Renegade (2013) (7 page)

One of the other servers at the pass-through window turned to talk to someone. “Call the cops. Quick.”

With one long stride, Carl crossed the space between himself and
Teresa. He wrapped a long-fingered, black-taloned hand around her elbow and yanked her toward the nearest table. “I said, get over here and take my order.”

“No.” Teresa fought back against him, but he was too strong. He dragged her to the table. Then she clawed his arm with her free hand, slicing streamers of blood along his forearm and wrist.

Carl cursed, released her, and backhanded her with surprising speed. The blow knocked her from her feet and she went down flat on her back. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and she cried, wrapping her arms around her head in a learned response as she curled up into a ball.

Pike was out of the booth and moving even as Carl drew back a boot to kick the woman. Carl saw him coming and grinned. “You shacked up with her? Coming over here to protect—?”

Without a word, Pike walked straight up to the man and hit him in the mouth. Talking to Carl would have only been a waste of time and left Pike open to an attack. The man had come into the diner looking for a fight and obviously wasn’t going to leave until he had one.

The impact from Pike’s blow staggered Carl and knocked him backward. Surprisingly, he remained on his feet, and Pike realized the man was made of sterner stuff than he’d first thought. He hadn’t pulled his punch.

Watching the man, never taking his eyes from him, Pike reached down and helped Teresa to her feet. He pushed her toward the back of the diner and slipped into place between her and Carl.

The man stood there, and this time maniacal amusement lit his face. He wiped at the blood running from his nose and his burst lips. Crimson stained his teeth. “Well, now, that was a mistake. You wanted a piece of this? Now I’m gonna get me a piece of you.” He pulled a lockback knife from his belt and flicked it open in a glimmer of steel. Light splintered from the razor-sharp edge.

Pike stood loose and easy, resting on the balls of his feet, his hands open at his sides.

“Got nothing to say?” Carl came forward and took a few swipes with the blade, obviously intending to scare Pike with the weapon.

Instead, Pike crossed the distance between them in one step, grabbed Carl’s knife wrist in his left hand, and held it locked there. Then he punched Carl in the face three times in quick succession, finishing up with a jab to the throat that he pulled to keep from killing the man only because he didn’t want to do something like that in front of Hector. Personally, Pike figured the man was a waste of breath. Erasing him from the face of the planet wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Carl swayed drunkenly, his beer-tainted breath smelling harsh as kerosene. Pike grabbed the man’s shirt, stepped into him again, and kneed him in the crotch. As Carl sagged, Pike controlled him with the captured wrist, twisting the arm till he shoved his opponent facedown on the floor. He took the knife away as Carl’s three buddies started to move forward.

Pike glared at them and they froze, holding their hands up in surrender.

Then the front door banged open. As it turned out, the two plainclothes detectives had evidently been talking in the parking lot and had seen the violence break out. They came in pointing guns and yelling, flashing badges. “Tulsa police! Down on the floor!”

One of them pointed his weapon at Pike.

Pike didn’t argue. He placed the captured knife on the floor and slid it away. Then he lay down and waited for them to handcuff him. As he lay there feeling the steel cuffs bite into his flesh, he almost laughed. It was the first time all day that he’d felt like his old self.

BORISOV LED THE WAY
to the room where the CIA agents lay in wait. Yaqub followed the man and felt himself calm almost to the point of numbness. He silently prayed and readied himself to take the lives of his enemies if the situation called for that, but he hoped that it did not. Live CIA agents were much better than dead ones.

One of the CIA men lounged at the end of the hallway just as Borisov had advised them. The man made an effort to not notice them, to continue looking out the nearby window. That wasn’t a true reaction. A man who had been in the hallway with nothing but time on his hands would have looked to see who had arrived.

Borisov used his key to open the door. After all, this was supposed to be his room, the place where he was conducting business with Yaqub. The Russian stepped back from the open door and waved Yaqub inside.

Heart pounding smoothly behind his sternum and pulsing at his ears, Yaqub entered the room as though he suspected nothing.

Dressed in
shalwar kameez
and
pakols
, the two remaining CIA agents sat at a table in the center of the room. Though one of the men was black and the other man was heavily tanned, Yaqub could see their nationality stamped into their features. They had lived lives of comfort, and Yaqub despised them for that. Americans warred
with impunity in Afghanistan, forcing everyone to heel under their tyranny and their godlessness. There was no disguise for that.

Their Pashtun guides sat on a couch against the wall to the left. The room was small and neat, but it had seen better days a long time ago. The stink of cigarettes and hashish clung to the yellowed walls.

Yaqub stopped only a few feet into the room. Hasan was just behind him. The al Qaeda leader let suspicion show on his face, knowing that in this next moment he might die, but God would have the virgins waiting for him for dying in this holiest of wars.

The CIA agents exploded into action, unable to keep themselves still. They pulled pistols from their clothing.

“Hold it right there, Yaqub! Raise your hands or you’re a dead man!”

Even as weapons filled the Americans’ hands, though, Hasan was faster still. As Yaqub raised his hands, the boy stepped slightly around the al Qaeda leader and fired immediately.

Yaqub kept himself still, trusting his faith and Hasan’s skill. The boy proved to be spectacular. His bullets tore at the flesh of the Americans, punching into their legs and arms. A round struck one of the CIA agents in the hand.

The second man got off one shot before he went down, but he too fell as his wounded legs buckled under him.

Yaqub leaped forward and grabbed the pistol from the wounded man. As he stood, he turned the weapon on the Pashtun guides still seated on the couch. Neither of those men looked like they knew what they needed to do. Yaqub shot them both in the face, dropping their corpses to the couch.

Turning, Yaqub spotted Hasan lying on the floor, his brown eyes wide in surprise. Blood spread from the center of his chest, growing as Yaqub watched.

“Hasan!” Forgetting himself for a moment, thinking only of the boy’s loss, Yaqub dropped to his knees beside Hasan. As he saw the
spreading pool of blood, Yaqub knew there was nothing he could do. Hasan was dying. Crimson bubbles burst across the boy’s lips as his face visibly paled during a shaky, forced breath.

Borisov cursed in his native language and clawed for the pistol in his pocket. He couldn’t get it out before the last CIA agent filled the doorway. Almost as soon as the man appeared, though, he stumbled back and his right arm went limp, dropping the pistol he’d held in his hand. Blood gushed from a wound high up on his arm.

Reacting instantly, Borisov finished drawing his pistol, then swung the weapon in a backhanded blow that slammed against the CIA agent’s forehead. Unconscious immediately, the man sank bonelessly to the ground.

“Mullah.” Hasan’s voice was so weak it was almost inaudible.

Resting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, Yaqub knelt over him, leaning in close so he could hear him. “Yes.”

“Did I only wound them?”

“You did. You were amazing, Hasan. Truly, God has blessed you.”

With a final shudder, Hasan relaxed in death. His pupils bloomed in his eyes till there was no color left, and nothing of the boy remained in his body.

Praying, Yaqub closed the boy’s eyes, then stood and looked through the window to see Wali leaving the opposite building and crossing the street.

One of the CIA agents moaned as he clutched his maimed hand.

Wali, Faisal, and more of Yaqub’s men rushed into the room.

Yaqub pointed at the moaning man. “Get a tourniquet on his arm. I do not wish for him to bleed out now that we have him.”

Faisal knelt to tend to the task himself, using a shoestring from the man’s own footwear.

Quickly the CIA agents were gathered up by Yaqub’s warriors and carried into the hallway. Wali stared at the dead boy.

“He did his job, Wali. There was no hesitation in him. You trained him well. Take pride in what you gave him.”

Wali nodded, then leaned down and picked up the small corpse. He carried the dead boy out into the hallway too. He would not be left to be defiled by whomever the Americans recruited to investigate the incident.

Out in the hallway, Yaqub followed the others down the stairs. On the first floor, they did not leave the building and go out onto the street. They went into a back room, then down into one of the smuggler’s tunnels that had been constructed beneath various buildings in the city. Townspeople also used them to escape structures that had been targeted.

Yaqub took one of the candles from a shelf built into the wall behind the short ladder that led into the tunnel. He lit it from Borisov’s, then followed the big Russian through the darkness.

“Well, you have your CIA agents as you wished, Yaqub. I am curious, though, as to what you are going to do with them.”

“You will see soon enough. The world will know.”

“What do you mean, they’re gone?”

Carter stood to one side of the control center and took the call from Langley over his headset. “I mean they’re gone.” This was Carter’s first time to deal with CIA Special Agent in Charge Marshal Stivers, and he was definitely not a fan of the man. Instead of determining what could be done to find his team, Stivers seemed more intent on making sure the blame for their loss was placed elsewhere.

Of course, to be fair, there was a lot of stress on the CIA SAC now that one of his teams had been taken from a region they weren’t officially allowed in. The Pakistanis had been adamant about clearing the spy agency out of the country.

“How could you people just lose my team?”

“With all respect, this was not our operation. We were picking up pieces from your agency. Your team got lost because you people lost them. We were trying to help you keep a visual on them. In the end, that wasn’t possible.” Carter glanced at the tablet he was carrying that linked him to information streaming in from the control center.

Prentiss was running recon on the area, watching as many of the streets as she could, but that was going to be wasted effort in the end. The city was too large for one drone to cover. A Reaper’s usefulness, like any other tool in the military arsenal, was limited by available information.

“You probably know Parachinar as well as I do, Special Agent Stivers. All FATA lands are veritable smugglers’ paradises. Black market goods and contraband filter through that region like grease through a goose.” Carter wasn’t exactly sure what that last meant, but it was something his grandfather had often said. “If you can get me a twenty on those men, I can get a bird in the air to keep track of them. When someone goes missing like this, it takes boots on the ground to locate them again.”

With a final snarled curse, Stivers broke the connection.

Turning around, Carter faced the control center and studied the panel in front of Prentiss. The city lay revealed before them, but there was no clue where the CIA team had disappeared to.

On the screen to the right, the faces of the three agents were lined up. Carter and his team hadn’t been given their names. That information was strictly need-to-know, and Carter had been informed that he didn’t need to know. He’d accepted that.

Prentiss’s shoulders had bowed with tension. That was a frequent problem with the cyber unit. Everything was at a distance. Sitting in Nevada, halfway around the world, the remote operators often forgot that the distance separated them from everything happening over
there. Until something went wrong. Then that separation became painfully apparent.

“Take a moment, Prentiss. You’re not going to find them by going blind staring at that monitor.”

“I know.” Prentiss took a deep breath and leaned back. “I know that losing them wasn’t my fault. I’ve done this long enough that I realize we’re limited in what we do. We’re a backup measure at best and only occasionally strike-capable.”

“That’s right.”

“But I still feel like there’s something I should be doing.”

“You’re doing it. You’re looking for those men.”

Prentiss adjusted her headset. “I’ve got an electronic signal coming from inside that building. It’s a video feed.”

“Put it on-screen.” Carter’s phone rang and he automatically answered. “Carter.”

Stivers spoke without preamble. “I’ve got a local team on-site at that structure. I need you to piggyback a signal through your bird.”

“Can do. They’ve already pinged us. We’re not going to be in real time with them. We’re compressing and encrypting the data.” Carter covered the mouthpiece and relayed the request to Prentiss.

Anger tainted Stivers’s words. “I know the drill. Just get it to me. I’ve got analysts waiting on it.”

Carter bit back a sharp retort. Evidently a guy didn’t have to be polite at Langley. He just had to be good at what he did. Losing a team wasn’t a measure of competency.

The data stream unpacked and showed on the panel, revealing the bloody room where the CIA team had evidently met whatever fate they’d encountered. Blood stained the walls. Two dead men sat slumped on a couch. When the man providing the video turned, a pool of blood was revealed on the floor near the door. Another was just outside the entrance.

There was no sign of the three faces on Prentiss’s second panel, but the room had been turned into a charnel house.

Abruptly, the camera turned again, briefly catching the legs of another person in the room as well.

Prentiss looked up at Carter and mouthed,
Relaying.

Carter nodded and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Are you getting this?”

“Looking at it now.”

The camera view suddenly shifted again, lowering to the floor and increasing magnification. It took Carter a moment to figure out what the cameraman was focusing on; then—when he did figure it out—he wished he didn’t know.

Two human fingers lay under the sofa the dead men sat on. One of them had been severed at the knuckle. The other at the second joint. Both amputated digits showed obvious trauma, not clean cuts.

Prentiss’s reflection in the panel took on a more somber cast. Her mouth became a hard line. Without a word, she opened the drawer in front of her and slid a hand inside. From the time that he had worked with her, Carter knew she kept a Bible there—a touchstone for faith and family, she’d once told him. After a moment, she took her hand back out and seemed a little more composed.

On the panel, a man’s hand appeared in front of the camera and scooped up the two amputated fingers.

Then the camera’s digital upload ceased, clearing the panel so only the serene image of Parachinar’s streets and surrounding snowcapped mountains stood revealed.

“That’ll do, Carter. Thank you for your assistance.” Stivers hung up before Carter could respond.

Prentiss looked at Carter as he punched off the phone. “Think those—” she paused—“belonged to one of the missing agents?”

“Yeah.”

A shiver passed through Prentiss. “So who took the video?”

“Probably one of the CIA assets in the area. Somebody like those two Pashtuns who were dead in that room.”

Prentiss hesitated. “I might be able to blow up some frames of those fingers, maybe pull the friction ridges and search through the system for who they belonged to.”

Carter shook his head. “The CIA knows who they belong to. We’re out of it, Prentiss. Unless they call us back in. Until then—” he nodded to her desk—“maybe you could say a prayer for those men.”

“I already have been.”

“Yeah. Me too. I think they’re going to need it.”