“Can he help us?” asked Katie.

“He’s trying to,” said Igor, smiling. “But he’s having a hard time getting any work done because you’re asking him too many fucking questions.”

Katie nodded, then grinned.

“Lawbreaker, huh?” she said.

Igor smiled.

“Is that closer to your type?”

“A little.”

Igor pointed at the live video stream coming from Iceland.

“That warehouse generates so much heat that it had to be situated near cold water or else the air-conditioning would’ve been cost prohibitive. Right now, every computer in that room is scouring Langley’s technological infrastructure. Once we find the precise vulnerability point that Cloud is accessing, that is, his trapdoor, that, Katie, you beautiful American girl, is when you will have Cloud.”

“How long will that take?”

“If I had to guess, a week.”

“A week?” asked Katie.

“Then again, if a certain American woman with the most gorgeous blue eyes I’ve ever seen were to want to go to dinner with me, it might inspire me to do it quicker.”

“Well, I do want to find him,” said Katie, smiling mischievously at Igor, “but not that badly.”

“What happens if you can’t find him?” asked Tacoma.

Igor’s smile disappeared as his eyes roamed to Tacoma.

“Then we’re fucked.”

64

ELEKTROSTAL

Cloud saw the red icon in the shape of a star suddenly pop to the front of his screen. He double-clicked it, then scanned the flag:

22:00:15

Reinholt T.C.

Minsk NA MSQ UMMS 223

Withdrawal

NBRB

Exch. 75000 BEL ruble * RUS ruble

Cloud read and reread the alert. Reinholt was not one of the men, so why had the flag popped?

He went into the database and brought up the last two days’ worth of electronic signatures for both Brainard and Reinholt. Brainard’s last event was the purchase of drinks at a Minsk restaurant. The cash withdrawal at the airport ATM was Reinholt’s first. He did a quick directory search on Reinholt, using his passport identification to architect his financial activities—credit cards, bank accounts, and anything else the database had. Reinholt had three credit cards and two bank accounts. All of them had been created that day. In fact, the ATM withdrawals were the first electronic signature—the first transaction—Reinholt had ever made.

“Perhaps he’s a mountain man?” said Cloud to himself, facetiously. “Lived in a tree house for his whole life. Just happens to have a few credit cards along with a bunch of money in the bank. Now he wants to go to Moscow. Makes perfect sense.”

It was Langley’s asset, Brainard. He was at Minsk National Airport, where he’d just exchanged Belarus rubles for Russian ones.

Cloud looked at a publicly available schedule of flights between Minsk and Moscow. There was only one more flight that evening, a 10:07 P.M. Belavia flight.

He glanced at his watch: 10:00 P.M.

Within a minute, Cloud discovered a vulnerability in one of Aeroflot’s servers, enabling him to penetrate the airline’s computer network. By 10:04, he was looking at the passenger manifest of Belavia flight 9984 Minsk to Moscow. He thought for a minute. Then he copied the list of names and ran it against the Belavia customer database. Only one name was new. Either Langley had an alias they were employing for Brainard’s trip to Moscow unaffiliated with his identity, or they’d provisioned new identity in the last hour. If it was the former, there was little Cloud could do at this point.

At 10:06, Cloud dialed Minsk Customs emergency hotline.

“Customs hotline.”

“My name is Rudyev and I work for Federal Security Service,” said Cloud. “You have a suspected terrorist on flight nine-nine-eight-four. A Mr. Reinholt. He’s seated in 9B. Do not let that plane leave the ground.”

*   *   *

Two minutes later, from his seat aboard the plane, Brainard watched through a large terminal window as at least a dozen uniformed Customs agents charged through the terminal.

He picked up his cell and dialed Carter.

“I’m blown. Let Bill know.”

65

NOVGOROD, RUSSIA

Dewey got on the main highway between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the M10. With every passing minute, he knew FSB would put more men on finding him. But those same minutes bought Dewey distance and—the farther away he got from Saint Petersburg—anonymity. They would be looking for him near the city. Then he remembered what Calibrisi told him. His photo was on the wire. His likeness attached to the APB posed a significant challenge.

There was something to take his mind off the feeling of being hunted, however …

He’d felt it for the past hour now, down his leg: cold, wet, raw.

So far, he’d been able to ignore the pain, as he’d been trained to do, but it was deep and it was getting worse. Dewey’s sheer size, and the layers of muscle on his arms, torso, and legs, prevented several bones from breaking when he’d hit the ground outside the Four Seasons, but that was little consolation right now. The bleeding wasn’t stopping.

Dewey looked at his leg. From the knee down, the trousers were solid red.

He unzipped his pants. Slowly, as he drove, he pulled them down below his knees, groaning in pain as the rough fabric chafed against the wound. In the dim light, he could see a deep gash glistening in fresh, dark blood.

He’d ignored it thus far, but the blood loss would debilitate him if he didn’t deal with it.

At the first exit, Dewey turned off the highway. He pulled into a modern orange-and-white Eka gas station.

He climbed out of the car and stuck the pump nozzle into the fuel tank, then limped toward the gas station, glancing down at the thin, wet trail of blood dripping from his right pant leg.

The wind had picked up. He looked at the black sky and could see clouds undulating with stripes of white and, below, far in the distance, lightning. A storm was coming.

He remembered words from training:

You will learn to operate in the worst types of weather, so when it comes, you’re ready. A storm is an opportunity. It’s the time when strength and power can be freely used. In this way, the weather is a weapon. The best offensive operations occur at night, during storms.

The store was crowded. Dewey walked the aisles, looking for something to stop the bleeding. He picked up a package of baby wipes, scissors, duct tape, garbage bags, a bag of salt, cornstarch, bandages, and paper towels. He grabbed two large bottles of vodka, then looked up and made eye contact with a teenage girl, who abruptly turned and walked away. Dewey glanced at a mirror in the corner, seeing his face. He was drenched in sweat, and his skin was bright red. His clothes didn’t fit. He looked from the mirror to the floor. A small pool of blood had collected at his shoe. He saw an advertisement in the far corner of the convenience store. It was a photo of a fish, hooked to a fishing pole, as the fisherman pulled it flying out of a stream. Near the advertisement, he found a large stainless steel fishhook, a spool of fishing line, and a pair of pliers.

He stepped into line. The chaos of the crowd helped conceal the trail of blood at Dewey’s feet. People were too busy to look down, as they fumbled for their wallets and cash. As Dewey got to the front of the line, his eyes shot left, to the door. But it wasn’t something outside that caused him to turn. Instead, it was a bulletin attached to the door. It was a large poster, freshly hung. A Wanted poster. Dewey’s photo was spread across the center.

Luckily, the photo showed a man with long brown hair. Chopping off his hair had been a good call.

Dewey turned calmly back to the cashier. She was young and plump, with neon-blue-tinted hair, dressed in an Eka uniform.