Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

It was a lousy counteroffer and he knew it. He was stalling. He began moving for the hallway with his arm still wrapped around Viktor’s neck.

“He stays,” I repeated.

“After he shows me to the door,” said the Mudir. “I am a guest, after all.”

I joined Elizabeth in the hallway, but we stayed back as the Mudir headed for the front door of Viktor’s apartment. He walked backward, his eyes never leaving us, and the sights of our guns never leaving him. When he reached the door, Viktor knew enough to open it for him, shifting his laptop from one hand to the other.

“Now let him go,” I said.

Standing with one foot out in the foyer, the Mudir nodded. “As you wish,” he said. But it was the way he said it.

Only by then it was too late.

Chapter 79

LIKE A magician, the Mudir made a show of reaching for Viktor’s laptop while releasing him from his grasp. All eyes were where the Mudir wanted them to be. On the laptop. Not his gun.

By the time Elizabeth and I blinked, the Mudir had sidestepped out of the apartment. Now all we could see was the gun.

Viktor was staying, all right, along with everything he could tell us about the Mudir. It was all staying with him forever.

Bam!

The shot was so clean, so straight, that the blood didn’t splatter. It gurgled. Then poured.

Viktor’s right temple turned into a spigot of red as he spun downward, his legs collapsing beneath him. It was impossible not to watch, and again the Mudir was banking on it. We were frozen. Only for a few seconds, but it was all the time he needed for his head start. That and the length of the hallway that separated us.

“Me!” I said to Elizabeth, finally taking off. Me, as in, not you. As in, the one with the badge stays with the body.

“I can’t see him,” came Julian’s voice in my ear. He was checking all the security cameras. He didn’t need to be told what had happened. “Watch your front.”

The Mudir could’ve been right by the elevator waiting for me. Only he wasn’t. By the time I slid to a stop— damn these socks —and peeled around Viktor’s front door, the only thing to be seen beyond the barrel of my gun was the door to the stairwell closing shut. As much as the Mudir wanted me dead, he wanted out of that building more.

“Shit!”

“What is it?” asked Julian.

I’d reached the stairs only to suddenly stop on the landing. “He took my shoes.”

I could practically hear the Mudir laughing. It wasn’t that I couldn’t chase him without shoes, it’s that he knew I’d come to a stop once I saw they were gone. That’s just the way the mind works.

The Mudir’s racing footsteps floors below were echoing all around me now. There was still a slim chance I could catch him. But I didn’t budge.

Instead, I sat down and simply exhaled. Shoes or no shoes, I realized that ultimately catching the Mudir would have nothing to do with my feet. It was all between the ears. I’d have to outthink him.

“He just hit the lobby,” said Julian. “Elvis has left the building.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You still there?” Julian finally asked.

“Yeah. Still here.”

“You okay?”

“I will be.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Okay, say it with me now.”

I knew what was coming. Of his many eclectic pursuits and interests, World War II held a special place in Julian’s heart. Most people fixated on the musings of Winston Churchill. Julian, however, was more partial to quoting Charles de Gaulle. Go figure.

“C’mon, don’t leave me hanging,” he said before switching to his horrible French accent. “France has lost a battle…”

It was the accent that got me every time. “But France has not lost the war,” I said.

Julian was reminding me that we’d been here before. The setback. The bump in the road. But this time felt different. The word war had always been a metaphor. Now it was literal.

“How much time do you figure?” asked Julian.

“Forty-eight hours,” I answered.

That’s how long we had to stop the Mudir before his next attack.

Chapter 80

TWO LARGE blackboards had been wheeled into the windowless conference room at the JTTF field unit, along with a mini fridge filled with sodas and waters. Four pizzas had been ordered, delivered, and eaten.

“Go home and get some sleep,” Evan Pritchard told his assistant, Gwen, at almost three in the morning. She declined by quoting Warren Zevon.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” she said. Then she announced to the room that she was making another pot of coffee. “Raise your hand if you want some.”

Everyone’s hand shot up.

We were redefining the meaning of joint in the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In fact, the non-agents outnumbered the agents. Elizabeth and her boss, Pritchard, were the only ones with proper JTTF field unit IDs. Landon Foxx, my father, and I were their SIGs, special invited guests. SIGs who just happened to be current and former CIA. Last but not least, on the two-way encrypted speakerphone, was Julian.

In the light of day, this ad hoc gathering of the minds would’ve never happened. Egos aside, there’d be too much bureaucratic red tape to slice and dice through. But under the cover of night, with the red tape asleep or at least looking the other way, here we were.

Waiting.

“I like the sound that chalk makes,” Pritchard had told us, explaining his preference for blackboards in strategy sessions. “That’s all we use here. It makes everything you write more emphatic.”

Emphatically written across the two blackboards was everything we knew so far. And everything included a few things only some of us in the room should’ve been allowed to know. But there was simply no time for parsing security clearances. The clock was ticking. The Mudir had literally said as much.

My old friend and operative Ahmed Al-Hamdah had infiltrated one of the Mudir’s cells. He gave his life trying to prevent the Times Square bombings. In doing so, he spooked the Mudir to the point of thinking there could be other moles in his cells. In his effort to find them, the Mudir somehow found a path that led directly to me. He literally knocked on my front door.

Only days before that, Professor Jahan Darvish’s corpse had been discovered in his Manhattan hotel room. His toxicology report, filed by a city coroner, was initially viewed under the pretense of an accidental death. A second—and secret—report, issued by the CIA, had no such pretense but still couldn’t prove foul play. While the combination of drugs in Darvish’s system may have precipitated his cardiac arrest, two of the three had been prescribed for him.

Now, in reexamining the report, what appeared to be an inadvertent overdose was most likely anything but. As for the mini bottle of Jim Beam in his actual butt, well, that was just clever to the point of genius. Classic misdirection of the mind. Professor Darvish just had to be the only person in the room given something like that, right?

Wrong. Sadira Yavari either killed him herself or paved the way for someone else. Because she’d used Halo to conceal her identity, my initial thought was that she was CIA. Foxx, as the Agency’s New York section chief, would almost certainly know if she was an operative. But he swore up and down that she wasn’t. And while the first rule of being with the Agency is Trust no one, I had no reason not to believe him. Especially when he revealed that Darvish had been a CIA informant.

There you have it. A terrorist attack and a murder in a hotel room. Two seemingly unrelated events that would’ve stayed unrelated were it not for a certain Russian art dealer, Viktor Alexandrov. Professor Darvish had been receiving additional money beyond what the Iranian government was paying him, and Alexandrov had been the cryptocurrency point man. Turned out, he also had been a point man for the Mudir on some type of shipment that had yet to clear customs.