Free A Gentleman's Game by Greg Rucka Page B

was dressed in black tactical BDUs, and he motioned her inside without a word. Chace stepped through, then aside, and he closed the door as silently as he’d opened it. He pointed to her, indicated toward the main room, and Chace nodded, following as he led the way.
    There were three others just like him, one affixing a fiber-optic cable to the wall with strips of tape he’d stuck to the left thigh of his pants. The other two were crouched around a laptop, their faces lit in green from the light from the screen. All were armed, pistols set in holsters on their legs, MP-5s hanging from the straps at their backs. None of them looked up.
    The furniture had been moved to the far side of the room, and Chace could see the naked picture hooks on the wall that adjoined four-twelve, where the Assault Team had taken down the frames. Resting in a corner of the couch, she counted four stuffed animals, heaped haphazardly atop a stack of picture books. One of the toys was a small fat panda bear, with thick, brightly colored pieces of hardened rubber stuck to its hands and feet.
    A family’s apartment, Chace concluded. One child, young enough to still be teething.
    She wondered where they’d been relocated to, and if they had any idea why the Security Services had so covertly and unceremoniously evicted them from their home.
    The man guided Chace across the room, pointing down to indicate the coiled power cables and cords, mutely warning her to watch her step, heading for a door opposite the wall to four-twelve. She heard a soft whine, cast a glance back to see that the one who’d been placing the fiber optics was now using a small electric drill to cut a lead hole into the drywall. They’d place charges next.
    The man gave her another nod, then left her to go through the next door alone. She did so, stepping into the bedroom and more light than she’d encountered in the last ninety minutes. She hadn’t expected it, and it blinded her for an instant, and when her vision came back she was facing a man.
    “Fucking hell,” David Kinney said softly, and he looked anything but pleased to see her. “You.”
    “Me, Mister Kinney,” Chace said. “How nice to see you again.”
    Kinney pulled a face, then turned away from her, lifting the radio in his hand to his mouth, whispering a string of orders. He was built of a similar stock as the Deputy Chief, but a larger version, as if Weldon had been the structural test case and David Kinney the final product. In his early forties, straight black wiry hair and a mustache to match, black suit, hands like hammers, he always made Chace think of the stereotypical trade union leader, at least physically. Kinney’s position was much like D-Ops’s own, except at Box, where he ran Security Service operations in the Counter Intelligence and Counter Terror divisions.
    This was most certainly a CT operation. It made sense that Kinney would be here.
    But Chace had to wonder why he couldn’t have been somewhere else instead, at one of the two other operations running, perhaps, where Poole or Lankford would have had to deal with him instead of her. But she knew the answer as soon as she posed the question; she’d dealt with Kinney before, and the bad blood of that past encounter notwithstanding, Crocker had been obliged to send his Head of Section as a courtesy. Anything else would have been an insult.
    Chace waited until Kinney was finished on the radio, then asked, “How many?”
    Kinney sucked air through his teeth, as if debating whether or not to tell her. It was against his every instinct to be honest with SIS, just as it was against all of Crocker’s to play fair with Box. But tragedy made for strange bedfellows, and for the moment inter-service rivalry had been forced into the backseat, at least for tonight.
    “Five,” Kinney said. “Three men, two women.”
    “Armed?”
    “That’s what we’ve been led to believe.”
    “Explosives?”
    “Suspected. Not confirmed.”
    “And they’re