I faced the Metro’s Transit Authority officer with my hands up. She trained her shaky pistol on me. Miguel stepped sideways to get clear of her field of fire. Even though they’re trained for this kind of encounter, few law enforcement officers are ready for them. Life-threatening danger leaves them scared as hell and flooded with adrenaline. She wasn’t mentally prepared to confront heavily armed men duking it out on the nice clean platforms of the Capitol’s mass transit system a minute before closing time.
The Russian with the bloody nose, slumped against the shiny Metro car beside me, would regain his senses shortly. If he resumed the fight where he left off, there was a good chance that he’d pull the trigger on his PSS, a silent assassination pistol developed by the Spetsnaz during the Cold War. Which would probably make the brave cop pull her trigger. With her arm shaking like that, it was anyone’s guess as to who would catch the bullet.
Mercury leaned his elbow on the cop’s shoulder. Dude, this is so not-awesome. You survive the professional assassin only to get wasted by the subway guard? That just not be worthy of my believers, brutha. Jumping on a nuclear bomb and riding it to glory, now that would be cool.
I said, Help me get out of this or shut up.
Why you gotta be so salty? Mercury asked. Scary Spice here is looking to get off work, not fill out three hours of paperwork and spend the next six weeks talking about it with a therapist.
“My brother’s a drug addict,” I told the subway cop. “Mom sent me to find him. I’ll take him home.”
She relaxed her shooting stance.
The Russian bear-man stirred. Like any good soldier, the first thing he thought about was his weapon. He tightened his grip. His eyes remained closed.
Not good.
“Is it all right if I take his gun away from him, ma’am?” I asked.
She looked at me down the sight of her pistol, then aimed at him. The PSS is a funny-looking pistol. It’s stubby, with mechanicals above the barrel instead of below. A piston in front of the standard gunpowder charge transfers energy from the blast to the bullet. But the piston stops at the end of the barrel, trapping the explosion—and the noise—inside the gun. It can kill at a distance of up to fifty feet without a sound. Which is why the Commies used it for assassinations. Which is, presumably, what the bear had in mind for me.
“You can have the weapon.” I began to lean toward him while still looking at her.
She nodded. I put my foot on his wrist and twisted the hunk of metal away. Holding it with two fingers, I handed it to the cop. She took it.
The Russian said something unintelligible and rocked back and forth.
“Does he need an ambulance?” she asked.
“Only if they carry an antidote.”
She holstered her sidearm and nodded over her shoulder at the exit. “Get him out of here. If I ever see you guys again…”
She walked away, shaking her head.
Miguel and I each grabbed an arm and pulled the guy to his feet. He staggered a couple steps with us. I put a shoulder under his armpit, and Miguel grabbed him by the neck. We pushed our man down the ramp toward the Grosvenor Metro parking lot.
Outside the station, we sat him down on a bench and popped a Sabel Dart in his leg. It’s a projectile the size of a bullet filled with a nonlethal dose of Inland Taipan snake venom backed by a heavy sedative. The venom produces instant flaccid paralysis long enough for the sedative to put our victim to sleep. Once we had him propped up, we called Dhanpal for a ride.
Twenty minutes later, the three of us shoved the Russian’s dead weight into the back of Dhanpal’s Porsche Cayenne. After we closed the hatch, I admired the car for a noticeably long moment.
“Pia didn’t like it,” Dhanpal said. “So, she gave it to me.”
Ms. Sabel gave me a Volkswagen after I saved her life. A few months later, a not-very-nice guy blew it up with a homemade bomb. No word yet from my favorite billionaire about a replacement. Some things are below her radar, I guess. I glanced at Miguel, who drove a Mercedes SUV—also given to him by our generous boss.
“You keep drooling over her McLarens and Lambos, man.” He shrugged. “She keeps those for herself. If you want a cast-off, mention an SUV. She hates them.”
I sorted through the Russian’s personal items. According to his passport, his name was Ivan something-unpronounceable. His phone had what I was looking for: Viktor Popov’s mobile number.
Viktor answered his phone with a question in Russian.
“I hate to disappoint you,” I gloated, “but Ivan the Terrible isn’t coming home tonight. If you want him to live, have your people drop you off—alone—at the Grosvenor Metro station.”
He ranted a threat laced with Russian obscenities.
I hate sore losers. I never listen to them. I clicked off and tossed the phone across the parking lot.
Dhanpal stayed behind to work the trap while Miguel and I took Dhanpal’s car. We laid Ivan the Terrible on the grass outside the Cabin John Indoor Tennis Courts, several miles from the Metro.
From there, we drove to Sabel Security’s Ops Center.
We marched into Meeting Room Zero, our NSA/CIA/FBI-proof room: a few indoor acres encased in concrete. No one could eavesdrop, electronically or otherwise, without walking a hundred yards to the middle where a glass table with four Aeron chairs waited under halogen lights. Miguel and I took seats and waited for our guest of honor.
After a long wait, my mission team reported from the Metro station. The Russians tried to swarm the area with only eight men. Our hastily arranged crew of thirty Sabel agents easily overwhelmed them.
They brought Viktor to us ten minutes later. Three agents wheeled him in, pushed him to the table, and removed his hood. He and I maintained a lengthy soldier-stare. I didn’t speak. He didn’t speak. His gray hair was still immaculately coiffed. His expensive watch glistened. Instead of the Brioni suit, he wore a bathrobe that barely covered his most inglorious parts. His leg was elevated. Titanium pins protruded from his skin to a two-foot-long shiny metal rig holding his damaged bone fragments in place.
It was enough to make a normal person feel bad.
“Your man tried to kill me.” I drummed my fingers on the table. “That pisses me off. Not as much as stealing my dog, but still.”
Viktor kept up his tough-guy look. He wasn’t half-bad at it, either. There was a good chance he did a couple tours in Afghanistan back when the Russians spent a decade learning why the English fought and lost three wars in those poppy fields. God only knows why the USA went there after everyone else failed.
After a long silence, Viktor shrugged.
“You know I can hurt you.” I glanced at the oil derrick holding his leg together. “Yet you send men after me. What’s up with that?”
He gave another tired shrug. “Preemptive.”
“Something happens to me, my friends will come for you.” I nodded at Miguel.
“So many try.” He gave my friend a taste of his glare.
“Let’s de-escalate things,” I said. “Tell me why you want the Pozdeeva drive. I told you there’s nothing on it.”
“The lies Pozdeeva brought you are of no concern to us. We know they are lies.” He shifted his weight and winced. “What is true does not matter to American press. Only what is sensational. What sells papers.”
“Free press sucks, right?” I tossed the original USB drive on the table. “Here you go. Now we can walk away from each other.”
“You discover microdots, da?” He leaned forward and flicked the drive back at me. “Too late for detente.”
“They mean nothing to us.”
“What else would you say?” He leaned closer to me, shifting his titanium armature and causing himself pain that showed on his face. “Do not challenge me.”
“The only reason we had a translator take another look at them was due to your interest.”
“Forget about Pozdeeva.” Viktor sat motionless except for his lips. He controlled his breathing, but he blinked several times. “Tell your Sabels to forget about him.”
Something about the dog-napper pissed me off. Maybe it was the look in his eyes: the arrogant murderer who killed whoever he pleased to achieve his goals. Maybe it was his disrespect. Or his cold threats. Whatever it was, I wanted to shoot him right then and there. No doubt I would save the world from a good deal of pain and anguish. But I’d end up in a world of hurt as well. Killing a diplomat, even if everyone knows he’s a spy, is frowned upon in certain circles.
“See this?” I held up my stained sleeve. “This is where Ivan bled all over me. Your threats are nothing more than laundry bills to me. Tell me what’s so special about those memos, and we’ll think about letting you go.”
“You let me go anyway. It is not in your power.” He snorted. “Peasant.”
Miguel grabbed my shoulder before I leapt across the table to strangle the bastard.
My phone buzzed with a text from the front desk: “Got a small army of county, state, and Federal agents swarming the building looking for a diplomat named Popov. They have search warrants. Seen him?”
“Never heard of him,” I texted back. “Show them around. We booked Meeting Room Twelve. Probably.”
And that pissed me off even more. He had the law on his side. He was a malicious killer who was getting away with it, and it showed in his eyes.
“Is that it then?” I asked Viktor. “You’re going to try to kill twenty thousand Sabel Security employees?”
“The Sabel Industries building, well-guarded.” He gave me a long sneer. “Three men in underground garage. Two in lobby. Two more on floors. Sabel Technologies headquarters in Columbia, eight armed guards wandering location. Ah, but Sabel Gardens, so many acres and so many trees.”