“Only one way to find out.”
“If you’re going inside,” Jess said, “we’re going with you.”
“That would be no,” Tyler said. “Something about this doesn’t feel right. Until we know it’s safe, you’re staying in the car.”
“Should we call the police?” Fay said.
“We don’t have any reason to just yet.”
Grant pointed at the warehouse. “We’ve got movement.”
Two men walked quickly from the warehouse. One of them, a powerfully built man in his forties, had steel-gray hair. They climbed inside the van.
“Neither of those guys looked like students to me,” Grant said.
“Looks more like our mysterious sponsor.”
“And the other one wasn’t Stevens. He must be in the warehouse.”
“We’re going to see if we can get a better view of the place from the other side,” Tyler said. “We’ll also try to snap a photo of our mystery man’s face. Jess, you take the wheel. Drive us down past the next warehouse. We’ll hop out and you continue on.”
“Where?”
“Drive around the block and come back here to keep an eye on the place. We’ll turn off our cell phone ringers but leave them on vibrate. If you see anything suspicious, text me, then call the police. We’ll call when we’re ready to be picked up.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Neither do I,” Tyler said as he backed the Jeep up the street until they were out of view of the warehouse. “But we need to get some answers, and I’m not ready to put Fay in harm’s way again.”
Getting shot at and having her house burned down was bad enough. If it was the same guys, they might want to finish the job. Tyler was already queasy about putting her in this much jeopardy.
“You don’t even have guns,” Jess said.
“This is just a recon mission. If we see any weapons, I’ll text you to call the cavalry.”
Jess reluctantly nodded. “All right. But be careful.”
“What do you think?” Tyler said to Grant. “Should we be careful?”
Before Grant could answer, Jess punched Tyler in the arm. “Okay, wiseass. Out of the car.”
As he passed her outside, he said with a smile, “That’s Doctor Wiseass to you.”
“Tell me when it’s on your business card.”
Tyler and Grant got in the back and put their phones on vibrate. Jess drove to the empty warehouse next door as if she were delivering something in back. When they were on the opposite side, Tyler and Grant jumped out. Jess made a U-turn and headed back to the street.
Grant peeked around the corner at the warehouse and switched his cell phone to camera mode. “There’s a Dumpster thirty feet away. We’ll be able to see him if we hide behind it. I think that’s about as close as we can get.”
Tyler smiled. “We could always bust into the warehouse unannounced.”
“Going into a warehouse potentially full of gunmen with no intel and armed with whatever large rocks we can pick up from the dirt? Even a rookie lieutenant would think we’d be nuts going with that plan.”
“And so instead we take pictures.”
“Then we’ll text the photo to Hyland,” Grant said.
“Right. If he positively identifies the guy as Blaine’s cohort, we’ll ask the police to come on down and knock on the front door.”
“Sounds easy enough.”
A woman spoke from behind them. “No, it’s not.”
Tyler turned expecting to see that Jess had ignored his instructions. Instead, a blonde woman walked toward them flanked by two serious-looking men.
All three of them were aiming pistols at him and Grant, who raised their hands to show they were unarmed.
“What?” Grant said. “They have cameras that can see all the way over here?”
“If you mean the men inside that warehouse,” the woman said, “I’m not with them.”
“Who are you?” Tyler said.
“Nadia Bedova. Russian intelligence.”
Tyler looked at Grant, who stared back at him with the same astonished look he must have had on his own face.
“What the hell is going on here?” he said.
“Dr. Locke, you and Mr. Westfield are going to help me disarm a bomb.”
SEVENTEEN
“Search them,” Bedova said.
While she and one of the men kept their guns trained on Tyler and Grant, the second man frisked them. He found their phones and Tyler’s Leatherman multi-tool. She held on to the phones but tossed the tool back to Tyler.
“I can’t have you attempting to make a call, but you may need that for your task,” Bedova said, nodding at the Leatherman. “You can lower your hands.”
Tyler narrowed his eyes at Bedova. “How do you know our names?”
“When I saw you driving down the street casing the warehouse,” she said with the slightest accent, “I used our facial recognition software to identify you.”
“You have us on file?”
“Do you really think you could stay off our radar after finding Noah’s Ark and the tomb of King Midas?”
Grant raised a hand. “My first question, and, I think, most relevant: uh, bomb?”
“The silver-haired man you saw going to the van is Vladimir Colchev,” Bedova said. “According to our intelligence, he’s been trying to acquire explosives from mining companies around the country for months, apparently unsuccessfully. But we know that this week he procured forty tons of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive and had it shipped here. We think he’s planning to use it. Today.”
Grant whistled. “That would put a nice dent in Ayer’s Rock.”
“Who is Colchev?” Tyler asked her.
“A Russian national wanted by my government. He has a highly trained team ready to follow his orders. Now a question from me. Why are you here?”
“Concerned citizens.”
“You’re not even Australian. I already have a potential international incident on my hands, so either you cooperate or I’ll shoot you both now and take my chances without you.”
Tyler cleared his throat. “Well, that seems like a fair trade. Two of his men attacked a woman in Queenstown, New Zealand yesterday. Burned her house to the ground and tried to kill her.”
“Did they succeed?”
Grant shook his head. “They’re both currently resting comfortably in the morgue.”
“Do you know why they attacked her?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Tyler lied without hesitation.
“Then why are you here?” Bedova asked.
“We got a tip that one of the assailants had been seen in Alice Springs,” Grant said, “so we came to do a little private detective work and ran into you lovely people in the process.”
“Did you talk to the man before he died?”
“Fay did,” Tyler said. He saw no reason to hide her name since it was all over the news.
“Did he say anything about Icarus or the date July twenty-fifth?”
“Not that we know of. What’s Icarus?”
“How about the Baja drug cartel or Wisconsin Ave?”
Tyler was confounded. A rogue Russian spy is willing to kill for a relic from Roswell, then buys enough explosive to depopulate central Australia, and now the agent after him is asking about Mexican narcotics gangs and Greek mythology? If Tyler lived through this, he was going to love to hear the explanation behind it.
He shook his head in answer to her question. “Never heard of them. Maybe a little context would be useful.”
Bedova stared at him. “I need you to look at the bomb he’s built and tell me if it can be disarmed.”
“Why do you want our help? Why not just call the police?”
“We obtained a layout of the warehouse, so we have our assault planned out, but we’re waiting on our bomb expert. When you showed up, I saw an opportunity to keep this quiet. He’s coming from Singapore and won’t be here for another five hours. From our observations, Colchev is getting ready to make his move sooner than that. Are you going to help us or will you let him detonate a truck bomb in the middle of the city?”