by Marc Cameron
“And what is it you think I am after?” she asked.
“This is the second time we’ve run into each other near Valentine Zamora.” Quinn narrowed his eyes. “I know he’s an arms dealer and I also happen to know who you work for.”
“Is that so?” Kanatova gave a wary half smile. “You believe we should work together to achieve our goal?”
“The thought had occurred to me,” Quinn said. He listened to her rhythmic breathing for a long moment as she considered this.
“I suppose the alternative would be us getting in each other’s way at every turn,” she said. “Or… I kill you, but that might prove messy.”
He gave a solemn nod. “It would.”
“Work together?” She stared at his face. “To recover the device?”
“That would be the plan,” Quinn said. “We’re not certain he’s even the one who has it.”
“I am,” Kanatova said without further explanation. “At first I believed it was the Chechens, but the way Rustam Daudov pesters him, he has to be trying to get the device from Zamora. What I do not yet know is where Zamora has it hidden or what he plans to do with it.” She cocked her head to one side. “I find myself at a disadvantage. If we are to be a team, as you Americans say it, I should know who I’m to work with.”
He put out his hand. “Captain Jericho Quinn, United States Air Force.”
Kanatova raised a wary brow. The corners of her small mouth pricked in the beginnings of a smile as she held on to his hand. “An Air Force captain who fights like spetsnaz?”
“It’s complicated,” Quinn said. “But I’ve raced the Dakar before, so I was a natural choice for the assignment.”
“And I see you have other skills beyond racing motorcycles?”
“I boxed a little in college.” Quinn shrugged, working through a plan in his head.
“To play devil’s advocate, as they say. If Zamora has such a device — as we believe he does…” Aleksandra’s voice trailed while she waited for two men wearing red Loctite shirts to stumble past in the darkness, on their way to another party. “… why is he going to the trouble to run this stupid race?”
Quinn had been struggling with the same question. A bomb worth over a quarter of a billion dollars on the black market would make anyone change his plans.
“These old Soviet devices would have at least some level of safeguard, right?”
“That is correct,” Aleksandra said.
“So, in order to use the bomb, Zamora would have to get past those safeguards.”
“And bring the device back into working order.” Kanatova nodded. “They are small and portable, but this fact makes them lightly shielded. Radiation is extremely hard on the circuitry.”
“Ah.” Quinn rubbed his dark whiskers. “It makes perfect sense then. If Zamora values his life, he’s going to be as far away from the bomb as possible while his people get it in working order.” He looked at her, playing the thought over and over in his head before voicing it. At length, he sighed. “Listen, where are you staying?”
“A tent near Dakar Village where the spectators have a large camp. My government does not pay to put me up in fancy hotels with entertainment, caviar, and endless champagne.”
“Mine either anymore,” Quinn laughed. “But we’ll have plenty of opportunity for staying in tents at the bivouacs on the course. Zamora has already seen us together. It won’t be a big stretch for him to assume you came here with our team. We have an extra bed at our place for the night.” He raised a wary brow. “Though, considering who you are, my government would consider it a serious breach of etiquette that I’m even talking to you alone right now.”
“Breach of etiquette?” Kanatova scoffed, resuming her head-down walk. “I am discussing a missing Soviet nuclear bomb with a foreign operative. My superiors would have me shot.”
CHAPTER 29
A hollow pit of exhaustion settled over Aleksandra’s stomach by the time she rolled her sleeping bag out on the low bed shoved back under the angled eaves of the second-floor bedroom. It had taken another hour after they’d left Zamora’s to gather her gear and make their way back up the hill to Captain Quinn’s flat. She’d smiled inside when he’d given her his room and moved his own sleeping bag to the sagging couch downstairs. He was an American white knight — skilled in the brutal arts of violence, but all manners and kindness when it came to women. Her FSB instructors had taught courses about such men — how to manipulate their good intentions and innate trust of womanhood to leverage a proper end to the mission or even turn them as Russian assets.
Still, there was something about this Jericho Quinn’s earnest demeanor that gave Aleksandra pause. It reminded her of Mikhail when she’d first met him. The thought made the pit in her stomach worse.
Dead on her feet with abject mental and physical fatigue, she moved to the small window at the foot of the bed. She leaned against the cool glass with her forehead and looked out over the flickering lights from Dakar city a few blocks away. Her breath threw small patches of fog against the window. Chewing on what was left of her sorry fingernails, she repeated the solemn oath she’d made the night she’d heard Mikhail Ivanovich Polzin had been murdered. “Somewhere out there is the man who killed you. I will find him and kill him, Misha. I swear it. And no one, no matter how kind or earnest, will get in my way.”
CHAPTER 30
January 1
It was four-thirty in the morning when Boaz Quinn walked to the door with a bowl of cereal. A swarm of moths thumped against the screen, trying to get to the light. He wore only his boxers and a loose white T-shirt. The angry black octopus tattoo contrasted sharply with the tan flesh of his arm. Assorted scars from blade and bullet mapped the rough-and-tumble life Bo Quinn had led since striking out on his own shortly after high school.
Jericho had already finished a protein and carbohydrate shake that would become his pre-breakfast staple over the next two weeks and sat on a bench by the front door snapping the cam-locks on his riding boots. Thibodaux was outside loading extra tires on top of the support truck.
“There’s a chickaloon in the shower,” Bo said. He slurped placidly on a spoonful of cereal, apparently used to women showing up in surprise places. “She almost cut me when I went in to pee.”
“That’s Aleksandra. She’s working with us now,” Jericho said, giving a brief explanation.
“A Rusky?” Bo gave a long, groaning stretch, holding the cereal bowl out in front of him. “You know how I feel about Russians.”
“I know,” Quinn said. The entire incident — a fight with some drunk Russian nationals talking smack about America during his Air Force Academy parade — had very nearly made it so Jericho wasn’t allowed to graduate. It had become the stuff of Academy legend and followed him his entire career. “Behave,” he chided. “This particular Russian is after the same thing we are.”
Bo held up his spoon and shook it at Jericho to drive home his point. “Did I mention she nearly cut me a minute ago? I thought it was you in the shower. Anyways, I hear Russian women are—”
“Russian women are what?” Aleksandra’s husky voice came from the stairs. She was dressed in a pair of white shorts and a blue and white striped tank top. Red hair hung in damp ringlets around her shoulders from the shower.
Bo waved her off, but shot a “save me” glance at Quinn.
“I’m interested too, brother.” Jericho grinned. “What is it you hear about Russian women?”
“I prefer American women,” Bo grumbled, going back to eating his cereal. “That’s all.”
Aleksandra let the trill of her accent creep fully into her words. “You spend two minutes with a Russian woman and you will throw rocks at American girls.”
Jericho chuckled at that. A woman who could go toe-to-toe with his brother was a rare find indeed.
“Come on,” Jericho said, looking at Kanatova. “You can ride with me to ASO headquarters before the start of the first stage. We need to get you a wristband now that yo
u’re officially a member of Team Quinn or you won’t be able to get into camp every night.”
CHAPTER 31
Stage One
The British government wasn’t exactly forthcoming about known terror suspects who might happen to be racing under their flag in the Dakar Rally. Palmer had started a process of elimination, and by the time Quinn was at the starting line the first day of actual racing they’d been able to weed down the contestants, leaving them with two possibilities. Both were motorcyclists — Joey Blessington riding a Husaburg and Basil Tuckwood aboard a Honda. Like Quinn, both racers rode as privateers, meaning they had no major sponsor or big team support.
Much of Quinn’s cover story had been contrived by populating the Web with phony information and news releases about his investment business and photos of his thrill-seeking adventures.
Quinn was practical enough to know that completely stopping the flow of information to the World Wide Web was impossible. Even from high school he’d tried to keep his presence in the public venue as shadowy as he could. He refused to register new products that asked for his personal information and steered clear of social networking sites.
Palmer’s team had done a fair job of scrubbing both Quinn and Thibodaux’s online personas, but information invariably popped up. Even pizza delivery companies sold phone numbers and addresses to online people searches. The only way to combat the true information that leaked out was to flood the Web with so much content that the first ten to fifteen pages of any Internet search showed only hits related to the cover identity.
It was the pop-ups that made both Blessington and Tuckwood candidates for the Chechen’s British contact and had drawn Zamora’s attention.
Five pages into a Google search, a Daily Mail article told the story of a Newcastle teen who’d gotten into a fistfight after a rugby match. Since this was his third ASBO — antisocial behavior order — he had been offered the choice of military service or incarceration. Given the secret branches of many governments’ propensity for recruiting redeemed social misfits, Basil Tuckwood was a good candidate.
Joey Blessington was an HR executive for a large oil company based in England, but the sheer lack of information online about anything else he’d ever done made Quinn suspicious of him as well.
Now, all Quinn had to do was figure out which one was the agent and get to him before Zamora or his man Monagas did.
A pink orange line ran along the eastern horizon as if a lid over the black ocean had just been cracked open. Dust and gasoline fumes hung with the excitement of race jitters in the chilly predawn air. Riding gear squeaked and heavy boots crunched on gravel between blatting engine noises. Thousands of people lined the streets to cheer on their favorite riders. Some revelers had been up all night from celebrating the New Year and looked as though they might keel over from exhaustion at any moment in the predawn haze.
The motorcycles would start first, battling not only each other but racing to stay well ahead of the other vehicles, especially the monster trucks that threw up huge clouds of dust that choked riders and left them blind and disoriented.
Each day started with the Liaison, the section of the race where riders rode over marked roads and trails, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers, sometimes just a few. During the Liaison, riders were expected to keep to the speed limit and obey all traffic laws. The Liaison route took them to the Special Stage, where they would leave the beaten track and navigate their way through mountains and desert and monstrous, bike-eating dunes to various checkpoints before racing for the finish. Navigation was done without the aid of electronics, using a paper scroll known as a road book that was mounted on each racer’s motorcycle. Once a rider made it within two kilometers from any checkpoint their GPS would turn on and help guide him in. Each bike was also fitted with an IriTrak, the tracking system that let race officials keep tabs on everyone — as well as a proximity alarm to warn riders if one of the giant race trucks was looming up in the dust to crush them like a bug.
Helicopters would provide oversight on the route, shoot approved media footage, watch for rule infractions, and ensure rider safety.
Each day while racers battled away on the dunes, Dakar staff would strike the tents housing medical, catering, and mechanical support, pack them into trucks, and engage in their own race to the next staging area to set everything back up in a new bivouac before the first riders arrived.
It took a very complicated and intricate dance to make it all work.
Beginning life as the Paris Dakar in 1978, the rally beat its way through the deserts of North Africa until terrorist activity in Mauritania stopped the 2008 race. After that, officials moved the rally to the remote stretches of desert in South America and changed the name to simply the Dakar.
Grueling and deadly as it was beautiful, it was a race made for Jericho Quinn.
Prowling on the KTM, Quinn found the number 121 bike next to a row of portable toilets across the parking lot from the Liaison starting line.
Tuckwood, a tall, lanky fellow with a bobbing walk and thinning blond hair, came out of the green plastic toilet nearest to the bike. His face was ghost pale in the predawn light. He glanced up at Quinn with a wan smile.
“Had too much wine and song last night, I did,” he said with a deep Yorkshire accent. “I’m lucky to be alive, me.”
Quinn sat straddling his KTM, helmet in hand. “I hear you,” he said. If Tuckwood was a hired gun, he was a pretty good actor. Goofy didn’t even begin to describe him — and at the moment he seemed to be suffering from acute discomfort of the lower intestine.
Quinn rolled on, closer to the starting line.
Joey Blessington was a completely different story. Quinn recognized a dangerous man when he saw one. There was a certain air, a heavy confidence about him that said, “I’m not here to fight, but if you insist, I’d actually enjoy the chance to oblige you.”
Quinn shared the sentiment.
Blessington sat on his bike a few yards back from the start, goggles up, ready but relaxed. He periodically scanned the area around him, just enough to stay apprised of possible dangers, but not enough to draw inordinate attention to himself. He kept to himself, but met the other competitors’ eyes and didn’t appear standoffish.
He had to be the one.
Team Quinn stood behind the barrier tape with other support crews just a little closer than the mass of chanting onlookers in the Spectator Zones. Signs for race favorites Caine and Geroux dominated the group, but local favorites from Argentina, Chile, and Peru had their share of screaming youths and handsome Latin women. Jericho pushed thoughts of Veronica Garcia out of his mind as he rolled by Thibodaux and Bo, giving them each a high-five. Aleksandra, to her credit as a professional, leaned across to touch his shoulder, a tender move a female companion might do when her man went off on a race.
“Number one-sixty-eight.” Quinn took off his helmet, holding it in on his lap. He kicked up a foot for the last few moments of rest he’d have for the day. “I think that’s the guy to watch.”
Aleksandra nodded. “You’re right,” she said, her face growing dark. “It is obvious.”
Monagas stood on the other end of the start on the spectator side of the tape, scanning the crowd. If he’d identified Blessington as the threat, he didn’t show it.
Zamora, with the number 159, would be the one hundred fifty-ninth bike to leave on this first day of racing. Blessington would be the hundred sixty-eighth to start and Quinn would follow four bikes later with number 172. Future starts would depend on race results each day, with the fastest times starting first.
“What’s your plan, Jer?” Bo stood beside Aleksandra. A little too close, Quinn thought. Bo was a big boy, though, and could, in theory, take care of himself.
“The important thing is to finish near Zamora,” Quinn said. “That will put us starting near each other tomorrow and on subsequent days.” He shook his head. “The Special Section is a short one today. It’ll be crazy out here, but we’ll be bunch
ed up most of the day. My biggest worry today is getting mobbed by the spectators.”
Bo smacked him on the arm. “Zamora is away,” he said. “You best be getting your game face on.”
Quinn pulled on his helmet and fastened the chinstrap. Lowering his goggles, he gave one last salute to his team and rolled forward to enter the line of bikes waiting to depart down the cordoned-off streets of Mar del Plata.
“How do you read?” he said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.
“Slurred and stupid,” Thibodaux chuckled. “Seriously, bro, you’re five by five. You got me?”
“Loud and clear.”
The communication gear was completely against the rules, but Quinn didn’t plan on trying to win the race. All support teams could track the whereabouts of their racer with smartphones as they made it from checkpoint to checkpoint. With Palmer’s help, Team Quinn had been able to hack into the ASO’s main tracking system for Zamora’s — and now Blessington’s — loca-tion in real time. It would be Thibodaux’s job to keep him in the loop about their respective locations if he happened to lose track.
Quinn took a deep breath and looked down the gauntlet formed by thousands of race fans, volunteers, vendors, ASO officials, security, and Argentine National Police. The sun was just coming up as he made his way to the line along with number 171, a rider from Sweden.
He gunned the KTM’s engine, feeling the power between his knees. Thibodaux’s thick Cajun drawl buzzed inside his helmet.
“You watch yourself, l’ami. There’s a gob of lonely spots out there in the desert where a body could find suddenly hisself very dead.”
CHAPTER 32
