by Derek Haas
“Twenty-four hours. Set out from the embassy in your car and head north. I’ll flash my lights when it’s safe to pull over. Don’t fuck this up.”
Clay got up and left before the chicken came.
He spent that night at the Vega Hotel near Izmailovsky Park, the kind of high-rise hotel built for the 1980 Olympics with so many rooms, more than seventy-five hundred, that each customer was scrutinized with the same attentiveness with which you might look at an individual blade of grass on a lawn. He stayed in the room, with the DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the door handle, and thought of Marika. Had he been rash to dump her in such a place? Was he foolish not to keep her where he could see her? No, it was the right thing to do. The next bit was going to get messy, and if he was caught, or worse, she would have a fighting chance. He slept, and woke with muddy memories of unsettling dreams.
Molina had dark circles under his eyes when he handed over the folder. He peered at his feet and said, “It’s there all of it it’s there.”
Clay took it from him without looking at the contents and headed back to his car.
Molina shouted, “You won’t see me again thank you I’m sorry for what I did thank you I’m—” but his words were cut off when Clay shut his car door, indifferent. Maybe his next assignment would be to track down Molina and kill him. If so, he would show no remorse, and the promise not to come looking for him would prove as empty as his mercy.
They already had Nelson in Moscow and were holding him at a well-armed, well-guarded safe house on Teatralny Porezd. The plan was to transfer him to the exchange via the popular Novoryazanskoye Highway, which would include a short trip through a double-lane tunnel. The exchange would take place on a closed runway at Domodedovo Airport. The Americans would have a G5 already parked on the tarmac, waiting to whisk Nelson away. The Russians would load Marika into the same Suburban that Nelson had just occupied, and she would evaporate from the world as quickly as dew on a meadow. They would use two black Suburbans for the transit. The entire trip, from safe house to airport, would take less than twelve minutes.
Clay made a phone call to Stedding and asked for two things, two things that gave his handler an upset stomach and little doubt as to Clay’s intentions. First, he asked that the exchange be negotiated for the following afternoon at 5 p.m.—when traffic would be at its thickest—and that the US side put up every sign that they were negotiating forcefully but acquiesce as to the location and terms of the exchange.
The second thing he asked for was a car full of guns.
Sometimes things went terribly wrong. If you can plan appropriately, you can whittle chance down to a fine powder. You can fortify your position with backup plans and alternatives, with reinforcements and fallbacks, but when you try to do this shit by the seat of your pants, when time is of the essence, when the mission changes and then changes again, when you make decisions based on emotion—and how the fuck did that happen, anyway?—well, it had happened even before Clay stepped into that apartment in Vladivostok, when she had just been an image in his mind’s eye and then it had solidified on the long road to Moscow, when she showed courage and depth and grit and mettle—and it wasn’t reason driving him, it wasn’t sense, it wasn’t calculation; it was a raw, terrible hungry idea that he could prevent injustice from happening. He could act quickly, he could do the right thing, he could protect an innocent girl who had listened to a blathering dolt who should’ve known to keep his mouth shut. And now he had not to act but to react, not to plan but to improvise, not to think but to move. It was aleatory anarchy, a flash mob, as ugly as a blunt-force instrument when a sniper’s rifle would’ve been so, so clean. It was out of character, but it was his character, an oxymoron that couldn’t be halved, reconciled. Sometimes you lit dynamite and the fuse burned too quickly and it exploded in your face. Forget the left hand, the right hand wasn’t quite fucking sure what the right hand was doing. And sometimes things went terribly wrong.
When attempting to intercept a target, when planning an ambush, it’s best to strike while the asset is in transit. Clay knew the route they’d be coming by, thanks to Molina’s file. He knew the approximate time they would take that route. He knew how many of them there would be, and he knew where they would be positioned. There was a lot he didn’t know: how they were trained, how responsive they were to extreme stress, whether or not they would kill their prisoner the moment they knew they were under attack. He preferred not to think about what he didn’t know, because sometimes things went terribly wrong.
Nelson wondered about the exchange. He believed they really were willing to deal him—why would they go through the motions of collecting him in a black Suburban while its twin led the way to the airport? They were incredibly advanced at psychological warfare—he had been the subject of that particular experiment for longer than he’d thought he could endure—but what more could they gain from faking his release?
No, this had the feel of a real exchange. He wondered what his side had been willing to give up to get him back. There was a famous story that King Edward III had exchanged a few horses and a trifling sum to ransom a young page named Geoffrey Chaucer back from the French after the Battle of Rheims. He wondered what captured low-level Russian agent was on his way to the scene right now.
As he rode the highway to the airport, he thought for the first time of his future. What would the CIA do with him? What do you do with compromised agents? Give him an analyst position? Let him teach a class on how not to stand up to torture? Egorov sat in the passenger seat, looking small in the large Suburban. Behind the wheel was a young man Nelson hadn’t met before. On either side of him were the two large Russians who had put on the gloves and executed Egorov’s bidding. It would all be over soon. How much would he tell his own handler of what he’d endured?
Clay spotted them creeping toward the tunnel and eased from the service road on the hill into the oncoming lanes. In about fifteen minutes, they would meet in the center of the tunnel, traveling in opposite directions, surrounded by congestion, boxed in on all sides. He would step out of his car and shoot the two drivers, then everyone else inside the Suburbans other than Nelson. He would use the inevitable commotion inside the tunnel to get back into his SUV and plow over to the emergency lane to get the hell out of there. That was the plan. It wasn’t flawless; hell, it wasn’t even sound, but he had surprise on his side, and he had his skills, and he hoped Nelson would pitch in, but sometimes things, well, they went terribly wrong.
He eased toward the tunnel and watched it happen. In the oncoming lane, a delivery truck clipped a Fiat and it spun like a top, popping into a tiny Niva next to it before flipping over onto its side. Several drivers exited their vehicles to see where they could help, and the already thick traffic on that side of the tunnel shut down completely.
Shit, Clay thought.
Egorov clucked his tongue just as they approached the tunnel. Nelson could see through the front windshield that an accident had brought traffic to a standstill. The driver pulled up a phone, and Nelson heard him say something about sending police to help them through the jam.
Egorov fidgeted and finally demanded they turn around and find an alternate route. The driver relayed this to the security patrol in the lead Suburban, and they banked into the emergency lane and headed into the flow.
Nelson’s pulse quickened. Was this some sort of staged accident so the Americans could free him? His hand tightened around the handle of his cane, which he held absently between his knees.
Clay was already ensnared on the inside lane just outside the tunnel, and only the downslope on his side allowed him to see what the Suburbans were doing. He threw on his blinker, but there was nowhere to go. He felt like an animal in a cage, and he could feel blood rushing to his face, hot. He swiveled his head, but both sides of the traffic were equally stuck. The Suburbans continued to move away, back against the traffic, like salmon swimming upstream.
Clay saw a flash in his side-view mirror as a motorcycle buzzed by, z
ipping through the spaces between cars. He switched to the rearview and saw more motorcyclists with the same idea heading his way. He reached over his shoulder, unzipped a black canvas bag, snatched up a pair of Beretta compact Cheetah .380s. Each had a clip of thirteen rounds, and he hoped it would be enough in a firefight. He didn’t have time to pocket the spare clips.
His driver’s-side mirror showed a Voskhod rider with a black helmet rapidly approaching. Clay eased his sedan a foot toward the center barrier to narrow the space in which the motorcycle could pass and then timed it perfectly. As the cycle went by, he put his shoulder into his door and whipped it open like a battering ram. He caught the back tire flush, and the unprepared rider somersaulted over the handlebars as the bike bucked and then fell. Clay was out of the car and throttling the bike before the rider could climb to his knees and curse him. Cruising between cars as easily as rainwater finding a rivulet, Clay pegged the Voskhod. He handled it better than the bike he’d stolen back in Stepnoy, and he was thankful he had put some miles on a two-wheeler recently. He slipped back into the balanced feel as if he were putting on comfortable shoes after a few days of hiking in work boots.
Up ahead, the traffic bottled as he neared the wreck, and he followed a few other motorcycles around a semitruck, found daylight on the other side of the tunnel, and broke into the open. The traffic behind him, he had this side of the highway more or less to himself, and he charged ahead like a bullet escaping a barrel. He could make out the black Suburbans heading up the emergency lane and thought he might get some help from a patrol car moving up the lane from the other direction. The patrol car split off, though, as if it had been summoned. Maybe it had, maybe someone inside the lead Suburban was in communication with the police—that was only going to add more to the equation, because he only had twenty-six bullets, and sometimes things went terribly wrong.
The police car sliced the traffic like Moses parting the Red Sea and let the Suburbans shoot over to the opposite side of the highway, where an exit took them away.
Clay lowered his head over the handlebars and jerked the bike to the right, crossing twin lanes and dipping down off the highway. It was one of those circular exits and Clay flew around it, using the centripetal force to slingshot himself under the highway on a crossing street.
He temporarily lost sight of the two black Suburbans as he zigzagged through slower traffic, exploding past cars and trucks like a sidewinder missile.
He cleared the other side of the highway underpass, then picked up the black Suburbans filing up a smaller, industrial street, one lined with warehouses and factories coughing turbulent smoke into the air.
Clay’s mood matched the color of the exhaust as he punished the motorcycle, its engine producing a shrill whine. He swerved out into the street and chased down the Suburbans from behind. They were braking for a red light, and he might still take them by surprise. They had avoided the ambush by chance and were unaware of it, he hoped.
He slowed the bike, dropped it behind the trailing Suburban, ducked low, now fisting both handguns, scooted past the first vehicle, and crept up on the driver’s side of the other to begin his work.
A mistake would’ve been to fire into the driver’s window—the glass was surely bulletproof. Instead, he fired two quick shots into the door lock at point-blank range, disintegrating it. With the shots still ringing in his ears, he flipped up the handle and the driver’s door sprang open. He had eleven shots left in this gun, thirteen in the other.
The startled driver jammed on the gas, but Clay had already climbed up into the door. He shot the driver and then the passenger, head shots, kill shots, and the Suburban jerked forward, running into the back of the police car in front of it.
Clay rode this out, half in and half out of the driver’s door as if he were surfing a wave, calm and methodical. In the backseat were two men in suits, most likely diplomats, but Clay couldn’t leave anything to chance, so he put them down with two more bullets.
Ahead of him, both Russian policemen had popped out of their squad car and were taking the standard cop position taught the world over, using their doors as shields. There was a flaw in this technique, though. Clay fell backward out of the Suburban, lay on his back on the pavement, and fired under both doors, first hitting the cops in their knees and then in their heads.
Gun number one was empty when he turned his attention to the second Suburban. He hoped to find Nelson alive in there, but sometimes things went terribly wrong.
Nelson lowered his eyes. He told himself to control his emotions, to choke back the self-pity, to be glad he was still alive, but his wretched lack of character overwhelmed him. They had broken him completely. If only he had one tiny bit of—
“What’s this?” he heard Egorov chirp, alarm rising in his voice, and Nelson jerked his eyes up. Beyond the front windshield, a large man was hanging outside the driver’s door of the lead Suburban. Muzzle flashes were lighting up the interior, and then the vehicle leapt forward and smashed into the back of the police car.
Everyone in Nelson’s Suburban leaned forward, as if they were watching a 3-D movie out the front glass and were being sucked into the action.
A smile crept across Nelson’s lips. He had fucked up royally, he had spilled every secret he had ever known, he had folded like a boneless, skinless chicken when they had put him on the rack, but all of that could turn on a single word: redemption.
While everyone else in the truck watched the big man spill onto his back and shoot both cops out from under their defensive positions, Nelson reached down and pulled the rubber gripper off his plastic cane.
Clay chucked his spent gun and transferred the loaded one from his left hand to his right as he jumped back to his feet.
In every fight he’d ever been in, someone had made a mistake. He’d had near-misses when he had underestimated an enemy, but had been lucky enough not to fatally pay for those judgment lapses. The men in the trailing Suburban weren’t so lucky. The rear doors flew open and twin behemoths stepped out of either side of the truck. Clay caught the first one in the side of his head before he put both feet on the ground.
The second fired across the hood of the Suburban and then ducked down to use the vehicle as a shield, but Clay snaked toward him and was closing the distance when the driver panicked, threw the car into reverse, and left the Russian exposed. Clay hit him in the chest three times in a tight pattern and the big man toppled backward.
Clay had dropped his motorcycle behind the Suburban for a reason; in the driver’s excited attempt to reverse the hell out of there, the back tires entangled with the bike, and the result was that the vehicle floundered like a beached whale, the tires spinning without traction. The back doors were still open.
Nelson watched the men on either side of him throw open the passenger doors to help their comrades. Big mistake, he thought just as both men were mowed down on either side of the Suburban.
The driver turned backward to reverse the car; he hit the gas, and Nelson raised the cane and drove the sharp tip with all his force into the man’s head as if he were thrusting a sword. It went in easier than he’d imagined, or maybe it just seemed that way, and the driver jiggled, surprised, and then slumped over. Nelson pulled back on the cane and withdrew the bloody tip just as Egorov spun in horror and raised a tiny 9mm Makarov pistol.
Clay reached the door just in time to see Nelson pull some sort of sword out of the driver’s face. He recognized Nelson—though the man looked twenty pounds lighter than the last time he’d seen him—but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out where the hell the agent would have gotten a sword.
As these disparate thoughts rattled around his head, he saw the last man standing—sitting, actually—a bearded, gray-haired, fat-faced Russian in the passenger seat. The man swiveled with a small pistol in his hand and aimed at Nelson in the backseat. Clay hurried to shoot him before he could pop a shot off, but Nelson swung the sword more quickly, getting just enough leverage to wallop the bastard in
the side of the head, just as the gun went off. The bullet nearly tore off Nelson’s shoulder but buried itself in the backseat about an inch too high.
Clay made sure the Russian didn’t have a chance to correct his aim.
He helped Nelson from the car, and it became apparent his cohort couldn’t put any significant weight on his left leg.
“You hit?” Clay grunted, his eyes flashing over the scene.
“Before. It’s healing.” Nelson reached back inside the bloody Suburban and fished out his sword, which Clay could see now was a medical cane with a sharpened end.
“They thought they’d broken me,” Nelson offered by way of explanation.
“Had they?”
“Not enough.”
Clay hurried the agent over to the police car, whose doors were still wide open. He shouldered Nelson into the passenger seat, then slipped behind the wheel. He didn’t see the Russian cop on the far side of the car, still alive when Clay stepped over him. He didn’t see the cop blindly raise his side arm and fire into the passenger door. He heard the shot, knew the sound, but didn’t know its origin. He didn’t know the dying cop’s aim was true. He didn’t know the bullet had found its target.
Oblivious, Clay floored the accelerator, and the car leapt forward like a horse out of the starting gate. He swept his eyes in every direction, but no more shots came. He leaned back in his seat, momentarily relaxing. The car whipped around a corner and he pulled into an enormous parking structure adjacent to an apartment tower, then drove down to the lowest level, where only a few rusty cars sat abandoned in the poor light.
