They planned to drive her back to San Bernardino in the morning, but tonight they dozed in chairs in her room. Both detectives had sustained lucky gunshot wounds; Franklin had been grazed in the shoulder and Chan had a through-and-through bullet wound in the flabby left side of his considerable waist. They were both very fortunate.
Staci awoke and saw her guardians fast asleep. Her broken wrist was in a cast, her knee wrapped and in a brace, her nose bandaged. She didn’t like drugs, but the pain meds helped a lot. She manipulated the electric bed to put herself in a sitting position and then swung her legs over the side and onto the floor. With some agonized effort she stood and pulled a sheet from her bed.
She softly whispered, “Thank you, God. Thank you, God,” as she draped the sheet over Bobby Chan. She found a blanket and limped over to the other side of the bed, where she draped it onto Ron Franklin.
“Thank you, God.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she whimpered softly as she stood at the foot of her bed.
Chan woke up, disoriented for a second. He noticed the sheet covering him, then saw Staci Bennings standing a few feet away, crying.
The big man silently stood and crossed to her, then gently embraced her. She grabbed him tightly, buried her head into his chest, and cried.
Margarite Padilla sat at her kitchen table scanning news Web sites—The Huffington Post, Drudge Report, the Hill, Politico—on her tablet computer as she swigged coffee from a red St. Louis Cardinals mug.
A cell phone rang from within her purse, but her look said it wasn’t a cell phone she wanted to answer.
“This better be good,” she said into the phone.
“The EMP bomb from Sandia is in a white Dodge pickup on the second level of the parking structure at Hooters Casino in Las Vegas,” said Kit as he drove the blue van toward downtown.
“I just got a call from the DCI who told me the weapon you stole detonated over Las Vegas earlier tonight.”
“Negative. A Russian device detonated. I warned you about it.”
“The DCI insists the Sandia bomb was used.”
“It’s at Hooters. Send a team to pick it up. It’s… not exactly in the same condition as when I borrowed it, but maybe you could use it to embarrass the DCI.”
Padilla almost allowed herself a smile. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said in a while. So Popov used his bomb for a diamond heist?”
Bennings quickly explained how Popov had parachuted from the Palazzo and how he was caught holding the stolen goods.
“All of this for diamonds?”
“Negative again. But the clueless political hacks in top management of the CIA might believe that.”
“If you think the robbery was a diversion, then what’s the real target?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You’re in custody at Nellis!”
“Not exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I was there, but opportunity knocked.”
“Bennings, they were going to give you amnesty.”
“My job isn’t finished yet, Madam Secretary.”
“Yes, it’s finished. This has gone far enough,” she said with cold authority. “The DCI keeps talking about ‘your man Bennings.’ That was true in Moscow, but not anymore. You are off the reservation, soldier. I am ordering you to turn yourself in. Don’t call me again until you do.”
“Why? Because it’s inconvenient for you? Because you might have to assume some responsibility you’d rather not by having ‘your man Bennings’ in play? I risk my life, but we mustn’t interrupt your high tea at the Mayflower, is that it?”
“You are out of line!”
“No, you are out of line!” yelled Bennings as he pulled the van over to the side of the highway. “I volunteered, as a soldier, to give my life for my country. I did not volunteer my family to give their lives. This is not finished!
“People like me work long hours for lousy pay in places that could get us tortured and killed. We don’t get public acknowledgment, we have to spend months or years away from our loved ones, but we do it out of service to our country.
“Whether we succeed or whether we fail, we don’t expect any support from all of the spineless, inside-the-Beltway, power-hungry political appointees, bureaucrats, and hatchet men and women that make up so much of Washington. We all know better than to expect much support from the D.C. sewer system. It would be nice, however, if you all would sometimes put politics and your own self-promotion aside and do what’s good for the country. In this instance that means stopping Viktor Popov, a man the CIA still loves because of all the free intelligence he’s given them and continues to give them, a man whom the FBI couldn’t locate if he was using their toilet on Pennsylvania Avenue!
“Here’s a CRITIC, a critical intelligence message, for you, Padilla. I’m the guy who is going to stop Popov! Do I have to tattoo a reminder on your ass that my mother was murdered because you sent me on a job I didn’t ask for or want? I spent nine months of my life to find two moles the agency couldn’t locate, and you will reap the hosannas in the power circles, won’t you!? And all it cost me was my mom and sister!”
“I have taken a lot of heat trying to provide you with political cover,” Padilla said defensively.
“You have taken heat trying to give me cover? I got news for you: when you have secret operatives in the field, you don’t try to give them cover, you do it! You have tacitly approved everything I’ve done. Own it!
“Oh, and by the way, seven CIA contract killers masquerading as army MPs tried to wipe me and Petkova at Nellis about thirty minutes ago. Stout tried to take out ‘your man Bennings.’ And how was your day?”
Kit angrily threw the cell phone out the window onto Interstate 15.
He sat there for two minutes, regulating his breathing and settling down.
“There’s a small army looking for Staci. You and I helping wouldn’t make much difference, so our next stop is Moscow,” he said. “We have unfinished business.”
CHAPTER 46
Since there wasn’t enough room for a piece of paper between the Russian neoclassical buildings crowded onto Nikolskaya Street, in Moscow’s city center, the best way to tell one solid old structure from the next was to examine the subtle changes in paint schemes and the slight differences in architectural details.
Even though the neighborhood had been run-down when the Soviet Union collapsed, Popov had wisely bought the building on the assumption a renaissance would eventually take place. He was correct. The GUM Department Store was just down the street. In the bad old days of communism, the lines were long for jars of borscht and loaves of bread sold from mostly empty shelves. Now GUM is a jewel of a shopping center purveying Armani and Yves Saint Laurent and the best designer goods from around the world. So Popov’s investment had paid off, but instead of selling the three-story Nikolskaya building for a tidy profit, he undertook massive internal renovations to make it his Moscow headquarters.
Over the last ten years, fortified with heavy-duty electrical wiring, fiber-optic cabling, a high-end HVAC system, and other improvements, the solid, sturdy building had evolved into a Tier 4 data center exclusively for Popov’s Russian black hat hackers. The servers were kept in an environmentally controlled room, while the hackers worked in shifts in a third-floor room. The entire third floor of the modestly sized building was devoted to the hackers and their needs: dining room/kitchen with a cook available 24/7, game room with pool table and arcade games, chill lounge, showers, and small individual bedrooms. The well-paid hackers had never before been confined to the premises, but they were now confined for the duration of the deception, so Popov had made it as comfortable for them as he could.