Authors: Derek Haas
Clay shot out onto a small walking trail and crested a hill. He had a minute, maybe less.
In the animal kingdom, there are a few creatures that instinctively know the art of the ambush. They don’t stalk like lions, they don’t group hunt like chimpanzees, they don’t rely on speed or strength like hawks. They lie still, in wait, and when opportunity arises, they pounce. A crocodile beneath the water, a stonefish on a rocky sea bottom, an African bush viper on a tree branch.
Clay thought his pursuers should have spent less time taking potshots while speeding down a highway and more time learning the way nature worked. He intended to teach them the last lesson of their lives.
The first of the two Mercedes crested the hill and nearly ran over the capsized Spoykin. The Mercedes abruptly parked and the doors popped open, two FSB agents climbing out like synchronized swimmers with pistols drawn. They had only a second to realize they’d made a mistake by stepping out of the car before Clay was on them. He flew out from behind a tree and blitzed into the nearest agent, smashing him into the side of the car and wrestling his gun away in the blink of an eye. He shot the agent as he crumpled to the ground, directly through the top of his head, a kill shot. The second agent dove, but Clay anticipated the defensive move and dropped to the ground at the same time. He fired under the car and caught the second agent in the back before he could get into a seated position and gain his bearings. The agent fell over sideways and watched his own blood seep into the forest floor, unsure how he’d been killed right up to the moment his synapses stopped firing.
Clay quickly climbed behind the wheel of the Mercedes and piloted it into a three-point turn, just as the other Mercedes approached. He honked and signaled with his hand out the window for the second car to pull alongside. With the tinted windows so many European departments insisted upon, the men in the other car couldn’t see a thing inside his sedan. They drew even with his driver’s-side door, and the driver rolled down his window. Two bullets greeted him and his partner. Hello and good-bye.
The police sedan was the final puzzle piece in this bloody contest. It did not turn into the woods to follow, Gregor and Vlad content to lead the big dogs to the hunt and then sit back and collect whatever commendations were headed their way for their role in recognizing the fugitive.
Clay steered the Mercedes back onto the road but emerged from the woods a hundred yards in front of the cruiser. He turned to face it. No other traffic appeared on the road, and he couldn’t help thinking they looked like two gunslingers facing off in an Old West town, except surrounded by chrome, steel, and glass instead of perched on horses.
He rolled down his window and waved the police cruiser forward.
The Volkswagen started his way and then stopped again, like a distrustful dog. His radio crackled and a Russian voice barked, “Report!”
Must be Gregor, though Clay couldn’t see through the windshield with the sun bouncing off it. He thought about replying but decided to try the arm one more time rather than allow his voice to give anything away. He waved more vigorously. Maybe they’d think he had engine trouble or was wounded.
The radio chirped again, “Report!”
Clay shook his head and picked up the receiver. In his most neutral Russian, he tried, “We’re hurt.”
The cruiser in front of him didn’t respond, and the radio remained silent for a good twenty seconds.
Then the police car gunned into a sharp turn, tires peeling out on the asphalt so it could head back toward town.
Clay reacted immediately, stamping his foot on the accelerator. The Mercedes charged forward, loping after the sedan like a wolf after a chicken. Thankfully, the cruiser was an older make and was no match for the diesel engine of the FSB Mercedes.
The easiest way to take out a lead vehicle is to tag the bumper from behind, forcing it into a slide, a tactic seen on the five o’clock news at least once a week in every big city in America. But the cops utilized that maneuver for a reason: they cared whether the driver lived or died at the end of the pursuit.
Clay chose a more effective route. He pulled even with the driver’s back tire and then emptied into it the entire contents of the Grach he’d taken from the hand of the dead FSB agent. The tire exploded and the cruiser leapt into the air like a startled rabbit, then rolled eleven times before flipping off the road like a bowling pin.
Clay immediately parked and hurried out of his car. No time to let Gregor recover and get his bearings if he’d survived the crash. Clay didn’t stalk his enemies, didn’t toy with them—he moved in swiftly and shot them before they could shoot back. This wasn’t sport.
He descended on the smoking cruiser, which had ended up on its back, tires up, a turtle on its shell. He quickly hit his belly and aimed into the driver’s window, but stopped, surprised to see Vlad behind the wheel, alone.
“Where’s Gregor?”
Vlad looked disoriented, strapped in upside down, bleeding from the chin. He turned and tried to focus on Clay.
“The Belanshky Theater closed.”
“What?”
“You said you held the Belanshky Theater for eleven months. But it closed two years ago. I knew you were lying.”
Clay nodded. He had misjudged which cop was the more ambitious. Vlad wanted the acclaim for himself.
“I called FSB. They’re looking for you. Said you were dangerous.”
Clay shot him then, thinking the FSB was right.
H
E WASN’T
sure what he had told them. Nelson remembered the pain, the hunger, the thirst, and the fear, all with unkind clarity, but of what he had told them, he wasn’t sure. Central Intelligence had trained him to withstand torture, but those efforts had proved woefully inadequate. If he had wondered during those sessions at the Farm how long he could hold out, he had his answer. Not long.
His leg was healing. The cast was off and the pain had subsided. He might walk unassisted soon, but for now, he relied on a cane. They had provided one made of hard plastic, the kind found in hospitals. Leaving him with a stick he could conceivably wield as a weapon told him everything he needed to know: they had broken him and they weren’t worried.
He rose from his bed and made his way over to the window facing the Kremlin. He had tried to open it once, but that had brought punishment. He hadn’t tried again. He was sure it wouldn’t open, anyway, and the glass was reinforced and unbreakable. Even if he hurled his body against it in order to jump, it wouldn’t give. He was sure of that. The window was a torture in and of itself; he could see people scurrying about their business, driving cars, drinking coffee, commuting, smoking, talking, unaware of the prisoner thirty stories above them.
They’d kept him alive and treated his gunshot wound, and that meant something. He was now a pawn on a chessboard; he would be traded so the Russians could collect a piece of their own.
The fat-faced man with the gray beard entered. He’d had it trimmed sometime in the last few days, and it made him appear younger. His name was Egorov, Nelson had learned in one of the cycles when the man was nice to him. A smile formed inside the beard. This was one of those times, it appeared.
“Ahh, you’re up.”
“You knew that before you walked in.” There were cameras in three of the corners of the room, covering it with constant surveillance. Nelson didn’t even bother nodding at them to make the point.
Egorov clucked his tongue, an affectation Nelson had come to despise. “You seem irritated.”
Nelson closed his eyes, then turned from the window. He forced a tight smile. “I’m fine.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Better, thank you.”
“We’re going to have another session about Marika.”
The smile disappeared. Nelson wished his hand wouldn’t tremble on the cane’s handle, but the tremor came involuntarily. He tried saying, “I’ve told you everything I know.”
“You’ve told us the answers to everything we’ve asked, but perhaps we weren’t asking the right questions.”
“What could I possibly have left to say?”
“Who might be completing your work?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Who might your brothers at Central Intelligence have sent to take your place?”
Nelson covered his right hand with his left, trying to force the trembling to subside. It was no use. He searched his brain for an answer, but only the worst one would come to him. “I don’t know.”
Egorov frowned, crow’s-feet appearing next to his eyes. “Like I said, we weren’t asking the right questions.”
“Dear God, don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?”
“Maybe you need help thinking.”
A couple of large Russians wearing blue rubber gloves entered the suite behind Egorov.
Nelson dropped the cane and sat down heavily on the carpet. His knee had buckled. Then he had an idea, and his face momentarily lit up. “Kespy! Kespy out of our Turkish bureau! They’d send Kespy!”
“We have Kespy under surveillance in Istanbul. He hasn’t moved.”
Nelson dropped his chin, defeated. He wished tears wouldn’t spring to his eyes, he wished he didn’t have to fight off a sob, but he did.
Michael Adams drove himself toward downtown Los Angeles. Traffic was light on Olympic this time of night, and he picked his way through Koreatown, only braking for an occasional red light. He liked to listen to Classic Radio on his SiriusXM player, and the host, Greg Bell, was spinning back-to-back episodes of
Suspense,
his favorite old-timey show. Agnes Moorehead was in the middle of a panic attack, unable to get her husband on the telephone, when Adams reached the garage of his office building. He thought about sitting in his car until the episode ended, but time wasn’t on his side. It was already late on the East Coast.
His parking space was closest to the door, and he crossed the garage, entered the seven-digit code into the keypad, and arrived in the vestibule, closing the door behind him. No signs marked the building, the garage, the vestibule, or the elevator.
Adams pulled out his key card and slid it into the slot next to the elevator. The elevator car arrived in moments and whisked him up to the seventh floor.
When most Americans think of Central Intelligence offices, they think of Langley on the East Coast, the George Bush Center for Intelligence, and men in suits shuffling past marines to get to conference rooms featuring wall-to-wall computers loaded with the latest technology. In reality, there are seven of these domestic district offices spread out across the United States; besides Virginia, there are offices in Miami, Dallas, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. They look like accounting firms, with ten-years-out-of-date furniture, bland cubicles, and cream-colored walls.
At least the computers are fairly new,
Adams thought; they did run Echelon programs with the latest encryption software. Resources went into technology, not feng shui furniture.
Staffers worked the phones. There were no weekends in Intelligence, no holidays. These men and women were among those who had sewn the very fabric of this country but would go forever unrecognized. Adams admired the hell out of them. Hell, he was one of ’em.
He had climbed the ranks from a junior analyst position when he’d joined the CIA to a case officer—a handler, in popular parlance—with a stable of five field operatives under his direction, to case supervisor, where the number of field operatives quintupled to twenty-five, and here he was at age forty-five, heading the second-largest district in the Agency. Only Laura knew what he really did for a living; everyone else thought he was in risk management. Coming up on the analyst side instead of the field side, he’d been able to marry his college sweetheart and have a family. Though one or two analysts in the course of the sixty-five-year history of the Agency had been caught stealing sensitive documents, they weren’t targeted by foreign intelligence the way field officers were. They could lead normal lives, as long as they didn’t mind the fluctuating hours.
He stopped at the desk of Warren Sumner, a recent Princeton graduate he had pulled out of Washington to be his assistant.
“How we doing?” Adams asked as he approached.
“Hovering right around fine, sir.”
Why can’t Warren just answer a question like a normal person?
Adams thought, but he said nothing, only smiled. Warren continued, “DCI just called…I said to hold, you were in the elevator on the way up, but he said call back when you got behind your desk.”
Adams grimaced. “Thanks, Warren,” he said as he headed into his office.
“One more thing.” Warren held up a finger, and Adams waited, half in and half out of his doorway. His demeanor said that his assistant had better get on with it.
“I received a sit-com report from Eppie in Havana. I went ahead and gave him the parameters you described at the debriefing Wednesday. If I overstepped…”
Adams frowned and shook his head. “No, it’s fine.”
“I would’ve waited for you personally, but I knew you had this Director call….”
“It’s fine, Warren. Good job.” Adams’s assistant beamed. Adams had told Warren a long time ago he was looking for an assistant who would step up, would reach further than his grasp, would be able to anticipate needs and fulfill requests before he was asked. Warren Sumner had exceeded even these lofty expectations. Adams prided himself on his ability to find good people, raise smart, qualified lieutenants, and Sumner would undoubtedly make a good case officer in the near future. Still, there was something a tiny bit off-putting about his obsequiousness; he was like a dog you like having around but wish wouldn’t lick the dirt off your toes.
“Anything else?”
“That’s it. Getting the Director now.”
Warren reached for his phone, and Adams shut his door.
A minute later, he heard Director Manning’s voice on the other end of a secure line.
“Howdy, Michael.”
“How are you, Andrew?”
“All right. How’s the family?”
“Everyone’s great. Thanks for asking.”
“I heard you got away to Ojai for a few days?”
“I did.”
“You have to recharge your batteries every now and then or this job’ll eat you alive.”
“Yes, sir.” Adams wondered if the Director was in one of his talkative moods or if there was a point to this call. He got his answer.
“Tell me what you know of a field officer named Austin Clay.”
“One of the best I ever supervised. I mean, I was a new case officer at the time….”
“You ever get a disloyal vibe off him?”
The Director was asking if Adams thought this officer could be turned. They had ways of making euphemisms out of everything in the intelligence game…no one ever wanted to be on the record for anything, even the Director.
“Never once. What happened to him? I heard he—”
“Thanks, Michael. When are you headed to Prague?”
“Next week.”
“Right. Have your man schedule it so you get a day in DC. I want to talk to you in person before you go.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Talk to you soon.”
The phone went dead in Adams’s hand.
He returned the receiver to its cradle, and Warren almost immediately knocked on his door. “Come in.”
“You want to go over your calendar, sir?”
Adams didn’t immediately answer. Austin Clay. Clay had worked the field all over Europe and the Middle East and in those early days had been Adams’s go-to hot spot guy. Langley had moved the officer out from under him a long time ago, and he hadn’t heard the name in years.
“Your calendar, sir?”
Adams snapped back to the present. His calendar. Prague. That was going to be a hell of a meeting…the other district office heads jockeying for a European appointment.
“Yes. The Director wants me for a day in DC on the front end of it.”
“On it,” Warren said, and headed for the door.