“Something to do with oil. With them dead, a new cabinet would be named, and he’s paid off the likely new group. They will declare any leases void that haven’t started pumping yet, which is all but one, and then Grigenko will be awarded the new lease.” Yuri’s voice was starting to fade. “Please. The morphine.”
“After a few more questions. Were you behind the attacks on the houses in Israel?”
“Yes.”
“And on her, in Trinidad?”
“Yes.”
“What about the team members?”
“Yes.”
“Why kill them?”
“Loose ends. He couldn’t afford anyone to live who might have known about the oil. You were all a liability.” Yuri’s eyes closed from pain, and then he opened them and fixed Jet with a glare. “You’ll never be safe. He will spare nothing to kill you. You murdered his brother. Nothing will save you.”
“So I’ve heard,” Jet said, obviously unimpressed. “Now for the most important question, and then you get the shot. Where is Grigenko now?”
Yuri grimaced, a cadaverous grin that stretched his pallid skin taut.
“You have no chance.”
“Perhaps. But where is he?”
“In his compound, safe, in Moscow, surrounded by the best security in the world.”
Jet held his eyes.
“Give him the shot,” she said and stepped back.
David moved to him and stabbed the needle into his arm, depressing the plunger.
Jet moved back to his side.
“Every target has a weakness. No security is airtight. There has to be a way to Grigenko in Moscow. I need you to think. How would you do it if you had to take him out?”
Yuri shook his head. “Impossible.” His eyes began to drift.
“Let’s get you to a hospital,” David said.
Yuri jolted. “No. I failed — and the price for this kind of failure is the ultimate one. I’m a dead man. He can’t afford me to implicate him. Even if I somehow managed to survive, I don’t want to spend my life in a Belizean jail.”
“I’m afraid that’s not your choice. But look at the bright side. There’s a better than even chance you’ll die before the doctors can save you,” David reasoned.
“Not good enough. Release the belt. This will be over quickly. Painlessly.”
“Sorry, Yuri. It’s just not your lucky day.”
His eyes filled with panic. “I can tell you how to get to him,” Yuri blurted, his words slurring slightly as the morphine hit.
“What? How?” Jet asked.
“Promise to let me die and I’ll tell you,” Yuri gasped.
David stepped away from him, and Jet moved closer.
“Fine. I’ll see you in hell soon enough, anyway. Tell me and I’ll keep my word,” she promised.
He motioned to her with his good hand. She leaned into him.
Yuri began speaking, softly, as if to a lover, his words a murmur.
A minute later, she straightened.
“The explosions and gunfire will draw police and military here soon. Even in the middle of nowhere, the sound of explosions carries for many miles. We need to get out of here,” she said to David.
Yuri looked at her expectantly.
She moved back to him and took his good hand, then guided it down to the belt around his thigh, pulling the end tighter to clear the prong from the belt hole. He gripped it shakily.
“Now you control your destiny. Just release the belt and it’s over.”
His eyes found hers with a flicker of gratitude. She turned to David, her business with Yuri concluded.
“Come on. Let’s move.”
They dropped their night vision goggles back into place, and she fished the GPS out of her backpack, then powered it on and waited for it to lock onto a satellite. After a quick consultation, she pointed at the trees, and they took off at a jog.
Yuri watched them disappear into the dark. His head swam, and a wave of nausea washed over him, and then his vision dimmed. In spite of the heat, he was cold.
He muttered a few words of a prayer his grandmother had taught him in secret as a small child — everything he could remember all these long years later. A tear rolled down his face, and he looked up at the night sky, faint stars glimmering overhead. There was Cancer. The Big Dipper. Mars.
He’d always been fascinated by the cosmos when he was young, the idea of other life forms somewhere out there having captured his adolescent imagination before he’d moved too much into this world, into adulthood, leaving the dreams and the wonder behind, exchanging them for the more attainable aspirations of a young man with high purpose.
Where had the time gone?
Would he have done anything differently if he’d been told that his life would end in a clearing in the middle of an anonymous jungle at thirty-nine years old? Would he have walked the same path? Could he have been someone different than who he had turned out to be?
His grandmother’s tremulous voice echoed in his mind as if from a great distance, the ancient words, like velvet, redolent of a magic long departed from the world, coaxing him to rest easy, the sound of crickets a rhythmic accompaniment to her incantation.
“I’m on my way, Nana,” he whispered.
Yuri released the belt and closed his eyes.
He was going home.
Chapter 28
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Terry stared at the memo in his hand, fresh from his Central America analyst.
He re-read it, then moved to his encrypted phone and made a call.
Half an hour later, Terry watched Sloan approach the barista and order tea, then stiffly mount the stairs to where Terry was already sitting in the Starbucks lounge area.
“I heard,” he said by way of greeting to Terry.
Terry reclined in his overstuffed lounge chair and toasted Sloan with his beverage.
“Amazing, don’t you think?”
Sloane nodded. “That’s why you want to spread your bets around. You can never be sure how things will turn out. A smart man has a foot in all camps and positions himself to prosper no matter what the outcome.”
“That sounds like something from a fortune cookie,” Terry said. “How the hell did they take out, what, sixteen men? Maybe I should hire them.”
“I have a feeling they aren’t available.” Sloan took a sip of his tea, rolling it around in his mouth before setting the cup down on the small table between them.
“So what now?” Terry asked.
“We move to plan B. We still have the new governor general coming into office. Once he’s situated, he’ll suggest to the prime minister that the government look hard at the oil prospecting rights that have been assigned, and terminate any outstanding prospecting licenses that have passed their mandated end date. So far they’ve just let them sort of drift along, hoping something good happens. Ending the licenses is a reasonable step, and within the government’s power. He will then propose that Belize find a strategic partner for its oil exploration moving forward — a group with clout.”
“Responsible adults,” Terry agreed.
“That’s right. A few weeks later, our group will go in and make the administration an offer they can’t refuse. The find is still a secret, and the only ones who know about it are Grigenko and us, so the price should be a relative bargain — remember, they have no idea what they’re sitting on. Grigenko can’t say anything or word of his terrorist attempt will leak, and then even his pull with the Russian government won’t be enough to stop international prosecution. Putting a group of killers in place to execute a sovereign government qualifies as terrorism, and there will be no place for him to hide. My hunch is he’ll stay quiet. So we’ll ink a deal and make the discovery a few months later, and everyone will win — except, of course, Grigenko. Check and mate.”
“You think he’ll just walk away?” Terry asked skeptically.
“The man is already filthy rich. This won’t change anything for him
long term. True, he would have been filthier and richer, but it’s not worth losing his empire over. He’ll drop it, but he won’t be happy.”
“What about Belize? I can’t believe that’s all there is to it.”
“There’s more going on here than meets the eye, Terry. You don’t really want to know the rest. Suffice it to say that you’ll get a nice bonus and life will go on. Some things are best left alone. Trust me on that.”
“And the girl? The Israeli — David?”
“They’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? Let Grigenko hunt them down. It’s not our concern.”
Terry nodded. “And if they touch base again? Need more help?”
“Bring me any requests. As you’ve pointed out, they’re uniquely effective. It might be valuable to have them as allies down the road. Especially the woman. We both know an operative like that is worth her weight in platinum.” Sloan took a sip of his tea, then studied the cup like it had bitten him and frowned at it. “Remember, Terry. Always spread your bets out. You never know when that rainy day you’ve been saving up for will come. Nobody does.”
Sloan stood and looked around the empty area.
“Always nice to see you, Terry. Enjoy your coffee.”
Mikhail Grigenko slammed the telephone handset down in fury and paced around his expansive office, rage threatening to completely overtake him.
His plot to get the exclusive on the Belize find had disintegrated. Reports of bodies in the jungle were surfacing, and Yuri was nowhere to be found — he hadn’t answered his satellite phone in twenty-four hours.
He had to assume the worst — that somehow, some way, his plan had been compromised and parties unknown had taken on his men. Successfully, from all indications.
The early news was sporadic and vague. The Belizean government had issued a terse statement alluding to Guatemalan separatists, or drug cartels, or smugglers who had fought it out with another faction. Commitments to get to the bottom of things, along with reassurances that all was well were the customary boilerplate and meant nothing.
Grigenko could do the math, and it wasn’t in his favor.
As he paced, the dawning sense that his force couldn’t have been eliminated without a serious security breach crept into his consciousness, eventually staking a claim.
Yuri’s men were as good as they came. For them to be wiped out smacked of government intervention. Had Belize somehow learned of his plot and moved against him before he could follow through? Superior force was the only possibility, as unlikely as it sounded. But a superior force to a well-equipped team of Spetsnaz commandoes was hard to envision in a nation where the power went out several times a day.
There was no obvious answer, and that made Grigenko nervous.
Struggling to contain his anger, he sat behind his desk and stared out the window. He had faced adversity before, been tested, and prevailed. He just needed to think his way through the current situation and craft a new solution.
Grigenko swiveled his chair and rose. He went to the marble-topped bar and poured himself two fingers of vodka, swallowing it in a single gulp. The familiar burn warmed his throat, and he felt himself calming.
In his favor, there was still no sign that anyone knew about the oil find. That put him far in front of anyone else in the region. Information was power, and he had all of it at present. The current administration had rebuffed his tentative explorations to buy favor, but that could well have been a price issue — in truth, he had been cheap, figuring that there was no reason to leave money on the table if the locals didn’t know about what they had. Perhaps it was time to push a few more chips into the pot and raise the stakes. The clock wasn’t his friend on this, and every day that he didn’t have a deal in place was another day that one of his competitors could slip in ahead of him and eat his lunch.
He’d considered a number of scenarios before deciding that a bold strike to take out the current government would be his most promising. One of the possibilities had been to lobby for the government to sign his group to act as the de facto national oil company, winding down its arrangements with any prospecting groups. That kind of unilateral action from the government would encounter a number of significant hurdles, not the least of which would come from the American companies that would want a shot at earning that business, so he had erred on the side of stealthy violence and subterfuge.
Perhaps that had been a strategic mistake.
Yuri had been gung ho about the military strike, arguing that destabilizing the country would result in a more pliant administration moving forward. Once he had his deal in place, they could trumpet the find, and the government would be heroes — it would add billions to the balance sheet over just a matter of a few years, wiping out the entire national debt and rendering the little banana republic relatively prosperous. Of course, Grigenko would see eighty cents on every dollar for his role in providing the necessary infrastructure and support, but then again, he was doing all the heavy lifting. There would be plenty of money to go around, and his company would go from being a virtual non-player in the Americas to a heavyweight, overnight.
He poured another jolt of spirit into his glass and swallowed it, swishing it around in his mouth to better appreciate its nuance.
This was a setback, but one he could recover from. He just had to keep his head and be clever.
The first thing he would need to do was hire a new security group. Whatever had happened with Yuri, these kinds of mistakes couldn’t be tolerated — first the debacle in Trinidad, then the failed execution in Israel…Yuri had obviously either gotten sloppy or had lost his touch. It didn’t really matter which. Grigenko couldn’t afford to have second-rate talent working for him. Yuri had been the best at one point, but no longer, and it was time to retire him. If he surfaced, a bullet to the back of the head in a Moscow alley would permanently terminate their relationship.
He sat down heavily and sighed.
What should have been a week of triumph had culminated in his greatest defeat.
That couldn’t stand.
It was time to get off the mat and start swinging again. He had delegated too much responsibility to Yuri, and the man had failed him. There was an important lesson in that. If he wanted something important done right, he needed to attend to it himself and not hand it off to underlings. There were no shortcuts.
Thinking through his next steps, he flipped open his rolodex and pulled out a card, then put his feet up on his desk and leaned back as he dialed a number.
“Andrei. It’s Mikhail Grigenko. Yes, yes. It has been too long. My friend, I think today is your lucky day. Can you come over for lunch?”
~ ~ ~
Tom wiped sweat off his face as he rounded the bend to the single lane bridge in the optimistically-named town of Hopeville, just north of Punta Gorda. The damned Nissan was running rough again, either because of the crap gas he’d been getting or something wrong with the fuel system. It coughed and protested as he crept over the water, and he mentally committed to changing the fuel filter tomorrow no matter how unpleasant the weather was.
He made a left onto the dirt road that led to his tiny house, and the old truck shuddered, wheezing like an asthmatic in a dust storm.
“Come on, baby. Just a little farther,” he coaxed, stroking the dash hopefully, as though his encouragement would make the difference in the vehicle making it or not.
The engine died with a gasp, and the headlights dimmed as it continued rolling from the momentum. He pulled onto the grass at the side of the road and cursed, then got out and began walking to his house, just a hundred yards up the road.
Even at ten at night, the heat was oppressive, and he swatted at mosquitoes that quickly found him as he wearily trudged home.
The single silenced bullet caught him in the back of the head as he passed his front porch. He tumbled face forward, dead even as he dropped.
His killer approached from behind. Nudging Tom’s inert form with his foot, he pulled a cell phon
e from his pocket and made a call.
“Problem solved. Get someone to drop him into the ocean — let the sharks take care of him. We don’t need any questions being asked.”
“Five minutes.”
“I’m out of here.”
Chapter 29
A stunning young blonde with aggressively-styled short hair, wearing a black leather jumpsuit that clung to her like a second skin, stood at the roulette table in the Salon Europe of the world famous Grand Casino de Monte Carlo, playing five thousand dollars at a spin. She had arrived an hour earlier and was now up — she had two hundred thousand dollars of chips in front of her after starting the evening with a hundred and fifty. A small gathering of admirers, mostly male, watched as she won and lost, her outfit drawing as much scrutiny as her winning streak, all shiny, supple surfaces and chrome zippers. Her bronze skin accented the captivating almond shape of her eyes, and even in a venue that was no stranger to beautiful women, she was a stand out.
Jet pushed more chips onto black and nodded to the croupier, who watched as other players made their bets before he closed the gaming and gave the wheel a spin. She sipped her mineral water with a lime twist, the pink of her tongue darting seductively out of her mouth to catch a stray droplet on her bottom lip. A collective pause in the breathing of the spectators accompanied the slowing of the wheel, and a muffled exclamation greeted her winning yet again.
By any standards, the casino was opulent, filled with the wealthy from all over Europe, Russia and the Middle East, a favorite of the rich and famous for generations. The building exuded old money and prosperity, and boasted a reputation that had been carefully groomed for over a hundred and fifty years. Made famous to the general population after featuring in several James Bond films, it was a staid playground for the well-heeled in a country where one needed a minimum income of approximately five hundred thousand dollars a year to reside.
She threw her head back and laughed at a flirtatious comment from an extremely handsome Swiss gentleman in his forties, who had whispered in her ear by way of congratulation. Her eyes sparkled in the light cast by the overhead chandeliers as she wagged her finger at the prospective suitor, who was as taken with her as the other men who had decided to pause from their gambling near her table.
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