They were looking for him.
Len heard the unmistakable hammering of automatic weapons, and a moment later, the urgency of the tone on the radio confirmed his worst fears. “We have intruders in the compound! Good God, I don’t know how many they’ve killed.” In the background, he could hear the cries of the wounded.
Dmitri’s voice appeared on the radio just a moment later. “Two sentries have been shot. Their bodies are in the reception area.”
Len scanned his surveillance screens, looking for some indication of what was happening, but everything looked entirely normal.
Oh no. He felt his face flush. The reception hall showed normal. Area Four showed normal. Good God, this was a nightmare. Someone had hijacked their video feed. He was blind.
He felt the early signs of panic boiling up inside him. Too many thoughts swam through his head to process them quickly enough. That meant he needed to prioritize. He needed to think not just about the words he was hearing, but about their meaning. He inhaled deeply to calm himself, and then modulated his voice to be as calm as he could make it.
He brought his radio to his lips. “I understand two bodies in the reception area. Unit reporting intruders. Who are you?”
“Gregory Jones.”
Len recognized it as a cover name, but he didn’t remember who it was covering for. “Okay, Gregory, how many intruders are there?”
“I don’t know,” he said. The horrible cacophony of wailing men echoed in the background. “I didn’t get to see, but there must be many.”
A large and talented attack force could only mean the police, perhaps with the assistance of the military.
“Thomas to Central,” someone said. “What do you want me to do with all these trucks?”
“Central” was the radio designation for the watch commander, but Len spoke up before he had a chance. “This is Len,” he said. “I am taking command. Dmitri, what do you see?” By now, he’d had plenty of time to get to the door of the chapel.
“I don’t see anyone,” Dmitri replied. “There’s another body in the hallway outside the chapel, and I smell smoke coming from Area Four, but I see no signs of intruders.”
How could that be?
Wait. Of course! This wasn’t about the weapons in the chapel. This was about the Mishins. That explains why they were in Area Four. That was the innermost part of the complex. Only the cell blocks lay within. That had to be where they were headed.
He switched to Russian for better radio security. (If his enemy could tap his security cameras, they could certainly listen in on his communication.) “Thomas, tell the drivers to start loading right away. Gregory, gather those who are capable, and all of you meet me at the base of the barracks stairs in three minutes.”
Grabbing an AK and a bandolier of ammunition, Len headed for his office door. He moved quickly down the spiral stone steps to what would have been a lovely reception area in the hotel that would now never exist. The stairway door, which would normally be dead bolted, lay open, no doubt because Dmitri had been in a hurry.
The front doors opened as he passed them, admitting three men dressed as anyone might be for the cold weather. Two of them wheeled hand trucks, but it was the third one who spoke. “Where—”
Len pointed. “Through those doors and then left,” he said.
The truck crew took a few steps, and then stopped as they all saw the dead sentries at the same time.
“Don’t worry about them,” Len said. “Just do your job, and do it quickly.”
“But what happened to them?”
“They didn’t do their jobs quickly enough,” Len said.
“What’s with the Russian on the radio all of a sudden?” Boxers asked.
“I think that means we’re made,” Jonathan said.
Yelena translated, “He told the trucks to start loading. Then he told people to wait at the base of the sleeping quarters for him.”
“Like I said,” Jonathan said. “I think we’re made”
They were hustling through a honeycomb of stone and steel. Jonathan had always found jails to be terrible, soul-stealing places, but this one was particularly bleak with its peeling paint and low ceilings. He recognized their location from the satellite photos as the oldest part of the prison — the original part. Building Delta sat at the end of this corridor, and somewhere in there sat their PCs.
“I don’t like that they’re loading the trucks,” Jonathan said.
“I’ve got the detonator right here,” Boxers said. “Say the word and I’ll ruin their whole day.”
Thanks to layer upon layer of stone walls, Jonathan was confident that they were far enough away from the explosion that it wouldn’t impact them, but he worried about the timing. For diversions to work their magic, the choreography had to go just right. They hadn’t even located the PCs yet. Did he want to blow stuff up now to buy more time to locate them, or did he want to wait until he had the Mishins in his custody and play his trump card during the exfil?
The deciding factor for him was the arrival of the trucks. If people started pulling stuff out of the chapel, there was a reasonable chance that they’d either discover or disconnect the charges they’d set.
“Go ahead,” Jonathan said.
Boxers grinned. “I love this part.”
“Why did they turn the lights on?” Josef asked with a start.
Nicholas thought the boy had been sleeping. Hoped he had. There was a certain irony, he supposed, to the fact that the only way to escape a living nightmare was to close your eyes and risk a sleeping nightmare. On a night like this, it was hard to tell the difference.
“I don’t know,” Nicholas said. “Maybe they have nighttime chores to do. Try to go back to sleep.”
The boy dug at his eyes with the backs of his hands. “It’s too bright.”
“That’s just because it was so dark before. It won’t look so bright in a few minutes.”
“I hear a bell, too,” the boy said. “Do you hear a bell?”
Nicholas pulled him closer. “We’ll be fine.” Nicholas had never felt so helpless. Josef had done nothing wrong.
In his heart, Nicholas knew that all of this had something to do with Tony Darmond. Whether he’d ordered them to be kidnapped — a wild stretch, even in the midst of panic — or they’d been kidnapped to hurt him, the president of the United States was at the heart of the Mishin family’s misery. Nicholas remembered the endless screaming matches between his mom and Tony back when he was a nobody and she was still trying to perfect her English and make something of herself.
He’d been young when they first found each other — maybe two or three years old — and he was five when they married. Never once — not for a single day — did Tony treat him as anything but the bastard stepchild that he was. Punishment regimens that were designed as household chores, whether painting fences or mowing the yard or bagging up dog shit in the back yard. Tony made sure that Nicholas would have no real friends because there was never time to hang out with them. As he got older, the chores morphed into jobs that were couched as opportunities to teach him responsibility.
Thinking these thoughts now reminded him of the single time he’d tried to voice them to his mother. The tasks all seemed so normal at their face — so character-building — that it was impossible to get others to realize the malevolence behind them. Nicholas could see it behind the bastard’s eyes when he gave the assignments, and he was confident that his mother saw it, too.
Yet she never intervened. Not once. It was always Tony’s way or the highway. Nicholas had always suspected that at one level, she was afraid of Tony. And the more power he gained, the more frightened she became.
So Nicholas had taken it upon himself to get even for a childhood full of nastiness. Nothing like a presidential candidacy to give a disgruntled stepson a bully pulpit for payback.