SIXTY-TWO
When Court had checked the GPS while Zack drove, he’d noticed that the tracking device was parked next to a lake and near a very large structure. From the satellite imagery on Google, it seemed to be some sort of abandoned factory.
The two men followed the tracker on Court’s phone up Kiefernweg to the lake, and then they turned left. Squinting into the thick fog, the men knew they were close. They separated, one on each side of the road, both ready to duck down in foliage for concealment if necessary.
When they were only forty yards from their target, Zack balled his fist and held it above his head, and Court stopped in his tracks.
“There it is,” Zack said softly into his mic.
“I see it.” The blue moving van was parked under trees, its nose pointing towards the black lake and its rear towards the street.
Both men moved into bushes on opposite sides of the road, and they maintained communication through their earpieces.
Zack said, “You want to just hit it? If our girl’s got company, we can just gag ’em and zip ’em.”
Court was still taking in the surroundings, making certain of his and Zack’s immediate security. While doing this, he looked up the dark road, and he saw movement there.
“Hold,” Court whispered, and Zack said nothing in return.
A few seconds later two forms took shape in front of Court on the road. “I got two pax moving in from the east, heading in the direction of the van. Backpacks, ball caps, hands empty.”
“Roger that. I got them.” Zack watched them for a moment. “They look a little squirrelly.”
Court replied, “Amped up, yeah. I see it.”
While both men watched, the men came flush with the van, then left the road, walking towards the back door of the vehicle.
Zack said, “Surveillance techs?”
Court didn’t answer; he just watched while one of the men reached for the latch on the door, then looked back to his partner, who stood fifteen feet away on the road in the darkness.
Zack said it first. “Oh shit.”
Then Court recognized what was about to happen, as well. “Son of a bitch.”
The first man opened the door, and the second drew a pistol from his bag and opened fire. His weapon didn’t even flash as he dumped round after round through the long suppressor and into the occupants of the van; the sound of several loud thumps echoed around the trees.
Court and Zack just watched helplessly from forty yards away.
There was a sharp tinkling of spent shell casings on the asphalt, and then it was quiet on the scene for a few seconds, until the body of a young man with dark hair tumbled out of the rear of the van. The body wore headphones, which were snapped back by their cord, and then hung there over the body by the rear bumper.
The two men shined flashlights inside the van for a moment, and then they began walking back up the street in the direction they came.
“What do you suppose that was all about?” Zack asked softly.
“I got here the same time you did.”
To this Zack replied, “I sure as hell wish I knew who the good guys were.”
“That’s us. I don’t know about anybody else.” He thought a moment. “These guys might be the same jackwads I ran into in Caracas. And a few days ago, on the Ku’damm. They were no slouches. Do not engage till we get more information.”
To this Zack whispered back, “Only way we’re gonna get more information about those assholes is to see where those assholes went.”
“Let’s do it,” Court said, and the two men moved out up the street, now one hundred yards behind the two killers.
“What about calling in Travers?” Zack asked.
“Negative,” Court replied. “This is still recon. If a helo full of gun monkeys shows up, it’s going to make a lot of noise; they might scare them away. Let’s find an enemy and fix them to a location before calling in the shooters.”
“Roger that. Hey, Six, you know what would be cool right now?”
“What’s that?”
“A boat. We could come at them across the lake.”
Court thought it over. “You want to steal a boat?”
“Yeah, like a speedboat, something with some power. But something quiet.” Without waiting for Court’s approval, he began walking towards the lakeshore, just a few dozen yards off his right.
Court followed along through the heavy mist, mumbling under his breath. “Fucking Navy guys.”
Annika Dittenhofer arrived at the front gate of the massive animal feed factory, and even through the fog she could make out a dark array of broken-down buildings strewn with garbage and graffiti. She saw no lights or vehicles ahead, and she’d heard no warnings from Moises and Yanis, so she decided to keep going in search of Mirza’s phone.
The tall chain-link gate was closed and locked with a rusty padlock, but part of the nearby fence had been pulled back, giving her enough room to slip through.
She was dressed head to toe in black and gray, so she felt stealthy enough, but for the first time in her career, she wished she carried a gun. There could be all types of ne’er-do-wells to deal with in here, but she felt an overwhelming need to press on.
A minute later Annika still hadn’t heard from Moises or Yanis, and she took that to mean she was clear to move forward. The signal from Mirza’s phone was being broadcast from the inside of the building closest to the water, so she walked quietly and carefully through the ruined streets around the fenced-off area towards the mouth of the Havel River.
She, of course, had taken into account the possibility that this was some sort of a trap, but she thought it much more likely the phone had been dumped here. She couldn’t know for sure until she found it, but it was her hope to find a weapons cache, or some other intelligence that she could take to authorities so they could track down Haz Mirza and any surviving members of his cell.
She wasn’t doing any of this tonight for Shrike International, nor was she doing this for Rudy Spangler. This was Annika going rogue, for the first time in her career, with the unwitting accomplices in the van on the lakeshore helping her find information that would lead to the capture of an on-the-loose terrorist before he could perpetrate another attack.
She’d devoted her adult life to intelligence work, and it would culminate, she hoped, in finally stopping the last remnants of the cell she had been keeping tabs on for over a year, now that their leader had proven a willingness to act.
Just outside the main building she pulled out her phone and dialed Moises. She was surprised when he did not immediately answer, and more surprised when the call went to his voice mail.
This wouldn’t be the first time she’d had comms trouble in the field, however, so she pushed any worry she had to the back of her mind. Thinking it over carefully, she decided to press on ahead, knowing she could be only meters away from the phone and whatever else Mirza had left here in the abandoned factory complex.
She entered the main building finally. Her flashlight was off but held at the ready, both to help her avoid obstacles and to use as a blunt instrument if she encountered someone. There was a little light here and there when the moon shone through the clouds and the lake mist, and then through the massive shattered windows high on the concrete walls, enough for her to pick her way carefully around the trash and debris on the floor.
Still, her footfalls made noise, amplified by the cavernous hallways and other empty spaces around her. If there had been any hint whatsoever from the audio feed from the passive receivers in the phone, she wouldn’t have dared go forward, but so far, anyway, Moises and Yanis hadn’t called to report any issues.
Soon she found herself in the middle of a large, open room, a factory floor where the grain was milled and mixed and packaged. She could smell the river and knew it was just past the far wall, so she pressed on, but it was darker here; the moonlight came and went with the cloud cover through the windows high over the catwalks and just under the ceiling, some three stories above her.
There was a hole in the floor on the west side of the room, and she nearly fell into it. As she moved around it and continued forward, she recognized it as a staircase, perhaps down into a basement level, and she shuddered, hoping like hell she wouldn’t have to go down there to find the phone.
She kept going, slow, careful steps in the low light, making her way to the middle of the large factory floor. But after a long period of heavy cloud cover, shrouding the scene in near total darkness, Annika saw no choice but to take a chance and turn on her flashlight for the first time.
She clicked the tail cap, and a white beam shot out across the dusty space.
And instantly she screamed out in surprise, her cry echoing all around.
Men stood on a metal catwalk twenty meters in front of her, one story off the factory floor. They all had rifles pointed at her, and when she dropped her flashlight to the floor, they turned on their weapon lights, blinding her with thousands of lumens.
“Don’t move!” a man shouted in English, and she recognized an American accent.
She heard rushing footsteps behind her now, and soon a pair of armed men appeared on her shoulders and yanked her forward.
Yet another pair of men were there, on the ground level below the men on the catwalk. They wore rifles on their chests, and the bearded man on the left held a pistol in his right hand.
She was brought directly to the man on the right.
“Your name is Dittenhofer, and you and I need to have a little convo.”
She had no idea what was going on. These weren’t Mirza’s people, no way. They were American, big and brawny; all the ones she’d seen had beards and hard faces. She wondered if they were CIA. Another possibility, she realized, was that these were the men who’d killed Drummond, and they worked for Shrike International’s mysterious client.
But, if so, what did they want with her?
And then he told her what he wanted, but it did nothing to elucidate the situation.
“Where is Gentry?”
Annika cocked her head. “Who?”
The man slapped her across the face, knocking her to the floor.