Vasily was the third man lying in the alley. His legs and lower torso had been shot several times, and he was conscious, but barely.
As she leaned over him, he looked at her with confusion.
“Koshka?”
She pulled the medical kit from Ruslan’s tactical vest under his jacket and yanked out a tourniquet. With it she began cinching Vasily’s right leg, and while she worked she asked, “The others?”
Vasily looked up at the fire escape landing above him. He shook his head.
“You are certain they are all dead?”
He nodded now. Then he said, “What are you doing here?”
Zoya did not answer. She wrapped the tourniquet around his upper leg, tightened it just below his crotch, and then yanked as hard as she could to completely cut off the blood flow. Vasily yelled out while she tied it off, but she covered his mouth with a free hand.
When he recovered, the Zaslon commander said, “Fantom. Where’s Fantom?”
Zoya knew another officer from the SVR would have replaced her, but she was surprised to hear Vasily use the code name of Oleg Utkin. Utkin was known as a competent officer, but she’d personally never thought much of him as a leader. He was the guy SVR sent in to wine and dine foreign turncoats, not to run a task force of Zaslon snake eaters. She assumed he must have just been the closest, most senior operative at the time Zoya was relieved of command, so Moscow had sent him here to pick up the operation where she left it.
Fucking fools, she thought. Fan Jiang was too important a mission to hand over to Oleg Utkin.
She grabbed Vasily’s walkie-talkie off his belt and depressed the talk key. “Fantom, this is Sirena. How do you copy?”
She put down the radio and kept working on Vasily, then checked on Ruslan again. Finally Utkin replied through the little speaker. “What are you doing on this net?”
Zoya picked up the radio again. “I’m on Anna One’s radio. Where the fuck are you?”
“I’m at the RP.”
“You have a vehicle?”
“Of course we have vehicles. We have two here. The Anna team has a minibus, and I have a two-door Audi.”
Zoya replied coldly, “Well, you’ll only need the car. There are two survivors. Get to the alleyway west of the Black Pearl, now. Hurry!”
CHAPTER
FORTY-FOUR
Court sat parked seventy-five yards away from the blond woman in the skimpy teal dress. Through the binoculars he’d pulled from his go-pack on the front seat next to him, he could see the woman on her bare knees in the narrow alley, treating one of two men lying there.
He wondered if she still had the Glock and the .38 on her. Her teal minidress was form-fitting with a high-rise waistline, so it certainly didn’t lend itself to hiding two pounds of steel, polymer, and ammo, but Court couldn’t see well enough into the dark alley from here, and for all he knew she could have taped or tied the weapons to her thighs if she had to, or she might have had a purse she’d laid next to the men that he couldn’t see from here.
While she continued to work alone in the dark below the fire escape, flames and smoke poured out of the windows of the building right next to her. Everyone else — civilians, police, firefighters — were all staying out of the alley because of the danger there, but Court knew the blonde wasn’t going to remain undetected for long, because she was just forty or fifty yards from the intersection on the opposite side of the block from Court, and there a Bangkok fire department truck and a crowd of onlookers were in plain view, and she was in plain view of them if they took the time to shine a light up the alley.
As Court focused again on the woman performing immediate-action first aid on the two prostrate figures, a black Audi coupe rolled up to the mouth of the alleyway between Court and the blonde, just half a block from the American’s Toyota four-door. The Audi turned into the alley but stopped abruptly, likely because of the fire and the narrowness of the channel between the buildings.
A man climbed out of the driver-side door, then knelt and pulled his seat forward to access the backseats in the coupe. He left his door open as he jogged off up the alley.
Court realized instantly this was the man he’d pegged as an SVR operative in the nightclub earlier. Clearly he’d left the car door open because he planned on carrying the injured men to his car.
Court looked at the open back door on the far side of the man’s vehicle, then quickly pulled one of his phones out of his pack along with the Bluetooth earpiece he’d bought with it, and he climbed out of his Toyota. He took off in a sprint for the Audi.
As he ran he dialed the number of his other phone — he’d written it on a piece of tape affixed to the back of the device — and then he paired that phone with the Bluetooth earpiece. As soon as he got to the car he ducked down behind it and looked up the alley, and here he saw that the man in the suit and the blonde were both kneeling over one of the men lying on his back.
Court reached into the Audi and crammed the cell phone under the driver’s seat, then took the tiny Bluetooth earpiece and wedged it between the driver’s headrest and the seat back, careful to position the device so only the microphone tip was visible, and then only to someone really looking for it.
Court spun back out of the Audi, then ran back for his own car in a crouch.
Oleg Utkin knelt down over Vasily and Ruslan, but he did not render first aid. Instead he looked up at the bright intersection ahead, which was crowded with firefighters.
He slowly surveyed the alley around him. A dead Chinese man in a black suit was crumpled against the wall between some metal garbage cans. He asked, “Where is the rest of Anna?”
Zoya pointed up, and Utkin looked to the fire escape. There, just a few meters over his head, Pyotr, Yevgeni, and Andrei all lay there in a heap, their bodies a twisted mass. Blood dripped down from multiple locations, missing Oleg by no more than a couple of feet.
Zoya said, “Before he passed out, Vasily said Mikhail was killed on the fourth floor.”
“Der’mo. How bad are they?” he asked, referring to the two survivors.
“They’ll survive if we get them to a hospital.” She had removed their guns and gear and radios, Ruslan’s body armor, and the extra magazines she found in Vasily’s pockets. She threw the equipment over by the dead Chinese operative.
Oleg knelt down and started to lift Vasily.
Zoya said, “What are you doing?”
“Taking him to the car. Get his legs.”
“I just told you they need a hospital.” She stood up, waved to the firefighters forty meters away on the well-lit street, and shouted for them to help.
Oleg said, “No! These men can’t be interviewed by police!” He started to heave Vasily up alone, but Zoya grabbed Utkin by the arm and spun him to face her.
“They’ll die!”
Utkin said, “Then they’ll die! I have my orders. No compromise.”
But Bangkok firefighters had heard Zoya, and they were already running over. Zoya found one who spoke some English, and she showed the man the wounds on the two men. He immediately spoke into his radio, while other firemen grabbed the victims to pull them farther away from the burning building, closer to the dead Chinese gunman.
The firemen stared in astonishment at all the weapons and bullet holes in the four men, and Zoya realized they hadn’t even seen the dead men on the fire escape’s landing.