Dragunov didn’t like the idea of splitting up, but they were fighting a battle on two fronts. He slid one of the dead men’s pistols across the kitchen floor to Gil. “Don’t get killed, you fool.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
Gil wrapped around the corner with a pistol in each hand, stalking boldly into the first bedroom, where the Russian had taken cover. He caught him completely unprepared and shot him twice in the head. A teenage girl cowered on the bed in the corner, and he waved her into the corridor, signaling for her to gather the others from their rooms and take them to the kitchen. There was a burst of fire from Dragunov’s Uzi down the back hall, and she grabbed onto Gil, but he pushed her away, hazing her toward the kitchen.
“Katarina, call them to the kitchen!”
Katarina poked her head around, calling the others out of hiding, and five more girls emerged from their rooms.
“Lucian!” Gil shouted through the red-beaded curtain.
Someone answered in Russian from around the corner to the right.
“Dumb fuck,” Gil thought to himself, now knowing his target’s location and that the hall entrance was bracketed to the left and right.
There was a wild exchange of gunfire in the back of the building, Dragunov’s Uzi followed by a few lengthy blasts from an AK-47.
Seconds later, men were screaming in hand-to-hand combat. Gil jammed one pistol down his belt and stepped to the right side of the hall, peering through the beaded curtain to his left, visually cutting the lobby into sections as if it were a pie, each minute step forward revealing another thin slice of the room. He glimpsed a man’s shoulder and fired through the beads.
The Russian twisted into the wound, grabbing it with his right hand, and Gil shot him in the spine between the shoulder blades. The women in the foyer cried out, and he shifted to the left side of the hall, cutting the pie to the right in search of Lucian.
A fusillade of shots rang out, and several severed strands of beads showered to the floor. Gil summersaulted through the curtain over his right shoulder, twisting to his left and shooting Lucian three times in the brachial nerve bundle of his shoulder, instantly paralyzing his gun arm and knocking him over backward.
The women in the room jumped to their feet and fled through the curtain to the kitchen. Gil checked Lucian for additional weapons and hauled him to his feet. “Game over, fuck stick!”
Dragunov appeared through the curtain with dark red blood covering his face from the nose down. “All clear in the back.”
Gil saw the blood. “How bad are you?”
Dragunov swiped at his face, spitting blood and viscera onto the floor. “It’s not mine. I had to bite the big bastard’s throat.”
A minute later, they were in the back office with Lucian on his knees in front of the safe.
“Open it!” Dragunov thumped him in the head with the muzzle of his M9.
“Fuck you!” Lucian sneered in Russian.
Gil looked at Dragunov. “We don’t have all night here.”
“Tie his hands,” Dragunov said. “I’ll be back.”
Gil kicked Lucian onto his face and ripped the phone cord from the wall, using it to bind the Russian’s hands as tightly as he could. The man groaned in pain.
Gil then rolled him onto his back as Dragunov returned with four women in their midtwenties. “What’s goin’ on?”
“They’ll make the man talk.”
That’s when Gil realized each of the women held a serrated steak knife from the kitchen. They swarmed over Lucian, ripping and sawing through his clothes. He tried to reason with them in panic, but they swore at him and spit in his face. One of them grabbed his ear and began to saw it off. He screamed, and they slashed at his exposed groin. He kicked at them, but one of the girls jumped on his legs to hold him down, and he howled like a man put to the rack.
Dragunov allowed the mutilation to continue for a few seconds before calling them off. Then he stood glowering over the hyperventilating Russian. “Are you going to open the box or let them feed you your balls?”
“I’ll open it!” Lucian gasped, an ear and part of his nose already carved off, his genitalia slashed and bleeding. “Let me up!”
Gil cut his hands free, and Lucian flexed his fingers, quickly working the combination, his clothes half torn from his body.
“He’ll have a gun in there,” Gil warned.
Dragunov gave him a wink. “Probably the reason he’s agreed to open it.”
The second Lucian turned the handle, Dragunov shot him in the back of the head and kicked the body aside. Inside the safe was a Tokarev pistol, along with multiple bundles of Turkish lira and a stack of eighteen red passports bound with a thick rubber band.
Gil stuffed the passports into his pocket, and the women began to protest immediately. He saw Katarina standing in the doorway. “Kat, explain to them I don’t want them losing their passports before we get to the airport. There’s gonna be a lot of confusion between here and there.”
Katarina told the others what he’d said, and that seemed to settle them for the moment.
“Get them dressed and ready to go,” Dragunov said to Katarina
solemnly in Russian. Then he looked at Gil. “You’re going to make a lot of trouble for the Kremlin with this.”
Gil knelt in front of the safe, stacking the bundles of cash on top of it. “Not if you guys know a damn thing about PR.”
“Putin is not exactly a PR specialist.”
“Fuck Putin,” Gil said, getting to his feet. “I don’t work for his ass.”
“I
do
.”
“Then I’ll take them back to Moscow by myself, and you can blame it all on me—however you want it. But I’m blown here, so I gotta get the fuck out of Turkey before word of this gets around.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t go to Moscow. You don’t have—”
Gil held up his Russian passport. “I’m flying home to Mother Russia, and not even Putin can stop me.”
40
THE WHITE HOUSE
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Couture hung up the phone and looked across the room at White House Chief of Staff Glen Brooks. “You’d better get the old man, Glen. The shit is about to hit the fan in Eastern Europe.”
Brooks put down the report he was reading. “They hit the pipeline?”
Couture shook his head. “That was Pope. Shannon just knocked over a Russian whorehouse in Istanbul. Now he’s getting ready to fly eighteen female abductees home to Moscow.”
Brooks gaped at him. “He can’t do that.”
“Wanna bet? He’s a got a Russian passport and three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Turkish lira. He can do just about anything he wants at this point.”
“No, I mean he can’t do that,” Brooks said, getting up. “He’s on a mission. He’s got orders.”
Couture stared across the room with his hands on his hips. “Where the hell have
you
been the past eighteen months?”
“But—”
“But
hell
,” Couture said, stepping forward. “Didn’t you read the file I sent over on Operation Tiger Claw?”
“I skimmed it.”
“Did you skim the part where Shannon brought a pregnant Iranian back from Iran—a pregnant Iranian he’d been ordered to kill by that idiot Lerher?”
“I didn’t catch that part, no.”
Couture dry-wiped his mouth. “If we don’t play this right, it’s going to rain dung. President Putin is one suspicious son of a bitch, and it’s all too possible he’ll think we staged this as a stunt to make him look like a fool. Not to mention that Shannon’s head is packed with intel we don’t really need the Russians to have.”
Brooks stepped around the table. “I’ll get the president.”
“Hold on a second. Let’s make sure we’re on the same page.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, what are we going to advise?”
Brooks looked at his watch. “How soon does Shannon land?”
“Pope doesn’t know, but they’re not even in the air yet, so we’ve got time. Shannon still has to get them to the airport and buy the tickets. He called Pope so State would have time to contact Moscow before their arrival.”
“Why the hell is he flying with them? Why doesn’t he just put them on the plane?”
“Because the Russian mob is going to be hot on his ass.”
“And his solution to that is flying to Russia, for Christ’s sake?”
“All he’s got is a Russian passport.”
Brooks let out a sigh, and they each grabbed a chair.
“Okay,” Brooks said. “So we check the scheduled flights out of Istanbul. That will give us some idea of the time frame we’re working with. From there we can judge how soon to contact Moscow.”
Couture nodded and picked up the phone, directing his aide to print off a list of flights leaving Istanbul for Moscow over the next twenty-four hours.
“What about the Spetsnaz guy?” Brooks said. “Is Dragunov dead, or what?”
“Pope didn’t mention him. What we need to figure out right now is how to advise the president before he gets on the horn to Putin.”
Brooks sat thinking. “What about grounding the flight? We have people in Istanbul who can make that happen, right?”
“You mean maroon them there?”
“Sure,” Brooks said. “Why not? Look, Shannon exceeded mission parameters—something he’s apparently done before—so he’ll have only himself to blame. Once he realizes we’re not letting him out of Turkey with those women, he’ll have to abandon them and get his ass back on track with the mission he was sent in there to carry out. He’s a resourceful man. I’m sure he’ll find his way to Georgia without the Russian mob catching up to him.”
“And the women?”
Brooks shrugged. “They’re prostitutes.”
“I told you they were abducted,” Couture said. “They’re victims of the slave trade.”
“Not our responsibility, Bill. Hell, their own government doesn’t even care about them. Why should we risk straining our relations with Moscow over a few Russian runaways? We’re already in enough of a tussle with Putin over the mess in Ukraine.”
Brooks saw the strained look on Couture’s face. “Look, it’s heartless. I know that. But what we’re talking about here is an American CIA agent flying into
Moscow
on a
Russian
passport with eighteen Russian prostitutes. Come on, Bill! We can’t allow that to happen if it’s within our means to stop it. We just can’t. What you said about Putin is exactly right. He’ll think we did it to make him look stupid. Hell, he’d be stupid
not
to think so.”
Couture was silent for a long moment. “Is that how you’re going to advise the president?”
Brooks nodded. “That’s where I come out, yeah. What about you?”
The general got up from his chair. “I respect you sticking to your guns, Glen, but I’m going to advise we allow the State Department to do their job.”
“Fair enough,” Brooks said, getting to his feet. “Now, let me go and pull him away from the first lady.”
Couture chuckled. “You deserve hazard pay for that.”
“So far she and I get along pretty well.”
When the door closed, Couture reached for the phone again. “Bob, it’s Bill. Listen, you’d better advise Typhoon he might have to find alternate transport for himself and his cargo. I don’t know for sure yet, but the president may elect to ground the flight.”
41
MEXICO CITY,
Mexico
The phone rang on the nightstand beside the bed, and Tim Hagen stepped into the bedroom to answer it. “Hello?”
“Are you alone?” asked Ken Peterson.
Hagen glanced across the hotel suite at his two Mexican bodyguards, who sat watching a soccer game on television. “Hold on a second.” He went to close the door and then returned to the phone. “Okay, what is it?”
“The FBI busted Grieves’s informant inside the White House—we’re all burned. To make matters worse, Shannon got out of Sicily, and Pope’s been given Secret Service protection. I’m calling to warn you because we go back a long time, but I’m striking camp and bugging out.”
Hagen sat down on the bed, weak in the legs. “Bugging out to where?”
“Never mind that. You need to think about where
you’re
going.”
“But there’s no proof we’ve done anything.”
“There will be,” Peterson said. “The Frenchman is talking, so it’s only a matter of time before the good senator from New York is forced to give us up for accessing the CIA mainframe.”
“What mainframe?” Hagen knew Peterson was shrewd enough to have already turned state’s evidence and that the FBI might be listening in on the call.
Peterson chuckled sardonically. “Tim, don’t get paranoid. Nobody’s listening. I haven’t gone to the Feds. The writing’s been on the wall for a long time now, so believe me, I’ve prepared for this eventuality. With men like Pope and Webb running the CIA, the US is screwed. How long do you think it’ll be before those two clowns let another nuke into the country? I did what I did to try and save the agency, but I failed. So it’s time to fall on my sword or run like hell, and I’m not the type to fall on my sword.”
Hagen sat with his head in his hand, having hardly heard a word. “It should’ve been the simplest thing,” he muttered to himself, unable to believe that Shannon was still alive, with so many others dead. “He’s only one man, for God’s sake. There has to be a way to stop him!”
“Tim, did you hear what I just told you? Killing Shannon doesn’t solve our problems anymore. There’s going to be a federal investigation. We’re burned!”
“Stop saying that!” Hagen flared. “We can handle a goddamn investigation. The evidence against us is practically nonexistent. All we have to do is keep Grieves from opening his fat mouth!”
Peterson sighed at other the end of the line. “And how do you propose we accomplish that? You got photos of him shagging a hooker too?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m talking about something a hell of a lot more certain than blackmail. And with Grieves out of the way, the only one left to worry about is Shannon.”
“Christ Almighty. What is your obsession with that guy?”
Hagen stood up from the bed, his rage finally boiling over. “He’s
Pope’s right-hand man, you pompous ass! And Pope destroyed everything I worked ten years to achieve! I was run out of the White House in disgrace because of him!
That’s
my fucking obsession, Ken!”
Peterson was incredulous. “So that’s what this was all about? You blew our entire operation over a personal vendetta? You stupid, stupid son of a bitch. No.
I’m
the stupid son of a bitch. I should’ve known you didn’t give a shit about protecting the country. You’ve never given a shit about anyone but yourself.”
Hagen smirked. “Like the country ever gave a shit about you? Wake up, Ken. It’s a zero-sum game. Whoever’s got the most at the end wins, and I don’t plan on walking away from the table anytime soon.”
“At the end of what, Tim?”
“Life!” Hagen slammed the phone down in the cradle. He had one card left up his sleeve, and it was time to play it.