Last Chance to Die

by Noah Boyd

  “Wow, yeah, I’m good.”

  As quietly as possible, Vail chambered a buckshot round. Then he checked the phone and pointed up the road. Quietly but quickly they started walking. There were some stands of trees, mostly hardwoods, now bare. A few minutes later, they followed a turn in the road, and in the distance both Kate and Bursaw, through their goggles, could see a stone cottage sitting on a small rise about seventy yards away. Thirty yards from it was an old-fashioned water well. It had a waist-high wall around it, constructed of the same type of stone as the cottage. The car they had followed was parked next to the well, and the two men were taking Radkay’s body out of the trunk.

  Beside the well was a small, newly constructed shed. One of the men carried something from it that looked like a bag of cement. Through his goggles Bursaw could see that the man had taken out a pocketknife and was cutting open the top of the bag. He then went to help carry the body.

  Bursaw described everything to Vail in whispers.

  “That’s probably lye. It’ll eventually destroy all traces of the body. Let’s go.”

  When they got to the top of the rise that the old house sat on, Vail glanced over at Bursaw, who because of the goggles didn’t notice the red laser dot on his own chest. Vail jumped into him just as a rifle shot came from the house, which was now at their ten o’clock. At the same time, Kate dove to the ground. Quickly Vail crawled next to Bursaw. “Are you hit, Luke?”

  “Left shoulder.”

  Vail pulled his friend’s coat open, and after finding the bullet hole in his shirt, he carefully tore it open. “It’s not bad.” Another shot came from the house. Vail called over to Kate. “You all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  There was a small amount of cover provided by the uneven terrain, so Vail crawled forward a couple of yards to find a firing position but immediately started taking handgun fire from the two men at the well. He came back to Kate and Luke’s position. “This is an ambush. They were expecting us.”

  “How?” Kate asked.

  “Probably my call to the club. Radkay would have used a code name.”

  From a second window in the house, a barrage of automatic-weapons fire ricocheted around them. “I guess we had a wrong head count. There are at least four of them. And they’ve got us pinned down in an L-shaped crossfire. Right now they can’t hit us. If they had waited another ten yards before springing this, we’d all be well-diving by now. In a minute they’re going to figure out that if the two in the house can keep us pinned down, the two at the car can start moving up to our position and pick us off.”

  “So?” Kate said, with a little more urgency than she intended.

  “When your position becomes indefensible, there’s only one option. You have to—”

  Bursaw said, “Don’t say it.”

  “Attack.” Vail picked up the MP5 and handed it to Kate. “You know how to use this, right?”

  “I fam-fired it at the range a few times.”

  “Well, you’re about to get a lot more familiar with it.” Vail started ejecting the buckshot rounds from the shotgun and replacing them with deer slugs. “Luke, you think you can fire this into their car, one round every ten to fifteen seconds? It’ll sound like a howitzer when it hits and keep their heads down so Kate can move.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll go after the two in the house. Once I start shooting and moving toward them, Luke, you fire. Kate, you’re going to have to move when we shoot and get down when we stop. If you don’t, that rifle probably has a night scope along with the laser, and they’ll be able to find you. Even though your two targets are at our twelve, you should flare off to like one o’clock so you’re not coming straight into them. Then, when you get there, you’ll be on their flank rather than head-on.” He could hear her breathing. “You ready for this, Kate?”

  She chambered the first round and flicked off the safety. “This is getting close to being worse than our last date in Chicago, but I’ll be fine.”

  Vail said. “Luke, you set?”

  He rolled onto his side and passed Vail two more of his Glock magazines. “Hands down, this is the worse date I’ve ever been on with you.”

  Vail crawled around Bursaw and watched the cottage that was to their ten o’clock. Then he was up, running and firing. Behind him the shotgun exploded, the massive slug thudding into the car that the two LCS men were using as cover, causing them to squat further down. Kate was off at a dead run in the one o’clock direction Vail had suggested.

  Keeping low, Vail used the same slightly indirect route, approximately toward nine o’clock, that he had suggested to Kate, running to the stone house in an arc that swept away from both Bursaw’s and Kate’s positions. That would force the two gunmen in the house to shift their points of aim away from the other agents, so they could fire at Vail. If the sniper rifle that had hit Bursaw was resting on something to keep it steady, Vail’s path would completely disrupt its accuracy as it tracked him.

  The front of the house had a single door with a window on each side. The scoped rifle was being fired out the right window and the assault rifle the left. When Vail got to within twenty yards of the house, the automatic weapon opened up on him.

  Inside, Alex Zogas said in an urgent whisper, “Karl, did you get him?”

  “I think so.”

  Outside, Bursaw’s shotgun boomed again, followed by the thud of the slug hitting the car. Within the house the two men’s focus shifted back to Bursaw and Kate, trying to reestablish them as targets.

  Suddenly Zogas noticed the doorknob turning. He snapped his fingers to get Karl’s attention, pointing at the door. Karl nodded and backed up a few steps from the window and toward the door to establish a better angle to shoot through it. Then he opened fire, expending the entire clip into the door. Zogas had taken the rifle off the window rest and stepped back himself, ready to fire.

  A single shot came through Karl’s window, hitting him in the face, throwing him back into the wall, where he crumpled to the floor. Zogas could see that he was dead. He backed up a few more steps with the rifle held on his hip, waiting for Vail.

  Kate got up from the ground where she had found cover in what looked like a deep wheel rut. She could see one of the men through her night goggles. She was far enough off to his left that he hadn’t seen her yet. She was hoping that Bursaw could track her through his goggles.

  As quietly as possible, she walked toward the gunman. But somehow he sensed her movement, turning quickly and firing blindly. She was in the open now and had no choice but to be aggressive. Flipping up her goggles so as not to be blinded by her own gunfire, she quickened her stride, walking steadily toward him, firing two- to three-round bursts. She wasn’t sure exactly where he was, so she would have to fire out the clip in hopes of hitting him. If not, she still had her handgun.

  The killer fired back, and now she knew exactly where he was. She adjusted her fire with the next couple of bursts. Then, with a sickening clank, the gun’s bolt locked back, indicating that her MP5 was empty. But the final burst had found the gunman, at least one of the last three rounds hitting him in the stomach. She dropped the submachine gun and started to draw her sidearm when the second man came around the car and leveled his gun on her. “Kale,” he spit out at her in a guttural foreign tongue, a derogatory term every woman recognized no matter the language. Her only option now was to try to finish drawing.

  Then a single shot rattled through the cold night. The Lithuanian fell to the ground dead. A head shot had blown out a good portion of his left temple. She had the presence of mind to flip down her goggles.

  The first man she’d hit in the stomach got to his knees and raised his gun. Kate took careful aim and fired three rounds into him. He fell back, his legs at impossible angles under him. She went over and checked him for a pulse. He was dead.

  The adrenaline vanishing from her body, Kate started shaking and sank to her knees. She replayed in her mind what had happened. At the time, becaus
e her life was about to end, it hadn’t registered. Now, in slow-motion memory, she watched a tiny red dot settle onto the right side of the gunman’s head. And then the shot. “Luke!” she yelled down the rise to Bursaw. “They’re both dead! Hold your fire!”

  She worked her way back to Bursaw’s position, keeping her Glock in her hand, watching the stone house. “You get them both?” he asked.

  “Just one. Steve must have shot the other one,” she said. “Hold on, let me see if he needs any help.”

  She moved quickly but cautiously to the cottage. There was a small light on inside. When she opened the door, she immediately saw the sniper rifle sitting on its firing stand at the window oriented toward the car. Vail was kneeling over Zogas’s body, searching his pockets. The Lithuanian lay on his back, his chest and abdomen covered with blood. She walked up to Vail’s side. “You all right?”

  “Fine, you?”

  “I assume that last shot was yours.”

  “Can you go get Luke out of the cold? I’ll turn up the heat in here.”

  “Sure.”

  By the time she got back with Bursaw, Zogas’s body had been rolled over and Vail had turned on more lights. He was searching the other man’s clothing. Kate sat Bursaw in a chair. Vail came over and helped him off with his coat and shirt. Examining the wound, he said, “How’s it feel?”

  “I don’t know whether it’s the cold or the endorphins, but not bad.”

  Vail prodded it a little more roughly now. “Looks like just meat, no bone.”

  Kate found a couple of clean towels and gave them to Vail. He pressed them against the wound. In the distance they could hear what sounded like a single siren. “Luke, I think your ride is here,” Vail said. “Kate, can you hold this in place? I’m going to make sure the ambulance finds us.”

  Vail hurried down to the road and was surprised to see John Kalix getting out of his car. “Put on your flashers so everyone will know where we’re at,” he told Kalix. “Where’d you come from?”

  They started back to the house. “Everybody all right?”

  “Luke got dinged, but he’ll be okay.”

  “When Kate called Richmond, she told them to call me. I’ve had this thing up over a hundred. I don’t ever want to do that again. How about the bad guys?”

  “Four dead, including Zogas.”

  “I’m sorry, who’s Zogas?”

  “He’s the leader of the Lithuanians.”

  “The Lithuanians?”

  “They’re tied in to the Russians. I’ll explain everything when we get Luke taken care of.”

  As they reached the house, more sirens could be heard in the distance. Kalix went inside. “Luke, how you doing?”

  He said to Kalix, “I’m begging you, John, make Vail go back to Chicago.”

  Kalix said, “Kate, how about you?”

  “You should have seen her,” Bursaw said. “Charging the enemy, taking them out with that MP5. It was definitely ladies’ night out there.”

  “One of them anyway,” she said, looking at Vail.

  “Well, Bannon,” he said, “if you think you’ve had trouble getting a date up until now, wait until the guys hear about you machine-gunning men who cross you.”

  “Actually, I’m thinking about reloading right now.”

  37

  The blurry light of dawn had come up just as Vail and Kate started back to Washington. Bursaw had been taken to a local hospital, and the doctor had said he would be fine but that he wanted to keep him for twenty-four hours to preclude the risk of infection. Agents from the lab had been brought in to supervise the crime-scene investigation and the excavation of the well where it appeared that multiple bodies had been dumped.

  Vail was unusually quiet during the drive. As they crossed into D.C., Kate said, “You’re going to make me ask?”

  “About?”

  “About searching Zogas’s body?”

  Vail said, “Yes, I searched his body.”

  “And you don’t want to tell me if you found anything.” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Apparently that isn’t what’s really bothering you.”

  “You’re right, it’s not. My real problem is that your first instinct was to call Kalix.”

  “He’s the assistant director in charge of counterintelligence. Remember, the director wanted him in the loop. You know, the director, the guy who keeps calling me every time something goes wrong. What’s the big deal? The entire Richmond division was on their way—do you think it was going to be kept a secret?”

  “For once let’s look at this from my perspective. Six months ago I told you that under no circumstance would I work for the FBI. And then again two weeks ago, I made it quite clear I did not want to get involved in this. But when the director told me what had happened to you, I agreed, for no other reason than . . . well, since I don’t know how you really feel about me—let’s call it loyalty. And never once did I back off my commitment to you. The only thing I asked in return was that no one at headquarters be told what we were doing. Apparently even after all this time, you don’t understand that’s how I get things done. I knew they would find out soon enough, but I’d have enough time to figure out the next step before they got in the way. As they did when Dellasanti was killed at the drop. And, even worse, the next day, when they somehow figured out I was going to the park to look for more evidence. I don’t know how they figured out what I was doing. I didn’t think they were smart enough. But you were.”

  “You think I told Langston?”

  “After this call to Kalix, I’m starting to wonder.”

  “Why would I do that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope it’s not because of your career, but that is the one thing that keeps getting in our way.”

  “So you think—” She stopped herself and fell silent for a moment. “All along, you didn’t really care if the director or Kalix found out what we were doing. Your telling me to keep it quiet was just a test of my loyalty, wasn’t it?”

  “If it was, do you think you passed?”

  She laughed sarcastically. “You do understand that the real problem here is your inability to trust anyone. I understand that, because I’m the same way. At least I was. But I’d like to think I’ve made myself change. And do you know why? Because I thought there was a chance for us. The first time I came to Chicago, that was one of the most difficult, most open things I’ve ever done. I was hoping that my trust would be contagious. But it wasn’t. That’s why our last date was a catastrophe. That’s why I told you not to come here for New Year’s. You can’t trust anyone or anything. I understand now that it’s because of what your father did. The other night when you told me about him, I thought you were finally letting me inside your life. The problem is that deep down inside, you don’t want to let go of what your father did to you. You think it gives you an edge, and I suppose it does. Nothing gets by you. While that makes you a great agent, it’s the reason there’ll never be any hope for us. You absolutely will not allow yourself the vulnerability that is necessary if two people are going to trust each other. You keep trying to make your life failureproof, and you believe that the only way to do it is to cut everyone out of it.”

  “You don’t think I’ve tried to trust people?”

  “I don’t think you’ve even tried to trust yourself.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? You’re even afraid to let anyone see your sculptures. Your pieces are good, really good, but you don’t trust yourself enough to put them out there. You’re one of the bravest men I know, but I seriously doubt that you have the courage to ask yourself why that is.”

  Vail stopped at a light, and she got out, slamming the door. The light changed, and he sat there, watching as she hurried away.

  Vail stood in Alex Zogas’s house, unable to stop thinking about his argument with Kate. She, of course, had been right. He was incapable of trusting anyone. But that was hardly a revelation for him. It was something he had reluctantly accepted
about himself long ago. And she was right about its giving him an edge, especially when it came to resolving complex situations like going after the LCS. And also, there couldn’t be any argument that he was unwilling to do anything that would take away that advantage.

  If asked twenty-four hours earlier, he would have said unequivocally that the one person in the world he did trust was Kate Bannon, but, as she had demonstrated, that wasn’t true. Since there was no longer an investigation to camouflage his flaws, he wondered if he hadn’t picked the fight with her so he wouldn’t have to complicate his life by committing to a relationship with her. Maybe that was why he was now standing in Zogas’s house—to prolong the investigation, to delude himself with the possible repair of the impossible rift between them.

  There had not been anything in Zogas’s pockets except his wallet and keys, which Vail used to get into the house. He turned on the computer, which sat on a living-room table. While he waited for it to fully load, the image of Kate’s face, twisted with anger and, even worse, disappointment rose up in his memory. He blanked it out halfheartedly, knowing that it would be back.

  To suppose that the FBI had uncovered every single double agent in Washington, at least those recruited by the Lithuanians, would have been naïve and shortsighted. They had given up their inactive sources to further the Calculus scheme, but there still had to be individuals currently supplying them with information. If the entire Calculus matter had proved anything, it was how susceptible the government had become to counterintelligence. Espionage was no longer about one country trying to gain an upper hand militarily or politically; it was about the global marketplace—technologies and trade secrets to be stolen and sold.

  Raymond Radkay had existed completely undetected, so why not others? If there were others, their names, addresses, and contact points had to be kept somewhere. Vail started checking the files on the computer. There weren’t many documents stored, but he would have been surprised if Zogas had been that obvious.