Out of Range: A Novel (24 page)

Chapter Forty-five

T
he complex was constructed in a rough ladder shape, with two main longitudinal halls and a number of smaller connecting hallways, some of which were straight and some of which contained confusing doglegs and cul-de-sacs. Salim and Charlie started at the eastern edge of the tunnel complex and worked their way west, room by room, hall by hall. The first few hallways consisted mainly of living and eating quarters. Because the staff of the missile command had been far larger than Byko had ever needed, most of the rooms were empty and dank, smelling of mold and neglect.

At the other end of the complex were briefing rooms, offices, control rooms and so on. Some were full of equipment that had been obsolete long before the Cold War was over—tube-driven amplifiers and radio sets, broken oscilloscopes, controls for missiles that had been dismantled decades ago.

Occasionally they found signs of recent use—coffee cups, pens, stocks of tin cans, a microwave oven, an occasional box of ammunition. But no sign of Julie. No sign of Byko. And no sign of anything related to his planned attacks or where he and his men might have gone.

As they worked their way closer to the end of the complex, Charlie began to feel less and less hopeful and then, halfway down the final hallway, they found the small white-painted room. Cameras in all four corners of the ceiling, drain set into the concrete floor, white chair with Velcro straps at the wrists and ankles.

This was where Julie had been held, and interrogated and tortured.

“She was here?” Salim asked.

Charlie picked out a couple of wavy brown hairs from one of the Velcro straps. He thought he could actually smell her.

“I think she is still alive,” Salim said matter-of-factly. “If they killed her, there would be blood.”

Charlie took in the boy. Six years earlier, Salim’s own brother had been killed in a room much like this. But that didn’t make the kid an expert. What he didn’t know was what the drain on the floor meant. Quinn could have easily drowned Julie in here and dumped her body in any one of the scores of rooms in the complex.

One way or another, Charlie needed to know for sure.

“Let’s finish,” Charlie said and headed back into the hallway.

It hadn’t been obvious until they reached the final corridor, but now that Charlie was here, it seemed clear that this had been the area where Byko’s people had spent most of their time. The walls were freshly painted, the lights brighter, and the electrical system appeared to have been newly restored to fit the world of laptops and cell phone chargers. There were also full wastebaskets, uneaten food, discarded clothes, and various other signs that people had recently left in a hurry.

“You start at that end and I’ll keep working my way down from this end,” Charlie whispered. “And be careful,” he warned. “If there’s anybody left, they’re here somewhere.”

Charlie checked two more rooms. There were clear signs of recent use, but nothing that pointed to Julie’s presence. He was about to step back into the hallway when he heard a soft, stealthy creak.

Charlie poked his head out and scanned the corridor. Salim was standing at the far end, fingers poised on the handle of a door, trying to pull it open. Apparently the door was locked and Charlie felt certain that the creaky sound did not come from Salim.

That was when Charlie saw—halfway down the corridor—another door slowly opening. Before Charlie could call out, the door burst open and Hasan emerged.

Salim whirled, ready to fight but then he saw the red dot of the laser from Hasan’s tricked-out machine gun pointed at his chest. He dropped his rifle, hope draining from his eyes.

Charlie had a shot from where he was—fifty yards down the hall—but the chances of hitting Hasan from that distance were next to impossible.

“Who’s with you?” Hasan barked. “How many of you are there?”

Salim’s eyes flicked over Hasan’s shoulder. Charlie crept closer, a finger to his mouth, shhh.

“Please,” Salim said, trying to stall. “Don’t hurt me. I’m just a—”

“How many?” Hasan hissed.

Charlie took one step, then another. Then another.

“The rest are dead,” Salim said. “They were killed by your men.”

Closer. Charlie needed to be ten yards closer.

“Who sent you?”

Three more steps.

One, two . . .

“Who sent you!” Hasan demanded again.

As Salim was about to answer, Charlie’s shoe squeaked. In any other circumstance the noise would have been so insignificant as to be unnoticeable. But here, Charlie might as well have set off a firecracker.

Hasan turned.

And Charlie fired. Pressing the trigger as fast as he could.

Hasan roared like a wounded lion, his AK-47 haphazardly spewing bullets as he stumbled toward Charlie, trying to find his balance.

Charlie ducked but kept firing and Hasan collapsed, his rifle falling to the floor.

Charlie was still pointing the pistol at him, squeezing the trigger over and over. But the gun was empty.

Hasan was bleeding profusely from his shoulder and neck, but the fight hadn’t gone out of him. “What you gonna do now?” he growled. “You got no bullets left.”

“No,” Salim said, stepping toward him with his rifle. “But he’s got me.”

“Where’s Julie?” Charlie barked at Hasan.

“They’re gone,” Hasan said. “You never going to find them now.”

Charlie grabbed the AK and pointed it in Hasan’s face, finger tightening on the trigger. “Answer now or you’re a dead man.”

The big man broke into a coughing fit, his face going pale. He grabbed at his bloody neck, trying to staunch the bleeding, but his body gave out, eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

Even in death there seemed to be defiance in his eyes.

C
harlie sat with his back against the wall, holding his head in his hands as Salim worked his way down the hallway, checking the last few doors. His mind felt as empty as the bunker in which he sat—a hollowed-out shell, nothing of any substance left. With Hasan dead, with no evidence here of any kind as to where Byko had taken Julie, this was the end of the line.

For a moment Charlie pictured himself arriving at home, having to tell the kids that he’d gone all this way and come back empty-handed. What would their faces look like? How would they feel? For Ollie, losing his mother would leave a scar that would probably never heal. But what about Meagan? She was young enough that she might forget Julie altogether, her only memories of her mother cobbled together from the photos and home videos they’d taken. Which would be worse? The loss or the absence of any memory at all?

As he was mulling this over, Salim came out of the last door and shook his head. Charlie looked away, his gaze falling on Hasan’s lifeless body.

Then something struck him.

Why was Hasan here? He didn’t seem like the hide-out-and-keep-his-head-down type. He was Byko’s personal bodyguard, yet he had stayed behind.

Charlie stood and looked into the room from which Hasan had exited. As Salim had already reported, it was basically empty. A table, an iPod trailing a pair of white earphones and an empty bookcase of gray-painted steel. That was it. As innocuous as a room could possibly be. And yet something about it didn’t seem right. Charlie found his eye drawn to the bookcase and realized that it was sitting at an odd angle, as though it had been hurriedly shoved into place. He moved toward it and noticed scrape marks on the floor.

The bookcase had been moved.

“Give me a hand, Salim!”

Salim came into the room and together they dragged the heavy bookcase to the side.

Sure enough, they found a door. Charlie yanked it open and walked in.

The room was brightly lit and lined with painted white walls. There were several racks of modern computer servers and several cubicles containing various computers and monitors. Plus a radio and a phone. This was the nerve center of the facility.

And every single piece of equipment in the room was wired with explosives.

Charlie eyed Salim warily. “That’s why Hasan was left behind. He was supposed to blow the place.”

Salim nodded and stepped forward cautiously. “Don’t touch anything,” Charlie warned, looking around for some sort of detonation timer.

What he found was a small black box attached to some wires. A tiny red light burned on the front of the box. But other than that, there was no clear sign of what it did or how it worked.

He felt pretty sure that the explosives couldn’t detonate spontaneously. But still . . .

Where was the trigger for the detonator?

And then something else caught his eye. Sitting on a table off to the side of the room—a computer that looked like it was owned by an individual. A sleek Apple, the screen still lit up, a wire connecting it to the big stack of servers.

shut down now? said an icon in the middle of the screen.

“I think you should get out of here,” Charlie told Salim.

“What are you going to do?”

“Just go. To the next corridor.”

Salim hesitated but headed out.

Charlie waited two minutes—long enough for Salim to get far away—then moved the mouse over the button that said no.

He took a deep breath and clicked.

Chapter Forty-six

Q
uinn sat in the back of Byko’s Escalade, which was hitched to a flat car thundering through the tunnel from one end of the Vasilevsky Missile Complex to the other. The small train of about half a dozen cars, including a battered old electric engine and a Spartan crew car, ran on narrow-gauge rails of the sort used in mining operations. The flatbed cars had been built to transport both medium-range ballistic missiles and tracked military vehicles, and so served well for transporting the SUVs in Quinn’s convoy. But it was so dark inside the tunnels that Quinn could see none of this.

They had left a skeleton crew at the command center to guard the place while Byko’s most trusted bodyguard, Hasan, wired the communications equipment to blow. Quinn had managed to convince Byko to leave his own computer at the command center, to be blown up along with the rest of the gear. The more places that information was stored, the greater the possibility of penetration, and as far as Quinn was concerned, Byko was already too exposed.

After eleven months in the man’s employ, Byko remained an enigma to Quinn. How could a man willing to unleash dirty bombs all over the world have such a weakness for this woman? This woman who had lied to him and betrayed him? Who had humiliated him and nearly destroyed him?

And now here she was, sleeping like a baby—they’d been forced to give her a sedative—her head leaning against Byko’s shoulder as if they were still lovers.

Quinn supposed that she was attractive in her way, that there was a certain earnest quality in her that might be intoxicating to a man looking for reassurance. But still . . . to drag her along with them now? To what end?

In spite of himself, Quinn had to admit that he admired her spunk and tenacity. She’d endured almost everything he could dish out—the drugs, the waterboarding, the hours of sleep deprivation—and still, when they’d tried to remove her from the bunker, she’d writhed and fought like a wounded animal, cursing them all for killing her husband. Quinn smiled—he thought that was rather a nice touch on Byko’s part, lying to her about Charlie’s demise.

Byko looked up at Quinn, as if he knew he was being observed, and nudged Julie’s head off of him.

“Do you have a signal yet?” Byko asked.

Quinn suspected he was merely trying to change the subject, unspoken though it was, from Julie to Hasan, but he checked his cell phone for effect. “It’s not going to work down here. We’ll use the hard line when we get to the silo.”

“How long?”

“Less than five.”

Byko shifted in his seat, glanced again at Julie, then stared out the window into the darkness.

What drove a man like him? How had he progressed from libertine playboy to rabid revolutionary to international terrorist in less than a decade? Quinn supposed the drugs had something to do with it. And the deaths in his family, of course. But there was no way that could be the whole story. People lost their families all the time. Quinn was no psychologist, but he suspected there must have been something megalomaniacal about Byko from a very early age. Maybe it was being surrounded by all of that wealth and power and violence. Maybe it was knowing from the time he was a toddler that he would inherit billions.

Who the hell knows?
Quinn thought.
Who the hell cares really?
He was getting his fifty million and soon he’d be sitting on an island in Fiji sipping banana daquiris on a private beach in front of his own goddamn mansion.

The train shuddered, jerked and began to slow with a scream of rarely used brakes as it pulled into a concrete bunker similar to the terminus at the command center.

“We’re here,” Quinn said.

He bounded out of the car and leaped onto the platform while the train was still moving, heading straight for an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone handset that hung from a concrete pillar near an air-lock door. He lifted the handset, consulted the brass plate with its list of Cyrillic numbers and dialed the four-digit extension for the command center.

It rang and rang and rang.

“Nobody’s answering,” Quinn told Byko as he hung up. “That probably means it’s done. I’ll go up top. We can catch a cell signal there.”

Quinn headed up a huge concrete ramp, leaving behind workers busy unhitching the vehicles from the train cars. Predictably, Byko stayed with Julie. When Quinn reached the top of the ramp, he found himself standing on a high desert plateau. The sun had just set and a moonless night cloaked the world in darkness.

He took out his secure cell phone. It was a very sophisticated model that generated unique SIM numbers for each call, making it essentially impossible to trace, and then it encrypted each call so that anyone who happened to lock on to the signal would be unable to make any sense of it. He dialed the number for Hasan’s sat phone. Unlike cell phones, which depended on proximity to cell towers, a sat phone would work almost anywhere on earth. As long as Hasan was aboveground, he’d be able to reach him.

But again, Hasan didn’t answer.

Quinn tried three more times, each time allowing the phone to ring for at least a minute.

As a fallback, Hasan was supposed to leave a message on a one-time-only voice mail box to confirm the job was done. Quinn tried that. But there was nothing there either.

An aching feeling rose slowly in Quinn’s chest.

Something had gone wrong.