Riess stopped himself from kicking the cabinet again, his hands in fists so tight he could feel his fingernails biting into his palms. He wanted to spit, to scream about right and wrong, to say it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.
He didn’t want to grow the fuck up.
“Somewhere in Tashkent, right now, there’s an SIS Officer on an unsanctioned mission,” Tower said, evenly. “The girl you banged, she’s here on a job, and you know what it is, you know the why and the where and maybe the how.”
“I didn’t—”
“No.” Tower cut him off. “We’re past that now, Chuck. You’ve got only a couple moves left here, and you need to choose them real carefully. Telling me what you know will go a long way to making sure the skin is still on your career when the dust settles.”
Riess closed his eyes, thinking of Dina Malikov and the way her body had been desecrated, then destroyed. The words, when they came, were the betrayal, and the defeat was bitter. “We just wanted to make things better.”
If he had hoped for sympathy, Tower’s tone dashed it. “This wasn’t the way to do it. And I’m still waiting for my answers.”
And Charles Riess, standing in the kitchen in his semidetached home in Tashkent, sighed heavily, then gave Tower all the answers he could.
CHAPTER 20
Uzbekistan—Tashkent—
182 Sulaymonova
21 February 0001 (GMT+5.00)
She was already bloody twitched. It had started before she’d even left the hotel.
Chace had woken from her sleep in the dark, disoriented by the lack of light and the strange noises from the street and the hall, had come awake alarmed, the hush puppy in her hand feeling alien and awkward. She’d showered, dressed in the darkest clothes she had—all black, from turtleneck to trousers, down to the knickers—all the while trying to shake the sluggish feeling that seemed to have invaded every muscle.
Chace had wondered if she wasn’t coming down with something on top of everything else.
She’d left the room and made it as far as the lobby, thinking that food would be in order, and that was when it happened, the first real blossom of fear opening in her chest. What was the rule again? No food before an action—the Rikki-Tikki-Tavi rule was what the CQC instructor at the School had called it.
Basic, so basic, and she’d almost forgotten, and against her will Chace found herself trying to imagine the pain of her own intestines spilling their contents into her body. Wondering how quickly she’d lose blood from a gut wound. Realizing that, even if she had a catheter, even if she had bothered to precanulate, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good because she’d never be able to replace the fluid loss anyway. She imagined herself in a Tashkent hospital, writhing on a gurney in agony as doctors tried to get a line of what passed for Ringer’s solution in this part of the world into her, and how long it would take her to die.
Once those thoughts started, it was hard to stop them again.
It took her fifty-three minutes to walk from where she’d parked the Range Rover off Forobiy, near the Chagatai Cemetery and some seven miles from Ruslan’s home, to the apartment building housing Sevara Malikov-Ganiev’s penthouse.
The buildings on this part of Sulaymonova were largely residential, older Soviet-style apartments sharing space with more modern condominium complexes, and at midnight on a Monday, the streets were deserted. Everywhere Chace had gone in Tashkent, she’d seen the same signs, architectural proof of Uzbekistan’s struggle to claw itself out of its Communist-dominated past into an as-yet-uncertain future. The condominiums at 182 Sulaymonova were the nicest she’d seen in the city, and Chace wasn’t at all surprised that Sevara made her home here.
There was an underground parking garage, blocked from the street by a metal gate at the bottom of the ramp, the ramp itself wide enough for two-way traffic. Sodium lights glowed on either side of the slope, serving as deterrent and security in lieu of more practical means such as cameras or guards. Chace took a moment from across the street to check around her once more, then craned her head, and spied lights on in the penthouse. Her angle was bad, however, and she couldn’t tell how many, nor how bright, only that there was illumination.
So presumably Sevara was in, and, hopefully, entertaining. Whether or not it was Zahidov being entertained, that was something else entirely. And the Audi’s absence in the garage wouldn’t be proof that he wasn’t, either; Chace had no way of knowing how many vehicles Zahidov owned, nor which he favored when going to fuck the daughter of the President of Uzbekistan. For all Chace knew, he might choose to visit her on roller skates.
It was a gamble, then, like everything else. The car might be there, but it might not. And if it wasn’t, Chace wasn’t entirely certain how she’d proceed. She’d wasted enough time already getting things into position just this far. If she lost more time on foot, she was looking at not being able to hit the house until almost four A.M., and that was dangerously close to the morning shift change. She’d have to abort for the night.
Which meant another day of exposure in Tashkent, another day that could see Ruslan and son dead before sunset.
Presuming that Zahidov and his NSS crew hadn’t already done the deed while Chace was catching up on her sleep.
Too many variables, too many unknowns.
She knew she was wasting time, stalling, and she also knew why she was doing it. That part of the mind— consciousness, or ego, call it what you will—trying to talk her out of going through with it, knowing what she was about to do was dangerous. Knowing what she was about to do could cost her her life.
Time and fear were allies, after all. And the more time she had, the more time to become afraid.
So Zahidov was with Sevara. Or someone in one of the other condominiums also owned a black Audi. Or—
