Apart from the tiny red taillights of a car briefly visible far ahead before vanishing around a curve, they seemed to have the road all to themselves. Much as Flynn wanted to put distance between himself and their unknown enemy’s kill team, he fought the temptation to floor it. The snow wasn’t accumulating fast enough to make driving dangerous, but there was no point in making themselves unnecessarily conspicuous by speeding.
Despite his careful driving, they were just a couple of miles north of Kitzbühel when Flynn saw a pair of blue flashing lights appear suddenly in his rearview mirror and turn out onto the highway behind them. It was a lone rider on a motorcycle. And he was closing the gap between them fast.
“We’ve got company,” he muttered to Van Horn.
She craned her head around to peer back through the sedan’s rear window. “Yeah. How truly nice.”
“Is that a cop?” Flynn asked.
She turned back around with a frown. “Maybe. And maybe not.” Her right hand slid inside her jacket. “But somehow I don’t think Br’er Fox will be very happy if we end up in an Austrian slammer after a high-speed chase through the Alps.”
Nodding tightly, Flynn eased his foot off the accelerator, moved over onto the narrow verge of the road, and then braked to a stop. He tapped a control to roll down the driver’s side window. A blast of cold air whistled in, along with a few snowflakes that spun and swirled around the interior before melting.
In his rearview mirror, he saw the rider pull in behind them and dismount from his motorcycle. The blue lights on the bike strobed rhythmically, eerily illuminating the night around them. The cyclist pulled off his white plastic helmet and hung it on the handlebars. Then he strode forward confidently, with one hand on the pistol holstered at his hip.
Flynn’s eyes narrowed in concentration. Was the other man wearing a police uniform? Or just a mix of dark-colored civilian clothing? In the weird, oscillating blend of light and shadow created by those flashing lights, it was almost impossible to be sure one way or the other.
The motorcycle rider reached the window and bent down to peer inside.
“What’s the problem, Officer?” Flynn asked politely in German.
The other man shrugged. “Nur eine Routineprüfung. Ihr Führerschein, bitte? Just a routine check. Your driver’s license, please?”
Flynn’s hackles rose. He’d caught the faint hint of an accent — the wrong accent — in the man’s voice. He felt a rush of adrenaline flood his system, ice-cold even in the already frigid winter air. Time seemed to slow. One part of his brain noticed the man’s right hand darting fast toward the weapon at his hip. Oh, hell.
“Lean back, Nick,” Laura Van Horn said conversationally. Then she fired twice with her own pistol, the sound of the shots deafeningly loud inside the car.
Hit dead center by both rounds, the motorcyclist staggered back from the window. His mouth opened wide in shock. Reddening stains spread outward from the holes punched through his black leather jacket. He fumbled again at his holster. Without hesitating, Van Horn leaned even farther around Flynn and squeezed the trigger two more times. Her third shot slammed into the man’s chest. Her fourth caught him in the face and exploded out the back of his skull.
He collapsed onto the road and lay still.
Flynn didn’t wait to see more. He put the Mercedes in gear and pulled away. He glanced at Van Horn.
“Not a cop,” she mouthed. Both their ears were still ringing from the sharp crack of four shots fired in rapid succession.
He nodded grimly. Whoever these guys were, they’d launched a full-court press to find and kill him — with lookouts apparently posted at all the exits from Kitzbühel. He sped up. The more miles they put between themselves and the dead man lying twisted on the highway, the better.
A little farther up the road, Van Horn had him swing left at a junction — turning onto a highway that would take them west to Innsbruck, then south to the Brenner Pass, and from there into Italy. “Change of plans,” she told him, reading the text she’d just received from Fox. He wanted Flynn back in the States ASAP, and it had just become blazingly obvious that Austria was too damned hot for both of them. With Arif Khavari dead and their still-unidentified opposition out in force and looking for blood, returning to Vienna would be a sucker’s move.
Three
Pavel Voronin stood perfectly at ease, looking out the east-facing, floor-to-ceiling windows that formed one whole wall of his spacious private office. From here, forty-four stories up the Mercury Tower, one of six ultramodern skyscrapers that made up the city’s International Business Center, he could see all the way across the frozen Moskva River to the Kremlin’s redbrick walls and spires and beyond. A cloudless blue sky overhead signaled the arrival of a massive wave of high pressure from Siberia, sending temperatures in the Russian capital plunging to well below zero. In the bright sunlight, the Mercury Tower’s bronze-tinted reflective glass glowed like a soaring pillar of fire on Moscow’s skyline.
It was an ostentatious display that mirrored the self-proclaimed status of the building’s prosperous tenants — five-star restaurants, luxury-apartment owners, high-end retail stores, and the business offices of some of Russia’s most successful enterprises.
Including his own Sindikat Vorona, the Raven Syndicate, which now occupied three full floors of the gleaming skyscraper.
Idly, with a thin, cold smile that never reached his pale gray eyes, Voronin gazed down across Moscow’s icy streets, so full of tiny-seeming cars and trucks and scurrying, antlike pedestrians. It was a view he relished — especially since this office had once belonged to Dmitri Grishin, one of Russia’s most powerful and wealthiest oligarchs, the man who had been his mentor for more than a decade.
Grishin had prized both Voronin’s outward polish — the product of the best preparatory schools and universities in the United Kingdom and the United States — and his utter ruthlessness. And he had used the younger man to run his most illegal ventures, culminating in a daring scheme to secretly orchestrate the theft of Russia’s most advanced stealth bomber and then sell it to the highest bidder. In the end, they’d obtained huge sums of ransom money from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. — only to have the aircraft unexpectedly crash and explode deep in Alaska’s uncharted wilderness, making it impossible to return the technological marvel to their own country as promised.
But in this seeming setback, Voronin had immediately seen the opportunity he’d long craved, a chance to permanently end his apprenticeship to Grishin. He’d callously betrayed the oligarch to Russia’s state security services and to the lethal vengeance of the nation’s authoritarian ruler, President Piotr Zhdanov. Then, posing as a patriot appalled by the older man’s “crimes,” he’d helped the Kremlin also retrieve the hundreds of billions of rubles it had paid into some of Grishin’s secret accounts. Of course, now secure in Zhdanov’s good graces, he’d kept for himself the three billion dollars so unwisely paid into other hidden accounts by the American CIA — using it to fund the creation of the Raven Syndicate, his own private military and intelligence “consulting” firm.
His smile widened slightly at the memory of watching Dmitri Grishin’s bullet-shattered corpse drift out to sea. That one small, perfect act of treachery had freed him to pursue his deepest ambitions… and simultaneously provided the wealth he required. In little more than a year, he’d built up a deadly and efficient organization — luring many of Russia’s best-trained special forces soldiers and intelligence specialists away from its vaunted Spetsnaz commando groups, its foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, and its military intelligence unit, the GRU, and into his own service. Poaching so many of their best people hadn’t won him any friends in Russia’s Ministry of Defense or its official intelligence organizations. But he didn’t really give a damn.