Fisher shook his head. “Sympathy and respect are different things. Once they throw Ames in jail, I’ll be happy to throw away the key.”
A few minutes later both their OPSATs beeped. Noboru checked the screen. “Qaderi’s moving. There must be a little lag time. He’s already outside Severobaikalsk. Wait a second… He’s heading south, back toward us.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How far?”
“Thirty miles. Should we tell Hansen?”
“He knows.”
Fisher pressed the gas pedal down, and the Lada surged ahead.
“Still heading south,” Noboru reported five minutes later.
The minutes and the miles ticked away, and slowly the one-lane road widened and veered inland, away from the shore and behind a screen of pine trees. Sheltered from the wind and spray, the road lost its coating of ice. They were able to increase speed to fifty miles per hour, bumping over the washboard surface.
“Twenty miles,” Noboru reported. “Sun’s coming up.”
Fisher glanced out the passenger window. Through the trees, a pinkish orange glow backlit the mountains.
Seven minutes passed and Noboru announced, “Ten miles,” then a few minutes after that, “Five miles.”
Fisher checked his OPSAT screen and muttered, “Come on, where are you?”
“What?” asked Noboru.
“That.”
The Lada’s headlights swept over a left-hand split in the road. Fisher slammed on the brakes, eased up, then began pumping them as the Lada slewed right, then left, then corrected and came to a halt thirty feet beyond the split. Fisher glanced in the rearview mirror. Hansen’s SUV was fifty yards behind, sitting broadside in the road. Fisher put the transmission in reverse. Hansen took the hint and straightened out and began backing up. Fisher stopped, cranked the wheel to the left, and pulled onto the left-hand road. Hansen followed. The road took them up a grade, then through a series of S-curves. Fisher kept his eyes on the road but occasionally glanced out the passenger window.
“Look sharp,” Fisher ordered. “They should be along anytime now.”
Fisher reached down and shut off the Lada’s headlights. Behind him, Hansen did the same. They rounded another curve, and to the right and below, through the trees, they could see a small lake no more than a half mile across. The rising sun glinted off the flat, calm waters.
“Sludjanka Lake,” Noboru announced.
On the opposite shore, another Lada SUV was heading south.
“That’s him,” Noboru said.
“Yep.”
“Where’s he going, though? The auction site?”
Fisher didn’t answer. He got out and Noboru followed. Hansen and the others had done the same. They met between the cars at the edge of the road.
“Auction site?” Hansen echoed.
“Maybe,” Fisher said. He lifted his binoculars and watched the Lada’s progress. “Can’t see who’s inside, but unless he dumped his computer and phones, it’s Qaderi.”
Suddenly, from inside the Lada there came three overlapping orange flashes. The SUV slewed sideways off the road, then back up, and coasted to a stop.
“Holy crap!” said Gillespie.
Fisher zoomed in on the Lada and waited. After thirty seconds the front passenger door opened and a figure emerged. The man turned around, leaned back into the car, and then came out with a briefcase. He slammed the door shut and turned around. For a split second his face was illuminated by the sun. It was not Qaderi. Nor his bodyguards.
“What the hell is this?” Hansen muttered.
“I think Qaderi just got uninvited to the auction,” Fisher replied.
With his back to Fisher and the group, the man knelt down beside the Lada and opened the briefcase. He rummaged around for several minutes, then closed the briefcase and stood up. He loitered around the Lada as though waiting for something. Ten minutes passed. Then, to the east, came the thumping of helicopter rotors. They saw the mist on the lake’s surface ten seconds before the helicopter appeared. Flying at twenty feet, the robin’s- egg blue and white Sikorsky S-76 swept over the Lada, banked south, and then stopped in a hover and touched down astride the road a hundred yards away. The cabin door opened, and four men in black coveralls jumped out and sprinted to the man standing at the Lada. Without a word passing between them, the man got back into the Lada and the four men began pushing. Once the SUV was pointing at the Sludjanka Lake, the driver climbed out and helped the other four until the Lada was rolling at ten to twelve miles an hour. With only a slight bump as it went over the berm at the edge of the road, the SUV plunged into the water and sank from sight.
The five men sprinted back to the Sikorsky and climbed aboard. Thirty seconds later the helicopter was heading east over the lake. Fisher and the others stood in silence until the sound of the rotors faded.
“They must have known Qaderi was tagged,” Valentina said.
“But not how. That briefcase they took was Qaderi’s. I saw it in Romania. Everything that can identify him and his bodyguards is inside — including their phones and his laptop. If their Lada’s ever found, they’ll be John Does.”
“So that’s what the guy was doing when he was kneeling,” Gillespie said. “Checking for beacons.”
“Safe bet.” Fisher told Valentina and Gillespie about the Ajax bots. He checked his watch. “Grim briefed him two hours ago. Just enough time for him to pass along the message. She left out any mention of Ajax, though, and he would have assumed she meant standard, Third Echelon-issue beacons.”
Hansen was studying his OPSAT’s screen. “The bots are heading due east at 150 miles an hour.”
“We’re still in the game,” said Gillespie.
“What now?” asked Noboru.
“We hide.”
Hansen was the first to spot it on their foldable, topographical map of the area, an abandoned Stalin-era mica mine built into the cliffs a mile west of the lake. The dirt tract that led from the lake to the mine was littered with boulders and axle deep in a snow-mud mix the consistency of oatmeal, so it was an hour before they pulled into the clearing before the mine’s entrance. Fisher backed in his SUV, followed by Hansen. Everyone climbed out.
“Okay, now tell us: Why are we hiding?” Noboru said.
“They killed Qaderi because Kovac reported the trackers. Grim told Kovac we were still in Irkutsk, and the weather was causing problems with the GPS. That’s why the Sikorsky didn’t look for anyone tailing the Lada. My gut tells me they’ll be back — about the time we’d arrive if we’d left Irkutsk when Kovac thinks we did.”
Hansen said, “You and Grim put some thought into this, didn’t you?”
Fisher nodded.
“How long do we wait?” asked Valentina.
“Depends on where the Ajax bots go and how long it takes the Sikorsky to leave.”
They got the answer to their first question two hours later, when Hansen called out from where he was sitting against the tunnel wall. “They’re back.” After leaving the site of Qaderi’s execution, the Sikorsky had flown lazy figure-eight patterns up and down the lake’s eastern shore and the foothills beyond. “Looks like its touching down. Thirty miles due east of us, about one and a half miles inland from Ayaya Bay.”
Fisher got the topographical map, unfolded it on the Lada’s hood, and found the spot Hansen had indicated. It sat two-thirds of the way between Ayaya Bay and a smaller V-shaped lake called Frolikha. “Middle of nowhere,” he said. “The perfect spot for a black-market auction.”
“I don’t see any roads,” Gillespie said.
