Laynie Portland, Spy Resurrected

by Vikki Kestell

  He frowned and considered the unanticipated twist.

  Does this affect the plan?

  No. As long as the woman is not part of the corruption within the agency—as long as she conveys my intelligence to the director without being intercepted, I need not change the plan.

  The intelligence must reach him. Nothing else matters.

  And it mattered a great deal.

  Less than three months after the attacks of 9/11, new assaults against the US were in the making. In fact, the next terrorist action was mere weeks away, a series of coordinated New Year’s Eve attacks across the US eastern states to further demoralize America—to soften her up for the coup d'état, a stroke so brazen and devastating that it would drop America to her knees, shake her economy, and trigger her fury. The attack would pit America against the Russian Federation—which was the objective.

  All of the attacks are engineered to point back to Russia.

  And when tensions between America and Russia escalated to all-out war? Russia’s attention would swing away from Chechnya and her former Soviet Bloc states, providing the opening for every separatist militia to strike in concert under the direction of AGFA and its ruthless, single-minded leader, Mohammed Eldar Sayed.

  Sayed.

  Should the moles within the director’s organization intercept this woman? And should she be found to be carrying the specifics of the next plot? Then AGFA would know that they had a leak. Sayed would know he had been betrayed from within.

  Two things would happen. First, Sayed would goad AGFA into a more tightly controlled structure and move to purge anyone he deemed a possible leak. Proof of guilt would not be required—Sayed was merciless. He would cut off every possible avenue of treason no matter how loyal or close to him.

  Second, Sayed would order his generals to alter the plans.

  Cossack thought on the tenuous alliance between his militia and AGFA, the fragile trust Sayed had bestowed on him and his people.

  For more than twenty years, Cossack had fought for Chechen independence. He had cut off every tie from his past, had given himself fully to the Chechen cause, had espoused Islam, and had been more than “careful.” He told those who asked that he had been born in eastern Ukraine to a Chechen man and a Ukrainian woman, that his father had filled his childhood with tales of Chechen glory and independence. He spoke Laamaroy muott Chechen, the dialect of the southern mountain tribes as the native he pretended to be. He spoke fluent Russian with a Chechen accent, and he spoke passable Arabic.

  He had taken particular pains to ensure that no one knew he spoke English.

  More than once, other militia leaders had spoken English in his presence—much of it broken, all of it heavily accented—thinking their conversation was private. Cossack had come away with important facts and a sense of how they viewed him.

  He had lived this hard and lonely life to infiltrate the radical Islamists, to keep his fingers on the pulse of the Chechen wars with Russia, and to pass on to his handlers at home any immediate and long-term intelligence he could gather. He was the eyes and ears of the US as closely embedded with the radicals as he could get.

  Would it all be in vain?

  I and my militia would certainly fall under Sayed’s suspicion. At the very least, he would box us out while they changed their plans. At worst, he would move to purge us. Either way, the attacks would go forward—and I would not be privy to the altered plans. The US would have no warning.

  The possibility of exposure caused Cossack’s gorge to rise. He ground his teeth. That cannot happen.

  Cossack watched as his men, Deshi and Chovka, stepped from the shadows and drew alongside the woman.

  It was time. Throwing some coins on the table, Cossack rose and threaded his way toward the tea room’s back exit to retrieve his motorbike.

  LAYNIE UNDERSTOOD THAT the innocuous red bag dangling from her arm marked her as the director’s operative. She had not taken ten steps before two men converged on her, one on either side. They kept their faces and eyes forward as did Laynie. Outwardly, the men appeared to be ordinary shoppers in the bazaar, unknown and unrelated to her—until the man on her right nudged her elbow.

  “Follow,” he whispered in heavily accented English, never turning his face or eyes in her direction. “We have car.”

  He walked on, and Laynie fell in a little behind him while the second man dropped behind her. As they reached the street at the edge of the market, a black late-model Russian-manufactured Lada Riva sedan pulled to the curb. The man ahead of her threw open the rear door. Laynie did not hesitate. She climbed in and scooted toward the opposite door. The man got in after her.

  The second man took the front passenger seat. As he closed the car door, he hissed to the driver, “Go!”

  The driver edged away from the curb and expertly maneuvered the Riva through the congested foot traffic. A block later, the pedestrians thinned. He sped up and turned onto a wider road where traffic flowed in both directions—cars, vans, trucks, and motorcycles moving as fast as their drivers chose. The driver of the Riva was obviously accustomed to navigating through the chaotic melee, and they sped onward, dodging other vehicles, changing lanes without notice.

  No one spoke.

  Several blocks later, the driver slowed as the car approached a busy intersection. One vehicle ahead, a woman had left the curb on their right, dragging a small cart filled with produce directly into the path of ongoing traffic. In response to the slowdown, horns blared, drivers cursed in frustration, and tires squealed as they sought purchase on the asphalt.

  With her head bent toward the pavement, the woman in the intersection seemed either heedless of the danger or oblivious to it.

  Laynie’s driver stomped his brakes to avoid rear-ending the car in front of them. About then, the woman lifted her head and raised a shaking fist. She rained down curses on the cars and their drivers before continuing her slow progress across the intersection. As traffic began to move, Laynie’s driver looked to the right and let up on the brakes. Laynie glanced right, too, just as the driver turned his head to the left. Suddenly the driver shouted. Laynie’s head snapped left in time to only glimpse what was bearing down on them from that direction.

  She cried out as the heavy truck plowed into them, striking the front side of the Riva including the driver’s door at around forty miles an hour. Metal shrieked and crumpled. The truck’s forward motion carried the sedan across the sidewalk and slammed it into a high retaining wall. Moments later, the truck reversed, leaving its bumper embedded in the Riva’s frame.

  THE TRUCK BACKED, TURNED in the direction from which the Riva had come, and idled in the intersection. The driver swore as he fought the gearshift, trying to force it to move. The truck’s transmission protested then acquiesced as the driver, sweating and laboring with furious intent, at last jammed it into gear and stomped on the accelerator, lumbering away from the accident, slowly picking up speed.

  The Riva, its right side mashed against the retaining wall, blocked the sidewalk. Concerned pedestrians drew near to render aid. Other vehicles stopped and disgorged their drivers and passengers. Many hands worked to wrench open the driver’s door and the passenger door behind him. The driver’s door, however, was completely caved in. The steering column had crushed the driver’s chest and his head lolled unnaturally. The would-be rescuers muttered to each other that it was too late for him and set to work prying the rear door open.

  Uniformed Tbilisi police rolled up in two unmarked cars followed by an ambulance. Brandishing batons, two policemen drove the civilians away from the wreck and demanded that they move their vehicles out of the intersection. The remaining officers took over the work on the rear door behind the driver’s seat. The paramedics wheeled a lumpy gurney to the Riva, ready to transport accident victims as they were extricated. The officers labored feverishly, shouting at each other to hurry, because the car sizzled and steamed. Thick black smoke roiled from under the car, and the smell of gasoline was everywhere.r />
  With a tortured screech of metal, the door behind the driver’s seat gave way, and the paramedics pushed the gurney closer. Only one of the car’s occupants, the man in the far rear seat, stirred. He tried to move, but the mechanism that adjusted the seat ahead of him forward or back had given way. The passenger seat, along with the weight of the passenger’s dead body, sat on his right foot, crushing it. A woman sat beside him, behind the driver. Hands reached for her unconscious figure first, but the driver’s seat, pushed backward, wedged her in place.

  The smell of gasoline . . . and the odor of something on the edge of burning filled the air with choking fumes. The conscious passenger struggled urgently to free himself and screamed for the officers and paramedics to help him.

  “Hurry! Hurry! Please! My foot is stuck!”

  The smoke thickened. Flames shot out from under the car’s crumpled hood, and onlookers shouted warnings. The police and paramedics backed away, their frustration apparent to the crowd as the heat began to scorch them.

  It was too late to save the passengers.

  The man in the rear seat shrieked with fear until—with a gasping whoooomp—the gas tank ignited and the back end of the car lifted six feet off the ground. When it crashed back down onto the street, fire and flaming debris rained down thirty feet in all directions.

  Not all the onlookers had heeded the police’s commands to move back nor did they escape injury from the falling debris. Even the police and paramedics retreating from the burning vehicle suffered minor cuts and burns. A fire truck arrived to put out the inferno. The paramedics shook their heads, loaded their gurney into the ambulance, and drove away. Soon after, the police, too, left the scene.

  TEN MINUTES AFTER DRIVING away from the tea room, Cossack arrived at the prearranged meeting place, an abandoned house with a partially caved-in roof. All seemed as it should be when he climbed from his motorbike and walked it up the drive to the house and its dilapidated garage. His men would have arrived before him and parked inside the garage. Their orders were to maintain the illusion of the abandoned house. No lights. No opened curtains. No signs of activity.

  But something felt “off” to Cossack. He scanned the muddy drive, looking for tire tracks in the damp earth. He saw none. He pried open the side door to the garage and peered inside.

  It was empty.

  His stomach churned with sudden anxiety. Do not panic. They will be along shortly. Perhaps an accident stalled traffic on their route.

  He stowed his motorbike inside the garage out of sight and waited. When they still did not arrive, he began to truly worry.

  Where are they? How could they not be here by now?

  He retrieved his motorbike, straddled it, and coasted down the drive to the road. He then started the engine and drove off, planning to backtrack along his men’s most likely route.

  As he drove, he questioned himself and his planning. Could Sayed know that I came to Tbilisi? Could my plans have been found out? Is my cover blown?

  He shook his head. I think not. I’ve been too careful. No one from Chechnya knows I am here, not even the most trusted captains in my militia who think me in Turkey buying arms. And for this meeting, I have used only men carefully recruited over the years, Chechen Christians whose families fled to Georgia because of the war, men who would be utterly unknown to my militia.

  His analytical mind spoke back to him. You are thinking of your end of this operation. If there are leaks, they must be on the director’s end.

  Cossack turned onto one of the busier streets his men might have taken. Traffic coming at him was not as dense as the traffic going the opposite direction.

  Odd . . .

  Lifting his eyes and searching far down the road, he spotted a smudge of black smoke. The discomfort in his gut intensified, and he tasted bile in his throat. He hawked, spat it out, and drove toward the source of the smoke.

  That logical part of his mind spoke again. Could the operation at the director’s end have been compromised?

  Yes, he admitted.

  Could the moles in the director’s organization have had the director’s agent followed to Tbilisi?

  Quite possibly.

  He relaxed a little. If so, my end of the operation should be secure, my cover still safe.

  Less than two minutes later he came upon the smoldering ruin of a car and the remnant of the crowd that had watched it burn. Cossack’s heart thudded as he recognized the Riva’s remains. The sedan had been pushed into a high stone wall. Whatever had hit the unfortunate vehicle had been big enough to pancake its front end against the wall and crush the driver’s seat.

  Although the firemen had doused the vehicle, the car’s burned framework continued to smolder and radiate heat. The door behind the driver hung ajar on blackened, warped hinges.

  What happened? Did anyone get out and escape the flames?

  He dismounted and walked his motorbike past the wreck, staring into the rear seat, forcing his disbelieving mind to acknowledge what he saw. He slowed, stopped, put down the bike’s kickstand, and drew nearer to the charred wreckage.

  He squatted a few feet from the open rear seat. Heat and residual smoke from the fire wafted around him as he took stock of what he saw.

  The human remains within the wreckage were misshapen—spines twisted grotesquely, arms contorted by superheated flames, the jaws of the skulls frozen in agonized gapes or grimaces.

  He swallowed and forced himself to count. Then recount. No, there was no mistaking the charred outlines of the corpses.

  Four of them.

  Chapter 2

  AN INCESSANT CHIRPING roused Jaz. She rolled from her cot and remembered too late that she wasn’t in a real bed—or how near to the floor her cot was. She landed on the cold gym floor with a bone-jarring thud.

  “Ow.”

  Dragging herself onto her knees, she found her chair and climbed into it. The screen before her was a blur until she’d wiped her eyes several times.

  What time is it? Right. Oh-dead-thirty.

  She wiped her eyes again. The clock on her computer read 3:17 a.m. Blur or not, she already knew what the chirping meant—she’d lost the signal from Bella’s phone.

  She checked the carrier Bella’s phone was on. No problems. No outages.

  Tobin appeared beside her, his hair tousled, his face bleary. They had both set up camp in the gym.

  “What’s up?”

  “Lost the signal to Bella’s phone.”

  “Where was she when—”

  “Yah, yah. Hold your horses. I’m getting to it, Yank.”

  Jaz retraced the last cell towers the phone had pinged off of, then zoomed in on an online map of Tbilisi.

  “Huh.”

  “What? What does ‘huh’ mean?”

  “Dunno for sure. Her rendezvous with you-know-who was set for noon. That’s just seventeen minutes ago, Tbilisi time. Her phone pinged continuously from . . . around here,” Jaz jabbed the map, “that’s near her hotel, before it moved up this river about two miles, then over to here.”

  She poked the map again. “That’s the bazaar.”

  “So, she made her rendezvous.”

  “Yah. I’d say so, but . . .”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Dunno. Her phone dropped off the carrier’s network three minutes ago.”

  Tobin chewed his lower lip. “Think you-know-who took her phone and pulled the battery from it?”

  “Good OPSEC if he did.”

  “Then we should expect her phone to reconnect when they’re done meeting.”

  “Sounds right.” She fiddled with a new stick of Black Jack gum but didn’t unwrap it.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just . . . gonna wait up for a while.”

  “Tea?” Tobin suggested.

  “Better make it coffee.”

  “Really?”

  “You overcaffeinated Americans have ruined my love for tea. ’Sides, I don’t want to sleep again until I’ve reacquired her
signal.”

  “Me, neither. Coffee it is.”

  Tobin wandered off to fire up the task force’s coffee maker.

  COSSACK LEFT THE SCENE with the horrific images burning behind his eyes. As bad as they were, he’d seen too many brutal deaths in the last twenty years for the images to throw off his thinking.

  The director’s operative is dead. Men from my Tbilisi cell are dead.

  A number of important questions nagged at him. Was the car crash a fluke, an accident? How likely was that? He shook his head. Worst case, it was intentional. If intentional, then the operation had been compromised—from Wolfe’s end.

  Cossack sighed within himself. If the mole inside the director’s organization had given Sayed the identity of the director’s operative, that meant that Sayed’s people had followed the woman from the US to Tbilisi. And from her hotel to the market.

  Sayed.

  Cossack shuddered. It is, perhaps, a mercy that my men died with the woman. If they had been taken alive? Sayed’s people would have interrogated them. As loyal as they were to me, under torture they would have eventually given my description to Sayed. Yes, it was a mercy for them to have died quickly. And a relief for me.

  He checked himself into a cheap Muslim boarding house where his tribal dress drew no comment, paid cash for the room, and wheeled his motorbike inside. He locked the door behind him and gave himself over to analysis of the situation.

  My cover should be intact, but the New Year’s attacks are still in motion. Even if I don’t possess every nuance, I can give the director sufficient details for his people to unravel the rest, if—if—I can convey what I know without the intel being intercepted.

  He thought of the dead woman in the car’s charred remains. At the very least, the director needs to be told his operative is dead.

  He preferred breaking the bad news directly to Wolfe—something of a trick since the director’s calls could very well be monitored and even recorded by the moles in his organization.

  His next steps would require forethought and planning.