“You sure these are all the same person?” Danny asked Nuri.
“Of course not,” said Nuri. “But here’s what I think. Ivanski stayed in Moldova after the camp was closed. But he didn’t practice medicine, for whatever reason. At some point either he got antsy or needed money. He adopted Nudstrumov’s identity.”
“Or he was Nudstrumov, and living in Russia,” offered Danny.
“Exactly. He buys the property under the Moldovan name, but for some reason decides he can’t practice as Ivanski. He already had his credentials, but maybe it’s the connection to the place he didn’t want known. In any event, Ivanski more or less disappears, and we have Nudstrumov.”
“And Rustam Gorgov?” asked Danny.
“Totally fictitious — the computer hasn’t found any other data on him at all. I’m sure there’s more. We just haven’t found it.”
“Where’s the connection to the assassins?” asked Flash.
“We don’t know yet,” said Nuri. “That’s why we keep looking. But there’s definitely enough that’s suspicious.”
“Maybe he’s just trying to keep an affair quiet,” said Flash. “Or he’s a drug dealer on the side.”
“He may grow marijuana on that farm,” said Nuri. “It’s a cash crop in Moldova. We have to check it out.”
“Man, I wish we’d do something more than check things out,” said Flash. “I’m getting — stale, I guess.”
Danny turned and looked at Flash. Like him, Flash was action oriented — give him a clear-cut assignment, and he was good to go. This was far more nebulous — this was like wandering through a fog and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no clear-cut path to the right door.
God, he thought, we’re miles and miles away from getting a real handle on this.
“The doctor may take us to some other connection,” said Nuri. “We have to be a little patient.”
“The problem is time,” answered Danny.
“I can follow the leads here,” answered Nuri. “You can get back to Kiev.”
“We may do that.” Danny glanced at his watch. It was five to three. The doctor should be leaving soon.
Nuri checked the signal on the tracking device, to make sure it was working. The radio signal was being sent through a commercial GPS satellite system, and was accurate to within roughly a third of a meter. Adapted from a commercial design used to track trucks over the highway, the device worked extremely well in open areas. Inside cities it could be problematic, however, as the larger buildings and other obstacles occasionally shielded the signal.
Nuri was sure they were tantalizingly close to figuring this out. All they needed was one more strategic bit of information and they’d know where and who these guys were.
They might already have it. He had originally thought the doctor was an unlikely choice to be the leader of the assassin group, but the fact that he had at least two other aliases gave him some hope. Underlings, he reasoned, had no need for multiple names.
Nuri didn’t buy most of the speculation about the human experiments. He thought Stoner was probably involved, but wondered if the helicopter crash hadn’t somehow been arranged. That wasn’t something the Agency would be too ready to admit or even investigate — it implied that whatever intelligence they’d gathered in the Revolution operation — Danny’s name for it — had been tainted, fed to them by a double agent.
Stoner.
Maybe Stoner had felt the Agency was closing in. Maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Or occupation.
Becoming an assassin, Nuri thought — well, there was a money-making retirement option he had never thought of.
His watch beeped. It was 3:00 P.M.
At exactly 3:05, MY-PID announced that Dr. Nudstrumov was coming out of his clinic and heading toward the elevator.
“Bankers’ hours,” Flash told Danny. “See ya in a bit.”
Danny waited as Flash got out of the car, then put his signal on and checked the traffic. He pulled out behind a bright red Fiat and drove toward the building. He wanted to time it so he got there just as the doctor was getting into his car. But he’d been a little too anxious; he was a block away before Nudstrumov finally got into the elevator to go down to the lobby.
“I’m going to pull into the lot,” Danny told the others. “Flash, hang back.”
“Yeah, copy that.”
“Nuri?”
“Right.”
A panel truck turned into the lot just ahead of Danny, then stopped, waiting for a car that was pulling out. Danny stopped, still in the roadway. He glanced in his mirror anxiously — the last thing he wanted right now was a car accident.
The truck finally pulled ahead. Danny took his foot off the brake. The door to the building was on his right.
“Subject exiting building.”
There he was, just ahead on the right. He was short and rotund, not particularly distinguished looking. If you were Hollywood, he thought, and you were going to cast someone in the role of assassin mastermind, Dr. Nudstrumov wouldn’t be it.
Nudstrumov glanced over his shoulder as he began walking to his car. Danny got a glimpse of his face. He looked somewhat annoyed, not quite angry but not relaxed either.
The doctor kept walking, his chubby legs stroking quickly. A car on Danny’s left started to pull out into the aisle. Danny stopped, waiting for her to go — he’d pull in, then wait for the doctor to leave before following.
He looked back at the doctor. He was only a few meters from his car now. He had his keys in his left hand.
Suddenly the doctor seemed to spin to his left. Danny thought for a moment that he had recognized him through the car window somehow. Then in the next moment the right side of his forehead exploded, bursting into a red splatter of blood.
“Shit!” yelled Danny. “He’s been shot! Nudstrumov’s been shot!”
27
The first shot had been low, deadly but not instantaneous lethal. The second hit home perfectly, exploding Nudstrumov’s skull.
A thing of beauty.
But the Black Wolf knew he couldn’t stop to admire it. He had to move.
He pulled the rifle back, quickly folding the stock and dropping it into the box. He slapped it closed and picked it up. He already had his backpack on.
A person got out of the car across the street, near the lot where he’d shot the doctor. The Black Wolf saw him through the window from the corner of his eye.
He turned and focused.
A black man.
Familiar.
Familiar. He focused — narrowed his vision so the man was right next to him, features large in his brain.
He was very, very familiar. Yet he couldn’t quite identify him.
Why did he know him?
No time for that: Go! Go! Go!
28
Danny leapt out of the car. His first instinct was to run to Nudstrumov, even though he knew it was too late to help him. He took a step, then dove to the ground, belatedly realizing that he, too, would be in the killer’s sights.
Or could be.
The shot had come from across the street. There was another building — several.
One of the rooftops.
“Danny, what’s going on?” asked Nuri.
“Somebody just shot the doctor. They must have been across the street.”
Danny jumped to his feet and began running.