Close Pursuit

by Cindy Dees

  “I will. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” the Frenchman said.

  “Will do.”

  Now what? He was out of ideas. He called Sister Mary Harris back. “I need more information,” he said without preamble. “Is Katie’s car still in your parking lot?”

  “I don’t know. Let me check.”

  He waited in an agony of impatience while the elderly nun made her way to a window in the front of the convent. “What does it look like?” she finally asked.

  Crap. What did she rent? He thought back fast to the hospital parking garage. “Cobalt-blue mini-sedan.”

  “No blue cars here. She must be taking the baby someplace safe. I’m sure she’s bringing Dawn to see you. I wish she’d told me she was going to take Dawn out, though. I’ve been worried—”

  He hung up on the nun’s nattering. He had no time for that. If Katie was in her car, she should have been here well before now. Unless she was trying to shake a tail. His mind threatened to vapor lock. Think, dammit. If she was in a car, she was traceable. He considered his options and headed for his car once more.

  A half hour later found him barging past the receptionist at Walter Reed Hospital with a terse explanation that he was a doctor and there was a crisis with a patient. The woman subsided as he leaped into an elevator.

  He slowed only when he hit the doorway of Michael McCloud’s room. If he didn’t miss his guess, Katie’s brother had the contacts and resources to track his little sister now and not wait the twenty-four hours the police required before they would take action.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” McCloud growled.

  Her brother was alone in his room. Good. This needed to be a private conversation, and he doubted McCloud’s family would voluntarily leave Mike alone with the man who’d stabbed him. “Katie’s in trouble.”

  McCloud’s truculent expression evaporated in an instant. “What’s wrong?”

  “My lawyer was murdered today and the files pertaining to Dawn—she’s the baby we brought back from Zaghastan with us—were stolen. Katie and Dawn disappeared a little over an hour ago. Her phone’s turned off. I think she’s in a car. No idea if she’s alone or with a captor. I need to find the vehicle ASAP. It’s a rental, so it should have a tracking chip in it.”

  Alex held out his cell phone to Mike. Without hesitating, Katie’s brother snatched it and punched in a number. Thank God. He hadn’t judged the guy wrong.

  “It’s Candyman. Emergency authentication Charlie Whiskey Three One Tango Tango.”

  Alex scribbled down the make and model of the car and the rental company on the napkin beside Mike’s dinner tray while they waited for the authentication to be verified.

  Abruptly, Mike started talking. He relayed the information on Katie’s car with a request to use government security overrides to get a license plate number and initiate immediate tracking on the vehicle due to a possible hostage situation.

  That ought to get folks on the other end of the line hopping.

  The person at the other end of the phone said something that made Mike swear violently, though. Then he said, “Fine. I’ll pull my own damned strings.”

  He disconnected the call and started dialing another number.

  “Problem?” Alex asked.

  “My people have no authority to request the trace.” He added grimly, “But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

  Alex grinned darkly. He liked the way this guy rolled.

  “Uncle Charlie? It’s me, Mikey. Katie’s in trouble.” A pause. “No, he’s here with me right now. He’s the one looking for her. She’s disappeared with her kid.”

  Realizing belatedly that Mike was trying to talk around the issue on the assumption that the phone might be bugged, Alex said quickly, “My cell phone has 256-bit encryption. It’s secure.”

  “Bless you,” Mikey muttered. “Charlie, this line’s secure at my end. How’s your end?” A short pause and then Mike said quickly, “We think she’s in a chipped rental car and have reason to suspect hostile action against her and the baby. Can you have your people pull a license plate number and track the chip?” He relayed the car’s data to his uncle quickly.

  Mike ended the call and passed the phone back to Alex. “That’s more like it,” he growled. “Now we’ll get some action. And in the meantime, what the hell’s going on? Tell me everything.”

  Alex was glad to have a trained operative to dump everything on. Maybe Mike could see some connection he’d missed. “After I stabbed you, Katie and I caught a plane hop to Osh. From there we headed for Tashkent. We were followed in both cities. Had a little trouble with my old man. He’s—”

  Mike interrupted. “I know who your father is.”

  Alex nodded tersely. “I took Katie to my place in D.C. It’s a fortress. But we got picked up on the street and tailed. We hid the baby in an orphanage with an old friend of mine for safety. Katie was attacked on her way to visit you this afternoon, and my lawyer was killed soon after that.”

  “Christ, dude. Who’d you piss off?”

  Alex shrugged. “Wish I knew. I was at my lawyer’s office when I got the call that Katie and the baby had disappeared from the orphanage.”

  “Any guesses as to who’s tailing you?” Mike demanded.

  “Pros for sure. Maybe FSB. Maybe CIA.”

  “What do they want?”

  Alex snorted. “They want me to work for them.”

  “You think they’re making a run at Katie and the kid to twist your arm?”

  “Possibly.” He corrected himself angrily, “Hell, probably.”

  “Any other possible players?”

  He frowned thoughtfully. “It’s a long shot, but Katie’s been poking around trying to find out who Dawn’s birth father is.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a local from Karshan?” Mike asked in surprise.

  “Dawn’s blonde and blue-eyed. Birth father’s Caucasian.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Mike breathed. “So Katie’s been kicking rocks. Who’d she expose?”

  “I was hoping you could help me with that. What were you doing in Zaghastan?”

  “You know the drill. That’s classified.”

  “Just listen then. Someone’s been chasing Katie and me pretty much continuously since the Karshan Valley, starting with you. I thought for a while that it was all about me. God knows, I’ve got plenty of enemies with the manpower to follow me around and hassle me.”

  “But?”

  “But Katie got this idea that we should find Dawn’s birth father and let him know he had a kid. She asked for a list of names from your uncle of all the Caucasian men in the Karshan Valley nine months ago. A guy named Yevgeny Archaki was on it.”

  Mike shook his head. He obviously hadn’t heard of the guy.

  “Ukrainian mafia. Arms dealer, drug lord. Smuggler.”

  “And?”

  “Tell me something. Did you ever find any poppy fields in that area? Any evidence to indicate that opium production or smuggling was going on?”

  “No. Nothing like that,” Mike said firmly. Alex saw no tells of deception at all. The guy was telling him the truth.

  “How about weapons dealing? Any arms runners passing through there?”

  “Negative.”

  “Then why would a guy like Archaki spend months in a godforsaken place like the Karshan Valley?”

  “I got nothin’. You got a theory?”

  “Yes, in fact. I do.” He exhaled hard. “This is a little crazy, McCloud, but go with me for a minute.” He described the caves with the bore holes in their walls and the deep shaft in the cave he and Katie had hidden in. He then described the chronic cough the locals all seemed to have, and the weird smell in the valley.

  “Yeah, I noticed that stench,” Mike piped up. “I tracked it to those big communal ovens they used.”

  “I don’t think those were ovens. I think they were smelters.” That sent Mike’s eyebrows up, but he listened in silence as Alex continued. �
�I took a close look at this Archaki character. No political ties. Purely a businessman. Wouldn’t go to the Karshan Valley unless there was money in it for him. With me so far?”

  Mike nodded, watching him intently. Alex saw where Katie got her smarts from. It was a family trait.

  He continued, “So, I did a little research on what he could be doing there to turn a profit. Like you, I saw no evidence of drug production or arms trade through the valley. Population wasn’t high enough to support human trafficking. Plus, I’d have heard of girls disappearing from my patients.”

  Mike nodded, following his logic closely.

  “Ever heard of samarium?” Alex asked.

  Katie’s brother frowned. “Sounds like something from my chemistry class.”

  “Good guess. It’s a rare earth element. It’s used a lot in control rods for nuclear reactors. It’s also used in lasers and as a hardening agent in missile casings. It’s highly heat resistant. It’s always found in nature in conjunction with other minerals. It has to be melted down and separated from the nuisance minerals it’s found with. That smelting process stinks to high heaven.”

  “Let me guess,” Mike supplied drily. “There’s samarium in the Karshan Valley.”

  “Give the man a gold star.”

  “Was Archaki getting this stuff for the Ukraine?”

  Alex shook his head. “The guy hates the current regime in Kiev. And besides, both Russia and Ukraine have sources of it within their own borders. Unless you saw heavy transport trucks or cargo planes coming into the Karshan Valley routinely, we’re looking at a local buyer.”

  “Christ!” Mike burst out. “Iran’s a stone’s throw from the Karshan Valley, and they’d have all kinds of military uses for the stuff. Do you think this Archaki guy was getting samarium from the locals and selling it to the Iranians?”

  “Did you see locals hauling baskets down out of the hills? They’d be heavy. Full of rocks. Maybe an occasional truck coming and going like it picked up a heavy cargo and hauled it out?”

  Mike nodded just once, very slowly. Alex understood. The guy couldn’t say anything to him, but if Alex were to guess correctly, he could nod.

  “If the locals were smelting it in those ovens in the middle of their villages, they’d ingest a crap-ton of the stuff,” Alex pointed out. He didn’t like having to reveal the next bit to an employee of the U.S. government, but he needed this man’s help. Mike had been on the ground in Zaghastan for months more than him and Katie. He was the single most likely person to know who they’d pissed off in Zaghastan and who might have kidnapped Katie.

  “And?” Mike prompted warily.

  “Katie and I saw the rebels coming that last night. We both thought they moved like soldiers. Spec Ops types. Those weren’t local rebels at all. Surely you saw them, too.”

  Mike nodded firmly.

  Jesus H. Christ. It was one thing to suspect sinister layers to an event. It was another to have it confirmed for him. Alex’s pulse sped up. He only hoped he wasn’t on the right track all the way to the horrible, logical conclusion.

  “Go on,” Mike urged.

  “For argument’s sake, let’s assume Charlie gave Katie the complete list and didn’t omit any of his own people. Your name was the only obviously American one on the list, by which I’m going to assume you were working solo out there.”

  Mike nodded infinitesimally.

  Alex finished heavily, “Which means that Spec Ops squad wasn’t American.”

  Mike nodded more obviously.

  “Those were undoubtedly the guys who slaughtered everyone in the Karshan village that night. They’re probably the same team that took out the village in the next valley over, too.”

  “Logical,” Mike commented cautiously. Which Alex interpreted to mean that Mike didn’t know that for sure but agreed with Alex’s conjecture.

  “The team we saw had attack drones. RPGs. Helicopters. That was no Ukrainian mob job. That was a full-blown, state-sponsored military attack.”

  Mike’s eyes opened wide as he saw where Alex was going.

  “Yeah,” Alex muttered. “The Russians.”

  “Why?” Mike breathed. “This samarium stuff?”

  “There’s plenty of it in the Caucasus Mountains. They don’t need it.”

  “Then what are we looking at—” Mike started. He broke off as the hallway door opened. Alex spun, his hands going up defensively.

  * * *

  KATIE WAITED UNTIL the last minute before the Metro train pulled out of a random station to jump off it. She raced for the exit and didn’t see anyone hurrying after her. As far as her limited spycraft could tell, she hadn’t been followed as she emerged into the night.

  “Cab, lady?”

  Katie started. “Umm. Yes.” Impulse. Operate on impulse. She slid into the cab’s backseat and took a look around at where she was. She recognized the neighborhood with a start.

  “Where to?”

  She gave the guy the address of the Doctors Unlimited offices only a few blocks away. She couldn’t go tearing around out in the open where Alex’s enemies would spot her and Dawn, for goodness’ sake. And besides, she needed a phone to make a call.

  * * *

  “GOOD EVENING, MR. MCCLOUD,” a male voice said from the doorway.

  “Hey, Doc Kowalski,” Mike said.

  Alex relaxed fractionally. If McCloud knew the guy, he wouldn’t kill the man. Except something wasn’t right about the set of the doctor’s shoulders. They were hunched too high. The guy was wicked tense. Alex slid quietly to the side, slightly behind the doctor. Mike noted the movement and arched a questioning brow.

  “We got some interesting lab results back on you just now, Mr. McCloud,” the doctor said. He glanced over his shoulder at Alex. “If your guest would step out into the hallway for a minute, I’d like to go over them with you.”

  “He stays,” McCloud said tersely.

  Interesting. Katie’s brother must sense the doctor’s abnormal tension, too. Or maybe he just trusted Alex’s instincts. Operators tended to listen to their guts more than the average bear.

  “Uh, okay. It turns out you test positive for exposure to radioactive isotopes. Have you been inside a nuclear power plant recently, or had a large ionic dose X-ray in the past few weeks?”

  “No. And no.”

  Alex piped up. “What specific isotopes did the chromatograph spike on?”

  The doctor frowned. “The spike was consistent with unrefined uranium.”

  Alex’s jaw dropped, but not nearly as far as Mike’s. “Uranium?” McCloud demanded. “There must be some mistake.”

  “No mistake. The techs ran the tests twice. They were startled by the first results and verified them for me.”

  “Health ramifications?” Alex bit out. He’d studied radiation poisoning superficially in his medical training but was no expert in the subject.

  “The levels aren’t life threatening but do bear watching. You’ll have a slightly increased cancer risk. And you should probably avoid any more X-rays for the remainder of your life. We can discuss chelation to remove some of the isotopes you’ve ingested from your liver and kidneys.”

  “That I’ve ingested?” McCloud asked incredulously.

  “Most likely way for radioactive cells to show up in your liver and kidneys is to swallow them. A recheck of your CT scan revealed trace amounts of uranium in your lungs, as well. We initially thought the specks were an anomaly in the scan itself.” He added, “You must have inhaled dust containing trace amounts of the isotope for it to end up in your lungs.”

  Alex’s mind raced, and he really, really hated the direction it was going in. He asked reluctantly, “Excuse me, Doctor. Did Mr. McCloud test positive for any rare earth metals, or just the uranium?”

  “We picked up trace amounts of thorium, samarite and iron dust in his lung tissue.”

  Ho. Lee. Crap. The implications of that all but paralyzed his brain. He caught Mike’s eye behind the doctor’s back and jerked
his head toward the door.

  Mike caught his meaning and said, “Thanks for the heads-up, Doc. I’ll try to remember where I might have gotten exposed to something like that and let you know. Right now, I’m tired. I’d like to rest a little if you don’t mind.”

  The doctor nodded and left. Alex tucked a chair under the doorknob behind the guy and then turned to Mike. The two men traded grim looks. Uranium in the Karshan Valley was a game changer. Big-time.

  “Russia and Ukraine have their own internal sources of uranium. I can’t imagine they’d send a mobster after a small, crude source of it for them, anyway.”

  “So Archaki was out there for himself. A business deal.”

  “With who?” Alex muttered aloud.

  “I didn’t see any long-distance trucks or cargo planes come through there. Like you said before, the buyer had to be local—” McCloud broke off and looked faintly ill.

  Alex closed his eyes in dismay. Zaghastan’s western border with Iran again. He looked up at Katie’s brother, and the same realization was clear in his appalled stare.

  * * *

  KATIE WALKED UP to the front door of the Doctors Unlimited building and prayed her entry code would work at night when the building was not open for business. She punched in the sequence, and a green light went on over the pad. She tugged at the door, and, blessedly, it opened.

  She slipped inside, grateful to be off the street. She’d felt like a rat out in the open just waiting to get picked off by some flying predator that would swoop down, smash into her and whisk her away to eat at its leisure.

  A phone. She needed a phone. Creeping through the darkened lobby, she felt like a criminal, and fear pounded through her. Heck, if she got caught, she’d just tell whoever caught her that she worked here. It was like Alex had said the night he’d agreed to steal the personnel list. It wasn’t a crime to enter a building she rightfully belonged in.

  Nope. The pep talk didn’t work. She still felt like a criminal and in terror of getting caught.

  She eased around the receptionist’s desk and stared down at the oversize phone and the raft of buttons on its face. She picked up the receiver and reached for the dial buttons.