Storm Front

CHAPTER 17

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa

It was all going wrong. Just awful, dead, horribly wrong.

Volkov had entered the operation a man down as it was. Not that Yuri had been much help when it came time to doing the wet work, but he’d been a warm body who knew how to pull a trigger. He’d had his uses. Nevertheless, Volkov had opted against hiring local help to augment his numbers. He never trusted locals, and besides, five men — five of his men, anyway — would be enough to do this job.

Naturally, there were security forces to contend with. Volkov had counted on that — every white person with more than two rands to rub together in South Africa had armed security forces, and a wealthy banker like Jeff Diamant had enough to afford a good one. As a result, Volkov and his men had spent a day doing their usual surveillance, locating the weak points in the ten-acre compound where Diamant resided, assessing security patrol patterns, figuring out where the cameras were located, finding the threats that needed to be disabled, making their plan.

Everyone’s role had been quite clear. They would each approach the main house through the trees that surrounded it, each coming from a different direction, quietly deactivating the various security apparatus he met along the way. They would surprise and kill each one of the seven guards who were stationed at various points throughout the compound. They would silently raid the main house and find Diamant and his wife asleep in bed. They would do what they came to do, what they always did.

The plan was perfect. Volkov never moved on a target with anything less.

Then Nicolai, who had been assigned to the south approach, had forgotten to take out the pit bulls that were known to guard that area. It was the first thing he was supposed to do after short-circuiting the electric fence and scaling the compound wall: find the sleeping dogs using his thermal night vision goggles, fix the silencer on his gun, and put two well-aimed bullets in the dogs’ heads.

Instead, Nicolai just inexplicably blundered on through, forgetting about the dogs entirely. The brutes woke up, making a bawling racket as they charged. Nicolai was able to kill the first from about five feet, but the second one managed to sink its teeth into Nicolai’s thigh. Nicolai beat the dog with the gun butt and finally shot it dead. But by that point, the dogs were no longer his biggest problem. He had not had time to put his silencer on, so if the baying dogs hadn’t alerted everyone to his presence, the gunshots surely had. Nicolai was still trying to pry the dead dog’s jaws open and get the thing’s teeth out of his thigh when a security guard put a double tap between Nicolai’s eyes.

From there, everything was just a mess. An alarm sounded. Floodlights positioned all around the main house instantly flashed on, illuminating the two hundred feet of lawn surrounding the house. Lights also came on inside the guard house and the main house. The guards sprang to life. They were surprisingly well coordinated, as if they had trained for this sort of thing and were merely implementing an oft-drilled exercise. They fanned out over the compound, immediately discovering two more of Volkov’s men, making their approaches from the southwest and southeast, respectively. A gun battle ensued. Yes, Volkov’s men got their shots in, killing one guard and wounding another. But they didn’t last long. Just like that, it was five against two. There was only Volkov, coming in from the northwest, and Viktor, approaching from due east.

Then they found Viktor. He also put up a fight, taking out two more security guards. But he was ultimately outflanked and ended up taking a bullet to the side of his head.

Volkov didn’t know any of this yet — or at least he didn’t know precisely. He had just heard a lot of gunfire and was aware his men were no longer responding on radio. This was more than enough to tell him his carefully constructed plan was now a pathetic shambles.

Any other man might have at least considered aborting the mission. Not Volkov. He just retreated and reassessed, scrambling up a chunky baobab tree that gave him a view of the entire compound. This was not yet a loss. Just a setback.

He surveyed the scene with his thermal goggles, using their telephoto function to zoom in and out until he located all four of his men’s bodies, confirming that he was now alone. He also found the three dead security guards and watched as the wounded one joined the healthy three in withdrawing back to the main house.

Volkov knew that for whatever training they had, they would still be terrified and uncertain. If he waited, they might think the attack had ended and then he’d be able to move on the house and pick them off. Four against one — rather, three and a half against one — was not particularly daunting to a man of Volkov’s ability.

That changed quickly when the South African Police Service arrived. They came in force, with five marked cars and three unmarked pulling through the front gate and parking in the broad, circular driveway adjacent to the main house. Volkov counted fourteen cops disembarking from those vehicles. Fourteen cops plus three remaining healthy security guards. Volkov could handle four-to-one. Seventeen-to-one was beyond even him.

Then more forces arrived. Crime scene techs. Other cops, whose purpose he could not immediately identify. Some uniformed. Others not. It was a small army against one man.

All the one man had was the element of surprise. They didn’t know he was out there. They would make the assumption that they had either killed all of the invaders, or that any other thugs had run off when the gun battle turned against them.

Sure enough, the cops soon began overtaking the grounds as if they owned the place and had nothing to fear. The bulk of them busied themselves by throwing up lights over the bodies of Volkov’s fallen teammates, then hustling and bustling around the corpses, taking photos and collecting shell casings.

But four of them, all uniformed officers, began combing the compound with flashlights, likely looking for other evidence. They spread out — ten acres was a lot of ground to cover — and made the terrible mistake of not working in pairs. Volkov noted their vulnerability, but hadn’t decided how to capitalize on it until a meat wagon from the local coroner’s office arrived. It was as he watched Nicolai getting carted away that he formulated his new plan.

Volkov waited until one of the officers, a young constable, was directly under his tree. He dropped on him from above. With two hundred twenty pounds landing on top of him at high velocity, the man immediately went down, letting out a muffled grunt as he fell. Not giving him a chance to make another sound, Volkov clamped one hand on the cop’s mouth then wrapped his arm around the constable’s neck. The young man — really, not much more than a boy — struggled briefly but was soon asphyxiated. He was no match for Volkov’s enormous strength.

Once he was sure the constable was dead, Volkov released his grip and began pulling off the man’s uniform and then putting it on himself, starting with the hat and working down. It was far from a perfect fit, but Volkov wasn’t attending a police fashion show. Mostly, he was relying on the fact that it was dark. He rolled the sleeves of the shirt and used his knife to do a quick, barbaric alteration on the length of the pants. He donned the man’s utility belt and his gun. He could feel the weight of the constable’s car keys in his front pocket and a wallet in his back one.

Volkov knew he had no time to get rid of the body properly. He improvised, leaning it up against the trunk of the tree on the opposite side of the house, where it would remain in shadows until morning. Good enough. He began walking through the trees toward the main house.

Now for the nervy part: the two hundred feet of open turf between the wooded parts of the property and the house. Pulling the dead cop’s hat low over his face, he passed by teams of crime scene techs and medical examiners, albeit with his face in shadow. They paid him no attention. Volkov entered through the front door without encountering any resistance.

Once inside, he was relieved to discover there was no police presence. The assailants, as far as the investigators knew, had not made it in or near the house. Volkov moved through the rooms with confidence, until he came across one of the security guards, sitting in a chair outside a closed door. Volkov could hear classical music coming from inside. He squared his body to the man.

“Can I help you, mate?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Volkov said. “Can you tell me what time it is?”

The moment the man looked toward his watch, Volkov reached down, grabbing the man’s chin and the back of his head simultaneously and giving them a violent, counterclockwise twist. For Volkov, it was like unscrewing the cap of a large tube of toothpaste. The man’s neck snapped easily. The crunching of vertebrae was the only sound it made. Volkov dragged the man off the chair, hauled him into a nearby closet, and left him there. Volkov was not absolutely certain the man was dead, but it didn’t matter: He was unconscious, and if he ever did awaken, it wasn’t as if he would be able to crawl out. Volkov would be long gone by then.

He went back to the room the man had been guarding and opened the door. Volkov walked fast, like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why he was there.

Diamant was sitting at a desk, listening to Rachmaninoff. Volkov couldn’t help but silently approve of the choice and almost — almost — felt bad to kill a man of such surpassing good taste. The composer represented all that was great about the culture of Volkov’s motherland.

Diamant’s gaze lifted as Volkov drew near.

“Mr. Diamant, I’m Officer Gregor Volkov,” he said, not bothering to come up with a different name. At least it would help explain the Russian accent.

“What can I do for you, Officer?” Diamant asked. He looked weary, confused. This was to Volkov’s advantage. So was Volkov’s own obvious disfigurement. He saw Diamant fixate briefly on his eye patch and facial scars, but then Diamant quickly looked away. Like many people, Diamant was too polite to stare.

“We’ve set up our temporary morgue about a mile down the road,” he said. “We’ve got the first of the assailants down there now. It would help us a lot if you would come down and take a look at him.”

“But the inspector already showed me pictures. I told him: I don’t know any of them.”

“I’m aware of that,” Volkov lied smoothly. “But sometimes seeing a body in the flesh can change that. Maybe you’ll notice a tattoo that looks familiar.”

“Can’t… can’t it wait? I’m not sure I—”

“The inspector says time is important,” Volkov said. “Maybe you know the perps, maybe you don’t. To be honest, sir, I’m just trying to follow orders. And the inspector said to bring you down to the temporary morgue.”

Diamant shook his head but said, “Very well.”

The banker obediently followed Volkov out of the main house and into the driveway. This was the last part Volkov worried about — he had car keys in his pocket, but he didn’t know which vehicle they belonged to. He slid them out, pressed the unlock button on the key fob, and hoped it made something happen. He didn’t want to have to hit the alarm button.

After a brief delay, the lights on one of the patrol cars quickly flashed. Volkov allowed himself a quick, smug smile as he opened the back door for Diamant. Once inside, the man would have no way of escaping. Cop cars were good that way.

“I greatly appreciate your cooperation, sir,” Volkov said.

“Oh, and I must say, that’s a nice manicure you have.”

He closed the door. The fifth MonEx code would soon be his. Then he would hire a new team — which was never hard for a man with Volkov’s connections — and go after the final name on his list.

In some ways, it was the most important. It was the one in New York, after all.

It was to the consternation of the South African Police Service inspector approximately two hours later when someone finally realized that the young constable who had been sent to the northwest corner of the property had not reported back in some time.

The inspector tried to reach the constable on the radio and failed. Then someone noticed his patrol car was missing.

They put out a bulletin for the car, thinking it was a weird act of insubordination on the part of a young officer who had inexplicably bailed on an important crime scene. Didn’t he know better?

Then a member of Diamant’s security forces went to relieve the man standing guard outside of the banker’s office and found only an empty chair. He knocked on the door and got no answer. He went inside the office. Diamant was not there.

Nor was he in the bedroom. Nor the kitchen. Nor, seemingly, anywhere else inside the house or on the grounds.

The private security guard took the news of Diamant’s disappearance to the inspector, who was already trying to make sense of his officer going AWOL.

Sometime later, off a little-used road, the rear bumper of a police patrol car was spotted half-sunk in a swamp. Sometime after that, around sunrise, the officer’s body was encountered slumped against the tree trunk on Diamant’s property. The security guard with the snapped neck was found in the closet within the hour.

And then, the terrible discovery by a child on his way to school: a corpse that had been secured with police handcuffs to a jackalberry tree. The body was missing all the fingernails on its right hand. It was quickly identified as the body of Jeff Diamant of Standard Rand Bank.

It took another hour or so for the authorities to unravel the whole mystery, and another hour or so beyond that for the thing to be put in the Interpol computer. From there, the flags went up. Interpol performed its notification protocol quickly.

Jedediah Jones got the call around 5 A.M. East Coast time, just as he was coming in from his daily run. Jones waited until a slightly more decent hour to call Derrick Storm and tell him the fifth banker was now dead. They had already put out the necessary bulletins for Gregor Volkov, but it was redundant. He was already on every Do Not Fly and Most Wanted list across the world. And yet he had once again disappeared into the mist.