Days of Rage (15 page)

J
ennifer felt Decoy’s hand slip into hers, a pathetic attempt at pretending he was solidifying their cover. Before she had time to react, her phone vibrated, giving her a reason to pull away.

“Hello? Why are you calling directly instead of group chat?”

“Just checking up. What’s man-whore doing?”

She toyed with telling Pike about the hand-holding just to drive him nuts, but ultimately decided against it, instead focusing on the mission.

“He’s doing fine.
We’re
doing fine. Chiclet is at a café and he’s seated with another man of Middle Eastern descent. I’ll get you a photo in a minute. We’re up the street about fifty meters away at another food vendor. We should have brought a parabolic on this. I’d love to hear what they’re saying.”

Pike said, “Yeah, well, I’m just amazed we found him. Get as much as you can on visual and we’ll make a case to Kurt for continued operations.”

She acknowledged, about to hang up, then heard, “Hey, he isn’t doing anything he shouldn’t, is he?”

She grinned and caught Decoy’s eye, saying, “Who? Chiclet?”

“No. Man-whore.”

“He’s a perfect gentleman.”

“Bullshit. Nobody in the Taskforce has the time of day for split tails. Let me know if he steps over the line. I’ll bust his head open.”

Jennifer hung up without telling Pike how insulting the “split tail” comment was. He wouldn’t get it. Pike worked in a world dominated by males, only fighting for her after he’d seen what she brought to the mission. He believed in her capabilities now, more so than anyone else.
Truly
believed, which was what endeared her to him, but he still had to be convinced initially.

Unlike Decoy.

Raised with four sisters by a mother that had left an abusive father, Decoy was an anomaly. A Taskforce operator that honestly didn’t feel threatened by Jennifer. Pike was right about him bedding anything he came across, but wrong in the reason. Unlike just about anyone else in the Taskforce, he did it because he
understood
women. Jennifer knew saying that truth would just aggravate Pike, so she kept that particular insight to herself.

Even after Pike had made it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate any insults to Jennifer, Decoy had spent every minute trying to get her out of her pants, but he did so without any prejudice. Operationally, he couldn’t care less what her gender was. He was one of the first to recognize her talents in the covert world, and one of the first to welcome them on the Taskforce stage, treating her just like any other operator.

But he still wanted to get laid.

At the end of the day, she wondered if Decoy, given all of his man-whore proclivities, wasn’t actually more open than all of the other men in the Taskforce.

Decoy said, “What was that about?”

“Nothing. Pike just checking in.”

She felt his hand slink in again, trapping her wrist and bringing a grin. She knew he was doing it just to get a rise out of her. He’d figured out her relationship with Pike long before anyone else and knew he stood no chance. He squeezed her hand and winked. In the
middle
of an operation. She couldn’t believe it.

Man-whore is right.

 • • • 

Pretending to browse a selection of silver jewelry at an outdoor stall, Yuri could just make out the elbow of the Syrian intelligence officer seventy meters away. With the canalization of the narrow street, he’d brought a minimal force to survey the meeting. Since Akinbo knew what Yuri looked like, he’d stayed on the bazaar side, near the mosque outside of gate sixteen. He’d put Dmitri inside the restaurant and had the giant of a man Mishka on the far side. Far enough away to give early warning, but not draw attention to the meeting. The man had his uses, but blending in wasn’t one of them.

With the sun rapidly falling below the horizon, the heat from the day began to drop as well, and the crowds started to pick up, a mix of foreigners and locals. Yuri had the men focus on the Turks, ignoring all the tourists. If anyone was going to show interest in the meeting, it would be someone working for the Turkish MIT, but so far, the only highlight was a young waiter who was serving both the Syrian’s table as well as Dmitri’s.

He waited until the meeting was well under way, then called his men. He received a negative report from Mishka and a joke about the waiter’s outfit from Dmitri. He grinned and checked his watch. Five more minutes and the meeting would be over. Successfully.

Five minutes.

He began thinking about the follow-on meeting with Akinbo, where they’d plan the next steps of the mission, when a flash of light caught his eye. He saw a minibike approaching, the headlight bouncing erratically over the ancient cobblestones as it wove between pedestrians, both the driver and passenger wearing full-face helmets. The driver swerved to the left of the narrow lane, and the passenger pulled something out of his jacket.

As the bike entered the pool of light spilling out from the café, Yuri recognized a mini–Uzi machine pistol. His mouth opened in disbelief. The driver pulled up next to Akinbo on the other side of the wood rail and the passenger flipped out a small metal-skeleton stock, seating it into his shoulder pocket. Before Yuri even thought to shout the passenger squeezed the trigger, the weapon sounding like a canvas tarp ripping apart.

The Syrian held his hands up as if they could stop the death, then began twitching from the rounds shredding his body. He slumped over the wood railing next to the table, dripping dark fluid on the street, mixing in with the remains of a spilled bottle of Coca-Cola.

The pedestrians began to react as the minibike surged forward, gaining distance from the targeted killing. The driver cranked the handlebars hard to the right to get the bike turned around and aimed back up the lane, away from the dead end of the bazaar. He gunned the engine and the tires hit something wet on the street, a patch of liquid as slick as black ice. Instead of gaining traction, both tires flew out from underneath the bike, the engine slamming onto the cobblestone and spraying sparks. The passenger spilled onto the concrete and the bike ground on top of the driver, causing a scream as the exhaust branded his leg.

He pulled himself from underneath and got it back upright, but the crowds of pedestrians now blocked his way out, pointing and shouting at the killing. Running and leaping on the back of the motorcycle, the passenger yelled, jabbing his finger in Yuri’s direction, and the bike jumped forward, heading right toward him.

He jumped out of the way, watching it race right through gate sixteen into the Grand Bazaar.

Incredulous, he called Dmitri. “Status. What’s the status?”

Out of breath, Dmitri said, “The Syrian’s dead, and I swear to God I’m looking at that female I drove over a cliff. She’s got brown hair now, but it’s her.”

The Americans.
How in the hell did they get here so quickly? How did they know about the Syrian?

The anger boiled up and he spit out, “Kill her and anyone with her.”

J
ennifer stood up so fast she knocked her chair over. On the group channel she said, “Pike, Pike, this is Koko. A motorcycle hit team just took out the Arabic man talking to Chiclet. Their egress route was blocked by civilians. They’re coming right at you.”

“At me? I’m in the bazaar.”

Decoy, on the edge of their café, standing on a chair to see over the crowd, said, “Roger that, Pike; he’s driving the motorcycle straight into it.”

He jumped down, saying, “He’s coming. We’ll stay outside for containment.”

Jennifer felt a shadow and turned around to see a giant of a man towering over her, holding a pistol in his fist, the bulbous suppressor aimed at Decoy’s head.

She shouted a warning and he pulled the trigger. The weapon spit noise like a muffled clap, the sound in no way reflecting the violence it wrought. The bullet entered Decoy’s head just above his nose. It channeled through his brain, mushrooming out at the resistance, then exited the back of his head, bringing with it a good section of his skull and splattering the wall behind him. Decoy dropped straight down, the life fleeing his body instantly, his arms ending up unnaturally beneath him, his eyes dimly open.

The earth stood still for a moment, Jennifer looking but not seeing the corpse of her teammate, her brain failing to register the catastrophic damage to Decoy’s visage.

She saw the weapon swinging around, the eyes of the killer lining up the sights on her own face. The image was crystal, the details hyperreal. She stared straight through the black hole of the barrel, seeing the hair on the sausage knuckle of the trigger finger, like the bristles of a hog. She saw the hairs shift, and knew the finger was moving backward.

She exploded into action, slapping both hands over the weapon and trapping the man’s hand against the frame of the pistol. She rotated up, snapping his finger in the trigger guard and locking his wrist joint, the weapon discharging harmlessly into the air.

He screamed, a high-pitched, feminine noise from such a large man, and she rotated the joint, bringing him to his knees. He swung his other hand, the fist hammering her shoulder like a mace from medieval times. She flew against the wall, her back sliding through Decoy’s brain matter. But she held on to the pistol.

The giant cursed at her and began to advance. She pulled the trigger, the first bullet striking the center of his chest. He staggered, but kept coming. She continued to fire, both hands on the weapon. The beast seemed to absorb each round and shrug it off. Frothy blood began to escape his lips. Two more steps and he was above her again. He reached out with both hands. She jabbed the suppressor to his forehead and squeezed. His head snapped back in a spray and he finally dropped, landing on top of Decoy’s body.

A bullet impacted the wall next to her head, alerting her to another threat. She saw a man holding a pistol outside Chiclet’s café, batting people aside and advancing. She raised her own weapon, seeing the slide had locked open on an empty magazine. The man began to run toward her, darting through the chaos of the crowd.

 • • • 

No sooner did Decoy shout the ridiculous warning about a motorcycle carrying a couple of assassins than I heard people screaming, then saw them jumping out of the way.

The motorcycle—a moped, really—came scooting by me one row over, the driver steering through the crowd and the passenger alternating between a death grip on the driver’s jacket and waving his arms to get people to move. I took off after it, knowing whoever was on the back was the same person who had killed Turbo and tried to kill me.

The bazaar was shaped roughly like a square, which meant after penetrating gate sixteen on the northeast corner, they were running south, parallel to a series of exits. If they took one, they’d be on the streets and alleys leading to high-speed escape routes. They’d be gone.

I jogged parallel to them one row over, hearing the driver tooting his little horn. They were slowly pulling away from me because I couldn’t get through the crowd quickly enough. While people were diving out of the motorcycle’s way, they weren’t doing shit for me. I saw an exit from the bazaar and took it to the narrow street outside, now able to run as fast as I could away from the chaos, but unable to see the motorcycle’s movement.

I sprinted down the road in an effort to get ahead of the assassins, leaping over buckets, pallets, and other refuse. I saw another gate ahead and increased my speed, intent on cutting them off. Just before I reached it, the motorcycle popped out of the stone portal, literally three feet away. The driver turned right and goosed the engine, oblivious to my presence.

I reached out and snagged the collar of the passenger, jerking him straight off the back. He was a small man, and I slammed him to the deck with great force, seeing an Uzi machine pistol fly out. The motorcycle spun around thirty feet away with the driver jabbing his left hand into his jacket. I raised the Uzi and squeezed the trigger, getting no recoil. It was empty. Nothing but dead weight, with apparently all of the bullets inside the Arabic man at the café.

The driver didn’t know it, though. I cinched the little skeletal stock into my shoulder pocket and leaned into a fighting stance as if I was about to unleash holy hell. He dropped his attempt at getting to his weapon, thinking better of taking me on. He gunned the throttle and was gone, escaping down the road to the four-lane avenue known as Ordu Caddesi.

Before I could focus on what I’d caught, the assassin below me lashed out with a foot, catching the inside of my thigh, dropping my body to a knee, and infuriating me. I grabbed his head and bashed it into the pavement hard enough to crack his helmet down the middle, stunning him.

I rolled him onto his stomach and cinched the chinstrap of the helmet into his throat. He slapped his hands behind him, coughing and gagging. I kept working the strap, eventually seating it into his carotid arteries. He struggled a brief moment more, then relaxed, unconscious.

I dragged him into an alley, then removed his helmet. The first thing I noticed was the hair. A mess of it that had been placed in a ponytail. It confused me for a moment, then I realized why he was so slight and small.

The killer was a woman.

J
ennifer heard the feet slapping behind her and darted into the first alley she came to. She ran flat-out, on the edge of losing control, the small lane black as pitch. Her toe caught an outcropping of brick and she went down headfirst, slamming her elbow into the ground and skidding into a wall.

She shook her head, attempting to clear it, gritting her teeth over the pain in her arm, knowing she was losing precious time. She started to rise and heard the pursuers round the corner to the alley. She tucked into a ball, pressed next to a stairwell leading down, getting as small as possible to rectify the mistake of coming into the alley. She needed to get into the light. Into the tourist crowds.

But that didn’t stop them from killing Decoy.
His shattered face exploded into her consciousness and she shunted it aside.

They came jogging forward, slower and more careful than her, but still moving too fast to identify where she was crouching. She willed herself to look like a pallet or garbage can, and they went by. When they were thirty feet past her, she stood and began sprinting back the way she had come.

She heard a shout just as she reached the intersection of a larger road that had actual vehicle traffic on it. She saw a puff of dust in the bricks to her left and heard the whine of a ricochet. She turned the corner without looking back. She ran down the thoroughfare, seeing the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in the distance, a thing of beauty silhouetted by spotlights, the blue tile shimmering and the six minarets spearing into the sky. It would give her a refuge, if she could make it. One of the last of the great mosques, and the most famous landmark in all of Turkey, she knew it would be well protected. A place a Russian would never dare attack.

The Russians knew it as well, and did what they could to prevent her from reaching it. She broke out into a park, seeing a crowd gathered near a large fountain. She slowed to a jog, then heard a flurry of rounds snap by her head.

She realized they were willing to harm anyone to get her. They would kill whomever it took. She was like a person pulling a trailer carrying plague, dragging the death with her wherever she went.

She couldn’t be responsible for that.
Need the authorities. Someone with guns. Away from the crowds.

She saw the Hagia Sophia museum to her left. Having once been an Orthodox church at the time the Bible was cemented, then a grand mosque of the Ottoman Empire, it was now a museum. Which meant it was closed at this hour. But surely guarded inside.

She stopped next to a kiosk that was locked, pretended to go around it, then ducked low to find her predators. She saw them less than fifty meters away and running flat out, scaring the hell out of her and short-circuiting any logical battle plan. Like a cat flushed from hiding, she sprinted across the open terrain, straight at the outside wall of the Hagia Sofia. In the dim illumination from the lights of the fountain, she saw the suppressed pistol rounds impacting the wall in front of her, searing her core. She knew if
she
were shooting, she’d miss at most twice. Pike, only once.

She jerked to the right for a split second, then went into a roll before leaping up against the stone wall. She put her left foot against it and pushed off, literally running up the wall and grabbing the top. She heard the impact of the bullets below and hoisted herself over, dropping into a courtyard of the museum.

She looked left and right, trying to see a camera or a guard post, but coming up empty. The area was well lit, but there was no overt security. The worst of both worlds.

Jesus Christ. The damn wall is the security?

She’d just dropped into a kill zone.

She heard a scraping above her and saw a silhouette. He fired once at sound alone, missing wide, but enough to keep her off-balance. To keep her from creating a plan. She ran past the entrance metal detectors and ticket gates, all turned off and silent. She kept going to the front of the church, looking for a camera. Somewhere, someone was watching this place.

She found nothing.

Even given the danger, the discovery was mildly insulting to her, aggravating her protectionist sense of history. She glanced around, looking for a hiding spot. She found several, but all were dead ends. They would protect her, but would do nothing if she was discovered. She needed something with an escape route. She entered the cathedral proper and saw an enormous cavern, dimly lit with emergency lighting.

The place was huge, but had no real area to conceal her. It was just a wide-open space, the walls ornately gilded and clearly ancient, but providing no protection. The only unique feature was a section of scaffolding stretching all the way to the roof ninety feet above her, going past a balcony that ringed the cathedral. Something erected to make repairs to the ancient building, but more than that, something she could use. A set of monkey bars that beckoned.

Like a squirrel that raced up a tree at the sight of a dog, she looked to the heights for safety. It was an equalizer for both strength and skill. A place where she knew she could rule.

She waited until she was sure they had entered, her heart thumping so loud she was positive they would hear. She heard them whisper in Russian, then split up. Not what she wanted. She needed both chasing her when she looped back around to the scaffolding on the second floor, leaving them behind.

Her hand forced, she sprinted behind them toward the stairwell leading to the upper balcony, letting them see her. She heard the snap of a single round, the bullet splitting the air by her head louder than the cycling of the suppressed pistol. She instinctively ducked, knowing it was like reacting to thunder after the lightning struck.

Someone shouted and she looked behind her, seeing only one man coming.

Shit.

She entered the stairwell and saw it wasn’t stairs at all, but a hallway that went to the upper floor like an ancient handicapped ramp, switching back every fifteen meters and paved with stones that were gleaming smooth from centuries of use. A configuration that gave the man behind her the chance to shoot and kill her, since she had to run uphill fifty feet before each turn. As the balcony was sixty or seventy feet in the air, there were a lot of turns.

She sprinted as fast as she could, now depending on her athletic ability to beat the man behind her. And it proved enough. He was able to get only one shot at her before she broke onto the hall with the balcony, seeing the scaffolding before her. But it would do no good now. Getting on it would only leave her vulnerable to the man below. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Unless I can get them to ignore the weapons. Get them to think they’ve won. Get them to want to interrogate me.

It was a huge, huge risk, but she saw no other alternative. She had the athletic ability to beat them, but she couldn’t outrun a bullet. She needed to reduce that threat. Beat them with intelligence.

She took a deep breath and let it out, hearing the man break out onto her level. She moved into the light, hands high, and said, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

He shouted something in Russian to the man below, holding the pistol on her. After hearing an answer, the man before her said, “Get on your knees. Put your hands behind your head.”

She sank down in relief, interlacing her fingers on top of her head, thinking about her next move. Looking at the scaffolding four feet away.

She said, “Don’t kill me. Please.” She cowered down, projecting weakness.

And he believed it.