The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  Crack.

  A couple of feet beyond where she lay, a fleeing man screamed and fell to the ground. Blood poured from his back.

  You can move. So move.

  “Come on.” She could see the relief in Doc’s eyes as she spoke. Despite the pain in her back, she rolled to a crouch and scrambled for the shelter of the nearest vendor cart. Doc scuttled after her on all fours.

  The fact that she was hurt, not dead, was, she realized as the initial trauma of being hit faded, entirely due to the bulletproof garment she wore under her dress. The impact of the bullet had been stunning, but she didn’t think she’d suffered more than a superficial injury.

  Thank God for SiuSiu.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  Rounds fired in quick succession splintered the cart’s wooden front even as she and Doc huddled behind it. A shower of leaves from the potted cherry tree behind them rained down on their heads. They weren’t alone: a petrified-looking man crouched behind the cart, too. He spoke frantically to them in Mandarin, but for once Bianca was unable to translate: she was too rattled. Her back ached like someone had stabbed an ice pick into it, and her heart pounded and her mind raced as she tried to come up with a plan.

  “Are you hit? I thought for sure you were hit.” Doc’s voice was shaky with anxiety. His hand ran over her back. Lifting it away, he looked at his palm as though expecting to find it covered with blood.

  “I’m okay.” Time enough to explain the ins and outs of it when they weren’t facing imminent death.

  The Wynn’s water show with its accompanying music was in full swing. The sound and the spectacle were enough to keep anyone outside the square from immediately realizing what was happening. The crowded street and the busy hotels and casinos were keeping on keeping on: show business as usual. They could have been a world away.

  She looked around desperately. Establishing a safe exit route was priority number one. Simply making a run for it would be suicidal. There was little cover. The night was dark, but the paper lanterns and the neon glow from the nearby hotels illuminated the square. A sniper with a decent scope would have no trouble taking out anyone he pleased. Terrified people crouched behind whatever they could find that might serve as a shield. Some screamed, some wept and a few were on their cell phones. Help would be coming soon: security, police.

  Probably not soon enough.

  A few intrepid souls took advantage of the cessation of fire to bolt for safety. A group of hand-holding women dashed past the cart.

  Crack. Crack.

  Another scream. One of the women went down. Another cried out and dropped to her knees beside the victim while the rest fled.

  Following the angle of the shot, Bianca looked up in the direction from which it had come. She could see nothing: the distance was too great, and between the flashing neon and the darkness, the lighting was too erratic. But by calculating the angles she was able to pinpoint the sniper’s general location. It was the top of the parking garage next to the Wynn.

  “They’re shooting at us, aren’t they? At you. Think it’s those dudes from the parking garage?” Hunched over behind the cart so that he was as small as he could make himself, Doc looked at her with eyes so wide she could see the whites all the way around the irises.

  “Maybe.”

  “We’re not going to die here tonight, right?”

  “Hope not,” she replied, more honestly than she probably should have. Doc groaned while the man on her other side once again chattered at her in Mandarin.

  “Shui zai zuo zhege?” he said. Who is doing this?

  Now the translation came to her automatically. Her back might ache but least her mind was fully functional again.

  There was no way she was telling him what she suspected. That answer could not help, and it opened up a whole ’nother can of worms. Her reply was a universal gesture: she shrugged.

  Oh, God, she needed a plan.

  In her heart, she knew this couldn’t be a result of the Darjeeling Brothers’ contract—it had to be the CIA. Despite the fact that a well-trained sniper wouldn’t be firing indiscriminately, which was what this one seemed to be doing. He wasn’t waiting for his target (her, she was almost positive) to show herself. Snipers were almost surgically precise: they took out their target and were done, and a CIA kill team had some of the best snipers in the world. This one was shooting at everyone and everything. Five people that she could see from her vantage point lay dead or wounded on the cobblestones. Bullets had torn up the square. But the most damage had been done to the cart she was sheltering behind, the tree above her, and the tall ceramic jars that held the brightly colored paper parasols that were this cart’s merchandise and now lay scattered over the ground in blue and white shards.

  The only way any of that made sense was if the sniper’s object was to make her killing look like part of a random mass shooting.

  While maybe pinning her down as the rest of the kill team closed in to make sure she was dead.

  Her insides curdled. Her mouth went dry.

  In a word, bingo.

  All these people murdered for no other reason than to eliminate her. The ferocity and ruthlessness of it horrified her. The inhumanity of it infuriated her.

  “What do we do?” Doc’s voice was an octave higher than usual.

  “Stay put.” She had a plan. It had burst upon her as she’d looked one more time for the best possible exit route. Charting a path from cart to cart, she’d seen something that might actually be the answer to her prayers. To all their prayers. “I’ll be back.”

  She hoped. If she didn’t die.

  Taking off like a champion sprinter, she darted for the next cart over.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  There was no mistake: the rounds targeted her, taking a chunk out of the cobblestones a slit second before her feet hit that spot, shattering a large, ornamental ceramic planter a split second after she crossed in front of it, zipping so close to her head that she felt the breeze of it blow past her forehead.

  Heart thundering, galvanized by the nearness of the miss, she abandoned running to dive for cover.

  Crack. Crack.

  The front of the cart she rolled behind exploded in a shower of splinters as bullets raked it.

  Two women crouching there, a local woman and a teenage girl who from the look of them had been working the cart, screamed.

  “Puk gai.” The woman used a common Cantonese curse as the girl’s first scream degenerated into an outburst of ear-splitting hysteria. Wrapping her arms around the girl, rocking and patting her, the woman—Bianca thought she might be the girl’s mother—pulled the teenager’s head down to her shoulder and crooned soothingly to her while rolling terrified eyes at Bianca.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  The cart shook under the onslaught.

  “Dak laa,” Bianca said to them in Cantonese as she reached up, snagged a large, clear plastic bowl from the top of the cart and plopped it down on the cobblestones near her knees. The rough translation was, it’s going to be okay, and the thing was, she thought as she dug through her purse for the lighter Mason had given her, she was pretty sure she was telling the truth.

  If the damned lighter actually worked.

  It did. Bianca grabbed a handful of the many small smoke bombs that filled the bowl, lit the wicks and tossed them out into the square. Their thick smoke instantly shot skyward in mushrooming clouds of vivid blue, red and purple. She was already lighting and throwing more. Yellow, green, pink, garish and beautiful, the smoke clouds created a shifting, billowing wall between victims and sniper. Seeing what she was doing, the woman let go of the still-keening girl, pulled a lighter from her pocket and began lighting smoke bombs too and throwing them out into the square with swift efficiency.

  She and Bianca exchanged looks: emergency comrades in arms.

  Crack. Crack.
Crack.

  The sniper was still shooting, but he was shooting blind now. He couldn’t see anyone to target them. The malodorous smoke was denser than London’s thickest pea-soup fog. It filled the square, blanketed it, providing the best cover imaginable.

  “Run. Go,” she told the woman and girl in Cantonese as the bowl emptied.

  The woman looked at her, nodded. The girl, who was maybe fourteen, shook and sobbed but no longer screamed.

  “Mhgoi,” the woman said, thanking her as she grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her to her feet. Together they bolted.

  “Mang.” Bianca shouted run in Cantonese to everyone else in the square as she lit the last of the bombs. Throwing them, she catapulted from behind the cart and flew to collect Doc. There was an immediate mass exodus as everyone who’d been hunkered down jumped up and stampeded through the billowing, suffocating smoke toward safety.

  She reached Doc and together they bolted.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  The rounds pinged off cobblestones, slammed into tree trunks and ceramic pots, smashed windows across the square. The sound of shattering glass was sharp and startling.

  Crack. Crack.

  No one screamed. No one coughed, although the smoke was thick enough now to clog the lungs. Everyone seemed to instinctively realize that sound was the enemy, that it was the one thing that would allow the sniper to pinpoint them. Except for the muffled thunder of feet, the survivors fled as silently and invisibly as ghosts.

  Crack.

  A scream. A random bullet had found its mark. Wincing at the sound, gripping Doc’s hand to guard against losing him in the smoke and dragging him after her like a speedboat with a trailing anchor, Bianca sprinted toward the alley she had earlier chosen as the most promising exit. She didn’t bother to zig or zag, for the simple reason that, with the shooter blind, she was as likely to zig into the path of a bullet as zag away from one.

  Crack. Crack.

  Scrunching up her eyes against the burning smoke, she ran. And prayed.

  Crack.

  She and Doc charged into the alley, pounded down it. Other survivors ran through the alley, as well. The headlong panic of their flight reminded her of something she’d seen once at the running of the bulls. It was impossible to identify anyone: glimpses of dark shadows flitting into view and out again as they all ran for their lives. The alley was narrow and smoke filled as the cloud blanketing the square was pulled through it as if drawn by a chimney.

  If a kill team was on its way in to make sure the sniper’s job was done, the members would be rushing toward the scene at that moment, possibly from different ingress points. Bianca’s worst fear was that she and Doc would run smack into one or more of them.

  They burst out into the street without incident. It was busy even at nearly 2:00 a.m., because the pleasure near-island that was Macau was another of those cities that never sleep. Some people were already turning to look curiously at the drifts of smoke coming out of the alley as the survivors rushed from it. The survivors shouted, screamed, pointed back toward the square, alerting passersby to the atrocity that had just occurred.

  With Doc in tow, Bianca melted into the crowd. Doc was coughing now, in deep, spasmodic bursts that he tried to muffle behind his hand. Bianca shushed him under her breath.

  “Whoa.” Cough. “We almost died back there.”

  “I warned you.” She cast a quick look behind them: no pursuit that she could see. All the activity was concentrated around the mouth of the alley. “Next time I tell you to stay home, maybe you’ll listen.”

  “Live and learn.” Cough.

  “Give me your phone.” Bianca forced herself to maintain a steady pace because running headlong as her every instinct screamed at her to do would attract the very attention she was desperate to avoid. The people who were out to kill her could be anywhere. Right now, the best, safest thing she and Doc could do was keep a low profile while putting as much distance between themselves and the square as possible.

  The harrowing truth was, the hunt was on and she was the prey.

  Doc handed over his phone. He knew as well as she did that the phones were liabilities now: they were too easily tracked.

  Bianca dumped them down the nearest storm drain.

  Shouts coming from the direction of the square told her that help in some form or another was arriving for the victims. In the distance, sirens wailed.

  “So where are we going?” Five minutes later, Doc still coughed spasmodically from the smoke. Bianca had just finished acquainting him with the fact that they wouldn’t be returning to their hotel rooms and that the items left behind in them would soon self-destruct. They had reached Old Town. The gaudy lights of the big new casinos were left behind. The centuries-old brick streets were dark and thin of company. The only light was provided by an occasional street lamp, or the spill of an interior light through a curtained window. Favored by bargain hunters, this part of Macau was considered dangerous for visitors at night, so the few people about were locals, most of whom were probably up to no good. There were no sidewalks now, only narrow streets and tall, side-by-side buildings that formed canyons on either side of them. If a kill team came upon them here, they were toast. But at this point all the exits out of Macau were being watched, Bianca was sure. To show up at one was to court instant death.

  The only thing to do was to go to ground.

  “Somewhere safe,” she said, while silently adding Please God as they emerged into the too-large, too-open space of Senado Square.

  21

  The small shop was located just around the corner from the ruins of St. Paul’s, a tourist favorite. Its arched door was painted bright red and outfitted with black iron fittings. The stucco facade of the shop itself was painted ocher yellow. The colors had been selected, Bianca knew, to provide an eye-catching contrast with the black and white mosaic tiles of the square itself.

  In the dead of the night, though, as this was, it was all shades of gray.

  From the outside, no lights could be seen through the small square windows on either side of the door. Given that business hours were long over, it might have been expected that the shop was empty.

  Bianca knew it wasn’t. The question was, would whoever was inside pretend like it was?

  She was breathing too hard. Her heart was beating too fast. Once out of the busy streets surrounding the Strip, she and Doc had kept close to walls, staying in the shadows, moving as fast as they dared. Now, as they paused opposite the shop, she carefully probed the darkness around the door and looked up and down the nearly deserted street before climbing the four shallow steps that led to the door.

  Coming here was a gamble. This was a place that she had been to before. That made it dangerous to come back. The problem was, not coming here was probably more dangerous still.

  She calculated that she could expect to survive about six hours if she stayed at large in Macau, which was small. It was contained. There were too many eyes to see, people to be bribed. She would be spotted. She would be killed.

  On the other hand, she was supremely conscious that if she’d made the wrong call in coming to the little shop, she—and Doc—could die in the next few minutes.

  Place your bets. Take your chances.

  She spared a wistful thought for Mason’s helicopter.

  “Frieda’s Fancy Clothing?” Doc read the sign that hung above the door in a hushed voice as Bianca pressed the bell. Three short rings, three long, then three short again: the universal SOS signal.

  “I talk, you don’t.” Bianca reminded him of the instruction she’d given him before they’d reached the shop. The people inside didn’t like strangers at the best of times. These were not the best of times.

  Even if there wasn’t an ambush waiting for them, they could still be killed just because the person beyond that door didn’t like the way they looked.
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  A tiny, round peephole in the heavy wood door opened as its old-fashioned cover was swung to one side.

  Bianca had been expecting it. She gave a little three-fingered wave at the dark, glinting eyeball that peered out at her.

  “Pang yau,” she said. It was the code, the signal that she was one of the fraternity that patronized the alternate business that was conducted at this shop. Roughly translated from the Cantonese she used, it meant friend.

  The door opened. A compact, muscular man in a loose white shirt and trousers looked them over, then peered past them up and down the street. Apparently satisfied, he gestured at them to enter.

  They stepped inside a dark, low-ceilinged hallway that smelled of sandalwood.

  “SiuSiu?” Bianca asked as he closed and locked the door behind them. Except for the faint glow emanating from what, she saw, was the cloth-covered, battery-powered lantern he carried, the establishment was dark as pitch.

  He grunted, turned away and started walking.

  Bianca felt a measure of relief that apparently she and Doc had passed muster. This man, the gatekeeper as he was known among the community that was familiar with this place, could instantly have had them killed. She was aware of the heavily armed men waiting silently in the shadows on either side of the hall for a word from him.

  The word didn’t come.

  With a gesture that told Doc to stay with her, Bianca walked the gauntlet. As they passed beyond the entry hall, the gatekeeper pulled off the cloth he’d draped over the lantern. The purpose of the cloth, presumably, was to prevent any trace of light from being seen by anyone outside and thus alerting any chance observer to the after-hours business conducted in the shop.

  The lantern’s meager light allowed them glimpses of things Bianca already knew were there. He led them through a mirrored showroom with racks of garments lining the walls and mannequins in custom-made dresses and suits occupying the prime real estate in the center of the floor, another large room outfitted with at least a dozen sewing machines and other accoutrements of a tailor’s trade, a storage room packed floor to ceiling with bolts of cloth, and then another storage room with bins on the shelves lining it.