“Помогите мне!” he said.
Help me.
He wasn’t begging. He looked back over his shoulder, making it obvious that he was being chased, and knowing that these kinds of people wouldn’t like the people chasing him. He’d led them, literally, into a lion’s den.
One of them nodded toward a screen door — the kitchen. He stepped through it. A woman stood over the sink. She wasn’t doing the dishes. She seemed to be marking out lines of coke. He stood with his back to the wall. He could see the door through a trick of perspective, from a mirror in the kitchen to a mirror in the hall.
The first man appeared in the doorway. He carried a Kalash. A Kalashnikov Automatic. A monster of a gun. It didn’t help him.
The first gunshot came a heartbeat later.
A single shot followed by the crash of the gunman stumbling backward into the doorframe.
The second shot hit as he slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the faded flowered wallpaper above his head.
His fingers closed on the trigger of his automatic, the pistol bucking as he unleashed a hail of bullets indiscriminately into the drug-hazed smoke filling room. If the gods came in bullet form he’d just released an entire pantheon into this small space, silencing all unbelievers.
When the bullets stopped, he was dead.
The second man wasn’t so eager to die. He paused beyond the threshold, out of line-of-sight. But once the shooting stopped, he made his move, coming in fast and low. The apartment was filled with echoes and silence and the smell of death.
He watched the hunter through the mirrors as he turned over the corpses in search of his target, kicking them with his booted foot so their jaws jutted out proudly in the face of the reaper. Obviously, the target wasn’t amongst the dead. There were three other rooms in the small apartment. He gestured for his companions to go right and left, checking each room off.
The woman had given up on the white lines and curled up in a ball beside the kitchen sink. Above her head, an open window waited. He could see the wrought-iron railings of a fire escape.
The metal groaned under his weight as he descended.
He moved as quickly as he could without his feet clanging on each step, knowing it was only a matter of time before they realized where he’d gone. Every second he could gain the better; every step could make a difference.
The staccato rattle of gunfire filled the air before he’d descended a single floor.
Lights went on in some of the flats. The sensible ones stayed dark. Whatever was going on had nothing to do with them; they knew better than to be nosy. Curiosity killed more than cats.
He heard the door above him swing open.
He didn’t turn around to look.
He couldn’t afford a moment’s delay.
He stumbled as his foot reached the cracked concrete at the bottom of the stairway. His knee bent and he fought to stay upright as the clatter of pursuit sounded hot on his heels. The entire fire escape trembled beneath the weight of it. The gunman was descending fast, gaining on him. There had been three of them in the apartment, but now it sounded as though only one of them had followed him out of the window, which meant the other two had gone back out to the walkway and would work their way around to the back of the apartment block.
He ducked into the blackest of shadows, hugging close to the building.
A light went on inside one of the ground floor rooms, throwing bright light over his face for a second before he ducked back into shadow.
It was enough to give him away.
No point in trying to be quiet now.
To live he needed to run like the wind blowing through the canyons of the city. Anything else meant death. He was a rat in a maze, three ratters looking to feast on him before he found the cheese. He could only hope he knew these desolate streets better than his hunters did. He risked the briefest of glances at his watch. Ten minutes — that was all he had. If he didn’t get there in time this would all have been for nothing. Dying was always a risk. It came with the territory. Failure though, failure belonged in another zip code.
He turned a corner, heading away from the ranks of tower blocks, running hard for the main road. Cars, some with only one working headlight, rumbled along the poorly lit road. Some drove so slowly, crawling along the curb, that their purpose was clear. A Saab slowed to a halt a hundred yards ahead of him. A young woman with bleached blond hair and a skirt that barely covered her goods bent down to talk to the driver. She thrust her hip out, advertising it to the other drivers as if to say, Look what could be yours, the freshest meat your rubles can buy. The red sequins on her skirt glittered cheaply in the streetlight. He kept running right toward them, willing the driver to move on.
She opened the passenger side door and slid inside.
She slammed the door.
He was too late. The window had closed.
She was being withdrawn.
He kept on running, willing her to see him. The car pulled away from the curb, crawling toward him. He glanced over his shoulder as the gunman came skidding around the corner.
Time’s up.
Then the saw the girl’s hand reach out through the open passenger side window. She’d recognized him. He had one chance as they were pulling out into traffic to make the handover. His fist closed around the secrets he’d risked his life to get out of Mother Russia. He made the drop, literally and figuratively, letting the package fall into her hand as their fingers brushed. He didn’t break his stride. Maybe the gunman saw it, maybe he didn’t. The Saab accelerated away.
He ducked right, relief surging through his system. He’d done it. The information in that package was worth dying for, and now it was free. The woman would get it back to her handler, and he’d get it out of the country. In silent warfare, it would be a whisper that would be heard all around the world. And it was down to him.
He had three choices. Left, right or straight ahead.
He chose left.
He chose badly.
It took him into a blind alley between apartment complexes that opened out into a courtyard for the neighboring buildings to hang their laundry and beat the dust out of heavy rugs. There was only one way out of the courtyard. Back the way he’d come.
He raised his hands above his head, knowing that he had nowhere left to run.He lowered his head. He’d made a mistake that would cost him his life.
But he hadn’t failed. That was all that mattered.
He turned slowly. He looked up as the first shot was fired.
He didn’t feel it.
TWO
One room looked like every other conference room in every other jurisdiction, in every other part of hell. It didn’t matter which city it was in, which state, or even which country. This one was on the Coronado military base in California, but could just as easily have been in a hotel in Anchorage now that the blinds had been closed.
The people in the room waited for the briefing to start.
They didn’t know why there were here, but looking around the room, seeing who had been assembled, it was obvious that it was important. At least Zara Leopov assumed everyone else was in the dark. She certainly had no idea why she had been summoned. Her position in naval intelligence didn’t put her in the same room as the top brass that often. She resisted the temptation to count the pips on the uniforms around the table, afraid she’d lose count. It was readily apparent that most of the men knew each other. She was the only outsider here. They barely even spared her a second glance, assuming she was here to make the coffee. This was a testosterone-fueled world, after all.