“Settle down, you’re not in any trouble. Your sister back in the States has been trying to call your sat phone. She finally called the Red Cross, and they called us. So I guess I’m the one who has to tell you: your mother was killed in a car accident. She apparently couldn’t negotiate a sharp curve and ended up in an embankment. I’m very sorry. Tell me what I can do for you. We can get you on the first thing smoking out of Moscow. You can leave today if you want.”
Kit sat in stunned silence holding on tightly to the arms of the chair. He hadn’t called home last night. He’d forgotten. One day his mom’s bank accounts were raided, the next day she was dead. What in the hell? And worse, he wasn’t even there to have helped. His head was spinning.
He simply couldn’t believe it. He had exactly one family member left in the world, his sister, Staci.
“Major Bennings?”
“Yes, sir.” It came out automatically, in almost a whisper. Kit realized his eyes had moistened. He squeezed the armrests as hard as he could, then bit down on his tongue till it almost bled. He worked hard to consciously swallow the emotion and keep it from rising to his head.
General Alexander stood and poured a glass of water from a pitcher on a side table. He handed it to Kit.
“Thank you, General.” Kit drank deeply from the water as his intellect overrode the emotion, as he’d been trained to do. His mind raced. “Sir, I have a few things to wrap up. I’d like to fly back to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon, if that can be arranged.”
“Consider it done.”
He saluted and managed to walk out without shedding a tear.
The general provided a private office with a phone, and Kit immediately called Staci at home in Chino Hills. She cried for most of an hour, but he held the space of the emotional anchor point, the solid rock of reason to her wailing sorrow. Her fiancé, Blanchard, was a globe-trotting financial adviser currently closing a big deal in Tokyo; he couldn’t get back to Chino Hills for at least a week without blowing his multimillion-dollar deal. But Rick and Maria Carrillo were with Staci. Rick had flown with Kit’s father, Tommy, during the Vietnam War; he had flown with Tommy as an airline copilot, and he had been a founding partner in the aviation company Tommy had started. Rick and Maria had been best friends to Tommy and Gina for decades and were like an uncle and aunt to Kit and Staci. At least Rick and Maria are there.
Bennings then sent a coded, encrypted message to Herb Sinclair saying he was leaving Moscow due to a personal emergency. Sinclair had the communications of so many embassy employees wired, there was a good chance he already knew about the accident. Either way, it was instructive how when “life” intrudes upon your world—in this case life being death—so much that had been terribly important suddenly becomes meaningless. Like the search for the third mole.
CHAPTER 8
“This isn’t plan B, this is plan XYZ,” groused Dimi, the Russian driver, as he popped a chunk of pink bubble gum into his mouth. This time, Dimi sat behind the wheel of a silver Ford Crown Victoria. He began loading tranquilizer darts into a special pistol as lights twinkled in the darkness from homes on the nearby hills.
“And what difference does it make to you?” quizzed Lily Bain. There was no cutie-pie smile, just a quick, sharp look flashed like a shiv at Dimi. She sat in the front seat and returned her gaze to a tablet computer as a video feed suddenly appeared showing the driveway leading up to the Bennings house in Chino Hills. A blueprint of the home lay on the seat between them.
The Crown Vic sat parked next to the white panel van on a deserted turnout. Ten more thugs sat crammed into the van.
“Why not wait until the old couple leaves?” asked Dimi.
“Because Viktor wanted it done fifteen minutes ago. Would you like me to call him for you and express your concerns?”
Dimi looked at Lily. He wasn’t intimidated by her and certainly wasn’t squeamish about killing, he just liked to kill smart. He disagreed with almost every tactical decision Lily Bain made, but he had to tread lightly, since she occasionally slept with the boss and had Popov’s confidence. For now.
Suddenly, a disembodied voice crackled over the two-way radios. “Phone line is cut, alarms and CCTV are hacked and down. All cell-phone signals are jammed within a quarter mile.”
“Okay, let’s go,” said Lily into her radio.
The van moved out first, with lights out, and arrived at the target within one minute. The armed ten-man team crept up the Bennings’s driveway, where a Mercedes and an Audi sat parked, and assumed their prearranged positions around the house. The hilly nature of the subdivision ensured that no neighbors lived too close or had a direct line of sight, especially at night, to the front of the house.
Dimi pulled the Crown Vic into the driveway. With its antennae, the Ford sedan looked like an unmarked police car. Lily wore a pantsuit, Dimi a sport jacket as they crossed to the front door and rang the bell. Dimi remembered to spit out the gum, and then he smoothed down his jacket.
Ricardo “Rick” Carrillo, an athletic man of sixty-two with gray hair and a mustache to match, moved to the front door as the bell gently chimed. When he reached for the doorknob, he noticed the alarm system was down. Rick stopped short of opening the door and instead turned in Staci’s direction. “Staci, did you turn off the alarm?”
Staci looked up from her chair in the living room. “No.”
Rick punched in the code to turn on the alarm, but nothing happened. “It’s not working.”
“It was working this morning,” said Staci.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“Maybe it’s flowers. From Kit or Blanchard, or—”
“Flowers at this hour?”
Rick was already plenty upset, but he was also a cautious man. He knew very well that Gina Bennings had driven through the S turns on Carbon Canyon Road hundreds, no, thousands of times. He was having a hard time accepting his old friend’s death.
Rick looked out the front door peephole and saw a man and woman standing there. To Rick they looked young, both well under thirty.
“Staci, check the CCTV cameras,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear. She quickly got up and crossed to her late father’s office.
There was nothing flimsy about the Bennings home; it was solid construction, and the thick, hardwood front door provided a substantial buffer between occupants and the occasional traveling salesman. Hence there was an intercom, and Rick engaged it.
“Can I help you?”
“San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detectives,” said Lily, using the intercom as she and Dimi held up fake, but authentic-looking police IDs and badges.
“Homicide?”
“Yes, we’re here about Mrs. Bennings,” said Lily.
“Does Captain Clark, the homicide commander, know you’re here?” asked Rick, who quickly squinted through the peephole to see their response.
Dimi stared back blankly; Lily’s eyes rolled up for a split second before she answered.
“Sir, our investigation uncovered some troubling information. You’re welcome to accompany us to the station, or we can talk here,” said Lily.
“So Clark approved this visit at this late hour?”