“Ota!” Stepan wailed. “Ota, Ota!”
She wrenched the wheel, fighting the Audi up the side of the bank, and the car popped onto harder ground. The searchlight flashed on them again, and she saw the orange blossoms of muzzle-flash in her mirrors, and the rear window exploded. The Audi hit the pavement, and Chace slid the car into a right, the rear wheels squealing as they bit into the asphalt.
Stepan had slumped, gone silent, and Chace glanced over and for a horrifying second saw only the blood on the flak jacket. She forgot the stick for a moment, reaching for the boy with her right hand, yanking back the fabric, and saw nothing beneath, no fresh blood. Stepan’s face was streaked with tears, snot running from his nose over his lips.
“Ota—”
“I’m sorry,” Chace told him, the ache in her chest sudden, making the words sound like a companion sob.
She put her hand back to the stick, her focus back on the road, trying to think of an escape.
The Sikorsky was fast, faster than the Audi, and she weaved on the road, trying to stay out of the searchlight. They weren’t shooting now, and they weren’t trying to get ahead of her, and she assumed that meant they liked where she was headed, and wanted her to keep going there. On radios, probably, she decided, maybe a roadblock, but the problem was that she didn’t have any other choice. She had to get back to Tashkent, Tashkent was the only option, and Chace cursed herself for not having planned a fallback exfil, no other way out of the country.
She had to get to one of the embassies, either the American or the British, it didn’t matter. To hell with Crocker and his secret plans, to hell with keeping things quiet, they’d gotten very loud now, and she’d run out of options. She’d lost Ruslan, she’d blown the mission, but she was damned if she was going to lose the son, too. She’d fucked it up, but she wasn’t going to lose the son, too.
Over her dead body would she lose Stepan.
Then she saw the headlights, and she saw the silhouette of the man standing in front of them, and more, saw the silhouette of what he was raising onto his shoulder.
“Oh, fucking hell,” Chace said.
Yanking the handbrake, she twisted the wheel, stomping the pedal. The Audi slid, spinning left, and Chace shot out her hand to catch Stepan before the boy could be thrown about the interior of the car. The car screeched to a stop and the engine lurched, then died.
Pulling Stepan after her, Chace shoved her door open and tumbled out of the car, onto the cracked highway. She wrapped her arms around the boy as she regained her feet, felt him clinging to her, whimpering. The searchlight found them both again, and she winced in its glare, half running, half stumbling for the side of the road, desperate to get away from the Audi. The Sikorsky was coming around on her left, trying to block her passage, descending, but keeping distance.
It knows what happens next, Chace thought.
The world split, and she felt heat sweep over her back, pain following after it, her legs knocked from beneath her. Everything turned around, surrounding her in weightlessness and vertigo, and Chace knew her feet weren’t on the ground anymore. She tightened her grip on the child, flashed for a final instant on his face pressed against her chest, his eyes squeezed closed, black hair shining in the light of the exploding car.
She saw Tamsin.
Then she saw nothing.
CHAPTER 28
London—Vauxhall Cross,
Office of the Chief of Service
21 February, 0016 Hours GMT
Frances Barclay looked like a man under siege. His shoulders were hunched inward, his hands laid flat on the blotter on his desk, his neck lowered, his chin thrust forward, and his eyes behind his glasses brimming with hatred. And for once, that hatred wasn’t being directed at Crocker himself, but rather at the Deputy Chief standing beside him, though Crocker knew it was only a matter of time before he became its focus again.
“You knew about this, you knew about all of this, and you failed to inform me?”
“The operation was undertaken in response to a directive by the FCO,” Alison Gordon-Palmer said evenly.
“Not an official directive!”
“The PUS acted with both the Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister’s blessing, sir. If PUS felt it necessary to omit you from the conops, then you’ll have to take it up with him. But D-Ops was acting as ordered, and the paper trail exists to prove it.”
“Placed after the fact, no doubt.”
Gordon-Palmer didn’t respond, and Crocker, for his part, continued standing in silence beside her. Another chapter to be written in his manual of desk usage, Crocker thought. In any other instance, the Deputy Chief and the Director of Operations standing at C’s desk while C himself railed at them from his chair would have been the perfect portrait of subordinate reinforcement, more akin to the dressing-down of ill-mannered children than not. Yet this time, with C seated and the two of them standing, it seemed the players were entirely reversed.
Barclay seemed to sense it, as well, because he chose that moment to get to his feet and lean on the desk.
“I know what this is,” he told the Deputy Chief. “This is a coup d’état. Don’t think I won’t fight it.”
“If that’s how you see it, sir,” she replied.
“There’s another way I should see it?”
“The disposition of the operation is still in question. Should it be successfully concluded, you’ll certainly be entitled, even expected, to take full credit for it.”
“Which is your way of saying that, when it fails, I’ll be expected to own it?”
Crocker was impressed that Gordon-Palmer managed to sound mildly indignant. “Not at all, sir. Should the operation fail, you have the perfect scapegoats.”
“You.”
“And D-Ops, yes, sir.”
It didn’t reassure Barclay in the slightest. If anything, the look on his face hardened further. “So you say. Yet you’ve also said that the White House is adamant that Sevara Malikov and not her brother becomes Uzbekistan’s next President. Even if the operation is successful, it will be a failure.”
“Not necessarily,” Crocker said. “If Ruslan and his son are lifted, they can be positioned for an eventual return to the country and an attempted ouster of the sister.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Barclay snapped. “The operation is pointless, at least as declared. It does nothing but expose Ruslan and force his sister and her supporters to move against him, perhaps overtly, and the results of an overt move will do nothing but damage U.K. relations with Uzbekistan. In the final analysis, it solidifies her power, not diminishes it.”
Crocker held his tongue, mostly because he couldn’t argue the point. Until three hours earlier, he would have argued that Ruslan had every chance to become Uzbekistan’s next President, especially with Seccombe’s promised support for the coup. But that was no longer the case. According to Gordon-Palmer, in fact, it never had been.