Eagle Station

Orlov shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. But if they aren’t already in custody, it’s gotta be because the Russians have them on a string, waiting to see where they go and who they contact.”

“Right then,” he heard the other man say slowly. “Well, you’d best be off, Zach. I’ll follow along after I do a bit of checking up on this end. With luck, I’ll see you back in the States soon enough.”

Orlov sighed, hearing the ironclad determination in Jones’s voice. “You’re not going to ditch them, are you? Even though getting out fast and on your own is the smart play?”

He heard the short, slender Welshman laugh softly. “Look, boyo, no one ever said I was terribly bright. See, Sam and Marcus and I have been in many a tight spot together over the years. So I owe it to them not to just cut and run. Not until I’m sure there’s no hope at all of shaking them loose.”

“You be careful, then,” Orlov said quietly.

“As ever I can be,” Jones agreed.

Sadly, Orlov tapped his phone, ending the call. He had a bad feeling that he would never hear from David Jones again.

Fourteen

On the Avtodoroga Baykal (Baykal Road), Several Kilometers Outside Krasnoyarsk, Russia

A Short Time Later

Sam Kerr tapped the brakes gently as soon as she saw the battered pale blue UAZ delivery van parked off on the shoulder of the tree-lined, two-lane highway. Their rented Mercedes sedan slowed in response — giving her time to read the crude, hand-lettered cardboard sign held up by the short, skinny young man standing beside the van. It read, need 520 rubles for petrol. please help me.

Five hundred rubles came to only about eight U.S. dollars, so that wasn’t an extravagant request for money — if it had been genuine.

Her eyes automatically noted the sedan’s current odometer reading as she sped back up and drove on past.

“We’ve got trouble,” Marcus Cartwright said tersely.

Sam nodded. Seeing David Jones waiting for them with an emergency signal meant something, somewhere had gone very badly wrong. The 520 rubles on his sign indicated they were approximately 5.2 kilometers from the place he’d picked out for a covert rendezvous. A quick glance at her rearview mirror showed the Welshman climbing back into his van.

Five kilometers down the highway, they passed a gas station on the left. The next turnoff was a dirt road roughly two hundred meters farther on.

Sam took it, driving slowly uphill past a truckers’ café and a run-down motel. There, not far ahead, was an apparently abandoned garage. Graffiti daubed its pitted concrete-block walls. A section of its rusted metal roof had fallen in at one corner, and there were no windows or doors left — just black openings into an unlighted interior strewn with moldering piles of junk and debris.

Not exactly a garden spot, she thought, but just the place for some quiet, unobserved conversation. She turned in next to the dilapidated building, following a winding, bumpy driveway choked with tall weeds. Around the back, there were a couple of wrecked Ladas that had been stripped and left to rust out in the open a long time ago. She pulled the Mercedes in close beside them and turned off the ignition.

Two minutes later, Jones parked his blue delivery van behind the black rental sedan and clambered out from behind the wheel. Sam and Cartwright went over to meet him.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“About as bad as bad can be,” Jones told her bluntly. “The whole outfit’s blown sky-high. You, Marcus there, and the Moscow office entirely.”

They listened closely while he briefed them on Orlov’s frantic call. “The only good thing I can see in this is that you’re not being actively tailed right now,” he finished.

“That’s because the Russians know exactly where we’re headed,” Cartwright pointed out grimly.

Sam nodded. Since the FSB’s counterintelligence officers knew they were both booked out on a flight to Moscow in a couple of hours, why risk alarming their quarry prematurely? As far as they knew, she and Marcus were still blissfully ignorant of the danger they were in… and would trot along to Krasnoyarsk’s airport like good little lambs on their way to slaughter.

Which meant that was the last thing they should do, she decided. Even if the Russians didn’t plan to arrest them immediately, or as soon as they touched down at Moscow, it was still too risky to play along with the FSB’s game. Once they were under close surveillance, shaking loose and evading capture would become almost impossible. Anyway, as soon as Q Directorate’s hackers realized they weren’t going to get anything useful out of the Tekhwerk computer network, the Russians were bound to come down on them fast and hard.

Cartwright agreed with her reasoning. “So what’s your plan?” he asked.