by Rachel Grant
But still, she’d tiptoed away and searched for a place to hide. A place to die. Because sure as hell the man was here to kill her.
She grabbed her purse from the table on her dash through the dining room. If she hid, maybe she’d buy just enough time to place a call. From the bedroom nightstand she’d grabbed Luke’s landline, she’d use that to call 911. She’d use her cell to call Luke.
She slid down into the smallest, deepest corner of the closet as the 911 operator answered. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?” a woman said in a flat voice.
“This is Undine Gray,” she whispered even as she pulled up Luke’s cell number with her other hand. “There is a man with a gun at the door. He’s a Ukrainian terrorist.”
Luke’s phone rang.
“This is part of the raid of the marina by the SWAT team,” she continued. “The terrorists are here.” Her eyes teared. Please, Luke, pick up. “The SWAT team is in the wrong place.”
“Undine? What’s going on?” Luke asked.
“The SWAT team needs to come here,” she whispered into both phones. “Alexei Lutsenko is here. I’m hiding in the closet. Help me. Please, Luke. Help me.”
Luke’s stomach plummeted at Undine’s desperate words. “I’m coming, honey. I’ll bring the team.” To the men on the boat, he said, “Alexei Lutsenko is at my apartment. Now. With Undine.” He bolted for the deck and grabbed Parker and a SWAT officer. “I need back up.”
Into the phone, he said, “Undine, is he inside or in the hall?”
“Not—”
He heard a muted bang, and she let out a sharp squeal of fear.
“He just shot the lock, I think.” Her words were interrupted by trembling breaths.
The dead bolt would require more than one bullet. Sure enough, more thumps sounded over the connection. The apartment walls were thin enough that the sound carried all the way to the bedroom closet and over the phone line.
The SWAT officer directed them to a patrol car positioned at the end of the dock. Parker and Luke jumped into the backseat, while the SWAT officer directed the uniform to drive them to Luke’s.
Within seconds, they were racing down the waterfront street, Luke providing directions. On the police radio, a dispatcher announced there were reports of shots fired in an apartment building. Luke’s address was given. A second report indicated they had a 911 call from a woman claiming a terrorist was at the same address.
“He’s inside now, Luke!” Undine whispered urgently.
“We’re coming, sweetheart. Tuck the phone in your pocket. Keep the line open. Do everything he says. Even hand over the phone if he demands it. I’m coming.”
“I love you, Luke.”
“I love you too, Undine. I’m coming, sweetheart.”
They rounded a sharp corner at speed. One side of the vehicle lifted, but the officer handled it with the skill of practice.
“He’s in the living room.”
“Hide the phone. I can see my building. We’re five blocks up the street. Can you hear the siren?”
“Yes.” A pause. “He’s in the room.” Sound became muffled. She must’ve tucked the phone away.
Muted, indistinguishable words. Her voice. Then a man’s. The muffling got worse. The phone was being jostled. Undine let out a shriek.
The loud pop of a gun firing.
He gripped the phone so tightly, he was in danger of crushing it.
She screamed louder.
The phone thumped some more. “Bitch! You think I didn’t guess you’d have a phone?” The voice had a heavy accent, Ukrainian, he’d bet, but to his untrained ear it could easily be Russian. The man spoke directly into the receiver. “You want your woman, Sevick? I will give you her and the bomb for ten million dollars.”
Luke stared at the phone in shock. No way in hell were these men after a simple ransom for the weapon. Yuri Kravchenko was a zealot who’d spent years looking for this bomb. He didn’t want a payoff; Luke believed in his gut Yuri wanted nothing less than a world war.
But maybe Alexei hadn’t gotten the same memo?
“Where the hell am I supposed to get ten million dollars?” he said, just to keep the man talking. Four blocks to go. Sirens surrounded them. Everyone was closing in, but the traffic between them and the building was a mess as drivers panicked upon seeing a wave of police vehicles in their rearview mirrors.
“Dr. Stefan Gray can pay,” Alexei said.
Luke seriously doubted Stefan had that kind of cash on hand, but he wasn’t about to tell the Ukrainian that. He relayed the ransom demand to the SWAT officer, who relayed the information over the police radio. Parker spoke to his commander on his cell phone.
Keep him talking, Parker mouthed.
Luke nodded. “How do we get the money to you?”
“You’ll receive instructions. Wait for my call.”
The line went dead.
“What can you tell us about your building?” the SWAT officer asked.
Luke focused inward. He wasn’t a NOAA lieutenant tonight. He was a special forces operator, and this was an op. He couldn’t think about Undine in danger. He had to think like the operator he was. “Underground parking. The best way to get her out would be to have a vehicle in the garage.”
“How many exits?”
“Two. One on the north side, one on the east.”
The SWAT officer radioed the information to the rest of his team. Vehicles sped past them into position.
“He won’t get away,” the officer at the wheel said. “There are only three of them. We have an army.”
“But he has a hostage. And a nuclear bomb.”
Nothing about this felt right.
Ransom?
Undine found it hard to believe Yuri had gone to all this trouble only to pull a Dr. Evil-type super-villain move and demand money.
Money he knew her father didn’t have. He’d sneered at her father’s solution to fund his struggling institute enough in the week they’d worked together.
But Alexei was convincing, making her wonder if he didn’t know Yuri’s real agenda.
She struggled against him as he dragged her toward the front door of the apartment. He slapped her. “You scream, and I will shoot anyone who crosses our path. Man. Woman. Child. They will die.” He studied her with the cold, hard gaze of a sociopath.
She nodded.
He pressed his gun into her lower back and pushed her out the door. “To the stairs.”
Thankfully, they came across no one on the short trip to the stairway. Luke’s neighbors were all likely hunkered down in their closets after the shots were fired, just as Undine had done.
Sirens echoed in the stairwell. From the noise, she could believe every police car in Port Angeles was closing in on the building.
Luke is coming.
They went down two flights before Alexei yanked her into a hall. They were on the second floor of the building, the first level of condos. He dragged her down the hall, passing two apartments before he shoved open the door to unit 206. Was he going to take another hostage?
Inside, she came face-to-face with Yuri Kravchenko.
Chapter Thirty-Three
They weren’t in his apartment and hadn’t left through the garage or any of the exits. Her phone was still on, but the GPS hadn’t moved. And the phone wasn’t in his apartment.
Which left only one option: they were still in the building.
Four floors. Sixteen apartments per floor, except for the first floor, which had business offices and shops that had already been evacuated. A convenience store on the waterfront side. A wine bar. A dentist office. There’d been no sign of Undine and Alexei in any of the businesses. The apartments were now being evacuated one floor at a time.
They would find Undine. They had to. But what condition would she be in?
Why had Yuri chosen this for his stand, when the ferry had appeared to be the perfect target? It should have been irresistible for the angry zealot.
But instead
Yuri had fixated on Undine. A different sort of statement, but it made a kind of sense. Undine had exposed him. He’d spent years searching, and she’d triggered the series of events that would have ended his plot before it could get off the ground. So Yuri had gone for the personal target.
That it made sense didn’t help. Luke never should have left her. He should have insisted she go with her parents to Seattle. He should have protected her as he’d vowed he would to Keith Hatcher.
He stood in the lobby as another family was led out the door. He nodded to his neighbors, who looked terrified at the chaos that had become of their comfortable condominium community. He doubted his landlord would renew his lease when this was all over.
Not that he gave a fuck. He just wanted Undine back. He marched across the lobby and headed for the stairs. He’d join the search of the apartments. He had to do something.
He stepped onto the second-floor hallway and nodded to the SWAT officer who guarded the stairs. If Luke were making a stand here, he’d choose this floor—low enough to escape through a window if necessary, and a decorative lip circled the building just below the second-floor windows, providing a wide ledge for walking.
This was the floor. Sixteen apartments. Were any vacant? He turned to the SWAT officer. “What’s the word on this floor? Any vacancies?”
The man radioed his boss, who was with the building manager, to relay the question.
A moment later, the reply came. “We have a vacation mail hold on 201, and 206 is vacant. For sale.”
“Is the unit number included in the real estate listing? And do the photos show the unit without furniture, obviously vacant?”
The officer relayed the question; the response was immediate. “Yes and yes.”
The officer in charge of the manhunt followed up with orders for Luke and the officer. “I’m sending the search team to you. We’re placing priority on 206 and the other two vacant units with a public listing, but only 206 has photos that show an empty condo, making it our first priority. We need to evacuate the adjacent apartment—quietly. Guard the entrance to 206, but do not move on the unit unless you have reason to believe the hostage will die without immediate intervention. The hostage negotiator is en route as we speak.”
Undine. The hostage has a name.
He didn’t dare say the words aloud.
Luke positioned himself to the side of the door, out of the peephole’s view. He listened but heard no voices. Given the thin walls, if they were in there, either they were in the bedroom, or they were being amazingly silent. Even low sounds would echo off the empty apartment’s walls.
The SWAT team arrived and confirmed the adjacent apartment was empty. It was a weekday afternoon, and the building had gone into lockdown before five o’clock. The apartment was on the same side of the elevator as Luke’s apartment, meaning that like his, these were the one-bedroom units. Most families—people who were more likely to be home on a Friday afternoon—lived down the hall, on the other side of the elevator, in the two- and three-bedroom units.
He knew the layout. The door would open directly into the dining area, which flowed directly into the living room. The living and dining rooms were essentially one long rectangle that stretched the length of the apartment from hallway to street side.
To the left of the dining room was the open kitchen. Next to the kitchen was the bathroom, next to the bathroom the only bedroom. The bathroom had two doors: one opened into the living room, one into the bedroom. The main bedroom door opened directly into the living room. A simple, efficient design, without wasting space with an unnecessary hallway, the entire unit was a rectangle. The bedroom and living room shared the north-facing exterior wall, and both boasted wide windows that overlooked the strait. The kitchen and dining room shared the south wall that spanned the corridor.
He signaled to Officer Blakely, the SWAT team leader he’d met on Yuri’s boat what already seemed like ages ago, but in reality was ninety minutes at most. They walked toward the stairway, away from 206. “I might be able to confirm they’re in there and even where they are in the apartment.”
“If you can perform that miracle, and we get orders to storm the place, you’re on the team.”
A minute later, he and Blakely and a third officer silently entered the living room of the adjacent apartment. He pulled out his phone and dialed Undine’s number.
Her ringtone played clear as day through the thin wall.
Yuri’s gaze jerked toward Alexei. “You idiot! You kept her phone?”
“Why does it matter? They know we’re in the building. This way we can arrange the ransom without using our own phones.”
Undine breathed shallowly, silently, determined not to draw attention to herself in the stark bedroom. She tucked herself into the corner. Her hands and feet were bound, but there was nothing in the bare apartment to tie her to, leaving her free to scoot and roll.
“Your job isn’t to think, Alexei.” Yuri’s voice echoed off the walls. “Your job was to grab the girl. Her phone could be used as a bug. They could be listening to us now.”
Yuri dropped her cell phone on the wood floor and slammed the heel of his boot into it. He glared at his nephew. “Flush it down the toilet.”
“Why not toss it out the window?”
“They’re watching the windows, fool. Trying to pinpoint where we are in the building. Once they know, they’ll put snipers on the rooftop of the restaurant in front of us. This apartment doesn’t have curtains. We’ll be easy targets. The longer it takes them to find us, the better chance we have of escaping with our lives.”
Ivan entered the room and spoke in rapid Ukrainian. At least she assumed it was Ukrainian. He pointed to Undine, and she guessed he cursed at both men.
“It doesn’t matter if she can understand us,” Yuri said in crisp but accented English. “Because she won’t be able to tell anyone. The hostage negotiator will broker the deal. Our safe passage for the bomb, but she will come with us, our insurance. They want the bomb so badly, they’ll give her up without a fuss. The bomb is more important than any one woman, and everyone—including her—knows that.”
Ivan argued in Ukrainian, his face turning red as he spoke to his uncle. He pointed at Undine again and then gestured in frustration.
“We’ll tell them that if they provide us with a lifeboat, we’ll put her on it once we’re deep in the Pacific. They’ll have no choice but to accept the deal, or the Olympic Peninsula will know the pain of Chernobyl.”
Yuri’s plan crystalized for Undine. They would demand a boat stocked for the long ocean crossing so they could flee to allies in Russia, likely intending to toss her overboard when they no longer needed her. There were so many flaws with the plan—for starters there would almost certainly be tracking devices on the vessel. The US military could and would hunt them to their deaths. But with her as a hostage, they would have a strong bargaining chip. The military would be forced to hold back. Yuri was a skilled seaman. He could pilot the vessel across the ocean to a Siberian port. His allies might even have a ship or a submarine awaiting them.
It was unlikely he worked for the current Ukrainian government, as they were generally allied with the US. Threatening Washington State with a nuclear bomb would only harm their cause. He must be with one of the splinter groups—the neo-Nazis or some other faction—a group that was taking a page from ISIS’s playbook, using terror to destabilize and grab power.
“Why, after years of searching, are you giving up the bomb so quickly?” she asked, her voice a dry rasp.
Ivan swung to face her, offering a frigid glare, while Yuri shrugged, unconcerned. He answered Ivan in Ukrainian, then turned to Undine. “Your government will figure it out soon enough. Aside from the fact that you made it impossible for me to bring the bomb back to Russia to set it off in Moscow, I don’t have the keys to activate it. We had to stop diving on Magnum before we could find the key box because the Coast Guard had patrol boats guarding the site twenty-four hours a day.”
>
“You don’t have the key box?” she asked. Was that what Luke had found on their first dive? But then, if it were, Yuri would have gotten the box when he killed Annie, so it must not have been it. Then she shook her head, realizing what Yuri had just said. He can’t initiate the bomb.
This whole abduction was a bluff. He had a nuclear warhead he couldn’t move and couldn’t use. So he was trading it for a big payday and a ride out of town.
He couldn’t kill Undine and expect to walk out of this apartment alive, and he couldn’t set off the bomb.
If only Yuri hadn’t destroyed her phone. There was a chance the FBI had used it as a listening device. Mara had told her how Raptor had done exactly that, back when Raptor was owned by Robert Beck. If the police knew which apartment they were in and knew Yuri couldn’t activate the bomb, they could storm the place. She might be hurt in the crossfire, but she had a helluva better chance at survival than she did if she were hauled off by Yuri and his nephews as their hostage.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Luke met Blakely’s gaze, blessing the cheap construction he’d once cursed. Yuri had backed himself into a corner, intending to bluff his way out, but then unknowingly showed his cards to the very people he needed to dupe.
Luke and Blakely left the third officer in the apartment with a notepad and whispered instructions to write down everything he heard. Their advantage would last until Yuri realized they knew where he was. If he disclosed more, they needed to know every word.
They returned to the hall and sent a second officer in to act as runner should they overhear something vital. Both men had their radios turned off. No noise from police communication would tip off Yuri that they’d taken up a position that allowed them to listen in.
Pacing quite a distance down the hall from 206, Blakely radioed his boss and told the man to get a sniper on the roof across the street immediately, then relayed the vital piece: the bomb was a bluff. Both Luke and Blakely were ordered to return to the ground floor, where they could discuss the situation with the just-arrived hostage negotiator.