Their guide paused at the end of this room to press the heel of his palm against the wall between two shelves.
The wall swung outward.
A warm yellow glow, the sound of voices, and an earthy, basementy scent announced the presence of a lower level. Behind her, Bianca heard Doc’s indrawn breath.
They followed their guide downstairs to the vast, underground Aladdin’s cave that was filled with everything from custom “spy clothes” as SiuSiu called them—Bianca’s bulletproof dress was an example—to specially designed gadgets and equipment to truck-size stacks of (counterfeit) bills from practically every currency in the world to weapons.
There was nothing counterfeit about the weapons.
Workers labored at various tasks. Armed guards lurked in corners. A few looked at Bianca and Doc as they followed in the gatekeeper’s wake. Most did not.
A glance back at Doc’s face as they were led through the treasure trove of illicit goods showed Bianca that he was doing his best not to gape.
A woman emerged from a side chamber to pick her way through mounds of ordinary-looking umbrellas, musical instruments and power tools, all of which, Bianca knew, had multiple concealed functions.
SiuSiu.
She was around forty but looked younger due to amazing, creamy skin and a petite build. Her features were even, her eyes dark. Her long black hair was worn up, secured in a luxurious bun on top of her head by a pair of what looked like golden chopsticks. She wore a black silk top, a pair of tight, western-style jeans and platform pumps that added inches to her height.
For a moment she stared hard at Bianca. Then she smiled.
“Julie T! Is that you?” She spoke in excellent, American-accented English, because Julie Taberski, which was the name she knew Bianca by, was American. The double air-kiss she presently bestowed on Bianca was a rare mark of esteem from the hard-nosed businesswoman, and was indicative of the length of time they’d known each other, which was a little less than twenty years. They’d first met when Mason had brought Bianca to the shop. He’d had dealings with SiuSiu’s grandfather, who at that time had been the shop’s proprietor. SiuSiu had been his apprentice. The then twenty-year-old had been assigned by her grandfather to look after the six-year-old daughter that Mason, whom they knew as Peter Taberski, had brought with him.
“This is not Peter.” There was the faintest of condemning undertones to SiuSiu’s statement as she gave Doc a frowning once-over.
Knowing that bringing in strangers was generally verboten, Bianca said, “This is my associate. I vouch for him.”
To vouch for someone to SiuSiu came with serious consequences. As in, get it wrong and die. SiuSiu was serious about the preservation of her organization. Although she and SiuSiu were longtime friendly acquaintances, Bianca never made the mistake of thinking that if something she did threatened that organization SiuSiu wouldn’t have her killed without batting an eye.
SiuSiu gave Doc another long look, nodded and turned her attention back to Bianca.
“You have come for your order?”
“That and—I need your help.”
* * *
Rogan stood in the Wynn’s small Security Office, leaning over a cluttered metal desk as he grimly rewatched the video that showed a chubby guy in a black suit and a hat that obscured his face entering the interior hallway after him, and that same guy exiting just ahead of Sylvia some minutes later.
The bastard had snuck up behind him and clubbed him over the head with something. There was no other explanation for how he’d wound up unconscious on the floor.
Chubs had then escaped with Sylvia.
Whoever he was, he was definitely not Mason Thayer, who Rogan had just identified on another video as the wheelchair-bound old man seated next to Sylvia at the blackjack table where he’d first spotted her. Rogan was kicking himself for not having seen through that disguise instantly. After all, Thayer was the reason that he’d traveled to Macau, and he’d been right beside Sylvia, the first place any competent investigator should’ve known to look. His only excuse, and it was a piss-poor one, was that once he’d set eyes on Sylvia, she was the only thing he saw.
That wasn’t an explanation he planned to share with anyone.
Other than that, Rogan had no idea who the guy who’d hit him was.
To say that Rogan wanted to get his hands on him—on him and Sylvia both—was putting it mildly. Almost as much as he wanted to get his hands on Thayer.
Thayer was his primary target and he’d apparently gotten away clean. According to Rogan’s intel, a chopper had flown him from the roof of the adjacent parking garage to Hong Kong, where he’d vanished. Watching the video of Thayer zipping in his wheelchair out through the east entrance in the teeth of Rogan and his team who were right there in the same room was one of the more chagrin-making experiences of his life.
All in all, it hadn’t been the best night’s work he’d ever put in.
The knot on the back of his skull was the approximate size of a golf ball. Rogan held in one hand a cold soda can from the vending machine in the nearby employee break room that he kept applying to the bump. So far it hadn’t helped. His head hurt like hell.
His pride hurt worse. In hindsight, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Sylvia getting herself collared by security had been a distraction designed to give Thayer time to escape. And in the case of Chubs, it been a long time since anyone had managed to get the drop on Rogan.
At least he’d managed to get to Sylvia first, even if he hadn’t been able to talk her into turning on Thayer. But if things worked out the way he hoped, maybe—
Shouting in the hallway outside interrupted his thoughts, made him look up. The language was Cantonese, so he had no idea what all the excitement was about. But the security guard who’d been deputed to assist him in reviewing the surveillance videos and who’d been sitting in a plastic chair against the wall leaped to his feet. From the look on his face something major was up.
Before Rogan could react in any more substantial way, one of his own men, Fergus Benchley, burst through the door. Benchley was his age, thirty-two, blond, brawny and loyal. When the tip had come in that Thayer had been spotted in Macau, Rogan had tapped him along with three other Cambridge Solutions employees, all former British SAS, to fly into the gambling mecca with him because capturing Thayer was not something that he trusted the Public Security Police Force of Macau to be able to help him with.
Benchley looked at him and said, “There’s been a shooting in the square across the street. That fit bird you were keen to nab? Word is she was there when it started.”
Rogan’s gut clenched. He really didn’t like the fact that it did. “Was she hit?”
“The local police are in the square ID’ing the dead and wounded now.”
Rogan strode from the office without another word.
Ten minutes later he’d determined that Sylvia was not among the victims. Neither was Chubs. Witness accounts of what had happened were garbled, but they’d almost universally included salvation via a massive cloud of multicolored smoke as well as a woman who’d created the cloud by means of lighting and throwing smoke bombs. Several reports of said woman’s flight to safety hand in hand with a fat man sealed the deal: Sylvia.
He had no trouble at all picturing her in the role of heroine.
Rogan had determined something else, too, by examining the locations of the victims, the angle of their wounds and the spent rounds. The killings had been perpetrated by a single sniper firing from atop the parking garage adjacent to the Wynn. From the markings on the recovered bullets, he was fairly certain that the weapon was an MK12, which was a favorite of the US Special Forces.
Combine that with an unexpected and unwelcome image he’d seen while reviewing the casino videos, and he wasn’t especially surprised to see Steve Hanes walking toward him across the square.
“Murdering civilians now?” was how Rogan greeted Hanes as the man reached him. The harshness of the klieg lights the police had set up in the square made Hanes’s hair look redder than Rogan remembered, and his face look unnaturally pale. In the CIA uniform of a dark suit and white shirt, he looked exactly like what he was: a US federal agent. No attempt at subterfuge at all.
They didn’t shake hands.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hanes’s tone wasn’t friendly. Which was fine. Rogan wasn’t feeling friendly, either. Antagonistic was more like it. He was doing his best to keep a lid on it. “I’m here to apprehend Thayer. Who, from everything I’ve heard, you let get away.”
Rogan held up a recovered round. “I’m willing to bet that this came from an MK12. A favorite of your special forces.”
Hanes’s eyes narrowed at him. “Are you trying to imply something?”
“Not at all. I’m saying that I think you set one of your men up there on top of that parking garage to shoot up the square. I’m saying I think you’re responsible for the deaths of these civilians.”
Hanes’s face didn’t change. “And why would I do that?”
“To take out Thayer’s female associate.”
Hanes gave a scornful laugh. “You can’t prove that round came from a MK12. Anyway, plenty of people have access to one. Shooter could have been anybody. For my money, it was totally random—one of those terrorist things. But if the target of this shooting was Thayer’s female associate—by the way, we’ve learned that she goes by any number of names, but the one she’s been using the longest is Beth McAlister—anybody could have done it. She’s got a contract out on her—one million dollars for the hit. You ever hear of Darjeeling Brothers?”
Rogan had.
Hanes continued, “She’s on there, big as Ike.”
In rapid succession, Rogan felt surprise, consternation, and out and out fear, all on Sylvia’s behalf. Darjeeling Brothers was the dark web’s answer to Murder, Inc. Get listed on there, and you didn’t live long.
Much as Rogan hated to admit it, if that was true it broadened the list of suspects who could’ve shot up the square. Half the hit men in the world would be gunning for Sylvia. Or Beth. Whatever her name was.
He felt as antsy as hell, on edge with the urgent need to find her before anyone else did. All it would take was one wrong decision, one wrong move, one bit of bad luck on her part, and she would be dead.
He asked, “Why would one of Thayer’s flunkies rate a million-dollar contract by Darjeeling Brothers?”
Hanes shrugged. “She must’ve been a real bad girl.”
In the interest of not alerting Hanes to the fact that he seemed to be developing a really inconvenient soft spot for Sylvia, Rogan swallowed the choice words that crowded the tip of his tongue. Hanes must’ve been able to read something of what he didn’t say in his face, because his expression turned ugly.
“You contractor types, you’re all alike,” Hanes said, his voice laced with contempt. “You collect your paycheck and walk away. You don’t have any idea about the big picture. I thought we had an agreement. You were going to keep me in the loop on what was going on in your investigation. Yet here you are in Macau, which means you obviously got a tip that Thayer was going to be here, and I didn’t hear squat from you. Why is that?”
Forget swallowing.
“Piss off,” Rogan said. “I don’t work for you.”
“You work for Interpol, which cooperates with us upon request. So fucking cooperate. Next time you get a bead on Thayer or this Beth, you let me know.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Rogan said.
Hanes said, “I’m right now officially requesting your cooperation. That girl—Beth—couldn’t have gotten far. I want to sweep the area, bring her in, see what she can tell us about where to find Thayer, before some freelancer puts a bullet in her brain. Combine your men with mine, and we can get the job done.”
Rogan realized he had a choice: he could do what he wanted to do, which was tell Hanes to go fuck himself, launch his own hunt for Sylvia and hope to find her before Hanes or someone else did. Or he could go along with Hanes, join in the search for Sylvia and do his best to protect her if she was found.
“Let’s do it,” he said.
22
Five days later Bianca and Doc stepped off the train in Budapest, Hungary, and trudged out of Nyugati station into the gathering twilight. Planes, trains and automobiles had nothing on their odyssey: add in bicycles, buses and boats, and you were in the ballpark. They bore little resemblance to the travelers who had boarded in Bucharest, after a series of journeys that had begun with SiuSiu smuggling them out of Macau on a freighter along with a gun shipment destined for the Philippines. Bianca had abandoned the freighter as soon as possible, because as fond as she was of SiuSiu, placing too much trust in anyone under these conditions was a good way to wind up dead.
Knowing that the hunt for her was in full cry, Bianca had called on every bit of tradecraft she’d ever learned to get them safely to this point. Call her paranoid, but she saw potential killers everywhere: in the homeless man who came up to them begging for money in Yerevan, in the police officer directing traffic in Istanbul, in the train ticket agent who looked at her a little too closely in Bucharest. The thing was, all it took was one keen-eyed individual with access to the dark web and she was in trouble.
You’re not paranoid if they’re really after you.
“There’s a KFC down the street. How about we grab some food?” Doc looked with real longing at the iconic red and white bucket on a sign near the closest intersection. The lure of the fast-food staple was strong. Bianca knew, because she felt it, too. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast. But the danger, she judged, was too great. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that, knowing that she was an American, places like KFCs that might be expected to appeal to an American palate were being watched: the CIA had eyes on the ground everywhere, and then there were random bounty hunters to consider. And a restaurant like that would have security cameras, counter clerks—no, it was best to steer clear.
“Food truck.” Bianca pointed to a blue van pulled up to the curb. It was doing a brisk business with the locals. Doc grimaced, but once he bit into his pulled pork sandwich he was clearly resigned. The food was good. Bianca ate her sandwich and drank a Hungarian cola, Doc did the same and, refreshed, they moved on down the street to find a taxi.
It was a cold, clear evening. The moon was nearly full, a pale ghost in a deepening blue sky that showed more and more tiny twinkling stars with every passing minute. Bianca was glad of her dark gray, fleece-lined jacket, which she wore over a long-sleeved fisherman’s sweater in an indeterminate oatmeal shade with jeans and hiking boots. A long, dark brown wig confined in a single plait and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses completed her outfit. Doc wore jeans and a heavy flannel shirt under an olive military-style jacket. A gray knit watch cap was pulled down over his head, and he sported a thick black faux mustache that made Bianca want to laugh every time she looked at it.
The clothes and accessories had been provided by SiuSiu, along with a selection from her specialized weapons arsenal. A cylindrical silver rape whistle that Bianca wore as a pendant was in actuality a one-shot gun that she fired by pushing down on the mouthpiece with her thumb. (She never carried a gun; the fact that she now did meant that the situation was beyond serious.) The smaller matching earrings held additional bullets. Her old-fashioned-looking watch contained a knockout spray that she dispensed by hitting the small windup mechanism.
In addition, SiuSiu had given her a large amount of cash in various currencies. (Bianca’s fervent hope was that it was real—not counterfeit—cash; SiuSiu
had included the amount in the bill Bianca had paid by wire transfer from a special account she kept for just that purpose, but with SiuSiu one never knew. In any event, Bianca had had no trouble spending it during the journey, so whether it was real or not it got the job done.)
Bottom line, she and Doc looked like tourists, which was the point.
As one of the largest cities in the European Union, Budapest hosted over four million tourists a year. English was widely spoken. With their gear stowed in backpacks, Bianca was confident that they blended right in.
She flagged down a taxi at the corner near the KFC and directed it to Szabadkai Way. Budapest taxi drivers were notorious for preying on travelers, but she was familiar with how they worked and after a sharp word when the driver would have gone the wrong way (twice) she was able to sit back and admire the deep sapphire waters of the Danube River, which cut through the heart of the city, and the Chain Bridge, which connected the rolling hills of the Buda District with the flat Pest District. The Gresham Palace and St. Stephen’s Basilica were as magnificent as she remembered. The city itself looked beautiful, lit up as it was against the evening sky. She’d last visited it with Mason, years ago.
Remembering, she felt sad, and immediately banished the recollections. If she’d learned nothing else in her life, she’d learned that feeling sad was a waste of time.
Beside her, Doc stayed silent. He was tired, she knew, as was she. Homesick too, probably, although he wouldn’t admit it. But she guessed, because she was feeling a little homesick herself. She kept in touch with Evie and Hay by email: she knew they’d worry if they didn’t hear from her. She’d even ducked into a hospital to call Evie from a pay phone in the lobby—European hospitals still had pay phones—just to keep the fiction going that she was at the bedside of her sick father.
Hearing Evie’s voice had brought her life—her real life in Savannah—back to her in vivid detail.
The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 23