“Because I’m not supposed to be here,” he said.
“I thought—then why are you?”
“Vlad is my friend. I don’t have many.”
She watched him blankly, still breathing hard. Finally, she said, “Come on,” and led the way once again.
McNEIL GAVE up the pursuit once witnesses said the people he was chasing went down the manhole.
They were already pushing it after Stiletto’s shotgun blast. If the Russians caught them worming around underground, there’d be hell to pay.
He reunited with the rest of his crew in the good car and went back to the embassy. He’d have to report the shooting and the damaged car. The embassy would have to deal with the cops on that one, work out some sort of cover story.
McNeil stewed all the way back.
In the embassy cafeteria, he sat quietly at a corner table, letting a cup of coffee get cold.
He looked up when Joe Wilcox, his contact at the embassy, dropped into the unoccupied chair opposite him.
“Staking out Pushkin was a good idea,” Wilcox said. “Do you have any other ideas?”
“Bring in Pushkin. They went there for a reason.”
“We can’t.”
“Why?”
“Pushkin was shot in the head. The cops are looking for a man and a woman and they know the man is American. They didn’t exactly hide their faces, and they left a guard alive.”
McNeil shook his head.
“Stiletto is in more trouble,” Wilcox said, “than he realizes.”
ANASTASIA LED them through a maze of tunnels, Stiletto losing any sense of where they were many times, the rumbles of car engines and street traffic sometimes audible through the concrete above. Presently she stopped at a ladder, climbed to the top, and popped open another manhole. After a look around, she slid the lid back and climbed to the street Stiletto followed. They made a long sprint up two blocks before finally reaching the safe house, where a nervous Ravkin greeted them and explained that the cops were hunting them for Pushkin’s murder, and that they had his car. That meant he was a suspect too.
Stiletto explained the circumstances for leaving the car but had nothing to say on Pushkin. Anastasia handled that, but her flippant answer didn’t satisfy Ravkin. Before an argument could start, Stiletto told Ravkin what information Pushkin had revealed.
“The mob is using an oil refinery near Leninsky Ave., just off the Moskva River, as a hide out. Glinkov being kept there.”
Ravkin forgot about Anastasia and went to his laptop. He typed hurriedly and clicked on a picture of the refinery.
Ravkin said, “I’m afraid that’s never been on our radar as a place for them to use.”
“We don’t know how old the information is,” Scott said, “so Vlad might not be there anymore. But it’s a place where security is armed, it’s hard to get in and out, and nobody would come looking there.”
Ravkin agreed.
“Let’s go knock on the front door.”
Rina Glinkov came over from the couch. “What about us?”
“You’ll be safe here,” Ravkin said.
The little girl joined her mother and wrapped both arms around her left leg. She looked at Scott, Anastasia and Ravkin from around the side.
“Are you going to bring back my daddy?”
None of them could muster an immediate answer. Scott thought back to another child who asked him a similar not very long ago.
He said, “We’ll bring him back, honey.”
Xenia smiled.
THE BRIGHT lights of the refinery blazed into a narrow portable building on the west end of the property, and Rostov had ordered heavy drapes put over the windows. The light still broke through the gaps around the edges, an eclipse effect.
He hadn’t wanted to remain in charge of the detail holding Vladimir Glinkov prisoner, but orders were orders.
The building had been brought specifically onto the property for the purposes of using it as a jail; they had Glinkov chained to the wall, naked except for a T-shirt now stained with sweat and blood. He lay slumped against the wall and half on the floor, unconscious, his breathing slow. There was still plenty of information to get out of him, Rostov’s bosses and the government believed, so they didn’t want to dump him in the river just yet.
But to Rostov, the chance of a rebel counterattack was too realistic. He’d asked for twenty men. His bosses laughed. At the refinery? Somebody will notice. You can have ten men and that should be more than enough. His crew was spread out around the refinery, wearing appropriate uniforms and badges, and, so far, there had been no trouble. If the government had rounded up all of the coup suspects, there would be no more need for Glinkov.
But as he sat behind a desk at the far end of the portable, shuffling a deck of cards for a game of solitaire, he reflected that not only did he have his orders, he also didn’t make the decisions.
However, he’d be fully in charge of his destiny once he retired.
When the alarm went off, he dropped the cards and ran to the door. Two guards cradling short-barreled AKs stood at the ready.
“What’s happening?” Rostov said.
One of the guards had a radio set in his ear. He said, “I can’t raise the front gate, sir.”
“Send somebody to look.”
THE GATE of the refinery was right off Leningradsky Avenue. The Moskva River was a back drop, more city lights across the water. The guard shack brightly lighted. The automatic gate was firmly closed, and as he approached, Stiletto figured the opening mechanism was on the panel on the guard shack. The guard looked up at him as he came within six feet.
The guard stepped out with a hand up. “Turn around. It’s after-hours.”
Stiletto dragged the sawed-off from the pocket of his overcoat and smashed the guard on the side of the head. But the man didn’t drop, he just leaned to one side, caught his balance, and looked angrily at Scott. He let out a curse as he swung in return, Stiletto ducking the fist, snapping a leg out to kick the guard in the stomach. The man doubled over but didn’t fall, grabbing Scott’s leg, twisting. Scott hit the ground hard on his side, the wind knocked out of him, losing his grip on the sawed-off. The guard kicked him in the back. Stiletto grabbed his weapon and started to turn as the guard ran back to the shack and hit the alarm button.
The wailing Klaxon filled the night. The sawed-off boomed once. The guard went down in a spatter of blood, broken glass and splintered wood. On his feet, Scott was quickly joined by Ravkin and Anastasia. Ravkin helped him up as Anastasia reached through the open guard shack and pressed the button on the panel that swung open the gate.
“So much for quiet,” Ravkin said.
Stiletto, gasping, only nodded. He dropped two more shells into the shotgun.
“They make you people out of solid rock or something?”
“How do you think we survive the winters?” Anastasia said, heading through the open gate and onto the property. She carried her Dakota Tactical D54R-N A3 like she’d had it since birth.
Stiletto and Ravkin followed, the trio quickly splitting up to take care of their individual tasks which they’d worked out in the car.
The size of the refinery was awesome. The sprawling complex contained a set of buildings off to one side, and a mass of pipes, storage containers, pumping units and tanks on the other, the pipes intertwining like multiple spider webs and lit up with bright lamps that made it feel like daylight. The glare of the lights clashed against the dark background of the night sky.
Stiletto put away the shotgun and unleathered the MK18 submachine gun. His job was to search the buildings for any sign of Glinkov. And with the alarm blaring, they had to be quick. Enemy forces would be all over; the alarm would also signal cops and federal agents.