by Ben Coes
The pain in his right knee was getting worse. He shut his eyes and focused on not groaning, lest he alert them where he was hiding.
One of the men charged into the garage. He groped for a light switch, found it, and flipped on the lights. The near bay was empty. In the second bay, a car was raised up in the air.
From his crouching position, Dewey turned his head and searched the wall. Above him, he saw a large black hydraulic lever used to raise and lower the cars.
The first Russian was soon joined by the other.
They both clutched guns. One man flanked left, the other right.
Dewey reached to his calf and removed his combat blade. He held it in his right hand. He watched as one of the men crossed the garage, gun out, searching for him. He kicked over garbage cans, peered behind oil drums, and rummaged along the wall at the far side of the garage.
The second Russian called out something as Dewey squatted against the tool chest, his knee firing sharp bolts of pain up his leg as he tried to keep still and quiet.
Dewey couldn’t see the second man, but he heard his footsteps scuffing the ground as he moved toward him. When he felt a small bump on the other side of the tool chest, he held his breath. Then the front of a running shoe came into view just inches away.
Dewey took one last glance across the garage. The other man was inching toward the mechanic’s well beneath the raised car, looking to see if Dewey had climbed down inside.
Squatting on the concrete floor, Dewey stared up at where he knew the other Russian would emerge. He clutched the knife in his right hand. The gunman took one more step. His face was visible above the tool chest. A second later, the muzzle of his gun appeared just inches away from Dewey’s head.
The other Russian was inching cautiously to the mechanic’s well beneath the raised auto.
“Come on,” muttered Dewey as his eyes returned to the closer man.
His eyes found Dewey. But by the time he could scream, Dewey had sprung up at him, slashing the knife through the air and spearing it into the man’s gut, then pulling it back out and stabbing it into his chest.
Unmuted gunfire shattered the air as the Russian opened fire on Dewey, but Dewey was moving, shielded by the chest. Then he reached over his head and grabbed the hydraulic lever, yanking it just as a slug struck the wall in front of him. The car atop the hoist dropped down on top of the gunman, crushing him.
Dewey pulled his combat blade from the dead Russian’s chest. He searched his pockets and removed a cell phone. Then he moved to the door.
Outside the garage, the skies had opened up. Rain was cascading down in sideways sheets of warm water. Dewey welcomed the water against his skin, cooling him, washing away the blood.
At the front of the Eka store, he retrieved the shopping bags. He walked quickly to the station wagon, hung the nozzle back on the pump, climbed inside, then sped out of the gas station. Soon, he was back on the highway. He fell into a line of slow-moving vehicles almost paralyzed by the violent storm.
Dewey moved to the middle of the front seat, steering with his left hand and using his left foot for the gas and brake.
He reached beneath the seat, found the gun, and set it in the driver’s seat.
He pulled out a bottle of vodka. He unscrewed the cap and took a big gulp, then another, trying to quell the pain now emanating from his knee.
Dewey put the tip of the Gerber against his right knee. He counted to three, then pushed until the blade punctured the trousers. He pushed the blade down the length of his calf, cutting away the pants. He put the knife between his teeth then grabbed the pants and tore them aside, exposing his knee.
The traffic abruptly came to a halt; Dewey hit the brakes just inches from striking the bumper of the car in front of him. He took another swig from the bottle.
In the dim light, Dewey could barely see his knee, only a sheen of wet blood. When he turned on the overhead light, the sight was gruesome. The knee looked pulverized. The skin all around the wound was black and purple, while the wound itself was open and raw.
Dewey poured vodka over the wound, biting hard on the knife handle and letting out a mumbled groan as the pain seared him.
He opened the glove compartment and set the knife on the shelf.
Dewey splashed more vodka on the gash, then pressed a handful of baby wipes against the wound. He reached into the shopping bag and found the fishhook and put it between his teeth. Without looking, he threaded the fishing line through the eyelet, then tied a hangman’s knot.
His eyes were startled by something up ahead. A set of police lights, red and blue, flashed in the distance, coming in the opposite direction, moving recklessly fast. Another cruiser was behind it, then a third. The roar of the sirens couldn’t be heard at first, dulled by the rain, then it grew loud as the vehicles swept by.
Dewey removed the bloody baby wipes and tossed them to the floor. He poured more vodka into the wound.
He reached inside the bag for the box of cornstarch. He ripped off the top and placed it on the shelf. Then he found the bag of salt. He set it between his legs, stabbing the top with the knife and ripping it open.
Dewey looked up at the road. The blurry line of lights went straight for as far as he could see. He slowed down a bit, then looked back at his knee. He took a sip, then poured the rest of the vodka into the wound. He poured cornstarch into the gash, then slammed his fist against it, pounding the cornstarch into every possible part of the wound to absorb the blood.
He glanced up at the road, making sure he was still in the line of traffic.
Dewey took a big handful of salt and sprinkled it down into the wound, screaming as the salt cauterized the blood. The pain was like fire. It branched out like electricity, shooting through every part of him. Tears rolled involuntarily down his cheeks. He pounded the salt in, then repeated it, pouring more in, pounding, until the bleeding stopped.
With baby wipes, he cleaned away the excess salt and cornstarch.
He paused for several minutes, allowing himself to get past the pain of the salt. When it had settled into a dull ache, he took the fishhook, glanced at the car in front of him, then looked down and stuck the tip through the healthy skin above the edge of the wound. He stuck his index finger into the wound and worked it up, under the skin, toward the hook. When he found it, he gripped the end and pulled it through, along with the line. He put the hook through the skin on the other side of the wound, pulling it through. He pulled the line semitight, being careful not to rip the skin.
Dewey methodically moved the hook between the edges of the gash, sewing the skin back together.
When he was done, he cut the line and tied the ends together. He wrapped the bandage around the wound, then wrapped duct tape around the bandage.
He moved back into the driver’s seat. He lit a cigarette, opening the window slightly, despite the rain.
A large green traffic sign was illuminated above the road ahead:
Moskva 300 km
66
INVERNESS AIRPORT
INVERNESS, SCOTLAND
A light blue Bombardier Global 6000 cut down out of the gray clouds, then dropped in a tight line to the ground, coming to a thunderous stop on the tarmac at Inverness Airport. Legally speaking, the runway was too short for the jet. Its occupant, however, insisted on making the landing anyway, and when Derek Chalmers insisted on something, it usually ended up happening.
The MI6-owned jet taxied to a stop near the small one-story terminal.
Chalmers sat in a tan captain’s chair looking at an iPad. He was reading the files detailing everything Langley knew about Cloud, including photos and up-to-the-minute transcripts from the USS Hartford. There was also extensive biographical research on Katya Basaeyev.
Something troubled him, though he didn’t know what it was. Obviously, Cloud was a despicable figure, but it was the dancer who made him uneasy. How could she not have known?
“Director Chalmers?”
Chalmers looked
up at the pilot.
“Yes, Brantley.”
“They’re on approach, sir.”
Chalmers nodded.
“Thank you.”
Chalmers turned off the device, then looked to a plain-looking middle-aged woman seated directly in front of him, Victoria Smythson, MI6’s head of clandestine operations. Though Chalmers was there to interrogate Katya, he thought whatever came out of the interrogation might spill into the need for mission work.
“Is Banchor Cottage ready?” asked Chalmers.
“Yes,” said Smythson. “The pharma squad is in place.”
“Who is it?”
“Dr. Robbins.”
“I thought he retired?”
“To Aberdeen,” said Smythson. “He agreed to help out.”
“I’d like not to have to use pharmaceuticals on her,” said Chalmers. “You read the files. What do you think?”
“You have a nuclear bomb en route to the United States,” said Smythson. “Less than three days until it arrives. If it were up to me, I’d have an IV in her arm the moment she walks through the door at Banchor.”
Chalmers stared at Smythson but didn’t react. He looked out the window as a dark green Range Rover sped across the runway and stopped next to the jet. A moment later came the low-pitched, high-decibel whirr of the Osprey V-22 on approach.
Chalmers stood and pulled on a dark blue Burberry trench coat. He climbed down out of the Bombardier, trailed by Smythson, as the Osprey roared out of the clouds and then seemed to stop overhead as its rotors suddenly tilted upward. The plane descended like a helicopter to the tarmac a few feet away.
Chalmers and Smythson walked beneath the tail of the plane, out of the rain. A moment later, the loading ramp at the back of the Osprey lowered. Standing at the top of the ramp, soldiers on both sides of her, was Katya.
Chalmers nodded to one of the soldiers, who said something to Katya. Slowly, she stepped down the ramp. She had on a pair of black Gore-Tex technical pants along with a gray sweatshirt. Her wrists and ankles were both cuffed. She was tiny, her skin as dark as leather, her eyes strikingly blue.
When she got to the bottom of the ramp, she glanced around the desolate airport as rain poured down. Seeing little of interest, she stepped before Chalmers and looked up at him, then at Smythson.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“Scotland.”
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“Know what?”
“That he was going to kill the Americans. He’s not a terrorist. You have to believe me.”
Chalmers reached into his pocket. He pulled out his cell phone and showed her a photo of a room littered with corpses enclosed by walls splattered in blood. It was a photo from the Vietnamese scow. She gasped. She shook her head and closed her eyes, as if she could will away the memory.
Chalmers looked at Smythson.
“Let’s go,” he said.
67
ELEKTROSTAL
The icon flashed again on Cloud’s computer screen and he double-clicked it.
Cloud had stopped one of the CIA agents—Brainard—in Minsk. Fairweather, the other CIA man on his way to Moscow, was all that remained.
The agent had made a phone call from the Poznań–Ławica Airport in Poland. Cloud examined the time stamp on the call. It had been made more than an hour ago.
Cloud searched for flights between Poland and Moscow. There were none left. When he searched for earlier flights the CIA agent might’ve been able to take, there was one, an Aeroflot flight at 10:58 P.M.
It was now midnight.
Cloud scanned the Aeroflot flight manifest but was unable to find any record of Fairweather getting on a plane. When he ran the passenger manifest against the Aeroflot customer database, there was nothing suspicious. All the passengers on the flight were either Russian or Polish. Every passenger had flown Aeroflot on numerous previous occasions.
Cloud went to a Web site that tracked flights and entered the Aeroflot flight number. The plane was slightly ahead of schedule. It would land in fifteen minutes.
“How did I miss it?” he asked.
Cloud shut his eyes, remembering the day more than a decade before when he helped Al-Medi hack into U.S. air defenses on 9/11. The day he helped scramble radar at Griffiss Air Force Base and convince the men and women at Northeast Air Defense Sector that American Airlines flight 11 was twenty miles away, even as it bore down on the north tower of the World Trade Center.
It was the day Cloud understood how easy it was to use his computer to bring evil on an unsuspecting world.
When he opened his eyes, Sascha was staring at him.
“Is everything okay?” Sascha asked.
Cloud said nothing.
In 2001, Cloud was shocked to find that data signals between airplanes and control towers in the United States were for the most part unencrypted. Once he succeeded in hacking into the Griffiss tower through their ERP, he altered altitude, latitude, and longitude settings emitted by the plane, fooling everyone until it was too late.
Cloud had hacked into Aeroflot many years before, but altering the plane’s signals to the Moscow tower was the opposite of what he needed to do. Right now, he needed to fool the Aeroflot pilot, not the control tower.
“State ATM,” said Cloud, referring to the agency that controlled Russia’s airspace, similar to the FAA. “Have you ever attempted to penetrate it?”
“No,” said Sascha. “But I know someone who did.”
“Is it someone you trust?”
Sascha considered the question, then shrugged.
“Yes.”
“I need a trapdoor into ATM. I need it immediately.”
68
MISSION THEATER TARGA
LANGLEY
Polk hung up his phone after getting the update from Carter, his Minsk chief of station. He looked around the operations room.
“Brainard got blown. They stopped him at the airport.”
Polk was seated at a workstation inside the dimly lit command center. The room was half empty. In front of him was a carton of chicken fried rice, which he hadn’t touched. All he could do was stare at the screen on the front wall of the room. It showed a digital map tracking Tom Fairweather’s flight from Poland to Moscow.
“Ten minutes out,” said a case officer. “They’re on the final approach.”
“Check activity at the airport,” said Polk. “FSB and Customs. See if there’ve been any threat elevations.”
“No Customs flags in the past two hours, other than the one on Dewey. Ditto with FSB.”
Polk nodded, then picked up a bottle of Gatorade and took a sip.
“Come on, Tommy,” he whispered.
Brainard getting stopped by Belarus Customs angered Polk. Having a hacker inside the Agency was like running a race with a thousand-pound weight tied around your neck. Though no evidence existed, it was clear that Cloud had been behind Brainard’s removal from the Belavia flight. Polk had already spoken twice to the U.S. ambassador to Belarus about getting Brainard out of jail. Fairweather was different, and Polk felt more confident. The passport Fairweather used was purchased from a corrupt GRU administrator, its numbers clean and designed to withstand a so-called database back-pull at the Russian border.
Polk stood up, clutching the bottle of Gatorade. He stepped to the front of the room, just a few feet from the screen, watching as the flashing red dot—Aeroflot Flight 43—drew closer and closer to Moscow.
“Thirty seconds, sir.”
Polk adjusted his glasses. He knew the radar could sometimes show inaccuracies, and yet what he was seeing made a cold shiver run through his body.
He turned back to the case officer.
“They’re coming in low,” he said. “Are they too far left?”
The case officer highlighted the flight path. Suddenly, the plasma screen view zoomed close up. Lights on the plane’s wings became visible against the dark ground below. Digital numbers—representing speed and altitude—scr
olled above the plane in bright red.
“They’re not going to make it, sir.”
* * *
Fairweather was asleep when the plane’s alarm went off. It was a piercing, high-pitched siren that shrieked so loudly it caused him to lurch involuntarily forward.
Then came the recorded words of a woman, first in Russian, then Polish, repeated over and over: “Emergency. Assume crash position.”
Screams engulfed the jet. Several passengers stood up, desperate to run somewhere, to escape, even though there was no place to go. Panic and terror consumed the plane. A man ran by Fairweather for the front of the plane. Several people opened overhead bins, grabbing their belongings.
Fairweather tried to remain calm. He looked out the window. They were flying just barely above a residential neighborhood. The lights of one home were so close he could see the colored movement of a TV show in an upstairs bedroom.
His eyes scanned. In the distance, at least half a mile away, he saw the airport’s strobe lights pulsing halogen into the night.
As the siren continued to wail, as the recorded voice repeated its warnings, as screams seemed to reach a crescendo, he felt a hand on his arm gently touching him. He turned. A young woman was clutching her child, her face stricken with fear.
“Is it going to be all right?” she whispered, in Polish.
Slowly, Fairweather nodded.
“Yes,” he said, willing himself to smile as he heard the sound of treetops brushing against the fuselage. “Everything is going to be fine.”
69
LANGLEY
Gant stepped through one of several back doors at CIA headquarters, swiping his badge. Rather than return to his office on the fourth floor, he went straight ahead and entered the Agency’s day-care center.
A woman was seated in a cubicle across from the glass-walled nursery, which was filled with children.
On seeing Gant, she stood up.
“Hello, Mr. Gant.”
Gant looked at her badge.
“Anne, is there an empty office where I can make a phone call? I don’t have time to run upstairs.”