Chapter 17: "Mercenaries, mostly" (rated T for violence);
Rome, Italy, late December, 2014, (rated T for violence)
Just before dawn the phone rang, and Brody sat up in his bed. On the other end of the call, the men on night watch were watching activity in the alleyways near Grace's school.
"Feels like the party's starting – ," he said, and then he got up out of bed, and headed down the hall, knocking on doors, telling his men to get up.
Reese could hear them moving and opened his eyes. The fire was out in the fireplace, and the ashes had all gone cold. He'd fallen asleep in the chair there, after Harold had left, and now he was cold and stiff from sitting all night. He could smell coffee brewing, so someone was up, and then the men were coming in with their gear, gathering there in the living room. He stood up, stretched, and went looking for Brody.
"Night watch called. There's some kind of action goin' on near the school," Brody said, leaning over, pulling his gear bag up off the floor. "We've been hearin' chatter lately like they're gettin' ready for somethin' – can't tell what, though. We're gonna take a run over there and see what we see. The other day, with Four-eyes, we took out a nest of 'em," Brody said, looking up at Reese.
"What about the police?"
"They stay out of it, over here. These people don't call them when things happen. Back home, for most of 'em, the police can't be trusted. So they don't even think about calling 'em here."
"Who are they, the ones you pick up?"
"Mercenaries, mostly. Workin' for Greer's people. Hired guns from eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa. Plenty of people around lookin' for action and some money."
"I'll come with you," Reese said. "And, I'll need a weapon."
"Me, too." They turned around and Shaw was there, dressed in black tactical gear.
"Okay. Glad to have you. I'll see what I have," he said and walked back down the hallway.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"Some kind of action near the school. They called it in a little while ago. Brody says they've been hearing chatter about something going down soon. He just wants to go over and check it out. Maybe nothing," Reese said.
He went back to the room, and changed into fatigues, then threw some water on his face to wake up. His knee was bad today, aching from sitting in the cold all night. He tried to flex it up and down to warm it up, but it wasn't happy.
When he went back out to the living room, the men were all there, drinking coffee and eating leftover bread and hunks of cheese from dinner last night. Shaw handed Reese a cup of steaming black coffee and a handful of bread with cheese wrapped inside. He nodded, and drank down the coffee, then went back out to the kitchen for more. A new pot had just finished dripping, and he leaned back out toward the living room, with his cup held high, gesturing to Shaw. She nodded yes, and walked back there to meet him.
Reese poured more into her cup, then his, and then a few more stragglers showed up, for refills. He and Shaw stayed in the kitchen, while the rest of the day watch team moved past to the door, hefting their packs on their shoulders.
Brody showed up next, with two more rifles and a bag of extra ammo, handing them off to Reese and Shaw. They checked over the rifles while Brody drank his coffee, and then the three of them left for the back lot together.
Two vans pulled out, the day watch team in one, and Reese, Shaw, Brody and four crew in the other. On the way there, Brody radioed the night watch team near the school.
"Anything yet?" Brody asked.
"Nothin' so far. But it don't feel right. Too many people just hangin' around." the soldier answered.
Reese's phone rang in his pocket. It was Finch, back in the Headquarters house.
"Mr. Reese, the Machine is sending a warning. There is trouble up ahead of you. A roadblock or something with the traffic. Be cautious."
"I'll let 'em know," Reese said. He looked ahead on the street, and then turned to Brody.
"Watch for something with the traffic up ahead. Got a tip there may be trouble." Brody nodded back to Reese.
"On our way. Gotta go," he said to night watch. Then he clicked over to the van up in front.
"Heads up. Watch for something with the traffic up there. Got a tip," he said. Through the back window of the van ahead, he could see the driver lift his hand and wave it side to side, acknowledging.
Brody drove them down the cobblestone street, then turned down another, then another, and finally, onto the one running past Grace's school. The buildings for blocks were empty, boarded up. And no one was on the streets.
"Looks like a ghost town," Reese said.
"Yeah. Something's up. This area would usually have some traffic by now."
There was a flash of blue from the right up ahead, engine noise, and their black van up ahead swerved left, tires screeching, then their engine revving. There were gunshots, and the blue truck lurched but kept coming, aiming to ram the van, but it swerved again, and the truck clipped their bumper instead. Glass sprayed out all over the street, and the van spun tight right, firing more shots into their windshield.
They could hear acceleration, as the van kept turning the other way, accelerating free of the wreck, and then racing back down the street, toward Brody. The blue truck careened like a billiard ball, jumped the curb, spraying sparks from the undercarriage, and slammed straight into a pole. It stopped dead, with the engine racing, fluid gushing out below the front grille. White smoke trailed from the engine.
In their van, everyone was watching the blue truck, but no one was coming out. It sat there, pinned against the pole, smoking.
Brody had stopped, idling in the street, and their black van drove past them on their right and u-turned in the street behind them.
"Talk to me," Brody said into the box at his shoulder.
"We're okay," from the other van.
Then Brody was on the radio with night watch, telling them the vans were under attack, but to stay put with Grace's school. Reese and Shaw scanned rooftops and windows, looking for snipers, open windows, anything that looked wrong. Denny, the soldier Shaw had treated, knelt in the back of the van, looking out at the damaged one behind them.
"Looks minor. Just the bumper. It's drive-able," he called up to Brody, who relayed it back to the van. They watched as it pulled up alongside. The two vans sat idling side-by-side in the street. Minutes passed.
"I wonder what they're waiting for?" Shaw said, out loud.
Up ahead, a car pulled around the corner, fast, coming their way, then a second and a third, fanning wide across the street, two in front and one behind.
"Back up, back up!" Brody yelled into his radio. The two vans screeched into reverse, full-speed backwards down the street.
"You first!" Brody yelled, and then he slowed for a moment, while the other van put some space between them, and spun itself around, lurching and heading forward down the street. Then Brody sped up, backwards, and spun them around in the van, tires screeching, stomachs churning in the turn.
And then he accelerated up the street toward the other van. They pulled side-by-side, watching in the rear view mirrors as the cars were gaining.
"Split up. Go right. I'll go left, next corner. Smoke and tacks."
At the next corner, the vans turned opposite ways, down the side-streets. The cars separated, too, two on Brody and one to the right on the other van. Brody accelerated down the street, swinging side to side, using up the whole street, with the two cars staggered in a pattern behind him. He hit the gas, drawing them in, faster, behind him.
Brody reached down to the console near his knee, opened a clear plastic cover and flipped the toggle inside. Dark smoke poured from the back of the van, and then, just a moment later, he flipped the toggle the other way, and they heard metal dropping and bouncing on the street. Squealing tires, a loud impact, crunching and glass breaking, then cars flipping over and over in the street behind them. They couldn't see it through the smoke, but those sounds couldn't be anything else.
They pulled down the next street and stopped at the curb, Denny pushing the back open once they'd stopped rolling. The men rushed out with guns ready.
Half crossed the street, and half stayed on this side, working back toward the wreck. Smoke was thinning, and they could see outlines of the cars, tires flat, one turned over on its roof, the other on its side against a building.
Reese and Shaw saw dozens of palm-sized black shapes on the street; heavy iron triangles with spikes sticking up. Tacks. These were deployed from the back of their van, dumped with the toggle onto the street. Designed so no matter how they bounced or rolled, there was always a spike aimed up when they stopped.
In the smoke, the drivers behind them hadn't seen them come out, and they drove over them with their tires. Instant flats, at high speed, blinded in the smoke. They'd had no chance. They'd smashed together, bounced off, flipped in the street, over and over, into the front of the old stone building.
Brody's men were checking for signs of life in the cars, but the roofs were crushed in, and the sides collapsed. There were bodies on the street, and it didn't look good for anyone left inside.
He was on his radio with his driver in the other van. They were out of the van, he said, taking fire in the street.
"Head out!" Brody yelled. "Denny, you're here with Rizzo and Jax. Get this mopped up."
The rest of them ran back to the corner to the van and slid in, while Brody gunned the engine and sped off. He wound through empty back streets, accelerating on the straights and squealing around corners, circling back behind their van's position.
"Comin' up now," he said into his radio. They could hear gunshots ahead, and Brody drove around a corner, and up close to a wall. They jumped out and hugged the wall, down an alleyway parallel to the street. Gunshots got louder, echoing in the alleyway. They were nearing a corner, Reese in front on Shaw's side, and Brody in front, with a fourth man behind him, on the left side.
Bright glare shone down on Shaw's face for a second, and she looked up to see where it was coming from. A window, forced open, high above the street. She could see hands and arms, and part of his body behind the window glass; and then, he was kneeling down. A muzzle appeared at the window corner, pointing down the street to their right, toward their men.
She lifted her rifle, said softly, "don't do it," aimed at the glass, bottom right corner, and squeezed off the shot. The glass wobbled, punctured and blood splattered all over the inside of the glass. Shaw watched as the muzzle tipped forward. Then the whole thing slid out, nose down, banging on the terrace railings to the street below. They watched for motion up inside the window, but nothing moved there at all.
In Brody's earpiece, "four down, one missing."
He turned to the others and gestured to them, one left. At the corner, Brody headed left with his man, and Reese and Shaw headed right. An overhang above shielded them from shots above. But cover was sparse from the side. Reese could see his men up ahead, kneeling behind their van, looking up at a building in front of them. He and Shaw stopped walking and swung their eyes up to the building, too, searching for anything threatening.
From the corner of his eye, Reese saw a movement, a quick motion of a head peeking out, street level. Someone was facing down the street toward his men, body bracing back on a corner wall, with the tip of his rifle held high, coming down, as he pulled the butt back against his shoulder. He was ready to fire.
Reese stepped away from the building into the street, out at an angle where he could see the shooter. Reese shouldered his rifle, firing, firing until the man was down and didn't move. He stood there watching, with his rifle on the shooter, as Shaw moved up alongside him.
Reese limped up beside her and kept his gun on the shooter, while Shaw kicked the rifle away, and knelt down to check for a pulse. She looked up at Reese and shook her head, no.
In a few minutes, the van pulled up beside them with the day watch team inside. They piled out and surrounded Reese, Shaw, and the shooter. One of the men was searching through pockets, and snapping a picture of the dead man's face with his phone.
Brody walked up behind them, talking with the men near Grace's school. While their car chase was happening, night watch had had to go out after the men in the alleyway. They'd started to make their move toward Grace's school.
There was a fight in the alleyway. Two of Greer's men were down and wounded. The rest were dead. Minor casualties among their own team. Grace and the children were safe and unaware.
For the rest of the morning, the teams spread out at each location, winching the cars up onto flatbed trucks, stacking them side-by-side, like junkers. They drove to a warehouse, where the bodies were pulled, photographed, searched, and returned to the wrecks. Then, late in the evening two flatbeds headed out, cars and the blue truck covered with tarps.
Rocking along, with the wind flapping the tarps, they drove in the dark twenty miles to a road at the side of a lake. Secluded, deep in the trees, they drove to a spot where the road turned sharply left, like a metal hair pin, then back the way it had come. The road was narrow and the ground fell away steeply down to the lake. The spot was muddy, deserted, unlit. At the tip of the turn, they'd stopped the flatbeds. In the dark, one after the other, they'd winched the wrecks off the trucks, down the steep slope, and into the lake. This was a huge, deep lake to the East of Rome. More than three hundred feet down to the bottom. No one was going to find Greer's soldiers here.
By morning, the next day, hardly any evidence remained of the battles on the streets. Some damage on a pole, paint scrapes on some buildings, skid marks and some leftover glass in the streets. But all the Tacks were picked up, back in their bins in the vans. All the cars, the blue truck, the bodies were hidden.
And the last step, to raid their HQ, was finished. Greer's threat in Rome was over, for the moment. Five prisoners taken, and all of their equipment pulled or destroyed. Computers, documents, a treasure trove of data for Harold and his Machine. Perhaps there would be plans, timetables, data they could use.
Without Samaritan, Greer's teams were helpless. No warnings, no intel. Vulnerable for the first time since Samaritan had powered up.
Here was their chance. If they could find him, capture Greer, this all could be over soon. Samaritan crippled. Greer captured. His teams broken and scattered.
For the first time, there was light at the end of the long, bloody tunnel.