Death Echo
Page 34
“Bugs? Plural?” Emma asked.
“Identical, too,” Faroe said. “Russian. Bulky, tough, and long lived. They only transmitted every twelve hours.”
“My head hurts,” Emma said. “Make it easy on me.”
Alara laughed. “Ah, if only. Like most covert disasters, the postmortems on the Blackbird affair have barely begun. I do know that the op was old. It began years ago when we doubled an agent. The man was well connected with the Russian government as well as the mafiya. Originally it was a currency sting.”
“Still hurting, here,” Emma said.
Mac took her hand from his hair and kissed her palm. “So Harrow was telling a form of the truth.”
“‘A form of the truth.’” Alara smiled. “I will remember that. The currency in question was used to buy the contents of an orphan nuclear source—an abandoned lighthouse in Kamchatka. As the op evolved in Russia, it became a game of embarrassing the Georgians. We informed the Georgians, who decided to let the op go—and then swoop in at the last minute and embarrass the Russians.”
“How did the U.S. feel about it?” Mac asked.
“We collected intel every step of the way,” Alara said.
“You could have stopped it at any point.”
“I? No. I wasn’t informed until the last minute, when Blackbird was identified as the twin of Black Swan, the primary pawn in the op.”
Silence.
“Eventually,” Alara continued, “Grigori Sidorov took over the Russian end of the op. He decided he’d rather destroy an American city and blame it on the Georgians. After all, the Georgians had left a nuclear calling card—a rudimentary dirty bomb—in Moscow once, simply as a warning. Why would anyone doubt that they would do it again as payback to the U.S. for not supporting their government more boldly?”
“What was in it for Sidorov?” Emma asked.
“Power, of course. And a kind of patriotism. According to our intel, Sidorov wasn’t entirely sane.”
“No shit,” Faroe said under his breath.
“He grew up in the ruins of the former empire and was obsessed with making Russia powerful again, with himself as a kind of peasant tsar,” Alara said. “Demidov was his employee.”
“Grigori Sidorov,” Emma said. “Last night, I saw that name in an online blog where present and former State Department types weigh in.”
Mac nodded. “You read the blog to me. Something about a mafiya-style execution—no head, no hands, lots of torture. Heavy betting on who would come into power now.”
“I heard that, too,” Alara said blandly.
“Just somebody sending a message,” Faroe said. “Break the nuclear rules and die the hard way.”
“Who dropped the hammer on Tommy?” Mac asked.
“According to Lina, it was Demidov,” Alara said.
“Why?” Mac asked.
“Our best guess is that Sidorov wanted to delay the op long enough for an important enemy to arrive in Seattle on international business. The man couldn’t be killed in Russia. Sidorov had tried several times.”
“Take out a city, take out an enemy. A twofer,” Mac said. “Son of a bitch.”
“Some people should have been killed at birth,” Emma said.
“Unfortunately,” Alara said, “we don’t know which ones until it is too late.”
Silence expanded.
Emma looked at Mac. He shook his head.
“No more questions on our end,” she said.
Alara nodded and turned to leave.
“You okay?” Faroe asked Mac and Emma.
Mac took her hand again. “We’re good.”
“I’ll check back in a few hours,” Faroe said.
“We’re fine,” Emma said.
“Tell it to Grace.”
The door shut behind Alara and Faroe. Emma let out a long breath. So did Mac. He rubbed his cheek against her palm.
“Did I thank you for saving my life?” he asked.
“You saved mine first. No way I could have taken Temuri down.”
“You know what they say about saving a life….”
“What?” she asked.
“That life belongs to you.”
“So we belong to each other?” she asked.
“Sure do.”
Emma touched Mac’s lips with their intertwined fingers and smiled.
“Works for me.”
About the Author
ELIZABETH LOWELL is the author of many remarkable New York Times bestselling historical and contemporary novels. She lives in Washington with her husband with whom she writes mystery novels under a pseudonym.
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ALSO BY ELIZABETH LOWELL
Blue Smoke and Murder
Innocent as Sin
The Wrong Hostage
Whirlpool
Always Time to Die
The Secret Sister
The Color of Death
Death Is Forever
Die in Plain Sight
Running Scared
Moving Target
Midnight in Ruby Bayou
Pearl Cove
Jade Island
Amber Beach
Credits
Jacket design by Richard Aquan
Jacket photograph by Olive/Getty Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
DEATH ECHO. Copyright © 2010 by Two of a Kind, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199798-3
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Table of Contents
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
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10
11
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