At Any Cost (24 page)

Omar Koss deplaned at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport and proceeded outside to the queue of taxis. Snow was falling, gentle and calm. It was midnight here, dawn in Washington D.C. Like a pilot, much of his life was distilled down to time and weather. A taxi driver peered at him through the windows; it was late, there were few passengers, and the well-dressed businessman holding a chic leather travel bag no doubt looked like an easy fare.

Omar examined the taxi. The tires were worn; the black paint job with the words TAXI STOCKHOLM looked legit. It was a habit, looking for the tiny thing that would give away the enemy.

He climbed inside.

“Do you want me to put the bag in the back?” the driver asked in Swedish.

“No, thank you,” Omar replied, also in Swedish.

The taxi steered away from the curb. “Where to?”

“Bromma Airport.”

The driver looked at him in the rearview mirror. “You fly again tonight?”

“Important business,” Koss replied with a weary smile. An easy smile, the kind that signaled a businessman's fatigue and weariness on the road, rather than what it masked, which was fatigue and weariness from his time in Russia. Corrupting their entire internal grid had been extreme, but it prevented them from attacking the United States.

He had no doubt that his old enemies in the GRU or FSA would come for him. If the taxi driver was still here when they arrived, he would be interrogated painfully and then killed. For his sake, he hoped the driver called it a night after he dropped Koss at the airport.

The drive south from Arlanda Airport to Bromma took only thirty minutes; traffic was nonexistent. Koss leaned his head against the seat, allowing himself to rest for a few moments. When he opened his eyes, they were driving up to the small terminal of Bromma.

He paid the driver and stepped into the terminal. A woman behind the counter smiled at his appearance. “Good evening, Mr. Banks. Your aircraft is ready. The crew is already on board.”

Koss used several aliases. Banks was his favorite when he was traveling with an American passport. Edward Banks thanked the lady and walked out to the apron that stood in front of the VIP receiving area. A Gulfstream G-600 was warming its engines, exterior lights blazing and the door open in anticipation of his arrival. No other airplanes were readying for a trip this late.

It was exactly what he had ordered but as he stepped onto the stair, his instinct told him something was wrong. The lady. He had flown through Bromma many times, but he didn't remember ever seeing her. He had a photographic memory that did not rely on extraordinary beauty or ugliness; he absorbed and filed everything.

He glanced back and saw her at the glass doors of the terminal. She wore a jacket over her airport uniform. It was heated comfortably inside, he thought. The jacket would cover a multitude of weapons at her waist. She pushed the door open. “Is everything okay, sir?”

The flight attendant appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Banks,” she purred. “Welcome aboard.”

He caught the glint of light on the dark metal of her gun the moment she brought it from behind her back. Automatically his leg violently struck out, kicking it from her hand. As she moved to find it, the two pilots, who had been waiting inside the body of the plane, appeared.

The lady from the desk was instantly behind him, the cold barrel of a pistol shoved against his spine. With the two pilots advancing he would have to be crude. Omar spun around, grabbing the woman's head between his hands, and snapped her neck hard to the left. Her gun fell to the ground with a clatter one second before her lifeless body did the same.

Two pilots were coming for him. He reached into the leather duffel bag and pulled out the MP-5. Even in the snowy semidarkness of the airport, his shots were deadly accurate. Though he disliked killing, he was good at it. One of the best in the world, in fact. Humanely, he aimed for the heads, and they vanished in a spray of red mist.

He would leave the front desk lady lying where she fell but thought it best to carry the flight crew with him on this particular trip. There would be questions in the morning as more business flights arrived, and leaving four bodies on the tarmac would alarm the locals. He would have to dispose of the corpses at some point, but that was a problem he could easily solve. He would call some associates to take care of the mess.

He dragged the dead bodies inside, to the very back of the plane. Respectfully he laid them on the floor, as not to stain the plush leather bulkhead seating with viscera, and then covered them with blue woolen blankets found in the overhead compartments.

He had not planned on flying tonight—he was exhausted already—but he had to get to D.C. and this was the most expedient way.

He fastened himself in the cockpit, taxied to the runway, and launched the jet into the sky. Once he got above the snow clouds, the G-600 was smooth as silk—practically flew herself. In seven hours he'd be at Dulles. That gave him time to wonder if the dead people in back were Russians who had beat him to the airport, or if perhaps they were a team of Georgians; he'd worked in Tbilisi recently. Oh hell, there were enemies all over the globe, some even in the Unites States, who wanted him dead. He would have to investigate later. Right now, he just wanted to get home.

Omar Koss landed at Manassas Airport where a team was waiting for him with a car. He normally worked alone but in this instance it was nice to have someone clean up the bodies for him. There were two of them and they reminded him of FBI agents with that corn-fed earnestness. He hated FBI agents.

“There are three bodies in the back,” he said and handed them the keys. “Return it to Dulles after you clean it.”

“Yes, sir,” the pretty female said sarcastically. She wasn't yet accustomed to being ordered around. That would change soon enough.

He slung his leather duffel into the passenger seat of the Crown Victoria and headed east on Route 66 toward D.C. It was already evening again and he had not slept in two days. While in Russia he had been so typically focused on his mission that nothing of the outside world penetrated his cone of concentration. So when he turned on the radio and heard for the first time that Fallon Hughes had been kidnapped, he knew with an instinct honed to a finely sensitive instrument that Collin had become impatient. Koss frowned, angry with himself for not managing him better.

That probably explained the dead bodies in the plane; Collin, perhaps to delay him, had ordered a team to kill him.

Stupid, foolish kid. Omar felt a sudden great weariness. The stupidity of people, and the cruelty, had ceased to faze him long ago. But because he knew Collin, and he understood the situation better than Collin, he allowed himself to feel almost sentimental about Collin's ignorance. He would have to kill the kid. It was such a waste.

The Central Intelligence Agency had used decoy companies for many years, but after September 11, they became a vital part of the covert program in order to draw terrorists by operating false weapons organizations.

Most of these operated in the Middle East, the most famous of which was Brewster Jennings where Valerie Plame had worked. After the Plame affair, Brewster Jennings had been shuttered, and another one had popped up, headquartered in Kuwait.

One organization, blandly named Sutton Layes International, operated in the United States. Omar Koss was a “contract employee” of Sutton Layes, a fictional status, a pretense created by bureaucrats that offered no legal protection from activities he knew to be illegal. Only twelve people operated inside SLI. For security reasons, Omar knew none of their names. A squad of support staff in a classified CIA facility in downtown Washington, D.C. was his only connection to his ostensible employer.

While still working officially for the CIA, a gaggle of the world's foremost psychology authorities had interviewed the potential operators for attributes such as innovation, ruthlessness, and the ability to genuinely thrive on stress. Independence was prized over teamwork since many of the missions were single or two-man missions, requiring expert technical, physical and social skills.

The fact that SLI was small and secretive made its resources almost limitless. Its missions to eliminate terrorists were classified NEED TO KNOW. And there was no one, save for the president and the director, who needed to know. Even the operations group never knew the details of any missions. They were trained to simply get the resources to the operatives who called in.

About a year ago, intelligence from Gitmo was indicating that someone inside the US government was selling electronic capabilities to anyone who had the funds to pay for it. In an effort to find out how much was compromised, Omar had simply put himself in the right place at the right time, and sure enough Richard Mullinax had contacted him with an appalling proposal: he wanted to sell the map of the keys.

Omar Koss was not a law enforcement officer so he could not arrest him. All he could do was try to disrupt his plans while simultaneously attempting to learn more about his contacts. Koss had been close to turning over the information to the brass at the CIA and hope they would get it to the FBI for prosecution—sometimes that happened and sometimes it didn't, depending on the current goals of the administration. In any case, the circumstances had become complicated in the last twenty-four hours when he was in Russia, and he knew that any potential Mullinax prosecution had just been delayed.

Mullinax had gotten impatient: he'd had those Russian diplomats killed; he'd launched a warhead from Israel into Russia just to show what the map of the keys could do. People were dying now. War was imminent—or it had been until he'd taken the whole damn country offline: a crude solution, admittedly.

Omar drove into D.C. and the first thing he saw was the Washington Monument. It was one of his favorite views, a gasp of blue sky and the monolith rising from the ground, circled with crisp American flags. A certain simple happiness wrapped itself around his heart. Even with all the death, it was good to be home.

She had resisted. She thought it important that her family knew she had resisted with all the power and strength in her body. She'd tried to claw their eyes out, the way she'd learned in a women's self-defense class she and Gwen had taken two years ago. She'd twisted from their steely trapping grasps, she kicked and screamed and fought, but they subdued her with a shot of something delivered with a pinch into her neck. It acted quickly, making her weak, almost paralyzed, and the blindfold was wrapped around her head with no protest at all. Her hands were tied with plastic flex ties but she wasn't sure when they'd bound them. They drove for a long time, switching cars twice. Blind, she tried very hard to imagine the map of Washington D.C. so she knew where she was going, but she lost her sense of direction almost instantly. It seemed like they had driven in circles, then they took her out of the car. Another car had driven her in silence on what she thought was a freeway; the car wheels on asphalt made a constant, lulling rhythm.

When they stopped abruptly, she was yanked out of the car. She stood in the freezing cold, hearing a whipping sound.
Whoop whoop whoop
. After several moments, she realized she was hearing the rotary blades of a helicopter. Rough arms picked her up and she wanted to struggle, but her body wouldn't resist. Her mind still struggled somewhat, but her body was limp and useless. Whatever impotent flailing she managed certainly had no effect at all. They put her inside the helicopter. The helicopter lifted, hung for a moment and swayed before rising through the air.

It was cold inside the helicopter. She shivered. Nobody spoke. When she tried to speak, she realized a gag was tied around her mouth. She slumped against the seat, trying to figure out where she was and where she was going, but it was so hard to think. Everything felt so far away, as if it were happening to someone else. Foggy images of Tom and Evan and Travis and her parents shifted through her mind. There had been a crash and the men grabbed her. She saw Tom—this she did remember—she saw the expression on his face as if time had stood still. The frantic activity had slowed, the roar of traffic and the constant barrage of gunplay had ceased, and she looked across four lanes of skidding, car-slamming traffic. Under a light post, Tom Bishop stopped in mid-fire and looked directly at her. She said his name. She was sure he heard her. She saw the stunned dread on his face when he realized they had her, the frozen alarm evident in his intense green eyes.

In the blackness behind her eyes, she clung to the image. It disintegrated.

It was impossible to know how long they were in the helicopter. It seemed like they flew in circles again, specifically to disorient her.

Finally they landed and then Fallon was gathered from her slumped position in the helicopter. It was freezing cold. She felt wetness and remembered it was snowing. The peaceful sound of sloshing water made her think she was on a boat or maybe at a beach house. They picked her up. The stink of their sweat made her gorge rise in her throat; the rough arms around her felt like prison bars. Slowly, heart pounding, she stumbled along. They entered a shelter; the temperature was a little warmer than it was outside; there was no sharp, slicing wind, at least, and the sloshing water was gone. Almost immediately she was taken into an interior room. It echoed slightly as the door opened and had the particular feeling of being empty, like the basement of a funeral home, she thought—but the thought had no weight. It flitted and was gone.

They pushed her to the ground and threw a wool blanket over her. The doors slammed shut. She thought she was alone; there were no voices at all, not even outside the room. No rats snuffling through ancient wooden beams. For that matter there was also no feeling of stale air, the way some basements can be stale.

The floor felt like poured concrete; it was very cold against her butt and back. In only her small merlot-colored lace dress, she shivered violently. She pulled the blanket over her head, trying to create a small cubicle of warmth.

She didn't know how long they left her there. Maybe she slept. Or maybe she was sleeping now, dreaming of this incredible cold because she could not recall ever feeling this particular bone-piercing freeze in real life.

At some point she became more awake. The drugs were wearing off, the haze receding. The cold remained. The gag and blindfold were making her claustrophobic; she ordered herself to stay calm. The more awake she became, the more she began to panic. She focused on breathing, like she did in yoga. In through the nose, hold for eight, exhale slowly. As long as she could breathe, she would be okay. Something her father said during the campaign came to her. He told her the story of Bay of Pigs. He said that President Kennedy was having a meeting with his cabinet and he would listen to every person until he became emotional. When he raised his voice, or began to look hysterical, Kennedy calmly asked him to leave because he simply did not trust the judgment of anyone who could not control his emotions. You're not thinking when you're emotional, her father intoned. In desperate times, the best thing you could do was force yourself to stay calm so you could think.

She tried to take heed. The memory of the words calmed her. Deep breath. She would not cry. That would only wet her blindfold, and it would be hard to breathe through the gag. Calmly dragging in a deep breath, she held it for eight and then let it out for eight.

A giant reservoir of love opened up inside her, deep as the Marianas Trench. Tom and her family would miss her if she did not get out of here, and she hoped that they would be okay. Evan especially. Her sweet little brother—the thought of his gentle innocence made her throat constrict and her heart boil. She hoped her father would learn to take care of her mother. She hoped her mother would finally let herself be loved.

And Tom …. The pain in his eyes when she'd slapped him was compounded by unimaginable degrees when Travis arrived. She felt ashamed for flaunting her date and trying to make him jealous. So juvenile, so stupid. Hopefully he would know that she loved him, despite the way she had acted. She hoped he would see to her heart, the way he always had before.

One day he would find a woman he could love without any guilt or reservations at all. She wanted him to have that; he deserved that kind of relationship. She wished so sincerely that it could have been her.

The breathtaking snowcapped mountains of Shelby, Montana came back with vivid clarity.
Home
. She would have liked to see the vast blue sky one more time, the majestic glaciated peaks of the Tetons. She would have liked to see and do so many things.

Suddenly the door swung opened with a loud bang. She heard their voices for the first time. There were many of them, more than ten, she thought. She identified their language; it was Chechen. A ray of hope began to shiver through the black fog when she recognized it. It was not the same dialect she knew from her time in Jordan, but she understood it well enough. Plus, she had lived in Tajikistan for a while and spoke Tajik and Russian, both very similar to Chechen. They were Chechen Muslims who practice the same extreme form of Wahabism as practiced in Saudi Arabia and other places in the Middle East. Reluctantly, she understood what this meant for herself. They regularly slaughtered Westerners. They killed a school full of babies and children earlier in the decade. They decapitated an oil executive last year and ghoulishly filmed it and uploaded it to the Internet. They meant to kill her. A lump appeared in her throat and she bleakly willed it away, impotently reminding herself to stay calm.

Someone roughly yanked her up under the armpits and dropped her on a chair. She was then tied to the chair at her wrists and ankles. Her legs were numb from the cold; the chair was cold.

“You will say a message that you are okay,” someone said in English.

She didn't reply.

She heard some scraping, people moving around.

Then she heard: “Fallon is okay as you can see. This is for the reporter, Leah. As you see we have Fallon Hughes. We are invisible so do not attempt to find us. Our demand is simple. We want Mahomet Ayrzu in exchange for Fallon Hughes. If we do not have an agreement from the president by midnight, we will kill her and the next video you see of her, she will be headless.”

The blindfold was suddenly ripped away. Blazing white light hurt her eyes; she blinked and squinted, unable to see anything but dark figures in front of the light. She barely made out the green recording light of a handheld camera. She began to speak quickly, to say all she could because she didn't believe she'd ever have another chance. She wanted to speak directly to Tom, to let him know she was thinking about him. If she was going to die, she wanted him to know that she did love him: that was the overriding message.

The blindfold was again wrapped tightly around her head. They left her alone in silence after that.

How long ago was that? An hour? Twenty-four hours? She couldn't guess. Time had begun to spin and blur, to become a measure of nothing. She thought of her father and Tom. Maybe they would somehow find her before she outlived her usefulness to the terrorists. Her job right now was to stay calm. Just breathe. In for eight. Hold. Out for eight.