She smiled. “You are expected, gentlemen.”
After asking to copy our credentials, which we passed through a tray, Riggs buzzed us into a larger reception with a stacked-granite weeping wall that gave the room a pleasant sound. Beside the wall hung a small, understated logo: PALADIN INC. superimposed over a faint number 12.
Bree had explained it to us in the summary of her research. In twelfth-century French literature, the paladins, or twelve peers, were said to be the elite protectors and agents of King Charlemagne, comparable to the Knights of the Round Table in the Arthurian legends.
Paladin Inc. had been launched five years before by Vance, a veteran Silicon Valley CEO, and Malcomb, a brilliant tech wizard who’d started and sold four companies before the age of forty. The focus of Vance and Malcomb’s most recent venture involved data mining.
The company had corporate and U.S. government contracts based on ingenious algorithms written by Malcomb that allowed Paladin to scour and sift through monstrous amounts of data at an astonishingly fast pace. The system had yielded investigative targets of interest to various U.S. law enforcement agencies and private security operations like Bluestone Group, all of which increasingly looked to Paladin because of the company’s unrivaled accuracy.
A door opened on the other side of the weeping wall. A short redheaded woman with a bowl haircut exited; she was wearing a baby-blue puffy jacket despite the August heat outside and looked like a cruise-ship passenger who’d just been told there was a norovirus outbreak onboard.
“I’m Sheila Farr, Paladin’s legal counsel,” she said stiffly. “Unfortunately, Mr. Malcomb’s mother has had a bad fall in her Palo Alto home and he’s on his way there. But Steve will see you now.”
Chapter
58
Mexico City
Later that morning in the Mexican capital, Matthew Butler went to the window on the empty fourth floor of a building at the corner of Calle de Venustiano and José María Pino Suárez. With latex gloves on, he moved the window shade just enough to see diagonally across the intersection to the Mexican National Supreme Court of Justice.
“Highest law in the land,” Butler said.
“Traffic?” M said in his ear.
“No less than any Tuesday when it’s already blistering hot out at seven a.m.”
“Timing has to be perfect for the statement to have impact.”
“It does,” Butler said. “We good?”
“You are go.”
“Roll,” Butler said into his jawbone microphone.
“Rolling,” Vincente said. “Forty seconds out.”
Purdy said, “Walking at my target.”
“Squared up on mine,” Cortland said.
Butler took his eyes off the street and looked over two windows to the profile of his sniper. Cortland held a powerful, accurate, multi-shot air gun attached to a small compressor. He had the barrel and the first two inches of his telescopic sight aimed through slits he’d cut in the blind.
“Thirty seconds, taking a right onto José María Pino Suárez,” Vincente said. “Twenty-five seconds.”
“Got you,” Butler said, seeing the top of the nondescript white cargo van with graffiti on the side coming down the street at him in the far lane along a line of inadequate green traffic barriers. “Twenty seconds. Take him, Cort. Take him, Purdy.”
Butler heard Cortland’s first shot; it sounded like the thud of a beefy paintball gun. The dart whistled across the intersection and struck a federal police officer in the side of his neck. He staggered two feet and dropped.
Cortland changed barrels on his gun. On the far sidewalk, Purdy walked toward the main entrance to the seat of high justice in Mexico, using her skills at being small and going unnoticed, raising a kerchief over her face, just waiting for the first scream.
It came from the far corner of the block.
Purdy slipped diagonally left toward the two armed guards at the entrance to the supreme court. Seeing them strain to look toward the sounds of shouting, she brought out her two small air pistols and shot both guards at close range; it was no more than three feet from her to the sides of their necks, where darts were now embedded.
“Jump to it,” Butler said.
The men dropped in their tracks. Purdy stepped over them a nanosecond before the reinforced-steel bumper of Vincente’s cargo van smashed through the inadequate barrier designed to protect the courthouse and skidded to a stop on the sidewalk a few feet beyond the entrance to the court.
The rear doors flew open. Wearing a black Day of the Dead mask, Big DD leaped out, dragging two corpses by the napes of their necks behind him.