Less than five miles separated the Four Seasons Hotel from the Palacio San Lazaro, the seat of Mexico’s legislative body, but the luxury of the five-star hotel was a world removed from the chaos at the heart of the federal district. According to news reports, the protests, which had been ongoing since the incident in Juarez just a few days previously, were nearing critical mass, evidently in response to Esperanza’s passionate speech the day before, yet nothing Greg Johns had seen since arriving in Mexico City shortly before sunrise would have led him to believe that the government was on the brink of collapse.
But he knew well that appearances could be deceiving. Mass protests and riots usually began at specific aggregation points—government buildings, stock exchanges, large city parks—while just a few city blocks away, people went about their daily lives blissfully unaware that the foundation of their world was crumbling.
Most of the turmoil had been focused in the Zocalo, the famed plaza that had once been the center of historic Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital that had become Mexico City. Known formally as Plaza de la Constitución, it remained a destination for visitors and a focal point for both the city and the nation. The square was of particular interest to the protestors since it was also the location of the National Palace, from which President Mendoza led—or some would say, failed to lead—the country. Today, however, some of that attention had shifted to the San Lazaro palace, where the president would be meeting with Juarez businessman Guillermo Esperanza to discuss, rumor had it, a matter that would have profound implications for the future of the beleaguered nation.
If the Myrmidons failed to stop Oleg Samsonov from assassinating Mendoza, the firestorm would begin there.
Lavelle had been surprisingly forthcoming. Greg suspected this was because the Dominion leader believed that it was already too late for them to stop Samsonov, but Sievers’ gleeful offer to give a demonstration of “enhanced interrogation techniques” might also have been a factor. Unfortunately, Lavelle knew only that Samsonov planned to hit Mendoza as soon as he arrived at the congressional building. The exact means by which he planned to kill the Mexican president were unknown, even to Lavelle.
The weight of the decision had fallen on Tam. Alerting the Estado Mayor Presidencial—Mexico’s military equivalent to the Secret Service—was an option of last resort. There was no guarantee that the warning would be taken seriously. If it was, there would be no way to conceal the discovery of the treaty, the scope of the Dominion plot, or the involvement of the Russians, and that might very well trigger the chaos they hoped to prevent. If the EMP ignored the warnings and Samsonov succeeded, the situation would be even worse.
On the other hand, if the Myrmidons could take Samsonov down quietly, it would be a major coup.
Stone’s appraisal of the situation provided the deciding factor. “Samsonov will want to take care of this personally,” he told Tam. “Just like he did in Vienna. He won’t trust this to anyone else.”
“But how are we going to find him in time?” Greg asked.
“Leave that to me,” Tam had told them, a strange and eager gleam in her eye. With Sievers remaining behind to guard both the prisoners, and if things went badly, help Avery and Stone escape the city, the others boarded waiting taxis and dispersed to carry out the desperate plan.
As Greg and Kasey sped toward the congressional building, their route taking them just ten blocks south of the Zocalo, they began to see the first signs of the unrest they had heard about. Graffiti messages, demanding the ouster of President Mendoza and accusing him of collusion with drug cartels, were spray-painted on walls in letters ten feet high. Scorch marks on walls and pavement marked the places where random fires had burned. Plywood covered store front windows that had presumably been shattered, no doubt the work of hooligans using the political turmoil as an excuse for wanton destruction.
When they were still more than half a mile from the San Lazaro palace, all forward progress abruptly ceased. The road ahead was a veritable parking lot.
“I hope Tam’s having an easier go of it,” Greg remarked.
“No kidding.” Kasey leaned forward and spoke to the taxi driver. In halting Spanish, she asked if the gridlock was due to the protests. The man’s response was a machine-gun-like burst of words, of which Greg understood just a handful. Kasey’s next utterance was in English, harsh and monosyllabic.
“What’s wrong?” Greg asked.
“He says the street has been blocked by the president’s security men.”
“Nice of him to let us know.” Greg threw a handful of hundred peso notes over the seat, more than the figure on the meter and a lot more than the driver deserved, then threw open his door. Kasey got out on her side, and they both took off running down the sidewalk.
The first few steps reminded him of the aches and bruises incurred from the previous day’s border crossing, but the pain subsided as he found his pace. Tam held them all to an exacting regimen of physical training for situations just such as this. Under ideal conditions, Greg could easily knock out a six-minute mile, and the lithe Kasey was even faster, but it soon became evident that conditions would not be ideal. Mexico City was nearly a mile and a half above sea level. The altitude not only left the runners winded, but amplified the effects of air pollution on the crowded streets of the world’s fifth largest metropolitan area, turning the atmosphere into a choking miasma of automobile exhaust and ozone. After just a minute of running, Greg’s chest was burning, and a metallic taste filled his mouth. To make matters worse, the sidewalk was crowded with sign-carrying protesters and nearly as congested as the boulevard.
Tam’s voice squawked through the speakers in his ear bud a couple minutes later. “I’ve reached the search area. What’s your ETA?”
She had to shout to be heard over the strident background noise. Her voice was already hoarse from breathing the foul air, and although it brought him no comfort, Greg knew that Tam was facing an even greater ordeal than he and Kasey.
He keyed his mic. “We’re on foot. A couple minutes out.”
“You’ll need to do better than that. I’ve got eyes on Mendoza’s car. Coming in from the north. He’ll be there in two minutes.”
Greg glanced over at Kasey who gave a resigned shrug and somehow managed to increase her pace. Greg attempted to do the same, and immediately felt a burn in his muscles.
They dashed across an intersection and beneath an overpass, slipped between unmoving cars, and reached the blockaded security perimeter. Foot traffic was bunched up in front of hastily erected barricades, beyond which dozens of police officers in riot gear stood ready in the event that the physical barriers proved insufficient. To the right, a tall metal fence, painted red, blocked access to the forested grounds of the San Lazaro palace. The west entrance, where President Mendoza would be arriving at any moment, was still a couple hundred yards away.
“End of the road,” Greg croaked into his microphone as he skidded to a halt.
Tam’s next transmission was an almost deafening shout. “I see him! Rooftop. Two hundred yards west of the entrance. Looks like he’s picked up a Dragunov.”
Stone had also told them that Samsonov would favor this method of assassination. Explosives were unpredictable. A close-range pistol shot would be difficult to pull off given the tight security, not to mention the problem of escaping afterward. It was hardly a stretch to anticipate that Samsonov, who had once been a former Spetsnaz sharpshooter before taking a job at the FSB, would have the highest degree of confidence using the reliably familiar Russian-made SVD “Dragunov” sniper rifle. His choice of weapons would in no way tie the Russians to the assassination. Soviet-era weapons like the SVD were common and easy to acquire on the black market, and the blame for the crime would almost certainly be placed on the drug cartels. At two hundred yards—a distance that every U.S. Army soldier in basic training was expected to hit using an M16 with standard iron sights—it would be extraordinary only if he missed.
Greg turned in the indicated direction. The specified building lay on the other side of a Metro commuter train line that ran parallel to the boulevard and the congressional building. The tracks were protected by a barbed wire-topped fence that ran unbroken in both directions as far as Greg could see. A signpost marked the location of an underground stairway leading to a nearby station and presumably a way to reach the other side, but a throng of protestors lay between them and it.
No time for that, he thought. Nor was there time to double back and get on the overpass. Which left only one painful option.
“Kasey! This way!”
He bolted across the street, weaving through the traffic jam, and mounted the grassy verge beside the tracks. Shouts went up from the crowd as people realized what he intended to do, but no one moved to stop him. He reached the fence and immediately leaped onto it, clawing his way up the chain-link. The barbed wire snagged his clothes and tore bloody furrows in his exposed skin, but he was channeling pure adrenaline now. Nothing slowed him. He crested the fence and dropped down onto the graveled rail bed, leaving half his shirt behind in the process.
He skipped over the rails, assuming at least a couple of them were electrified, and clambered onto the opposite fence. Fortunately, there were no trains moving through the station.
At least something is breaking our way, Greg thought. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kasey, just a few steps behind him, crossing the tracks. A few seconds later, they were both on the ground and running again.
“I see you!” Tam called. “Samsonov is one block west, northeast corner of an apartment building.”
Greg spotted the building, a five-story block of flats, painted gray with red trim, jutting above the treetops of a small urban park. He veered left, sprinting through the greenspace as fast as his burning legs and tortured lungs would allow. There were signs of an earlier unrest here as well—more graffiti and fire damage—along with a few straggling protesters who appeared to be using the park as a rally point. Greg ignored their stares and made a beeline for the entrance closest to where Tam had spotted the Russian. The angle was too steep for him to make out the roofs, to say nothing of a shooter positioned atop one of them, but that meant Samsonov could not see him or Kasey.
He dropped a step, planted his left foot, and jammed the heel of his right foot into a spot just below the door knob. The door could have been unlocked for all he knew, but stopping to check would have robbed him of momentum. The door flew open, splinters of the door frame spraying like shrapnel, revealing a tiled foyer.
“Mendoza’s car has reached the entrance,” Tam advised. “Greg, if you can’t make it—”
“I’ll make it,” Greg rasped. He spotted a flight of stairs and started bounding up, three steps at a time, whipped himself around the banister at the midway landing, kept going.
Tam’s urgent voice sounded again. “Greg...?”
The stairs ended at the fifth floor landing, but an iron ladder continued up to the ceiling, terminating at a trap door. From its base, he could see that it was secured with a padlocked slide latch. Samsonov had evidently found a different route to the rooftop, but Greg did not have the time to look for it.
He drew his gun and aimed up at the latch. The noise would alert Samsonov, along with everyone else in the building, but it couldn’t be helped.
He fired.
The 10-millimeter round smashed into the flimsy bolt, snapping it in two.
The report left his ears ringing, but through it, he thought he could hear Tam’s voice. Perhaps the shot had startled Samsonov, frightened him into abandoning his deadly mission. Or maybe it was a warning that he would be waiting.
He glanced back at Kasey, who had her own pistol drawn and aimed up at the trapdoor. “Stay close.” He thought he might be shouting, but he could barely hear his own voice. “I’m going through fast. If he kills me...”
“Got it! Go!”
He went, scrambling up the narrow rungs like he had rockets strapped to his feet. He threw the forearm of his shooting hand against the door and pushed hard, throwing it up and out, and then in the same fluid motion, launched himself through the square opening.
Samsonov was waiting, just as Greg knew he would be.
Greg fired, even before he had a target. So did the Russian.
Kasey heard the shots, felt something hot on her face and knew Greg had been hit. Nevertheless, he kept moving, propelling himself through the trap door, clearing the way for her, and she was not about to let his sacrifice be for nothing. As she neared the top rung, she coiled her body like a compressed spring, and then exploded through the trap door, pistol extended and ready to fire at the first hint of movement.
A flash of daylight captured the instant like a freeze-frame. Greg, to her left, rolling away from the aperture, but still firing. His free hand was pressed to his neck, the fingers stained bright red, unable to hold back the tide.
Greg, no!
Ten feet away, the stocky form of a man, back turned, fleeing across the rooftops, leaving his own trail of crimson droplets. Greg had not missed either. There was a pistol in the Russian’s hand. The Dragunov rifle, its deadly purpose thwarted, had been left behind. Kasey adjusted her aim, finger tightening on the trigger, but in that instant, Samsonov leaped over the side of the building and vanished.
Stunned by the unexpected development, Kasey’s first thought was to rush to help Greg, but he waved her off.
“Go after him!”
After him?
She kicked herself for missing the obvious. Samsonov would not have simply jumped off the building. He was getting away.
So what? They had stopped the assassination. That was all that really mattered.
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “It’s just a scratch. Go!”
Kasey did not think he looked fine, but he was still alive, and he did seem to have the bleeding under control. If their roles had been reversed, she would have wanted him to go after Samsonov. “Promise?”
His brow furrowed in annoyance. “Go!”
She went.
It had been only a few seconds since the Russian had gone over the side, not enough time, she discovered upon reaching the edge of the roof, for him to reach the ground. Samsonov was descending one floor at a time, lowering himself onto the protruding patios that looked out over the street. Kasey arrived just in time to see him swing out over the edge of the second story patio, where he hung for a moment before dropping twelve feet to the street below.
As soon as he landed, he curled up and fell to one side. It was a move taught to airborne soldiers, a way to redistribute some of the energy of hitting the ground. Samsonov however was slow to recover, struggling to his feet. There was a conspicuous dark stain on the ground to mark the spot where he had landed.
Kasey tried to draw a bead on him, but Samsonov, as if sensing her intent, shrank against the side of the building, removing himself from the line of fire.
“We’ll do it your way then,” she muttered.
She holstered her pistol and dropped flat, rolled to the edge, and lowered herself onto the uppermost balcony. As soon as her feet touched down, she was moving again, following the Russian’s lead but doing so with considerably more grace. She swung her body out over the balcony rail and let go, executing a controlled fall onto the patio rail directly below, and then without pausing, dropped into a crouch and lowered herself again, skipping down the vertical face.
When she reached the second story, she swung her legs toward the building as she let go of the balcony rail, planting her feet against the wall and rebounding away to mitigate the effects of gravity. When she finally did hit the sidewalk, she managed to redirect the energy into forward momentum, sprinting out of the half-stumble and charging after the retreating form of the assassin.
Samsonov rounded the corner before she could unholster her pistol. He was injured, slowing, and Kasey knew she could catch him, but she also remembered that he was still dangerous. She drew up short, pistol extended, finger on the trigger, and edged cautiously into the open.
Instead of a gunshot, the next sound she heard was of an engine roaring to life. Fifty feet away, Samsonov sat astride a motorcycle, shrouded in a cloak of exhaust smoke. In the moment it took Kasey to adjust her aim and fire, he let out the clutch and rocketed away into the street.
Kasey resisted the almost overwhelming urge to empty her magazine at the retreating form. The chances of hitting Samsonov were iffy at best, the possibility of killing an innocent bystander made it an unacceptable risk. She keyed her mic. “Tam, he got away. Motorcycle.”
“I see him,” came the shouted reply. “Go help Greg. I’ll take care of Samsonov.”
And then, her coming heralded by a familiar mechanical scream, Tam Broderick descended from the heavens.
While Greg and Kasey had been negotiating the snarled traffic of the Federal District, Tam had raced to a different destination, two miles further east: Mexico City International Airport, where they had landed only a few hours earlier. Tam’s ultimate goal was not the Learjet itself, but something tucked away in its luggage compartment, an aircraft of a different sort, the GEN H-4 personal helicopter, which Kasey had used to whisk Stone away from the black site in Romania.
She assembled it quickly, double-checking every connection as she went, and within five minutes of arriving at the jet’s hangar, was in the air.
The H-4’s low profile made it virtually undetectable by radar, but it was by no means invisible to the naked eye. Tam stayed low, just a few feet above the open field surrounding the airport’s runways, gaining altitude only when she was clear of the flight path. Even so, the little helicopter shuddered as it passed through patches of turbulence caused by the thrust-wake of not-quite-distant-enough jets coming and going.
Once past this unseen storm, she had moved immediately to the vicinity of San Lazaro Palace to begin looking for Samsonov. Finding him had been relatively easy; there were only so many places where a sniper could have positioned himself to hit the entrance to the congressional building. Stopping him, at least from the air, was a different matter entirely. If she had attempted to approach the rooftop, the strident whine of the H-4’s engine would almost certainly have given her away, and Samsonov, with his long-range sniper rifle, would have easily picked her off before she could have even gotten close. Instead, she hovered more than three hundred feet above the rooftop, guiding Greg and Kasey to his position.
They had succeeded in preventing him from carrying out his mission, but success had come at a dear price and she regretted not simply taking her chances in the first place.
She would not make that mistake again.
As Samsonov sped away on his motorcycle, Tam pulled the control bar forward and dove toward street level. She saw Kasey, frustrated by the Russian’s getaway, heard the young woman’s voice in her ear bud, barely audible over the buzzsaw drone of the H-4’s four little ten horsepower two-stroke engines. She had no idea if Kasey heard her reply.
She leveled out about thirty feet above the pavement, just high enough to avoid snagging the power lines that criss-crossed the street. The personal helicopter had a top speed of over a hundred and twenty miles per hour, but like most internal combustion engines, it couldn’t sustain that rate for long without overheating. If Samsonov red-lined his bike for too long, it would stall out. If she pushed the H-4 too far, she would drop out of the sky. Fortunately, the would-be assassin was already easing off the throttle, confident that he had left the pursuit behind and unable to hear Tam’s approach over the growl of his own engine.
Tam lined up directly on his six o’clock and eased off the gas. The street below had transformed into an open-air marketplace, with stalls stretching for several blocks. Samsonov bullied his way through the milling crowd, while Tam was forced to climb higher to avoid the tall shade trees that lined the avenue.
At the first major intersection, a southbound one-way thoroughfare, Samsonov veered left and joined the flow of traffic, then began working his way to the far side. Tam called out the direction change as she banked the mini-copter in pursuit. It was nothing more than a habit really; the chances of Kasey and Greg finding a way to follow were effectively nil.
Out in the open, above the traffic, the sight of the little helicopter did not go unnoticed. Passersby gawked and stared, some pointing skyward. Samsonov noticed their attention and glanced back, a quick head turn, barely long enough for his eye to even register anything, before returning his attention to the road ahead.
Then he looked again, and Tam felt his eyes lock onto her.
“Crap!” She shouted into her mic. “He saw me.”
If Samsonov was surprised at the sight of the H-4 cruising above the Mexico City streets, he gave no indication. A lifetime of military training had evidently insulated him against the shock of witnessing the extraordinary. He looked up, just for a second, then brought his eyes to the front once more, but this time, he did not merely continue on as before. Instead, he twisted the throttle and shot forward, riding the lane markers to slip between cars. The motorcycle abruptly cut right, narrowly avoiding a collision with a city bus, and headed onto a westbound street at full throttle.
Tam increased her speed as well, but now instead of following him, she knew that she would have to run him down. The H-4’s controls did not allow for one-handed operation. Since she could not fly and shoot at the same time, her only weapon was the aircraft itself. She was still wrestling with the question of how to wield it without killing herself when Samsonov took another hard right turn and headed north.
She banked the nimble aircraft and followed without sacrificing any speed. From her high vantage, she could see several blocks ahead. For a moment, she thought Samsonov had made a fatal error; the street did not go through, the way ahead was blocked by an imposing colonial structure—a church, judging by the magnificent bell tower jutting up into the sky. Then she spotted a second bell tower. Not a mere church, but the Metropolitan Cathedral, the largest and oldest cathedral in the Western Hemisphere.
In that instant, she knew that Samsonov had chosen his route deliberately. The Cathedral was one of several historic buildings, built on the site of what had once been the center of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, ringing the open square of the Plaza de la Constitucion.
“He’s heading into the Zocalo.”
The plaza was crowded with people, protestors in all likelihood, since the National Palace—the official seat of the executive branch—dominated the eastern edge of the square. The President was away, of course, probably meeting with Guillermo Esperanza right that very moment, but that evidently had not prompted the throng to disperse.
If Samsonov reached the Zocalo, he would be able to lose himself in the mass of bodies, disappear completely, never to be seen again.
Tam pushed the throttle wide open, surging forward to catch up with the Russian, even as he began downshifting in anticipation of a hasty dismount. She was over him in an instant. Unlike a traditional helicopter, the H-4 did not have a cyclic control to adjust the tilt of the rotor blades for lift. The only way to make the helicopter rise or fall in a hover was by adjusting the throttle. Finesse was required to find that sweet spot between settling gently and plummeting like a stone. Tam did not have time for finesse.
She cut the throttle, just for an instant, and felt her stomach leap into her throat as the H-4 dropped fast. She switched it back to full, but before the rotor blades could lift it back up again, the protruding footrest slammed down onto the back wheel of Samsonov’s motorcycle.
There was a screech as the tire compressed down to the rim, then the vehicle shot forward like a bean squirting from its husk. Samsonov flew backward as the bike’s front wheel popped up in an unexpected wheelie, and just like that, man and motorcycle were separated.
While the section of the street leading into the Zocalo was not nearly as crowded as the plaza itself, Tam’s sudden plunge sent even the most curious spectators fleeing in panic. When the Russian hit the ground, there was not a soul within fifty feet.
Tam eased off the throttle again, less hastily this time, while pushing the right side of the control bar, carving a tight turn to come about, facing the fallen assassin a few yards away and less than six feet above the ground. Samsonov was crouching on the paving stones, a Makarov in one hand, aimed right at her.
There was only one place to go, and it wasn’t up. Tam hauled back on the control bar, curling her body forward to tilt the twin rotor discs down. She saw Samsonov scrambling back, the pistol forgotten, barely clearing the sweep of the top rotor, and then the entire world seemed to come apart at the seams.
The rotor blades met the pavement and shattered, flinging fragments of carbon fiber in every direction. A tooth-loosening tremor shuddered through the lightweight frame, even as it continued to shift forward, dropping Tam toward the road surface.
The engines stalled, ending the vibration and most of the tumult. Tam fumbled for the safety belt, and then abruptly dropped a foot and a half to land face down on the street. She rolled away from the wreckage, kicking to disentangle herself from the footrest, even though she was no longer certain which way was up.
She did not think she had sustained any new injuries in the collision with the ground, but the impact and subsequent shaking reminded her of every single old one she had accrued over the past few days. She got to her hands and knees, and then remembered the reason for everything she had just done.
Samsonov was still crabbing backward, as if afraid to turn his back on her.
Smart, she thought, and went for her own Makarov.
The Russian, realizing what she was about to do, abruptly flipped over and sprang to his feet, racing headlong toward the still retreating crowd.
Tam sighted her pistol but held her fire. Too many innocent bystanders, too many witnesses.
She got her own feet under her and started after him. A spear of pain stabbed through her ankle, and despite her best efforts to grit her teeth and drive on, the best she could manage was an ungainly lurch. Samsonov was not doing much better. His left pant leg was soaked through with blood, most of which seemed to be coming from the same area as the ragged hole in his trousers, six inches above the knee. Nevertheless, he somehow managed to move at something approaching a jog, reaching the edge of the massed onlookers before Tam had closed half the distance. Samsonov pushed past an old man wearing a denim shirt and a cowboy hat, collided with a young woman in sandals, then veered left, behind both of them and vanished from Tam’s sight.
“No, you don’t,” she snarled, willing a burst of speed that brought tears to her eyes. She reached the old man a second later, searching the sidewalk for some sign of her prey and found it: fat red stains on the dirty concrete. She followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs and a moment later spotted him.
“Samsonov!”
He kept going, not once looking back. Tam was closing the distance slowly, one painful step at a time, but if the Russian was feeling the effects of blood loss, it was not showing. The pursuit stretched down the block, and as he neared the intersection, Samsonov abruptly took a step toward the street, as if intending to dart out into traffic at the first opportunity.
A black Range Rover slid up beside him, and then without warning, the door flew open and slammed into the Russian, sending him sprawling backward.
Astonished, Tam barely managed to stop short of tripping over the stunned assassin. The SUV pulled to a stop alongside her, and she looked up to see Stone’s face framed in the open driver’s side window. “Need a lift?” he asked.