by Ward Larsen
Bastards!
Slaton felt an unfamiliar rage well up, something deep and irrepressible. El-Masri might have earned this, made himself a target. But not the others. The frustration he felt at losing El-Masri as a source of information was overwhelmed by the greater tragedy before him—and, if he were honest, the equivalency to his own situation. Whoever these men were, they had no hesitation in eliminating innocents.
Aside from the bodies, Slaton saw no one in the room. He imagined three men in the central hall, looking tentatively down the stairwell. Guns poised and listening. Debating who would go down on point. Or perhaps they were already on their way. Movement across the street caught his eye. A neighbor, an older woman framed in her front window. She was looking outside with a phone to her ear.
Time was becoming critical.
Slaton weighed his options. The easiest choice was egress. Move to the backside of the roof, get out the way he’d come in. Let three killers go free. Then logic began to intervene. These men had come to kill El-Masri, which meant they were almost certainly linked to the greater scheme. Linked to whoever had taken his family. It occurred to Slaton that this team might be a better source of information than El-Masri himself. One link closer in the chain. He made his decision without respect to justice or payback. At least that’s what he told himself.
He eased lower along the roofline, and took a knee above the front door. He directed the barrel of the Vityaz menacingly downward. Below him was the brickwork leading to the front door. On any other day, the stonemason in him might have noted quarry-stone pavers in an edged herringbone pattern, an attractive bull-nose step fronting the threshold where the door had been.
As it was, Slaton waited with absolute stillness for one of two things.
The clatter of a metal trash can on the rear doorstep.
Or the appearance of three men directly below.
He didn’t have to wait long.
THIRTY-NINE
The first thing Slaton saw was a sweeping gun barrel. The oscillations stopped abruptly, and he heard a flurry of hushed words, again in a decidedly Oriental dialect. The gun barrel lowered slightly and three men appeared. Cautious and alert.
Three heads swiveled left and right with the precision of a metronome.
Slaton’s finger tensed. They paused as a group, and one backtracked toward the house. Slaton heard him trying to pull the ruined front door into place. He either succeeded or gave up, and soon Slaton was again looking down at three crowns of close-cropped black hair. All still scanning left and right. The lead man wore a night optic device. Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he quit scanning and rotated his glass up and away. They began walking toward the van.
As offensive scenarios went, the one before Slaton was among the most simple he’d ever seen. He was looking directly down at three unsuspecting targets. Two he would kill outright. The third had to be incapacitated. If there were more time, he might try to determine who was the commander. Unfortunately, in seconds all three would disappear around the side of the house.
He paired his rounds. The first two hit the leftmost man at the base of his neck. It certainly destroyed his spinal column, and he dropped as if crushed by some invisible force. The other two went rigid, a primal instinct—and exactly what Slaton expected. Before the first target had hit the ground, the right-hand man was suffering the same fate. Two bullets flew through the collar of his vest, no doubt tumbling as they decelerated, tearing bone and tissue, and rebounded off the inner faces of the hard plates. Armor having the opposite of its intended effect, the consequences surely fatal.
In an epiphany, the third man looked up. Yet before he could focus on the kneeling, shadowed figure on the roof, Slaton had sent two more rounds. In this case he aimed for the hips. One round hit, but the second missed as the man spun. He went flat on the ground, and Slaton put two more rounds high on his right arm—the man’s strong side for shooting based on how he was holding his weapon.
Slaton paused to evaluate.
The first two killers were still. The third lay writhing in pain, his weapon beneath a contorted arm. Slaton put another round into his left shoulder. Nothing to do with malice. Everything to do with certainty.
The man groaned loudly, his movement slowing.
Without taking his eyes off his target, Slaton rotated his legs over the edge of the roof. He gripped the shingled edge with one hand and launched into space. His grip on the roof interrupted his fall—not completely, but enough that the remaining five-foot drop was manageable. He landed with bent knees on grass, rolling onto a hip for good measure. He sprang straight to his feet, and within seconds had a knee on the wounded man’s chest.
There was little resistance. One foot kicked out, and the man’s right arm rose slightly before dropping limp. His eyes were half-shut, blinking like a light bulb with a failing filament. Slaton checked his wounds. Blood was pooling fast on the pavers on one side—a major artery severed high in his right arm. Or perhaps fragments of the round had deflected off a bone or a Kevlar plate, taking a detour toward his heart.
Slaton felt no remorse. Not for a man who’d minutes ago taken part in killing three people, two of whom were noncombatants. Yet the man was fading fast—that hadn’t been Slaton’s intent. He’d always been good at the killing. But sometimes better than he wanted to be.
“Who do you work for?” he demanded, having no idea if the man spoke English.
A flutter of the lips, then his eyes drifted shut. He was breathing, but shallow ragged breaths.
“Who?” Slaton shouted.
No response. He didn’t have long.
Slaton drew a sharp breath of his own, trying to hold steady against an onrushing sense of dread. In another situation he might have attributed his pause to the aftermath of battle, an ebb of adrenaline. Or even regret at the senseless loss of life. Yet the man dying beneath him seemed eerily symbolic. He wasn’t watching one more soldier slip away—it was something far more precious.
He grabbed a fistful of the man’s plate carrier, felt the armor beneath that had proved so ineffective. “Where are my wife and son?” he shouted ferociously. “Where?” He shook the man frantically, desperate for his eyes to open one last time. He only needed one minute. A few hard questions.
The eyes remained closed.
He put a finger to the man’s carotid. No pulse at all.
“Dammit!”
Slaton’s head sank low. He closed his eyes as disjointed thoughts caromed through his head. First El-Masri. Now this. Two failures on the same mission. Frustration went to anger. Anger to hopelessness. Slaton felt as if he were drowning, his body not responding. His thoughts faltered.
He tried to push it all away—there wasn’t time.
Keep going! Find another way!
The sound of a distant engine brought him back.
He checked the street, saw it was clear. The lights of a car passed on a nearby side street and quickly disappeared.
Slaton weighed his situation. There were not yet any sirens approaching. He had only intended to incapacitate the third target. Get information, then leave him for the police. The minimum force necessary to get the job done. But no such outcome could ever be guaranteed. There were too many variables when bullets started to fly.
He released the vest. The limp body inside settled to the ground. Slaton began searching. Every pocket in the man’s black cargo pants, every pouch on his vest. There was no ID, no phone. Only spare mags, a flashlight, a utility tool: the usual gear a professional would carry on such a mission. He glanced at the other two and knew it would be the same. Slaton was about to rise when something caught his eye. Clipped to the front of the man’s vest was a small tube. The tip glistened in reflected light, like the eye of some tiny electronic viper.
A tactical camera.
By feel he traced the fiber-optic tube. It ended in a comm unit. Other wires led to a tactical mic and an earbud. Everything was still in place, and a faint red light shone on the trans
mitter. The unit was active. Slaton knew internal comm was standard in small units, thus the earbud and mic. Yet this device was fairly large, and the addition of a camera implied something else.
Something he might be able to use …
* * *
General Park could only stare at the video feed.
He sat in the SSD command center, deep inside the headquarters building in Pyongyang. The concept of what he was doing—watching one of his best tactical teams conduct a mission in Austria in real time—was an entirely new experience for Park. The Russians had given them the gear after years of asking, and this was the first mission to leverage the technology. Unfortunately, it was now a mission gone wrong.
The first images had been of success: Tarek El-Masri and his family, confirmed killed on the upper floor of their home. Park had nearly left the room at that point, but then the audio began picking up chatter about possible resistance. Now he was staring at a nightmare scenario.
On the eerie low-light feed before him were images of disaster. The lens of one of the two tactical cameras was being swept across the scene by some unseen hand. Three of his men lay bloody in front of El-Masri’s house. The other two had not been heard from since the first moments of the mission. After completing the terrible panorama, the camera was redirected to a close-up of a very determined face.
Park sat staring at a man he’d never seen before, although he was quite sure he knew who it was—the legendary Mossad assassin. The man Mordechai had brought into the picture. David Slaton. He had sandy hair and a few days’ growth of beard. The expression on his face was … resolute.
The killer lifted a microphone to his lips, put an earbud near one ear. He said, “Are we going to talk?”
The two technicians next to Park looked at him expectantly. One offered up a headset with a microphone. Park pushed it away without comment.
After what seemed an eternity—actually only ten seconds—the man in the video feed said, “No, I didn’t think so. So you can just listen. I want my family’s safe return. If it is not confirmed to me within forty-eight hours, through the messaging account you’ve already used to contact me, I will provide to multiple media outlets documentation of the theft of highly enriched uranium by Tarek El-Masri.” The man looked up, away from the lens, and Park thought he could discern the alternating tones of a distant siren in the audio. The man readdressed the camera. “Alternately, if my family is harmed … I will learn who you are. I will make it my life’s mission to hunt you down, and I will not fail. Forty-eight hours.”
The video failed suddenly and the audio feed went to a harsh white noise.
Park sat motionless for a time. He considered what he’d just seen, combining it with the intercepts he’d received only an hour ago—Bureau 121 making itself useful again. In addition to Mordechai’s text to Mallorca, he’d sent another—presumably to Slaton—claiming to have uncovered damning information about El-Masri. The Bureau had seen that message, but there had been no chance to alter it.
Slaton.
He was becoming a tremendous complication. Based on what Park had just seen, his only interest was in finding his family. To that end, he’d gone after El-Masri—no doubt for information. I should have predicted that, Park thought. More pressingly, he wondered what Mordechai had uncovered. If there was hard evidence of their plot, it had to be controlled. He only needed a few more days …
“I must talk to Khang!” he barked.
There was a burst of typing by a tech at a nearby console. Thirty seconds later Park was given a standard phone handset.
* * *
The man named Khang had also been watching the video feed, and from only a few miles away. Park’s muscular lieutenant, who’d served ably to this point, was situated in a rented farmhouse just outside Vienna. He had, in fact, planned tonight’s operation—which made it that much more difficult to watch his men die.
Wrath was evident in his gravelly voice when he asked Park the obvious question.
“It can only be this assassin,” Park answered. “The one Mordechai called in.”
“The same man who eliminated the three Islamists in the park.”
“That was a mistake on our part,” Park said, a surgeon unconcerned he’d lopped off the wrong leg. “We should never have used such fools.”
“You had your reasons,” Khang replied woodenly, reminding Park it had been his decision. The complications introduced by Mordechai had come on suddenly. Khang’s team had not yet arrived in country, and Park insisted on hiring locals to quash the problem.
When Park didn’t reply, Khang sensed he’d gone too far. He added, “If things had gone to plan in the park, it would have been simple for my team to clean up.”
“But things didn’t go to plan. Not in the park, and not tonight. This man is creating too many problems.”
“Does it matter? Our primary mission in Vienna is complete. El-Masri has been eliminated—he was the threat.”
“No longer,” said Park. He explained Mordechai’s claim of unearthing damaging information. And that Slaton also claimed to have it.
“One problem can be solved easily,” said Khang. “But as to the other…”
Park let silence run. He himself had never been a field operative. He’d risen through the ranks of SSD not by cutting throats, but by cutthroat politicking. Even so, he knew men like Khang were sometimes necessary. And he knew there were times they should be listened to.
“Do you have any more information on Slaton?” asked the killer in Vienna.
“We’ve been working on it since he became involved. We believe him to be a former Mossad operative. Beyond that we’ve uncovered almost nothing. Yet there is one possibility … he seems to believe we’ve taken his family.”
“His family?”
“It’s something I should have pursued sooner. We captured a communication stream between Mordechai and Slaton, and so we know how he was drawn into it—Mordechai arranged the disappearance of his wife and son. Yet we neglected to follow up. We waited too long to pick up their trail.”
“Do you know where they are now?”
“Not precisely,” said Park, “but the Bureau is getting close. They have been tracking a phone and a certain credit card in the Western Mediterranean. Can you finish things alone in Vienna?”
“Yes,” Khang said confidently. He then added, “But I must ask … what about recovering my team?”
Park nearly blurted that he didn’t give a damn about five men who’d failed. Then he remembered that soldiers could be an eccentric lot. They were oddly predisposed to retrieving their dead—some code-of-honor nonsense.
“Can they be identified as North Korean?”
“No. We entered the country separately, by way of Slovenia and Hungary. We have been staying in a farmhouse, very remote. Everything was arranged by an advance team who are all clear. The strike unit was sanitized for tonight’s mission—mandatory for foreign operations. The police will find no identity documents, and of course there can be no biometric matches.”
Park was always wary of overconfidence, but in this case Khang was right. It was one of the minor benefits of living in a totalitarian state—no one outside North Korea had access to national records. There was a chance the police could run DNA profiles, establish Korean ancestry for the deceased team members, but that could just as easily point to their brothers in South Korea. The bodies outside El-Masri’s home would prove completely untraceable—five men who might as well never have existed.
“No,” Park decided. “We can’t jeopardize the operation to repatriate the bodies.”
Khang was silent, but didn’t argue.
Park knew there would be a broader investigation of tonight’s events, most relevantly into El-Masri’s work and personal finances. He had already discounted the risk that presented. The Egyptian’s misdeeds were always going to be uncovered sooner or later. Yet unless Mordechai or Slaton could give the authorities a head start, any investigation was going to plod a
long for weeks, or even months. By then it would be too late.
Park said, “I will instruct the Bureau to emphasize tracking down Slaton’s family. Contact me once you’ve shut things down in Vienna. And use caution—Slaton is still nearby.”
Khang’s tone changed ever so subtly. “With all respect, sir … he has killed five of my men. The time is past for caution.”
FORTY
Slaton got out of harm’s way the same way he’d gone in. He scaled the rear wall of El-Masri’s property and dropped into an adjoining backyard. It was a virtual junkyard of tires and old appliance shells. The windows of the attendant house had been dark all night, and he was quite sure it was unoccupied.
He ran flat-out for the first three minutes, distance more important than stealth. Only as he approached his car did he slow to a purposeful walk. The Renault was fast approaching its sell-by date for surveillance work. That was just as well—he would soon put Vienna behind him.
He found the car right where he’d left it, behind a small grocery store that had been closed for hours, but whose parking lot took overflow from a pub across the street. As he set out toward the main road, Slaton was overwhelmed by an avalanche of theories, new facts displacing old assumptions. His encounter two nights ago in the park had been with men of Middle Eastern extraction. Tonight, Asian involvement. A senior administrator at IAEA stood accused of thieving highly enriched uranium. Not coincidentally, El-Masri and his family had now been murdered.
Christine and Davy had never seemed so far away.
He steered the little car down an unknown street, his only destination being somewhere different. It seemed an apt metaphor for his life, and gave rise to an even more unthinkable idea.
What if I fail?
That was a question Slaton had never before asked. In his line of work, one that couldn’t be allowed.
Certainly not here.
