Takedown (An Alexandra Poe Thriller) (2 page)

Malina checked her watch and said, “We have to hurry. The guard will be making his rounds soon.”

Ivan frowned. “How do you know all this?”

“You think we’re working alone? We have friends, Ivan. All over the world. Always remember that.”

“Yes, but…”

“Just hurry up. We need to get inside the train before the guard comes.”

But as they stepped over a set of tracks and headed into the narrow passageway between two parked trains, the silhouette of a man appeared several yards in front of them.
 

“You!” he shouted. “Stop right there. Who
are
you?”

A beam of light cut through the darkness and lit up their faces. Ivan jerked to a halt, but, to his surprise, Malina did not. Instead, in a single, flowing motion, she took a step forward, slipped her backpack from her shoulder, and produced a pistol from inside, firing two shots in quick succession, the sound dulled by the attached silencer.

Ivan heard a groan as the guard’s flashlight fell to the ground. Malina sprang forward, stepping over to where the man now lay. Without hesitation, she fired another shot into his head.

Oh, Jesus
.
She just killed him in cold blood.

Malina turned to Ivan and shone her miniature flashlight at him. “It had to be done,” she said. “I couldn’t let him radio for help.”

Ivan stood there, unable to move, his legs trembling. Killing a train full of anonymous people from a remote location was a notion he could view in the abstract, but killing a man up close and in person was something else altogether.

The buzz in his stomach began to rise toward his chest and throat, carrying with it the chicken chow mein he and Malina had eaten for dinner. She must have sensed his dismay, because she moved toward him, her light still in his face.

“Pull it together, Ivan. Can you do that for me?”

He knew she had the gun in her other hand and wondered if she would use it on
him
. Swallowing bile, he nodded, vigorously, but couldn’t make himself speak.

“You need to pull it together, all right? Put the suitcase down, very carefully, and help me move him inside.” She gestured to the line of subway cars on their right.

Ivan nodded a second time, stooped down, and carefully set the suitcase on the ground. She gestured again and he joined her and took his first good look at the guard. The guy couldn’t have been much older than they were. He had died with surprise on his face and dark round holes in his chest and forehead.

Ivan had never seen a dead man before, and the chow mein once again threatened to choke him.

“Are you good?” Malina asked. “I can’t do this alone.”

Ivan nodded a third time.

Malina studied him for a moment as if waiting for him to change his mind. When she seemed satisfied he wouldn’t, she moved to the nearest subway car in his chosen row, and pried the doors open with a crowbar from her backpack.

“Grab his feet,” she said as she returned to Ivan and the dead man.

Ivan didn’t resist. What was the point? Still trembling, he grabbed hold of the guard’s ankles as Malina took the man by the armpits. She counted
one-two-three
and they hefted the body, carried it through the open doorway into the subway car, and laid it on the floor.

“Get the case,” she said.

The moment he returned with it, she took it from him and laid it flat on one of the plastic chairs in the middle of the car. Handing him her flashlight, she told him to shine it on the case, then popped the latches and swung the lid open, revealing the pipes full of explosives and the wires and the cell phone mounted to a small board in the center of it all.

The phone had been modified and given to her by one of her uncle’s contacts—a burner, she’d called it. But a very special one.

“You call the number,” she had explained the first time she’d shown him her creation. “The phone vibrates, the wires connect, and
boom
.”

“You can call it from any phone?”

“Yes, from any phone. Anywhere.”
 

Now, she flipped a small lever that looked like a miniature light switch mounted near the phone, then closed the lid, locked the case, and placed it on the floor under the seat.

She gestured to the body of the guard. “They’re bound to start wondering about him at some point. We’ll have to hide him somewhere in the yard and hope they—”

The ring of a cell phone cut her off.
 

Ivan flinched, thinking the sound had come from the suitcase, but then realized it was Malina’s personal phone. She pulled it from her back pocket, looking as relieved as he felt. When she saw the name on the screen, she smiled and pressed a button, putting it on speakerphone so Ivan could hear.

“Uncle Radovan,” she said. “I was hoping you’d call. We had some unexpected trouble, but we’ve just delivered the package and it’s ready to go.”

“That is good to know,” a voice said, but it was clearly not the one Malina had been expecting. The accent sounded German.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“People call me Valac.”

“Who?”

“I am a friend of your Uncle’s. Unfortunately, it seems he is very much in need of a lesson in proper business etiquette.”

Malina looked alarmed. “What does that mean? What have you done to him?”

 
“It means you pay your debts on time or you will be assessed a surtax. A very significant surtax. Something he is about to learn the hard way.”

“I don’t understand. What do my uncle’s debts have to do with me? Have you done something to him?”

“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “Do you mind if I call you back?”

“I—”

The line went dead and Malina remained crouched there, looking both exasperated and dumbfounded.
 

Ivan was about to ask her what was going on when her expression shifted, as if she had just thought of the solution to a very difficult puzzle, but found no comfort in the answer at all.
 

“Oh my God,” she said. She jumped to her feet and shouted, her voice filled with panic, “Run, Ivan. Run!
Run
!”

But before either of them could take a single step, another cell phone rang—this one muffled by the aluminum case it was stored in.

Then the world around them exploded, tearing Ivan Kovac and the love of his short life into a thousand tiny pieces.

Istanbul, Turkey—Six Months Later

W
HEN
SHE
WAS
young, Alexandra Poe had often dreamed of working in a hospital, but
this
wasn’t exactly what she’d had in mind.

The scrubs she wore were half a size too small and her shoes squeaked. And as she worked her way through the corridor, she felt uncomfortable and conspicuous, certain she wasn’t blending in as well as they had hoped she would.

Fortunately, despite its age and current state of disrepair, Yardim Hastanesi was one of the busiest hospitals in all of Istanbul. Alex tried to convince herself that anyone watching—Yusuf Solak’s bodyguards, for example—would see her as nothing more than another woman in hospital green.
 

Pretending to read the chart in her hands, she made her way to the elevator at the far end of the corridor. The uniformed guard who waited outside its open doors had undoubtedly been paid off by Solak. He was checking the credentials of anyone who attempted to board.

Alex kept her eyes on the chart and acted as if she hadn’t noticed him, but he stopped her just short of stepping inside.

She smiled politely, hoping to disarm him a bit, but he was all business. He snapped his fingers and gestured to the ID card clipped to the lanyard around her neck.

She removed it and handed it to him.
 

As he studied it, he said in guttural Turkish, “Where are you headed?”

The words came out so quickly that Alex barely understood them.
 

In the months since she had associated herself with Stonewell International, she had spent her spare time taking crash courses in a multitude of languages. Her instructors had been surprised to discover she was something of a savant. What took most people weeks to learn took Alex only a matter of days, including conversational Turkish, which she had come very close to mastering—although not quite as close as she liked to believe.

“Where are you headed?” the guard repeated impatiently. “Which floor?”

She caught it this time and said, “The radiology lab on four.” Istanbul was a melting pot and the small imperfections in her accent didn’t seem to faze him. She pointed to the ID. “See? I’m an X-ray technician.”

He studied the card again, then handed it back to her without expression and let her pass.
 

Alex heaved an inward sigh of relief and got on board, where two nurses, a doctor, and three civilians were waiting, none of them happy about the delay.
 

One of the nurses muttered something unintelligible and hit a button on the panel.

Friendly place.

The doors closed and Alex leaned past her, bypassed the button for the fourth floor and pressed six instead. The elevator car groaned and lurched into motion, a lumbering beast that wasn’t any happier than its occupants. Alex waited patiently as the numbers above the door ticked off their progress.
 

The car stopped at floors two and five before finally landing on six.

When the doors rolled open, she was the only passenger left, which was just as well considering how crowded it was up here. Several patients lay on gurneys in the hallway, waiting for someone to attend to them. The hospital staffers chatting nearby seemed about as interested in these poor people as weary morgue attendants in a room full of corpses.

“I’m on the target’s floor,” she said quietly. The pen clipped to her breast pocket had an extremely sensitive microphone built into it.

“Good,” Cooper said in her ear. “What’s your ETA?”

“Half a minute, give or take. Deuce, are you in position?”

“Ready whenever you are, kid.”

Alex threaded her way past the gurneys, giving one of the patients a reassuring pat, and moved down the corridor, headed in the direction of Room 633.

Yusuf Solak’s room.

After grabbing a stray wheelchair, she pushed it in front of her as she rounded a corner and found herself in a much less crowded hallway—empty except for two casually dressed but very dangerous-looking men, who immediately eyed her with suspicion.

Solak’s bodyguards. Both were JİT, Turkish Gendarmerie Intelligence, doing a bit of moonlighting on Solak’s dime. Alex knew from the intel that there should be two more men inside the room, and another half dozen in various parts of the building, including the stairwell where Deuce was poised and ready to strike.

She pushed the wheelchair toward the bodyguards, offering a smile. One of them came forward and raised a hand, commanding her to “Halt.”

When she did, he unceremoniously grabbed her by the elbow, shoved her against the nearest wall, and ran his hands along her sides and up and down her legs, coming perilously close to a molestation charge. She half expected him to order her to drop trou, but she was spared the indignity as he turned her around and decided instead to concentrate on her bra.

When he was done pawing her breasts, he took hold of her arm again and shoved her back toward the wheelchair.

“She’s clean,” he said to his partner. “Let her through.”

The partner nodded and stepped aside, offering her a crude grin as he gestured toward the open doorway to Room 633. She could feel his gaze on her as she passed, no doubt studying her ass, and she hoped he stuck around long enough to let her wipe away that grin with a well-placed fist.

She was greeted at the doorway by another bodyguard, this one smaller than his colleagues but no less dangerous. “Who are
you
?” he said.

No trouble with comprehension this time.

“Enise,” she told him. “From radiology. Mr. Karga is due for an X-ray.”

As a security precaution, Solak had been admitted under the name Nazim Karga, his occupation listed as importer-exporter. What the hospital didn’t know was that “Mr. Karga” exported terror, in many different forms. The network he commanded was responsible for a number of attacks on US and European targets, and had ties to the Taliban and several Islamist splinter groups in Iran, placing him on a number of wanted lists around the world.

As a result, Stonewell International, which specialized in fugitive retrieval, had been commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security to do a little exporting of its own. And because Alex was female and half Persian, allowing her to easily infiltrate the facility, she and her team had been tasked with grabbing Solak from his hospital bed and putting him on the next available transport out of the country.

Despite mixed feelings about her association with Stonewell, Alex had no misgivings whatsoever about the target. Slugs like Solak set her teeth on edge, and she was all too happy to be part of this acquisition.

The guy in the doorway frowned at her. “We weren’t told about any X-rays.”

“It’s right here on the chart.” Alex showed it to him.
 

He took it from her and flipped impatiently through the pages that had been expertly forged by Stonewell’s Photoshop whizzes.

“This is indecipherable,” he said. “What are all these numbers and abbreviations?”

“Things I spent many years in school to learn.” She pointed to a line on the top page. “There it is, right there. AP and lateral CSRX, two o’clock.” She checked her watch. “And if we don’t hurry, he’ll be late.”

“Who ordered this?”

She pointed again. “That’s there, too. Doctor Hasan.”

Hasan was one of three doctors who had been caring for Solak since his heart bypass a week earlier, and as far as Alex knew, he hadn’t ordered a damn thing. But it would take the guards a while to figure this out, and all she needed was to get inside Solak’s room. Once Deuce did his thing, the rest should fall into place.

That was the theory, at least.

The bodyguard sighed impatiently, handed back the chart, then gestured Alex through the doorway.