Surveillance (A Chris Bruen Novel Book 3)

by Reece Hirsch

  There was so much that she wanted to say to Chris, but she had only a few moments before someone was going to come back to find her.

  She was nearly ready to sign off when the bedroom door opened. It was Maria, staring at her with open suspicion. She closed the door behind her.

  Zoey logged off with a few quick keystrokes and shut the laptop. “Okay, I’m ready to roll.”

  “What were you doing?” Maria asked.

  “Checking the firewall activity,” Zoey said. “Trying to see how far they’ve gotten.”

  “I don’t believe you. You wouldn’t use that laptop to do that. You’d use the iMac.”

  “Sure I would. I’ve been using the laptop all night. If you weren’t so busy drinking tequila and celebrating, you’d know that.”

  Maria stepped closer. “Take your hands off that laptop. I’m going to check the history.”

  Zoey turned away from her. “I don’t have time for this.”

  Maria put a hand on her shoulder. “There’s time if I say there is.”

  “Okay, then come and get it.” Zoey took a quick step away, dropped the laptop on the desk, and cranked up the volume on the boom box—loud. The room filled with the warpath guitars and deadpan vocals of Liz Phair’s “6´1˝.”

  Maria smiled, recognizing what the move meant. She stepped to one side so that she stood between Zoey and the door.

  They stared at each other a moment, neither willing to make the first move. Maria was no bigger than Zoey, and from her hesitation she probably wasn’t any more accustomed to fighting, but judging from the look in her eye she might be meaner.

  Maria charged at Zoey in an awkward stutter step but managed to land a hard right to the chin. Zoey fell backward, stunned, into a low cinder-block bookcase against the wall that had served as the crew’s library. The makeshift bookcase collapsed under Zoey’s weight, and volumes fell to the floor. Zoey expected her opponent to fall on her with more blows, but Maria stood back, wincing and cursing; from the way she held her right hand, she might have broken it.

  As Zoey got her feet beneath her and propped herself up into a crouch, Maria charged her. Zoey tried to dodge, but too late. Maria kneed her in the chest and got her hands around Zoey’s throat, squeezing, thumbs digging into her windpipe. Zoey punched her in the head and ribs a couple of times, but Maria didn’t release her grip. Zoey was already beginning to black out, white spots blooming before her eyes.

  Desperate now, and with no weapons at hand, Zoey jabbed a sharp thumb into Maria’s left eye, which caused her to cry out and briefly loosen her grip. Zoey kicked Maria back and got out from under her. Maria staggered away across the book-littered floor, holding a hand to her eye. She reached the desk, opened a drawer, and came up with a pair of scissors, which she clutched in her good hand like a knife. Zoey picked up a hardback book and threw it at Maria’s head, hitting her but not doing any damage.

  Maria advanced more cautiously now with the scissors. Zoey threw another book at her, but she blocked it with her forearm. Zoey reached down and grabbed a thick George R. R. Martin hardback. Maria was already upon her. She swiped at Zoey’s face with the scissors, but Zoey turned her head, making it a narrow miss.

  As Maria’s momentum followed her errant stab, Zoey swung the heavy book around like a baseball bat and connected squarely with Maria’s face, breaking her nose with a loud crunch. Before Maria could fall, Zoey hit her again with the book on the back of the head, dropping it like an axe. Maria collapsed face-first on the floor, unconscious, at least for the moment.

  Zoey took the laptop back and quickly stepped out of the bedroom. She was startled to see Roland looking at her from the other end of the dim hallway, cast in outline by the brightly lit living room behind him.

  “You ready to go?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll be right there,” Zoey said. “All my stuff’s in the SUV.”

  “Okay,” he said, disappearing from the frame of the doorway.

  Zoey walked quickly down the hallway and out the rear door. Her heart raced; there’d be no turning back now. She drew a gasping breath, pushed through the door, and began running with the laptop tucked under her arm like a football.

  It was 3:00 a.m. and the streets were deserted. She sprinted down a narrow street of one-story shops in faded, alternating reds, greens, and yellows. Her steps echoed and clattered on the cobblestones.

  They would have found Maria by now, and she knew she had to get off of the long, straight streets, where it would be easy to spot her and run her down in their truck.

  Her breathing was growing labored, but she knew that she couldn’t stop. She needed to find an alley or some other place to hide, but the street was one long, uninterrupted row of closed storefronts.

  Finally, the street opened into a square with a brightly colored mural of a stern, sharp-featured Simón Bolívar rising out of the Andes as if carved out of the mountains. In front of the mural stood a statue consisting of a stone pillar topped by a hawk taking flight.

  Zoey heard an engine rev and ducked behind the statue. The black SUV pulled into the middle of the square and idled. A door opened, and Roland jumped out and made a circle in the empty intersection, peering down each of the streets that converged on the square.

  Zoey tried to hold her breath but found it impossible; she was still gasping for air after her dash. Loja had an elevation of some six thousand feet—higher than most cities in North America—so the thin air did not help matters.

  Roland’s footsteps drew near the statue. If he got much closer, he’d hear her. Zoey tried to hold her breath.

  The footsteps drew nearer still. If he walked around to the other side of the statue, it was all over. She clenched her hands into fists, preparing to spring at Roland if he came into view.

  “Get back in here, man!” Damian shouted. “She’s getting away!”

  Roland’s footsteps retreated, the car door slammed, and the SUV sped away. When the car engine became a distant drone, Zoey rose from behind the statue.

  She stood in the square and for the first time began to contemplate how she might escape from this town and then the country without being killed by Damian’s crew or the Sinaloa Cartel. All she had to work with was the clothing she had on and a laptop.

  She checked her pockets and confirmed: no wallet, no passport. They were probably still in the nightstand next to her bed.

  Back at the house.

  The house that the Sinaloa Cartel was headed for with the intent of killing every living thing in sight.

  Another sickening thought: if her passport was the only lead they had on the thieves, then they would be coming for her with everything they had, no matter where she ran.

  The choice was really no option at all: she had to return to the house to retrieve her wallet and passport.

  Zoey set out running again, this time back to the house that she had just fled from. She listened for approaching vehicles, but her harsh breathing drowned out all other sounds. She slowed to a jog as she approached the rear of the house. Morning had begun to kindle on the night sky’s eastern horizon. A few lights had come up in nearby houses, but the streets remained mostly empty. From a block away she circled around a building to see if there were any new cars out front but saw none. The cartel wasn’t on the scene yet.

  Zoey returned to the street that ran behind the rear of the house, quietly approaching the back door. She listened for a long moment for any sounds of movement inside. The house remained quiet.

  She nudged through the unlocked door and stood in the entrance to the hallway for several moments, ready to bolt at the slightest rustle. When she heard no noises, she advanced down the hallway to the bedroom that she had occupied.

  The bedroom door hung open, and she stepped inside. Zoey opened the bottom drawer of the nightstand and was profoundly relieved to find her wallet and passport where she had left them. Damian’s crew had been in such a rush to leave that they hadn’t had time to give the place a thorough inspection.


  As soon as Zoey shoved the wallet and passport in the pockets of her jeans, she heard a noise out front. A car engine and a sharp squeal of brakes. A power-surge jolt of pure, uncut fear seized her heart and scrambled her thoughts.

  The cartel had arrived.

  Zoey took several quick steps out of the bedroom. As she was entering the hallway, she heard a crash as the front door blew open.

  Male voices shouting in Spanish.

  Heavy footsteps.

  Zoey ran, hoping that the turmoil in the living room would cover the sound of her footfalls. She pushed through the door at the end of the hallway that led to the street behind the house. She didn’t dare take the moment that would have been required to turn and see if one of the cartel thugs had reached the entrance to the hallway. She knew exactly how narrow her margin of escape was—if she had any margin at all.

  Zoey made it into the street without hearing the burst of gunfire or feeling the impact of a bullet. She did take the time to shut the door slowly, avoiding the slam that would have brought her pursuers directly to her.

  The street remained largely deserted, now illuminated by the first light of dawn. Shortly, merchants would begin unlocking their shops and sweeping their sidewalks, the world at large indifferent to her peril. Zoey wasn’t sure if that was alarming or comforting.

  She walked briskly away from the house, turned at the first corner, and kept moving through the narrow streets of Loja for the next hour, trying to get lost and as far away as possible. She passed cathedrals, parks, and the town’s most recognizable landmark, La Puerta de la Ciudad, a structure built to resemble a medieval gatehouse, complete with a fake portcullis.

  Zoey walked on, entering a sparser neighborhood of schools and warehouses. With fewer buildings to obstruct the view, she saw the jagged, fog-draped mountains looming over the valley. She felt exposed and kept turning to watch for the black SUV with Damian’s crew. It was possible they were still looking for her, but she hoped that they were already well on their way to Quito. The choice between catching her and avoiding the cartel’s murder squad seemed an easy one.

  Zoey also watched for the members of the Sinaloa Cartel, but she knew they would blend in better than her former cohorts. They could be nearly any of the tough-looking young men that she passed.

  She decided that she needed to get out of view for a while until everyone gave up on combing the streets. She found an unlocked, empty warehouse on the outskirts of town and waited out the morning there, watching the sun advance across the floor from a broken skylight. In midafternoon she found a small library, took a seat, and looked at maps until it closed and she was forced to leave. As she walked out into the humid night, she was ready with a plan to get to Quito and exit the country.

  Zoey wasn’t certain whether it was riskier to remain in Ecuador as a highly noticeable expat or to run the gauntlet of the Quito airport in hopes of disappearing into the urban sprawl of Mexico City. She had the fake passport going for her. That and her promise to Chris made her decision: if it were at all possible, she would meet him in Mexico City.

  She gingerly touched her bruised windpipe and thought about how close she had come to dying. Zoey had sometimes felt guilty for not reading more poetry, but not today. A slender volume of poetry would never have done the job. No, it had taken the thousand-page George R. R. Martin hardback A Storm of Swords to knock that bitch out.

  32

  By the time Sam had gotten his bearings, the door to the sedan had already slammed shut and they had pulled out into traffic. Its black-tinted windows made it futile to signal to pedestrians for help.

  Sam had been abducted by three men in suits, two sitting across from him and another beside him. They were hard-looking men and almost certainly armed.

  “Who are you?” Sam asked. He didn’t ask why they had picked him up, because he already had a pretty good idea.

  The man sitting directly across from him, who had a closely shaved head, said, “You may not believe this yet, but we’re your friends.” He spoke with a heavy Russian accent.

  “So, friends, are you going to kill me?”

  “No, no, of course not. But if we hadn’t pulled you off the sidewalk, you would already be dead.”

  “Were you the ones who tried to kill me in my hotel room?”

  “No, not us. That was your former colleagues.”

  “So I’m going to ask again—who are you?”

  “SVR, Russian intelligence. Our government is prepared to offer you sanctuary—from your own government.”

  “And what if I refuse?”

  “Please understand, this is not kidnapping. We will respect your choice. But if we put you back on the sidewalk, then you will never get to tell your story. You will die.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To Moscow—with your permission, of course.”

  “Like Snowden.”

  “Yes, like the great patriot Snowden.”

  “What will you expect from me in return for sanctuary? You want me for the propaganda value.”

  “I’m just an agent assigned to bring you in. My name is Alex. My boss can provide details. But, yes, hosting you will embarrass your country. This is not lost on us.”

  “And if I refuse to go, what happens?”

  The man placed his hands together, imploring Sam. “It’s not like that. We will not hurt you. Other people? Yes. But not us.”

  “I think you can understand that I want to be very certain about that point.”

  “Of course. You weren’t a field operative, were you?”

  “No, I was a data analyst. No one has ever tried to kill me before.”

  “Yes, I’m acquainted with data analysts at SVR. Gray little men. I know this must be very upsetting for you. Please know that you’re out of danger now. Breathe. It will be okay.”

  The driver of the car shouted through the open partition in Russian. At the same time Sam felt the g-force of acceleration as the car turned a sharp corner.

  “What’s going on?” Sam asked.

  The man next to him was turning around in his seat to look through the rear window. He reached into his jacket and drew a pistol.

  “Your countrymen are following us,” Alex said. “We’re going to have to lose them before we can go to the airport.”

  “I thought I was safe now.”

  “Please,” Alex said, raising a finger to shut him up.

  The car sped down one of the city’s cobbled thoroughfares, with the river on one side and medieval stone buildings and red-tiled roofs on the other. The three SVR agents spoke tersely to one another in Russian as they studied their pursuers through the rear window.

  Sam tried to look too, but he couldn’t tell which car belonged to the Working Group agents. Even though he didn’t doubt that his former employer would welcome the opportunity to kill him, he still felt vaguely disloyal being even momentarily on the same side as the Russians.

  The car took another vertiginous turn and raced toward a stoplight. The light turned red, but the driver kept barreling through the intersection. An atonal blast of car horns behind them as their pursuers followed. When he didn’t hear the crunch of colliding metal, Sam assumed that the Working Group agents remained on their tail.

  More terse comments in Russian were exchanged by his captors.

  Alex began speaking urgently into his cell phone. When the call ended, he said, “We’re going to stop up ahead, and you and I are going to get out, along with Anatoly.” He nodded at the Nordic-looking agent sitting next to Sam.

  The car stopped abruptly, hurling Sam forward. The door opened, and Anatoly shoved him out onto the pavement in front of a store that had a facade resembling modular gray glass boxes. As soon as Sam, Anatoly, and Alex were out of the car, it sped away with a shriek of tires.

  “Come,” Alex said, herding him toward the revolving-door entrance of Kotva Department Store.

  Before they could enter the store, Sam took one last look back at the
car that they had just climbed out of. He was just in time to see it all unfold.

  With sickening deliberation, a heavy van pulled slowly in front of the black sedan. The town car T-boned the van, its front end crumpling and the windows shattering.

  Before anyone could climb out of the town car, it was surrounded by men with guns drawn. The sedan’s doors opened, and the Russians emerged—the driver and the other agent who had remained behind.

  There was no shooting, and the Russian agents had their hands raised. From the body language, it looked like they were all shouting at one another.

  When the Americans saw that Sam was not in the car, they began looking around for him, heads swiveling. Anatoly pushed him through the revolving door, and they disappeared into the crowded department store.

  With the Russians on either side of him, Sam had no opportunity to think about escape. They strode past high-cheekboned women offering perfume samples, glowing white-lit cosmetics cases, then flat-screen TVs (all broadcasting the same soccer match) and electronics.

  They went directly down the central passage of the city block–wide store until they reached another set of revolving doors that opened onto another busy street. When they emerged from the store, another black sedan was idling outside.

  The door opened as they approached, and Alex and Anatoly roughly ushered him inside.

  Once they were back in the flow of traffic, Alex seemed to relax a bit. “If you hadn’t gotten out of the car when you did, what do you think would have happened to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said.

  “I think you do know,” Alex said, pointing a finger to his head to indicate that Sam was smarter than he let on. “You know. That’s what your government thinks of you.”

  “Those people are not my government,” Sam said. “My government was elected. They’re in the shadows.”

  “You live in the data too long,” Alex said. “It makes you naive. Of course they are the government. They are more the government than your elected officials. Presidents come and go, but your NSA, my SVR—they go on.”