Kilkenny found a German-made military-grade radio transmitter clipped to the man’s hip, the kind of communications equipment favored by special forces. He flipped the SEND switch into the off position, then removed the earpiece/lip mike component from the man’s ear and slipped the gear on himself. His right ear filled with a faint hiss of static, then two sharp clicks crackled harshly in the ear-piece. The clicks repeated a few seconds later.
These guys are operators, Kilkenny thought as he ignored the clicks — a request for the dead man to report in to his commanding officer.
A quick pat search of the man revealed little. The mover carried a silenced 9-mm Glock and two spare clips of ammunition. Kilkenny found no identification of any kind. He pocketed the two ammo clips, chambered a round in the Glock, and carefully moved back into Nieuwland Hall.
One shitbag down, he thought, four more to go.
5
Krasny adín? Dmitri puzzled over Vanya’s urgent warning in his mind.
Yuri, the radioman, sent two more rapid clicks and waited.
No reply.
Yuri looked over at Dmitri, the team leader, and shook his head.
Dmitri knew that things went wrong on missions — it was a fact of life. The Americans had a name for this phenomenon: Murphy’s Law. He’d lost radio contact with men before; nine times out of ten it was an equipment failure. But Vanya had broken radio silence and called out Krasny adín — Red One — alerting them that his position was under attack. Now Vanya was off the air, and his brief warning had stopped Dmitri and the rest of the team just as they got off the freight elevator.
Dmitri carefully moved to a window that overlooked the rear of Nieuwland Hall. Below, he saw the trailer extending from the loading dock and, in the far corner of the paved lot, a black Mercedes truck. The scene appeared just as they had left it moments ago. Other than a few people walking on the campus pathways, he saw nothing to indicate that their mission had been discovered, nothing that would cause Vanya to report that he was under attack.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Dmitri said quietly, wishing he could, ‘but Vanya’s position is almost beneath us.’
His men were all professionals; each had served under him in the Spetsnaz, the Red Army’s elite special warfare unit. He’d handpicked them for this private operations force when paychecks in the Russian military became scarce. Today, they were well-paid and well-equipped mercenaries in the employ of Victor Orlov.
Dmitri scratched at the stubble on his chin. A gritty film of dried sweat covered his muscled frame, the result of moving dozens of heavy boxes containing the equipment, books, and experimental documentation that he had been sent to retrieve.
‘You want me to go check on Vanya?’ Josef asked.
Dmitri pondered the question, then shook his head at the swarthy, black-haired Georgian. ‘Nyet. We proceed as planned, but stay alert. It may be nothing more than garbled communications and equipment failure.’
‘If not?’
‘If not, Josef, then I want you here with the rest of the unit.’ Leskov turned toward the two movers watching the hallway. ‘How’s it look, Pavel?’
‘Clear,’ Pavel replied confidently. Not so much as a shadow had moved in the empty hallway.
Dmitri smiled, proud of the professionalism his younger brother displayed. Pavel was on point, checking the path ahead as the unit moved forward.
‘Move out,’ Dmitri ordered.
Pavel strode into the hallway, followed by Yuri and Dmitri, who guided a flat four-wheeled cart. Josef took up position a few steps behind the others, covering the unit’s rear. Sandstrom’s lab was down at the far end of the corridor.
‘This looks like the last of it,’ Dmitri announced as they entered the lab, his English flawlessly Middle American.
Dmitri’s men spread out, moving toward the last remaining boxes. Paramo was seated in a chair near where Kelsey stood by the windows; Sandstrom sat up on a lab bench, reclining back on his elbows.
As he closed within ten feet of Sandstrom, Dmitri’s right hand deftly slipped to the holster nestled in the small of his back and drew his weapon. The muscles in his body coiled tightly as he gripped the Air Taser with both hands and fired.
Propelled by a charge of compressed nitrogen, two needlelike metal probes silently flew toward Sandstrom. In less than a tenth of a second, the twin probes tore through the physicist’s cotton shirt and struck his chest. A pulsating electrical current raced from Dmitri’s weapon, through the probes, into Sandstrom’s body.
Sandstrom shuddered involuntarily and fell back onto the lab bench. His head struck the thick black countertop with a muffled thud.
Across the room Yuri and Pavel’s attack mirrored that of their leader. Only the briefest change in expression on the faces of Kelsey and Paramo preceded their sudden incapacitation.
‘Josef,’ Dmitri called out.
‘Corridor is clear,’ the Georgian replied.
‘The man with the red hair, Kilkenny, he is missing. His truck is still parked by the loading dock. He must be somewhere in the building. Keep an eye out for him.’
As the Taser’s pulsating charge attacked Paramo’s nervous system, the aging physicist’s heartbeat became erratic. The muscle fluttered, struggling to find a steady rhythm until the already weakened organ stopped beating altogether.
‘I think I killed the old one,’ Pavel announced unemotionally. ‘He’s not shaking like the others.’
‘So much the better for him,’ Yuri replied. ‘Put those boxes on the cart while I set the explosives.’
Yuri pulled the quilted blanket off the cart, uncovering four pistols in shoulder holsters and a pair of sealed translucent bags, each containing about a quart of fluid. As Pavel loaded the last two boxes, Yuri picked up the two plastic bags and carefully placed them on the lab bench near the sink. He then closed the drain and turned on the water until the sink was about a third full.
‘Ready,’ Yuri announced.
Dmitri looked at his watch. ‘On my mark.’ The second hand swept closer to twelve. ‘Now.’
Yuri placed the light-colored bag into the water first, followed by the darker bag. Tiny bubbles immediately began to form on the surface of the bags.
‘We have five minutes,’ Yuri announced as he hastily strapped on his shoulder holster and checked the Glock.
Dmitri nodded. ‘Pavel,’ he said, handing his brother one of the silenced pistols, ‘take the point.’
6
Kilkenny carefully worked his way back into Nieuwland Hall and up the building’s center staircase. He encountered no one during his ascent to the second floor. On the landing, he cautiously peered through the slit window of wiremesh glass in the fire door. The hallway on the other side was empty, but the window was too narrow to provide a view of Sandstrom’s lab farther down the hall.
Slowly Kilkenny pulled open the fire door until a quarter-inch gap appeared. Sandstrom’s lab was on the same side of the corridor as the stairwell, so he studied the reflection in the glass doors of a display case on the opposite wall. There he saw one of the movers standing watch beside the lab door.
He had to assume that Kelsey, Sandstrom, and Paramo were in the lab with four armed men. For the sake of the two physicists and the woman he loved, Kilkenny focused on the situation at hand rather than trying to fathom the motive behind it.