Authors: Dale Brown
Chisinau, Moldova
T
he first shot had been low, deadly but not instantaneous lethal. The second hit home perfectly, exploding Nudstrumov’s skull.
A thing of beauty.
But the Black Wolf knew he couldn’t stop to admire it. He had to move.
He pulled the rifle back, quickly folding the stock and dropping it into the box. He slapped it closed and picked it up. He already had his backpack on.
A person got out of the car across the street, near the lot where he’d shot the doctor. The Black Wolf saw him through the window from the corner of his eye.
He turned and focused.
A black man.
Familiar.
Familiar. He focused—narrowed his vision so the man was right next to him, features large in his brain.
He was very, very familiar. Yet he couldn’t quite identify him.
Why did he know him?
No time for that:
Go! Go! Go!
Chisinau, Moldova
D
anny leapt out of the car. His first instinct was to run to Nudstrumov, even though he knew it was too late to help him. He took a step, then dove to the ground, belatedly realizing that he, too, would be in the killer’s sights.
Or could be.
The shot had come from across the street. There was another building—several.
One of the rooftops.
“Danny, what’s going on?” asked Nuri.
“Somebody just shot the doctor. They must have been across the street.”
Danny jumped to his feet and began running.
“Where? Where?”
“From the roof, maybe. It had to be a rifle—the shot came down from above, and it was pretty high-powered. There’s no one in the lot that could have shot him.”
Danny crossed the street. There was no one nearby or in the cars, and the shot had definitely come from above.
He reached inside his jacket for his Beretta, then thought better of it. If the police responded and saw a man with a gun, they’d jump to conclusions—and shoot before asking questions.
There were three buildings, all butting up against each other. All three were five-story buildings. There were storefronts on the ground floor, offices and apartments above.
Would there be a fire escape?
He walked quickly to the end of the block, turned, then began to trot. An alley ran behind the buildings. He turned down it.
“Danny, where are you?” asked Flash over the radio.
“I’m behind the buildings across the street. Just east of the lot.”
“I’m turning down the side street now,” said Flash. “I’ll be behind you.”
“Good.”
The alley was lined with garbage cans and old cars. There were balconies on the right, fire escapes on the left. Two children were playing soccer at the far end, banging the ball against a rusted chain-link fence.
Danny looked up to his left.
How long would it take a shooter to get down from the roof or one of the upper apartments?
A minute, maybe two, assuming he planned it right. And these guys always planned it right.
But where would he have gone? No one had passed him. The buildings on the right, though only three and two stories, were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. To get past them you’d have to go through them. Or maybe over them.
He turned so he had the back of the building in view and sidled in the direction of the kids. Any second, the killer could appear over the side.
Danny put his hand near his gun, ready, just in case.
“I need words to ask the children if they saw someone,” Danny told MY-PID.
The computer spat out a phrase. Danny yelled it to the kids, but they didn’t react, too consumed in their game.
A window flew open behind him. Danny spun, dropped to his knee.
A head popped out. Danny grabbed his gun.
But it was a woman, yelling at him.
“What’s she saying? Translate mode,” Danny told MY-PID.
“Unknown. Repeat.”
“Give me the Moldovan for ‘Did you see anything?’ ”
MY-PID gave him the proper phrase. Danny yelled it up. The woman yelled back again, once more indecipherable.
“The words are unclear,” said MY-PID. “The language is not Moldovan. It appears to be a Russian dialect, but too distant to hear.”
The woman pointed upward. As Danny followed her gesture, a car pulled into the far end of the alley. It was Flash.
“The police are on their way,” Nuri said over the radio.
Danny looked around. There was a fire escape a few meters to his right. “I’m going to check the roof.”
“I’ll get your car out of there,” Nuri said. “Don’t stay too long.”
Danny jumped up and grabbed the steel ladder to the bottom of the fire escape. He pulled it down, starting to climb even before it hit the stop. Flash, meanwhile, made a U-turn, then pulled around so it would be easier to get away.
Sirens wailed in the distance as Danny reached the edge of the roof. He stopped, pulled out his pistol, then went over, rolling over the low wall and spinning up, ready. But there was no one there.
He looked around the roof quickly. There was a mattress near the front edge.
“Danny—police are pulling in,” said Nuri. “Time to go.”
Danny ignored him, running to the front of the building. He wanted something—a shell casing, a soda bottle, a coffee cup.
Nothing except the mattress. He knelt on it and looked toward the doctor’s building.
Too much of an angle. The shooter would have been to his left somewhere.
“Danny!” shouted Nuri.
“I’m coming. Flash?”
“I’m here. Let’s move.”
Danny pulled out the MY-PID control unit and had it record a video of the roof. Then he raced over to the fire escape ladder and descended.
They saw the ambulance arriving as they drove past the building.
“Kinda late for that,” said Flash.
Washington, D.C.
M
oldova was seven hours ahead of Washington, and Breanna was just pulling into the Pentagon lot on her way to work when Reid called.
“There are some other developments in Moldova,” he told her. “We should review them together as soon as we get a chance.”
“I can meet you after lunch,” she told him.
“Earlier, would be better. There’s been a shooting.”
“Were we involved?”
“We saw it. The person who was killed may have been connected to the Wolves. They’re still sorting things out.”
“Can you get over to the Pentagon this morning?” Breanna asked.
“Name a time.”
Breanna told him to come whenever he could and her secretary would get her.
A half hour later she made a graceful exit from a phone conference with a contractor in Rhode Island working on a project for the Navy.
“Could you get me some coffee, MaryClaire, please?” Breanna asked as Reid came in. “I’m having a caffeine fit.”
Her secretary smiled. MaryClaire Bennett was an old Pentagon hand. While their first few days had been a bit rocky, she’d relaxed considerably since. Breanna had learned to trust her people sense, which was based on many years of experience with the different personalities in the building. She’d seen many axes buried along the way—most, as the saying went, in people’s backs.
“Mr. Reid?”
“I’ve had my quota for today, thank you.”
Reid pulled a seat in front of Breanna’s desk.
“Busy day?” he asked.
“We have an aircraft demonstration coming up,” she told him. “And I’m going to have to be away from the office for a few days. So I have to get a lot of the day-to-day things out of the way. You know how it goes.”
“Yes. When are you leaving?”
“Sunday night. I’ll be at Dreamland.”
“How long?”
“Until Tuesday night.”
“Back in time for the NATO conference.”
“Yes.”
MaryClaire knocked on the door and came in with the coffee.
“General Magnus is looking for you,” the secretary said. “I told him you were tied up. He asks that you call him when you can—shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. It’s about the plane.”
“OK.” Breanna took a sip of the coffee, trying to get her brain to switch gears as MaryClaire left. “So, I saw the bulletin. The doctor was shot?”
“Yes. It was a sniper. Danny thinks the shot came from across the street, a roof, though he couldn’t find any shells.”
Reid gave her some background on the shooting. The local police were investigating. The local news services had almost nothing to report.
“The doctor was using the name of Nudstrumov. We’ve found, or at least think we’ve found, another alias. Rustam Gorgov. Gorgov owns property in northeastern Moldova, not all that far from the former training camp. And the cemetery where Mark Stoner was supposedly buried.”
He had an update on that as well—an overnight check of the DNA on the corpses showed no match.
“We have to wait for the full report and the entire testing suite, which is more extensive,” said Nuri. “But there were no matches. One of the dead men would have been about Stoner’s age and size, for what that’s worth.”
Breanna nodded.
“They must realize we’re after them,” said Reid. “The doctor visited a Russian spymaster. Maybe that was what got him killed.”
“Why?”
“Maybe he was a bad risk. Maybe they don’t work for the Russians.”
“If they don’t, we won’t have anything to worry about,” said Breanna.
A faint smile appeared at the corner of Reid’s mouth. It was an ironic smile, the sort that indicated he thought she was being naive.
“What about the property?” Breanna asked.
Reid opened his briefcase and took out a set of satellite photos, along with a satellite map. MY-PID was still analyzing different data related to the property and the surrounding area—everything from its ownership to electric bills.
No concrete ties to the Wolves had been found. But a review of commercial satellite images over the past four years showed flashes of light that appeared to be weapons.
“Could be a training ground,” said Reid. “Or just a farmer doing nighttime poaching. I’ve already applied for a Global Hawk assignment so we can get a closer look. But I’d suggest we have Whiplash check it out as well. Discreetly. And from a safe distance.”
“Agreed.”
“The question is what we do if we think they’re in there,” said Breanna.
“That’s always been the problem. It would be one thing to catch them in the act. Here . . .”
“Do you think it’s time to call the White House?” asked Breanna, putting down her coffee.
“I think so. If we take any direct action, outside of protecting the NATO ministers, we’ll need a finding. If the group is as accomplished as we believe they are, anything we do would be bound to . . .” He paused, trying to find the right phrase. “It is bound to be complicated,” he added finally.
“All right. And they’re going to need more people,” said Breanna. “We should have them ready.”
Reid nodded. Then he asked the question she’d been dreading since they were first handed the assignment:
“What do you want them to do if it’s Stoner?”
“I think, unfortunately, if he resists, they have to kill him,” said Breanna, ignoring the lump in her throat. “There’s really no other choice.”
Northeastern Moldova
T
he text message the Black Wolf received a few hours after killing the doctor consisted of one word:
EXCELLENT
It was the message he received whenever a job was complete. The doctor was the same as the others, just one more on the list.
The man he’d seen, getting of the car. A black man. African.
Or American.
Did he know Americans?
He had lived before the crash. He had a whole past, but it was locked off from him, erased by whatever they had used to resurrect him, to rebuild him, to keep him going.
He didn’t want it back.
But who was that man?
He had other things to worry about. As much as he hated Nudstrumov, the doctor had readily supplied the serum he needed. Who would do that now?
They would. Or he would hunt them down. Maybe he should start on that now.
The Black Wolf’s cell phone beeped with a second message. It indicated a new website.
This one was German, a listing of art shows. There was a phone number he had to call, using a prepaid cell phone.
It was best not to make the call from the house. He went out to the barn and got his motorcycle.
He’d seen the black man somewhere. But where?
A half hour later, sitting at the top of a hill ten miles from the house, the Black Wolf made the call to the number in the listing.
“The assignment has changed,” said a computerized voice in English. “You will go to Prague. A new team is being prepared. Further instructions will be provided. Leave immediately.”
The Black Wolf looked down at the phone. He pressed the
1
digit to show that he understood. Then he hung up.