Читать книгу Rogue Commander - Leo J. Maloney - Страница 10

Chapter Three

Lily Randall woke up to the rocking of a vehicle, her left cheekbone aching from the hard floor of the van. It wasn’t long before she felt a hard tug on her hair, which pulled her up to a seated position. She tried to fight the person off but found that her arms had been tied behind her back.

She flailed, trying to wrest herself free, and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.

“No,” the man holding it said. “Chill out.”

She complied, resting against the side of the van as well as she could, given the circumstances.

The back of the van was windowless, and she was sharing it with three men. The one opposite her, who had threatened her with a gun, looked to be, like her, nearing his thirties. He was wearing a plaid beret covering his shaved head, and when he grinned, she saw that one of his top front incisors looked to be made of gold.

They spoke in what she supposed was Czech. She had the distinct impression that they were debating whether to kill her.

Her eyes darted, straining to see the men sitting in front, looking for Lukacs among the occupants of the van. He wasn’t among them. Did the others succeed in capturing him? If so, that gave her a chance to survive this.

She ventured to speak. “You want your boss back.”

The man with the gold tooth sneered. “Not boss. No boss.”

“Still, Lukacs didn’t pay everything up front, did he?”

The men looked at each other, and she knew she was right.

“So you want him back. Maybe we can help each other out.”

Gold Tooth leaned in toward her. “What are you going to do, all tied up?”

“Call my people. We’ll make an exchange.”

The men exchanged some words. One of them raised his voice in anger. Gold Tooth snapped at him, then turned back to Lily. “Number.”

The man said something and held out his hand, and one of the others handed him a cell phone.

“Let me make the call,” she said.

“No,” the man said. “We call.”

She gave him the number—the emergency local number they had each committed to memory for the mission.

The man dialed and waited, until Lily heard the faint response—not enough for her to make out who was talking or what was said.

“Who is this?” the man demanded. Then, after the response, “We have your agent. The sexy woman with the green eyes.” Lily shuddered with revulsion at his description. He continued. “We want Lukacs back.”

Lily held her breath. She wasn’t sure whether they would make the exchange. She wasn’t even sure whether she wanted them to make the exchange. She wanted to be saved, but they had worked long and hard to catch Lukacs—a man responsible for dozens, probably hundreds, of deaths. To give her up to hold on to him—she might take it if the roles were reversed.

But they must not have made the choice, because the merc responded with, “Good. Stromovka Park, at the pond, south side, at midnight. We will exchange the prisoners then.”

He listened as the person on the line spoke. Then he brought the phone to Lily’s ear, holding it there.

“She wants to talk to you.”

“This—” she stammered. “This is Agent Randall.”

“Randall.” It was Bloch. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Keep talking to me as long as you can, understand?”

“Yes,” Lily replied and continued. “Yes, you want to do exactly as they say. I think they took me as leverage only, in case something like this happened. The impression I get is that they’re men just trying to do a job they were hired for, nothing else.”

She could practically see Bloch doing one of her death’s head smiles at how Lily was following her orders as well as subtly instructing the men holding her captive. “Do you know where you are? Any identifying elements you can tell me?”

She couldn’t see anything outside. “No. There’s nothing...nothing seems done to me while I was unconscious. These men seem intent on their job, that’s all. No reason to contact any local authorities.”

“Very good, Randall,” Bloch reassured her. “Tell me anything more.”

Lily thought furiously of some way to pass on details without alerting her abductors. “It was five,” she said. “Five o’clock your time when they took me. I don’t know how many more minutes since then...”

The man with the gun yanked the phone away from Lily’s ear.

“Stromovka Park,” he repeated for Bloch. “Midnight.” Then he hung up.

The blow came too quickly for her to dodge, hard on her right temple. She felt dizzy and retched from the pain.

“I did not let you talk to give information to your people. Do not play with me.”

The man removed the battery from the phone. Damn. There was no way Zeta could track it now.

* * * *

“I lost the signal,” Shepard said over the video connection.

Morgan walked restlessly around the living room, which held his daughter and Peter Conley. They were in a city apartment a few blocks from the historic downtown. It had belonged to an old widower who’d died heirless a few weeks before. Zeta had arranged their occupation by pulling a string of favors, which gave them a near-ideal base of operations with no paper trail.

“Of course,” Alex said sarcastically. “Don’t you always?”

“Find it again,” Morgan said.

“It’s no use,” Shepard said. “It’s gone.”

“Then do something else! Track the vehicle!”

“Spoken like a field agent,” Shepard sighed. “It’s not that simple. We don’t know which vehicle it was. Tracking the phone gives us a radius, that’s all. It was on the highway. Too many cars, too many ways to go.”

“Just get it done, Shepard.”

“If you really need me to, I can prove to you mathematically that we can’t,” Karen O’Neal broke in. “Too many variables. Too little data.”

Morgan felt like he was going to explode at any second. Lily had been captured, and he couldn’t stand doing nothing.

“So what do we do?” Alex asked.

“We go get her,” said Morgan. “Of course we go get her. We make the goddamn exchange and get our agent back.”

“Actually, that question is not settled yet.” The speaker was Paul Kirby, who was back at Zeta headquarters in Boston with Bloch, Shepard, and Karen O’Neal.

“We expended significant resources and manpower to find Enver Lukacs. If he disappears now, we may not get a second chance.”

Morgan was seeing red. Kirby ought to have been glad that he was on another continent. “You can’t be serious.”

“Let me remind you that this is a man who moves top of the line Russian arms to US enemies in active war zones, who puts high explosives in the hands of Colombian militias, who provided chemical weapons to ISIS. Let’s not forget who we are dealing with here, and what the price would be if we were to lose him again.”

“Bloch,” said Morgan. “Tell me you’re not going to leave Lily in the hands of these—”

“We will make a decision and let you know.”

“There’s nothing to think about. We don’t leave an agent behind.”

“Your position on the issue is noted, Morgan. I need to discuss this with my superiors. I will let you know.”

“You tell that dickless Smith that if he doesn’t—”

Bloch cut the connection. Morgan pounded the wall with his fist. Paintings and a cuckoo clock rattled from the force.

“Dad...” Alex said softly.

It didn’t work. He was filled with bile and darkness.

He looked at the door to the guest bedroom, where they were keeping Lukacs. “I’m going to get that bastard,” he growled.

“Morgan,” Conley said, holding his hand up to calm him down.

“Get out of my way,” Morgan said, pushing past his friend. He opened the door and found Lukacs tied to a heavy wooden chair, a sack stuffed over his head.

“Wake up, you piece of shit.”

Morgan pulled the sack off. Lukacs squinted in the light, blinking as he adjusted.

Morgan punched him in the face.

“Ouch,” Lukacs deadpanned. Blood trickled down from his nose.

“You’re going to tell me where I can find the bastards who work for you.”

Lukacs licked the blood from his lips. “They took your agent, did they?” He laughed, showing his red-stained teeth. “My men?” Morgan stared at him, eyes slits from rage. “The door is not so thick, you know.”

Morgan smacked him with an open palm. “Tell me where they are!”

“You hit like a girl.”

Morgan grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “I can do a lot worse if you’d like.”

“Break some bones, pull teeth, I don’t care,” Lukacs said, laughing. “You need me alive, and you need to give me back today. That means I don’t have to tell you shit.”

“You’d better hope they decide to make the exchange,” Morgan said. “Or else it’s you and me until the day you die.”

“Or until the day they set me free, after I tell them what I have to give them.”

Morgan drew his knife from its sheath and held it two inches from Lukacs’s eye. “I think you’ll still be able to talk even if you can’t see. Don’t you?”

Lukacs’s eyes flitted to something behind him, at the door to the room. Morgan turned to look behind him. Alex was watching him from the door.

His rage seeped from him, and he lowered the knife. No. He couldn’t torture a man in front of his daughter.

Morgan sheathed the knife and put his foot on Lukacs’s chest, shoving the chair half a foot up against the wall with the force that the arms dealer knocked his head. “This isn’t over, Lukacs.”

Alex stepped back as he walked out of the room and slammed the door. Conley approached him. “Got it out of your system, buddy?”

“No.” Morgan sank into a musty armchair. “There’s a lot more where that came from.”

“Keep your cool. This isn’t over yet. Shepard might catch a break—”

“He won’t,” Morgan said. “Have you ever seen that cocky bastard underestimate his own ability?”

“Well, maybe something else will come up,” Alex said. “Maybe Lily will manage to get away somehow.”

“Maybe,” said Conley. “But I don’t like her odds.”

The ticking of the cuckoo filled the room. Dust mites, accumulated over the years, danced in the afternoon light filtering in through the window.

“I’m going,” Morgan said. “No matter what Bloch says. We’re not leaving Lily behind.”

“If it comes to that, I’ll go with you,” Conley said.

“Me too,” Alex said.

“Not you. Don’t argue.”

It took all of Alex’s willpower not to roll her eyes.

“I’ll go,” Conley broke in to stem an argument. “But Lukacs stays. That’s my price.”

Morgan gritted his teeth. Conley laying conditions like this grated on him, but truth be told Morgan didn’t know whether he’d bring Lukacs to the exchange either. It made his skin crawl to agree with Kirby, but the bastard was right about what it would mean for Lukacs to go free.

Morgan did not have to make up his mind because they were hailed on the screen by Bloch.

“I spoke to Smith,” said Bloch. “We’ve come to a decision.”

Morgan’s fingers tightened on the chair’s armrests.

“We are going to make the exchange. We’re going to get Lily back. Get in touch with Tactical and plan this operation. We are not losing anyone today.”