Something made her turn. An unfamiliar sound. Instinctively, she picked up her gun and put it at the side of her leg.
Then she heard her front door smash in, the door frame collapsing with the weight of a heavy foot. She rushed toward the bedroom door, her gun now leading her way.
By the time she reached the hallway, two dark figures appeared in front of her in the living room. Both carried guns with red laser lights. She aimed and shot twice, dropping the first man to the floor. The second man opened fire, forcing her back into her bedroom.
She got to the floor at the edge of the door and waited. Voices in a foreign language, hushed but still audible, came from the living room. What was that?
As she heard footfalls coming her way, the red lights bouncing off her walls, she shoved herself across the ground into the hallway and fired at two more targets. One of them returned fire on his way to the floor. But she had already emptied half of her magazine on the two of them and pulled herself back into her bedroom.
Silence. Only the echo and wringing in her ears. The air was filled with gun powder. Her heart beat out of control now.
She pulled out her magazine and saw she had five more rounds. Getting up, she cautiously made her way out into the living room, stepping over two dead men and finding the third dead man lying where she had shot him, blood pooling out onto her Persian rug. All three men were wearing masks, but she could tell now the language they were speaking. It was Chinese.
Thinking quickly, an idea came to her. She hurried into her bathroom, found her trauma kit and then took off her jacket and rolled up her left sleeve. She pulled out surgical tubing, an IV needle, tape and an adhesive bandage. Within seconds she attached the tubing to the IV, poked it into her arm, and started flexing her hand.
Blood flowed out of her in a heavy stream. She quickly ran out of the bathroom spraying her own blood all over the floor and walls. She left a huge pool of blood on her bedroom floor, where she dropped her gun. Then she slowly worked her way out of the apartment, the sound of Polizei sirens in the far distance.
On the way out the door, she slung her backpack over her right shoulder. She turned to look at her apartment and it looked like a careless butcher shop. Besides the three dead men bleeding all over her place, she had added to the horrific scene by spraying her own blood everywhere. Before leaving, she pulled the IV out and bandaged the entry wound. She took the tubing and IV with her. She’d have to dump that on the way to the airport.
The sirens were getting closer. She left her own car parked on the street and took the beat up VW Passat she had been using while undercover.
Alexandra tried to forget about her apartment as she slowly drove out toward the autobahn in the opposite direction of the oncoming Polizei cars. She had just three hours before her flight. With the loss of blood, she felt a little light headed. She could rest on the plane.
Jake had the taxi drop him off at the main terminal at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport forty kilometers from downtown Taipei. From there he took a shuttle to the cargo terminal at the other end of the taxiway.
On the taxi drive out to the airport, Jake had confirmed his suspicions. While the Taiwanese government had cancelled all passenger flights, the cargo terminal was still open for business. His only problem would be finding his way onto a cargo plane leaving the island. It might require a major bribe.
Unfortunately the Taiwanese were not easily coaxed. And Jake had to keep a low profile, considering every police officer in the country had his photo, even though it looked nothing like him now. But Jake had one more idea.
He walked down the road to the private aviation area. There he found a private business charter flight to Hong Kong. Good enough. He got the last seat. From Hong Kong he could easily catch a flight to Singapore.
7
When Kurt Jenkins retired as the CIA Director more than six months ago, he thought he could simply kick back and perhaps read novels or go fishing. After all, he had been part of some of the country’s greatest espionage cases, from the Cold War to post-911. He got an adrenalin rush every time he went to work. He suspected it was like retiring from professional football, where athletes often had a hard time transitioning back to normal society. Now he had to face facts. He was bored out of his mind.
So, when he was asked by the current CIA Director to recommend an independent contractor to track down Bill Remington, Kurt jumped at the opportunity to help. In fact, he wanted to take the job himself. But that was problematic for two reasons. First, everyone in the intelligence community knew him. And second, his wife would have cut off his nuts. As a former covert operative, she could do it.
Hours ago Jake Adams had sent him two encrypted file folders with dozens of files in each. At first he wasn’t sure what he was reading, since Jake had not been very clear on what he had sent and why. The files apparently came from Jake’s old friend at German Intel, Alexandra, who had ‘acquired’ documents from a Munich company called Kreuzwelt Industries. Kurt was familiar with this company, since they were a major player in the defense establishment. However, after a few hours of digging through the documents, he wasn’t sure why in the hell this company had kept any of these files. Perhaps it was something within the German DNA that made them keep such meticulous records. The same affliction had been the downfall of the NAZI party after the end of World War II. They had been hanged by their own documents.
This was different, of course. The documents had nothing to do with the extermination of an entire people. But it could be even worse than that — the hegemony of one country over the entire world. Sure, Hitler had that goal. But eventually even he must have known than the Germanic people would never be numerous enough to control the entire planet. His pact with Japan would have lasted only as long as that country could kill enough Americans to make them a target for Germany. Then the Germans would have killed the Japanese as well.
As Kurt shifted his analysis from the German documents to those Jake had gotten in Taiwan, he almost immediately found a pattern. Well, not immediately. He had spent hours, gone through pots of coffee and then nearly a half bottle of his best Scotch, sitting on the floor of his home office with papers spread about like a child unwrapping Christmas presents, until he formed a viable conclusion.
His Mandarin Chinese was a little rusty, but he had found payments sent not only to Bill Remington’s account, which Jake had already tracked down, but dozens of other accounts. These would take time to discern, he knew. Checking on some of the routing numbers, Kurt understood that a number of them were in Europe. Not the typical Swiss accounts, since the U.S. government had forced them to divulge information on clients after 9-11. No, these were from Luxemburg, Lichtenstein and Andorra — some of the only secret tax haven states left in Europe. And even those would be gone soon.
Kurt picked up his glass of Scotch and swirled the amber contents around before taking a long drink and enjoying the taste on his tongue as the liquid warmed him from his throat to his stomach.
He reached over and grabbed his phone, but he hesitated for a moment. Who should know about what he had found? Did he trust his own former organization? It wasn’t really something they would have investigated. That was the job of the FBI. He had contacts there. But maybe it would be better if he gathered more information first.