THERE IS NEVER A GOOD DAY to bury someone. Even when the sun is shining and the air is warm, there is nothing whatsoever positive about laying a cold body in the cold earth, particularly someone with three bullet holes that cut her life short by at least four decades. And in Wisbach there was no sun, no warmth. The rain was coming down in sheets and buckets as Shaw and Katie sat in the car at the graveyard that was set next to a small church.
They’d flown into Frankfurt that morning and driven over. Going through airport security in Dublin the alarms had sounded when Shaw had stepped through the metal detector. The wand the security guard ran over him homed in on his left arm.
“Roll up your sleeve, sir,” the guard had ordered, an edge to his voice.
When his gaze hit the row of metal staples revealed under the bandage, he flinched.
“Damn, does that hurt?”
“Only when I roll up my sleeve,” Shaw answered.
At the gravesite the rain had turned the mound of fresh earth next to the six-foot-deep hole into a mud pile. Anna’s coffin and the people here paying their respects were under a large tent set up next to the gravesite to keep them reasonably dry.
Shaw had decided not to join the mourners. He’d spotted Wolfgang Fischer’s lumbering figure, Natascha next to him. Neither looked very tall today. They seemed bent, destroyed. So Shaw just sat in the car. And watched them lower the coffin into the grave. Wolfgang nearly collapsed with grief. It took several men to get him back to the car.
Next to him Katie felt tears slide down her cheeks as she watched. Thank God, she thought, that I don’t have to write death lines about this. She looked at Shaw. His gaze was impassive, his eyes dry.
“It’s so sad,” she said.
Shaw didn’t answer. He just kept watching.
Half an hour later the last person had left and the gravediggers moved in, tempest and all, to plant Anna in the earth of Wisbach for good.
Shaw got out of the car. “You remember what to do?”
She nodded. “Just be careful.”
“You too.”
He shut the door, glanced around, and headed to the hole in the earth, trying not to think about the much bigger one in his heart.
He pulled some euros from his pocket and asked the diggers, in German, to give him some time alone here. No doubt happy to be relieved of their wet duty, they took the money and fled.
Shaw stood next to the grave and looked down at the coffin. He did not want to visualize Anna inside that box. She didn’t belong there. He spoke in quiet tones to her, saying things he should have said while the woman was alive. He had many regrets in his life. The most devastating by far was not being with Anna when she needed him most.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry. You deserved a lot better than me.”
He grabbed a shovel and spent the next half hour filling in her grave. He felt it was his task to perform, no one else’s. He was soaked through to the skin by the time he was done, but didn’t seem to notice.
He looked at the headstone. It gave Anna’s full name, Anastasia Brigitte Sabena Fischer. Her dates of birth and death. And the phrase at the bottom in German, “May our beautiful daughter rest in peace.”
“Rest in peace,” Shaw said. “Rest in peace for both of us, Anna. Because I don’t see peace ever coming my way again.”
He knelt down in the mud, his head bowed.
As he did so the two men stepped clear of the trees, guns in hand.
The car horn instantly split the silence of the cemetery and then Katie slid down in her seat.
Startled, the two men ran straight at Shaw.
A split second later the rear glass of the car Katie was in was shattered by a gun blast.
CHAPTER 77
IN A BLUR OF MOTION, Shaw erupted forward like a blitzing linebacker, knocking both men to the ground. In another instant his pistol was stuffed nearly down one man’s throat as his partner lay unconscious next to him.
A moment later the men in black swooped in.
Katie sat back up in the car, flicking glass off her. She looked anxiously over at Shaw. When he rose from the ground clutching one of the gunmen, she breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out of the car.
Twenty feet behind the car Frank stood over the dead man who’d tried to kill Katie. She joined him.
Frank said, “Sorry we cut it so close. Bastard got the shot off before we could nail him.”
Later, they sat in an empty barn outside of Wisbach. The two would-be killers were manacled together back to back in the middle of the straw floor.
Frank, Katie, and Shaw stood together in an informal powwow.
“Thanks for agreeing to back us up on this,” Shaw told Frank.
“Hey, other than keeping the world safe and secure, I’ve got lots of time on my hands.”
They’d already run the pairs’ prints through the usual databases and gotten zip for their troubles. Their interrogation so far had resulted in a cascade of foul language from the man who’d ended up chewing on Shaw’s gun barrel. By contrast, his partner, a beefy man with a stoic expression, hadn’t said a word. He looked like he might not even speak English. They’d tried several other languages out on him but his silence remained golden. They had no IDs. Two pistols and a gutting knife were the only things of interest found on their persons. The dead man had been similarly sterilized.
“Not even a cell phone,” Frank said.
“Means they were going to rendezvous with someone after they killed me and Shaw,” Katie said. “Probably close by.”
Frank turned to Shaw. “What now?”
“Keep pounding away at these two until they pop. We’ll be in touch.”
Frank put a hand on Shaw’s shoulder. “Look, Shaw, watch your back. My gut’s telling me something is off here.”
“Off how?” Katie asked.
“Off as in it seems like they’re always a step ahead of us.”
As they drove down the road Shaw said gloomily, “I was pretty sure they’d be watching Anna’s funeral in case we showed. That’s why I called in Frank for an assist. But it didn’t score us anything.”
“They might talk at some point.”
“I doubt they know much beyond being paid to kill me and you. These people have been really good about covering their tracks.”
“They’ll make a mistake. They always do,” she said confidently.
“Oh, you think so?”
“I know so.”
He stopped the car. “Why are you so sure all of sudden?”
Katie could barely contain her excitement. “Because I just thought of a brilliant way to flush them out.”
CHAPTER 78
BY NOW THE ENTIRE WORLD was convinced that China was behind the Red Menace for reasons as yet unknown, and that Russia had wiped out The Phoenix Group in retaliation. And no matter how many denials issued from Beijing and Moscow, this belief remained largely unshaken.
Elaborate theories were cropping up everywhere, in both digital and real ink, as to why China would have done such a thing. They ranged from wanting to turn the world against the only country in Asia that was a true rival both economically and militarily to China’s ascension to the top spot in the global pecking order, to fears in Beijing that Russia’s slide back to autocracy posed a real threat to the region’s stability. How making Russia even angrier and more dangerous than it supposedly was would alleviate that threat was still a puzzle. Yet when people wanted to believe something badly enough facts and logic never proved to be difficult obstacles.
Whatever the reason, it was true that both nations were now mobilizing. The two countries shared an enormous border to the east of Mongolia, along with a much smaller wedge of land between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Russian army units along with armor and air support were being marshaled at both of these sites. It was also rumored that Gorshkov was contemplating going straight through Mongolia in a planned invasion of China, which would have made it a much shorter route to Beijing, despite some political and topographical problems. The Chinese, knowing this full well, had set up thick walls of men and machines at each of these points. Yet war did not seem imminent. Indeed, it was clear that both countries well knew that such a contest would result in them both losing, so closely matched were they. But it was also believed, though no public statement had been made, that both China and Russia had signed long-term deals with unnamed defense contractors to rearm so that if they indeed did go to war years from now, they could each wipe out the other in grandly impressive style.