The Moscow Vector c-6

by Robert Ludlum

  Suddenly Randi froze and crouched even lower, trusting to the shadows to stay hidden. Not far ahead, no more than a few meters away, she had seen something moving, a brief glimpse of a figure outlined by the light from Kessler’s house.

  She peered intently through the tangle of underbrush and the maze of low-hanging branches. She was looking at a man, a short, heavyset man in a suit and a thick wool overcoat. He was pacing slowly up and down along the driveway. In one big, beefy hand, he held a small tactical radio. In the other, he gripped a pistol fitted with a silencer. He looked nervous. Despite the cold, his forehead glistened with sweat.

  Randi looked past him. There were two cars parked in the space between the villa and the garage. One was a dark red Mercedes sedan. The other was the black BMW she had shot up during the brief, brutal action along Clayallee. Another man in black clothes and body armor sat slumped against the side of the BMW. Blood-soaked bandages were wrapped tightly around his extended right leg. He was either unconscious or dead.

  She nodded, knowing now that she had guessed right. Renke’s assassins must have driven straight here after wiping out her surveillance team. The other black-clad gunmen must still be inside dealing with Ulrich Kessler.

  The heavyset man they had left outside on guard turned again on his heel and paced back toward the two cars. He checked his watch, swore worriedly, and then lifted the radio to his mouth. “Lange, this is Mueller,” he said tensely. “How much longer?”

  A harsh voice crackled over the radio. “Five minutes. Now sit tight and stay off the air. Lange out.”

  Listening, Randi made up her mind. She was going to have to go in after these bastards. There was no time to call for a new backup team. And waiting here to ambush Renke’s men when they came out of the house was a non-starter. If she was lucky, she might be able to drop one or two of them before they nailed her, but those silenced submachine guns they carried gave them too much firepower to face in a stand-up fight out here in the open. Inside, in a close-quarters battle, she would actually have slightly better odds of surviving.

  A quick, self-conscious grin flashed across her lean, taut face. “Better” in this case was probably only the difference between “no chance at all” and “one chance in a thousand.” Then her grin faded. Any chance at all was still more than the other members of her team had gotten.

  Intently, Randi studied the short, paunchy man called Mueller as he nervously paced up and down. Should she try to take him prisoner? No, she decided coldly. That would be far too risky. If he managed to shout or radio a warning to his heavily armed comrades inside Kessler’s house, she was as good as dead.

  Still watching Mueller parade back and forth in increasing agitation, she put one hand in her coat pocket and pulled out a noise suppressor of her own.

  It screwed tightly over the muzzle of her Beretta.

  Ready now, she took careful aim, sighting coolly down the barrel. Phut.

  Phut. Her pistol coughed twice. The metallic noise of the bolt crashing back as the weapon fired seemed to hang forever in the hushed evening air. In reality, she knew, both sets of sounds would be almost inaudible to anyone more than ten meters away.

  One round hit Mueller in the chest. The second tore open his throat. The heavyset man went down in a heap and lay twitching and gurgling, bleeding his life away across the cold concrete. He was dead in seconds.

  Randi swiveled rapidly, swinging the Beretta to cover the man she had wounded earlier. Her finger tightened on the trigger, ready to fire, and then gradually eased off. He had not moved. Hurrying now and staying low, she raced out from under the trees and across the open driveway, careful to keep the cars between her and the house. She reached the BMW and dropped to one knee beside the silent, motionless man. He sat as before, propped up against the side of the black car, with his shattered leg stretched out in front of him.

  While she held her pistol aimed at his head with one hand, she felt for a pulse with the other. Nothing. And his skin was already growing cold. There, lying on the concrete beside him, Randi saw an empty syringe. Her mouth tightened in disgust. That had undoubtedly contained an overdose of mor-phine or some other fatal drug. Renke’s men must be under orders not to leave any wounded behind them —not even their own.

  Then she saw something else, a black angular shape, set on the hard ground next to the dead man. It was his submachine gun. His comrades must have left the weapon beside him, waiting for the lethal drug with which they had injected him to take effect.

  Scarcely daring to believe her luck, Randi unscrewed the silencer from her Beretta and shoved the pistol back into her shoulder holster. Then she reached across the corpse and snagged the abandoned submachine gun.

  Moving quickly and confidently, she examined the weapon, a Heckler &

  Koch MP5SD, found a nearly full thirty-round magazine, yanked back on the cocking handle to chamber a 9mm round, and set the firing selector for three-round bursts.

  Pleased, she patted the weapon with one hand. At least now she had firepower parity with the bad guys. Of course, that still left her outnumbered by at least three-to-one, Randi reminded herself coolly—by trained killers. Trained killers wearing body armor.

  Then she shrugged. Waiting longer was not going to make this any easier.

  She took one more deep breath, counting down inside her own head. Three.

  Two. One. Now!

  Randi jumped to her feet and dashed for the side of Kessler’s villa, half-expecting a sudden burst of gunfire from one of the lighted upstairs windows.

  Instead, there was only silence. She reached the house and flattened her back against the wall, listening hard for the startled shouts that would tell her that she had been spotted.

  Still nothing.

  With the MP5SD tucked firmly against her shoulder, Randi glided forward again, edging around the corner until she had a view of the front door.

  She kept going, caught up in an adrenaline rush that made her intensely aware of every nerve ending, and of even the smallest movements around her.

  Every sense seemed magnified. All the pain from the cuts, scrapes, and bruises she had taken earlier seemed to fade away. She could hear even the tiniest sounds—the crunch of her boots on snow, the faint tick of one of the car engines as it cooled, contracting slowly in the freezing air, and the distant wail of fire, ambulance, and police vehicles speeding toward the carnage on Clayallee.

  She reached the front of the house.

  The front door was already starting to open. Bright interior light spilled through the rapidly widening crack. For a fraction of a second, time seemed to come to a full stop. What should she do? Then, equally abruptly, the world spun back into motion. She only had time to act, not to think.

  Furiously, Randi hurtled forward and hit the door with her right shoulder, slamming it all the way open with enormous force. The heavy door jarred back against her as it crashed into someone on the other side. There was a sudden, loud, surprised grunt as the powerful impact knocked whoever it was backward into the villa’s broad entry foyer. Her shoulder went numb for a brief moment and then flared into white-hot agony. Moving too fast to stop easily, she skidded across the tiled floor, rebounded off a wall, and spun around to cover the corridor.

  One of Renke’s gunmen —lean, dark-eyed, and with dark blond hair—was sprawled just a couple of meters away. Still dazed by the unexpected blow he had taken, the man pushed himself up onto his knees. His submachine gun lay on the floor beside him. Blearily, he glanced up and saw her staring back at him. His mouth fell open in astonishment, and he grabbed for his weapon, trying frantically to aim it in her direction.

  Randi shot him first, squeezing off a quick, three-round burst at pointblank range.

  Two rounds slammed into the gunman’s torso. Unable to penetrate his armor, the copper-jacketed slugs splattered across the bulky vest instead, smashing vital internal organs with enormous impacts that threw the dark-eyed man back against the nearest wall. Her third bullet hit him
right in the face and tore his head apart.

  “Karic?” a startled voice called out from above.

  Caught equally off-guard, Randi swung round and looked up the great curving staircase that led to the villa’s upper floor. A second black-clad gunman loomed there, peering over the railing. He raised his weapon first, taking rapid aim.

  She threw herself backward just as the submachine gun stuttered. Rounds cracked through air all around her, blowing huge craters in the floor. Pieces of broken tile flew in all directions. Ricochets tumbled wickedly across the corridor.

  Desperately, Randi rolled away across the foyer, trying to get out of the line of fire without being hit. A sharp-edged sliver of tile sliced across her cheek, drawing blood. Another burst from the staircase smashed two antique chairs on either side of a gold-framed mirror, turning them into heaps of splintered wood and torn fabric. The mirror itself exploded, sending broken glass riving.

  More gunfire knocked one of Ulrich Kessler’s ill-gotten pieces of art, a Diebenkorn, off the wall and sent the tangled wreckage skidding across the foyer. It had been reduced to a few tattered shreds of stained canvas clinging to a bullet-mangled frame.

  “Damn,” she muttered grimly. While the gunman above her kept shooting, this wide-open entrance to Kessler’s home was quickly becoming a death trap.

  She had to do something to change the situation, and she had to do it fast.

  Abruptly, Randi stopped rolling. Ignoring the bullets lashing the corridor around her, she brought her submachine gun on line, aiming straight up at the large chandelier hanging above the foyer. Frowning in concentration, she squeezed the trigger. The MP5SD hammered back against her shoulder.

  The chandelier exploded, smashed into a thousand glittering shards by her burst. Fragments of shattered glass and crystal spiraled away through the air and cascaded down across the tiles. Immediately, the lights went out, plunging the foyer into darkness.

  Right away, the gunman at the top of the stairs stopped shooting, holding his fire to avoid giving away his position.

  Randi grimaced. This guy was too good. She had been hoping to draw a bead on his muzzle flashes in the dark. Instead, the gunman seemed perfectly content to hold his ground in silence, waiting for her to make the fatal mistake of trying to charge up that staircase.

  It was a Mexican standoff, she thought coolly. She could not get up those stairs without getting killed, and Renke’s hired killers could not come down without suffering the same fate. Well, maybe she could hold them here long enough for the German police to arrive.

  Then Randi shook her head, angry with herself for being overconfident.

  There were at least two of the gunmen left alive. While one kept her pinned down, the other could easily sneak up behind her. After all, this grand, sweeping staircase was not the only way down from the upper floor.

  She sat up cautiously, thinking hard about that.

  When Randi had broken into Kessler’s house the day before, she had spent more than an hour combing through it from top to bottom, exploring every room and corridor while looking for incriminating evidence against the corrupt BKA official and planting an array of hidden listening devices. In the process, she had come across another staircase toward the back, a much smaller and drabber piece of construction.

  These stairs, concealed behind a nondescript door near the kitchen, had originally been intended for use by the servants employed by ever)’ upper-class family in the early 1900s. In those davs, household staff were expected to go about their daily labors unobtrusively, staying out of the grand public spaces reserved for their masters and their guests whenever possible.

  In the darkness, she grinned suddenly. The odds were that Renke’s men had not yet found those back stairs. Their whole attention would be fixed here, at the front of the villa.

  Randi flipped the firing selector on her submachine gun to safe and slung the weapon across her back. Then she rolled back onto her stomach and crawled quietly away down the pitch-black hallway that led toward the rear of the house. As she glided away across the floor, she carefully brushed the debris of spent shell casings and bits of broken tile and glass out of her path. If her plan was going to work, it was absolutely essential that she avoid making any noise that could betrav her movements to that unseen gunman lurking at the top of the stairs.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Upstairs, in Ulrich Kessler’s study, Gerhard Lange scowled. “Mueller,” he hissed into his radio. “Come in!”

  But only static crackled through the small receiver set in his ear.

  “Mueller,” the former Stasi officer said tersely, repeating his attempt to contact the man he had left on guard outside. “Reply!”

  Again, there was no answer.

  Angrily, Lange abandoned the futile effort. Mueller was either dead, a prisoner, or already fleeing the scene as fast as his fat legs would carry him. In any case, he and Stepanovic were very much on their own.

  He glanced across the room to where Kessler’s bodv lav twisted and contorted on the carpet next to an ornate, intricately carved desk. His lips curled in contempt. Against all logic, the weak, cowardly fool had actually imagined that they had come to rescue him.

  What now, though? Lange bleakly considered his own options. His orders from Brandt had been explicit. Destroy the CIA team spying on Kessler. Kill Kessler himself and, after that, destroy the house itself. Leave only ashes for the German police to sift, Brandt had said, destroying any evidence that might link the dead man to Wulf Renke. Everything had seemed to be going according to plan, at least until that maniac crashed through the front door into the foyer, killed Karic, and then managed to survive Stepanovic’s return fire.

  The former Stasi officer cursed softly. Mueller must have missed one of the American agents watching the perimeter of Kessler’s property. Now this unknown American had them trapped up here, trapped with a corpse and a room full of incriminating evidence. But waiting meekly for the police to come and arrest them was not an acceptable option. Erich Brandt had a very long arm and any man who failed him so miserably would not live long enough to regret it, even in the supposed security of a Berlin jail cell.

  No, Lange decided coldly, he and Stepanovic would have to break out past this lone American, trusting that their weapons and body armor would help them survive a headlong rush down those stairs. But first he would carry out Brandt’s orders to the fullest possible extent. If nothing else, setting the villa on

  fire should provide a useful distraction when they made their escape. Shrugging, he picked up the heavy petrol can again and continued sloshing the flam-mable liquid across the carpet, drapes, and desk as he backed out through the open door and into the upstairs corridor. He had already thoroughly drenched Kessler’s corpse with petrol. A single match would set the whole room ablaze.

  * * *

  Striding upward through the darkness on cat-quiet feet, Randi Russell reached the top of the servants’ staircase. She went prone on a small landing and peered down the barrel of her submachine gun, poised and ready to open fire. The door out into the main second floor corridor was just ahead of her. It was closed, but light glimmered faintly through a narrow gap at the bottom.

  Randi frowned. Some of the upstairs lights were still on. That was bad. It meant that once she went through that door, she would be out in the open, lit up and left without any real cover—a sitting duck for anyone who happened to be looking in her direction.

  A faint smell eddied under the door, growing stronger with every second.

  Her nose wrinkled at the familiar, cloying reek. Gasoline fumes? Inside the house? Her eyes widened as understanding dawned. Renke’s men must be planning to burn Kessler’s villa to the ground to cover their tracks!

  Frowning, Randi jumped back to her feet. Whatever she was going to do, she had better do now. Her only chance would be to move fast and keep moving. Still holding the MP5SD’s pistol grip with her right hand, she reached out for the doorknob with her left. It turned eas
ily. The latch clicked and the door began slowly swinging open, creaking loudly on hinges that had not been oiled for far too long.

  Go! She took a short, sharp breath, kicked the door open all the way, and immediately threw herself out into the hallway. She rolled on her shoulder to get well away from the open door and came up on one knee, already sighting down the long corridor toward the top of the staircase.

  There, in the faint glow filtering out into the hall from several of the adjoining rooms, she spotted movement—a squat black shape silhouetted against the deeper black of the unlit foyer. It was a dark-haired man, bulky in body armor, and he was already spinning round to face her. He had a weapon in his hands.

  Too late, you son of a bitch, Randi thought icily. She pulled the trigger of her submachine gun, firing a series of rapid, three-round bursts. The MP5SD chattered, bucking hard against her grip as it punched 9mm rounds toward the gunman.

  Near misses tore sections of the railing behind him to pieces, sending jagged, flame-bright sparks flying as bullets ripped through brass and shattered marble. Other bullets struck the dangling remains of the ruined chandelier.

  More fragments of glass and crystal broke away to smash onto the tile floor far below.

  Hit repeatedly by several rounds that splattered across his Kevlar vest with bone-crushing force, the dark-haired gunman stumbled back, hunched over in agony. He crashed into the weakened section of railing and then screamed in sudden terror as it bent and gave way under his weight.

  Randi kept shooting, grimly holding the submachine gun on target as it kicked higher with each burst.