by Sean McFate
Jackson turned noticeably paler, even under the garage’s dim fluorescent light. His mouth moved but nothing came out. Finally, just a whisper: “You wouldn’t dare. Is this another bluff?”
“And you thought the president was your biggest problem. What a fool!” cackled Winters.
“This better not be more lies, Winters, or so help me God I will string you up in Lafayette Square like Mussolini. Do not gamble with American cities!” bellowed Jackson, spittle flying from his mouth. “WMD was deliberately precluded from our arrangement.”
“The arrangement has changed.”
Jackson clenched his fists, and Winters feared the man would strike him.
“There is no place you can run, hide, or slither, Winters, that I cannot find you. Nukes or no nukes. And if not me, then someone like me. You can’t outrun the government.”
“The people I work for are far less forgiving than me,” said Winters in a severe tone. “They will destroy you, someone like you, or the entire government, if they must.”
“People? What people?” retorted Jackson, doubt on his face. “You’re a bottom feeder, Winters. All you crave is power, but there are things more important, like country.”
“‘Country’?! Listen to yourself, old man. You are stuck in the twentieth century, while the rest of the world has moved on. Today’s superpowers are no longer countries but something else. They operate in the shadows and manipulate the rest.”
“That torture cell warped your brain worse than I thought.”
Winters squeezed the ivory monkey head but held his temper. “There’s a war going on, Jackson, an invisible one, and it’s not being fought by nations. Its weapons are not militaries, but deception and manipulation. Its pawns are countries and corporations. Nothing else matters. Don’t you see it? The U.S. invades faraway places that pose no existential threat, like Iraq and Afghanistan, and stays there forever regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. It makes no sense, yet Americans wave their flags and support the troops, and for what? It’s all for naught. The U.S. is no longer a superpower—it’s a tool. We’ve been manipulated into fighting other people’s wars. Sometimes the more obvious a thing is, the harder it is to see.”
“When did you become a conspiracy theorist?” mocked Jackson, and Winters’s face darkened.
“Talent is hitting targets no one else can hit, but genius is hitting targets no one else can see. I made a choice, George, and so should you. You’re a pawn in a global war you don’t see or comprehend. If you care about your country, then you should choose not to become a tool.”
Winters started walking away.
“Hey, where are you going? I’m not done,” yelled Jackson.
“But I am,” rasped Winters without stopping. “You’ve been warned. I’m just the messenger.”
“What does that mean?”
Winters spun around. “It means you’re expendable.”
Chapter 33
Lin waited until nightfall before driving to the mystery safe house in McLean, Virginia. Dan’s counterintelligence team monitored Russian agents from this house and saw them meeting with Apollo Outcomes teams covertly. No one knew why. When his boss ran it up the chain, he was ordered to shut down his operation. When he refused, he was exiled to Omaha and his team dispersed with prejudice.
Someone high up is protecting this safe house, and I want to know why, thought Lin as she drove a little too fast. Even if she wasn’t fired by the FBI, she would always choose her own car, a zippy Mini Cooper, over the FBI’s joke of an unmarked car, the conspicuous Ford Crown Vic. Twenty minutes later, she found Dan’s mystery safe house in a cul-de-sac of McMansions deep in suburban Virginia, ironically not far from CIA headquarters.
“There you are,” she whispered as she cut the engine. Parking well up the street, she observed the surreptitious safe house. Nothing stood out. Trees surrounded the property and swayed in the winter gusts. Lights were on but she saw no movement. Nearby homes were equally quiet, but she saw people inside.
It’s go time, Lin thought as she zipped up her black jacket and pulled her wool cap low. Casually, she walked down Rockland Terrace, as if she were there visiting relatives. The houses were spaced well apart, marking it as an affluent suburb, and no one looked out their windows at this late hour. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
Lin’s heart beat faster as she approached the McMansion. Its front double doors were framed by a two-story colonnade and unpruned shrubbery. Sheer curtains hung in the windows, obscuring the house’s interior. However, she could see the outline of a humongous but cheap chandelier hanging in the atrium; several of its bulbs were dead. Up close, the place looked inert and run down. Then she saw silhouettes in a second-story window.
Someone’s definitely home, she thought, and unconsciously felt her Glock beneath her coat. Lin moved into the tree line, and the frozen snow crunched beneath her sneakers. The driveway was shoveled and salted, another clue that people lived here. She crept to the backyard and found a wooden deck and rusty barbeque. The backyard was even more unkept than the front.
An outside light flicked on. Crap! she thought, then realized it was a motion sensor light, the kind you can get at any hardware store. She froze, blending into the night’s shadows. Seconds later, the light turned off and she moved.
Calm. Be calm, she told herself, gliding furtively up the deck stairs. Kneeling in front of the back door, she pulled out a screwdriver and a ring of bump keys, each with a small O-ring around its base. Working rapidly, she tried each key until she found one that fit the lock. She turned it slightly to the right and tapped on the back of the key with the screwdriver’s handle. Two taps later, the lock turned, and she was inside.
Eeeeeeee. The house alarm buzzed, but it was not the siren that called in reinforcements. She had about thirty seconds to find the alarm panel and disable it before the real alarm blared. Alarms give owners a grace period to deactivate the alarm, even safe houses, and she was operating within that grace period.
Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, she counted as she entered the house, Glock drawn. Alarm panels were usually in a basement utility closet. Bounding across the supersized kitchen, she started opening closets. Pantry. Coats. Junk. It was the utility closet, and up near the ceiling was the alarm panel, an unassuming gray steel box. Too high for a circuit breaker.
That’s it, she thought as she closed the door behind her and turned on her Maglite. Upstairs, footsteps were moving down a hallway and then down the stairs. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast, she told herself. Climbing up on a washing machine, Lin bump-keyed the steel box open. Ten, nine, eight. Inside lay a tangle of wires, lights, and circuit boards. Holding the Maglite in her mouth, she located the power supply and yanked it lose. Five, four, three. Then she found the battery backup and pried it out with the screwdriver. The alarm died.
Lin didn’t move and just listened over the pounding of her heart. Someone—a man, by the weight of the footsteps—sped past the closet door and into the kitchen. Slowly, she slid off the washing machine and aimed her weapon at the utility closet’s door. No sound. The man stopped in the kitchen, or did he? She wasn’t sure. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her head.
Click, click. She heard him unlock and lock the back door’s deadbolt. Then silence again. Keep moving. Nothing to see here, she thought. Finally, the footsteps crossed the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door. She heard a plate clink on the stone countertop, and she thought he was probably loading up some snacks. Then he headed back upstairs at a leisurely pace. Lin lowered her weapon and breathed deeply to tame her heart rate.
Let’s see who you are, she thought as she slipped out the closet door. If you’re nobody, I’ll leave and you’ll never know I was here.
Lin padded through the dining room and living room, each with a vaulted ceiling. The place was sparsely furnished in the anodyne style of a hotel lobby. There were no magazines, personal pictures on the walls, or any other artifa
cts of life. The McMansion had a home office/library, but the shelves were vacant and the desk drawers empty. There was not even pen and paper.
I’ve seen motel rooms with more soul, she thought and continued her security sweep. Stealthily, she crept up the large double staircase in the atrium, Glock pointing forward, until she reached the top floor. Bedrooms with male clothing, mostly active sportswear. A grand bathroom with no female accoutrements. Closets, mostly empty.
She heard voices. Humans. Lin stopped. Someone was watching a movie behind a closed door, an action thriller by the sound of it.
OK, time to leave, she told herself, turning around and feeling awkward. Jason was right, I should never have come here.
Two young men laughed in unison, then spoke in Russian. Lin froze and felt adrenaline shoot through her veins. She strained to hear them but couldn’t make out the conversation, only the language. It was definitely Russian. She had to get closer.
This could be my big break, but I need to be sure, she thought, inching toward the door. Her heart thumped against her rib cage, making her Glock shake. Steady, she commanded as she got closer. They were talking about the movie.
“She is a sexy chick but has miserable tits,” judged a young man in Russian.
Pigs! she thought, and her Glock went steady.
“Yeah, I’ve seen ironing boards more fuckable,” said the other, laughing.
So rude, she thought as she carefully extended a hand for the doorknob while the other held the Glock. Slowly she turned it and cracked open the door so she could peak inside.
Two young men leaned back in desk chairs with their feet on makeshift desks. An array of large computer monitors hung off a steel frame, and one showed the movie. Old boxes of microwaved junk food littered their desks, and the place reeked of sweat socks and pizza. It could have been a frat house, save the multiple computer screens with high-end spy programs in Cyrillic.
Russian hackers, all right, she thought. Probably on loan from the Troll Factory in St. Petersburg, the nickname for the Russian government’s notorious hacker unit. Normally they operated from the motherland. What are they doing here?
“I bet he screws like a squirrel,” said one of the Russians about the movie star, who was busy shooting bad guys.
“And she’s his nut,” said the other and laughed.
“Women need to be crushed like nuts in sex. A man must show her who is fucking who.”
“As in sex, so too in life. The woman is under the man, as it’s meant to be.” Both young men nodded in their perceived wisdom.
“Then what does that make me?” said Lin in Russian. The men jerked upright in shock and spun around to face her, only to see her gun pointing at them. “On the ground, boys!”
“Who are . . .” stammered one, unable to finish his sentence.
“I’ll tell you what. Since you’re the weaker sex, I’ll put my gun away.” Carefully she slid the Glock back into her holster and both men eyed their own 9 mm pistols sitting on the computer console. She saw the weapons, too. “There, now it’s a fair fight. Two dicks versus one woman. Let’s see how it ends.”
The two men reached for their pistols, but the hackers were no match for Lin. Seconds later they were flex-cuffed to furniture, each breathing heavily through the pain. One man’s nose was smashed and bled all over his T-shirt and the floor. He instinctively held his nose up in the air, as if that would slow the bleeding, but it made no difference. The other was balled up in a fetal position, clutching broken ribs and taking shallow sips of air. Each breath caused sharp pain to shoot up his side. Lin stood over them, dominant.
“Looks like you’re the bitches now,” she said, then dug her toe gently into the second man’s injured side. He shrieked and she smiled. “That’s on behalf of the other fifty percent of the human race.”
Lin wheeled up one of the office chairs and sat down, legs crossed and arms on the armrests, like a queen in judgment. “Now that introductions are over, I wish to have a friendly conversation. If you refuse to reciprocate, our discussion will become progressively unfriendly.”
“Piss off,” said the one with the broken nose, in bad English. “You have no idea who you’re dealing with, bitch. We will fuck you up!”
“Not friendly,” replied Lin calmly in Russian. “And do not worry. I will fuck you hard, but not in the way you think. I will crush you like a nut. I may even pulverize all four nuts,” she said, holding the Glock by its barrel and swinging it like a hammer. Both men closed their legs unconsciously and turned away from her glare. “Last chance, and try to use your brains before you answer this time. Who are you? Who do you work for? What are you doing here? When did you arrive?”
Neither man spoke.
“Talk to me!” shouted Lin, and both men jumped in alarm. But they remained silent, and the man with the broken nose spat blood at her. Lin walked over to him and hammered his nose again with the butt of her weapon. His scream was horrific, and the other man grimaced with fear.
“I don’t have all goddamned night,” she said, and it was true. They could have tripped a silent alarm, and heavies could be on the way.
“Go to hell,” wheezed the man with broken ribs, each word a stabbing pain. “You’re a dead woman. Dead!” He started coughing in agony.
Lin knelt beside the man huddled on the floor and nuzzled her gun gently into his broken ribs. He screeched. “Talk to me, Ribs, or I will blow Nosebleed’s head off. Talk to me or I kill your friend. Five seconds, you decide.” She stood up and aimed the gun at Nosebleed’s head, cocking the hammer; the man looked away. “Five, four . . .”
“Do it Yuri! Tell her!” shouted the man with the broken nose. Yuri didn’t speak.
“. . . three . . .”
“Stop! Stop!” screamed the man with the broken nose. Lin steadied her aim.
“. . . two . . .”
“I will tell you! I will tell you!!”
Lin lowered her weapon. “Tell me what, Nosebleed?”
“The room,” said the man with the broken nose.
“You traitor!” yelled the man on the floor, and contorted in pain.
“Screw you, Yuri! I’m not dying for this. Besides, she’s dead anyway.”
“Do I look dead to you?” asked Lin, amused.
“You will be. Now untie me, and I will show you.”
“Show me what?”
“Untie me.” No one moved. Growing impatient, Lin raised her Glock to his head. “Stop, stop, stop!” he said, blood still trickling down his mouth and chin. “What you want is in the basement. I promise. Untie me, and I will show you.”
It could be a ploy, she thought. But I can take him, especially in his beat-ass state. “OK, Nosebleed,” she said, drawing a small boot knife and holding it to his jugular. “But fuck with me and I will gut you.” With that she sliced the flex-cuff, and he fell away, rubbing his wrists. “Up! Show me.”
“Andrei. My name is Andrei.”
“Whatever, Nosebleed. Walk.” They moved down the hall, and she kept her gun at his back. They walked downstairs and into the basement. It was empty, save a laundry area.
“Are you lying to me, Nosebleed?” asked Lin in disbelief, holding her Glock to his head.
“No, no! Please. Secret room,” he said, pointing to a dark corner. She followed at a distance and aimed her pistol at his torso as he opened up a large fuse box. Then he opened the front panel, a fake. Behind it was a handprint scanner. Andrei pressed his right hand on the scanner, and she heard a heavy bolt inside the wall release. With a grunt, he pushed and the entire wall rotated inward and to the right, revealing a spacious hidden room.
“Impressive,” Lin heard herself say out loud.
“They will come for me,” said the hacker, smiling. “They will kill you. After their fun.”
“Who? FSB? Spetznatz? Who?”
He smiled, blood dibbling down his chin. “Worse.”
Worse? She thought. Who’s worse than Russian special forces? You have to be a qualifi
ed psychopath to make their ranks. What the civilized world considered human rights abuse, they considered training. New recruits had to survive dedovshchina, or the “Rule of the Grandfathers,” that left many maimed or dead. Those that made it were ethically unhinged. Even the Russian mob feared them.
“Don’t bluff me, asshole,” said Lin, and flex-cuffed him to a pipe in the safe room. He continued smiling, feeding off her fear. She found the light switch and flipped it. The place was an armory: racks of assault rifles, pistols with silencers, .50-cal snipers with Forward Looking InfraRed (FLIR) thermal imaging scopes, munitions crates, high-end surveillance kits, communications gear, laptops, and a large street map of Washington, DC, taped to the wall. Everything needed to start a world war, except . . .
“Where’s the demo?” demanded Lin.
“I do not understand,” he said with a puzzled expression.
“The demolitions! How did you blow the bridge, Nosebleed?” she repeated, but the man was perplexed. Then she heard the garage door open above, and a large vehicle drive in and park.
“They’re here!” said Andrei with bloody glee.
Chapter 34
Tye stood with his arms folded and Lava gave a low whistle as they inspected my wrecked BMW. Both its front and rear ends were smashed in, with a lake of neon-green radiator fluid under the chassis. I wondered how I made it back to my safe house at all. As soon as I did, I called Lava on the burner phone. What else could I do? I was ambushed and he was my only lifeline. He said he would come as soon as possible; that was hours ago and now it was midnight.
“Not exactly the ‘quiet professional,’ are you, Locke?” teased Tye, referring to a maxim of special operators everywhere. “Every cop in the city is looking for you.”
“The country,” corrected Lava. “Every cop in the country. And Interpol, too. Your name, picture, and physical description are on every blotter and news website in the world. They’re saying you’re the terrorist that assassinated the vice president.” Lava gave a mock expression of admiration.
