“Reports are being disseminated calling this the largest attempted terrorist attack in history, outraged demands for action from all our usual suspects are pouring in, and the media is portraying it as ‘suspected Iran-sponsored terrorist Saif al-Diin’ on most channels. We’re hoping that can create enough traction so that we–”
“The Russians, French, and Germans will say it’s bullshit and speculation, and that nothing actually happened. And they’ll be right. Sure, this will play well within our borders, but we won’t get a get-out-of-jail card elsewhere.” The older man shook his head.
“The President will be issuing a strongly worded statement within an hour.”
“Big deal. Let me guess. ‘Terrorism is bad. We will not rest until these bastards are all brought to justice. Those sponsoring it will be dragged kicking and screaming,’ blah blah blah. All good, but we don’t have any footage of babies lying in rubble. No corpses, no free lunch. Maybe we can make it work, but my gut says we blew this round. Not to mention blew half a billion dollars for nothing.”
“Let’s assume you’re right. You have to agree that we’re much closer now with the videos and this attack than we were. Maybe we’re not in the end zone quite yet, but we’re at the five yard line. So we plan something else that will tip the scales,” the younger man said.
The older man rubbed his face and eased back in his chair, then leaned forward and placed both hands flat on the table, palms down.
“There’s a lot at risk, gentlemen. We cannot afford to let this get away from us. And I get the sense it has. I hope nobody has any plans for the next few days, because we’re going to be sitting in this room doing damage control. Now get the White House on the line and let me fine tune the speech. If we’re going to turn a punt into a run, we’re going to need to be all over the details on this one.” The older man coughed. “And put the cigarettes out.”
~ ~ ~
Moscow, Russian Federation
Jet took a final scan of the empty street before she ran headlong down the block and leapt at the side of the building, using the long stone planter as a launch pad as she vaulted up. Her hands found a hold on the decorative steel beams that stretched skyward above the eleven-foot-high concrete and glass wall of the ground floor, and she pushed up with her toes against the rough mortar, fighting for a grip. She inched up, little by little, and then her feet were pressed against either side of the steel girders, using the four-foot gap between the beams to create friction, stopping her from slipping down.
She took a deep breath and pulled herself up, and then began moving higher, climbing one story, then another, then another. As she passed the tenth story the breeze got stronger, tugging at her black top and pants, her backpack secure. Up she climbed, past the fifteenth, then the twentieth, then the twenty-fifth, a fly on the side of the post-modern tower, moving relentlessly heavenwards, invisible to anyone watching from below – not that there were many on the street in that district after it had gotten dark at seven.
At the top, she gripped the girder that ran around the lip and swung her torso up, seeming to defy gravity, then locked a leg around it and pulled, heaving her body over the edge. The motion sensors measured for movement in the air above the building, but not on the roof – the flaw in the ultra-expensive security precautions. She understood the reasoning: They wanted an early warning if something was dropping towards the roof; it would have to get through that invisible envelope to alight on the roof, by which time alarms would have already sounded, so roof sensors would – normally – be redundant.
She dropped three feet from the lip that encircled the edge to the hard, flat surface and took stock. Her watch said it was eight-ten. She didn’t have much time, although she was prepared to spend the night if Grigenko left early – but she was hoping to get this over with now.
Alan had called earlier to give her summary of the failed attack on the sports venue and had filled her in on the latest, including the terrorist’s revelation about the false flag nature of the attack and the purported real reason behind it. Nothing surprised her anymore – she’d seen enough conniving and double-dealing to last her twenty lifetimes, so the idea that shadowy figures that were the real power in a government would contrive an attack on their own population in order to further their ends required no suspension of disbelief. It was an all-too-familiar pattern throughout human history, and there were no new ideas.
Jet scanned her surroundings and saw the helipad circle and next to it the access door to the lower floors. She knew better than to try to break in that way, though – she’d seen the blueprints and the electronics schematic, and knew there were both motion detectors and thermal sensors in the stairwell that led down to Grigenko’s suite.
She crept to a ventilation duct, shrugged her backpack off, and removed a tool kit and a blow torch before cutting her way through the thin metal housing. Five minutes later she was in. She repacked the kit and slid it back into the sack, repositioning the ultra-compact Hechler & Koch MP7A1 submachine gun and silencer nearer the zippered opening for easy access.
Checking the time again, she removed a set of night vision goggles and pulled the strap over her head, adjusting it carefully, the thin coating of neoprene she’d affixed to the hardware to silence any inadvertent bumping spongy under her fingers. With a final glance around the roof, she flipped the goggles over her eyes and turned them on, then dropped headfirst into the shaft, using her hands to control her slide down the stainless steel chute.
Chapter 38
A tiny fiber optic camera on a telescoping rod slid through the grate that pumped fresh air into the gym and turned slowly, surveying the space, having done the same in the office area and come up blank before moving to the workout area. Movement caught its attention and after a few seconds of scanning, the camera snaked back up into the grate, soundless as smoke.
Grigenko stood in the center of his gymnasium, sweating and panting slightly, his nightly hour-long martial arts workout nearly concluded. He admired the sculpted shape of his arms and the steel ridges of his abdominal muscles in one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors and then flung himself across the room in a series of flying kicks and flips. When he landed, he corrected his form automatically and made a mental note that he needed to work on those more. Something about the mid-air twist when spinning to the left was weak; he knew that most people favored either turning to the left or the right, and he automatically registered which in his adversaries – knowing which they would defer to could mean the difference between victory and defeat. He had worked sedulously to correct any preference and considered himself ambidextrous now, but the kicks were still a problem.
He steadied himself and then tried the entire sequence again, but reversing direction on each move, and when he landed he had a look of smug satisfaction on his face.
Better. Much better.
“Not bad for an amateur.”
He spun and found himself face to face with Jet, who was glaring at him with luminescent green eyes, her finger on the trigger of the H&K MP7A1 submachine gun trained on his bare torso.
“How did you get in here?” he demanded, and then his expression changed as he recognized her. “Ah. Stupid question. I presume I have the dubious honor of meeting the infamous Jet? Mossad whore and serial killer?”
“You’re not as stupid as you look. Of course, that would be hard, but it’s still always entertaining when the walking dead speak. Your father cried like a blubbering baby when I killed him. Really an ugly display of character weakness. I see you take after him,” she commented without emotion.
“Big talker when you have a gun on an unarmed man.”
“Sort of like yours were when they came for me in Uruguay. I mopped the floor with them, by the way. I guess you heard. Never send boys to do a man’s job.”
Grigenko sneered but said nothing.
“I heard about the failure of the device you sold the terrorists. You couldn’t even do that right, could you?” she taunted.
“Ha. I got half a billion dollars and gave them nothing but hope. The best transaction I’ve done yet. You think I’m stupid enough to sell them a weapon that would be inevitably traced back to me? The world isn’t big enough to evade the heat that would bring. Who do you think called the Israelis, anyway? Are you really that dim?”
She nodded slowly. “Why the Mossad and not the CIA?”
“Because I knew there was a good chance the Americans would try to take him alive. The Mossad doesn’t have those squeamish sentiments. But just in case, I also sent my own man to finish the job, which he ended up having to do, leaving the Mossad agent to pick up the pieces.” He cracked a feral grin. “So what is it going to be? Shoot me in the head or the torso? Although with that little pop gun, you could probably cut me in two. Oh, and congratulations on getting past all the security. I guess it wasn’t worth what I paid for it.”
“Yet another stupid decision by a sub-par punk who inherited Daddy’s money but can’t fit into his shoes. Which is a joke, given what a pussy he was. A coward. Like his twin brother. Did you know I cut his brother’s guts out and held his heart up for him to see with his last breath? Did Papa ever tell you? No? I see by your eyes that he didn’t. Too bad. I know it was a big reason he was stupid enough to come after me in the first place, which resulted in him finishing up as an oily smudge on the runway in Nice. Lots of bad decision-making in your inbred family, I suppose.”
He took a few steps back and held his arms out at his sides. “I wonder if your retarded daughter will live long enough to be trading blowjobs for a crack rock by the time she’s twelve? I was considering leaving her alive and letting one of my South American contacts have her. Worse than just snuffing her. Then again, I’ve read your dossier, so I know you know what that’s like. Foster dad and all. Must have been rough, but look at the bright side – you’ve probably got pretty good technique with all the practice.” He leered at her. “So are you going to shoot me? I know you don’t have the balls to fight me without a gun. Cowardly whores never do. I’ve met hundreds like you, and you’re all the same. Weak. Pathetic.”
Jet tried to force the rage and sting of his words away, but for a brief instance her anger got the better of her. She set the gun down and shrugged off the backpack, then stood and took three steps towards him.
“I really don’t need a gun to take you down. I killed your father and his brother without breaking a sweat. I see no reason not to add you to the list.” She raised her hands in a classic defensive position. “Come on, bitch boy, give it your best shot. Let’s see what all your expensive lessons have taught you. You’ll find taking on someone who knows what they’re doing isn’t as much fun as beating up people who are paid to lose.”
Grigenko smirked – he’d gotten her to make her first bad decision by stoking her anger. She was making a classic mistake and allowing it to color her behavior.
“You should have shot me,” he said as he approached. She took three more steps, closing the gap.
“Why waste the bullets on a nothing like you? I’ve taken down better before breakfast. Come on, pussy boy. Bring it,” she snarled in Russian, then waited, bouncing on the balls of her feet.
When his offense came, it was better than she’d thought it would be, a combination of karate and her own specialty, Krav Maga – the Israeli martial art taught to members of the Mossad as one of their core disciplines.
She parried the blows and got in several brutal strikes, finishing with a flying roundhouse kick that nearly knocked his head off. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth as he sized her up with new respect, and then he brushed it aside with his hand and licked it off his fingers. She had gotten a feel for him already, and he was strong – brutally strong – but he favored approaches that leveraged that strength, so his likely tactics were predictable.
“Looks like you got a booboo there, bitch boy,” she taunted. Whenever possible, she wanted to keep him off-balance and operating from pride and rage – something she realized belatedly he had done masterfully with her. Now she needed to keep him away from the gun. She had absolutely no doubt that he would try for it if he thought he could. “I thought you were going to bring shock and awe. You hit like a schoolgirl. Probably should have spent more time practicing and less time shaving your chest and admiring yourself in the mirror.”
The next attack was sudden. She had barely spat out the final words of her taunt when he launched into the air, and she crouched and delivered a vicious strike to his groin with her right arm, then followed it up with a double blow to his kidneys. She had experienced that strike before, and the pain would be intense, blinding for a few seconds. Seizing the advantage, she spun and kicked him in the side of the head, his ear smashing against her Doc Martens boot. She was just preparing for the final blow in the series when he caught her by surprise with a spin and a lunging elbow strike, followed by a glancing punch to her jaw.
The sound of her ribs cracking was audible, and Grigenko smirked as he shook his head to clear it. The pain from Jet’s fractured ribs was severe, but she had fought through worse. More alarming was that he had landed the devastating blow in the first place. Her jaw throbbed where he had clipped her, and she tasted the tell-tale saltiness of blood.
“I should have known not to go for the groin. I assumed you had balls.” She spat a red stain onto the floor, and then launched her own attack as he was still recovering from the pain.
He parried her strikes, turned, and tried to land two of his own, but she dodged them and then pivoted and struck his chest full force with her knee, and heard ribs crack as well – but these were higher, potentially deadly if she could land another blow to make them compound, hopefully driving one through a lung. He delivered a powerful strike to her already-injured side, but she ignored the agony and drove her boot down hard onto the arch of his foot, snapping several of the bones and drawing a groan from him. His hands were swinging down to break her collarbone when she pounded the back of her head into his face with jarring force and felt a spray of warm blood on the back of her neck. She evaded the collarbone strike by dropping to the floor and then bashed his knee with a precisely targeted blow, as she had many times before, breaking boards and bricks in karate practice.
Grigenko was already falling to one knee, obviously severely incapacitated, the shattered foot and ribs dropping him. She leapt to her feet and stood over him, then backed up four strides and threw herself through a series of airborne flips and twists, finishing by slamming her boot into his chest with her full weight, driving the already splintered ribs through his lungs, and one through his heart. He toppled backwards, a crimson river streaming from his nose and mouth, gasping for breath through the gurgling blood, when a scream from behind Jet shattered the room’s silence.
“Nooooooooooo!” Grigenko’s mother stood twenty feet away, a Makarov pistol clenched in her shaking hand, pointed at Jet, who slowly turned to face her. Grigenko was drowning even as his heart pumped blood into his abdominal cavity, and he was barely able to raise his head for a final look at his mother before he collapsed and his head struck the floor with a thunk, the burbling of his labored breath increasing in volume.
“What have you done? You miserable bitch. I’ll kill you, and I’ll kill your whore daughter too. I’ll make sure she’s raped for weeks before–”
Grigenko’s mother’s vitriol was cut off as her son exhaled a groaning death rattle, his body violently convulsing behind Jet. Her pistol strayed as her attention was momentarily drawn to him, and when she looked back at Jet it was with puzzled surprise – the hilt of one of Jet’s throwing knives quivering with her heart beat as it protruded from the base of her throat. Jet watched as she grabbed at the knife with a palsied hand, trying to pull it free, and then with the last of her energy brought the ugly little pistol up to shoot Jet.
Jet threw herself into the air in a flurry of forward somersaults, the final one converting into a scissor kick that knocked Grigenko’s mother flat on her back, her wea
pon skittering harmlessly a few feet away. Jet stood, clutching her side, and then leaned over the dying woman and spat blood onto her hatred-contorted face.
“Rot in hell with your bastard son, and know that he failed. He was never good enough. Lousy genes.”
The older woman’s eyes fluttered and Jet saw the familiar fade in her focus as life fled her body; and then the crash of a door and running footsteps from the far end of the suite signaled that she only had seconds left to escape.
Chapter 39
The guards stopped at the gymnasium door, fumbling for the light switch in the now-darkened space. The overhead lamps flickered on a few seconds later, and the men stood gawping at the corpses on the floor, the blood pooling around their master stark evidence of their failure to protect him. They crept cautiously into the gym, weapons sweeping the cavernous empty room, and then the leader pointed at the door that led to the roof stairwell, warning the guards to silence with a curt gesture.
The men moved on stealthy feet towards the door. The leader’s radio hissed static and a man’s gruff baritone voice erupted from it.
“Dmitri. There’s an alarm sounding down here from the roof door. It looks like someone’s gotten in. Repeat. There’s been a breach on the roof door. The motion detectors are going crazy. This is not a drill. Again, this is NOT a drill.”
The leader turned the volume down, cursing the timing of the downstairs security man’s alert, and then returned his attention to the door. His men looked at him, unsure of how to proceed, pistols searching for a non-existent threat.
His subordinate inched closer and leaned into him.
Jet 03: Vengeance Page 24