The First Order
Page 36
Irina fell into the dirt outside the weather station. She scrabbled for the cell phone in her pocket…She needed a doctor. Her fingers fumbled with the buttons. It wasn’t working. It wasn’t…
She saw him, then, as blood from her femoral artery watered the soil, coming through the birches and the pines. Sergei, smiling, walking toward her on the wind.
“Come on,” Sam said, “come on.” He could see now that his brother had been shot in the side and the chest, and was bleeding profusely.
Sam carried Danny down the rest of the tunnel, his own arm afire with pain and blood. He just ignored it. The tunnel to Finland seemed to stretch forever, like a long concrete tomb. “Don’t die,” Sam said. “Don’t die. Don’t leave me.”
“I don’t want to,” Danny said. “Not again.”
“The tunnel is giving us forever to talk,” Sam managed. His arm was a blaze of agony. He had to keep his brother moving. And pray that it wasn’t Irina’s people waiting for them at the end of the tunnel.
The long game that Irina had played. The long game should be life and living it, not manipulation for a pointless revenge. So talk about life, he thought. Make him want to keep it.
“I want you to come to New Orleans. Play with Daniel.”
“Don’t sing that song to Daniel,” Danny said. “If I am dead…in sunshine or in shadow. It’s all too sad; what was Mom thinking?” His voice went ragged. “Sleep in peace… You came to me…”
Sam pulled him up the stairs. He sang: “Danny Boy…I love you so.”
“I love you,” Danny whispered. “Tell Mom and Dad…I’m sorry.”
A spill of light showed the stairs, rising. The door. Finally, the door. Finland. Freedom. Unless Irina’s team was on the other side. They’d die together.
He set Danny down on the floor. His brother touched his cheek. “Sam. You got me out.”
“Hold on, hold on…”
“I had one more day with you.” He tried to smile. “One more day…”
Sam stood, his shot arm thundering with agony. He opened the door with the other key, nearly collapsing. He tried to push and it didn’t budge. Then he yanked and the door opened toward him. Another bookcase on the other side, one house a twin to the other; one a place of death, this one a place of hope. He pulled hard against the bookcase, his arm aflame with pain. Through the windows he could see, fifty yards away, a private helicopter, three men standing…and one of them was Bob Seaforth. He unlocked the front door and yelled for help, that he needed a doctor. The men ran toward him, Seaforth following slowly, waving.
Sam stumbled back down the stairs.
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said. But Danny was so still. Quiet. He touched his brother’s throat. He wasn’t supposed to leave him again. Sam said his brother’s name, from whisper to scream, and it echoed down the empty blackness of the tunnel.
75
Northern Virginia
TWO WEEKS LATER.
Sam Capra paged through the newspapers from Russia.
The summit had gone well, marred by the news that Katya Kirova had dropped out of sight shortly after arriving in the United States, and had reportedly eloped to Mexico with a film star. The paparazzi waited at every major nightclub but she did not turn up, and eventually her father and the other Russians returned home without her. The Kirov yacht sailed through the Panama Canal and headed north, toward Baja, where Katya had last been reported. Sam wondered if Yuri would somehow get his daughter those millions in cash hidden in the server room, so she could live out her life out of the public eye.
Irina Belinskaya, the security chief for the inner circle, had gone missing as well, as had five of her employees. Initial reports suggested foul play. A search of her office aboard the Kirov yacht yielded a shock—a small amount of polonium-210, in a marked vial, a highly lethal poison only obtainable via nuclear facilities. Shortly thereafter, the bodies of two of her employees were found in a basement at the Nebo compound, and she and her men were found dead near the Finnish border. All had been shot to death. It was decided that the conspirators must have turned on each other and killed each other. Why they were heading to Finland was left to conjecture.
There was no mention in the press accounts of Sam Capra, Mila Cebotari, or Philip Judge. Or the long-ago murdered hostage, Danny Capra.
The inner circle, desperate to avoid blame or connection, cleaned up very well after themselves. Stefan Varro quickly bought a majority interest in Belinsky Global, and he promptly renamed it Varro Security.
Dmitri Morozov left the summit, with his inner circle now ready to make deals with their American counterparts, heralding a new era of closeness. But he noticed that the American demands got a bit stiffer in the following weeks. He got irritated. Finally the words he had long dreaded, like a dark shadow, the truth he thought had died with Sergei, came to him, carefully delivered by private message from the United States embassy.
Our intelligence service knows that your trusted associate Sergei Belinsky murdered a CIA operative named Zalmay Quereshi in Afghanistan and killed the son of one of your closest associates, Anton Varro, while conducting drug-running operations to fund murder and bribery on your behalf in Russia. We have physical proof. Consider your actions carefully should you wish not to have this information become public.
The accompanying photo showed Sergei Belinsky, a balaclava mask shoved up to his forehead, standing and glancing down at Zalmay Quereshi. The proof had been found in a house owned by one Robert Clayton, in Miami.
The relationship between the two countries, formed on this new trust (in that I will trust you not to ruin me), seemed to strengthen. A few pundits said President Morozov seemed far more amenable to the Western overtures and offers than he had before the summit.
Sam closed the papers. He missed Mila. He missed his son. He missed his brother.
Bob Seaforth came into the room.
“I don’t much like hospitals,” Sam said. “I thought I could go home.”
“We’re flying Leonie and Daniel up here to see you. We thought it best to wait.”
Sam looked at Bob. “We need to talk about the Round Table. I’m ready now.”
“Our sources inside MI-5 have already told us. Your patron, James Court…he’s finally talked. They cut him a deal. You’re free of him.”
“What will they do to him?”
“He’ll resign from Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He’ll take a quiet pensioned job in a government backwater and turn over every contact he had to them. He did some very good favors for the Allies. Some were questionable. But he is cooperating. I understand his finally getting to see his wife face-to-face was the trigger for his talking. They should have tried that in the first place.”
“His wife.”
“I understand they are honoring whatever deal they gave her. Citizenship, the security of her family.”
“I doubt she will want to see me.” He thought: What if I never see her again?
Seaforth said: “My understanding is that the, um, marriage between Mila and de Courcey is not…surviving the strain of this, um, situation. But that is rumor, not a fact I can confirm.”
“De Courcey? His name is Court.”
“His real name is Lord James de Courcey, third son of Henry and Georgina, the Duke and Duchess of Avondale.”
Sam was silent.
“The Avondales are not very stereotypically aristocratic. There’s a family estate, though. His parents are heavy into organic farming, green energy, natural textiles, and they very much stay out of the public eye. But…still a duke and a duchess. James was taught at home before going to university in Wales and majoring in history. He got a job working for MI-6, much to his father’s displeasure. But under the name James Court he runs a small software consulting firm in London. That’s his cover that you and your, um, friend know.”
“Mila…”
“As I said, I hear the marriage is over. The Brits are not at all eager to advertise that a spy who is also the son of
a duke was pulling intel jobs on the side—especially one that eventually led to MI-6 attacking a member of the Russian inner circle outside Nebo. It would be deeply embarrassing. Each intelligence agency has dealt with their Round Table member in their own way. There has been a spate of quiet resignations.”
“I can’t resign.”
“True. You weren’t an actual intelligence officer during your time working for Mr. Court. So. We’re prepared to be…forgetful of this period. Thanks to you, we now have Morozov in our pocket.”
Sam said nothing. It was thanks to more than him.
“But pockets get emptied.” Seaforth risked a smile. “The analysts suggest that if Morozov keeps acquiescing to our demands, his popularity will be slipping. We have him, but who knows if he’ll survive in power. Morozov could be gone soon enough, and then one of them perhaps in his place. We’ll have to put pressure on the next president. Or maybe we’ll get lucky, and so will the Russian people, and they’ll have an actual choice.”
Sam said nothing.
“Your brother…”
“I know.”
“Sam. This was started because a CIA agent used very bad judgment in taking your brother along when he shouldn’t have. Zalmay put them in a situation where they both might have been killed. Foolishly, and thoughtlessly. The agency never should have recruited Zalmay. But…whatever else your brother did, he gave us a leverage with Russia we’ve never had before.”
“So he’s a hero.”
“Is he one to you?”
“I knew him better than anyone else. Yet in some ways he was still a stranger to me. Our business is to know. I didn’t know my wife. I didn’t know my brother. I don’t know who I want to be anymore.”
“What will you do now?”
“You mean like a job? I…”
“Those bars are still in your name. With the Round Table gone, there’s no one to contest your ownership. Certainly none of the intel agencies want a legal fight over them. They’re yours.”
“I’m not sure I want to keep them.”
Seaforth cleared his throat. “I know you and the agency did not part on the best of terms.”
“True.”
“You fixed this. You took on tracking a man who could have killed Morozov and sent this world into a dark and dangerous place. I need fixers, Sam. I need people who can do what you just did.” He sat across from Sam. “Would you come back, work for me in a special capacity? The bars would still be your cover. And I would only ask for you in times of trouble. You could have some normalcy in your and your son’s life.”
“A normal life.”
“Any crimes you committed working for the Round Table, they’re gone. Full immunity.” Bob Seaforth took a deep breath. “I’ve freed you, Sam. Would you like to work for me? Help me fix the problems no one else can touch?”
“You? And what are you that you can cover up Avril Claybourne’s murder and get me and my brother out of Finland with no one the wiser?”
“I’ve left the agency. I now work for the Federal Intelligence Analysis Office.”
“What is that?”
“Officially we help agencies understand their data better. Unofficially we do far more.”
“You call it the Church,” Sam said. He remembered the code name from when he’d eavesdropped on Seaforth’s meeting with his team. “You have a team of misfits: Romy, Julian, Prakash.”
Seaforth stared. “How do you know that?”
Sam shrugged. “I’ll tell you someday.”
Seaforth cracked an astonished smile. “Well. Then you know I’ve recruited people who don’t always conform to the rules. I’ve had my eye on you for a while.”
“I’m not sure I can handle doing CIA work again.”
“We’re not the CIA. We are an experiment. Trying to do our work the old-fashioned way, depending on humans gathering information directly from other humans. You are exactly what we need.”
“May I think about it?”
“Of course.”
Second chances, Sam thought. What will you do with yours?
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Mitch Hoffman, Jade Chandler, Lindsey Rose, Jamie Raab, David Shelley, Ursula Mackenzie, Deb Futter, Beth deGuzman, Brian McLendon, Matthew Ballast, Karen Torres, Andy Dodds, Jo Wickham, Andrew Duncan, Anthony Goff, Thalia Proctor, David Palmer, Kimberly Escobar, Jane Lee, and all the amazing teams at Grand Central Publishing and Little, Brown UK.
I am blessed also to work with Peter Ginsberg, Shirley Stewart, Jonathan Lyons, Holly Frederick, Eliane Benisti, Kerry D’Agostino, and Sarah Perillo.
For their generosity and expertise I thank Sherrie Saint (Director of Investigations, Alabama Department of Forensic Science); Nick Slavik, who shared his experiences in Afghanistan; Ed Lasher and Yachtcomputing LC; Kerry Kingery of the United States Coast Guard; Zsuzsa Megyeri, my editor at Jaffa Kiado, for Budapest advice; Paige Pennekamp McClendon and Marianne Fernandez, for Miami expertise and the please-forgive-me borrowing of names. I would also like to acknowledge the late Dr. Gale Stokes, my Russian history professor at Rice University, who inspired a lifelong interest in Russia, and who thought writing crime novels was a fine use of my history degree. Any misrepresentation of facts, or bending of time or geography to suit the purposes of the story, is my responsibility.
Special thanks always to my family, Leslie, Charles, and William, who are my anchors during the writing and rewriting of the books.
Russia is a complicated land, and this book presents an entirely fictional take on the political and economic leadership of the nation. However, it is true that (a) much of the country’s vast wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a few and (b) some of those business leaders are former KGB. Those facts served as a seed for the idea of this novel. There is no oligarch compound in Russia called Nebo, and the abandoned airfield at Vyborg remains abandoned. Zheleznogorsk exists and remains a forbidden city, and polonium-210 was identified as the poison used in the 2006 murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London. One scenario of how he was poisoned suggests that the polonium, possibly taken from the Avangard reactor in the closed city of science, Sarov, was introduced into his tea at a London hotel.
ALSO BY JEFF ABBOTT
Sam Capra series
Adrenaline
The Last Minute
Downfall
Inside Man
Whit Mosley series
A Kiss Gone Bad
Black Jack Point
Cut and Run
Other fiction
Panic
Fear
Collision
Trust Me
About the Author
Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of sixteen novels. His books include the Sam Capra thrillers Adrenaline, The Last Minute, Downfall, and Inside Man, as well as the standalone novels Panic, Fear, Collision, and Trust Me. The Last Minute won an International Thriller Writers award, and Jeff is also a three-time nominee for the Edgar Award. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his family. You can visit his website at JeffAbbott.com.
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
Sign Up
Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: If I Am Dead 1: Manhattan
2: Islamabad, Pakistan
3: Afghanistan
4: Long Island
5: Budapest
6: En Route to Vienna, Austria
7: London
8: Brooklyn
9: Oxford, UK
10: Paris
11: New Orleans
12: London
13: Manhattan
14: Manhattan
15: Fremont, California<
br />
16: The Forbidden City
17: Fremont
18: Manhattan
19: Manhattan
20: The Past—Burundi
21: Manhattan
22: Miami
23: Brooklyn
24: Brooklyn
25: Miami
26: Manhattan
27: Manhattan
28: Brooklyn
29: Miami
30: Manhattan
Part Two: In Sunshine or in Shadow 31: Nassau
32: Nassau
33: The Svetlana, Nassau
34: The Svetlana, Nassau
35: The Svetlana, Nassau
36: Nassau
37: The Svetlana, Nassau
38: Nassau
39: The Svetlana, Nassau
40: The Svetlana, Nassau
41: Varro Jet, Nassau Airport
42: The Svetlana, the Atlantic Ocean
43: Miami
44: Miami
45: Nebo, Russia
46: The Svetlana, the Atlantic Ocean
47: The Varro Estate, Nebo, Russia
48: The Church HQ, New York
49: The Kirov Estate, Nebo, Russia
50: Kirov Jet, En Route to Russia
51: Near London
52: En Route to Moscow
53: Near Nebo, Russia
54: Kirov Jet, Approaching Nebo, Russia
55: Moscow
56: Nebo, Russia
57: The Morozov Estate, Nebo, Russia
58: The Varro Estate, Nebo, Russia
59: Nebo, Russia
60: The Presidential Ilyushin
61: Nebo, Russia
62: The Empty House, Nebo
63: The Presidential Ilyushin
64: The Empty House, Nebo
65: The Empty House, Nebo
66: The Empty House, Nebo
67: En Route to Moscow
68: Nebo, Russia
69: Toward Moscow