Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Twenty feet to the right of where Court descended the circular staircase down to the dance floor, SVR operations officer Oleg Utkin took a slow sip of his iced vodka, then spoke into his hidden cuff mic.

“Anna One, this is Fantom. Subject has entered a rear door with three bodyguards and six prostitutes. I can’t see if it’s a stairwell, but the layout of the building suggests it is.”

The reply came from Vasily seconds later. “Anna One copies. We will advise when we are in the building.”

“Ponial,” the SVR operative said, and he returned to his duty of keeping watch over the nightclub.

Oleg Utkin had been on another operation in Manila two days earlier when he’d received an emergency message from his control officer at the Lubyanka building in Moscow, letting him know he would be taking over an SVR task force whose previous commander had been recalled because of poor performance. He was ordered to fly directly to Bangkok and, as soon as he landed, he was picked up by the Zaslon operators.

In the safe house he’d read his complete orders and brief for the mission, and he’d been astonished by the overall scope of the operation, the incredible events of the past week and a half, and, most of all, the fact that the leader of the task force who’d been relieved of command was Sirena.

Utkin knew Zoya Zakharova, and while he couldn’t stand that edgy bitch, he had never known her to fail in the field. She’d worked with Zaslon units much more than Oleg had; she was accustomed to guns and rope ladders and parachutes and all that other silliness, whereas Oleg was a “suit and tie” man, a different type of operative altogether.

He’d been warned by the Lubyanka that Sirena had not returned to Moscow as ordered, and although his control officer had asserted she’d probably just gone AWOL to drown herself in booze for a couple of days for being pulled off such an important operation, Oleg Utkin figured she was probably going it alone, still working some angle involving Fan Jiang, because he knew Zoya was a woman wholly unaccustomed to losing.

Vasily agreed with him; he insisted Sirena could turn up around any corner on this mission, and when she did turn up, she’d try to strong-arm her way back in somehow.

But neither Oleg nor Vasily thought Zoya would appear here in Bangkok. No, she was probably back in Cambodia, still wandering the jungles and swamps, which was exactly what the Anna team had done for an entire day, and it was exactly what they would still be doing if Russian intelligence had not intercepted an encoded message from Fan “Funky Monkey” Jiang, letting Taiwanese intelligence know he was in the hands of a Chao Pho known as the Chamroon Syndicate.

Moscow didn’t know how the hell Fan had managed to escape Vietnam, or for that matter how he’d been picked up by the Thais, but that was not to say no one in SVR could have guessed how Fan ended up here… if they’d been read in on the op.

The assistant resident of the SVR office in Cambodia knew he’d put the SVR non-official cover operative called Sirena in touch with the Thai organization, but he knew nothing about Fan Jiang, and nothing about Russia’s new interest in the Chamroon Syndicate. He was back in Cambodia and he’d been compartmentalized out of this, so he did not have a clue what he had started.

All he knew was that less than an hour after he’d set up the conversation between a Chamroon operative and Sirena, he’d received a call from the chief resident telling him Sirena was burned to the SVR, and providing her help was expressly forbidden.

When the assistant resident got this call, he just confirmed the order and hung up the phone, because he had been in government service long enough to know how this game was played. He couldn’t very well admit he’d just connected Sirena with one of the largest transnational criminal syndicates in Southeast Asia. His completely legitimate explanation that he’d done so before he got the word that she was persona non grata would not serve as a valid excuse, because the man up the chain of command at fault for not passing on the information faster would simply change the timeline of events and throw his underling under the bus for his own failure.

The SVR assistant resident in Phnom Penh knew how bureaucracies like intelligence agencies operated.

Shit runs downhill.

Yes, the prudent course of action for him was to sit there with his mouth shut and hope his assistance to Sirena never came to light, pop antacids, and drink his worry away to help him along in this endeavor. Much better that than to immediately reveal the truth, because even though the truth would exonerate him, the truth was fungible, and he’d be sure to pay.

There was only one option that provided a pathway forward for the SVR man’s career — quietly rooting for Sirena to die, to keep her mouth shut, or to weasel her way out of the bad graces of the SVR.

If the sexy operative who’d fallen out of Moscow’s favor ever talked, the assistant resident would find himself just as fucked as Sirena.

The seven-man Zaslon unit was not inside the Black Pearl, but they were close enough to hear the music. Vasily and his team stood on the roof of the five-story condominium complex separated by a tree-lined alleyway from the four-story building holding the nightclub and a private spa above it.

Down below them in the alley there wasn’t much light and there was even less activity, but a half block to their right, bouncers stood around the club’s entrance, traffic cops sat on their bikes at the intersections, and the club’s security cameras kept an unblinking eye on the scene.

But the dark roof of the target building was unguarded and unwatched.

After the SVR officer code named Fantom gave the word, Vasily nodded to Arseny and Andrei. Both men held thin cables, on the end of which were black grappling hooks. They spun the cables in circles, paying out a little more line with each revolution. When they let the hooks fly, they sailed over the alley and across to the lower rooftop. The hooks dropped among a tangle of HVAC piping a few feet off the ground. Then the men pulled their lines taut to hook them securely.

A minute later Andrei tightened the sling to his B&T APC9 submachine gun to bring the short-barreled, suppressed weapon tight against his chest, then hooked a carabiner affixed to his chest rig hidden under his civilian jacket to one of the cables strung over the alleyway. He hooked a second carabiner to the other line, then slowly and carefully leaned out over the alleyway, using his gloved hands on the cables to control his movement.

The lines had been attached to an iron beam on the roof of the condo building, and they were pulled taut, so Andrei knew this would be a quick ride if he lost hold — and that was only if at least one of the lines held. If both grappling hooks came loose at the termination above the nightclub and spa, then it would be an even quicker ride, but of course that journey would end with him dead in the alley five floors below.

But Andrei slid across in a safe and controlled fashion, and after removing the grappling hooks and securing the terminations of the cables, the rest of the team slid down even faster.

Six minutes after Fantom announced that tonight’s target had gone up into the spa area of the nightclub, the entire Russian paramilitary team was stacked up at the rooftop door to the building.

Pyotr had already removed a blowtorch from his pack and was preparing to get to work on the lock, when the door opened suddenly from the inside.

Standing in the doorway was a bodyguard. He’d already put a cigarette in his mouth and he held a lighter in his hand, but when he saw the group of men all wearing dark clothing right in front of him, he froze.

Pyotr dropped his blowtorch, grabbed the stunned man, and spun him out of the doorway, face-first onto the rooftop.

Court walked down a hallway on the ground floor of the nightclub on the opposite side of the stage from the VIP section. He found the bathrooms ahead on his left, and directly past them was a stairwell to the higher floors of the building. Court wanted to go up to look for Nattapong and his entourage, but he wouldn’t be able to do so before he dealt with the headset-wearing bouncer who stood there on the lower step, so he made a left into the dimly lit men’s room, passing a few men on the way out.

All four urinals were occupied and one of the two stalls’ doors was shut. Court had planned on either lighting a fire in the garbage can or coming up with some other low-scale diversion to move the guard at the stairs away from his post, but before he’d had time to decide on his plan, the bathroom door opened and a young man in a suit entered.

A look at his clothing and his build suggested to Court that this guy was one of the bodyguards who’d arrived with the Chamroon leadership, but only when he saw the earpiece in the man’s ear did he know for sure. The security man made a beeline for the unoccupied stall while Court turned to begin washing his own hands.

Court watched through the mirror while the four young men at the urinals headed back out the door, leaving Court, the bodyguard, and the individual enjoying the bathroom’s ambiance from the comfort of the other stall.

The security man stood facing the toilet in the stall, leaving the door open. Ten feet behind him Court spun away from the mirror, crossed the tile floor quietly, then reached up and grabbed the header above the open stall door. He used this to hoist himself off the ground and arc back like a gymnast, and then he swung forward like a pendulum with his legs out in front of him. He kicked the man between his shoulder blades and knocked him face-first into the wall over the toilet.

The armed gangster slammed hard, then crumpled down to the floor of the stall unconscious.

The man in the next stall called out in Thai, his voice filled with alarm.

Court knelt over the unconscious guard and ran his hands through the man’s clothing. He pulled a Glock 17 pistol and two extra seventeen-round magazines, slipped the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, and dropped the mags into his pocket.

He also extracted the radio from the man’s belt and pulled his wired earpiece. Court didn’t speak a word of Thai, but he knew what it sounded like when people were freaking out about something, so he slipped the earpiece in his ear and the radio under his coat so he’d be alerted when word got out that this guy had been found.

The man in the next stall called out again, no doubt asking what the ruckus was three feet away from him.

Court went back to the sink and washed his hands. He heard the toilet flush in the stall next to his victim, and then the door to the hallway opened, and five young men with spiked hair entered, laughing and talking. Three of them stepped up to the urinals, and a fourth approached the stalls at the same moment the stall door opened. Court was already heading to the exit, but behind him he heard a quick and concerned exchange in Thai, and then a shout of surprise.

Court pushed quickly out of the bathroom as more men entered, and he pointed back inside, well within earshot of the bouncer, just ten feet away at the bottom of the stairwell.

And then Court said the one word all bouncers, all over the world, love to hear. “Fight!”

The man at the stairs quickly took a waist-high velvet rope barricade off a hook in the wall and brought it across the stairs, where he hooked it onto the banister. Then he took off into the bathroom in a run, transmitting in Thai on his headset mic as he moved.

Court looked back up the hall towards the front of the club, saw only a couple there making out and not facing his direction, then used the banister to vault the rope.

He shot up the stairs unnoticed.