“I lifted them before we left the chateau this morning.”
“To limit my communication options?”
“To keep them safe.” Tyler nodded down at the device. “Put them on.” As he spoke, the bunker door swung open. “Thanks, Eddie.”
“You’re welcome. But that’s all I’ve got. The entrances were tied in to the same net as the defense guns. The interior doors are out of my reach.”
With a series of lefts and rights he guided them to the upper level of the missile control room. They encountered two guards at the final corner, and Talia shot both on instinct. A chill swept through her as she watched them fall. She had never shot anyone before, not for real.
Moaning, one of the guards tried to rise. Tyler rushed ahead and smashed him in the forehead with the butt of his gun, catching the other one in the temple when he sat up as well. “Vests,” he said, pulling down the second guard’s collar as Talia came up beside him. “In this world, if you really have to kill a man, aim for the head.”
One final door with a six-digit key code barred their path to the missile control room. “He’s in there,” Talia said. “And we have maybe eight minutes before the launch. How do we get through? Eddie?”
“I told you. The interior doors are out of my reach. But Finn has the skills to hot-wire that pad.”
“True . . . blue.” The cat burglar puffed into the comms. “But I can’t . . . reach you in time.”
“This one is on you, Talia.” Tyler positioned her in front of the pad. “You can do it.”
Six digits. An impossible number of combinations. Talia had bypassed locked doors at the Farm, but not under this level of pressure. When she was faced with key codes and passwords, her training had taught her to consider the organization—or in cases like this, consider the man. After a few more seconds, she let out a laugh. “Aria, Natasha . . .” She pictured the letters of a telephone keypad and tapped in the code. “P-O-R-T-I-A.”
The numbers flashed. The lock clicked.
Chapter
seventy-
one
AVANTEC ISLAND LAUNCH FACILITY
THE BLACK SEA
“WATCH OUT. Ivanov has cameras,” Eddie said. “One above the door and another in the corner to your right. He knows you’re coming.”
Tyler took a step back and blew the camera above the door off its mount.
Talia caught his intent. She turned and took care of the one in the corner. “Let’s not give them any more awareness than they already have.” She pointed to Tyler and directed two fingers at the floor, indicating he should go low. Then she tapped her chest and pointed to the door.
He nodded, pressing close to the wall. Tyler fired a burst the moment she opened the door, and kept firing, crouching low and sidestepping in a wide angle. “One guard, headed for the stairs,” he said, and pushed inside.
The floor beyond the threshold was steel plate. Talia advanced, keeping the barrel of her confiscated MP-5 above Tyler’s stooping shoulder, and experienced a faint sense of déjà vu. Looking down past the rail, she could see the two other levels of the stacked control room, reminding her of the Sanctum and her failed final exam. Ivanov and at least one guard waited for her below. She could hear Jordan’s voice in her head. The high ground is everything. You get an edge and you keep it! She should have held back one of Darcy’s spare bits of TNT for this moment, but she hadn’t. Was she about to fail the same test she had before?
Talia felt the old ache in her side.
Her eyes strayed to the hangar, visible from each level through a Lexan window. Three missiles, not one, sat on long metal rails, angled up at twenty degrees toward a broad rectangular door. Ivanov was using an electric rail-launch system—no blast for early warning sensors to detect. She fired at the nearest missile, but the Lexan deflected the rounds.
“Watch it!” Tyler backed into the corner at the top of the stairs as more bullets plinked the platform. He returned fire.
Talia raised her weapon to join him, and felt an arm wrap around her neck from behind. “Ty—”
The arm choked off her cry. Talia elbowed her attacker in the gut, ducked out of the chokehold, and turned. “Pudgy?”
He bristled at the term. She didn’t care. She punched him in the trachea and his eyes bulged. Pudgy’s hands went instinctively to his throat. Talia caught his right sleeve, spun him sideways, and swept his left leg, using his weight and his own forearm to pinch off his left carotid. The blade of her wrist took care of the right. Pudgy’s pupils rolled back.
Talia let him fall and bound him with the zip ties from his utility belt. She pulled a Taser from his vest pocket and patted his cheek. “This may not be the right career for you.”
“You done?” Tyler asked, still trading fire with the guard below.
“You could’ve helped.”
“I was busy.” He tilted his head toward a countdown clock on the hangar wall. Less than four minutes remained. “It’s time to get serious.”
Eddie saw it too, through Talia’s glasses. She heard him clicking madly at his keyboard. “That’s . . . That’s not what I calculated. We’re short.”
“Yeah, well, that happens.” Tyler kept shooting. “Finn, say your status.”
“We’re in place, but the door is heavy steel—hinges on the inside. We can neither open nor jam it.”
“Not an issue.”
“It is an issue,” Eddie countered. “That door uses high-speed actuators, like the bomb bay doors on the F-22, designed to minimize exposure of the interior.”
“So?” Talia rested her back against the wall. Pudgy stirred. She hit him with the Taser. He flopped around a bit and went limp again.
“So Ivanov’s missiles will be heading up the rails before the door opens. Our plan won’t work!”
The gunfire ceased.
The clock read two minutes and fifty-six seconds.
Talia heard a slow clapping from the bottom level. “Mr. Tyler. Miss Natalia. I am impressed! Surviving the fall of Gryphon is quite an achievement. I am so moved that part of me wishes to reward your efforts by stopping the launch.” He let the clock count down three more seconds before continuing. “Alas, it is only a very small part.”
Talia thought of rushing down the stairs with Tyler, guns blazing. But abandoning caution had caused her fiasco at the Sanctum. This was no test. Thousands of lives depended on her getting it right. She needed help. “Keep him talking,” she whispered to Tyler, backing up against the wall beside him. “Eddie, get me Val.”
“Already up.” The grifter’s voice came through calm and even. “Did you think I would miss this?”
“We’re out of brute force options. I need to talk Ivanov into stopping the launch. That’s your department.” Talia rolled her head left for a look at the clock. “Not to rush you, but we have two minutes and twenty-five seconds before this goes horribly south.” She waited.
Val said nothing.
“Twenty-three . . . Twenty-two.”
“Hush, darling. I’m thinking.”
From the top of the stairs, Tyler interlaced one-round potshots with verbal pokes at Ivanov. He was conserving ammo, and that meant he was running low. “Three missiles?” he shouted, lowering the gun for a moment. “Since when do you have multiple prototypes, Pavel?”
“Did I not say you knew nothing?” Ivanov waited for his guard to take a shot of his own, a stream of bullets that chipped away at the cinder block wall above Tyler’s head. “One prototype system, that is true. But that system has three kinetic missiles. Each strikes in geometric harmony with the others, amplifying the blast to match the destruction of Hiroshima.” The guard fired again and Ivanov chuckled. “Trust me. If I hold one back to reverse engineer Visser’s design, the remaining two will supply enough death to impress my buyers.”
Two minutes remained.
Talia prodded the grifter. “Val?”
“Okay. A good con builds on mutual goals, right? What is it that you and Ivanov both want?”
“Yes, but there must be something in between—an intermediate step.”
An intermediate step. A light dawned in Talia’s mind. “I’ve got it. Stand by, Val. Tyler, cover me.”
With Tyler shooting measured bursts to keep the guard pinned, Talia crawled forward to the edge of the walkway, enough to see Ivanov’s control panels. She checked the clock. One minute seven seconds.
Val kept coaching. “Good. Now, this next bit is subtle. Use a slightly lower register in your voice to—”
“I said I’ve got it.” Talia opened fire in full auto. She sprayed the Lexan above the control panel, aiming high for fear of causing an early launch. The move had the desired effect. Talia couldn’t identify the door control, but Ivanov didn’t know that.
“She’s trying to jam the door!” He stepped into view below, firing a pistol to drive her back. She feigned compliance, and saw him crank down on a black-and-yellow lever. The hangar door flashed down. Daylight flooded the bay. “You cannot stop this!”
“Oh, but I already have, Pavel.”
“I don’t get it,” Val said.
“Your mutual goal. Ivanov wants to fire the missiles. I want to stop him. But we both needed the same intermediate step—opening the hangar door. I just got him to open it early.” Talia shifted her gaze to the hangar windows. “Now, Finn!”
With forty-three seconds on the clock, Finn appeared at one corner of the hangar door. Mac, supported by Darcy, appeared at the other. Both men heaved bulging duffel bags into the hangar, and all three dove out of view. The bags slid down the canted floor, coming to rest beneath the missiles.
Ivanov shouted something.
The ensuing blast covered his words.
Darcy’s salvaged TNT shattered the Lexan windows. Dust and flame flew into the control room. An instant later, the fuel cells of the missiles blew. The rails collapsed. The walls of the hangar burned. A sprinkler system kicked on.
Ears ringing, face stinging as if from the worst sunburn, Talia pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the rail, remembering too late to raise her gun. It didn’t matter. Ivanov, along with not one but three guards, was dead. The other two had been hiding. If she and Tyler had rushed the lower level, they would surely have been killed, and Ivanov would have destroyed DC’s National Mall.
Talia had kept the high ground. She let out a pained laugh. “Thanks, Jordan.” She turned the empty corner where Tyler had been. “Tyler?”
“Down here.” His voice was weak, barely audible in the gentle patter of the sprinklers. He was lying on the stairs, a few steps below the upper platform. Tyler used the rail to pull himself up to his knees. Blood ran from his ears, mixing with the water. His gun had fallen to the landing below. He swallowed, looking up at her. “It’s over.”
Talia kept her machine gun leveled. She still had half a magazine. “No, Tyler. It isn’t.”
Chapter
seventy-
two
AVANTEC ISLAND LAUNCH FACILITY
THE BLACK SEA
“UH, TALIA?” EDDIE SAID. “What are we doing?”
She ripped off the glasses and flung them across the room. The earpiece came next. Talia ground it under her heel and nodded to Tyler. “Yours too.”
“Right. Sure.” Tyler pulled the device from his ear and tossed it over his shoulder. He gave her a thin smile, squinting against the spray from the sprinklers. “Now we’re alone. Before we go on, I’d like to say you did well today. From the moment you saw the ekranoplan, you became our strategist. You helped Darcy come up with the TNT charges, fought off a guard well enough to make Mac proud, and unlocked a door that neither our burglar nor our hacker could breach.” He made a face. “I’d have to say your final grift was a little brutish, but it did the trick.”
“Enough.” Talia walked down a step, bringing the gun closer to his head. “Why, Tyler?”
“I told you in Milan. Your dad was my final hit.”
“And you were just following orders. That’s not an excuse.”
“No. It’s merely the reason. I questioned those orders, but when pressed, I took the wrong action. I should have waited.” Tyler dropped his eyes. “God forgive me. I should have waited.”
Talia snorted. “You think he’ll forgive you?”
“He has. I know that. But you haven’t.” Tyler sat back on his heels and gestured at the disaster area surrounding them, a blend of fire, water, and smoke. “That’s what all this has been about. The mission. Our time together. Do you understand? I wanted you to know me before we came to this moment, the way that only those who’ve fought side by side can know each other.”
“Know you?” Talia couldn’t believe Tyler’s gall. “How can I know you? You’ve been lying to me since we met. You told me you would help me kill Lukon.”
“I didn’t lie about that.” With speed that Talia could not counter, Tyler caught her weapon in both hands. She resisted, but he overpowered her and jerked the barrel up against his own skull. “I told you that if you still wanted it, I would help you put a bullet in Lukon’s brain. Here I am.”
The strength of his voice, the fierceness in those eyes that had haunted her nightmares for so long, took Talia’s breath away. She tried to pull the weapon back. Tyler held it fast.
“That’s why you risked your life for me, isn’t it? It’s why you put us in harm’s way in the first place.” Tears that Talia didn’t want fell down her cheeks. “The bullet you took at the Shard. That stunt on Gryphon, shoving me into the pressure chamber before putting your helmet on. You wanted to die. You wanted to die for me.”
“A life for a life.” Tyler let out a rueful huff. “A life for two lives. I took your father’s life and destroyed yours. For fifteen years, this hate has devoured you. If my death helps you let go—if it gives you a chance to rediscover the God I found through your pain—then it’s worth it. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” Tyler spread his arms and leaned forward, letting the barrel of Talia’s gun take his weight. “This is a debt I’m willing to pay.”
Greater love. The debt paid. Talia’s eidetic memory returned to Conrad, wearing that ridiculous apron. Forgiveness belongs to him, Talia. One debt paid for all.
Her finger tightened around the trigger. She looked up and screamed into artificial rain, then threw the gun aside and dropped to her knees, wrapping Tyler in an embrace. “I forgive you! I forgive you!” She sobbed into his shoulder, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I forgive you.”
Chapter
seventy-
three
THE POTOMAC RIVER
WEST OF THE GEORGETOWN BOATHOUSE
THE RACING SHELL cut an even furrow through the black waters of the Potomac. The low morning mist swirled above the eddies left by two big oars—one Talia’s, one Jenni’s.
The pain Talia had learned to live with, a pain she had come to expect with every pull of an oar, was gone. A few times since she and Jenni had left the dock that morning, she had caught herself searching for that pain, perhaps even missing it. But those moments had quickly passed.
“Are you sure . . . you don’t mind . . . hitting the water this early?” Talia worked the question into her breathing cycle, using the recoveries between strokes.
Jenni did the same with her answer. “Totally . . . In fact . . . we should make this . . . our thing.”
Talia glanced over her shoulder, giving Jenni a smile and checking their heading. They were nearing the deep water east of the Three Sisters, where they had capsized on their last row. But they had found a good rhythm this time. Despite the challenge of balancing the two staggered oars of the sweep-style pair, Talia had no fear of flipping over again. “Let’s pick it up!” she said and dug in with her next pull.
The Special Tactics Team from Incirlik Air Base had raided Ivano
v’s island an hour after Darcy’s TNT destroyed the hangar. By that time, Tyler and his thieves had found an Avantec runabout and made their escape, leaving Talia with only Pudgy for company. He had started shouting in angry Moldovan the moment the soldiers hit the beach. One of them, whom Talia suspected was the Agency asset embedded with the team, shot Pudgy with a tranquilizer dart to shut him up.
The road home, traveled mostly in cramped economy-class seats on regional airlines she had never heard of, gave Talia a good deal of time to think. It also gave her time to pray. She prayed more than she had in her entire life. She told God she forgave him for the loss of her father, admitted she had no right to be angry with him in the first place, and asked him to forgive her for the unforgiveness she had harbored for so long.
Talia still wasn’t entirely sure where to go from there, but when she had landed at Dulles—as if in answer to all those prayers—there had been a message waiting from Jenni.
The two rowed on past the Sisters, pushing the workout. Neither of the girls had enough spare breath to continue the conversation until they let up at Fletcher’s Cove.
“Dinner,” Jenni panted, dragging an oar in the water to turn the boat.
Talia wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly, or maybe part of her was afraid she had. “What was that?”
“Dinner . . . Tonight . . . My place.”
“You mean your parents’ place.”
“Our parents’ place.”
They steadied the boat to let the current take them, and Talia glanced over her shoulder. Jenni cocked her head, biting her lip, waiting.
They had talked about it briefly on the phone, with Talia crying outside the ladies’ room at the Dulles baggage claim. The words had come pouring out of her. Each of her foster fathers had been faced with an impossible task, a gap impossible to fill. And whether they tried or not, Talia had punished them for it, getting angrier with each passing year. Jenni’s father, Bill—Talia’s last foster father—had answered that immense challenge with love, pure and simple.
In the pattern of unforgiveness she had clung to, Talia had created anger where none belonged. She had placed it squarely between her and Bill and let it fester so long. She didn’t know if she could face him. “There’s so much I have to say.”
The Gryphon Heist Page 31
