Watchlist (42 page)

“She was just a nurse.”

“I’ll call Northern Command if I have to.”

The guards regarded each other. They rose, readied their machine guns.

One covered the door while the other unlocked and flung it open. He peered inside, his face a mask of shock. “There is problem. No, no!”

The other Indian soldier raced into the room, Middleton and Tesla right behind.

They stopped fast, seeing Chernayev’s body. It was in the middle of the small office, whose windows were covered with thick steel mesh. He’d been shot in the back of the head as he tried desperately to claw his way out.

“The nurse,” a guard whispered, gesturing at the only other door in the room, leading to a third office.

“There’s a back door?”

“No, just the one, the front.”

The nurse was trapped. They’d keep her pinned and call in a marine tac team. “I’ll get—”

“No, we will stop her.”

“Wait!” Middleton whispered. “She can’t—”

They flung the door open and blinked as a brilliant light, the sort used for construction site work at night, clicked on. Blinded, they staggered back as four well-placed silenced rounds found their targets—the men’s foreheads.

In a blur the woman rushed out. She was dressed in a British army soldier’s uniform, but the poor fit and a small red stain on the chest told Middleton how she’d come by the outfit. He didn’t recognize her.

She hesitated in shock, not expecting the other two to be in the room. But before she could lift the .22 again, Middleton drew the Beretta that Chernayev had given him. When he touched the muzzle to her head she debated only a moment and dropped her own weapon.

Tesla then stepped forward, grabbed the woman and, wincing from the wound in her own shoulder, flung the attacker to the floor hard. Then she struck her furiously in the head and face.

“Nora, stop!” Middleton said, pulling her off and securing the shooter with one of the dead guard’s handcuffs. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Oh, yes, I did.”

Middleton frowned.

Tesla said, “You don’t know who she is, do you?”

“No.”

“It’s Jana Grover.”

“In Paris, did you check on my body?” Jana snapped contemptuously at Tesla. “Did you call
les gendarmes
, did you call
Le Deuxieme Bureau
. No, of course not. What you saw floating in the Seine was my jacket. And you took that at face value. I’m sorry I escaped and deprived you of another chance to torture me.”

Middleton glanced at Tesla, silent at this. He now understood the earlier reaction to what Ian Barrett-Bone had said. He let it go.

They sat in the same trailer that had been Chernayev’s cell. And his coffin. The body had been removed. And a forensic team was going through the place.

In addition to Connie Carson and Wiki Chang, Ian Barrett-Bone was here. He was lip-biting mad at the Indians for letting the hit woman into the trailer. The officer who’d been bribed by Jana to okay access was in custody, but that was small consolation.

“Why?” the British agent asked.

“She treats all colleagues that way,” Tesla said bitterly, “if there’s any chance they might be witnesses against her. Just like she killed Kavi Balan in the South of France.”

“I’m not so sure,” Middleton said, again considering unanswered questions. “I think something else is going on here.”

“Ah, you’re as sharp as I thought, Colonel. How I wish Balan had been successful that day at the beach at Cap D’Antibes.”

“I don’t understand,” Barrett-Bone said.

“No, you certainly do not,” the beautiful Pakistani said. “You haven’t understood anything—any of you, from the beginning . . . I wasn’t with Chernayev or the Chinese. They were my
enemies
. I’d been struggling for months to find them and kill them.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

As if speaking to school children, Jana said, “Some time ago Devras Sikari was negotiating with the Mujahedeen here in Jammu about power sharing if he could secure an independent Kashmir. But he learned that this person known as the Scorpion and a Chinese associate wanted to fabricate some terror attack as an excuse for the Chinese to invade and occupy Kashmir. They planned to blame the terrible incident on Devras. He learned about their scheme and came up with a plan to expose them: He pretended to enlist the Mujahedeen to help him blow up the dam. Yes, he arranged for some explosives to be stolen and shipped there but he knew the dam was too solid to be destroyed. He was an engineer, remember.”

Tesla said, “But the email we found on Kavi Balan’s computer said he planned to destroy the Village.”

“Wait. No, it didn’t,” Middleton countered. “It just said he had something ‘planned’ for it.”

“And he did,” Jana continued. “He planned to get to the truth of the Scorpion’s plot. He wasn’t going to destroy the Village. He was going to
save
it—and expose the Scorpion and his associate to the world, if we couldn’t stop them first.”

Middleton had to laugh. He realized that he and the Volunteers were the ones who had accomplished Sikari’s goal: protecting the Village and exposing the Scorpion’s and Zang’s plan.

Jana continued, “
My
job was to find the Scorpion and eliminate threats. That’s why I needed your daughter . . . to use her to find out what you knew. After Balan failed to kill you, I learned who you were. Not some spy for the Scorpion. Or for those crazy men with the Group. But the Volunteers.” Her face darkened. “I was getting close to stopping you and to learning who the Scorpion was . . . And then tragedy. Archer killed his fa ther.”

Barrett-Bone said, “Tragedy? Why, you helped him do it!”

“Are you mad?” she raged. “Devras was my mentor, a colleague of my father. He was a genius. Archer was a street thug, a fool.” The woman shivered in disgust. “He never understood the politics, the culture, the depth of our region. And like most stupid men, he was easily seduced, by the Scorpion. He never realized that the last thing Devras wanted was a real incident here, especially the deaths of foreigners. It would destroy forever his hopes for a free Kashmir.”

Middleton said, “So you’re the one who shot Archer.”

She sighed. “My only regret is that I couldn’t get close enough to tell him how I despised him before I pulled the trigger.”

“And Crane?” Barrett-Bone asked. “The reporter.”

“I thought he would be valuable in finding Scorpion. He led me to your daughter and her.” A contemptuous nod toward Tesla. “But he gave me little else.”

“You wanted Chernayev and Zang stopped, right?” Connie Carson said.

“Yes, of course, I did.”

“Well, they were stopped. We had them in custody. Why did you kill Chernayev?”

“Why
didn’t
you?” Jana replied with contempt. “A vastly powerful man? It would only have been a matter of time until he escaped or bought his way out of prison.”

“There’s another reason, though, isn’t there?” Tesla asked.

Jana smiled at her coldly. “Yes. Chernayev was responsible for the death of my father. He and Zang killed him and the Indian student they also sponsored. They only kept Devras alive to use him in their plot. I decided years ago that whoever the Scorpion was, whatever else he was guilty of, he’d die for the murder of my father. Poisoned by well water. He died in pain.”

Middleton said, “So Chernayev using the Mujahedeen here today, that was a fallback plan, right? Originally, he and Zang were going to claim that the dam had the copper bracelet technology in it—that would be the Chinese’s excuse to occupy Kashmir.”

“Exactly. A weapon of mass destruction. And by the time it was learned there was none, they’d have the country all locked up. Sorry we didn’t find any weapons, but we’re not leaving.” She offered a grim smile to the Americans. “That worked well for you not long ago, no?”

“And what
about
the copper bracelet technology?” Wiki Chang asked eagerly.

“Devras was obsessed with it. The project consumed him at university and afterward. But he never perfected a practical system. He could never recreate what the Nazis did. He patented parts of the technology, but it never could work as he dreamed. Still, he thought of the project affectionately. If anyone became dear to him, he’d give them his greatest symbol of affection and gratitude—a real copper bracelet.”

Middleton glanced outside and saw a cluster of Indian troops walking past. More security, he assumed, though they no longer had the key prisoner to guard. They’d have to be satisfied with a mere hit woman.

Then he felt an itch. Something was wrong.

What was it?

He glanced at Archer’s phone, which sat nearby in an evidence bag. He recalled again the last message: “Mission accomplished.”

And he realized something else. Jana wasn’t the least troubled by her capture. And she’d been talking quite freely. In the past ten minutes she’d admitted to several murders.

Hell, the only way she would share information like this was if . . .

Her dark, beautiful face turned to him and smiled.

Middleton understood the text message: Archer had put an extraction plan in place to get him out of the area after the explosions at the dam. One of his associates texted him that the plan was ready to go. Jana had undoubtedly been in touch and explained that Archer was dead, but she was taking over the operation and needed to be extracted from the dam site.

Middleton cried, “Everyone, get down! Get—”

Automatic gunfire erupted outside, and, with a piercing crack, a frame charge ripped a large hole in the flimsy side of the trailer. Tear gas canisters rolled inside and filled the room with unbearable fumes.

Despite the near blindness and the fire in his lungs, Middleton lunged for Jana. Her hands were cuffed but her feet weren’t shackled and, though she was as impaired as the rest of them by the CS gas, she’d noted exactly where the rent in the trailer wall was before the cloud filled the room. She stumbled to it and flung herself out—into the waiting arms of the rescue party.

The band of insurgents loyal to Archer, unaware of Jana’s betrayal, laid down covering fire as they retreated.

Middleton and Barrett-Bone struggled outside, crawling from cover to cover. More tear gas clouds were rising and none of the Indian or SAS troops knew what was going on.

Middleton finally spotted a group of a dozen people vanish into a clearing, where a helicopter was waiting. He didn’t see Jana, but he knew this had to be the raiding party; as one man stepped through a band of sun, Middleton saw a golden flash off his wrist.

Its source, he knew, was a copper bracelet.

What was about to happen had been a long, long time coming.

This was the thought in the mind of the slim woman walking down the busy street of an overcast London. Autumn wind swirled grit and papers and crisp leaves around her.

At a street corner she paused and pulled her overcoat more tightly around her. She oriented herself and spotted her destination: the Tufnell Park mosque.

Someone jostled the briefcase she carried, but Jana Grover kept a firm grip on it. No enemy knew she was here—it was just a teenage girl obliviously on a mobile—but had a mugger tried to take the case from her, she would have killed him in an instant.

Yes, the briefcase was that important.

Indeed, its contents were the centerpiece of Devras Sikari’s ultimate plan.

She glanced down at the street and saw the faded white-painted message “Look Right.” A warning to pedestrians that traffic could come barreling along from an unexpected direction.

This amused her a great deal. The light changed and she started across the street, toward the mosque.

Trying to imagine the consequences of what was about to happen.

Monumental.

Dodging the stream of pedestrians. Some were Anglo: girls and boys in school uniforms or hoodies, delivery people, stiffly dressed businessmen, solid women navigating shabby perambulators. Mostly, though, Arabs, Iranians, Pakis . . . A few Sikhs and Indians, too.

London, what a melting pot.

Jana was wearing Western clothing, but pants. Also, of course, a head scarf. She had to blend in.

And she thought again: a long time coming.

Clutching her precious briefcase, she arrived at the mosque and walked around the nondescript building, which was one of the few here free from graffiti. It was one of the biggest in London. Nearly twenty-five hundred men prayed here daily; women too, though shunted ignominiously away behind dirty curtain partitions.

Jana looked for security. Nothing out of the ordinary. She needn’t worry.

All was going according to the plan.

She paused near the entrance. Shivered as a gust of wind swept over her.

And she turned, walked into the Café Nero across the street, ordered a latte.

In this neighborhood, even in a Starbucks-like coffee shop chain, it was a bit unusual to see a woman alone without her husband or brother or a clutch of girlfriends. Traditional values flowed strongly here. In fact, an honor killing by a Pakistani brother of his eloped sister had taken place only two blocks away.

As Jana took her coffee, sat and shrugged off her coat, a bearded man in a turban walked in and regarded her contemptuously, despite the conservative outfit she wore and the scarf.

She decided if he made any comment to her, she would, at some point, hurt him very, very badly.

He took his tea, muttering to himself. Undoubtedly about infidels, women and respect.

Another glance at the mosque.

And she felt the exhilaration of a mission nearly completed.

The mission that was Devras Sikari’s life plan.

Devras had been one of the most brilliant revolutionaries of his time. While Chernayev and Zang and Archer and the Mujahedeen believed that their goals could be achieved by explosives and gunfire, Devras knew that was short-sighted, the approach of the simple-minded. Childish.

Why, look at Palestine and Israel, look at Sri Lanka and the Tamal Tigers, England and the IRA. Look at Africa.

Oh, there was nothing wrong with violence as a surgical tool; it was necessary to eliminate risks. But as a means to achieve a political end?