Day Of Wrath (31 page)

He nodded toward the next corner. “I should be able to take a quick look at the RP from there.”

“Oh? What’s this “I,’ Peter?” she asked quietly.

“This is where we split up,” he said. “if anybody unfriendly is out there waiting for us, they’ll be looking first for a couple. So I’ll just mosey on over there—run a fast recon—and then swing back. In the meantime, you keep an eye on my back. just in case we missed somebody on our tail. Okay?”

Helen’s eyes narrowed. “You really don’t trust Larry Mcdowell, do you?”

Thorn shrugged. “From what you’ve told me about him, and from what I saw at the crash site, I trust him to be a lying, slimy, incompetent asshole.”

She laughed softly. “I’d say you have the man pegged just right.

Okay, Peter, you go run your sweep. I’ll watch your back.”

He kissed her once and then stepped out of the doorway. He sauntered off, whistling softly under his breath—determined to look and act as much as possible like a local making his way home from one of the several pubs they’d passed.

At the corner, Thorn stopped briefly—looking both ways before crossing the street. He let his eyes sweep west down the block toward the intersection Mcdowell had picked out as the rendezvous point, scanning for anything and anyone out of the ordinary.

Nothing. Nothing.

There! His eyes lingered for an instant on the dark Mercedes sedan with Berlin plates parked halfway down the block under a burned-out streetlight. That’s too nice a car for this neighborhood, he thought grimly. And he’d bet a month’s pay there were a couple of guys sitting inside that can-hidden behind tinted windows. His senses went on full alert.

Without breaking stride, Thorn crossed the street, putting a graffiti-smeared apartment building between him and the Mercedes. It took him another five minutes to circle his way east and then north again to get back to the doorway where he’d left Helen on watch.

“Well?” she asked.

“We’ve got trouble,” Thorn said. He filled her in on the car he’d spotted.

“Might just belong to the local Lotto winner …” she said slowly.

Thorn grinned. “Why, yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus …”

“Very funny, Peter.” Helen tapped her watch. “We’ve still got fifteen minutes before Crittenden is supposed to show. You want to scope this out a little further?”

He nodded. “Let’s say I’m kinda curious to find out who may be gunning for us this time.”

She shook her head. “Jesus, Peter, I sure hope you’re just being paranoid.”

They headed east for several blocks before turning south again. Once they had gone far enough that way, they swung back west down a trash-filled alley. It took them the better part of ten more minutes to work their way closer to the target intersection, approaching it from the south this time.

They were within a hundred meters of the rendezvous point when Thorn felt Helen stiffen slightly. Her hand closed around his arm—and tugged him off the street into another alley between two brick tenements.

“Shit,” she said under her breath. “I don’t frigging believe it.”

She looked up at him, eyes wide in the darkness. “There are two more up ahead fifty meters or so. Standing in a doorway on our side of the street.”

“Describe them,” Thorn said.

“Dark leather jackets. Jeans. One’s wearing a baseball cap. The other’s bareheaded.” Helen shook her head in disbelief. “How the hell did they know where to find us?”

Thorn spread his hands. “Maybe there’s a leak in the Bureau’s Berlin office. Or in D.C. somewhere. Hell, maybe Mcdowell’s phone’s being tapped …”

She grimaced. “I can’t believe that. The phone lines into and out of the Hoover Building are checked and rechecked practically every day.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “all I know is that these people have been all over us every time we get close to their goddamned operation.

As to how exactly they’re doing that …” He shrugged.

“We should start doing some serious thinking about it later. After we get ourselves out of this fix we’re in right now.”

Helen nodded.

Thorn looked intently at her. “So, if you were setting up a tight surveillance net around that intersection, how would you do it?”

She didn’t hesitate. “I’d cover all four approach routes, and I’d use at least two foot teams and two cars to do it. That way I’d be set, no matter how my targets entered the zone.”

“So we’re facing around eight hostiles here,” he concluded.

“At least.” Helen looked troubled. “We’re outside the net now, Peter.

We could just back off quietly and slip away. God knows, that would be the smart move.”

“Yeah.” Thorn knew she was right, but somehow the idea stuck in his craw. Fading back meant ceding the initiative to their unknown adversaries—again. And it would leave them right where they’d started: stuck in Germany while what they suspected was a stolen Russian nuke was sailing into an unsuspecting American port city.

He suddenly realized that Helen was watching him closely.

“You getting tired of playing it safe, Colonel Thorn?” she asked quietly.

“Playing it safe’s not exactly our forte, is it, Special Agent Gray?”

“No, I guess not.”

He nodded toward the unseen intersection. “Okay. Pretend you’re running that op out there. One of your teams spots someone who might be one of the two people you’re after—but this person is heading away from the place you’ve staked out. What would you do?”

Helen hesitated for only a split second before answering. “I’d detach a team to investigate.”

“But not your whole force?” Thorn pressed.

She shook her head. “No way. Not with so many variables still in play. I’d want confirmation first.” A wolfish smile crept across her face. “You want a little personal contact with a Couple of these folks, Peter?”

He nodded grimly. “You could say that.”

Two minutes later, Thorn waited alone inside the dark alley—near the opening to the street. He could feel the damp, dirty brick wall right at his back. A dog barked somewhere off in the distance. Soon now, he thought.

Helen strode right past the opening—heading straight toward the intersection they knew was under surveillance. Her eyes didn’t even flicker in his direction.

Good work, he thought.

She left his field of view. Her footsteps faded.

Thorn ran a slow countdown in his head. She must be forty meters from the closest two-man surveillance team. Thirty meters.

Twenty.

Adrenaline flooded into his bloodstream-distorting his sense of time.

Seconds passed with agonizing slowness. Doubts crept in and multiplied. Had they spotted Helen yet? Would they react the way he hoped?

Helen came back into sight, walking faster now. She stopped, looked toward the alley as though seeing it for the first time, and then darted in. She slipped into the shadows beside him.

“Two on the way,” she whispered.

Thorn listened carefully—trying to screen out the dull rumble of background traffic noise to pick out the sound of any nearby car engine starting. If the people out there looking for them started pulling the whole surveillance net around them, he and Helen would have to bug out fast. He listened harder. There. He heard the sound of footsteps ringing on the pavement, coming closer.

Soon. Soon.

Two men appeared at the entrance to the alley. Both wore leather jackets and jeans. One had a baseball cap pulled down right over close-cropped hair. Without hesitating, they plunged into the narrow, dark, trash-strewn passageway. They walked right past him.

Now!

Thorn lunged out of the darkness, grabbed the closest, the one wearing the baseball cap, by the scruff of his neck and the back of his jacket, and whirled him around—slamming him face-first into the brick wall. A quick neck chop dropped the moaning man to the pavement-out cold.

A rapid glance showed him that Helen had put her target down and out in that same split second.

Moving quickly, they dragged the two unconscious men further into the alley, behind a row of overflowing trash bins.

Thorn knelt beside his victim, rapidly frisking the man for weapons and ID. Helen did the same.

“Jesus, I feel like a mugger,” she muttered.

“Yeah. But at least we’re highly efficient muggers,” Thorn said with a wry grin. He set the Walther P5 pistol he’d found in the unconscious man’s shoulder holster down on the ground and kept searching.

The smile slipped off his face as his hand closed around a small leather wallet, thin but stiff, in the man’s jacket pocket. He flipped it open. One side held a photo identity card of the man he’d knocked out. The other held a badge. The word “Polizei” practically leapt off the ID card.

“Oh, shit,” Thorn said softly. “Now we are well and truly fucked …”

“No kidding.” Helen showed him the police credentials she’d found on her own man. “And there’s more.” She handed him a crumpled sheet of paper. “I found this next to the badge. Take a look.”

Thorn glanced down at the paper. He couldn’t read all the German but the two Xeroxed black-and-white photos-one of Helen and one of himself in his U.S. Army uniform—were clear enough. He frowned.

“That’s my
FBI
file photo,” Helen said.

“That son of a bitch Mcdowell set us up,” Thorn growled.

“Looks that way.” Helen shook her head. “I’d guess he decided to have us locked up before we could do any more damage to his precious reputation inside the Bureau. He must be betting he can do enough spin control so that we come out of this smelling real bad—and he gets the credit for shopping us to the German authorities.”’ “I think Mcdowell and I have a few things to sort out,” Thorn said.

“After me, Peter. After me.” Helen dropped the ID card on top of the man she’d attacked and jumped to her feet. “In the meantime, we’ve got maybe two minutes before their boss runs a radio check and all hell breaks loose. I suggest we skedaddle while the coast is still clear.”

“Amen to that.” He scrambled upright. “Back to the hotel?”

Helen shook her head, leading the way east down the alley toward the next street over. “No. Too dangerous. If the Berlin police are on the ball, this’ll hit the news in minutes. So we leave our bags here and start running now.”

“To where? Not the train station,” Thorn said.

“Same problem,” Helen agreed. “The cops will have men on watch at every train station, bus terminal, and all the airports before we could even get close.”

She didn’t bother hiding the despair in her voice as she continued.

“Thanks to Mcdowell, we’re about to become the targets of a major manhunt. The Polizei aren’t going to be very happy that we just put two of their plainclothes detectives in the hospital.

And I don’t have the faintest idea of how we’re going to get out of this damned city—let alone the country?”

Thorn kept his mouth shut as they left the alley and kept heading east—deeper into the city. There wasn’t any point in trying to cheer her up with false optimism. He was already feeling the walls close in around them himself.

JUNE
13

Vienna, Virginia

Major General Sam Farrell, U.S. Army, retired, had finished writing for the day when the phone rang. He clicked the television off in mid-
CNN
interview. Who the hell would be calling him after midnight?

He pushed himself upright out of the recliner and reached for the phone on his desk. The desk, like his study, was almost impossibly neat—with everything in its place and spotlessly clean.

Farrell blamed his compulsive neatness on the thirty-plus years he’d spent in the Army. Louisa, his wife, said he just had too much free time.

He got to the phone on the third ring. “Farrell.”

“General, it’s Peter Thorn.”

Farrell’s irritation changed to pleasure. “Pete! It’s damned good to hear your voice.”

He’d known Thorn for most of the younger man’s military career.

The special warfare community was a small, tightly knit fraternity-one that built lasting friendships.

Since his retirement, he’d heard from Thorn once a month or so a postcard, e-mail, or phone call. And always a card on holidays.

Farrell wouldn’t call it a father-son relationship, but then he’d served with Thorn’s dad, too—long before Pete had been born . Nobody was going to replace big, tough John Thorn in his son’s affections.

Still, he suspected their friendship bridged some of the emptiness Thorn had felt after his dad passed away.

Somehow, though, Farrell doubted this call was a social one.

He knew Thorn too well. “Where are you, Pete?”

“Berlin, sir.”

“Berlin?” Farrell wrinkled his brow. “After that business in Pechenga, I’d have thought you’d be back home by now.”

“You heard about Pechenga?”

“Hell, Pete. Hear about it?” Farrell smiled wryly. “Anybody with a TV or radio heard about it. Louisa and I keep expecting to see you and Helen on Oprah on a show about Then and Women Who Date Under Fire.”” He’d never admit it to Thorn, but he’d also been greedily following any news about the O.S.I.A plane crash and the ensuing events in Russia. It was an interesting and intriguing story, but, more important, he’d known that Thorn was involved.

Farrell turned serious. “I’m real glad you both came through that mess unscratched. It sounded like a bad one.”

“It was, sir,” Thorn said.

This time Farrell caught the faint undercurrent of very real desperation in the younger man’s voice. He frowned. He’d never heard Peter Thorn desperate before. Angry, yes. Determined, always.

And sometimes as stubborn as a mule. But never desperate.

He gripped the phone tighter. “Okay, Pete. What the hell’s going on ?”

There was a long pause—long enough to make him wonder whether he’d lost the connection to Berlin.

Finally, Thorn said, “Helen and I need your help, sir. But frankly I’m not sure you should give it to us.”

What? Farrell’s frown grew deeper. “Try me.”

“Okay, sir,” Thorn said. “Here’s the situation we’re in …”

Farrell listened intently as the younger man outlined what he and Helen Gray had done since escaping the carnage aboard that rusting freighter in Pechenga. He found himself shaking his head in growing astonishment at each successive scrape that the two had plunged themselves into.