Extraction Read online

  Danika frowned. What a waste of time. Still, she’d warned him.

  The computer beeped, and the screen changed. The hacker she’d saved from Interpol last year had paid her off with a revolutionary program—devised on a quantum computer, he’d promised—that could brute force its way into virtually any system on the planet.

  She looked at the readouts and followed the lines of code as the program took root in Oakrock’s server and infiltrated the file structure.

  “Skit,” she swore. “It may get into any system but even a high school kid can see what I’m doing!” She would only have moments to get the info she needed before Oakrock’s IT department realized what was going on and locked her out.

  “Annnnd they’re onto me already…dammit…” she muttered, typing away furiously, trying to glean anything of value. Dead end files, empty shells of programs with tantalizing names—it was all standard decoy bullshit. She slapped her hand on the rickety outdoor patio table, shaking the laptop.

  “Fuck!”

  They were fast—faster than she’d expected. Her access was shrinking by the second as Oakrock attempted to take itself off line all together—just about the only surefire way to stop her hacking.

  Her only option was to dump everything and hope she could puzzle out the details offline. She hit the command and the program dutifully started to download anything and everything that wasn’t nailed down. She chewed her lip and watched the progress bar on the screen creep up as the total file structure shrank.

  It was over in moments. The computer beeped again and signaled it had downloaded everything found, but she also noticed that by the time the program finished, 97% of Oakrock’s file structure was offline.

  Despite the poor showing, she grinned. Someone at Oakrock likely needed a new change of pants after the equivalent of a nuclear bomb went off deep in the heart of their servers.

  The connection died, and she went offline. Cracking her knuckles in anticipation, she started sifting through the data. In the distance, over the darkened rooftops and apartment buildings, a gunshot rang out, and was answered by two more quick pops. A dog barked somewhere nearby, two stories down on the street, but nothing moved, only the birds in the sky.

  As the computer searched through the files for any mention of Jayne Renolds—any of her known aliases, or the Council—Danika sipped her water and enjoyed the serenity of a dead city.

  Minutes melted into an hour, then two, then three. The computer heated up, it’s processor over-clocked and racing through file after file, tearing the newfound data to pieces in a mad effort to ferret out something useful. Danika had long since moved inside the darkened apartment and continued to rummage through the lives of the people who had died there last year.

  As the night deepened, her computer paused, and the silence made Danika poke her head out from the bedroom where she’d been idly looking through an extensive collection of boudoir photos of the young woman who’d lived there. Danika could only guess for who they were taken—no one else appeared in any of the pictures—and was keeping herself occupied trying to discover the woman’s lover through clues left in the house when she noticed the absence of the computer’s whirring hard drive.

  She glanced at the glowing screen, now safely hidden in the living room, away from the open balcony. The last thing she needed was for some other fool out there to think there was something up here worth stealing and try to break in. She’d killed enough for one day already.

  Walking over to the computer, she snagged a meal replacement bar from her pack and ripped it open. It was loaded with protein, and very little taste. Sitting down to chew her snack, she tapped a few commands into the keyboard to see what the computer had uncovered.

  She supposed that when the search stopped, it meant something had been found or the computer had melted down—

  “Son of a bitch,” she hissed, bits of protein bar falling from her mouth. She wiped the back of her hand across her lips and dropped the bar to the floor.

  A series of emails—on a public server for God’s sake!—had been copied to the computer of one Brent Atkins, CEO and founder of Oakrock. These emails, Danika discovered as she scrolled through the half-dozen missives, were to an alias of Roland MacTavish.

  She sat back and thought for a moment. MacTavish—she hadn’t heard about him in years. He had been one of the other top operators in Reginald’s tool chest, but after a failed mission in Tunisia, he’d vanished. She’d always assumed Reginald had him terminated for failure to complete the op—a relatively standard practice for the Earl of Dunkeith.

  But here he was, just two months ago, evidently plotting with Atkins…but why?

  The emails indicated MacTavish wasn’t acting on his own, or for the Council. He was freelancing on behalf of someone else, but he was careful to never mention anyone by name. And Atkins, though sloppier, played the game adequately enough that other than the tenuous link of association, she had nothing.

  She smirked. But it wasn’t nothing. It was the first piece of concrete evidence proving something was going down at Oakrock, whether it was connected to the Council or Jayne didn’t matter. Braaten’s instinct was right.

  She was about to close the emails and try a different search string when her eye caught a word repeated in every email: herself. Only it wasn’t used by Atkins in the grammatically correct manner, but apparently as a name.

  “What’s this, then?” she asked, leaning forward to get a better look. Danika wouldn’t have given it a second thought, and was ready to chalk it up to Atkins fudging his email, when she checked and found it in every email, and in one, capitalized: Herself.

  She sat back and smiled. There was only one woman on the planet that she knew who could get people to refer to her like that. Atkins was working with Jayne, through MacTavish.

  She jabbed a finger at the screen. “I fucking got you!”

  Using the metadata from the emails received from MacTavish, Danika tracked down his IP address and location to a fake account out of Bangladesh. Knowing the Council protocol for such communications, she used her old credentials to access the Indian ISP and discovered the intricate web of false IPs and redirects.

  It took longer than she wanted, but by the time the sun rose and she was yawning wide enough to crack her jaw, she’d nailed it. Jayne was still in the UK, somewhere near Manchester, England by the looks of it, and the bitch was contacting someone in Moscow almost hourly.

  It had to be Igor Voroshilov. He was the senior Councilman in Russia and one of the last upper tier Council members still at large. Danika grinned in triumph.

  “Oh, Igor, what are you up to?” Now that she had a lead, it was time to contact Braaten. Something was definitely going down, and the fact that Jayne was focused on Moscow at precisely the time he was there had to be more than just a coincidence.

  She frowned as the phone rang and rang but the call never went through. Danika dialed Braaten’s AR glasses again, using the backdoor access she’d left the last time they’d talked. Unless he’d gone completely off the grid—or the glasses had been destroyed—she should be able to reach him no matter what.

  “Come on, pick up already,” she muttered, staring out the windows at Dublin. There were only a handful of lights scattered over the city. For the most part it looked completely dark and deserted.

  On her third failed attempt to contact Braaten, she started packing her meager kit. It was time to catch a plane to Moscow. Something was wrong, and if her hunch was correct, the shitstorm she felt brewing was all heading for Braaten. She didn’t want to leave Ireland, being so close to her target, but if she knew Jayne, the bitch wouldn’t sit still for long—and after the fiasco in Edinburgh, she’d prefer to exact her revenge on Braaten in person.

  And now that I’ve kicked in the door to Oakrock, she’s going to know that I’m on to her, too.

  There was only one option now—abandon the hunt for Jayne and get to Braaten before she did. “God dammit.”

  She’
d seen the news reports that President Harris had announced Jayne’s death as a result of the plane crash on the coast. But she’d also been to the crash site and knew they hadn’t found any bodies. How Jayne had managed to survive the beating Danika had leveled upon her in Edinburgh Castle’s ancient little chapel was something she could puzzle out on the way to Moscow.

  Danika shouldered her bag and picked up the pistol she’d taken from her would-be attacker. She quickly disassembled it and threw the slide over the balcony to clatter on the empty street below. The magazine she tossed up to the third-floor balcony above, and the frame she left in the living room. No one would get killed with that piece of shit tonight.

  Stepping to the apartment’s front door, she drew her own meticulously cared for, hyper-tuned Glock 17 from her drop-thigh holster. The weapon melded into her hand and became an extension of her body. Now that was how a gun was supposed to feel.

  Danika opened the door and after a cursory check of the still-empty, still-reeking hallway, she left Dublin, her jaw set firmly and her eyes sweeping everything before her.

  The mission was back on.

  18

  Starushka

  Moscow, Russian Federation

  Cooper sat on the blocky, Soviet-era park bench and sipped his tea, watching the few early risers head off to work. This section of Moscow had been hit hard by the bioweapon—almost every door had a big “X” in spray paint on it, denoting a dead body had been inside—from the looks of some buildings, he couldn’t tell if that had happened before the attack or after.

  He'd been sitting in front of the apartment complex that served as Beslan’s safe house for the past ten minutes, and he felt the inexorable beat of every second, propelling him forward into action, to stop sitting around and do something.

  He needed to get moving. He needed to find the ambassador and rescue him—and his wife. He needed to get out of Moscow before international relations made things too difficult. He needed to find Jayne.

  But Cooper Braaten wasn't some rook, fresh out of boot. He was an operator, and a well-seasoned one at that. He took a calm sip of his tea, fighting the tension and Dexedrine that made his heart hammer in his chest. The enemy would expect him to make a rash move—he got an alert, a little blinking message that appeared on his HUD, explaining that Oakrock had detected a transmission from the western edge of Moscow.

  Ambassador Marquadt had been in a car accident. Authorities were converging on the scene, but Cooper was confident when they arrived, the ambassador and his wife would be long gone. That had been over an hour ago.

  Cooper needed to get inside the building directly across from him, find Beslan, and get back on mission. But he knew the enemy would expect him to do that right away, too. It could very easily be a trap. He was under the clock, out-gunned and outnumbered, behind enemy lines…and his time was running out.

  If the bratva had managed to whisk Ambassador Marquadt and his wife to some unknown location, it was possible Cooper would never find them—Russia was a big goddamn country.

  Cooper frowned. On the other hand, if he rushed in, guns blazing, it was almost guaranteed that the mafia would surround and overwhelm him. The thugs he’d faced so far had been incompetent, but a few had shown signs of intelligence. He was sure he'd only been facing the bottom of the barrel, but he didn't want to waste his time or energy fighting. He needed to find the ambassador and get the fuck out of Dodge.

  So why couldn't he just get up and walk across the street? He asked himself that question one more time. Something—some subconscious tremor tugged at his mind and kept him rooted to the bench, despite the fact that his ass was going numb on the crude Soviet architecture.

  Through his years in the Teams, Cooper had learned to trust his instinct when it told him to wait just a second and check things out. Something wasn't right, something he wasn't actively seeing, but his subconscious mind had picked up on the clues and put together a warning package.

  It occurred to him then, what it was that had made him pause. On a bench similar to the one on which he sat, directly next to the front door of the crumbling building, a little old lady patiently watched the flu-ravaged world wake. Her gnarled hands wrapped around the head of a simple wooden stick, resting in front of her as she regarded the world with a bemused, wrinkled smile.

  Every now and then, a pigeon would land at her feet, and she’d mumble something to it, then toss a few crumbs from a wrinkled paper sack in her lap. The birds pecked at the ground, only to fly away in a burst of feathers and wings when the door opened and some young person stumbled out, half-asleep, checking watches or cell phones. She would look up, offer a smile and a nod in greeting, and go back to watching the world and those stupid fucking birds.

  Cooper sipped his tea and frowned at her. What the hell is it that’s so dangerous about you?

  Movement out of the corner of his eye drew Cooper's gaze across his cup to a bald a young man with a heavily tattooed neck, wearing a black and gold track suit, striding across the street down the block like he owned the world. His eyes locked on the apartment building and he moved with a singular purpose, ignoring the few pedestrians around him, shoving aside anyone who got in his way.

  Cooper sighed inwardly. Another bratva thug. These guys take obvious to an art form.

  The hitman hadn't even bothered to look at the park across the street. Cooper watched with disdain as the thug marched down the block and approached the target apartment building. As he drew near, his eyes shifted to the old lady, then flicked away, ignoring her. She mumbled something and nodded, offering a smile, but the man waved his wrist in a casual, dismissive manner.

  The facial expression on the old woman changed, and Cooper paused mid-sip. He’d seen a flicker of something primal in her eyes when the man waved her off, dismissing her as a street urchin. It was there for only a split-second, the hungry gaze of a predator about to strike.

  The thug was having some difficulty gaining entry into the apartment building. He pounded on the intercom system, and shouted something, his voice echoing across the street.

  The old lady said something again, and again he dismissed her, this time with an angry chop of his arm. The message was clear: leave me alone.

  Cooper grimaced. Better shut your mouth lady, I don't think this guy has a problem hitting women.

  She said something again, and the younger man spun on her, raising his hand menacingly. In an explosion of sudden movement, the old woman lashed out with her stick, catching the young man on the side of his head—Cooper heard the dull thwack.

  The thug staggered to the left and hit the wall, sliding down to find himself on the ground. The old lady got to her feet, took a quick look around, and shuffled out of range as he tried to sweep her with his foot, but the movement was slow and drunken.

  That gave Cooper a chance to observe the old woman on her feet. He realized then, what it was that had caused him to hesitate before approaching the building. The red checkered bandanna she wore over her hair jogged his memory.

  He was sure of it now, from the shape of the hunch on her back, to the way she leaned forward over the stick—it was the same old lady that he smiled at in the airport after passing through customs.

  And even more troubling, there was something about the way she stood that made his eyes narrow. Her feet had shifted from the tottering stance of a decrepit old woman, to the confident, toes spread shoulder-width stance of a veteran fighter.

  He couldn't see the shape of her body under the frumpy, patchwork overcoat she wore. When Cooper sub-vocalized the word "thermal," he got nothing but a gray outline of the old lady in his AR glasses.

  What kind of starushka wears an IR blocking thermal coat?

  He couldn't help himself from grinning. The kind of old lady that looks like Beslan in disguise.

  Cooper stood from his bench, checked the streets and waited for a rusted, smoke-belching cab to drive by. He walked across as if he lived in the apartment building and approached the old
lady, now gently poking at the unconscious man on the ground by the door with her walking stick.

  Cooper could tell by the way her body stiffened just slightly that she had heard him long before he approached.

  "Excuse me ma'am, are you okay?" he asked in Russian.

  The old woman spun, raising her walking stick sideways like she meant to crosscheck Cooper. Recognition flashed across her eyes, and she recovered the move gracefully, using her momentum to plant the stick between her feet and assume the role of a wizened old lady once more.

  Cooper raised his hands and said, “Marsha oylla.” The common greeting was about the extent of Cooper’s knowledge of the Chechen language, but he knew it literally translated as enter in freedom. The Chechens were fiercely independent and always had been.

  The old woman smiled as she relaxed, then replied in Russian: "It's not often I find someone speaking the language of my youth. You do me a sweetness to start the day.”

  Cooper nodded, then glanced at the body on the ground behind her. "Is this punk giving you any trouble?" he asked, switching back to Russian.

  The twinkle in the old woman's eyes and the curl of her wrinkled lip gave Cooper confirmation that Beslan was indeed the old woman. "It's about time you got here. You walked right past me at the airport," he/she said.

  Cooper grunted. "I guess you know why I'm here."

  "Not a clue," the old woman/Beslan said, scanning the street behind Cooper. "Come, we can’t talk out here. It's not safe."

  Cooper glanced down at the thug. "Expecting more like him?"

  The old woman snorted. "Hardly. These punks don't scare me. But the FSB can ruin your day pretty quick. Come, follow me." The old lady turned and reached out a shaking hand for the door. The palm scanner, attached to the crumbling door frame’s stonework, looked out of place, though the box that held it was rusted by many years of use. The door clicked, and she went to open it, but Cooper stepped forward and pulled it back, releasing stale air onto the front steps.