Under Fire Read online

  At sunset he drove back to the motel.

  Another twelve hours passed.

  • • •

  “I THINK YOU HIT PAY DIRT,” Gavin said the following afternoon. “Your boy Pechkin isn’t as crafty as he thinks. He deleted his Gmail account, but forgot about Google’s mysterious ways.”

  “Explain.”

  “Pechkin frequently checked his Gmail account from the Hamrah office in Archivan. He deleted all of the e-mails, and his browser history, but he forgot or didn’t realize that Hamrah’s website is set up with Google Analytics. It tracks back-end website data—traffic, referrers, conversions, and so on. It also keeps a hidden cache of browser history. Interesting, no?”

  “Gavin . . .”

  “Okay. About six hours after your shoot-out at the Nemin farm, someone logged in to Hamrah’s computer system, then went straight to a Web-based e-mail site called YourMailStack. Their firewall is for shit. Pechkin e-mailed someone outside the country—someone in Scotland.”

  Long shot though it had seemed, Jack wondered whether Oleg Pechkin—also playing the roles of Farid Rasulov, Suleiman Balkhi, and Ervaz—might also be pulling the strings of Aminat Medzhid’s kidnappers.

  “Where’d his e-mail go?” Say, “An address in Kinghorn,” Jack thought.

  “A cell phone, but it’s somewhere where the cell towers are few and far between. I don’t have the resources to pin down the signal.”

  “Shit,” Jack replied. Then, a thought: “The NSA would. Give it to Gerry, tell him to get out his favors-owed book. And one more thing: I need a gun.”

  • • •

  THEIR SECOND CAPTIVE—Steven was the name he’d finally offered Olik—had by the evening tired himself out and now lay sleeping on a blanket in the cottage’s basement.

  The team sat down at the dinner table for a meal of TV dinners Helen had stocked the refrigerator with. Hunched over, Roma shoveled spoonfuls of pasta and green beans into his mouth. “Not bad,” he said. “Perhaps when I get home I will buy myself a microwave oven.”

  “Good idea,” Helen said with a smile.

  For whatever reason, slowly throughout the day Roma had emerged from his funk and had started talking and joking with the others, and even asking after the girl’s condition.

  “I’m sorry about all that,” he told the group. “I shouldn’t have hit the other girl. It’s just that this place, all these people . . . I don’t like it here.”

  “We’ll be home soon, my friend.”

  Helen hoped this was true. Her latest communication with their employer was troubling. Medzhid would not be approached in the manner planned. She and the others were to stay in place and not leave the cottage under any circumstances. Worse still, Aminat’s “disappearance” had reached the news earlier than Helen had hoped, and the fact that Scotland Yard was involved told her the authorities were treating the affair as a kidnapping. This had happened much more quickly than she’d anticipated.

  Though her team had seen the same news reports, Helen had done her best to assuage their fears. “This was all expected and planned for. We’re safe here.”

  But not Aminat and Steven, she thought, if she followed orders.

  Yegor said to Roma, “And when we’re back we will go shopping for microwaves, the two of us. I know the perfect store in Lipetsk.”

  “With your money, yes?”

  “Do not push your luck.”

  Roma laughed.

  • • •

  HELEN AWOKE to shouting and footsteps pounding the kitchen floor below her room. Still dressed as she’d fallen into bed, Helen threw back the covers, reached under her pillow, and grabbed the semi-auto pistol there, then ran for the door. Yegor, emerging from his own bedroom, nearly crashed into her. He backpedaled as she raced to the stairs, then followed.

  Taking the steps two at a time, Helen heard a door bang open and then Olik rasping, trying to keep his voice down, “Roma, no, don’t—”

  Helen turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Olik dash through the open door. From outside came a reedy scream, then the grunting-thump of two bodies colliding. The screams became muffled, but more frantic.

  “Shut up!” Roma growled. “Shut . . . up! Shut . . . up!”

  With each repetition came an umph of expelled breath.

  Helen sprinted out the door. In the driveway a pair of bodies were writhing, indistinguishable from each other in the darkness. Helen saw one of the bodies rise up. Moonlight glinted on the blade of a knife. It plunged downward.

  Helen shoved Olik aside, rushed forward, raised the pistol, and slammed it against the back of Roma’s skull. He rolled off the body beneath him and started crawling away. Helen took another step and crashed the pistol’s butt against his temple. He went down.

  “Oh, no, no . . .” Yegor murmured.

  Helen turned. Yegor and Olik were kneeling beside Steven. The boy lay on his back, eyes glazed over. The front of his sweatshirt was a patchwork of blood.

  Helen’s head swirled. She took a breath, refocused on the boy. Think . . .

  “Get him inside,” she whispered. “Put him on the kitchen floor.”

  With one lifting Steven’s shoulders and the other his feet, they carried him toward the door.

  “Then come and get this piece of shit,” Helen called. “And put him in the basement.”

  • • •

  HELEN STOOD, staring dumbly at the boy. The linoleum floor beneath his body was slick with blood.

  “Go upstairs and get some towels.” She knelt beside the boy and grasped his hand. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “You’ll be okay. Just look at me. That’s it . . .”

  She kept her eyes on his until they went dark and he stopped breathing.

  When the other two returned she told them to pack the blankets around his body to dam the blood.

  Helen shuffled to the dining table and sat down. She could feel a haze of panic creeping into her brain.

  “Get buckets,” she ordered. “Wash the blood off the pavement. Check everywhere. Don’t miss even a drop. Olik, when it’s done, take a walk around the neighborhood. Look for anyone outside or any lights on.”

  It took five minutes, the two of them filling and refilling buckets in the kitchen sink until Yegor came back inside and shut the door behind him. He walked to the sink and dropped Roma’s knife into it. It clattered against the stainless steel.

  Yegor sat down at the table with Helen, neither speaking until Olik returned. “Nothing. No lights, no one outside. I heard no sirens, either.”

  Helen wondered if it mattered. If the police even knocked on their door and asked anything more than the most rudimentary questions, it was over for them.

  “What happened, Olik?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was in the kitchen, like you told me, keeping watch. Roma was in the other room watching television. I told him I had to go to the bathroom and asked him to cover for me. It was only going to be for a few minutes.”

  “Keep going.”

  “When I came back down here, the basement door swung open and the boy came stumbling up.”

  “Steven.”

  “What? Yes, Steven. I reached for him, but I missed, then Roma shoved me aside and went out the door after him. You know the rest. It happened so fast, Helen.”

  Yegor asked, “What do you want to do?”

  She stood up, opened the basement door, and started down the stairs. “Both of you stay here.”

  As she’d instructed, Yegor and Olik had tied Roma to the same pipes against the basement’s far wall where Steven had been secured. The room stank of urine and sweat. A lone lightbulb dangled from the center rafter. Roma lay on his side on the blanket.

  She walked to him and nudged his foot with her own.

  He did
n’t stir.

  She kicked him in the thigh. He jerked his leg back. His head rolled sideways and his eyes opened. “What happened?” he croaked. “Hey, why am I tied up?”

  “You killed the boy.”

  “He tried to get away.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Olik went to piss. I heard the kid call up that he had to use the bucket so I went downstairs. The bucket was full, so instead of dragging it to him and getting piss and shit all over me, I untied him and walked him over to it. He broke free, ran up the stairs, and then out the door. I tackled him, but he was strong. He was fighting me. I had to stab him.”

  Roma’s story was plausible, but Helen could hear the lie in his voice. Worse still, his eyes shone with amusement, as though he was replaying the act for his own pleasure. Now Helen was sure: Roma was a psychopath. He let Steven go, told him to run, then chased him down and stabbed him to death. He’d done it because he wanted to do it.

  “I didn’t have a choice, Helen. He was going to get away. Untie me. This is silly.”

  Helen turned around and walked back up to the kitchen.

  Roma shouted, “Hey, come on, let me go.”

  “What did he say?” asked Yegor.

  Helen ignored him. She climbed the stairs to her room and grabbed a pillow from her bed and returned to the kitchen.

  “What are you doing?” Olik asked.

  “Shut up.”

  She picked up the gun from the dining table and, with the pillow in her left hand, walked back downstairs. When Roma saw her he said, “Are you going to let me—”

  “No.”

  She strode over to him, doubled up the pillow, and shoved it hard against his head.

  “Hey, what—”

  She pressed the gun’s barrel to the pillow and pulled the trigger.

  OF JACK’S TWO latest requests of Gavin, the gun had been the easier, surprisingly so. Jack’s request for an NSA trace of what Jack hoped was Helen’s cell phone was a tougher task.

  “The gun’s coming from some connection of Mr. Clark’s,” Gavin explained. “Some guy from Hereford, whatever that is.”

  “Home of the 22 SAS Regiment,” Jack replied, referring to the Special Air Service, Britain’s elite Special Forces unit.

  “Sure,” Gavin replied, and then gave him the details.

  As promised, in locker 123 at Saint Andrews Street bus station Jack found the weapon inside a padded envelope. It was a noise-suppressed .32-caliber Walther inside a paddle holster with belt pouches containing three spare magazines, each full of what Jack knew would be subsonic rounds.

  Jack was pulling back into his motel’s parking lot when his phone trilled. “It’s under way,” Gavin said. “Gerry didn’t look too happy about it, but you’ve got your trace. Providing the phone’s not off, we should have a location in a couple hours.”

  “Good. I’m heading back to Kinghorn.”

  • • •

  THE TRACE didn’t come in a couple hours, and it didn’t come four hours after that. Jack, who’d been sipping coffee and waiting in Kinghorn’s only twenty-four-hour coffee shop, left as the sun was coming up and checked into the Carousel Motel overlooking the ocean. Through his balcony windows the sun reflected yellow off the choppy water.

  At noon, Gavin texted him a “still working on it” message.

  • • •

  AT FIVE, Gavin called. “I’m with Gerry and Mr. Clark.”

  Clark said, “We’ve got a hit on the phone. It’s pinging somewhere east of the Pettycur coastal road, about a hundred-meter square between Abden Place and Long Craigs Terrace.”

  “How many houses?”

  Gavin said, “Twenty-two. We have no way of knowing which ones are occupied, though.”

  “Helen paid cash for the garage in Edinburgh and I’m betting she paid cash for their van. Stands to reason she would have done the same here.”

  “Good point,” said Clark. “Gavin, see what you can come up with. Check rental permits versus private ownership, landlords hauled into court for unfit lodgings, pensioners on a fixed income—”

  “Why?”

  “If you own the house you’re not as likely to hand the keys to a stranger with a wad of bills. And poor landlords who take cash under the table are often stingy with repairs and not fans of Her Majesty’s tax collectors.”

  “Ah. Okay, I’m all over it.”

  Gerry said, “John’s going to run the plan with you, Jack.”

  “I can handle—”

  Clark interrupted. “If you find the house you’ll probably be outnumbered. And whoever’s inside has done this kind of thing before. Fail to plan, plan to fail.”

  He’s right, Jack thought. As much as he wanted to move right now, blindly crashing through whatever door he eventually found would probably get both him and Aminat Medzhid killed.

  “Okay, let’s walk it through.”

  • • •

  JACK WAITED until nightfall, then parked his Fiesta in a pub parking lot on Nethergate Street, then started the five-minute walk to the target area. If Kinghorn’s streets were quiet during the day, they were almost deserted at night. He passed an equally vacant trailer park overlooking the shoreline to his right. When he drew even with Abden Place, which sat back twenty yards from the coastal road, he stepped off the shoulder and down a short grass slope to a paved trail bordered by hedges; through them he could hear the crash of waves. In the distance a buoy bell gonged rhythmically. Across the road sat the line of Abden Place. He counted five porch lights on, but none of the front windows were illuminated.

  Jack stopped and texted, IN PLACE.

  STAND BY, came the reply. This would be John Clark.

  To his left he saw a pair of headlights coming down the road. He backed deeper into the hedge and crouched down. A few seconds later he saw the car pass; on its roof was a light bar.

  POLICE. KEEP GOING . . .

  The car’s engine faded.

  Jack waited.

  • • •

  HIS PHONE VIBRATED.

  SIX RENTAL COTTAGES, Clark texted. TWO ON LONG CRAIGS TERRACE, FOUR ON ABDEN PLACE; OF THESE, TWO BELONG TO PENSIONERS. HOUSE NUMBERS 5 AND 9.

  Jack texted, MOVING.

  STAY IN TOUCH.

  Jack looked left and right down the road, then crossed. On the other side of a strip of grass he reached the sidewalk. The address placard on the cottage before him read ABDEN PLACE #2, the one to its right, #3. Both porch lights were dark.

  Behind one of the cottages a dog yipped twice, then went silent.

  Jack started walking, counting cottages as he went. When he drew even with number 5 he saw the porch light was on. He continued on and soon reached number 9, the last cottage on the block. This one’s porch light was also lit.

  Were the kidnappers more or less likely to leave the lights on? he wondered. On, was his guess. If the group was clever—which Helen clearly was—they’d want to behave as naturally as possible. Occupied homes tended to leave the porch lights on. It was the friendly thing to do.

  Jack passed number 9 and followed the sidewalk as it curved around and intersected with Long Craigs Terrace. To his right he could see the fenced backyards of the Abden cottages; running between each one was an alleyway. He walked south until he was back at number 5, then turned down the alleyway. At its end he found himself standing between the cottage and its garage. Gently, Jack opened the side gate and crept down the grass path to the garage’s half-glass door. He clicked on his penlight and shined it through the window. Inside was a white Škoda station wagon.

  This wasn’t proof positive, of course. The kidnappers may have ditched the van they’d used to abduct Amy.

  He retraced his path through the alley, then back down the sidewalk until he reached the second cottage’s yard, then again took the alley to the front of the
house. To his right was the cottage’s side door. Through it he heard a soft metallic clink, like a utensil striking metal. The kitchen.

  Jack crouched down. His heart was pounding.

  He drew the Walther from its holster and then affixed the noise suppressor to the muzzle. Gun trained on the door, he stepped onto the driveway, then sidestepped to the gate. He pushed it open, went through, swung the gate shut, then stepped to the garage door. Hand cupped around the end of the flashlight, he shined the beam through the glass and saw a dark brown wheel well. He panned the flashlight upward.

  It was the van.

  Behind him the cottage door creaked open.

  “I’m taking the garbage out,” a voice called.

  Jack detected an accent. It sounded Russian.

  He retreated down the path to the corner of the garage, circled it, pressed his back against the wall. He brought the Walther up across his body and aimed it at the corner.

  The gate banged open against the fence.

  Footsteps squished on the sodden grass.

  Jack realized he was holding his breath; he let it out.

  Come on, go away . . .

  The garage door swung open and a moment later Jack heard the soft clunk of aluminum cans and glass on concrete.

  The footsteps faded. The cottage door clicked shut.

  Jack couldn’t tell if the lock had engaged.

  He got out his phone and texted, FOUND IT. GOING IN.

  He checked his watch: 10:04.

  As arranged, if he didn’t reestablish contact within ten minutes Clark would push the panic button. This was false comfort, of course, and Jack assumed Clark knew it. Three thousand miles from home, ten minutes or ten hours made no difference.

  MONITORING POLICE CHANNELS, Clark replied. WATCH YOUR SIX.

  • • •

  HAVING ALREADY decided kicking in the cottage’s front door was a no-go, Jack turned his focus to the side door. This was problematic, however. There was at least one man on the other side of it, in the kitchen. Beyond this, he had no idea of the cottage’s layout. He would have to clear the cottage blindly and on the fly.