He watched as the older man took a small bottle from his coat pocket, shaking two round capsules into his palm.
“Pain medication,” Abu Kareem said, answering the unasked question. “The doctors tell me that I have only a few months left to live. Cancer.”
“There’s no treatment?”
“None that could save my life — by the time they found it, it had spread all through my lungs.”
He looked up, visibly hesitating. “I do not wish Tarik to know of this — I am trusting you to keep this secret, my son. It is the last wish of my life that I die as I have lived, in the service of God.”
The Suburban that had left earlier in the day was returning, the remotely-controlled gates of the Andropov mansion swinging open wide to admit it.
Han raised the camera, adjusting the telephoto lens as he snapped picture after picture. It was a fruitless exercise, given the blacked-out windows and the fact that he already had the license number. Alpha-one-five-Bravo-Papa-Delta.
But it was training, old reflexes taking back over. Being in special ops was like riding a bicycle. Some things, you never forgot.
No matter how hard you tried.
He was laying prone on a dirty mattress, the stock of a sniper rifle pressed against his shoulder. Watching a street full of people through the scope, each of them only a hair’s-breadth away from death. Ciudad del Este. Paraguay.
One target.
His hands trembled at the unbidden memory, and he lowered the camera, realizing suddenly that he was sweating, a thin sheen of perspiration covering his forearms.
Get a grip.
He passed a hand over his face, walking back through the empty rooms of the house until he arrived at the kitchen.
“The Suburban is back,” the former SEAL announced, glancing over toward where Carol sat. “Couldn’t get an ID on the driver.”
She acknowledged his words with a nod. “Harry called — they had just crossed the city limits of Las Vegas. Still shadowing Andropov.”
“And they’ve not been detected?” Han pursed his lips together. “That’s impressive.”
“I hope so,” she murmured. “If they’ve been able to stay behind them this long — Vasiliev must be good at what he does.”
“Vasiliev…is the best,” Han replied, laying the camera on the granite of the kitchen’s island. “He made it through the hell of Afghanistan in the eighties, stayed alive in the middle of the power struggles that followed the dissolution of the USSR. He’s a survivor. I’ve never met anyone like him.”
“I wish Harry hadn’t gone with him,” Carol observed, her voice suddenly brittle. “It’s not safe.”
He looked at her for a long moment, sadness growing in his eyes. He knew that tone. Sherri.
All those years, and he could still hear the pain in his wife’s voice, still feel the tension as they spent their last night together before deployment. Before Yemen.
He remembered her body shuddering as she lay in his arms, tears falling from her eyes. It was as though she had known. Their souls inextricably linked.
“You care for him, don’t you?” The words came out more abruptly than he intended, but there was no reaction. Not for a painfully long moment.
“There are moments…” She hesitated as if searching for the right words, still not looking at him. “Moments when I see another side of him…and in those moments I tell myself that this is a man I could love.”
The SEAL stared down at his hands, big fingers splayed against the granite. Memories.
“Don’t do this to yourself.”
She turned toward him, disbelief and anger playing across her features. “What do you mean?”
He fell silent for a moment. “Harry is one of the few men I truly respect — there was a time in my life when I would have crossed hell in a rubber raft had he given the order. It doesn’t change one simple reality: he’s going to end up just like me.”
There was no response. He could see her fingers trembling, whether from anger or fear, he couldn’t tell. When the phone rang a moment later, she didn’t move to answer it.
He picked the cellphone off the countertop, answering it with a simple, “Hello.”
It was Harry.
The SEAL listened without commenting for a couple minutes, then responded, “We’ll keep you updated from our end.”
He closed the phone, turning back to Carol. “They’ve lost Andropov.”
Open ground. The sniper in him hated it. Thomas moved out from cover, the stubble of a snow-frosted corn field jabbing through his skin. The briars in the hedgerow of multiflora behind him had already pulled and tugged at his makeshift ghillie suit, but he preferred it to the nakedness of the open field.
You never got to choose your tactical environment. Or your conditions. There were some forms of cover you couldn’t see from. He lifted a small pair of binoculars to his eyes, staring across the mounded snow, toward the mobile home nestled beneath a copse of trees at the edge of the field. A single vehicle in the driveway. A light in a rear window, presumably a bedroom by the placement.
“What’s your sitrep, LONGBOW?” Tex’s voice, crackling through the static on his earpiece.
“I’m in position.” Thomas glanced at his watch, marking the time. Twenty-two hundred hours. “Watch and wait.”
Chapter 18
The security camera was smashed in the parking garage where Vasiliev parked the Taurus. An old act of vandalism, judging by the weathering of the cracked plastic housing. As if it had been broken the previous year and no one had possessed the time or money needed to replace it.
“Leave your pistol in the car,” Vasiliev instructed as Harry opened the door.
Harry looked at him. Just because he knew why didn’t mean he had to like it. “It’s only five blocks to the club, and you can’t get inside with it.” A smile crossed the Russian’s face. “Just because the place is run by the mafiya, don’t think that we’re completely lawless.”
He opened the center console and pulled out a pair of Bluetooth earpieces. “We’ll use these to stay in contact if we need to separate. The miracle of technology, tovarisch. Twenty years ago, sitting at a bar with a wire protruding from your ear — you might as well tattoo spy on your forehead. But now…”
It also made identifying your opponents a lot harder, Harry thought, briefly testing the device to make sure it worked. For every technology, there was a downside. And a countermeasure.
“I assume it’s occurred to you that someone may recognize you, Alexei. You are the consulate’s head of security, after all.”
Vasiliev came around the end of the car, taking in Harry’s worn leather jacket and faded jeans at a glance. “It has. In point of fact, I am counting on it. Your fashion sense certainly isn’t going to get us past the bouncer.”
If there was one thing Marika had learned about the Bureau over her years of service, it was that subtlety wasn’t their strong suit. In the hours following Russell’s call, they had descended on the mosque in force — forty agents at last count.
Snow crunched beneath her feet as she ducked under the crime scene tape, heading for her car. Behind her the mosque was bathed in floodlights, ahead the Dearborn PD had officers stationed, keeping the crowd back. At least fifteen officers, a sizable percentage of their entire force.