Ghost Sniper (16 page)

37

CHONGQING, CHINA

13:30 HOURS

Not long after Gil and Lena cleared Chinese customs, Gil spotted a pair of Russians hanging around outside the airport, not exactly attempting to look inconspicuous. “That sure didn't take long,” he said, pretending not to notice them as he hailed a taxi.

“What did you expect?” Lena asked. “We were spotted getting on the plane.”

A cab pulled to the curb, and Gil opened the backdoor for her to get in. “It couldn't be helped.”

“I guess not,” she said irritably, climbing into the cab. “Not with you refusing to keep a low profile.”

He got in beside her as the driver loaded their bags into the trunk. “If I keep a low profile, they might not know where to find me.”

She gave him a look. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Relax,” he said, kissing her hand. “It would take more than a baseball hat and a pair of sunglasses to throw these guys off my scent.”

“You could at least try.” Their flight to Beijing had been marked with similar exchanges.

“Hey,” he said, squeezing her hand, “would it help at all if I told you I know what I'm doing?”

“In China,” she said dryly. “You know what you're doing in China.”

“I do.”

“Then tell
me
!”

“I would,” he said with a smile, “but then I'd have to kill you.”

She pulled her hand away, but he grabbed her face and kissed her. She resisted for a brief second but then slid her hand behind his neck and pulled his lips tighter against hers.

Then she shoved him away. “You're going to get us both killed.”

“You knew what you were signing on for. Are we reaching the limit of your courage?”

“Is this a test?”

“As matter of fact, it is.” The driver got behind the wheel and closed the door. “So say the word now, and I'll put you back on a plane for neat and tidy Switzerland.”

“Now you're just trying to make me angry.” She told the driver the name of their hotel, and he pulled from the curb. “It's not the danger that pisses me off, Gil. It's being kept in the dark.”

“It's necessary,” he said, resting his hand her on knee.

Despite feeling worried, Lena believed that he was telling the truth; she squeezed his hand and looked out the car window. The Russians tailing them in a white sedan were no more careful about being spotted than the two men outside the airport had been. They even went so far as to pull up alongside them at a red light, both men grinning.

“Look how confident they are,” she said, feeling true fear for the first time. “They know it's only a matter of time before they get you. We might as well be in Moscow.”

Gil chuckled, ignoring them. “I was in Moscow last spring. Had lunch with Putin, as a matter of fact.”

She looked at him. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Once in their hotel room, they were careful to lock the door and push the minifridge up against it before hurriedly taking a shower and making love.

When they were finished, Lena lay in the crook of his arm, helping him smoke a cigarette.

“This trip has nothing to do jumping the Dragon Wall, does it?”

“We brought the wing suits, didn't we?”

“That doesn't answer my question, Gilbert.”

He sat up, flashing back to 1993 when the movie
What's Eating Gilbert Grape
had first come out. He was still pissed at its star, Johnny Depp, for ruining his senior year in high school. “My name is not
Gilbert
—it's
Gi
l
!”

She laughed, her eyes dancing. “Did I touch a nerve?”

“
Gil
,” he said, grinning. “
Gil
Shannon. That's it—no middle name. Got it?”

She gave him a playful salute. “Got it.”

“Once we know each other a little better, you
may
call me ­Gilligan—but not Gilbert, ever.”

She laughed again. “Like the TV show?”

“Yes,” he said, lying back down beside her, “like the TV show.”

She tickled his ear until they fell asleep, awaking eventually to the sound of someone knocking at the door, ignoring the Do Not Disturb sign.

Gil stood to the side of the door in his underwear without looking through the peephole, saying something in a language Lena did not understand. The person in the hall answered, and he opened the door to a small Asian man in his forties.

They spoke briefly, and the man disappeared.

She sat up, holding the sheet over her breasts. “You speak Chinese?”

“Vietnamese,” he said. “That was Nahn. I worked with him the last time I was in China. He's says the lobby's crawling with Russians, so he's gonna sneak us outta here. You'd better get dressed.”

She got out of bed, reaching for her pants. “How the hell do you speak Vietnamese?”

He pulled a clean shirt from his bag. “My dad was a Green Beret in the Vietnam War. He lived with the mountain tribes—the Montagnards—for six years, training them to fight the Vietcong. I grew up speaking English with my mother and lots of Vietnamese with my dad.”

“Wasn't that a little strange?” she asked, buttoning her pants.

He chuckled, a sad look in his eyes. “It was
a lot
strange. But that was my dad.”

“Where is he now?”

“Drank himself to death.” Gil snatched his pants from the floor and stepped into them. “We need to hurry. Nahn doesn't fuck around.”

38

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

16:40 HOURS

There were always risks involved when Lazaro Serrano and Hector Ruvalcaba met face-to-face, but they had serious matters to discuss, and with the city devastated by the earthquake, Serrano had to abandon his normal security precautions. So the two men met in a brothel run by the Ruvalcabas on the outskirts of the Federal District, where quake damage had been minimal to none.

“Our attack on the Toluca police station was a complete disaster,” said Ruvalcaba, a stately looking man in his early sixties, with graying hair and green eyes. He had escaped from a maximum security prison the year before via a tunnel dug from the outside to his prison cell. Serrano had arranged for and funded the tunnel's construction, a service for which he had been handsomely reimbursed. “I still don't know what went wrong, but I lost seventeen of my best people. Apparently the remaining Guerrero brother is not the timid young coward we've been led to believe.”

Serrano sat puffing a cigar. “Is this new chief supposed to have killed all seventeen men himself?”

Ruvalcaba made a face. “Of course not. My point is that he apparently possesses the strength of will to hold the police force together even in the face of his brother's very public assassination. ”

Serrano shrugged. “So the Toluca police have rallied around the memory of their martyred chief. We've seen it before. Juan Guerrero was a brave man—
a man of the people
. It's only natural they would stick together long enough to fight a battle in his name. After all, they are Mexicans, are they not? It's our fault for underestimating them. Now we'll do it right. We'll send Hancock back to Toluca with orders to kill ten or twelve policemen in the street, all in broad daylight. That will put a most definite end to their resolve, I assure you.”

Ruvalcaba demurred. “I don't believe it's that simple. But it doesn't matter because Hancock won't go back to the same city twice. I've asked him before, and he has always refused. He considers it too dangerous.”

“He works for us,” Serrano said. “He goes where he's told.”

Ruvalcaba cocked an eyebrow. “
You
tell him that.”

Deciding to leave the issue for the moment, Serrano gestured at the large yellow envelope he'd placed on the table when he first arrived. “That is a gift for you. It will take your mind off our
problem
in Toluca.”

Eying the politician, Ruvalcaba reached out and picked up the envelope. He shook out all eleven files onto the table and sat looking them over. “Are these—these are PFM agents!”

“Straight from the hands of the CIA,” Serrano said with a twisted smile.

“Puta madre!”
Ruvalcaba pulled one of the photos free from its staple. “This man was one of mine!”

“Luis Mendoza?” Serrano asked.

“You knew already?”

“The CIA told me yesterday afternoon. Mendoza and the American DSS agent are helping the PFM to build a case against us.”

“That can't be,” Ruvalcaba said. “I've been told they were dead.”

“The PFM falsified the crime scene. Both are still very much alive. Vaught has disappeared, but we will get this pig Mendoza to tell us where he is, and Hancock will kill him for us. The gringo sniper has even more to fear from him than we do. You'd better plan on three or four simultaneous abductions. Once word gets out that Mendoza and his family have vanished, the other agents in that file will take extra precautions. And forget the Toluca police for the moment. We'll send Hancock after Mendoza. He'll be more than happy to help once he realizes there are witnesses who can place him behind the rifle that killed Alice Downly.”

39

LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

18:00 HOURS

Midori Kagawa had come to work for Pope at the CIA as an analyst and computer programmer even before graduating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when Pope was still in charge of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). For the past ten years, she had been blindly loyal to him, deferring to his judgement on all matters. Recently, however, she had noticed a change in Pope. There was a coldness to the CIA director now where before there had been only the distracted genius concerned with protecting his operators in the field.

Midori believed she knew the cause of the change. Pope had been shot twice in the chest the year before, in two separate assassination attempts. He himself had shot the second attacker to death at point-blank range, and though Pope had made a full physical recovery, he had never met once with a psychologist. There were times now when Midori could see that he was struggling with the emotional
trauma of the previous year, and this convinced her that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Since the discovery of Turkish gold in the French storage unit, Pope had become obsessed with expanding the reach and power of the Anti-Terrorist Response Unit. Midori believed that he had set unattainable goals for the new special mission unit—such as reaching into the House of Saud to assassinate members of the Saudi royal family whom Pope had found to be complicit with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the same terrorist network responsible for the now-infamous attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi.

Midori viewed this objective as pure fantasy. Whether an ATRU assassin left evidence or not, the royal family would readily suspect CIA involvement—viewing the
lack
of evidence as evidence in and of itself—and with Saddam Hussein long dead, Saudi Arabia now had much less to fear in the region, and thus much less reason to tolerate the CIA's picking off minor members of its family.

It was true that a lesser member of the House of Saud—a naturalized American citizen—
had
been instrumental in aiding Chechen terrorists to purchase a pair of Russian suitcase nukes eighteen months earlier, but the Saudi royal family had accepted no responsibility for this, instantly disinheriting the man in the wake of the attempted nuclear attacks on US soil.

While Midori remained prepared to assist Pope in his plans for expanding the ATRU to the best of her considerable abilities, she was not prepared to sit idle while he effectively turned his back on the operators who had helped him gain control of the CIA. Without the direct involvement of Gil Shannon, Daniel Crosswhite, and Mariana Mederos, the US Naval Fleet in San Diego Bay—­including two brand-new aircraft carriers—would have been destroyed in a nuclear explosion, and Robert Pope would have been run out of JSOC on a rail. As it turned out, Pope was hailed as a hero before the Senate, and his appointment as director of the CIA had been approved unanimously.

Midori had only briefly considered discussing her concerns with
Pope, realizing that to even voice an opinion on the matter would preclude any future assistance she might want to offer Gil, Crosswhite, or Mariana. The way things stood, Pope trusted her implicitly, and she needed to keep it that way in order to remain outside his suspicions. So she didn't view helping Gil save Sabastian Blickensderfer's life as a betrayal of Pope's trust but rather as an act of loyalty to the man who had enabled Pope to ascend to power.

The concern weighing most heavily on Midori's mind at the moment was Pope's willingness to allow Clemson Fields such a free hand in dealing with the Alice Downly assassination. This was another matter she didn't dare offer an opinion on for fear of arousing suspicion. Fields had scheduled a flight to Mexico City via a CIA aircraft without providing any itinerary. The CIA's deputy director, Cletus Webb, had signed off on the flight without asking a single question, fully aware that Fields was Pope's point man in the Mexico crisis.

At first, Midori assumed that Fields had consulted with Pope before scheduling the flight, but that assumption proved false, after she'd asked Pope in passing, “Any idea what Clemson Fields is doing in Mexico City?”

Pope had merely shrugged. “I told him to fix the Alice Downly problem. He's probably using the earthquake as cover to get into the capital unnoticed. Agent Vaught made a real mess of things down there, and we'll have to smooth Mexico's ruffled feathers at some point, so it might as well be now. Don't concern yourself with Fields. He's been around a long time.”

Something else worrying Midori was that Pope had expressed no concern for Dan Crosswhite's well-being since the quake, nor had he directed her to attempt contact. So she decided to make contact on her own, using Dan's private number and catching him in the middle of training the Tolucan police officers.

She told him about Fields's flight to Mexico City.

“So Doctor Doom is here in Mexico.” Crosswhite did not sound overly impressed. “He gave Mariana the gestapo treatment up in Texas a couple days ago. I don't know what he and Pope are up to, but
I've gone off the grid for now. I've got some personal shit to handle down here, and the PFM has its hands full with the earthquake.”

“What about the case against Serrano?” Midori asked. “They're letting him go?”

“Ya know what?” Crosswhite said. “Why don't you ask Pope what's going on with Serrano? He's the one who's been feeding intel to that fat drug-dealing bastard.”

Midori had no knowledge of any communications between Pope and Lazaro Serrano. “Are you sure? What kind of intel?”

“I have no idea,” Crosswhite said. “Hold on a second . . .” In the background she heard him giving lengthy instructions to a Tolucan police officer in Spanish before coming back on the phone. “Yeah, so anyway,” he continued, “Fields let that slip while he was playing ‘operation mind crime' with Mariana. So whatever he's cooked up with Pope, it sounds like we've
all
been left out of it. All I can tell you for sure is that I'm done steppin' and fetchin' for that son of a bitch. He's playing both ends against the middle, and I won't tolerate it.”

“How sure are you Fields wasn't making it up?”

“It doesn't matter if he was,” Crosswhite said. “Pope put the fucker on the case. He broke the faith, and I will not work for a man who uses me like a pawn.”

Midori needed a friend to confide in, and she knew she could trust Crosswhite. “He's sick, Dan. I think he's messed up in the head from being shot last year. He's not the same man.”

“I'll bet he is fucked up,” Crosswhite said. “Hell, he's probably got PTSD, but that's not my problem. He's playing games with my life and the lives of my family.”

“Well, I don't know what to do,” she said. “I'm afraid if I say anything, he'll stop trusting me.”

“Is he getting paranoid?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if he's really got PTSD, he could easily become paranoid. So, yeah, don't ask him any questions unless you want him getting suspicious.”

“Shit.”

“
Shit
just about covers it. Hey, have you heard from Gil?”

“He's in China,” she said. “He's in touch with our asset in Beijing. He'll be out of contact the entire time he's inside the border. Chinese electronic surveillance is too dangerous.”

“Does Pope know Gil asked you to arrange the asset?”

“He asked me not to say anything.” Midori didn't mention that she'd been communicating with Gil behind Pope's back for some weeks now, since the discovery of the Turkish gold.

“Good boy,” Crosswhite muttered to himself. “We're finally on the same page.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Gil's not drinkin' the Kool-Aid anymore—which is good to know.”

“I'm worried about him. What's he really doing in China?”

Crosswhite laughed. “You tell me, baby, and we'll
both
know!”