Falcone filed the remark away in the brain cells that were curious about connections between GSS and the CIA. And now GSS and the Mossad.
“They’ll have photos of all of us,” Reilly said. “We’re leaving behind our passports—our real passports. And our luggage. They’ll think we won’t try to leave without them.”
“That was true in Plan A,” Falcone said. “We won’t need passports to get on our plane home. And we were briefed about abandoning our luggage.”
“But we’re blown for any future op in Russia,” Reilly said.
Turning directly to Reilly, Rachel said, “It’s a big world, Harry. I’m sure the General will pay for a shave to get you into Russia again.”
Reilly laughed, and the tense moment passed. She went on to describe the beginning of the op in Hamilton’s suite and assigned their separate departure times from her room, along with the details of their short taxi trips and walks to the Kempinski and Falcone’s room. “I’ll pick up the van from … someone I trust and drive it to the hotel alley.”
When she got to a description of the van—“black, plain, looking like the kind local police use for undercover work”—Gregor reacted with a Russian phrase, followed by a translation: “What the fuck?!”
“It’ll have a better chance than an orange-and-red DHL van,” Rachel said.
“I agree,” Falcone said. “From what I know, our van comes from a good, dependable home.” Gregor and Rachel exchanged quick glances. Gregor knows about her Mossad connection, Falcone thought. Maybe he’s Mossad, too.
“Van’s no problem,” Gregor said. “I’ve driven Russian vans. Yeah. I can see how it may be a little less risky. And crazy enough to work.”
“A local asset will deliver the van to an alley near the parking garage loading dock and disappear,” Rachel said. “I’ll drive to the lot to pick you all up, along with Hamilton. If he acts up, Harry, give him the needle. Greg, as planned, gets behind the wheel, drives us to the Vnukovo Airport and uses his FSB ID to reach the private-jet terminal. We get aboard our DHL aircraft to Latvia. As I said, ‘piece of cake.’”
This time, nobody laughed.
Falcone, the first to leave, was able to take a taxi directly to the Kempinski. He had spotted a black ZIL limousine behind him during the short trip and suspected he was being followed. He entered the lobby and lingered by a planter, positioning himself so that he had a view of the front entrance in a large wall mirror.
He saw the black ZIL pull up. Someone got out of the ZIL, spoke to the driver, then to the doorman, and hurried in. Falcone recognized him as the FSB operative Rachel had floored. He headed directly to the elevator and inserted a key card.
Falcone watched the floor indicator, which showed that the elevator stopped at the top floor, where Hamilton’s suite was located. Falcone assumed that the man from FSB was assigned to track him—and watch over Hamilton—in anticipation of a visit from the former national security adviser, sent to convince Hamilton to return to the United States. That would mean the FSB had no suspicion of the imminent snatching of Hamilton. Falcone wanted to call Rachel and relay his speculation, but he did not want to risk any communication, even by his Blackphone.
Shortly after Falcone entered his suite there was a knock at his door. He looked at his watch. 7:39.
He opened the door to Rachel. She wore black slacks and a black leather jacket, open over a black turtleneck sweater. She put a finger to her lips and took from her large handbag a pen, a notebook, and the device that looked like a flashlight. SPEAK AND ACT NATURAL, she wrote and held up the message.
“Andrea! Good to see you!” Falcone exclaimed. “You were fabulous at the conference.”
“I thought we’d have a meeting with your associates before tomorrow’s session, Mr. Falcone,” she said as she began sweeping the room. “I’m glad your firm is interested in installing ITAccess in your offices in America.”
“Yes, I plan to have my associates meet with you. And I think I’ll call room service for a pot of coffee,” he said, holding the telephone in front of her so that she could check it. She nodded and he made the call.
A few minutes later, she wrote ROOM CLEAN and held up her notebook. He told her about the FSB operative. He could not help whispering, despite her assurance that no one was eavesdropping and there was no need for him to worry about the FSB.
“I think they’ve got people watching over Hamilton and one of them was briefed on you. They must have wondered why you were here.”
“And so,” he said, “they peeled a guy off the Hamilton babysitters squad to see if I went to the conference. That guy had seen us talking here—before you decked him.”
“That was pure luck,” she said. “They could see what we were up to: two people meeting by chance and going to a conference. Your shadow saw us at the conference. We weren’t connected to Hamilton. So far, we’re lucky.”
“So far,” Falcone echoed.
They were at the toughest stage of an operation: waiting for it to begin.
* * *
One by one, still in the suits they had worn at the conference, Jack Beckley, Harry Reilly, Bobby Joe Pickens, and Gregor Ivanisov arrived, minus their code names. Rachel greeted them by their real names, ignoring one of Drexler’s cardinal security rules. Somehow, this relaxed Falcone. He was in a real world dealing with people with real names.
Gregor, Jack, and Harry stood around talking, mostly about the Redskins. Bobby Joe Pickens was by a window, sipping coffee, staring out at the darkness.
Rachel held up her Blackphone and said, “Seven forty-five. Everybody got that? And don’t forget to set your phones to vibrate.”
As the GSS men checked their Blackphones, Falcone moved closer to Rachel. “It’s okay to call you Rachel now,” he said. “Rachel—that’s a relief. And I don’t want to meet you accidentally again. I want us to meet on purpose, somewhere, sometime.”
“We can’t talk about us until this is over,” she said. “But I like the idea of meeting again.”
She kissed him on the cheek, waved to them all, and left. It was 8:00 sharp. Falcone pictured her going to a Mossad safe house’s garage, where she would enter a van.
Thirty minutes later, first Gregor, then the others shook hands with Falcone and headed toward the elevator. He wished he could go with them.
55
When they got off the elevator, they stood for a moment at the door to Hamilton’s suite. Then Gregor stepped forward and pounded on the door. Down the hallway a door opened and a large man stepped out. He was in his stocking feet, wearing a white T-shirt and black trousers with red suspenders hanging down. He shouted something in Russian and Gregor shouted back, “Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti.”
The man ran toward them. “Take him out,” Gregor told Bobby Joe.
Head down, Bobby Joe took two steps forward and smashed into the man. He clipped him on the neck with his right hand while dipping his left hand into his suit coat pocket and taking out a roll of silvery duct tape. In swift moves, he stuck a strip of tape across the man’s mouth, tore off another strip, flipped the man on his face, pulled his hands together, and wrapped them with tape. He then girded the man’s neck with one suspender strap and tied it to the other strap, enwrapping it around his hands in such a way that a tug tightened the strap around his neck.
Seeing that the man’s door was ajar, Gregor said, “Drag him into his room.” He turned to Reilly. “Give him the needle. We’ll pick up you guys when we come out with Hamilton.”
As Gregor spoke, the door opened. He pushed it in, startling Hamilton, who stepped back. He wore a dark blue sweatshirt, matching pants, white socks, and black-and-white sneakers.
“What … what is this?” he asked, his voice rising indignantly as he took in the situation.
“Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti,” Gregor said, adding such authority to his voice that for an instant Jack Beckley stiffened and stood at attention.
“I do not speak Russian,” Hamilton said
slowly.
“Federal Security Service,” Gregor said, speaking with a heavy accent and showing his credentials. “You are to come with us for questions.”
“Now look here, whatever your name is. I am an American citizen and—”
Gregor signaled to Beckley, who deftly placed plastic handcuffs around Hamilton’s wrists and started frog-marching him to the elevator. Pickens and Reilly fell in step behind them.
In the elevator, Gregor dropped his accent and said, “Mr. Hamilton, if you shout or struggle, it will be necessary to drug and gag you. Please remain calm.”
“Calm?! I assure you: I am not calm,” Hamilton said. He lunged toward the elevator control board, apparently to hit the emergency signal with his shoulder. Pickens yanked him back.
Reilly reloaded his syringe and was injecting a more powerful sedative dose into Hamilton’s upper left arm as the elevator stopped and Falcone entered. No one spoke.
The elevator continued its descent to the lowest parking level, two stories below the first floor. The door opened and the men filed out, half dragging Hamilton, who was already looking confused. Gregor, last man out, used a Swiss Army blade to pry loose a button labeled Открытая дверь—“Open Door.” He then inserted the blade into the mechanism and exposed and cut a yellow wire. The elevator light went out and the door remained open.
Following the choreography they had practiced in the GSS barn, Gregor and Bobby Joe sprinted up the spiraling ramp to the closed garage door. Gregor opened a switch box on the wall and pressed a button. The door yawned open. The others hurried toward the opening: Falcone, followed by Harry Reilly and Jack Beckley, who were holding up Hamilton.
They all passed through the open garage door and reassembled in the alley. Hamilton was still being held up. He was the only one who was not shivering and stamping in the dark cold. Gregor, switching on a penlight, found a switch box on the outside wall, opened it with his knife, pressed a button, and the garage door slowly closed. He then donned a thick gray glove, yanked out a circuit breaker and threw it into the darkness, setting off a cluster of sparks and sealing the door shut. He returned the glove to a suit coat pocket.
Gregor led the others to the right, toward the street and to the spot, thirty meters away, where Rachel and the van were to be, engine purring, lights out.
The van was not there.
Falcone’s Blackphone vibrated. It was Rachel, speaking calmly. “Sean. Go to the street you’re facing. Turn right. Walk—do not run—about a hundred meters and turn right again and continue a few meters to the van, parked at the curb. Tell the others to stay where they are until the van arrives.”
“Okay,” Falcone said. He turned to Gregor and said, “Rachel wants everyone to stay here and wait for the van.”
Gregor frowned for an instant, then nodded. Falcone began rapidly walking away.
56
Rachel was standing at the driver’s side of a black van parked at the curb. “An unexpected matter,” she said as Falcone reached her. “I decided to call you to keep the team intact.”
“What happened?” Falcone asked, wincing inwardly at the idea he was not on the team.
“I can only guess,” she said, pointing to the van. The window on the driver’s side was rolled all the way down. For a moment all Falcone could see was the profile of a man staring straight ahead. Then Falcone looked more closely. The man’s face was covered with blood.
“He was shot right here, as he parked. Someone simply walked up to the van and maybe asked him a question. He rolled down the window to speak to the man. Then the man shot the driver and got picked up by another car or just kept on walking,” she said. Leaning in closer, she added half to herself, “Probably a Makarov PMM with an integral silencer.”
“Who … was he?”
“Local asset. We met only once.”
Falcone looked back at the face in the window and said, “The man at the restaurant?”
“Yes,” she said impatiently. “Now, we must move quickly.” She pointed to an alley. “There are garbage cans there.”
Rachel opened the driver’s door. Falcone grabbed the body as it leaned out, the bloodied face rubbing against his. Shapeless, amorphous memories of blood and war surged for an instant through Falcone’s mind. He quickly looked around, saw the side street was clear, and then, reaching under the arms of the man, hauled out the body.
Rachel slipped behind the wheel, turned on the ignition, and said, “I’m going to the meeting spot. Wait here.” She drove off, lights out.
The body was surprisingly light—the slim remains of a nameless man in a long black overcoat. The man’s black cap fell to the sidewalk as Falcone dragged the body into the alley, passed three overflowing garbage cans, and put the body down while he opened the lid of a half-filled Dumpster. He lifted the body up and pushed it in, then noiselessly lowered the lid.
Back at the curb, time seemed to stop. He could smell the sour scent of blood, could still see the dark, stinking cavern of the Dumpster. Smell and sight were all that existed. Then a sound and something pressing into his back, just above his waist.
Old lessons took over Falcone’s body while his mind raced. He had been taught, so many years ago a lesson that had been drilled into his brain, a lesson he had never forgotten. The lesson was called “response to a standing submission,” and the Ranger instructor called it “the live-or-die moment. You chose to submit and surely die or respond and maybe live.”
Falcone spun around. He was facing a man saying something in Russia. The man was shorter than Falcone, burly in a black peacoat. In his right hand he held a pistol with a barrel made longer by a silencer. Falcone realized that the man could have killed him but, for some unknown reason, had hesitated. The hesitation enabled Falcone to grab the gun with his left hand while chopping at the man’s throat with his extended right hand and wrist wielded like an ax. Before the shooter could raise his right hand to shoot, Falcone twisted the gun downward.
The shooter screamed as a 9-mm bullet ripped open his belly. His trigger finger weakened. Falcone placed his middle finger atop the shooter’s and pulled back the trigger. Another bullet tore into the shooter and he fell to the ground.
The van was coming toward Falcone with its headlights off. It stopped long enough for a sliding door to open. Falcone was only half in, his wrist encased by Reilly’s big, outreaching hand, when the van leaped forward and Reilly yanked him into a seat next to him in the rear row. In front of him were Jack Beckley and Bobby Joe Pickens, with Hamilton between them. He was snoring, his head flung back. Bobby Joe, using a special safety-cutter, removed Hamilton’s plastic handcuffs.
“You okay?” Bobby Joe asked Falcone, whose face, shirt, and suit coat were blood-smeared.
“There was another guy,” Falcone said. “I … shot him.”
“You’ve got a gun?”
“His gun.”
* * *
Falcone suddenly realized that this was the second time he had seen Hamilton. The first time was in the Metropolitan Club in Washington, having lunch with Phil Dake of the Post. Dake had pointed out Hamilton dining with a senator who later resigned for shadowy doings with billionaires like Hamilton. That was when this all began, Falcone thought, remembering that at the time Hamilton had been unveiling his plan to capture asteroids and mine them.
His thoughts were interrupted by Gregor’s gruff voice. “We should be at Vnukovo Airport in about thirty-five minutes,” Gregor said, sounding more hopeful than he felt. “But we don’t know what in hell the shooting of the driver is about.”
“I think the FSB was following him,” said Rachel, who sat next to Gregor. “Perhaps his name came up in the questioning of Danshov. Either the driver told the shooter he was delivering the van for someone else or the shooter figured it out for himself and waited.”
“I think he spilled all he knew,” Falcone said.
“We can’t be sure,” Rachel said.
“All I know,” Falcone said, “is when
I felt that gun, I expected I’d be shot. He hesitated. I think I know why.”
“Tell me.”
“He was expecting a woman. I was a surprise—and he hesitated.”
“And that killed him,” Rachel said.
“Seems to me, Rachel, that Sean killed him. With the guy’s own gun,” Gregor said.
Rachel did not respond. She was reaching into her handbag. “The driver carried his wallet in his coat pocket. The name on his propusk is Vladimir Matviyenko. It says he worked as a driver for a limousine service.”
“And who was he really working for?” Falcone asked.
“I assume he was a freelancer,” she said.
“Toss that stuff out the window,” Gregor said. “If we get stopped and searched, I don’t want them to find a murdered guy’s papers.”
“Good idea,” Rachel said, opening the window and throwing the wallet and propusk. A wave of cold air passed through the van.
“The way he was killed, it was like an execution,” Gregor said. “The FSB is getting rough.” He sounded worried. The van’s lights were on now as Gregor wove through the evening traffic.
57
Cars and trucks whizzed by the van while Gregor kept within the speed limit, making his way to the first circuit highway, which crossed the Moskva River. “No problem on the bridge,” he said after reaching the far side. He turned onto the artery that ran to the major Moscow beltway, then continued on to the high-speed highway to Vnukovo Airport. Gregor, with his road bulletins, was the only person talking as the van sped through the night.
Up ahead, Gregor saw the blinking blue and red lights of a roadblock and a lineup of cars and trucks.
“The van was delivered with a Taser in the glove compartment,” Rachel said.
“We’ve got our own,” Bobby Joe said, patting a pocket.
“So what?” Gregor said. “These guys don’t have Tasers. They kill people.” Hamilton suddenly stirred, as if reacting to kill. Everyone else thought about what happened to the man who had been where Gregor was sitting.
Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel Page 25