“Pffft! I’m still trying to figure out what the hell we’re doing in China.”
“We’re jumping the Dragon Wall.”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said. “You know that Victor Kovats was killed jumping the Wall, right?”
“Who’s Victor Kovatch?”
“Kovats. He was the Hungarian wing suit champion.”
“Oh, the Hungarian champion!” Gil chuckled sarcastically. “I’ll bet he had to be pretty good to be the Hungarian champ.”
She suppressed a smile, both amused and offended by his American air of superiority. “You should know the best wing suit fliers in the world are from Europe.”
He laughed. “And they’re apparently splattered all over China.”
She laughed, too, in spite of herself, slapping him on the shoulder. “You Americans think you’re so great!”
For reasons Gil could not quite pin down — competitive reasons, perhaps? — Lena brought out the conceit in him. “Well,” he said, “how many Europeans have HALO’d into Iran from the back of a Turkish 727?”
An experienced parachutist, Lena knew that a HALO jump was a High-Altitude, Low-Opening parachute jump employed by Special Forces to infiltrate enemy territory. Her jaw hung open. “You did that?”
He did not answer the question directly. “So who’s got bigger balls now? Me or Kovatch?”
“Kovats,” she said quietly, her ardor beginning to smolder. She slid her hand along the inside of his thigh. “Why were you in Iran?”
He thought briefly about his plans for the future — should there be a future, considering the insanity factor of the jump he planned to make — and decided to share a classified secret: “I was sent in to assassinate a bomb maker and his pregnant wife.”
She sat back with a gasp. “You murdered a pregnant woman?”
He shook his head. “I shot her, but I didn’t kill her. I killed her husband and her father, though. Then I kidnapped her back to Afghanistan, and she gave birth to a baby boy that same night. The kid’ll probably grow up to become a damn terrorist, thanks to me. Last year, I killed the CIA man who ordered me to shoot her without telling me she was pregnant.” He took his eyes off the road just long enough to meet her gaze. “How do you like me now?”
She put her hand on his knee. “No wonder you can’t go back to your old life.”
“How could anyone go back?” he muttered, thinking of Marie. “The things I’ve done…”
Her voice felt thick to her as she spoke. “You and I were destined to meet, Gil.”
“Dunno about that.” He was eyeing the mirror again, wishing he could kill the Russians now instead of having to wait, but it was necessary to the plan. “Maybe we were — if you believe that kinda crap.”
An hour later, they were approaching Zhangjiajie, the city nearest to Tianmen Mountain National Park in northwestern Hunan Province. Tianmen Mountain was often called the Dragon Wall because of the winding, serpentine road that led up to the almost five-thousand-foot-high summit from which wing-suit fliers from all over the world launched themselves into the sky like Wile E. Coyote.
Victor Kovats had died there on October 8, 2013, during the World Wingsuit League Championships. His parachute had failed to deploy just shy of the landing pad, and he impacted the trees at nearly a hundred miles an hour.
When they arrived at their hotel, Gil parked in front and got out, smiling at the Russians as they drove slowly past and signaling for the driver to roll down his window.
The blond Russian stopped the car, staring with his dead blue eyes as he put down the window, waiting to hear what Gil had to say.
Gil saw the Bratva tattoos on the Russian’s neck. “You can park right over there and just bring our bags up to the room,” he wisecracked.
Without giving any indication that he’d understood, the Russian put up the window and pulled past the hotel.
Lena was afraid of the Russians outside of Switzerland. “Why do you antagonize them?”
“It was necessary,” he said, opening the back of the black Land Rover Defender to remove their bags.
An Asian man on a bicycle emerged from around the corner of the building and pedaled past in the same direction as the Russians. Lena recognized him at once as Nahn. “Hey, that’s—” She turned to Gil. “He got here ahead of us! You wanted him to see which car they were in!”
Gil gave her wink. “Never fuck with the United States Navy.”
She laughed and shook her head. “My God, you’re arrogant.”
“Only around you, baby.” He pulled her carry-on from the back of the truck and handed it to her. “Here. It won’t kill you to carry one up yourself.”
She laughed again, taking the bag. “Fuck you, Gil.”
42
Mariana Mederos had rented a small apartment outside of Puerto Vallarta in order to remain close to Antonio Castañeda, pending completion of Crosswhite’s mission in Toluca. After Serrano and the gringo sniper were dead, she would have to make some decisions regarding her future with the CIA. For now, though, she had a purpose, and that was to arrange for any logistical support that Crosswhite might need from Castañeda’s people in the South. Under normal circumstances, she would have been afraid to remain in the same city as Castañeda, alone and unprotected, but she was beginning to see that, despite his ruthless nature, the former GAFE operator did adhere to a certain moral code. There was no way of divining the limits of that code, but it did provide a small degree of predictability.
She was walking north along the beach with her feet in the surf when her cellular began to ring in her bag. She did not recognize the number, but it was from the DC area code: 202.
“Hello?” she said, convinced that it would be Pope.
“I’m surprised you answered,” said Clemson Fields.
His voice had a nerve-grating nasal overtone that Mariana recognized at once. “What do you want?”
“I see you’re down in Vallarta,” he said. “Do you have time to meet me in Tijuana?”
Mariana’s desire to meet Fields in Tijuana — or anywhere else — ranked right up there with her desire to be eaten by a shark. “For what?”
“By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that Alice Downly was killed by an ex-Ranger sniper working for the Ruvalcabas. I’ve tracked his spotter, Billy Jessup, to Tijuana, and I need you to get close to him so you can learn the sniper’s location.”
“And how do you suggest I do that?”
“That will be up to you,” Fields said, “but Jessup has a fondness for Mexican women.”
“In other words, you expect me to sleep with him.”
“I expect you to do whatever you can to help end this crisis. I won’t waste time sparring with you, Mariana. You know the gringo sniper is hunting Agent Vaught and is therefore hunting Crosswhite as well. Even if you no longer care about the future of the CIA, I believe you do care about Dan Crosswhite. Or am I wrong?”
She realized that both Fields and Pope were under the impression that she and Crosswhite had slept together, and this annoyed her, but they were right to assume she cared about him. This annoyed her as well. They had discovered a weakness, and Fields was exploiting it.
Very well. If men were going to exploit her weaknesses, she would fly to Tijuana to exploit one of theirs, but sleeping with anyone was out of the question; she’d sooner resort to using a pair of scissors to get the information she wanted. “The spotter’s name is Jessup?”