Counter-Strike (A Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker Novel Book 2) (4 page)

Chapter 6

Gideon Consulting was a three-story
building nestled near the center of Tel Aviv, its glass-lined exterior blending
in with the rest of the corporate facilities lining the bustling downtown
region. The business nameplate on the exterior lobby doors only indicated
GC
in gold letters above the address and revealed nothing about its role as a premier
kidnapping and ransom company that had its hand in global operations. The
entrance was key-coded and a plain-clothes guard stood inside to the right,
greeting staff as they entered for the day shift. The burly man’s
shoulder-holstered Glocks went unnoticed by visitors and their discreetness belied
the fact that all of Gideon’s staff were armed. Even the secretary behind the stainless-steel
desk near the elevators had an MP-5 mounted under the frame.

Gideon was the creation of Anatoly
Leitner, Dev’s father, and a large photograph of his image was mounted on the
wall opposite the lobby doors. Since his untimely death in the U.S. three
months earlier, Dev had struggled to hold onto the reins of his business. The
pressures of managing a large company of over one hundred and twenty staff comprised
largely of alpha-male warriors while coping with her own grief made for a rocky
start.

Under Dev’s direction, the company was
starting to explore work in Latin America and expanding their operations in Eastern
Europe. She had worked enough in Africa to know just how volatile and deadly
that region was and she wanted to avoid any further assignments there if
possible. Working in Somalia and Sudan had gotten her too jaded to military dictatorships,
armed bandits, and the frequent sight of decaying bodies in the alleys and she
had vowed to pull Gideon’s involvement out of those perilous third-world
countries despite the protests of senior Gideon advisors who reminded her of
the lucrative nature of those contracts. Most of her father’s former clients
were corporations who signed on with Gideon as a sort of pre-emptive kidnapping
insurance policy. Many were multi-national oil firms that employed workers in
politically charged climates and needed assurance that their staff could be
rescued without months of red tape and negative attention from the press.

Dev had just finished her morning briefing
with her board of directors when she returned to her office, where Mitch was
waiting.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said,
standing up from the leather seat beside her desk.

“You’re the only thing good about it so
far.” She tossed a thick stack of manila folders on the desk then ran her
fingers through her thick hair, letting out an exhale. “We’ve just lost another
stakeholder, this time a company in the U.S. who said they no longer require
our services if we won’t cover Africa. That’s the second corporation in six
weeks.”

“You told me before that Africa is where the
dollars are flowing these days for ransoming hostages.”

“True, but we’ve lost enough of our
personnel there over the years and I just don’t see any need to sacrifice three
of our people to rescue one worker who decided to break company protocols and
play dumb tourist on his day off. I’ve lost enough fine men since my father’s
passing that pretty soon it’s going to be me and Jacob, the guard at the front
door, keeping this place afloat. Oh, and don’t get started on the tug-of-war
with the board of directors on how things should be run.”

Mitch frowned and walked to the window,
looking at the grounds below where a steady flow of clients were walking out of
the other buildings while Gideon’s doors were still. “Maybe you need to look at
restructuring things to a more manageable size and one that doesn’t cause such
an elevated blood pressure every time you’re here.”

“Maybe, cowboy, maybe, but you didn’t come
here to advise me.” She opened up her laptop and clicked on a file that pulled
up black-and-white security camera footage from the Heathrow Airport. “So come
look at this,” she said, pointing to the figure of Bob Schueller after he
exited the plane. “Notice this blond-haired woman walking parallel in the
distance to Schueller, occasionally glancing over at him.”

Mitch squinted at the screen for a moment,
finding it difficult to pull his attention away from his troubled friend. Dev
enhanced the photograph and then compared the woman in it to a picture from a
passport. “These documents were obtained from a colleague who works in international
customs. “This woman, Jessica Yin, shows up on the passenger manifest—she was
seated next to your friend during the flight, in first class.”

Mitch strained his eyes, taking in the
details of the half-Asian woman’s face and glancing back to the footage from
Heathrow.

“So, what’s the connection?”

Dev pulled up another file which showed
four images of Yin taken in different cities around the world. Each time her
hair was a different color and length. “Chau, Yin, or whatever her real name
is, is implicated in over a dozen corporate espionage cases over the past ten
years. All of them are connected, in some way, with bio-tech research and pharmaceuticals.
You tell me if that doesn’t link her to your friend’s disappearance.”

Mitch was gripping the edge of the desk,
his fingers turning white as his breathing constricted with each glance at the
woman’s image. “Margo, his wife, said that he hadn’t been working on anything
out of the ordinary at the university. He was merely going to London for a
routine conference. It didn’t sound like anything top-secret. I mean, hell, the
DOD wouldn’t have even let him leave the country if it was a security risk.”

“Well, something caused him to appear on Yin’s
radar or whoever is pulling her strings.”

“Ah, shit, Bob,” he said, tapping the
picture of his friend. “What did you get tied up with? Maybe you weren’t even
aware of the well you’d dipped into.”

Then he settled his gaze upon Yin, his
eyelids narrowing. “Now I just need to locate this hellish fiend and pay her a
visit.”

“Mitch, this is a job for MI6 and your
U.S. agencies. I have some contacts that we can turn this over to.”

“So Yin can get hung up in an interdiction
battle with all the countries that want their hands on her. No thanks.”

She started speaking in a monotone voice. “I’d
like to help further but this is as far as my company can reach out.” She
turned the laptop towards him then clicked on another screen which showed her
company’s darknet facial recognition program, pulling up the image of Yin
followed by GPS coordinates to a location in Austria. “I have to go grab some
coffee and I may be gone for a few minutes and won’t be able to acknowledge to
the board that someone gleaned information from my device during that brief
absence.” She looked straight ahead and then walked to the double doors and
exited, leaving Mitch alone.

Mitch’s crooked grin diminished after she
left and he stared at the screen again, committing the information to memory. “Austria.
As for you, Ms. Yin, your life may be forfeit.”

***

That night, back at his studio apartment,
Mitch couldn’t sleep. His thoughts were focused on the upcoming mission and the
welfare of Bob. His head hurt from the stress and he found himself unable to
turn it all off. A hundred scenarios played out in his head including the
dreaded one that involved him making a visit to Margo to tell her the bad news.
Have to stay focused
—
he’s still alive. He has to be. Don’t let doubt
undermine your training
.

Mitch decided to go over his gear one more
time which would keep him occupied for a while. He pulled out the Berenson
leather jacket from his duffel bag. It was designed to look like a standard
jacket but was tailor-made by a friend of his who designed tactical
accoutrements for the Secret Service. In addition to the triple-stitched seams
and reinforced shoulders to support weight for stowing weapons, it had a
plethora of concealed pockets. Each of these contained specific items that he
had used over the years during undercover work with the FBI. Every piece of
gear was carefully selected for its practicality and durability.

Mitch rechecked each receptacle. In an
internal zippered pocket near the chest was a tactical flashlight, a spare
battery, a small first-aid kit, and a mini-tourniquet. Opposite that side was a
velcroed pocket containing a small monocular, a chem-light, a button compass, and
a finger-sized portable phone charger. In his outside pockets were assault
gloves, an N95 dust mask, two protein bars, two energy gels, and a reflective
blanket along with a bottle of iodine tablets for water purification. In a
hidden shoulder compartment was a plastic handcuff key along with $100 in
assorted bills and a few silver coins.

Since he was traveling internationally, he
had to constantly run through a mental checklist for airport security
regulations but since Dev had volunteered Gideon’s private jet, he could skip
leaving his knives behind. Having trained for years in the Filipino martial arts,
he relished having at least three blades on him at all times. Normally, he
stowed these in his checked luggage but there were so many conflicting laws
from country-to-country that he had opted for just buying some when he arrived
in Israel. One was a folder which he kept in his right front pants pocket while
the other two were four-inch fixed blades spread around his waistline in Kydex
sheaths.

He had even removed the factory laces from
his desert boots and replaced those with a specially made type of para-cord
which contained seven strands of Kevlar thread which could be used for slicing
through zip-ties, turned into emergency suturing material, or fashioned into foot
snares.

As he laced up his boots, he reflected
back upon previous missions in the Special Forces and how different this time
felt. His objective had never involved rescuing a friend whose fate was
uncertain in a country where he had no support to fall back on. It was just
going to be him and Dev and now he felt responsible for her since she was putting
her company on the line. Still, he didn’t feel like he had any choice—there
were no fellow FBI agents he could utilize and no one that would pluck him out
of an Austrian jail if things went south. He stowed his gear and walked to the
window, gripping the edge of a chair as if he was trying to snap it in half.
Mitch looked out at the busy streets below, taking a deep breath and wondering
what the next day would hold. 

Chapter 7

Jessica Yin was standing on the third
floor of the Tudor-style estate in the foothills of northern Austria; beside her
was a metallic briefcase and an ivory-handled Walther PPK pistol. Her long
blond hair had been shorn to just below the ears and dyed black and she wore
contact lenses that turned her normally blue eyes a shade of hazel. She knew it
wouldn’t be enough to dodge sophisticated facial recognition software but it
would help her slip by the Interpol images that were no doubt being circulated
around Europe by the local authorities.

She’d managed to slip into the countryside
safe house set up by Kyle and would be on her way out of Austria within the
next twenty-four hours once she received the green light that the second phase
of the operation was under way. Then she could be out of this icy palace in the
mountains and basking in the tropics. Patrolling the grounds outside the estate
were five of her trusted bodyguards, men that Kyle had selected himself and
that she had worked with extensively.

She was intrigued by Kyle as a woodworker would
be taken with a twisted piece of driftwood. Having served on his deep-cover
team in Beijing where she kept surveillance on Kyle from a distance, their
interactions were largely via encrypted cellphone texts or old-school dead
drops. After he went missing and was presumed dead, she went into the Hong Kong
underworld, selling her clandestine services under an assumed identity, taking
any mercenary work that could keep her afloat and on the move. She remembered
the day three months earlier when she saw Kyle stride into a café in Singapore
and sit at her table, like a tortured apparition coming to claim her soul. Yin
went from shocked to relieved to enthralled within the hour as she heard him
replay the horrors of his capture and his coming plan for retribution.

In the months since that fateful day,
their relationship had largely remained strictly business, though she hoped to
pry into the battered recesses of his soul one day. He had a sooty kind of
charisma—one born of experience in the trenches but colored by gruesome events
that had left more than his body scarred. He was perhaps as capable a field
operator as she was but it was his indomitable spirit and perverse ambition
that she was drawn to—that and the money he was offering her. She wouldn’t have
to take on another assignment again if this all went down accordingly. Jessica
had always slipped into the shadows after a mission but this time she wanted to
see Kyle’s larger plan unfold, however little he had hinted at it. As for
Tokarev, she couldn’t stand the Armani-wearing homunculus though it was largely
the Russian billionaire’s funds that were driving this whole operation forward.
He provided the vehicles, the weapons, passports, and the encrypted cellphones
along with any incidentals along the way.

Her phone rang and she put it on speaker
so she could keep pacing back and forth, feeling the plush carpeting on her
bare feet.

“Did everything go according to plan?”
said Kyle in the gravelly voice that she pretended not to like.

“Yes, though the files Schueller had on
his laptop appear to have heavier encryption than I thought. I’ve not been able
to crack it yet and Schueller is still under sedation with a few of my men
delivering him to the next location you requested.”

“Send the file over to me. I’ll provide
you with a secure uplink that will expire after delivery.”

“I was going to hand it to you in person,
my good man.”

“Our timeline has been moved up. I won’t
be making it to your location tonight. Send it over to me.”

“Did your little experiment not work out
as planned?”

“It worked but the onset of death was not
as fast as I’d hoped for. Too many of the victims survived, requiring them to
be euthanized firsthand. I need the viral sequencing you obtained from the
subject to obtain the raw materials so Schueller, with some persuasion, can go
to work on weaponizing the samples in our possession. What he has on his laptop
is of little use to anyone which is why he was traveling with it but combined
with what’s in our possession and with his help, we can bring this to fruition.”

“If I send this file then what assurance
do I have that I’ll get my money or ever see you again?”

Kyle’s voice softened. “
My good lady
,
you can rendezvous with us in the tropics tomorrow. I’m not finished with you
yet.” She heard him stretch out the last word as he sometimes did when
returning her flirtatious comments.

“Very well. Very well. Send me the uplink
site,” she said, blowing a strand of black hair off her nose then moving to the
laptop and inserting the metallic flash drive with Schueller’s files.

“I’ve just texted you the flight number
and your ticket so you know I’m a man of my word.”

She looked at her phone screen. “Hmm,
Vienna. How romantic. Wish you were there to join me.” She clicked on the enter
button on her laptop and sent Schueller’s files.

He chuckled. “No thanks. I’ve seen how you
treat your fellow passengers.”

“Now, if you were here with me…” She
stopped abruptly, her head swiveling to the balcony doors where she’d heard a
crackling sound.

“Jessica, are you there?”

“Gotta go—something’s wrong.” She hung up
and stuffed the phone in the rear pocket of her jeans then grabbed the PPK off
the dresser and flicked off the light switch. She quickly slid her ankle-high
boots on and then secreted herself against the wall, making her way past the
closet. The balcony doors were still secure and there weren’t any shadows
playing off the moonlight to indicate that someone was there. Still, something
had prickled her instincts. Jessica moved to a small porthole window and
glanced down at the driveway. Splayed on the ground near the gated entrance was
one of her guards, his head evidently split apart by a high-caliber round.
Jessica gasped then noticed another guard lying in the bushes beside the Audi,
whose tires were flat.

Shit! Better grab my stuff and get the
hell out of here.
The glass on the balcony doors shattered as an armed man slammed through, the
rooftop rope attached to his waist harness growing slack as he landed.
Instantly, his rifle went full-auto and Jessica found herself diving through a
hail of bullets, one of them grazing her right tricep and sending her pistol to
the floor. She somersaulted behind a couch then darted for the dresser, which
she overturned in a fit of fury. The cacophony of gunfire continued as she
pressed her back into the thick wood of the dresser. With the familiar sound of
the rifle clicking dry, she leapt over the furniture and sprinted into a
linebacker tackle at the tall figure outlined in the balcony. Slamming him into
the door frame, she struck him with a right hook squarely in the jaw then drove
her shin into his groin, the blow slowed by the thick harness. The man folded
forward with a groan but then came up with a fixed blade, slashing in an
uppercut at her face. Jessica parried with her right hand while sidestepping
and smashed her elbow into his face then drove her boot heel into the side of
his knee, cracking the joint. The man bellowed in pain but continued to slash
as he collapsed to the glass-covered carpet. Jessica grabbed a small brass lamp
from an end table and struck him across the skull, ending his failing attack.

“Fucking Kyle—you piece of shit. You get
the file then send your men to dispose of me.” She cursed something in Cantonese
while kneeling down beside the contorted figure. Jessica grabbed his rifle off
the carpet and took a fresh magazine from the man’s vest and swapped it out.
She peeled off his black mask and saw a Caucasian face, her eyes expressing
wonder at the sight.
Who the hell is this guy?
She lifted his arm and
slid down the sleeve, searching for a particular tattoo, but only saw the bare
skin.
Not Indonesian.
Maybe this isn’t Kyle after all. Ah, who the
fuck knows.
She twisted her head up at the ceiling, her eyes widening.
Shit,
is this Crenna’s doing? That old bastard could be on my trail again.

Jessica heard the faint sound of suppressed
gunfire coming from the hallway. She stood up and ran to the overturned dresser
to grab her laptop and a few belongings then squatted beside the splintered furniture
with her weapon fixed on the door. Another volley of pistol fire was followed
by the thumping sound of a body collapsing outside the door. Then she heard the
husky voice of Edward, the lead bodyguard, calling her name. She yelled at him
to open the door while she kept her weapon sights fixed on the entrance.

Edward slowly entered, his blood-stained
hands clutching the suppressed Glock as he nodded towards Jessica, issuing a
sigh of relief. His hulking figure took up nearly the entire doorframe. “The
rest of our men are dead. We need to go, now.”

She tucked the laptop under her arm and
followed Edward out of the room and down the winding staircase. Once they made
sure the driveway was clear, they made their way to a small barn nestled in the
treeline. Jessica had a second Land Rover stowed there for such an emergency
egress. Driving out the rear, Edward headed down a narrow dirt road that led
out opposite the main driveway while Jessica tried unsuccessfully to call Kyle.

As her heartrate slowed with each passing
mile, she felt the sting of the bullet that grazed her arm. She removed the med
kit from the glovebox and began wrapping the wound while pondering her next
move.

“Where to?” said Edward.

“Not Vienna, that’s for damn sure. I’m not
sure who’s behind this but I need to cover my tracks,” she said. “Once you hit
the main road, head northwest. We’ll fly out of Munich instead.”

***

Von was lying in a supine position in the
woods with a sniper rifle, four hundred yards away from the estate when he’d
seen Jessica dart outside with one of her bodyguards. As he was fixing his
night-vision scope on her head, his ear-mic clicked on and the voice of Crenna
jabbed into his thoughts.

“Have you dispatched the target already?”
said his boss.

Von’s finger was hovering over the trigger
while Jessica and the guard trotted to a barn. “Well, she’s nearly got one foot
in the grave as we speak but there’s no sign of Schueller.”

“Withdraw. I repeat, withdraw. I need her
alive. There’s a bigger fish in the water who just appeared on my radar. Follow
her and see where she goes next. I’m on my way to Sweden to follow up on
something.”

Von removed his finger from the trigger
and watched through his scope as a Land Rover pulled out of the barn and headed
into the forest. “Clever girl. It’s a shame you’re such a bad apple.”

He zoomed in on the license plate and memorized
the numbers. Then he stood up and walked down the small hill to his SUV,
stowing the suppressed .308 rifle in the rear and removing a small tablet from
his backpack. He pulled up the agency satellite images for the area and typed
in the license plate number. While he waited for the search to commence, he drove
down the gravel road to the front of the estate to survey the scene and check
for any survivors. He stepped onto the muddy embankment near the grass and
examined the splayed bodies peppering the lawn of the estate. He looked at the
body of one of his fellow agents near the side entrance. “What a shit-show. More
good men lost to the fucking wind. Looks like I’m running solo on this one.”
Von rubbed a thick knot in his neck.

He felt like Crenna was keeping more than
the usual mission details from him on this assignment and wondered what his
boss was hiding. Not that it mattered—Von had little choice but to follow
through on his orders from above. He’d heard about what happened to field
agents who swam against the tide and probed into their superiors’ affairs. He
didn’t need his helicopter to mysteriously crash in the mountains like one of his
colleagues on another of Crenna’s teams did last year after doing wet work in
Latin America. At least that’s what Von suspected. He continued rubbing his
neck as the satellite image refined its search and zoomed in on the fleeing
Land Rover which was headed towards Germany. Von grinned at the thought of
heading to that country. He remembered a college semester abroad in Stuttgart—when
the world seemed so good. Before he signed away his life to the agency and
their claws became embedded in his soul.