Free Origin by J.T. Brannan

involve more and more people – people whom the Alpha Brigade would end up having to silence.
    It seemed that Matthew Adams and Evelyn Edwards had again been underestimated. Two teams of Eldridge’s men – men of the fabled Alpha Brigade, the best of the best – had so far failed, and Jacobs had made it more than plain that anything less than outright success would simply not be tolerated.
    Grimacing, Eldridge knew he would have to push on. The organization aside, he was not a man who accepted failure.
    Eldridge and his men tore out of the block of buildings, hot on the tail of their two targets. He was now being provided with real-time information on the pair’s movements, monitored from directly above. He knew it was from an observation satellite in low-earth orbit, and was not surprised that access to such a satellite had been granted so quickly – although relations between the various intelligence services were notoriously bad, Jacobs’ organization always had a way of expediting things.
    As Eldridge led his team on to Huérfanos, the electronic voice in his earpiece told him that the targets had just entered the Plaza de Brasil, less than five hundred feet directly east. Ignoring the startled look on the faces of the people in the streets as they stared at the heavily armed, masked men sprinting down the palm-lined boulevard, he quickly directed his teammates.
    Two would go down each side of the square, racing round to cut off the north and south exits, while the van would drive round to secure the far west exit. Eldridge and his partner would enter the Plaza directly, and make the arrest.
    He hoped.

9
    T HE SIGHT THAT greeted Adams and Lynn as they entered the plaza took their breath away, although they hardly paused, pressing on into the main square, and the centre of the Festival del Barrio Brasil.
    Everywhere they looked, something was going on. There was street theatre, mime artists, dance troupes, art exhibitions, acrobats, music bands, surrounded by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of captivated spectators. The big plaza was also well covered by trees, offering shade and shelter, and it looked the perfect place to get lost in the crowd.
    Adams, all too aware that the armed team was probably right behind them, pulled Lynn forward further into the vast mass of people, slowing down to a fast walk so as not to draw attention.
    With everything that was going on in the plaza, it seemed an impossibility that they would be seen.
    Five hundred feet below the Nevada desert, the technicians monitored the live feeds coming in from the NSA satellites, as well as the Santiago metropolitan CCTV.
    They observed as the targets – Charlie One and Charlie Two – entered the crowded plaza. They lost them both momentarily, but then the program software highlighted them, indicating them with a blue light, and the lead technician cross-checked the given location and patched it through to the plaza’s CCTV cameras, which then turned and focused on the given targets.
    Images then came up of Charlie One and Two, drifting easily through the crowd, an American Indian man and Caucasian woman, late thirties, both carrying bags, looking carefully around them.
    As the technician reported the details to the field team, he felt almost guilty about how easy it all was.
    Eldridge gasped as he saw the crowds, wondering how in the hell he would ever find the targets in such an environment, but then his earpiece crackled, and the information came through with crystal clarity – they were forty yards south-east into the park, directly in the middle of a group of twenty-seven spectators just to the side of the acrobat display.
    He relayed the information to the rest of his team, clicked the safety off his weapon, and stalked forward, ignoring the screams of the people who saw him.
    Adams didn’t know which was first – the sight of the CCTV camera, all but hidden behind a large palm tree to the north of the square, turning slowly towards