False Flag

by Jack Slater

  “Leave the girl with me,” Trapp said, his back flush against the hallway wall. It was a crappy tactical position. And he had no leverage. Both men knew it, which made the conversation that followed inevitable.

  “I can’t do that. And you know it.”

  The man carrying Ikeda jerked his head back into Alstyne’s now empty hotel suite. “Get in.”

  Trapp didn’t move. “What will you do with her?”

  “Get in the room,” the man said, enunciating every word without ever answering his question. “Or she dies.”

  “Maybe I’ll put a bullet in your head first. Take you out with me.”

  The man holding Ikeda shrugged — at least, that’s what Trapp figured he was trying to do. The girl’s weight made it difficult. “Be my guest. But you’ll sign her death warrant if you do. My men have orders to kill her first.”

  Trapp clenched his free hand into a fist. He tried not to show his frustration, but it was palpable, leaking out of him like oil from a stricken tanker. He choked out the words. “Then what?”

  “I have the man I came for. If you do exactly as I tell you, I’ll leave your girl in the elevator and send her down to the lobby. Give the pigs who run this place a hell of a shock.”

  Trapp knew it was a lie. He could see it in the man’s eyes—even through the gloom that filled the hallway. He wore a hungry, predatory look. Trapp knew that he intended to take Ikeda with him.

  It’s what he would’ve done.

  And yet he had no other choice. If he tried anything stupid, then he would be as good as signing the woman’s death certificate. And that was a risk he couldn’t take. As long as Ikeda was alive, then Trapp would find her—even if it took him to the very ends of the earth itself.

  “I’ll do it.”

  The second the door swung closed behind Trapp, he dropped to the ground and belly crawled into the depths of the enormous hotel suite, fearing that at any second a spray of lead would chase him through the door.

  It never came. But the captain’s accented voice called out after him.

  “My men have rigged explosives to the outside of this door. If you step through, you will die.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Trapp growled. “Why not just let me blow myself up?”

  “What is it you Americans say?” the man gloated. “I prefer to give you a sporting chance. Good luck, Mr. American. When the Chinese get their hands on you, I think you’ll need it.”

  Trapp didn’t dignify the prick with a response. His body hummed with anger, vibrating like an over-strung guitar. Mostly, he was angry at himself. He had been outplayed, outmaneuvered, and he was stuck in a luxurious prison, waiting for a one-way ticket to the basement beneath the headquarters of the MSS in Beijing.

  He ground the frustration into mincemeat and pushed it away. He could deal with it later. Right now, he needed to focus on getting himself out of this mess. He was the only chance Ikeda had, and every second he was stuck in here was a second in which the unknown kidnapper was getting away.

  His eyes were by now accustomed to the gloom, and picked out most of the details he expected, having seen images of Alstyne’s suite in his briefing packs. The bed, the coffee table, the private bar.

  But Trapp was almost certain the Ritz-Carlton advertising materials didn’t mention the last item he saw. A body, lying face down on the floor, with what looked like a vicious shard of glass sticking out from a deep cut in his neck, glinting like a stalactite growing from rust red rock.

  Atta girl, he thought with grim satisfaction. Trapp had known from the second he met her that Eliza Ikeda was a different class of operative. He hadn’t needed proof of it—but here it was nonetheless. She had been in an impossible situation, and she’d done what she could to tip the scale in her favor.

  Still, it wasn’t enough.

  Trapp remembered the flashlight he still had in the pocket of his denim jeans. He retrieved it, flicked it on, and played the beam over the dead body. Like the others, the shooter was East Asian, and wore all-black fatigues. The blood from his neck had drained fast, and the cream carpet beneath his corpse was stained red. Trapp’s eyes were drawn inexorably to the wound in his neck. With the aid of the flashlight, he saw that Ikeda’s improvised weapon had been what looked suspiciously like a champagne flute.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. “What a way to go.”

  He took a step toward the body, nestled his flashlight between his teeth, and crouched down. That was when he felt it: the faintest tingling at the base of his spine. An iron tang on his tongue. In short—the unmistakable feeling that something was wrong with this picture.

  It was too easy.

  Trapp shone the flashlight across the corpse. The beam glistened against the setting blood, but that wasn’t what Trapp was looking for. In truth, he had no idea what that was, but he’d know it when he found it. Something about this didn’t make sense.

  Unless…

  Gently, Trapp began to lift the body, moving it only a fraction of an inch at a time. He pressed his head against the ground, guided by the beam of the flashlight.

  And then he saw it.

  “Ah, hell.”

  His opponent had lied. There were no explosives on the other side of the door. They were in the room all along. And they were about to detonate.

  13

  For one long second, Trapp froze, staring down at the explosive package with something akin to shock. His legs felt nailed to the floor, and thoughts crawled in his mind at the glacial pace of cement in a mixer.

  Trapp let out a deep, ragged breath, expelling his fear. He instantly catalogued his options. They were not good. His opponent had played him, and he’d fallen for the man’s trick hook, line and sinker. The explosive device was simple: a rectangular block of plastic explosive, wrapped in mylar film and equipped with a simple anti-tamper radio-controlled detonation switch. Trapp’s experienced eye played over the sight. He only had matter of seconds to make his decision.

  Crap.

  The unknown operative would have expected that the dead body would attract Trapp’s attention. Like a fly to an electric trap, he’d allowed himself to be drawn in. Before long, an unseen thumb would hover over the detonation switch, before punching down, and Trapp’s fate would be sealed in a wall of flame.

  Trapp had neither the experience nor the time to attempt to disarm the device. Which meant only two options remained: either to get as far away from the bomb as he could, or get it as far away from him as possible. He quickly discounted the first option. For all he knew, there might still be a second charge waiting for him on the other side of the hotel suite’s door, or else he might run into a barrage of gunfire.

  Trapp sucked in a deep breath and prayed. He would only get one shot at this.

  He sprang into action, picking the block of plastic explosive up with one hand. He didn’t recognize the manufacturer, or the Asian language scrawled on the wrapper, but it weighed about as much as its American counterparts—about a pound.

  Enough explosive power to reduce the hotel suite, and anything inside it, to blood and dust. The only upside, as far as Trapp could tell, was that it was a makeshift device. Whoever had set the trap up hadn’t had the time—or the deadly ingredients to hand—to pack the plastique with ball bearings.

  It meant he had a chance.

  A slim one, but a chance nonetheless.

  “Here goes nothing,” he muttered, levering his arm back and aiming for the depths of the bathroom at the opposite side of the suite. His bicep contracted, forearm surged forward, and the package of death sailed through the black air in a perfect arc.

  Trapp didn’t wait around to watch it.

  He spun on his heel and scrambled backward, dragging the thick goose down mattress off the top of the bed. He grunted as he did so. It felt like attempting to shift the body of an obese shut-in.

  Every sinew strained, threatening to tear loose from bone, and just as Trapp was ready to collapse from exhaustion it moved an inc
h, and then another, and then another. He dived beneath it, sliding his body between the slats of the bed and the thick mattress, and pressed his palms against his ears. For a brief time, he felt slightly foolish as he stared up into blackness, feeling the thick weight of the mattress pressing down against his face. He began to count.

  One.

  Two.

  Three never came. A geyser of flame filled the suite, and the explosive shockwave flipped Trapp over, pummeling his lungs, his ribs, his eardrums. A wave of heat followed, singeing without burning. Behind closed eyelids, Trapp’s vision surged white.

  And then it receded. But Trapp just lay there, gasping for breath, his entire body vibrating from the shock. His ears rang, but it was a far-off sound, like a class bell heard through the hissing of waves breaking against a rocky shore.

  Trapp opened his eyes. Gingerly at first, half-expecting a second wave of flame to follow the first. He was facing down now, instead of up, his right cheek pressed against the bed’s wooden slats. He tasted iron, where his incisors had sliced through a section of gum and grimaced, spitting out a thick, stringy mixture of blood and saliva that lingered on his lips like a bungee cord before kissing the floor.

  And then he saw it. Eliza Ikeda’s parting gift: her purse. Whether it contained Alstyne’s drive or the dummy, Trapp did not know, but a wave of adrenaline suffused him, and he reached forward desperately, his fingers grasping for the prize. They reached it, and he opened it with numbed fingers, depressing the hidden compartment, and closing tight around the silver drive.

  How it had found its way under the bed, Trapp didn’t know. The simplest explanation was that it had simply been carried there by the force of the blast wave. But he did not believe that for a second. He knew that Ikeda had left it there for him to find.

  And he had.

  Now it was time to repay the favor. Trapp vowed that wherever the unknown players had taken Ikeda, he would find her. And if they so much as harmed a hair on her head, he wouldn’t stop until he killed them all.

  The explosion had thrown a chunk of the heavy porcelain basin out of the bathroom and straight through the suite’s door. It had impacted with the bottom third and destroyed a chunk of wood the height of a credit card and the width of a man’s arm. Tiny shards of ceramic lay strewn around the bottom of the door like a field of fresh-fallen snow.

  Trapp snapped into action. He knew every second he lingered, Ikeda’s kidnappers were getting farther away. It had probably only been two minutes since they’d taken her, but that might as well be a lifetime. Their operation had been well-planned—they would no doubt even now be entering a getaway vehicle and screaming out of a basement parking lot, tires leaving black kisses on the concrete.

  Trapp found his flashlight, which was miraculously in the center of the room, its beam still alight. He entered the destroyed bathroom at a run, his boots splashing into a deep puddle of liquid, since a powerful jet of water was spewing from a damaged pipe. The mirror was already destroyed, and he removed a shard of reflective glass from the wall, ignoring the thin line of blood that glistened on his fingers as its sharp teeth bit into his flesh.

  He went for the door to the suite, crouching down in front of it and thrusting the mirrored shard through. He pressed his eye against the hole, straining to see any sign of an explosive device on the outside of the door. But he got nothing. The angle was bad, and the hallway outside was pitch black.

  Trapp chewed his lip. He reached for the flashlight and shone its beam at the far wall.

  Better.

  It wasn’t much of an improvement, but it was enough. He could just about make out the outside of the suite’s door in the right-angled reflection. He saw the chrome knob, and the decorative wooden paneling.

  But no bomb. It was a trick all along.

  Trapp breathed a sigh of relief. He sprang to his feet, pushing his weary body on for one last effort. He pulled the door open, and was half out before he stopped dead, desire battling with duty in his brain. He wanted to go after Ikeda immediately, but there was no guarantee she was even still alive.

  The unknown operators might have put a bullet in her brain the second the door to the hotel suite shut closed behind Trapp.

  He didn’t think it was likely, but it was possible. If it had been him, he would’ve clung on to Ikeda. With Alstyne unconscious, and possibly out of the picture, she would be their only lead. But either way, the second he left this room, that would be it. Local police would swarm the area. And as soon as they realized who—and what—they had lost, the MSS would close a dragnet around the entire city.

  “Fuck,” he growled.

  Trapp needed a lead, and the only man who could give him one was lying in the center of the room, his sightless eyes forever staring at the ceiling. He turned back to the dead man. The man’s corpse was peppered by debris. The shooter’s helmet and Kevlar ballistic vest had protected the torso and head, but his legs had been crushed by the explosion.

  Trapp quickly searched his body, but found little more than an assortment of weapons and ammunition that could be purchased from any black-market arms dealer this side of the Pacific. He snapped a couple of pictures of the man’s face, but it was charred from the blast, coated with dust and smeared with blood. Even the whiz kid, Dr. Timothy Greaves, would struggle to get anything from it.

  The commando’s vest was secured with two clips to either side. He undid them and searched the man’s uniform. He found nothing. No rank insignia, no unit tags. No clue as to where these men had come from, or where they had gone. They had just appeared, like the monsters in a child’s bedtime story, and disappeared into the darkness just as easily.

  The dead operator had a knife in a sheath strapped to his left thigh, and Trapp removed it, using the sharp blade to slit the man’s black, dust-coated T-shirt open from belly to collar. He was looking for manufacturer’s tags, anything to hint as to where these killers had appeared from, because everything else was coming up empty.

  He found something else entirely.

  A tattoo of a five-pointed star, inked onto the olive skin around the man’s left nipple, the points of the star intertwined in barbed wire. The illustration was faded and uneven, like a prison tat, and Trapp had no idea what it meant.

  But he intended to find out.

  14

  A minute later, Trapp grunted as he shouldered his way into the suite the CIA team had turned into an operations center. He had the body of a dead Agency operative over one shoulder, and looked up to see a Glock pointed at the spot dead between his eyes.

  The barrel was shivering.

  “Put that down before you hurt someone,” he growled.

  The CIA technician almost collapsed with relief as he realized that he wasn’t about to die. “What the hell happened out there?” he asked. “It sounded like a war zone.”

  It was the exact question that Trapp had been asking himself—and since he hadn’t come up with an answer, he didn’t bother trying. Instead, as he reverently set the man’s body down against the bed, he fired back another question. “You got any incendiaries?”

  The technician stared back at him blankly. “Incendiaries?” he repeated. “What for?”

  “What the hell do you think?” Trapp said harshly.

  The man nodded quickly. “In the bathroom, with the rest of the weapons.”

  “Good,” Trapp grunted. “Go get the other body. If you’re not back in the next three minutes, I’m leaving without you.”

  “Leaving…”

  The technician looked at Trapp’s black expression, and clearly thought better of finishing his sentence. He nodded and ran headlong from the room. Trapp watched him go, absently analyzing his slight frame and wondering if he’d even be able to carry the body of the other dead Agency operative.

  Trapp moved quickly, hating himself for what was about to do, but knew it had to be done regardless. The weapons and most of the equipment were ghosts—mostly purchased on the civilian market with cash, serial
numbers filed off. They were dead ends, and he left them where they were. Just another false lead to slow the Chinese down.

  He entered the bathroom and opened a green crate containing an Agency special: a rectangular incendiary device about the size of a shoebox. It contained a couple of pounds of thermite, as well as a significant quantity of a napalm-like substance. The combination of the two chemicals would render flesh from bone, and turn anything they touched into unrecognizable char.

  Returning to the main suite, he piled all of the technician’s computer equipment next to the body of the operator. He only left a satellite phone on the trestle table. He set a thirty-second timer on the incendiary, but didn’t arm it.

  As the technician returned, his arms lashed around the second dead operative’s torso, droplets of sweat running down his face and his breath ragged and uneven, Trapp helped the man gently lower the body to the ground, next to his fallen comrade.

  “What are you—oh,” the technician said, his voice finishing in an upward hiccough of surprise.

  Trapp gave the technician a push. “Go,” he growled. “I’ll finish cleaning up here. Follow your extraction protocol, get to the safe house, and don’t even fucking blink until someone comes to get you. Understood?”

  The man gulped and nodded. He gave Trapp one last, almost longing look, and then spun on his heel, exiting the room.

  Trapp picked up the satellite phone and punched in a number from memory.

  The scientists were lined up in a row in the main control room of the Xishang Satellite Control Center. Most lived onsite, in spartan barracks, and many were dressed in casual clothes, off-duty at this time in the evening. Their cell phones had been collected, and were now piled up in a trashcan, as one of Kim’s men doused them in gasoline.

  “Which one of you is Dr. Chu?” Kim asked, his grating voice provoking a shiver of fear that trembled down the line of five men and three women. His only answer was a whimper of terror.