All out war, p.3
All Out War, page 3
“I will have to find someone else to get Hassan out of prison,” Gabriel began. “But that is not your problem. Your problem is that you must decide to either allow Dr. Chin to implant the device . . .”
“Or?”
“Or my friend here implants a bullet in the back of your skull and then drops your body in a vat of acid,” Gabriel said, picking a piece of lint off his pant leg.
“Not much of a choice,” Zakayev said.
Let them put their tracker in, a voice in his head said. Make them think that they can trust you. Then when the time is right, kill them.
“Fine,” Zakayev finally said. “Do it.”
He closed his eyes, waiting for more medical savagery. He remembered an incident in Syria. Zakayev had seen a grenade explode behind one of his fighters. The shrapnel pierced the skull, but the man didn’t notice he’d been hit until Zakayev pulled him to the ground and pressed a bandage to the wound.
The fighter said he never felt a thing.
Later one of the doctors told Zakayev that there weren’t any nerve endings in the back of the head.
Maybe, Zakayev thought, I won’t notice when Dr. Chin inserts the implant.
He realized that was a lie the moment the drill bit ripped into his skull. The pain was intense. It felt as if he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. The current spread from the top of his head down to his toes. His muscles tensed and his body started to shake, but he refused to cry out. He saw the nurse insert a dot of metal into an oversize syringe and slip out of sight.
Then the procedure was over and Dr. Chin was standing in front of him. The man’s mouth was moving, but Zakayev couldn’t hear the words.
Shit, the infernal thing made me deaf.
His hearing returned after a few seconds.
“Try not to touch it too much,” Chin was saying. “They are temperamental.”
“Temperamental?” Zakayev gasped. “What the hell does that mean?”
Chin brought his hands together and formed them into a ball. “Temperamental,” he repeated, pantomiming an explosion. “You understand, yes?”
“If you do your job, you will have nothing to worry about,” Gabriel assured him.
Now Zakayev reached for the back of his head again, then stopped himself in time. His hands were clean. He was ready to finish off the torture. He had been patient, but now he would extract the information he needed.
He entered the dining room and turned his attention to the figures zip-tied to the metal-legged chairs. The man was leaning so far forward that the only things holding him in the chair were the zip ties around his arms and legs. Zakayev guessed he was in his mid-sixties, but after the beating he’d suffered, he looked much older. Zakayev walked over, flicked open the switchblade he took from his pocket, and placed the tip against the man’s chin. He slowly increased the pressure until the man raised his head.
“Well?” Zakayev asked.
The man opened his mouth and a stream of blood rolled off his lips and splattered on the floor between his feet. Defiance mixed with pain flared in his eyes as he looked up.
“Fuck you,” the man replied.
Zakayev shrugged. “Very well.”
He turned his attention to the woman. Her name was Emily. She was much younger than Nolan with jet-black hair, a thin nose, and pretty lips, hidden by the strip of tape over her mouth.
“Your wife is very beautiful,” he began. “Or, should I say, was very beautiful.”
She tried to say something, but all that came out was a series of vowel sounds.
He placed the flat of the blade against her skin and traced it down her shoulder, beneath the cloth. Turning his hand so the cutting edge was against the fabric, he deftly sliced her shirt from top to bottom. The fabric parted, revealing a lace bra.
“What do you think, Yuri?” he asked the man next to Nolan.
“Very nice,” he said with a lecherous smile.
“I haven’t touched a woman in almost three years.” He took his time cutting her bra straps. He pulled the bra free and stepped to one side so Bo Nolan could watch him run his hands over his wife’s bare breasts. How curious, he thought, that the nipples would harden despite her furious thrashing.
“When I was in Black Dolphin, they put me in the hole. Do you know what that is?”
Nolan fought against his bonds, flexing his arms and trying to snap the chair with brute strength. When he didn’t answer, Yuri took a handful of salt from the table.
“He asked you a question,” he said, shoving the salt into the man’s wounds.
“Fuuuck!” Nolan screamed. “Solitary. They put you in solitary.”
“They called it the pit. For the first two months there was no light, no sound, just you and the darkness.” Zakayev grabbed two handfuls of Emily’s breasts and grinned at Nolan.
“A man has nothing to do but think about the terrible things he would do if he got out.”
“I am going to kill you, do you hear me?”
Zakayev dismissed the man’s threat with a tsk and walked back to the fireplace.
“No, you won’t,” he said, grabbing a poker and pulling it from the coals. The white-hot tip shimmered and popped in the air. “You are a strong man, but everyone tells me what I want to know in the end. Do you know why?” Zakayev asked, walking over to Emily.
“Don’t do this,” Nolan said.
“He asked you a question,” Yuri repeated, roughly rubbing another handful of salt against the bleeding man’s face.
“Whyyyy?” he begged.
“Because no matter how tough the man is, there is always something in his life that makes him weak.”
Zakayev ripped the tape from Emily’s mouth.
“Let us see how much he loves you.”
“Don’t—don’t do this,” Nolan begged.
Zakayev was lost in the terror he saw in the woman’s eyes. Her powerlessness infected him like morphine. Slowly he touched the tip of the poker to her cheek. The skin sizzled and blistered, filling the room with the smell of burning flesh. Zakayev dragged the poker lazily toward her ear and watched the skin open up only to be cauterized a moment later by the superheated iron.
Emily screamed, her mouth opening wider and wider until it appeared she was trying to swallow the room. Her scream came from a primal place, sounding more like an animal than a human.
“Stop! Stop, I’ll tell you,” Nolan screamed.
But Zakayev didn’t stop.
He ran the poker across her forehead and into her hair. “Such a shame,” he said dreamily. “All that beauty, corrupted by—”
“I sent the package to America. I can give you the address.”
Now that he had broken his silence, Nolan couldn’t talk fast enough. His words spilled out like water from a broken dam, an unrelenting rush of classified names, places, and code words.
It was a treasure trove of information, but Zakayev didn’t care about any of that.
“The man you sent it to. What was his name?”
A strange look came into his eyes. “I . . . I don’t know.”
Zakayev turned on his heel and swung the poker in a tight arc toward Nolan’s head. Fed by oxygen as it whistled through the air, the tip glowed white, and when it struck Nolan in the side of the head, the blow sent a shower of sparks across the floor. Zakayev grabbed him by the throat before his momentum tipped over the chair and held the poker against the flesh of his exposed arm.
“Look at her face when you think about lying. I can make her pain last forever.”
And in the end, like they all did, the old man gave up what he wanted.
“His name is Eric Steele.”
Chapter 4
Present Day
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
As Eric Steele crossed the Fleming Park Bridge, the sun’s rays glinted off the Ohio River below. Neville Island was a two-mile strip of land that lay in the middle of the river. Once a vital part of the local economy, it was now a scrapyard. Block after block of abandoned warehouses, overgrown lots. A rusted legacy to Pittsburgh’s past, barely a stone’s throw from the city center.
It was also Steele’s home.
According to his grandfather, Fred, it hadn’t always been this way.
“Did you know that they used to call that ol’ scrap heap the ‘Market Basket of Pittsburgh’?”
“No, sir,” young Eric had answered.
“Farmers said the soil was so rich that they could plant a clothespin and it would grow. The strawberries and asparagus they grew were featured at most four-star hotels along the Eastern Seaboard.”
“What happened?”
“Times changed, and the farmers couldn’t keep up. The fields were torn up, and developers started building factories. You know when I was in the Pacific, our LSTs—”
“LSTs?” Steele had asked.
“That was the name of the boats we used during the landing at Guadalcanal. Do you know who made them?”
“No, sir.”
“Dravo Corporation of Neville Island, PA.”
His grandfather had rarely talked about World War II, but when he did, Eric got the feeling that he had left a part of himself behind. Steele wouldn’t know what that feeling was like until he returned home from his first deployment to Afghanistan. He seemed to belong to all the violence he left behind rather than to the calm streets of his childhood.
But when his financial adviser told him that the state was selling properties on Neville Island for pennies on the dollar, he couldn’t pass up a chance to own a piece of history.
The scenery wasn’t anything to write home about, but it had everything Steele needed. He pulled the GTO onto the access road and used the remote clipped to the visor to open a reinforced security gate. As Steele wheeled through, the engine’s guttural rumble echoed off the bricks and abandoned spools of wire strewn atop the cobblestones.
When he reached the river, Steele turned left. The headlights played over a red brick building with dravo corp written in faded white letters. By the time he turned the corner, the steel rollup door was open and the white light from the garage splayed over the scene of urban desolation.
Eric backed the muscle car in, killed the engine, and savored the smells that filled the garage. They reminded him of his childhood, before his father left.
Hank Steele was a soldier just like Fred. But instead of joining the marines, he went into the army and became a Green Beret. He deployed a great deal, and Eric treasured any time he got to spend with him.
In particular, his fondest memories were the nights they spent in the garage. Hank would teach him to rebuild a carburetor or adjust the timing of an engine. A week before Hank’s final deployment, father and son purchased a rusted-out GTO and hauled it back to their garage.
It was going to be their project, and Hank told his son that he wanted the rust gone by the time he got back. Every night after finishing his homework, Steele went out to the garage. He was almost done with the rear quarter panel the night his mom came outside, her eyes red-rimmed and wet.
“Your father . . .”
Steele brushed the memories aside. All this R&R was making him soft. He snatched the wine off the floorboard and walked inside.
The transformation of the warehouse was a testament to the fact that Steele couldn’t sit still. The first time he’d inspected the building it was so filthy even the bums stayed away. But Steele was smitten.
He hired a demolition crew to gut it, remove the faulty wiring and asbestos. Another crew used pressure washers to kill the black mold and blast a quarter century of pigeon shit off the roof and facade.
When that was done, Steele hired security contractors to install cameras, motion sensors, and Krieger level-four blast doors capable of withstanding ballistic, thermal, and explosive breaches.
Steele did the rest of the work by himself. He installed the hardwood flooring, hung cabinets in the kitchen, and added marble countertops and appliances. It took four months, but now he finally had a home.
In the kitchen he lit the Viking grill and went to the refrigerator for an ice-cold Yuengling. He lifted out the steaks he’d been marinating since morning. He had just laid the first one on the grill when the panel on the wall rang.
“Answer,” Steele said, his hands dripping with marinade.
His mother’s face appeared on the screen in the center of the panel.
“Mom, I thought we talked about you driving and FaceTiming,” he said.
“Eric, I’m not driving. I am sitting at a stoplight,” she said, brushing him off.
A curt honk drew her attention to the rearview. “Oh, the light has changed, thank you,” she said, hitting the gas and waving at the car behind her. “I’d planned to get the wine, but then a courier stopped at the house as I was pulling out. He had a package for you.”
“For me?” Steele asked, not sure if he’d heard her right.
“Yep.”
How is that possible?
The moment an Alpha was brought into the Program, every record of their former life was deleted. The Program had even helped Steele move the deed of his mother’s house under the cover of an LLC that he’d set up so that he couldn’t be tracked through her.
“Who is it from?”
A shadow passed over the screen and he knew she was entering the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. The audio and video began to distort from the interference.
“It’s . . . from . . . alt . . . illings.”
“You are cutting out. Text the name,” Steele said.
The call froze, and the screen went black with the words CALL DROPPED in the center.
Steele was about to try and call her back when a text bubble popped up:
WALTER BILLINGS
Alarmed, Steele immediately walked into the entryway and stopped next to a metal table with mosaic panels on top. He wasn’t looking for a table when his girlfriend, Meg Harden, had dragged him to an estate sale. But when the middle-aged lady running it had shown him the hidden compartment beneath the panels, he couldn’t resist.
He hinged it open, revealing two rows of ammo boxes and a stack of preloaded Wilson Combat Hi Capacity mags. Steele dropped one in the 1911 and racked the slide. The ejector flipped the chambered round skyward, and he snatched it out of the air without even looking.
Walter Billings was an alias. It belonged to Bo Nolan, a man Steele had been tracking for the last seven years. He wasn’t sure how Nolan had found his mother’s address. Right now it didn’t matter. What did matter was that Steele didn’t believe in coincidences.
He believed in being prepared.
Which was why he was switching to the 9 mm Cor Bon Hollow Points.
The Cor Bons were man stoppers. While they wouldn’t punch through body armor, they were guaranteed to put a man on his ass long enough for Steele to finish him with a headshot. The Hi Cap magazines held two rounds more than his everyday carry mags.
If Nolan was sending him a package, there was a chance that he wanted to meet up. If that was the case, Steele wanted to make sure he had plenty of ammo when he came face-to-face with Nolan—the last man to see his father alive.
Chapter 5
Present Day
Georgetown
Chief of Staff Ted Lansky was many things, but a morning person was not one of them. When his alarm clock woke him up at 0500, Lansky’s first thought was to hit ignore and go back to sleep. But he knew that wasn’t an option.
Lansky rolled over, eyes still heavy from sleep, and plucked the phone from the bedside charger. He ran his thumb over the screen, blinked his eyes into focus, and read the text he’d just received.
Volta Park 0530
Lansky thumbed his reply and then got out of bed with a “dammit.” A career in the clandestine service had taken its toll, especially on his knees, and as he walked to the bathroom his gait was stiff and slow. He stepped into the shower and turned the cold water knob all the way to the left before he could talk himself out of it.
The showerhead coughed, then sprayed him in the face. The cold water cleared his mind faster than a shot of espresso.
Lansky had assumed the days of waking up before the sun to meet an off-the-books asset had ended when he left the CIA. But six months after suffering a stroke at the State of the Union address, President Denton Cole was forced to step down and Lansky’s boss, Vice President John Rockford, became the acting president of the United States, so that was exactly what he was doing.
Lansky dressed quickly, pulling on a pair of black shorts, a gray T-shirt, and Brooks running shoes, and then headed for the stairs. On the first floor of his town house, the day’s first light had found its way through a crack in the blinds and was slowly advancing across the den. The interior of the brownstone had come furnished with a couch, a scuffed coffee table, and a recliner that was still covered in shipping plastic.
Lansky hadn’t seen the need to add anything else. Especially since the only rooms he used with any regularity were all upstairs. In the den, the only object that looked lived in was the worn go bag he passed on the way out the door.
The bag was a holdover from a past life. A testament to the saying: “Once a spy, always a spy.”
Out in the street, Lansky set off on a labored trot. A mile and a half later, when his body had finally warmed up, he jogged into Volta Park. Lansky followed the path through the trees and slowed to a walk fifteen yards shy of the tennis courts.
He found Major Mike Pitts sitting on the metal bench below the sign for court number two. The first time they had met was two weeks after former president Cole’s stroke. Lansky was summoned to the hospital, where he found Cole propped up in his bed surrounded by two men he’d never seen before.
Pitts looked up as he approached. “Back when I was in Ranger Battalion, I ran five miles as warm-up,” he said with a grimace. “Now it damn near cripples me.”
“Serves you right for waking me up at 0500,” Lansky said with a smile. “What’s the problem?”
“It’s Bo Nolan,” Pitts replied, stomping his knee into the graphite prosthetic and then rising to his feet.
