She could feel him behind her, his hands coming up to rest tentatively on her shoulders. “How are you holding up?”
“I’ll be fine.” She was lying, and they both knew it. His hand slipped down, encircling her waist — drawing her close. A comforting presence, despite everything that had gone before.
“No one is ever fine,” he whispered. “Not after seeing that. And I deserve every bit of the blame.”
“No.” She found the words came out more sharply than she had intended, anger and remorse warring within her heart. “I do.”
The images of Pyotr’s shattered corpse flickered back across her mind and she buried her face in his chest, guilt washing over her, her body wracked with silent sobs. I do…
The sound of a car engine roused Thomas from his seat at the table, taking his Beretta 92 with him as he moved toward the front of the double-wide.
“It’s your boss,” Rhoda Stevens announced, giving him a disapproving glance at the sight of his sidearm. What the relationship between her and Lay was — or had been, he would probably never know. But she was taking the DCIA’s condition personally. And his role in the affair.
“Gotcha,” he retorted, peering through the blinds to see Kranemeyer emerging from the black Suburban, his trench coat flapping in the breeze as he advanced on the house.
The Dark Lord.
Thomas moved to the door, throwing back the bolt just as the DCS reached it.
“Have you established any contact with Nichols?” his boss demanded, not bothering with a greeting. The look on Kranemeyer’s face told him something was wrong.
A shake of the head. “I checked the sites this morning, all of them. No signal. What’s happened?”
“He’s popped back up on the radar,” came the terse reply. “A local LEO placed him at that mass shooting in California.”
“That Russian?” No way. He’d seen the reports on the morning news. A veritable bloodbath. Someone had gone after a key player of the mafiya, eliminating his entire security team and executing him with a bullet to the head. The media had reported the story with their typical glee, mingling blood and gore with their viewers’ raisin bran. Harry?
“Yes,” Kranemeyer responded, pushing past him into the trailer. “That’s the way it’s being reported. He’s running out of room to run, out of places to hide. Run the sites again.”
Thomas led the way back into the living room, firing up his Macbook on the table. “How’s David?” Kranemeyer asked as the webpage loaded, regarding Thomas with hooded eyes.
“Doctor says he’s stabilizing. A full recovery is weeks away, if ever.”
Silence. Thomas loaded the web forums, checking briefly through the new threads. Looking for the code, the signal that would indicate Harry had been there.
Nothing. The second site was the same. Two down, three to go.
He scrolled up to Favorites, selecting Ebay and running a search. And there it was…a new listing, only two hours old. A first edition copy of Ayn Rand’s massive tome Atlas Shrugged, its cover a blood-red sun glaring down tracks of glistening steel.
Rearden steel.
Despite the gravity of the moment, Thomas found himself smiling. It was Harry who had given him his copy, the outgrowth of a long ago conversation. And the inspiration behind this code.
“It’s here,” he breathed, mousing over the description until he found it, down near the bottom. A list of pages torn or missing from the book.
As Kranemeyer watched, he grabbed a sheet of notepaper and began jotting down the numbers in sequence.
“It’s GPS coordinates,” Thomas announced, realizing the import of his statement almost as soon as the words were out of his mouth.
Harry was in California, after all.
“And this is a call for help.”
“You said you would call me when it was done.” Roy Coftey frowned as he descended the marble staircase into the rotunda of what had been known as the Old Senate Office Building. He switched the phone to his right hand, checking his watch.
“Something’s come up,” the voice on the other end of the phone announced. “I need the use of your plane. A brief flight out to LAX. Two passengers out. Indeterminate on the return trip.”
The senator shook his head, making an effort not to use the man’s name. Not over the phone. “Do we need to meet?”
“Negative. This is unconnected to our other business. Your Lear is on the ground at Dulles, right?”
“Yes, but…everything’s grounded.” Coftey stopped short, lowering his voice as one of his staffers came hustling down the stairs after him. “I told you I would have your back, but there’s only so far anyone can protect you. And if I’m going to get that jet off the ground, I will need an airtight cover story.”
“You’ll have it. I want my people wheels-up by 1600.”
And his message had not gone unseen. A smile touched Harry’s lips for a fleeting moment as his eyes fell upon the top bid: $1186. The number of pages in the first edition of Rand’s magnum opus.
The countersign.
“Everything ready?” Han asked, entering the office trailer from the back. He was buttoning his faded black windbreaker over the tactical vest beneath it, the SCAR cradled in the crook of his arm.
Harry checked the file protocols Carol had set up one last time. Everything was in place. If a password wasn’t entered every twelve hours, what little information they had on Tarik Abdul Muhammad and his Christmas Day terror attack would go streaming out through cyberspace to the FBI, CIA, DHS, and a round dozen of the other members of the alphabet soup that was D.C. bureaucracy.
“Time to hang out our shingle,” he nodded, grabbing up his UMP-45. They were running low on ammunition, almost too low for what was to come.
If waiting had been an option, he would have waited. The cavalry was coming.
But Korsakov had to be taken out of the equation now. And the only way to lure the wolf into the trap was to bait it…with themselves.
Chapter 22
Airborne. Kranemeyer read the text message off the screen of his phone, marveling at the brevity. The Texan was as taciturn as ever.
He leaned back against the seat of the Suburban, gazing out the window at the setting sun, rays of light flickering out from behind snow-laden clouds the color of slate.
Valentin Andropov’s nineteen-year-old son had been found dead in a house across the street from his estate. Executed with a single bullet to the head — just like his father.
According to the early reports Kranemeyer had seen, the murder weapon had differed between the two, but that didn’t really matter. Nor did it matter that Nichols was supposed to be acting under Lay’s orders, sketchy as they had been.
They might have swept anything else under the rug — made it go away — but this…this was more difficult.
The son had been an American citizen. And Nichols was now well beyond redemption.
Something to consider when he reflected on his own plans. Kranemeyer flipped open the folder beside him, the printed sheet therein containing Shapiro’s evening itinerary.