Whirlwind (13 page)

“The DefCon Enterprises presentation?”

Charlie could barely control his glee. DefCon, eh? Now I’ve got a name, and that is one hell of a lot more than Sam gave me. “Exactly. You know if you try to read the disk, it’ll blow up?”

“Of course. I am no fool.” She raised the pistol. “And you are mistaken. I know precisely what I have my hands on.”

Nice bluff, lady. “You know as much as I know zero, zip, zilch, nada. Both of us are in the dark. All we can be certain of is that you’ve got your hands on a secret worth killing for.”

“You are mistaken about what I do or do not know.”

“Baloney. They faxed me a topological map of the base you burglarized, and a floor plan of the lab. I measured the distances, and I checked the times when the generator failed, when the backup came online. Under the best of circumstances, if you and your partner had been standing at the fence line when the lights went out, you had ten minutes in that lab. Probably less. You stole the disk because the presentation on it looked interesting. You stole Whirlwind because… why? .. . my guess is because your partner, a trained engineer, knew what it was.”

“He did. And he told me.”

“No, he did not.” Charlie could see it now, see how it unfolded. Given the time and distances involved, there was no other way it could have happened. “You didn’t have a chance to chitter-chatter. With armed guards all around, the most you two did was whisper a few words to one another. You sure as blazes kept silent once you were out of the lab and running for the fence. Dominik Grisin may have known what he was stealing or at least made a good guess. But he didn’t tell you. Don’t lie to me, Irina, you’re every thing a spy should be, but you simply aren’t seasoned enough to fool an old fox like me.”

Resignation in her eyes, she nodded. “You said you were good at what you do. This is true, I think.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. “Thank you. Now are you going to do the right thing?”

“What is the right thing?”

“Whatever you think is right.” Her eyebrows shot up. Oh, yeah, score one for Charlie! She was expecting some fatherly quote-advice-unquote, same as I bet her dad gave her every minute of her waking life. Nope, my sweet, I’m not falling into that trap. “Look, I’ve been in this racket a long time. I know what I’d do if I were in your situation. I also know that when I was your age the last thing I’d do would be to trust an enemy who claimed he had a grudge against his own people. So, like I said, you do whatever you think you should. If it works out for you, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll be around to give you a hand.”

She smiled. Pretty smile! “I think not. You will be handcuffed to a sink for quite some time. I will be far away.”

“Sure you will. But I’ll be coming after you.”

“You don’t know where I’m going.”

“Wanna bet?”

e drove one-handed on an empty highway, night surrounding her, darkness shrouding her soul.

To be born Russian is to be born in bitterness, centuries of oppression your only heritage. You are a child of a nation that has bowed beneath the indistinguishable tyrannies of czars, of Party apparatchiks, of elected kleptocrats and their Mafya henchmen. No matter how many joys life may bring, foreboding and suspicion weigh upon your every thought. Distrustful of life, resigned to death, you look upon the outer world as an impoverished child looks through the window of a toy store, angrily envious of delights that can never be yours.

Hope is denied. Despair is certain.

But now, just at this time, she had a chance to rise above a fate foretold.

An accomplishment beyond the grasp of ordinary men lay within her reach. All she need do was seize it. Then would be a victory that none could question, none belittle.

Good grades are not enough. I expect no less of my blood than perfection. Sit with me, girl, I will show the proper way to approach these problems….

Being a member of a winning team is an achievement of little individual merit. You will come with me tomorrow. A Navy trainer will make you a true athlete…

The state honors you for your Olympic medal. In four years, they will honor another. You will be forgotten….

They would honor her again, honor her for a triumph that none could deny, none could denigrate. Irina set her jaw. You will salute me, father! You will stand at attention and salute your superior!

She’d made a mistake. She was running. The enemy expected that. Doing what they expected was the wrong thing to do.

What, she asked herself, would they not anticipate? No police can search every hiding place. She had to find a place where they would not think to look.

If that McKenzie man had been telling the truth, and he probably was, the Americans had concentrated their security forces to the east although, no doubt, hunters prowled every point of the compass. North, south, east, or west, they expected her to run somewhere. And therefore unexpected was … She flipped on the Dodge’s turn signal, eased into the right lane, and took the next exit. She turned left, then left again back onto the interstate, back to the city whose borders she’d left an hour earlier.

They know I was there. They will be sure I have moved on. What is the most unexpected thing a fugitive can do? Answer: not flee.

She wouldn’t run. She would stay put. It was the only feint they might not foresee.

Besides she cursed herself only a fool would drive this barren countryside at night. In the empty hours, out in the vastness of New Mexico and Arizona, hers would be the only vehicle on the road. Easily seen, easily stopped, she might as well have painted a bull’s-eye target on her truck.

Lay low. Find a motel. Get out of sight.

What kind of a motel? Her choices were limitless. She could afford anything.

The very peculiar Mr. McKenzie had shouted at her as she left Mitch’s house: “My car doors are open. There’s a present for you on the backseat.”

An understatement. She found a large brown shoebox on which, in an elegant script, he’d written, “For Irina Kolodenkova.” It contained fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred dollar bills, a Texas driver’s license bearing her photo but another woman’s name, and both a Visa and a MasterCard. He’d attached a small note to the driver’s license: “Irina, the credit cards are issued by an Israeli bank. They’re prozrachnyj, what my side calls glassies, totally safe and untraceable. The cash has been laundered. The driver’s license comes from the Mossad’s finest forgers. Good luck, Charlie.”

She’d gaped. McKenzie never expected her to cooperate. He’d walked unarmed into Mitch’s house knowing that she would take him prisoner, and knowing that she would flee.

What is his game? Does he truly seek revenge against his own?

She shook her head. The questions were not answerable. Clearly he had his own agenda an agenda that must be as dangerous as the man himself. The best she could hope for was to elude him the same as she planned to elude all the others who sought to keep her from her victory.

An hour later she saw the sign: Airport, Next Exit.

Perfect. There will be motels nearby. Everyone will be a transient, and I just another traveler passing through.

She swung off the expressway onto a four-lane artery. Three stoplights later, she passed a T intersection the airport access road to her left, to her right a row of motels with familiar signs: Ramada, Day’s Inn, Motel Six, Marriott Courtyard, and the largest, a convention hotel with trade show facilities. I will be lost in the crowd the Airport Hilton.

Pulling into the parking lot, she glanced at her overnight bag. She’d kept it with her all day, transferring it from Jeep to Volvo to Aerostar to Dodge pickup truck. It was not large, but she thought it large enough to look like an air traveler’s luggage. The desk clerk might not notice.

The desk clerk did not notice. She was an older woman, olive-skinned, perhaps of Mexican blood. She asked only if Irina had a reservation (“No. My flight was canceled. I drove straight here from the airport.”), whether she preferred a smoking or non-smoking room (“Non-smoking, please.”), and what credit card Irina planned to use (“Visa,” said Irina, handing her a card bearing the name Caroline Sonderstrom).

Five clocks were fixed above the reception desk one showing local time, the others marked Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and New York. How pretentious, Irina thought. Although, perhaps, Americans did not grasp the subtleties of time zones as readily as other nationalities.

“Thank you, Miss Sonderstrom. You’re in room four-oh-four. Checkout’s at eleven. Complimentary continental breakfast is in the lobby lounge between seven and ten. The elevator’s just past the restaurant on your left. You have a nice stay, hear?”

Irina nodded politely, picked up her bag, and started toward the elevator.

Behind her she heard the lobby’s automatic doors hiss open, then a Germanic voice so resonantly basso that it made her turn: “Sleep comfortable tonight, gentlemen. It could be a long time between soft mattresses.” The speaker was slender, pale, aglow with power. Even though it was nighttime, he wore tinted glasses. She could not see his eyes. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she was certain they were as cold and grey as the North Sea.

Other men crowded behind him two Africans, a single Arab, and a half dozen crop-haired whites. None looked like the man with the dark glasses, but, in some sense they all looked like one another: well exercised beyond civilized norms, primitively muscular, insolently self-confident. They swaggered with a braggart’s arrogance, spoke with a bully’s contempt: “Long way between women, too. I wish we had that Russki blonde babe to play with tonight.”

“Patience, gentlemen. All good things come to him who waits. Even tasty young spies.”

Whispering among themselves, they snickered of their appetites, and how they’d sate them.

Charlie almost missed the party. Thank Kolodenkova for that. No sooner had he pulled his spare handcuff key out of his socks than he noticed something a wee bit wrong with the lock. The damned girl had stuffed chewing gum in the keyhole.

Sneaky, devious, and tricky. I admire that in a woman.

What he didn’t admire was the sweaty work it took to pry a rusty drain pipe out of the wall, or the time wasted running hot water over the cuffs to loosen the gum. Add to that more distractions: first, freeing an angry cowboy hog-tied in a closet; second, calming down the aforementioned wrangler; third, swindling the lad into doing something imprudently dangerous; fourth, jury-rigging the wires of a shattered, 1960s-vintage telephone to his Power-Book computer so that, fifth, he could send urgent e-mails to an Israeli friend and to a hacker who called himself Sledgehammer.

Add it all up and it was just about nine in the evening when he belly-crawled to the top of a low bunker some distance from the airport terminal. He’d expected to spot a few suspicious planes parked near the general aviation hangar. That he arrived in time to watch through the clear bright lenses of 10x42 power Leica binoculars a private jet taxiing toward the debarking area was a lucky bonus.

Less lucky was the familiar logo on the jet’s tail: a stylized red eagle falling for the kill.

The plane rolled to a stop. As its engines wound down, a rear door swung open, stairs deploying automatically. Sniffing the night air, tasting it and drinking it down, a man in darkened glasses stepped out: bad news personified, the big kahuna himself, Johan Schmidt.

Charlie gasped liked he’d been gut-punched. Jesus, he silently cursed, Sam’s put that thing of darkness on the payroll! Nobody hires him unless they’re scared witless. Goddamnit, what kind of unholy hell is this Whirlwind thing?

Ash blonde and cat-graceful in tailored tropical garb, Schmidt was followed from the plane by nine plug-ugly henchmen. They strutted toward five different vehicles, four of them ordinary-looking pickup trucks (although Charlie was willing to bet their engines had been tinkered with). The fifth vehicle, the one that Schmidt seemed to have reserved for himself, was neither ordinary nor anonymous a military model Mercedes Gelandewagen 500.

Used, the brute would set you back twice the price of its civilian cousin. God only knew what it cost new. Mean, muscular, and totally bad assed, G-Wagens ate Humvees. The thing could clock over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, hit sixty in about seven seconds, and climb slopes that would intimidate a mountain goat. Bulletproof, rugged enough to take a triple roll and keep on truckin’, and strong enough to tow an elephant, oh, yeah, Schmidt’s little toy gave new meaning to the phrase “mean machine.”

Refocusing his binoculars, Charlie scanned the rest of the airport. The Gulfstream GV that had brought him here was still parked near the hangar. Next to it sat two Falcon 50s Agency aircraft from their identification numbers and an old Learjet. FBI? Probably. A couple of clearly marked Bureau choppers were out on the tarmac and, more troubling, five olive drab helicopter gunships. No military markings. Not the property of the Air National Guard, I think.

He pointed the binoculars back at Schmidt and his minions, now clustered around their trucks. Damn you, Sam. I figured I’d find a mercenary plane or two here. But Schmidt and his thugs? Hell, if I had any sense, I’d bail out of this assignment right this second.

Charlie swiveled to the right, scanning the length of the terminal, then letting his binoculars roam the full length of the runway. Idly wondering where Schmidt was planning to sleep that night, he aimed the Leicas up the airport access road, picking out the row of hotels across from the T intersection where that road ended. Hmm, I wonder if brother ]ohan has booked a room at the same hotel as me. Now that would present a fine opportunity for bloodshed on an epic scale … what?… aw, no, say it ain’t so…. Streetlights illuminated a black Dodge pickup truck waiting at the intersection for the light to change. A tarpaulin-covered box rested in its bed; a chestnut-haired woman sat in the driver’s seat.

I do not need this. I do not, do not, do not!

The light changed, and wouldn’t you know it, she pulled into the Hilton parking lot.

God damn this!

Schmidt was in his G-Wagen, his gorillas were in their trucks. Their convoy rolled toward the exit.