A Red Dotted Line (Mike Walton Book 2) Read online

  “Is the asset dead?” Phillips asked. Truth was, he was feeling guilty as hell about hoping it was the case.

  “We can’t confirm death at this point, Richard. And don’t sound so fucking happy about this,” Mapother said, his tone glacial.

  “I’m not, Charles,” Phillips replied, making sure to keep his tone in check. “But I’m sure you know as well as I do what capturing one of your assets could mean to this administration, yes?”

  “I won’t even bother to reply to your stupid remark, Richard,” Mapother said. “I was under the impression you actually cared about the men and women serving this country. Was I wrong?”

  “You know damn well how I feel about them?” Phillips replied, yelling into his phone. How dare Mapother say something like this to him? Hadn’t he proved his loyalty already?

  “Just wanted to make sure where you stood,” Mapother said. “Because there’s something else we need to discuss.”

  Goddamn it. What now?

  “We’ve looked at some info we were able to put our hands on and it doesn’t look good, Richard,” Mapother started. “From what we’ve got, I can pretty much tell you that the Russians were successful at creating a new thread of the Marburg virus.”

  Phillips sighed. I’ll definitely have to go to the president with this.

  “This isn’t some kind of speculation, is it?” he asked. “You actually have proof of this?”

  “I wouldn’t call you if I didn’t,” Mapother replied. “The intelligence was passed to us by someone I’ve dealt with in the past.”

  “What’s next?”

  “I have another asset in Moscow. His job is to determine how far along the Russians are in the process of producing this new virus and what is the Sheik’s involvement.”

  “Too bad you weren’t able to kill him in Croatia,” Phillips said.

  “I’ll let you know once I have more info,” Mapother added before hanging up.

  Phillips finished his business and got up from the toilet, only to find himself falling back on his seat again. His legs had cramped from sitting on the toilet for too long. Again.

  CHAPTER 42

  Moscow, Russia

  Mike Walton used his infrared binoculars to scan for any other threats in the vicinity while Victor kept an eye on the SUV.

  “It’s all quiet,” Mike said. “If someone’s lurking, I can’t see them.”

  “I don’t think they positioned anyone else,” Victor replied, keeping his voice down. “We would have seen another vehicle. This one was full and everyone is accounted for.”

  If they acted quickly and managed to surprise the Sheik’s men, Mike was confident they could overtake them all without much problem. The wild card was Victor. Mike was still not one hundred percent sure about him. But he needed his help.

  “Ready?”

  The Russian nodded.

  Mike emerged from the relative safety of the shadows and headed toward the SUV. If Victor had bluffed his way, Mike would find out now. He’d be shot in the back. Half expecting a bullet in the back of the head, Mike continued along the sidewalk. His senses were alert and he embraced the adrenaline rush that came every time he put himself in danger. There were no safety nets on these kinds of operations and Mike compared them to parachuting in the dark. A simple slip or mistake could trigger a whole chain of events that would result in his death.

  His plan for taking out the driver was simple enough. He would approach the SUV from behind and lightly touch the side windows to see if they were bulletproof. If they weren’t, he would fire at the driver from the outside. If they were, he’d continue walking to the end of the street and Victor would take over. Twenty feet away from the vehicle, Mike could see that the SUV was a G-Class Mercedes and that it was probably armored. Mike had seen these exact vehicles while training with the Germans for a protection mission back when he was working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He didn’t even have to touch the windows to know they were reinforced. A large caliber round would go through but his pistol would do no more than chip the window.

  Hands deep in his pockets, Mike walked past the Mercedes without glancing at it or attempting to look inside. The tinted windows would have prevented him from seeing anything anyway.

  The ball was now in Victor’s camp and Mike would know soon enough if he had been right to trust the Russian with his life.

  ........

  Victor Simonich swore under his breath. How many other things would go wrong before the day was over? When he woke up this morning, he would never have believed anyone telling him how this day would shape up. Nevertheless, he was proud of what he was doing. When he saw Mike walk by the SUV without firing his weapon, Victor knew it was his turn to act.

  He approached the SUV with confidence and hoped the driver wouldn’t notice he had no car. The only thing he needed the driver to do was open the door of his vehicle. Victor would take care of the rest but he needed to hurry. The rest of the Sheik’s men would come down any moment now.

  Victor knocked on the window, his badge out. “Police,” he said.

  The deeply tinted windows forbade him a look at the driver. “Turn off the engine,” Victor ordered in Russian. The driver didn’t obey, but responded by opening his window a couple of inches.

  “We’re on official government business. Just run our license plate, you’ll see,” the driver said, closing his window. This is taking too long. I’m running out of time.

  “I already did and it came back stolen,” Victor replied, taking his gun out and aiming it at the window. “I need to see some ID.”

  The window stopped its ascent and the man swore in Arabic. “Nonsense,” he said in Russian, but the window was coming back down.

  Victor fired his PB silent pistol the moment the window was lowered enough for him to see the man’s eyes. But the driver must have felt something was wrong because he ducked and Victor’s first bullet missed. The driver fired back at Victor, hitting him high on the left shoulder. The Mercedes probably had the “one touch down” button option because the window kept going down while both men continued firing at each other at close range. Victor was hit again and he fell to the pavement, two new holes in his body. His rounds had also found their mark as the driver slumped to his side. Victor’s last round had mushroomed into his brain.

  As he lay on the street, his eyes to the black skies, Victor swore he saw a bright shooting star pass just over him. He briefly wondered why he had never seen one before. Then darkness took over.

  ........

  Mike Walton knew there was trouble the moment he heard gunfire. Victor’s PB silent pistol might not have been completely noiseless but it didn’t produce the noise level he had just heard. His own pistol out in front of him, Mike sprinted to the Mercedes just in time to see Victor collapse on the street like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  Fuck.

  He was fifty feet from the SUV when he noticed movement at the building’s entrance. Four armed men were coming out, running toward the Mercedes. Mike automatically dropped to his knees to establish a better, more-stable firing position. Lying flat on the sidewalk would have made him a smaller target, but firing a pistol from a prone position was much more difficult and precision was often less than spectacular.

  Mike pulled the trigger as fast as he could while maintaining proper sight alignment. He started working on the man closest to the Mercedes and worked his way to his left. He fired ten rounds in less than three seconds. Caught by surprise, the three men Mike fired at first fell almost together. The fourth one went down too but returned fired. His shots went high and right. Mike rolled to his left and fired again, this time taking half a second to do so. His round hit the man in head. He hoped he hadn’t killed the first three men to go down. He did a tactical magazine change and cautiously approached the downed men while making sure he kept the SUV in his line of s
ight in case Victor had failed to neutralize the driver.5

  Two of the men were still moving. Clearly in pain, one of them saw him and looked for the firearm he had dropped at his side. Blood came from two bullet wounds in his legs. He used his arms to thrust himself forward, toward the Mercedes.

  The wailing of police sirens pierced the night and their proximity told Mike he had, at best, a minute or two before they were on scene. Betting the man who was crawling to the SUV was in good enough shape to answer his questions, Mike fired at point blank range into the head of the other surviving member of the Sheik’s team before he grabbed onto the injured man. The man rolled onto his back and yelled something in Russian.

  Mike shoved the barrel of his pistol into the man’s mouth, breaking two teeth in the process. “You speak English?”

  The man nodded with enthusiasm. Satisfied he had picked the right man, Mike slammed the butt of his pistol into the man’s forehead, knocking him unconscious. He then advanced toward the SUV, pretty sure that if the driver hadn’t engaged him by now, Victor had taken care of him.

  Shit! Victor. I can’t leave him here.

  The sirens were now dangerously close. As he moved to the driver’s side of the SUV, he saw Victor twitch on the pavement. A large puddle a dark blood poured out from under him.

  Mike kneeled next to Victor. The man was still alive.

  “Shit, Victor, I’m sorry,” Mike said, desperately trying to find the entry wounds.

  “Don’t let it be . . . for nothing,” the Russian replied, his voice barely audible. But Victor still had enough strength to push Mike’s hands away from him. “Don’t let all of this fool you . . . my American friend. Russia . . . is a great . . . country. Proud.”

  “I know.”

  “Go. Now . . .”

  “Fuck,” Mike said out loud as the last sign of life vanished from Victor’s eyes, leaving them fixed, blank and empty.

  Mike jumped to his feet and rushed to the SUV. He reached inside and unlocked the doors. He grabbed the dead driver and threw him on the ground next to Victor. He then hurried back to the man he had knocked unconscious and dragged him inside the Mercedes and placed him on the back seat.

  Mike climbed into the driver’s seat and drove away with only seconds to spare before the first police vehicle turned onto the street. It took five minutes to reach the highway and another two minutes until he was satisfied he wasn’t being followed. Mike wasn’t naïve enough to believe he was safe, though. He glanced at the unconscious man on the backseat and wondered if he hadn’t hit him too hard.

  It would be a shame to have gone through all this only to accidentally kill the man that could lead him to the Sheik. Before he could attest to the man’s health, he needed to contact Support Two.

  “Are you okay?” Cooper asked. “The police have sent numerous units to the Solntsevo District.”

  “I need help, James, and I need it now.”

  “Anything,” Cooper replied.

  “Do we have a safe house in Moscow?”

  “We don’t. But I can have an ad hoc one in thirty minutes.”

  Shit! “A hotel room? That won’t do.”

  “That’s the best we can do on such short notice. We aren’t in—”

  “Stop with the excuses, James,” Mike roared. “I know we’re in Russia but I need a place where I can interrogate someone and I need it now.”

  “What about the embassy?”

  “I’ll call you back when you stop talking nonsense,” Mike said before he terminated the call.

  Did the CIA or any other federal agencies have one they could share? That would cost Mapother a lot of IOUs, but what if he could arrange one? It was worth a try.

  “Holy shit, Mike!” Mapother exclaimed once the call went through. “What did you do?”

  “What I had to, Charles, and now isn’t the time to debrief. I need help.”

  Mapother’s tone changed immediately. “Whatever you need.”

  “I hope you mean that because what I need is a real safe house in Moscow.”

  “What else?” Mapother replied.

  “You have one?” Mike asked. Didn’t Support Two just tell him there weren’t any?

  “Kind of. What else?”

  “That’s it for now. But I’ll need Support Two to take care of the vehicle I borrowed from the Sheik.”

  There was a long silence on the other end and Mike thought the line had been cut.

  “I just sent the pertinent info regarding the safe house to your smartphone.”

  “Thanks. How did you—”

  “It doesn’t matter how I got it, Mike, I got it. And one last thing?”

  “I’m listening.” Mike looked in his rearview mirror for any sign he had picked up a tail.

  “The intelligence Support Two forwarded to us is invaluable but we need to corroborate it before it can be dispatched to the rest of the community. It’s just too big.”

  “Understood. I’ll get you what you need. And much more.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Moscow, Russia

  Sheik Qasim Al-Assad pressed the button that would send his text message to Lidiya Votyakov. When news of the attack had reached him, he had felt the clutch of fear for the first time in a very long time. He still needed to find out exactly why he had felt this way. Was it because Lidiya still meant something to him? Or was it because without her, there was no way he’d be able to achieve the results the Russian president expected of him?

  “Sheik Al-Assad?” said the female Russian agent working the operation center.

  “What is it?” the Sheik replied, walking to her workstation.

  “Your team isn’t responding,” she said. “And we’re receiving numerous reports of shots fired on location.”

  The Sheik had dispatched two teams. The first one, a team of two, was in Koltsovo conducting surveillance on Dr. Galkin’s wife. Only the Sheik, and other persons the Russian president had chosen, knew that Sophia Galkin had stopped loving her husband decades ago, but she had stayed with him because he was a good man. A loyal man. But everything changed when he confessed to her that he had contacted an American acquaintance regarding his work at Biopreparat. He had told her to be ready to leave at an instant’s notice. The Russian president had not been very clear about why she had betrayed her husband, but the next morning, Sophia Galkin had contacted her brother, an FSB agent working in Moscow. The Sheik suspected that the opposition didn’t know about the differences between Dr. Galkin and his wife, and that if a deal had been reached they’d tried to get Sophia out of Russia.

  The second team, a team of five, was in the Solntsevo District. Their orders were to verify that the address where he had originally planned to conduct the interview with Dr. Galkin hadn’t been breached. The fact that shots were fired didn’t worry him. It simply confirmed that somehow the opposition had found out about the safe house he kept in the Solntsevo District. What troubled him was that they didn’t respond. These five men were the best he had in Moscow.

  “The police are now on location, Sheik Al-Assad,” the Russian agent said.

  With Dr. Galkin dead and Victor Simonich not answering his phone, the Sheik didn’t like the direction the whole operation was suddenly taking. They were still far from ready to launch a full-scale biological attack on the United States. They had a few doses ready, but that wouldn’t be enough to consider moving forward with the original plan. And with the threat of discovery, he was afraid the Russian president would cut his losses. And cut me loose.

  “The police say that there are several bodies.”

  “Any signs of our SUV? It’s a G-Class Mercedes.”

  “There’s no mention of that yet,” the male Russian agent replied from the other side of the room. He was holding a police radio to his ear. “Everybody’s dead. There are no survivors.”

  “
I want to know what happened,” the Sheik yelled. This can’t be happening. He needed to find out who the opposition was and what they knew about Biopreparat’s discovery. Whoever they were, they couldn’t leave Russia. He had to think about a way to hide what had just happened from the Russian president.

  “Sheik Al-Assad, we’re getting a live report from Koltsovo,” said the female agent. “A team of FSB agents found your men dead in Sophia Galkin’s apartment.”

  The Sheik felt as if he had just been punched in the stomach. Since the terrible loss suffered at Benalmadena, only bad news seemed to find its way to him. Why was he so cursed? Two years ago he was on top; now he was fighting for survival. And it had all started with Charles Mapother. How could he turn the tables on the man who had wreaked havoc on his organization? Could he use Ray Powell somehow?

  “They found a woman,” she added. “And she’s still alive. Looks like she’s been shot numerous time.”

  “Who is she?” the Sheik asked.

  It took a moment for the female agent to reply. “There’s no ID on her. The agents are taking a picture. We’ll get it in a minute.”

  The Sheik paced the room. This could be the breakthrough he was looking for. If he could catch one of his foes alive, he’d find a way to get the answers he needed.

  “This is from the Solntsevo District, Sheik Al-Assad,” said the male agent. “Victor Simonich is amongst the dead. His body was found next to one of your men.”

  The Sheik wondered how the Russian president would react to the loss of his nephew. Not well, he guessed. But I might be able to use his anger to push forward even with our latest setbacks.

  “Here’s the picture, sir,” the female agent said. “It’s coming online now.”