Jeffery Deaver - Watchlist

They stopped fast, seeing Chernayev’s body. It was in the middle of the small office, whose windows were covered with thick steel mesh. He’d been shot in the back of the head as he tried desperately to claw his way out.

“The nurse,” a guard whispered, gesturing at the only other door in the room, leading to a third office.

“There’s a back door?”

“No, just the one, the front.”

The nurse was trapped. They’d keep her pinned and call in a marine tac team. “I’ll get-”

“No, we will stop her.”

“Wait!” Middleton whispered. “She can’t-”

They flung the door open and blinked as a brilliant light, the sort used for construction site work at night, clicked on. Blinded, they staggered back as four well-placed silenced rounds found their targets-the men’s foreheads.

In a blur the woman rushed out. She was dressed in a British army soldier’s uniform, but the poor fit and a small red stain on the chest told Middleton how she’d come by the outfit. He didn’t recognize her.

She hesitated in shock, not expecting the other two to be in the room. But before she could lift the.22 again, Middleton drew the Beretta that Chernayev had given him. When he touched the muzzle to her head she debated only a moment and dropped her own weapon.

Tesla then stepped forward, grabbed the woman and, wincing from the wound in her own shoulder, flung the attacker to the floor hard. Then she struck her furiously in the head and face.

“Nora, stop!” Middleton said, pulling her off and securing the shooter with one of the dead guard’s handcuffs. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Oh, yes, I did.”

Middleton frowned.

Tesla said, “You don’t know who she is, do you?”

“No.”

“It’s Jana Grover.”

“In Paris, did you check on my body?” Jana snapped contemptuously at Tesla. “Did you call les gendarmes , did you call Le Deuxieme Bureau . No, of course not. What you saw floating in the Seine was my jacket. And you took that at face value. I’m sorry I escaped and deprived you of another chance to torture me.”

Middleton glanced at Tesla, silent at this. He now understood the earlier reaction to what Ian Barrett-Bone had said. He let it go.

They sat in the same trailer that had been Chernayev’s cell. And his coffin. The body had been removed. And a forensic team was going through the place.

In addition to Connie Carson and Wiki Chang, Ian Barrett-Bone was here. He was lip-biting mad at the Indians for letting the hit woman into the trailer. The officer who’d been bribed by Jana to okay access was in custody, but that was small consolation.

“Why?” the British agent asked.

“She treats all colleagues that way,” Tesla said bitterly, “if there’s any chance they might be witnesses against her. Just like she killed Kavi Balan in the South of France.”

“I’m not so sure,” Middleton said, again considering unanswered questions. “I think something else is going on here.”

“Ah, you’re as sharp as I thought, Colonel. How I wish Balan had been successful that day at the beach at Cap D’Antibes.”

“I don’t understand,” Barrett-Bone said.

“No, you certainly do not,” the beautiful Pakistani said. “You haven’t understood anything-any of you, from the beginning… I wasn’t with Chernayev or the Chinese. They were my enemies . I’d been struggling for months to find them and kill them.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

As if speaking to school children, Jana said, “Some time ago Devras Sikari was negotiating with the Mujahedeen here in Jammu about power sharing if he could secure an independent Kashmir. But he learned that this person known as the Scorpion and a Chinese associate wanted to fabricate some terror attack as an excuse for the Chinese to invade and occupy Kashmir. They planned to blame the terrible incident on Devras. He learned about their scheme and came up with a plan to expose them: He pretended to enlist the Mujahedeen to help him blow up the dam. Yes, he arranged for some explosives to be stolen and shipped there but he knew the dam was too solid to be destroyed. He was an engineer, remember.”

Tesla said, “But the email we found on Kavi Balan’s computer said he planned to destroy the Village.”

“Wait. No, it didn’t,” Middleton countered. “It just said he had something ‘planned’ for it.”

“And he did,” Jana continued. “He planned to get to the truth of the Scorpion’s plot. He wasn’t going to destroy the Village. He was going to save it-and expose the Scorpion and his associate to the world, if we couldn’t stop them first.”

Middleton had to laugh. He realized that he and the Volunteers were the ones who had accomplished Sikari’s goal: protecting the Village and exposing the Scorpion’s and Zang’s plan.

Jana continued, “ My job was to find the Scorpion and eliminate threats. That’s why I needed your daughter… to use her to find out what you knew. After Balan failed to kill you, I learned who you were. Not some spy for the Scorpion. Or for those crazy men with the Group. But the Volunteers.” Her face darkened. “I was getting close to stopping you and to learning who the Scorpion was… And then tragedy. Archer killed his fa ther.”

Barrett-Bone said, “Tragedy? Why, you helped him do it!”

“Are you mad?” she raged. “Devras was my mentor, a colleague of my father. He was a genius. Archer was a street thug, a fool.” The woman shivered in disgust. “He never understood the politics, the culture, the depth of our region. And like most stupid men, he was easily seduced, by the Scorpion. He never realized that the last thing Devras wanted was a real incident here, especially the deaths of foreigners. It would destroy forever his hopes for a free Kashmir.”

Middleton said, “So you’re the one who shot Archer.”

She sighed. “My only regret is that I couldn’t get close enough to tell him how I despised him before I pulled the trigger.”

“And Crane?” Barrett-Bone asked. “The reporter.”

“I thought he would be valuable in finding Scorpion. He led me to your daughter and her.” A contemptuous nod toward Tesla. “But he gave me little else.”

“You wanted Chernayev and Zang stopped, right?” Connie Carson said.

“Yes, of course, I did.”

“Well, they were stopped. We had them in custody. Why did you kill Chernayev?”

“Why didn’t you?” Jana replied with contempt. “A vastly powerful man? It would only have been a matter of time until he escaped or bought his way out of prison.”

“There’s another reason, though, isn’t there?” Tesla asked.

Jana smiled at her coldly. “Yes. Chernayev was responsible for the death of my father. He and Zang killed him and the Indian student they also sponsored. They only kept Devras alive to use him in their plot. I decided years ago that whoever the Scorpion was, whatever else he was guilty of, he’d die for the murder of my father. Poisoned by well water. He died in pain.”

Middleton said, “So Chernayev using the Mujahedeen here today, that was a fallback plan, right? Originally, he and Zang were going to claim that the dam had the copper bracelet technology in it-that would be the Chinese’s excuse to occupy Kashmir.”

“Exactly. A weapon of mass destruction. And by the time it was learned there was none, they’d have the country all locked up. Sorry we didn’t find any weapons, but we’re not leaving.” She offered a grim smile to the Americans. “That worked well for you not long ago, no?”

“And what about the copper bracelet technology?” Wiki Chang asked eagerly.

“Devras was obsessed with it. The project consumed him at university and afterward. But he never perfected a practical system. He could never recreate what the Nazis did. He patented parts of the technology, but it never could work as he dreamed. Still, he thought of the project affectionately. If anyone became dear to him, he’d give them his greatest symbol of affection and gratitude-a real copper bracelet.”