Pushing Brilliance

by Tim Tigner

  “Why?”

  “Because they were winning. My case was looking hopeless. And because killing you doesn’t fit that scenario at all.”

  She was quick processing that one too. “You’re right. I agree.”

  “Somebody has a business interest they’re trying to protect, Katya. A business interest that my father and brother somehow threatened. A business interest that’s still vulnerable.”

  “And you plan to expose them?”

  “I plan to destroy them. These people killed my family. When I get done with them, they will–” I stopped myself there, remembering that I wasn’t talking to Dix or one of the guys. “They’ll regret it, for a second or two.”

  Katya didn’t seem put off by this glimpse of my inner animal, reminding me of where she’d come from and what she’d been through growing up in Moscow during perestroika.

  “Where are we going to start?” she asked.

  Her use of the plural pronoun rang sweet in my ears. “We’re going to start with one of the things that changed. We’re going to start with the guys who are trying to kill you.”

  Chapter 20

  Cul-de-sac

  I FELT LIKE I’d spotted the Loch Ness Monster. It was two hours after sunset, but the East Palo Alto rooftop was still warming us from below when a black Escalade entered the cul-de-sac, running dark. A shiny black hole in the calm California night. Katya inhaled sharply beside me as we watched it glide to a stop beside a red curb.

  The driver kept the motor running.

  “What are they doing?” she whispered.

  “They’re counting the windows to be sure your light is on. They’ll get excited in a second when the oscillating fan shifts the curtains. After two days of reporting failure, you can be sure they’re eager for good news and redemption.”

  The Escalade rolled forward, lights still off. It drove quietly past the entrance to Katya’s apartment building before backing into a visitor’s spot. This time, the driver cut the engine. The passenger pushed a button on the roof before they opened the doors, killing the cabin light. Katya had told me they were disciplined. Apparently they were also meticulous.

  I smiled. If I was right, their professionalism would soon be working in my favor.

  Both the goons’ heads crested the Escalade when they stood. I put them at 6’4” or 6’5” — Katya had been right, they were taller than me. Her mind hadn’t exaggerated despite the fear and stress. I tucked that observation away for future reference.

  They weren’t wearing wraparound sunglasses, but otherwise the pair matched her description. Black suits and buzz cuts, or as she’d put it, Secret Service agents with t-shirts rather than ties. I saw no evidence of firearms, and knew their mission wouldn’t require them. Against Katya’s relatively fragile frame, 500 pounds of beef would more than suffice. I watched them turn and walk toward Katya’s building, without locking their car.

  “Will you be okay up here alone for a few minutes?” I asked Katya.

  “I’ll be fine. Will you? I’m worried about you.” She inclined her head toward the giant receding figures. “Maybe we should call the police?”

  “No worries. These guys won’t know what hit them until it’s too late.”

  Rolling to my left, I pulled out my iPhone and tapped the only stored contact. As Katya’s phone began to vibrate, I dropped over the side of the two-story building and lowered myself to the ground using nothing but handholds, a technique climbers called campusing because of the campus boards widely used to practice climbing with only hands.

  I was halfway across the parking lot when Katya’s whispered words came across my wireless earpiece. “You didn’t tell me your plan.”

  “The general plan is to disable one of them and question the other. I was planning to strike when they exited your apartment. Whack one and push the other back inside. But now I think I’ll wait to jump them in their car. More private, and the confinement will work to my advantage.” As we spoke, I slipped in the rear driver’s door and ducked behind the second-row passenger seat. “Let me know when you see them coming,”

  I pulled on a black balaclava. I’d swapped my habitual white tee for a long-sleeved black one, and with the headgear was now sufficiently shadow-like. “When they find your place empty, they might wait inside to ambush you, but my guess is that they’ll come back to the car to wait for your return.”

  “Why is that your guess?”

  “It gives them more control and options if you don’t come home alone.”

  We lapsed into silence.

  The most recent twelve months aside, my entire adult life had been one competitive mission after another. First with the Olympic biathlon team, then with the CIA’s Special Operations Group. Observation and assault. Measures and countermeasures. Winners and losers. This was what I knew. My comfort zone.

  Katya, on the other hand, had spent her adult life immersed in probability theory. Distribution functions and stochastic processes and the theorems of Kolmogorov and Cardano. No doubt she found my tools and techniques as foreign and intimidating as I’d find the equations in her notebooks.

  “How did you end up at the CIA?” she asked, burning off nervous energy.

  I played with the release lever on the bucket seat before me as I formulated my response. It flipped the seat forward, first pancaking it and then rolling the whole assembly against the front passenger seat. It was quick and quiet, yielding sufficient room to operate.

  I decided to answer Katya’s question with a question. “Suppose you tripped and hit your head, and lost your ability to solve equations. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was wrought with emotion. “I’d be devastated. Mathematics is my life. Oh, I see. That’s essentially what happened to you with the Olympics. But I don’t see the connection, except that biathletes and spies both need to be sharpshooters.”

  Boy was she quick. Her mind hummed like a Gatling gun. “The connection was indirect. Not wanting to become bitter after my injury, I funneled all my energy and frustrations into rock climbing. I went straight for free-soloing, tackling cliffs like they were battlefields, and I was my ancient namesake. I was reckless. But with my Olympic conditioning, I quickly set a couple of speed records. Nothing newsworthy anywhere outside Colorado or climbing circles, but enough to make the local papers. The top guy at the Special Operations Group, Granger, was visiting the Air Force Academy when he saw an article and got curious. He ended up recruiting me. Kinda made me his pet project and brought in top guns like Dix for my training, since I didn’t have a Special Forces background. I was very fortunate.”

  “So why did you leave? Wait! Here they come!”

  “Both of them?”

  “Both.”

  “Okay. Please mute your microphone. If bad becomes worse, call 911 and give them the Escalade’s license plate number.”

  Chapter 21

  Bad Connection

  EARLIER IN THE DAY, I’d hit a military surplus store to stock up for our little operation. My purchases included the black tee and balaclava I now wore, plus a sap — a heavy little flexible club designed for knockout blows to the head.

  As the assassins approached, I readied Dix’s new Sig in my left hand, palmed the sap in my right, and rehearsed the combat sequence in my head.

  The driver was the first to reach his door. He slid in and started the car. His partner hopped in a second later, rocking the whole car.

  “Zdec budem zhdat? We going to wait here?” the driver asked in Russian.

  “Ona machinu znayet. She knows the car. Luche sprachemsya. Better to hide.”

  The driver flipped the selector and pulled out slowly. I hoped Katya had heard them so she wouldn’t panic. The seatbelt reminder began to chime. Listen to it, guys, I willed them. Buckle up. Strap yourselves in. The passenger complied but the driver ignored the chime’s warning. He circled the cul-de-sac, looking for an inconspicuous parking place with the right vantage point. I didn’t dare raise my head
to look, but the map in my mind had them driving a route similar to the one Katya and I had used that morning when searching for their Escalade.

  The passenger pointed. “Look, her car’s in its spot. She must be at a neighbors. Or maybe the gym. This dump have a gym?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I decided not to wait to find out what would happen next. I wanted the driver busy driving and the passenger strapped in. I brought my right hand across my body, preparing it for a backhanded knockout sap strike to the side of the passenger’s skull. Still holding the Sig in my left, I readied my middle finger on the seat lever. I pictured the two giant enforcers attacking Katya, pummeling her tiny frame with their massive arms. Rabid dogs with a rag doll, begging to be put down. I felt my muscles twitch and my adrenaline rise and then I flipped the seat lever.

  I rocketed forward, swinging the sap as I flew. Whether the move took a quarter of a second or a half, it proved to be all the time they needed to react. These were no ordinary men. They weren’t rent-a-cops or mob enforcers or strip mall martial artists. They had combat-hardened reflexes as quick and true as those of any elite soldier I’d known. And their eyes, their piercing, intelligent eyes were so unexpected that their gaze nearly stopped me in my tracks.

  But it didn’t.

  I adapted instead.

  Ratcheted it up.

  The passenger spun fast enough that the sap struck him between the eyes. The driver was faster still. He had his Glock out and sweeping in my direction before the sap’s sickening crack had fully registered on my ears.

  From there on it was a race.

  I was bringing my Sig up from below.

  He was bringing his Glock around from the front.

  I still had a three-foot arc to traverse.

  He only had two.

  It didn’t matter how much faster his gun would be lined up with my head than my gun with his. Ten seconds or a tenth of a second, the end result would be the same.

  He was leaning forward, giving his shoulder room to move.

  I was leaning left, forcing his arc to extend.

  I was straining and groaning and willing my muscles to move faster than they’d ever moved before. But I couldn’t move my whole body faster than he could move his arm.

  He was going to win.

  My whole reason for being collapsed down to completing a single task. My brain didn’t need to think. My heart didn’t need to beat. My lungs didn’t need to breathe. For that one split second of time, the only thing I had to do was prevent that arm from traversing those three feet.

  The Escalade is a luxury vehicle. It’s high on polish and full on feature, kind on the eye and cruel on the wallet. The driver’s seat is designed to make its occupant feel like a million bucks. It’s wrapped in rich leather, coddling the captain, while a tough plastic shell defends his backside from kicking kids and clumsy cargo. Inside, the driver’s seat is packed with framing tubes and motion systems, heating elements and cooling fans. Wires and rods and cushions and sensors. It’s a miracle of modern engineering.

  A nine millimeter parabellum, while an engineering marvel in its own right, is a far less sophisticated artifact. A quarter ounce of lead wearing a full metal jacket, it escapes the barrel of a Sig P320 at 1,300 feet per second. Minimal weight, but tremendous velocity, and spec’d to punch through 14 inches of hog muscle. I didn’t know how 14 inches of pork compared to an Escalade seat, but I was about to find out.

  I didn’t wait for the headshot. I didn’t even wait to clear the seat. I started squeezing the trigger as soon as there was flesh in the flight path. Bang. Bang. Bang. Buttocks. Kidney. Heart. The driver’s arm dropped, head slumped, and body rolled — lifeless, onto the door.

  Glancing beyond the windshield, I saw that while I’d stopped the driver, I’d failed to halt the car. We were now seconds from colliding with a parked pickup and attracting attention.

  I dove for the selector switch and slammed it into park with my right while I swung the Sig back at the passenger with my left. My eyes met his, but they weren’t looking back. He wasn’t dazed, he was dead.

  I’d killed them both.

  That was a problem. Dead men tell no tales.

  Chapter 22

  Travel Plans

  I PUT AN ARM around Katya’s shoulders as she averted her eyes from the fresh corpses of her would-be killers. She was shivering, but her mind wasn’t shaken.

  “What are we going to do now?” Her query was analytical, not accusatory, and it nailed the big question on the head. We’d just lost our only leads.

  I was amazed by her resilience. She was a 28-year-old academic, not a homicide detective. “Are you all right? I know this isn’t your comfort zone.”

  “I may not have been in jail, but I’ve been out of my comfort zone since I found Colin’s body. Then these killers came for me. Twice. You saved my life. So while I may not be all right, I am a lot better with them gone. But, now that we don’t have anyone to question, I am quite anxious to learn what’s next?”

  I was happy to keep the analytical side of her mind occupied. “We’ve got a tactical decision, and a strategic decision.”

  She gave me a lay-it-on-me wag of her chin.

  “Tactically, we have to decide what to do with the bodies. Leave them or hide them.”

  “Why would you hide them?”

  “To confuse the enemy. Always a good move.” I paused there to help the point stick, like Granger always did. “Put yourself in your assailants’ shoes for a minute. They’ve been reporting failure for nearly a week now. Odds are their boss is pretty upset. Odds are he’s not the warm-and-fuzzy type. Life and death situation like this, I’m guessing he threatened them. Applied a bit of stick. So if they disappear now, he won’t be certain if they were killed — or they ran.”

  Katya took a second to process our unusual problem. “Where would you hide them?”

  “We could dumpster the bodies and leave the Escalade to be stolen. Or we could cover the bodies with a blanket in the back of the Escalade and leave it in long-term parking at the airport.”

  While Katya wrapped her big brain around our body-disposal options — a first for her, I’m guessing — a car entered the cul-de-sac, headlights blazing.

  We were in her Ford, parked in her assigned spot like a couple at the end of a date. But the corpses were exposed. They were bleeding out where they’d died, in the front seats of a car badly parked in a fire lane. If anybody bothered to look, they’d be on 911 before their screaming stopped. Whatever we decided to do, we had to do it quickly.

  “You also referenced a strategic decision?”

  My brain had bridged that gap while Katya was contemplating. “I think I just figured that out. We should head for the airport. And since we’re going there anyway–”

  “We have our plan for the bodies.” Katya’s voice was upbeat, given the circumstances.

  “Right. Let’s run inside so you can change into jeans and throw your travel essentials into your backpack. If you’ll give me your two worst blankets, some window cleaner, and a roll of paper towels, I’ll get to work down here.”

  “Slow down, Achilles. You’re being cryptic again.”

  “I don’t mean to be. I’m just excited. I found the common thread connecting your assailants with the death of my family. It’s just a thread, but it’s enough for us to start unraveling this thing.”

  “But we didn’t learn anything from the hit men. You killed them before question one.”

  “That was my first reaction too. But then I realized that I was overlooking the obvious.” I wanted to let her figure it out. She’d feel better if she did.

  The dim light from a streetlamp filtered through the windshield onto Katya’s contemplative face. I watched her mind working it. She seemed to appreciate the mental exercise and momentary distraction. After a few blank seconds, I threw her a prompt. “Remember our discussion last night about motive?”

  She nodded. “You concluded that your father
and Colin were killed to gain some unknown business benefit. You convinced me that no other motive explained the incident.”

  “Right. Now think about the hit men. What do they have in common with a business interest my brother and father shared?

  “We didn’t learn anything from the hit men. At least I didn’t. Did you see something?”

  “It wasn’t what I saw. It was what we heard.”

  Katya was clearly frustrated that she couldn’t grasp it, but I knew that she would. She began thinking out loud. “They were talking about what to do. Where to wait for me. They saw my car and figured I was at a neighbor’s house or the gym. Nothing about themselves or their boss …” Her voice trailed off, then I saw her get it. “Russian. They were speaking Russian. Your father and brother had business in Russia.”

  “Can’t be a coincidence. Do you happen to know who Colin worked with?”

  “The company folded.”

  “The company may no longer exist, but hopefully some of the former employees still do. Did you know any of them?”

  She thought about that for a moment, her face delightfully animated. “I didn’t move in with him until after Vitalis closed, so I don’t know much about it at all. I do know that he was the only company employee in Russia. As a startup they outsourced everything. His focus as chief medical officer was the clinical trial, and for that he worked with a contract research organization based out of the Sechenov Medical School. The Clinical Connection or something like that. It’s over near Moscow State University. The only person Colin ever mentioned was the clinical coordinator, Dr. Tarasova. Tanya Tarasova. She called him more than once. I can look up the office number and ask for her.”

  “Excellent. When we get to the airport, give her a call and make an appointment.”

  “We’re going to Moscow? That’s the flight we have to catch?”

  “You got it.”