The Hunters (5 page)

Callahan fumed. ‘You’re such an idiot! We finally see some action, and you’re jerking off instead of taking pictures?’

‘Action? What action?’

‘Look out the damn window!’

Koontz did as he was told and was stunned by the sight. Guards poured from the surrounding homes like a flood, filling the streets with crew cuts and guns. ‘Holy shit! What the hell happened? Did someone find the
Red October
?’

‘I don’t know what happened. I was hoping you could tell me!’

‘Heck if I know,’ Koontz admitted. Instead of monitoring local chatter, he had been listening to the audio feed of the baseball game. ‘Give me a minute, and I’ll check the tape.’

‘Screw the tape! Check the live feed from the house.’

Despite his lackadaisical demeanor, Koontz was actually a talented field agent, one who knew Russian, Ukrainian, and several other languages. It was that skill more than any other that had led to this particular assignment. He could eavesdrop on any conversation in Brighton Beach and figure out what was being said.

Koontz listened and translated for his partner. ‘They found a body in the kitchen. A big fucker named Boris. He was just lying in the middle of the floor.’

‘A body? As in, someone died?’

The news excited Callahan. A dead body, no matter who it was, would give them cause to knock down the door. Not only that, it would tie Kozlov to a murder.

His mind raced at the possibilities.

‘No, not dead,’ Koontz informed him. ‘Just really messed up. There’s a lot of commotion, but I think someone said he broke his hip.’

‘Shit!’ Callahan blurted. His vision of storming the mansion was replaced by thoughts of an old man slipping on an ice cube.

Koontz continued to listen. ‘Now they’re talking about killing someone.’

‘Killing who?’ Callahan demanded.

He paused for a moment. ‘You.’

‘
Me?
They’re talking about killing
me
?’

Koontz laughed. ‘Nah, I’m just messing with you. They’re looking for some intruder. They think he’s in the vault, and they’re gathering the troops to find him.’

‘What intruder? What vault?’

‘How the hell should I know? I can only translate so many things at once - especially since I’m flying solo. It might be nice if I had some help.’

* * *

Compared to traditional elevators, the dumb waiter shaft was dark and cramped, but it felt downright spacious compared to the chimneys, crawlspaces, and ventilation ducts Sarah had shimmied through over the years. And since the dumb waiter car had been removed long ago, she had plenty of room to maneuver.

Splaying her legs to the sides, she climbed the chute with relative ease. All she had to do was maintain enough side-to-side pressure with her arms and legs to support her bodyweight while she crawled vertically toward the roof. She wasn’t sure if the top of the shaft would offer an exit or if she would have to create one herself. For the time being, her only goal was to avoid a messy confrontation in the basement.

When she reached the pulleys that had once held the support ropes in place, Sarah realized she had come to the end of the line. The exit door to the third floor had long since been covered by plasterboard, but it wasn’t all bad news in her mind since they hadn’t reset the studs in the wall. She knew she could punch through drywall, but two-inch-thick boards would have been a different matter.

Before she did anything drastic, Sarah pressed her ear against the shaft and listened for any signs of life on the other side of the wall. Guards scurried on the floors below, desperately searching for the evil ninja who had defeated the giant ogre they kept locked in the basement, but she heard nothing but silence outside the chute.

It was now or never.

She walked her feet around the perimeter of the shaft and planted her shoes firmly against the frame of the opening. Holding onto the pulley above, she curled her legs against her chest and swung out from the wall with all her might. As gravity reversed her course, she combined her momentum with a violent thrust of her legs.

The wall splintered on contact as she drove her feet through the drywall. Chunks of plaster flew into the hallway and clanked down the shaft to the basement below, but she knew the noise was worth the risk. She repeated the process again and again, widening the hole until she could slip through the narrow gap.

She looked like a gopher searching for hawks when she peeked her head through the hole. She turned left, then right, then left again, making sure the coast was clear before she fully emerged from the wall. Satisfied with her surroundings, she dove through the small fissure, launching all but her lower legs into the hallway beyond. She quickly pulled her calves, ankles, and feet through the wall and rose to one knee.

She listened, wondering if her breach had been detected.

‘You’re good,’ Garcia said in her ear. ‘The mass of guards hasn’t moved from the lower floors. I think you’re clear unless …’

‘Unless what?’ she whispered.

‘Hold on! We have movement. One person, heading your—’

‘Shit,’ she blurted.

Not thirty feet in front of her, Kozlov himself emerged from a room at the end of the hallway. He stared at her, consumed with rage. Although he was unarmed, she half expected fireballs to burst forth from his eyes - that’s how angry he was.

‘Here!’ he screamed in Russian. ‘The intruder is standing right in front of me! Someone, grab him!’

Even with the language barrier, Sarah understood that she wouldn’t be getting a holiday card from Kozlov anytime soon. Preparing for the worst, she slipped her brass knuckles on and took a step toward the crime boss.

‘Shit!’ Garcia yelled in her ear. ‘Here comes another!’

Almost instantly, a single figure appeared on the stairwell nearest Kozlov’s room. Dressed in a dark suit, he dashed up the steps two at a time while pulling a pistol from the holster inside his coat. His eyes locked on Sarah as he charged at her with his gun raised. Kozlov sneered and pointed at Sarah as she turned and sprinted down a hallway toward the back half of the house.

Thinking quickly, the gunman leaped over a railing in the open mezzanine and tried to catch her before she reached the back deck. He fired once, barely missing her right shoulder but hitting the French doors in front of her. The glass shattered on contact, which surprised everyone in the hallway because it was
supposed
to be bulletproof.

* * *

Despite the chaos, Kozlov made a mental note to kill the contractor who had installed the window. Then he returned his focus to the gunman.

He fired again. And again. And again.

Every time his bullet just missed.

Kozlov watched in amazement as the intruder reached the end of the hallway but didn’t stop running until ‘he’ leaped off the third-story patio with reckless abandon. His national pride soared when he watched the gunman do the same. Kozlov thought it was suicide to go after the thief in that way, but he appreciated the dedication. As soon as he learned the new guard’s name, he would reward him for his bravery.

Just to be safe, Kozlov waited for several guards to join him before he led them down the hallway to where the intruder had made ‘his’ escape. In Kozlov’s mind, the intruder had to be a
man
because women were incapable of such feats of strength. Of course, it was assumptions like
that
that helped her get away.

Hoping to find the intruder’s blood on his carpet, Kozlov saw nothing but broken glass. Disappointed, he raced to the balcony where he expected to see two crumpled bodies on the pool deck below. Instead, he saw something that sickened him to his very core: the gunman was helping the intruder out of the pool.

It took a moment for it to all sink in.

The two of them were working together.

Kozlov’s face turned red as he roared, ‘Kill them both!’

It took Callahan nearly ten minutes to reach the surveillance van through the mob of gunmen that filled the street outside of Kozlov’s house. Not because the guards were hassling him - just about everyone in the neighborhood knew what the Feds looked like - but because Callahan was hassling
them
.

When it came to gun laws, New York City had some of the strictest in the nation. Callahan knew he could bust all of them on felony charges if he had wanted to. Instead, he tried to use the threat of arrest to obtain more information about that night’s events while Koontz filmed the scene from afar.

Callahan realized the odds of getting information from one of Kozlov’s men was pretty unlikely, especially with so many of them packed together. But he hoped this approach would spook someone into revealing something of value in the crowd.

As luck should have it, one of the lead guards spotted Callahan and spread the word through the ranks: if anyone told the Feds about the upcoming art auction or about the intruder who had tried to rob the basement vault, the offending party would be shot in the face and fed to the sharks. That message was repeated again and again in Russian and Ukrainian until everyone on the street had gotten the word.

Unfortunately for them, Koontz got it, too.

Inside the van, he laughed at the irony of the warning. By telling his underlings what they shouldn’t say, the lead guard had actually revealed everything.

That was taking stupid to a whole new level.

Koontz was still laughing when his partner reached the van. He looked forward to briefing Callahan on everything he had heard - and how he had obtained it - but before they had a chance to speak, gunfire rang out from across the street.

Koontz threw open the van door and pulled Callahan inside.

‘Who the hell is shooting?’ Callahan demanded.

‘I don’t know,’ Koontz said as he turned his attention to the van’s computer system. He punched a few keys and tried to locate the source of the sound, using the parabolic microphones that a tech team had covertly planted around the neighborhood.

Callahan checked his weapon. Unlike the thugs outside, he was legally allowed to shoot people in Brighton Beach. ‘Please be Kozlov. I want to be the one to arrest him.’

Koontz shook his head. ‘Sorry. He’s shouting,
not
shooting.’

‘Figures. What’s he shouting about?’

‘He just yelled,
kill them both
.’

‘There are two of them?’

Koontz nodded. ‘That’s what “both” means.’

Callahan sneered. ‘And
both
of them are in the house?’

He shook his head. ‘
Were
. They
were
in the house. They just jumped off a balcony into Kozlov’s pool.’

Callahan waited for more. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. The guards are looking for them.’

‘Then so are we,’ Callahan said as he opened the van door. ‘If they’ve been inside Kozlov’s house, we need to find them before the guards do.’

* * *

Jack Cobb was soaking wet, but at least he was alive.

And, thankfully, so was Sarah.

Water poured from his suit as he yanked her from the pool. He had millions of questions for his partner-in-crime, but they would have to wait for now. There was little time for chitchat with Kozlov’s guards giving chase.

Despite the danger, Sarah scolded him as they hustled toward the fence in the back of the grounds. ‘I could have done it myself, you know. I didn’t need your help.’

‘I could see that,’ Cobb replied sarcastically. ‘You had them right where you wanted.’

‘It wasn’t
them
,’ she countered. ‘It was one man. No, scratch that. It was
the
man. I could have ended everything right there.’

‘Ended what, exactly? Our mission wasn’t to kill him. It was to rob him. You need to put your Agency training behind you. The only way you’ll survive as a criminal is to think like a criminal.’

‘But I’m
not
a criminal!’ she insisted.

‘Not yet, you aren’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!’

Sarah realized there was no point in arguing. They could pick up this discussion later, once they had evaded the Russians and made it safely to their rendezvous.

That is,
if
they made it to their rendezvous.

‘Okay, Mr Helper,’ she said as they scaled the fence together. ‘Now that you’ve decided to get involved, what exactly do you have in mind?’

Cobb scurried to his right and scanned the terrain. ‘I say we run down the beach as fast as we can and hope the Russians don’t catch us.’

‘That’s it? That’s your big plan? I swoop down like a bat in the middle of the night and break into the most heavily guarded compound this side of the White House, and your big plan is to run as fast as we can?’

Cobb shrugged. ‘Part of it.’

‘Wonderful. What’s the other part?’

He fought the urge to smile. ‘Hey McNutt, can you hear me?’

A new voice entered the conversation. ‘I can hear
you
, I can hear
her
, and I can hear gunfire. The only thing I can’t hear is the nerd. Is he still on the line?’

‘Still here,’ Garcia assured them.

‘Oh goody,’ McNutt teased, ‘if we have any questions about
Star Wars
or time travel, we’ll be sure to let you know.’

Cobb cut them off. It was bad enough that Sarah was giving him lip. He couldn’t afford antics from the other guys on the team, too. Not with hostiles in hot pursuit.

‘Josh, what’s your position?’ Cobb asked.

‘Two hundred yards west,’ McNutt answered.

‘Sarah and I are headed your way. We’re going to need cover.’

‘It’s about time. Shoot to kill?’

Cobb shook his head. ‘That’s a negative.’

McNutt grumbled but followed his orders.

The man with the dirty beard and unkempt hair had been patrolling the sand with his metal detector for several hours. His ratty clothes and strange demeanor kept passersby at a safe distance, not that there were many at this time of night. Every so often he would dig in the sand and search for buried treasure, but he never came up with anything more substantial than an aluminum can or a foil wrapper.

To most observers, he fit in with half the scavengers who roamed the beaches at night. Over the years, Kozlov’s guards had dealt with so many of these people that they had learned the best way to handle them was to simply ignore them. That might have been a wonderful policy for tourists, but it wasn’t the best strategy when it came to guard duty. If Kozlov’s men had been paying closer attention, they would have realized the crazy man in the Hawaiian shirt wasn’t searching for treasure, he was actually planting devices in the sand. And the ‘metal detector’ that he had been using for half the night couldn’t actually detect metal - but it sure as hell could deliver it.