by Brad Taylor
Nikita laughed and said, “No, no. That thing is perfect for Maksim. All pretty on the outside, but pure trash when it comes time to execute.”
Maksim bristled and Nikita waved his hand, saying, “Calm down. I’m just wondering how much you paid for this room. Since I’ve given you authority to spend money.”
They were sitting in a side alcove of a restaurant called SOHO, on the shore of Salvador and just a stone’s throw from the navy base housing the police response for the ferry. From the window, they had a wide-open view of the bay, with nothing but a beaded curtain separating them from the other tables on the deck.
The restaurant was sparsely occupied, and, due to the chill, most of the other patrons were eating inside, but one couple had braved the ocean wind to eat outside, next to the water.
Maksim said, “It was free. I just had to ask. Don’t worry, I’m not driving up our expenses.”
Nikita said, “Good, because they’re getting high enough already.” He made no mention of the costs for the help of his cyber friend in the United States, keeping the operation compartmented, just as he did with the teams in Brazil, but this operation in Salvador had forced him to consolidate.
He said, “Where do we stand with the ferry? When can we move on to the other targets? Time is growing short, and I have people to answer to.”
“It’s tonight. The police captain took your incentive to heart. He’s regained operational control, and they plan on assaulting prior to daylight, when the terrorists are at their most vulnerable.”
Nikita chuckled and said, “Can we not convince him to attack when they aren’t at their most vulnerable?”
Maksim said, “Sir, there’s only so much people will believe. A failed raid is one thing, but stupid planning in advance will open up the operation to questions. He’ll get what we want. He’s going to trigger the explosives on the boat during the assault. It will be enough.”
“Are you sure he’s on our side?”
Maksim grimaced and said, “No, he’s most certainly not on our side. But he’ll obey. That finger we sent was persuasive.”
Nikita nodded, his weird eye looking over Maksim’s shoulder, and Alek finally spoke. “There is another issue, however.”
Nikita focused his good eye on him and hissed, “What now?”
“The captain said they’re making headway with the terrorists. The government is negotiating, and the terrorists are capitulating. They may just give up.”
Nikita dropped his piece of nigiri in disgust. “Is this from the captain? Is he trying to manipulate us?”
“It is from the captain, but I think it’s true. There has been enormous pressure placed on the government to get this resolved. There are two Americans—not counting our target—and four from France. It’s an international incident, and the government would rather negotiate out of this than assault. The only thing in our favor is that the terrorists are stubborn. The police captain thinks they’re about to capitulate, but the government doesn’t want to wait this out. Every day causes the situation to deteriorate, and our captain has been given the green light for an assault tonight. It’s reached a head, but the terrorists don’t know that.”
Alek leaned back and said, “They might quit between now and tonight.”
Nikita said, “Those two Americans are also our targets. They all need to die. We need a contingency.”
Alek said, “Sir, I’ve already thought of that. We have an observation post in the bell tower of a church overlooking the harbor. We’ve been using it just to monitor the situation, but it’ll duplicate as a sniper hide.”
“How does that help?”
“If the terrorists give in, they’ll simply drive the ferry into the dock. Once it’s there, as the people exit, we can shoot one of the explosive bags. Even if it doesn’t cause a chain reaction with the others, it’ll kill our target. The police will storm the boat, but they won’t waste time with EOD defusing the bags. They’ll rush everyone off before they do that, and it leaves them vulnerable.”
Nikita smiled, saying, “This is the thought process I’m looking for. Can you make this happen?”
“Yes. It’s easy. Just give me the order.”
“You have it. Now, what about the next target? Mr. Gabino Alves, the Mines and Energy minister? We’re running out of time, and his stranglehold on the oil concessions needs to be broken.”
Alek looked at Maksim, liking the compliments and not wanting to bring up bad news. He would leave that to Maksim.
Maksim said, “Sir, since we’ve consolidated here, we’ve lost contact with him. He was last seen in Rio, at the Petrobras headquarters. We know he’s scheduled to escort a group of Chinese investors starting tomorrow, but we don’t know if that means he’ll stay in Rio, or go somewhere else.”
Nikita scowled and said, “I thought we had enough manpower to track him? Not enough to execute, but enough to keep control of his movements.”
“We did. I have a man still on him, but he can only do so much. Gabino has been unsighted at the headquarters for two days. It might just be a question of waiting.”
Nikita considered, then said, “We can’t afford to wait. If he’s left Rio, we need to know. This thing will be done by dawn tomorrow, and we need to be able to react immediately to the next target. I have men on the way, but they won’t be here in time. Reinforce the singleton. Talk to the people in the Petrobras headquarters. Find out what he’s going to do. We need a pattern of life right now.”
Maksim hesitated, then said, “Sir, that’s going to leave us short here. I have to maintain security on Felipe’s wife in the church, then man the sniper hide. Each of those requires at least four. More for the long term. They need to sleep sometime.”
“Well, you don’t have that. How much could a sniper’s hide need? A guy with a gun and a guy pulling security. As for the safe house, one guy inside with a gun is enough. She’s a woman.”
Maksim said, “Sir, it’s not the woman, it’s the threat—”
Aggravated, Nikita cut him off, saying, “You fucks have never worked on the edge, where you were supposed to succeed with only what you have. The team only needs to stay awake for one night. Pull one of them.”
“We need security outside the site. A man inside can control her, but he needs protection.”
Nikita slammed his hand onto the table and said, “Figure it the fuck out.”
Both Alek and Maksim jumped at his outburst, then glanced outside, seeing the couple at the table staring at them.
Nikita pointed a finger at Alek and said, “You get to Rio.” He turned to Maksim. “You stay here. And I want no more fuckups.”
Maksim said, “I’ll do everything you ask, but I was wondering about Sergey. He’s sitting on a team in Charleston, in America, doing nothing. Can’t we get him here to help? He won’t arrive until tomorrow, but we could use him.”
The words seemed to make Nikita even angrier. Maksim saw his wild eye staring into space and his face grow red.
Nikita said, “Sergey is committed. He’s dealing with another problem.”
Chapter 27
Sergey Ivanov watched the small child enter the house, followed by the nanny. He stared at the nanny’s rear, carrying groceries with her hips swinging, and thought about what he could do before he killed her.
They entered the side door of the old wooden house, and he studied the street. Getting a feel for the battlefield and his new mission. Yesterday, he’d been on the way to the airport to fly home when he’d been given a redirection. Far from leaving, he was to receive a new team and continue the attack against Grolier Recovery Services, making him glad he’d taken the initiative to follow the nanny from the original target to this one.
The house on Sullivan’s Island was located on a side avenue, the second-to-last one on a dead-end street that butted up against a park called Fort Moultrie—some asinine triumph for the United States of America. Sergey hadn’t bothered to check out the grounds, because in truth, history bored him.
He’d taken a ferry to Fort Sumter with his now-dead partner, and that had been nothing but a slog through a history of a civil war he cared nothing about. He’d lived through civil wars, having seen the death and inhumanity. Having provided the death and inhumanity. He really didn’t give a shit about an American one. All he cared about was the mission.
And that nanny’s ass.
He keyed his radio. “Target is in. We wait for nightfall, and we go.”
Chapter 28
I got the call from Aaron saying the meeting was breaking up, and he had no good audio. Which was a bummer. We were running out of time, and it was forcing me into an endgame I didn’t want to execute.
I said, “Did you get anything?”
“Yes. A little. They were in a separate room, but it had a beaded curtain, so the lip-synch game was up. We switched to microphone and picked up a little. But not enough, I’m sure. The translations are broken, but there’s enough to prove you were right.”
Through the help of George Wolffe and Creed, we’d located the phone that was tied to the Russian in Charleston, and then had traced it to a high-end condo complex in the city of Salvador, Brazil. From there, after about a seven-hour surveillance effort, we’d identified the man who owned it—some freaky-looking guy with an eyeball that was always staring off into space.
Surveillance efforts always took time, sifting out the wheat from the chaff, and I didn’t have that luxury. I’d have liked to watch this guy for three days to develop a pattern of life, but one was all I was going to get, because I knew the ferry hostage crisis was reaching an endgame.
He’d left the complex, and we followed, stopping at a sushi restaurant called SOHO. The place had a little bit of a mall around it, complete with a parking garage, so it was no effort to get in undetected. I’d thrown Aaron and Shoshana against the target using a button camera with a little twist from the Mossad: facial recognition software designed to read lip movements.
They’d introduced it to me on another operation, and it was the bomb for outside surveillance. You didn’t need to get close enough to hear, you only needed to get close enough to see. Then, the damn beaded curtain had cut that short, but Aaron also had a directional microphone that could be slaved to the same software for translation.
He’d heard something, or he wouldn’t have said it, but I knew it wasn’t going to be the golden egg. That would only come with wringing one of these guys out, which was where I stood now. I’d already determined that taking out goggle-eye in his gated condo complex was a nonstarter due to the security, but the two at the table presented an additional opportunity. Because they were meeting here, they obviously weren’t staying in the same complex.
I said, “Call when they’ve left the table. We’ll pick a target and follow, you catch up.”
“Two are leaving. Pirate eye is staying behind.”
“Roger that, but his callsign is Hannibal. I’m the pirate. He’s the psycho. Calling him a pirate is an insult.”
Shoshana came on and said, “Hannibal? Who is that?”
“Someone you might take a shine to. A psychopath.”
Jennifer gave me a glare, and off the radio I said, “Come on. You know it’s true.”
She said, “You ever look in a mirror? She’s here because you asked her to come. Just like you came when she asked in Israel. You two are the flip side of the same coin.”
I glanced at her and, just to poke a bit, I said, “So that makes you like Aaron?”
She sank back in the seat and said, “No. Aaron is like her. He just hides it.”
Surprised, I said, “You think that?”
Because I sure did. I’d seen those two together, and it was a little weird. Jennifer was my backstop in life. Her moral compass had led me out of a forest of evil, and because of it, I trusted her explicitly. Aaron was different. While he had the ability to keep Shoshana in check, he seemed to do so out of tactical considerations instead of any moral constraints. But I was surprised that Jennifer felt the same way.
She said, “Yeah. He’s like her. He hides it, but if it came down to murder or the mission, he’d murder.”
I said, “So if it came down to the mission here or me, you wouldn’t kill?”
She looked at me, and I saw the pain. She said, “No, no. That’s not what I meant. Don’t put me there, Pike. Don’t make me choose between your life or murder.”
I held up my hands, shocked at her words. I said, “Murder? Hey, that’s not what I meant at all. You said something before getting in that elevator in Charleston. Was that a play? Or did you mean it?”
She glanced out the window of our car, saying nothing. I now feared the response. She might, in fact, have been playing me, and I wasn’t sure I could handle such a revelation.
I said, “Hello?”
She turned to me and said, “You said something in the back of an armored car in England. Did you mean that?”
A couple of years ago we’d managed to stop a terrorist attack on the London Eye due to some serious heroics on her part, and had been unceremoniously arrested for the help. While sitting in the back of a British paddy wagon I’d blurted out my feelings for her, but before she could even register what I’d said, we were hip-deep in rescuing Kylie—my new nanny—from a bunch of Irish terrorists.
In the end, we’d both pretended as if my words had never been uttered. I now realized she was just as afraid of rejection as I was, and it brought a sense of calm.
I took a step off the ledge.
“Yes. I meant it.”
I saw a hint of a smile escape her, and the iPad between us dinged, then our radio came alive.
“Two are moving, I say again, two are moving. Hannibal stayed behind.”
I picked up the iPad and saw a picture of two men, one of average height, with a shock of red hair and a mustache, the other thicker, with a receding hairline and crooked teeth. On the net I said, “Roger all. We’ll take the follow. Break off of Hannibal when you can. Leave before he does but make it casual. I’ll vector you in to our location.”
Off the net, Jennifer began prepping for a surveillance effort, pulling out beacons and other useful things. She said, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you planned that.”
I chuckled, relieved at the interruption. I started our vehicle, saying, “I’m good, but I’m not that good. Let’s get in view of the taxi stand.”
The two men who’d met with Hannibal had arrived by two separate cabs, so it was a fair bet they’d leave the same way. Now all I had to do was pick one of them.
We drove around the deck, reaching the exit, the entrance to the SOHO restaurant on our right, and the road out from the little mall area on our left. Right in front of us were three cabs lined up.
We waited, and, looking at the surveillance photos on the iPad, Jennifer said, “Which one do you want to take?”
I said, “I think the guy with crooked teeth. He looks a little older and overweight. The other one looks like he keeps in shape. That means he’s a cog in the wheel, used for the hammer, and the other guy is more like management.”
“What about Hannibal?”
“Yeah, he’d be the best one, but that bastard is living in a fortress, and so far he hasn’t shown anything of a pattern.” I slapped the dash in frustration and said, “We need more time.”
She ignored my outburst, as always, and started packing a small knapsack, saying, “Time is the one thing we don’t have. From the news reports, this is being treated like the search for the Boston Marathon bomber, with all the presidential candidates using it as a club. It’s going to come to a head sooner rather than later.”
I glanced out the windshield, saying, “I know, I know,” then the targets appeared.
I said, “There they are.”
The two men walked right in front of the garage, and I stared at them hard, wondering if they had been involved in the death of Kurt Hale. Wanting to confront them right on the street. I felt my pulse increase at the t
hought, and Jennifer caught the change, rubbing my arm like she was calming a growling dog.
I tracked them to the taxi stand, but instead of getting in separate cabs, they both entered a single one.
“Shit.”
I needed them separated, just like I did in Charleston. Taking on two guys was asking for trouble.
Jennifer said, “Wait on Hannibal?”
The taxi started moving and I put our car in gear, saying, “No. Let’s see how this plays out.”
Chapter 29
We swung out on Avenue Lafayete Countinho, the main coastal road, heading toward the lower old town. We passed the harbor, then the naval headquarters, the front full of police cars and other government vehicles, officials coming and going, all managing the chaos of the hostage crisis. Which was a good sign.
With that much activity, they probably hadn’t settled on an assault plan yet. Or maybe they had and now everyone was getting briefed.
We reached the Mercado market and the cab pulled over, dropping the passengers off. I swung in behind it, finding no place to park. The cab pulled away and I knew I was going to lose them.
I said, “On you. Keep in contact with them. Get out.”
Jennifer bailed without another word. Singleton follows were the absolute worst, and not something I would have done if I had a choice, but she knew the constraints we were under and took on the mission without complaint.
I circled around the Mercado, now headed back the way I’d come, not finding anywhere to ditch the car. Aaron came on the radio: “We’re out. Where do we need to stage?”
I said, “Come to the Mercado. As soon as you find a place to park, do so. Meet me at the elevator.”
The city of Salvador was built on an escarpment, where the lower part, near the water, held the oceangoing economic engine, and the upper part the residential neighborhoods. Since the founding of the city, the citizens have struggled to find a way to overcome the vertical distance between the two, with the Jesuits in the seventeenth century starting the march of progress using a rope and pulley system.