Reyna didn’t turn. “I had a hunch. The company has government contracts. Which means they have navy personnel looking over their shoulders all the time. Figured they would program security to allow access to IDs with the highest clearance. I have ‘Top Secret’ clearance, so the front door isn’t a problem.”
Her finger traced a path up the wall-mounted directory. “Where’s his office?”
“Second floor.”
She nodded and led the way past the vacated security desk toward the elevators.
I got on the elevator behind her.
She frowned at the elevator control panel. “No special ID needed for any of the floors.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“It just seems odd that there’s so little security for this type of facility. Unless this isn’t where actual development takes place. If the labs are in this building I’d—we’d—need SCI or SAP clearance. Sensitive Compartmented Information or Special Access Programs. Did you notice if the offices have any locks?”
“Keyed, I think.” I couldn’t remember if Caruthers had used an actual key or a keycard to let me in D’Amato’s office.
“We’ll soon see.” She looked up into the corner of the car, smiled and waved. The smile vanished as if someone had thrown a switch.
“Why not just give them the finger?”
“They had us on video as soon as we came within range of the front door,” she said. “With luck, they won’t check the feed anyway, since we’re not here to rob or blow the place up.”
I faced front and kept my mouth shut. When the doors opened, I led the way to D’Amato’s office, footfalls a whisper on the carpeted floor. The door was locked. Reyna nudged me aside and bent down to look at it in the dim light from an exit sign over a stairwell door nearby. She dug in her bag again, pulling out a penlight and a small, flat case. She turned on the little flashlight and held it in her teeth, beam pointed at the lock. Zipping open the case, she pulled out a metal tool that looked suspiciously like a dental pick. But it wasn’t my teeth she was interested in. She took another tool out of the case and inserted both into the lock. Within twenty seconds, she turned the handle and swung the door inward.
Quickly dousing the automatic ceiling lights, she stood and stepped inside, heading directly for the file cabinet.
She handed me the penlight. “Hold this.”
I aimed it at the lock on the cabinet and peered over her shoulder while she worked. She quickly popped the lock and opened the drawer. I shined the light at the labeled tabs on the folders while she riffled through them. She pulled four from the drawer and set them on the desk.
She slipped one open. “Put the lights back on, would you?”
Apparently we were abandoning all pretense of stealth. I shut the office door and flipped the switch on the wall next to it. Fluorescents in the ceiling flickered and came to life. I walked back to the desk and tried to read the file she pored over upside down. Even right side up it would have made no sense to me, all technical jargon and cryptic notes. From Reyna came appreciative noises—first a “hmm” then a “that’s interesting”—but she didn’t share.
My mind wandered. I leashed it to keep it from sniffing too close to the rotting corpses on the fringes of consciousness. It strained against its bonds, and the imaginary scent of blood kick-started my heart.
Breathe!
I studied Reyna’s face instead, the broad mouth and full lips, delicate nose, the wide-set hazel eyes… My pulse didn’t slow any.
She tapped the folder and raised her head to look at me. “He was working on a laser.”
“We knew that.”
She pursed her lips. “This one’s for communications. A green laser.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
With a sigh, she squared her shoulders and spoke slowly. “DARPA’s been funding research for green lasers for decades. So have we. The Navy, I mean. Green’s the holy grail for underwater communications. Nobody’s managed it, so far.”
“You mean, like, ship to submarine? And D’Amato? He figured it out?”
She frowned. “Not according to these files. Looks like he was onto something, but his experiments failed.”
“It doesn’t make sense. Why would they go after him unless he had something to sell?”
She gazed at something between us. “Maybe they killed him because he couldn’t deliver.”
“What would be the point? A message? Who to?”
Pawing through some more pages she said, “I don’t know, but the answer isn’t here. We could spend all night going through his files, but these are his most recent.”
“What about the lab?”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to chance it. And I wouldn’t know what to look for anyway. Come on, civvy. Let’s get out of here.”
She rounded the desk, put the files back in the drawer and joined me. Her phone rang as I pulled the door shut behind us. She murmured into it quietly and paced down the hall with it pressed to her ear. I caught up with her at the elevator. She stabbed the call button and faced me.
“That was Janet. She found something. A line-item addendum to the budget for this project. For ‘special research.’”
“To keep the project going?”
“She doesn’t know yet. It’s dated after D’Amato’s files indicate the project failed. But something’s not right. The budget for the line item is TBD.”
I let that soak in. As a consultant, I’d used “to be determined” to indicate numbers we hadn’t sussed out yet. I assumed in government parlance TBD generally meant “unlimited.”
“So maybe they knew he was close and gave him a blank check to keep working on it.”
“Maybe.” She sounded skeptical.
We’d gotten halfway across the parking lot to the car the phone in my pocket vibrated, making me jump. I pulled it out and answered.
“Is this Mr. Sanders?” A woman’s voice. She was crying.
“Yes?”
“My name is Tatyana. You’ve been looking for me.”
“Ah, yes, I—”
“Don’t try to find me, I beg you. They’ll kill us.”
“I need to talk to you. It’s about your daughter.”
“No! Leave us alone. Stop looking.” Her voice rose. “You’ll just lead them to us!”
“Please. D’Amato made me promise—”
“I can’t help you. I have to go.”
The connection went dead.
C hapter 30
July 27—North Pacific Ocean
As soon as Macready’s watch ended he made his way to sick bay. The encounter with the captain had unnerved him. He’d let his guard slip and had made a stupid mistake, making up an excuse for his presence in the hangar that he couldn’t back up. His carelessness had put him on the captain’s radar.
More disconcerting, though, had been the appearance of Dudayev on the deck above as he’d returned to duty. He wasn’t sure if Dudayev knew Macready had been keeping tabs on him, or if Dudayev had become the hunter. Macready hadn’t much cared for the few times he’d found himself prey to roving bands of Taliban in Afghanistan. There, he’d done his best to turn the tables quickly and take out the enemy one by one, carefully stalking those who would kill him and waiting for opportunities to cut stragglers loose from the herd.
Now he was curious. Nominally, Dudayev was his commanding officer. That didn’t mean much on a medical staff. Macready had no problem acceding to Dudayev’s superior medical skill and experience, but it wasn’t as if Dudayev was going to order him into battle. But the physician was up to something, and now it seemed that Macready had become a part of it. Macready wanted to learn everything he could about Dudayev, find out what made him tick, and most of all discover why Dudayev was watching him. He figured the place to start was Dudayev’s office.
He pulled up short, though, when he heard a voice emanating through the office door. With stealthy strides, he quickly toured the rest of sickbay. Finding it empty, he cautious
ly approached the office door again and leaned in to listen. For a moment he was confused. He shook his head thinking exhaustion was making his mind play tricks. He heard Dudayev’s voice, but couldn’t understand the words. And despite pauses no voice answered. Macready pressed his ear to the door and strained to make out what Dudayev was saying.
Finally, he realized that Dudayev had to be alone, perhaps on a radio or satellite phone. He wasn’t speaking Russian. And though some of what he said sounded similar to Arabic, Macready thought the language might be Chechen. As conjecture turned to certainty, he backed away from the door in alarm.
There was another agenda at play aboard this ship, one that had nothing to do with the laser device the Russians had attached to one of their helicopters. Was Dudayev planning some sort of attack on the ship? Chechen separatists continued to fight a guerilla war for independence from Russia. But Chechnya was home to a lot of ethnic Russians, too. No doubt a lot of Chechens were both loyal to the Russian Federation and served in its military. Dudayev could be one of them, though his name was more common in the Caucasus than in Moscow. And why speak Chechen if he were loyal to the motherland? Behind a closed door, no less.
Macready moved silently down the passageway and out of sickbay. Someone was trying to sabotage the ship. First, a fire near the engine room. Then, an abandon-ship signal that had nearly caused a ship-wide panic. Now, Dudayev speaking Chechen to an empty office in secret. Macready didn’t have much time if he wanted to find proof. As long as Dudayev was in sickbay then the quarters he shared with other medical personnel might be empty. Macready rounded a corner, quickly strode ten paces and rounded another corner putting him on the other side of sickbay. He ducked his head inside the door to berthing for medical personnel—two surgeons, a dentist and an ophthalmologist who also reported to Dudayev. The room was empty.
He stepped in and pulled the door nearly closed, keeping an ear cocked for noises in the passageway. As if he’d hear anything over the constant rumble of the gas turbine engines reverberating through the metal hull and decks. He quickly discerned which bunk and footlocker belonged to Dudayev. With a sharp tug, Macready popped the flimsy lock on the duffel that served as a locker and zipped it open. Not knowing what he was looking for, he rifled through the contents and saw nothing suspicious. He rearranged the contents the way he found them then raised the mattress for a look. Nothing. He checked Dudayev’s shaving kit, too. Frustrated, he took one last look around and slipped out into the passageway.
Chiding himself for expecting to find something incriminating, he headed for the mess to get some tea. He needed the caffeine. Exhaustion and stress made him long for his bed in California, but he couldn’t rest now. Of course Dudayev wouldn’t keep anything that might compromise him in his quarters. Not with the lock broken. Macready would have to check sickbay later if he got the chance. Dudayev had been talking to someone from there, which meant he had a link to the outside world, and didn’t want to use the radio room.
The stakes had just been raised, and the clock was ticking.
Chapter 31
July 27
The night enveloped us, a black velvet pouch, soft and warm as it rustled on our skin. The city sprawled out ahead, lighted buildings marching up and down Seattle’s hills, not Rome, but maybe a 21st Century version of it, Key Arena, the Clink and Safeco Field sitting in for Circus Neronis, Circus Maximus and the Coliseum; our Space Needle a representation of ancient obelisks like the Vaticano brought back from Alexandria by Caligula in 40 A.D. for the spina of the Vatican Circus.
Reyna drove with the windows down, the wind flapping tresses of dark hair that framed her face like a raven’s wings. She held her lower lip in her teeth, concentrating on wheeling the rental through the sparse traffic, relying on the accelerator and a deft touch rather than on brakes, finding holes where seconds earlier there had been none. She had borrowed my focus, apparently. My mind leapfrogged from lily pad to lily pad, never sitting long enough to admire the view or catch a passing fly.
Anya had been terrified. She knew who’d killed Masha, knew what they were capable of. She was right to be afraid. Now I was, too. The monsters had taken my friends. No, more than that. Chance and Peter were family. Cole was gone. Molly had divorced me. Chance and Peter were all I had left… except for Reyna. I stared at her, at the first face that had turned my head since Molly, my college sweetheart.
“Do you have a plan?” I said loudly over the wind rush.
She glanced at me and turned her eyes back to the road. “The only way they’ll let your friends go is if you negotiate. You have something they want, Blake.”
“So I offer to give it to Dmitrov. What’s to stop him from killing them anyway?”
“Me.” Her glance caught my look of skepticism. “Isn’t that why you called me? Here’s what we do. First, we get the lenses you took off D’Amato. You call Dmitrov and arrange a place to meet for the exchange. I go to Chance and Peter’s and introduce myself to Dmitrov’s friends. When you meet Dmitrov, you let him know that if I don’t hear from you afterward, I kill his goon squad.”
I chewed on it for a mile or so, like masticating a tough piece of jerky. The fresh night air blowing through the car smelled like charred flesh, and the taillights streaming through the night ahead of us reminded me of ribbons of blood. So much of it in the past two years. So much violence, so much death.
“It won’t work for me unless Dmitrov’s dead. I can’t spend my life wondering when he’ll be back, when he’ll decide I’m expendable. Or worse, when he might go after someone I love again, just for fun.” I shook my head. “No, I have to take this guy out. Kill or be killed. And I’ll understand if you don’t want to be a part of it. But if we try to do it by the numbers or involve law enforcement, we’ll lose. These people don’t give a shit about rules. I think a frontal assault is the only way.”
She was quiet for a moment. Without looking at me, she said, “I’ve followed rules all my life. I believe that without rules and a chain of command, we end up with anarchy, chaos. But ever since I met you I seem to be breaking them.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Let me finish. Sometimes the rules have to be broken, or at least bent. Right now I’ll break every rule in the book to get out from under this situation and get my job back. I wouldn’t be here, otherwise. But we both have to live with ourselves afterward. Can you do that?”
I swallowed hard. Sweaty nightmares and a tendency to jump at unexpected sounds no matter how small were better than being dead.
“Are you suggesting we live with each other?” I managed a small smile.
“Don’t start what you can’t finish,” she warned. “Tell you what, ask me again when we’re not planning a hostage rescue.”
“Back to where we started. Do you have a plan?”
She nibbled her lower lip. “Go to your place and get the negotiating chip. We have to find another place for it that’s not right under their noses. We might still need it to negotiate. Then assess the situation upstairs, see how we want to play this.”
Bringing D’Amato’s electronic gear and the weird contact lenses back to my apartment had been dumb. Given the circumstances maybe I could be excused, but the thought of sneaking into my own apartment with Dmitrov and company upstairs made me uncomfortable. I wanted them out of my life, where they couldn’t harm me or my friends anymore. But Reyna was the tactician, so I kept my mouth shut. She had the military experience, the ability to analyze and synthesize the data, not my strong suits. I was good at rote, where I could function on autopilot, or improvisation if I had something to focus on. A lifetime ago that had been a basketball. The stakes had gotten a little higher.
Inside twenty minutes she drove us past the front of the house. Windows blazed with light, but pulled drapes hid any activity within. The street showed no signs of life. Reyna parked a block away from my place and we cut through the alley to the rear of the house. I opened the back gate silently and Reyna slipped through, gun i
n hand. Trailing her to the door, I took out my keys and managed to keep them from jangling. But the sound of the key pushing past the pins in the stiff lock seemed as loud as a drum roll in the still night air. Reyna turned her head, ear cocked for indications we’d been heard. I made a mental note to lubricate the lock with some graphite, but knew that noting such reminders was like drawing on an Etch-A-Sketch.
I followed Reyna inside and reached for the wall switch. She covered my hand with hers. Enough light filtered through the front window from the streetlight in the alley that I clearly saw her shake her head and point at the ceiling. The muffled thud of heavy footsteps sounded overhead. Someone with a heavier tread than either Peter or Chance.
“Where is it?” she mouthed, placing her gun back in her purse.
I moved past her into the kitchen. The water bottle was still in the refrigerator where I left it. I pulled it out and closed the door quickly. I blinked as my eyes readjusted to the darkness, and over Reyna’s shoulder saw a man’s silhouette passing by the window outside. Before I could think to warn Reyna, the door crashed open and a figure filled the opening.
“Not to move, please,” he said in accented English.
Lights over the entry and the small dining table popped on. Grigori stood in the doorway, one hand coming away from the wall switches. A pistol dwarfed in his big fist pointed at me, but he directed his gaze at Reyna.
He arched his eyebrows. “What have we here? Pretty little thing.” The gun swung from me to Reyna and back again. “Weapons, please. Both of you. Slowly.”
I reached behind my back and took the pistol out of my waistband with thumb and forefinger and held it out for him to see. Reyna reached into her purse, causing Grigori to jerk his pistol back in her direction.
“Drop bag now!” he barked.
Reyna took her hand out of her purse, raised it above her head and bent her knees to lay the purse on the floor at her feet. I should have taken a shot while he was distracted, but my hand trembled too much to hold the gun steady, and the thought came too late. He motioned me to put my gun on the floor. I mimicked Reyna, crouching with one hand over my head until I could set the pistol down. He waggled hand holding his gun, backing us away from our weapons and stooped to collect them, first Reyna’s bag, then my gun.
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