Element 42

by Seeley James

  “Anatoly Mokin’s men are looking for me. I need a head count and any other intel.”

  “You’re taking on Mokin?” He squinted, chewed his cheek some more, and gave Tania the once-over. “The lot of you?”

  “Already bagged a dozen of them.”

  He leaned back and gave me a hint of admiration. “Very well then.”

  Nigel handed me a card for a hotel gift shop and disappeared between the bushes.

  Tania sat as far from me as the bench would allow and crossed her arms.

  I caught her glance. “Why’d you change your mind and take the shot at Mokin?”

  “I didn’t. I shot off Kasey’s other ear.”

  I laughed and put out my hand for a high-five. She left me hanging for a long second but gave in and slapped it.

  “What the hell was he doing in Mokin’s office?” she asked.

  “Velox Deployment Services and Mokin International Enterprises, merger maybe? Hell if I know.”

  My phone vibrated with a call from Ms. Sabel.

  “Jacob, patch Tania in,” she said. When we merged the calls, she continued in a desperate voice I’d never heard from her before. “I thought Otis was working with Windsor, but he knew Violet Windsor was dead before the police knew. All our leads are dead—Windsor, Cummings, Otis—and we still don’t know what happened to Element 42. And they didn’t have Levoxavir at the Borneo site. Why not? At this point, Mokin is our only lead, so don’t kill him.”

  “We’re working on Mokin,” I said. “We should have him cornered soon.”

  Tania scowled at me.

  I shook her off.

  We could have Mokin cornered soon. It was possible.

  Ms. Sabel said, “Why kill the board and executives?”

  “It gets worse. A guy from Velox Deployment is meeting with Mokin.”

  “The press is all over this,” Ms. Sabel said. “They claimed I’m killing all these people to drive up business. Where is Emily?”

  “She’s busy right now, but I think she’ll have a story filed soon.”

  Tania muted her line and whispered. “Tell her the truth.”

  I muted my line. “She doesn’t need the truth. She needs to feel better, get her confidence back.”

  “Are you there?” the boss asked.

  I glared at Tania and unmuted. “Sorry, background noise.”

  “I’ll join you as soon as I can get Dad’s jet in the air. In the meantime, you have to find Mokin. Otis said it was bigger than Philly. I don’t know what that means but it scares the hell out of me.”

  “Who was Otis working for?” Tania asked.

  “We traced his calls, but the number is unidentified.”

  “Wu Fang?”

  “That’s why you need to find Mokin. He could lead you to Fang, and that might be the answer. But you have to hurry.”

  “We’re on it, ma’am,” I said.

  “What was that?” Tania shrieked after we clicked off. “We’re on it—ma’am. Are you the biggest suck up in Asia? You think I’m going to let you cut me out of this job?”

  “She needed to hear something positive,” I said. “I didn’t hear you helping out.”

  Tania was so mad I thought she would bite my face off. But she turned and stalked away. I slammed my fists in my jacket pockets and left in the other direction.

  Our separate paths converged again at the planned rendezvous with Nigel via the card he’d given me earlier. The Landmark Hotel was a shiny new skyscraper overlooking the river and Haizhu Square. I sauntered into the gift shop and looked at a book co-authored by James Patterson and one of his minions. Tania slid to the makeup rack an arm’s length away.

  I sensed the invisible SAS officer at the candy rack next to us. I asked, “What’re we up against?”

  “Anatoly Mokin, for starters,” he said. “But you know that—”

  “His guys filled the mass grave on Borneo.”

  “The one on the news? Bloody hell.” He snapped a glance at me. “They’ve some fancy friends in China somewhere high up the food chain. At the moment your odds are fair. You’ve three soldiers guarding Mokin. They’ve sprung their lad and moved off somewhere.”

  “How do I get Miguel and Emily out?” I asked.

  “Meet them at the British Consulate in an hour. I’ve pressed the lass and Miguel into service to the Crown, temporarily.”

  “An hour?”

  “He can’t walk out. Mokin left a raft of men there waiting for you to show up.”

  “One more favor. I need to meet with Mokin. Could I borrow your consulate for neutral ground?”

  “Good god man, are you insane?” He stared at me until I convinced him I was both insane and serious. He shook his head. “The Canadians have an empty warehouse, I could abuse them this once. With any luck, the poor sods will forgive me one day.”

  He texted me contacts and instructions.

  “Thanks,” I said, “now I owe you one.”

  “Let’s pray it never comes to that.”

  An hour later, Tania and I stood in the warehouse. We were searched and disarmed by three Canadian intel officers who warned us they intended to record every word. They also gave us the same rules they gave Mokin: no fighting, no biting, no punches below the belt, and no killing until after we left the premises. They opened a door and gestured us in.

  Anatoly Mokin sprawled across a chair in a cramped office. Behind him stood a Kazakh with a permanent scowl etched in his face.

  I sat across the table, hands folded in front of me. Tania sat next to me, straight across from Mokin, in the same position.

  Mokin leaned forward. “Show me ID of yours.”

  Tania slapped a hand on the table. “Where the fuck is Element 42?”

  “You know we not discuss this thing.” He kept staring at me. “What ministry do you work for?”

  “We know you targeted Philadelphia,” Tania said. “Where is it?”

  “You know nothing you talk about. What bureau you work for?” he asked me. “Show me ID.”

  “Terrorism is not something we take lightly.”

  “You work for Watson, yes?”

  “You were never supposed to ship it to the US.”

  Mokin leaned back, his hands spread wide with innocence. “I never ship to USA. Windsor steals it. We already tell Watson this, da?” He squinted. “Who are you peoples?”

  “We’re done.” Tania pushed back her chair and knocked on the door.

  An intel officer opened it and led us out. “Did you get something out of that?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  He hustled us out the secret exit that opened onto the street a block away.

  Pulling out my phone, I dialed up Mokin. “Hey, Anatoly, Jacob Stearne here. I wish I could say it was nice meeting you. Tell me something. Who did the Canadians tell you we were?”

  He was screaming Kazakh obscenities when I clicked off.

  Tania and I bumped fists. We peered around the corner and saw no one suspicious.

  “Did you suspect Watson and the FBI?” Tania asked.

  “It makes sense now. They weren’t investigating the break-in at NIH, they were cleaning it up.”

  “You think they’re a step ahead of us?”

  I shrugged. “I trust the FBI implicitly, but David Watson and Counterintelligence has too much power and too little oversight. We can’t contact our own embassy without him getting wind of it. Sua Sponte.”

  “Is that the Ranger motto? What’s it mean?”

  “Of their own accord. Or, we’re on our own.”

  Tania and I took separate sides of the street, with our comm link open and our earbuds firmly in place. The last thing we wanted to do was disappoint Mokin by not taking down the men he left out front to kill us.

  We approached from two blocks back, hoping to pick off a Kazakh or two. Instead, we watched a car full of Kazakhs join the party. My long-lost pal Kasey Earl, with one ear missing and the other ear sporting a ton of gauze and white medic
al tape, gave out assignments. We circled the Canadian warehouse until we counted eight thugs waiting for us, plus Kasey.

  Tania and I retreated to a narrow alley full of bicycles, cardboard boxes, and blankets.

  “Does Mokin have a pipeline full of these guys?” Tania asked.

  Doing the math in my head, I realized we had faced at least two platoons from the beginning. One led by Yuri and the other by Mukhtar. It was possible that Mokin brought in Kasey to replace his lost lieutenants. If I was right, there were forty to fifty Kazakhs altogether. We’d captured, killed, or incapacitated only a dozen or so between Washington and Borneo. We had to reduce that number, but a large-scale killing spree was not an option.

  “We need to get them in trouble with the Chinese.”

  “Yeah.” I snapped my fingers. “They’re armed and the Chinese have strict gun control—”

  She rolled her eyes. “No, we’re not going to make them shoot us.”

  “These guys couldn’t hit the broadside of a—”

  “Fine, they miss you. What about the innocent people behind you?”

  Mercury said, Dude, that’s what happens when you work for a girl. Even a cowardly Centurion would’ve mowed ’em all down. Just saying.

  The mouth of the alley darkened with three men, Kasey in front. “There you are, Jacob. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Tania and I ducked and fired three times before he finished his sentence.

  The alley came alive with moving cardboard as if a biblical swarm of insects was coming to life underneath them. Thirty Chinese homeless people looked at us, looked at Kasey, and started a screaming panic. They fled with their bicycles, leaving behind anything bulky. We tailed the stampede, charging at Kasey.

  When we reached the alley’s mouth, she fired left and I fired right. They went down hard on the sidewalk.

  Sabel darts are quieter than regular firearms but the noise was unmistakable. China has half the police-to-citizen ratio as the USA but a more extensive reporting system for state security. We dragged the darted Kazakhs into the alley. I snapped a picture and sent it to Mokin.

  We fled the scene a few steps ahead of the police and ducked into a street market two blocks away. Unadorned boxes of oranges, bananas, apples, and other fruits lined the sidewalks and spilled into the narrow road. One oddball in the crowd was selling chopsticks. It gave me an idea.

  Grabbing Tania’s arm, I stopped, pulled out Tang’s card, and called him.

  “Tang, I need two motorcycles, helmets, and a roll of duct tape.” I listened to him for a second. “Yes, I’ll find an ATM before you get here.”

  I clicked off and looked at Tania. “How many twenties do you have on you?”

  CHAPTER 44

  It took longer to pull the darts out of the brass shell casings than I expected. We had to be careful not to snag the needle on a finger and wind up sleeping it off for the next four hours. We taped them to our newly acquired chopsticks and examined our work.

  “We’ll need momentum,” Tania said. “The plunger in these things is based on stopping from eight hundred miles an hour.”

  “Dhanpal did it in training once,” I said. “Took down Miguel, and all he had was a running start with a hand thrust at the end.”

  She looked skeptical but didn’t have a better idea.

  For every five minutes Tang and his pal had to wait, we slapped another twenty in his hand.

  When we were ready, Tang and his pal took to their jobs with glee. It was all fun and games to them. We sped through the city toward Mokin’s office where a Kazakh stood on the corner. Tang took the corner tight, I leaned over with my dart-on-a-chopstick and stuck Mokin’s man in the thigh. His reaction was slower than usual, but no less effective. He couldn’t raise a defense of any kind before he flailed to the ground.

  Three blocks away, Tania had similar results.

  Collectively, we neutralized five guys before Tang and I rolled several blocks without finding another Kazakh. Then Tania and her driver flew past us heading for the bridge.

  Tania shouted into the wind. “They stole our Buick.”

  I glanced behind me in time to see a Kazakh lean out of the Buick’s window with a Berretta.

  Tang saw the man in his mirror and twisted the Znen’s gas, flinging us into the fruit market. Ducking and weaving, we drove under t-shirts hanging from overhangs and mounds of melons and citrus. The Buick plowed straight in, scattering people and fruit in every direction. One lone merchant-vigilante smashed their windshield with a baseball bat. When the vigilante saw the pistol, he whacked the man’s arm. I saw it fly into the air. But they had more than one.

  Two blocks later, brand new, first-class skyscrapers lined the streets. Tang took us across a pedestrian plaza and around a fountain. I caught a glimpse of the Buick going the long way around with a spider-webbed windshield. The passenger leaned out and fired two shots across the plaza. His driver threw caution to the wind and bounced up the curb and across the plaza heading straight for us.

  Tang’s eyes were bigger than the grapefruits we’d dodged. He overcorrected and dumped the bike. The polished granite burned my hip and thigh as I slid across it, coming to rest against a vehicle barrier. Tang landed five yards away and his bike five more. I ran to it and pushed it upright as the Buick bore down fast. Tang jumped on in front of me and would’ve taken off without me if I hadn’t wrapped my arm around his waist. As I wrenched myself upright, he drove between the car barriers and into the building lobby.

  We zoomed past stunned security guards.

  I waved and smiled.

  Tang yelled in Chinese and someone on the lobby’s far side held the door open for us. We plowed through a gaggle of young men, bounced down a grand staircase and into the street. He crossed four lanes of high-speed traffic with an inch to spare, swerved onto a broad bridge, and sped down the sidewalk.

  Once we were across the river, we fled down a side street where Tang brought us to a stop. “You get off. Get off! You crazy person.”

  I heaved my sore leg off the seat. He gave me a dirty scowl until he saw the fifty I held between us.

  “British Consulate, two more riders. One of them is a big guy.”

  He hesitated, almost reached for the bill, then pulled back and shook his head. “No-no. Guns no good. You in trouble with Triad. No good for Tang.”

  “Triad?”

  “Hong Kong mafia, like movies. Very bad guys.”

  “No, they’re Anatoly Mokin’s men, from Kazakhstan.” I added another fifty and waved them both.

  Tang no longer salivated over my cash. He leaned back, waving his hands between us. “Oh no. No good, no good. Mokin very bad man. Worse than Triad. No good for Tang.”

  He snatched both fifties, twisted the gas, and sped away into the night.

  Several blocks away, Tania had a similar experience. We met in a nearby department store. I tried Miguel’s phone for the twentieth time and Nigel answered. Without preamble, he named a restaurant near the British Consulate and clicked off. I entered the name into my mapping software and determined it was within walking distance.

  Tania and I both had a Glock with three darts, a magazine of bullets, and four chopstick-darts. Enough to take down the remaining Kazakhs should they show. A quick check of Mokin’s GPS showed him on the far side of the city heading out of town. We felt good about our chances.

  We made our way on foot into the neighborhood, an international district teeming with nightlife and fancy buildings. We passed nicely kept alleys filled with people who congregated around tables. Streetlights glowed above bustling streets along the main road. International hotels filled every corner with small but perfectly manicured green spaces in their driveways. We were as far from the gritty streets of Mokin’s operations as we were going to get.

  Tania cleared every store we passed, checking out anyone looking vaguely Euro. She was on full alert, ready to kill Kazakhs first and ask questions later. I relaxed, safe in the knowledge that my long-f
orgotten god would warn me should trouble rear its ugly head. His unemployment benefits had run out fifteen hundred years ago and he needed the work.

  It was hard to keep my eyes off Tania after running down the wedding dress street. She was beautiful. I could picture her in any of those dresses, even the white ones. I thought about a thousand different things I could say that might lower her defenses enough to rekindle our relationship. Nothing sounded good enough. I decided to blurt out my love for her. I’d throw myself at her feet and let her humiliate me or accept me—I was beyond caring which.

  Just as I steeled myself for my confession, my phone broke the mood with a beep from the mapping software.

  A shoulder-wide alley disappeared into the dark between two storefronts. Our destination was sixty feet into that dark space.

  Mercury said, Dark alleys on foreign soil, dawg. Do you even need me for this? Look high and right.

  Tania and I gave each other a glance and drew our weapons. I led with Tania’s back to mine. I sensed a presence above me, right where Mercury predicted. I stopped and raised my arms in surrender. Tania positioned herself at my shoulder, tense and ready.

  Nigel dropped from a second story window a foot in front of me, his Browning HP in my face.

  Tania slipped under my upraised arm and shoved her Glock under his chin.

  I said, “Dramatic, Nigel. Put it away before Tania gets nervous.”

  He lowered the weapon and held a finger to his lips, pointed to a door. I led, Nigel followed, Tania kept her Glock pressed against the back of his head.

  Through the door was a windowless room. Miguel and Emily stood on the other side of a map table.

  Emily’s hug was hard and sustained. She was no longer a travel reporter trying to scrape a lurid headline from her connections inside the Sabel empire. She was a veteran who’d lost a friend in combat. There are two crossings in the soldier’s life, losing your first friend, and making your first kill. She’d made that first horrible crossing. From now on, everything in her life would be more vivid, each friendship more precious, every moment more valuable. As I let go of her embrace, I prayed she would never come to the second crossing.

  “Miguel’s sketched the scenario for me,” our host said. “I’ve appealed for official support but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is slow on a good day. I’m all the resource you’ll have from the UK. And officially, I’m not here.”