by Jeff Gunhus
“I know this . . . to be true . . .” the old man said, the last word fading into a sigh.
And then his body went rigid and his eyes went wide, as if he’d seen something terrifying.
Then he went still.
Dead.
Thales marched across the hut and grabbed the odd little monk who cowered there.
“Why?” he roared. “Tell me why you did this thing?”
The monk cried out, pushed past Thales, and rushed to the bed. There he crouched down, kissing the man’s feet over and over. He buried his head in his one good hand. The other arm hung limply at his side.
Scott watched dumbfounded. Could it be possible the man had shot Father Spiros by accident? One look at how perfectly centered the shot was dispelled that idea. But the remorse seemed real.
“I was his friend, his only friend,” the monk said. “I cared for him when no one else would.”
Scott nodded to the old man’s now destroyed chest. “Hate to see what you do to your enemies. Why did you do it?”
The monk lowered his head onto the mattress and sobbed.
“You’d better start talking, asshole,” Scott said, “or I’m going to bury you up to your chin in the sand out there and see how the crabs like the taste of you.”
Whether due to a guilty conscience or the fear of Scott’s threat, the monk started to talk.
“He made me swear,” he cried. “If he ever became delirious, if he ever lost his faculties and seemed ready to give up the secret of what Apostoli planned, then I was to do what I just did.” He turned to the old man. “This is what you swore me to do, Father. Forgive me.”
Thales grabbed the monk roughly. “You know what the plan is, then? Tell us.”
“He never told me, I swear it,” he said. “Only that Apostoli was on a mission from God to change the world. Father Spiros and I were to be together to watch the coming of our Lord and Savior.”
“When?” Scott growled. When the monk hesitated, he grabbed him by the arm that he’d already dislocated. The man whimpered in pain. “I said when?”
“Soon,” the monk said. “Sometime next week is what he told me.” He began to sob uncontrollably again. “He was so close to making it. So close.”
Next week. It was Friday now. The fuse on the situation just became a lot shorter than what Scott had expected.
“You have to know more,” Scott growled. “You’re going to tell us everything.”
“No . . . I’ve told too much . . .” Urgo wept as he spoke. A line of spittle hung from his mouth. “I didn’t want this . . .”
“You’re part of it now,” Scott said. “You better hope you have something to help us.”
Urgo trembled, sobs racking his body. “This isn’t what’s supposed to be . . . Father, I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . .”
Without warning, the man lurched up from the edge of the bed, throwing his shoulder into Thales and running for the door of the skete.
“Wait!” Scott shouted.
But it was too late. Urgo screamed as ran through the open door. And then silence.
There was a split second in which Scott’s mind didn’t process what he’d just seen. The initial annoyance of the man running when there was clearly no escape was replaced by a realization of what had just happened.
He and Thales glanced at each other and walked to the door, leaning out.
Urgo lay sprawled on the rocks below where he’d hit headfirst. Judging from the odd angle of his neck and the halo of blood spreading around him, it was clear they no longer had someone to question.
Scott held out his hand to Thales. “I’m taking your car.”
Thales, shaken by monk’s suicide, looked incredulous. “We should search the skete. There could be things here that can help us.”
Scott didn’t think so. He had a sense that he’d learned as much here as he was able. Father Spiros was unlikely to have trusted the fool who’d just shot him with any intelligence of value. But with the man dead, he really didn’t expect there to be much in the way of evidence. The fact that the old man had put such a dramatic fail-safe into place made him believe there wouldn’t be anything of value lying around the stone dwelling, either.
No, there was a sense of operational purity about it. The one man who knew what Scarvan was about to do had just bled out in front of him.
He would need to figure out what it was from the clues he had.
Cut off all the snake heads at once.
Send the world into chaos.
Scott had no idea what to make of it. Thankfully there was a great team back in DC that just might. Hawthorn had assembled some truly great minds under the Alpha Team banner. He just hoped the inactivity over the last six months hadn’t dulled their senses.
“The keys,” Scott said, hand outstretched. “I’ll send in reinforcements, but just in case you’re right and there is something here—”
“––we need to ensure there are no other crazies like this one over here that will clean the place out. I get it.” He tossed Scott the keys. “You know how to get out of here?”
“The second goat track on the left,” Scott said. “Straight on ’til morning.” Thales gave him a confused expression. Scott didn’t have time to explain the reference. “Call me directly if you uncover anything.”
“Is this real?” Thales asked as Scott headed to the door. “Does this single man have the ability to carry out an attack that will change the world?”
“A handful of men on airplanes brought the world nearly two decades of war after 9/11,” Scott said. “Whatever Scarvan has planned, it will be far worse.”
As he left the skete and climbed down the ladder to the rocky ground below, it occurred to Scott what that plan might be. He immediately dialed his sat phone, his heart pounding in his chest. He needed to tell Hawthorn and have the team check on his idea.
If he was right, Scarvan was even more of a madman than he’d thought.
CHAPTER 32
Mara didn’t like Marcus Ryker, but she couldn’t put her finger on the reason why.
She’d spent the flight from Paris to Prague replaying her interaction with him in her head. As an expert interrogator, she’d spent her share of time with sociopaths. The wannabes who’d watched too many movies twirled their mustaches and made broad pronouncements about their distaste for society. It was people like Ryker who were harder to read.
Her instincts told her there was something off with him, but she had to admit he was a unique case.
A man with a higher net worth than most small countries and a brilliant scientific mind who had literally changed the world.
Was it a delusion of grandeur if, in fact, your impact on the world was undeniable?
Certainly, there was a massive ego there, but that was expected. Ryker had used that persona to his advantage, cultivating it at every turn. She didn’t doubt for a second that he had some idea who had called him to warn him of the attack. Or at least a few guesses. Anyone with the extent of his wealth and with business interests spread through so many countries was bound to have friends in high places. And more than a few enemies.
But the data collection team back at Alpha headquarters hadn’t been able to find anything either. Through an agreement with NSA, they had access to the most powerful surveillance tools in the world, especially outside America’s borders. The call into Ryker’s phone had been located and isolated, but whoever had been on the other end had covered their tracks well, bouncing the signal all over the world in a way that made it impossible to track. Even that precaution was likely a red herring designed to keep them occupied. Chances were that the caller had used a burner phone, discarded after one call.
None of that really bothered her. Someone who knew what was about to go down had been able to reach out and avoid additional collateral damage of one of the most-liked and respected businessmen on the planet.
Maybe she should be thankful someone had decided Ryker had been worth saving.
But
there were two problems.
First, all of this only reaffirmed that Scarvan had an accomplice. Or perhaps many. Someone had killed the Clemsons. And certainly, Scarvan hadn’t made the call himself. What did he care of collateral damage? Why would he have risked Ryker warning Nochek of the attack? What were the chances that Scarvan’s accomplice would have Ryker’s personal phone number? Unless they’d known well in advance that it was Ryker who was going to meet Nochek.
If that were the case, perhaps there was a connection somehow between Scarvan’s group and Ryker.
The second issue was the mania she’d seen in Ryker’s eyes when he’d talked about his work. It’d been like the curtains were pulled back for just a few seconds, revealing the real man behind the carefully crafted facade.
. . . in defiance of the reckless excesses of the human race.
Those were the words he’d used.
And with them came a flash of rage and righteousness that she’d only seen in the eyes of fanatics.
Perhaps she’d misread it. Maybe she wasn’t impervious to the man’s famed charisma after all.
Or maybe there was something wrong about Marcus Ryker.
Her aircraft taxied to a remote maintenance hangar in Vaclav Havel International Airport where a representative of the Bez-pecnostni Informacni Sluzba, BIS for short, would ensure her visit to their country went unreported. Nikolas Koudelka, the head of this intelligence service, was an old friend of Hawthorn’s and so she was told to expect full cooperation.
She liked the BIS motto, Audi, Vide, Tace: Hear, See, Be Silent.
She hoped Koudelka’s men had heard and seen something useful since learning of Sergei Kolonov’s presence in the city.
Scarvan had already slipped through her fingers once. If he came after Kolonov, she didn’t intend to let it happen again.
The BIS assistance was welcome. The person waiting for her when she walked down the stairs from the jet wasn’t.
The woman was in her late forties, maybe early fifties. She was fit, carrying herself with the perfect relaxed posture of someone who was once a competitive athlete. She wore designer clothes, Gucci by the look of it, a cream-colored suit with a white scarf flecked with the same blue of her eyes. Her blond hair was pulled back, giving her an efficient look, like she was there to work. Her face was as beautiful as it was inquisitive. There was something about it, perhaps the placement of her eyes, or maybe the slight narrowness of her cheekbones, that made her look ready to question everything she saw. She looked as incredible for her age as she’d looked in the photograph Mara had been shown on the plane.
As she closed the gap between them, she studied Anna Beliniski’s eyes. She was surprised by what she saw there.
Recognition and pure delight.
“Welcome to the Czech Republic, Mara,” she said. “So good to meet you.”
She was taken aback by the enthusiasm in the woman’s handshake. “Mara Roberts. And you are?” Mara didn’t want to show she already knew who the woman was.
“Anna Beliniski, I’m with BIS, here to support you in any way you need.”
Anna was the other person on Scarvan’s list. The woman her father apparently had some prior relationship with. She remembered Hawthorn telling them that she was working for the Czech intelligence service now, but there had been no indication that she would be joining the mission. She wondered if Hawthorn had any idea.
“Nice to meet you. How briefed in are you?” Mara asked, following Anna to a waiting sedan parked inside the hangar. The sedan had tinted windows, making it difficult for any curious eyes to determine who had just arrived and been given the special treatment through immigration and customs.
“Director Hawthorn walked me through some of the pieces in motion,” she said. “I believe you know of my past involvement here.”
Mara caught that there was perhaps a double meaning here—both her relationship to Scarvan, but perhaps fishing for whether Mara knew anything about her and Scott. She was surprised Hawthorn had briefed her himself and not let her know before arrival. But she liked how the woman had phrased her answer. Whenever another intelligence officer told her they were fully briefed on a mission, it made her think them foolish. As field agents, they were all told what the powers-that-be thought they needed to know, nothing more. It was supposed to be different with Alpha Team, but she wondered how many secrets Hawthorn still kept.
“Do we have a location for Kolonov?” Mara asked, impressed as the sedan was waved through a variety of checkpoints leading out of the airport.
“We have a location. We’re going there now. Also, every major transport station has been sent photos of Jacobslav Scarvan. The CCTV system AI has been programmed to prioritize a facial recognition for him both with and without his beard.”
Mara was familiar with the sophisticated artificial intelligence now being used in European capitals. In the trade-off between safety and security, Europe had stepped more strongly to the security side of the equation than America. At least as far as the American public knew. Cameras covered nearly every inch of the streets in every European capital and AI software produced surprisingly accurate facial recognition results out of the terabytes of data it gathered.
“I assume nothing yet. If you’d spotted him, that would have been the headline.”
“Nothing,” Anna said. “But if something turns up, we’ll be notified immediately.”
Mara sensed the woman wanted to say more but was having trouble finding the words.
“What is it?” she asked, fearing bad news.
“It’s just a pleasure to meet you,” Anna said. “I . . . know your father. He speaks very highly of you.”
Mara was surprised at the admission.
“Was this recently?” Mara asked. Her father had always insisted he’d never cheated on her mother, even for a field assignment.
“We met a lifetime ago,” she said. “Then worked together again two years ago. When he was in Prague looking for answers to your mother’s death.”
The implication wasn’t lost on her.
“You were helping him when he was persona non grata to the U.S. intelligence community?”
“Like I said, I knew him from many years earlier. When we were both young agents, we worked on a mission together here in Prague. And we’d see each other periodically over the years.” She paused as if relishing the memory.
Mara felt her face heat. She’d always wondered about her dad’s early days in the Agency. She’d seen some of the files, heard a few stories from some of the old saws who were riding desks at Langley now, but it was always just snippets. Always the heroics.
She’d once stung him with an accusation of being the philandering playboy that was part of the Scott Roberts mythos. He’d been livid, saying he’d never once cheated on her mother.
Now she was sitting in front of a beautiful woman who she imagined as nearly irresistible two decades earlier.
A hand on her leg startled her.
“I can see I’ve given the wrong impression. Nothing happened between us, not back in the old days. If I’m being honest, I wanted there to be. I wanted it very much.”
“Attracted to married men?” Mara asked.
“Not at all. You know how it is. We didn’t share personal details until later in the mission, until after I’d grown to . . . know him. But in the end, he told me about his wife and two daughters back home and he refused to betray them.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
Anna shrugged. “I felt you deserved to know that your father was an honorable man. I didn’t know it at the time, but it’s a rare commodity among men in this world.”
“See where that got him,” Mara said.
“It got him you,” Anna said. “And your sister. He told me wonderful stories about Lucy as well. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
The sentiment was nice, but it immediately put her back in Lucy’s hospital room, watching as the cancer destroyed her. And that final afternoon, when
she’d laid down on the bed to comfort her, falling asleep next to her as she’d done hundreds of times when they were little girls. Only this time when Mara woke up, her sister was cold and silent. Gone. Leaving behind her son for Mara to care for.
“I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to . . .”
“No, it’s fine,” Mara said, snapping herself back to the present. “This all just . . . just caught me off guard.”
Anna leaned back in her seat. “I take it Scott never told you about me, then?”
“You know how he is.”
Anna laughed. “What’s the expression? ‘Stubborn like a moose’?”
“Usually we say mule, but moose works for him, too,” Mara said, warming to this woman. She seemed like a perfect match for her dad. Someone who could bring a little joy into his life. “My dad’s on his way here,” she said, enjoying how the woman tried to hide her reaction to this news. “Only a couple hours behind me.”
“Really? I hadn’t heard that. Was his trip to Mount Athos fruitful?”
An alarm went off in her head. Everything slowed down as she reevaluated her surroundings. The driver glancing back too often in a rearview mirror angled to watch her, not the road behind them. The front passenger angled in his chair at nearly forty-five degrees, even though he twisted his torso to make it seem like he was facing forward.
Anna. Her right hand inside the designer purse discreetly placed between her leg and the door.
She’d not told her about Mt. Athos.
And she was pretty damn sure Hawthorn wouldn’t have given up an operational detail like that to someone outside of Alpha Team.
She did her best not to let her face betray any emotion.
“A dead end,” she said. “Kolonov is our last real chance to catch Scarvan. That’s why we’re here.”
Mara thought she’d pulled it off, but this woman was good. Her expression changed as she looked down at her purse. Slowly, she removed the Sig Sauer handgun and shrugged.
“These are interesting times,” Anna said, as if that explained everything. “One can never be too careful in a world of shifting alliances.”