Order to Kill

CHAPTER 24

NEAR DOMINICAL

COSTA RICA

GRISHA Azarov eased his pickup along the badly rutted dirt road, keeping his speed under thirty kilometers per hour. Not that he couldn’t go faster. He’d paid almost two hundred thousand U.S. dollars to have the vehicle custom built. It looked like a thousand others roaming Central America, but beneath the stock Toyota body was a 600-horsepower offroad racing machine. Based on his tests, he could maintain almost two hundred kilometers an hour on roads that most people crawled along at the pace of a horse-drawn cart.

He was relieved to be out of Pakistan, away from the CIA men operating there, and outside Maxim Krupin’s intelligence network. It was a beautiful day in Costa Rica. Humid, but unseasonably cool. Skies were clear and the sound of the jungle around him calmed his mind. In many ways, this was home. Or at least the closest thing to a home he would likely ever have.

Azarov turned onto an even rougher road and began climbing, scanning the dense trees on either side but keeping his window open and his left arm hanging out. The glass wasn’t bulletproof and even if it had been, anyone Krupin sent to punish him for his failure would use a weapon sufficient to defeat any armoring.

Azarov had given his situation a great deal of thought on the flight to Panama and the long overland drive that followed. He was reasonably confident that Krupin wouldn’t attempt to have him killed in the near term. Not certain enough that he didn’t have a loaded pistol resting in his lap, though.

At thirty-five, he was probably at the peak of his abilities and on the verge of his inevitable decline. He assumed that Krupin recognized this and would be looking for a replacement. Perhaps he’d even found one and was now in the lengthy training and grooming process that Azarov himself had endured. Would this new recruit one day be sent for him? Would that be the boy’s test to prove his worth?

Perhaps. But for now, he suspected the benefits of his continued existence outweighed the drawbacks. Still, he had never known Krupin to completely ignore a failure by one of his people. The Russian president felt it set a bad example.

Azarov came to the top of a rise and reached for his cell phone, knowing that he would have a signal until he started dropping down the other side. He dialed and tossed the phone on the dash.

“Hola, Grisha.”

“Hola, Juan. Are you well?”

“My back went out again last week,” the man responded in Spanish.

Azarov smiled. Juan Fernandez had been running a fruit stand outside the small town of Dominical since he was a child. He knew everyone in the area and was the clearinghouse for local gossip. If anyone suspicious was hanging around the area or asking questions, Juan would know.

For the very reasonable price of three million colones per year, they had an ongoing agreement that Azarov would call him when he was approaching the area. If Juan’s answer to the inquiry about his health was bueno, then there was a problem. Conversely, if it was an honest recitation of the Costa Rican’s many real and imagined infirmities, he had noticed nothing unusual.

“Sorry to hear it. Have you gone to see the doctor?”

“Doctors,” he spat. “What do they know? They tell me I’m healthy. But I’m eighty years old. I ask you: How can I be healthy at my age?”

“Clean living,” Azarov suggested. “Does Olga need me to pick anything up?”

“No, she was in town shopping just yesterday. But I hear a rumor that there’s a problem with your refrigerator.”

Azarov was feeling better and better about his situation. If only Russian intelligence had people as thorough as Juan Fernandez.

“Thank you, my friend. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll have a drink.”

He disconnected the call and dialed Olga, the woman he lived with. She didn’t pick up, but that wasn’t unusual. She wasn’t terribly reliable and had been angry at him when he last left. If Olga had any gift beyond her startling beauty, it was her ability to hold a grudge.

He accelerated to fifty kilometers per hour and passed by a partially hidden right turn. After a few hundred meters, he saw another, but decided at the last moment to pass it by, too. Finally, he drifted onto the third.

The locals had thought he was crazy when he’d had five separate roads built to his mountaintop home. The land itself had cost less than half a million U.S. dollars. Another million had built the house. The kilometers-long driveways, though, had cost more than the land and buildings combined.

They were yet another insurance policy. Anyone hired to come after him would be hesitant to try to take him at his house-the home field advantage was difficult to overcome. Much better to do it during his approach. The five different routes created a situation where one would need a fairly large team to cover every possibility. Just the kind of team that Juan Fernandez would be likely to notice.

The quality of road was bad enough to make it impassable for cars available from standard rental agencies. Again, this was accomplished with significant forethought. As obvious as Russian assassins would be in this quiet surf haven, ones piloting unusual four-wheel drives might as well simply announce their presence personally to Juan.

He pressed the accelerator a bit harder, increasing his speed to over a hundred kilometers an hour. The sound of the engine became deafening-something the people who built the truck had refused to correct, insisting that they worked tirelessly to give it just the right growl. When he approached a small bridge, he slammed on the oversize brakes and diverted right, plummeting down the bank and hitting the stream below hard enough to send water arcing over the roof.

The massive shock absorbers barely cycled through half their travel and the snorkel kept the motor running smoothly during the crossing. When he came to the top of the opposite bank, the truck lofted a good meter in the air. He hated bridges. Too exposed. But Olga insisted on them and he had to admit they could be quite useful during the rainy season.

Azarov accelerated further, reaching a speed that would make it difficult for even a topnotch sniper to track him from the jungle. Difficult, but not impossible. He wondered sometimes if it would have been safer to live in a city. He owned high-rise flats in both New York and London, cities with countless security cameras, twenty-four-hour crowds, and sophisticated police forces. But he hadn’t set foot in either for years. He needed this place. The remoteness. The silence. The distance from the reality he’d become trapped in.

When the house came into view, he began to slow. It was a massive stucco-and-glass structure, open in a way that, if he skidded to a stop, the dust would drift through the living area. In light of that, he continued to ease back on the throttle. What he didn’t need was for his reunion with Olga to begin with her screaming at him for an hour in Russian.

Her car was parked in the driveway but she didn’t come out to greet him. Normally, he would have slipped his weapon in his waistband instead of keeping it in hand, but the depth of the silence bothered him. Even the insects that sang in the surrounding jungle seemed unusually subdued.

“Olga?”

No answer. It was possible that she was up at the gym, but unlikely. She tended to maintain her spectacular figure through youth and starvation more than exercise.

Azarov had designed the house to allow him to efficiently clear the rooms while making it impractical for anyone to get behind him. He worked his way through it quickly, finding nothing unusual until he reached the master bedroom.

Olga was sitting on the bed wearing a yellow bikini he remembered her paying over a thousand euros for in Paris. She was held upright by her arms, spread wide and secured to the headboard with wire. Her chin was resting on her chest, causing her blond hair to hang down enough to hide her face, but not enough to hide the long gash across her throat.

Blood from the wound had dried across her breasts but was still wet where it had soaked into the mattress. He slid his gun into the back of his pants and stood motionless in the doorway, staring down at her.

Olga Smolin had been a gift for a particularly difficult job he’d completed in Ukraine. A runway model from Tomsk, she’d been beautiful, reasonably good in bed, and a passably competent administrator of his household affairs. On a more basic level, she had been a deeply unhappy young woman. She didn’t like the remoteness of Costa Rica, but even in the world’s great cities, she seemed to feel nothing was good enough. It made taking pleasure in the simple things impossible for her.

Or maybe she just felt trapped. Like he did.

Azarov freed her and covered her body with a bloodstained sheet. Though she wasn’t a woman he would have chosen, he would miss her. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Krupin once again demonstrated his skill. Azarov had been punished in a way that was extremely visceral but not sufficient to start a war between them.

He heard the crunch of gravel out front but didn’t reach for his gun. His punishment had been meted out. There was nothing more to fear.

“Hello?” he heard a familiar voice call. “Is anyone here?”

Azarov came out of the hallway just as a young woman with a cooler in her hands took a hesitant step into his living room. She was an American surf instructor who provided home management services for some of the wealthier foreign owners.

“How are you, Cara?”

She jumped at the sound of his voice, but managed to keep from dropping the cooler. “Oh, hi, Grisha. I’m fine, thanks. What about you? What happened to your face?”

“A car accident. The window shattered.”

“Oh, man. I guess you should consider yourself lucky that nothing hit you in the eye, huh?”

“Very lucky.”

Cara Hansen was in many ways the complete opposite of the woman Azarov had spent the last two years living with. She was just as beautiful, but in a natural, perpetually disheveled way that contrasted with Olga’s icy perfection. She always had a smile on her face, and seemed to think neither of the past nor the future. While Olga had everything and appreciated nothing, Cara had very little and loved all of it.

Azarov had known her in a peripheral way for years, but paid no attention to her. He’d never looked into her background or had a conversation with her that didn’t involve some problem with his house or meaningless small talk about waves or the weather. He couldn’t. If Krupin knew how he felt about this twenty-nine-year-old Californian expat, it would have been her, and not Olga, bleeding into his mattress.

Azarov pointed to the cooler. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. They told me you needed a bunch of ice. Party or broken fridge?”

“The latter.”

“I could take a look at it.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It’s not problem,” she said, pushing past him into the kitchen. She put the cooler on the island and opened the refrigerator, crouching down to get a closer look.

He watched with calculated indifference as she poked her head inside.

“Seems fine. The light’s on and it feels cold.”

“It comes and goes.”

“Well, I wouldn’t eat any of this stuff, then,” she said, standing and turning toward him.

He made sure not to look at the way her shirt clung to her or the tantalizing strip of skin between the bottom of it and the top of her shorts.

“That’s good advice, Cara. Thank you.”

“Where’s Olga?”

“Russia.”

“Cool trip. When’s she coming back?”

“Probably never.”

“Oh,” she said, suddenly looking a bit uneasy. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

She thumbed toward the door. “You want the rest of the ice I brought? I feel like they told me way too much.”

“Sure. Just in case.”

He followed her out and she brushed a hand along his truck. “This thing must be faster than it looks. I could see you kicking up dust all the way from town.”

“Really? Interesting. It’s something I’ve never given thought to.”

Cara cocked her head inquisitively, but then just grabbed another cooler from the back of her Suzuki. He pulled out the last one and followed her back to the house.

She put the cooler down on the floor next to the dishwasher but didn’t make a move to leave.

“Thank you,” he said, not sure why she was just standing there. Did she know something? That Olga hadn’t left? Had she noticed someone lurking around the house? He assumed that Krupin had sent a lone female to kill Olga. Juan couldn’t be blamed for overlooking the presence of an unaccompanied eastern European woman on the local beaches.

“Hey, you know, since you’re… I mean, since your food’s probably bad, I’m getting together with some friends tonight at Patrón’s. You should come down and get a bite to eat. Maybe have a drink. You seem like you could use a few.”

“Thank you for the invitation, Cara, but I’ve been traveling for the last thirty hours and I think I’m just going to go to bed.”

“Yeah, I understand. Maybe some other time.”

“Maybe.”

She finally turned to leave and he watched her go, waiting until the sound of her car faded before he carried one of the coolers to the bathroom and emptied it into the tub. Krupin thought of everything.

Another ten minutes work and Olga was on ice. She’d keep until he figured out how to dispose of the body and mattress without running the risk of piquing anyone’s interest.

After cleaning the bedroom, he wanted nothing more than to lie in his hammock and drain a good bottle of bourbon. Instead, he stripped off his bloody clothes and put on a pair of running shorts. There were only two hours of daylight left, so he grabbed a headlamp from the shelf next to his running shoes.

Mitch Rapp was coming. Not today and probably not tomorrow. But soon.