McCoy pulled the.45 from behind her back and fired three shots through the windshield. The horn went silent, as did the driver. Two more shots and Stupachkin was dead too. Machine-gun fire erupted behind her.
McCoy ducked down, reached through the open window to unlock the door, then pulled the driver out and jumped in behind the wheel.
Jamming the car in reverse, she floored it and did a J turn as bullets smashed through the remaining windows of the vehicle. Crouching down and praying that she wouldn’t be hit, she peeled through the closing gate only to slam into a Moscow police cruiser.
She fired six shots through the windshield of her car and into the windshield of the cruiser. She backed up far enough to get clear of the cruiser, then hit the gas again, fishtailing down the narrow street as the night filled with gunfire and sirens.
At the first intersection, McCoy took a hard left, then veered left across four lanes of traffic and cut across the deserted parking lot of a shopping plaza.
McCoy knew she had to ditch the shattered Mercedes. In a dark corner of the plaza parking lot she saw an old Volga sedan. She stopped the car, got out, and ran toward the Volga. It was unlocked. She got in, reached beneath the dashboard, and pulled a handful of wires down from inside the steering column. She had trained for this; she could do it blindfolded. Ten seconds later she had removed the protective coating from the battery lead and wrapped it firmly around the bare wire to the ignition switch. For a breathless moment, nothing happened. Then the car’s engine roared to life.
Six minutes later, she eased through several alleys and onto a main boulevard. When she hit a straightaway, she glanced in her rearview mirror to see if any FSB agents were hunting her down. That’s when she noticed the blood streaming down her face.
It was almost 4 a.m. when Gogolov got the news.
No one had wanted to wake him, including Zyuganov and Jibril.
Prison officials and the top FSB brass had been desperate to find McCoy before having to confess that they’d ever lost her in the first place. They’d found the Mercedes by now, with blood all over the steering wheel, dashboard, and front seats. They knew McCoy was wounded. They also knew she was too smart to seek medical attention.
Gogolov was furious. He cursed Jibril and threatened to murder Zyuganov’s children if McCoy wasn’t found quickly. He demanded a house-to-house, building-to-building search of Moscow and ordered that McCoy’s photo be distributed throughout the city on flyers and nationwide over television. He no longer cared that the U.S. would know she was alive.
“Frame her as a serial killer,” Gogolov directed. “Tell the press we never had her, that we believed she’d been killed in a cross fire on the night of the coup. Say she just resurfaced and has gone on a killing rampage. Tell them three innocent women are dead, including a pregnant woman and her child. Then give them pictures of the bodies — brutally slaughtered.”
“But we don’t have any pictures like that.”
“Then kill a pregnant woman and take some.”
“Y-yes,” Zyuganov stammered. “Anything else, Your Excellency?”
“Da. Put a price on her head — ten million rubles, dead or alive… preferably dead.”
An e-mail popped onto Mordechai’s screen.
It was from Sasha. Mordechai’s pulse quickened.
“Old friend, you have caught a break,” Sasha wrote. “The police radios here are going crazy with reports that Erin McCoy has been spotted in Moscow and is on the run. Don’t know more yet. Am monitoring every frequency I can. Send your first funds transfer to my account in Zurich. When I have more, you’ll be the first to know.”
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang in the Oval Office.
“Yes, Jack?”
“Radio Moscow reports a massive manhunt is under way for Erin McCoy,” Director Mitchell reported.
“She’s alive?”
“The Russians are saying she’s CIA, and that she’s killed three people, one of whom was a pregnant woman. They’re about to release pictures. They say she’s been spotted and is on the run somewhere in Moscow. And they’ve put a bounty on her head, Mr. President.”
“How much?”
“More than three hundred thousand dollars, U.S.”
“You think it’s really her?” the president asked.
“It could be, but…”
“But what?”
“It could just be bait to catch Bennett.”
McCoy stopped the car under a grove of trees in Gorky Park.
She’d been on the run for hours. She knew she could not last much longer, exposed on the streets. She was exhausted. She was losing blood. She had no way to contact Washington or Bennett, and now, as she listened to the breaking news on the car radio, she tried desperately to think of any of the CIA’s dozen safe houses in Moscow. But her mind was blank.
It was strange to hear any news from the outside world, even if it was news controlled by the Kremlin. She’d had no idea, for example, of the assassination attempt against Gogolov. Nor of the U.N. resolution and deadline or of Russian and Islamic forces moving toward Israel.
Why? What was happening?
McCoy fought back tears at the thought of the men she’d killed or injured. She knew there was no other way, and she didn’t believe that God wanted her to give up and die after all she’d been through in the past weeks. Still, she felt numb, hollow. She’d come so far. There was no point losing faith now, but she felt completely disoriented. Nothing seemed familiar.
Except, oddly, Gorky Park.
Why was being here of all places ringing a bell?
She hit the windshield wipers and looked out through the trees at the row of buildings across the river. What was it?
Her mind reeled. Across the river were row upon row of apartment buildings. New ones. She looked left, then right. She couldn’t see it. But it had to be there. Somewhere along that street was the condemned apartment building where Naina Petrovsky, Jon’s nanny, had once lived. It would be abandoned.
Could she find it? Would it be safe?
54
Hamid began cautiously. “I have a question.”
“Fire away, my friend,” said Bennett.
“I do not understand, fire-way?”
“No, no, it’s an expression, it’s… never mind. What’s your question?”
“Are you ready to leave for Russia? I believe it is time.”
Bennett stared in disbelief at his new friend. Was he kidding? For almost two weeks, Bennett, Hamid, and Hamid’s pregnant wife — the real Nadia — had been holed up in Hamid’s home in Tabriz, Iran. A city of nearly one and a half million, Tabriz was about three hundred kilometers east of the Iranian-Turkish border. It was the provincial capital of East Azerbaijan, not to be confused with the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Now it was a transit point for the Great Mobilization.
So far, they’d been unable to move as continuous caravans of Russian and Iranian shock troops and their supplies used every available lane of every major road — as well as all available rail lines — to get to Turkey and then into Syria and Lebanon, ostensibly to enforce U.N. Resolution 2441. Bennett was beside himself. Local TV and radio were useless for details from the outside world. Hamid had no shortwave radio, and satellite calls were too risky, making it impossible for Bennett to stay in contact with Mordechai.