Iris Johansen - Silent Thunder

"You bet it's not." The voice came from the rear of the store.

Hannah whirled to see a fair-haired, teenage girl of maybe sixteen or seventeen with a gun aimed at Kirov's head.

Petrenko stiffened. "Anna! No."

The gun was wavering in the girl's trembling hand. "Move away from him."

Kirov didn't move.

"Anna, I'm fine," Petrenko said gently. "Go upstairs and lock the door."

Anna shook her head. "No way." She spoke to Kirov and Hannah. "Get the hell out of here, both of you."

Kirov slowly turned to face her. "You don't want to do this."

"The hell I don't."

"We didn't come here to hurt your father."

"Yeah, sure, I heard you. And he's not my father."

"Then who is he to you?"

"None of your goddamned business." She readjusted the gun in her hands. "I could blow your brains out, and nobody would blame me. I'd tell them that you broke in here and tried to rob us."

Kirov's brows lifted. "Rob you? With what? I don't even have a gun."

"Anna, we didn't come here to hurt him or anybody," Hannah said. "We just need to find out some things that are very important to me."

"I heard the whole thing. He said he couldn't help you, so go."

Kirov spoke softly. "We can't do that. I'm totally unarmed, but if you want to kill me, you'll just have to press that trigger."

"Anna," Petrenko said, "go get the briefcase."

Anna's eyes widened. "What?"

"The briefcase from the other night. From the boat."

She shook her head. "The others may come back for it."

"No one is coming for it. Go get the case, please."

She thought for a moment, then moved close to Petrenko. "Here. Hold the gun."

"Gladly."

Keeping the gun aimed at Kirov, she slowly handed it over to Petrenko. He turned and casually threw the weapon into a counter drawer.

"No!" Anna gazed at him in horror. "What are you doing?"

"Go get the case. Hurry along now."

Still keeping a wary eye on Kirov and Hannah, she slowly moved toward the back of the store.

"I hope there aren't any other guns back there," Hannah said.

"No. You must excuse my young friend's tempestuous nature. She's very protective."

"Like a pit bull," Hannah said.

Kirov smiled. "Yes, she's obviously a bit impulsive. You know, of course, she had the safety on."

Petrenko nodded. "She's protective but completely unversed in the use of firearms. I prefer that she remain in that ignorance. Violence can scar children."

"More than children," Kirov said. "What's in this case you sent her to fetch?"

"As you know, my passengers from the other night were forced to slip overboard a few miles from shore. One of them left behind a small satchel. Apparently it contained nothing of real value because I received a note with my money instructing me to destroy it."

"Which you obviously didn't do," Hannah said.

"I hadn't gotten around to it." He grimaced. "Okay, I thought it might prove valuable if they wanted it destroyed. I was considering my options."

"That case isn't going to buy you out. I still need the name of your contact," Kirov said.

"I was afraid you'd say that," Petrenko sighed.

"If I have to question him, I'll make sure that he thinks someone else tipped me."

"His name is Dan McClary. He works out of Cobh, Ireland."

Anna brought the black satchel from the back and placed it on the counter in front of Petrenko. "You said I could keep the iPod."

Petrenko shrugged. "It belongs to this gentleman now."

Anna looked at Kirov.

"Sorry," Kirov said.

Anna shook her head. "I should have shot you when I had the chance."

"Not over an iPod." Kirov picked up the briefcase. "This is a far happier solution for everyone, I assure you." He turned to Petrenko. "But if I find that you lied to me about McClary…"

"You'll know where to find me." Petrenko waved his arm around the store. "I've been here twelve years. This is my life, and I don't intend to abandon it."

"Sometimes life abandons you," Kirov said as he opened the door for Hannah. "Thank you, Petrenko." He glanced at the girl, who was still glaring at him. "Take good care of him. We all need someone to stand by us."

At a rest stop on Highway 25, Hannah and Kirov stopped to examine the contents of the black satchel.

"I don't suppose there's any chance that this is the GRU information Pavski sent for," Hannah said as she opened the satchel.

"Not if Petrenko was ordered to destroy it."

That was what Hannah had reasoned. She held up a cylindrical object. "What's this?"

"A silencer for a.357 Magnum handgun. Petrenko's passengers obviously didn't come to sightsee." Kirov took the silencer and sniffed it. "It's been used."

"Recently?"

"Difficult to tell. There's nothing particularly silent about these things. It's not like the movies, where silenced handguns only make a slight whistling sound. It's more like a cannon being shot in the next room."

"Good to know for the next time I need to use one." She pulled out a well-read copy of The London Times , dated six days earlier.

Kirov glanced at the front page. "I'd say this paper was probably purchased somewhere else in Europe, maybe Ireland."

Hannah studied the page. "Are you looking at the price sticker?"

"Yes. It covers the newspaper's price, as you'd see with out-of-town newspapers. It's in euros, and much higher than you'd pay in London."

Hannah pulled out the Apple iPod portable music player. "And here's the MP3 player that Anna wanted so much. I think you enjoyed taking it from her."

"You're wrong. I never enjoy depriving women of things they desire. I'm much too primitive."

"Primitive?"

"From cave days man has instinctively provided for the female." He smiled as he unwound the earphones. "Or maybe it's not instinct but the knowledge that they'd be given what they want much more easily if they kept them happy." He put on the earphones and powered up the player. "She probably would have appreciated this terrible Euro-rap music far more than I do." He yanked the earphones and turned off the player.

Hannah reached into the satchel and pulled out an assortment of personal items with Russian-language packaging, including toothpaste, floss, shampoo, and condoms.

She tapped the pack of condoms. "Someone was planning on a busy stay here."

"You'd be amazed at the effect a Russian accent can have on young American women. It surprised me."

"I'm sure you used that as efficiently as you do everything else."

"I'd be disappointed if I thought I had to rely on anything so trivial," he said absently as he examined the iPod more closely.

He was right. His appeal was not surface shallow. He was totally adult, totally male, with a potent mixture of both the primitive he had mentioned and sophistication.

She lowered her eyes to the contents of the bag. "You don't have that much of an accent anyway."

"Nice jab. What else is in there?"

She pulled out a handheld GPS locator/mapping device, similar to the models used by hikers and campers. She switched it on. "Conner used one of these. He had the worst sense of direction known to man. If this was used to navigate the user to a specific destination, it may still be in the memory."

"Good thinking. What do you see?"

Hannah cycled through the options as she glanced through the menu screens. "Damn. A big fat nothing. All previous destinations have been deleted."

"Pavski has always been good at covering his tracks, and I'd expect the same from anyone he would hire." Kirov took the device. "Still, there's deleted and there's deleted . Just because the operating system doesn't recognize the data doesn't mean it isn't still in there somewhere."

"How can we tell?"

"I'll give it a once-over with my laptop. If that doesn't work, I have many friends in low places."