The Janus Reprisal (2 page)

R
ANDI RUSSELL STOOD
IN THE
CIA’s situation room in McLean, Virginia, surrounded by eight flat-screen televisions mounted on the walls and sixteen computer terminals stationed at desks. At least ten people filled the eighteen-by-twelve-foot room. It was 9
PM
Eastern Standard Time, and her entire crew had arrived when the first reports of gunfire near The Hague began. Her best officers sat at computer terminals monitoring the Internet status updates from various networking sites, while others watched the traditional media report live from the perimeter of emergency vehicles surrounding the hotel. Russell herself had been working round the clock to decipher the exact location of the attack and had only just gone home to sleep when her phone rang to tell her that what they had warned about had begun. She’d thrown on a pair of jeans, boots, and a cotton long-sleeved shirt while she raced to her car. For the entire drive to McLean she’d prayed that the terrorists would be thwarted before they took too many casualties.

Now she paced before the screens watching the Dutch police handle an action that was straining their capabilities and plotted how her group could help. The live feed from CNN showed the stately Grand Royal Hotel with fire pouring from a sixth-floor window. Russell could hear gunfire and explosions through the microphones. The CNN correspondent kept pointing out how often shots were heard in a voice pitched high with adrenaline.

“The hotel guests are updating. There appears to be a shooter on every floor.” Jana Wendel, a new hire fresh out of Yale, was monitoring a networking site that provided short updates in real time. The site had crashed twice since the beginning of the attack, but each time had been brought back online only to show a continuous stream of heartbreaking sentences. “My husband’s been shot, he’s bleeding to death, please send help to room 602” was the latest. Wendel set her jaw, and Russell thought she would soon be crying. The man sitting next to her, Nicholas Jordan, another new hire, was in charge of monitoring a second, European version of the site, and he, too, looked ready to weep. Despite the obvious emotion they were feeling, they stayed in position, grimly doing their jobs.

“Where’s Andreas Beckmann?” Russell said to the room in general.

“On his way,” another officer replied.

“Get him in position. As close as possible to the hotel.” Beckmann was a CIA sharpshooter, and one of the few stationed in the Netherlands at the moment.

Russell was temporarily stationed in McLean under a new program instituted by the director of national intelligence. The DNI was an entirely new entity signed into law after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. The DNI reported directly to the president and since 2005 had been giving him his daily briefing. The DNI was mainly concerned with correcting perceived intelligence failures of the 9/11 attacks, and the latest program was designed to increase communication between officers in the field and McLean. Russell had proven her competence in the field time and time again, and her last mission had helped destroy a growing problem in Africa, after which the CIA had decided that she was best stationed away from that continent until memories faded. She’d been hauled home to act in a consulting capacity within headquarters and to manage a small cadre of agents spread across Europe. Despite the fact that the job was managerial in nature, she was surprised to find that she enjoyed the broad overview that the role gave her, as well as the power to implement real changes in protocol throughout Europe. Occasionally she chafed at the inactivity of a desk job, even a temporary one, but as an operative she knew just how vital it was to have a command center that could support rather than hinder.

The CNN cameras focused a lens on the third floor, where a man was standing in an open window. After a moment he emerged from the pane, holding on to the building’s side. The CNN correspondent noted the man’s actions.

“There appears to be a hotel guest desperate to leave the nightmare that is the Grand Royal,” the CNN correspondent said. Russell felt her irritation rise. The situation was dire enough without dramatic narration from the media.

The supervisor for her assigned area, the director of European Operations, stepped up next to her. Dr. George Cromwell was in his early sixties and had spent his entire career in the CIA. He’d risen from the ranks during the final days of the cold war and was set to retire in two more years. He wore a rumpled shirt and khaki pants, having clearly just left the comfort of his own home.

“That guy falls and he’s a dead man,” Cromwell said. Russell nodded. The man clinging to the wall wore drawstring pants in a black watch pattern with a black T-shirt. His feet were bare and he moved along the slender ledge with precision, never looking down. The CNN camera telescoped, and the man’s profile came into focus. Russell gasped.

“What is it?” Cromwell said.

“That’s Jon Smith.” Russell stepped closer to the flat screen. Smith’s image filled the forty-two-inch monitor.

“You know him?” Cromwell said.

“He’s army, and was engaged to my late sister, Sophia.” Both Wendel and Jordan looked up from their computer screens. Wendel gave Jordan a glance, her eyebrows raised, before returning her attention to the monitor.

Russell scanned the room. “Someone get me a list of hotel guests. Didn’t we have one?” An officer handed her some papers. She ran her eyes down the first page, then the second, then the third. She pointed to a name that she showed Cromwell. “There he is.”

“US Army. He’s a doctor?” Cromwell said.

Russell nodded. “And a molecular biologist. Highly skilled.” She waved a hand at Jordan.

“Do we have a channel to the fire department? Put me through, could you? But remember to use the cover ID.” Russell’s cover included a fake name and false picture on the CIA website, and her title was acting CIA director of public liaison. She’d been using it for the past month when sending out communiqués to various European agencies about current threat levels.

Russell resumed pacing while she waited for the fire department call to be connected to the wireless headset she wore. She watched Smith make his way across the wall and felt her stomach twist with tension. While her feelings about Smith were complicated, she didn’t want to watch him fall to his death. She stopped pacing when she heard the chief of the fire department address her.

“This is Brandweercommandant van Joer.” He spoke English with a British accent.

“Commandant, can you get a ladder to that man? Quickly?”

“I’m sorry, but I cannot. My orders are to keep my men away from the building. They have no body armor, and we’re afraid that the terrorists will kill them before they even maneuver a ladder into position. We’re waiting for our tactical team to contain the situation first.”

“But he might fall at any moment.”

“I’m sorry. But I’d like to point out that he also has a gun in his waistband. It’s entirely possible that he is one of the terrorists.”

“No, no, he’s one of ours.”

“But he has a gun…”

“Of course he has a gun! He’s United States Army.”

“What’s he doing at a WHO conference with a gun?”

Russell hesitated. She knew that Smith’s activity as a Covert-One operative often placed him wherever a crisis was happening, but in this instance his presence at the hotel could have been purely coincidence. His real job also placed him at the scene of disasters and near disasters, and it was entirely possible that he was there in that capacity as well.

“He’s an infectious disease specialist. I imagine he was invited by WHO to attend.”

“I’m very, very sorry, but I can’t risk my men. Again, I’m sorry.”

“Ms. Russell, Beckmann’s in position. I’m patching him through,” Wendel said, and she tapped on her keyboard.

Russell watched the screen. Smith was almost to the corner when she saw a masked man’s face appear at the window to his left. The terrorist maneuvered an assault weapon out and trained it on Smith.

“Beckmann, fire,” Russell said.

S
MITH TURNED HIS HEAD
to stare into the eyes of the man who was preparing to kill him. He expected some emotion there. Perhaps anger that Smith had eluded him so far, or glee that he finally had Smith where he wanted him, but all he saw was a calculated coldness. A gunshot cracked and the man’s head whipped back. Bits of blood shot out of a hole in the man’s temple, splattering across the window above the terrorist’s head. The bulk of the brain matter that Smith knew would be scattering as well remained contained within the man’s hood. The assassin slumped forward and his body hung there, half in and half out of the window. His fingers loosened and the assault weapon fell straight down. It made a clattering sound as it hit the ground below.

“Thank you, whoever you are,” Smith whispered the words.

Another attacker stuck his head out of the window.

Stupid, Smith thought. The gunshot echoed again and the second man slumped. This one hadn’t pushed all the way out, and his body fell backward, into the room.

Smith heard rather than saw the reaction of the crowds of police and fire personnel behind him. A man’s voice on a loudspeaker kept repeating the same sentence over and over in Dutch, and out of the corner of his eye Smith saw the crowds shifting, moving. One camera-toting observer stepped backward, keeping the lens of his commercial-grade equipment pointed at the hotel and Smith, but moving to a new position. The perimeter grew wider, farther away. There would be no ladder for him anytime soon.

Smith redirected his attention to moving to the corner. His fingers ached at each knuckle from the strain of gripping the small protrusion, and his biceps burned. His toes grasped the stone piece well enough, but his calves were in pain from being locked in the same position. He made it to the corner and carefully reached his hand around the point and grasped the section on the other side with a sigh. At least now he could stretch out his arms, which provided some relief to his biceps.

He shifted around the corner and was confronted with another window. This one had a hole in it where a stray bullet had exited. The curtains had been pulled, but Smith was able to peer into the room through a small opening between them. He saw a man’s foot hanging off the edge of the bed. The foot didn’t move. Presumably the terrorists had already visited this room, and the man was dead.

Smith glanced down, looking for an awning or something below that he could jump into with the hope of a semisoft landing. There was nothing. He wasn’t willing to keep going. The burn in his limbs signaled that they were reaching the failure point, and he could feel the beginnings of a cramp forming in his calf. He carefully released one hand from the ledge, balancing himself as well as he could, and reached behind and pulled his weapon out of his waistband. He flipped the gun over and hit the butt on the glass next to the bullet hole, trying to widen it enough to knock out a section. He couldn’t get his body at an angle that would allow him to generate any force, and as a result the blows were weak and ineffectual. The pane held.

While not a fitness fanatic, Smith worked out every day to maintain his strength and flexibility, and as a result he knew his abilities. Clinging to the ledge was pushing his muscles to the limit, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he would be able to continue inching along. He felt the panic that he’d been tamping down since the start of the ordeal begin to break through to the surface. He swallowed once and prepared to continue forward until his limbs failed completely.

He heard a gunshot crack, and the window shivered as a bullet shot through it, a few inches above and to the right of the existing hole, but this one making an entry pattern. Whoever had shot the terrorists was now shooting at the window. Slivers of glass flew and Smith closed his eyes against the shards. A second crack broke through the dark and another hole appeared, this one completing a triangle. Smith felt hope surge in him. The sniper knew how to shatter a window. A triangular pattern of shots would overcome even bulletproof glass, which this window certainly was not. He heard the double pane start to crack, and long fissures snaked out from the holes. Smith pulled out his weapon and tapped on the glass with the gun’s butt to speed it along. The entire pane came crashing down. He moved toward the opening, breathing a sigh of relief as his hand wrapped once again around the aluminum window edge. He swung a leg over the frame and lowered himself into the room on the other side.

Smith fell onto the rug and lay there a moment, breathing hard. He heard a smattering of applause from the police officers at the perimeter, but he was in no mood to celebrate with them. He was back in the heart of the disaster, with a dead man inside the room and no idea what awaited him outside. The terrorists still roamed the hotel.

Water sprayed down on him from the sprinkler system, but the alarm had stopped. The phone in his pocket began to ring and he jerked in surprise. He reached down and pulled it free. The display read “unknown.” Smith paused, wondering if he should answer, but decided that it might be Klein calling again from a different phone. He clicked it on and put it to his ear, saying nothing.

“Mr. Smith, this is the man who just shot the terrorists and the window. May I ask a favor? Could you collect any bullets that you find? The two that I used on the terrorists are meant to explode in a manner that renders them untraceable. Not so the two that I used on the window.”

Smith rose to standing while he took the extraordinary call. The man’s English was inflected with a slight accent that Smith thought might have been German or Swiss, and he spoke in a calm, relaxed manner, as if shooting terrorists dead were a daily occurrence and didn’t rattle him in the least.

“Why do you need them?” Smith asked.

“My employer would rather no questions be raised about my role here. I am technically not supposed to shoot people on foreign soil, no matter how despicable they are.”

Smith had initially thought that the man worked for Covert-One, but now he knew that was not possible. Covert-One was an organization so removed from governmental checks and balances that Smith doubted it was subject to any rules about shooting undesirables on foreign soil.

He searched around the far side of the bed, looking for the two bullets that had completed the triangle, and found them embedded in the wall. He propped the phone between his ear and shoulder while he used his fingers to dig them out. He dropped the bullets into his pocket.

“I’ve got them. How did you get this number?”

“My employer gave it to me. I don’t think there are any more terrorists on the third floor, but I don’t advise that you remain there. I suggest that you make your way down the north stairwell. I’m heading that way and will be prepared to cover you as you emerge. There’s a cordon of Dutch police forming, but I saw a second contingent of attackers on the move away from the hotel. This night is far from over.”

Smith ran through his mind the people who would have the expertise to shoot with the accuracy that this man had along with the ability to gain access to his private cell number. He decided that the caller was either employed by a European military group or was part of the intelligence organization of another country. His use of the term “foreign soil” meant that he wasn’t Dutch.

“CIA, Mossad, or MI6?” Smith said.

“I’ve been informed that I am to escort you safely out of that hotel if at all possible. You’ll be safe with me.” The man had dodged the question, but Smith decided to take him at his word. He’d just saved Smith’s life, and options were few in any event.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He swept an eye over the dead man on the bed, but didn’t bother to take his pulse; the large bloom of blood growing on the man’s shirt where the bullet had entered his chest left little room for doubt. He checked his weapon and headed to the door, preparing to face whatever was out there.