That was the plan. Gregor’s first clue that the plan had gone wrong was when a hand fell on his arm and the blade of a knife pressed against his throat.
Max was proud of his team. Like true professionals, they had turned off their emotions and were going about their jobs in complete silence and with utter proficiency. With tactics learned from the Army Rangers, the Special Forces, the Navy SEALs, and other SpecOps groups, they identified the enemy and took them out by ones and twos, all without firing a shot. What was even more surprising was that, ignoring the rage that had to be burning within them as brightly as the compound, they neutralized the attackers without firing a shot and, as far as Blackburn could tell, without killing a single one of the enemy. This was one band of terrorists that would live to see a trial.
Seeing the last two enemies in front of them, Max raised his hand, signaling for extra caution, and then moved forward. Megan was on his left, and the two of them were flanked by two other members of his team.
Under other circumstances, Blackburn might have played it more cautiously and let one of the others take the point. Then again, he might not have. He and Gordian had argued about this countless times, but the simple fact was that Max refused to consider that any member of his team, no matter how new or how young or how inexperienced, was less indispensable than he was himself. And he absolutely refused to send men in where he himself would not go.
Slipping forward on silent feet, he waited for the man’s hand to come off the radio at his belt, and then he acted, reaching forward and seizing the man’s arm with his right hand and laying a knife along his throat with his left hand. He didn’t say anything. He was more than half hoping the man would react, would start to fight, would do anything to give him a reason to use that knife.
Beside him, Megan wasn’t so nice. Stepping forward in tandem with him, her own short-bladed knife in her hand, she closed on the woman who was her target. Reversing her blade, she brought the hilt down hard on the base of the woman’s neck. The woman tumbled to the ground, unconscious, long, dark hair spilling out from beneath her helmet as she fell.
Too easy, Blackburn thought. He wanted blood. He wanted to pull the knife hard across the neck of the man he’d captured. But he couldn’t. He was a soldier, first and foremost, and though he worked for a company rather than a country, still he had a code to uphold.
Besides, someday this pain and rage would fade, and on that day he wanted to be able to live with himself.
He maintained control of the man he had captured until his men had secured him. Then he sheathed his blade and said, “Get them the hell out of here.”
Spinning away from them, he started the process of searching for survivors. It had been a long night already, and he knew that it was only going to get longer.
FORTY-THREE
“Yuri Vostov,” Gordian said to his desktop videophone. His voice was dull, inflectionless, almost mechanical. It somehow reminded Nimec of the way robotic voices had sounded in science fiction movies that were made in the 1950s. He’d never heard Gordian speak in that sort of tone before, and it disquieted him perhaps more than anything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours. What was going on inside the man?
Gordian sat there in his office and continued looking at Max Blackburn’s image in the small LCD monitor. Across the desk from him, Nimec sipped his third coffee of the morning. None of the men had gotten any sleep, and it showed in the dark crescents under all their eyes.
“According to everything Pete’s got on him, Vostov’s a black marketeer. A drug dealer. A cheap John Gotti knockoff,” Gordian said. “Are we really expected to believe he’d be behind a plot of this complexity?”
Blackburn’s voice came through the speaker. “What Korut Zelva would like us to swallow isn’t important. He probably decided that by flushing Vostov he could throw us off the trail awhile.”
“Whose trail? And long enough for what?” Nimec said. “I don’t care if this guy’s some kind of dimwit, he has to know we’re going to look into his information.” Especially after what was done to our people at the ground station, he almost added, stopping himself at the last moment.
“That’s just it, Pete,” Blackburn said. “I tend to believe there’s a very large grain of truth in the things he’s told us about Vostov. I mean, it makes perfect sense that he’s the next link up in the chain from Nick Roma’s outfit.”
Gordian shook his head. “That still doesn’t address Pete’s essential point. How far does knowing about Vostov really get us? I don’t care how deeply the Russian mafia are involved, they wouldn’t have brought Zelva and the woman…” He glanced down at the notes in front of him, searching for her name. “… Gilea Nastik into this. Those two are professional terrorists. Freelancers.”
“With a grudge against the United States that goes back to the days after the Gulf War,” Nimec said. “From what Ibrahim’s told Max, they blame our government for having reneged on a promise to support the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. And God help us, there may be truth in that.”
“Their grievance doesn’t concern me, not after they’ve butchered thousands of innocents,” Gordian said. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that Vostov could have used his own people and kept it simple.”
“Roger—”
“It doesn’t sit right,” Gordian interrupted. “It doesn’t goddamned sit right.”
Nimec saw Roger’s hand clench and unclench in the air, and again wondered what the deaths of the Steiners, and all the others, were doing to him inside.
“Gord, listen, it seems to me we’re all saying the same thing here,” Nimec said. “If we’re agreed Vostov’s in it, then our next step is to go after him. Squeeze him hard. See what he’ll give up.”
“I don’t think we can assume he’d give up anything.” Gordian looked at Nimec, then turned back to the screen, a set expression on his face. “Don’t you see? According to the reasoning I’ve heard from both of you, this Korut gave us Vostov as a diversion. But why bother if he thought Vostov would crack and send us in the right direction?”
Nimec pursed his lips, thinking.
“Maybe he underestimated the sort of pressure we’d be willing to apply,” Blackburn said in a low, meaningful voice.
“Somebody left a dead body for us to find in a Milan hotel room, and another corpse on a beach in Andalucia. The first man was hanging from a noose. The second man’s throat had been slashed almost to his spine. And both were members of the bombing team. Whoever killed them is obviously convinced we intend to get to the bottom of this affair.”
“Roger,” Blackburn said, “I’m only saying…”
Gordian went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “They slaughtered Art and Elaine Steiner in cold blood — two of the kindest, most decent human beings I’ve ever met, married forty years, both looking toward retirement. They killed dozens of our technicians, administrators, and construction workers, people who’d never lifted a weapon in their lives. People who were just out there doing their jobs, making an honest wage, and perhaps doing a little good for this world in the process. They killed my friends and my employees and tried burning my ground station to the ground, Max. They know we’re in it up to our necks. They know, and they’ve been trying to scare us off, and yesterday they took it as far as they could. But they made a mistake. Because I swear to God, I’m going to bring those bastards down for what they’ve done.”