Judging by the position of the barrel, Kirk was pretty sure the second bullet had shattered Dashiell’s femur. The bleeding from both wounds was steady, not gushing, and Kirk didn’t think the femoral arteries had been torn. Untreated, he would eventually bleed out, but he should survive at least a couple hours. Long enough to watch.
Kirk set the gun on the table to his left. It took him only a moment to gag him. “You could have stopped all of this if you’d just told me right away what I wanted.”
Dashiell’s eyes were bleary with pain from the gunshots. His head sagged, and Kirk feared that the blood loss was affecting him more quickly than he’d anticipated. He slapped his cheek. “Look at me!”
The man seemed to refocus.
“You need to know that Erin’s death and everything that precedes it will have been your fault for inconveniencing me for the last three hours.”
Although obviously disoriented, Dashiell pulled against his bonds once again but then winced terribly as his leg tensed. He tried to cry out in pain, but the gag swallowed the sounds.
Kirk unlocked the side door so the building would be accessible to his partner. As he was returning to the table, he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. Only one person had the call-in code for this number.
Valkyrie.
Precisely the person he needed to talk to.
Kirk tapped the phone’s screen, but before he could speak, the electronically masked voice on the other end said, “I was watching the video feed. I saw your man take the girl.”
“He does good work,” Kirk said. “We got what we wanted. Dashiell’s contact is Rear Admiral Colberg. At the Pentagon.” Kirk arranged the items he would be needing for his time with Erin. The tape. The ropes. The cuffs.
“You should have left the girl out of this.”
If there was one thing Kirk Tyler did not like, it was having to explain himself. “I wouldn’t have done it unless I believed it was the most prudent course of action.” He decided not to mention his plans regarding the girl.
“The most prudent course of action.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you thought.”
A pause that made Kirk somewhat uneasy.
“You should have left the girl out of this,” Valkyrie repeated. But this time the words had a tighter edge to them. “This was sloppy.”
“It was efficient.”
“Efficiency means limiting collateral damage, decreasing exposure-”
“You weren’t here.” He had never cut Valkyrie off midsentence before, but he wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. “Don’t question my decision.”
A longer pause this time. “In lieu of what I’ve seen tonight, I’ve decided to have someone else finish the job.”
Kirk felt his grip on the phone tighten. “That wouldn’t be wise.”
“I told you when we started that there would be consequences if anything was mishandled. This situation with the girl-I consider it mishandled.”
A warning flared through Kirk’s mind.
He’s watching you.
Kirk drew his Tanfoglio again, scanned the shadows of the warehouse. “You do not want to do this.” He clicked through the possible places Valkyrie or one of his men might be hiding. Saw nothing. “You pull me from this and I’m coming for you.”
“Good-bye, Kirk.”
And before Kirk Tyler could respond, the cell phone he was holding beside his ear exploded, ripping off his forearm and most of his head, sending a frenzy of blood and brain and splintered skull across the table. As his body dropped clumsily to the ground, tiny globs of gray matter dribbled onto the concrete, and Dashiell watched in horror-thinking only of what would happen to Erin and to him when the dead man’s associate arrived.
Alexei Chekov was halfway through the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov when he heard from Valkyrie asking him to come in and clean up a mess.
“You remember Kirk Tyler?” the voice said.
“I’m familiar with him, though we’ve never actually met.” Alexei’s English was impeccable, as was his Russian, Arabic, and Italian. When Valkyrie had first contacted him, he’d noticed a sentence structure that suggested someone who’d either studied in or grown up in the States. Because of this Alexei had chosen American English for their conversations.
“I’m afraid you won’t have the opportunity.”
“He disappointed you.”
“Yes.”
Alexei placed a bookmark and set down the novel.
Valkyrie.
In early Norse mythology, a Valkyrie was a goddess who flew over the battlefields deciding who would live and who would die-a job strikingly close to his own. The myths evolved over time and turned Valkyries into beautiful, angelic creatures who rewarded fallen heroes in paradise.
Death and rewards. Who lives and who dies-the ultimate decision.
Valkyrie filled Alexei in concerning Dashiell Collet and his daughter and all that had happened at the warehouse. “It’s not far from where you are,” Valkyrie explained. “I want you to dress Dashiell’s gunshot wounds, take care of Tyler’s body, then call an ambulance for Mr. Collet. I want him alive in case we need to speak with him again.”
Valkyrie’s comment about the warehouse being nearby told Alexei that his own location wasn’t as secret as he’d thought it was, and he realized that he might have underestimated Valkyrie, a person he had never met, didn’t even know the identity of.
“What about the girl?”
“She’ll wake up in an hour or two. I’m afraid the man who tried to abduct her won’t be so lucky.”
Alexei knew a little about the calculated synchronization of Valkyrie’s work, and he imagined that the would-be abductor’s Bluetooth earpiece had been wired to detonate just as Kirk’s phone had been.
He tried not to picture what the girl would see beside her when she awoke.
Over the years Alexei had developed a professional objectivity toward these things, but still, images like the one Erin would awaken to were deeply disturbing, and he found himself sympathizing with her, for the nightmares that would undoubtadly chase her for the rest of her life. Maybe he could get there before she awoke, move her someplace safe.
“Do you need me to clean that up as well?”
“I’ll have someone else take care of it. Just get to the warehouse. Tonight I’ll have a plane take you to Alexandria, Virginia. I want you to have a chat with Rear Admiral Alan Colberg. Tell him we need the access codes to the station. He’ll know what you’re talking about.”
“All right.”
“By the way, providentially, Tyler had a Tanfoglio with him. I know you lost one last year in Italy. Keep it. It’s yours. For the inconvenience of being called upon so late in the evening.”
Once again, impressive. How Valkyrie could have known about the incident in Italy was a mystery to Alexei. He had the sense that Valkyrie had mentioned it just to show him that his past was no secret. “I don’t use guns,” he replied. “Not anymore.”
“Not since your wife’s death.”
How?
“Yes.”
A pause. “Of course. Contact me when you’ve finished with Colberg.”
“I will.”
The conversation ended.
Though Alexei did not carry a handgun, he did carry something else.
He slipped the cylindrical object into the breast pocket of his suit coat and left for the warehouse.
Valkyrie should not have known about the Tanfoglio or about Tatiana’s death. It showed Alexei that Valkyrie had pried into his past, and when people poke around like that, they inevitably leave evidence of their presence.
On the way out the door, Alexei put a call through to one of his contacts in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate, to see if he could find out who might be using the code name Valkyrie.
Based on the work Alexei needed to do at the warehouse, the flight time to Virginia, and the time change, he anticipated that the rear admiral would be just sitting down for breakfast when he arrived.
Hopefully, Colberg would be cooperative and Alexei wouldn’t have to put the object he now carried in his pocket to use.