At the end of the long flight from St. Petersburg, Pia waited in the Gulfstream’s cargo hold for the pilot’s signal. More than an hour after midnight, he sent a short beep before he drove off the tarmac at Ercan Airport. Seven miles west lay Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus. They were on a mission to retrieve caches of evidence Dad had left behind twenty years earlier. Time and the pace of his rapidly expanding business empire had obscured locations and content, but he was convinced they would bury Roche. Pia just liked working with him.
Her father and Tania remained silent beside her in the dark. Pia wore the coveralls of an aircraft mechanic, her hair under a male wig and a t-shirt. Due to her height and build, it was easier to disguise her as a man—a fact she didn’t like but agreed to because the gypsy act had been too difficult. Tania wore a waitress’s dress. Alan dressed like a bum with five-day stubble.
The Major and the body doubles had long since left for the hotel as a decoy convoy to throw off any potential covert surveillance. Later they would provide backup for the operation.
Pia opened the hatch and hopped down. Tania and Alan followed right behind her. The facility looked almost abandoned at two in the morning. They found car keys behind the tire of the only car left in the lot, a Suzuki Ignis.
Pia and Alan squeezed themselves in. Without an inch to spare, their shoulders rubbed against the windows on one side and each other in the middle. After the Sabels raked their seats back, eliminating the backseat footwells, Tania climbed in crosswise in back.
They drove away on the dark, rural airport road. Two miles north across a dry, barren plain, they passed a small shopping mall. A car pulled onto the road behind them.
“Am I being paranoid, or did they not take the bait?” Pia asked.
“If they didn’t f-f-follow the Major, they’re smarter than w-w-we thought.” Tania sank below the rear window and loaded an assault rifle.
“You were right,” Dad said. “They anticipated my visit. That’s not good for Eleni. We must hurry.”
He raised his phone to take a selfie and used the camera to zoom in on the car behind them. “Four men, considerably larger than the average Cypriot male.”
Pia watched the mirror for a moment before taking the cloverleaf onto the main highway to Nicosia. The Mercedes sedan followed them. She downshifted, revved up the tiny engine, and accelerated halfway through the arc. As she expected, they matched her speed. She took it up another notch, and they stayed with her. Her car banged over a pothole. Pia and Alan smacked their heads. The much faster Mercedes closed in, tailgating.
“Now?” Tania asked, her finger stroking her trigger.
“If we start shooting now, do they have backup?”
“Let’s shoot them and find out.”
“Let’s try bluffing first.” Pia swerved through a tiny opening in the tree-lined median and drove into a dark petrol station. Their pursuers were unable to make the turn but went to the next break in the median and came back.
Pia’s tires squealed around the large pumping islands built for tractor-trailers. She rounded the back of the empty building and slowed. Tania opened her door, rolled out, and disappeared into the dark.
Pia sped up. She rounded the next corner and slammed the brakes, bringing them headlamp-to-headlamp with their adversaries.
Two men, silhouetted by their brighter lights, held Kalashnikovs aimed at them. They were lightly dressed in clothing similar to the local farmers’ garb. No room for hidden weapons or body armor. Two more men remained in the car.
“Are they going to kill us?” Dad asked.
“Not yet.” Pia raised her hands. “You do the talking. My voice doesn’t match the disguise.”
The men with rifles motioned for them to get out. They complied. Alan stooped, keeping his head down, and pulled a few mangled and dirty euro notes from his pocket. Shuffling in his best approximation of a Cypriot bum, he moved toward them and held out the bills.
One of the men shouted something in Turkish. Alan shrugged and tried a pathetic look.
“Your ID,” the man said in heavily accented English.
They pulled out their wallets. Pia had to think about where it was before remembering the back pocket. She handed it to her dad to keep her polished nails from becoming too obvious.
The man looked them over, comparing pictures and people. He nodded at his companion. The pair jumped back in their car and sped off.
“Dad, are you OK?”
“How do you do it?” Dad’s knees were shaking. “I thought they were going to kill us.”
“Consider yourself already dead at the start, and you won’t worry about dying. Besides, we had Tania backing us up.”
“N-n-not really.” Tania stepped from behind the building with scraped knees and a dirty dress. “I forgot I was w-w-wearing a dress.”
“They headed into town,” Alan said. “We have to meet Eleni.”
“For the record, I absolutely hate dressing like a man.” Pia restarted the car. “They sit on their wallets. Their clothes fit like cardboard boxes.”
They raced as fast as the little engine could manage. The Russians were long gone.
“There weren’t any other planes at the airport.” Pia willed the little car to go faster.
“They were KSO,” Tania said. “The R-R-Russian version of SEALs. Matted, wet hair. I’m guessing they l-l-landed a Zodiac on the c-coast, stole a car, and tried to meet our jet.”
Pia glanced at the map on her phone and kept her foot pressed hard to the floor. “Is Eleni Christoforou an obvious destination for us?”
“It was a long time ago,” Dad said. “She was close to retiring back then. I’d hoped they forgot about her.” He sighed. “But Strangelove sent these guys.”
“What does she have?”
“What she told me then—and I took her advice to heart—was to stash a copy of the paperwork along the way. Hardcopies, she told me. You don’t want geeks erasing or rewriting your data. Cyprus deals with companies and governments of all kinds. They aren’t corrupt, but they don’t mind banking for the corrupt. They know the importance of records to protect themselves.”
“You kept copies then?”
“A few documents on Santalum and Roche in safety deposit boxes here and in Barcelona, Zurich, Singapore, other places.”
“Let me guess,” Pia said. “That’s what you were doing when I found you in Barcelona. Your boxes were emptied?”
“Polished, clean and shiny. The bank had my signature on the form an hour before I landed.” He clenched his fist and stopped himself from pounding the dash. “He’s been one step ahead of me.”
“Let’s send agents out for the rest of them.”
“One problem,” Dad looked out the window. “At the time I left each box, I thought I would write them all down. I cross-referenced a few, but I was working hundred-hour work weeks and never had enough time to document their locations. Jonelle and I have been reconstructing the trail as best we can.”
“You had time.” Pia glanced at him. “You came to all my games.”
“I, uh—” Dad took a deep breath “—made choices.”
Pia gripped the steering wheel, wishing she could be more appreciative of what he had accomplished.
She twisted the car through wide and narrow lanes. They arrived in a suburb that looked as American as any in the USA. They parked at an unlit curb two blocks from the banker’s house, got out and closed their doors quietly.
Pia opened the trunk and grabbed their gear. Tania ditched her dress for her more familiar ninja gear with liquid body armor and took the far side of the street. Pia donned her body armor. Both took a pistol with darts and a sound-suppressed MP5 with real bullets. She handed her father a pistol. All three of them slipped on the new dark-vision glasses from Sabel Tech. A combined night vision and thermal imaging display produced better-than-daylight sight in the dark.
They walked past Eleni’s street. The Mercedes was nowhere to be seen, but Pia remained vigilant. Tania circled into the backyard. Pia and her dad slipped quietly back to the front door.
Tania’s voice whispered in their earbuds. “Two Russians are inside, back of the house. Looks like a home office. They’re tearing up the place in the dark. That means night vision goggles. There’s a woman, slumped in a chair.”
Pia tried the doorknob. Locked. She pulled a slide hammer out of her coveralls, screwed the end into the lock and slid the weight back quickly. The lock came out with a small bang.
“Wait here, Dad.” She pulled her rifle around and tugged on the door.
“I’m coming with you.” He raised his pistol. “I’m not letting you go in there alone.”
Telling Dad what to do was hard enough; telling a self-made billionaire what to do was nearly impossible. If she left him behind, he would ignore her orders and rush inside to save the day. A well-intentioned idea that would lead to disaster. She knew because she’d done just that several times before she started listening to Jacob and Tania. Her best bet was to give Dad a role and make it significant.
“Cover the front.” She placed a hand on his chest. “You’re not trained for inside.”
“But I couldn’t let anything happen to—”
“I need you to cover our backs. Keep an eye open for the other two Russians.” She squeezed his shoulder. “Covering our six is very important.”
Alan stepped back and took up a position around the corner. He was content making a valuable contribution. Besides, the Major and her squad would be providing backup when they arrived in a few minutes.
Pia pushed the door and stepped inside. She could hear the Russians in the back. She crept through a family room into the kitchen. She slid the door open to let Tania in. Together, they stole down the hall.
The noises grew louder as they approached a narrow passageway with two open doors at the end, one straight ahead and the other on the left. Pia recognized the danger. A noisy distraction could be a trap.
Tania tapped her, motioning for her to step aside. She wound up an underhand lob. A pan from the kitchen flew past Pia into the darkened room and landed with a bang. The noise stopped. A figure leaned out of the door on the left. The hidden sentry.
Pia pulled her pistol and put him down with a dart. Tania ran past her and rolled out on the office floor. Pia holstered her handgun and pulled up her MP5. She ran in behind Tania and fired twice. Her target didn’t drop.
Which alarmed her.
The Russians were wearing body armor as advanced as hers. Which meant the dart probably didn’t work on the first guy.
The target in front of her aimed at her.
Tania opened up on him with her muzzle aimed at his face.
Pia dove to the left and covered Tania’s six. A bullet buzzed her ear. She emptied her MP5 in an upward arc at the man she thought she’d already dropped. The rounds hit the man in the groin, then stitched their way up to his head. This time he went down hard. At least one bullet had slipped between armor coverage to take him out.
Pia spun to aim at the last soldier. Tania rolled away as he fired into her empty space. Pia’s magazine was empty. She swapped as Tania, and her adversary exchanged shots. Pia rose, located her target, but held her fire. The man had dropped to his knees.
Tania scrambled to her feet, pulled her pistol and darted the man.
Pia surveyed the room and found an older woman in an executive chair. Blood oozed between Eleni’s fingers and dripped to the floor. Her face contorted with pain. Her body twisted in agony.
Tania flipped on the lights and went to clear the house.
“You’re little Pia?” Eleni Christoforou reached out with shaking fingers. “You’ve grown.”
Pia knelt next to the chair. There was a familiar feel about the woman. A memory of an ocean breeze came to her: an airy, white stucco house on a sandy beach where she’d played in the surf. “Did you used to live on the coast?”
“I had a cottage there.” A smile tried to cross her face. “We used it for discreet meetings. I liked your father. He was a good man. He read poems to you from that funny book. He deserved better than …”
Pia stroked the woman’s arm. She remembered the funny poems well. Shel Silverstein’s books were her favorite bedtime reading.
Alan touched Pia’s shoulder.
Eleni looked up and saw him. “Alan. Can I get you some tea?”
“Don’t get up.” Pia touched the woman as if she were keeping her down. “I’ll get it.”
“I’m sorry, I seem to be stuck in this chair.” Her eyes wandered about the room. “Those men took your papers. Two of them left earlier. I’m sorry I could…”
Her voice drifted to a barely audible mumble.
“Is she going to be OK?” Dad asked.
Pia looked at the large pool of blood on the floor, then at the woman’s clammy skin. She listened to the shallow, labored breathing. She looked at her father and shook her head.