Independence Day (22 page)

Dowling reached to his wrist and triggered his commo, then whispered.

“Phase Line One, on the ground.”

Fitzgerald, Tosatti, and Dowling made a wide arc across the back of the dacha, stalking along behind a canopy of birch trees, in the darkness and shadows.

The house was long and rectangular, a modern box made almost entirely of glass. It stood elevated on steel stilts. Every room in the house was alight.

On the south side of the dacha, set back from the window, was a room full of people seated around a dining table.

Tosatti snapped his fingers, pointing to the driveway.

Dowling moved his night goggles down over his eyes. Two men were standing in the driveway, between two automobiles. One was smoking. Both men clutched submachine guns, trained at the ground.

Dowling nodded to Tosatti and Fitzgerald.

“On my go,” he whispered. “I got the Ivan in back; Dave, take the other guy. Fitz, backup.”

“Roger that,” whispered Fitzgerald.

All three men raised their carbines. Dowling aimed at the guard facing them, while Tosatti aimed at the man whose back was turned.

Fitzgerald was backup. He aimed at a spot between the two men and would fire only if Dowling or Tosatti missed.

“On three,” whispered Dowling. “One, two…”

Tosatti and Dowling triggered their guns. Dowling struck his man above his right ear, dropping him, and in the same instant Tosatti took the top of the other guard’s head clean off.

They moved quietly, at the back edge of the lawn, scanning the terrain for other guards. They didn’t see any.

Dowling took out a high-powered monocular. He studied the dining room. He counted fourteen people, all seated around a large oval table, eating dinner. The low din of conversation could be heard.

He scanned each person at the table. Seated at the right corner was a tall man with an Afro of curly blond hair. Dowling couldn’t see his face, but the hair was unmistakable.

“I got him,” he whispered. “Front right.”

Fitzgerald moved toward the driveway. He pulled a preset explosive from his weapons belt as he moved: C-4 with a remote detonator. He came to the side of the house, then stalked, pressed against the wall, toward the front. As he was about to move around the corner to the front door, headlights abruptly punctured the darkness.

The vehicle barreled through the entrance to the driveway. It was out of Fitzgerald’s sight line, but he would soon be illuminated by the lights.

Dowling whistled as Tosatti raised his carbine and trained it on the approaching vehicle. Fitzgerald turned. Dowling signaled to hold his position.

A Range Rover sped up the driveway and parked just feet from the dead bodyguards. The lights on the SUV went out. A woman in a white summer dress stepped out from the driver’s door. She had yet to see the dead men on the ground, but she would soon step on them.

Tosatti trained the sniper rifle on the woman, who was now walking toward the front door. The dead guards lay directly in her path. He aimed, then waited.

“Sorry, honey,” he whispered.

He fired. The bullet ripped the woman’s chest, exploding crimson across her white dress, pummeling her backward. She tumbled to the ground.

Dowling nodded to Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald moved to the front entrance. The objective was simple: create a diversion at the front of the house, then enter through the back. The explosives were the diversion. He attached a small brick of C-4 to the door, just below the doorknob, then moved silently along the side of the dacha back to Dowling and Tosatti.

Dowling led the team to the back of the glass house. A swimming pool twinkled in muted subwater green light. Behind it was a stairway that led up to a deck. The three men moved rapidly now, around the side of the pool, then climbed the stairs. They stopped outside the door.

Dowling ran his hand along the perimeter of the door, studying it. He took a preset explosive from his belt, smaller than the one on the front door. He stuck it beneath the doorknob.

The men stood as silent and still as statues. Their faces were black with paint. They were as dark, as invisible as phantoms, shielded by the door.

“I have the target,” Dowling whispered to Tosatti and Fitzgerald.

Tosatti and Fitzgerald nodded.

Dowling reached to his wrist, pressing commo.

“We’re at the line,” he whispered, telling Langley they were about to strike.

*   *   *

Polk stood, arms crossed, directly in front of the plasma, watching a live video feed picked up from a satellite ten miles in the sky. Calibrisi was a foot behind him, to the right. Every man and woman in the room stared at the screen.

Polk was calm. He’d stood in the exact same place many times, directing literally hundreds of operations in his storied career. He looked like a high school English teacher, with horn-rimmed glasses, a striped rep tie, a pink button-down shirt, khakis, a needlepoint belt, and penny loafers. He was considered the best in-mission commander in the history of NCS.

*   *   *

The thermal prints of Dowling, Tosatti, and Fitzgerald were grouped to the left of the screen, like apparitions, huddled three abreast just outside the door.

On the other side of the door, a few feet away from the waiting commandos, the thermal outlines of the dinner party attendees were similarly visible, their movements well defined if hazy: seven bodies on each side of a table, facing each other; the rapid movements of arms, heads, shoulders in the act of enjoying dinner.

One of the people stood up and started to move toward the front entrance.

Polk glanced at Calibrisi, then reached for commo.

“You have someone moving to the door,” said Polk. “Get in there.”

*   *   *

At the back door to the dacha, Dowling registered Polk’s words, glanced at Fitzgerald, who clutched the detonator for the C-4 at the front door, then nodded.

Fitzgerald flipped the metal cap off the detonator and thumbed a small red button. A loud boom abruptly ripped the air on the other side of the house, shaking the ground.

The steel front door was blown like a cannonball into the dacha, down the front hallway. It slammed headlong into a woman on her way to the bathroom, hitting her at more than fifty miles per hour and killing her instantly.

Steel and concrete from above the door were kicked thirty feet in the air. Red and orange flames burst in a fiery cloud. Glass shattered throughout the front wing of the dacha as shouting, then screams, suddenly filled the air.

The wailing of the house alarm came next, a high-pitched siren that only added to the sense of chaos.

Then, at the seeming height of pandemonium, Dowling hit the button on his detonator.

A small-burst explosion ripped the back door off its hinges. It tumbled down onto the deck.

The screams from inside the dacha were louder now.

Tosatti held a small pocket mirror in the door opening, looking for security or signs of weapons. All he could see, through the smoke-clogged air, was the dining room table filled with people, all of whom had raised their hands.

Tosatti signaled the other two commandos, then moved.

They charged through the smoke into the dining room. Tosatti surged first into the room, ASh-12.7 in his grip, suppressor jutting out, then moved right. Fitzgerald was half a step behind him, also armed with an ASh-12.7, and he leapt to the left, surrounding the table.

Then Dowling ran in, moving to the man at the corner of the table as Tosatti and Fitzgerald provided cover.

The thirteen remaining guests stared at the three commandos. Several of the women were crying, hysterical with fear.

“
Comment?
” asked one of the men, his accent unmistakably French.

Dowling stepped in front of the man known to them only as Cloud. But instead of a young man, the one who now cowered before Dowling’s suppressor was much older. He stared blankly at Dowling, his arms raised.

“Where is he?” asked Dowling.

“Who?” he whispered.

“Cloud.”

The man was silent. His hands, raised above his head, trembled in fear.

Fitzgerald moved his wrist to his mouth and triggered commo.

“Bill, we’ve got a situation,” he said.

But before Polk could respond, another explosion shattered the night.

It started beneath the dacha—ten pounds of Semtex, igniting in a ferocious moment that no one had time to flee. The detonation ripped the floor, scorching white-hot fire and heat through the dacha like a grenade through a sand castle. The three commandos, along with the guests, were vaporized before they could even register the white heat as it engulfed them. The glass-and-concrete house shattered in a wild, violent moment. Steel beams went flying as the force of the explosion spread sideways and up, in one horrendous sequence. The dacha burst into a mushroom cloud of flames and heat, white, red, and orange, against the desolate Russian night.

33

MISSION THEATER TARGA

LANGLEY

At CIA headquarters, Polk, Calibrisi, and the rest of the NCS mission team watched as the plasma screen abruptly lit up. A bright orange ball of flames appeared at the center of the screen, then spread out in a concentric wave, overtaking and obliterating everything in frenzied light.

Gasps came from the back of the conference room.

Calibrisi lurched toward the screen.

“
Mother of God,
” he whispered.

“
Johnny!
” barked Polk.

But there was no answer.

Polk watched the screen for a few more moments as it billowed in a silent blur of white light, then disappeared into black. A pained look crossed his normally placid demeanor. He shut his eyes for a moment, swallowed, then stepped to the left, in front of the other plasma screen. On it, the red Mercedes was visible from the sky above, the size of a toy Matchbox car.

Polk looked at Calibrisi, then triggered commo: “Saint Petersburg,” said Polk calmly, “you’re live.”

Polk glanced at Calibrisi, who held up his left index finger, signaling Polk to tell the agents an additional piece of information.

Polk hit commo again: “This is an Emergency Priority operation. I repeat,
Emergency Priority.
Safeties off. Take whatever action is required to get the girl.”

34

ELEKTROSTAL

Cloud read the words and shook his head in disbelief.

“Idioty,”
he muttered.

“What is it?” Sascha asked.

“They still don’t know we’re watching.”

He had on black Oliver Peoples sunglasses. Behind the lenses, his eyes were rimmed with red from a lack of sleep. He wore black leather pants, Saint Laurent boots, and a sleeveless green T-shirt. His shoulders and arms were visible. His muscles were sinewy, brown, sensual, muscles that aren’t made by weights or steroids but rather a gift from his lineage. He was extremely thin.

His feet were up on the table. He stared lackadaisically at the screen, reading live transcription of the CIA operation.

Most people looking at a Monet in a museum see the subject of the painting: flowers, colors, water. A rare few, other masters, see beyond the visual representation. They see brushstrokes. They see layers beneath the colors that are at the surface. They see empty spaces. Motivation and passion, deceit and laziness. They see the way the painting itself is done, from the very kernel of the idea through the painting’s completion. They understand it in a way only Monet himself could have intended.

Cloud was able to see the Internet in much the same way.

If the Internet was, for most, a vehicle for connection, information, and entertainment, for Cloud this surface level of interaction was a thin veneer, indeed, even a distraction. A girl might go online to read about her friends on Facebook, to buy a new shirt from J.Crew, to text her boyfriend. Each separate action involved the movement of data—numbers, letters, and symbols—over wire, or glass fiber, or through the air. These numbers, letters, and symbols, traveling at almost impossibly fast speeds, invisible to the human eye, carried, in their precise structure, very specific commands. That shirt, in this size, send to this address. In exchange for sending it to me, take money from this bank account or that credit card. They were commands. At any given moment, the world was being shaped, changed, and lived in an almost infinitely large architecture of precise data commands and responses. It was where the world was lived. The girl saw only that which had been framed and presented. She saw the results of the commands—pictures of her friends on Facebook, photos of blouses on J. Crew, letters on a screen from her boyfriend. What Cloud saw were the textual representations of the commands and their movement. Within, he saw the human beings behind such commands. He looked for the human brushstrokes, for here is where he could find the human frailties and mistakes that enabled him to penetrate.

The pathways of the data, the multilayered connections across public networks—where it moved, how it moved—were, to Cloud, like the brushstrokes upon the canvas. This was where he lived.