Element 42

by Seeley James

  Tania stood behind him, shaking her head slowly. Miguel caught the signal and scowled.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’d rather go alone if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ve an arsenal.” He pointed to boxes in the corner. “And transport.”

  “He’s coming with us,” Miguel said, staring at Tania. “We need the help.”

  Nigel pointed to the map. “Have you Mokin’s location?”

  Tania pushed her way to the map. “Jacob can drive us there. Mokin’s location is a need-to-know situation, and you don’t need to know.”

  I glanced at Mokin’s updated location and spotted it on the larger map. The man was still on the move, but his heading was easier to predict. He was on a lone road in an empty mountainous area.

  Nigel looked down his nose at her. “It would be helpful to know the terrain—”

  “You aren’t bringing any resources. If you want to come with us, all you need to do is play whack-a-Kazakh.”

  He studied the others for support, his gaze stopped at Miguel.

  “She’s got her reasons,” Miguel said.

  Nigel shrugged. “Very well, then.”

  Outside, a Jaguar beeped and my new pal handed me the keys. Miguel hefted two crates of hardware into the trunk, took the passenger seat, and buzzed it back.

  Tania grabbed Nigel and pulled the phone from his pocket. She tossed it under the car’s back tire and gestured to the middle seat.

  “Hey, I’m helping you,” Nigel said.

  “I’d hate to have to kill you because someone accidentally followed your signal.”

  “Show some respect. I’ve—”

  “This is respect. Miguel vouched for you or you’d be nursing a broken nose on the sidewalk.”

  He climbed in and we were off. Miles of endless city droned by, followed by a long steady climb into the mountains. The roads grew smaller and less traveled as the night wore on. My traveling companions were bored to sleep. Eventually, even Miguel gave out and tucked his head against the glass for a snooze.

  I kept checking Mokin’s GPS signal, surprised he was vulnerable to a simple hack like ours. One day my luck would run out and my victim would figure out he was connected to Sabel Satellite’s WiFi signal. But Mokin was happy enough to have a signal in the middle of nowhere and afraid that questioning it might make it disappear. On he drove, and on I followed, his coordinates heading north and east.

  Three hours later, with everyone still asleep, I rolled to a gentle stop in front of an abandoned restaurant on the rain-slicked one-lane road, several miles short of Mokin’s location. The Kazakh King had been stationary for the last half hour. The only road between us followed the jagged coast of a mountain reservoir before spiraling up switchbacks over the ridgeline. Five miles as the crow flies translated into twenty-two miles of mountain roads.

  I texted a short, upbeat report to the Major while my imagination spun up hundreds of ambush scenarios. There was only one reason Anatoly Mokin would place himself at the far end of impassable terrain. One way in. One way out. No doubt he had already sealed our exit. The only course of action available was to move forward into an unknown terrain, against an unknown number, armed with unknown weapons, and seize the initiative. Press the opportunity immediately.

  It was one of those leadership decisions I hated to make. Press on and lead my team to their deaths? Or sit here and wait for death to come to us?

  I leaned back in the seat and thought about life and death and love. All anyone wants is to fill that gap between life and death with as much love as possible. Family love, friendly love, romantic love, eternal love are all facets of the same jewel. Cops and criminals, hajjis and soldiers, pacifists and haters are filling their lives with love in the way each thinks best. People on both sides convinced that they are the good guys. I’d made a career of hastening death for those whose love didn’t meet my society’s standards. And like the bereaved of those I had dispatched, I felt the pang of losing a loved life to the silent void of death.

  And just like that, the dark demons from Borneo came to me. I’d murdered a prisoner just to keep Emily from doing it. Worse, I followed Mokin here to kill the Kazakhs for letting them ambush me. And Borneo wasn’t the first time. Good guys don’t do things like that.

  I closed my eyes and felt the tremors coming back. The ones I’d left behind so many years ago.

  CHAPTER 45

  Alan Sabel’s jet roared through the sky, carrying Pia and her crew to an uncertain future in China. From the corner of her eye, she saw her father pour a glass of water in the galley and carry it to her. He placed it on the table and waited in the aisle. She never looked up from her tablet.

  He sat across from her. “I thought I raised a girl who said—”

  “Thanks for the water.”

  “You found Wu Fang’s address. What else do you need?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “Any way I can help?”

  Pia glanced up. “Sorry, Dad. I couldn’t explain it.”

  She nosed into her tablet again, zooming and turning the screen.

  “Try me. Sometimes talking it out—”

  “They’re boxed in,” she said. She leaned back, her eyes still on the tablet. “No way out and an unknown situation on the ground. Jacob estimated Mokin has forty men left, but it could be a hundred for all we know.”

  “You’re not worried about the odds.”

  She pushed the tablet away and gazed out the window. Somewhere in the predawn dark, fifty thousand feet below, the Pacific Ocean sloshed from Asia to America.

  She sighed. “The satellite images, they’re crap. Manhattan is clear and crisp, but rural China is a haze.”

  Alan leaned over the table and pulled the tablet closer to him. He checked out the map and zoomed in.

  “No matter how you zoom in,” she said, “the smallest identifiable object on the ground is so fuzzy you can’t tell if it’s a car or a stadium.”

  Alan nodded and pushed the tablet back to her. “What happened to that old friend of yours? The one you had over for dinner a couple times.”

  Pia shrugged. “Who?”

  “That pretty Latina girl, used to be a soccer rival in high school. I think she was the captain at Bethesda or Rockville?”

  “Bianca Dominguez? She’s one of Jacob’s girlfriends.” Pia leaned forward, her eyes intent on the tablet again. “Dad, thanks, but I need to concentrate.”

  “Didn’t she work at the NSA?”

  Pia looked up again and nodded. A slow smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “You got rich by being smart.”

  Pia checked the time difference—morning in DC—and dialed Bianca’s number. Her old friend was thrilled to help out and promised hi-res files would reach her soon.

  Five minutes later, instead of the files from Bianca, Pia received a terse call from the NSA’s director. In the next minute she received a bitter call from Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, which was followed by a nasty call from the Deputy Secretary of Defense. She sent the next incoming call straight to voicemail and drummed her fingernails on the table.

  “That went bad quickly,” Alan said.

  “Bianca’s going to jail.” She kept drumming her fingernails. “We’ve known the feds are keeping tabs on us, but that escalated a lot faster than I expected.”

  “To escalate that quickly means someone is monitoring that patch of China. And that level of attention comes from the Oval Office.”

  Pia thought through her options. Once she made up her mind about what to do next, she picked up her phone and started to dial.

  Alan pulled it from her hands. “A pragmatic approach is always best. Think before you make that call. You’ll only get one shot at it.”

  He placed the phone down between them.

  Pia stared at it while she drummed her fingernails on the table some more. She picked it up, put it down, and picked it up again. After a long, hard look at her father, she dialed.

  “Madam Pres
ident, thank you for taking my call.”

  “You’ve interrupted my morning schedule, Ms. Sabel. Make it quick.”

  “We’ve had our differences, but I have an opportunity for you to do something good. My agents have tracked the people responsible for the mass graves on Borneo to rural China and—”

  “Allow me to jump for joy. Now go through proper channels for whatever you need and never call me again.”

  Pia glanced at her father, who listened on a muted line. He shrugged.

  Pia said, “We believe they’re connected to someone in the Chinese—”

  “You’re way out of line here, Pia. Relations with China are strained. It’s not like Russia or Italy or Argentina. China owns enough of our national debt to send our credit into a tailspin if they chose. I’m not going to risk an international incident to capture some band of outlaws just so you can get a good press release out of it.”

  “This is not about Sabel Security. This is about biological disaster and justice for the dead.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about Kaya, the little girl you left behind. I hope you feel guilty. Nonetheless, upsetting the delicate relationship between two superpowers so you can finally sleep at night is not going to happen.”

  “My people are in position to stop another mass killing,” Pia said. “We don’t know where they’re planning to strike, but I have people positioned outside their base of operations. I can shut them down and the Chinese will never know we were there.”

  “You’re asking me to assist an attack on the second biggest economy in the world? You obviously don’t know anything about sovereignty, young lady. The US cannot enter a country illegally and kill people at will because of evidence you claim to have against—”

  “For God’s sake, get on the right side of history for once.” Pia pounded her fist on the table. Her father flinched. “You have the opportunity to save thousands of lives, possibly hundreds of thousands.”

  Alan Sabel turned white and waved his hands back and forth over the table, begging his daughter to stop.

  “The world is bigger than Pia Sabel’s problems, you little shit. Get over yourself.”

  “I have Bill McCarty’s deathbed confession.”

  President Hunter said nothing for a long time, then took a deep breath. “We’ve been over that operation. Anything he said about Snare Drum is sealed.”

  “I’m not talking about Snare Drum. I’m talking about the murder of my parents. He made a video hours before committing suicide. He named the person who gave him the order to kill American citizens on American soil.”

  President Hunter gasped loud enough for Pia to hear. Alan Sabel buried his head in his hands.

  “I don’t have time for any more of your cheap theatrics, and I will never give into extortion. Do you understand me?” The President took a deep breath. “Now. What do you want?”

  “Release Bianca Dominguez and drop the charges against her. Then authorize the release of the satellite maps she tried to send me.”

  “Fine, but the little bitch won’t get her job back.”

  Pia clicked off, placed the phone on the table in front of her father.

  “You shouldn’t bluff the leader of the free world,” he said.

  “It’s not a bluff.”

  “The FBI confiscated all of McCarty’s things, including all his blackmail material.”

  Pia placed her hands flat on the table and stared at her father.

  “Anything they missed,” he continued, “we need to turn over to them.”

  “Hours before Jacob tracked him down,” Pia said, “McCarty made a video addressed to me. He knew he would die. He felt bad about his involvement in the murders and wanted to get it off his chest.”

  “But the FBI had a warrant to retrieve—”

  “Everything illegally obtained by McCarty. This video was legal. It was addressed to me. It’s mine.” Pia watched him, her gray-green eyes drilling for truth. “Dad, is there anything you want to tell me about the day my parents died?”

  “You and I have been over that a thousand times with the best therapists in the country.”

  She stared at him.

  He leaned back and tugged at his cufflinks. “No, Pia, there’s nothing I want to tell you about that day.”

  She nodded, her lips drawn tight, her eyes narrowed.

  Small beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. “Why? What did McCarty say?”

  CHAPTER 46

  Visions of long-forgotten battles in Afghanistan and Iraq resurfaced with the moral choices I’d made at the ripe old age of eighteen when weapons filled my hands and easy decisions filled my head. I shook off the past only to confront the dark shadows of my present.

  Miguel’s steady hand on my shoulder felt good, but I still wanted to throw up. I’d lost a friend on every one of Ms. Sabel’s missions. Either she was worse luck than a green lieutenant or I’d lost my killer instinct. Neither option was good for my team or our collective future. Miguel squeezed my shoulder again. My shaking subsided a little.

  He said, “There are always risks. I know them. You know them. Carmen knew them. Each of us made a decision. We came.”

  I glanced at the back seat, where sleepy stirrings were giving way to blinking eyes.

  “Why have we stopped?” Tania asked. She bolted upright when she realized she’d snuggled to the Englishman during the ride. “Is Mokin here?”

  Emily and Nigel took their first waking breaths and smacked their dry lips.

  “How long have we been here?” Tania asked.

  “A few minutes.”

  “They could be here.” She scrambled out and listened in the dark.

  We joined her and stretched. The night was quiet, a bit of wind in the trees. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance.

  “Holy crap, it’s cold,” Emily said. She hugged herself.

  Everyone turned to look at Nigel.

  “No, I didn’t bring any blankets,” he said. “You refused to tell me we were leaving Guangzhou where it’s always twenty-six degrees.” He looked at each of us. “Twenty-six Celsius, eighty Fahrenheit.”

  A text from Ms. Sabel flashed on my phone. It directed me to refresh my satellite maps of the area on my tablet. When I did, I found them crisp and clear and extremely detailed. If you knew anything about horticulture, you could identify the genus of every tree in the forest from the new maps. I set it on the trunk and showed the team where we were without giving Nigel coordinates.

  Nothing got past the Englishman. “Astonishing detail, that.”

  Miguel and Tania looked at him, then at me, then at the tablet. In a couple of wordless seconds, we pieced together the Brit’s implication. Hi-def satellite imagery takes mega-resources, not to mention a few repeat passes for clouds and light. Spy satellites map every square inch of the planet, but they reserve the gigapixel bandwidth for special points of interest. We were in a rural area, far from anything noteworthy, yet when I zoomed in, I could see a squirrel on a tree branch. Whoever ordered the spy satellite to spend several days mapping out the neighborhood had committed a large amount of time and money and that meant whoever it was had a lot of power. Tania and Miguel and I shuddered in unison.

  Mercury said, What are you brothas worried about? You’ve taken on the government before.

  I said, Not two at once.

  “We can ponder this later,” I said. “Right now, we have to dig Mokin out of his hole and slap him around until he tells us where to find Element 42.”

  “Then we kill him?” Emily asked.

  Everyone’s eyes turned to her, except Nigel’s. His eyes judged me.

  “Babe,” Miguel said. “You’re creeping us out here. Chill.”

  We returned to the maps and checked elevations and distances and structures. Our intel was good but lacked critical background info.

  I glanced at my watch. “They couldn’t be too much farther behind. We should set up.”

  Nigel opened the boxes in his trunk.

  Emil
y grabbed an MK5. Miguel grabbed it back and held out a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. I thought it was a good call. We didn’t need our untrained Emily firing 700 rounds per minute.

  “I want a real gun,” Emily said. “I’ve been to the shooting range.”

  “With an AR-15?”

  She shrugged and yanked the shotgun out of his hands.

  Miguel and I went with MP5s, sound suppressors attached.

  Tania took an HK417 sniper rifle and faced me. “Let’s take these fucktards down.”

  Tania started for the restaurant roof, but stopped with a thoughtful look. She wheeled around and opened all four doors on the Jaguar. She connected her phone and cranked up the stereo playing an old rock-n-roll tune from the 60s that my grandmother used to listen to—“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by the Rolling Stones. The music blared through the deserted lakeside. She scampered to the rooftop and propped her rifle on the ridge.

  Miguel ran a hundred yards up the road to the first bend. Our Englishman took the most dangerous position across the road. I stepped behind the restaurant wall and pushed Emily behind me.

  We checked our comm link and settled in for the wait. Five seconds or five hours, there was no way of knowing.

  After a long radio silence in which the song played twice and was near losing its appeal, Miguel reported on the comm link. “Headlights, ten minutes out.”

  I felt the adrenaline begin to flow. It started in my core and moved outward like a microscopic and unstoppable Mongol horde charging through my veins. It flowed into my arms and legs, past my elbows and knees, and up my neck.

  Mercury said, Psyched yet, psycho?

  I said, Yes, I am. Bring it.

  Emily squeezed up close behind me. She trembled with excitement. I pushed the barrel of her shotgun away from my shoulder.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I haven’t shot a gun since—”

  I pressed my finger across her lips.