Resurrection Day (31 page)

Collins pushed the stairwell door open a crack. Looking back at Kursk, he saw that the Russian had his pistol out — a Gyurza SR-1 automatic. Beads of sweat glistened on his face. 'Ready, Major?'

Kursk nodded. 'When you are.'

'Here goes.' Collins pushed open the door and moved cautiously into the stairwell, Kursk behind him. Tension braided the air and Collins' heart pounded. As they started to round the first bend in the stairs, two shots suddenly rang out. The noise in the enclosed stairwell was deafening. Then came two more shots, sending chips flying off the plaster walls above their heads.

'Jesus!' Collins fired twice up the stairwell in reply, and three shots answered in rapid succession, the rounds gouging the walls, ricochets whistling above their heads, and he and Kursk were forced to retreat back down the stairs into the lobby. Sweat beaded Collins' face. Across the lobby the frightened caretaker peered from the cover of the office door. 'Sam! What's out the back?'

'Car ... carpark. Garbage area.'

'There a fire escape?'

'Yes, sir. There sure is.'

'Stay in the office and don't come out until I tell you to.'

'Yes, sir. Got no problem doing that.' The caretaker disappeared into the office and the door banged shut. Collins flicked on his two-way radio. 'Lou? You there, Lou?' A crackle, and then, 'Yeah, I'm here. Go ahead.'

'They're in the building, Lou. Rashid, Gorev and the woman. They've got us pinned down at the ground-floor stairwell.'

Jesus!'

'Get the call in fast, then cover the front.'

'Jack ... listen to me, man, don't go doing anything crazy.'

'Get the call in, Lou! We need backup.'

'Doing it now. Hang in there, Jack.' Collins stuffed the radio in his pocket, wiped sweat from his face and turned to Kursk. 'Whoever's holding us off isn't going to stay up there for ever.' He nodded towards the lobby. 'I'll take a bet the others will try to make it out by the fire escape. How about you try and cover the back, Major?' Kursk nodded, moved to go. Collins gripped his arm. 'Hey, just be careful, OK?'

Rashid led the way to the fire escape. They raced down the metal steps and across the rear parking lot to where Rashid's navy blue Explorer was parked. He yanked open the driver's door and Karla jumped in beside him, just as gunfire cracked somewhere deep inside the building. In panic, Rashid went to start the engine.

'What about Nikolai?'

'Forget him.' Rashid was frantic. 'We're getting out of here.'

'No, we're not leaving without him.' Karla moved to climb out of the Explorer but Rashid gripped her arm. 'Are you insane? We haven't got time!' She pulled herself away, grabbed Rashid's Skorpion machine-pistol. 'I'm going back. Start the engine and wait for us.'

'You stupid bitch, you'll get us killed!' Rashid tried to stop her, but Karla jumped from the Explorer and raced towards the block's rear entrance.

Kursk reached the back door at the end of the lobby hallway. He jerked the handle, peered out, and saw an asphalt parking lot outside. It was deserted, apart from a half-dozen empty parked cars. Which way was the fire escape? Left or right? He decided left, and stepped out cautiously. A corner of the apartment block jutted out from the main building and masked his view of the rest of the parking lot. As he stepped towards the corner a crackle of gunfire erupted from somewhere inside the block and he looked back, startled. It sounded as if Collins was still pinned down on the stairs. As Kursk started to turn round again he felt something hard prod his neck ...

On the second-floor stairwell Gorev slid a fresh magazine into the Beretta and checked his watch. He'd kept Kursk and the second man at bay for over two minutes. Karla and Rashid should have made it out the back by now. He noticed the smell of burning from along the corridor, and when he looked back saw a thin veil of smoke. Time to move.

He shouted down the stairwell in Russian. 'Are you there, Alexei?' No reply. 'Answer me!' Gorev shouted.

A voice shouted back, in English. 'This is the FBI.'

Gorev thought: It has to be the other man I saw in the lobby. He shouted down the stairs, in English this time. 'I want to speak with Kursk. Get him for me!'

A pause before the voice came back. 'You want to talk, you talk to me. You and your friends do exactly as I say and no one's going to get hurt. Throw down your weapons, come down the stairs.'

Gorev thought: The American must be alone. If Alexei was there, he'd have answered by now. He must have gone to get help or cover the back. Gorev tore open his backpack. He pulled out a grenade, yanked the pin and lobbed the grenade, which clattered down the stairwell ...

Collins heard something rattle on the stairs. He twisted his body to get a better look, kept his Glock pointed up the stairwell, saw the grenade bounce towards him down the steps. There was a split second of indecision, a moment of cold, stark horror as he reached out, grabbed the grenade on its final bounce, and flung it back up the stairwell ...

'Drop the pistol, or I'll kill you.'

A woman's voice spoke in English. Kursk dropped his pistol. It clattered to the ground. 'Raise your hands. Don't look round.' Kursk raised his hands and the voice said, 'Move back inside.' Kursk moved back to the rear door, went to open it.

The moment he did so, the crack of an explosion erupted from inside the building and startled them both. Kursk seized the moment, spun round and grabbed the muzzle of the woman's machine-pistol, directing it away. He and Karla Sharif stared into each other's faces, struggling to gain control of the weapon. The Skorpion chattered. A burst sprayed the brick walls and the hot muzzle burned Kursk's hand, but he held on, tried to force the weapon from the woman's grasp. She held on to it fiercely, a strength in her that Kursk never could have imagined, and then something painfully hard jammed into his neck, and a familiar voice said, 'Let it go, Alexei. Let it go now.'

In the lobby, Collins staggered to his feet. His eardrums rang; his clothes were covered with fragments of plaster and wood. The blast had splintered the stairwell door, almost blown it off its hinges. The instant he'd thrown the grenade he'd flung himself bodily out the door, and a split second later the explosion had come, high up in the stairwell. The percussion had left him dazed. Suddenly a fire alarm went off, and the shrill sound of bells filled the lobby.

'Jack!' Morgan burst into the lobby brandishing a Heckler from the car, holding it to his shoulder, prepared to fire. He stared over at the stairwell door. 'Jesus, are you OK, man? The fuck happened?'

'Grenade ... ' Collins was still in shock, his mind a fog. 'Help's on its way. Where's your weapon, Jack?' Collins, still dazed, looked round for his Glock, couldn't remember where he'd dropped it. On the stairwell probably. Trying to move up the stairs again after Gorev was pointless. He would have taken the fire escape by now. The fog started to clear and a single thought entered his head: Where the hell is Rashid? Collins felt a sudden, powerful fury, a livid need for revenge.

Morgan said, 'You sure you're OK? Where the hell's Kursk?'

'The back way. Gone after the others. Give me the damned Heckler.' Collins frantically grabbed the weapon from Morgan and stumbled across the lobby towards the rear door ...

Kursk let the muzzle go. The sound of a fire alarm could be heard inside the building. He turned round as the woman stepped away, brandishing the machine-pistol. Kursk saw a tense-looking Gorev holding a Beretta in his right hand, the barrel pointed directly at his face. 'Get over to the jeep,' Gorev ordered the woman. Kursk stared at her, their eyes met for an instant, and then the woman raced away and disappeared round the corner. Gorev's face was pale, carved in stone, and Kursk noticed that he was clutching his side.

'You're a long way from home, Alexei.' Kursk looked down. Blood dripped from a wound in Gorev's side, crimson spots spattered on the ground. Kursk noticed that his navy blue parka was stained with a slash of dark red.

'You need help.'

'I've suffered worse. But you can thank your friend. Tell him that from me.'

'What you're doing is insanity, Nikolai. You're only signing your own death warrants, all of you.'

'A matter of opinion.' Gorev raised his pistol. Kursk was white faced as Gorev aimed directly at his head, squeezed the trigger. At the last second Gorev turned the pistol away, fired into the nearby wall, sending brick chips flying. 'If I were you, Alexei, I'd keep my nose well out of this, for both our sakes. I'm telling you that as a friend. Otherwise, I'd hate to think where it all might lead. You and your comrade have overstepped the bounds already. Try and stop us, harm us in any way, and you'll turn this city into a graveyard. I mean that, Alexei. You're playing with fire.'

A navy blue Explorer roared up, growled to a halt, and its passenger door was flung open. Kursk saw the woman in the back seat, recognised the man that had to be Mohamed Rashid at the wheel, with blond dyed hair, cropped short. Gorev climbed in, still clutching his side, pulled the door shut and gave a grim salute through the rolled-down window. 'Dosvedanya, old friend. And remember what I said, or else we'll both have the Devil to pay.'

The Explorer's engine revved, the tyres spun, and it tore away.

As the Explorer accelerated away, Collins burst out the rear door with the Heckler, Morgan behind him, brandishing his Glock. For a split second, Collins caught a glimpse of Rashid in the driver's seat. Kursk was in their line of fire and Collins screamed, 'Get down, Kursk!' Kursk, startled, saw the FBI men take aim.

'No! Don't shoot!' He moved to block the line of fire, but Collins barrelled past him, shoved him aside.

'Get out of the damned way!' But as Collins and Morgan prepared to fire the Explorer screeched round the corner, put on a powerful burst of speed and was gone.

Washington, DC 1 p.m.

Sergei Maslov was astonished. As he was sitting down with his wife to enjoy a breakfast of sausages and fried potatoes in their one-bed Moscow apartment, the knock had come on his front door. Two men he had never seen before produced FSB identity cards, instructed him to pack an overnight case, and assured Maslov's shocked wife Lara that her husband, the professor, was not being arrested but was required to attend a very important meeting outside Moscow and would be gone for two days, before whisking him in their car at high speed to the FSB's headquarters.

There, Maslov had been briefed for almost two hours by a half-dozen intelligence officials and senior chemists from the Defence Ministry before being sped away in a black-windowed BMW to Vnukovo airfield. Unceremoniously deposited in the cabin of a private American Learjet waiting on the tarmac, the thirty-nineyear-old scientist from Volgograd had been hurtled at over five hundred miles an hour across the darkness of the Arctic Circle. Touching down at Andrews Air Force Base almost eight hours later, Maslov was met by a Russian embassy official and again whisked by car — this time part of a convoy of smoke-glassed Secret Service Chevrolet Jeeps and police motorcycle escorts — into the rear grounds of the White House. He was bundled along a narrow tunnel that ran into a basement of the East Wing, leading eventually to a small private room, crammed with high-powered computers, line-printers, scanners and at least a couple of dozen phone lines, along with a bubbling coffee-maker, a water dispenser, and a serving trolley laden with snacks and soft drinks: cans of Seven-Up, Fanta and Pepsi.

Disoriented from his hectic journey, and barely awake, Maslov met the twelve-strong group of US military officers and civilians, chemists and nerve-gas experts from the US Army Soldier and Biological Chemical Command who had been anxiously awaiting his arrival. For almost two hours they had grilled him about Substance A232X, queried his figures and mathematical extrapolations, and between mouthfuls of coffee they had tapped his data into the computers, until finally the resulting print-outs were pressed into his hand and it was time for Maslov to be ushered into another room. He had never been to Washington before, let alone America, and certainly in his wildest dreams had never thought he would be a guest at the White House. But here he was, in a roomful of very important people: face to face with President Andrew W. Booth and his Security Council. Maslov was overwhelmed. Tiny dew-drops of sweat began to form on his nose and forehead.

'Mr Maslov ... Sergei ... perhaps you'd like to begin, sir?'

Maslov nervously picked at the small gold earring in his left lobe, a trinket he'd worn since his student days at the Moscow Academy of Sciences, twenty years ago, when punk had been all the rage. The specialist interpreter by his side had been provided by the Americans, but Maslov doubted the woman would be needed. He spoke excellent English thanks to the time his father had served as Soviet military attache in London. He was confident of his command of the language, had all the figures in front of him, knew the gist of what he wanted to say. He stood and faced the packed audience: the US President and his advisers seated at the table, senior chemical experts from the US Army standing around the walls.

'A nerve-gas attack on a big city like Washington, using a thousand litres of A232X, would have only one result — incredible human devastation,' Maslov began, trying to banish his anxiety by imagining he was addressing a class of students. 'However, I cannot say with total precision what such a weapon is going to do to your American capital. The fact is, there are no human studies for A232X, so everything I tell you is totally speculative. But what I can say is that the laboratory tests on animals I have witnessed suggest that the potential for death and injury is so great, so ... ' Maslov searched his mind for the right word, conscious of the female translator by his side, poised to see him through any difficulty. ' ... so immense, it is almost impossible to conceive.'

Seeing that he had engaged the attention of his audience, and with his confidence increasing, he walked over to the special map that had been set up on a trestle at the top of the conference table. It was a map of Washington, DC, showing the city centre and outlying districts. A series of three thick concentric circles in red, orange and green, drawn with indelible marker, fanned out from the capital's heart. Maslov was unfamiliar with Washington, but he knew exactly what the coloured circles meant, and that was enough. 'But what I have done — with the help of your colleagues — is to work out my best estimate of the human deaths and injuries such an attack would cause, based on our calculations. Since you don't know where the device is hidden, I have assumed for the purpose of this study a worst case-scenario — that it would be dispersed in optimum fashion, during a busy, near-windless day when the city's streets are heavily populated, near the centre of the capital, and from an ideal height — with the intention of causing maximum human damage.' Maslov moved his finger in turn around each of the red, orange and green hoops. 'These three circles indicate the principal damage zones, in order of severity. Let us start with the red zone. If we assume it's rush hour, five-thirty p.m., on a typical working day, with people going about their usual daily business — leaving the office, waiting to catch a bus or walking to get to the metro, or perhaps driving home — and the device goes off, exploded by a carrier missile at a height of a thousand feet, the warhead containing one thousand litres of A232X ... ' Maslov again drew his finger around the red hoop: it touched the Union Station in the north, the National Mall down as far as 4th Street in the east, the edge of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Freeway in the south, and cut through Independence Avenue in the east. Capitol Hill was bang in the centre of the hoop. 'Nobody inside this circle is going to survive. They will be gassed instantly.'

'Nobody?' the President asked, incredulous. 'Nobody at all?' Maslov shook his head. 'No, sir. Even those people inside offices or homes will not be safe. Where windows are open, gas will drift into buildings. And even if they're closed, the gas will be sucked in by air-conditioning vents. Perhaps there may be small pockets of survivors — those who are deep underground, in basements or the metro system at the time of the attack but not many. For everyone else within the circle ... ' Maslov clicked his fingers. 'They are corpses, just like that, virtually within seconds.'

Paul Burton was astounded. 'It seems incredible that a gas could do that.'

'You must remember, A232X is much more toxic than any other nerve gas,' Maslov replied. 'The actual killing dose is just 1.5 hundredths of a drop in the lungs. That's a minuscule amount, totally invisible to the naked eye.' Maslov paused. 'For example, in one test we conducted, a micro droplet one tenth the size of a pinhead caused a healthy German shepherd dog with a sixty-kilogram body weight to die within five seconds. You can take it that a perfectly healthy adolescent or child of the same physical weight would die within the same time if exposed to the same dose.' Maslov paused again, let his chilling information sink in. 'What will happen is this: the victims might see the missile exploding. Then a foggy white gas cloud would appear overhead. There would be a faint unpleasant smell, like a mild rotting-fish odour. The victims would feel intense pain in their eyes, an unbearable tightness in their chest, as if a powerful band of steel had been placed around them. Bodily secretions would pour from their noses and mouths, and the victims would gasp desperately for air. They would suffer vomiting or diarrhoea, or both, and begin to twitch and convulse as their bodies went into spasm, quickly followed by loss of consciousness. Death would occur within seconds or minutes, depending on the how close they were to the device when it exploded. But in the case of the red zone, the sequence of symptoms would be almost nonexistent, because almost everyone trapped inside this zone would inhale an overdose.' Maslov turned to the stunned, horrified faces staring up a him. 'They would perish immediately.'

Alexandria, Virginia 1.18 p.m.