Clark’s eyes sharpened as he scanned the room quickly.
“What?”
His eyes stopped scanning, locked onto the vodka bottle on the windowsill. It pressed against the blinds, closing them.
A signal to the men in the park. “Son of a bitch!” Clark shouted, and he shot back through the kitchen, out the door, and up the hallway.
He heard noises in the stairwell, the chirping of a walkie-talkie and the slapping, echoing footfalls of two men. John ran to the top of the stairs and grabbed a heavy, round metal ashtray/garbage can that had been positioned there. He laid the cylinder on its side at the edge of the top stair, waited until the sounds of the men told him they were just around the corner below, and then he kicked the metal can. He just caught a glimpse of the first man turning at the landing; he wore a heavy black coat and carried a small black pistol and a radio. John drew his pistol and adopted a combat stance at the top of the stairs.
The metal garbage can picked up speed as it bounced down the stairs. As the men turned onto the flight just below Clark, the can bounced head high and banged into them, sending both men crashing to the tile floor. One man dropped his pistol, but the other retained his weapon and tried to aim it up the stairwell at the man standing above them.
John fired a single round. The .45-caliber bullet burned a red crease into the man’s left cheek.
“Drop it!” Clark shouted in English.
The man on the tile floor below did as he was told. Along with his partner he raised his hands into the air as he lay there.
Even with the silencer on his SIG Sauer .45 the echo of Clark’s pistol in the stairwell was painfully loud, and he had no doubt residents would be on the phone to the police in seconds. He descended to the landing and stepped between the two men, keeping his pistol trained on them all the while. He liberated them of their guns and their walkie-talkies and their mobile phones. One of the men cursed Clark in French, but he kept his hands in the air while doing so, and John ignored him. John did not say another word to the men before continuing down the stairs.
He exited the back door of the apartment building a minute later, and here he dumped the men’s equipment in a trash can.
He thought, for a fleeting hopeful moment, that he was in the clear, but a white panel truck passed by on the opposite side of the road, and then it slammed on its brakes. Four men leapt out, there were eight lanes of afternoon traffic between John and the four, but they began running through the cars, heading right for him.
John broke into a run. His original objective had been the Pushkinskaya Metro station. But the men were on his heels, not fifty yards back, and they were a lot faster than he. The underground station would slow his escape — he would never make it on a train before they caught him. He ran across busy Tverskaya Street, eight lanes of traffic that he had to negotiate like a violent dance.
On the other side of the street he chanced a glance behind him. The four men were joined by two more in the street. The six hunters were only twenty-five yards back now.
They were going to catch him, it was quickly becoming apparent. There were too many men, they were too well trained, too well coordinated, and, he had to admit, they were too motherfucking young and fit for him to outrun them all across Moscow.
He could not get away from them, but he could, with a little cunning and guile, “game” his capture.
John picked up the pace now, trying to put a little space between himself and the six behind. As he did so, he pulled the prepaid phone he’d purchased the day before from his coat pocket.
The phone had an “auto answer” key that set the device to pick up automatically any incoming call after two rings. He enabled this feature with a few taps of his thumb, and then he turned down a side street that ran perpendicular to Pushkin Square. It was little more than an alley, but Clark saw what he was looking for. A municipal garbage truck rolled slowly in the opposite direction after just loading up with refuse from a dumpster outside the McDonald’s. John took his phone, looked down at the number on the screen, and then hurled it into the back of the truck just as it made a left behind the McDonald’s.
Then Clark turned into the doors of the restaurant as the men chasing him turned the corner behind.
John shot through the door, ran past smiling employees asking if they could help him, and pushed through a crowd that pushed him back.
He tried to escape through a side entrance but a black sedan screeched to a halt there, and two men in black sunglasses and heavy coats emerged from the backseat.
Clark ducked back into the restaurant and then headed toward the kitchen.
This Pushkin Square McDonald’s was the largest McDonald’s in the world. It could serve nine hundred customers simultaneously, and Clark got the impression they were having a busy afternoon rush. Finally he managed to make his way through the crowd and into the kitchen.
In an office beyond, Clark lifted the phone and dialed the number he’d just memorized. “Come on! Come on!”
After two rings, he heard a click and knew the call had been put through.
At that moment the six armed hunters appeared in the doorway to the office.
Clark spoke loudly into the phone: “Fabrice Bertrand-Morel, Paul Laska, and Valentin Kovalenko of the SVR.” He said it again as the men closed on him, then he hung up the phone.
The biggest man of the crew lifted his handgun high over his head, then brought it down hard onto the bridge of John Clark’s nose.
And then everything went black.
Clark awoke tied to a chair in a dark room without windows. His face hurt, his nose hurt, and his nostrils seemed to be full of bloody gauze.
He spit blood on the floor.
There was only one reason he was still alive. His phone call had confused them. Now these men, their boss, and their employer would all be scrambling to figure out whom he had communicated with. If they killed him now, after he’d passed the information on, it would do them no good.
Now they might beat him to get him to reveal his contact, but at least they would not put a bullet in his brain.
Not yet, anyway.
70
The Baikonur Cosmodrome, located north of the Syr Darya River in the steppes of the former Soviet satellite state of Kazakhstan, is both the oldest and the largest spaceport on earth. The entire grounds of the facility are roughly a circle some fifty miles in diameter, containing dozens of buildings, launch pads, hardened silos, processing facilities, tracking stations, launch control buildings, roads, an airfield, and a train station. The nearby town of Baikonur has its own airport and another rail station is nearby in Tyuratam.
The first rocket launch pad was built here in the 1950s at the start of the Cold War, and from here in Baikonur, Yuri Gagarin launched to become the first man in space. The commercial space industry would not exist for another thirty years, but today Baikonur is Russia’s main hub of private commercial space operations. They rent the property out from Kazakhstan, paying not in dollars or rubles or euros, but in military equipment.
Georgi Safronov had been walking the halls, standing on the pads, driving trucks across the steppes here for nearly twenty years. He was the face of the new Russia when it came to outer space, not unlike Gagarin himself representing Russia’s space operations a half-century earlier.
On his first day back at Baikonur, the day before the planned launching of the first of three Dnepr rockets in quick succession, forty-five-year-old Georgi Safronov sat in his temporary office in the LCC, the launch control center, situated some five miles west of the three launch silos devoted to Dnepr launches at Baikonur. The Dnepr area, though it encompassed dozens of square miles of territory, was actually quite small when compared with the launch facilities for the Soyuz, Proton, and Rokot systems in other parts of the Cosmodrome.