by Alex Lukeman
Nick opened his door and got out. Viktor stood off to the side. He had an AK pointed at them. He was too far away to disarm without getting shot.
"What's the problem, Viktor?" Nick asked.
Lamont and Ronnie came up and stood next to Nick and Selena.
"Maybe you should have paid him what he asked," Lamont said.
"You are the problem," Viktor said.
Nick's ear was beginning to itch and burn. He reached up to scratch it.
"Let me guess. You're Mitreski's spy. Everything Josef is planning is already going to fail."
The third man said something angry to Viktor. Viktor swung his rifle around and fired a quick three round burst. Then he turned on the other and shot him as well before he could react.
"Whoa," Lamont said.
The white snow turned red around the bodies. Viktor brought the gun to bear on them again.
"Maybe you used up all your ammo," Nick said.
Viktor laughed. "There are more than twenty rounds left. More than enough."
He gestured with the rifle at Ronnie and Lamont. "You and you. Pick those two up and put them in the first car. Don't try for a weapon or I will kill you."
They did as he said, first one body, then the other. They put both dead men in the front seats.
"Close the doors. Good. Now come back over here."
They came back and stood next to Nick.
"You're making a mistake," Nick said.
"I don't think so."
"So Josef was right? The Russians are behind this?"
"Mitreski is simply preserving order," Viktor said. "The Russians are helping us keep our country from becoming another puppet of the West."
"Oh," Selena said. "I see. You would rather be Moscow's puppet instead."
"The time when America could tell everyone what to do is over."
"What about the Macedonians who want a new government?" Selena asked.
"There are always troublemakers, people who don't understand what is good for them."
He raised the rifle. "Get in the car with my former comrades. All of you."
Ronnie fell to his knees and held up his hands, pleading. "Please don't kill us. We can help you."
Viktor sneered at him. "Help me? Look at you. You can't even help yourself. Stand up. Die like a man."
"No, no, please."
Ronnie ducked his head. His hand moved up behind his neck and there was a sudden glint of steel in the air. His throwing knife buried itself under Viktor's chin.
Viktor stumbled and choked, blood spurting out the front of his throat. He grasped at the knife with his left hand. His right hand with the rifle dropped away and the gun fired into the ground. Viktor fell onto his back, pawing at the knife. His feet twitched in the snow and then he was still.
Ronnie stood up and brushed snow from his knees.
"I forgot about that little sticker you keep back there," Lamont said.
"Most people miss it if they do a search," Ronnie said.
"No, no, please? Where did you get that line?" Nick said. "Out of a grade B movie?"
"Hey, it worked didn't it? What do you want, an Oscar performance?"
Selena went to Ronnie and kissed him on the cheek. "I thought you were great."
Ronnie blushed.
Nick turned on his satellite phone and held it up.
"No signal. Let's get out of here," he said. "I'm cold."
"Let me get my knife," Ronnie said.
He went over to Viktor's body and pulled out the blade. He wiped the blood off on Viktor's jacket and looked down at the body. The friendly smile of the helpful guide was gone, replaced by a contorted grimace of death.
"We never did get that coffee he promised," Lamont said.
CHAPTER 17
Stephanie sat at the wide console that controlled the enormous power of the Crays lined up behind her, staring at the lines of code filling her monitor. The room was cold with the air conditioning that kept the computers happy.
The chill Stephanie felt went far deeper than the number on the thermostat.
A cup of coffee cooled on her desk, forgotten. The lines of code displayed in front of her might as well have been written by aliens from Mars for all the sense they made to her at the moment.
She couldn't stop thinking about the ambush that had almost killed her and made her lose the baby. Physically she was healing but the unseen effects were another story.
It would be Christmas soon. She thought about how she would have been in her third trimester, shopping for a baby that now would never come. The doctors had told her she could have another, that there was no damage to prevent a healthy pregnancy. The words were meant to comfort her but were a poor substitute for the child she'd lost.
She'd been in surgery for more than six hours. For a while afterward the pain and the drugs the doctors gave her kept her from thinking clearly. She'd been numb, unable to embrace the reality of her loss. Then the dam cracked and the emotions had flooded in, a dark mix of anger, frustration, grief and guilt. It was a tossup as to which one was the strongest.
Her anger could find no outlet. The men who had violated her were dead. The man who had sent them was dead. There was no one left to go after, to punish. No one to take out her frustration on, no way to satisfy her desire for justice. She'd never seen the men who'd shot her, never seen their bodies. One minute she'd been happy, riding into town with the man she loved to have dinner with her friends. Then there'd been noise and pain and fear and darkness.
She'd woken in the hospital to the certainty of loss. She'd known the baby was gone before they told her. Over the next few weeks she'd struggled with mood swings and the hormonal changes that came from having the baby ripped from her body before its time. She'd swung back and forth between rage and grief, between helplessness and the urge to strike out at someone, anyone.
Thank God for Lucas, she thought.
Without Lucas it would have been worse. He'd shown patience she hadn't dreamed he possessed. They had grieved together. When she lashed out at him for no reason he took it calmly. When she cried, he didn't try to tell her that everything was going to be all right.
As soon as they could handle the physical stress, they'd both immersed themselves in work, Lucas in his job as Director of National Clandestine Services at Langley and Stephanie here at Project headquarters. Work was the only way she could think of to prevent what happened to her from happening to someone else. The man who had caused her so much grief was dead but there were many others like him. Men who cared about nothing. Men who lacked basic human empathy. Men who had to be stopped.
Before the ambush that had been her job. Now it had become her mission.
She felt the grief waiting and pushed it away.
Come on, Steph. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Stephanie forced herself to look at the monitor. She was writing a program to penetrate the sophisticated cyber security protecting China's satellites. The Chinese were very good at what they did with computers. They had succeeded in hacking into millions of Washington's restricted files, even into the White House. But they were not quite good enough to get into the Project files. She had blocked several attempts to bypass her firewalls, most of them coming from Beijing. Cyber espionage was a constant game of offense and defense, played by a small group of world class hackers who stood above everyone else. Every advanced nation had one or two. Stephanie was part of that elite company.
She picked up the cold coffee and set it back down. Elizabeth came into the room.
"I brought you a fresh coffee."
"You must have been reading my mind. I was just going to make a new pot."
Elizabeth handed the cup to Stephanie. There were deep shadows under Steph's eyes. She looked as if she was a mile away.
"What are you working on?" Elizabeth asked.
"I'm designing a program to get through the firewalls the Chinese have built around their satellite servers. If it works like I think it will, we could take o
ut any of their satellites anytime we wished."
"The Pentagon would love that."
"Beijing has been trying to break into our servers for months," Stephanie said. "It seems fair that I return the favor. Besides, it makes me feel like I'm doing something to fight back."
"Fight back?"
"Against all those evil bastards out there who want to mess things up for everyone. When someone tries to break my firewalls it feels personal. It makes me want to get back at them. In this case it's the Chinese."
Steph's voice was hard, angry.
"It's not really about the Chinese, is it?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean, Steph."
"No, I don't."
"I know you don't want to hear this but hiding out down here in your cave isn't the answer."
"I don't think I want to have this conversation."
"We've been friends for a long time," Elizabeth said. "If your friends can't tell you what you need to hear, you're in trouble. No one blames you for being angry or feeling like you want to retreat. But isolating yourself isn't the answer."
"How would you know? It wasn't your baby."
"I was pregnant, once," Elizabeth said.
Stephanie looked at her, surprised. "You were? I didn't know that."
"Not many people do."
"What happened?"
"I miscarried about six months after I'd gotten married. In hindsight it's just as well, given what happened later with the jerk I thought was the love of my life. But at the time I thought I'd never be all right again. I thought it was my fault, that somehow if I'd done something different everything would've been okay. But the truth was that there was nothing I could have done about it. Just like there was nothing you could've done about those people who shot at you."
"It's not fair," Stephanie said. Her eyes filled with moisture.
"No, it's not."
Steph took a tissue from a box on her console and dabbed at her eyes. She blew her nose.
"I haven't been sleeping well," Steph said. "I have nightmares. Sometimes I'm back in that car and there's blood and glass and screaming. At first I don't know who's screaming, then I realize it's the baby."
"Oh, Steph."
"Then I realize it's me," Stephanie said, "and I wake up and my face is covered with tears and the bed is soaked with sweat and Lucas is saying my name…"
"Oh, Steph," Elizabeth said again. "I'm so sorry."
"Lucas wants me to see someone."
"It might be a good idea."
"I'm not sure if it is."
"Well, you don't have to decide right now."
"I don't think I can decide much of anything right now."
"Come upstairs and we'll have lunch," Elizabeth said. "Bring your coffee. We need to talk about what's happening in Macedonia."
"You heard from Nick?"
"He called in about half an hour ago. Things are getting complicated over there."
Stephanie smiled, the first time Elizabeth had seen her smile in a week. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"
"I don't think anything Nick comes up with would surprise me at this stage of the game," Elizabeth said.
CHAPTER 18
The street in front of Valentina's hotel was packed solid with supporters of the 11 October movement. They'd been arriving since before dawn, bundled against the cold. No one seemed to mind the freezing temperatures. Todorovski was scheduled to speak at 10 o'clock. Mitreski's state-controlled television had carried nothing about the event but word had spread throughout the city.
Anyone could see that a revolution was coming. Whether it would be peaceful or violent remained to be seen. Valentina had no interest one way or the other. She didn't care what happened in Macedonia. It wasn't her job to care. Her job was to follow orders, in this case assassinate a troublemaker who was causing problems for the Kremlin.
Valentina's room was directly across from the balcony where Todorovski would stand to make his speech. It would be an easy shot. She would fire from within the room, through a window already open enough to allow a clear field of vision through the PSO-1 scope. Sheer white curtains of thin gauze-like material blocked any curious eyes on the street from seeing into her room. She'd weighted down the ends so they wouldn't move in the morning breeze.
She'd placed a narrow table end-on to the window, where she would rest the rifle on its bipod. She'd pulled a chair up where she could sit and wait. When the time came to take the shot every eye would be on Todorovski. No one would notice the muzzle of the rifle inside the room across the street.
She took the Dragunov SVU from the flower box and assembled it with practiced movements. She mounted the scope. Every PSO-1 scope was matched to a particular weapon by serial number. The scope was an older design that had been slightly modified over the years, the perfect choice for the kind of shooting needed today. She would have preferred a different scope if she were shooting at extreme range.
She had used the PSO-1 before and liked it. The scope was filled with nitrogen to prevent fogging. It featured a range finding reticle illuminated by radium that relied on human thinking rather than fault-prone, computer rangefinders. A small ^ symbol in the center provided an aiming mark. A stadiametric rangefinder using a 0 to 10 scale curved upward in the left of the shooter's vision.
The street was a major artery through the city, wide and modern. She looked through the scope and the thin barrier of the curtains at the balcony where Todorovski would stand. She used the rangefinder to split the distance between the floor of the balcony and the top of the window behind it and estimated the distance at about 50 yards.
Child's play.
She cocked the weapon. With a gentle squeeze she dry-fired at the balcony. The trigger pull had been adjusted to a little under three pounds, about what she'd expected. Smooth, easy, with no noticeable creep.
She inserted a ten round magazine and charged the weapon. The Dragonov used a 7.62 X 54 rimmed cartridge that had been in service for over a hundred and twenty years. Normally the cartridge was fitted with an armor piercing, jacketed bullet. Valentina's rounds had been modified to explode on impact. Todorovski would be dead before he hit the ground.
She looked at her watch. It was a little after eight-thirty in the morning. She settled back in her chair to wait and allowed her mind to drift.
She remembered the day everything changed. It had been the beginning of a long journey that had taken many turns and placed her in this room, waiting to kill again.
The snow fell in big flakes outside the window of her room at Specialized School 144, turning the industrialized landscape of Ekaterinburg into a fairytale wonderland that resembled a gigantic, frosted cake. She was reading her latest assignment, The Grapes of Wrath by the American writer, Steinbeck. School 144 specialized in advanced English studies.
She was nine years old, marked as someone with unusual abilities, someone who would go far in the service of the Rodina, the Motherland. She didn't understand everything in the novel about something called the depression, but she understood the unfairness of the way the characters were treated by the evil capitalists. She knew they were capitalists because she had been through many courses teaching about Lenin and capitalism and what was good and what was not. The Party taught the only correct way to think. By the time she was nine she'd learned not to question the teachers unless it was within prescribed limits. A challenge was always met with stern disapproval and rebuke.
Because of her status she had her own room. Most of the students at School 144 lived in dormitories but a few like herself had special privileges. Valentina took it for granted. Her mother was a decorated agent in the KGB. Valentina wasn't sure what the KGB did, but she knew it was very important for the safety of the Motherland. Her uncle Alexei was also in the KGB, recently promoted to major. He had visited her a week after his promotion wearing his new uniform. Everyone had been impressed.
There was a knock on her door and uncle Alexei came into her room. Valen
tina ran to him.
"Uncle, it is so pretty outside. Can I go out and play in the snow? I can wear my new jacket."
"Perhaps later, child. But I have something to tell you first. You must be strong because it is going to make you sad."
"I don't want to be sad."
"Then as I said, you must be strong. Valentina, your mother is dead."
"No she isn't. She was here last week. She brought my new jacket."
"Valentina," Alexei had said, "I'm sorry but it's true. She died a hero, fighting for our beloved Motherland. She was betrayed by the Americans. They are the ones who killed her."
Valentina had looked into his eyes and known he was telling the truth. She was still holding the book in her hand, the book by an American writer. She hurled it across the room against the wall.
"I hate them. I hate Americans. They are evil, mean people."
"Not all of them, Valentina. But the rich men who run their country are. One day the people of the world will realize that their hope lies here in Mother Russia. Your mother knew that. She worked hard to make that day come closer. That is why the Americans killed her."
Valentina didn't know what to do. The truth was that she wasn't very close to her mother. Mother was always off somewhere working for the good of the people. She saw uncle Alexei more than anyone. She was seldom home with her mother in Moscow. Most of the time she spent in schools like this one. The visit in the past week when her mother had given her the jacket was the first time Valentina had seen her in over seven months.
She supposed she should cry. People did that in the novels she read when someone died but her eyes were dry.
"I can be strong."
If her uncle was surprised by her reaction he gave no sign of it.
"Good. You are a brave girl. One day you will have a chance to get back at the Americans if that is what you want to do. For now you must continue your studies. But I promise you that they will not all be about books. Would you like to be someone who helps protect our country?"