Betrayal (44 page)

Tapping her chest, she pointed off to the left, moving her hand in a curving motion, then pointed to him and gestured for him to move right. Drake nodded, grasping her hastily conceived plan immediately. He would make a bolt for it, trying to draw their attention, while she went left to outflank and open fire on them. It wasn’t much of a battle plan, and it meant putting himself right in the line of fire, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

Trying to be as quiet as possible, he gulped in a couple of deep breaths to get more oxygen into his bloodstream. Adrenalin was flowing thick and fast now, lending new energy to his tired body. Good. He would need every ounce of strength and aggression and violence that he could summon up.

He caught sight of movement in the murk, and looked up just as a pair of figures emerged from behind the hulking shape of a machine lathe. Both were clad in dark combat gear, face masks and full body armour, and both had MP5 sub-machine guns up at their shoulders. Excellent weapons for close-quarters action like this, and able to spit out close to 800 rounds per minute.

This was it.

Bracing his heels against the floor, Drake launched himself at the nearest man, tackling him like a rugby player. His opponent was neither big nor strong, and Drake had the advantage of momentum. Staggering backwards under the sudden assault, he barrelled straight into his companion, knocking him off balance to land in a sprawl against the lathe.

It was one on one, at least for the next couple of seconds. He certainly had their attention now, and could only hope that Miranova was moving into position to open fire on them.

But none of that would matter if Drake couldn’t get the weapon off his new friend. Clamping a hand around the gun’s foregrip, Drake yanked it upwards, forcing his opponent’s arms with it and exposing his torso.

With the weapon out of play for now, he laid into his enemy with kicks and punches, lashing out half-blind at any vulnerable spot he could find. Face, eyes, groin, stomach, throat. It didn’t matter. There was no great technique to situations like this. He would do anything to hurt the fucker and put him out of action.

Still he heard no sounds of gunfire. Where was Miranova?

Drake felt his fist collide with the unyielding bones of the man’s skull, and winced at the flash of pain that travelled up his arm, but carried on with his vicious assault regardless. Pain was irrelevant now; all that mattered was doing as much damage as possible.

A mistimed punch that struck his enemy’s exposed throat was enough to knock the fight out of him, followed by a knee to the stomach that doubled him over. The vest he was wearing was designed to resist bullets, not blunt-force trauma attacks like this. With his grip on the weapon slackening, Drake finally managed to wrench it from his grasp.

He was taking no chances with either of these boys. He’d spray both of them on full automatic, aiming for their heads, arms or legs to nullify the body armour. He didn’t care if he killed them outright, only that he removed their ability to kill him.

He was just bringing the weapon to bear when suddenly pain exploded from the back of his head and he fell to his knees, his arms and legs no longer obeying commands from his brain. Vaguely he was aware of the gun falling from his grip before he pitched forwards, landing hard on the rough floor with stars and flashes of light filling his vision.

He could feel the warm wetness of blood on his scalp. Something had struck him at the base of the skull; most likely the butt of a gun. Whatever it was, it had been more than enough to knock him out of the fight.

He felt a boot pressed against his shoulder, rolling him over on to his back. There was a blur of movement, and then he found himself staring up at the roof. He could do nothing but watch as a dark figure in body armour loomed over him, then frowned in confusion as Anya’s face swam into bleary focus.

For a moment he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, couldn’t reconcile this woman’s face with the sudden attack on the safe house. However, his confusion vanished when she shook her head, visibly angry with him.

‘I told you what would happen if you stayed, Ryan,’ he heard her say over the ringing in his ears and the pounding of his own heart. Her tone carried a mixture of frustration, grief and regret.

Behind her, Drake could just make out one of the assault team wrestling with Miranova, forcing his knee between her shoulder blades while he yanked her arms behind her back. She cried out in pain as the tendons in her shoulders strained to their limit.

He saw a brief flicker of sadness in her eyes, as if she were trying to apologise for failing him. No doubt she too had fallen victim to Anya’s expertise in close combat.

He tried to get up, tried to reach out to her, but Anya planted a boot firmly on his chest, preventing him from moving.

Glancing away, she gave a single curt nod, then backed off as a second man moved in. Drake felt the coarse fabric of a sack being pulled over his head, and a moment later the world went dark.

As Drake and Miranova were hauled to their feet and dragged away to the waiting vehicles outside, Anya turned her attention to the workstations that had been set up in the centre of the room. With a secure satellite uplink to the FSB’s central mainframe in Moscow, each terminal represented a doorway to one of the most secure networks in the world.

And she had three of them right in front of her. The assault team had been under strict instructions to take no action that would put the computer terminals at risk. Their users were expendable, but the machines themselves were vital.

Selecting the nearest one, she reached into her pocket, withdrew a USB memory stick and inserted it into one of several ports on the laptop’s side. The contents of the USB stick were designed to auto-run the moment they were plugged in, and sure enough a dialog box appeared, confirming that the program was being uploaded.

Anya stood by in silence as she waited for the upload to complete. The noise of the assault would surely attract attention, and it wouldn’t take long for the FSB to arrive here in force. That was one battle she had no interest in fighting.

Finally the laptop pinged and a dialog box appeared notifying her that full system access had been granted. Reaching for the cellphone in her pocket, she selected a text message she had composed prior to the attack: the agreed code phrase to signify that the Trojan had been uploaded and that the FSB’s network was now ripe for the taking.

Our table is booked. See you soon.

There was only one recipient – Atayev. Without hesitation she hit the send button, then turned her attention back to the terminal. She had fulfilled her end of the agreement, but she had one other task to complete here.

She needed one small scrap of information from the vast repository now available to her. One little piece, and all of this would be worth it.

Forcing calm into her mind, Anya inputted her search criteria and waited while the program went to work.

Poklonnaya Hill, Moscow

‘Boris to Gregory. Respond,’ Kamarov growled into his radio. ‘I repeat, respond.’

Gregory, the call sign for their base of operations at the disused foundry, had dropped off the radio net a couple of minutes earlier. They weren’t transmitting, and they apparently weren’t receiving either.

‘Boris to all units. Anyone have comms with Gregory?’

‘Nothing from Olga,’ the spotter team replied.

‘Anna has nothing.’

Swearing under his breath, Kamarov removed his radio earpiece and reached for the cellphone in his jacket pocket, quickly dialling Miranova’s number. The seconds stretched out, with no response.

That was enough to decide him.

‘All units, switch to alternate encryption now,’ he ordered, quickly switching channels on his own radio before barking out further orders. ‘The meeting was a diversion. Gregory may be compromised. Anna and Boris teams converge on that location. Go now!’

Pain.

Noise and jolting movement.

The smell of petrol and old leather and cigarette smoke. The feeling of rough, cold metal against his cheek. The pressure of handcuffs biting into the flesh of his wrists.

With his mind lingering on the edge of consciousness, Drake struggled to process any information beyond simple physical sensations. He opened his eyes with great effort and looked around, only to be rewarded with darkness.

Of course. A hood had been placed over him back at the foundry. He could feel the fabric clinging to his face every time he inhaled, hot and clammy and smothering.

Unable to see, he concentrated instead on his other senses, using touch and sound and smell to glean what he could about his surroundings.

He was lying on his side in the cargo compartment of some kind of commercial vehicle. That much was obvious from the movement and sounds. The floor beneath him was bare metal, corrugated for extra grip, and interspersed with small holes for latching straps to stop cargo rolling around.

They were taking him somewhere. That single revelation was enough to kindle a fire of hope within him. They could have killed him at the foundry, but instead they had opted to take him with them.

They wanted him alive, for now at least.

Another hard jolt, this one violent enough to slam his head on to the metal floor with painful force. Where was he? More importantly, where was he going?

He raised his head up to look around, and was promptly rewarded with a kick to the shoulder that drove him down against the floor again.

‘Stay down,’ a gruff voice warned.

Another man mumbled something under his breath in Russian, followed by an amused chuckle. So there were at least two of them in the van. He had no idea if Anya was amongst them.

He heard the faint hiss of an indrawn breath, and then a moment later a spent cigarette was flicked from somewhere behind him to land on the metal floor, still smoking. The acrid smell stung his nostrils.

With a final shuddering lurch, the van halted, the engine still ticking over.

More urgent voices talking in Russian, and suddenly he felt strong hands grip his right arm, one at his elbow and the other at his wrist. Instinctively he began to struggle, trying to break out of the hold, but a sharp blow to the back of the head was enough to put paid to that idea.

‘Don’t move. You’ve been implanted with a tracking device,’ Anya hissed in his ear. So she was here after all. ‘You know what I have to do. Don’t move or I will sever an artery.’

A moment later Drake felt something sharp pressed into his forearm, the pressure increasing until with a tear and a warm trickle of blood, the skin parted and the blade made entry.

Strangely, it didn’t hurt as much as he’d expected. He was aware of the bleeding, but the sensation was more akin to a shaving cut. Perhaps his senses were still dulled by the injuries he’d taken earlier, he thought with a pang of hope.

No such luck. The moment he felt the metal tweezers inserted into the newly opened wound, the pain hit him hard. He gritted his teeth, letting out an agonised groan as Anya pressed the tweezers in deeper, searching for the little tracking module nestled within the muscle tissue.

At least she was familiar with procedures like this. He’d seen her perform one on herself during their escape from DC last year.

That wasn’t much comfort to him as a fresh lightning bolt of pain shot down his arm. He couldn’t tell if she’d touched a nerve during her probing; all he knew was that he felt as if his entire arm had been submerged in boiling oil.

Unable to restrain himself, he let out a cry of pain as the tweezers closed around the module and, with a single hard yank, pulled it free.

‘That’s good, Ryan,’ he heard Anya whisper, her voice barely registering as he lay there on the dirty floor of the van, breathing hard, blood trickling from the wound at his arm. ‘Just breathe. It is done.’

Several orders were exchanged in Russian, then with a roar from the engine, the van lurched forwards once more.

‘Someone hit them hard and fast,’ Agent Pushkin concluded as he grimly surveyed the scene of carnage within the foundry. ‘They took out the two agents outside, breached the door and came in with stun grenades and automatic weapons. The technicians here didn’t stand a chance.’

Kamarov said nothing as he picked his way through the spent shell casings and bloodstains, taking in the grisly results of the attack. It was easy to see why they had lost comms so suddenly. The three technicians in charge of the radio net were lying sprawled on the floor in pools of blood. Burn marks on the ground indicated the spots where flash-bang grenades had detonated.

He almost felt a moment of respect for his adversary. Anya had left a trail for them to follow after the attack in Grozny, had lured them out here with the promise of an easy take-down so she could hit them where they were vulnerable. It was a bold and audacious move, and he had fallen for it.

‘What about Drake and Miranova?’ he asked, glancing up at the younger man.

Pushkin’s expression darkened further. ‘We swept the building. There’s no sign.’

Wasting no more time here, Kamarov turned away, reached for his cellphone and dialled a number in Moscow. Director Surovsky had seen to it that any calls from his phone were given highest priority.

‘Access code, please,’ came the crisp greeting of an FSB signals technician a few moments later.

‘This is Alexei Kamarov, access number 501129,’ he began, his tone clipped and efficient. ‘I need a priority track on a previous subject – Drake, Ryan.’

Disguised as an antibiotic shot to prevent infection, a tiny RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) device no larger than a grain of rice had instead been implanted in the muscle layer in Drake’s arm without his knowledge. A team of technicians and analysts had been tracking Drake’s every move from the moment the device was implanted, and was still doing so even now.

At that time Kamarov had seen it as a wise precaution in case Drake turned against them, but now he sensed a far more useful purpose.

‘Copy that, sir. The tracking module is active. He’s moving north-east, about eight miles from you. Too fast to be on foot – looks like he’s in a vehicle.’