“Sir, I’m now in charge of the investigation. We’re here to ask questions, not answer them.”
“Hold on, I’m not dressed,” said Rick into the intercom. He then quickly moved away from the door as Staci emerged from the office.
“The cameras aren’t working, either,” said Staci.
“If they’re cops, I’m Kermit the Frog!”
“What?!”
“Imposters, pretending to be police.” Rick pulled out his cell phone. “No signal!”
“What’s going on?” asked Staci, alarmed.
“Are the guns still kept in your dad’s old office?”
Dimi couldn’t help but smirk. He might just be the driver, but he was ten times smarter than Lily. Her plan B was already unraveling. She should have only cut landline and cell-phone service and kept the alarms and cameras working until the front door was opened. Dimi was a former Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces, operator and knew exactly what should be done.
“They’re suspicious. They won’t open the door,” whispered Dimi.
“Yes they will.”
“You didn’t answer his questions about this Captain Clark person.”
“He’s getting dressed, then—”
“He’s finding out the phones don’t work and he’s getting a gun, is what he’s probably doing,” said Dimi, no longer whispering. “If he starts shooting, the whole neighborhood will hear.” He spoke into his radio, “Remember, do not shoot the girl. Go, go, go!”
Before Lily could react to her authority being usurped, Dimi unholstered a sound-suppressed KRISS Super V, a compact .45 caliber subgun, from a special shoulder rig, and then emptied the magazine into the door-lock mechanism. The gun was quiet, the sound of wood splintering and rounds hitting metal door hardware less so, but the nearest neighbor was a hundred yards away. One kick from Dimi, and the big door gave way. He charged into the house with Lily following.
Staci held a 9mm Beretta 92F, the same type of sidearm she had carried in Iraq, and scrambled toward the kitchen, shouting, “Maria!”
Rick’s short, silver-haired, slender wife, Maria, appeared in the kitchen doorway and was then immediately riddled with suppressed rounds from behind. Her face a mask of confused shock, she dropped to the floor a bloody mess. A black form appeared in the doorway behind Maria, and Staci put three rounds into the man, the booming reports of her weapon echoing throughout the house like a cannon.
She heard more people moving in the kitchen, but then gunfire erupted from behind her.
Rick stood in the office doorway, firing a shotgun. The man and woman—the fake cops—dove to the ground and scrambled behind furniture.
Someone will hear this; help will come, thought Staci as her world went into slow motion. Two more men charged through the front door. She sighted her weapon and started firing, not stopping until the slide locked back, the magazine empty. Both men went down hard, with blood leaking all over the parquet floor.
The blond woman stood and fired several times, hitting Rick Carrillo. He fell back onto the white office door, then slid to the floor, blood streaking the wood.
Staci heard a pop, and a piercing sting burrowed into her chest. The man in the sport jacket had fired it, but she turned to the blonde; since she was out of ammunition, Staci threw the Beretta at her head. The blonde charged her, and Staci, who had studied Brazilian jiujitsu for years, feinted, then delivered a spinning back kick to the face of the blonde, knocking her down.
As more men crowded into the room, Staci turned to face the man who’d shot her. But her legs wobbled, her vision blurred, and she fell… right into the arms of Dimi, the driver.
CHAPTER 9
They got him just outside Barrikadnaya Metro station near the embassy. Two college-age females distracted him, pretending to be lost, when a third lady hit him with a blackjack.
Kit Bennings woke up chained to a solid wooden chair in some kind of cold warehouse. Waves of pain shot through his head, seemingly timed to the constant dripping of water from a leaking pipe onto a dirty cement floor.
As he struggled to focus, he saw it wasn’t a warehouse at all, but a meat locker. Slabs of beef hung from hooks that slid on overhead rails. And it was not just cold, it was very cold. Bennings fought not to shiver, since six big strong irritated men stood around watching him. One of them moved off into another room.
“Can you write your names down for me?” asked Kit in Russian, grinning, as he studied their faces. “Because I’m going to kill every last one of you.”
“Don’t be so cocky,” said Viktor Popov, stepping into the meat locker. “Or they’ll turn you into shashlik.”
He hadn’t started putting it all together until he left the embassy. Popov’s people had hacked his mom’s bank accounts to create financial panic within the family. But when Popov had made the generous money-for-marriage approach, Kit had rebuffed him. So then they killed Gina as a message that he’d better reconsider. He understood that all of this had nothing to do with his secret counterintelligence work with Sinclair, because the intelligence agencies would never kill a family member of an opponent. But the Russian mob had no such gentlemanly compunctions. They often killed family members of their adversaries—that’s exactly what had happened long ago to Popov’s twin daughters. But what was it that the former KGB general, now a Mafia don, really wanted from him? Just to marry his niece Yulana? No way; there was something else.
“They won’t do a damn thing to me,” said Bennings with contempt. “You didn’t go to the trouble of killing my mother just to bring me here and do the same.”
“No one killed your mother. That was an accident,” said Popov, checking his smartphone.
“It won’t be an accident when I shove that phone down your throat.”
“Your sentiments are duly noted. Regretfully, the abduction went bad. Your mother accelerated instead of braked, and crashed her car,” said Popov, matter-of-factly.
Bennings digested the possibility he was telling the truth. “Even if that’s true, that doesn’t erase your responsibility. She’s dead because of the actions of your people, who were following your orders.”
“She is of no use to me dead!” snapped Popov. “I’ve no leverage over you if she’s a corpse.”
Oh, crap. I didn’t warn Staci. Staci! Bennings’s mind raced. He had to protect Staci, had to agree to any demands or offers until he could secure her safety. But he couldn’t appear to be too anxious to cooperate.
“I’m starting to get the picture that you want me to marry your niece, and you’ll go to a lot of trouble to make it happen. Where is she?”
“You’ll be meeting her soon enough.” Popov gestured, and one of the men opened a laptop on a huge slab of butcher’s block and booted it up.
Kit wasn’t sure what the laptop was for; he simply had to steer away from his sister whatever was coming.
“You’ve kidnapped an American diplomat. I doubt the Kremlin would approve. In fact, they might kill you for this.”
“You’re correct in that regard. But I don’t think you’ll be filing a complaint or mentioning our new arrangement to anyone.”
Damn. Popov is so sure of himself. His people must already have grabbed Staci in California. “Let’s cut to the chase. Give me your niece’s passport, and I can get the visa done on the spot. She can fly out with me tomorrow.” Bennings spoke with the tone of a man who had some leverage in the deal and not someone who was chained to a chair, surrounded by amoral killers.
“Before, you said you could not get her a visa unless I gave you something juicy.”