The Poseidon Initiative (11 page)

Inside, Tanner was grinning hard. But outside, he kept up his impassive stare. Amir mistook his silence for anger.

“There is nothing I can do about that. It may work without incident. It may not. Usually when I transfer this much money my superiors know about it in advance. That’s all I’m saying. If we can wait until morning I can go into a bank in person and withdraw the entire sum from one of my personal accounts. Not that I relish the thought of spending the night like this,” he said, looking over at Danielle’s pistol pointed at his face, “but if it means life rather than death then of course I will do it.”

Tanner moved close enough to read the screen. “Do the transfer.”

Amir nodded and put his hands on the computer. He typed in a dot-com web address. Tanner didn’t recognize it, and it didn’t suggest any connection to Hofstad.

Tanner watched closely as Amir used familiar looking online banking controls to transfer ten thousand U.S. dollars to another account. Tanner noted that he had to set the currency into dollars from Euros, strongly suggesting a European-based system.

Amir looked over his shoulder at Tanner. “Your account number?”

Tanner removed a piece of paper from his briefcase while Danielle guarded Amir. He read off the numbers, which Amir entered into the online system. He clicked enter and the site gave a confirmation that the transfer was processing.

“It is done.” Amir turned around to look Tanner in the eye.

Tanner waved his weapon toward the bed. “Go have a seat while I confirm the transfer.” He didn’t really care about the money. He was just buying time. He hoped that someone in Hofstad would notice that ten thousand dollars had been transferred from one of their accounts immediately after one of their lab techs had declared the antidote samples to be ineffective and probably outright junk, and come running. But checking to see that Amir had actually initiated a transfer and not some kind of coded alert would be worth doing also, he thought, as he faced the laptop’s screen away from Amir’s view.

Tanner logged into the OUTCAST financial account and checked the recent activity. Indeed, there it was: a pending deposit for $10,000.

“Lucky for you it worked, Amir.”

“Can I go now?”

Suddenly Tanner’s radio squawked on his belt. Liam’s voice. Tanner picked up the unit and lowered the volume, holding it up to his ear as he took it into the bathroom. No need for Amir to hear Liam. Especially when he sounded so frantic, as he did now.

“Activity at the front entrance. Four guys just got dropped out of an SUV that I was watching. They’re headed into the lobby now.”

Charleston, South Carolina

In Amir’s hotel room bathroom, Tanner adjusted his radio’s squelch setting, attempting to get a cleaner signal.

“Say again, Bravo — did you say
four
guys?”

“That’s affirmative! Coming in now. Should I follow them in?”

“Yes! We’ve got control of the tango up here.” He gave Liam the room number.

“Copy that, in pursuit.”

Tanner felt much better knowing he had the ex-SEAL on his side. Three on four — or three on five if one counted Amir — were much preferable odds to two on five. Tanner considered that they might be able to use Amir as a hostage, but in his experience terrorists cared little for their own. They would not shed a tear for their fallen comrade.

He walked out of the bathroom and back into the main room, where Amir was pleading with Danielle to let him go.

“Shut up, Amir,” Tanner said, collecting his laptop and tossing it into his briefcase.

“They split up,” Liam said over the radio, audible to everyone in the room, including Amir.

“Two going up the elevator, two went ground level out back, by the pool.”

Tanner ran to the balcony and pulled the curtain aside just enough to get a look outside. The pool deck was underneath, mostly empty at this evening hour but with a small group in the hot tub. He didn’t see a fire ladder or any way to readily access the balconies from below, although he knew that a prepared team could make easy work of it.

“You have support on the outside!” Amir accused. “Who are you? You are not simply a biotechnology company wanting to help people with your product, are you? You don’t even have a product — the sample you gave us was pure trash. Who do you work for? CIA?”

Tanner knew Danielle was too disciplined to look away from her charge, but he could see her flinch at the closeness with which Amir’s verbal dart came to hitting the bullseye.

“Sorry, Amir, old buddy,” Tanner said as he crossed the room to the phone on the nightstand, “But there’s no time to chat now.”

“What are you doing?” Amir asked.

Tanner pressed a button on the phone and waited a second before saying, “Yes, I’d like a bottle of your best champagne brought up immediately, please. Yes, charge it to the room. Thank you.”

Tanner let the phone receiver drop and turned to Amir. “Sorry to pile on the expenses, pal, but your boss will understand, I’m sure.” He raised his gun and walked toward Amir until the barrel pressed into his temple. “Who’s coming up here? Do they work for you or do you work for them?”

Amir breathed heavily, his substantial gut heaving in anxiety-riddled gasps. A tracer of blood sluiced down his temple to his cheek.

“Answer the question!”

Danielle interjected. “They’re here.”

They heard men calling through the door in Danish. Tanner heard what he was pretty sure was a name, but it wasn’t Amir, not that he thought Amir was his real name.

“Answer it!” He jammed the gun barrel into Amir’s head at the same time as a little warning bell went off in his mind.

His hands are still untied…

They heard the door being kicked in at the same time as Amir rammed his head into the belly of Tanner, who had been looking at the entrance.

“Tanner!” Danielle fired two shots at the intruders, who wore black ski masks with their eyes blacked out and brandished sound-suppressed handguns. Tanner fired a shot of his own at the doorway and at that moment Amir made his move. Not bothering to get up from the chair, he lashed out with a vicious judo chop to Tanner’s arms, both of which were holding his gun. Tanner’s second shot went low, hitting the carpet. His gun went flying a couple of feet away onto the floor.

Tanner dove for his gun but Amir toppled over in his chair onto him, grabbing his legs. The OUTCAST leader wormed his way on the floor toward his weapon while Amir struggled to pull him away from it.

Danielle fired two more rounds at the advancing intruders. One of them grunted in pain as he took a bullet and spun into the wall, but the other kept shooting. Danielle used the end of the dresser as cover, crouching behind it just as a bullet chipped away a corner, missing her but spraying a splinter into her left eye and blurring her vision in that orb. She fired again, this time at the Hofstad man she hadn’t hit, who was now advancing on Tanner’s fallen pistol. She hit him in the gut but he kept coming and she knew he was wearing body armor beneath his clothes.

In another second, four things happened at once.

They heard a knock on the hotel door followed by a woman calling, “Room service!”

Tanner was grappling with Amir and the gunman who had advanced into the room.

Danielle saw an opportunity and shot the same man she’d hit before in the head, splashing his cerebral matter onto the cerulean wallpaper.

The sliding glass door leading to the balcony exploded in a shower of glass and two more Hofstad men crashed through into the room. Danielle’s heart sank for a moment. Then she saw that they were both already dead.

“Freeze, don’t move!” The terrorist inside the room shouted. He had his shoe on Tanner’s gun and his own firearm pointed at Tanner’s head.

Danielle swiveled the barrel of her gun from Amir to the balcony. When she started to swing it back to Amir, the terrorist yelled at her: “Put it down or I blow your friend away!”

Amir outstretched his meaty palm. “Give it to me.”

And then she watched as the head of the man pointing the gun at Tanner seemed to explode into a misshapen mass of extruded meat, his eyes suddenly traveling down the sides of his face. His gun flew up into the air as his cranial contents dripped to the floor. With a surprising degree of alacrity for a man of his bulk, Amir reached up and caught the weapon in mid-air.

Tanner gut shot him as soon as he did. Amir made a coughing sound and dropped to his knees, both hands, including the one still holding the gun clutching at his ruined mid-section.

Then they heard Liam’s voice. “Balcony, clear!”

“Main room, clear,” Tanner responded. His voice did not sound nearly as energetic as Liam’s.

The ex-SEAL stormed into the room, counting the bodies as he looked about.

“Got what we need?”

Tanner nodded.

“Time to go, boys and girls, unless you want to stick around to explain five dead bodies.”

Tanner got to his feet and looked around at the carnage, disparaged. Every single Hofstad man was dead. Quickly, the three of them searched each body for anything that might lead them higher up the terror organization’s hierarchical structure.

But they found nothing.

Then came shouting coming from the hall, the trammel of fast-moving footsteps, and the room phone ringing.

“This way, please.” Liam patiently waved an arm at the balcony. “Rope slide. Let’s go.”

He led them to the balcony, drawing the curtain and door shut as they heard loud knocking at the door, hotel employees calling into the room.

Liam jumped off the balcony, seeming to barely touch the rope on the way to the ground. Tanner and Danielle went next, their egress slower than Liam’s almost supernatural glide but still serviceable.

With a flick of the wrist Liam pulled the rope down from the balcony as they ran down a maintenance path. The trio of operatives made it to Tanner’s vehicle and they left the area, abandoning Liam’s scooter.

Behind the wheel, Tanner felt the sting of failure along with the rush of wind through his hair. They’d dispatched five Hofstad agents, none of them key members. They were no closer than before to following the beast’s tentacles back to its head.

The mission was a failure.

He could only hope that his agents were having more luck at Jasmijn’s lab. Or that Shah — even though his objective had the lowest probability of success of all of them — was courting Lady Luck in the embassy.

United States Embassy, The Hague

Stephen Shah exited the elevator onto the first floor and passed through the cubicle farm. He caught some odd looks on the way.
Yeah, I’m the guy who just shut your asses down. Deal with it.
At least he hoped that’s what the looks were about. But as he neared the end of the cube farm just before it opened into the expansive lobby area, he saw a man bolt upright, his head shooting above his workstation wall like a hyperactive prairie dog emerging from its hole in the ground.

Shah did his best to ignore him but saw the man point dramatically at him. Heard him say into the phone, “He’s here! Yes, right now, he’s about to walk out of here into the lobby.”

Shah picked up his pace as much as he could without seeming like he was acting suspicious, but then came the shouted commands.

“Mr. Rahim! Stop, please, we need to talk to you! Mr. Rahim…”

Then a duo of suited security personnel emerged from a row of cubicles and headed right for Shah. One of them held up a badge. Shah didn’t take the time to figure out what it represented. His ruse hadn’t worked.

A few of the workers began to catcall at him.

“Close us down?”

“You with Hofstad?”

Shah took solace in the fact that they didn’t yet know who he was.

One of the security men silenced these rabble-rousers with a wave. One of them touched an earpiece as if straining to hear better, and then he pointed assertively in Shah’s direction. He and his associate ran toward the OUTCAST operator, blocking the thoroughfare to the main exit.

Shah sidestepped down a row of cubicles, eliciting screams from surprised female workers who feared what this imposter among their ranks might do now that he’d been outed. He was dangerous in the same way a wild animal was unpredictable when cornered.

Halfway down the row of cubes Shah jumped up on a desk surface and leapt over the cubicle wall. He landed on the desk of the cubicle on the other side. Fortunately it was unoccupied but he slipped on some papers before he regained his balance enough to jump to the floor.

“We just want to talk!” one of the guards implored.

“Don’t make this worse than it needs to be,” chimed in the second.

Shah’s voiceless opposition made it clear to the security detail that they would have to forcibly take this man down. No surrender here.

Shah, who had long practiced Krav Maga, saw potential weapons everywhere as he began to make his course more erratic. A pencil jar holding a pair of scissors here. A pewter paperweight there. A computer cable. Even a thin notebook computer could be flung into a windpipe with devastating force. But for now he concentrated on evasive action.