Carol looked up, her face lit by the screen glow of the PDA in her hands. Wires stretched from the back of the small computer to the security keypad. “Patience…you do realize that your KGB friend couldn’t pick out decent electronics to save his life.”
Harry chuckled in spite of himself. “When Alexei got into this business, computers took up entire rooms. Technology isn’t exactly his thing.”
A beeping noise came from the PDA, the screen lighting up. “The password is 071289,” Carol announced. “The date of the realtor’s anniversary.”
“Do I want to ask how you know that?”
A faint smile played around her lips as she punched the number into the keypad with a gloved finger. “Probably not. If people had the faintest idea how much of their personal information was available on the Internet…”
An LED light began blinking to one side of the pad, a message scrolling across the top. ALARMS DISABLED.
She gestured for him to take the lead and his fingers reached out, touching the doorknob. The door swung open and Harry brought the Colt up in both hands, stepping into the four-car garage.
Empty. He marked the position of the door switches, then lifted the shortwave radio to his lips. “We’re in, Sammy. Come on home.”
Chapter 17
Darkness. The room was spinning around him, blood trickling from between his fingers, wet and viscous. So weak. Polished wood — the nightstand — beneath his outstretched fingers, but he couldn’t begin to pull himself up. Dying…
Hancock came awake with a start, his breath coming fast and heavy, his mind racing. He raised his hands, staring at them in the darkness as if he expected them to be drenched in blood.
He pushed back the sheets, realizing slowly that his clothing was soaked in sweat. Something was happening. Somehow — he had never been a man given to dreams. Or nightmares.
It’s just a dream. Of course. He flicked on the switch, letting out a sigh as the room filled with light. He was alone — Nicole had gone to Camp David, beginning her Christmas vacation. Against the “recommendations” of the Secret Service, but that was Nicole. The traditional, retiring role of First Lady had never been for her.
It was nerves, yes, that was it. He’d been working too hard. Needed a rest. Needed a woman. That was all it was. There was one of Cahill’s aides…what was her name?
Just a dream. He’d never dreamed of his own death. Hancock looked down at his fingers, realizing that they were still trembling. So real…
It hadn’t been the first night in her life that she had stayed up till three in the morning trying to connect nonexistent dots, but it had been a while. And she’d been younger.
The ring of her cellphone on the nightstand of the Holiday Inn jarred her from a sound sleep, her hand flailing out from beneath the covers.
“Altmann here.”
“Special Agent Altmann?” The voice was young, she realized, trying to clear the fog from her brain. Young and slightly accented.
Middle Eastern.
That brought her fully awake. “Who is this?”
“Please, listen to me,” the voice continued. “I am Nasir. Nasir abu Rashid. I have been working for your FBI.”
“I know,” Marika responded, reaching for her pants at the foot of the bed. “How did you get this number?”
“My handler. I only have a few minutes. They may be back at any moment.”
“They? What is going on, Nasir — who are you involved with?” So many questions flooding her mind. So little time. They’d suspected that his disappearance was linked to the Michigan State Police’s discovery of that fully-automatic Kalashnikov, but there had been no direct ties. Silence. “Is an attack imminent?”
A moment passed, then he came back on, his voice even lower than before. “I don’t know — we’re leaving the city tonight.”
“We? I need names, Nasir.” There was no time to establish a relationship with this informant — no time for anything.
“I don’t have them,” the informant stammered. “You have to believe me, I knew of none of this before this morning. My brother had said nothing to me, absolutely nothing…the leader — they call him the ‘Shaikh.’ A tall man, with eyes the color of the sea.”
“Your brother?”
“My brother — no, one of the brothers, I mean.” She could hear the fear in his tones. The uncertainty. The deception. He had lied to her, but what about? Did he have family involved…
He went on before she could respond, announcing abruptly. “I will call you again.”
The phone’s screen went black, eliciting a curse from Marika. She dropped the phone back into the front pocket of her jeans, pulling on a sweater over her head.
The holstered Glock in her hand, she padded across the hotel room to knock on Russell’s door. “We’ve got a situation.”
Despite being empty for several years, the house had lost none of its grandeur. The bathroom appeared massive in the morning light, the sunrise streaming in through double french doors leading out onto a balcony.
Good sniper post, Harry observed, mentally calculating the range. Open the doors, and a man lying prone on the tiles of the bathroom floor would have a clear shot at anyone coming out of Valentin Andropov’s front door. Over the protective wall. In the absence of a dedicated sniper rifle, the FN SCAR had the range to do it.
By the time he’d made his way out to the kitchen, Carol was already sitting there. A solitary barstool was about the only piece of furniture left in the place, and she had commandeered it, her laptop resting securely on the granite countertop.
“How’s the battery back-up working out?” Han had run more errands, this time for the electronics they needed to set up shop.
She brushed her hair out of her eyes, looking up at him. “They’re not top-of-the-line, but they’ll serve our purposes. With just the laptop and the cameras, we should have well over forty-eight hours of battery power.”
Might be enough. Might not. It was impossible to say when the target window would open.
Harry walked over to the windows, eyeing the placement of the cameras. Mounting them under the eaves of the mansion had been tricky, but they were in position.
The more “eyes” you could have on a surveillance mission, the better.
“Have you done anything with the laser mic?” he asked, glancing back to where she sat.
A nod. “It’s not going to work — he’s utilizing vibration maskers on all the windows facing the street.”
“Privacy freak,” Harry observed. “I hate people like that.”
Carol looked up from her laptop. “Fortunately, his son Pyotr isn’t nearly as obsessed. He’s got an electronic footprint the size of Silicon Valley.”
“Can you exploit it?”
A smile. “Already have,” she replied, tapping the screen with a finger.
Harry looked where she was pointing. The e-mail link was headlined with an “alluring” photo of a European girl, with the caption, “Hot women in live action — FREE!”
“Let me guess — he clicked?”
“Of course. Have to hand it to him, though…it took him five minutes to decide. The average is two minutes…or so Carter used to say.”
He shook his head. That would be Carter. “So, what happened after our boy clicked on the link?”