Betrayal (7 page)

‘And you’re involved?’ she asked as if nothing had happened.

‘I am now,’ Drake remarked. ‘An ambulance was on the scene right after the attack. I want to know where it went.’

‘Maybe a hospital?’ she suggested with unveiled sarcasm.

‘Thanks for the insight, but I doubt this one was on the books. It happened too fast.’

‘You think it was a lift?’

‘Maybe. Either way, someone went to a lot of trouble to set this up, and I want to know why. I need someone who can backtrack surveillance footage of the attack, and you’re the best I can think of.’

Frost rolled her eyes. ‘Fuck off, Ryan. Flattery doesn’t suit you.’

‘I’m working on that. The attack happened ten minutes ago, on the 395 just west of Garfield Park. Can you access traffic-cam footage and figure out what happened?’

She reached for her beer and downed the dregs. With her Agency security clearance, she could access virtually any police or civilian system. And like any technical specialist, her home set-up was easily on a par with anything she could put together at Langley.

‘Okay, fine. I’ll save the day for you – again. Just remember this shit the next time we’re discussing my annual bonus.’

‘No promises,’ he said. ‘Call me when you have something.’

‘What a novel idea.’

He didn’t bother replying to that, and instead hung up.

Tossing the phone on the bed for now, Frost stood up and scanned the discarded pile of clothes on the floor, finally finding her vest top and underwear. She tried to ignore Rick’s look of disappointment as she hurriedly dressed.

‘My boss. Duty calls,’ she said by way of apology. ‘Get your clothes on.’

The younger man looked at her in disbelief. ‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah, seriously.’ Reaching down, she grabbed his jeans and tossed them to him. ‘Sixty seconds from now you’re leaving, with or without your clothes.’

Rick glared at her in annoyance, but nonetheless started to pull the jeans on.

‘Your boss is a real asshole, you know that?’

Frost flashed a crooked smile. ‘Yeah. Yeah, he is.’

Interstate 95, north of Washington, DC, 19 December 2008

Anya was cruising north on the interstate highway in a rented Chevy Aveo, keeping her speed at a steady 70mph to avoid police attention. Just as well really, because she doubted the underpowered saloon was capable of much more.

Still, she had made good progress in the past hour. After making her escape from the rooftop, it had been a brisk walk three blocks north to her car. She could have run such a distance easily, but running attracted attention. That was one thing she didn’t need today.

Instead she chose a steady ground-covering pace that saw her in her car within five minutes. Nobody challenged her, nobody suspected her, nobody even paid attention to her in fact. She was a Caucasian woman, dressed in respectable clothes and displaying completely unthreatening behaviour. Why would they?

She hadn’t even broken stride as a Metro PD cruiser roared past, sirens wailing and blue lights flashing. She had known the cops inside hadn’t seen her, just as the people she walked past on the street didn’t really see her. Living in a large city like DC, they were used to not seeing people.

Less than seven minutes after the attack, and with emergency services only just starting to vector police units to the scene, she was in her car and on her way out of DC.

Now, an hour later, she was approaching Wilmington; just one of thousands of other motorists rumbling down the big interstate highway.

She exhaled, allowing herself to relax just a little. The first phase of the operation had been a success. She had done her part and escaped more or less without incident, leaving her free to move on to her next objective.

But her relief was tempered by unease at the unexpected arrival of Drake in the very midst of the attack. Such interference had brought her to the edge of disaster. Had he interrupted at the crucial moment, she might have missed her shots entirely. Demochev would still be free, and her plan would have been in tatters.

Her grip tightened on the wheel. Such an encounter simply couldn’t have been random chance – Anya had long ago stopped believing in coincidences. Her sniper position had been nowhere near his home or place of work, or any logical commuting route between the two. He’d been there because he’d intended to be, but why? And why had he drawn a weapon on her?

She was reluctant to consider him a threat after everything they had been through together, but Drake’s interference was an unwelcome and dangerous variable in a plan that depended on many elements working together in perfect harmony, each event creating the conditions for the ones to follow. A man like him could unbalance everything, whether he intended to or not.

She could not allow that to happen.

She reached for the bottle of water in the cup holder to her right and took a drink. It wasn’t exactly champagne, but then she didn’t exactly feel like celebrating. A lot still had to happen for her to reach her goal, and as she had learned already tonight, a lot could still go wrong.

She was just replacing the bottle when her cellphone buzzed with an incoming text message. Glancing down at it unobtrusively in case an unmarked police car happened to pull her over for the minor violation, she opened the message.

Have dropped Brett off. He was very grateful. See you for drinks on Sunday.

Anya wasn’t sure whether to feel good about that or not. ‘Brett’ was their code word for Demochev, which in this case meant he had given up the information they needed. She doubted he would have given it up willingly, though she preferred not to think about what had been done to him to force him to talk.

In either case, he was certainly dead by now. If what she’d heard about him was true, his death wasn’t undeserved. Still, such things were out of her hands.

She had other tasks to accomplish, chief amongst which was getting herself out of the United States as soon as possible. According to her dash-mounted GPS it was over 450 miles to the Canadian border, and another 50 or so more to Montreal International Airport.

She had a long night ahead of her if she wanted to make her morning flight, and was beginning to wish she’d brought a Thermos of coffee for the ride. Settling back into the driver’s seat, she flicked on the radio and waited while it tuned to a local station.

As she’d expected, it was dominated by coverage of the attack.

By now well clear of the crime scene, Drake was ensconced in a small coffee shop near Union Station on the north-east side of central DC. His mood was as dark as the steaming liquid in his cup, not helped by the constant coverage of the sniper attack playing on a TV mounted above the service counter.

Anya’s handiwork laid out for the world to see. But why?

Police follow-up from his escapade on the rooftop was unlikely now. Neither officer had seen his face, and he’d made good his escape from the immediate area before backup could arrive. He’d been obliged to buy a new jacket and jeans from the nearest department store to eliminate the chance of a clothing match, but he could live with that. The only thing they could use against him was his English accent, and even that was unlikely to help much in a city that saw a regular influx of foreign tourists.

For now at least, he was in the clear.

His unhappy contemplation was interrupted when his phone started ringing. It was Franklin. Snatching it up, he inputted his DateCalculator access code and hit the green button to take the call.

‘What have you got, Dan?’

‘News, and none of it good,’ his friend began. ‘You were right about those Mercs. They were part of a Russian diplomatic convoy fresh in from Andrews AFB.’

It didn’t take much effort to spot the link to Anya. She had been incarcerated in a Russian jail when Drake had found her. The exact reasons for her imprisonment were unknown, but clearly she was important to them. And it seemed she was now returning the favour.

‘We’re still getting police reports in, but we know both drivers were killed by high-velocity sniper rounds. The damn things punched right through the bulletproof windshields like they weren’t even there.’

‘Yeah, I saw the gun,’ Drake confirmed. ‘Looked like it could take out a tank.’

‘It gets better. The survivors were executed at close range by small-arms fire. Double taps to the head – real professional.’

Drake wasn’t surprised. He would expect nothing less from any operation that Anya was part of. ‘So the “paramedics” I saw were there to finish the job.’

‘This wasn’t just an assassination,’ Franklin went on. ‘According to the convoy manifest, we’ve got an MIA. Anton Demochev, director of the FSB’s counter-terrorism branch.’

Drake felt as though he was immersed in a bad dream, and it was getting worse by the minute. The convoy that had been hit belonged to Russia’s Federal Security Bureau, better known as the FSB.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the old KGB broke up into a number of successor agencies, all vying for power and influence. The FSB had eventually emerged as the dominant entity and was now the main intelligence service of the Russian Federation, responsible for both foreign and domestic security.

Essentially they were the CIA and the FBI rolled into one. As such, their power and resources were considerable. And as many in Russia and elsewhere had learned to their cost, they weren’t shy about flexing their political and military muscles.

‘So this was an abduction,’ he said, stating the obvious.

‘Looks that way. The Russians are going apeshit over this. If they hold him to ransom, it will be a PR disaster.’ Franklin was silent for a moment, and Drake could almost feel his growing anger. ‘Anya might have caused a goddamned international incident.’

Drake looked down at his coffee. He could think of nothing to say to that, because his friend might well be right. Her actions this evening had already resulted in several deaths, not to mention incurring the wrath of one of the world’s most dangerous intelligence services.

‘What are we doing about it?’ he asked instead. With an incident of this magnitude, an Agency response was inevitable.

‘We’re coordinating with FBI and Homeland Security, trying to figure out where they took him. But it’s slow going.’

Drake could guess why. Cooperation between America’s security services was less than impressive at the best of times, and with a sudden attack like this, just piecing together what had happened could take hours. They were a sledgehammer, when what was needed was a scalpel.

Fortunately Drake had just the instrument in mind.

‘I have to go, Dan,’ he said, as his phone buzzed to let him know another caller was trying to reach him. ‘I’ll call you back if I have anything new.’

‘Likewise.’

Ending his call with Franklin, Drake immediately hit the accept button to take one from Frost. He could only hope she had good news.

‘Yeah, Keira?’

‘I think we’ve got them,’ the young woman announced without preamble. ‘Our friends from the freeway dumped the ambulance at an underground parking lot on the east side of DC. Then they switched vehicles. They must have handled the transfer in a blind spot because I couldn’t see it on any of the security cameras, but thirty seconds later they left in a blue Chevrolet Express.’

Drake’s heartbeat had stepped up a gear now. ‘Did you get a look at the plates?’

‘No need,’ she explained. ‘I tracked them to a self-storage facility in Capitol Heights, and I doubt they’re there to offload old furniture.’

Drake was already up and moving, heading for his car, which was parked outside. ‘Good work. Text me the address.’

Capitol Heights was on the east side of the city, no more than a couple of miles away. Assuming he managed to avoid the worst of the traffic, he could be there in five minutes or less.

‘I hope you’re not planning on going in there alone?’

‘You know me,’ he evaded. He needed to know what the hell Anya was involved in, and one way or another he intended to get some answers.

‘That’s what I’m afraid of, Ryan. If …
she’s
there, I’d go in wearing fashionable Kevlar. And a tank.’

‘Duly noted,’ he promised, closing the phone down.

As he approached his car, Drake instinctively reached into his jacket and felt the reassuring shape of the Sig automatic. He might be going in for Anya, but he was under no illusions about what he might find when he got there. If the welcome was less than friendly, he would do what he had to do to defend himself.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. All around her was darkness, cloying and suffocating. The gag in her mouth pressed tight into her flesh, making it difficult to swallow and impossible to cry out. There was no way to summon help, no chance of escape.

With her hands and feet bound behind her back and a thick burlap sack drawn over her face, she lay helpless on the hard, cold, metal floor of the van. Her body, bruised and battered after the crash that had almost killed her, ached with the pain of countless small injuries, while her head throbbed as blood pulsed through it.

All she could do was lie there with the coarse material of the hood pressed suffocatingly against her face, listening to the sounds of the brutal torture session going on outside.

Even through the thick fabric and the metal walls of the van she was being held inside, she could hear Demochev’s agonised screams as his captors went about their grim work.

Anton Demochev, the man whose safety had been entrusted to her, was being tortured to death mere yards away. And she could do nothing to help him.

All she could do was lie there, fighting back the growing feeling of nausea as she listened to Demochev’s screams echoing around the interior of the van.

Ten minutes after leaving the coffee shop, Drake, along with five members of an Agency tactical team, were crammed into the rear compartment of a Ford Econoline Transit van as it hurtled through the eastern suburbs of DC.

With the Agency on alert after the freeway attack, they had several such units on standby throughout the city. A call to Franklin was all it had taken to place the nearest one at Drake’s disposal for a limited duration.