Dale Brown - Puppet Master

“No, no,” said Chelsea, scooping up his rifle. “Leave him. Don’t kill him!”

They shouted something at her that sounded like norham jushua. She gathered they were saying he was a bad man or evil.

“That’s all right. Leave him. He’s hurt. Come on.”

She started in the direction of the van, following Peter as he headed toward the second Russian.

Someone yelled, and then there was a shot. Chelsea grabbed the children close and pushed them with her to the ground, watching Peter rush forward toward the commotion.

A second later she heard a familiar voice yelling from the woods.

“It’s me!” shouted Bozzone. “I know you’re here if Peter is. Are you all right?”

Better than all right, ballerina girl, laughed her father in her head.

Chelsea jumped to her feet.

Tolevi pushed himself up from the dirt. The butcher was still on the ground.

“Asshole,” he yelled, stomping his wrist to release the pistol. He grabbed it, then took hold of the back of the butcher’s shirt.

Something blew up in the front of the building.

“We’re here, we’re here!” Tolevi yelled, running around to the side. The last thing he needed was that idiot White shooting him. “The butcher is with me! The butcher is with me!”

The doorbell rang.

Borya looked up at Mary Martyak.

“Think we should get it?” asked Martyak.

“Yes, of course,” said Borya, putting down her phone. Chelsea had had to hang up but had told her to stand by.

Stand by .

Borya left the phone on the table and ran to the door.

“Who is it?” she asked, pulling it open.

“Hey there, Borya,” said Johnny Givens. “You left this at work.” He held up the backpack.

“Oh wow, I totally forgot it.”

“Hello, Johnny,” said Mary Martyak from inside.

“Mary.”

“Come on in,” said Borya, grabbing Johnny’s hand. “I just talked to Chelsea.”

“You did?”

Across the street, Medved and the Russian intelligence operative got back into their car.

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” said Medved. “Stratowich should be able to keep his mouth shut until then.”

“He better.”

“You’re welcome to get rid of him, as far as I’m concerned,” said Medved. “Take him and Tolevi out. I’d sleep better.”

“What makes you think I’m not going to?”

Medved nodded. There was a little too much menace in his companion’s voice, he thought, the sort of tone that hinted he would be next.

“Let’s go to my club and have something to drink,” Medved said. “Relax with some wine and girls. Tomorrow is another day.”

“Tomorrow, yes,” said the man. “Tomorrow.”

They were in the trucks, all of them, including Bozzone and Porter, both of whom had been shot.

The butcher’s hands and feet were trussed, and Tolevi was not being very gentle with him.

Massina looked over at Johansen.

“They’re good,” said Johansen. “They’ll make it.”

“Who is the butcher, really?” said Massina.

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t want to be rescued. He had a gun on Tolevi. You can see it in the videos. And Tolevi tied him up.”

“He did want to be rescued. At one point.”

“Who was he?”

“The Russian SVR officer who was involved in planning the Ukrainian invasion,” confessed Johansen. “The rebels got tired of him and put him in their prison. He sent a message through his brother that he wanted to defect.”

“Does anyone else on the team know that?”

“It’s need to know. And they didn’t.”

Tolevi had a strong suspicion about what was up, but there was no way to be sure until it played out. And the only way for that to happen was to pick up the brother as planned, because otherwise they’d never make it through Ukraine. So he drove to an intersection two miles from the compound and waited for the butcher’s brother to appear.

It took nearly twenty minutes.

“Hop in,” Tolevi said, opening the side door of the van. “We’re running a little late.”

The butcher’s brother climbed in. Tolevi pointed to the lumpy frame under the blanket in the back. “He’s unconscious, but OK. We’re letting him sleep”

The brother yanked a pistol from his belt. “Bastard,” he yelled, shooting at the figure below the blanket.

He got off three shots before Tolevi and one of the CIA paras managed to get the gun away from him. They wrestled him to the side, then searched him for weapons. They found a small 9mm at his back and a radio.

The para tied him up.

“Why?” asked Tolevi.

“He’s not my brother. I am working for SBU— Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrayiny. ” The Ukrainian special service — in effect, their FBI.

“No shit,” said Tolevi. “But I will say you guys look a lot alike. You could be brothers.”

“That’s why they sent me, no? I was a colonel in the army. They came to me. We have worked on this six months, more.”

“Why?” asked Tolevi.

“He’s one of the barbarians who set up the invasion. He was so despicable, even the rebels couldn’t deal with him. They put him in the prison to keep him safe. A lot of them wanted to kill him. He was in the house by himself.”

“Why didn’t you just blow up the prison?”

“We’ve tried. We couldn’t get him ourselves.” He spit on the blanket. “We knew the Americans could. I’ll help you get across the border. I owe you.”

“I hate to tell you this, but this ain’t him.” Tolevi pulled off the blanket, revealing a pair of duffel bags, a backpack and some rolled towels. “Don’t worry, though. He’ll pay for his sins many times over.”

Getting to the border was easy, even though none of them trusted the directions the butcher’s brother had laid out. Dan found a road, and a bribe to the Ukrainian guard saved them the trouble of shooting the poor bastard. Once across, they changed the plates so the vehicles looked like government trucks, and they were left alone.

The “brother” did look an awful lot like Olak Urum, Tolevi thought. But in reality he was a colonel in the Ukrainian intelligence service, which had concocted an elaborate plot to get the butcher killed in revenge for the many deaths he’d caused. Ironically, just like the butcher, he had started his career in the Soviet KGB.

Takes one to know one.

Now the butcher was coming back to the U.S. anyway, where he’d detail Russia’s lies for the world.

They drove for several hours before reaching Kiev and the airport. The plane was waiting in the commercial area. The guards there — all CIA — whisked them to the tarmac. Neither the butcher nor his brother, both sleeping with the aid of a heavy dose of propofol, objected at all.

They left the Ukrainian in the back of the van. The butcher was carried onto the plane in a stretcher. It was a 737 registered to a South African airline — according to the papers, at least.

“We got everybody?” asked White as the last para boarded.

Asshole CIA officers, thought Tolevi. Can’t even friggin’ count. But they always got to be in charge.

Screw him.

A million bucks.

I think Johansen owes me a bonus on this one. Call it entertainment tax.