“Agent wounded and bad guy down. Another bad guy heading back. Lost him turning the corner.” The agent ran after him, but tripped on a packing case.
They let him come through the door. One agent, his torso protected with a bullet-resistant vest, was between the door and the hostage. They could take the chance now. It was the one who’d gotten the rent-a-car, Werner knew at once, and his weapon wasn’t pointed at anybody yet. The man saw three HRT members dressed in black Nomex jump suits and obviously protected with body armor. His face showed the beginnings of hesitation.
“Drop the gun!” Werner screamed. “Don’t—”
Leonid saw where Gregory was and remembered his orders. The pistol started coming around.
Werner did what he’d always told his people not to do, but would never remember why. He loosed half a dozen rounds at the man’s arm, going for the gun—and miraculously enough, it worked. The gun hand jerked like a puppet’s and the pistol fell free in a cloud of spraying blood. Werner leaped forward, knocking the subject down and placing the muzzle of his silenced gun right on his forehead.
“Number three is down! Hostage safe! Team: check in!”
“Outside, number one down and dead.”
“Trailer, number two down and dead! One agent hit in the arm, not serious.”
“Female down and dead,” Werner called. “One subject wounded and in custody. Secure the area! Ambulances, now!” From the time of the sniper shots, it had taken a total of twenty-nine seconds.
Three agents appeared at the window through which Werner and the other two had arrived. One of the agents inside pulled out his combat knife and cut through the ropes that held Gregory, then practically threw him out the window, where he was caught and carried off like a rag doll. Al was put in the back of the HRT truck and rushed off. On the highway, an Air Force helicopter landed. As soon as Gregory was tossed inside, it lifted off.
All HRT members have medical training, and two on the assault team had trained with firemen-paramedics. One of them was wounded in the arm, and directed the bandaging done by the man who’d shot Oleg. The other trained paramedic came back and started working on Leonid.
“He’ll make it. The arm’s gonna need some surgery, though. Radius, ulna, and humerus all fractured, boss.”
“You should have dropped the gun,” Werner told him. “You didn’t have much of a chance.”
“Jesus.” It was Paulson. He stood at the window and looked to see what his single bullet had done. An agent was searching the body, looking for a weapon. He stood up, shaking his head. That told the rifleman something he would have preferred not to know. In that moment, he knew that he’d never hunt again. The bullet had entered just below the left eye. Most of the rest of her head was on the wall opposite the window. Paulson told himself that he should never have looked. The rifleman turned away after five long seconds and unloaded his weapon.
The helicopter took Gregory directly to the project. Six armed security people were waiting when it landed, and hustled him inside. He was surprised when someone snapped some pictures. Someone else tossed Al a can of Coke, and he anointed himself with carbonated spray when he worked the pop-top. After taking a drink, he spoke: “What the hell was all that?”
“We’re not even sure ourselves,” the chief of project security replied. It took a few more seconds for Gregory’s mind to catch up with what had happened. That’s when he started shaking.
Werner and his people were outside the trailer while the evidence team took over. A dozen New Mexico State Police officers were there also. The wounded agent and the wounded KGB officer were loaded into the same ambulance, though the latter was handcuffed to his stretcher and doing his best not to scream with the pain of three shattered bones in his arm.
“Where you taking him?” a state police captain asked.
“The base hospital at Kirtland—both of them,” Werner replied.
“Long ways.”
“Orders are to keep this one under wraps. For what it’s worth, the guy who popped your officer is that one over there—from the description he gave us, it’s him anyway.”
“I’m surprised you took one alive.” That earned the Captain a curious look. “I mean, they were all armed, right?”
“Yeah,” Werner agreed. He smiled in an odd sort of way. “I’m surprised, too.”
24.
The Rules of
the Game
THE amazing thing was that it didn’t make the news. Only a handful of unmuffled shots had been fired, and gunfire is not all that unusual a thing in the American West. An inquiry to the New Mexico State Police had gotten the reply that the investigation into the shooting of Officer Mendez was still continuing, with a break expected at any time, but that the helicopter activity was merely part of a routine search-and-rescue exercise conducted jointly by the state police and Air Force personnel. It wasn’t all that good a story, but good enough to keep reporters off everyone’s back for a day or two.
The evidence team sifted through the trailer and not surprisingly found little of note, A police photographer took the requisite pictures of all the victims—he called himself a professional ghoul—and handed over the film to the senior FBI agent on the scene. The bodies were bagged and driven to Kirtland, from which they were flown to Dover Air Force Base, where there was a special receiving center staffed by forensic pathologists. The developed photos of the dead KGB officers were sent electronically to Washington. The local police and FBI began talking about how the case against the surviving KGB agent would be handled. It was determined that he’d broken at least a dozen statutes, evenly divided between federal and state jurisdiction, and various attorneys would have to sort that mess out, even though they knew that the real decision would be made in Washington. They were wrong in that assessment, however. Part of it would be decided elsewhere.
It was four in the morning when Ryan felt a hand on his shoulder. He rolled over and looked in time to see Candela flip on the bedstand light.
“What?” Ryan asked as coherently as he could manage.
“The Bureau pulled it off. They have Gregory and he’s fine,” Candela said. He handed over some photos. Ryan’s eyes blinked a few times before going very wide.
“That’s a hell of a thing to wake up to,” Jack said, even before seeing what had happened to Tania Bisyarina. “Holy shit!” He dropped the photos on the bed and walked into the bathroom. Candela heard the sound of running water, then Ryan emerged and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out a can of soda and popped it open.
“Excuse me. You want one?” Jack gestured at the refrigerator.
“It’s a little early for me. You made the pass to Golovko yesterday?”
“Yeah. The session starts this afternoon. I want to see our friend about eight. I was planning to get up about five-thirty.”
“I thought you’d want to see these right away,” Candela said. That elicited a grunt.
“Sure. It beats the morning paper . . . We got his ass,” Ryan noted, staring at the carpet. “Unless . . .”
“Unless he wants to die real bad,” the CIA officer agreed.
“What about his wife and daughter?” Jack asked. “If you got opinions, I sure as hell want to hear them.”
“The meet’s where I suggested?”
“Yep.”
“Push him as hard as you can.” Candela lifted the pictures off the bed and tucked them in an envelope. “Make sure you show him these. I don’t think it’ll trouble his conscience much, but it’ll damned well show him we’re serious. If you want an opinion, I thought you were crazy before. Now”—he grinned—”I think you’re just about crazy enough. I’ll be back when you’re all woke up.”
Ryan nodded and watched him leave before heading into the shower. The water was hot, and Jack took his time, in the process filling the small room with steam that he had to wipe off the mirror. When he shaved, he made a conscious effort to stare at his beard rather than his eyes. It wasn’t a time for self-doubt.
It was dark outside his windows. Moscow was not lit the same way as an American city. Perhaps it was the near-total absence of cars at this hour. Washington always had people moving about. There was always the unconscious certainty that somewhere people were up and about their business, whatever that might be. The concept didn’t translate here. Just as the words of one language never exactly, never quite correspond to those of another, so Moscow was to Ryan just similar enough to other major cities he’d visited to seem all the more alien in its differences. People didn’t go about their business here. For the most part they went about the business assigned to them by someone else. The irony was that he would soon be one of the people giving orders, to a person who’d forgotten how to take them.