“You give in to these people, bullies—schikanieren—and they only get stronger.”
His father was defiant. He continued the work. Nuclear power. Nuclear defense. The Americans did nothing after Israel acquired the atomic bomb, but if anyone else should try to get it, the U.S. would stand by as men of science were assassinated in their homes. It took Hynd years to realize that the Americans were the root evil, and by then they had fielded their own kill teams in Cold Harvest.
The West didn’t obey their own laws. They tortured and killed. And when another nation tried to defend itself, to arm itself against threats, they came in and murdered everyone involved. They didn’t scare his father. He’d never backed down.
He died on a Sunday. Hynd was in his room, reading, when the boom shook the floor. He went to the window and saw the flames rising from his family’s Lada sedan. It was so strange, how his father loved all those finely tooled gears and pistons, would spend hours going over the mechanical drawings for the lab, and in the end it was machinery that tore him apart. They buried him in a closed casket.
Hynd wasn’t like the other children. He never cried, never laughed. Beliefs fascinated him. Belief had gotten his father killed, so he himself held none. He would study others, to understand how they behaved, what motivated them, to pretend he was like them, to make them do what he wanted, to get control. He’d been studying people ever since, and he’d found it so useful against the Americans.
His work of killing began long ago as a personal vendetta against the men who’d murdered his father, and it led him to the great powers who were ultimately behind that act. It became his calling and his profession. America had many enemies, open and secret, and he drew on their financing and resources to stop the West’s assassins. There was none more dangerous than Cold Harvest.
Now he was close, so close. They had brought the war to his home, and he would bring it to theirs. He had everything he needed.
Chapter 37
HAYES LEANED OVER the tailgate of his truck with a prepaid mobile phone in his hand. He’d taken it from the last man he’d shot outside the West Virginia trailer. Some dried blood flaked off the handset. All the other shooters he’d run across had wiped theirs, but this one was still working. Maybe the young gunman had hoped to get out a last message to whoever was handling him.
He’d traced the forest roads with his truck, but none went to the west. He’d need a dirt bike to chase Claire, and she was an expert rider, could race through tight-packed second-growth trees.
The search area was growing every minute. He’d called it in to Morgan to get a helicopter out here but needed to move on before any local law enforcement showed up and started asking questions about why he’d just dropped three people in the woods. He drove until he picked up a strong signal on the far side of the ridge, then called the NSA tech.
“Jonathan.”
Hayes didn’t bother introducing himself. The NSA always knew who was calling. “I have a bad guy’s phone,” he said. “Can you give me anything on it if I get it up on the system?”
“Plug it in and log in.”
Hayes connected it to his laptop and then used his mobile data card to access a virtual private network.
“I can see it. I’m cloning it now,” Jonathan said.
“Anything on it?”
“I can get the last number, but it looks like a relay.”
“Can you trace it?”
“Not if it’s done right, and this looks like a quality setup.”
“And if I call it?”
“Hang on a minute.”
Hayes waited, listening to the quiet tapping of keys.
“Okay,” Jonathan said. “I’ve pulled everything off there. Go ahead with the call. It can’t hurt. I’ll try the trace.”
“Ready?”
“Shoot.”
Hayes put his phone down, then lifted the dead man’s and hit redial. It rang once, and the line opened, but then there was more ringing, a connection, another ring, as the call bounced from relay to relay. They might have been able to trace the killer’s field teams, but whoever was on the other end of this, in command, was well insulated.
Finally, there was the slight static of an open line, and Hayes heard a distorted voice say, “Verify yourself.” The person on the other end wanted an authentication code.
“Who are you?” Hayes asked.
There was no reply. He only hoped that by holding the line a little longer he might help trace the call.
“All of the men you sent to ambush me are dead,” Hayes said. “What do you want?”
There was a rustle on the other end of the line, and then a new voice. Despite the distortion, Hayes could tell it was deeper, a man’s.
“What do you want?” Hayes asked again.
“The same as you. To end the terror. To keep our families safe. You people are so blinded by your own myths. You never seem to understand. You’re the violence.”
The line went dead.
Three hundred miles away, Hynd stripped the back off the phone, pulled the SIM card and battery, and handed them off. Three more of his contractors were dead, but there was some grace in it. Claire had met with this man from Cold Harvest, and they had both survived. Each might assume that the other had drawn him or her into an ambush. If Hynd played this right, he might be able to turn them against each other. Claire could not only lead him to his targets, but even act as his weapon.
Chapter 38
CLAIRE FELT THE blood soak through her sock. It reminded her of the blisters she used to get during the endless marches that were used to weed out candidates for Cold Harvest.
The only roads out of those woods were to the east, so she had gone west. She had left the dirt bike near a river. She couldn’t get it across.
She’d been walking for so long. What started as friction and heat in her heel had become a stabbing pain, and now it was only a wet nothing. The hiking had felt like a slog at first, and then a numbing rhythm as she cruised through the dark.
The bruise under her jaw grew, balled up like a swollen gland. Hayes, the only one she trusted, had drawn her into a trap and tried to kill her.
The people behind this were inside the program. And she had no idea who was innocent and who had been turned. Everything is a cover. Everyone is suspect.
How could she warn her teammates? How could she protect them when any of them was liable to put a knife in her back?
Run, she thought. Forget about protecting the others. Just grab what you need and run.
She’d tried to run before. She’d learned her lesson, a lesson Hayes would learn too. You can’t quit. Because the violence becomes a part of you. You can’t escape who you are.
It was after the Paris killings, the gut shot. Paul took care of her, but the doubts broke through. He was a war photographer. He’d seen enough gunshot wounds to know.
He started sleeping in the guest room, and Claire knew that if she fed him one more lie, he would leave. It was over if she didn’t quit. She had to choose.
She went to Gray and said she was done.
“Take as much time as you need.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“You’re going to live the cover?”
“Yes.”
“You need this, Claire,” he said, and he took a deep breath. “That life doesn’t exist without this one. It’s not who you are. You need both. You need the outlet.”
The marriage license. The birth certificate. They all bore a false name, but it was more real than anyone she’d ever been.
“I tell you this because I don’t want you to get hurt. It’s not going to work. You can’t change who you are.”
She walked out.
He was right, but she wouldn’t learn it for some time. She lived the lie. And she was happy.
A month later she and Paul were on vacation in Chania, an ancient port town on the island of Crete. They had met while she was working in Turkey and gone to Crete for what was essentially t
heir first date, a weeklong trip together. During that visit, all the joy of falling in love had been cut through with the knowledge that it was all a lie, that it could never work.
This time it was pure, unsullied. They went in early September and stayed at the same pension. They would lie out on the small terrace, drive over the mountains to empty beaches of the southern shore, to a spot where the myths say the Cyclops lived, looking across the sea to Libya. She made plans. She wanted a garden like her mother had, instead of the cut flowers she had been buying for years, with no roots, ready to be discarded.
The old instincts never left her, sure, and the old paranoia worked at the margins of every moment. She would see the same man twice and mark him as a foot surveillant, start searching every vehicle for a potential snatch team. But over time they ebbed.
One night, they went to a restaurant housed in a building that long ago had been a Turkish bath. Half the tables were down on the marble of the old pools. It was nearly closing time, and Paul had just convinced her to take a second shot of raki.
She raised her glass and paused, holding the clear liquor in the air. The windows were at street level, and she saw a pair of shoes out front move across, then back, and then stop. Good trackers follow the shoes. Jackets and hats are easy to switch. But shoes are too bulky to carry and slow to change.
She’d seen them before and cycled through the faces from their afternoon and evening, stored like Polaroids in her mind, matching them up to threats from her past: Mogadishu, Ukraine, Aceh.
You’re paranoid.
Yes, she was.
“Excuse me for a second,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I think so,” she said, and she placed her hand on her stomach. She went toward the bathrooms, then passed the kitchen to a rear exit. She wanted to see the pursuer’s face, the reaction. As she came out in the small alley between the stone buildings, she could see the watcher waiting outside the restaurant. He turned and walked away.
She looked through the window and saw her husband. That’s why she didn’t want to go, and why she had no choice. That was why the anger was a gift: it was the instinct to protect because she had failed to protect her mother.
Claire started after him, and the pace quickened. She worked the angles of the old city to block him. He must have not known the terrain, because he was moving into an area of fewer, not more, choices and, finally, a dead end, a long lane that was cut off not far from the water by the ancient warehouses along the port.
Her hand closed on her knife as she approached. It was her only weapon, a sturdy folder with a frame lock that she kept sharp enough to shave with. He was cornered. She marveled at how easy it had been to get the better of him, even after all her time away from the nonstop drilling, exercises, and training.
The man’s route was amateurish almost. But what she had seen of him so far wasn’t the work of an amateur. A dead end. She had cornered him. Or he had lured her into a trap. She flattened against the wall, looked back, and saw movement behind her.
She sprinted at it, watched the hands rise toward her and cut right down a side street just as a silenced shot lit the narrow lane red.
Run, run! her instincts screamed, but she stopped as soon as her shadow couldn’t be seen from around the corner, then pressed against the wall and moved nearer to the gunman. She slipped back into a doorway and drew her knife. The target always runs. No one goes closer to the threat. Which was why she had.
As he came running around the corner she gripped the knife in her fist and drove it sideways into his neck, just below the ear. The gun clattered to the ground, and she lunged toward it.
But she was too late; the other man was a blur of black rounding the corner and coming at her in a sprawl. She pivoted out of his line, dropped down, then shot her palm into his upper lip and nose.
The shock of pain and then the quick jerk of his head stunned him. She kept pushing, shoving his face back, then down to the ground.
She could hear police sirens in the distance, echoing through the maze of streets, concealing their location. He fired an errant shot as she climbed on top of him, chest to his, arm around his neck. She had to keep him so close he couldn’t get the gun between them to fire. Her cheek was against his. She raised his head with hers and slammed it back down against the cold stone.
She did it a second time, and the blow shook through the bones of her own face. A third, and the gun dropped. She had her arms around his head like a running back cradling a football to his chest, and she drove it against the cobbles.
There was no time to find out who he was or who had sent him. The sirens moved closer.
“Please,” he whispered as she slammed his head once more and heard the nauseating crack as his skull caved in.
He started to plead again, but she brought him up, chest to chest, and thought only of her husband and the animal need to protect what she loved as she finished him against the roadway with one double-handed blow. She dragged her palms along the curb, smearing the blood against the worn stone, then picked up the pistol.
It was a long way back to the restaurant with her following the gun around every corner. Paul was gone.
She called the Cold Harvest night-action line from a pay phone. No answer. The number had changed. She knew none of the codes to authenticate herself anymore anyway. She was boxed out. She’d gotten her wish, to go clear, and now she was on her own.
She washed her face and hands in the brass lion-head fountain in the central square, then walked back to the pension, shoved the double front door hard enough to overcome the cheap dead bolt, and went upstairs.
The room was empty.
She felt the anger return. There was no one on the terrace, and she swept back into the room with the pistol raised.
“Do you speak English?” Paul’s voice. She hid the pistol in her waistband and covered it with a light coat, then came down the rear stairs. He was in the back hall with the phone to his ear, probably calling the police.
She pressed down the button on the receiver.
“Hello? Hello?” He turned. “Carol! Jesus. Where have you been?”
He wrapped his arm around her, and she angled away so he wouldn’t feel the gun.
“We need to go,” she said.
“What? What happened? Jesus. Were you mugged?”
“We need to go.”
He was putting them both in danger.
“Carol, if—”
“Now!” And she showed him, for an instant, the strength of her true self. He froze. This man who had stood in front of advancing tanks with his Canon 5D and taken shot after steady shot.
“Okay. Okay.”
Some part of her thrilled to that feeling, of showing him the killer and seeing his fear. And that scared her as much as the men on her trail.
Chapter 39
SHE WALKED THROUGH the woods alongside the highway for four miles before she came to the truck stop. The yellow lamps in the parking lot seemed to burn like the sun after so much time in the dark.
She entered the convenience store from a side entrance and walked straight past the CB antennas and 12-volt accessories. She smelled bad. Her shoe was full of blood. The girl behind the checkout stared at her, not because she hadn’t seen worse—there were plenty of tweakers who ran through here—but because Claire had no shame as she bought a change of clothes and strode calmly toward the bathroom.
She went to the showers, fed in ten dollars, and stood under the steam for all six minutes. Then she sat on the little bench out front and put antiseptic deep into the cut before heading back to the parking lot.
She looked over the cars, checking for signs of long-term parking, good candidates for theft. Headlights came toward her. She kept walking. A Jeep Rubicon pulled up alongside her.
“You look like you could use a friend,” the man said.
The car looked brand-new, no signs of hard use, but it was about the most capable off-road made.
His hand had
a wedding ring on it, and a knife clip stuck out from the pocket of his jeans. She watched his eyes as he measured her body with his. He should have noticed the desperation on her, the convenience-store clothes. He probably did, but it only encouraged him. She seemed to be helpless. He looked like a soccer coach, but he was a predator.
Claire considered the Jeep. It would open up a lot of terrain where the police never go.
“I could,” she said.
“You need a ride?”
“I do.”
He gestured with his head to the passenger door.
She circled around the car and climbed in as he rolled up the window.
“You didn’t ask me where I was going,” he said, and he laid his hand on her thigh.
“Just a ride,” she said, and she put her hand on his, stopping it. He smiled and reached between her legs. She gripped his forearm and drew him toward her. His instinct led him to pull back, and as he did she released his arm, and slammed her palm into the side of his neck. She caught the jaw from under and added her strength to his own momentum to drive his head into the window with a heavy chunk, like a bat connecting with a baseball.
He wailed as she pulled the knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and put it into the hollow of his throat.
“Get out of the car.”
He cursed and called her every vulgar thing you can call a woman. “Put that down before you kill somebody.”
It was a nice knife, a Spyderco with a grippy handle. She pressed it forward, just barely breaking the skin. A drop of blood ran down his neck.
“Get out of the car.”
His hand found the door latch, and he stepped out. She opened the glove box and pulled the registration and a Ruger pistol. “I have your address here,” she said. “You report this to the police in less than twenty-four hours and I come to your house and kill you.”
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