“Kuchin,” said Shaw. “He’s alive, and on the hunt.”
“Our cover was very good,” said Mallory.
“Very good won’t cut it. I read the report on the guy. A mental makeup like that often houses an obsession factor that goes far beyond all reason or predictability. We need to simply assume that he is looking for all of us and that he will find us at some point. When he does, what are you prepared to do about it?”
“Kill him,” answered Whit. “Which is what we should have done in the first place. In fact I could’ve put a bullet right in his brain if you hadn’t stopped me.”
“In all fairness, we also would’ve died if he hadn’t been there,” Reggie reminded him.
Whit looked darkly at her. “That’s part of the risk. I was willing to accept it. I assumed you were as well.”
“Talking about the past doesn’t deal with the future,” said Shaw. He kept staring at Mallory. “Are you prepared to deal with the future?”
Mallory sat back. “What do you suggest?”
“I need all the intel you have on Kuchin. If we can get to him first, I’ll take it from there.”
“Meaning what exactly?” said Whit.
“I’m assuming you have proof that he is Fedir Kuchin and he committed all those crimes?”
“We do.”
“Then the guy will be tried and convicted.”
“That’s not exactly how we do things here, Mr. Shaw,” said Mallory.
“Yeah, well I do things a little differently. But I imagine there’s a court in Ukraine that would be very interested in dealing with the man. I doubt he would walk out of that country alive.”
“That may be true, although quite frankly I don’t know if our evidence would stand up in a court of law. I know it would morally, but the law doesn’t seem to care about such things anymore. But more to the point, if he is tried and convicted does our involvement have to come out?”
Shaw glanced at Reggie. “I don’t see a reason for that, no.”
“Then it comes down to whether we can trust you or not.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Miles,” said Liza. “If the man wanted to bury us, he certainly has had the opportunity to do so by now.”
“She’s right,” said Reggie. “He didn’t have to come here with me. He’d already found the place.”
Mallory looked interested by this. “May I ask why you wish to help us?”
“Pretty simple, actually. Kuchin deserves whatever’s coming to him,” said Shaw. “If I can help you bring him in, I’m more than happy to do it.”
“And the people you work with are okay with that?”
“I didn’t ask their permission.”
“And that isn’t a problem?”
“Not unless you make it one.” Shaw stood. “Now we’ve reached the point of wasting time. Do we have a deal? We get Kuchin and he gets tried in a court?”
Mallory eyed the others. “Unless anyone objects, I think we can welcome you to our team then.”
Shaw took Whit’s mag out of his pocket and tossed it to him. Then he eyed Reggie. “Actually, I prefer to think of it as a temporary assignment.”
CHAPTER
78
THANK YOU for helping me, my friend,” said Kuchin as he shook the other man’s hand and gripped his shoulder. They were meeting in Kuchin’s hideaway place on the outskirts of Montreal. The other fellow had the build and the confident manner of someone who probably walked alone and unafraid down dark streets in unfamiliar cities. Fifteen years ago he had held the position that Pascal now did before going on to start his own business.
“Urgency in your voice, Evan. We do go back.”
Kuchin poured out a drink for him and slid it across the table. The man took a sip, cradled the glass, and said, “She left a trail. Not a particularly clean one, but there are things there to lean on.”
Kuchin sat and looked expectant.
The man drained his glass, wiped his mouth, and opened a file. “Credit card and travel records. From Zurich she traveled by Swiss-air to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt she rented a car. The mileage shows she went no farther than one hour outside of Frankfurt. Still, that constitutes a large radius. She stayed at a small hotel in Wisbach. Why she was there and what she did is not revealed. I will need to put assets on the ground in order to build that information.”
“Let’s hear the rest first.”
“From Frankfurt she traveled to Paris. She stayed there for four days. From Paris she took the Chunnel to London. It is unclear where she stayed in London. There are no credit card records for that time.”
“She stays at friends’ homes from time to time, apparently while they’re not there.”
“Then that makes sense. There would be no record in that case. She returned to the States. New York, D.C., San Francisco. If she worked for anyone during that time we could find no record of such.”
“What about her cell phone? They can be tracked via GPS now.”
“We tried that route. She has apparently disabled her GPS chip. And cell tower triangulation in circumstances such as this can be unreliable. If I had the resources of the FBI or the NSA, not so difficult, but I do not. She is a woman who does not want to be found, I think.”
“What do you have most recently?” asked Kuchin.
“I can tell you that several weeks ago she was in Paris.”
Kuchin sat forward. “What else?”
“There is nothing else. No hotel. No credit card purchases for food. She either uses cash only or eats like a bird out of trash cans. She didn’t stay long. She left Paris the next day and returned to the States. I have seen the flight reservation and accompanying documentation myself. And she appeared on the security camera at de Gaulle on that day.”
“So she returned to San Francisco?”
“No. Washington, D.C. I’ve checked the airlines, the trains, the buses, and the rental car companies outgoing from that city and found nothing. Now, she could have used fake documents under an assumed name, but she might still be there.”
“But again, no hotel?”
“No. Perhaps she has another friend who accommodates her there.”
“Perhaps,” said Kuchin thoughtfully.
“Relatively speaking Washington is not that big. I can send in some of my people, beat the bushes, see if she pops out.”
Kuchin was already shaking his head. “No. That won’t be necessary. I will take up the hunt from here.”
The other man rose. “I will continue to feed you any additional information that comes along. I have markers in place in the system. If she buys a plane ticket, rents a car, uses her credit or ATM card, or engages her GPS chip I will know about it, and then so will you.”
After the man left Kuchin sat in his chair thinking. He actually had several matters on his plate that demanded attention. He was used to this, though he was a man who liked focus and compartmentalization. Yet sometimes one did not get what one wished for.
Still, his focus had to be Katie James. She was the only link they had. He had to find the woman.
CHAPTER
79
TWO DAYS had passed. Shaw had been over every inch of Harrowsfield, observing the personnel tracking down the next target, and having long, detailed conversations with Professor Mallory, Liza, Reggie, Whit, and Dominic. He’d even ventured to the underground firing range with Reggie. There he’d watched her nail the target over ninety percent of the time even with a wall of smoke between her and the silhouette at which she was firing.
“I’m impressed,” he said as they moved back to fresher air. “How do you do it?”
“I remember where the target is under the smoke.”
“Well, in real life targets almost never stay still.”
They passed the cemetery on their way back to the house. Shaw paused in front of Laura R. Campion’s grave.
“Related?” he said. Reggie had told him her last name.
“I doubt it.”
“You come here often?�
�
“More often than I probably should,” she admitted.
She sat down on the old bench. He stood next to her. “So you come and stare at a grave of someone you may or may not be related to and call it, what, mental health time?”
“Don’t be a git. Everyone has quirks.”
“Okay, what about your known family?”
“What about them?” she said a bit too defensively.
“Are they living?”
“No. How’re your kids doing? Fix that problem with your son back in the States, did you?”
“My first memories were of a fat old nun in an orphanage. And I never married. No kids.”
“The truth this time?”
“Yes.”
“But a grave outside of Frankfurt. Anna?”
Shaw inclined his head at the sunken trough of earth. “But I knew the woman in that grave.”
Reggie looked in that direction. “Like I said, quirks. But I would like to know more about her.”
“Who? The woman in my grave or yours?”
“Both.”
Shaw stared off, eyeing a bird riding a breeze across the sky. “So what happened to your family?”
“They died,” she said sharply. “They just died,” she added more quietly. She looked over at him. “People do, you know. Every second of every day.” Her expression changed. “So what have you learned about us so far?”
“That you’re lucky to be alive.”
Reggie frowned. “How do you mean?”
“You might be good in the field, though I’ve only witnessed the debacle in Gordes. But this place has no perimeter security, little internal safeguards, and most of the people I’ve met would never pass a basic security clearance check. Whit, for example, is a wreck just waiting for a train to come by. And your fearless leader Professor Mallory looks like a reincarnation of C. S. Lewis only with a homicidal edge to him.”
“Actually, I believe he’s partial to Tolkien.”
“Doesn’t really change the equation. You guys are skating on thin ice.”
Reggie stood. “Well, you know what? We’ve gotten by just fine. Until you showed up.”
“If I hadn’t shown up, you’d be dead,” he reminded her.
“Fine. You want me to get down on my knees and attest to your superiority? We don’t have big budgets and planes and all that crap, but we get the job done.”
“Most of the time you get the job done,” he corrected.
Now she looked away, her face reddening. When she stared back, Reggie said, “Any other insults you want to send my way while you’re in such rare form?”
“They’re not insults. They’re critiques. You asked me what I thought and I told you. If you didn’t want to know, then you shouldn’t have asked.”
“You really are something,” she said heatedly.
“Is there a problem I’m not seeing? Because your attitude is a little hostile.”
“No problems. Like you said before, it’s just a job. That’s all you’re here for. A bloody job. Right? ‘Temporary assignment,’ I believe were also your words, with emphasis on the temporary, I reckon.”
“And I also told you I don’t fall into bed with someone lightly.”
“Yeah, that is what you told me.”
“And I meant it.”
“Right. I’m sure you did.”
“I’m here to help you. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“I think you’re also here to nail Kuchin and make sure you don’t have to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Don’t pretend it’s all about altruism.”
“Frankly, I already have to look over my shoulder anyway. And he’s actually not the worst scum I’ve had to track down.”
“And have you always been successful?”
Shaw snatched a glance at the grave. “Not always, no.”
A minute of silence passed and Reggie’s expression finally softened. “Look, I guess I’m a bit out of line. I’m also confused, and to put it bluntly I’m a bit knock-kneed about this whole damn thing.” She looked around. “Harrowsfield and what we do here, it’s all I’ve really got, Shaw. Probably seems pretty pathetic to you, but that’s just the way it is with me. And if I lose this, then I’m not quite sure what’ll be left.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to make sure you don’t lose it.”
“I suppose I’ll find out soon enough, won’t I?”
“Actually, we both will.”
CHAPTER
80
FEDIR KUCHIN stared out the window of his hotel room into the wash of streetlights. He was dissecting the city in his mind. Washington, D.C., was separated into four quadrants. The sector tourists were most familiar with was northwest D.C., where most of the major monuments and the White House were located. This area was relatively safe. Yet there were narrow but consistent pockets of violence throughout the rest of the city. He had learned that three percent of the zip codes here accounted for over seventy percent of the violent crime. Much of it was drug- and gang-related and kept the police chief deploying more and more resources in those areas.
Kuchin sat back down and studied his map of the city, breaking it down as he had in other battles. D.C. had a fairly large footprint, but was certainly not the most populous metropolis in the country. Still, nearly six hundred thousand people called it home and far more than that commuted into the city every day from the suburbs. He did not think Katie James would be staying in any of the high-crime sections, so that somewhat limited his search. In the business district were mostly hotels. To stay there she would need to use a credit card, so he could reasonably rule that out. Around the U.S. Capitol Building where the four quadrants converged were residential neighborhoods where she conceivably might be staying. There were also high-dollar areas in Georgetown to the west and up along Massachusetts Avenue, or Embassy Row as it was known, and on Connecticut Avenue and Sixteenth Street heading toward the Maryland state line. He had a finite amount of manpower with him and did not intend on deploying it inefficiently.
He was staying at the Hay-Adams Hotel, on the back side of Lafayette Park, which was across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. He was here with six men including Pascal to conduct his hunt for the elusive journalist. And that was the key for him. She was a journalist. What did journalists do? They traveled, wrote stories, interviewed people, and checked in with their employers from time to time. The problem was, it seemed that James was not currently employed.
He stared down at his list. Still, she might be working at some point. If so, there were a few possibilities.
The Washington Post was the city’s best-known newspaper. James had worked for them years ago and had since done freelance jobs for them, though not for several years. Its offices were on Fifteenth Street northwest. Kuchin had a man posted there with a picture of James. Another man was watching the bureau offices of the New York Tribune, which was two blocks over from the Post. James had won two Pulitzers while at the Trib, but Kuchin had learned that the reporter and the paper had had a falling-out. Still, it was a base he had to cover.
The New York Times had its bureau headquarters at First Street, also in the northwest quadrant. CNN, while not a print publication, was also located on First Street, but in the northeast. Both the Times and CNN were in sight of the Capitol. According to her file, James had also worked for the Times and had done both on- and off-camera reporting for CNN during the first years of the Afghan war. There were many other news organizations in the city, but these, at least in Kuchin’s mind, were the most likely to attract the attention of a journalist with the hefty reputation of Katie James.
Kuchin paced his hotel room. He would give this strategy a few days to see if anything came of it. He would also hope that Katie James used a
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