State of Emergency (16 page)

“Did Mom tell you to say that?”

Mattie sucked in her breath. “Oh no.” She giggled again. “But it bugs her when I do.”

Jericho grinned while his little girl shared her dreams and goals and wishes for Christmas. She might look like her mother, but sadly for her, Mattie Quinn was an awful lot like him.

 

T
he SinFull strip club hadn't changed décor since it was the Booby Trap in the late eighties. Aleks Kanatova sat in a corner booth and wondered if the carpet had ever been vacuumed. A black light hung on the wooden paneling made the tonic water in her gin glow an eerie blue. Cigarette smoke hung in swirling plumes and dance music vibrated the walls with a rhythmic bass thrum. The heady odor of desperation made it difficult to breathe.

Umarov had been sitting at the bar for nearly an hour, drinking vodka martinis and throwing lousy tips at a sullen pole dancer named Cinnamon—whose black G-string did a poor job of covering her C-section scar. The only other dancer, a roundish Latina in nothing but a flimsy open teddy and a pair of red stiletto heels, ate a Big Mac and fries at the end of the bar. There was a kitchen in the back, but Aleksandra made a mental note to stick with just her drink. It was a bad sign that the hired girls wouldn't eat from the menu.

It was midafternoon and there were less than a half dozen patrons in the place. Cinnamon hung by one arm off the pole with all the charisma of someone waiting for a bus. In a city where titty bars were as plentiful as corner gas stations, the blue-collar customers seemed more interested in a European soccer game on the flat-screen television than in any of Cinnamon's labored gyrations. Despite the seedy atmosphere, the bartender smiled a lot and chatted easily about local politics with the Latina eating the Big Mac—as if she wasn't naked. From the bulk of his arms, Aleksandra guessed he doubled as the bouncer during the day shift.

Following the Chechen had been easy enough. During their struggle at Zamora's party, Aleksandra had dropped a gold money clip from a belt pouch on her swimsuit, making certain it fell right before his eyes. Umarov was known to like shiny things and Aleksandra had correctly assumed he would pick it up if given the opportunity. The clip itself was plated, but three gold ten-ruble coins bearing the head of Tsar Nicholas II were brazed along its length. Inside the hollow coins and body of the clip hid the circuitry of an electronic tracker. Even when she lost sight of him, Aleksandra could read the signal on her smartphone as long as she was within a mile of the coins.

“Finally,” she mumbled to herself. The Chechen pushed away from the bar and staggered toward the long hallway leading to the restroom without giving her a second look. He smelled of alcohol and his lap was covered with dancer dust, the telltale body glitter that had surely gotten more than one husband in trouble after he'd stopped for “drinks” on the way home from work.

She counted to twenty after Umarov shut the bathroom door, then followed him down the hall. Between the soccer game and Cinnamon, no one gave her a second look.

Relatively sure no one else had gone in the men's room, Aleksandra waited outside for another ten count to listen just in case. Daring was good; calculated daring was more likely to keep her alive. She heard nothing but the sound of a fan through the door. Satisfied, she took a last look down the hallway behind her and, seeing no one, tried the handle. As she suspected, it was locked. Operatives like Akhmad Umarov didn't live so long by being careless while they relieved themselves.

Restroom locks were only meant to discourage accidental walk-ins and it took Aleksandra less than fifteen seconds to quietly slip the mechanism. Drawing an H&K P7 nine-millimeter from under the tail of her loose shirt, she pushed open the door.

Inside, she eased the flimsy wooden door shut behind her, twisting the lock again. The room was small and there was barely enough space for the single urinal squeezed in between the porcelain sink and two toilet stalls. The far door was slightly ajar, but the Chechen's feet were visible under the edge of the nearest stall, his pants pooling in a wrinkled heap around his ankles. Aleksandra had to force herself to keep from gagging at the noxious smell that hung like a biological weapon in the small room.

The Chechen coughed, the universal signal to let someone know the stall was occupied, as if his odor wasn't already indicator enough.

Pistol in hand, Aleksandra kicked open the stall door and pointed it at the Chechen's face. There were few things worse than facing a determined woman with a gun while sitting on the toilet.

But it was Aleksandra who froze.

What she'd thought was a warning cough had been a death groan. Dark, arterial blood soaked Umarov's gray T-shirt—but she hardly noticed. From the pattern on the tile floor it looked as though he'd tried to put up a fight—but that made little difference to her.

Above the Chechen's left eye, on the greasy smooth skin of his forehead was the unmistakable imprint of a double-headed eagle.

Whoever hit him had been wearing Mikhail's ring.

Aleksandra's heart shivered in her chest. She'd seen no one else come or go from the restroom since Umarov had gone in and there were no windows—

She dropped instantly, spinning as she fell to shoot through the wall separating the two stalls. Working on a sudden dump of adrenaline, she heard no shots but watched bullet holes appear in the metal divider as someone—the man who'd killed her friend—returned her fire. He must have been perched on the toilet for her to have missed his feet when she first came in. She cursed herself for such stupidity. Instinctively, she grabbed the dead Chechen and yanked him down on top of her for cover, shooting around his flopping arm.

Her H&K carried nine rounds, including the one in the chamber—not enough to conduct the type of gunfight Americans called spray and pray. Aleksandra had already used six firing through the stall. She was an excellent shot but held little hope she hit anything vital shooting so blindly.

She was vaguely aware that the far stall slammed open. She caught a shadowed glimpse of the other shooter as he lunged across the room and crashed out the flimsy wooden door.

“Idiot!” Aleksandra spat, as much to herself as the dead man in her lap. She collapsed back against the clammy wall, gun in hand, half expecting the shooter to come back and finish the job. She would never have left a witness alive.

Excited voices streamed in from the hallway.

Moving quickly, she tucked the pistol back in the holster over her kidney, then ripped the buttons of her shirt to expose her bra. She rubbed her hand across the Chechen's chest, then wiped a smear of his blood on her face and exposed shoulder.

Umarov was heavy and it took all of Aleksandra's strength to push his dead weight off her legs as the bartender peeked his head into the men's room.

He stood in open-mouthed shock as she crawled across the tile floor toward him, blood smeared across her face.

“He . . . he . . .” She said little, letting her appearance and the dead man with his pants around his ankles tell the story. Willing her body to shake, she conjured up buckets of sniffling tears and tugged at the collar of her torn shirt in a show of horrified modesty. She'd worn her green lace bra and knew the bartender would be hard pressed to recall much for a police artist. Right now he saw her only as a pair of heaving breasts covered in gore.

“You'll be okay,” he whispered, helping her to her feet. He passed her back to a wan-looking Cinnamon, who looked sickly pale and out of place, wearing nothing but her G-string and body glitter in the stark light of the restroom.

While the bartender and others went in to investigate the dead man with his pants around his ankles, Aleksandra slipped down the dark hallway and out the front door before anyone figured out that she was a great deal more than an innocent victim.

She had reached her rental car two blocks away by the time she heard the sirens. She put on a fresh shirt from her bag in the backseat. The bloody one she stuffed in an old McDonald's sack before tossing it behind a palm tree. Less than six minutes from the time she'd exchanged gunfire with Mikhail's killer, she took the entrance ramp to I-95. The man who wore Mikhail's ring had surely murdered him—and was sure to be the one in possession of Baba Yaga. Whoever he was, that same man had just killed the Chechen she'd seen at Valentine Zamora's party. Aleksandra calmed herself with slow, rhythmic breaths. She used her thumb to punch numbers into the disposable cell phone as she drove.

Somehow, Valentine Zamora held the answers, and if he had the answers, it was very likely he had the bomb.

“It's me,” she said. “I'm going to South America.”

“Y
our employer is very persuasive,” General Bundu of the Bissau-Guinean Army said. He stood with his arms folded over his belly, which had grown considerably since his ascendance to top military leader. Legs spread wide apart like an oil derrick, he peered up at a cloudless West African sky.

“You have no idea,” Matt Pollard mumbled from his spot in the dry grass beside the general. Above them, well out over the Atlantic, a slender Boeing 727 came out of a long downwind to bank slowly for a final approach. The runway was little more than five thousand feet of relatively obstacle-free hardpan with the trees and shrubs cleared from the parched salt grass on either side to give wing clearance to large aircraft. The ocean lapped at a breakwater of large black stones at the far end of the strip.

Behind Pollard and the general, two dozen riflemen, dressed in the woodland camouflage uniforms of the Bissau-Guinean Army, stood guard over five palletized stacks of assorted boxes. The box Pollard was the most concerned with was packed in the center of the second pallet in line, hiding in plain sight. As far as he knew, no one at the airstrip but him was aware of the true contents of that particular case.

Off to the side, two rusted fuel trucks idled under the sparse shade of three lonely palms beside a tethered goat. Each truck contained about nine thousand gallons of jet fuel, more than enough to get the thirsty 727 refilled for her return flight as long as she was fitted with extra tanks.

Though Zamora hadn't explained the details of his operation, it hadn't been too difficult for Pollard to put it together. The U.S. war on drugs made it increasingly difficult to smuggle large quantities of product across the Mexican border. South American cartels had branched out to lucrative European markets. Large oceangoing trawlers were still a favorite method of transport, but with the glut of retired commuter aircraft on the market, cartels were able to purchase planes for pennies on the dollar. Large quantities of cocaine now moved via these DC-9s, 727s, and older Gulfstreams, primarily from Venezuela to West Africa. Sometimes it was cheaper to pay the pilots two or three hundred grand to fly over a load of dope, then once the delivery was made, torch the plane and fly home commercially.

But Zamora dealt in weapons, many of them coming from former Soviet Bloc countries. The return drug flights offered the perfect way of getting his guns and explosive ordnance back to South America.

Zamora had been clear on one thing. Pollard's job was to escort the bomb back to Venezuela, where he could work on it away from prying eyes, perform what maintenance it needed, and get past the Permissive Action Link. In simple terms, the PAL was the arming code for the bomb, the encrypted signal that permitted someone to blow it up. The U.S. had been using them since the 1960s in one form or another to safeguard against the very scenario Pollard now faced. Later PALs were impossible to bypass. As nuclear physicist Peter Zimmerman put it—“Bypassing a PAL should be about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.”

Pollard wasn't entirely sure he'd be able to pull it off. He was, however, certain that if he didn't, Zamora and his insane girlfriend would murder Marie and Simon without a second's thought.

It was the perfect conundrum for his ethics class. Who is more important? The two people in the world you love the most, or fifteen thousand strangers? Should sheer numbers matter, or was the worth of one soul comparable to that of a thousand others? Pollard's skull ached from rehearsing the arguments over and over, then sobbing himself into an exhausted sleep.

Zamora was obviously sure enough Pollard would choose his family that he didn't even bother to put a guard with him. Perhaps Zamora knew him better than he knew himself.

General Bundu raised his hand and twirled it in a tight circle as the big jet made a breaking turn at the end of the runway amid a cloud of red dust and lumbered back toward them. His men sprang into action, jumping onto a gang of three ancient forklifts to be ready to unload as soon as the plane came to a stop. More time on the ground meant more chance of interception.

“The goal is to exchange cargo by the time they have finished fueling,” Bundu said, taking a square tin of snuff from the breast pocket of his uniform. “The pilots don't like to stay on the ground too long.” His men moved with antlike precision, but the general's eyes flicked this way and that with each order he gave as if the entire operation was his first time.

One of the forklift operators rolled up to the front of the aircraft and raised an empty pallet up as the front door swung open. A slender man who was obviously the pilot stepped onto the pallet and grabbed the attached handrail. He wore sturdy boots, jeans, and a well-worn leather jacket. Silver-gray hair was mussed from wearing a headset for hours on end.

The forklift driver backed up a few feet and lowered the pallet smoothly to the ground. The pilot stepped off and strode over to where Pollard and Bundu stood.

Pollard started to shake hands, but realized maybe that wasn't the thing to do with these drug-running types.

“Change of plans,” the pilot said, peering between bushy gray eyebrows and the top of his Ray-Bans.

Bundu tensed and Pollard held his breath.

“How so?” the general asked.

“We're offloading here as usual,” the pilot said. “But the boss says we are not to take this cargo back to Caracas.”

“The boss?” Pollard asked. “Zamora said not to take the load back?”

“That's right,” the pilot said. “But we still need to get airborne again right away.” He began to look longingly at the dilapidated hangar. “I gotta take a serious dump and I'd just as soon not cram myself in the head on board that box of bolts.”

“I don't understand,” Pollard said. “What am I supposed to do with the . . . items we have on hand?”

“I don't give a shit,” the pilot said, turning for the hangar. “And neither does Rafael Zamora.”

Pollard grabbed him by the shoulder.

“You mean Valentine Zamora,” he said.

The pilot tore off his sunglasses and glared at Pollard. “Son,” he hissed. “You'll want to let go of me now.”

Pollard nodded and stepped back.

“Sorry,” he said. “Rafael?”

The pilot turned to go. “Rafael is Valentine's daddy. Those are
his
drugs being off-loaded from
his
airplane.”

“But we have to get this load back,” Pollard said, his voice sounding more desperate than he would have liked. He left out the part about his wife and son being killed if he failed.

 

 

Pollard borrowed Bundu's phone and called the emergency number Zamora had given him.

The Venezuelan sputtered with anger at the news. “He said what? Never mind what he said.... The device must get to . . . Tell the pilot I will pay him double. . . . No, tell him I'll have him shot.... Wait, put him on and let me tell him myself. . . .”

Pollard took a deep breath and held it for a long moment, wracking his brain. It killed him to think up viable solutions for this man.

Before he could speak, Zamora began ranting again. “I'll call my father and find out what this is all about. Tell General Bundu to shoot the pilots if they try to leave before I call back.”

The line went dead and Pollard relayed the message to a stunned Bundu.

“This job proves much more difficult than I imagined,” the deflated general whispered. His round face drooped like a despondent schoolboy's. “If I shoot Rafael Zamora's pilots he will send men to murder me. If I don't shoot Rafael Zamora's pilots, Valentine Zamora will come to Africa and murder me himself.”

Luckily for everyone involved, the pilot's business inside the hangar took long enough that Valentine was able to call back and ask to speak to him. The pilot stood chatting for a full minute. His head swiveled this way and that as if he expected a raid at any moment. At length he shrugged and said, “Okay, I'll keep our deal going. But if your father finds out, we're all dead.”

He passed the phone back to Pollard.

“It seems my father believes our shipments bring unnecessary scrutiny on his high office,” Zamora said. “The bastard has barred me from doing business in my own country, Matthew. Can you believe that? He said he'd have me arrested if I landed in Venezuela with a load of weapons.”

Pollard swallowed. He didn't know what to say. He only wanted to see his wife and son again.

“In any case,” Zamora went on. “Your priorities have not changed. Do as the pilot tells you. I will see you soon—and when I do, I hope for your family's sake everything is in working order.” His voice grew giddy as if they were old friends. “Okay then, bye now. . . .”

Pollard switched off the phone and let his hand fall to his side. He looked at the pilot for directions.

“Load your shit,” the pilot said. “Looks like I'm taking you to Bolivia—if the bastards don't shoot us out of the air.”