Thomas blinked as though he hadn’t heard correctly. The DCIA was missing and presumed dead or taken hostage, their colleagues had been blown up in the bowels of the Headquarters building itself, and their Team Lead was the subject of a manhunt. Take a vacation?
Then Kranemeyer picked up the laptop from off his desk and swiveled the screen toward the two paramilitaries.
Across the screen, a simple message read: MEET ME AT THE BLACK ROOSTER. 2100 HOURS.
The former Delta Force sergeant smiled briefly and pressed Backspace. Another moment, and the message had disappeared.
“Any questions?” Kranemeyer asked, clearly not referring to the message.
There were none.
The warehouse was a poor staging area, but it would have to do. Sergei Korsakov had seen worse.
The Russian Army had always been short on money, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and even in the “elite” Spetsnaz units.
So, you learned to improvise — make do with what you had. The hackneyed old cliché of necessity being the mother of invention came to mind.
“Anything yet, Viktor?” Korsakov asked, rubbing his hands together for warmth.
The gaunt young man looked up from the Toshiba laptop he had perched precariously on top of a fifty-gallon oil drum. “Nyet.”
At twenty-one, the Bulgarian-born Viktor was the youngest member of the team and the only one with no prior military experience. A scraggly black beard masked the lower half of a death-pale face and the Glock 19 looked ludicrously out of place in its holster on his skinny hip. But what he lacked in physique, he made up for in technical expertise.
They’d been a team for six years, ever since Korsakov had rescued him from the Black Sea brothel where he’d been enslaved.
Six years, and yet the boy still cowered whenever a stranger came near him. His body still bore the scars.
Most of his quickness with a computer he owed to the fact that he had been forced to upload videos from the brothel to the servers of a pornographic website.
That he had received most of the scars from being nearly beaten to death after he had infected those video files with a homemade computer virus only proved to Korsakov that the boy still had spirit.
“Are you sure the American’s not playing games with us, Viktor?” Korsakov asked softly, laying a hand on his protégé’s shoulder. He felt the boy quiver at his touch and murmured a silent curse. The owners of the brothel were dead, killed by his own hand, but nothing could undo the damage they had wrought.
The boy thought for a moment. “It’s hard to know if he’s restricted my access when I don’t know everything that’s supposed to be there. But I’m on the FBI’s servers, this much I know. Look, I’ll show you their patrol grid.”
His hands danced over the keyboard, bringing up a map overlay of the tri-state area. “Red dots, FBI-DHS. From the memos I’ve seen — their Department of Homeland Security is trying to take over the search.”
Another couple clicks, and yellow dots scattered across the screen, adding to the growing web. “Police of the state of Virginia.”
Blue dots. “The locals — sheriffs’ deputies, so forth.”
Korsakov swore under his breath. They were everywhere. Had his own mission not been so critical, it might have been awe-inspiring — the full might of the American federal government thrown out after one man. But now…
“Keep a close eye on things, Viktor. If they find Nichols and Chambers, we’ll have to be ready to intercept.”
“Da, tovarisch.”
The assassin had already turned away when it occurred to him. “Viktor?”
“Da?”
“How long until the second tracker goes live?”
The boy glanced at the computer screen, then consulted his watch as though there might be a contradiction. When he looked up into Korsakov’s face, his eyes held the expectation of a rebuke. “Sixteen hours.”
Snow was still falling when Harry climbed back into the driver’s seat of the SUV. “Looks like everything’s clear.”
He saw her face in the brief moment before the dome light went back off, plunging them both into darkness. She looked weary, rumpled, her face shadowed by the grief of the day. The Kahr .45 was still in her lap, clutched tightly in both hands, the way it had been ever since he’d left her alone.
Harry moved the torn packaging of a consumed MRE off the center console and put the vehicle into gear, moving slowly down the lane, past the realtor sign that had become ever more common in the years since the financial crisis of 2008: Foreclosed.
The abandoned split-level was off the main road, tucked into what Harry’s grandfather would have called a “hollow.” Perfect for their purposes.
Harry’s lockpick gun got them through both the deadbolt and front door lock in under a minute. As he had always said, locks were for honest people.
Gripping a tactical light between his teeth and his 1911 in both hands, Harry led the way into the deserted house, clearing it room by room.
The former homeowners had left a bed and a moth-eaten recliner in a downstairs bedroom, a room decorated on one wall with a mural of a unicorn. A little girl’s room.
Once upon a time, it might have been beautiful, but now the fading image loomed threateningly in the glare of Harry’s tactical light. A relic from more prosperous times.
He gave the recliner a suspicious prod with his foot, as though wondering if it would crumble into pieces.
It didn’t. His light swept the room once again, a final check before he turned to face her. “The bed’s yours.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the hesitancy in her reply. “Thanks, I guess. Are you going to be able to sleep in that recliner?”
Harry pulled back his jacket, sliding the big Colt into its leather holster. “I won’t be doing much in the way of sleeping.”
Thomas had never been to the Black Rooster, had never even heard of it before doing a Google search for the words on Kranemeyer’s screen.
Arriving on-site, it wasn’t hard to understand why. The bar occupied the corner of an office building on L Street, its brick exterior about the only thing distinguishing it from the rest of the buildings.
Warm air and the sound of ‘70s music hit him in the face as he entered. He brushed a melting snowflake off the sleeve of his jacket, looking around him.
Tex was already there, his long legs wrapped around a barstool in front of the massive wooden bar. Even from across the pub, Thomas could see the big man’s eyes — watching the mirrors that hung behind the bar. Nearly the perfect setup.
“What you having, buddy?” the bartender asked, a weary smile on his face as Thomas took the stool beside Tex.
“All depends — what’s my friend having?” he asked, eyeing the clear liquid in Tex’s glass.
The smile was replaced by a crooked smirk. “Water.”
Of course. Thomas shook his head. What a day…he knew Tex didn’t drink. He went to the same church as Harry — of course he didn’t drink. How could it have slipped his mind?
“What would you recommend?”
“Maybe a Dark and Stormy?” the bartender asked speculatively, looking up from the shot glass he was wiping. “Jamaican rum and ginger beer.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“He’s here,” Tex announced beneath his breath, waiting until the bartender had turned to fill the order. Thomas looked up into the mirrors, seeing the form of the DCS, a shadowy presence in the door of the bar.