Yet she was an innocent. Harry pulled back the charging handle of the UMP-45, chambering a round. He raised the submachine gun to his shoulder, making sure the sling was adjusted properly.
“No.”
Vasiliev arched an eyebrow. “These lines you draw, tovarisch — they are pointless, aren’t they? And who will know of your lofty principles when you’re dead?”
“I will,” came the quiet response. Harry turned without another word, leading the way into the kitchen. His stun grenades lay on the counter near Carol’s laptop — their only edge once surprise was lost.
“Don’t use these until I give the signal,” he cautioned, handing one of them to Vasiliev.
“I have been to this dance a time or two,” the Russian chuckled. “I think I can promise not to embarrass…”
His voice trailed off and Harry looked back to see Vasiliev’s phone in his hand, a strange look on his face. He put up a hand for quiet. “I have to take this.”
“Who?”
“Vournikov,” Alexei replied, opening the phone. “Da? This is Vasiliev.”
He listened for a long moment, a frown spreading across his face. “Where am I? I’m in a hotel at the moment — the Best Western out on the 405. No, no I’m not alone. Would you like to speak to her?”
The Russian winced, gesturing with his phone toward Carol.
She froze, slowly realizing his intentions. And the part she was being asked to play. Her throat felt dry as she reached out for the phone, bringing it up to her ear. “Who are you?” came the first question, a heavily accented Slavic voice ringing in her ears.
“Maria,” Carol responded, her voice trembling ever so slightly. As many times as she had seen this done…
“And you’re in a hotel with Alexei?”
She hesitated a moment before responding, making up the script as she went.
“Si. If that is his name?” She stammered. “Por favor, senor, only little English.”
It was the final straw, and the other end of the line exploded in curses, punctuated by the gravelly command, “Put him back on, whore.”
A smile crossed her lips as she extended the phone to Vasiliev, watching as he took it. His brow furrowed as he continued listening to the consul. “Nyet, I’ve been here most of the evening. I can contact my men at the safehouses to confirm, but if this has been done, it has been without my knowledge.”
An emphatic shake of the head. “We have no men at that location — haven’t for several weeks. Perhaps a break-in? Da, I can check. Just give me a couple of hours to look into it.”
Vasiliev closed the phone and turned without warning, smashing it against the granite countertop.
“What’s going on?” This from Han, entering the room behind the Russian.
“Someone got to him,” Vasiliev replied, his eyes locking with Harry’s. “Someone is putting pressure on Vournikov to find you — and they know for certain you were at the consulate.”
The Russian’s air of self-assurance was gone, completely gone. “He said all this?” Harry demanded.
“No,” Vasiliev replied, reaching for his jacket. “It’s what he didn’t say. He doesn’t trust me.”
“Imagine that,” Han murmured. Harry shot him a dark look, but if the ex-KGB officer had heard the remark, he took no notice of it.
“Do they have your location?”
“Nyet.” Vasiliev gestured to the destroyed phone. “This phone was set up to receive calls forwarded from my consulate-supplied Blackberry. It is in a motel on the 405. And that is the GPS signal they’ll be tracking, if they get that far.”
Someone had taught the old dog all the new tricks. But it would buy them precious little time. Harry turned toward Carol. “Is everything in place?”
A brief nod was her only reply, her long fingers dancing over the keyboard as she entered the final commands.
He looked down at the luminous dial of his watch, noting the time. “Let’s do this, gentlemen.”
Whenever possible, Valentin Andropov surrounded himself with people he knew. People he could trust, as far as that went. It was why he had hired Sergei Korsakov. And now he was wondering if that had been a mistake.
“Da, everything is cleared to proceed, Sergei,” he replied over the phone, rolling his eyes at the head of his security detail. “Vournikov confirms that there are no consulate personnel on site.”
His old comrade had changed over the years, despite his many successful contracts. Grown more cautious, hesitant even. And it was testing his patience. “Stop acting like an old woman, Sergei,” Andropov snarled, biting sarcasm in his tones. “Just get in there and complete your contract. Call me when you have the girl.”
He placed the phone on the desk in front of him, shaking his head as he glared across the room at his chief of security. “It appears that I may have overestimated Korsakov’s usefulness. Sergei and his team…they won’t be leaving the country.”
The former MVD colonel nodded his understanding.
“Betraying a comrade is not something I would do lightly,” Andropov said, using a guillotine cutter to trim the end of the hand-rolled cigar in his hand. “You understand this, Maxim. Sergei was an old friend — we fought together in the war. But I can no longer trust him implicitly. And that is something I require.”
The oligarch fished a lighter out of his pocket, holding the open flame to the tip of his cigar. “I can count on you in this, da?”
There was no time for a response — the next moment, the room was plunged into darkness, the only illumination coming from the flickering ember at the end of Andropov’s cigar.
“All the taxes I pay to this state,” Andropov swore, “and still these blackouts.”
Impact. Harry landed in a bed of Serbian bellflowers, throwing out a hand to catch himself as he pitched forward. He heard movement behind him, Vasiliev surmounting the wall, but he paid it no heed.
The door. Propelling himself upright, he hurtled forward, feet pounding across the turf toward the patio, his eyes focused in on the keypad.
He was half-way there when he heard the dogs begin to bark.
Vasiliev heard them too, from his position in the shadow of the wall. He dropped to one knee, the suppressed Ruger Mark II clutched in both hands, a rock-steady grip.
Back in the van, the SEAL had called the weapon a “hush puppy”, exhibiting a dark sense of humor that Alexei hadn’t seen from him before. Time to see if it lived up to its name.
Volkodav. Wolf crusher. The dogs came around the corner of the house at full gallop, great slavering beasts. In Chechnya, they had accompanied he and his men into the mountains, but they seemed larger than he remembered. Perhaps it was all a matter of perspective.
Nichols was at the door, his dark form obscuring the keypad — but the dogs had him spotted now. Moving too fast…
No time.
Raising his voice just loud enough for the dogs to hear, Vasiliev spat out a command in Russian, one of several he remembered from that long Chechen winter.
They slowed, hesitating at the sound of the familiar command. The foremost dog let out a howl of frustration, turning his massive head toward Vasiliev.
Sight picture. The Russian’s finger closed around the Mark II’s trigger, squeezing ever so gently.
A whisper of death spat from the long, dark barrel, barely audible even to Vasiliev. The subsonic .22-caliber round slammed into the dog’s nose from fifteen feet away, smashing through bone and tissue until it reached the brain.