He paled, taking a step back from Vasiliev, breathing heavily. His voice trembled as he spoke.
“Leave, Alexei,” he warned, gesturing with the barrel of his pistol. “Leave before I kill you.”
Vasiliev leaned there against the wall for a long moment, massaging his sore throat, regarding Harry soberly. “Of course, tovarisch. As you wish.”
Kill him. The impulse came suddenly, without warning and without reason — a premonition of danger entering his soul. Kill him and have done with it.
It was as if the shroud of the future had been pulled back for but a scant moment. Kill him.
And yet he found himself incapable of pulling the trigger. He watched the Russian go as if in a haze, smelling the stench of death pervading the room — the presence of a tangible evil.
The straight-eight sights of his Colt centered on the back of Alexei’s head as he reached the door — the perfect target for a scant moment of time.
And then he was gone. Harry stood there staring at the empty doorway for a long moment, a strange sense of regret washing over him. A regret that had nothing to do with the murder of Pyotr.
Pyotr. He turned to see Carol on her knees beside the boy’s broken body, his blood staining her shirt. “You knew,” she whispered, shaking her head as tears rolled down her cheeks. “You knew.”
It felt as if a knife had gone through his body. A thousand excuses rose to his lips, but they all rang hollow.
He had made his deal with the devil he knew, and Pyotr had paid the price. It was that simple.
And none of it mattered in this moment. “We have to go,” he said, reaching down for her wrist.
She shook off his hand, her fingers stroking Pyotr’s lifeless arm. “You swore that he would come to no harm.”
Yes. He had. Her hand came up to brush away her tears in an angry gesture, leaving a streak of blood in its wake. “Does this look like ‘no harm’ to you?”
Sirens in the distance. The rhythmic thwap-thwap-thwap of an inbound helicopter. They had to be gone, moments of freedom slipping away the longer they lingered. He slipped the Colt back into its holster, reaching down to grasp her shoulder, pulling her roughly to her feet.
Run…
Night flying was something that had never appealed to Yuri. Too many memories of operations gone wrong — missions sabotaged by insufficient intelligence or indecisive superiors. He sat just back of the pilot in the Sikorsky S-76 as the helicopter swept over Beverly Hills toward Andropov’s estate, one thousand feet over the housetops.
Lifeless. It was the first word that came to his mind as the mansion entered his view through the side windows of the executive helicopter. Everything was dark, no flicker of light from the windows. Nothing.
“Take us around for another pass over the neighborhood,” the man from Leningrad instructed. “Lower this time.”
The pilot, a young — almost boyish — Russian with an unrecognizable American accent, shook his head. “Can’t do that — FAA regs. A thousand feet over residential neighborhoods. Andropov’s neighbors…well, they all got nearly as much money as he does and a propensity for complaining to go with it.”
Yuri shook his head at his comrades, leaning forward until his face was only inches away from the pilot’s. “Do I look like a man who cares about your ‘regs’ or his neighbors?”
He drew back the slide of his Glock deliberately, his eyes never leaving the pilot’s face as the young man’s eyes widened. “Take us down.”
The pilot nodded wordlessly, easing the helicopter’s nose forward and circling around for another pass, this time at four hundred feet. It was then that Yuri saw it, a faint movement in the faint glow of a streetlight below. A gray panel van…
He slid his phone open, fingers moving clumsily over the small buttons. Contact made.
The taillights of a minivan glowed red in front of him and Harry shifted into the right lane, accelerating. He was going too fast — he knew that. Running from something he couldn’t escape.
Himself.
One who would fight with monsters must take care that he does not become one. What had he become?
The answer to that question was a luxury he couldn’t afford. Not now. Innocents died in war, had ever since the dawn of time. Pyotr was collateral damage — nothing more, he thought, his face hardening.
They had the intel they had sought. And no way to act on it. They needed support, as risky as that was going to be.
No doubt the bodies of Valentin Andropov and his bodyguards had already been discovered. His son’s would take the police a few more hours, but find him they would.
And once more the dragnet would be thrown out. “Do you hear that?” Han asked quietly from the van’s front passenger seat.
He didn’t have to clarify his question. Harry knew exactly what he was talking about. Had known ever since they had left the neighborhood of Andropov’s estate.
A helicopter. He glanced out the window of the panel van, endeavoring to catch a glimpse of it against the night sky. Waiting for the finger of a police searchlight to reach down, pinpointing them in the midst of the traffic. For red-and-blue lights to appear in his rear-view mirror, sirens wailing.
Nothing. And that brought with it a no less troubling conclusion.
Korsakov?
His eyes returned to the road, watching the signs carefully. Two miles. Only a few minutes till he could merge onto the I-10. Lose themselves in the interstate.
Only a few more minutes…
A stern chase is a long chase, Korsakov thought, calling back to mind the words of his father, a sailor in the Red Navy. And this one was going to be very long. The speedometer needle of the Suburban held steady at ninety-five miles per hour as the SUV flew down the interstate. They weren’t going to intercept in time.
“Can you give me any satellite coverage?” he asked, glancing in the overhead mirror.
He could see Viktor biting his lip, a rough shock of hair fallen over the boy’s face as he worked at the laptop. “I’m working on it — may have to be a commercial sat.”
That would provide the bare minimum of coverage in the best of times — and provide no help at all at this hour of the night.
Korsakov looked down at his phone, at the latest message from Yuri, trying to conceal his frustration. The helicopter was running out of fuel, only fifteen minutes away from breaking off the chase.
He glanced at the GPS read-out again, a plan forming in his mind. It was a desperate shot, but for all his personal differences with Yuri, the man was good.
The assassin’s thumbs moved over the small keyboard of the phone, hesitating for a moment before finally pressing SEND.
They had no back-up plan.
“Look, I was told not to ask you any questions, but we’re nearly bingo-fuel here. This is a ten-million dollar chopper and it belongs to Mr. Andropov, not you.”
Yuri shook his head, ignoring the pilot’s protest as he glanced down at the glowing screen of the phone in his hand. Had Korsakov gone mad?
He read the message a second time. His employer was tossing caution completely to the wind — and it stood a good chance of killing him in the process. Still…