Under Fire

18

The thought gnawed at his brain: Had he just signed Aminat Medzhid’s death warrant? If the police hadn’t yet obtained the surveillance videos Gavin had just erased, they might now have no leads at all. Chancellors Court’s parking lot looked empty and was poorly lit. Even if there had been witnesses, something told Jack the people inside that van weren’t dumb enough to use real license plates, or at least unobscured ones, leaving the police with only a vague description of a vehicle that had been sitting in the lot for less than two minutes.

Of course, Jack had little more than this information. The smart move would be to turn over what he had to the police, pray they find Aminat before Medzhid’s five-day deadline expired, then hope Seth could convince Medzhid they had nothing to do with the kidnapping.

Jack dismissed the idea. He would find her and get her back home.

What happened with the coup was Seth’s problem.

Jack spent the rest of the day and all the next morning either pacing around his hotel room, watching the news for reports on either Amy Brecon’s kidnapping or the disappearance of Aminat, or driving around the city, going nowhere in particular and hoping his subconscious brain would kick out some angle he hadn’t yet considered. He managed to resist the impulse to go to Chancellors Court and start canvassing the occupants, knowing he’d end up sitting in a police interview room, being asked questions he couldn’t answer.

Jack awoke to the sound of a news reporter’s voice: “… police spokeswoman has verified for an STV Edinburgh producer that reports of a missing Edinburgh University student are indeed true.”

Jack sat up, found the remote beside his pillow, and increased the volume.

“Though the police spokeswoman refused to confirm whether investigators believe the young woman’s disappearance may be the result of foul play, they will be treating the circumstances of the disappearance as suspicious until further notice. The young woman, as yet unnamed, is apparently the citizen of another country, having come to Edinburgh two years ago—”

Jack muted the TV.

The race was well and truly on now.

His phone rang. It was Ysabel.

“Where are you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“In a seedy motel in Edinburgh. I’m fine. You?”

“In Baku at the lovely Mirabat Hotel. There are cockroaches in the shower. Seth said he wants to be close to Medzhid. He’s also talking about breaking into Hamrah’s headquarters. He thinks he might be able to find a lead to Pechkin. I think Spellman’s talked him out of it.”

“How’s Seth acting?”

“Hyper, worse than I’ve ever seen him. I don’t think I trust him anymore, Jack.”

He was more than a little ashamed to admit it, but he shared her feelings. While he thought — hoped — Seth wouldn’t burn them again, his friend’s judgment was still highly questionable.

“I don’t blame you,” he said.

“One more thing: I found out that meeting, our relationship, was a lie.”

“Explain.”

“He told me himself. He’d been following Pechkin in Tehran; Pechkin got interested in the Pezhman working group at the university, so when I was brought on board, Seth set his sights on me.”

Was his tailing of Pechkin how Seth got involved with Hamrah Engineering, or was it the other way around? It didn’t matter, Jack decided. The two were intertwined.

Ysabel added, “I don’t really care, actually. The way he told me, it was so matter-of-fact it gave me the chills.” She chuckled. “I can tell you this much: He’s off my Shab-e Cheleh card list.”

Jack laughed. “You have a unique sense of humor, Ysabel Kashani. Do me a favor: Don’t let him out of your sight.”

Given Seth’s obsession with the coup, vindicating his father, and the mistakes he’d already made, Jack wondered what might be unraveling without their knowledge.

Mid-afternoon, his phone rang: Gavin. “I assume you saw the news?”

“Yes.”

“The latest is that Scotland Yard’s involved.”

“Please tell me you didn’t call to ruin my day,” said Jack.

“It is mostly bad news. I struck out on the van’s origin.”

Jack had hoped that if Helen had paid cash for the garage, she might have done the same for the van.

“Edinburgh’s got too many back-lot dealerships.”

“We’ve got another missing Edinburgh student, Jack, a kid named Steven Bagley. The same night Aminat was grabbed he was supposed to be headed home to London for a wedding. He never got there. Steven and Aminat are Facebook friends. Good ones, based on their posts. Campus security found his car parked a block from Chancellors Court. They must have gotten him, too, Jack.”

“Maybe he stopped by Chancellors to say good-bye,” Jack replied. “Where did you find this?”

“Bagley’s parents called his friends, then campus security. The police will have all this by now.”

Jack thought, Helen and her team didn’t intend to take Bagley. He saw something and tried to intervene. Bagley will be a burden to them. Expendable.

“Start watching for reports of bodies turning up that match his description,” he said. “Anything else?”

“I think I’ve figured out what Amy was talking about with the tolls. Forth Road Bridge used to be toll-free, but the toll was reinstated back in February.”

Jack called up Google Earth on his laptop, typed in the bridge’s name, and scanned the area. Forth Road led north, away from the city, and across the channel to the North Queensferry. On a hunch, Jack typed in “Kinghorn.”

The town was eighteen miles from Forth Road Bridge.

Jack gave Gavin his next set of marching orders and then, sick of sitting in his room waiting, got into his car and headed east, crossed the bridge, then drove up the coast to Kinghorn, more a quiet seaside resort than a town. As tourist season was still three months away, the streets were quiet, with only a few local cars on the main roads. As it had at the Firth of Tay, the wind whipped off the ocean, buffeting the Fiesta and whistling through its window seals.

He knew the trip was pointless, but it was action he could take. If he was very, very lucky perhaps the gods would smile on him and he’d stumble upon a late-model dark-colored van. It wasn’t going to happen, he knew, not even in a town as small as Kinghorn.

At sunset he drove back to the motel.

Another twelve hours passed.

“I think you hit pay dirt,” Gavin said the following afternoon. “Your boy Pechkin isn’t as crafty as he thinks. He deleted his Gmail account, but forgot about Google’s mysterious ways.”

“Explain.”

“Pechkin frequently checked his Gmail account from the Hamrah office in Archivan. He deleted all of the e-mails, and his browser history, but he forgot or didn’t realize that Hamrah’s website is set up with Google Analytics. It tracks back-end website data — traffic, referrers, conversions, and so on. It also keeps a hidden cache of browser history. Interesting, no?”

“Gavin…”

“Okay. About six hours after your shoot-out at the Nemin farm, someone logged in to Hamrah’s computer system, then went straight to a Web-based e-mail site called YourMailStack. Their firewall is for shit. Pechkin e-mailed someone outside the country — someone in Scotland.”

Long shot though it had seemed, Jack wondered whether Oleg Pechkin — also playing the roles of Farid Rasulov, Suleiman Balkhi, and Ervaz — might also be pulling the strings of Aminat Medzhid’s kidnappers.

“Where’d his e-mail go?” Say, “An address in Kinghorn,” Jack thought.

“A cell phone, but it’s somewhere where the cell towers are few and far between. I don’t have the resources to pin down the signal.”

“Shit,” Jack replied. Then, a thought: “The NSA would. Give it to Gerry, tell him to get out his favors-owed book. And one more thing: I need a gun.”

Their second captive — Steven was the name he’d finally offered Olik — had by the evening tired himself out and now lay sleeping on a blanket in the cottage’s basement.

The team sat down at the dinner table for a meal of TV dinners Helen had stocked the refrigerator with. Hunched over, Roma shoveled spoonfuls of pasta and green beans into his mouth. “Not bad,” he said. “Perhaps when I get home I will buy myself a microwave oven.”

“Good idea,” Helen said with a smile.

For whatever reason, slowly throughout the day Roma had emerged from his funk and had started talking and joking with the others, and even asking after the girl’s condition.

“I’m sorry about all that,” he told the group. “I shouldn’t have hit the other girl. It’s just that this place, all these people… I don’t like it here.”

“We’ll be home soon, my friend.”

Helen hoped this was true. Her latest communication with their employer was troubling. Medzhid would not be approached in the manner planned. She and the others were to stay in place and not leave the cottage under any circumstances. Worse still, Aminat’s “disappearance” had reached the news earlier than Helen had hoped, and the fact that Scotland Yard was involved told her the authorities were treating the affair as a kidnapping. This had happened much more quickly than she’d anticipated.

Though her team had seen the same news reports, Helen had done her best to assuage their fears. “This was all expected and planned for. We’re safe here.”

But not Aminat and Steven, she thought, if she followed orders.

Yegor said to Roma, “And when we’re back we will go shopping for microwaves, the two of us. I know the perfect store in Lipetsk.”

“With your money, yes?”

“Do not push your luck.”

Roma laughed.

Helen awoke to shouting and footsteps pounding the kitchen floor below her room. Still dressed as she’d fallen into bed, Helen threw back the covers, reached under her pillow, and grabbed the semi-auto pistol there, then ran for the door. Yegor, emerging from his own bedroom, nearly crashed into her. He backpedaled as she raced to the stairs, then followed.

Taking the steps two at a time, Helen heard a door bang open and then Olik rasping, trying to keep his voice down, “Roma, no, don’t—”

Helen turned the corner into the kitchen and saw Olik dash through the open door. From outside came a reedy scream, then the grunting-thump of two bodies colliding. The screams became muffled, but more frantic.

“Shut up!” Roma growled. “Shut… up! Shut… up!”

With each repetition came an umph of expelled breath.

Helen sprinted out the door. In the driveway a pair of bodies were writhing, indistinguishable from each other in the darkness. Helen saw one of the bodies rise up. Moonlight glinted on the blade of a knife. It plunged downward.

Helen shoved Olik aside, rushed forward, raised the pistol, and slammed it against the back of Roma’s skull. He rolled off the body beneath him and started crawling away. Helen took another step and crashed the pistol’s butt against his temple. He went down.

“Oh, no, no…” Yegor murmured.

Helen turned. Yegor and Olik were kneeling beside Steven. The boy lay on his back, eyes glazed over. The front of his sweatshirt was a patchwork of blood.

Helen’s head swirled. She took a breath, refocused on the boy. Think…

“Get him inside,” she whispered. “Put him on the kitchen floor.”

With one lifting Steven’s shoulders and the other his feet, they carried him toward the door.

“Then come and get this piece of shit,” Helen called. “And put him in the basement.”

Helen stood, staring dumbly at the boy. The linoleum floor beneath his body was slick with blood.

“Go upstairs and get some towels.” She knelt beside the boy and grasped his hand. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “You’ll be okay. Just look at me. That’s it…”

She kept her eyes on his until they went dark and he stopped breathing.

When the other two returned she told them to pack the blankets around his body to dam the blood.

Helen shuffled to the dining table and sat down. She could feel a haze of panic creeping into her brain.

“Get buckets,” she ordered. “Wash the blood off the pavement. Check everywhere. Don’t miss even a drop. Olik, when it’s done, take a walk around the neighborhood. Look for anyone outside or any lights on.”

It took five minutes, the two of them filling and refilling buckets in the kitchen sink until Yegor came back inside and shut the door behind him. He walked to the sink and dropped Roma’s knife into it. It clattered against the stainless steel.

Yegor sat down at the table with Helen, neither speaking until Olik returned. “Nothing. No lights, no one outside. I heard no sirens, either.”

Helen wondered if it mattered. If the police even knocked on their door and asked anything more than the most rudimentary questions, it was over for them.

“What happened, Olik?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was in the kitchen, like you told me, keeping watch. Roma was in the other room watching television. I told him I had to go to the bathroom and asked him to cover for me. It was only going to be for a few minutes.”

“Keep going.”

“When I came back down here, the basement door swung open and the boy came stumbling up.”

“Steven.”

“What? Yes, Steven. I reached for him, but I missed, then Roma shoved me aside and went out the door after him. You know the rest. It happened so fast, Helen.”

Yegor asked, “What do you want to do?”

She stood up, opened the basement door, and started down the stairs. “Both of you stay here.”

As she’d instructed, Yegor and Olik had tied Roma to the same pipes against the basement’s far wall where Steven had been secured. The room stank of urine and sweat. A lone lightbulb dangled from the center rafter. Roma lay on his side on the blanket.

She walked to him and nudged his foot with her own.

He didn’t stir.

She kicked him in the thigh. He jerked his leg back. His head rolled sideways and his eyes opened. “What happened?” he croaked. “Hey, why am I tied up?”

“You killed the boy.”

“He tried to get away.”

“How did that happen?”

“Olik went to piss. I heard the kid call up that he had to use the bucket so I went downstairs. The bucket was full, so instead of dragging it to him and getting piss and shit all over me, I untied him and walked him over to it. He broke free, ran up the stairs, and then out the door. I tackled him, but he was strong. He was fighting me. I had to stab him.”

Roma’s story was plausible, but Helen could hear the lie in his voice. Worse still, his eyes shone with amusement, as though he was replaying the act for his own pleasure. Now Helen was sure: Roma was a psychopath. He let Steven go, told him to run, then chased him down and stabbed him to death. He’d done it because he wanted to do it.

“I didn’t have a choice, Helen. He was going to get away. Untie me. This is silly.”

Helen turned around and walked back up to the kitchen.

Roma shouted, “Hey, come on, let me go.”

“What did he say?” asked Yegor.

Helen ignored him. She climbed the stairs to her room and grabbed a pillow from her bed and returned to the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” Olik asked.

“Shut up.”

She picked up the gun from the dining table and, with the pillow in her left hand, walked back downstairs. When Roma saw her he said, “Are you going to let me—”

“No.”

She strode over to him, doubled up the pillow, and shoved it hard against his head.

“Hey, what—”

She pressed the gun’s barrel to the pillow and pulled the trigger.