Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Whatever had taken place inside the Audi between the two Russian spies, it was over by the time Court arrived. He pulled up behind the vehicle a minute later with his headlights off, and he stayed fifty yards back, though he wanted to drive right up to the rear bumper. But since he was unarmed, and since he didn’t know what the situation was inside the black coupe ahead, he decided he could not get any closer.

He’d heard a total of three gunshots over the speakerphone, and sounds of a brutal struggle, but in the last twenty seconds all had been perfectly silent. He wondered if both Russians had been shot, but as he peered into the dark car parked next to the sidewalk on the two-lane residential street, he saw the driver-side door open. First a pistol fell out the door, clanked on the asphalt, and lay still. Then it seemed as if the man called Oleg was going to climb out; Court saw his head and left shoulder emerge from the car, but then his entire body just tipped sideways and rolled out, and he fell headfirst on top of the gun. His lower torso was pushed or kicked until his entire body was out of the car and lying still on the street.

Court heard the woman’s voice in his earpiece now. “Mu’dak.” Asshole. And then the car door closed and the Audi raced off on squealing tires.

Court waited for the Audi’s taillights to disappear in the darkness, and then he drove on, keeping an eye on the GPS phone.

He was surprised by her voice again in his ear, just five minutes later. She’d made a phone call, obviously, but Court would have to concentrate on her half of the conversation to work out who she was speaking with.

“It’s Sirena.” A pause. “Identity code…” She said a long string of numbers, but Court couldn’t follow them, and wouldn’t remember them five seconds later, anyway. He followed the blip on his mobile app, careful to keep his speed down and his eyes on the road.

A moment later the woman said, “That doesn’t matter. I am in Bangkok, as I’m sure you will work out quickly. Anna One and Anna Eight have been taken to a hospital. All the rest… all the rest, are dead. Yes… Fantom included.”

Court knew that for Russians, “Anna” was akin to “Alpha” in the NATO phonetic alphabet. He presumed the dead gunfighters were all part of “Team A” of whatever unit they belonged to. After a brief pause she entered into a back-and-forth with the other caller where she refused to give any information about herself, why she was there, or how she knew the status of the Anna team.

After this, she regained control of the conversation. “Listen carefully. I know where Fan is going. Don’t ask me how, just know that I will go, get positive ID, and contact you. Have another team prepped to travel.”

After a moment’s pause, she said, “You aren’t listening to me! This operation is too important. We have to do something to blunt China’s rise. Beijing will swallow up all of Asia in a couple of years. Russia can’t stop them, and America won’t. If we can get to Fan before the Chinese kill him, get him to work for us… then it could have incredible implications. China’s secure intelligence and defense networks exposed? Their classified operations and personnel revealed? Forget Russia, this is the best opportunity the West will ever get to tip the balance in our favor.”

The woman was silent for the next minute, other than a couple of unsuccessful attempts to interrupt the person on the other line. Finally she said, “You are making a mistake. The Americans were there tonight. Not in force, but they are in a better position to take Fan than we are, unless you sanction me to continue the operation.”

After another pause, Court heard a sound that told him she’d hung up her phone and dropped it on the seat next to her. Another sound, he guessed, was the Russian woman pounding the steering wheel in frustration.

A minute later the blip on his mobile tracking app stopped moving.

Zoya Zakharova knew it was a compromise bringing Oleg Utkin’s vehicle and gear to her room here at the big youth hostel in the Bang Rak neighborhood, but she wasn’t terribly worried, because she also knew how the SVR task force had been operating. Utkin might have tracking devices on his gear or in his rental car, but the Lubyanka would just now be looking for his vehicle. Once they did pinpoint the GPS coordinates of his car, it would still take security officers from the local residency an hour at a minimum to muster up a team to go to the location in force.

And Zoya only planned on being in her room here at the hostel for ten minutes to shower and change and grab her gear.

She entered the building with a master key given to each of the hostel’s guests, and then she walked down to her room at the end of a long hallway. She entered with another key, flipped on the light, and then stepped into the bathroom to turn on the shower.

While she waited for the water to warm she removed her blond wig with the long bangs, slipped off her torn and bloodstained teal dress and her sweat-soaked underwear, and tore off her fake eyelashes.

She looked in the bathroom mirror now and saw blood splatter across her face from where she’d turned Oleg Utkin’s pistol against him during the fight. She was still coming to grips with the fact that the prick had tried to kill her, but she knew she had to push that out of her mind so she could figure out the other aspects of the night that still did not make sense.

She took the stolen Glock 17 out of the stolen purse and put it on the sink within easy reach of her in the shower, and she pulled the five-shot .38 revolver and brought it with her into the shower, placing it on a tiny soap ledge.

She washed herself as quickly as possible, using a copious amount of cheap industrial liquid soap out of a pump bottle attached to the wall, and while she did so she thought back to what she could not help feeling was the most confusing part of the night.

The American.

The man who’d risked his life to come back for her and the other girls, with no possible benefit to his objective. In fact, the stranger had completely sacrificed his mission by returning to Zoya and the others, although he hadn’t known that was what he was doing at the time.

But why?

The man seemed to be operating completely alone, and this was not the modus operandi of the U.S. intelligence services. Zoya had spent over a decade on foreign jobs where knowledge of the CIA’s operating protocol was necessary to her completion of the mission. And this man’s actions didn’t look like a CIA job at all.

Some non-official cover operatives working with the Agency might function in a singleton capacity, but they sure as hell wouldn’t hit a nightclub with dozens of armed men while flying solo.

But what this American did… that took balls. She thought about him racing into the gunfire several times to rescue the girls, and she thought about how she’d left him there in the changing area, stealing both his gun and his captive.

She felt like shit about what she’d done, and this was a strange feeling for her.

She wondered what had happened to him, and then, at the moment she realized she couldn’t really remember what he looked like, she realized this was probably the same American she saw sitting at the bar on Po Toi Island, a week and a half earlier. He had been in the middle of Wo Shing Wo there, he was in the middle of the Chamroon Syndicate here… so it was only natural to wonder if he’d been the mysterious man who had absconded with Fan in Vietnam.

Why not? He certainly seemed crazy enough to do that on his own, as well.

Zoya had spared his life tonight because he’d helped the other women. She had spent two full days with victimized African and European human traffic victims, and while the first day she had wanted to wring some of their stupid necks herself, over time she had developed an odd bond with them.

Still, she didn’t know if she would run through gunfire multiple times to save them.

Zoya turned off the shower after just a minute and a half, and then she reached out to grab the towel. She started drying herself off, pushed the plastic curtain out of the way to climb out…

… and then dropped straight down to the floor of the shower onto her knees, grabbing the revolver off the ledge as she went down.

She extended the pistol in a combat crouch out in front of her, pointed it back towards her room, and held her breath.

The Glock 17 was gone from the sink, and the bathroom door was now closed.

After a few seconds a voice came from outside the door, speaking English. “If you toss the .38 out, I’ll throw in your clothes.”

Zoya recognized the American’s voice, and she knew he was in her room now, along with the pistol she’d stolen from him.

She didn’t know what to do. There was no good place for her to get behind cover in this tiny bathroom. Sure, she could open fire into her room, blast through the flimsy wooden door, but he had more room to maneuver for cover than she did, less space to fire into, and more bullets in his weapon, so he would have all the advantages in that fight.

With the presence of mind to use her Hungarian-accented English, she called out to him. “What do you want?”

“I just told you what I wanted. Shall I repeat it?”

Zoya cocked her head. There was a surprising composure in the man’s voice considering the two of them now held each other at gunpoint at a distance of three meters.

The door opened a foot, but the lights in her room were off, and the light from the bathroom didn’t reveal anyone out there.

“Toss it out, and I throw in some clothes.”

“No deal,” she said. “I can fight naked. I can’t fight without a gun.”

The American’s response came quickly. It was loud enough to be heard, but soft enough so that she was unable to pinpoint just where in the room the man was standing. “I’m trying to avoid a fight. Trust me, Sirena, this is the best deal you’re gonna get from me.”

How the hell does he know my code name?

After a few seconds her shoulders dropped, and she lowered the handgun. She opened the cylinder of the .38 Special and let the five rounds fall to the floor in the shower. They made a clinking sound that would have been obvious to anyone out in the bedroom. Then she put the revolver on the floor in front of her and slid it out through the opening in the door and into the room.

“Thank you,” came the voice. And then, “Are you ready?”

“What?”

The door opened a little further, and a few seconds later a black V-neck T-shirt and a pair of jeans tumbled through the air. Zoya caught the items, noticed there was no underwear, and just as she was about to say something about that, she heard the disembodied voice again.

“Oh… sorry.”

Folded underwear out of her backpack came sailing in.

The door was then pulled shut. Zoya wondered if the man had tied a string to the latch, because she’d neither seen nor heard anyone move inside the room. “No rush,” said the American, and she detected sarcasm in the statement.

Zoya thought this had to have been one of the strangest things she’d ever experienced in the field.

A minute later she was dressed, though her feet were bare, and her chin-length dark hair was still wet and tousled, half tucked behind her ears and half drooping in her face. She opened the door slowly and saw that the lights had been turned back on.

“Come out slowly, hands high.”

She raised her hands, stepped out, and looked into the eyes of the American she’d seen earlier in the night. He stood in front of the door to the hall; the big Glock pistol was low in his hands, but when he saw that her hands were empty he slid the pistol into his waistband at the small of his back.

She lowered her own hands and looked the man over.

He was in his thirties, perhaps thirty-one, perhaps thirty-nine; he had brown hair cut short but not severely so, an athletic build, and eyes that might have been brown, hazel, or amber. He wasn’t particularly tall, his clean-shaven face was pleasant enough but in no way descript, and his expression was impossibly calm, considering all that had happened tonight, and everything she had put him through. There was a little dark soot on the man’s face, but he’d changed clothes into a gray T-shirt and black cotton pants.

Zoya still used the Hungarian accent she’d been employing the past few days. “Who are you?” She felt sure her nervousness was obvious in her voice.

“You know who I am because I’m the one who wasn’t wearing a blond wig and ten layers of makeup tonight. I want to talk to you.”

She shook her head. “I have nothing to say.”

The man now asked, “Maybe I’ll just hang out here till you change your mind. How much time before someone comes here looking for you?”

“Other than yourself, you mean?”

“You know what I mean. From the residency.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“I placed a bug in Oleg’s car.” Then he switched into English-accented Russian. “Ya govoryu po russky.” I speak Russian.

And with that, she muttered, “Der’mo.”

“I’ll ask you again. How long do you have before they come for you?”

She sighed a little, sure she shouldn’t be talking, but unable to see what it mattered at this point. He was here, and he knew who she was and what had happened. She let her Hungarian accent drift off, and her very light Russian accent appeared. “I need to leave. Now.”

“I wouldn’t take the Audi.”

“No kidding.”

The man smiled a little, but he did not move.

Zoya said, “Well… If you came looking for Nattapong, as you can see, I’m not hiding him anywhere.”

The American replied, “I found Nattapong where you left him. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think he’s going to be much help to me.”

Zoya swallowed. Yes… now she understood the American’s plan here. He had come to torture her for the intel she picked up from Chamroon so he could get his hands on Fan Jiang. She wondered if he’d kill her when he was done.

She gauged the distance between herself and the door, and the distance between herself and the man with the gun in the small of his back. She thought she could get to him before he got the weapon out, but she found herself unwilling to try. He wasn’t particularly big, and he had not threatened her overtly, except by his presence here. But Zoya knew what this man had done tonight — part of it, anyway — and he’d certainly be wired to suspect some sort of resistance on her part.

And he’d be ready for it.

To her surprise he said, “I’m here to ask for your help.”

With suspicion in her voice, she asked, “What kind of help?”

“First, let’s take my car and get out of here. We’ll go somewhere safe. Then we can talk.”

The Russian girl with the wet dark hair looked down to the floor, bit her lip, and then shrugged a little. “You have the gun. So I will agree to your terms.”

“Good.”

“But I have to pack first.”

The American lifted her bag off the bed and onto his shoulder without taking his eyes from her. He said, “I took the liberty of packing for you while you were in the shower. And since I’m a gentleman, I’ll go ahead and carry this bag that has two folding knives and a switchblade in the outer pockets.”

“How very nice of you,” Zoya said, and she realized she was now a prisoner of the Central Intelligence Agency.