“Who are you?” Tyler said.
“Nadia Bedova. Russian intelligence.”
Tyler looked at Grant, who stared back at him with the same astonished look he must have had on his own face.
“What the hell is going on here?” he said.
“Dr. Locke, you and Mr. Westfield are going to help me disarm a bomb.”
SEVENTEEN
“Search them,” Bedova said.
While she and one of the men kept their guns trained on Tyler and Grant, the second man frisked them. He found their phones and Tyler’s Leatherman multi-tool. She held on to the phones but tossed the tool back to Tyler.
“I can’t have you attempting to make a call, but you may need that for your task,” Bedova said, nodding at the Leatherman. “You can lower your hands.”
Tyler narrowed his eyes at Bedova. “How do you know our names?”
“When I saw you driving down the street casing the warehouse,” she said with the slightest accent, “I used our facial recognition software to identify you.”
“You have us on file?”
“Do you really think you could stay off our radar after finding Noah’s Ark and the tomb of King Midas?”
Grant raised a hand. “My first question, and, I think, most relevant: uh, bomb?”
“The silver-haired man you saw going to the van is Vladimir Colchev,” Bedova said. “According to our intelligence, he’s been trying to acquire explosives from mining companies around the country for months, apparently unsuccessfully. But we know that this week he procured forty tons of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosive and had it shipped here. We think he’s planning to use it. Today.”
Grant whistled. “That would put a nice dent in Ayer’s Rock.”
“Who is Colchev?” Tyler asked her.
“A Russian national wanted by my government. He has a highly trained team ready to follow his orders. Now a question from me. Why are you here?”
“Concerned citizens.”
“You’re not even Australian. I already have a potential international incident on my hands, so either you cooperate or I’ll shoot you both now and take my chances without you.”
Tyler cleared his throat. “Well, that seems like a fair trade. Two of his men attacked a woman in Queenstown, New Zealand yesterday. Burned her house to the ground and tried to kill her.”
“Did they succeed?”
Grant shook his head. “They’re both currently resting comfortably in the morgue.”
“Do you know why they attacked her?”
“Haven’t a clue,” Tyler lied without hesitation.
“Then why are you here?” Bedova asked.
“We got a tip that one of the assailants had been seen in Alice Springs,” Grant said, “so we came to do a little private detective work and ran into you lovely people in the process.”
“Did you talk to the man before he died?”
“Fay did,” Tyler said. He saw no reason to hide her name since it was all over the news.
“Did he say anything about Icarus or the date July twenty-fifth?”
“Not that we know of. What’s Icarus?”
“How about the Baja drug cartel or Wisconsin Ave?”
Tyler was confounded. A rogue Russian spy is willing to kill for a relic from Roswell, then buys enough explosive to depopulate central Australia, and now the agent after him is asking about Mexican narcotics gangs and Greek mythology? If Tyler lived through this, he was going to love to hear the explanation behind it.
He shook his head in answer to her question. “Never heard of them. Maybe a little context would be useful.”
Bedova stared at him. “I need you to look at the bomb he’s built and tell me if it can be disarmed.”
“Why do you want our help? Why not just call the police?”
“We obtained a layout of the warehouse, so we have our assault planned out, but we’re waiting on our bomb expert. When you showed up, I saw an opportunity to keep this quiet. He’s coming from Singapore and won’t be here for another five hours. From our observations, Colchev is getting ready to make his move sooner than that. Are you going to help us or will you let him detonate a truck bomb in the middle of the city?”
“What you’re really saying is that you want us to save you the trouble of an international incident started by your rogue agent.”
“Will you do it?”
Tyler looked from the pistol to Grant. “What do you say?”
He could see that Grant was thinking the same thing. The odds were that she was sharing so much information with them because she was planning to get rid of them right after she did away with Colchev. Still, they had little choice, and if a bomb that size exploded, it could kill everyone within a quarter-mile, including Jess and Fay where they were parked.
Grant nodded and regarded Bedova with a dead-eyed gaze. “I couldn’t be more enthusiastic about assisting you.”
“Good,” she said, ignoring his sarcasm. “If you try to get away, I will shoot you both and then kill your friends waiting for you in the Jeep.”
Tyler mirrored her unflinching stare. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“The plan is that we wait for Colchev to come out of the van. As he’s entering the building, my two men on the other side of the warehouse will move in. We won’t kill him until we’re sure that there’s no danger of someone detonating the bomb. We think it’s in one of the four trucks backed up to the warehouse.”
“What if he’s divided the explosives among the four trucks?”
“Then you’ll have to assess all four and tell me if you can disable them.”
“And if we can’t?”
“Then we’ll call the police,” is what Bedova said, but Tyler didn’t think for a second that she actually would.
“All right,” Tyler said, furiously trying to think of a way out of their predicament. For now, going along with her was the only choice. “Lead the way. It’s your party.”
Bedova looked at him, perplexed. She obviously didn’t understand the idiom, but let it go. She tilted her head. Tyler guessed that she was listening to an earpiece hidden by her hair.
“He’s on the move,” she said. “It’s time. Stay behind me.”
With no one in sight, Bedova sprinted toward the warehouse. Tyler ran crouched next to Grant, with Bedova’s two men bringing up the rear. In the Army when he’d done this kind of thing, Tyler usually had a helmet, body armor, and M4 assault rifle, so now he felt practically naked. By the way Grant clenched his fists, Tyler could tell that his friend also missed the heft of a weapon.
They reached the door of the warehouse. Tyler could hear the shouts of men working inside. Bedova picked the lock and pulled the door ajar. She paused as she scanned the interior, then nodded. They all kept low as they crept inside.
Now Tyler saw why Bedova had chosen this entry. This door must have served as the entrance to the warehouse office. Its interior wasn’t visible from the main warehouse floor.
She kept below the level of the windows and went to the open door on the other side of the room. Tyler and Grant followed. Without speaking she pointed toward the front of the warehouse.
Tyler could see into the cargo area of the closest trailer. The shadows hid most of the contents, but five feet inside he could barely make out four oil drums with wires leading from them.
They’d found their bomb.
