The Hunted e-2 Read online

  “It’s been a long search,” Chopra muttered.

  “And we’ve had a lot of false leads,” the man grunted in return.

  “But this time you’re certain.”

  “I’ve already spoken to Warda. She knows you’re coming. She’s willing to meet with you.”

  “You made contact?”

  “I did.”

  “You fool. They’ll run now. We’ll lose them.”

  “No, she’s scheduled a meeting for later today.”

  Chopra recoiled in confusion. “Why aren’t they scared? Why aren’t they running? They scheduled a meeting? I’m confused…”

  Westerdale pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dragged it across his brow. “I don’t know why they did this.”

  “You should’ve asked.”

  “It didn’t occur to me. I guess I was too shocked.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t like this place. Bloody hot here! Maybe the heat has gotten to this family.”

  Chopra shrugged.

  Hussein Al Maktoum had three older sisters: Ara, Kalila, and Warda. Hussein’s father, it seemed, had kept having children until he’d produced a son. Warda was the oldest of the group, twenty-four now, and the woman with whom Westerdale had made contact. They, like their brother, had done a remarkable job of hiding themselves from the powers that be via a well-trained and well-paid staff.

  So what had changed? Maybe they were running out of money? Or perhaps the young sheikh had just grown tired of hiding? That seemed more likely. Was he aware of the dangers of revealing himself, especially now? The Russians would want to capture him, influence him, take control of the oil. There was already a huge price on his head as the sole heir to Dubai.

  The more Chopra thought about it, the more tense he became. “I need to meet with Warda right now.”

  “They said no.”

  “Because now they’re running, you fool. Why do I pay you? Where is she?”

  “She said she would come down to my villa. We’ll wait for them. Do as they say. I trust them.”

  Chopra stiffened in anger and glowered at his drink. He remembered an eighteen-year-old Warda arguing with her father over her extravagant spending on clothes and jewelry and her father’s grief over the massive phone bills she was incurring by calling friends all over the world, all the time, at all hours. Chopra smiled inwardly; the family had more money than they could ever spend in a thousand lifetimes, but her father had been trying to teach her responsibility, and it seemed that their world of lavish homes and exotic cars had made it nearly impossible to do that, unless he became much more of a disciplinarian. Nevertheless, Warda’s father was a push-over when it came to his daughters. They’d beg, and he’d give in.

  Chopra took a sip of his drink and felt a little better. Let the alcohol relax you, he told himself. If it was meant to be, it would happen.

  Across the bar sat a lean woman with short, dark hair. She wore a low-cut sundress, and when he looked at her, she averted her gaze and checked her watch. Women that beautiful were always waiting for someone — a man twice as handsome as Chopra, no doubt. He sighed and took a longer pull on his drink.

  * * *

  It was nearly sundown when Warda arrived at Chopra’s villa. She was accompanied by a large black man whom she did not introduce and whose job was obvious. After exchanging a tearful hello, they sat on Chopra’s veranda and spoke for a few minutes about the war, the bombs, the loss of her parents, and Chopra expressed his most sincere condolences. The children had been smuggled out of the country during the first indication that missiles might be launched. Their parents had been trying to escape not long after, but the sheikh’s plane had been targeted by Iranian fighter jets and blown out of the sky.

  Warda nodded and pulled back her long, black hair. She was a painfully beautiful woman, a flower who’d sprouted up from the heaps of debris that was now her country. “My father trusted you very much, which is why I agreed to this meeting. He once told me he loved you like a brother. He told me he had never met a man as smart or as loyal as you. He told me I should marry you.”

  Chopra blushed. “That’s rather shocking.”

  “Because of the age difference?”

  “Because I’m a Hindu.”

  She nodded her understanding. “He’d had some wine. I think he meant that I should marry a man with your qualities.”

  “Well, I hope you find him.”

  “Given the way I must live my life now, that is very, very difficult.”

  Chopra nodded. “You’ve done a remarkable job of hiding. It’s taken me this long to locate you — and all I want to do is help.”

  “There are so many who want to manipulate us, especially my brother.”

  “I need to speak to him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s time for him to lead your country back from the ashes. I want to return to him what is his, and I want to help him rebuild your nation. It’s the least I can do to thank your family for all you’ve done for me. That’s all I want. I have no other motivation. I have all the money I could possibly need. This is not about that. This is about restoring a family, an ideal… a country.”

  Warda began to choke up. She grabbed his hand. “I believe you, Manoj. I believe you.”

  “Then take me to him.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s not here.”

  Chopra sighed deeply in disappointment. “According to the information I had—”

  “He was only here for a few days. A short holiday. He just returned to London. He’s been attending a private prep school there, at my insistence. My other sisters have a place nearby.”

  “Excellent. He must continue his education.”

  “He doesn’t exactly agree. I think you’ll find him an interesting — and challenging — young man. That’s all I can say about my brother. We disagree over many subjects.”

  “I understand. Well, then, can you give him my contact information? I’ll leave for London in the morning.” Chopra reached into his wallet and withdrew his card.

  She rose and accepted the card. “I will. I’ll have him call you. It was wonderful to see you again, Manoj. And I hope this dream of rebuilding our country comes to pass. I’m tired of hiding.”

  He glanced around. “It’s not entirely unpleasant.”

  “No, but the company…” She glanced at her bodyguard and rolled her eyes.

  He smiled wanly. “I see.”

  She offered to have dinner with him, but he declined. It would be a form of torture he could not endure. He left and returned to his villa, where he sat in the living room, computer balanced on his lap, and began the process of chartering a private jet back to London.

  * * *

  A short time later, Chopra had dinner with Westerdale and shared the good news. The Brit reminded Chopra of the bonus attached to his contract, and Chopra assured him that he’d receive it. Westerdale had been scanning the news, and by his second glass of wine he’d launched into one of his trademark tirades about world events.

  Argentina’s new offshore oil discoveries, with the aid of Russian technology, were a windfall of the highest magnitude for the Russian Federation. The thick ooze pumping out of the Argentine ocean bed wasn’t the sweet crude of the Middle East, but in a world starving for oil, the industrial world’s lifeblood, there’d be no difficulty passing the excessive refining costs on to the Europeans. So yes, Westerdale, said, the Russians had found yet another way to screw over the Brits. The new fields kept product moving through the world markets, filled Russia’s coffers, and reduced the demands on Russia’s own oil production and reserves.

  The Russian Federation’s growing financial power unnerved Westerdale and Chopra and increased Chopra’s sense of urgency in helping the young sheikh put Dubai back on the map. The Russians had no idea how vast Dubai’s secret reserves were, and Chopra wished he could see the look on President Kapalkin’s face when some of his European clients began to turn away oil s
ales in favor of doing business with Dubai and the other emirates.

  Westerdale and Chopra finished dinner, and as Chopra was about to leave, he spotted that same woman again: lithe, muscular, short black hair. She was eating alone this time. Oh, how he wished he had the nerve to go over and speak to her. But he was leaving in the morning. And nothing would come of it, of course. She was probably a full head taller than him, and he was at least ten years her senior. He sighed as she took a phone call, then bid Westerdale a good evening. With a full belly and a renewed longing for female companionship, Chopra began the uphill hike for his villa.

  * * *

  The Snow Maiden could have abducted her prey within the first hour of his arrival in the Seychelles, but she planned to study him for a while. What was he doing here? What did he want? She wasn’t foolish enough to blindly take orders from her employers. She was ever the opportunist.

  Patti had said that Chopra was the key to getting them inside Dubai’s vaults. The Ganjin wanted the locations of Dubai’s secret oil reserves and the gold stored in one of the vaults. That was simple enough, but the Snow Maiden believed that Chopra was involved in something else that both intrigued and unsettled her.

  She’d already dusted his villa with nanobots so she’d be able to track him; consequently, she would keep him on a leash for a while, let him wander, let him provide a few more answers that could prove useful. She’d been in the hills near his villa and had electronically observed and listened in on his meeting with the woman. She had learned via a surveillance photograph sent back to the Ganjin that the woman was Warda Al Maktoum, daughter of the royal family of Dubai. Now Chopra was heading back to London in the morning to continue his mission to restore the old Dubai. It was hard to fathom that he had no ulterior motives. Those kind of people rarely existed in the Snow Maiden’s world. At once she admired and pitied him.

  And she resisted the temptation to move in now. Let him go to London. Let him make contact with the young sheikh he’d been struggling to find all these years. And certainly any more information about him was better kept from the Ganjin.

  She leaned back on the sofa of her own villa, staring at the signal superimposed over the satellite map on her computer. With a click she brought up views from the micro cameras she’d planted in his villa. Chopra was still there, preparing to settle down for the night. She would do the same. She’d already hacked into his computer and had his itinerary. She could relax for the moment. She closed her eyes, and they were there. Always there. Her husband. Her brothers.

  And now her cousin Andrei.

  He was too young and just a victim, and she was entirely responsible for his death. They killed him to hurt her, to demoralize her, to weaken her… so they could move in. But they had no idea what they had just done. Her rage was now a fiery maw that would consume them.

  Oh, yes, she felt certain the Russians had hired the Brigade. The terrorists had become too good at tracking her. Izotov was training and equipping them, letting them get their hands dirty while the smug bastard sat in his office and stuffed his face with gourmet food.

  Revenge would not bring back the dead, of course. Revenge was foolish, she knew. So she no longer called it revenge. She called it justice — for the future generations of Russia. The richer her nation became, the more corrupt grew its leaders. It would end. It must end.

  She was with Nikolai again, holding his hand while he lay in that hospital bed. The chemotherapy had turned him into a pale skeleton, but behind those sunken cheeks and hollow eyes was the man she loved.

  “Don’t cry,” he’d told her.

  “They did this to you.”

  “No, I did this to me. I chose. But it’s okay. This life is only temporary, and we’ll be together again.”

  “They knew this would happen. They didn’t care. They sent my brother in there. And they sent you to clean up the mess.”

  “Don’t be angry. You have a beautiful heart. Keep it warm for me.”

  She laid her head on his chest and cried.

  The Snow Maiden took in a long breath and opened her eyes. Her wineglass was nearly empty. As she sat up and reached toward the bottle, the door to her villa smashed open and was split in two.

  The man who appeared behind the shattering wood was a stocky German wearing a broad grin. That he had found her here was a testament to his tenacity because she’d been excruciatingly careful.

  But here he was, nonetheless, Mr. Heinrich Haussler, old GRU colleague and double agent, new nemesis, with a suppressed pistol pointed at her head.

  “Hello, Viktoria.”

  She snorted. “Hello, Heinrich. You could’ve knocked.”

  SIX

  Banyan Tree Seychelles Resort

  Mahé Island

  Republic of the Seychelles

  To say that Brent had grinned until it hurt would be an understatement. They’d sent him to a French paradise, where, well, the escargot had hit the fan, but then he’d learned they were sending him to a tropical paradise. The irony was killing him. He barely made enough money to vacation in these spots, yet he was getting all-expenses-paid trips courtesy of the American taxpayers. He hoped his dumb luck would continue.

  Dennison had leaned hard on the captured Russian colonel, Pavel Doletskaya, and he knew enough about the Snow Maiden to offer small details that might betray her whereabouts. She traveled under assumed identities, of course, and had access to some of the best document-forging techniques in the world via her old GRU contacts and other unknown sources. She was also able to defy most electronic ID systems. But in the end, she was still human, still susceptible to human impulse, to weakness, to using her mother’s initials as a prompt for devising her aliases — a tidbit only the Russian colonel would know. That eccentricity had led the NSA and Army intelligence to locating her in the Seychelles. Dennison herself had checked the airport security camera footage, and voilà, there she was, the Snow Maiden, wearing a tennis cap and shorts and carrying a sling bag. There was something haughty and audacious about her using commercial airliners. With all of her resources, Brent would have considered her moving about on private jets; perhaps she wasn’t as well connected or well funded as others thought, or perhaps a private jet might have called too much attention to her.

  Brent, the Splinter Cells, and the rest of his team were en route within an hour after receiving their first lead. And by the time they neared the island, they had pin-pointed her exact location.

  They infiltrated the resort via a borrowed yacht anchored offshore, and dressed in nondescript black fatigues and heavily armed, they were ready to take the Snow Maiden alive. The team was fanning out, about to set up full surveillance of her villa.

  Brent was curious why she was here. Her cousin had just been killed, and the higher-ups assumed she’d remain in Europe to exact payback on the terrorists. Maybe she was linking up with someone on the island who could help.

  As he and Lakota shifted through a dense forest running parallel to the hillside trail, the call came in from Thomas Voeckler: “We’ve just run an infrared scan on the hillside. I don’t believe this. It’s loaded with targets. I just pulled up satellite. We have nine armed operators already in place. What the hell is this, Brent?”

  “I’ll find out.” Brent crouched down and took a deep breath. “Ghost Team, this is Ghost Lead. Hold positions. Hammer, this is Ghost Lead, over.”

  “Go ahead, Ghost Lead,” replied Dennison, her image appearing in the head-up display.

  “Does the old cliché ��we’ve got company’ mean anything to you right now?”

  “Scanning.”

  Brent sighed in frustration. “Be nice if we knew who they were…”

  “Not sure yet. Let’s feel them out.”

  “Roger that. Ghost Team, split and shadow those other operators. I want you breathing down their necks, but don’t engage. Not yet. Schleck, you hold back and get ready to do your thing. Get your bead on that front door, over.”

  “Roger that, Boss,” repli
ed Schleck. “Holy—” Schleck finished the curse and added, “A guy just broke down her front door. He’s moving inside!”

  Gunfire erupted across the hillside, all kinds of fire: single-shot, automatic, even the crack of a carbine. Brent began cycling through the camera views of his people as he sent Lakota off toward the Snow Maiden’s villa about a hundred yards up the hill.

  “Ghost Team, hold fire! Do not give up your positions! Let them give up theirs!”

  “They just fired at a hotel security guard. He’s down,” reported Noboru.

  “I think they have infrared on us,” cried Daugherty. “Radar, satellite, the works! Might need to engage!”

  Brent swore under his breath and cried, “Gun and run if you have to, but keep it moving!”

  “He’s right,” Riggs chimed in. “I got one in my sights now. They’ve got headsets like ours.”

  Brent gritted his teeth and began cycling through the operator images piped in via his Cross-Com. He was trying to do the right thing as team leader: obtain as much information as possible before reacting to the situation.

  Aw, hell. He took off running.

  * * *

  Chopra had been watching the highlights of a soccer game and was lifting the remote toward the set, about to turn it off. He’d set up his air travel to London and all had been well — until he’d heard the sound of gunfire coming from the hills near his villa. He immediately called Westerdale, who was already panicking and crying that they should “get the bloody hell out of there.”

  “We should just stay here and take cover,” Chopra had argued.

  “You fool. If they’ve come for Warda and take her, she’ll talk. Then they’ll come for you. The only way you can help Hussein is to save yourself!”

  “All right.”

  Thankfully, Chopra had traveled light and his bag was already packed, except for his morning clothes. He gathered his belongings, flinched again at the sound of more gunshots, then, holding his breath, went running from his villa. He longed to go after Warda and prayed they wouldn’t hurt her, but Westerdale was right: If Chopra didn’t make contact with Hussein, then Dubai would never rise again and that would be a tragedy. As much as it pained him, he kept on toward Westerdale’s villa. The pops and booms continued from the jungle above him.