Imminent Threat

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Who was it?” Thales asked next to him. “Who did he kill?”

  Father Spiros turned to him as if just realizing the younger man was in the room. His eyes cleared, fully lucid.

  “Brother Misha,” he said. “He was the only other person on Mount Athos who knew for sure where Apostoli came from. He helped me nurse him back to life.”

  “Then why would he kill him?” Thales asked.

  Scott already knew the answer. “He was a loose end.”

  Father Spiros let his head roll to the side, so he once again looked at Scott. “Poor Misha suffered the sin of jealousy. He knew Apostoli had been chosen to change the world and he hated him for it. One day he threatened to tell others of how we’d found him washed up on the beach. That was his last day on earth.”

  “But he didn’t stop there,” Scott said. “He’s killed others for you.”

  “Killed . . . killed . . .” the old man muttered, his lips curled as if there was a foul taste in his mouth. “He fulfilled his purpose. As God instructed.”

  “Or was it as you instructed?” Thales said. “I know your politics, Father. I know you did not choose this stone hut for yourself. The patriarch himself remediated you here decades ago. To isolate you. To stop the poison you leaked into the young minds in the monasteries.”

  This got Scott’s attention. Something the analysts at Langley had missed in his brief. They’d warned of missing pockets of information. The world on Mt. Athos was insular and hard to penetrate. And who was kidding whom? Greek Orthodoxy wasn’t exactly a known hotbed of fundamental terrorism.

  The old man clucked his tongue in annoyance. The sound was thick and sticky.

  “A week with me and you would have been one of my disciples,” he said. “I can see the fire in your eye. God needs soldiers like you. Just like he needed Apostoli. Orthodoxy or die.”

  Scott recognized the saying from his briefing book. Years earlier, the monks at the Esphigmenou monastery on Mt. Athos had rebelled at the idea of the patriarch’s outreach to Catholicism to create a dialog. In a show of disobedience, they had refused to include ranking members of the church hierarchy in their daily prayers. Finally, the Church had had enough and went to court to label them as schismatics and therefore squatters on the monastery property. What followed was a multiyear standoff with monks inside the high walls of Esphigmenou surrounded by police. It was during that time that their slogan, Orthodoxy or Die, was made popular as the media hovered nearby, hoping the whole thing would turn violent. Instead, the monks waited out the authorities and eventually formed their own Order of Esphigmenou.

  “I’m supposed to believe that Jacobslav Scarvan came here and found religion?” Scott said.

  “Not religion,” the old man said. “He achieved theosis, a direct connection to God. First through catharsis, the purification of body and thought. Then, theoria, a personal vision sent to him alone. In this place, the Lord speaks to those prepared to listen.”

  “And what did God tell you to do?” Scott asked. “What did He tell Scarvan?”

  “To defend the one, true faith from those who would subvert its purity.” Father Spiros’s speech was slow and labored, each word a challenge to get out. “Orthodoxy has been plagued by false leaders. Those who would compete with Catholicism by diluting what is holy and just. By joining those who have bastardized our faith. These people had to be stopped. Apostoli, the man you call Scarvan, was the vehicle God sent to me. And he fulfilled his duty.”

  Scott noticed Thales rear back in horror. He understood something he did not.

  “What is it?” he asked, checking the door and windows in case a threat had appeared there without him seeing it.

  “Petros,” Thales whispered. “You’re talking about Petros.”

  Father Spiros looked away from the younger man. “I did as God commanded me to do.”

  The name was familiar to Scott, but he couldn’t place it. He looked to Thales to tell him.

  “In 2004, Petros VII, the patriarch of Alexandria, died in a helicopter crash on his way to Mount Athos. Twelve people died when his Chinook went down over the Aegean. No cause was ever determined. Not publicly anyway.”

  “Scarvan,” Scott said.

  Father Spiros shrugged his shoulders. “Was it? Or was it the hand of God?” He turned his head so that his eyes looked directly into Scott’s. “From my point of view, there is no difference.”

  “You crazy old shit,” Thales said. “You’ll pay for what you’ve done.”

  At this, Father Spiros wheezed and coughed, the sound a deep rattle in his chest. It took Scott a second to realize the old man was laughing. But the phlegm in his throat caused him trouble and his cough turned worse.

  Scott reached out and propped the old man up, cringing from feeling the bones protruding under his robe. The man was not much more than a breathing skeleton.

  “Get some water,” Scott told Thales as the old man gasped for air between ragged coughs.

  “Better to just let him die,” he said. But he crossed the skete and brought back a mug filled with water he found there.

  Scott poured some carefully into the old man’s mouth. He sputtered on the first attempt, but on the second he was able to swallow and get back control of his breathing.

  When he lay back down, tears had trekked down his cheeks and his face was flushed from the exertion. He groaned and held his stomach.

  “I’m sorry, Apostoli,” he mumbled. His eyes closed, his voice drifting, losing grip again on reality. “I should not have lied to you. But no matter how much I whispered in your ear while you slept, you would not change your belief.”

  “How did you lie to me?” Scott said, playing along.

  “You did this. It’s your fault,” Father Spiros said. “You misunderstood what God told you. I’m certain of it. I wanted to see the coming of the Lord you would bring about. I needed to see it with my own eyes. But you wouldn’t leave my side while I still lived. So I had to make you believe I was dead. To free you. To set you on your path. Don’t you see? Don’t . . . you . . .”

  Scott grabbed the old man by the shoulder and shook him. Not too hard, fearing the fragility of his bones and that his skin might tear.

  Father Spiros opened his eyes but they were focused on a distant spot, seeing a landscape only he could see.

  “ ‘Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him. All kindreds of the earth shall wail because of Him. His head and his hairs are white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes are as a flame of fire.’ ”

  “What is Scarvan planning?” Scott said, raising his voice. “Tell me.”

  “ ‘His voice is the sound of many waters. And he has in his right hand seven stars; and out of his mouth comes a sharp two-edged sword.’”

  Scott didn’t care about the man’s brittle bones any longer. He sensed he was losing him. The chance to understand Scarvan’s plan was slipping through his fingers. He pulled the man up from the bed, using one of his hands to support his head as if he were a newborn baby.

  “Where is he going?” Scott shouted.

  In a moment of clarity, the old man’s eyes turned to Scott. “The Lord demands the world be on its knees when he arrives. Sometimes the body is so diseased, the only mercy is to remove the head. Apostoli will cleanse the world in a rush of fire. This is the Lord’s will as it was shown to me. It is how it shall be. There is nothing you can do to stop it. And I will not tell you another thing.” Father Spiro looked past Scott and smiled, his thin, dry lips cracking open as he did. “Now, Urgo. Do what you must.”

  Scott spun around to see the odd caretaker monk standing inside of the door to the skete.

  A shotgun in his hands.

  “Wait!” Scott shouted.

  But it was too late.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mara was pissed.

  But she knew her anger needed to be directed at Scarvan. He had executed his plan right under her nose, killed her surveillance team, and then gotten clean away.
The easy thing to do was to lash out at the French police for apprehending her instead of pursuing Scarvan as she’d told them to do.

  As frustrating as it was, they’d only done their job.

  She’d sat silently in the squad car that had transported her to the station and then ignored the carousel of inquisitors who’d come in to question her. Their tactics had varied from screaming at her to offering her food and drink to put her at ease. Through it all, she’d stared at the clock on the wall, lost in her own thoughts of where she’d screwed up the mission.

  She knew Hawthorn would work his channels within the DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, the French intelligence arm. They’d be mad that an asset had been operating on their soil without permission. A formal complaint would be filed, and it would go into the circular bin at Langley with all the other complaints from nations around the world.

  Funny thing was they never complained when a U.S. counterintelligence operation tipped them off about an imminent threat. Or even stopped one, handing over the bad guys in a nice bundle.

  That was what she was supposed to have done.

  Instead, two operatives were dead. Not to mention however many people were in La Tour d’Argent or who had been injured from the debris.

  A rocket-propelled grenade. Launched from a goddamn boat.

  She still couldn’t believe it.

  It was a full hour before three men in suits from the American Embassy arrived to escort her out of French custody. Men dressed in black body armor glared at her as she walked through the station. These were GIGN, part of the French National Gendarmerie. She’d worked with them before and knew they were hardened professionals. While they could accept that she wasn’t the perpetrator, she understood the stares.

  She had information about the attack. And she wasn’t sharing.

  Mara had been on the other end of that particular equation before and she’d hated it. But it was Hawthorn’s call on what to share. She knew the protective details had been put on alert about Scarvan, but that was when the targets had been heads of state.

  An explosion in the middle of historic Paris was something else.

  Once they were out of the police station and into the waiting Mercedes SUV, she was handed a satellite phone.

  “Mara,” Hawthorn said, “thank God you’re all right.”

  His reaction surprised her. Gruff disappointment was more his style when a mission was botched. He was getting a little more sentimental in his old age. “Sorry, boss. I blew the chance.”

  “I already have footage,” Hawthorn said. “With the approach he took, he should have been an easy target for the surveillance team. The plan was sound.”

  Except for the part where I didn’t take into account he might not be working alone, Mara thought. “Any leads on who took them out?”

  She almost called them the Clemsons, but it felt awkward using their fake names. Especially now that they were dead. Somehow it seemed disrespectful.

  “The building security cam was wiped, but that wasn’t unexpected. The ATM camera across the street from the main entrance gives us a good look, though.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing yet,” Hawthorn said. “On first pass, all foot traffic entered multiple times. Residents or other renters. Some have their faces obscured but even those are IDed by their clothes worn earlier in the day.”

  Mara closed her eyes, thinking it through. Imagining how she would do it. The fact that the lobby video was gone meant the operative knew they would be on it, otherwise why bother taking it? That meant they came in through the main entrance.

  “He took someone’s clothes,” she said.

  There was silence on the other end of the line. She didn’t have to explain. Hawthorn had been at the game longer than she had. He’d played more permutations that she could even imagine. He knew she was right. She imagined he was processing how he’d missed it.

  “We’ll dig in and send you the image once we sort out which one it was,” he said. “We both know it likely won’t tell us much.”

  “Paris has more cameras per square mile than Moscow. We might get lucky,” she said, not really thinking they would. “But there’s something else I need you to get Jordi working on.”

  “Name it.”

  “Someone tipped off Marcus Ryker that the hit was about to happen,” Mara said, remembering the way the man had frozen and then turned and looked right at her. “And whoever did it knew I was on site, too.”

  That Ryker had stopped in front of La Tour d’Argent and done an about-face was something Hawthorn already would have known from video analysis. The idea that whoever had called with the warning also knew about their operation meant one of two things: either Mara had been followed or there was someone on the inside.

  If their operation to pursue Scarvan wasn’t small and compartmentalized already, Mara knew how Hawthorn operated. The circle of trust was about to get a lot smaller.

  A nagging thought occurred to her, just on the periphery of everything else she was processing. Was it possible that was exactly the reaction Scarvan wanted?

  “Can you tell these suit monkeys to take me to the apartment where the Clemsons were killed? They seem to think I’m getting on an airplane.”

  “That’s on my order, Mara,” Hawthorn said. “There’s nothing to see at the apartment. French police removed two bodies. They’re playing nice with our team, so if there’s anything useful, we’ll get it.”

  “I want to––”

  “Sergei Kolonov turned up,” Hawthorn said.

  Mara felt a surge of excitement. There were only two people left of any consequence for Scarvan to target, outside of Hawthorn and her dad, of course. The question was whether Scarvan would continue on his quest now that they’d tipped their hand they were on to him.

  Given the chance, Mara would have bet good money that he would.

  “Where is he?”

  “Prague.”

  The excitement from a few seconds earlier was replaced by a splash of cold water. The beautiful city was forever carved into her mind as the site of her mother’s death. She’d read the CIA report a hundred times, always ending on the photo of the Charles Bridge where it’d happened.

  Terrible memories that all came flooding back at her with that one word.

  Prague.

  “Are you there?” Hawthorn said.

  Mara shook her head as if that simple act were enough to push that kind of psychological trauma away. It worked enough for her to find her voice. “Got it. I assume the details will be on the plane?”

  “They will. And Scott will meet you there once he’s done on Mount Athos.”

  “Any word?”

  “No, but he left with a single man and drove out into a remote area of the isthmus. Hopefully it’s not a dead end.”

  Mara at least felt relieved that Scarvan’s presence in Paris had meant her dad had been relatively safe. She wasn’t looking forward to debriefing him about the missed opportunity to catch their target.

  Someone else spoke near Hawthorn and she heard only muffled sounds as he covered the phone and talked to them. When he got back on the line, he sounded pleased. “It appears you have one thing to do before you leave Paris.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Thanks to Jordi’s good work here, our French friends have detained Marcus Ryker at Le Bourget. He was about to leave on his private jet. He’s agreed to an interview before he departs. I want it to be you.”

  Mara grinned. “Usually you only have bad news. I hope this is the start of a new habit.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. Then he turned serious. “Be careful, Mara. He puts up a front, but Ryker is as clever as they come.”

  “The question is whether he’s also dangerous,” she said. “I expect I’m about to find out.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Paris-Le Bourget was the busiest general aviation airport in Europe. While the smaller aircraft that typically made up the
fleet for general aviation enthusiasts had a place there, the airport was really designed for one specific purpose: to cater to the massively affluent jet-setters from around the world when they wanted to visit the City of Light.

  Alpha Team’s Gulfstream was also parked there, fueled up and ready to take her to Prague. While the G5 was top of the line, it still paled in comparison to some of the private rides of the rich and famous.

  There were two styles on display on the tarmac. First were the small, sleek, and sophisticated planes, tricked out so they looked like something from a sci-fi thriller. These tended to be for short hops and to get into small airports, often just a landing strip cut out of the forest near someone’s Loire Valley chateau or German castle.

  Then there were the larger aircraft: Boeing 737s, DC10s, Airbus 319s, with interiors that made them more flying luxury hotels than aircraft. Mara had been on some that made Air Force One look like a worn-out motel by comparison. Then again, most of these aircraft didn’t have countermeasures to fend off surface-to-air missiles or the communication infrastructure to fight a protracted war without ever having to land.

  Then again, maybe some did.

  Of particular interest to her was the Boeing 787 she saw on the tarmac, elegant stairs rolled up to the closed door. The tail and fuselage were covered with the distinctive RYKER logo that was part of every brand Marcus Ryker owned. Subtlety was not the man’s strength.

  There were only a handful of private 787s in the world and most of them were outfitted by Westral Aviation Management. The CIA had attempted to infiltrate the company. Private buyers of three-hundred-million-dollar jets tended to be the kind of people who had information the CIA would find helpful. A few listening devices here and there on the planes could have yielded valuable information. It was the kind of initiative privacy groups loved to find out about and lodge complaints against. But regular Americans expected their government to do whatever was necessary to keep them safe.