Commander-In-Chief (55 page)

Caruso asked, “Where is it?”

Jack typed the name of the conference center in Google Maps. While he looked it up Chavez pulled into a parking place on the Place Jourdan, right in front of the Sofitel.

Jack looked up from his computer. “The conference center is next door to the Sofitel. Right around the corner from us right now. He held his phone back to his ear. “Gavin, give me the real-time feed for the fifth floor of the hotel.”

Nothing happened on Jack’s laptop. “Gavin?”

Over the line he said, “It’s not coming up. Someone else has hacked the feed, maybe? No, that’s not it . . . The entire camera system in the hotel is turned off. It had to have been physically switched off from inside the hotel. Guys, I don’t know what’s going on, but be careful in there.”

All three Americans then piled out of the Audi, unsure of what they would find on the fifth floor of the hotel in front of them, only certain now that Salvatore was not here to take pictures of celebrities.

S
alvatore sat on the edge of the sofa in the middle of the suite, confusion on his face. He had no idea what was going on, only the suspicion that he had been tricked somehow, and now he was in a great deal of trouble.

Three minutes ago he’d been standing in the hallway when the door to the suite opened and an attractive brunette came out wearing a blue blazer and blue skirt. She smiled at him and took him by the hand.

He was confused, but pleasantly so, because he thought he knew her from somewhere, and she seemed so happy.

She led him back into the living room of a big suite with an explanation about working with the same Russian handler who contacted Salvatore, and the promise that what they were doing here in Brussels would be a great step forward for the environment.

The environment?

She said she knew about the work he had done in the past. The protests, the arrests. Surely he wanted to do more.

Salvatore nodded distractedly, more interested in getting paid than in helping the environment. And then he looked over the large suite. The furniture had been moved around; a table and a chair had been placed close to the wall by the bedroom door on his right, in front of a white flag pinned on the wall. On the flag, planet Earth was represented by a globe-shaped maze of twisted pipelines, and an oil well protruded from the top. A red drop of blood dripped from the Earth at the bottom of the flag, just over the words
Le Mouvement pour la Terre.

Salvatore blinked in surprise when the others entered the living room of the suite from the bedroom next to the flag. The men wore dark suits with ties, and the women wore conservative business attire. They were all young, not one of them appeared to be older than thirty-five, but other than that he saw nothing similar about them. One of the women was black, one Asian. Of the six armed men in the room, most wore short beards; a few were clean-shaven. A couple of the women, Salvatore couldn’t help noticing, were very attractive.

He counted ten here in the room with him.

He didn’t need to see the guns stacked against the wall by the bedrooms to know what was going on, but he did see them. There were ten rifles of some sort. Salvatore didn’t know guns, but it didn’t matter, because the flag told him something about what was going on. That flag on the wall filled in the missing pieces of this puzzle.

He was certain he’d seen this group before now. On television.

The explosion of the liquefied natural gas facility in Lithuania, the event that set off the events of the war that had just begun a two days’ drive from where he now sat, had been conducted by this very group of men and women. The Spanish girl who’d collected him from the hall had been the masked woman reading the
statement taking responsibility for the attack. He recognized her voice easily. Salvatore wasn’t that dialed in to international news, but this story had been impossible to miss.

Now, while the others stood silently, the Spanish girl sat next to him and told him they had a mission, he had been chosen by the “Russian benefactor” to join them, and they would reveal it as soon as they recorded a video press release.

But the truth was, Salvatore didn’t need them to report anything. He knew their mission, perhaps better than they did.

Salvatore’s Russian contact had been using him all week to photograph the facility at the Albert Borschette Congress Center, to use his press credentials to get into other conferences and record the security, the placement of cameras, even the thickness of the walls and the makeup of the ceiling tiles.

He’d known all week the Russians were planning something with the Borschette Center, but he’d thought they were just going to bug it or install cameras of their own for the upcoming European Oil and Gas Conference.

Now he realized the men and women who blew up the LNG facility were a part of all this, and he knew they were in the hotel directly adjacent to the conference center. And he understood without a doubt what was happening. There was going to be a terrorist attack, right here, right now, and he would be complicit in it all.

He leapt off the couch, surprising some of the men and women around him, but not all. Others reached out for him, grabbed at his arms, and tried to pull him back to the couch. But Salvatore’s sudden burst of adrenaline allowed him to pull away, knocking two of the women to the floor.

He bolted for the door, flung it open, and pulled away from more hands grasping from behind.

He stumbled halfway out of the room before he saw the large
man standing in the hall in front of him, with a pistol pointed directly at his face.

The Italian raised his hands, and the men and women behind him tackled him and pulled him back into the hotel room.

His panic took hold of him completely now. His arms and legs flailed, he tried to scream, but a hand covered his mouth.

It was then he felt the hypodermic needle jabbed into the front of his forearm. He tried to pull away, but the Spanish girl threw her entire body over his hand and wrist, pinning his arm in place. He looked down to see a man press a plunger on the syringe, and a clear liquid disappear under his skin.

And in seconds Salvatore’s terror melted away, replaced by a sense of calm. He knew he’d just been injected with heroin, and he knew this hit would be enough to kill him, but it felt nice already, so he just relaxed and closed his eyes.

•   •   •

W
hile Ding took an employee elevator, Dom and Jack ascended the guest staircase to the fifth floor. None of the Americans drew their weapons, but all three opened their jackets and untucked their shirts, ready to go for their clandestine holsters if they needed to.

The two cousins made it out of the stairs, and peeked around the doorway to the hall. Jack leaned his head out first and found himself looking down a long hallway that ended in a right turn. There was no sign of life anywhere, so he hurried up the hall, with Dom right behind him. At the end of the hall he tucked his head out again. At the far end of the hall he could see Chavez signaling them. He was pointing toward the door to a room, and he had already drawn his weapon.

Jack and Dom arrived on his shoulder quietly. Ding kept his
pistol trained on the door, but he leaned closer and whispered to them, “Saw one man. Forties, wearing a business suit. He was armed, aiming at someone in the room. Don’t know who. He entered, and shut the door behind him. There are noises in there. Multiple pax.”

The two other Campus men understood. They lined up in a tactical train to the right of the door, with Ding in front. He reached out and tried the door, and found it locked.

He nodded to Jack, who dropped to his knees and crawled low, below the peephole. Here he took off his pack, removed Gavin’s unlocking device, and slipped the card in the card key slot. He activated it with a press of a button on the handset.

When the light on the lock flashed green, Dom pushed down on the latch. Jack scrambled to return to his position in the back of the train, then all three men burst into the large suite.

First they saw Salvatore; he lay unmoving on a sofa in front of them in the center of the room. To the right of the sofa, a huge group of masked and armed individuals stood in front of a bright light. On the opposite side of the room was a camera, and behind the camera a man in a business suit who wore no mask.

The three Americans had walked into the middle of a film shoot.

The three Campus men did not know what they would find when they hit this hotel room registered to Luigi Vignali, but none of them expected to see ten people standing around with assault rifles.

Chavez, Caruso, and Ryan raised their weapons as they filed into the room, but the group on the right—Ding was in near disbelief at the sheer number of gunmen—were all wielding AK-74s with collapsible stocks. When they saw the door fly open they spun around in surprise.

Chavez started to shout an order for everyone in the room to
drop their weapons, but in a heartbeat he realized this would be wasted breath. This was some sort of a terrorist outfit, and the way they moved showed Ding this wasn’t going to be a negotiation.

Nope, this was a gunfight—the only thing missing was gunfire.

An AK cracked from the back of the room, removing any faint chance anyone could be talked out of a fight.

The first Campus man to fire was Chavez, principally because he was the first in the room. He hit a tall man square in the chest, knocking him back against the wall. Others in the room charged their rifles as they dropped to the floor. Caruso shot the older man in the suit. He’d been ducking down behind his camera’s tripod, and the round hit him in the back of his shoulder. He spun to the floor, then disappeared into the bathroom to the left of the suite.

By the time Jack entered the room he found himself under fire. A 5.45-millimeter rifle round tore a piece of the door frame off in Jack’s face. Still, he was able to fire over the sofa, hitting one of the gunmen ducking there in the chest.

And then the AKs opened up in full force, turning the doorway into a fatal funnel of fire. All three Americans dove for the ground and scrambled back out of the room.

In the hallway they stayed low, as bullet holes above their heads rained wood and plaster down on top of them.

And then the explosion came. A massive eruption that blew smoke and debris out the door to the suite, blew over the three Americans lying on the ground, forced them to cover their heads as more plaster fell on them from the ceiling of the hallway.

It sounded to Chavez like it might have been some sort of improvised explosive device. The volume of the detonation was way more than any grenade or RPG he’d ever heard, even taking into consideration the closed space of the hotel suite.

It took at least ten seconds for the dust to clear, but when it did, Jack chanced a quick glance around the door frame back into the suite. As soon as he was able to see across the room in the smoke, he noticed a light behind the sofa that he had not noticed before.

He waited a few more seconds for the smoke and dust to dissipate, then looked again, and only then did he realize what he was looking at.

A hole blown in the wall of the suite behind the couch large enough to drive a small car through.

And the shooters were gone.

•   •   •

S
ecurity was especially tight this year here at the European Oil and Gas Conference in the Albert Borschette Congress Center. Among the three hundred attendees would be government ministers from all over Europe, as well as the leaders of million- and billion-dollar energy corporations.

The politics of the event also added to the heightened security presence. Aside from the typical environmental protesters ubiquitous at all European meetings of energy policy officials, recent conflicts in Ukraine and Lithuania had many in the industry concerned about the security of those present.

To accommodate the large crowd of vulnerable guests, the Belgian government sent uniformed police and special-tactics teams, and the EU brought in extra site security in the form of contractors.

Getting into and out of the Congress Center required X-rays, baggage checks, identity badges, and bomb-sniffing dogs.

It was Europe in 2016; security could be achieved, but only at the price of convenience.

All over the facility attendees were enjoying the last minutes of
break before the one p.m. lunch session began. Men and women checked their e-mails in the atrium or chatted in the coffee shop. Many were still out in the courtyard smoking, careful to keep their badges displayed at all times so they could make their way back through the heavy security.

Dozens more filled the restrooms on the three lower floors.

The massive conference room where lunch would be held was less than ten percent occupied with attendees when a ten-by-six portion of the southern wall at the back of the room exploded inward, launching cinder-block debris two dozen yards across the tables just set for lunch.

Men and women in the large room reacted to the explosion, of course, but more out of surprise and disbelief than any real fear. After all, what terrorist would plant a bomb in a wall and then detonate it in a barely occupied conference hall?

It wasn’t until the masked figures in the suits and ties appeared in the hole, then began climbing through, that people started to react with terror. A waitress who’d been pouring water at the table nearest the blast had been knocked down and bloodied. The men climbed over her as they entered the room, ignored her still form as she lay there, but they immediately lifted their weapons to their shoulders and began training their sights on the big room in front of them.

Gunfire boomed in seconds, and screams of panic erupted throughout the room.

Masked women in business attire climbed out of the hole now and passed through the dust cloud in front of it. A female conference attendee who’d arrived early to her table huddled behind a felled chair, but an armed female in a blue blazer and skirt combo opened fire and shot her dead where she crouched.

The eight gunners had hit their objective too early, this they
knew as soon as they saw all the empty tables, so within moments of the attack several of them were running for the exit to the atrium of the conference center.