Don Pendleton - Combat Machines

Several glasses of champagne later, they were making out in the back of the Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan Panshin’s company had provided to chauffeur him around the city. They’d ended up at his hotel, the luxurious Mandarin Oriental Geneva, and the rest of their time together had passed in a blur of incredible conversation, gourmet meals and mind-melting sex.

She got out of the shower and wrapped herself in a huge, fluffy towel. Checking the time, she figured she would just make it if she didn’t mind putting up with slightly damp hair on the way over.

Drying, dressing and applying her makeup in record time, she trotted out the door to find Panshin setting down his smartphone. He was sitting in front of two breakfasts on a tray—a full one for him, and a continental of croissants and fruit for her.

“That’s so sweet of you.” Even though it would put her behind, Brauer buttered a croissant. “Who called?”

“My company. They are impressed with what I have learned so far, and wish for me to stay in the city for a few more days—to better take advantage of the contacts I have made here.” He rose and took her hands in his, kissing pastry crumbs off them. “But we can discuss that this evening. As much as it pains me to say it, you should probably get going, yes?”

Damn!

“Yes, I’ve got to run.” She kissed him and turned to leave.

* * *

THE DRIVE TO the office seemed to take forever, and Brauer found it hard to concentrate on anything—paying attention to traffic, the emails she had her car’s built-in system read to her on the way, the project she was supposed to be briefing her boss on this morning—all of it paled in comparison to her new, white-hot relationship.

Pulling into the underground garage, she got out of her car and trotted to the elevator. As she was getting in, her phone vibrated.

Conference moved up. Go directly to 15th floor conference room, the text read. Brauer knew she was supposed to stop on the main level and go through the security checkpoint, but she was already running close to her scheduled conference start time as it was, and stopping there would make her late. Besides, she had been working at the WTO building for the past four years—she certainly wouldn’t risk destroying her career to smuggle in something. And no one else had gotten to her briefcase in all the time she’d had it, so when the elevator arrived, she got in and pushed the button for the fifteenth floor.

Grateful to find the elevator empty, Brauer took a few moments to run through the salient points of her presentation in her head, thanking her lucky stars she had been mostly done with it before she’d met Alexei.

The bell chimed, signaling she had reached her destination floor. Kathri stepped out and headed directly for the frosted glass conference room at the end of the corridor. She entered and blinked in surprise at seeing not only the CEO of the company, but also several board members.

“Ah, Ms. Brauer, so good to see you this morning,” her boss, Loïc Gilliard, greeted her as he shook her hand. He quickly introduced her to the other board members. “We’re looking forward to seeing what you have to show us today.”

“And I think you’ll be pleased with my recommendations, if you don’t mind my saying so,” she replied as she strode to the head of the table and set down her briefcase. “I’ll just need a few moments to set up—”

As she reached for the locks, she noticed a new scratch marring the brass finish on the left one—the same one that had popped open back at the hotel room. I’ll have to get that polished and fixed, she thought as she set the combination dials, undid the latches and opened the case. Or maybe just replace the whole damn thing—

The small bomb in her briefcase detonated with a force powerful enough to blow her face off. She was blasted off her feet, hitting the wall hard enough to crack the wood before crashing to the floor. She had no idea that the explosion blew out all of the windows in the room and set the fire alarm blaring.

The bank’s CEO, who had been walking over to stand next to Brauer, took the full force of the flying briefcase lid in the chest, pulverizing his ribs and stopping his heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

With the blast directed more or less away from the board members, they escaped with their lives.

Amazingly, Brauer lived for one hundred twenty-two minutes after the blast. But as the paramedics were lifting her onto a gurney to take her to a medevac helicopter in a vain attempt to save her life, all she kept repeating was one word:

“Alexei...”

Chapter Three

Stony Man Farm, Virginia

Twelve hours later

Head bobbing in time with the electronic dance music blasting through his earbuds, Akira Tokaido scanned the various monitors at his workstation. Although a genius computer hacker, the young man had quickly grown to love reviewing the endless data feeds. After all, what was data mining but searching for patterns in events and correlating the possible outcomes? In a way, he felt it was kind of like figuring out a program, but in real life.

However, real life was much more random and arbitrary. Just this morning, a bomb had gone off at the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Tokaido scanned the CIA summary document, learning that it seemed an employee had brought the explosives in with her, which explained how it had gotten by the main entry security. She had been killed in the blast, along with the current WTO chairman. Several board members had also been injured. No terrorist group had claimed responsibility yet, and police were pursuing all possible leads.

Tokaido flagged that as being of possible interest, then ran a search through domestic and international databases and law-enforcement files for acts classified as potential terrorism in the last thirty-six hours. More than eighty popped up, from a skirmish between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and what looked like the last of the Anyayna II resistance in the Sudan to a disarmed bomb planted by a radical anarchist splinter group in Iceland to a raid on a known militia headquarters in Montana.

Next, he refined his search to the European continent and the United Kingdom, getting a dozen hits. These ranged from the small—a flaming garbage bin in Leicester, England—to the much more deadly: an assassination of a midlevel government official in Brussels, Belgium.

The Stony Man hacker skimmed through that one as well, and learned the victim, Jean-George Belloc, was the country’s finance minister. He had been ambushed outside his home, shot in his car as he was heading to work. The suspect, driving a motorcycle, had worn a full-coverage helmet, and had made his escape before any eyewitnesses could get a good look at the assassin.

Pulling up recent quotes from the slain government official, Tokaido found he had been advocating taking a harder stance in trade negotiations with Russia, even suggesting the possibility of sanctions for its recent actions in the Ukraine, and its intervention in the Syrian civil war. Of course, that wasn’t really anything new—most of the countries in the European Union weren’t happy with Russia’s recent saber-rattling, but they apparently also weren’t going to speak too loudly about it, either, for fear of provoking the bear.

After all, look what happened to this guy, Tokaido mused.

On a hunch, he refined his search to potential terrorist acts with any links to Russia, adding his new target country to the list, in the event there had been any domestic incidents recently. His event list shrank to six: the Brussels event plus five others. Four of them he eliminated fairly quickly, although he did confirm that Polish authorities had finally captured a Lithuanian serial killer that had eluded them for the past decade. But the last one, occurring in Germany, made him frown as he studied it.