by Jack Soren
Tanaka cleared his throat loudly, bringing Jonathan back to Earth. Somehow he found the strength to break away from her and stepped back to look at her again. As he did, all the emotions of their time together on that mission came flooding back. But now there was a different look in her eyes. It had been over twenty years, but it felt like it had only been twenty minutes. And he knew that look all too well; she usually saved it for a Russian she was about to coldcock.
“Now, Maggie. Just hang on—”
Her left cross was just as powerful as ever, and it sent Jonathan rolling down onto the carpet.
“You bloody son of a bitch!” Maggie said.
“Whoa, what the hell?” Tanaka said. “Fahd said you two knew each other. And the kiss. I don’t get it.”
Jonathan sat up and leaned on the bed, touching the back of his hand to the bead of blood in the corner of his mouth, smiling. Now he understood the other reason Fahd had chosen him for this job.
“Oh, we know each other, all right,” Maggie said, her arms crossed. “Now who the hell is Fahd?”
“Captain, I’d like you to meet my fake wife.”
Chapter Nineteen
Russia, 1994
“SITREP, CANARY,” JONATHAN said without taking his eyes away from his night-vision binoculars. His voice-activated throat microphone picked up his larynx vibrations and automatically transmitted them across the expanse of frozen scrub and dirt to the seemingly lifeless hunting shack almost five hundred yards away. It was too far for his liking, but it couldn’t be helped. The ridge of trees where he was crouched was the closest possible cover.
“Almost done, Peddler,” Maggie’s response came back in his radio earpiece. “On the road in five.”
“Copy that, Canary. Don’t dawdle. Ivan’s on his way.” Jonathan actually had no idea if the Russian squad was returning, yet, but he wanted her out of there. Another sign things had gone too far, Jonathan thought.
“Copy that.”
He knew that even if the troops were walking in the door, Maggie wasn’t about to leave until she found what they were looking for. It had been almost three months, and this was the first opportunity they hadn’t blown. He understood perfectly from a logistics point of view, it was the feeling of helplessness he hated. At this distance, if the squad that usually manned the hunting cabin-turned–listening post decided to abruptly return, by the time he covered the distance between him and Maggie, it would be too late. He kept trying to tell himself that he was just being a nervous Nellie, that other concerns were coloring his judgment, but he’d had a bad feeling in his gut since this night had started. On any other op, he would have listened to his gut and called it off, but things were different this time. He couldn’t trust his instinct the way he usually did. And that scared the hell out of him.
Whitewash was a joint American/British mission to remove message codes from a listening post just across the Finnish/Russian border. They were codes the Russians didn’t even know they had, yet, and the mission was meant to keep it that way. Security was light, thanks to most of the Russian forces being busy with their impending Chechen War. Two three-man Russian squads rotated shifts every two weeks. In any other political climate, the data would have been sent to Moscow for analysis months ago, but Ivan’s internal strife had been Britain and America’s gain.
But with the squads living in—and rarely even going outside—the cabin, their only hope for undetected access was during the shift change. A few times there had been as much as an hour when, for whatever reason, the current squad left before their replacements arrived. That’s where Jonathan and Maggie came in.
Posing as newlyweds, they had been sitting across the border in a cabin for months, waiting for their chance. The cabin had a single twenty-inch television with no reception, a laser-disc player, and no discs. Now and then they’d turn on the set just to watch the snow on the screen instead of the snow on the windows for a while. Then on one of their sojourns into the nearby town, Jonathan found a single laser disc for sale in a bin of used books—the complete Star Wars collection. The disc had all three original movies and a ton of interviews and behind-the-scenes documentaries. Jonathan was in heaven. Maggie hated it, but they watched that thing over and over.
By this point, there had actually already been two chances to complete their mission, but they’d missed them.
On the first occurrence, they had been in town getting supplies. To keep up appearances for their cover, they would periodically go into town and be very “newlyweddy” in public — holding hands, laughing loudly, kissing and groping in the little shops. It was typical spy craft and they’d each done it on numerous occasions on other missions with other agents. But after two months of this, the act started to become real. It broke every rule in the book, but they couldn’t seem to help themselves. Nor did they care to try.
The second occurrence happened while they were slick and naked and lost in each other. They didn’t even realize they’d missed a chance until much later when they were exhausted and spent. It took hours explaining—lying—to each of their handlers about what had happened and that the mission was still viable. When they’d both finally succeeded in perpetuating the lie, they’d fallen on each other again to celebrate.
It was a whirlwind romance, and, Jonathan knew, one destined for disaster.
When the current opportunity finally occurred, Maggie was the one to go in, as planned. He was there, among other reasons, because he spoke Finnish. Maggie was fluent in Russian. From the very beginning, she was the one who would have to go into the lion’s den. At the time, he hadn’t thought anything of it. Now, it was killing him.
“Canary, do you have it or . . .” Jonathan’s transmission trailed off as he heard the unmistakable sound of a truck’s gears grinding across the field. Shit.
“Listen carefully, Peddler,” Maggie buzzed in his ear. And he knew. The second she spoke the first word, he knew. Her tone was different—resigned. They were blown.
Jonathan got up, grabbed his rifle and started running, commanding every cell in his body to ignore his training and get his ass across that field. His breath puffed in and out in steamy cold pulses under the new moon overhead. He fell into the crunchy grass and snow hard. Fighting for his wind, he jumped back up and started running again, barely fifty yards from where he’d started.
“Canary. I’m. Inbound,” he managed as he ran. “Find a defensible corner. Just keep firing. I’ll shoot from here and draw their—”
“Peddler.”
“—fire. Should be. Able to draw—”
“Jonathan, don’t.”
“—at least. One of them. Out into. The—”
“AGENT HALL, STOP!”
Jonathan stopped dead at the command, panting, his lungs on fire, his legs aching. He wasn’t even halfway.
“Maggie,” was all he could manage. He knew she was right. He tried to blink his eyes clear as he brought the binoculars up and looked at the tinted pale green horizon. It was the replacements. Five of them, this time. They were laughing and pushing each other like boys on a playground. He could just make out a bottle being passed around. They didn’t know she was there, yet. She had maybe two minutes before they tired of the rough-housing and went inside. If she was lucky, a minute after that before they found her. Then they’d be out of the cabin and searching the area for him. He barely had enough time to run back to cover.
He didn’t move.
“I knew the risk. Not your fault, baby,” Maggie said, her voice would have sounded strong to most people—to him a few months ago. But now he knew her inflections. She was terrified. So was he, for her.
“Jesus, Mags,” Jonathan said, frustration making him punch his hip as he paced back and forth. More than half of him wanted to keep running toward her, but he knew what she was doing. She was letting herself be taken so he could ge
t away. He couldn’t let what might be her last act be in vain.
“We’ll always have Hoth,” she said. Jonathan laughed, despite himself.
“Maggie, I—” A door slam rattled in his ear, and he knew they were inside the cabin.
“Go!”
He turned and ran, ran hard. It would be a miracle if he didn’t catch a bullet in the back. What did hit him hurt more. His earpiece buzzed one final time.
“I love you too.”
Chapter Twenty
Jirojin Maru
11:15 A.M. Local Time
BREATHING SO SHALLOWLY that he was on the verge of passing out, Lew Katchbrow reached up from the murky depths toward the rectangle of light above him. It shimmered like a mirage, and it wouldn’t have surprised Lew at all if it turned out to be a figment of his waterlogged imagination. With what little energy he had left, he kicked and slowly rose toward the light.
After things turned out not to be at all what they appeared on Fahd’s ship, Lew had feared that the Jirojin Maru might not have even had a moon pool, but there it was. Or, at least, he hoped it was there. As he rose, the rectangle grew. The moon pool was about the size of an in-ground backyard swimming pool. Shimmery colors and objects came into focus as he got closer, various cranes and hoists seeming to be the equipment of the day.
And then, finally, his water-wrinkled hand broke the surface and felt air for the first time in hours. With shaking limbs, he managed to pull himself up and over the lip of the moon pool onto the grating of the walkway around the edge. Lying facedown, he reached up and pulled the rebreather out of his mouth and the mask off his head. He lay there panting for a while, only finally moving because he started violently shivering.
They were right, Lew thought. Half a wetsuit was a dumb idea.
He kicked off his fins and shouldered his way out of the oxygen tank before trying to stand up. He fell right back down. Back when he’d first been trained, he would have jumped up and been ready for another dive by now. But there were just too many years between to think about anything except getting warm and finding Jonathan.
Using the ship’s bulkhead wall, he pulled himself up to his feet, steadying himself for a minute until the room stopped swirling.
“Excuse me,” someone said behind him, tapping his shoulder.
Crap. Busted five seconds after getting on board.
Lew turned around, trying to think up an excuse for why he’d just climbed aboard a ship in the middle of nowhere, but his worries were allayed when he saw a well-dressed black man swinging a pipe at his head.
“Wait!”
The pipe slammed into the side of Lew’s head, and he drowned in blackness.
“HANG ON,” JONATHAN said, tapping behind his ear and turning away from the others as if it would help him hear better. It was crazy, but he could have sworn he heard Lew for a second. Wait. He’d said wait. Was that his imagination, or was his conscience taking on Lew’s persona to get his attention? When almost a minute passed with no other sound, Jonathan turned back to Maggie and Tanaka, who were looking at him like he’d just spoken in tongues.
“You all right?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah, yeah, sorry. Thought I heard someone in the hall. You were saying,” Jonathan said, covering. He didn’t feel like explaining who The Custodians were or that he had a communication implant in his neck. From the look on Tanaka’s face, he didn’t want that either.
They had told Tanaka a very brief version of their mission in Russia. Neither one of them really wanted to relive the finer details. Jonathan had been wondering how Tanaka knew Maggie, but as it turned out, he didn’t, really. Once she’d established her cover on the Jirojin Maru as the new security chief, they’d only had passing contact. Fahd was the only reason Tanaka knew anything about Maggie and Jonathan’s history as spies—information exchanged before the communications blackout had gone into effect.
“So she was captured?” Tanaka said. Jonathan and Maggie looked at each other.
“Let’s stay in the present,” Jonathan said.
“This Fahd is your handler?” Maggie said, obviously agreeing with Jonathan. Tanaka had told Maggie that they were with the CIA. She seemed to be buying it. Jonathan hated lying to her, especially after all this time, but it was just more expedient.
“Yeah,” Jonathan said. He needed to get things moving. He understood now why Fahd had sent him in. They needed Maggie on their side, and they didn’t have time to convince her. Fahd was relying on Jonathan’s history with Maggie to get her on board in the shortest possible time. Having her help was a gift, but if he was going to get almost a hundred people inoculated before the gas was released, they didn’t have time for long-winded explanations. “You’re back with MI6?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay, I’m going to assume you were sent in here for the same reason Tanaka was, Dr. Norris’s phone call. Fahd sent me in because of what Tanaka found out.” Jonathan quickly told Maggie what Tanaka had just told him. Then he opened his suitcase and took out a mask and the injector gun, holding them up in front of him.
“We’ve got less than two hours to inject every person on board, or they’re all dead.”
“YOU’RE NOT SURPRISED?” Jonathan asked.
“No, not after what I’ve been seeing around the ship,” Maggie said. She explained about the hold below where she’d found all the crates and heard guards talking about tanks.
Jonathan stepped forward and injected Maggie, partly because he wanted her protected, but he was also curious just how far she trusted him.
“Thanks,” she said quietly.
“You need to be careful,” Tanaka said. “If you double-dose someone, you’re going to do Umi’s job for her.”
“What?” Jonathan said, shaking his head. “Look, this is never going to work. We’d be lucky to get half the ship done without a repeat, if that.”
“So half the people still die? No, that’s unacceptable,” Maggie said. Jonathan could tell she felt the same way about that as he did. It wasn’t an option. Tanaka, on the other hand, was more open-minded.
“They’re still good odds. Half the ship saved is still over fifty people alive,” Tanaka said.
“No. It’s almost fifty people dead,” Jonathan said, tossing the injector gun on the bed. “You might as well walk around and shoot fifty of them in the head. We need to come up with an alternative.”
“And fast,” Maggie said. They only had ninety minutes, now.
“Umi’s going to have the guards escort everyone to their rooms at twelve thirty you said,” Jonathan said to Tanaka.
“Yes, that’s the plan. At first, I thought it was because there wasn’t anywhere on the ship big enough to hold everyone for her welcoming speech, but now I think it has to do with the gas. It would just dissipate on the open, larger decks. The canisters are probably set up to flood all the rooms. More efficient,” Tanaka said.
“Right, and as soon as her speech is over, she’s going to release the gas. That’s not enough time if we wait for them to be in their rooms before we go door-to-door to inoculate them. We need to get them into their rooms sooner. Then we might have a chance of getting through the ship without killing anyone,” Jonathan said.
“You mean killing any passengers. Umi’s guards are going to be everywhere making sure the guests stay put,” Tanaka said. “Until they realize they don’t have enough masks, and Umi isn’t letting them off the ship either.
“How many guards have masks?” Jonathan asked.
“From what I can tell, less than ten,” Tanaka said.
“Great, add another forty corpses to the body count,” Jonathan said. “But before they realize they’re doomed, they’re going to make inoculations even harder to complete.”
“Unless they’re busy elsewhere,” Maggie said. Jonathan looked at her, recognizing th
e gleam in her eye.
“You got something?” he asked.
“Maybe. But first things first,” she said, looking at Tanaka. “She’ll never listen to me, but she’ll listen to you.”
“Huh? Now, wait. I told you, I’m an analyst, not an operative. The only reason I’m here is because I could pilot the ship, and I was close. What you’re talking about—”
Maggie put her hand on Tanaka’s shoulder. “Today everyone is an operative. Besides, look at all the information you’ve gathered on your own.”
“That’s different. All the intercoms go through the communications array on the bridge. All I did was push some buttons and listen.”
Jonathan put his hand on Tanaka’s other shoulder. “I got news for you buddy, that’s called being a spy.”
“Goddamn,” Tanaka said. He looked around the stateroom like he was trying to find a secret door that would take him out of this nightmare. When he didn’t find one, he sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
Jonathan straightened his captain’s hat. “You’re the captain. Just be the captain.”
ALEX CORSAIR HAD been ordering Umi’s guards around for months, both on the ship and when he took some of them down to Ashita with him, so when he asked three of them to come with him, they obeyed without question. He led them down into the hold, where minutes ago he’d carried the intruder’s limp body. Unconscious, the huge, half-naked man weighed more than Alex could have imagined. If not for the exoskeleton suit, he never would have been able to carry him on his own. Which would have meant providing explanations to what he considered expendable henchmen. Thankfully, the body was neatly tucked into Umi’s huge crate, the lid once again securely in place.
“That one,” Alex said, pointing at the crate. “Mrs. Tenabe wants it taken down immediately. You’ll need the exoskeleton suits.”
While they donned their strength-enhancing rigs, Alex lighted a cigarette and thought about what he’d seen in the crate. He’d looked in it before, of course, but it was still a wonder to see them again. No wonder Umi wanted it kept sealed, he thought.