NEAR THE BORDER BETWEEN RUSSIA AND KAZAKHSTAN
Guns’s brain flip-flopped as Massette told him a story about watching a group of assassins in Morocco. Though a native of Tennessee, the warrant officer’s English had a decided French slant. Even without the odd inflections, the story he told would have been difficult to follow, tracking back and forth between Paris and the narrow streets of North Africa. Jack Massette had been “loaned” to the DGSE—Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, the French Defense Ministry’s General Directorate for External Security—for an investigation into a ring smuggling ricin poison into France, but the assignment had morphed far from its original outline. Massette and the two French agents he was working with discovered that a criminal group was targeting the terrorist ringleader, apparently because of a financial dispute; they’d been told to allow the assassin to kill their target. Their unspoken orders directed the DGSE agents to do the job if the assassins didn’t.
“And so I shot him,” said Massette, reaching the punch line, “with the police in the next room.”
“The Paris police?”
“No, this was in Algiers. We had to pay these guys five hundred bucks so we could leave. I thought it was pretty cheap.”
Guns was going to ask how he’d gotten to Algiers when the train started to move again. As he put the Russian Calina in gear, the engine revved like a psychotic lawn clipper. The Vaz-made car looked and drove like a Ford Focus that had gone through one too many rinse cycles, but it had the virtue of going relatively far on a tankful of watered-down Russian petrol.
The road veered sharply to the left, following the rugged line of the hills. The border with Kazakhstan was about five miles to the south; Rankin and Corrine had already gone across. The road gradually became narrower and soon changed from macadam to barely packed gravel. The train tracks ran off to the left, running through a shallow valley to the border crossing. Though they saw that the train was stopping, there was no place for them to pull off; the two men lost sight of the cars as they drove on, looking for a good place to stop.
By the time Guns found a lot in front of a roadside inn, they’d lost sight of the train. Massette got out and walked to the right; Guns took his pocket binoculars and went left, crossing the road and sliding down the hill about twenty yards before reaching a place where he could see the train. It had pulled onto a siding to let another train pass; the soldiers accompanying it milled around, waiting as the approaching passenger train climbed the grade, its single diesel engine spewing black smoke.
Guns began walking back toward the car, angling up the slope. He was just about back to the roadway when an old jeeplike vehicle pulled alongside and stopped. Two men got out; he stopped for half a second before realizing he was undoubtedly staring at members of the Russian Federal Border Service in civilian dress.
As nonchalantly as possible he continued across the slope. The men shouted at him. Guns looked up at them and waved, not sure exactly what to say or do until one of the men reached beneath his jacket and unsnapped the flap on
his holster. Guns gestured meekly and began climbing the slope.
The man asked in English what he was doing with the binoculars.
Guns looked at them in his hand, trying to come up with an explanation that would make sense. Before he could find one, a voice on the road above began speaking in a jovial French.
“Permit me to introduce my colleague, Dr. Miles from the University of Paris,” said Massette, switching to English as he spoke to the two Russians. He pattered on about ornithology and the presence of a rare wren native only to these hills. Massette’s performance was aided by a bird book which he produced from his pocket, and within a few minutes he was quizzing the Russians about possible sightings. They were FSB agents, more dangerous than border guards, but he was so convincing that the conversation continued for more than ten minutes; had the Russians not been en route to an appointment they undoubtedly would have adjourned to the nearby inn, picking up the first round.
“Good thinking,” said Guns when they were back in the car.
“I learned with the French that bird-watching is a very valuable hobby,” said Massette. “As long as you take it to extremes.”
Corrine watched from the hilltop as the train rounded the bend and headed into the long tunnel. She put the glasses down, then checked the map. The train would change engines at a small yard about fifteen miles from here. Guns and Massette were supposed to cover the switch but had been delayed at the border crossing; Corrine had to decide whether to stay with the train and lose it as it went into the yard, or leave so they could circle northeast to get to the only point where the yard itself would be visible.
Given that the yard was the most likely place for something to happen, she opted to leave. She pulled out her phone as she walked back to the car, telling Massette and Guns
what was up. Massette complained that the line to the border wasn’t moving.
“Don’t sweat it,” she told him. “Call me if anything happens.” She clicked off the phone. “We’ll go to the yard at Kadagac in their place,” she told Rankin.
“Your call,” he said.
Corrine glanced at him, unsure whether he was questioning her decision or not.
“My call,” she said, her voice a little sharper than she intended.
Guns let Massette drive after they got over the border, thinking it might get him to stop complaining about the guards who had held them up for a twenty-dollar bribe before letting them pass. Massette was outraged that anyone would sell out his duty so cheaply.
In fact, the men had been persuaded to do their duty for that fee; getting them to do something illegal would have cost a bit more. Since joining the Team and watching Ferguson, Guns had come to understand how money lubricated nearly everything; he tried not to get too cynical or angry about it. Ferg had told him it was simply a fact of life, there to take advantage of.
“You missed the road,” said Guns, as Massette blew by the turnoff. “The train line’s down there.”
“We’re so far behind,” said Massette. “They’re past the tunnel. They should be changing engines in the yard by now.”
“Yeah, but we were going to follow the line.”
The older man didn’t bother answering. He also didn’t bother turning back. Guns wondered if he ought to tell him to turn back and what to do if he wouldn’t. He decided he was being ridiculous—and as he thought that, he saw the line again through the front corner of the windshield. As Massette had predicted, the train was long gone.
The train moved slowly into the far corner of the yard, shunted there by an ancient switcher engine. At least
two platoons of soldiers were deployed to guard it, ringing off the area.
Rankin and Corrine watched from a hill nearly a mile and a half away as the cars were pushed onto the new line. A row of freight cars as well as two small sheds blocked their view as a pair of American-made SD40s painted bright red began trundling toward the Y-shaped exit the train would take.
“We got a problem,” said Rankin. “We’re missing a car.”
“What? They’re all there.”
“One of the boxcars they tagged along at the end. It’s gone.”
“Shit. Are you sure?”
“I can’t see too well. Wait.”
Rankin pushed forward against the steering wheel, angling the glasses against the windshield. Impatient, Corrine opened the door and ran down the gravel embankment to the train line where they’d parked, standing on the rail and peering into the yard.
The boxcars had been unhooked from the rest of the train and were being towed to another track by the switcher. The cars with the waste remained on their own under heavy guard.
She looked to the left, scanning the yard for the missing car.
Rankin got out and climbed on top of the car to use his binoculars.
“Anywhere?” she asked.
“Can’t see it. Why would they take an empty freight car?”
“Maybe it wasn’t empty,” she said.
And now she realized how they did it—material was loaded surreptitiously at Buzuluk in what was supposed to be an empty car tagged on to the end of the train for transport. That was why the Russians couldn’t figure it out—the containment cars all made it. The waste that was being stolen wasn’t in the cars.
“We’re going to have to find it,” she told Rankin.
“We have to stay with the rest of the train,” he said. “Otherwise, we can’t be sure.”
She pulled out her phone, wanting to get the unpleasant task of telling them that she’d screwed up over with quickly.
That was what it was, she knew—they’d missed the decoupling and screwed up.
“They’re moving.”
“Shit,” she said. She was sure she was right—but what if she were wrong? The meter that had recorded the discrepancy was farther south.
What should she do?
Play it safe. She had to.
“Come on,” she told Rankin. “They’re moving. Let’s go. The others will have to look for the car.”