Authors: Russell Blake
Simon had long ago given up on the idea that what he did for a living was justified in any absolute moral sense; he’d traded the idealism of his youth for a cynical pragmatism as he’d seen too much. He’d walked through towns that had been bombed into ruins so the inhabitants could celebrate democracy – those that still had their lives, if not their limbs. He’d seen atrocities so gut-wrenching they still haunted his dreams, performed in the name of abstract principles that were little more than slogans. Simon no longer believed in a greater good, or evil, or that anything besides might made right. The realization that the rules the majority of the planet lived by were a sham, a contrivance engineered to make them more controllable by a tiny minority, had set him free, even as that understanding erased any belief that he was engaged in a higher purpose that made his actions defensible.
He flipped his notebook computer open and logged into a secure site whose stream was encrypted using military-grade algorithms. Even if it was intercepted by a snooping hotel agent, all they’d see was unintelligible static, lacking the coded microprocessor required to convert the gibberish to images. He tapped in a command, and the screen zoomed in on the earth until it was hovering over Syria from a distance of a few miles. A tiny red dot blinked in one corner of the screen, and Simon smiled to himself as he reached for his cell phone.
“Roamer,” a digitized voice answered on the first ring.
“This is Eagle.”
“Authentication code?”
“Niner seven two niner one one.”
“Proceed.”
“Target verified,” Simon said, and confirmed the latitude and longitude of the faint pulsing signal.
“Copy that.” The voice repeated the numbers back. “We have a lock.”
“Estimated time to impact?”
“Bird’s away. Ten minutes. Countdown will display real time in three…two…one…”
A timer appeared on Simon’s screen. “I have it.”
“Nice work.”
Hearing the praise from the mechanical voice chilled Simon’s blood. Was everything similarly artificial? Were his emotions, or lack of them, engineered like the computer program that offered an “atta boy” like a treat to a drooling dog?
“I’ll be off the board by eight a.m. local time, Roamer.”
“Roger that. Check in once at base.”
Simon disconnected and wished he had a bottle or three of good Scotch. Of course, that was an impossibility, but he still felt the tug, remembered the heat like it was only yesterday and not nine years ago, almost felt the sultry ambrosia slide down his throat and warm him, providing the temporary refuge of comforting numbness.
He placed the computer on the bed and flipped the bird at the fan before padding to the bathroom and relieving himself. The idiot ISIS arms merchant hadn’t even suspected that he might have a homing device, although even the most thorough physical search would have come up empty. He’d swallowed the transmitter, a nearly invisible piece of monofilament attached to his lower left molar preventing it from descending too far into his digestive tract, and had retrieved it in the bathroom and secured it to the bottom of the floor drain grid.
Simon flushed the toilet and moved back to the bed for the final minutes of the countdown as a cruise missile or maybe a drone made its way to the warehouse with a high-explosive payload. He didn’t question why his masters wanted the depot destroyed, although he suspected that it was to cover their tracks and eliminate any trace of a connection to the Russian missiles.
The hair on the back of his arms stood on end as he returned to his seat, and he only registered the faint movement behind him when a wire garrote had already been slipped over his head and around his neck.
It took Simon almost as long to die as it took the timer to reach zero, the wire slicing through his throat like butter. His executioner watched impassively as the screen flashed and then went dark, easing Simon’s body to the floor as he stared at the display with eyes the color of lead. He cleaned the room methodically, removing all trace of Simon’s operational purpose and real identity and, after five minutes of double-checking to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, let himself out of the room.
The killer had no idea why the man in the room had to die, nor did he care. He wasn’t paid to question, he was paid to clean up messy situations in faraway places, and he’d carried out his orders with the efficiency of a robot.
By tomorrow he would be on a plane bound for Paris, and after, to the headquarters of the consulting firm he worked for in Virginia, where he’d wait until another situation required his special skills.
Simon’s sightless eyes glared accusingly at the fan, the lake of blood beneath his corpse coagulating in the heat – an anonymous man without a country whose ultimate reward was to be buried in a shallow grave by local fixers paid the equivalent of beer money to sanitize the room before the hotel staff arrived in the morning.
Verkhnee Turovo, Russia
Jet held up a hand, signaling Yulia to stop. Yulia complied and Jet cocked her head, listening for sounds of pursuit, her legs trembling from the exertion of running. When she didn’t hear anything, she leaned toward Yulia and murmured in her ear, “Let’s find the van and get moving. Won’t be long before they have more roadblocks in place.”
Yulia nodded. “That was close.”
“We’re not in the clear yet.”
Jet glanced to her left and tried to gauge how far the road was, but was unable to with the forest cloaked in gloom. She took her best guess and cut toward where her internal compass told her the vehicle should be, and Yulia trailed her wordlessly. Every few minutes Jet stopped and listened, but the police seemed to have given up following them on foot, and she picked up the pace when she saw a strip of pavement through the trees.
When they arrived at the van, Mikhail and Evgeny weren’t in the back, and Yulia cursed. “We don’t have time for this,” she said, and called their names in a low voice.
“Over here,” Mikhail hailed from behind a clump of bushes and stepped into view. Evgeny followed him to the van under Yulia’s disapproving glare.
“We’re leaving. Pile in,” she said.
“What about Taras?”
Yulia swallowed hard. “He didn’t make it.”
“We heard shooting…”
Yulia made her way to the driver’s side. “So did everyone for miles around.” She climbed in and started the engine, and then her eyes widened on the side mirror as headlights appeared from down the road. “Get in. They’re coming.”
Jet slipped into the passenger seat, and the two men jumped into the back of the van and pulled the doors closed. Yulia tromped on the gas and Jet checked the submachine gun before turning toward her. “No way we can outrun them.”
“I know. It’s going to come down to who’s a better shot.” Yulia’s eyes fixed on Jet for a split second before moving back to the mirror. “I’m hoping you are.”
The police cruiser quickly gained on the van, its siren splitting the night as it bore down, and Jet readied herself for some tricky shooting. Hitting a moving target of any kind was difficult under the best of circumstances, even from a stationary location. Doing so while bouncing down a rutted road was close to impossible – but the cops would have the same problem, which equalized matters.
Jet twisted and yelled to the men over the sound of the straining engine. “Get down flat as you can.”
She didn’t have to warn them twice. Both threw themselves against the floor, and then a line of holes appeared in the upper rear quadrant of the van’s cargo area where their heads had been only moments before.
The report of the shots reached them an instant later, and Yulia began weaving back and forth erratically. Jet rolled down the window and called out to Yulia. “Slow down some and hold steady on my count. One…two…three…now!”
Yulia took her foot off the accelerator and gripped the wheel. Jet fired two bursts at the oncoming lights, and one of the headlamps blinked out. “Now speed up. Fast as you can,” Jet cried, and Yulia stomped on the throttle. The van lurched forward like a punchy prizefighter and Jet fired again, emptying the submachine gun at the speeding police car.
A round ricocheted off the asphalt and punctured one of the cruiser’s front tires. The car swerved as the driver fought for control, and then lost it when he hit a loose patch of gravel and tipped sideways in slow motion. Jet watched in relief as the car’s forward momentum carried it through a brutal series of flips. Yulia was slowing as it came to a stop on its crushed roof in the middle of the road.
A flash of orange licked from beneath the squad car’s hood, and then the vehicle exploded in a fireball as its gas tank ignited. Yulia floored the gas and flinched at the sudden blaze behind them. The van’s tired old engine sputtered uncertainly, as though it had exhausted itself in the final surge of speed during the chase.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Jet said, rolling her window up.
“No. It doesn’t,” Yulia agreed as the motor coughed again. “Everyone okay back there?”
“We’re fine,” Mikhail said.
The van settled into a rough drone as they rolled down the road, hesitating occasionally before resuming its labor. After several minutes at decent speed, Yulia tapped the fuel gauge. “We’re losing gas. We had half a tank, and now we’re down to less than a quarter.”
“Damn. They must have hit the fuel line or punctured the tank,” Jet said. “We need to find someplace to pull over well off the road, and either fix it or ditch it. What’s the closest town?”
Yulia frowned in concentration. “Next big one’s Kursk. But that’s too far. We’ll be empty way before we get there.”
“That’s also where the reinforcements will be coming from,” Jet observed. “Next junction, I say we turn off and take our chances.”
“The Russians will mount a full-blown manhunt when they find the police car,” Mikhail warned.
“Nothing we can do about that,” Yulia said. “We’re not that far from the border. Maybe eighty, a hundred kilometers?” She eyed the gauge again and quieted as Jet peered ahead.
A quarter hour later, Jet pointed out a road that disappeared into the night on their left. “We’ve pushed this far enough. Turn off.”
Yulia twisted the wheel and slowed as the marginal highway’s pavement transitioned to a barely passable farm service road. The van rocked along for a kilometer, and then the engine wheezed and died. Yulia turned into the adjacent field and the vehicle plowed to a halt in the soft dirt.
“End of the line,” she said.
They stepped from the van and surveyed their surroundings. To their right, a grove of trees darkened the horizon; beyond that, the outline of a building caught Jet’s eye. “Let’s make for that farm. Maybe there’s a car.”
“What if there isn’t?” Mikhail asked.
“Then we’ll see what
is
there and improvise accordingly.”
“That’s your plan?” he scoffed.
Jet decided to ignore him. She set off across the field in the direction of the structure and the Ukrainians followed, Yulia behind her and the two men trailing further back. The field was difficult going, the sod recently ploughed, and traversing the quarter kilometer or so took longer than Jet had hoped. Sirens rang from the main road, out of sight but too close for comfort, drawing worried looks from Mikhail and Evgeny. Yulia’s expression was stony, and Jet suspected that she was reliving Taras’s final moments. She didn’t envy the woman, but left her to her thoughts, there being no purpose served by interrupting them until something else happened. Jet marched forward on tired legs, her mind on her beautiful daughter, wondering if she’d seen her for the last time as she soldiered toward the desolate building ahead, a sliver of moon for guidance, their predicament worsening with every passing moment.
Jet circled the farmhouse, which appeared deserted – the drive was overgrown, the barn missing siding, and the adjacent buildings in obvious disrepair. Yulia shadowed her as the men stood beneath the spread of a tall tree, her expression worried.
“Looks like nobody’s home,” Yulia said once they’d completed their reconnaissance.
“Yes, but someone’s been here recently,” Jet said. “The field’s turned, and you can see where the grass on the drive is flat from tires. My guess is this is a working farm, but the owners don’t live here anymore. They just show up during the day.”
“Where does that leave us?”
Jet motioned at an insulated wire suspended from a tall pole, leading to just below the roofline of the house. “Looks like a phone line. It might be active. I’d say if it is, it’s time to call in the cavalry.”
A pane of glass on the rear door gave way to Jet’s elbow, and she led the group inside. The interior was cold but clean, only a few sticks of furniture in evidence, confirming Jet’s assessment that nobody was living there. She made her way to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and blinked at the light that flooded from the interior.
“There’s some food, and now we know there’s electricity,” she announced.
“What good does that do us if we’re stuck here?” Mikhail groused. “It’s only a matter of time before the cops find us, and they won’t be looking to take prisoners.”
“Look for a telephone,” Jet said, and moved from the kitchen into the small dining room, which was empty except for a square wooden table and two rustic straight-backed chairs. Glass containers clinked from the kitchen as Mikhail and Evgeny ferreted through the cabinets in search of provisions, and Yulia appeared in the doorway a moment later, her penlight illuminated.
“Anything?”
“Not yet.”
A quick search of the ground floor yielded no telephone, and the women mounted the rickety stairs to the second floor. Jet switched on her flashlight and swept the beam along the hallway and into each room. At the master bedroom, she nodded at the doorway.
“Phone’s on the nightstand by the bed.”
Yulia stepped into the dusty space and approached the telephone. She lifted the ancient black handset and held it to her ear. Her eyes flitted to the side and she smiled.
“There’s a dial tone.”
Jet nodded. “I need to use it after you do.”