Elijah rolled out of the way as the other Russian fired from the kitchen doorway, missing him narrowly. Ken was in the corridor now, and he fired a couple rounds toward the kitchen doorway, causing the Russian to duck inside for cover. Elijah was already on the move as the Russian ducked inside and he was on the other man before he could raise his weapon. He knocked the man to the ground and kicked the pistol away. He pulled his own pistol and trained it on the man’s head, only to see his eyes roll back in his head. Elijah put his finger to his neck, no pulse.
“I guess he wasn’t feeling particularly chatty,” Elijah said.
“Cyanide?” Ken asked when he walked in and saw the dead man.
“Or something stronger. He was dead in seconds.”
“More potent stuff than we had back in our day.”
“So, one dead in the hallway, this guy here…there’s still one other guy.”
“The wounded one?”
“No, the computer guy,” Elijah said as he ran down the hall to the next room.
“Bugger all,” Ken said as he entered the room right behind Elijah.
The window in the room was open wide and the computers were riddled with bullet holes. That explained the firing he heard earlier. Not having enough time to properly destroy them, the man had shot them up and fled. They exited the house and the car Ken had put the bug on was gone. He pulled his phone out and dialed a number. Hank picked up immediately.
“Hank, I activated another bug. Can you track it?”
“Already on it. Figured that’s what you were doing. Who’s in the car?”
“The guy we saw with the computers. He shot them up and took off.”
“Anything else interesting in there?”
“There’s still one alive, the wounded one. We’ll bring him and anything else that looks useful.”
“Bring what’s left of the computers. Maybe we can salvage something from the hard drives.”
“Will do, see you in a few.”
“Looks like we have company back to the house? I’ll bring the car,” Elijah said.
An hour later they arrived at the safe house and moved Grigory into a room Hank had prepared. Grigory hadn’t taken the same way out his comrade did, most likely due to being asleep when Ken found him. The capsule was in his mouth, but Ken managed to remove it before putting him in the car. On the way, the painkillers had worn off and he had woken up. Now he was propped up in a bed and in a good deal of pain. Leon was sitting by the bed with a glass of water and a bottle of painkillers and he was watching the way Grigory was looking at the bottle.
Leon held up the bottle of painkillers so Grigory could get a closer look.
“You know what I have here,” he said in Russian.
Grigory’s eyes grew wider and he nodded his head, but said nothing. He was trying to put up a good front, but Leon could tell by the sweat on his forehead that the pain was more than he was letting on.
“You and your friends have been causing trouble. I don’t like it when people cause trouble. At my age, I don’t need the hassle. So, this is really quite simple. You know some things that I need to know, and the sooner I know those things, the sooner you can have a couple of these.”
Grigory bit his lip and said nothing, but his eyes were fixed on the bottle in Leon’s hand.
Leon put the bottle down and stood up.
“Listen, I’m a patient man. I can sit here all night. How long you can hold out like that, I don’t know. It’s really up to you. I’m going to start with some simple questions. When I’m happy with the answers, we’ll see about doing something for your pain.”
Grigory still said nothing, but Leon could tell his resolve was wavering, so he figured he would give him time, but he had to keep the pressure on. He walked over toward him, pulled the covers back, and reached toward the wound in his leg. When his hand was still six inches away, he saw Grigory give an involuntary flinch. For his part, the Russian was trying his best to be the tough guy, but Leon knew it would not take much to get him to crack, at least he hoped that was the case. It wasn’t that he was afraid of pushing harder, but he really disliked extreme interrogation. There were times he had done it, and he always tried to justify it by reminding himself how important the information was, or how many lives he had saved, but he never felt good after it was over.
Finally, Grigory said something, so faint that Leon didn’t hear him clearly.
“What was that? You’re going to have to speak up.”
“Anatoly…”
“What about him?”
“Anatoly will find me…you will regret this.”
“Anatoly Karelin?”
“Yes…he will make you pay.”
Leon sent a quick text to Rachel and when she replied, he opened the photo on his phone and showed it to Grigory.
“You mean this guy? This is the man who’s going to make me pay?”
Grigory looked at the photo and blanched. It was like the air was let out of a balloon. Leon stayed silent for a moment and let Grigory process what he had just seen.
“Now, are you ready to tell me what you know?”
“I…I don’t know much.”
“Start by telling me who you work for.”
“Kazakov.”
“Yuriy Kazakov?”
“Yes, Yuriy.”
“How long have you worked for Yuriy?”
“Only since January.”
“Why did he send you to Paris?”
“I came with Pavel…security…for Pavel.”
“What were you doing at the hotel then?”
“Yuriy wanted the girl.”
“What did he want with her?”
“What the hell do I know? I was just-“
“I know…following orders. Not the first time I’ve heard that one. Is Yuriy planning something?”
“He’s always planning something, but he doesn’t tell people like me. I know what I need to know. Pavel knows everything. He runs the systems and…what is the word…gets into other systems.”
“I don’t know the Russian word. He’s a hacker.”
“Pavel is the only one who knows everything. He got away, didn’t he?”
“It would appear so.”
“I don’t know what he was planning, but it’s big. He was talking to Yuriy every day.”
“Do you know anything at all?”
“I know nothing. I just know he wanted the girl, thought she was a threat.”
“What kind of a threat could some young American girl be?”
“How would I know. I was just-“
“Yeah, save me the following orders crap.”
Leon’s phone buzzed and he picked it up.
“You having any luck?” Hank asked.
“He doesn’t know much. How about you.”
“I’ve been going through the shot- up computers. Can’t salvage much, but there is some data there. Make the Russian comfortable and come on out.”
“Shouldn’t someone keep an eye on him, just in case?”
“Then make him really comfortable.”
10
“How’s our friend doing?” Hank asked Leon when he walked into the computer room.
“Out like a light.”
“You two have a nice chat?”
“We did, but he doesn’t really know much. Pavel is the name of the one who got away. Apparently, he knows what Yuriy is up to.”
“So, he’s not much use to us now?”
“I don’t think so. What do we do with him? Can’t kill him.”
“We can dump him at the DGSE.”
“Have any luck with that?” Leon asked, pointing at the shot- up computer parts laid out on a table.
“I was able to get some data off one of the drives, but not much. I think he tried to wipe it before he shot it up.”
“What you got?”
“Just a few names. Check it out.”
Leon looked at the screen.
“All Asian names?”
; “Korean, to be precise.”
“You think Yuriy’s working with the Koreans?”
“Who knows? I wouldn’t put it past him. They could be anything. Informants, agents, targets.”
“Probably agents, but where?”
“Could be an op in the south.”
“We need to get ahold of Pavel.”
“Don’t we have a bug on his car?”
“Car hasn’t moved in a half hour,” Ken said from across the room.
“How far did he go,” asked Hank.
“That’s the weird thing. He only went about five miles and then stopped, right in the middle of a neighborhood.”
“Well, I think we need to have a talk with him. We think he might be privy to Yuriy’s plans.”
“Maybe we should just go nab him now…wait a minute…he’s moving now, heading north.”
“I say we take a couple cars and follow him for a bit,” Rachel said, “might get a chance to grab him.”
“You think that’s a good idea?” Leon asked.
“He is a priority,” Ken said, “Come on, young lady. Let’s roll.”
Ken and Rachel pulled out and followed the GPS tracker on their phones. It took them twenty minutes to catch up with the target vehicle. Rachel pulled next to him in traffic and he motioned for her to move ahead of the car. They would attempt to force Pavel off the road and move fast once the car was stopped. Rachel pulled in front of the car and Ken moved in behind. They stayed in this position for another two miles until they hit an empty stretch of road. Ken flashed his lights to signal Rachel and moved closer to the car ahead of him. Rachel slowed down and when the car started to move to pass her, she moved to cut it off, still slowing down.
The driver of the other vehicle gave up trying to evade them and pulled to the shoulder, coming to a complete stop. Rachel and Ken were out of their cars in an instant and approached the vehicle they had stopped, guns drawn. Rachel reached the car first, put one hand on the door handle while raising her pistol to the window, and shouted, “Get out of the car and keep your hands where I can see them.”
The car door slowly opened and Rachel kept her pistol trained on the occupant, until an elderly man leaned out of the car and asked in French, “What is going on here? We’re just going to the store.”
Rachel looked past the elderly man to see an old woman trembling in the passenger seat. She apologized to the old couple and started to go back to her car, when she noticed Ken checking under the old couple’s car. Sure enough, there was the bug, placed under the rear bumper. He put it in his pocket and went back to his car, stopping to apologize to the elderly couple. They both drove back to the house in silence, not trusting the security of their phones.
“The bugger got clean away,” Ken said when they walked into the house, “put the tracker on another car.”
“So you chased the wrong car?” Hank asked.
“Same kind of car that I put the bug on. He must have found our bug and switched it. We gave an old couple the fright of their lives.”
“So, where does that leave us now?” Rachel asked.
“In a bad spot,” Leon said, “Grigory, our friend in the other room, said this Pavel is the one who is privy to everything Yuriy is up to, and now we have no idea where he is.”
“How far can he have gone?” Rachel asked, “We know when he stopped. Surely we could figure out how far away he is.”
“In what direction? And that’s assuming he’s still in a car and hasn’t caught a flight.”
“And Grigory doesn’t have any useful information?”
“It looks like Yuriy compartmentalized everything. We’re not going to get the whole picture from one guy. Anatoly might have known more, but he’s not talking now.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, you did what you had to. Nothing to be sorry about there.”
“If anyone can find him, it’s Ahmed,” Rachel said as she picked up the encrypted phone and began to dial.
Pavel never left Paris after swapping the bug to the other car. Whoever had placed the bug and taken out the safe house would find out soon enough, but by then they would have no idea where he was. The whole situation was highly disturbing. Grigory and Vladimir were unable to take the girl, Vladimir was dead and Grigory wounded, and now the safe house was gone. It was obvious that she had local help. He could think of no other way she could manage all that by herself. The real mystery was Anatoly. Did she take him out as well?
He had already dumped his car for an older Peugeot, which he was driving around while he tried to figure out his next move. He turned on the radio and heard a report about an automobile accident the day before. Four bodies were recovered from the scene but the names of the victims weren’t given. The report went on and Pavel tried to grasp as much as his limited French would allow. The dead were one woman and three men, but two of the men had not been identified. There was a number to call with any information that would help in the investigation. Pavel headed straight toward the morgue, not bothering to take down the number.
Yuriy Kazakov was normally one to retire early, but he was still sitting in his study waiting for news from Paris. He had called the safe house and Anatoly’s mobile several times, reaching nobody. Boris was contacting every asset they knew in Paris, and was going to let him know when he found anything out. It wasn’t like Anatoly to not answer his phone, or not to return the call in a timely manner, but it had been over a day since they had last spoken. There were only so many reasons he would not be reachable, and none of them were good. Against his better judgment, he went to the bar and poured another glass of Scotch, and ambled back to his chair, scooting closer to the fire.
Two sips later he was interrupted by a knock at the door and Boris entered without waiting to be invited in.
“You might want to take this call,” Boris said as he handed Yuriy the phone before exiting the room as fast as he entered.
“Do you have news for me?” Yuriy asked.
“I have news, boss, but I’m afraid it isn’t good.”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s Anatoly. They killed him and they hit the house.”
“Who hit the house? Who killed Anatoly? Was it the girl?”
“Two Africans hit the house. I managed to get away.”
“Just two Africans?”
“They were the only ones I saw. There was shooting, I erased the computers and got away with a laptop.”
“Tell me about Anatoly? Was he there when the house was hit?”
“No. I just found out. His body was picked up at an accident scene north of the city. He wasn’t killed in the accident, boss. Looked like a knife to the throat.”
“How did you get into the morgue?”
“There was a report on the radio, unidentified victims, asking for help identifying them. I showed up, told them a story about a missing cousin, and they showed me the bodies. His leg was shot up and there was a wound in his neck. Looked like a knife. I just left there and called you.”
“How about the safe house? Are you sure you are the only one who got out?”
“I accessed the camera feeds a couple hours ago. Everyone’s dead except Grigory. He was gone.”
“They probably took him, but they won’t get any information out of him. He knew little…but he may still be useful.”
Ahmed snapped to attention and stifled a yawn. Miriam was standing next to his desk with two cups of coffee.
“You look like you could use one of these. Have a nice nap?” she asked him as she handed him one of the cups.
“I wasn’t napping…just nodded for a sec.”
“That was more than a sec. It was long enough for me to use the restroom and come back with coffee. How much did you sleep last night?”
“Two…three hours?”
“Come on, you need to get more than that.”
“Rachel needs us-”
“Rachel needs us to be functional. I’m here, Jenny’s here, your friends are learning the s
ystem. You need to get your rest. If we need you, we’ll wake you.”
“Yeah, I hear you. It’s just with all that’s going on-”
“You’re not the only one here. I know this system as well as you do and Jenny can work circles around either one of us. What if things really get crazy and you’re nodding off?”
“Look, your line’s ringing.”
Miriam went to her desk and took the call.
“Hi Rachel. What time is it over there?”
“Just past midnight. Listen, I need to turn in and catch some Zs, but we might have a bit of a problem over here. Need you and Ahmed to do some digging.”
“I’ll start digging. Ahmed will in a couple hours after he gets some more rest.”
“He didn’t sleep last night?”
“Long story.”
“Okay, here’s what’s going on. Ken and Elijah hit the Russian safe house, killed a couple of them and got some shot up hard drives we’re trying to get data off of. One of the Russians got away. All we have is a first name, Pavel. He’s apparently their tech guy and he’s close to Yuriy. Chances are something’s in the works and he might know what. The other Russian we captured seems to think Pavel is the key man in whatever Yuriy is planning. We put a tracker on his car and he found it, so we have no way of knowing where he is right now.”
“You have any idea what he looks like?”
“We did get some video footage before he fled. I’ll send that over shortly.”
“Okay, I’ll get the computer on it, facial recognition, the whole works.”
“I’d appreciate it. I have a bad feeling about this, like there’s something big but we don’t have a clue what…hold a sec…what’s that Hank? Oh…okay. One more thing. Hank’s trying to get data off the shot up hard drives. One of them just had some names, all Korean names. I know it’s not much, but we might want to keep an eye on Korea.”
“Can’t narrow that down any? North…South?”
“Could be a target in the South…or Yuriy’s working with elements in the North. My money’s on the North.”
“Why do you say that?”
The Korean Gambit Page 7
