Authors: Stephen England
The trunk popped open on the second try and the lieutenant let the crowbar fall to the ground, taking the flashlight from between his teeth.
Something glinted in the beam, and Dubroznik’s breath caught in his throat. He’d been prepared for neatly-wrapped packets of drugs—maybe a suitcase of money. Nothing like this.
The trunk was awash in rifle cartridges spilling out from two ruptured cardboard boxes, light reflecting off the steel casings. And then he saw it, half-hidden beneath a pile of men’s shorts. A disassembled assault rifle, what was that they called it…an AK?
His fingers trembled, and it had nothing to do with the cold. They were going to have to bring the Bureau into this.
5:49 P.M.
The mosque
Dearborn, Michigan
Astagfirullah
, Tarik whispered, staring at the cellphone now laying there on the desk, now silent, an inanimate piece of plastic. I ask Allah forgiveness.
Where had he failed? Two of his men were dead, another missing. Trained
mujahideen
, his friends. His brothers. The
Ikhwan
was more than just a name. They had fought and bled together in the mountains of his homeland. To die here.
A part of him wanted to rage against the injustice of it all, but he could not. There was no doubting the will of Allah, the most glorified, the most high. There was still a path, there had to be.
Show it to me, God
.
It was a long moment before he rose, closing his laptop computer and sliding it into his satchel. As much as he had found respite among the faithful, Dearborn would no longer be safe. Not after this…
3:52 P.M.
The Russian Consulate
San Francisco, California
“How high can they take this, Alexei?” Harry asked, following the Russian into his office. He glanced at his watch. It had been thirty minutes since Petrov had finished the delicate task of extracting the still-functioning tracker, but Carol still hadn’t even begun to come out from under the anesthesia. If Andropov had continued to make inquiries…
Vasiliev looked up. “It’s already as high as it’s going to go, Harry. You need not worry about that.”
“You’re not concerned that Andropov might have purchased himself influence with the consul?”
An eyebrow went up. “Vournikov? Right now he’s probably laying out on the beach down at Baker with his boyfriend. It’s where he spends most of his days while I run the consulate. Even on the cold days.”
Harry shook his head. Every time you thought you were to the point that nothing would surprise you…
And then Vasiliev reached into his desk, retrieving a holstered pistol. An MP-443
Grach
, from the looks of it. Standard-issue to the Russian military, the semiautomatic was chambered in 9mm Luger. Seventeen-round magazine.
“I thought you didn’t carry a weapon.”
The former KGB officer slid the paddle holster onto his belt and handed Harry his Colt. “What’s that old saying of yours? ‘To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven’…where’s that from, if I may ask?”
“The Bible,” Harry replied, pulling back the Colt’s slide to chamber a round. Cocked and locked. “Ecclesiastes, the wisdom of Solomon.”
An odd grin crossed Vasiliev’s face, and he clapped Harry on the shoulder as he moved toward the door. “Small wonder I had never heard of it.”
9:23 P.M. Eastern Time
Bethesda, Maryland
One look at Lasker’s residence was enough to dispel any notions of the spy business being lucrative. The small, faded brick townhouse was itself split into two apartments.
Kranemeyer mounted the steps of the porch, kicking the snow from his boots. He took another long look into the dark, sleet-filled night, then scanned the letterboxes for Lasker’s name. The apartment on the left.
He didn’t bother with the doorbell, bringing up his left hand and rapping on the metal of the door. A hard, peremptory knock.
Two minutes. Then three. Finally, he heard movement from within and the porch light flicked on, nearly blinding him. Kranemeyer swore under his breath, taking a step back.
He had just been exposed to the full view of anyone watching.
Even the paranoid have enemies
.
The deadbolt slid back and the door opened a crack, a young brunette looking out at him. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Lasker
had
always liked to hook up with coeds. “What do you want?”
“My name’s Kranemeyer. I’ve come to see Daniel.”
The girl regarded him for another long moment, shifting her gum from one corner of her mouth to the other. At length she nodded. “He’s mentioned you. Come on in.”
The DCS stepped in out of the cold, closing the door behind him. Lasker’s apartment was what he might have expected of the CLANDOPS comm chief, displaying the same sort of mad genius disorganization he brought to the workplace.
The brunette led the way, running a hand through her stringy hair as she padded barefoot across the shag carpet. “Danny!”
Kranemeyer heard the sound of a door opening and closing from the back of the apartment and then Lasker appeared, a towel wrapped around his mid-section.
His face flushed. “What’s going on, sir? I wasn’t expecting to see you tonight.”
“That’s apparent,” was Kranemeyer’s dry reply. The kid would never learn to stop calling him
sir
. He cast a sideways glance at the brunette, standing there in her pajama bottoms and tank top. “Can you give us a moment?”
She gave Lasker an impatient look, then disappeared into the bedroom with a toss of her head.
“Where
do
you find them?” Kranemeyer asked, slightly bemused.
“What?” Lasker seemed preoccupied with his towel. “Oh, her? A junior at Georgetown, majoring in international relations.”
The DCS raised an eyebrow and Lasker went on, “Was there something I can do for you, sir?”
Kranemeyer nodded, taking another look down the hallway to make sure the girl was nowhere in sight. He reached into his pocket, extracting the phone SIM card that Thomas Parker had cloned earlier in the day.
“Where did you get this?” Lasker asked, taking it from him.
“This is for me, Danny. And you don’t have need-to-know.” He held the young comm chief’s gaze, willing him not to ask too many questions. If Lasker knew under what circumstances it had been obtained…
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“I want a list of the most commonly called numbers, along with names and usual call zones. Anything that can help us pin down their location. If any of the numbers belong to pre-paid cells, I want that noted. Make this a priority, and give me a call the minute you have something.”
“Will do.” Kranemeyer turned to leave, his hand on the door, when Lasker spoke again.
“Sir? You want me to keep this on the down low?”
Another night, another time the choice of words might have brought a smile to Kranemeyer’s face. As it was, he simply nodded. “That would be best.”
And then he was gone.
9:34 P.M.
Altmann’s apartment
Alexandria, Virginia
There were no answers. She’d arrived at that conclusion after a hot shower, a “supper” of stale crackers and a half-empty can of Corona. No reason why the Bureau hadn’t already placed her at the scene of Vic’s murder.
A tired face, lined with age, looked back at Marika Altmann when she glanced in the mirror. She really should retire. A traitor at the highest levels of the Bureau? What was this, the Stasi?
It was time to give it up, the fight that she’d waged ever since coming to this land of the free. It just didn’t matter anymore.
It was as if the rules had changed, passing her by as if she’d been standing still. Were there still rules? Or was it just the alcohol talking?
She walked into her small bedroom, taking in the sight of the loaded Glock on her nightstand. She hadn’t always lived this way, in fear.
Her phone began to vibrate without warning, buzzing against the wood of the nightstand. The display told her it was the Bureau. “Altmann here,” she answered, trying to focus her thoughts.
The next words accomplished that for her. “Pack your bags. We’ve got a situation developing on the Michigan peninsula.”
6:09 P.M.
A safehouse
San Francisco, California
Numb. That was the best way to describe it. Her tongue felt dry, as if her mouth had been stuffed with cotton. A dull, throbbing pain in her mouth.
Carol’s eyes flickered open, staring up at the dull, off-white paint of the ceiling.
Where?
Voices. She tried to sit up, grabbing the edge of the bed’s headboard as another wave of dizziness washed over her.
Her vision cleared for a moment and she could glimpse another room through the partially-closed bedroom door.
Kitchen
?
Vasiliev was in her line of sight, his back to her as he leaned forward, both of his hands on the kitchen table. She could hear Han’s voice—then Harry’s, louder now.
“We’re going to need a panel van—tinted windows would be a plus.”
“Rent or buy?” Han moved into view, his face impassive.
“Buy—we’ll be ditching it when we’re done.” Harry’s voice seemed to be closer than it had been before and she looked up to see a blurred figure standing in the doorway.
The room began to spin, and Carol put out a hand to steady herself.
An arm wrapped itself gently around her waist, providing support. “Take it easy, there.”
Harry
.
A glass pressed against her lips, cool water trickling down her throat. The repeated assurance, “Easy, there.”
She leaned back against the pillows, surrendering to the darkness. So tired…
Harry closed the door softly behind him, returning the empty glass to the sink. “How’s she doing?” Han asked, looking up from his wallet.
“Out cold,” Harry responded. “More than I’d expect from a normal anesthetic.”
His head came up, staring at Vasiliev. “What
did
your dentist give her?”
Vasiliev shrugged. “To remove a microchip without damaging the tracking mechanism…is an operation of great delicacy. It is imperative that the patient be motionless.”
“What did he give her?” Harry repeated, an edge of steel creeping into his voice.
“I didn’t ask,” the former KGB officer responded. “I relied upon his professionalism in doing the job we required of him. He did say that it would probably be tomorrow morning before she is completely over the effects.”
Great
.
Vasiliev moved to the table, looking at the maps Han had printed off the safehouse’s desktop computer. “At first glance, there are not many good ways to approach the Andropov estate. High walls on three sides, he’s built himself a well-nigh impregnable fortress.”
Harry shook his head, motioning for Han to go secure their van. “Nothing is impregnable. Man never built a fortress that man couldn’t take.”
1:03 A.M. Central Time, December 19
th
The apartment
Dearborn, Michigan
The night is darkest just before the dawn, or so the writers say. At the very least, the early hours of morning are when the human body experiences its deepest sleep.
Noise. The sound of a door being slammed, somewhere distant, penetrating through a cobweb of dreams. On the street, maybe—a car door?
Nasir al-Khalidi came awake slowly, realizing that it wasn’t street noise. And it wasn’t one of their neighbors, paper-thin though the walls of the tenement were. It was in the very room with him.
He threw off the thin blanket, reaching under the pillow for the switchblade he kept with him as he slept. Ten times he had asked the Americans to give him a gun, ten times they had denied him, saying it was too “dangerous.”
Dangerous.
As if what he was doing for
them
wasn’t? He had been in Lebanon, had seen what the jihadis could do. There had been a time…he had even believed in their cause.
His bare feet touched the carpet, the shag cold between his toes. The heat must have shut off at some point in the night. Typical.
A drawer slid open, wood squeaking against wood and his breath caught in his throat. Light. He needed light.
The knife turned in his hand until he found the button, the rusty five-inch blade flipping open with a faint
snick
. It was little enough in the face of an intruder.
The drawer shut with a thud. Nasir thrust his hand out along the wall, finding the light switch and flicking it up.
The single compact fluorescent bulb in the ceiling came slowly to life, casting a faint glow over the room, the intruder on his knees in front of the faded wood dresser. The man looked up, his face ghostly white, the picture of terror.
“Jamal!” Nasir nearly dropped the knife. “What are you doing?”
In recent years, his older brother had always possessed confidence enough for the both of them, a surety of purpose. A faith, as if he believed his very steps were guided from Allah,
subhanahu wa ta’ala.
None of that was visible now. He was shaking. And then Nasir saw what his brother had been searching for in the dresser drawer. A small, snub-nosed revolver laying there on the carpet, worn blue steel gleaming in the pale light.
No
…
“What is going on, Jamal?” he asked, palming the switchblade and laying it on the bed. “If something is wrong…if you are in trouble, I will do whatever I can.”
He expected a cocky dismissal, but none was forthcoming. His brother was too shaken, too afraid. A cold fear gripped Nasir’s heart. For his brother to be this frightened…
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Jamal stammered. He paced over to the window, running his fingers through his short hair. “They weren’t supposed to die, not here—not in this way. Their work wasn’t done. I saw the police there…it’s only a matter of time.”
“
What
happened?” He felt like shaking his brother, but took him by the shoulder instead, guiding him to a seat on the bed.
It would take two hours to get the full story—and even then Nasir wondered if his pious brother had been drinking. Nerve gas? Here?
After all that they had seen in Lebanon, how could he…
“I will go with you,” he said finally, his mind struggling to absorb all that he had been told.
This wasn’t betrayal, he told himself. He would never betray his brother, his faith. It wasn’t
that
.
The lie didn’t even sound convincing to his ears. He dropped the revolver into a pocket of his cargo pants, along with the small box of .38 Special cartridges that Jamal had secreted in the drawer. Then together—his arm wrapped around his older brother’s shoulders—they left the apartment, melting into the darkness of the Dearborn night.
The door had scarce closed behind him before the cellphone stuffed under his threadbare mattress began to buzz insistently. Unheard and forgotten, the cellphone’s screen read NUMBER WITHHELD…
3:36 A.M.
A Gulfstream IV
Inbound to Detroit Metro Airport
“He’s not answering his phone.” Altmann swore softly under her breath, gazing off into space. She closed her phone, tucking it back into a pocket of her vest.
“Maybe to do so would compromise himself.” She looked up at the words, into the eyes of William Russell Cole. She’d drafted him to accompany her to Michigan—there was no telling when you might need a good hostage negotiator. Particularly when there were terrorists involved. And he had worked in Pakistan with the JTTF, knew the Islamic culture better than she did.
“Maybe.” Altmann stared out the window of the Gulfstream, into the night. “Maybe his cover has already been blown. Could be dead.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Marika,” the negotiator said calmly. “There’s any number of answers—you’ve run enough CIs to know, it’s not like having an actual agent undercover. They don’t have the training, and their loyalties are at best divided. For all we know Nasir abu Rashid may have done a runner on us.”
Altmann shot him a glare. “Isn’t that a comforting thought, Russ?”
“Never said it was supposed to be. Simply a possibility we must consider.” He paused. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
“Why?” The question didn’t come out the way she’d meant it to, an icy chill to her voice.
The negotiator never seemed to notice. “You lost your partner, Marika. There’s been no time for you to grieve.”
“There’s never time, Russ. Vic wasn’t the first agent I’ve lost through the years—nothing to do but keep moving, keep fighting. No time for grief.”
There was a long pause as he held her gaze, seeming to stare into her very soul. “And that…that is the most dangerous thing of all.”
4:02 A.M. Pacific Time
The safehouse
San Francisco, California
The sound of running water brought her awake slowly, the aftereffects of the anesthesia still dulling her senses.
Carol opened her eyes, blinking back sleep. A narrow shaft of light pierced the darkness, streaming from the half-open door of the adjoining bathroom.
It took a moment for her to place where she was, what had happened. Then it all came flooding back.
Her vision cleared and her eyes focused in on the light. She could see Harry standing in front of the sink, stripped to the waist, running water over his hands.
She’d seen pictures of torture. They’d been part of her training at Camp Peary. But nothing had prepared her for this.
His back and shoulders were a mass of old scars, purplish and discolored in the pale light—crisscrossing and overlapping each other as if he had been beaten to within an inch of his life.
He had. She could remember reading the after-action report in his dossier, the story of his capture by the Taliban in 2008. They’d nearly killed him. That he had ever been able to go back out into the field at all was testament to a sheer force of will.
Carol pushed back the blankets, reaching for the robe folded neatly on the nightstand. She didn’t remember undressing the previous night and a flush spread across her face as she realized that
she
hadn’t.
Water dripped down Harry’s face, droplets catching in the rough black stubble of his beard as he ran the steaming cloth over his shoulders, feeling the warmth seep into his skin.
Scars
.
There was no pain, not anymore, but the scars were never going away.
The cloth moved lower, pausing briefly near a scar on his upper right chest, a pockmarked, discolored indentation in his flesh. The relic of a dark night in Basra, 2005.
They’d been meeting with an informant—been ambushed by Shiite militants loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr. He’d been shot with an AK-47, the jacketed 7.62mm round passing straight through, missing his lung by inches. It would have been enough to qualify him for the Purple Heart if he’d been military—but he wasn’t and it didn’t.
He didn’t exist.
Harry felt her standing there before he saw her, half-hidden by shadows. “Hideous, isn’t it?” he asked, a wry smile crossing his face as he looked back to catch her eye.
He’d grown accustomed to the stares—but the look on her face was something different.
Pain—his pain—was reflected in those blue eyes, pain not unmixed with sympathy. It was the first time he had ever seen her with her defenses down, stripped of that look of determination that reminded him so much of her father.
“It was Afghanistan, wasn’t it?” she asked, her voice low and tender.
Harry nodded, feeling suddenly vulnerable. It wasn’t something he was used to. He laid down the washcloth and reached for his shirt, drawing it on over his arms. “Ancient history.”
He started to leave the bathroom, moving past her, but she put out a hand, catching him by the arm. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“For what?” he asked, pausing there in the doorway. She was so beautiful, standing there in the half-light, hair still askew from a night’s sleep. Close enough to take her into his arms, but something held him back.
There were so many things he could have said, but he’d said them all before, to others through the years.
Lies
.
And he couldn’t say the words now, even though he meant them with all his heart. Even though they were true.
Carol didn’t look at him. “You’ve risked your life to protect me. Sacrificed your career. Why?”
He hadn’t been expecting that question.
What
is
truth?
That he cared for her? That she had roused feelings he’d long thought dead?
“Your father was my friend, but the
why
doesn’t matter—not in the end,” he said finally, his fingers smoothing back a lock of golden hair, touching her cheek lightly. “Just know that I’m here for you—we’ve come this far together. Not going to leave you now.”
She nodded, glancing up into his eyes. “I know.”
So beautiful
, he thought, the voice within whispering,
Don’t get involved
.
“Han got in around three,” he announced, more for his benefit than hers, his hand falling away from her shoulder. Reminding himself that they weren’t alone, strength to his resolve. “He was able to find a van.”
The moment passed and he left her standing there in the doorway as he moved into the bedroom, buttoning his shirt. “When all this is over—what will you do?”
Something he hadn’t given much thought. “Don’t really know,” he replied, reaching for his 1911.
He flashed her a grim smile. “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.”
7:46 A.M. Eastern Time
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
The call log had confirmed his worst fears. Lasker rubbed the bridge of his nose, his eyes scanning the op-center. What Kranemeyer had asked him to do…well, “illegal” didn’t even begin to cover it.
Rumor had it that Carter had overstepped the boundaries of the Agency’s charter, and now he was under house arrest, in joint CIA/FBI custody. He had no desire to follow him down.
An uneaten bagel still sat in its box beside Lasker’s keyboard. His appetite was long gone.
Six calls over the course of three weeks, none of them lasting longer than four minutes. All of them made within CONUS, likely by an American citizen. Illegal territory without a FISA warrant, and he was operating without any written authorization at all.
Quicksand
.
The SIM card didn’t belong to your average Joe Sixpack. The owner was a player—all six calls had been made to the same number. No one did that.
The target number was…another prepaid cellphone, purchased in Manassas around the same time and activated by an
A. Smith
.
Lasker sniffed. Why people couldn’t show some imagination with their aliases…
A shadow loomed over his workstation and he nearly came out of his skin, tapping his mouse to minimize the open window. He looked up into the coal-black eyes of Bernard Kranemeyer.
“Any results, Danny?”
5:30 A.M. Pacific Time
The safehouse
San Francisco, California
When all
this is over—what will you do?
Carol’s words came streaming back through his mind, the one question he didn’t want to face.
Harry pushed his chair back from the table, walking over to the refrigerator. Barring a miracle, there was no going back to the Agency. He’d been burned.
The reality hadn’t really sunk in yet, he hadn’t
permitted
himself to consider it. Out of a job, out in the cold.