Gambit by David Hagberg (manga ereader .txt) 📗

will open the portside door. On her signal, you will jump, and make it quick. Clear?”

“Yes,” Vetrov said in English. “Where will you go afterward?”

“None of your business,” Darina told him.

“We’re cleared direct for Cairo to refuel, then return to Sofia,” Borisov said. He looked up. “Whatever it is that you mean to accomplish on the ground, I hope you are successful.”

Vetrov nodded. The man was decent, unlike the bitch flying right seat. He didn’t give a shit about her, he didn’t think that he would even fuck her given the chance, but it was too bad that the pilot would also have to die in thirty minutes.

The men were stirring when Vetrov went aft.

“Time?” Silin asked.

“T minus thirty,” Vetrov told them. “If you have to take a piss, do it now. No time for a shit. I want a final check of weapons, oxygen masks, and night vision optics, which we will wear on the way down.”

No one said a thing. They knew the drill, their objective, and their orders.

Vetrov took a bottle of vodka from the locker Silin had opened, took a deep draft, and held it up in salute. “Yeb vas. Udachi,” he said. Fuck your mother. Good luck.

He handed the bottle to Silin, who took a drink and passed it to Orlov.

“This time tomorrow, each of us will be in Athens in bed with a whore,” Vetrov said. “And we’ll be rich bastards!”

SIXTY-EIGHT

In Monaco, Hammond got a bottle of Krug, and he and Susan went down to the beach, which was deserted at this hour of the morning. The chaise longues in all the cabanas had been covered. Susan held the wine and flutes as Hammond uncovered a couple of them and pulled the small table between them, and they sat down.

“It’s to be tonight, then?” Susan asked. She’d been subdued ever since the baccarat salle.

“It should start around two,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “In a half hour or so.”

“Jesus,” Susan said. “And then it’ll be finally over with, right, Thomas? No matter the outcome?”

Hammond opened the bottle of wine and poured. They touched glasses and drank. “No matter what,” he said.

Bender and Alicia watched from the top-floor windows facing the interior of the island as McGarvey and Pete disappeared into the darkness. The circular bedroom had floor-to-ceiling windows that opened in every direction. But the ceiling was very tall, and above them, the kerosene lantern, large Fresnel lens, and gear drive that rotated the system when the lighthouse was operational were still in place.

It seemed surreal to Bender. Everything about the situation here and now seemed odd to him. He was an FBI agent but a deskbound man. An academic. A thinker, not a field officer like Alicia. And he wondered how the hell he’d managed to talk himself into it.

“You’re an ambitious man, Clarke,” the director had told him the morning of his official welcoming to the Bureau.

“Yes, sir, I am,” Bender told him.

“You passed Quantico, though not with any distinction. But you did pass.”

“I joined the Bureau not to arrest the bad guys but to figure out what they did wrong and where to find them,” Bender said. And thinking about that morning now, he realized just how cocky he must had sounded.

“Which is why we hired you,” Kallek had said three years ago. “Be careful that your ambition doesn’t take you in the wrong direction.”

Prophetic words, he mused now. But he needed an operation like this to add to his résumé, which would look good a few years down the line when he figured he would become the assistant director of the Bureau. And then Congress.

“You okay, Mr. Bender?” Alicia asked. She was leaning against the frame of the open window, from where she could look out but still be in the shadows, all but invisible to anyone coming up the hill.

“I’m a little nervous,” he said, surprised that he had made such an admission.

Alicia smiled. “You’d be a fool if you weren’t,” she said. “I figure my heart rate is topping a hundred.”

“I guess I’m no fool.”

“But you’ve got guts. Anyway, whoever is coming will have to get past McGarvey and his wife, and the two of them have quite a rep. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to draw down against either of them.”

“The man is fifty. And everybody loses their edge sooner or later, even the best of them.”

“And he goes down to the Farm every four or five months to keep his edge, and from what I’ve been told, the kids and the instructors have a lot of respect for him.”

“Has he done Quantico?”

“A couple of years ago, and he passed with flying colors. I had a talk with Ed Ames when I found out we were going to have a chat with McGarvey. He said he was willing to offer the man the job of running the place, but he was too intimidated to pop the question. Ed’s a tough guy and isn’t easily intimidated.”

“Everyone makes a mistake sooner or later. The odds sometimes get too big.”

“Not this time,” Alicia said. “My money’s on them.” She nodded in the direction Mac and Pete had gone.

At his apartment in Moscow, it was coming up on four in the morning, and Tarasov was in bed with his mistress, Larissa Kiselnikova, the former Bolshoi prima ballerina whose feet were so ugly, he kidded her from time to time that it was a wonder he loved her.

“But it’s your crooked nose, Mika, that makes me ashamed to introduce you to my friends.”

They’d been out dancing at the Pravda Club, one of Moscow’s top spots, until just an hour ago, when they’d returned here, dismissed the chief of the house staff, took a shower together, and made love.

Larissa was half-asleep lying next to him, one bare breast exposed, when his encrypted sat phone chimed. It was Yuri Sepelev, his computer geek contact in the GRU.

“The EUTELSAT bird covering block thirteen will go dark in T