They flew the raptors in an unmarked cargo plane out of a private strip in the canton, under the manifest of a dairy delivery.
That was Joyce’s idea. Joyce found the irony palatable. The crates in the hold were stainless and refrigerated and bore the small stenciled logo of a Swiss creamery that Grendel had bought eleven years before for cover purposes that were not, until tonight, much used. The crates did not smell of cheese. They smelled of a careful warm meatiness that the cargomaster had been told was a new starter culture for a hard alpine cheese in development. The cargomaster had nodded and signed.
In the back of the plane the five raptors lay in their crates with their snouts toward the small mesh-covered breathing slots, and the five regulator boxes blinked the slow blue cycle that meant they were under the gentle sedation of the long flight. Nick walked the row twice. He stopped at Spartacus’s crate. He put his palm flat on the steel, cold, and felt, on the other side of it, a slow heavy breathing that he was, by this stage of the operation, able to recognize from a yard away. Spartacus opened the eye on Nick’s side. Spartacus closed it.
The plane landed at a small airfield outside Tangier in the dark hour before midnight. The runway was a strip of crumbling asphalt with a windsock at the south end that hung dead in the still air. A single yellow sodium lamp lit a fuel bowser at the apron and an old Peugeot pickup with a man asleep in the cab. Two trucks were waiting. The trucks looked like fish trucks. The trucks were not fish trucks. The crates went into the back of the larger one. The smaller one was Nick’s command vehicle, a battered Land Cruiser with a rough exterior and a high-tech interior that Sherman, in transit, had spent a week building.
They drove into Tangier with the trucks in convoy.
Maya rode in the second vehicle. They had agreed, in a corridor at the castle two days before, that she would not be with Nick at the moment of breach. She would be at a command position one block back with Sherman and a console. She would have, on her console, a kill switch she had not told Joyce about, the kill switch a hardware override Sherman had built her against Joyce’s specification, a switch that, if she pulled it, would deliver into the bloodstream of any of the three raptors whose number she selected a slow steady oxytocin drip plus a dampened sedation enough to take the edge off without dropping them. Sherman had built it because Maya had asked him to. Sherman had built it without telling Sherman why.
The convoy pulled up at the edge of the decaying waterfront and the SUV pulled in alongside the truck the way a tugboat pulls in alongside a tanker.
The truck looked like a panel truck. The truck was not a panel truck. The hydraulic tailgate dropped on its slow whisper of pneumatics and became a ramp, and three eight-foot bio-engineered dinosaurs walked down it onto Moroccan asphalt, in flak vests, with night-vision cameras mounted at the shoulder. They smelled the air and went sideways into the alleys without sound.
Spartacus, Perseus, Orestes.
The other two were back at the castle. Maya had insisted. Three on the run, two on the bench. The two on the bench were Hector and Achilles. Achilles she did not, on this particular morning, trust.
Inside the SUV, the world was a different world. The dashboard had three monitors that fed off the shoulder cameras of the three raptors. A radio rack the size of a glove compartment. A grid locator with three blinking dots that were the raptors and a fixed cross-hair that was the SUV. A speaker headset on Nick’s head with a small microphone he had set on his lower lip. He was wearing a pheromone armband, a Kevlar vest, and an expression he had not worn outside of certain rooms in 2005.
His hands were free.
His hands were free for the short-barreled Heckler & Koch laid on the passenger seat, with three loaded magazines beside it. That was, for this part of the run, all he had.
“Squadron hold,” he said into the headset. “Camouflage.”
On the monitor for Perseus, an alley wall slid past in green tones, a peeling olive-oil advertisement on a brick wall, a cat sitting on a low ledge that flinched as the camera passed. The cat did not run. The cat did not know what to make of the smell that had gone past it.
On the monitor for Orestes, the back of a low warehouse, a metal loading-dock door with a chain through the handle and a rusted padlock the size of a man’s fist.
On the monitor for Spartacus, a fire escape ladder bolted to the side of a two-story warehouse with a faded sign that said something in French about olive oil.
Perseus paused at the front of the building.
He sniffed. He lifted his head. He opened his jaws wide and the meter in the SUV jumped on the ultrasonic register, and the camera-feed showed Spartacus arriving at the foot of the fire escape, and Orestes arriving at the back of the building. They put their heads together facing the wall. The needle on the ultrasonic meter danced.
Nick brought the SUV to a stop fifty yards short of the building.
“Looks like we’ve got something,” he said into the radio. “Sector twelve, building three-six-two.”
He unhooked the seatbelt. He lifted the H&K from the seat. He muttered, half to himself, half to whatever god of operations was listening:
“Let’s just hope it’s not a meat-packing plant.”
He got out.
The street was empty in the way streets get empty after midnight in places where people know to be off them. The smell of the harbor was wet rope and old fish and the small sweet smell of the fuel-oil they used in the boats. Up the wall of the warehouse, on the fire escape, Spartacus was placing his clawed feet, one rung at a time, with the careful weight-shift of a stalker. The metal of the fire escape creaked under him. The creak was an octave Nick could feel in the soles of his boots.
In the office on the second floor, on the monitor in the SUV he had left running, Nick had seen, just before climbing out, the man at the desk with his feet up. The Uzi on the lap. The yawn. The nod. The chair behind him in the middle of the room with a small girl curled in it under a thin grey blanket.
He went to the corner of the building.
He spoke low into the headset.
“All together, boys. You’re go to enter.”
Spartacus reached the platform. He shifted his weight onto his haunches. The fire escape gave a louder creak.
The man at the desk, on the monitor that was no longer in front of Nick, did not stir.
In the SUV’s rearview mirror, half a block back, Nick saw a flash of headlights kill themselves at the corner. A vehicle slid into a shadow. He kept his head forward. Maya was in the command warehouse two blocks east. Another car was where another car needed to be.
He brought his finger to the channel switch on the headset.
“Camouflage hold. Initial breach in three. Two.”
The fire escape was at the limit of what fire escapes had been built for. The bolts in the brick were old bolts. He had counted them in the briefing. The bolts in the brick were going to hold.
“One.”
Spartacus leaned in toward the window.
The window blew inward.
The roar that came out of the upper floor was a roar Nick had heard in mock-up at the practice village three days ago, and the practice village had not had real walls or real glass. This had both. The roar bounced down the alley and Nick felt it under his feet.
He brought the H&K up.
He went toward the warehouse, careful of his own footing, working a route along the inside wall where the streetlight from the corner did not reach.
The street was empty in the way streets get empty after midnight in places where people know to be off them. The smell of the harbor was wet rope and old fish and the small sweet smell of the fuel-oil they used in the boats, layered now under the scent of something hotter — adrenaline, and on top of that the small green note of olive press that came drifting out of the warehouse’s seams.
He had run rooms like this with brothers. He had run them without. He had never run one with three eight-foot extinct predators on his side and a child upstairs.
He spoke into the headset, low.
“Spartacus, hold.”
In the SUV monitor, somewhere behind him, a reading would be jumping. Sherman was in the second vehicle and would be reading it. Maya would be reading it.
“Spartacus, hold.”
Spartacus held.
Nick reached the corner of the building. The brick was cold. There was an old painted advert for a 1970s motor oil on the brick at face level, the man on the can smiling a lost smile, and Nick put his shoulder against the man’s face and listened.
Inside the warehouse, somebody coughed.
Behind him, somewhere up the alley, the headlights came back on. The vehicle Maya was in pulled into position one block back, the way she had said it would, the way they had agreed she would, and the agreement was an agreement Joyce did not know about.
Whatever happened in the next ninety seconds was, Nick understood, going to be mostly out of his hands.
The raptors had it.
He ran.
Above him, Spartacus’s silhouette filled the broken window in a lateral motion no animal Nick had grown up with was built to make. Something of the gantry crane in it. Something of the cobra. A shape no one on the planet had any business seeing.
Nick reached the front door of the warehouse and put his back against the wall.
In the upper floor, three sounds happened in the order of one human throat and then one human throat and then the breaking of a great deal of wood. Spartacus had gone in. The first kidnapper was halfway through whatever had been the last thought of his life. The second kidnapper had had the time to register that the first kidnapper had been wrong about the situation.
Nick heard, in his earpiece, Maya’s voice for the first time in an hour.
“Hold position,” she said.
“Holding.”
“Sherman has the upstairs feed. Spartacus is on Isabel.”
“On her.”
“Standing over her.”
He breathed.
“All right.”
The voice clicked off.
He waited, with his back on the cold brick, while inside the warehouse a small massacre took place at speed.
In a kind of waterfront night-quiet that was not quiet, that was full of small distant ships horns and small distant Arab music from a portable radio someone three streets up was listening to, Nick Harris stood with his palm flat on a wall and waited to be allowed back into his own building.
In the radio link he heard, very faint, a single small high voice. The voice spoke one word in French. Maman. The voice was a child’s voice, half asleep, the kind of voice a child uses to call for a parent in the middle of a dream the child does not yet understand to be a dream.
Then the link went hot with another voice, a kidnapper’s, the man’s last voice, and the voice cut.
Nick did not move from the wall.
Above him, on the second floor, what was happening was happening in the language of large animals. He could hear the bodies hit the wall. He could hear, between the impacts, a small careful crunching that, by the rhythm of it, was Spartacus standing on a man’s hand to make the man release the small thing in it.
He had taught five killers to love a child by way of a violet sweater and a pony hair. The chemistry was holding. He had a count of six bodies upstairs in three minutes, and the count was not done.