by Jack Mars
He appreciated what Baraf had done—not only letting him run in Staremesto, but keeping quiet about his identity—but there was nothing more the Italian agent could do for him. He’d gone too far, and this was the last time they would see one another.
Reid closed his eyes and sighed. “If this is going to be it for me,” he said quietly, “I want you to promise me two things. Not only as a friend, but as an agent. As someone who believes in justice.”
Baraf said nothing, but he raised an eyebrow and nodded once.
“First, promise me you will look into Varga. Find…” His mind raced. “Find the dates of his penthouse stays at the District. Find the security footage from those dates. Talk to the girl named Aiya. Tell her that you spoke to me…”
“That will still not be enough for someone in his position.”
“Try!” Reid slammed a hand down on the table. “My daughters were taken because people like him use their power to get what they want, when they want it, regardless of the repercussions. If I can’t do anything about it, I would expect someone I call a friend to take me at my word.”
“I will,” Baraf promised quietly. “I will try. The second thing?”
“My girls,” he said. “Their names are Sara and Maya Lawson, ages fourteen and sixteen. They were brought here by cargo plane to Bratislava. I don’t know where they are, but they were taken by Slovakian traffickers.”
“I will make sure my office has all of this information—”
“No, Baraf. I’m asking you. Personally. I want you to take this on. No one else.”
The door to the interrogation room opened before Baraf could make his promise. They both looked up to see the French agent, the interrogator, standing in the doorway.
“The American official is here to take him to the embassy,” the man said in French. Reid understood every word, but he did not let it show.
Baraf nodded. He stood and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his belt. He secured the second pair onto Reid’s wrists before unlocking the first, and then he directed Reid by the shoulder toward the door to escort him into the waiting hands of the CIA. They walked down a corridor that ended in a second thick steel door. A guard behind reinforced glass buzzed them through.
“Thank you, Agent.” On the other side of the door, Maria Johansson stood with her arms folded, looking stern. “I’ll take him from here.”
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Both Baraf and Reid glanced at her in bewilderment. None of the other three Interpol agents in the room with them, including the French interrogator, were the slightest bit aware that anything was amiss. Reid tried hard not to indicate any surprise, but she was not at all who he had been expecting to appear.
He shot a glance at Baraf. The Italian agent knew Maria well, having helped the two of them stop not only Amun from bombing the Economic Forum in Switzerland, but also securing the deadly smallpox virus in the Mediterranean Sea. There was little doubt that Baraf was very much aware of what her presence meant.
But will he say anything?
Baraf returned his gaze. His nostrils flared for a moment. Then he turned back to Maria and extended his hand. “Agent Vicente Baraf, Interpol.”
“Maria Johansson, CIA.” She flashed her credentials. “I’m here on behalf of the embassy to transfer the prisoner. My office should have already cleared it with you?” She raised an eyebrow at Baraf questioningly.
Reid understood what she was doing; forcing the Interpol agent to make a decision. Either break the law and help a friend, or have the both of them detained.
Baraf’s throat flexed in a gulp. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “Your director called.”
Reid let out a small breath of relief as Maria took him by the shoulder. “Thank you, Agents. We will be in full cooperation with your office regarding the investigation into this man’s charges, and will be petitioning the ICC to review his case.”
She turned Reid around. “Move,” she ordered him. “Quickly,” she added in a whisper. He started down the white corridor with Maria on his heels.
“Wait!” the French interrogator called out to them. Reid froze. They know something is wrong with this. “You are going to escort this man alone? Standard protocol is for us to send a car with you.”
Maria paused. Her gaze flitted from the Frenchman to Baraf. The Italian agent could do little but shrug slightly and murmur, “It is… protocol.”
She wheeled on the French agent and narrowed her eyes. “What is your name?”
“It is Bisset,” he answered, startled by her sudden intensity. “Agent Bisset.”
“Do you not think me capable of escorting a man in handcuffs ten minutes downtown?” she asked accusingly.
“Well, I… of course… it is just…” the interrogator stammered.
“Is it because I’m a woman?” Maria said with undue hostility. “Are you a chauvinist, Agent Bisset?”
“Do not be ridiculous!” Bisset said defensively, blinking quickly between her and Baraf.
“Now I’m ridiculous?” Maria scoffed. “I am bringing this man to the embassy. You follow if you feel you must. Just know that I’ll be having a talk with your supervisor about your attitude towards the opposite sex.”
“I… I didn’t mean…” Bisset gave up with a sigh of incredulity as Maria took Reid again by the shoulder and marched him down the corridor. Reid could have laughed at the situation—could have, if he didn’t realize what it meant for Maria to show up at an Interpol office and intercept a murder suspect.
As soon as they were clear of the building and in the parking deck, he spun on her and hissed, “What are you doing here? Why did you do that?”
“What do you mean, why?” she asked, astonished. “So you don’t spend the rest of your life in Hell Six, that’s why…”
He shook his head. “I mean, you gave them your real name. You showed your CIA credentials. The agency is going to know in minutes, and then you’ll be in just as much hot water as I am…”
“Kent,” she cut him off. “Who do you think sent me here?”
He blinked. He hadn’t thought about it, but there was no way that Maria could have waltzed into an Interpol regional office, flashed a badge, and been allowed to take a prisoner away. “Someone authorized this,” he murmured.
“I told you before; you’re my op right now. I’m supposed to apprehend you.” She gestured at the handcuffs. “Looks like I did that.”
“Who?” he insisted. “Who put you on this?”
She didn’t need to say. He knew by her pointed glance who made the call. Cartwright.
“He knows our history,” Reid said. “He can’t possibly believe you’re going to turn me in.”
“Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t,” Maria said quickly. “Maybe he doesn’t want to see you in a place like H-6. Maybe he doesn’t trust that an Eastern European prison can hold Agent Zero. But none of that matters right now, because I’m not the only one who was told to come here. We need to go, now.” She turned and marched down a row of the concrete parking deck.
Reid hurried after her, the handcuffs still rattling around his wrists. “And where are we going?”
“Well,” she said breathlessly, not breaking her stride, “in a few minutes I’m going to call it in that Kent Steele very cleverly managed to elude me. They’ll send Strickland after you, so we’ll have to change cars. Then we’re going after your girls—all three of us.” She paused by a blue four-door sedan and pressed a button on the fob to unlock the doors.
“Three?” he asked, an eyebrow raised. Reid pulled open the car door and peered into the cab. Seated in the backseat was a familiar young face framed in auburn hair.
“Aiya,” he said in utter surprise.
The trafficked Moldovan girl nodded to him from the rear of the blue car. “Hello again,” she said quietly in Ukrainian.
He turned to Maria. “What is she—”
“Get in!” Maria hissed. “And get down.”
Reid slid into the passenger
’s seat and ducked low. A moment later a black SUV rumbled slowly past them, heading toward the entrance to the Interpol office from which they had just emerged. He sat up slightly, just enough to peer above the frame of the window. The SUV parked only four spaces away from them, and a man got out of the car.
He looked young, late twenties at best, with a military-style fade cut and a thick neck. His muscular arms tested the limits of a black rayon T-shirt, and he made no attempt to hide the Glock holstered on his hip.
The young agent paused in the parking deck and looked around. Reid ducked down again as his gaze swept over the blue sedan. He didn’t need to ask; he already knew who he was.
“All clear,” Maria said. Reid sat up again as she shifted into drive and screeched out of the parking deck. “That was him,” she confirmed to his unasked question. “Strickland.”
“He looks young,” Reid noted.
“He is young. You’ve got almost a decade on him.” Maria smirked, but it faded quickly. “From what I hear, he’s a former Ranger. Tough as nails and loyal to a fault. A total Boy Scout. Not like some of us.” She tossed something into his lap; the keys to the handcuffs.
“Thanks,” he muttered as he unlocked the cuffs. “Do you want to tell me what she’s doing here?” He jerked a thumb toward the backseat and the Moldovan girl seated there.
“When you were arrested, I called in a favor,” Maria told him. “My, uh, ‘contact’ put in a call to the trafficker from the phone you grabbed, Mirko.” She glanced his way and noted his obvious disapproval. “I had to,” she explained. “The call had to come from a man or they would have known something was wrong.”
She had a point, he admitted to himself, but it still didn’t explain Aiya’s presence… then the realization struck him and he groaned. “Maria. Are you planning on using her as bait?”
“We set up a meeting,” she said quickly as she navigated the downtown streets. “They’re expecting your dead pimp, Metaj. We can’t very well show up without a girl. Aiya here is a foreign prostitute with no identification and no known family. All I had to do was flash a fake Interpol badge and the Bratislava police gladly handed her over.”
Reid shook his head. “This feels wrong.” He twisted in his seat and said in Ukrainian, “Did she tell you who we are? What we’re doing?”
“Of course I did,” Maria muttered.
Aiya nodded. “Yes,” she confirmed. “And I want to help.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” Reid told her. And he meant it.
“I believe I do,” the girl said simply, staring out the window.
Reid turned back around, facing forward again. In English he asked, “Where and when?”
“About thirty minutes north of here, and in about one hour,” said Maria.
“Location?”
“They set it up. Gave us coordinates. The best I can tell is that it’s a bridge in the middle of nowhere.”
“Okay.” Reid thought for a moment. “Then we’re going to need to change cars, and we’re going to need to cut my hair.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re expecting Metaj,” he replied. “Their location is likely remote and dark. I need to at least resemble him enough for us to get the drop on them.”
She nodded. “Anything else?”
“Gun?”
“Glove box. Along with the rest of your stuff.”
He twisted the latch and found the items he’d asked her to hold into—the painkillers, the epinephrine shot, his money. There was also a small pistol waiting for him there, a Ruger LC9. He turned it in his hands, its weight familiar and comfortable.
Not unlike him and Maria, working together, just like on an op.
Reid had to remind himself yet again that he was unsure where they stood, how he felt. On the one hand he wanted desperately to trust her. On the other, she had betrayed him, and more than once. She had failed to tell him the truth about Kate. She was, in some form, a double agent—perhaps a bizarre sort of triple agent.
The simple and unassailable truth was that he didn’t know her, not fully, not enough to put his and his daughters’ lives in her hands. Yet the other, far more vulnerable position in his mind was that the situation felt better when she was by his side. Not just better; it felt right.
Maria pulled the car into the parking lot of an all-night drug store and parked before pointing out a Jeep the color of rust. “Two birds, one stone,” she said. “I’ll get the car if you get the clippers.”
He nodded and got out of the car, tucking the snub-nosed LC9 into the back of his jeans as he made his way inside to prepare for his meeting with the human traffickers who had his daughters.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Reid sat in the backseat of the Jeep as Aiya slowly ran the electric clippers over his scalp, plugged into the auxiliary port in the center console, while Maria drove. He hadn’t had it cut in several weeks; thick clumps of dark hair fell liberally to the car’s floor as they headed for the rendezvous point the traffickers had given them.
Strange, he thought as he watched the loose hair fall past his shoulders. He couldn’t help but think of it as potential evidence—not unlike the strands his own daughter had tugged from her head and left behind for forensics to find.
I’m coming, Maya. Nothing and no one is going to stop me now.
“Okay,” Aiya murmured as she brushed hair from the back of his neck. “I think that is good.”
Reid ran a hand over his shorn scalp, cut down to about a quarter-inch. He knew he didn’t actually look like Metaj, but he had a similar height and build, close-cropped hair, and a few days’ growth on his chin. If it was dark enough, he could at least resemble the dead pimp enough to keep any alarm bells from ringing with the traffickers.
“Do we need to go over the plan again?” he asked in Ukrainian, for Aiya’s benefit.
“No,” the girl said quietly. “I understand.”
“I’m clear,” Maria confirmed. “Besides, we’re almost to the drop point.” She drove on for another mile or so, winding through the Slovakian countryside on a narrow two-lane road surrounded by trees. Then she cut the headlights and pulled to the shoulder.
“All right,” she said, “I think this is as good a place as any.”
Reid passed her a black triangular case, about the length of his forearm. He didn’t know where Maria had gotten it, but it was one of the items they’d transferred from her blue sedan to the Jeep. The case was hard plastic and molded in the shape of a butt stock; inside the hollow stock were the pieces of a collapsible sniper rifle, twenty-two gauge and semiautomatic with a six-round clip, the type that black ops personnel carried.
“You’ll be okay?” Maria asked as he handed her the case.
He nodded. “Six minutes,” he reminded her.
She pushed out of the Jeep and left the driver’s side door open as Reid got out and came around. He watched as her silhouette vanished into the dark tree line, and then he climbed behind the wheel.
Their plan was simple enough. The meeting with the traffickers would take place in six minutes’ time, and according to GPS it was to be held on a small bridge about a quarter mile from their current location. Six minutes was long enough for Maria to trek north on foot through the woods and find a good vantage point. Reid and Aiya would meet with the traffickers just long enough for Reid to ascertain the identity of the one called Mirko. They had worked out a subtle hand gesture for Reid to identify him to Maria; once she saw the signal, she would take out any comrades Mirko had brought along. In the confusion of an active shooter, Reid would incapacitate Mirko, and they would force him, in all the worst ways, to divulge whatever information he had about where they took the trafficked girls.
He glanced in the rearview mirror at the Moldovan girl in the backseat. Her only task in the plan was to keep her head down while they met with the traffickers; with a little luck, they would not recognize her as one of the girls who had escaped Varga’s penthouse. Reid had a hunch that the
traffickers would not remember faces so well. The girls they trafficked were stock to them, little more than chattel.
“There’s still time,” Reid said quietly in Ukrainian. “You don’t have to do this.” As much as he appreciated her help, he did not at all feel right about using the girl as bait.
“I want to do this.” Her voice wavered slightly. “Most of my life, I have done little that could be called noble or… or even good. This is my chance.”
“You have nothing to prove—” Reid began.
“I have to prove it to myself,” she said simply.
He nodded and shifted the Jeep into drive, pulling back onto the road and easing it in the direction of the rendezvous point. Maria’s intel had told them that he needed only to follow the country road a short distance further and he would end up on the bridge.
After a couple hundred yards the trees waned on either side of the road and gave way to a wide swath of what might have been farmland. The fields grew tall and wild with yellow grass; the place had not been cultivated in some time, abandoned and lost to neglect. Reid squinted in the glow of the headlights as he saw a dilapidated farmhouse ahead, a gray-planked structure with a peaked roof.
Then the road curved slightly, and suddenly the farmhouse was directly in their path, as if built right in the center of the pavement. Reid bit his lip and his heartbeat sped up as he realized what he was looking at.
The rendezvous point was a covered bridge.
It spanned no more than forty feet over a thin tributary that likely emptied into the Danube. The bridge’s entire length was housed in a simple wooden structure that, from a distance, had looked as if it could be a farmhouse. But no; the traffickers had chosen cover for their meeting.
Maria won’t have a vantage point.
From inside the covered bridge, Reid could see a pair of headlights, but they were not approaching; the vehicle was still. They’re already here.
“What do we do?” Aiya whispered behind him. In the rearview mirror he could see the wide, fearful whites of her eyes.
