Valkyrie’s comment about the warehouse being nearby told Alexei that his own location wasn’t as secret as he’d thought it was, and he realized that he might have underestimated Valkyrie, a person he had never met, didn’t even know the identity of.
“What about the girl?”
“She’ll wake up in an hour or two. I’m afraid the man who tried to abduct her won’t be so lucky.”
Alexei knew a little about the calculated synchronization of Valkyrie’s work, and he imagined that the would- be abductor’s Bluetooth earpiece had been wired to detonate just as Kirk’s phone had been.
He tried not to picture what the girl would see beside her when she awoke.
Over the years Alexei had developed a professional objectivity toward these things, but still, images like the one Erin would awaken to were deeply disturbing, and he found himself sympathizing with her, for the nightmares that would undoubtadly chase her for the rest of her life. Maybe he could get there before she awoke, move her someplace safe.
“Do you need me to clean that up as well?”
“I’ll have someone else take care of it. Just get to the warehouse. Tonight I’ll have a plane take you to Alexandria, Virginia. I want you to have a chat with Rear Admiral Alan Colberg. Tell him we need the access codes to the station. He’ll know what you’re talking about.”
“All right.”
“By the way, providentially, Tyler had a Tanfoglio with him. I know you lost one last year in Italy. Keep it. It’s yours. For the inconvenience of being called upon so late in the evening.”
Once again, impressive. How Valkyrie could have known about the incident in Italy was a mystery to Alexei. He had the sense that Valkyrie had mentioned it just to show him that his past was no secret. “I don’t use guns,” he replied. “Not anymore.”
“Not since your wife’s death.”
How?
“Yes.”
A pause. “Of course. Contact me when you’ve finished with Colberg.”
“I will.”
The conversation ended.
Though Alexei did not carry a handgun, he did carry something else.
He slipped the cylindrical object into the breast pocket of his suit coat and left for the warehouse.
Valkyrie should not have known about the Tanfoglio or about Tatiana’s death. It showed Alexei that Valkyrie had pried into his past, and when people poke around like that, they inevitably leave evidence of their presence.
On the way out the door, Alexei put a call through to one of his contacts in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence directorate, to see if he could find out who might be using the code name Valkyrie.
Based on the work Alexei needed to do at the warehouse, the flight time to Virginia, and the time change, he anticipated that the rear admiral would be just sitting down for breakfast when he arrived.
Hopefully, Colberg would be cooperative and Alexei wouldn’t have to put the object he now carried in his pocket to use.
1
18 hours later
Thursday, January 8
Lorelette Mobile Home Park
Merrill, Wisconsin
4:21 p.m.
I scanned the trailer park through the binoculars I’d borrowed from FBI SWAT Team Leader Torres.
Most of the task force had agreed that we should go in light, but FBI Director Wellington didn’t want to take any chances. So, even though we hadn’t been able to confirm that Travis Reiser was actually in the trailer, she’d ordered a full SWAT team present on site.
Now I was a quarter mile away with Team Leader Anton Torres, a rock-jawed jock I’d worked with on a dozen previous cases, by my side.
Eight inches of crusty snow covered the ground, but mounds at least four feet deep lay pushed up on the shoulders of the roads and at the ends of the parking areas.
A low pressure system was sweeping down from Canada, leaving a foot of snow in its wake. It would arrive tomorrow afternoon, and I was glad we were here today and not in the thick of the storm.
Most of the trailers in the park had paint that was faded or peeling, ripped screen doors, or rusted sheet- metal roofs telegraphing the economic demographic of the people living here. Nearly a third of the sixty trailers had abandoned toys, discarded sleds, or half-melted snowmen sandwiched in the tight quarters between the homes. A lot of children lived in this park. Not good.
The sun edged toward the bottom of the sky, lengthening the late-day shadows around us. Nearby, Torres’s snipers waited for his go-ahead to take up position before twilight swallowed the park.
“Well?” he asked.
Once again I directed my gaze at the yellow single-wide trailer where we believed Reiser was staying. “Still no movement.”
“His car is there.”
“Yes.” An eyewitness had seen Reiser enter the trailer last night. I didn’t need to tell Anton that. We’d gone over all this earlier.
I handed him the binoculars, and while he studied the trailer I surveyed the area, noting entrance and exit routes and evaluating their relationship to the roads that wandered through this part of the county.
“All right.” Torres set down the binoculars. “What are you thinking?”
“I see four possible exit routes.” I gestured toward the west end of the park. “There, near the quarry, but if we put Saunders and Haley on the ridge, they’ll have that one covered; the main entrance, one sniper can take that. There’s a break in the metal fence to the south, but it looks like Reiser would need to cross the field behind his trailer to get there, so, unlikely.” I pointed to the east. “I’d say that based on the layout of the park, if he rabbits he’ll most likely head south, past that home-”
“With the snow angels.”
“Yes.”
Torres’s jaw was set. “Kids are easier to handle than adults.”
“And Reiser is experienced. He’ll know it’s a lot harder for snipers to take a shot if they see a child in the scope along with the target.”
“They’ll hesitate.”
I nodded.
He studied the park. “I’m telling you, Pat, you have an instinct for this. You should’ve been SWAT instead of all this theoretical geospatial bull-” He cut himself off mid-curse, no doubt realizing that he was inadvertently turning his compliment into an insult. He corrected himself: “I’m just saying.”
“I appreciate it.”
Actually, the FBI’s SWAT program wouldn’t have been a bad choice, but I was born to work for the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, or NCAVC, and the last ten years had been a perfect fit for me.
“I’ll go in first,” I said.
He shook his head. “The director was clear. She wanted us to send in SWAT before you or Jake access the trailer.”
“That’s not the way to play this.” This was not the only thing I disagreed with the director on. “People react in kind. When they feel threatened, they respond accordingly. You go in heavy, he’s going to respond to meet the threat. I can talk him out.” My experience as a field agent and as a homicide detective before that gave me street
