Chapter Sixteen

Ivy gripped the phone as if she was afraid Dimitri would take it from her. She was so confused by him and even more confused by her feelings toward him.

She should hate him. Yet she didn’t. Couldn’t.

She wanted, more than anything, to know why he was doing this. To know what made him tick. If she had that piece, maybe she could find a way out for him.

Mara answered, and the call was brief. Curt was with her, and she gave them the rundown of events, why the transmitter had been disabled, and why there were no bodies to bring to Koror for the police to examine.

Curt launched into a series of questions, but Dimitri gave a hand signal indicating she needed to end the call. “Sorry, Curt, but we need to keep the boat moving,” she said, offering the prearranged excuse—which also happened to be true. “We need to put distance between us and the last point where CAM was transmitting, in case they have a boat and are searching for us. We’re going to spend the next thirty-six hours at sea to give the police a chance to catch up with the Syrians, if there are more, before we return to the Rock Islands. I’ll call again when I can.”

Dimitri hit the End button, and it was done. He returned the phone to the storage compartment under his seat and throttled up the engine. They headed out to deep, open sea—but not, Ivy soon learned, for a thirty-six-hour jaunt. Thirty minutes later, they turned, heading toward Palau’s southern edge. 

Twenty minutes after that, Dimitri cut the engine, full stop. 

“Why are we stopping?” she asked.

“Load CAM and RON in the tender. We’re abandoning Liberty. We’re sending her out to sea.”

“What? We can’t—”

“There’s a lot of ocean Liberty can cover before she runs out of gas. If she’s spotted, she might draw off the Syrians. Plus, Liberty is too big to maneuver in the waters where we need to search for the AUUV,” he said. 

“AUUV?”

“Air/Underwater Unmanned Vehicle. The Russians lost their prototype. We’re going to find it.”

“I thought you weren’t going to tell me what it is?”

He shrugged. “We need to work together if we’re going to find it quickly—before everyone has a chance to regroup.”

“And you know where it is?”

“I’ve narrowed down the search to ten islands and their surrounding waters. CAM will do the rest.”

“You lied when you said we were going to spend a day and a half at sea.”

“I lie about a lot of things. Say good-bye to Liberty. We’re going camping.”

Curt glanced at the clock before answering the phone. Ten p.m. Caller ID sent dread up his spine: Rudy Fredrickson, from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He didn’t waste a moment with pleasantries. “Dominick, I just got a call from the office. We got a hit on the Veselov name. As soon as my wife gets home to stay with our son, I’m heading into the office for a full debriefing and figured you’d want to be there too.”

Curt tightened his grip on the phone. Finally, a lead. “Thanks for the tip. You going to catch shit for keeping me in the loop?”

“No more than the usual.”

Like Curt, Rudy had been bothered by the way his bosses had set up Ivy. Curt wasn’t surprised he wasn’t toeing the DIA line and locking Curt out as others had been intent on doing.

“When do you think you’ll get there?”

“The embassy event Alyssa is coordinating is supposed to end in forty-five minutes. She said she’d try to slip out, but it’s hard to say. They’ll start without me, though, even though in theory I was the lead on this one. I’m thinking my days with DIA are numbered.”

Curt was tempted to tell the man to submit his résumé to the Justice Department, but in a few short months—long before a transfer would ever come about—he planned to be out of there himself. No point in inviting the man to further screw up relations with his current bosses when Curt couldn’t make promises.

“Thanks, Rudy. I’ll see you when you get there.”

Traffic was heavy—as usual—through Georgetown, but it cleared as soon as Curt left the city. He wished he could bring Mara along for this, but if he wasn’t officially invited, sure as hell the DIA didn’t want Ivy’s boss present. Mara had been livid at the way they’d manipulated and used Ivy. She was only marginally less angry at Curt for telling Ivy to cooperate with Veselov.

But really, what choice did they have at this point? Attempting to flee from the spy would have left her vulnerable to the Syrians. If she hadn’t been with Dimitri, she might have been taken.

He finally reached the Northern Virginia offices of the Defense Intelligence Agency and was admitted through the layers of security, his ID subjected to thorough scrutiny even though the guards greeted him by name before he even pulled out his government credentials.

The meeting was well underway by the time Curt entered the room. No one dared question how he’d known about the meeting, considering he should have been the first one notified and everyone from the general at the head of the table to the lowest-ranked officer in the room knew it.

In a firm voice, Curt asked to be brought up to speed on what he’d missed.

General Ellis cleared his throat and offered a tight smile. “Of course, Mr. Dominick.” He nodded to the analyst working the digital projector.

The analyst tapped his keyboard, and the images projected onto the screen at the front of the room changed in rapid procession. Curt recognized Parker Reeves from various points in his Coast Guard career, along with some candid snapshots Curt’s team had gathered when they investigated Reeves last fall. His office had given the DIA all the data they’d gathered.

Not everybody, it seemed, was in the mood to share.

“Have you had any luck determining if Veselov is working for the GRU?” Curt asked while the analyst found his starting point.

“That remains unclear,” General Ellis said. “But then, the man we knew as Parker Reeves was never confirmed to be from GRU.”

A fact that kept this investigation in intelligence circles and out of the State Department. For now. But the situation grew more volatile each day.

At last the images stopped on a shot of Liberty, Veselov’s boat. Curt recognized the image from Keaton’s charter tours website. The analyst cleared his throat. “The boat is legally registered to Jack Keaton, with a license filed in December, but tracing the history of the vessel prior to that was a stumbling block. We started by working backward with known vessels that fit the basic description—of which there are hundreds in that part of the world. But we caught a lucky break when we cross-referenced with Russian owners.

He clicked a button, and the image changed to a blurred photo of an older man with a hard look about him.

“This man was the head of a Bratva group. What’s known as the Pakhan. Word has it he was getting too powerful and not paying the kickbacks that usually flowed up government channels. Last September, he disappeared. Not long after he went missing, Russia made it known to the new Pakhan—and the other Bratva groups—that the problem had been taken care of by the Hammer, a known Russian enforcer.”

“An assassin,” Curt said as his belly rolled. He did not like where this was heading. This could explain why they’d been unable to confirm Reeves was GRU.

“Yes, a government assassin. The Hammer has at least a dozen suspected kills, all Bratva who wouldn’t play nice with official channels and were seen as getting too big or greedy to contain.”

“Is there meaning behind the Hammer name, besides the obvious, I mean?” another man asked.

“At first we thought it was because he was old-school—from the hammer-and-sickle days of the Soviet Union—but another story has come our way. It seems that the Hammer’s first kill didn’t go smoothly. He and his target fought. The victim was finally taken out by several blows from a ball-peen hammer to the skull. Word is the crime scene was…brutal.”

Curt winced.

“The hit took place in Japan, and it’s the only incident in which investigators believe DNA from the killer was collected,” the analyst continued. “We’ve requested they provide the data for comparison to blood on the clothing of the men who attacked the president of Palau in the ballroom, in case some of the blood belongs to Keaton.”

“How long until we’ll have the results?” Curt asked.

“Unknown. The request was submitted less than two hours ago.” The man hit the button, and more faces appeared. “These are other kills attributed to the Hammer. We’re cross-checking with dates for when Parker Reeves was on leave from the Coast Guard, although it’s difficult, because like the first victim I showed, most simply disappeared. No precise date, just a range in which they went missing.

“Liberty—as she is now called—was in the Philippines at the time of the Pakan’s disappearance. The boat disappeared in December, which, as you all know, was after Parker Reeves also disappeared. We believe he had it repainted, numbered, and named. He then sailed for Palau and set himself up as charter captain Jack Keaton. His paperwork for entering the country was pitch-perfect. The guy knows boats and port protocol, and acquired every special permit he could get his hands on for his charter business—which gave him the perfect cover to search Palauan waters and islands for the missing Russian AUUV.”

It went without saying that having served with the US Coast Guard for five years, Parker Reeves likely knew boats better than he knew cars.

“There are various descriptions of the Hammer that have surfaced.” Next came the series of slides of Parker through the years. “But there was never anything specific—at least, outside Bratva circles—we believe a handful of Bratva know what the Hammer looks like, but they aren’t sharing that information. Our search on the name Veselov, however, produced one interesting result. The name was associated with a hit in Moscow. But the first name wasn’t Dimitri, it was Sophia.”

“Sorry I’m late, what did I miss?”

Curt turned to the door to see Rudy Fredrickson looking anxious and irritated. The man must’ve broken speed records to get here so soon. Curt didn’t meet his gaze, not wanting to offer a hint of who had informed him of the meeting.

“Nice of you to join us, Fredrickson,” someone snickered.

“Fuck you, Pfeiffer, I have a four-year-old at home who I couldn’t leave alone.” He took a seat at the table. “Some of us give a crap about our kids.”

As much as Curt had thrived on his job, he looked forward to leaving the late-night emergency meetings behind as he and Mara started their family. Rudy’s situation was a prime example. This life was hard on families, hard on relationships.

The analyst continued as if there’d been no interruption, making it clear Fredrickson didn’t rank high enough to warrant starting over. “Our source believes Sophia Veselov is Dimitri Veselov’s sister.”

“Sophia Veselov is an assassin too?” Curt asked.

“No. Sophia Veselov had accused the victim of raping her. A few weeks later, the guy was found in a river, bullet through the brain.” The man cleared his throat. “But this time, there were other wounds. Notably, a hockey puck in the man’s mouth, held in place with duct tape. The victim’s teeth were cracked from biting down. But most notably, a ball peen hammer was lodged in the victim’s anus.”

Several men at the table shifted uncomfortably, and the man Rudy had called Pfeiffer cursed.

“Sophia Veselov had an airtight alibi for the time of death. Our source said rumor had it ballistics on the bullet matched a hit made by the Hammer. Worth noting, the government didn’t put forth a statement that the Hammer did it. But then, this guy wasn’t Bratva, like the others. He worked for the government—and some suspect he was affiliated with GRU.”

At last, there was that GRU connection. But not in the way they’d expected.

“So either it was a copycat, or it wasn’t a sanctioned hit,” Rudy said.

“Exactly.”

“If it was, indeed, the Hammer,” General Ellis said, “we can conclude Veselov cares about his sister.”

“Agreed,” the analyst said.

“How long ago was this?” Curt asked.

“About five years.”

“So where is the sister now?” Pfeiffer asked.

The analyst shrugged. “We’re looking into it.”

With each fact that had been laid out, Curt swallowed bile. It appeared he’d told Ivy to cooperate with a Russian assassin.