“You’re really not fond of windows, are you?” It was the first thing Harry had noticed upon arriving the previous afternoon. The beautiful picture window of the hunting cabin had been taken out and replaced by reinforced concrete — as had most of the other windows. Those that remained left the snow outside looking green in the sunlight — heavy, bullet-resistant glass. Too small to crawl through.
Han turned to look back at him.
“What’s that verse you used to quote out on an op, Harry? ‘For they have loved darkness rather than light’.” He laughed. “Nobody survives, not in the end. We’re not expected to. What’s the operational strength of the Special Activities Division?”
“One hundred and fifty men,” Harry replied, looking his old friend in the eye.
“Yeah,” Han continued bitterly, “you see what I mean. One hundred and fifty men to fight a war without end. It’s like tossin’ sand into the teeth of the wind.”
Harry started to respond, but Han cut him off, his hand on the door. “Get out of this business, Harry. While you still can. Before you end up like me.”
And he was gone.
Allahu akbar. La illaha illa Allah. Muhammad rasul Allah. Allahu akbar. God is great. There is no God but God. Muhammad is His prophet. God is great.
Abdul Aziz Omar rose from the fajr, the dawn prayer, his dark hands moving reverently to fold the prayer mat. “Astaghfirullah,” he whispered, repeating the phrase three times. I ask Allah forgiveness.
When he had approached al-Fileestini the previous year to volunteer for jihad, he had never anticipated this. Never anticipated something that would so test his faith. He hadn’t entered a nightclub since he had found the peace of Allah — since he’d been released from prison. Now, with their target revealed, he felt weak. So pitifully weak.
The beads of the tasbih rolled between his fingers as he mouthed an earnest prayer. “I seek refuge in Allah from the outcast Satan… ”
Staring at the ceiling got old, if you did it long enough. Carol rolled over on the mattress of the bunk bed, staring into the luminous dial of her watch. Time to get up.
She slipped out from beneath the blanket and got dressed in the darkness. It wasn’t hard when there was only one set of clothes to choose.
There was no mirror in the small bedroom of the bunker, but she knew her hair was a mess. That much she could feel.
Harry was sitting at the kitchen table when she arrived, newspapers spread out over the wooden table. His field-stripped 1911 was laid out before him, a cleaning brush held delicately in his long fingers.
“Coffee’s perking,” came the terse announcement, but he didn’t look up. “Orange concentrate is in the fridge. Just add water.”
He was different this morning, she realized, pausing with her hand on the refrigerator door. The care she’d seen in his eyes the previous night, the tenderness — it was all gone, like a switch had been thrown.
It left her to wonder which was real and which was the façade. Walls within walls. A maze…
“You find anything more on Korsakov?” she asked, forcing herself to focus.
Harry shook his head, his eyes narrowing as he held the Colt’s slide up to the light. “Might know someone with the answers.”
“Who?” Carol turned to face him, brushing her blond hair back from her eyes.
“His name is Alexei Mikhailovich Vasiliev. Former KGB, transferred over to the FSB.” A wry smile crept across Harry’s face. “Same job, different letterheads. He’s currently their ‘chief of security’ at the San Francisco consulate. Read: top spy. If there’s a player in the Russkie underworld capable of bringing Korsakov into the States, he would know who it is. But it’s going to require a face-to-face.”
There was something about the way he said it. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“Problem? No, it’s just that the last time I saw Alexei Mikhailovich I had a gun on him…”
“What do you mean it’s back?” Korsakov asked, the realization sinking in. He pulled the Steyr’s sling from around his shoulders, holding the assault rifle loosely in his right hand as he moved around the open back of the Suburban to see the screen of the laptop. It was snowing again, heavy wet flakes falling down out of the night sky, sliding off the sleek metal skin of the SUV.
Viktor ignored the question, his attention focused on his work. “The mountain — what did you find?”
“There’s a dacha a few hundred feet below the crest — a small hunting lodge. Nothing remarkable.”
“You say a government installation, perhaps?”
Korsakov shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it from the outside, but I don’t know how to explain the satellites. The tracker is back on-line?”
“Da. About an hour. Could there be a basement — a bunker?”
The assassin’s eyes lit up. “What are you saying?”
“If the tracker goes ten meters below the surface, we lose the signal. It’s the only explanation.”
Ten meters. Korsakov exchanged looks with Yuri and the man from Leningrad scowled back. Government.
That presented its own problems. And advantages. Governments were more predictable than a rogue agent.
“Well, they’re not going anywhere with this snow,” the assassin observed, opening the passenger door of the Suburban. “Yuri, take us back to the rally point. Viktor, I want you to set up a phone call for me.”
“Where to?”
Korsakov slipped the Steyr into its carrying case and glanced into the rear-view, allowing himself a faint smile. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Getting up late never did wonders for Caruso’s mood, and his temperament wasn’t improved by the sight of Marika Altmann standing in the foyer of the Alexandria field office, tucking up her greying hair under an FBI baseball cap.
Her suit jacket was off, lying over the back of a nearby chair. It had been replaced by a Level II flak vest. As he stood in the door, watching, she threw on a parka with the letters FBI across the back, covering up her .40 Glock.
“Going to stand there all day, Vic?” she asked, shooting a sharp glance over at him.
There was no good answer to that question, so Caruso elected to respond with another question. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got a lead on Nichols,” Marika replied, scooping up an AR-15 carbine from the couch beside her and tossing it to him. That earned her a glance of shock and disapproval from the office receptionist, but it didn’t seem to faze Altmann.
“Credible?”
The older woman snorted. “Haskel thinks so.”
Coming from Altmann, that wasn’t saying much. The Bureau chief had cut his law enforcement teeth in the Holder DOJ and his involvement in the ATF’s infamous “Fast and Furious” op wasn’t the type of record to endear him to his field agents.
“Where is he?” Caruso asked, following the woman back to the armory. Knowing Nichols, body armor was going to be mandatory.
“A hunting lodge in West Virginia. Klaus Jicha’s flyin’ in from Pittsburgh on a Gulfstream, along with the rest of the HRT. We’re meeting him at the airport in twenty.”
Haskel had to think it was serious. The Hostage Rescue Team was the FBI’s elite. Even the director didn’t pull them in on a whim. Caruso looked up from buttoning his jacket. “And you were planning on calling me — when?”