by Jeff Gunhus
Alexis dumped a small bag onto the table that served as a desk in the small hotel room.
“Here,” he said. “I’ve brought you everything. ID cards. My briefcase. A detailed log of every conversation I’ve had over the last three days. Who it was with, what was discussed.”
“You kept your interactions to the minimum?” Scarvan asked.
“Yes, I told them I was ill as you suggested,” he said. “That I wanted to be in the meetings to not miss anything, but not really participate. I even pretended to forget things already said, blaming my cough medicine and lack of sleep.”
“I hope you didn’t overdo it,” Scarvan said. “Don’t want them telling you to stay home.”
“I’m part of the bureaucracy, but I might as well be a political appointee. Everyone knows the Church favors me,” he said. “Even the prime minister knows to leave me alone.”
“Good,” Scarvan said. “Remove your clothes.”
Alexis hesitated. “I brought clothes for you. They are mine, but clean.”
“I want the smell of them,” Scarvan said, his voice making it clear that there was no discussion to be had.
Alexis pushed off his shoes and began to undress. “The bomb is positioned as you requested.”
“And the security sweep?”
“They have been through several times. With machines. With dogs. With people. Nothing.”
Scarvan shifted through the pile on the desk, placing everything into an orderly fashion. He tried to think of any other questions to ask the man, but he’d already done his homework. He waited until the man was standing in his underwear.
“I will remain here until it is done,” Alexis said. “In God’s name.”
“In God’s name,” Scarvan agreed.
Then he raised his hand, pointed a suppressed Glock at the man’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.
The back of Alexis’s skull blew out. A spray of blood and brain coated the wall behind him.
In the upcoming mission, there could be zero loose ends. Having the man he was going to meticulously impersonate to gain entry into the UN Building potentially getting cold feet was an unacceptable risk. Besides, once the mission was complete, there was no use for Alexis Papadopoulos in the world.
Scarvan said a short prayer for the man’s martyred soul. Then he got to work. He had eight hours to become Alexis Papadopoulos. And then it was time to finally set that last part of his plan in motion.
As he prepared, he wondered whether Scott and Mara Roberts would play their parts as he planned. As much as they wanted to think they were unpredictable, he felt like he knew them.
It would be one of the great pleasures of his life to see them suffer.
CHAPTER 52
“Positive ID.”
It was a tech manning one of the computer stations in the command center. Mara scanned the room and spotted the young woman with her hand raised in the air. It wasn’t necessary. Every head in the room had pivoted to look directly at her.
Mara jogged over to her station along with Rick, Scott, and Anna.
“Scarvan?” Rick asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Where?” Scott asked.
The tech pointed to the screen. On it was a tangle of different colored lines. It took Mara a second to figure out what she was looking at. A subway system.
The bastard was taking the subway on his way to commit his atrocity.
Only something was wrong.
“That’s not New York,” Rick said, confused.
“No sir,” the tech said. “It’s BART. San Francisco.”
Mara caught her dad’s eye. This was an unexpected wrench in the works.
“Do you have video?” Mara asked.
The tech punched away on her keyboard. The public transit areas in major U.S. cities were a surveillance professional’s playground. Cameras everywhere. Face-recognition software. Air samplers. The works.
“Here,” she said.
They all leaned in toward the screen. The video played through once, then rewound and played again on a loop. It showed a busy platform filled with commuters. The AI program running in the background showed each face it evaluated by a small green square appearing on each person, tracking movement until a lock was created.
In the center of the track, dressed in a long black trench coat, was a man staring at the platform camera. He bore some resemblance to Scarvan. Tall, lean, a wild shock of hair.
“Zoom in, please,” Rick said.
The tech froze the frame and zoomed in. The resolution turned grainy, but the program compensated, and it slowly turned into a crisp photo.
It wasn’t Scarvan. It was a man wearing glasses with thick black frames. Similar to what Jordi had shown them only two days before.
“I don’t understand,” the tech said. She pointed to the upper right-hand corner of her screen. It displayed a score of ninety-five percent match to Jacobslav Scarvan.
“Positive ID,” called out another tech in the room. “I have Scarvan in the subway system in Rome.”
“I have him in Tokyo,” another called out.
Anna pointed to the screen and the desk next to them. “Positive ID. Antwerp.”
“Jesus,” Rick said. “So much for the lone-wolf theory. This guy’s getting an assist all around the globe.”
“New York!” a tech in the far corner of the room called out. They all jogged to that desk. The video was already up. This one looked more like Scarvan, but it was hard to tell. He kept his face down and stayed in crowds as he moved to his train. It was the 7 train, heading to Grand Central Station. The nearest subway station to the UN building.
Rick put a hand on the tech’s shoulder. “Contact NYPD liaison officer. Need a takedown in Grand Central. Seven train arriving in . . .”
“Six minutes,” the tech said. “On it.”
As the tech conveyed the information to the NYPD contact, Mara leaned in. “Misinformation campaign. He’ll have us chasing our tails all day. This is Omega. Has to be.”
Rick glanced around at the others. He took her by the arm and pulled her aside. “Why would they do that? Our source, this . . . this . . . Asset, he said Omega wanted to stop Scarvan.”
“What if that was misdirection, too?” Mara said. “What if he was playing us the whole time?”
Scott stepped into their space. “Or Asset was telling the truth and Omega is running the plan so Scarvan isn’t scared off.”
Mara glared at her father. The pact to not tell anyone Asset was the source hadn’t lasted with him. She’d told him the truth early on. The stakes were too high. Still, she hadn’t planned on Rick finding out this way.
Rick stared openmouthed, first at Scott, then at Mara. Betrayal written all over his face. Mara hated seeing him look that way at her.
Scott saw the look, too. “There’s no time for that,” he said. “I’ve shared this intel with no one else. Not even Hawthorn. Bottom line, our best opportunity is to let this play out and intercept him when he tries to access the bomb.”
Mara did her best to stay professional. The look on Rick’s face was killing her. “Run down these Scarvan sightings,” Mara said. “So Scarvan doesn’t get spooked. Just don’t use any of your resources here.”
Rick pursed his lips. Mara had seen him angry before, but always at someone else. The anger she could live with, that would pass. It was the disappointment in his eyes that ate at her. She’d seen that look before from men in her life. Always at the end of relationships.
Anna walked up to them. “The takedown team is assembled. Is there a problem?”
“No, no problem,” Rick said, never taking his eyes off Mara. “Things are perfectly clear now.”
Scott stabbed a finger in the man’s chest. “Son, you need to get your head in the game.”
“And you need to get out of my face,” Rick said.
The two men stood toe-to-toe, neither willing to budge. It was Anna who broke the tension.
“Should I get a rule
r?” she asked. “We’re measuring dicks, right?”
“Enough,” Mara said. “We’ll come back to this. The three of us will join the intercept team. There could be eyes anywhere in this room that report back to Scarvan, so be careful.”
Rick gave the barest shake of his head, but he stepped away. Mara knew giving him advice right now on keeping a secret wasn’t her best move. But this was business.
She just hoped he saw it the same way in the end.
“Come on, Mara. Let’s go,” Scott said.
Rick had already turned away and was marching back to the first terminal that had the positive ID on Scarvan.
As she, Scott, and Anna left the room, she took a look back over her shoulder. Rick was watching them leave, his eyes boring into her.
“He’ll get over it,” Anna said, surprising her. “And if he doesn’t, then he’s the wrong man. Just remember that.”
As they left the room together, Mara pondered the wisdom of accepting relationship advice from a single, fifty-year-old woman whose idea of a good catch was her father.
Like the rest of her private life, she pushed it aside for the job at hand. Rick would have to wait. Right now, there was another man she had to worry about.
They assembled with the enhanced FBI Special Weapons and Tactics Team. These were hard men, disciplined and well trained on everything from hostage rescue and stronghold assaults to counterterrorism and high-risk arrests. Weapons ranged on display included both MP5s and Remington 870 shotguns.
There were ten of them.
Mara wondered whether that would be enough to face Scarvan.
CHAPTER 53
Scarvan barely recognized his own face as he passed the mirror in the hallway. He’d gained access into the Consulate General of the Hellenic Republic with ease, waved through by security who called him by his name, Alexis. Using a napkin to cover his mouth as he coughed, he avoided speaking as much as possible. He had a good sense of Alexis’s voice, but conversation was the weakest link in his disguise.
A single question or reference to something only the real Alexis would know could give him away. The greatest part of his disguise was in the room ahead of him.
“Good morning, Alexis,” Petro Angelides said as he walked into the reception room. There was a cluster of men in suits holding steaming cups of coffee. “I heard you aren’t feeling well today.”
“Good morning, Prime Minister,” Scarvan said with a slight bow. “Just a cold is all.” He coughed into his napkin for effect. “Wouldn’t miss today, though.”
“Everyone keep their distance from Alexis today,” the prime minister said, laughing. “It wouldn’t do to have the entire Greek delegation miss the gala tonight because we were all ill!”
The men around him laughed as men kissing up to power do, with deep, knowing chuckles recognizing their own sycophancy.
Scarvan waved a hand and gave his own chuckle in order to fit in with what was expected. Then he excused himself to the restroom, where he stayed until the delegation was ready to leave.
The car ride from the consulate on Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue down to the UN building on Forty-sixth Street and First Avenue was uneventful. Scarvan was in the prime minister’s vehicle but mumbled something about not getting everyone sick and climbed into the front passenger seat. The prime minister’s protective detail didn’t like the arrangement, but a single word from the prime minister and Scarvan was given the seat.
Everything was going precisely as planned.
The security to enter the United Nations complex was more orderly than he expected. Keeping a line of vehicles with heads of state in them exposed in a slow-moving line wasn’t optimal. Not all of them had the equivalent of the Beast, the armored vehicle used to transport the president of the United States. A machine capable of withstanding a direct hit from an RPG, let alone a sniper’s bullet. Most countries had bulletproof versions of a Mercedes Benz sedan or some kind of hardened SUV. Security details knew the term bulletproof was only meant to make their protectees feel safe. It was more like bullet-resistant.
Instead, the security teams had been given specific times to arrive at the entrance, staggering when the heads of state would make their appearance. In the diplomatic world where status was always on display, the nations were given times to arrive by a nameless protocol officer. The UN prided itself on evenhandedness, so the arrivals were in alphabetical order to avoid the appearance of preferential treatment. Regardless, on this day, with increased security, the decision had been made for the Security Council members to arrive last, with President Patterson arriving just before his speech to the General Assembly.
Based on that criteria, Greece was scheduled to arrive in the middle of the list. Scarvan would have preferred to arrive even earlier, but he could make it work.
The first layer of security was only a flash of the driver’s badge, a quick visual inspection inside the vehicle and the trunk, a 360 with the K-9 unit, and a cursory look under the hood and undercarriage with a mirror at the end of long pole. The team operated like a pit crew at a race, each with a job to do as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Once inside the complex, the cars with the principals in them were directed to the underground entrance. This ensured added security on exiting the vehicle. The other cars in the motorcade peeled off to a secondary parking area where the occupants who were to enter the building went through more extensive screening. The entourage attending the head of state was assumed to be well-known parts of the inner circle, which is why Alexis had served such an important role in the plan.
“This is unusual,” the prime minister said in the backseat.
Scarvan leaned forward. As the car inched along, he saw what the prime minister was looking at.
There were lines at the second level of security that entered the building from the garage. Metal detectors complemented by men with additional wands. Cameras covered the area, certainly employing the most advanced facial recognition software available. Each person was having their hands swabbed for traces of any bomb-making material. Scarvan knew he would pass such a test, he’d made sure of it, but the security level so soon concerned him. He couldn’t get caught here.
“Let me find out where you go,” the head of the prime minister’s security detail said, opening the door and climbing out.
“Like hell I’ll stand in that line,” the prime minister muttered.
Scarvan watched with interest as the head of security made his inquiries. The person he spoke with pointed to a much shorter line to the right. The head of security gesticulated wildly, pointing back to the car and then to the door. The man he spoke with shook his head. The message was clear: Everyone went through security.
When the car rolled to a stop, the security man was there to open the door.
“Sir, your entrance is this way,” he said.
Scarvan exited the car, coughing violently.
“Alexis, come with me,” the prime minister said. “You don’t need to stand in this longer line.”
Scarvan knew empathy wasn’t Angelides’s motivation. He, more than anyone, knew that Alexis Papadopoulos was the Church’s man. And what politician didn’t want the Church in their corner?
“Thank you,” Scarvan said.
“Alexis is coming with me,” the prime minister said to the others. “I’ll see the rest of you inside.”
The security man walked Scarvan and Angelides to the VIP line, introduced them to the UN protocol officer there, and then took his leave.
The protocol officer apologized for the inconvenience of the added security, adding that in the interest of fairness, all entrants had pass through security. The implication was clear. Some countries, even their leaders, were not to be trusted. Greece, the protocol officer’s tone suggested, was not one of those countries, but the game had to be played.
Scarvan wanted to ask whether they would make the American president go through a metal detector, but kept his mouth shut. He already knew the
answer.
Even with all of his precautions, he felt his heart rate elevate as he approached the entry-point. The facial recognition software likely wasn’t a problem. The prosthetics and makeup would see to that. The prime minister was asked to pass through the metal detector, but the officer with hand swabs waved him past. Scarvan extended his hands and allowed them to be swabbed. He’d tested for residue in his apartment, but what if the unit here had a higher sensitivity? How long before the questioning turned first awkward and then aggressive?
“Thank you, sir. Enjoy the day,” the officer said.
Scarvan nodded, coughing again into his napkin.
He followed Angelides into the building, both of them being led by the protocol officer assigned to them.
“Prime Minster, there is a reception of world leaders. I will take you there now,” the protocol officer said. “The rest of your party will be informed of where to go and when to meet you next.”
Alexis coughed again. “Sir, I must find a restroom. I will see you inside.”
The prime minister stopped and turned, looking at him curiously. Scarvan froze, trying to think if he’d forgotten to modulate his voice properly. Angelides knew Alexis from meetings, but they didn’t know each other socially. Scarvan had counted on him not knowing the man’s mannerisms that well.
“Are you sure you should be here?” the prime minister said. “Your eyes. They look terrible.”
Scarvan waved him away. “Go, please. I’ll be fine.”
Whether the prime minister was satisfied with the answer or simply reached the limits of his fake sympathy, he turned and followed the protocol officer to mingle with the other heads of state.
All of who would soon be dead.
CHAPTER 54
Scarvan found his way to a restroom. He relieved himself, washed his hands, preparing himself mentally for the next step.
