Authors: Stephen England
Harry had barely gotten through the door when a clerk approached, asking if he needed help.
“Not tonight,” he heard himself say.
Blasted customer service. Four minutes
.
The laptops were displayed at one end of the store, lined up in a nice row with placards proclaiming their speed, hard drive size, etc. He knew it was his age talking, but he could remember when disk space had been measured in megabytes.
The good thing about Staples was that their laptops were connected to the Internet. After a brief pretense of looking over the various models, Harry clicked on the Internet Explorer icon and went on-line.
It didn’t take long to find what he was looking for—not far outside town, either.
He took a pen from an inside pocket and scrawled the address on the palm of his hand.
Three minutes
. The Mapquest page loaded and he typed both his current address and the destination into the search box.
Got it.
6:03 P.M.
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
The pungent aroma of cigarette smoke struck Thomas’s nostrils as he pushed open the door to Kranemeyer’s office. As a federal building, smoking was officially prohibited, but the DCS had never been known for following the rules.
He closed the door behind him and advanced into the room, only then catching sight of Richards, already seated in front of Kranemeyer’s desk.
“Have a seat, Thomas,” Kranemeyer gestured with a flick of his hand. The offending cigarette lay a couple inches in front of him, still smoldering in the ashtray.
“What’s going on?” Thomas asked, still standing. Something was wrong. It was only when the DCS waved his hand once more that he sat down.
“Was waiting till you got here.” Kranemeyer looked down at his desk, then back at the two men. “Orders have come down from the top. The two of you are to be sidelined until Nichols is apprehended and this investigation is over.”
Thomas started to speak, but the DCS cut him off. “I’ve already appealed the decision, but it stands, and will continue to do so as long as Shapiro is acting director.”
“Then we’re being placed under arrest?” This from Tex, his coal-black eyes expressionless. Only the set of his chin revealed the tension there.
“Not exactly,” Kranemeyer responded, letting out a heavy sigh. “Shapiro just wants you as far out of the loop as possible. Got a few days of deer season left, I’d make the most of it.”
Thomas blinked as though he hadn’t heard correctly. The DCIA was missing and presumed dead or taken hostage, their colleagues had been blown up in the bowels of the Headquarters building itself, and their Team Lead was the subject of a manhunt. Take a vacation?
Then Kranemeyer picked up the laptop from off his desk and swiveled the screen toward the two paramilitaries.
Across the screen, a simple message read: MEET ME AT THE BLACK ROOSTER. 2100 HOURS.
The former Delta Force sergeant smiled briefly and pressed Backspace. Another moment, and the message had disappeared.
“Any questions?” Kranemeyer asked, clearly not referring to the message.
There were none.
6:21 P.M.
A warehouse
Manassas, Virginia
The warehouse was a poor staging area, but it would have to do. Sergei Korsakov had seen worse.
The Russian Army had always been short on money, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, and even in the “elite”
Spetsnaz
units.
So, you learned to improvise—make do with what you had. The hackneyed old cliché of necessity being the mother of invention came to mind.
“Anything yet, Viktor?” Korsakov asked, rubbing his hands together for warmth.
The gaunt young man looked up from the Toshiba laptop he had perched precariously on top of a fifty-gallon oil drum. “
Nyet
.”
At twenty-one, the Bulgarian-born Viktor was the youngest member of the team and the only one with no prior military experience. A scraggly black beard masked the lower half of a death-pale face and the Glock 19 looked ludicrously out of place in its holster on his skinny hip. But what he lacked in physique, he made up for in technical expertise.
They’d been a team for six years, ever since Korsakov had rescued him from the Black Sea brothel where he’d been enslaved.
Six years, and yet the boy still cowered whenever a stranger came near him. His body still bore the scars.
Most of his quickness with a computer he owed to the fact that he had been forced to upload videos from the brothel to the servers of a pornographic website.
That he had received most of the scars from being nearly beaten to death after he had infected those video files with a homemade computer virus only proved to Korsakov that the boy still had spirit.
“Are you sure the American’s not playing games with us, Viktor?” Korsakov asked softly, laying a hand on his protégé’s shoulder. He felt the boy quiver at his touch and murmured a silent curse. The owners of the brothel were dead, killed by his own hand, but nothing could undo the damage they had wrought.
The boy thought for a moment.
“It’s hard to know if he’s restricted my access when I don’t know everything that’s supposed to be there. But I’m on the FBI’s servers, this much I know. Look, I’ll show you their patrol grid.”
His hands danced over the keyboard, bringing up a map overlay of the tri-state area. “Red dots, FBI-DHS. From the memos I’ve seen—their Department of Homeland Security is trying to take over the search.”
Another couple clicks, and yellow dots scattered across the screen, adding to the growing web. “Police of the state of Virginia.”
Blue dots. “The locals—sheriffs’ deputies, so forth.”
Korsakov swore under his breath. They were everywhere. Had his own mission not been so critical, it might have been awe-inspiring—the full might of the American federal government thrown out after one man. But now…
“Keep a close eye on things, Viktor. If they find Nichols and Chambers, we’ll have to be ready to intercept.”
“
Da, tovarisch
.”
The assassin had already turned away when it occurred to him. “Viktor?”
“
Da
?”
“How long until the second tracker goes live?”
The boy glanced at the computer screen, then consulted his watch as though there might be a contradiction. When he looked up into Korsakov’s face, his eyes held the expectation of a rebuke. “Sixteen hours.”
6:29 P.M.
Outside New Market
Virginia
Snow was still falling when Harry climbed back into the driver’s seat of the SUV. “Looks like everything’s clear.”
He saw her face in the brief moment before the dome light went back off, plunging them both into darkness. She looked weary, rumpled, her face shadowed by the grief of the day. The Kahr .45 was still in her lap, clutched tightly in both hands, the way it had been ever since he’d left her alone.
Harry moved the torn packaging of a consumed MRE off the center console and put the vehicle into gear, moving slowly down the lane, past the realtor sign that had become ever more common in the years since the financial crisis of 2008:
Foreclosed
.
The abandoned split-level was off the main road, tucked into what Harry’s grandfather would have called a “hollow.” Perfect for their purposes.
Harry’s lockpick gun got them through both the deadbolt and front door lock in under a minute. As he had always said, locks were for honest people.
Gripping a tactical light between his teeth and his 1911 in both hands, Harry led the way into the deserted house, clearing it room by room.
The former homeowners had left a bed and a moth-eaten recliner in a downstairs bedroom, a room decorated on one wall with a mural of a unicorn. A little girl’s room.
Once upon a time, it might have been beautiful, but now the fading image loomed threateningly in the glare of Harry’s tactical light. A relic from more prosperous times.
He gave the recliner a suspicious prod with his foot, as though wondering if it would crumble into pieces.
It didn’t. His light swept the room once again, a final check before he turned to face her. “The bed’s yours.”
He couldn’t see her face, but he could hear the hesitancy in her reply. “Thanks, I guess. Are you going to be able to sleep in that recliner?”
Harry pulled back his jacket, sliding the big Colt into its leather holster. “I won’t be doing much in the way of sleeping.”
8:53 P.M.
The Black Rooster Pub
Washington, D.C.
Thomas had never been to the Black Rooster, had never even heard of it before doing a Google search for the words on Kranemeyer’s screen.
Arriving on-site, it wasn’t hard to understand why. The bar occupied the corner of an office building on L Street, its brick exterior about the only thing distinguishing it from the rest of the buildings.
Warm air and the sound of ‘70s music hit him in the face as he entered. He brushed a melting snowflake off the sleeve of his jacket, looking around him.
Tex was already there, his long legs wrapped around a barstool in front of the massive wooden bar. Even from across the pub, Thomas could see the big man’s eyes—watching the mirrors that hung behind the bar.
Nearly the perfect setup.
“What you having, buddy?” the bartender asked, a weary smile on his face as Thomas took the stool beside Tex.
“All depends—what’s my friend having?” he asked, eyeing the clear liquid in Tex’s glass.
The smile was replaced by a crooked smirk. “Water.”
Of course. Thomas shook his head. What a day…he knew Tex didn’t drink. He went to the same church as Harry—of course he didn’t drink. How could it have slipped his mind?
“What would you recommend?”
“Maybe a Dark and Stormy?” the bartender asked speculatively, looking up from the shot glass he was wiping. “Jamaican rum and ginger beer.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“He’s here,” Tex announced beneath his breath, waiting until the bartender had turned to fill the order. Thomas looked up into the mirrors, seeing the form of the DCS, a shadowy presence in the door of the bar.
Nine o’clock on the dot. 2100 hours. Punctual as ever.
The Dark Lord crossed the barroom and put his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “Glad to see you could make it, boys.”
And then he was gone, moving toward an empty booth at the back of the pub. Thomas put out a hand toward his glass, tilting it back with a sudden, brusque motion. The rum slid down his throat, warming him against the coldness within.
It wasn’t going to be enough. He drained the glass and set it back down on the bar, following after Kranemeyer.
Party’s over.
9:05 P.M.
The foreclosed house
New Market, Virginia
She wasn’t sleeping. Harry knew it from the moment he walked into the room, but he closed the door with all the care he would have shown if she’d been sound asleep.
He shifted the AK-47 to his right hand and sat down quietly in the recliner. The rifle had been chosen from the weapons in the vehicle after a moment’s careful consideration. The motorcyclists had been wearing body armor.
He could barely make out Carol’s form in the darkness, laying there on the bed, wrapped up in the sleeping bag they’d brought from the safehouse.
Laying there awake. He could tell by her breathing—he’d had a lifetime of listening to people sleep. Not all of them had woken back up.
Harry leaned back in the recliner, letting the assault rifle rest across his lap. It was cold in the house, bitterly cold, but there was no way around it, with the utilities cut to the house. The bi-level, like so many houses built in the mid-90s, had been built with no thought of any heat source aside from electric. It hadn’t been until near the end of the Obama administration, when utility rates had skyrocketed, that people had started to reconsider.
Cold. Yeah, that’s where he was. Out in the cold. He’d known it from the moment he had seen his picture splashed across Rhoda Stevens’ TV screen along with the Bureau’s APB. A bad picture, blurry even…but that life was forever over. His days on the run were only beginning.
Harry rose to his feet, a slightly sardonic smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He ran a gloved hand over the receiver of the Kalashnikov, feeling cold gunmetal through the neoprene fabric. Perhaps he’d always known that it would come to this.
9:15 P.M.
The Black Rooster
Washington, D.C.
One thing that inevitably resulted in social awkwardness among spies was a universal desire to sit facing the door. It was a mark of their respect for the older man that Thomas and Tex gave Bernard Kranemeyer that seat.