Alex Berenson - The Silent Man

And suddenly he knew.

Who rides a motorcycle when it’s thirty degrees?

Accidents on two bridges.

Too many coincidences this morning.

If he was wrong. no harm no foul. He’d call it paranoia and have something to talk about at the support group this week. But he knew.

He looked back, but his view was blocked by the bulk of the Suburban. He leaned forward and examined the passenger-side mirror. There. A red sportbike on his side, cutting between the traffic and the curb. Maybe ten cars back, three hundred feet in all, including the gaps between vehicles. Closing, slowly and steadily.

“Jenny. Check your mirror. Do you see a motorcycle?”

Exley leaned forward, peeked at her mirror. “Sure. A black bike. Back a ways.”

The red bike was 150 feet away, five car lengths. With his left hand, he unbuckled his seat belt. Then Exley’s. With his right, he reached under his jacket. He carried his Glock in an armpit holster under his left shoulder.

The traffic inched forward. On his side, the red bike was now only about three car lengths behind. Wells pulled the Glock, the big pistol solid in his hand. Time seemed to slow, a good sign. His reflexes were accelerating. Because he was right-handed, he’d have to get out of the van, expose himself, if he wanted a clean shot. Not what he wanted. But he had no choice.

“Open your door, Jenny. NOW.”

Wells couldn’t take the time to look at her, but he heard her door open. He reached across his body and opened his own door with his left hand, blocking the path of the bike.

In one smooth motion, he swung himself out of the minivan, left leg over right, and dropped to his knees, the gun in his right hand. He knew he had almost no time to decide. If he was wrong, he was about to kill a couple guys who were trying to beat traffic.

The bike was a red Ducati carrying two men. Just like the one that had passed them before. It was maybe fifty feet away, rolling slowly beside the Suburban chase car, nearly stopped, and then—

Then the passenger on the bike reached down and flicked something under the body of the big SUV.

“Grenade!” Wells yelled.

The Ducati revved toward him. He fired. The bike came fast, but the bullet was faster. The shot caught the rider in his right shoulder and the bike twisted right but stayed up, its front wheel barely ten feet from Wells. Wells shifted his aim and fired again. The mirrored face-plate of the helmet shattered. The rider’s head jerked back and his body slumped in death and his hands came off the bars. The bike started to go down—

And there were two explosions under the Suburban in quick succession—

Boom! Boom!

The Suburban lifted off the ground—

BOOM!

A larger explosion followed as the SUV’s gas tank blew—

Thick black smoke filled the air—

Wells kept shooting, aiming now at the second man on the Ducati, who was reaching under his jacket. But the bike was skidding down, giving Wells a clean look. Wells took his time and caught the guy with a shot to the side of the head. His helmet twitched. He fell off the back of the bike and hit the asphalt with a heavy dead thump.

Wells was already shifting his focus. Two grenades. Two motorcycles. He braced himself against the side of the minivan and spun. On the far side of the Caravan, by its left rear wheel, another rider stood, his bike between his legs, a pistol in his gloved right hand.

The pistol jerked twice in succession, crack-crack —

“John!” Exley screamed, a high hopeless sound—

Wells fired through the minivan, his only choice, knowing that if he missed, he risked killing an innocent driver in the cars behind the shooter—

And missed.

The rider turned toward Wells and fired. The round smashed through the van’s window—

And missed.

Wells sprang left, looking for a cleaner shot, a shot that wouldn’t be blocked by the van’s second row of seats. The rider reached under his jacket with his left hand. Wells fired, separated from the guy only by the width of the van—

The 9-millimeter slug from Wells’s Glock caught the guy full in the chest, tore open his leather jacket. Its force jerked him back, standing him upright. But he didn’t go down. Bulletproof vest, Wells thought. He ducked as the guy lifted his pistol and fired two shots, wild and high, then threw down the pistol and again reached into his jacket.

Wells slowed himself. Last chance. If he missed this time, the guy would toss a grenade under the van and cook Exley.

He aimed carefully through the van and squeezed the trigger.

Crack. Through the van, Wells saw the rider’s face-plate shatter. The guy fell backward, his helmet cracking against the roof of the BMW behind him, dead already.

WELLS RAN AROUND THE VAN to the driver’s side. Exley lay in the front seat, moaning, slumped forward.

“John.”

“Just stay still.”

Already he could hear sirens. Behind them, the Suburban crackled and burned, throwing off gobs of smoke that stank of gasoline and charred flesh. The agents inside were surely dead. Five dead here this morning. As long as it wasn’t six.

He didn’t see the wound. He pulled up her sweater. There it was, blooming red on her white shirt, the right side, just above the waist. Maybe the liver, Wells thought. If it was the liver, they’d better get her to a hospital quick before she bled out. He pressed down on it and she moaned again. Her warm blood seeped between his fingers. A bad one.

He put his hand to her cheek and listened to the sirens draw close. And he wondered who’d done this to them. He wondered who would pay.

In the dark, Grigory Farzadov couldn’t see the waves. But he could hear them, banging against the hull like living beasts. Thump. Thump. Thump- thoomp. In the last hour, their intensity had steadily increased. And yet Grigory didn’t mind. He’d grown up thousands of kilometers from the ocean. He’d never seen the Pacific or the Atlantic. He didn’t even know how to swim. But all his life he’d envied those lucky souls who lived on the water. Now he was one of them. Sort of.

His cousin wasn’t so sanguine. As the Tambulz Dream —the little fishing trawler that had been their home for a day — rocked sideways, Tajid laid a hand on his stomach and gripped the dirty steel rail that ran around the cabin. He’d already vomited once. Meanwhile Yusuf sat in a corner, cursing under his breath, his eyes dead and flat as ever. Grigory was sure that if he looked hard enough he would see smoke coming off Yusuf ’s head, and smell the faint stink of sulfur.

Though maybe the smell was just the Black Sea, a famously dank waterway. The sea lay between six countries — Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine — and had possessed a bad reputation for at least three thousand years. Technically, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean formed a single body of water, linked through the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that divided Istanbul. But the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean had little in common with the Black Sea. The complex currents that connected the two left the Black Sea’s depths a toxic stew, thick with salt and hydrogen sulfide, poisonous to fish.

The sea’s surface was hardly more pleasant, regularly racked by storms powerful enough to split oil tankers in half. Even so, anchovy and sturgeon lived in the sea’s upper layer, and fishing trawlers set out each day to catch what they could. This ship was one of them, a simple vessel, about a hundred feet long, its hull a faded blue, its one-story cabin white. Grigory knew nothing about boats, but even he could see that this one had seen better days. One of its cabin windows was missing, replaced with wooden planks. The engines growled madly when the captain pushed the throttle forward. Besides Grigory, Yusuf, and Tajid, the trawler carried a crew of three, the captain and two younger men who seemed to be his sons.