Popov screamed maniacally as his mind simply snapped. His knees buckled, he vomited, then, head spinning, he looked up into the flames of hell. And a devil was there. For Viktor felt certain he saw Kit Bennings’s face briefly appear, grinning smugly, formed from smoke and licking flames. Yes, he was sure of it.
Bennings! In his own house, his bedroom! And Sasha horribly maimed and killed. How could it be…?!
Popov shuffled along in a small circle, as if most of his brain’s circuits had been blown and he didn’t know which way to go. He was still functioning, but his thought processes had morphed into some kind of confused morass.
Finally, some semicoherent thoughts crystallized: the deception was finished, that much he knew without a doubt. He would play out the game, fight to the last bullet, but he’d lost. It was all gone, all for naught.
Everything ruined in the blink of an eye.
He mindlessly reached for a gun and tucked it into the waist of his silk pajama bottoms as a piercing alarm ripped the night.
Room 8 on the second floor was empty, but a cursory look around told Kit that a little girl had definitely been staying there. He could search every second-floor room right now, but it was more important to make sure Kala hadn’t been taken downstairs, where she would be overcome by the sleeping gas. He wobbled slightly as he donned a respirator and headed down to the ground floor.
Kit flew through the steel fire door at the bottom of the stairs. That fire door was keeping most of the incapacitating agent to the ground floor. Bodies of guards sprawled everywhere. They weren’t dead but wouldn’t be happy when they awoke.
Fighting excruciating pain with every step, he searched all the rooms, but there was no sign of Kala. He found the server room in the northeast corner. The thermite had eaten all the way through the second and third floors, and most of the server towers were already destroyed. He used the remaining three thermite grenades just to make sure the job was absolutely complete.
Yulana aimed very low and pulled the trigger. Her father had instructed her on how to shoot firearms when she was a young teen. She knew she had to breathe, to not jerk when she pulled the trigger. Still, this was incredibly hard for her to do, since Viktor Popov held her terrified daughter Kala in his arms as he stumbled barefoot in pajamas across the parking lot toward a Mercedes.
His hair tousled, his eyes wild with some kind of insane incomprehension, he fired back at Yulana, holding the gun one-handed, but he didn’t really aim. Perhaps he was firing at apparitions, perhaps at the ghosts of those he had already killed, who, sensing some kind of reckoning, were now appearing on the scene for a resettling of accounts.
Yulana wiped at her tears. Kala! Sweetheart! It’s Mommy! She could see the unspeakable fear on her daughter’s face, and simply ran toward her.
CHAPTER 52
Popov made it into the Mercedes and locked the door. He felt safer because the vehicle was armored: thick armored windows, armor plates in the doors, and run-flat tires, and it would take a tank to stop him. Do you have a tank, Bennings?! And, my God, she shot at her own daughter! I was holding her daughter, and she shot at me. What kind of mother does that? She is unfit, doesn’t deserve to have this child at all.
Viktor felt confused, he felt sick, he was tired. He put the car into gear just as Bennings ran out of his burning building.
Maybe he could just run him over?
Bennings started shooting some kind of gun—why was the man wearing sunglasses at night?—but the bullets just glanced off the windshield. Where were all of his men? Where was Dennis? Once again, I will have to finish the job myself. So he tromped on the gas and veered toward the American. But then he slammed on the brakes and screeched to a stop.
Kala was bawling, and he hadn’t secured her. So Popov reached over and buckled her seat belt as Kit tried to open the driver’s door. The mafia don then looked out, through the driver’s window into the eyes of his nemesis. The two men were no more than eighteen inches apart.
Popov looked at him, then looked through him and thought of other things. He needed to leave this place and call for more men and regroup. Yes, he needed to regroup. All was not lost after all; just a change of plans. Have to move on. Have to go now.
So as Bennings and Yulana emptied their magazines shooting at the tires and the engine compartment, Viktor calmly drove the Benz through the narrow stone archway, crashed through the iron gate, and turned east onto Nikolskaya.
Not quite believing what had just happened, Yulana watched Kit check inside the parked cars, but none of them had keys. After everything, after defeating the whole building, how could Viktor Popov just get into a car and drive away? It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right!
Suddenly, a motorcycle roared to life, and Yulana ran forward as she realized Kit had fired up a beast of a bike. She gave him a look that told him she was coming, she was riding with him, so he nodded for her to get on, then he powered the bike after Popov and Kala, into the darkness before dawn.
She felt something wet and sticky. In the strobe of passing streetlights she saw red soaking a large part of his jacket. Kit had been shot. She tried yelling, asking if he was okay, but the roar was too loud and she needed to watch the road, to lean with him as he drove the old streets in pursuit of everything that meant anything to her.
“We need a hard, hot entry,” said Buzz quietly.
“I could use one of those myself,” said his LVPD detective gal pal, smiling.
Buzz winked, then tucked his Savinelli pipe into a front pocket of his assault vest. The female detective nodded to a SWAT officer, who nodded to another SWAT officer, who swung a Thor’s Hammer breaching tool and smashed open the apartment door. Buzz and his lady friend rushed in right behind the SWAT guys, who were screaming, “Don’t move! Police! Don’t move!”
Two Russians sitting at the kitchen table in the fourth-floor apartment slowly raised their hands. The one with the mustache had a radio in his hand, and Buzz took it from him. The Russians had been playing cards as they monitored the feed from a video camera set up on a tripod behind them, a camera pointed at the AT&T PIC across the street.
As the Russians were cuffed, Buzz pulled out his own radio and said into it, “Phase two, go! Phase two, go!”
SWAT trucks drove through the chain-link gates surrounding the old motel and crashed through a barricade that had blocked off the U-shaped parking lot. Twenty officers began a room-to-room search of the compound but didn’t see a soul—until they came across four men smoking at a makeshift table in a gutted-out area next to a large deep hole in the ground into which all kinds of cabling had been run.
Jen, Angel, and half a dozen SWAT coppers didn’t bother buzzing the buzzer at the PIC’s gate, they just drove through it. At the entrance to the building, a startled employee wearing baggy, oversized gangster pants and a do-rag under a hard hat, let them in.
“Take us to the underground room where the relay switch is for the fiber-optic trunk. And hurry the hell up!” shouted Jen as more LVPD vehicles drove into the facility.
Alex Bobrik scratched his head. Moscow wasn’t answering the instant-chat connection they had been using to communicate. There must be some kind of—
The steel door to the stairwell suddenly swung open. Alex and his two assistants looked up to see police officers swarm into the cool confines of his domain.