by Derek Haas
The driver unloaded their suitcases and took them to a rack near the jet. The greatest advantage of flying private, Adams thought, no security lines, no check-in bullshit, no waiting around a crowded terminal. The pilot comes to get you in the hangar and off you go.
His phone chirped, and he excused himself.
“Are you in the air yet?” Warren asked, sounding breathless.
“No, what is it?”
“There’s been an Echelon hit on Fourticq.”
Echelon referred to the most advanced domestic surveillance technology the CIA had at its disposal. A hit would mean that tracking satellites had picked up chatter with prechosen buzzwords, either on cell phones, pay phones, email, or websites where terrorists might attempt to communicate. It wasn’t an infallible system; a majority of data managed to slip past it every second of every day, but analysts worked to improve Echelon continuously and it had contributed to the prevention of major disasters on a number of occasions.
“What’d he say?”
“I think it was said to him. It’s encoded within an obscure website that Snow Wolf—that Alan Fourticq—was using to communicate with his Russian counterparts prior to…well. He covered most of his tracks but wasn’t aware we knew about this one.”
“Get on with it,” Adams said, annoyed. He looked at his family, standing on the tarmac near the jet, chatting with the pilot. They were happy, excited about the future. They would do well in Europe, and he was eager to get into the air and get started on the rest of their lives.
“Yes, sir. Sorry. It seems an address was passed on to Fourticq. An address in Los Angeles.”
“Whose address?”
The girls were now tugging on their mother’s sleeves. Laura looked at Adams again and started walking toward the plane with the pilot.
“55 Park La Brea.”
Adams’s face registered his surprise. That address meant Fourticq knew…but why would he…
“All right…I’m on it.” He clicked off the phone and hurried over to his family and the pilot, catching them halfway across the tarmac.
“Laura!” he said as he reached them. “Why don’t you and the girls head back to the waiting room for a bit?”
The pilot was a young guy with an aquiline nose jutting from a wide face. “We’re ready to board, Mr. Adams.”
“I understand, but I have to make a phone call.”
“You’re more than welcome to do it from the plane.”
“I’m afraid I need to make it from a secure phone.”
“I understand, sir,” the pilot said warmly. His smile seemed awkward under that nose, as if it were spreading out solely to support its foundation. “But I’ve already filed a flight plan, and the tower’s waiting….”
“Talk to the tower and hold until I say otherwise.”
The pilot eyed him cautiously, as if he were contemplating his next move. Then the smile reappeared. “Yes, sir. Of course.” He walked back toward the G5.
Laura gave her husband a concerned look. “What is it?”
“Probably nothing, but I need to call—”
The plane exploded, knocking Adams to the unforgiving tarmac.
A man with scars snaking across the back of his shaved head sat on a bench near the jogging trail of Pan Pacific Park, adjacent to the Grove, in the middle of Los Angeles. An elderly Asian couple passed him, doing that half-run, half-walk thing that old people like to do, and he watched them truck on by, indifferent.
In a shoulder holster concealed beneath his sports jacket rested a .40-caliber Glock 27, a gun he had carried for the better part of twenty-five years. He had not been carrying it, however, on a night in Colombia in 1993 when he had been closing in on Pablo Escobar and had walked into an ambush. He had taken not one but two knives to the back of the head, and in a true case of “you should have seen the other guys,” he had emerged from the scene wounded but alive. He might have died on the side of the road if his friend and partner, Alan Fourticq, hadn’t dragged him out of the dirt and into a doctor’s house. The bald man would never be caught without his gun within arm’s reach again.
Through his sunglasses, he watched the entrance of the apartment complex across the street, a sprawling expanse of compact domiciles named Park La Brea. Soon enough, a young Hungarian woman with dark hair and a carefree smile, a young woman who knew how to speak Russian even though she had once lied about that ability to land a nannying job, emerged from the entrance and pressed the crosswalk button so she could walk over to the shopping center.
The bald man with the faded knife scars on the back of his head stood up and followed her.
Adams tasted blood, and his face felt as though the sun were resting on top of it. He opened his eyes to find that he could see as through a tunnel; dark smudges blurred the edges of his vision. Laura!
He saw her already climbing to her hands and knees, quelling the horror in his mind. His girls were also rising from the pavement; they had been behind their parents and had been shielded from the brunt of the blast. Adams had been looking at the jet, and that side of his face had not been spared.
He hurried to his family. “Is everyone okay?”
The girls were crying, but he checked them over and found only a couple of scraped elbows. “Your face, Daddy!” the younger one, Grace, squeaked. Her voice sounded muffled, as though she were speaking underwater.
He felt his face, and the heat seemed to be emanating from it, but his fingers didn’t come away bloody. “Just a sunburn, I promise.” It hurt like hell, but he was determined to keep up a solid front for Laura and the girls. His wife had a burn on the side of her cheek that gave him a sense of what his own face must look like, but she seemed to be fine.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, but we need to get off this tarmac.”
The sun was beating down on them, which made the whole thing more surreal. It was an otherwise sparkly Southern California morning, the kind that appeared almost every day of the year, except this one was marred by the column of smoke rising straight up from the burning jet like a black finger trying to scratch the sky.
Adams tried to keep himself calm and resolute. It was the second attempt on his life in the same month, and the incident in Prague had forged a new mettle inside him.
He shepherded his family toward the private hangar, away from the jet’s carcass. Where were the emergency vehicles? Who could have infiltrated a goddamn airport and put a bomb on a government plane, his plane? These questions jockeyed for position in his mind. He finally heard sirens as he opened the glass door of the hangar—it had been far enough away from the explosion to escape damage.
What was he doing before the blast? He had just received a call.
He looked down at his hand and saw his cell phone clutched in it, undamaged. He’d been about to call someone.
Yellow-and-green trucks raced their way. They looked like fire trucks, but he wasn’t sure. Things were jumbled in his mind, as if a telephone operator had failed to connect the wires.
He looked at the faces of his family. They were terrified, in shock. Kate looked up at him, her eyes searching for answers. Her eyes. In that moment, they reminded him of another young woman’s eyes.
And then it all came back to him.
Austin Clay answered the phone on its first ring. He assumed the techie in DC was calling to tell him he had decoded something else in all those bits of data floating around Fourticq’s hard drive. But it was Adams on the line, speaking over sirens in the background.
“He has her address.”
Clay stood up straight, as if he had been jolted with electricity.
“What? Who?”
“The Snow Wolf. Fourticq. He has her address. Marika’s—”
“How—”
“He’s here. He’s in LA.”
Clay didn’t hear any more, because he was already sprinting for the exit.
The Grove was a sprawling shopping complex built adjacent to the landmark farmers’
market smack-dab in the middle of Los Angeles. There was a Disneyland, movie-set feel to the shop fronts and stores that lined the long, curving paved street, complete with an old-timey trolley that ferried shoppers from one end of the complex to the other.
Marika stopped to look at the signs in the Apple store, announcing the latest smartphone, which seemed to be replacing another smartphone that had come out the previous year. The place was hopping, mostly with kids her age bustling in and out or mingling over the computer monitors. A young man stood near an iPad, explaining the newest features to a middle-aged customer, and something about the way he stood, the way he held one arm at the elbow with his other crossed in front of him, reminded her of David. She felt her throat tighten as the young man and the customer shuffled off and the feeling passed.
She had started to move west toward the farmers’ market when an uneasy feeling that she was being watched struck her. Goose pimples rose on her arms. She looked around but didn’t see anyone who stood out in the throng of shoppers milling around the Grove.
It was probably just the residual effect of the last year of her life, when looking over her shoulder had become an involuntary reflex. She told herself to relax. She was safe here.
She moved down the street but checked the reflections in shop windows to see if anyone was following her.
Clay drove his government-issued Taurus down the 110 freeway as if it had been launched from a missile chute. Five lanes let him weave in and out of slower traffic as though the other cars were standing still.
Cutting left, he easily caught the fork for the 10, saw an opening, and scooted up the shoulder. A stalled Jetta up ahead forced him to swing back out, and he nearly ran right up the backside of a slower bus. What the hell was it doing in the fast lane? No matter, he swept around it and shot down the freeway unimpeded, headed west.
With a little bit of room, he thumbed his phone, finding Marika’s number. She answered on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Where are you?”
“I walked over to find something to eat in the farmers’ market. They have—”
“Find a policeman or a security guard and stay with him until I get there.”
“What?”
“Five minutes.”
He hung up and slid diagonally across three lanes, hitting the Fairfax exit doing close to seventy.
Clay banked a hard right, ran the next five red lights, and swerved onto Third Street, blitzing toward the farmers’ market.
Marika heard the worry in Clay’s voice and bit down her fear when the line went dead. She was in danger, that much was clear, and she cursed herself for not trusting her instincts when she’d thought she was being watched.
She looked around the market and saw only the usual mix of tourists and LA strangers—emphasis on strange—amid the maze of restaurants, trinket shops, candy booths, and coffee kiosks. The corridors were tight here, and the patches of sky glimpsed over the awnings felt close. Everything felt close.
Run.
Her eyes scanned the area for men in uniform, cops or security guards, but she didn’t seen anyone except for a burly guy in a UPS shirt.
The jangle of smells accosted her—roasted pig, sushi, doughnuts, pizza—the market offered everything and nothing and she couldn’t get her thoughts straight.
That was when she saw a bald man with hard eyes moving her way.
Run.
Her legs wouldn’t move. The man didn’t even pretend to look elsewhere. He was cutting a swath through the crowd, knifing toward her.
Run.
She turned and spun directly into the arms of the Snow Wolf.
Clay didn’t bother to find a parking space. He peeled up to the outside of Du-par’s deli in the corner of the farmers’ market and sprinted into the sprawl of shops, leaving the car with the keys in it where it stopped.
The inside of the market was a madhouse, packed to overflowing with shoppers and eaters, and he scanned the masses for any sign of the girl. His eyes lit on a table of police officers eating tacos, and he hurried over. No sign of Marika, and as much as he wanted to ask after her, these guys wouldn’t be sitting there stuffing their faces if a pretty girl had hurried up asking for assistance.
Cars were honking a symphony in the parking lot, most likely because of his illegally parked car blocking traffic both ways, and he must’ve been standing there looking like a lunatic, because all four officers were staring in his direction with disapproving looks.
Then he heard a high-pitched scream above all the other noise in the market, a young woman yelling the name “Clay!” and he broke for the sound.
She didn’t think.
The man had a knife in her side and told Marika he’d finish her if she didn’t keep her head down and walk quickly with him. His feet were already moving and she was matching his stride more or less involuntarily.
The bald man had joined them and was leading the way toward the parking lot like some sort of fullback opening a hole in the line of scrimmage. She found herself staring at the back of his shaved head and the carving-board scars that looked a nasty white against his cream skin. It was as though there was a pattern there that she couldn’t quite figure out.
The sharpness of the knife in her side, the grip of the hand on her arm, were like someone hitting a buzzer in her brain; she couldn’t connect her thoughts and was only vaguely aware that her feet were moving. They were abducting her, she knew that. They wouldn’t kill her in this crowd, she knew that, too. But if they got her into a car, then what?
They steered her toward the little alley that left the market behind, and as she walked toward it, she saw a man pushing an elderly woman—his mother?—in a wheelchair and she didn’t think, she just reacted, twisting away with all her force from the man who held her, at the exact moment they were passing the wheelchair. She didn’t know what she was doing, was just trying to prolong her abduction, trying to cause a scene, trying to bring other people into her mess, and she hit the wheelchair and toppled it so that she and the man and the elderly woman all became tangled on the path.
“What the hell—?” cried the wheelchair pusher, and the man who was abducting Marika said, “So sorry, so sorry,” but was already snatching her back up by the wrist, his hand clamped like a vise.
In that instant, as she was rudely wrestled to her feet, a few shoppers moved a few steps out of her line of sight and she saw Austin Clay standing next to a table of policemen.
She didn’t think; she just screamed.
Clay felt the policemen chasing behind him without seeing them, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered, only reaching Marika mattered, let them come.
He could see her jerked to her feet by Fourticq, and Clay was going to kill him as soon as he closed the distance, by breaking his neck. There wouldn’t be a standoff, or a discussion, or a negotiation, he was going to pounce on the man like a jungle cat and snap his spinal column as easily as snapping a twig.
Fifty feet away and Fourticq had successfully untangled Marika from the man and old woman on the ground and was shoving her rudely toward the corridor that led out of the market. Forty feet. Clay sprinted recklessly, and men and woman hastened out of his way, or maybe out of the way of the cops chasing behind him. He didn’t care. Nothing mattered and everything mattered. Thirty feet.
He closed, he was closing, and then a bald man stepped protectively between Clay and his target. The man had a gun in his hand, a Glock, raised it, and fired.
Clay saw the shot coming and somehow pivoted at the last second, shifting course as smoothly and quickly as a gazelle, and the bullet clipped the top of his shoulder and buried itself in the cop behind him. The bald man did not get off a second shot.
Clay erupted from his pivot and landed a fist in the man’s throat with every bit of his torquing body behind it. The punch did what a pair of Colombian knives couldn’t do. It collapsed the bald man’s trachea, and the man went down gasping for air that would never find its way
to his lungs.
The three remaining cops pounced on the bald man then, and thank God he was the one with the gun, he was the one who’d opened fire, because they ignored Clay in their haste to make sure the shooter was incapacitated. Clay left them behind and focused on the Snow Wolf.
It’s not easy getting a woman into a car against her will. Fourticq decided he’d kill her right there. His chances of surviving this himself were diminishing steadily toward zero. He had a chance, however slight, and it was only if the animal zeroing in on him was preoccupied with saving the girl’s life.
He’d love to say it wasn’t personal, it was only business, but the two, the business and the personal, had intermingled like chemicals inside a bomb. The girl had cost him, the animal chasing him had cost him, and he might be going down into a dark hole in the ground, but he’d make them hurt before he did. His car was idling at the curb twenty feet away, but he’d never make it, never wrestle her inside and contain her and slip behind the wheel. No, the best chance he had was to end her life right then and there.
He spun her around so Clay would see, took the knife from her side, and raised it to her neck.
The sight of Clay jogged something in her memory, something he had told her a lifetime ago.
Eyes, groin. Eyes, groin. Eyes, groin.
The man holding her by the arm wheeled her around like a top and she saw Clay coming, saw the determination in his face, saw the panic rising. Then she felt the steel sharpness of the blade move from her side and she caught the flash of it moving upward, toward her neck.
She knew she should respond, should defend herself, but her limbs felt as if they were tied down.
Then a sharp noise surprised all of them, the clang, clang of the approaching trolley, pulling into the farmers’ market, headed directly for them. It caused the man holding her to lose his concentration for only a second. It was all she needed.
