“But my guys have Peter in custody now. We can try leaning on him a little harder. He was pretty talkative for you.”
Irene pulled out her cell phone and pressed buttons.
Jonathan pivoted to face David and Becky. He made a V with his first two fingers and pointed at both of them simultaneously. “Honest to God, you two. You’re seeing shit that you have no right to see. If even a hint of this appears in some newspaper—”
“I get it,” David said. His tone was harsh, his words percussive. “You’ve made that point already.”
Becky held up her hands in surrender. “Ditto. I understand.”
Jonathan held his glare, gauging their sincerity. He liked what he saw: equal parts fear and indignation.
Jonathan turned to Venice. “Have you already talked with our friend down south?”
She nodded, knowing that he was referring to Lee Burns, a former unit colleague who owned the SkysEye satellite network, for which Jonathan paid an astronomical fee every year to have access to a view from above that nearly rivaled the imagery that Uncle Sam could produce through the NSA and the air force.
Venice said, “I’ve actually pulled up some interesting imagery in the War Room. If you—”
“I need to speak to you both outside,” Boxers said. “Now.”
From the tone alone, Jonathan knew what he wanted to talk about, and it was probably a conversation worth having.
“Excuse us,” Jonathan said. He followed Boxers and Venice out into the area—he supposed you could call it a lobby—that separated their offices and the War Room.
The door to Jonathan’s office had barely closed when Boxers said, “What are we about to do?”
“Launch a rescue mission,” Jonathan said. “We’re going to do what we’re good at.”
“At what cost?” Boxers said. Even at a whisper, his voice was louder than it should have been. He leaned down when he spoke, an effort to get close to their faces. “And I don’t mean dollars. Do you see how many people we’re about to bring into the circle? Reporters, for God’s sake. Are you crazy?”
Eighty percent of Jonathan’s professional life these days was lived outside the law. Not the wrong side, but the outside. Whenever the covert element of Security Solutions kicked into gear, the laws of any land became irrelevant. This meant that he and Boxers routinely broke laws, and that Venice was an accomplice every time they did it. OpSec was a critical concern.
“Look,” Jonathan said, “Wolverine already knows what we do. She’s been involved in half of the ops anyway.”
“I’m not worried about her,” Boxers said. “She’s got skin in the game. If we testify, she’s toast. That makes her trustworthy. But these others . . .” He let his voice trail away.
“I agree with Boxers,” Venice said, words that rarely escaped her lips. “And that very fact should tell you something.”
“It’s a hint that life as we know it is about to end,” Jonathan quipped, but it fell flat. “Okay, Big Guy, tell me what our alternative is.”
He shrugged. “We just walk away. A day ago, Yelena Anna Poltanov friggin’ Darmond was our precious cargo. She’s the one we signed on to rescue. Okay, she’s safe. We’re done. Declare victory and walk away.”
“And her son and grandkid?” Jonathan addressed that question to Venice, who looked away.
“You see?” Boxers griped. “That’s your weapon. You use it all the time. You try to make it about the people and not about the operation. I hate that.”
“But the operation is the people,” Jonathan said. Boxers’ eye grew hot, no doubt because Jonathan was being deliberately obtuse. He knew exactly where Big Guy was coming from. Back in the day when they did what they did under the auspices of Uncle Sam, the operation meant everything—trumping all of humanity except that of the team members. You did what you did to accomplish the mission, and if that meant trading your life for that of the PC, that was fine. The difference—the wild card—back then was that someone else chose the mission for you. These days, the risks were all hand selected, and when you started stacking them on top of each other, it could get daunting.
Jonathan looked to Venice. “You?”
He could almost see her brain racing for options behind her eyes, but nothing formed.
“If it helps,” Jonathan said, “I’m not thrilled by the cast of characters, either. The First Lady is . . . well she’s whatever the hell she is, but this is for her kids, so I don’t worry too much about her.”
“Which brings me back to my original point,” Big Guy said. “The reporters. There’s no such thing as a trustworthy journalist. And that’s a lesson all three of us have learned the hard way.”
“We’ve never been screwed by anyone whose life we’ve saved,” Jonathan said. Something about the words amused him—the fact that the world could be divided into slices that actually included such a category.
He sensed Boxers’ frustration. Apparently, Venice could, too, because she moved to lighten the mood. “There’s another way to think of this,” she said. “Dig, you already gave your fear-of-God speech, and they already know where we are and what we’re doing. You saved their lives.”
“They’re reporters,” Boxers growled. How could he make his point any clearer?
“And as long as they’re here,” Venice said, “they’re controllable.”
“You know they’re going to want to come along, right?” Boxers said. “They’re going to try some embed bullshit, and you’re going to buy it.”
“The bright side,” Jonathan said. “Maybe they’ll get shot.”
“Not a bad idea.”
“You’re always free to say no,” Jonathan said. As soon as the words were out, he knew he’d made a mistake.
Boxers swelled to his full height, and somehow more than his full girth. His face turned red as his jaw set. Boxers had never once refused to follow Jonathan into any Golf Foxtrot—goat fuck—and as often as not, Big Guy had been the reason why Jonathan had gotten to come home to do it again.
“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said quickly. “That was cheap and it was wrong. I’m really, really sorry.” He had no business throwing a passive-aggressive guilt trip on him. It wasn’t even Jonathan’s nature to do such a thing. “Chalk it up to being really tired.”
Boxers held his anger long enough to make his point, and then he deflated. A little. “Just what we freaking need,” he said. “Here we are about to invade Canada, and you’re too tired to think straight.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Joey was cold. So very, very cold. And scared. Shivers consumed him, convulsing him from his feet to his shoulders.
He took a deep breath and held it, trying to get control. It didn’t work. Well, maybe a little. He tried again.
His head hurt. Not in the way that it hurt when you had the flu, but the way it hurt after someone hit you really hard and made sparks fly behind your eyes. The stars were still there, if he looked for them, little colored spots that swam through the darkness in the space between his eyes and his brain.
When he first awoke, he thought maybe he was blind—it was that dark—and then he remembered them slipping the hood over his head. It was heavy and thick, and now that he thought about it, it made breathing more difficult, and that launched another bout of panic until he realized that breathing was breathing, and he was doing it.
Who were these people?
Somehow, he knew that this was about his father, because the language the men were speaking in the room sounded like Russian. Joey didn’t understand Russian, but he recognized the hard vowels and the gurgling throat sounds as the ones he heard when his dad spoke with his babushka—the lady who was married to the president of the United States, whom he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
The floor moved and made him bounce. In that moment, Joey realized that he was in a car of some sort, and that it was moving. He wondered if he was in the trunk, and that thought triggered another flash of fear over running out of air. When you’d been kid
napped and beaten, it was really amazing how many things there were to be afraid of.
Why are they doing this to me?
That was the question of questions. He’d spent the entire evening gaming—and yes, exploring porn—but that was no reason to yank him out of bed and throw a sack over his head.
And why did they have to hurt him like that? They punched him in the balls and in the stomach and yanked his arms behind him, doing that stretchy thing that Simon Parker did in gym class that made your shoulders feel like they were going to pop right out of their sockets. And then they punched him in the head. Twice. At least twice.
Maybe it was because he was fighting back so well. He liked the thought of that. He liked the thought of being tough.
Unless that toughness pissed them off and made them decide to bury him alive in the trunk of a car with a sack over his head.
The shivering returned.
“Stop it,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice startled him.
“Josef?” a voice said. “Joey?”
“Dad?”
“Are you hurt, son?”
Joey nodded, and the nodding hurt his head. “Yes,” he said. And right away, he knew it was the wrong thing. When you’re being brave, you’re supposed to say that everything is all right. “I’m okay,” he added quickly.
“We’re going to be fine,” Dad said.
“What’s happening? Why are they doing this? I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too, son. I don’t know why this is happening. But we’re going to be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
For just the flash of an instant—the space of a heartbeat—Joey considered asking if his father’s hands were also tied behind his back, and if so, how was he going to keep anything from happening to anybody. He didn’t ask, though, because he knew that Dad was trying to be brave, too.
“Are we in a car?” Joey asked.
“I think it’s a van,” Dad said. “I think we’re being taken someplace.”
Joey felt his heart race. “Why? What did we do?”
A long silence followed.
What did we do? How do you answer a question like that when it’s coming from a thirteen-year-old? Do you go for the harsh truth, or do you try to shield him? When you’re blindfolded and tied, the harshest truth was hard to shield.
“I don’t think we did anything, son. Don’t think that way. You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t know.” Only a couple dozen words into this, and he’d already told his first lie. He had a good idea that this had something to do with his mother’s past, but how could he say that when Josef didn’t even know about that past?
“They were speaking Russian,” Joey said. “Wasn’t that Russian? Isn’t that the language you and Babushka talk to each other in?”
“Yes.”
“What were they saying?”
“You said you were hurt. Where are you hurt?” It was a deliberate change of subject, but a topic far more important than the lethal threats of Russian Mafia thugs.
“A little bit everywhere. My head and my cheek where they hit me, but that will be okay. Mostly it’s my shoulders and wrists now.”
“From being tied,” Nicholas said.
“Why do they have to do it so tight?”
Because they’re ruthless asshole bullies, Nicholas didn’t say. “Maybe they’ll loosen them soon.”
Silence followed for the next minute or two, filled only with the hum of tires on the roadway, and the sound of his own breathing, amplified and warmed by the hood. If he were a better father—maybe a full-time father—he would know what to say to calm his son. He would tell a story or sing a soothing song. He’d do something other than tell a lie or just be silent.
“Are they going to kill us?” Joey asked. For the first time in months, he sounded like a little boy again.
“I won’t let that happen,” Nicholas said again. Another lie, because he believed that the truth was one hundred eighty degrees separated from the answer he’d just given. No guilt for that one, though. Some things didn’t need to be said aloud.
It took a crazy kind of courage to kidnap the president’s stepson—the kind of courage that he couldn’t imagine would have a good outcome for the victims.
Enter, yet again, the face of bad parenting: Nicholas had been offered yet had turned down Secret Service protection for himself and his family. He wanted nothing to do with Tony Darmond or his policies or his lies, and he certainly hadn’t wanted anything to do with his henchmen.
How’s that one working out for you now, Nicky? He could almost hear Tony’s mocking tone in his head, almost see the self-righteous smirk.
You didn’t see much of that smirk during the last few years when Nicholas was leading the protests against the son of a bitch.
Come to think of it, after all of that, maybe Nicholas had earned some portion of the smirk he saw in his head.
So, now Nicholas’s stubbornness was going to cost the life of his son. For all he knew, Marcie might have been swept up in this, too.
No, that didn’t make sense. Whatever was happening, it had everything to do with Nicholas being related, however distantly, to the president of the United States.
“Will my hands have to be cut off because I can’t feel them anymore?” Joey asked.
“Wiggle your fingers,” Nicholas said. “Can you wiggle your fingers?”
“I think so, but they feel funny.”
“Feeling is feeling. That’s a good sign. Try moving your shoulders, too.” He tried to tell himself that this discomfort had to end soon, but reality came knocking yet again. He’d heard stories of Russian mobsters who’d learned at the feet of the KGB, who’d learned at the feet of Stalin’s torturers. The notion of taking mercy on children was an entirely Western notion. In the rest of the world, a boy was merely a future enemy, to be treated with the same brutality.
“How are we going to get away?” Josef asked.
Nicholas took a deep breath that turned out to be far noisier than he had expected. “If we find our chance, we have to take it,” he said. “But you have to leave that to me, okay? Will you promise that you’ll leave that to me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that I want you to trust me on the timing of things. If I say let’s run, we run. But if I don’t, I don’t want you running on your own. Okay?” Joey had always been impulsive, and he’d always been suspicious of authority. In his mind, Nicholas could see the boy bolting the instant that his hands were free, regardless of the likelihood of getting shot in the process. However this worked out, they would live together or they would die together. And if only one of them had to die, it would be Nicholas.
“I’ll try,” Josef said. “I promise that I’ll try.”
Nicholas heard the hedge loud and clear, and he admired it. Josef was far from a perfect kid—he got into too many fights, and he was incapable of keeping his mouth shut if someone pushed him too hard—but he was as scrupulously honest as a thirteen-year-old could be, and that was a great source of pride.
The van decelerated quickly, causing Nicholas to slide a few inches along the floor, and then it turned abruptly to the right, causing him to slide the other way.
“Whoa,” Josef said. “What the fuck—” He abruptly cut off his words.
Nicholas ignored the transgression. They were being kidnapped. Profanity was allowed.
After the turn was completed, the roadway became rougher. The bumps caused Nicholas to bounce on the floor, and the landings ignited jabs of pain through his body.
“Just hang on, Joey,” he said. “I think we’re going off-road.” He said that as if it were a good thing—or a neutral thing—when in fact, he couldn’t think of a single positive outcome from being delivered to an off-road location.
The Russians had a long history of bad things happening in the woods. Just ask the Romanov family.
As the bumps got more sever
e, the vehicle seemed to slow, then finally stopped.
“What’s happening?” Josef asked.
“Just try to stay calm,” Nicholas said. “I don’t know yet. Whatever it is, we can get through it.”
Just a blink later, he heard the sound of the back doors opening, and the accompanying blast of cold air.
“You two still alive?” someone said. The accent was comically thick.
“No thanks to you,” Nicholas said. The tough talk was for the benefit of his son. No boy wanted to hear his father snivel.
“Sorry about the rough ride,” the voice said. “The rest should be easier.”
“Where are you taking us?”
The question triggered laughter among whomever stood outside the vehicle.
“To La-La Land,” the captor said. “And I’m sorry to both of you for the bruise.”
Pain erupted in Nicholas’s thigh. By the time he realized they’d stuck him with a needle, he wasn’t there anymore.
It was nearly 3:00 A.M. when they all gathered in the War Room to look at the reconnaissance photos. “This comes from SkysEye,” Venice said. While not the very latest in imaging technology, it was every bit the equal of what Jonathan had used back in the day. With a little manipulation of the computer’s mouse, they could see the texture of the mortar between the bricks.
David was clearly impressed by what he saw. “Is this the kind of detailed view military commanders get when they launch a mission?”
“Depends on where the mission is,” Jonathan said. “Not all areas of the world are as well-viewed as the others.”
They all sat around the teak conference table in various postures of engagement and exhaustion, all of their chairs cheated toward the big screen at the end of the room.
Boxers said, “I’d give you an ‘ooh’ and an ‘ah’ too, if I didn’t know I had to get in and out of there.”
Saint Stephen’s Reformatory had clearly been modified and added to over the years. The twelve-foot exterior wall covered a rectangular footprint of about four acres. Those walls contained the prison complex itself, which consisted of four three-story buildings that themselves formed a square, with what Jonathan imagined to be an exercise yard in the middle. Another larger building extended perpendicularly from the middle of the northernmost annex of the complex.
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