Darkness(2)

Eyes narrowed against the blowing snow, Cal started walking toward the trucks.

He’d done a lot of things he didn’t want to do in his thirty-four years of life. One way or another, most of them had been for money.

Getting Rudy Delgado out of Kazakhstan was about to be one of them.

Rudy was a computer hacker. One of the best. Ten years before, under the cover of his legitimate day job as an IT specialist for the CIA, he’d gone into the system, found and publicly exposed dozens of clandestine operations that at that time had been under way in the Middle East, with the justification that he opposed the United States’ presence there. The public uproar had been enormous. The private backlash had cost serving officers their lives.

Having thus royally screwed the pooch, Rudy had fled the country, eventually winding up in Russia. In the years since, he’d continued working in IT, only for that country’s security services. It had been a sweet deal: Rudy did what the Russian government wanted, and they protected him from the Americans and let him live.

Only Rudy being Rudy, he’d gotten ambitious. He’d hacked his way into their classified files and started poking around.

The Russians being the Russians, they hadn’t liked that.

Nor had they liked what he’d found.

Rudy had fled again.

This time everybody and his mother was after him.

He’d wound up in Kazakhstan, where, via his specialty, the Internet, he dropped a bombshell on his former bosses at the CIA: he knew what had caused the crash of Flight 155 outside of Denver last year. He was prepared to trade the information, plus provide irrefutable proof of what he claimed, for a ride back to the States and a guarantee of immunity from prosecution once he got there.

His former bosses took the deal, but a complication arose. Rudy was arrested for some minor offense in Chapaev and wound up in the custody of the Kazakhstani government.

Which decided, clandestinely, to auction him off to the highest bidder.

The CIA won, and thus here Cal and company were.

Just another day at the office.

Three men emerged from the cab of the center truck and walked toward Cal. Two were tall and straight in their military uniforms. The third, the one in the middle, was short, round, bespectacled Rudy.

It was, in Cal’s opinion, a poor trade for five million dollars’ worth of diamonds, but what the US government did with its money wasn’t his call to make.

“Salaam.” Cal greeted the soldiers in their language, bowing his head in accordance with the custom. They nodded curtly. Not great believers in small talk, apparently, he observed to himself, which made them his kind of guys.

The soldier on the left held out his hand for the satchel. Cal handed it over. The soldier opened it up, thrust a gloved hand inside, rooted around. Apparently satisfied, he grunted, “Zhaksa,” which meant “good,” and closed the satchel back up again.

The soldier on the right, who’d had a hand wrapped around Rudy’s arm, thrust Rudy toward Cal. As Rudy stumbled forward, the soldiers turned around and left, striding swiftly back toward the trucks.

Cal grabbed Rudy’s arm in turn and started hustling him back toward the plane, which waited with steps down and engine running just ahead of them. The fuselage gleamed silver where the headlights struck it; the logo—a circle with two wavy lines under it—painted on the sides and tail gave it the look of a sleek corporate jet, which Cal supposed was the point.

The truth was he didn’t really give a damn about the plane’s aesthetics, especially not now—these crucial few seconds, where the Kazakhs had the diamonds and he, Ezra, and Rudy were still outside the jet, were the most likely time for an attack.

“You’re American?” Rudy gasped, breathless from the pace, as he looked up at Cal. Way up, because Rudy was maybe five-five. Beneath a red knit cap with a tassel at the crown, Rudy had scared-looking hazel eyes framed by wire-rimmed glasses, a big nose, a small mouth, and a round, pale face. Besides the cap, he was wearing a black fleece jacket zipped up to the neck, jeans, and sneakers. No backpack, no gear.

“You got proof of what you say happened to that plane? Because I want to see it,” was Cal’s reply. Cal had been offered a nice bonus on top of his fee if he made sure Rudy brought the promised “proof” with him. Of course, if Rudy couldn’t produce the proof, he’d still take Rudy back with him to the States. Rudy just might not like his reception at the other end.

“Yeah, sure. See?” Digging in his jeans pocket, Rudy came up with a small object that Cal had to squint at for a second before he recognized it: a flash drive.

Cal grunted and took the flash drive from Rudy, who looked like he wanted to protest but didn’t quite dare. Then they were at the plane steps. Shooing Rudy up the stairs, Cal glanced back at the trucks. They were still there at the end of the runway, still politely lighting up the pavement, waiting for their guests to leave.

“Easy enough,” Ezra said, coming up behind him.

“Seems like it,” Cal replied, and followed Rudy into the plane.

A few minutes later, they lifted off into what looked to be the start of a beautiful day.

Until it wasn’t.





Chapter Two





Freedom is a wonderful thing, Dr. Gina Sullivan thought as she watched the pair of rare white-tailed eagles disappear into the gathering storm clouds. The female of the pair had been trapped in an oil slick for nearly twenty-four hours. Cleaned up, tagged, and released, the eagle had been joined by her mate and the two were winging away toward the mountains to the north. Scudding along in a bright orange motorized rubber boat in the choppy gray waters off Attu Island’s Chirikof Point, Gina, an ornithologist, had been following as best she could in hopes of discovering the approximate location of their nest for later observation. But the oncoming storm meant that she was going to have to turn back, and so she’d stopped, shifting the Zodiac into neutral as she made one last observation. Lowering her binoculars with regret, she recorded in her small notebook the time—3:02 p.m.; the birds’ direction—northwest; and the birds’ speed—approximately twenty knots, then shoved the notebook into the pocket of her steel-blue, fur-lined parka for safekeeping.