“This is Condor Two, go ahead, Condor Main.”
“We have a data file to transmit from JITF-CT.”
Yes! The lieutenant had come through!
“Go ahead, Condor Main.”
“Please switch from voice to data mode, Condor Two, and advise on receipt.”
Anna made the switch, silently giving thanks for the technology that made it possible to zip files up to satellites, across oceans and down again with the speed of light. Or sound. Or whatever.
Mere seconds later she’d saved the file to her phone’s encrypted memory board and confirmed receipt. When she tried to read the contents, though, the print was too minuscule to decipher without a magnifying glass.
“Dammit.”
Frustrated, she took the phone to the desk set against one wall of the sitting room. Maybe she could print the file using a larger font.
Like the rest of the suite, the desk offered a blend of gilded antique and high tech. Not that high tech, unfortunately. The combination fax/scanner/printer on the credenza behind the desk didn’t do wireless, and a search of all drawers failed to produce a USB cord.
“Great. Just great!”
The USB cord had probably gone home in the briefcase of the last exec who’d stayed in this suite. Or whatever high-priced companion he’d brought up here with him. Anxious to decipher the data, she picked up the house phone and punched the button for the business center.
“How may I help you, Mr. Carmichael?”
“This is Mrs. Carmichael,” Anna corrected with no stumble this time. She was getting used to the title. “I need to print a document from my cell phone, but I can’t find a USB cord for the printer.”
“It should be in the top center drawer of the credenza, madam.”
“It’s not.”
“I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ll search out a replacement and send it up to you.”
Anna shifted her cell phone from hand to hand. Impatience bit at her. The transmission could contain vital data that should be shared with Yallin.
“That’s okay,” she told the business center manager. “We’ll come down there.”
She hurried back into the bedroom and shoved her feet into the high-tops she’d worn for most of the trip. When she reentered Duke’s bathroom, he greeted her with a smile.
“Change your mind about scrubbing my back?” he called over the whoosh of the shower.
“You wish!” She held up the phone for him to see. “The JITF data just came through. We need to review it.”
“Okay.” He reached for the miniature shampoo bottle supplied by the hotel. “Give me five minutes.”
She returned to the sitting room and paced. After two minutes, she’d almost decided to make a quick jog down to the business center herself. At three, another buzz stopped her in her tracks.
It was the doorbell this time. The business center must have sent up a USB connector, after all. She detoured to the door but wasn’t about to open it until she verified who stood on the other side. She put her eye to the peephole and got a distorted view of bulging eyeballs topped by fuzzy white eyebrows.
They identified the visitor immediately as the testy civilian bureaucrat from this morning’s meeting. Frowning, Anna unlocked the dead bolt but kept the chain guard on.
“Yes?”
The man was beet-red and sweating profusely. She couldn’t keep from staring at his protruding eyeballs. They looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets at any minute.
“I...I have uncovered some disturbing information about the accident,” he stuttered. “Special Agent Yallin said I should come speak with you about it.”
“Okay. Just a sec.”
She closed the door and released the chain, then opened the heavy oak panel again. If the man in the hallway was red-faced and sweating before, he looked like he was about to stroke out now. She reached instinctively for his arm.
“Are you okay?”
Before he could answer, a dark shadow separated from the wall beside the door. There was a glint of steel, and a flash of terror on the fat official’s face. In the next instant, a gaping maw opened in his throat.
Blood gushed like an uncapped oil well, splattering Anna’s face and chest. Before she could stumble back, before the gurgling bureaucrat had even sunk to his knees, a brutal hand was buried in her hair and a bloodied blade tip cut into the underside of her jaw.
“Don’t scream!” Varno dug the tip deeper, slicing skin, drawing blood. “Don’t scream, or I will kill you.”
Her head was angled so far back that all she could see were his eyes. They turned her bowels to water.
“You’ll...” She hated herself for whimpering. “You’ll kill me anyway.”
“Not unless you force me to. You’re more valuable alive than dead right now. Do as I say, and you may survive.”
She didn’t believe him. Not for a second. But she fought to breathe through her terror and listened desperately to the sounds from Duke’s bathroom. She had to warn him. Had to...
“Let’s go.”
In a lightning move, Varno switched his brutal grip from her hair to her arm. The knife was still there, pressed against her jugular, as she stumbled over the corpse now sprawled half-in, half-out of the suite.
Chapter 10
Like most combat veterans, Duke had racked up too many memories that still gave him night sweats. He’d seen men blown apart, others set ablaze. Heard them cry for their mothers, their wives, their God. He’d edged too close to the fine line between interrogation and torture to extract desperately needed information from a sobbing, terrified prisoner. On one grim occasion, he’d called in an air strike, then watched in horror when the NATO pilot missed his grid and splashed his 500-pounder less than two hundred meters from an Afghan village school.
Those soul-searing moments would always remain etched on his psyche. So would the moment he strolled out of the bathroom and spotted the blood-drenched body sprawled across the threshold of their suite. It wasn’t Anna. That registered instantly, and he was through the door almost before his heart kick-started again. There was no one in the hall. No sound, no movement, no dark smears in the plush carpet or bloody handprints on the wall. One of the digital displays above the elevators was blank, indicating no movement. The other was stopped at lobby level.
Duke raced the few yards to the emergency exit. Slamming the crash bar, he burst into the concrete-block stairwell. With a vicious effort of will, he shut down the fury and fear roaring in his ears and forced himself to listen. Just listen. No footsteps thudding up or clattering down. No gasps or grunts or harsh breathing other than his own.
Varno, he acknowledged savagely. It had to be Varno or his accomplices. Wherever they’d taken Anna, though, he knew in his gut it wasn’t to another floor or room in the hotel. They had to anticipate that the entire building would go into lockdown while the police conducted a room-to-room search. No, they had to get her out of the hotel, and fast.
Acting on pure instinct, he leaped down four flights of stairs. A crash door opened onto each floor, then into the lobby.
He bypassed the lobby exit with only a moment’s hesitation. They wouldn’t take her through the front entrance. Too many eyes, too much risk someone might see her terror, smell her fear. There had to be another exit, some way for guests to escape in the event of fire or evacuation.
There was. Another half flight down, a crash door opened onto a back alley. It was permeated with the stink of overflowing Dumpsters. The cars parked bumper to bumper along one side of the narrow passageway left barely enough space for other vehicles to squeeze by.
None were trying to at the moment. No delivery vans, no garbage trucks, no drivers attempting to un-wedge their parked car. But Duke did find two items that got his heart pumping pure adrenaline. The first was a small greenish splotch of coolant, still wet and shimmering, which suggested a vehicle had idled right outside the exit recently. Very recently. The second was the surveillance camera m
ounted on the hotel’s elaborate cornice. Its eye pointed straight down the alley.
Duke raced back up the half flight and hit the lobby at a dead run. Shoving past a couple waiting to check in, he barked at the receptionist.
“Where’s your security office?”
Startled, she gave the man she’d been helping an apologetic glance before addressing Duke.
“I’m sorry, sir, if you’ll just let me finish with this gentleman, I’ll be happy to...”
“Your security office! Where is it?”
“Uh, down the hall and to the left.” She reached for her phone. “I’ll call the security officer on duty, shall I, and ask him to come...”
Duke left her with the phone halfway to her ear.
The hotel’s security center sat hunched between the business office and the exercise room. Duke might have missed it completely if not for the discreet placard lettered in English, Japanese and Cyrillic. Inside the office was a reception area with a desk and comfortable chairs for guests coming in to report a lost watch or stolen credit card. Behind that was a glass partition separating the reception area from the flickering, black-and-white world of surveillance monitors.
The security officer on duty looked to be in his late thirties, with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand and a bored look on his thin, almost cadaverous, face.
“May I help...?”
Duke shoved past him and aimed for the area behind the partitions. His narrowed eyes skimmed the bank of monitors stacked six to a row.
“Sir!”
“David Carmichael,” he rapped out in answer to the indignant protest. “Suite 306. My wife’s been kidnapped.”
“Wh-what do you say?”
“There.”
He jabbed a finger at a still view of the hall leading to their suite. Their room was halfway down the hall. The open door showed clearly the lower half of a crumpled body.
“If you’d been doing your damned job you might have noticed you have a dead man on your hands.”
The security officer gaped at the screen, goggle-eyed. His bony fingers clamped down on his sandwich. A pinkish goo of some kind of sauce mixed with mayonnaise sprayed across his sleeve and just missed the business card Duke whipped out of his wallet.
“Call this number. Tell Special Agent Yallin we need him here, fast. Then run the disk for the security camera covering the alley behind the hotel.”
* * *
Yallin arrived less than twenty minutes later. By then a small phalanx of police and hotel security personnel had converged on the hotel. Half of them had treated Duke with naked suspicion. The other half was still trying to understand just how this big, burly American and his missing wife were tied to the dead official.
Yallin cut them all off with a curt order in Ukrainian. His shoulders were rigid under his blue-gray uniform, his Tartar eyes as black as ice as he faced Duke.
“What has happened?”
“I was in the shower.”
Duke kept his reply as hard and flat as Yallin’s expression. He’d rack up the self-recriminations later. Right now he didn’t have the luxury of excoriating himself for the extra few minutes he’d taken to soap down.
“Anna must have answered the door because the chain’s off and there’s no sign of forced entry. I’m guessing she recognized him....”
Duke gestured to the view still up on one of the screens. The body hadn’t been moved, but another small troop of uniformed and plain-clothed officials had taken up positions in the hall.
“Who is it?”
“The civilian who attended our meeting this morning. The one who got so hot at the idea his office would take bribes.”
The Ukrainian special agent muttered something in his native language. The tone didn’t convey a sense of regret for the bureaucrat’s demise.
“His throat’s slashed,” Duke continued. “It couldn’t have happened more than four or five minutes before I found him.”
“And Ms. Solkov?”
“Gone.”
“In four or five minutes? How is that possible?”
“Like this.”
He motioned to the bone-thin security officer. Still shaken by everything that had come down on him in the past half hour, the scarecrow keyed his console. His equipment wasn’t exactly high-tech but it was good enough to capture a grainy, black-and-white image of the small delivery van idling in the alley. Iridescent waves of exhaust rose from the van’s tailpipe. Rust streaked its roof. Caked-on mud obscured its front tag.
Although Duke had played and replayed the next sequence a half-dozen times, his stomach still knotted when the hotel’s back door kicked open. There was Anna, a thin stream of blood trickling from the underside of her chin, staining her white tank top. Varno had her arm twisted at a vicious angle behind her back and a five-inch blade at her throat.
The van’s back door opened. Varno shoved Anna inside and climbed in behind her. The door slammed. The van jerked into motion, then tore down the alley with reckless disregard for the Dumpsters and vehicles crowding it on either side.
“Run that again,” Yallin ordered.
He leaned into the monitor, scrutinizing the sequence with narrowed eyes, and had them freeze on the frame just before the van took off.
“The driver is a woman.”
“Yeah.” His jaw clenching, Duke stared the pale, blurred oval. “Varno’s weapon of choice.”
His already knotted stomach took another twist. An image filled his mind of the women who’d carried out the Moscow bombing. He pictured Anna draped in a heavy black burka. Her face was all but obscured by a veil. Only her eyes showed, flat and dulled by drugs as she walked into a crowded metro station wearing a heavy belt packed with explosives under the concealing black folds.
No! He couldn’t go there. Not when there was a hope they could run Varno to ground before the son of a bitch turned Anna into one of his instruments.
“Ms. Solkov received some data just before she was abducted,” he growled.
Yallin looked up sharply. “Concerning?”
“The other men killed or hurt in the accident that took Elena’s husband.”
The special agent’s eyes sharpened to dark lasers. “I’ve requested the same data but have not yet received it. How...?” He scrubbed a hand over his chin. “Never mind. Some things are best not explained. Where is this information now?”
“On Anna’s phone.”
“Her phone?” The look of a hunter spotting its prey lit Yallin’s face. “She has it with her?”
“No. It’s upstairs in our suite.”
Duke watched the agent’s hope of tracking the signal die with the same visceral disappointment he’d experienced when he’d tasked the 352nd to run an emergency trace.
“I’ve had the data fed in here, however.”
He passed Yallin the printed version of the DIA transmission. The single page contained the name and nationality of the second man who died in the explosion that killed Elena’s husband. It also listed the other five workers injured in the blast.
“The second victim was Vietnamese,” Yallin noted with a shake of his head. “Brought in by Russia to slave on their pipeline. He was probably paid no more than a hundred rubles a day. Even if his papers were in order, it will take time to track down his survivors.”
“Several others, however, live in Odessa. Including this one.”
Duke pointed to a name midlist. The brief entry indicated the injured man was twenty-six and recently married. Also that the blast had left him paralyzed from the neck down.
“Young, just married, completely incapacitated. Enough to turn any bride vengeful.”
“Our people will talk to her and the others on this list. They will also trace the van,” Yallin said with a glance at the vehicle still frozen on the screen. “In the meantime...”
“In the meantime?”
“All we can do is wait.”
“I’m not waiting!”
The Ukrainian agent stiffened. He starte
d to retort, caught himself and issued a curt order to the hotel’s security officer. The man left the screen room without a word.
“I understand your frustration, Sergeant Carmichael,” Yallin said carefully. “I share it.”
“Then you know I’m not about to sit around on my ass while you take over this hunt.”
“I’m afraid that is not your choice. My government has forwarded a request to yours to terminate Operation Condor. Your covert mission is over. And now that an American citizen has been kidnapped, it becomes even more imperative that we employ every resource within the Ministry of Internal Affairs to recover her safely. We cannot do that covertly.”
“Yeah, that’s obvious.”
The sarcastic drawl raised a flush on Yallin’s high cheekbones. “We will, of course, keep you informed and...”
“Informed, hell!”
Duke had had enough. The man facing him might hold officer’s rank. He might have the power of his government behind him. He might even be right about the termination of Operation Condor.
None of that meant squat to Duke. With or without orders, with or without either government’s approval, he was not standing down until Anna was safe.
“Listen to me, Special Agent Yallin. We work together on this or we work alone. Either way, I’m going to track Varno to his lair. And when I do, he’s a dead man.”
Chapter 11
“You’re a dead man.”
Anna shifted on the backless workbench. Plastic restraints cut into her wrists and tethered her arms around a rusted pipe that ran from the cement floor into the ceiling. Dried blood caked the underside of her chin and neck. Her eyes were locked on Varno as he entered through a side door and crossed the cluttered shop.
“You know that, right?” Her lip curled in what she hoped was a credible show of disdain. “If you don’t let me go, my husband will hunt you down like a rabid dog and put a bullet between your eyes.”
She didn’t have any problem with husband in this instance. Any weapon she could use against this killer, she would.
Course of Action: Out of Harm's WayAny Time, Any Place Page 20