Using her phone, Emma accessed the schematic drawings showing the visual feeds into the central processing facility. One fiber optic delivered all the images from the IAEA’s cameras. Another delivered the pictures from the plant’s own cameras. It was essential that no one see her on her rounds inside the complex. To that end, she cut the cable delivering the feed from the plant’s own cameras and spliced it onto that delivering the feed from the IAEA’s cameras. A check of the monitors confirmed that the pictures mirrored each other perfectly.
Next she froze the image processor so that the pictures were no longer being broadcast live but showed only a single static moment. Emma ran her eyes over the monitors for telltale signs indicating that the picture was a snapshot. In only two of the monitors were there human beings. One camera was aimed at the security guard manning the post at the outer perimeter fence. As usual, he was seated inside his booth. He might sit like this for long periods at a stretch. Nothing odd there.
The other feed showed the reactor control room, where four men stood in front of a giant bank of instruments. This was more problematic. One only needed to study the picture for ten seconds to begin willing them to move. It wasn’t natural for four individuals to stand frozen like mannequins. Still, there were 148 other monitors to study.
It came down to time. Emma couldn’t risk resetting the pictures. It would have to do as it was.
Emma opened the door and returned to Grégoire’s office. Hurriedly she dumped her tools back into her purse. A moment later the door opened and Alain Royale returned, carrying a pair of notebooks under one arm. “The manifests,” he said.
“Put them on the table,” said Emma.
Royale did as he was told.
“Still no word from M. Grégoire?” asked Emma.
Royale shook his head.
“I hope you understand that I’m not allowed to wait,” said Emma, in a sufficiently authoritative voice. “I like my inspections to begin promptly at shift change. I can’t have word getting out that I’m on site.”
“I’m sure he’ll be in any moment. I know he would want to say hello.”
“We’ll have ample opportunity to discuss my findings once I complete my inspection. In the interim, I’m sure he knows how to find me should he be so inclined.”
Alain Royale handed Emma her site badge, instructing her to wear it around her neck at all times. “And here is your key card. Swipe it downward quickly and the doors will unlock. Is there anything else?”
“No, thank you,” said Emma, slipping the key card into her pocket. Out the window, she had a clear view of the large reactor dome, and beyond it the Atlantic Ocean. “This will be more than enough.”
69
In London, sunrise came two minutes earlier, at 5:40 Greenwich Mean Time. In room 619 of the intensive care floor of St. Catharine’s Hospital, the first shaft of light dodged the drawn curtains and fell squarely upon the brow of the sleeping patient. He was a hard-looking man, with tousled black hair, a Roman nose, and a dense stubble darkening his hollow cheeks. In repose he maintained a formidable presence, a coiled animal-like tension that gave the impression that at any moment he might leap from the bed and attack. Everyone on the floor knew of the man and his reputation. They were right to be frightened.
But the patient did not move. Even as the minutes passed and the sunlight grew brighter and slanted across his eyes, he did not stir. For almost ninety-six hours, Russian Interior Minister Igor Ivanov had lain in a coma. Though he bore no visible wounds, the examining neurologists all agreed that he had suffered a terrible trauma caused by the concussive wave of the bomb blast that had killed a number of his countrymen. By now the patient’s vital signs had returned to normal. His blood pressure measured an admirable 120 over 70. His heart rate was an athlete’s 58 beats per minute. His bloodwork showed his cholesterol to be below average and his testosterone to be far above it. The same physicians concurred that it was the patient’s excellent level of fitness that had allowed him to survive such a heinous injury in the first place and kept him alive ever since.
A nurse entered the room and began her daily ministrations. She drew the curtains, lifted the patient’s head and plumped his pillow, then checked his urine bag and made sure that his catheter was properly in place. As usual, she lingered on this last task a second or two longer than was necessary. She was a devout Catholic girl, and though she had worked in the hospital for over a year now, she had rarely seen such a gifted endowment. She smiled, ashamed of herself, but only a little.
It was then that the frighteningly powerful hand grasped her arm and she cried out meekly.
“Next time,” said Igor Ivanov, his voice remarkably strong despite the hours of sleep, “please knock before you enter. And if you want to have a look, just ask.”
The nurse covered her mouth and fled the room.
Ivanov set his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. The mild exertion had left him with a headache and surprisingly fatigued. Still, he could already feel strength returning to his limbs. In a few hours he would be bristling with impatience. He decided that by six o’clock that evening, he would be on a plane to Moscow.
The doctors were wrong about what had kept him alive and prevented him from drifting ever after in a coma’s eternal netherworld. It was not his fitness. It was anger.
Igor Ivanov knew well and good who had done this to him.
And he wanted payback.
70
They formed lines on both sides of the hallway, each with six policemen clad in assault gear, backs to the wall, with Graves and Ford pulling up the rear. Black Panthers were permitted to carry weapons of their own choosing. The first man in line clutched a Benelli semiautomatic twelve-gauge shotgun. The second followed with a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. The strategy was blast and spray. And God help whoever was on the receiving end. The rest of them held pistols at the ready to fire on more precise targets.
The captain gave the signal to go forward. A policeman carrying a Remington Wingmaster ran down the hall and aimed the rifle at the door. The captain raised his gloved hand. His fingers counted down: five … four … three … two …
“Ready?” whispered Kate.
Graves nodded.
An earsplitting bang rent the hallway. The door careened off its hinges and slammed to the floor. There was a flash and a concussive change in the air pressure as the stun grenades exploded. One, then another. Smoke flooded the hallway. By now Graves was running into the apartment, his pistol extended, eyes watering. Someone was shouting, first in French, then in a language he couldn’t understand.
“Arrêtez! Arrêtez! Bougez pas!”
Shotgun blasts fired in rapid succession. Graves’s ears rang painfully. He registered the apartment in static frames. A run-down kitchen. A living room with threadbare furniture. The crate of machine guns. And another larger crate next to it, with the words “Property of Italian Armed Forces. Semtex-H. 50 kg.” It was the Semtex that Emma Ransom had stolen from the barracks near Rome. He heard a scream. He turned a corner to see a slew of black uniforms tackling someone to the ground. It was a man with gray hair, and he struggled fiercely, shouting something in a language Graves recognized but at first did not understand.
A staccato burst from an automatic weapon forced Graves to spin and look behind him. Pieces of drywall scattered through the air, clipping his face and neck. He ducked instinctively. The policeman next to him went down, half his face blown away. Graves leveled his gun at a woman who stood facing him, an AK-47 held in her hands. He squeezed the trigger, but before he could get off more than one round, there was another blast and another, and the woman was blown across the room and slammed high onto a wall. Graves looked and saw the French police captain, the Benelli shotgun pressed to his cheek.
And then, louder than all that had gone before, silence.
Seven seconds had passed.
Graves walked to the woman. She was dead, effectively sawed in half by the shotgun’s vicious barrage
. He noted that a single bullet had pierced the center of her forehead. It was not Emma Ransom.
He walked into the bedroom.
A man lay facedown on the floor, his hands cuffed behind him. He was dressed in a gray suit; his hair was the color of steel wool. It’s him, thought Graves. Shvets.
“Turn him over,” he said.
A policeman rolled the body over and Graves swore very loudly.
At first glance, the man was of Middle Eastern extraction. He let loose with a violent protest in the suddenly familiar language. It was Farsi.
“He says they’re Iranian diplomats,” translated Graves. “You can find their passports in the bedroom.”
A moment later another policeman emerged from the back room, clutching two diplomatic passports from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Graves opened the first. It identified the holder as Pasha Gozhi and stated that he was attached to the Foreign Ministry. “Mr. Gozhi,” he said, “what are you doing with a crate of machine guns and plastic explosives in your apartment?”
“I wish to see the ambassador,” he said. “I have diplomatic immunity.
You have no right to break in. Where is my wife? Anisha! Are you all right?”
Graves looked at Kate. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “We’re royally screwed.”
Kate placed a hand on his arm. “Maybe we’ll get that reading on the location of the phone call Emma Ransom placed last night.”
“Yeah,” said Graves, without hope. “Maybe.”
71
From his flat on the fourth floor of a building half a block away, Sergei Shvets watched in horror as the Black Panthers of the French RAID prepared to assault the Iranian safe house he’d used two nights earlier. There was no time to wonder how they had found it. A leak. A slip-up. A spy nestled close to his breast. A postmortem of the operation would locate the source. Right now, there was only time to act. Time to ensure that his months of careful planning did not result in unmitigated disaster. Reaching for his phone, he dialed a number to be used by him and him alone.
“What is it, Papi?” asked Emma Ransom.
“Where are you?”
“Inside the CPF. We’re cutting it close. There was an extra security presence at the main gate.”
“We had to expect as much once the Brits discovered the real reason for the bombing.”
“Then why are you calling?”
“Nothing for you to concern yourself with. Just hurry and get the job done as quickly as possible. I’ll be waiting at the airport.”
“Keep the engines running.”
“You have my word. Now go.”
Shvets hung up the phone and scrambled into the bedroom, where he gathered his clothing and stuffed it into his overnight bag. Using a damp cloth, he rubbed down the lamps, light switches, the television remote control, and any appliances in the kitchen he might have touched. Satisfied that the flat was clean, he put on his coat, slipped his pistol into his waist holster, and put on his jacket. He checked his watch. It was nearly six-thirty Just then there came an eruption of gunfire from outside, a succession of bangs that crackled like a cap gun. Shvets hurried to the window. The uniforms were nowhere in sight, and a crowd had gathered on the corner. There was a burst of machine-gun fire, and a window shattered on the upper floor of the apartment building. People screamed as the glass rained down. Smoke escaped the window and drifted into the sky. Picking up his bag in one hand and his phone in the other, he headed to the front door.
“Yuri,” he said, calling the pilot. “Get the plane fueled and ready for takeoff. I’ll be there in an hour … Yes, I know it’s early.” He opened the door. “There’s been a change of—” Shvets stopped in midsentence. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking at the man standing a foot away and pointing a pistol squarely at his face. “What are you doing here?”
“Hang up.”
Jonathan Ransom pressed the pistol against the heavyset man’s forehead and shoved him back into the apartment.
The man thumbed the off button hard enough to break it. “Where’s Alex?” he asked, with a heavy Russian accent.
“Dead.” Jonathan closed the door and put his back against it. “You’re Shvets?”
“Call me Papi. Lara does. Or would you prefer it if I called her Emma?”
“Call her whatever you want. I saw the file. Now turn around and walk into the living room. Sit down on the couch. Hands on your legs where I can see them.”
Shvets turned and walked into a sparsely furnished corner room with large picture windows. “You’ve become quite the professional,” he said, glancing over his shoulder.
“Yeah, well, I learned from the best.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Spacibo.”
“Fuck you, too.”
Shvets lowered himself onto the couch, placing his hands squarely on his legs. “Happy?”
“Great,” said Jonathan distractedly, his attention drawn to the hive of police vehicles jamming the street four stories below and the swarm of uniforms buzzing among them. He’d jumped from one hornet’s nest to another. “Why are the police down there?” he asked.
“They think that your wife and I are in the building on the corner,” said Shvets.
“Where is she?”
“Not there. You needn’t worry.”
Jonathan looked back at Shvets, wincing as pain radiated across his upper back and neck. Once the police had started banging down the door in Èze, he’d quickly come to the conclusion that there was no other way out than to fake his own death. It had worked for Emma, he’d reasoned. Why not him?
Jury-rigging the Peugeot to drive without him wasn’t a problem. He’d set cruise control at a hundred, hauled the dead Russian’s body into his seat, then opened the door and bailed out. Landing on the macadam road was another matter. He’d done his best to drop and roll, but somewhere between the drop and the roll, he’d impacted squarely on his left shoulder, resulting in a partial dislocation and, he suspected, a hairline fracture of the collarbone. It was raw, undistilled anger that had driven him to his feet and propelled his first uncertain, excruciating steps down the hillside. It was over, he’d told himself again and again as his shoulder cried out and his elbows bled. He was done being screwed with.
Half an hour later he’d limped into the station in Monaco, where he’d cleaned himself up in the lavatory before boarding the local to Nice. From there, he’d connected to the 22:58 to Paris, a TGV or train à grande vitesse, and had arrived at the Gare de Lyon at 5:24.
“What’s La Reine?” he asked. The words had figured prominently in a series of dispatches he’d found on the laptop written by Shvets to an agent referred to only as “L.” The dispatches were written in a furious shorthand, full of euphemisms and monikers, few of which he could suss out. He was able to decipher enough, however, to learn the address of Shvets’s apartment in Paris and that Emma was involved in an operation that called for blowing up a well-guarded facility, which was set to take place today.
“La Reine,” Jonathan repeated. “What is it?”
Shvets didn’t respond. He sat massaging his bruised jaw, a confident, almost cheerful expression lifting his great jowls.
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll ask them.” Jonathan nodded his head toward the police below.
“Go ahead. They’ll arrest you and throw you in jail before you can get two words out. From what I understand you’re looking at a lengthy stretch in a British prison.” Shvets spoke in a languorous monotone, as if he’d seen the worst the world could throw at him and he wasn’t impressed.
“Right now I’m not thinking about myself. I want to know about Emma.”
“If you like, I can arrange for you to see her. Tomorrow you can be together. Far from here.”
“Not tomorrow. Today. Where is she this minute?”
“You would do right to consider my offer. I can make sure that you’re safely away from here. Free. Without the risk of lifelong incarceration. What do you say?”
�
�No,” said Jonathan. “I’ll take a pass.”
From the street below came the whoop of a siren. Jonathan glanced out the window to see two ambulances parting the sea of police officers and first responders. He looked back at Shvets, trying to imagine that this tired gray man in a rumpled suit was the director of the FSB.
“Where did you find her?” asked Jonathan.
“Lara? She comes from a town in Siberia on the Kolymsky Peninsula. A bleak place. Her father was a deckhand on a fishing vessel and was absent eleven months of the year. Her mother worked in a fish-processing factory and drank. She beat Lara. It was after she’d broken her arm and leg that an agency intervened. Lara was seven. We have a unit that searches for people like her. Bright, rootless, in need of the state’s assistance. Diamonds in the rough, you might say. Lara was brought to our attention by the director of her school. At thirteen she was doing differential calculus and had taught herself Italian, French, and German. Her IQ was off the charts.” Shvets looked away, his eyes suddenly alive, illuminated by the past. “I brought her to Moscow myself. You should have seen her. Such desire. Such ambition. Such emotion. And, of course, such beauty. Without a trace of Western corruption. She was a little thin, perhaps, with terrible eczema, but a man could see that with the proper nutrition and medical care she would ripen into something special.”
“Did you bother to ask her if she wanted to join the KGB?”
“We didn’t have to. It was her idea from the start. She was born to it. One of the rare few. She’s like a shark that will die if it stops swimming. Except in place of oxygen, she requires adrenaline. Don’t fool yourself, Dr. Ransom. She was never a nice girl.”
Jonathan stepped closer to the Russian. He felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. Closing his fingers more tightly around the grip, he thumbed the hammer into the cocked position. He’d killed before. He’d put the barrel of a gun to a man’s head and pulled the trigger. He had felt nothing. No remorse, no recrimination. Only a dull rumble somewhere deep inside that he’d done what was necessary. He decided that he despised Shvets. It would be easy to kill him. “Where is she?”
Rules of Vengeance Page 37