by Jeff Gunhus
Mara felt her stomach drop. She cursed herself for not being more careful. For being lulled to sleep with the conversation about her dad.
“And what side are you on, Anna?” she asked.
She smiled and pointed the gun at Mara. “I’m on the side most likely to win.”
CHAPTER 33
Jim Hawthorn put down the phone and reached a hand to his desk to steady himself. He’d faced all manner of threats in his career, including the existential nuclear threats of the Cold War.
It’d been a while since he’d felt the immediacy of a threat this size.
Or felt like his adversary had the ability to pull it off regardless of his efforts to stop him.
Even having divined Scarvan’s intentions, assuming Scott’s conclusion was right, the whole thing was starting to remind Hawthorn of watching a talented street magician. One who explains his trick, even urging his audience to watch closely, and then still pulling it off right in front of their noses.
Only the trick Scarvan had planned wasn’t to entertain.
It was to bring chaos to the world.
Hawthorn picked up his secure phone and punched in a number from memory.
“’Mornin’, Jim, what can I do you for?” came the answer on the second ring. As chief of staff, Nancy McKeen was never away from her phone. Her Alabama drawl made Hawthorn feel like she’d perhaps taken the call on her front porch back home, maybe whiling away time on a rocking chair, just hoping someone would stop by to visit for a spell. He knew in reality she was hunkered down in her office only feet away from the Oval Office. McKeen was a brilliant DC operator. Most importantly, she was someone President Patterson listened to.
“Nancy, I’m coming over. I need time immediately.”
“If I ask, I suppose, once again, you’re not going to tell me what’s going on over the phone,” she said.
“Is Mitch Dreslan over there?” Hawthorn asked.
“Goddammit, Jim. If––”
“It’s no more immediate than it was twelve hours ago,” Jim said. “We have every reason to believe that Jacobslav Scarvan is not in the United States. Not yet.”
A long pause, then a heavy sigh. “Shit, anyone else I’d threaten to stripe their hide for not telling me what’s going on right goddamn now, but I don’t suppose that’s going to work here.”
“I don’t suppose it is,” he said. “My people are working on a few things first. I want to give everyone a clear picture when I go over it.”
“All right, I’ll clear the deck. Make up some excuse for messin’ up the official calendar. Again.”
“And get Dreslan. He needs to hear this.”
Hawthorn hung up the phone and checked his watch. Greece was seven hours ahead of DC. Scott would gain an hour flying to Prague. He just hoped he arrived on time to help Mara face Scarvan.
If Scarvan even showed up.
It was a fortunate coincidence that Kolonov showed his head when he did, giving Scarvan a chance to settle that one more score from the boat.
Hawthorn believed in coincidence, just not the kind that favored him. He’d seen it go the other way too many times. An operative on a mission running into a long-lost schoolmate in a foreign country. A phone intercept plucked at random for review to throw a wrench in the works of a covert job. One of his agents selected for additional random screening that led to their cover being blown.
He believed in bad luck, but he was suspicious when it went his team’s way.
No, Kolonov’s reappearance had to be more than coincidence. He was sure of it.
Hawthorn walked over to the small office located as far away as possible from everyone else in the Alpha Team headquarters. Jordi Pines liked his privacy and other people liked the distance between themselves and the odd smells that came out of the computer genius’s room.
Hawthorn knocked on the TOXIC CHEMICALS sign covering most of the door. He didn’t want to walk in catching the man doing something he couldn’t unsee.
“Entrée,” Jordi bellowed theatrically.
Hawthorn opened the door, wrinkling his nose at the smell of old pizza, incense, and body odor. Jordi looked up from his bank of computer screens, his hand deep inside a family-sized bag of Cheetos.
“The king graces my door with his presence,” he said, his mock-English accent especially strong today.
Hawthorn took stock of the room, a hoarder’s lair of garbage and pop culture. He’d made the effort to connect with Jordi, he’d prided himself through his career on being able to form a strong personal connection with all of his people. The way in had been their mutual appreciation first for Downton Abbey, and then for Spider-Man. Hawthorn was a fan of the original comics, and Jordi of every reference, in every medium since the superhero had been a flash of inspiration in Stan Lee’s and Steve Ditko’s brains. Like everything Jordi Pines, the Spidey fascination bordered on obsession.
“Busy?” Hawthorn asked.
Jordi shrugged. “Just breaking into sovereign government mainframes, burrowing into social media platforms, and using every camera in Europe to try to find this Scarvan bastard. You?”
“About the same,” he said. “Spoke with Scott. We think we know Scarvan’s plan.”
“Is it something dastardly and diabolical?” Jordi asked.
Hawthorn explained Scott’s theory. It seemed impossible given the man rarely saw the light of day, but Hawthorn could have sworn that Jordi actually turned pale as he described it to him.
“That’s grade-A evil mastermind shit, right there,” he said when Hawthorn was done. “At least we have a possible timeline for his main attack. What do you need me to do?”
“Kolonov showed up just in time for Scarvan to have a crack at him before his final act. That’s too much of a coincidence. I need you to find out why. Who pulled him out of hiding? Who set up the meet in Prague?”
“Find that out, we find out who is helping Scarvan,” Jordi said. “You think it’s our good friends at Omega?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised that, once you find out who it is, we trace them back into Omega. This whole thing feels like them.”
Jordi looked doubtful. “You think they planted Scarvan for twenty years and just now brought him out of retirement for this?”
“No, I think Scarvan’s decision to disappear was his own doing. And so was his reappearance. But since he’s been out in the open, my suspicion is that Omega hitched itself to him. Providing assistance when they can.”
“To keep us busy and off their trail,” Jordi said. “Not that we were honestly doing that great of a job of it to begin with.”
“Maybe this is the opportunity we’ve been looking for. Helping Scarvan might turn out to be a mistake on their end. It could expose them and give us the way in we’re looking for.”
“Or, if we screw this up, they could send the world into chaos and leave us and every other intelligence agency in the world scrambling for years trying to sort out the aftermath.”
“That’s why we can’t screw this up,” Hawthorn said. “I suggest you start working your magic on those things,” he said, waving at the massive computing power in the room.
“On it,” Jordi said. As Hawthorn turned to leave, Jordi called out, “Are you making sure my girl has the support she needs out there?”
Jordi was Mara’s connection and the man was fiercely loyal to her. He had no doubt his priorities were Mara first, the rest of the world a distant second.
“I wouldn’t worry about Mara,” Hawthorn said. “I’d just worry about the person stupid enough to go up against her.”
Jordi was no fool. He knew the dangers of the world. He knew that a sniper bullet from a half mile away didn’t care how talented the person was at the end of its flight path. He tossed the bag of Cheetos to the side and wiped his orange fingers on his shirt.
“Unfortunately, the world is full of stupid people. Let me get to work finding them for you.”
Hawthorn closed the door behind him as the clacking of the k
eyboard filled the air. He knew Jordi wouldn’t stop until he found an answer or was given some other task to pull him off of it.
He called and asked his driver to bring the car around. It was only ten minutes to the White House, but he was looking forward to that time to collect his thoughts.
He had to convince the president to cancel one of the most important public appearances of his administration, all on circumstantial evidence collected in a monk’s stone hut in the middle of nowhere.
His argument wasn’t going to be well-received: a lone-wolf assassin everyone had thought dead for over twenty years was going to infiltrate into the U.S. when every law enforcement officer would be looking for him, procure the materials he needed to create a powerful bomb, then somehow deliver the device into the center of what for four hours would be one of the most heavily guarded rooms in the world.
If it were anyone but Jacobslav Scarvan, he would have thought it all impossible. Especially now that they knew what to expect.
But Scarvan specialized in the impossible. Hawthorn had seen it many times.
To make it worse, based on what had happened in Paris, Mara had concluded Scarvan was not acting alone. If Omega was helping him, then things just got much worse.
Scott had pieced it together. Scarvan intended to remove the head from the diseased body of the world, sending it into chaos.
At first, they thought perhaps a round of assassinations. Taking out heads of state one by one. Not unlike the revenge he was taking on those involved with his own betrayal.
But Scott had realized it was something bigger than that.
What if every head of state could be killed at one moment?
One explosion?
Every country in the world left leaderless in an instant? Cleansed in a rush of fire, was how Scott said the old monk described it.
The chaos that followed would be incredible. Many countries had succession plans. Fewer had a history of following those plans.
Not only that, but with the world already teetering on the edge of multiple regional wars—the South China Sea, Kashmir, Yemen, North Korea, Ukraine, the list growing longer each day—the leadership vacuum was bound to lead some country to miscalculate and try to press an advantage.
If Omega was behind this, then there would be other levers applied once the world’s leaders were killed. Nudging the system toward collapse.
Scott had pieced it together. A quick search revealed his greatest fear.
Every world leader was scheduled to be in New York in three days.
Every single one. Most with an entourage of dignitaries, past leaders, royal family members, head diplomats.
It was the perfect target. During the remarks of the U.S. president commemorating the event, they would all be sitting in a single room.
In one explosion, all world government would be decimated.
The chaos following would be incredible. The type of thing that would keep every intelligence agency tied up for years. Effectively keeping all attention away from Omega.
Hawthorn wasn’t a religious man, but he said a short prayer nonetheless.
He asked that Mara and Scott would find the son of a bitch and kill him where he stood.
Otherwise, in three days, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the United Nations was going to be the scene of the greatest terrorist attack in world history.
CHAPTER 34
“What the hell is this?” Mara asked. She had a distaste for having guns pointed in her direction.
“Mr. Kolonov would like to meet with you,” Anna said. “These gentlemen work for him. They asked me to make the arrangement.”
Mara considered the ways she could disarm the woman in front of her. In all scenarios, she won the struggle, but didn’t cover the man in the front passenger seat.
“Are you working for him, too?”
“No, but I am a pragmatist as much as I am a patriot. Hawthorn, like always, wouldn’t tell us exactly what’s going on. The U.S. always treats us like a pawn in their games. I thought it best to make the decision to meet Kolonov as linear as possible.”
“By linear you mean me doing what you tell me to do?”
“If that’s how you want to phrase it, yes.”
“So, you thought you’d get some info out of me with this whole ‘let’s be best friends’ schtick first?”
Anna didn’t seem offended. “It was worth a try. But now we’ll meet Kolonov together and I will see what’s really happening.”
“You’re not a very trusting person, are you?” Mara asked.
“Belchik turned up dead after you and your father visited him. Curious, isn’t it?”
Mara had known the word would get out eventually. Belchik was a legend in the intelligence community. But she was surprised the news that it was she and her dad who’d done the mission was out, too.
“Not sure what you’re talking about,” Mara said, assuming the interaction was being filmed. She wasn’t going to admit to anything. “Besides, I’ve heard that Belchik had received lethal doses of radiation courtesy of an old friend. Perhaps someone put him out of his misery.”
“Perhaps. But then there was that explosion in Paris. You were on the scene there as well. This has my bosses wondering whether there’s something larger going on here. Maybe there’s something else the United States doesn’t want getting out. Whether this story about Jacobslav Scarvan is a convenient cover for some larger operation to clean up a mess.”
“You pulled a gun on a U.S. operative to make your point?”
Anna looked at the gun as if surprised Mara would make an issue of it. “This? I’m just a very careful person. I didn’t know how you were going to react to being told we’re going to see Kolonov and that I’m going with you. I also don’t know if Kolonov has an issue with you. This insurance policy is also here in case one of these fine gentlemen in the front has orders to kill you. And me along in the process.”
The men in the front both glanced back as if for the first time considering their passenger could put a bullet in the back of their heads at any second. The man in the passenger seat slid his right arm up to show the snub-nosed shotgun he had pressed against the seat pointed their way.
“See, now we all know where we stand,” Anna said. “Less prone to miscalculations, I find.”
“You think all this is a cover of some kind?”
Anna gave a dismissive shrug. “My bosses think so.”
“Not sure resurrecting a KBI agent from the dead would be my go-to for a cover story,” Mara said. “Besides, I thought you trusted my dad.”
“If you think having sex with a man is the same as trusting him, you and I need to have a talk,” Anna said. “He’s terrific in bed, by the way.”
The reference was meant to shock her. She didn’t give the woman the pleasure of seeing her react. “A lot of women say that, so maybe it’s true.”
The comment hit the mark and Anna frowned. Mara filed the look away, not sure if she’d meant for her to see or if this woman did harbor some true feelings for her dad.
“Okay, let’s go see Kolonov,” Mara said. “I just hope Scarvan doesn’t try to take him out during the meet. That would be inconvenient, for all of us.”
Mara took some pleasure in seeing the two men in the front exchange worried glances. It seemed Scarvan’s legend was alive and well, even among Kolonov’s thugs.
* * *
The sedan snaked its way through the streets of Prague, seeming to travel back in time as it did. Utilitarian office buildings and sleek new retail outlets gave way to increasingly narrow streets and older architecture. They crossed the Legion Bridge over the Vtlava. As they did, Mara caught a glimpse of the Charles Bridge just to the north. It was pedestrian only, a fact she appreciated since she didn’t want to be any closer than she had to be. The memory of her mother crowded in on her, threatening to overwhelm.
Mara pushed these thoughts away, angry with herself for letting them intrude when she ought to be focused on the matt
er at hand.
A glance over to Anna confirmed the woman was studying her closely, gauging her reaction.
Surprisingly, she saw compassion in the eyes staring back at her. She wondered if that was just part of the woman’s act, or whether at the heart of it she was sincere.
While she had a gun trained on her, Mara really didn’t give a damn.
Although she did note that the gun now pointed more at the man in the front passenger seat than at her.
The sedan continued deeper into the labyrinthine roads of the Mala Strana, or Lesser Quarter, the area under the Prague Castle. This area had been formed in 1257 but rebuilt in the sixteenth century after fire decimated the early architecture. While the rebuilding had changed the architecture to a more baroque look, the curving, narrow streets had remained the same. It was useful for ensuring they weren’t being followed. Not so useful for avoiding an ambush from the windows above. The image of Scarvan balancing the RPG on his shoulder in Paris came to her and she shuddered.
“We are here,” the man in the front seat said.
The driver pressed a button and a wide arched wooden door facing the street rumbled open, revealing a short passageway the led into an interior courtyard.
A metal security post blocked their way in the center of the cobblestone entry. A man walked out, checked with the driver, and then signaled to someone hidden inside. The post lowered into the ground and they rolled forward through the arch.
Mara took notice of the cameras on both sides of the car and the slits cut into the stone. Perhaps once meant for crossbows to protect the entrance she was certain that they were just as useful for guns.
The car pulled into the stone courtyard. It was beautiful inside. The sixteenth-century walls had a well-earned rose-colored patina. Plant boxes lined the walls and were on every balcony and window. These were filled with flowering plants, the most abundant being jasmine, which filled the air with its sweet scent. A fountain burbled in the corner, a stone statue of a young boy playing a flute.
Hardly what she expected as the meeting place with a hardened criminal like Kolonov.
“I’ll take that,” the man in the passenger seat said to Anna, holding his hand out for her gun.