Читать книгу Treason Play - Don Pendleton - Страница 6

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Terry Lang pretended not to notice the man following him.

In fact, it was the third man he’d pretended not to see in the past couple of hours. Whoever had taken it upon themselves to track his every move at least had shown enough sense to switch out the agents following him, a small attempt to hide that they were tailing him. But their skill had ended there. The first and the third had fallen all over themselves to not make eye contact with Lang, averting their gazes as if burned whenever he looked directly at them.

Lang stopped and bought a bottle of root beer from a street vendor. Unscrewing the cap, he brought the glass bottle to his lips, drained some of it and resumed walking. After two more blocks he spotted what he’d been looking for, an alley. Slipping inside, he advanced several yards. Along the way, he tipped the root beer bottle and drained its contents onto the cracked asphalt. It made a fizzing noise and welled up in a whitish foam. The odor of garbage cooking under Dubai’s midday heat registered with him and his nostrils wrinkled reflexively at the stench.

He found a recessed doorway and pressed himself inside its shade.

He switched the empty bottle to his other hand, his ears strained as he waited. Surely his tail hadn’t fallen back? He doubted it. They hadn’t followed him halfway across the city just to fall back when he disappeared into an alley. They didn’t strike him as particularly skilled, but they seemed committed.

Sweat beaded underneath his hairline, then rolled down his temples, cheeks and jawline. His pulse quickened. Moments later he heard the soft shuffling of shoe soles brushing against the pavement. The muscles of his legs, arms and torso bunched up as he prepared to pounce. A dark shadow stretched along the ground past his hiding place.

The sound of movement halted.

A small grunt telegraphed the guy’s next movement. By the time his pursuer rounded the doorway, a small, black automatic pistol clutched in his hand, Lang was prepared. He brought the bottle down in a wide arc. The fat end of the bottle exploded into a constellation of glass shards that glinted in the sunlight. Lang’s downward swing continued, the edges of the broken bottle raking flesh, opening crimson ravines in his face.

The man yelped in pain and surprise. He whipped his head away and covered the wound with his hand. Blood immediately seeped between his fingers. In the same instant he started to raise his shooting hand so he could get a bead on his mark.

Lang’s hand snaked out and he caught the guy’s wrist in his grip, squeezing hard. His other hand, the one clutching the neck of the bottle, came around in a horizontal arc. Lang buried the jagged end into his attacker’s eye socket.

The man screamed and wheeled away. His grip on his pistol loosened and the weapon fell to the ground. Lang gave the injured man a hard shove in the chest that sent him reeling.

Grinning, Lang tossed aside the remnants of the bottle. He scooped up the man’s discarded pistol and grabbed a handful of the man’s blood-soaked shirt and yanked him to his feet.

Shoving the guy into a wall, he pressed the gun’s muzzle into the man’s throat.

“Who sent you?” Lang asked, his voice barely a whisper.

The man, his face and neck streaked with blood, spit in Lang’s face. With the back of his fist, Lang wiped the glob of blood and saliva from his forehead.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” he said. “Who sent you? What do you want with me?”

The man’s lips curved outward as though he was ready to spit again. This time Lang drove a knee into the guy’s groin, eliciting a sharp draw of air, followed by a gut-churning moan.

“I can do this all day,” Lang said.

And to prove his point, he kneed the guy a second time. Groaning again, the man sagged and Lang let him crumple to the ground.

The squeal of tires on asphalt caused Lang to spin. A big midnight-blue sedan jerked to a stop at the mouth of the alley. Front and back doors snapped open and four men spilled from the vehicle’s interior, guns drawn, sites trained on him.

“Drop it!” someone yelled in English.

He guessed he could take out one, maybe two, before they killed him. More likely one. And then he’d end up on a slab. He still had no idea what this was all about and it was possible that, since he hadn’t killed anyone, he could talk his way out of this. He knelt and set the pistol on the asphalt. Raising his hands, he came back up to his full height.

A rail-thin man in navy-blue slacks and a white dress shirt broke from the group of shooters and approached Lang. Keeping his gun trained on the American, the small man scooped up the fallen pistol and shoved it into the waistband of his pants. He barked in Arabic—a language in which Lang was fluent—for someone to call an ambulance.

The guy gave Lang a murderous look. In return, he flipped the guy the middle finger.

“No ambulance,” a voice called in Arabic. “This one’s not worth the trouble.”

Lang turned and looked at the new speaker. A flash of recognition immediately morphed into dread.

A Caucasian man with sandy-brown hair, a wide face and flushed cheeks rounded the front of the sedan blocking the alley. He wore a blue polo shirt, tan slacks and brown loafers. If he carried a weapon, it wasn’t visible.

“Hello, Terry,” Daniel Masters said, his British accent obvious.

Lang nodded, but said nothing.

“You’ve caused us some problems,” Masters said.

“Sorry, Daniel,” Lang said. “I didn’t know you were in Dubai. Perhaps we can talk about this.”

If the Englishman was surprised Lang knew his name, he showed no outward signs. Instead, Masters nodded at the man on the ground. By now, the man was tucked into a fetal position, groaning, one hand clasped over his injured eye.

“Think I’ll pass,” Masters said. “I see how you talk.”

Lang shrugged. “Sorry about your man. I didn’t want to do it, but he pulled a gun on me.”

Masters made a dismissive gesture. “To hell with this idiot. You could kill fifty like him for all I care. Maim them, whatever. Best man won, as far as I can tell.”

“Very understanding.”

“You’re tough. For a reporter.”

“Special Forces. Army. Long time ago, but I still have a few tricks I can use. You probably already knew that, though.”

“I did. But I think it goes deeper than that.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

Lang knew where the conversation was going and he didn’t like it. Fear fluttered in his stomach and sweat slicked his palms. His hands closed into fists. Masters was close, but not close enough to take a swing at without taking a couple of steps forward, telegraphing the attack. Because it didn’t fit his cover, Lang didn’t carry a gun, though he thought longingly of the one hidden back in his apartment.

One of the men was moving in a wide circle around Lang, moving behind him. A third had broken away and was approaching from the side. All kept their distance, forcing him to lunge in any one direction if he wanted to strike first. That gave them ample time to put a bullet in his head before he could complete any attack.

Masters apparently sensed the calculations racing through Lang’s head.

“You can’t make it,” he said. “Even if you took one of us, the others would put you down in a heartbeat.”

Lang flashed what he hoped was his best disarming grin. He spread his hands wide. No threat here, his body language said.

“Hey, if this is about something I did, something I wrote, we can talk about it.”

A humorless laugh escaped Masters’s lips. “What you write in your shitty little newspaper isn’t the issue. It’s what you’re reporting elsewhere that’s giving us heartburn.”

“I don’t—”

“Khan tried to shut you down, tried to stop your snooping. It didn’t work. He tried to do it the easy way. Evidently, you’re too damn thick to get the message. So here we are.”

Lang put some steel in his voice. “Khan doesn’t tell me where to go, who to talk to. If he doesn’t like it, he can go to hell.”

“And aren’t you the crusader?” Masters said. “Playing the part to the very end. There’s a good lad.”

He nodded and the men who’d surrounded Lang closed in. Lang figured the charade was over. Lang hoped that because Masters had spent so much time jawboning and getting his men into position, that Masters wanted him alive. If that and Lang’s lack of a discernible weapon caused the men to hesitate even slightly, he’d exploit it as best he could.

If not, well, he probably wasn’t going to come out of this alive anyway. Given the choice of dying now or dying in captivity, he’d just as soon get it over with. The end result was the same.

The gunman closest to him brought his shooting hand up to shoulder level and locked his pistol on Lang. The CIA agent stepped sideways and brought the gleaming blade down in an arc, burying it in the soft tissue of the man’s neck. Yanking the blade, he brought it forward until steel burst through flesh in a spray of crimson. The man’s gun thundered, discharging a round within inches of Lang’s face. The close-range blast caused his ears to ring and disoriented him.

At the same instant something blunt, hard, punched the back of his skull. The impact caused a flash of white light to explode from behind his eyes. His legs turned rubbery and he crashed first to his knees, then to all fours.

Gasping, vision blurred, he only was vaguely aware of a shape that loomed overhead. When the second blow to the head was struck, his limbs went loose and he crashed to the ground. A black veil of unconsciousness settled over him.