Top Hook (44 page)

He would have in his pocket the first high-level Chinese intelligence in American history. China's intelligence service would be bankrupt and impotent. China would be caught in the middle of a public attempt at military adventurism, and she would have to back down on CNN. Shreed could see the ships turning away in his mind's eye. They wouldn't raise their heads out of the middle kingdom for a generation.

And then?

And then America would have no enemies with any power for a generation, and he would have been proven right. That would be his triumph. Even if he never went back, even if he never
made it
back, it would be his triumph. They would talk about him for generation after generation. Teach his great coup at the Ranch. He would be a legend.

Or a piece of shit, you egotistical bastard.
He grinned at his reflection in the train window. But, like all grins, it faded. For the cynic, there is no triumph, even in triumph.
What were you expecting, God's finger to come down from the sky and tickle you under the chin?
Still, he was glad that he hadn't been able to get to Belgrade, unable to kill Chen. This was going to be better, no matter how it ended.

He waited until the signal on his laptop indicated that he had a strong link to the Web. Then he put a finger on the key that would start the process, and, to his astonishment, the finger was trembling.
So long getting here—so much effort—
He thought of Janey. Had she forgiven him?

He pressed the Send button, sat back, and sipped his coffee.

His project had begun its final phase.

I'm so lonely, baby.

I'm so lonely I could…

The village at the top of the ridge above her appeared deserted. It reminded Anna of the hilltop village where she had spent her childhood, except that her village had had ancient stone walls and the graceful line of an aqueduct sweeping away to much less dramatic mountains. But her village had had much the same smell, and it was the smell that awakened her feelings: cedarwood fires, the perfume of strong spices, the dung of goats and sheep and horses.

She did not look like a daughter of this village, or of the one where she had been born, for that matter. She was dressed in ancient jeans and a flannel shirt, and her bright hair was covered in a local wool hat. Over the flannel shirt she wore the shell of an ancient army coat, and over both she wore a loose black cotton robe, unbelted, and a heavy internal frame pack on her back. She looked like any of the Western students who came to the mountains seeking enlightenment and a good climb.

She had no intention of walking up the road to the village. She knew that Shreed wouldn't play fair, but this time she intended to be early and be ahead. He had given her signals, alternates, routes—all irrelevant in her present mood. George Shreed, whether deserving or not, had become the archetype of every human being who had ever used her.

She had been on her own—without a protector,
without an
owner—
for three weeks. To preserve her freedom, she had killed, betrayed, stolen, lied, and kept her bed empty. She raised her head, looked at the village on the height, and smiled her feral smile. By one simple act of revenge against a man who had tried repeatedly to kill her, she would win security and, just maybe, some friends. Alan Craik would know that she was something…she didn't like that thought much and didn't follow it.

The scree at the bottom of the slope was the hardest part of the climb up the hill. She had to move around boulders through the shards of other rocks, with the weight on her back making movement difficult. Once free of the rubble field, she was able to move up the steep western slope with more speed and confidence. The moonlight made stark shadows among the rocks, lighting handholds and footholds in the lateral outcrops that made the west slope look like giant steps climbing into the moon.

After half an hour, she pulled herself over an outcrop and rested, panting, with her pack braced against the next ledge. A stronger smell of goat registered through her fatigue. There were goat droppings here on the outcrop; she was sitting in a tiny trail that led up to her left around the hill. When she stood, her sandal-clad feet could follow the gritty sand and gravel mix that marked the path by feel. She became cautious, expecting a sentry or a night herder.

Anna stopped. In a village without electricity, the last rays of the sun usually marked the end of the day, but the silence from above her was too total. She missed the sounds of animals, the occasional bang of a pot, the little night noises that proclaimed the health of a village. It was not yet late. In the time she had been on the slope,
not a baby had cried, not a single couple had engaged in a late-night shouting match. Perhaps Pakistanis were quieter than her own people, but she felt uneasy.

More than a hundred feet below her, she caught a movement in her peripheral vision. When she turned her head, she thought for some moments that she was watching an animal, but as she squatted in the trail, the movement resolved into two man-shapes moving warily. The moon provided her with a gleam of metal—a gun.
Shreed's people.

With muscle-aching care, she wriggled out of her pack, heedless of the old goat droppings in the trail. It took her more than a minute, and she cursed the American notion of “quick release.” Lighter by fifty pounds, she unzipped the top pocket of the pack and extracted a Walther pistol, fitted a clip into the butt, and winced at the click as it slid home. She slipped the pistol into the waistband of her jeans, rolled on her stomach, and got a drink from the water pack strapped to the pack frame. The men were still there. They seemed to be examining the base of the scree where she had started her climb. That was not a good sign.

The silencer and the second clip for the Walther P88 had slipped from the top pocket all the way to the bottom of the pack, and she thought that she must sound like an avalanche as she wormed her arm through the clothes looking for them. She put them in a pocket with her cellphone, took another drink of water, and started crawling up the trail.

Anna was the descendant of a hundred generations of practiced hill thieves. Childhood play for both sexes had involved hours of just this sort of pastime; crawling up a track covered in goat shit to surprise one of her brothers. They were all dead, but their arts lived in her, and she
wriggled along like a snake, ten yards at a time until she reached the edge of the plateau, where centuries of feet had cut a path in the final outcrop of rock. She leaned against the rock and raised her head above it, her heart crashing against her chest, rivers of sweat and grime running down between her breasts and down her back. Her head came up by inches, until one eye could just see over the lip.

The ground between her and the first square building appeared empty. She waited, motionless, for more than a minute. Stillness was how she had always caught her brothers.
Patience
. The patience that had enabled her to hide inside herself for five years as a prostitute in Riyadh and Dubai.

While she was motionless at the top of the ridge, it came to her forcefully that she
would
kill George Shreed. Up until that point it was an idea, an ambition. Now it was her sole focus. She had endured things that had destroyed other women. She could endure more to be free. She crouched, filthy from the crawl, at the top of a hill with enemies behind her and ahead and thought,
This is life. I will succeed or fail by my own hands.

She began to crawl across a patch of open ground. She made it to the edge of the first building unseen, close to the base of a trash heap that served several houses. It wasn't bad, after the goats; at the moment it smelled of lemons. She crawled around the rubbish with care, the soft base of the mulch muffling her movements completely. When she thought she might have a sight line into the village, she raised her head again with great care. She was between an outbuilding, probably a set of stalls for animals, and two houses at the western edge of the village. She guessed that the gray moonlit puzzle ahead represented a little maze of alleys, every window
shuttered against the dark. The village sloped down from where she lay, and she thought she could see a minaret against the moonlight. Its base was hidden by another shape, and it took her seconds to realize that there was some sort of tower rising between her and the minaret. High in the tower, a single light burned, either a candle or a kerosene lamp. It seemed to be the only light in the village.

She rose slowly to her feet and flattened herself against the second house, then crabwalked along the wall of the building until she reached the alley. She moved her head out at waist height and looked both ways. Again she was patient.

A man's boots sounded on a stone. He did not bother much with stealth—a villager? He moved quickly, almost violently along the alley until he reached the intersection so close that she could have slapped his back. He looked confident. He also looked
Chinese
.

His attention was on a building across the alley, a low, square building with a flat roof and the sort of decorative wall that often meant a roof garden in an Asian village. After a moment's hesitation, he stepped forward, leaped, and caught the wall with his hands. With muscular grace, he used his arms to pull his weight up and then swung his hips over the wall to land on the roof. It was the maneuver of an athlete.

The athlete had a sniper rifle on his back.

She listened. He had moved to the other corner of the roof, the one facing the rest of the village. The roof was high, and with the slight slope of the village, it probably afforded a view right to the base of the tower. The sniper was not there to watch the approaches to the village. He was there to cover the mosque.

What a viper Shreed was.
He had sold her to the Chinese
.

Anna took a long time over her options, and she shivered a little with the cool air and the sweat. Her retreat was blocked. If they had followed her trail up, they would be almost at the top by now.

If she had seen three of them, there must be at least a squad, perhaps a platoon. The sniper had had the muscles and agility of a hard man, a paratrooper or a commando. She needed a place. Would they search the houses if she didn't show up at Shreed's meeting place?

The sniper had a good spot. He was probably lying down, his rifle already set up, waiting for the action to begin. From the noise, he was fiddling with something. A tool? And he almost certainly had a radio. But who would call him? As she reckoned the odds, the sniper had the virtue of immediate action and comparative safety. He had a good rifle, too, a weapon she could use. He was the devil she knew. She drew the heavy silencer from her breast pocket and screwed it on the barrel, easing the threads back and forth to get a perfect fit as Efremov had taught her. Then she ejected the clip into her palm, easing the clip past the catch to muffle its sharp metallic noise. Then she wiped the sweat from her face and reversed the operation, inserting the other, the whisperload bullets from the stall in Dushanbe—subsonic bullets that made a silencer really effective. The clip still made a tiny
click
as it seated home, and again she waited, utterly silent, immobile.

She moved her head out into the alley again, this time at a different height, and waited, counting slowly to one hundred. Nothing moved but the man on the roof, who was making little metallic sounds. Now, too, she could hear the animal noises that had been hidden by the last rock outcrop on the hill. Up here, the village
sounded more alive, although the human noises were still absent. Every mother must be huddled in a cellar with her children gathered round her as the foreign soldiers prowled the village.

Now she was alive in the night with a gun, and the thought of terrified mothers and her own mother with her throat cut on the dirt floor of the cellar enraged her, pulled at her, and with one surge of adrenaline she crossed the alley and leaped higher than the man had done, her left hand catching the edge of the wall and her body swinging, right knee over, and the man was turning, his mouth a little open, his right hand scrabbling at his belt, and still she was patient the extra half a second, and she settled her right foot on the roof and dragged the left in next to it, crouched on her haunches, both hands coming together, and his eyes were huge in his round face and her hands came together with the gun. She shot him twice in the face. His body spasmed, his kicking feet making more noise than her whole sweeping attack, and she smelled his body's surrender of control. She sank to the roof and shook, the sweet high of adrenaline screaming in her veins in contrast to the silent village. Then she started to examine the body and the rifle.

Triffler's workday was nearing its end, and he was tired and let down after his high of the morning. He hadn't heard a word more about Dukas, and the rest of the case seemed frozen. And then the phone rang.

“Hey, Triffler, Carl Menzes.” Menzes was almost giggling. “Want to go on a bust?”

“What the hell?”

“I thought you might like to be in at the finish of
something. We ID'd a kid who was in Shreed's house and we're getting the guy who put him up to it. We're going to scoop them both in half an hour.”

“Four hours ago you didn't have zip!”

“Yeah, well, something of this importance, we
move.
Plus, with the Bureau, local cops, and my own folks, I got sixty people on this since noon.”

Sixty! Dukas would have killed for six!

Menzes was going on. “We got the cleaning woman; she started crying as soon as my man showed his badge. Moscowic, the dead guy, bribed a cop to get her kid on a dope charge—she lets him into Shreed's house, the kid goes free, so of course she did it.
That's
what cost five Gs. So she tells us that it wasn't Moscowic who went into the house; it was a kid, punk hairdo, the whole nine yards. And he goes in, and what do you think he does? He sits at Shreed's computers for two hours!”