I reminded myself bravery wasn’t the absence of fear; it was action taken in the face of it. I grabbed my coat and stepped into the mid-morning chill. The rear doors of all three SUVs opened and two masked men stepped out of each vehicle. Victor Andreyev emerged from the front passenger seat of the center vehicle. He sauntered toward me with the confidence of a feudal king.
“Where is the Bull?” he asked.
“Where are Beth and the children?” I countered.
“Here.” He nodded toward the vehicle on my left. “Give me what I want and this problem will be over for both of us.”
I studied the man. He was a proven liar and a spy. There wasn’t a single reason I should trust him. He sneered at me as if challenging me to disprove how powerless I was. Beth and the children gave him a clear advantage over me, and he knew it.
“Why me?” I asked. “Why did you hire me?”
He smiled. “We needed to find the woman and you are an adequate investigator,” he replied, lingering on the word “adequate.” “Get the Bull and I will tell you where our interests aligned.”
I glowered at him before returning to the Toyota. I opened the driver’s door, leaned inside and grabbed the bronze from under the front seat. I left the door open and returned to Andreyev, who eyed the figure greedily.
“Tell me,” I pressed. “Why me?”
“There was a certain degree of opportunism involved,” Andreyev replied as he took the heavy bronze object. “‘Two birds with one stone,’ to use one of your American expressions. You see, Mr. Morgan, you made some powerful enemies in Moscow, and for a while they had to play nice, but when this chance came along, well, it was only ever going to end one way. The order for your engagement came directly from the Kremlin. As did this.”
He turned abruptly and yelled a command in Russian. As he hurried toward his car, his masked subordinates drew their weapons and stepped forward. I look around fearfully. This ruinous, rusting industrial wasteland was where I was destined to die.
Chapter 86
The masked man closest to me raised his pistol. I backed toward the open car door. He aimed at my head, but never got the opportunity to pull the trigger. A terrifying rattle tore up the silence as a burst of bullets chewed the concrete directly in front of him and his accomplices. The six masked men were startled, and I took advantage of their shock to run toward the Toyota. The machine-gunfire continued and Andreyev barked commands. His masked gunmen turned their weapons on the source of the thunderous volley, but the window on the seventh floor of a warehouse to the east was too far away for an effective pistol shot. Two figures appeared intermittently in the aperture, but only in silhouette, vanishing between every burst of muzzle flash. Their machine guns spat flames and bullets and created chaos. Andreyev’s gunmen took cover behind their vehicles as the rounds shredded concrete, drilled through steel and shattered glass.
I jumped through the Toyota’s open door, landed in the driver’s seat, threw the car into gear and stepped on the gas. A couple masked men saw what I was doing and shot wildly at the car as I sped away, but their bullets went wide. As I put distance between me and my would-be killers, I looked in the rear-view and saw them scramble into their vehicles, which were being riddled by bullets. The three SUVs fled the scene under a hail of gunfire, which followed them until they disappeared behind a chemical processing facility west of the courtyard.
I turned off the service road and followed a set of fresh tire tracks through the snow. I drove round the warehouse. When I rounded the final corner I saw one of Private’s staff cars, a blue Nissan Rogue, parked by the entrance. As I pulled up beside the Nissan, the back door opened and Justine and Mo-bot stepped out.
I joined them in the snow.
“That sounded ugly,” Justine said, hugging me.
“It was pretty intense,” I replied.
“Didn’t mean to get so close,” Joshua Floyd said, emerging from the pockmarked old building. Jessie was with him. They each carried a full auto-converted AR-15 over their shoulder.
“You did great,” I responded. “Thanks for keeping me alive, yet again.”
I turned to Mo-bot.
“How are we doing?” I asked.
She leaned into the Nissan and took a tablet computer from the back seat. She showed me the screen, which displayed a constantly changing map. At the center was the locator beacon representing the tracking device we’d installed inside the bronze figure I’d given Andreyev.
“We’re picking up the signal loud and clear,” Mo-bot said.
I turned to Floyd. “Let’s go get your wife and kids.”
Chapter 87
We followed Andreyev’s convoy along Highway 209, keeping half a mile behind them, so there was less chance of being spotted. No one said much because we all knew the stakes. Floyd was particularly grim-faced, and I wondered how difficult it had been for him not to shoot the men who’d taken his wife and children. But if he had killed Andreyev and his accomplices, there was a good chance we would never have found Beth, Maria and Danny, so he’d restrained himself in the face of the scorching desire for vengeance that burned bright in his eyes.
I steered the Toyota off the 209 onto the Glasco Turnpike, a rural road that led toward Overlook Forest. We were in the New York wilderness, a few miles from Mount Marion. We drove through a white landscape, taking care to stay out of sight of the convoy. The road was deserted and the frozen landscape eerily still. I couldn’t help but feel the nausea of anticipation as we rolled on, and somehow the silence in the car made it worse. I looked at Justine, who sat next to me, and she gave me a strained smile. Jessie, Mo-bot and Floyd were in the back, each of them lost in their own world. Floyd caught me looking at him in the rear-view and nodded somberly. I recognized his expression; it was that of a warrior ready for action.
Ten miles from the 209, Mo-bot spoke. “They’re turning off. Left, in about eight hundred yards. From the satellite imagery, it looks like a farm. There’s a trail for about a mile and then some buildings.”
I slowed as we approached the turning.
“That’s it,” Mo-bot said, and I nodded and took a left that led me between two huge stretches of tall trees.
After a while, the forests either side of us thinned and gave way to rolling farmland. I slowed down, stopping just before the brow of a slope.
“Wait here,” I said.
I got out and ran along the icy gravel track to the crest of the hill. I crouched as I approached and peered down into a broad hollow to see the SUVs parked beside a farmhouse. Three large barns flanked a courtyard set a short distance away from the house. I saw two men standing guard outside one barn.
The corrugated-steel building seemed the obvious place to start looking for Beth and the children.
Andreyev stepped out of his SUV. His men did likewise. They removed their ski masks and chatted; some lit cigarettes. Andreyev examined the Bull and said something to the men around him before heading away from the house toward the barns. My heart sank. I hadn’t expected things to move this quickly.
He crossed the yard and signaled to the guards standing outside the farthest barn. One of them turned to open the door.
I had hoped we would have more time for surveillance, but it seemed we would have to act immediately.
I edged back from the brow of the hill, got to my feet, ran to the Toyota and leaned inside.
“We’re going to have to move now,” I said. “I think he’s going for Beth and the children.”