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hole in the wall, expressing their low admiration for the stack of bricks that was obscuring their view of what lay beyond.
    I glanced back and saw that the SWAT team had taken cover, along with the security guys, behind the gold stacked around the room. Reed stayed with them, peering out from behind a shiny pile just behind me, reflected light gleaming next to his face. I tiptoed up to the bullion, stacked about seven feet high, and wondered if anyone considered what a safety hazard that was. I considered just shoving it over onto the crooks and calling it a day, but decided that no, that probably wasn’t sporting.
    “Holy hell, man!” came the clearest voice from behind the pile. It wasn’t a thin stack, either, it ran about eight feet long and three feet deep. Just lifting the contents of this one stack would make our criminals a wealthy bunch, and there were a lot more piles than this one, divided out by country. “Look at all this!”
    “Cameras,” came a calm, clipped voice from nearer by the hole. I had my back to the bullion stack, waiting for my moment and trying to identify by sound how many of them there were. I gently pushed the button on my earpiece that activated my hands-free mike.
    “I’m on it, don’t get your panties in a twist,” came a relaxed voice that I knew came from Eric Simmons. I’d gotten used to the sound of his voice from listening in on his cell phone calls. He had a manner of speaking that was—how do I put it? He sounded like a cross between a surfer dude and a locker-room douchebag. When he was on the phone with his buddies, it was a constant series of profane discussions about the attributes of various women—celebrities, old acquaintances, some woman he just catcalled on the street. For a man with a supposed girlfriend—or boyfriend—he was a pretty dirty boy.
    I heard the sound of a single bar being lifted off the top of the pile, and the straining that followed told me that it was a human doing the lifting. “Man … this alone is worth half a million bucks.”
    I love it when some assclown sets me up. I slipped out, all demure and sweet (totally an act, obviously) and said, “Then you can afford to buy me a drink.” I waited for a moment in the shocked silence that followed and said, lowering my voice to a throaty whisper, “Hello, sailors.”
    “Aw, shit,” one of the guys in back said, “that’s Sienna Nealon.”
    “Got it in one,” I said, and I saw a guy in black work clothes pulling a gun, thinking he was covered behind his buddy. I snatched a brick of bullion off the stack and chucked it right at his head. It hit him dead on, and the sounds of skull cracking silenced them all. Bullseye , Wolfe said helpfully, glorying in my act of violence. He did that.
    “You killed him!” One of the guys said, a dude in a boiler suit that was covered in dirt. I had him pegged as the drill operator.
    “Yep,” I said, “he’s deader than Chester A. Arthur.” (What? Too soon?) “Hands in the air, the NYPD is here to collect you boys. The prize for winning in this listening contest is that your brains will remain inside your heads. The loser gets …” I made a faint gesture toward the giant, blood-spattered elephant in the room. “Well, you know.”
    Hands went into the air, guns were lowered and gently dropped. I watched the whole thing, keeping my eye on the hole the entire time. I could see the faint movement inside it, of course, and knew that Eric Simmons had slipped away like the rat I already knew he was.
    Now it was just a matter of waiting, and letting him lead us back to the brains of his operation.

3.
Eric Simmons
    Eric slipped through the tunnel, quietly as he could. Did she know he was here? She was still talking, issuing orders to the other guys. He knew her face, of course. Everybody did.
    Sienna fricking Nealon. Maybe she knew there was something going on here, that metas were involved somehow, but she couldn’t know who he was, could she? Of