Authors: Derek Haas
Clay pushed his way forward and saw Stedding lying on his back, half off and half on the curb, bleeding profusely from gunshot wounds to the stomach and chest. Clay forgot his cover, forgot his training, forgot everything and dropped to his knees, pushing the Czech paramedics out of the way. He cradled Stedding in his arms—and somehow the older man’s eyes found his and focused. Police arrived on the scene, and one of them, in his hurry to size up the situation, accidentally kicked a black duffel on the ground near the wounded man. Four pistols spilled out, another woman shrieked, and the police and crowd started chattering in Czech at the same time, voices rising as if someone had spun a volume dial on a stereo.
Stedding pulled his mouth up to Clay’s ear and whispered one word, “Ambassador,” and then his eyes shifted away.
Clay stood, his handler gone. They’d worked together for three years, but that had ended today, in the sun-baked street outside the Praha Hlavní Nádraží train station. A policeman grabbed Clay’s shoulder, but he shook it off and yelled, “This man needs help!” in English. “Ambulance! Ambulance! Help this man!” he continued to shout, until the police mistook him for the concerned and horrified bystander he pretended to be. The officers pressed past him to examine the body at the same time as the paramedics.
Clay took a few steps backward, until the crowd enveloped him and he could scurry away. At last, slipping around the corner, he broke into a sprint.
Whoever had put bullets into Stedding would be hurrying to finish the job on Adams, alerted and perhaps panicking, speeding up the plan. Stedding had given Clay a key piece of information before he died; Clay would make sure it wouldn’t be in vain. “Ambassador,” Stedding had whispered.
The Hotel Ambassador was in Wenceslas Square, less than five minutes away.
Adams waited for Fourticq to finish his preliminaries and introduce him. It seemed to take an eternity; the old man simply would not shut up.
“Finally, Michael Adams has a spot of news he would like to share with you all.”
Adams rose and felt all eyes turn his way, inspiriting him. He cleared his throat, ready to claim his new position, not in flowery language but with crisp directness, which he hoped would signal to the others the authoritative way he planned to conduct himself, but before he could speak, alarms sounded throughout the hotel and emergency lights blinked on and off in the hallway.
“Fire alarm,” Clausen said, and Adams looked to see whether Clausen’s face gave anything away. Was he behind this? A last-ditch effort to control the outcome? What could he possibly be trying to pull?
The four guards outside stepped into the room. Their leader had thick white hair but a youngish face. “Gentlemen, I suggest we move to the street until this clears.” The way he said it suggested poise and control. Adams thought he must remember to get this man’s name.
“Unless you want to wait it out?” Fourticq offered, unperturbed by the alarms. Adams noted that the old man was already leaving the decision up to him.
But Clausen’s voice interrupted that thought. “I’d rather not have my eardrums blasted into oblivion,” he hollered into their ears, and strode for the door.
Adams had been in the game long enough to suspect any interruption. A sudden disturbance with this many high-profile intelligence officers gathered in one room? He didn’t believe in luck, and he always doubted coincidence. He wondered whether Fourticq and Clausen felt the same way, and if so, were their poker faces as polished as his? A leader in charge of EurOps sure as hell better not show it if he’s rattled. Adams shrugged and followed.
As they entered the hallway, the elevator doors swung open and the distinctive
crack, crack
of gunfire rang out. Two of the guards dropped immediately, shouting as they fell. The white-haired guard and the thick one to his right hit the floor and returned fire, but the assassin in the elevator refused to show his face. Instead, a hand holding a pistol swung into view and popped three quick shots,
crack, crack, crack,
which echoed throughout the hallway.
“This way!” yelled Clausen over the volleys of return fire. He had somehow dashed unscathed to the emergency stairwell and was holding the door open, beckoning Adams to follow. But Adams found himself crouched next to Fourticq, unsure, this moment not in any of the myriad permutations he had sketched out for how the meeting would go. And before he could seize on a rational thought, the older man made a dash for the stairwell.
Shit.
The white-haired guard kept on pounding the elevator with cover fire as that disembodied pistol intermittently swung out and coughed bullets.
Adams had to make a move. Now or never. Fourticq made it to the stairs, and Clausen continued to hold it open for Adams. The other district heads had retreated, had overturned the conference table, and were crouched behind it. Bad move. For guys who sent men out to their deaths, who sat with files and computer screens and maps and pushed men’s fates around as if they were playing a game of chess, they were faltering spectacularly now that their own lives had been thrust from analysis into the field. Not the theoretical field, but a real-life, honest-to-God, bullets-flying battlefield. If the guards were to be overrun, they’d be sitting ducks. No, the best strategy was to stay mobile, extricate yourself, put as much distance between you and the shooter as possible. Adams might not have been a field agent, but he had studied their moves, pored over their reports, taken the time to learn their strategies.
He ducked his head and broke for the stairwell.
Clay had been to the Hotel Ambassador and knew its location on Wenceslas Square. The streets of Prague, which resembled more the cow paths of Boston than the reliable grid of New York, promoted walking and looking in windows rather than sprinting as fast as a man’s legs could carry him. Clay did his best to anticipate the pedestrian movement in front of him and not miss a step.
Stedding. Stedding had asked the wrong man for help—the Snow Wolf had been alerted to the nosy handler, and he had bought two to the chest for his efforts. He had been left for dead, the killer not taking the time to finish the job, do it right. It was a mistake, had allowed Stedding to live just long enough to finish one last mission, give one last piece of intelligence to his field agent, and Clay would make sure it meant something, goddammit.
The Snow Wolf had tipped his hand, too, had certainly narrowed the mystery of his identity, and Clay would expose him whether he was too late to save Adams or not. He’d expose him or kill him. Maybe both.
Adams burst into the stairwell and joined Fourticq and Clausen on the landing, breathing hard.
“Are either of you armed?” Clausen cried, and Adams shook his head, too rattled to force a lie, not sure what good it would do anyway. The question seemed absurd, or was it? Keep moving. That was all Adams could really focus on…keep moving and maybe stay alive.
The stairs looked clear, and the sound of gunfire receded as they pounded down the first flight, single file, Clausen in front, Fourticq behind, and Adams sandwiched between, the most covered—and the most vulnerable, if he stopped to think about it. But he didn’t think about it, didn’t want to, he was flushed with adrenaline, and the floor numbers dropped as they reached a flight, turned on a landing, and spiraled down to the next.
Adams sensed that something had changed, the sounds of their footfalls had changed rhythms, and he turned to see Fourticq doubled over on the riser above.
“Are you okay, Alan?”
He hurried back up to Forticq.
Clausen called from below. “We’ve got to keep moving!”
“Just a second, dammit!” Adams yelled back, more loudly than he meant to. Fourticq remained doubled over, and only then did Adams see the blood.
“My God, Alan, you’re shot.”
Fourticq grunted. “I don’t think so. Just grazed. I just cramped up. Haven’t run this much since the Boston Marathon. I was twenty then.”
“Let me see it.”
Adams guided Fourticq’s hand away. His shirt was stained with blood. Adams pulled the shirt back and was relieved; Fourticq was right, it was just a scratch, probably from shrapnel. There was no bullet hole.
“You must’ve caught a splinter from all that wood paneling taking a beating.”
“Do you get a Purple Heart for splinters?”
Adams had to smile at that, even in the midst of this pandemonium.
“Let’s go, for fuck’s sake!” yelled Clausen from the landing below.
Adams ignored him, spoke calmly to Fourticq. “I’ll wait as long as you need.”
“No, I’m fine. Let’s go.”
They started down the stairs again, Clausen leading the way.
Clay crossed Wenceslas Square without breaking stride and zeroed in on the Ambassador. The hotel looked the way he remembered it, a grand luxury job in the heart of the city.
Of course,
he thought
. Of course they would stay here
.
Sirens had been accumulating steadily behind him, or maybe his ears were just ringing.
He burst into the hotel’s lobby, knowing how he must look, and he forced himself to slow, to walk calmly toward the elevator bank. The receptionist eyed him with suspicion. She was talking to a brawny bell captain, a kid who couldn’t be more than nineteen and looked as if he might wrestle for the Czech national team. Clay tapped the up arrow again, hoping the doors would open or that perhaps the kid was approaching on a different errand, but neither happened, the kid approached and asked if he was staying at the hotel, and Clay nodded but pretended not to understand, and the kid asked again in English. Now the elevator doors were opening, but the kid moved between him and the car and asked to see his key. Clay didn’t want to hurt him, but he couldn’t afford any more lost time, and as the kid raised his hands to usher him away from the elevator they both heard the sound of gunfire—two shots—from somewhere nearby.
Adams turned down the landing to the basement floor and was following close behind Clausen when he stopped suddenly. A Russian FSB agent stood on the bottom platform in ambush, holding a pistol down low by his hip. He didn’t wait for Clausen to protest, didn’t wait for him to step closer, didn’t wait for him to plead or fight or flee, he just shot him in the head so Clausen’s blood sprinkled Adams’s face as though he had been sprayed with a misting bottle.
Clausen fell straight down as though his legs had been removed, and for a split second, the Russian’s gun was pointed at Adams. The man said something in his language that sounded to Adams’s trained ear like “Do you want me to—” but then a second gunshot followed the first, this one from over Adams’s shoulder, and it was the Russian’s turn to have shock, surprise, and pain sweep his face. He squinted at the hole in his chest, disbelieving, and then his gun fell from his hand and hit the bottom step of the stairwell one moment before his body joined it there.
Adams was too stunned to move. His emotions were jangled, on edge, as if he’d been dangling over an abyss with only a shrinking step holding back gravity.
Fourticq stepped past him, fisting a stainless steel Beretta 92, a single wisp of smoke drifting from the barrel.
“I didn’t—” Adams began to say, but found the words stuck in his throat.
Fourticq remained unruffled. He calmly stooped next to the dead Russian and fished the gun from under his body. He placed his own gun back in his pocket and pointed the Russian’s weapon at Adams.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” he said, and the Snow Wolf squeezed the trigger.
Clay smashed through the lobby’s stairwell door, and the reverberation from the door smacking against the handrail sounded like an explosion.
He looked down to see a man he recognized as Adams diving out of the way as a second man below him fired a pistol into the spot Adams had just vacated.
In the heat of battle, in the world Clay had lived in since the moment his uncle had walked below deck and caught him breaking open the money jar, he had honed his ability to slow time down, to take in everything in his field of vision as if he were inputting data into a computer, and then to kick out a strategy, a plan, a mode of action, all in the blink of an eye. It was what separated him from his enemies, what always worked to surprise them because of his size, turned them from offense to defense before they knew how or why.
He knew Adams, and Adams was jumping out of the way. He didn’t know the shooter, or the dead man lying at the shooter’s feet, and Clay didn’t wait for explanations or for everyone to identify himself; instead, he launched himself down the flight of stairs at the shooter as he’d done in Marika’s stepbrother’s apartment stairwell.
But Fourticq had positioned himself next to the basement door for a reason. He slipped through it before Clay could cross the distance. For just a moment, Clay turned back to his old handler on the landing above.
“You okay, Adams?”
“Yes!”
That was all he needed. Clay ripped open the door and poked his head out, and when no shots came, he ducked into the basement.
It was actually an underground parking lot—a large one. Clay heard an engine crank to life somewhere below, and it was followed by a shriek of tires. A BMW 5 Series banked around a turn, and Clay had a split second to lunge out of the way before Fourticq steamrolled him. Before the car passed, Clay was back on his feet, charging after it.
The BMW took out a wooden barricade as it sprang from the garage out onto an alley as if it had been shot from a cannon. Clay ignored the parking attendant, hurdled the debris, and kept up the chase.
You run until the car is out of sight, you keep chasing, you keep sprinting, and you hope your enemy makes a mistake
.
A row of cabs lined the street that crossed the alley, and Clay saw exactly what he needed, a cabdriver stepping out of his sedan to join the other smokers on the sidewalk outside an adjacent cafe. Had Clay stopped running, he wouldn’t have had this opportunity, and one axiom he had found consistent throughout his professional career was: Luck favored the persistent.