Gun Metal Heart (24 page)

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Girl, soldier. Bombs, blood. Pianist's fingers, nails shredded and bloody, reaching for her. Debris crushing ribs. Diggers screaming for help. The taste of dirt and blood. The smell of charred flesh. A woman's pitch-black eyes, the life in them fading. Lips moving, silent apologies.

Daria woke up under the bed, drenched in sweat, having dragged the covers and pillows down with her. It was 3:00
A.M.

It was the same dream that had dogged her since her youth. But the blast at the hotel in Florence had added fresh menace to it.

It was most annoying. Daria had survived blown-up buildings before. Daria had
blown up
buildings before. Why the nightmares were escalating, she could not say. She'd learned over the years that one of the only ways to stave them off was to sleep with someone—although that didn't always work. Daria didn't know anyone on the outskirts of Kistelek, so she woke up the proprietress and ordered a pot of strong black coffee, tipping her thrice the cost of the coffee to apologize for waking her. She sat up and drained the pot until dawn broke.

As the sun rose, she was sitting on the carpet in her panties, legs straight and spread wide, 160 degrees, in a dancer's stretch, feet arched and toes pointing, feeling the tension from the long road trip. She laid out a towel between her thighs and field stripped the Glock she'd stolen back in Florence. She made sure it was unloaded by removing the magazine and locking back the slide to check the barrel. She dry-fired the gun just to be sure.

As she cleaned the weapon she thought about the American she'd taken it from. Owen Cain Thorson, according to his wallet.

And it came to her: the second motorcycle rider, the man with the gun in the Tour de France. It was the American: Thorson.

She pictured the man in the livery building in Florence. He remained maddeningly familiar. For some reason, thinking of his face made Daria think of John Broom. She didn't know why, but it suggested that Thorson might have been involved in the battle in Milan. Or during her convalescence at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Those were the only two places she had ever met Broom face-to-face. Daria had been delirious during parts of those days. Wide swaths of her recovery remained only vague and splintered memories.

It was funny. She thought of Broom as her friend. But in truth, he was a stranger. A stranger who had shelved protocol, had risked his career and even his own skin to help her, both in Milan and Ramstein. Daria didn't trust that many souls. It was odd that a man she'd met only briefly, at the height of her illness, ended up being one of them.

Diego she had known for years, on and off. She'd known him in battle. He'd earned her trust the hard way.

Now those two men likely were in Belgrade, Serbia, awaiting her. Somewhere.

Then there was the tall blonde. Viorica.

In the espionage, gunrunning, and criminal circles of Europe, Daria had heard stories of the lovely blond polyglot with frost-blue eyes. She was a mercenary, a thief, and a killer. She had a reputation of success as crystalline as her eyes. Or so Daria had heard.

She had never given much thought to meeting this Viorica. But now here they were. Coming together over a situation Daria couldn't hope to pretend she understood. Fighting to stop
something
from happening, just because she'd made promises to people she hadn't kept.

She'd be in Belgrade later that morning. In just a few hours.

It was time to find out what this was all about.

 

Thirty

General Howard Cathcart returned from lunch to find mail waiting for him on the credenza outside his office, a soulless, anonymous little space in a subbasement of the Pentagon.

He froze, his eyes on the cheap, white, number ten envelope on the credenza.

In seven years assigned to black-budget weapons procurement, seven years in his tight little office buried deep in the deniability zone, General Cathcart had never, ever received any snail mail. E-mails, yes. Encrypted printouts from SigInt, yes. Summons from the three- and four-star gods of the building, always on their embossed stationery. Sure.

But a
letter
?

Cathcart picked it up. The address typed on a sticky label included Cathcart's name and rank and the room number of his office, a fact not wildly in circulation. He could see the rectangular card inside the cheap, almost transparent envelope. He ripped off a short end and shook the card out into his palm. In a flowery and distinctly feminine hand was the phrase,
GREETINGS FROM WHITE CITY!

Below that was a URL. The http, the colon and slashes, and the www were followed by a seemingly random cluster of letters and numbers. The addressed ended in .cm, not .com.

Cathcart swiped his keycard to enter his office. He sat at his desk and glowered at the card. He looked at the back side. It was blank.

He pinched the envelope to open it further and squinted into it. It was otherwise empty.

His mood darkened. He made sure his door was shut, then wheeled his chair over to the computer workstation to the left of his desk. He held the card in one hand and gingerly typed in the alien URL. He checked it twice before he hit Return.

A prompt appeared, with the gray scale, woodcut image of the five-sided behemoth and the words The Pentagon, Washington D.C. The online launch page also warned him that he was about to enter an unsecured site and asking if he wanted to proceed.

He hit yes.

The screen changed. It showed a horizontal black rectangle. Beneath that was a button. Cathcart moved his cursor to the button and clicked it.

The screen lit up.

The image was the top of the tall blonde's head.

She was looking down but glanced up when her screen came alive. She wore reading glasses. Cathcart caught a reverse image of his own face reflected in her glasses, and he cursed himself for not thinking to deactivate his computer camera first.

“Oh! Hi! There you are!” She removed the glasses.

Cathcart felt his blood boil over. “What in Christ's name—”

“Please don't take the Lord's name in vain, you goddamned peasant.”

Cathcart flinched back. But the blonde smiled and winked to take some of the vinegar out of her words.

“How did you get this address? What do you want?”

“First, you have a reputation as a historian, General. So I assumed you'd know ‘Belgrade' translates as ‘White City.' I also knew I couldn't easily hack into your computer but that you could dial out to any site you desired.”

Cathcart floundered for an acerbic reply, but he was begrudgingly impressed by her tactic.

The tall blonde removed her reading glasses, and the general caught a glimpse of a hardback book under her monitor as she marked her page and closed it. She'd been online, waiting for him to make contact.

“Look. A few days ago, I swiped sixty seconds off your mini-drones in Florence to prove to my buyers that I could. I did it once. I can do it again.”

Cathcart kept frowning but his mind raced: Was there a way to trace this signal?

“I am selling this technology to the Serbs,” she said, and her quicksilver eyes sparkled. “Thing is: I'm an American. Oh, not a good one, mind you. I'm a cutthroat mercenary. I'd sell sunscreen to vampires.”

“Scum like you—”

The tall blonde said, “Yes, yes. Got that out of your system? Good. I'm not the ingenue in this story, but I'm not the mustache-twirling villain, either. I don't particularly want these bloodthirsty grudge jockeys to have state-of-the-art weaponry. For the same reason I wouldn't give my sister's toddler a cocked auto. You know?”

“What do you want?”

“Well!” The blonde smiled brightly and seemed to settle into her chair. “In a word: money. In two words: more money!”

The general gnashed his teeth.

“I don't go back on my word, General. I told the Serbs I'd sell them the backdoor access to the American Citadel drones, and I will. But!” She paused for dramatic effect. “I'll sell it to you, too! Armed with this knowledge you can buy the Citadel drones and reengineer the software breach that let me take command of them. I get my paydays and you get your top-secret weapons. God is in his heaven and all's right with the world!”

Cathcart's mind revved up into the red zone. The Mercutio and Hotspur drones were the best mobile weapons platforms he had ever seen. And there was no question that this blond bitch had taken command of them. He needed to know how she'd done that.

He nodded. “Go on.”

“Come to Belgrade. You, personally. I'll give you the intercept technology. You pay me … oh, let's say six million dollars, American.”

“Six million.”

“Pentagon black-budget weapons procurements? You can find six million in your vending machines, General. And we both know it. A cool six mil gets you complete access to the greatest covert weapons system on earth.”

She waited for him to catch up.

“You have three options. You pay nothing and get nothing. You pay those ass-wipes at Citadel and get access to a tech that the thugocracy in Belgrade has, too. And you think that won't come back to bite you in the butt? Please. I have video of you at Citadel, remember? Or, you could go for what's behind door number three: pay Citadel, pay me, fuck the Serbs, and secure the peace for America and for Democracy.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
”

Cathcart sat and scowled. “How do I know I can trust you?”

The woman reached forward, somewhere near her keyboard. A second later, the timer music from
Jeopardy!
sounded.

“Alright!” he snapped. His jaw was starting to ache from grinding his teeth. “I'll think about it. I'll contact you at this address within—”

“This address leads to a server farm in Cameroon. Which I'll scrap at the end of this conversation. Here's how it works. You check into the Belgrade City Hotel in the next forty-eight hours. Be ready to transfer my money to an electronic account. Fail to do so and watch Kosovo get bombed into the Stone Age.
Capice?
”

Cathcart said, “I'll need certain conditions. First, you must—”

The blonde waggled her fingers. “Hasta la bye-bye.”

The screen went blank. A second later, and a scroll popped up:
CANNOT OPEN PAGE BECAUSE SERVER CANNOT BE FOUND.

Cathcart muttered, “Bitch,” and shut his computer down.

He thought about the situation for almost two minutes. Then he retrieved his secure communications rig and contacted Colonel Crace in Sandpoint.

She answered immediately.

“This line secure?”

“Yes, sir.”

Cathcart said, “Major Arcana contacted me. She wants to sell me the bypass that let her hijack the drones.”

Crace's normally impassive face showed her surprise. “How the hell did she—?”

“Focus! She was spotted in Belgrade yesterday. Any luck finding her again?”

“No, sir. But the truck with the drones will be there in about three hours.”

“Okay. I'll meet her and draw her out. Have the drones ready. We eliminate her and move forward with securing the technology from Citadel.”

Crace pinched her lower lip between her thumb and fingers. “Sir. It's a huge risk. There must be—”

“If you come up with a better plan before I get to Butt-Fuck Serbia, you have permission to speak freely. Cathcart out.”

He hung up.

He didn't trust the blond mercenary. Not one second, not one inch. But as long as he controlled the drone technology—and if he took his own trusted cadre of people with him to ensure his safety—there was no reason to think this brouhaha couldn't be over in a day or two.

He called covert operations and arranged for six good Special Forces soldiers—men he'd used before—to be at his command. Then he arranged for transport to Europe.

 

Thirty-One

Belgrade is a city of 1.6 million people. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in Central Europe, sitting at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers.

Daria had come in from the north, on the E70 bridge across the Danube, and hit Avenue 29 Novembra. She drove around until she found a district with nightclubs and “gentlemen's clubs” and casinos. She observed a couple of women who, based on their attire, likely made a living offering succor for a flat fee. She followed them to a smoke-colored hotel, windows flush against the walls and unadorned by windowsills. Disturbingly, the walls reminded her of nothing so much as the material they use to make Presto Logs.

She pulled Serb dinars out of an ATM using one of the Viking's debit cards, then paid cash for a room for the night. The clerk, a thin and stooped sickle of a man, had to do the math with a pencil and pad to figure out the overnight rate.

He spoke behind shatterproof glass laced with wire, and through a mesh speaker. She and the clerk discovered a common tongue in Italian, and Daria paid a bit extra for a set of clean sheets and pillowcases. She trudged upstairs, stripped the old and supposedly clean sheets off the bed, piled them up in the hallway, and stretched on the new and supposedly clean sheets. Then she showered.

She remembered the advice of an old spymaster in Tel Aviv. “In a foreign city? Hide in a whorehouse. Nobody sees nobody in a whorehouse. Can you imagine an intelligence officer anywhere in the world saying to his superiors, ‘You'll never guess who I saw with this hooker…'”

The shower water was tepid, the pressure anemic. Daria toweled off and sat on the newly made bed with a map of Belgrade that Fredrik Olsson had left in the car. The map showed a T-intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers. The ancient castle and Stari Grad were tucked tight up against the southeast corner of the T. Below that was the seat of government, including the Parliament building. South of that on Avenue Kralja Milana was an enormous Eastern Orthodox cathedral, St. Sava's. And between them, embassy row.