Out of Range: A Novel

by Hank Steinberg

  Salim whirled, ready to fight but then he saw the red dot of the laser from Hasan’s tricked-out machine gun pointed at his chest. He dropped his rifle, hope draining from his eyes.

  Charlie had a shot from where he was—fifty yards down the hall—but the chances of hitting Hasan from that distance were next to impossible.

  “Who’s with you?” Hasan barked. “How many of you are there?”

  Salim’s eyes flicked over Hasan’s shoulder. Charlie crept closer, a finger to his mouth, shhh.

  “Please,” Salim said, trying to stall. “Don’t hurt me. I’m just a—”

  “How many?” Hasan hissed.

  Charlie took one step, then another. Then another.

  “The rest are dead,” Salim said. “They were killed by your men.”

  Closer. Charlie needed to be ten yards closer.

  “Who sent you?”

  Three more steps.

  One, two . . .

  “Who sent you!” Hasan demanded again.

  As Salim was about to answer, Charlie’s shoe squeaked. In any other circumstance the noise would have been so insignificant as to be unnoticeable. But here, Charlie might as well have set off a firecracker.

  Hasan turned.

  And Charlie fired. Pressing the trigger as fast as he could.

  Hasan roared like a wounded lion, his AK-47 haphazardly spewing bullets as he stumbled toward Charlie, trying to find his balance.

  Charlie ducked but kept firing and Hasan collapsed, his rifle falling to the floor.

  Charlie was still pointing the pistol at him, squeezing the trigger over and over. But the gun was empty.

  Hasan was bleeding profusely from his shoulder and neck, but the fight hadn’t gone out of him. “What you gonna do now?” he growled. “You got no bullets left.”

  “No,” Salim said, stepping toward him with his rifle. “But he’s got me.”

  “Where’s Julie?” Charlie barked at Hasan.

  “They’re gone,” Hasan said. “You never going to find them now.”

  Charlie grabbed the AK and pointed it in Hasan’s face, finger tightening on the trigger. “Answer now or you’re a dead man.”

  The big man broke into a coughing fit, his face going pale. He grabbed at his bloody neck, trying to staunch the bleeding, but his body gave out, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

  Even in death there seemed to be defiance in his eyes.

  Charlie sat with his back against the wall, holding his head in his hands as Salim worked his way down the hallway, checking the last few doors. His mind felt as empty as the bunker in which he sat—a hollowed-out shell, nothing of any substance left. With Hasan dead, with no evidence here of any kind as to where Byko had taken Julie, this was the end of the line.

  For a moment Charlie pictured himself arriving at home, having to tell the kids that he’d gone all this way and come back empty-handed. What would their faces look like? How would they feel? For Ollie, losing his mother would leave a scar that would probably never heal. But what about Meagan? She was young enough that she might forget Julie altogether, her only memories of her mother cobbled together from the photos and home videos they’d taken. Which would be worse? The loss or the absence of any memory at all?

  As he was mulling this over, Salim came out of the last door and shook his head. Charlie looked away, his gaze falling on Hasan’s lifeless body.

  Then something struck him.

  Why was Hasan here? He didn’t seem like the hide-out-and-keep-his-head-down type. He was Byko’s personal bodyguard, yet he had stayed behind.

  Charlie stood and looked into the room from which Hasan had exited. As Salim had already reported, it was basically empty. A table, an iPod trailing a pair of white earphones and an empty bookcase of gray-painted steel. That was it. As innocuous as a room could possibly be. And yet something about it didn’t seem right. Charlie found his eye drawn to the bookcase and realized that it was sitting at an odd angle, as though it had been hurriedly shoved into place. He moved toward it and noticed scrape marks on the floor.

  The bookcase had been moved.

  “Give me a hand, Salim!”

  Salim came into the room and together they dragged the heavy bookcase to the side.

  Sure enough, they found a door. Charlie yanked it open and walked in.

  The room was brightly lit and lined with painted white walls. There were several racks of modern computer servers and several cubicles containing various computers and monitors. Plus a radio and a phone. This was the nerve center of the facility.

  And every single piece of equipment in the room was wired with explosives.

  Charlie eyed Salim warily. “That’s why Hasan was left behind. He was supposed to blow the place.”

  Salim nodded and stepped forward cautiously. “Don’t touch anything,” Charlie warned, looking around for some sort of detonation timer.

  What he found was a small black box attached to some wires. A tiny red light burned on the front of the box. But other than that, there was no clear sign of what it did or how it worked.

  He felt pretty sure that the explosives couldn’t detonate spontaneously. But still . . .

  Where was the trigger for the detonator?

  And then something else caught his eye. Sitting on a table off to the side of the room—a computer that looked like it was owned by an individual. A sleek Apple, the screen still lit up, a wire connecting it to the big stack of servers.

  shut down now? said an icon in the middle of the screen.

  “I think you should get out of here,” Charlie told Salim.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Just go. To the next corridor.”

  Salim hesitated but headed out.

  Charlie waited two minutes—long enough for Salim to get far away—then moved the mouse over the button that said no.

  He took a deep breath and clicked.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Quinn sat in the back of Byko’s Escalade, which was hitched to a flat car thundering through the tunnel from one end of the Vasilevsky Missile Complex to the other. The small train of about half a dozen cars, including a battered old electric engine and a Spartan crew car, ran on narrow-gauge rails of the sort used in mining operations. The flatbed cars had been built to transport both medium-range ballistic missiles and tracked military vehicles, and so served well for transporting the SUVs in Quinn’s convoy. But it was so dark inside the tunnels that Quinn could see none of this.

  They had left a skeleton crew at the command center to guard the place while Byko’s most trusted bodyguard, Hasan, wired the communications equipment to blow. Quinn had managed to convince Byko to leave his own computer at the command center, to be blown up along with the rest of the gear. The more places that information was stored, the greater the possibility of penetration, and as far as Quinn was concerned, Byko was already too exposed.

  After eleven months in the man’s employ, Byko remained an enigma to Quinn. How could a man willing to unleash dirty bombs all over the world have such a weakness for this woman? This woman who had lied to him and betrayed him? Who had humiliated him and nearly destroyed him?

  And now here she was, sleeping like a baby—they’d been forced to give her a sedative—her head leaning against Byko’s shoulder as if they were still lovers.

  Quinn supposed that she was attractive in her way, that there was a certain earnest quality in her that might be intoxicating to a man looking for reassurance. But still . . . to drag her along with them now? To what end?

  In spite of himself, Quinn had to admit that he admired her spunk and tenacity. She’d endured almost everything he could dish out—the drugs, the waterboarding, the hours of sleep deprivation—and still, when they’d tried to remove her from the bunker, she’d writhed and fought like a wounded animal, cursing them all for killing her husband. Quinn smiled—he thought that was rather a nice touch on Byko’s part, lying to her about Charlie’s demise.

  Byko looked up at Quinn
, as if he knew he was being observed, and nudged Julie’s head off of him.

  “Do you have a signal yet?” Byko asked.

  Quinn suspected he was merely trying to change the subject, unspoken though it was, from Julie to Hasan, but he checked his cell phone for effect. “It’s not going to work down here. We’ll use the hard line when we get to the silo.”

  “How long?”

  “Less than five.”

  Byko shifted in his seat, glanced again at Julie, then stared out the window into the darkness.

  What drove a man like him? How had he progressed from libertine playboy to rabid revolutionary to international terrorist in less than a decade? Quinn supposed the drugs had something to do with it. And the deaths in his family, of course. But there was no way that could be the whole story. People lost their families all the time. Quinn was no psychologist, but he suspected there must have been something megalomaniacal about Byko from a very early age. Maybe it was being surrounded by all of that wealth and power and violence. Maybe it was knowing from the time he was a toddler that he would inherit billions.

  Who the hell knows? Quinn thought. Who the hell cares really? He was getting his fifty million and soon he’d be sitting on an island in Fiji sipping banana daquiris on a private beach in front of his own goddamn mansion.

  The train shuddered, jerked and began to slow with a scream of rarely used brakes as it pulled into a concrete bunker similar to the terminus at the command center.

  “We’re here,” Quinn said.

  He bounded out of the car and leaped onto the platform while the train was still moving, heading straight for an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone handset that hung from a concrete pillar near an air-lock door. He lifted the handset, consulted the brass plate with its list of Cyrillic numbers and dialed the four-digit extension for the command center.

  It rang and rang and rang.

  “Nobody’s answering,” Quinn told Byko as he hung up. “That probably means it’s done. I’ll go up top. We can catch a cell signal there.”

  Quinn headed up a huge concrete ramp, leaving behind workers busy unhitching the vehicles from the train cars. Predictably, Byko stayed with Julie. When Quinn reached the top of the ramp, he found himself standing on a high desert plateau. The sun had just set and a moonless night cloaked the world in darkness.

  He took out his secure cell phone. It was a very sophisticated model that generated unique SIM numbers for each call, making it essentially impossible to trace, and then it encrypted each call so that anyone who happened to lock on to the signal would be unable to make any sense of it. He dialed the number for Hasan’s sat phone. Unlike cell phones, which depended on proximity to cell towers, a sat phone would work almost anywhere on earth. As long as Hasan was aboveground, he’d be able to reach him.

  But again, Hasan didn’t answer.

  Quinn tried three more times, each time allowing the phone to ring for at least a minute.

  As a fallback, Hasan was supposed to leave a message on a one-time-only voice mail box to confirm the job was done. Quinn tried that. But there was nothing there either.

  An aching feeling rose slowly in Quinn’s chest.

  Something had gone wrong.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Charlie closed the cover on Byko’s computer.

  As best he could tell, this machine contained the raw data Byko had used to construct his plans. Manifests, maps, names of men, locations of dead drops, lists of nuclear material weights and types . . .

  Putting it all together, Charlie could see the outlines of Byko’s plan. The nuclear material had been shipped to nine different cities, then picked up by members of various cells and transported to other cities. The actual target cities.

  The final targets seemed to be London, New York, Hanover, Chicago, Tokyo, Minneapolis, Vienna, Sydney and Copenhagen. It seemed an odd list. Hanover but not Berlin. Vienna but not Paris. Minneapolis but not L.A. or D.C.

  He supposed that some of it had probably been happenstansical: maybe it had something to do with logistics or communications, or perhaps Byko had only been able to staff his terror cells in certain cities. Both Minneapolis and Hanover had a signifigant Muslim presence. But Vienna had almost none at all, while Paris had the largest, and perhaps unhappiest, Muslim population in any European city. There was no way to know, really. In any case, he needed to get this information to MI6 as soon as possible.

  He didn’t have an email address for Hopkins, so he opted to send everything to his old friend Alan Marsh at the British Embassy with instructions to forward it. But when Charlie tried importing the files on to an email, he found that they were all blocked. They had been firewalled so that they could never be duplicated or sent out.

  Could he just walk out of the room with the computer? No, he had to think that Hasan might have anticipated that. After all, the computer already had a lump of plastic explosives attached to the rear of the screen. It seemed entirely plausible that the individual charges might have some kind of tamper circuit built into them that would blow the whole room to smithereens when he tried to disconnect the computer from the detonation wire.

  Then something struck him. Quickly, he called up all of the files that he’d already examined and began to take photos of them off the computer screen. This would take some time and Charlie felt agitated that the task was diverting him from finding Julie. But in his heart, he felt sure that this was what Julie would have wanted him to do. She’d risked her own life to put a stop to the madness. He had to honor that and follow her down the same path.

  Byko felt a wave of panic run through him. If anyone found that computer . . .

  He took out his phone and dialed the number for General Tempkin, a powerful general in the Interior Ministry. Aleksi Tempkin was one of the few ethnic Russians who had remained in the country after the split from the Soviets and Byko didn’t trust any Russian as far as he could throw him. But the General had been on the payroll for many years and he knew nothing of Byko’s plans—which meant he had every reason to believe the big payouts would continue indefinitely.

  “You shouldn’t be calling me directly,” the general greeted him.

  Byko was in no mood for this. “Did anyone authorize a raid on the command center at the Vasilevsky Missile Complex?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Anyone? Could the CIA or MI6 have hit it?”

  “No. The President has made himself unavailable to the foreigners. No incursions have been authorized.”

  “You will let me know if you hear otherwise,” Byko said firmly.

  “Of course,” said the General.

  Byko hung up the phone and exchanged a glance with Quinn.

  “Let’s try the command center again,” Quinn said. “Maybe Hasan got hung up for some reason.”

  Byko lifted the hard line himself this time and dialed.

  Charlie was snapping off the last few photos of the computer files when the hard line rang again. The first few times Charlie had declined to answer, but now that he was done, he thought there might be an upside. If this was Quinn calling—or better yet Byko—to check on what Hasan was doing, Charlie might just be able to leverage what he’d found here for Julie.

  It was a chance but a chance worth taking.

  He picked up the phone, but he didn’t say a word—he’d wait for whoever was at the other end of the line to reveal himself.

  For a long moment, his adversary refused to speak as well.

  Then finally, Byko caved. “Hasan?”

  “Hasan’s dead,” Charlie replied. “So are the rest of your men down here. And I’ve had a pretty good look at your computer. Impressive things you’ve got planned, Alisher.”

  There was a long pause. Charlie figured it was Byko trying to regain his composure.

  “What do you want, Charlie?”

  “I want my wife back,” Charlie said. “For that, you can have your computer.”

  “How do you know I haven’t already killed her?”
>
  “I think you would’ve left her here if you had.”

  There was another pause. Byko apparently considering the trade.

  “And where would you like to meet then? To make the exchange?”

  “Somewhere public. I’m thinking the square at Kokand.” That was the nearest town of any size.

  “Always with the squares,” Byko replied. “It seems that is our destiny.”

  Charlie looked at his watch. “Tonight. Eleven o’clock sharp.”

  “Agreed,” said Byko, almost too affably.

  “I’ll need to hear her voice, Alisher.”

  “You don’t trust me, Charlie?”

  “Put her on.”

  There was some rustling, then a groggy female voice. “Wha—?”

  “Say hello,” Byko coaxed.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Julie said wearily.

  Charlie heard Byko laugh, then the sound of his wife being taken away. She sounded out of it, but she was most definitely alive.

  “We have a deal then?” Charlie asked.

  “We do.”

  And with that, Byko hung up.

  For a moment, Charlie felt a surge of elation. She was alive. She was alive and he would be with her in less than an hour. But then it occurred to him that there was something too easy about all of this. And how could Byko be assured that Charlie wouldn’t just call MI6 and relay the information verbally? The answer was—he couldn’t.

  Charlie looked at Byko’s computer. At all of the explosives attached to it.

  What if Byko had a backup plan? A detonator switch that could be activated remotely? What if Byko was merely stalling Charlie until Quinn got it ready?

  Charlie bolted out of the room.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Charlie sprinted through the maze of passageways.

  “Salim!” he called. “We have to get out of here! Run! Run toward the air lock!”

  The basic layout of the command center was simple enough. But navigating the corridors at a full gallop was easier said than done. Some of the passageways doubled back or shifted direction unaccountably. And—if Charlie was right about what Byko was up to—there was no time for mistakes.