The Shadow Protocol (35 page)

Or … had he?

There was no time to consider that. “Tony,” he whispered. “I have eyes on al-Rais. Repeat, Muqaddim al-Rais is here.”

“We see him,” came the reply. “Stand by.”

The two bodyguards came down the gangplank onto the dock. Adam pulled back deeper into cover. Zykov followed his men; then the terrorists filed onto the shore, al-Rais shielded by their bodies at the center of the group. They all marched toward the Vityaz. The two bodyguards, al-Rais, and one of his men entered the cab; the other six clambered into the back compartment of the DT-10’s front half. Presumably the trailer would be used to carry the RTG.

Zykov, however, didn’t get in. Instead he reached into his coat and took out a telephone. Its oversized antenna revealed it to be a satellite unit rather than a cellular.

The Russian started to tap in a number. “Holly Jo,” Adam said, “Zykov’s making a call on a satphone.”

“I’ll try to snag it,” she replied.

Zykov put the phone to his ear. After a few moments he frowned and peered at the unit’s screen, then moved several paces away from the Vityaz and held the phone up to the sky. He turned in place, finally looking satisfied when he was facing south. Satellite phones depended on line of sight to their orbiting relays, and were also susceptible to local interference; the Vityaz, a big metal box housing a powerful engine, would not help reception.

He put the phone back to his head, waiting several seconds before getting a connection and starting to talk. Adam—or rather Browning—could make out most of what he heard, his current persona having acquired a fair knowledge of Russian during his years as an international atomic energy inspector. Zykov was talking to Colonel Sevnik: his seller.

A tension—no, an excitement, the thrill of the hunt—rose in Adam as he realized what Zykov was doing. “They’re arranging the meet,” he told the team. “This is it—they’re going to collect the RTG.”

He was about to ask Holly Jo if she had tapped into the call when Zykov suddenly waved to the driver, who leaned out of the cab. “Put these in!” Zykov called out in Russian. “Sixty-four! Twenty-five! Thirty-three, north! One-seven-three! Four! Thirty-seven, west!” The driver typed each number in turn into a unit on his dashboard.

A GPS. He was entering the coordinates for the rendezvous with Sevnik.

Adam hurriedly relayed the figures. “Where is that?”

“It’s about four and a half miles due east of your current position, up in the hills,” Tony replied. “That’s as the crow flies—it’s a lot farther going ’round the inlet.”

Adam glanced around the container. The desolate snow-covered hills rose steeply and uninvitingly on the fjord’s far side. He guessed the summits to be well over a thousand meters high. “What’s there?”

“Nothing, as far as I can tell. Looks like a glaciated valley.”

Zykov concluded his call, then returned to the Vityaz and climbed into the cab. The driver revved the engine, a plume of dirty exhaust smoke spouting skyward. Wherever they were going, Adam knew he had to follow. But the borrowed Lada would not get far off the road, while the articulated Vityaz could negotiate almost any terrain. So how …

Only one way. He hurried back to the car, pulling
Bianca’s door open. She looked up at him in surprise. “Come on. Bring the PERSONA—quick!”

She had not seen the terrorists leave the ship. “What’s happened?”

“Come on, now! They’re moving out.”

Still bewildered, she scrambled from the car. “Who’s moving? Zykov?”

“Yes—and al-Rais.”

“He’s here?”

“Yes, but not for long. Hurry up!” They retrieved the PERSONA cases, taking one each, then ran along the row of containers. Adam cautiously checked the road. The Vityaz was performing its caterpillar trick again, bending at the middle to drastically tighten its turning circle. Snow and gravel spitting up from its tracks, it ground back the way it had come.

Adam waited for the driver’s mirrors to be blocked by the trailer, then broke into a run after it. “Move, quick!”

Bianca followed, confused. “What are we doing?”

“We’ve got to get aboard!” Adam quickly caught up with the crawler. The trailer’s rear entrance was a wide bottom-hinged tailgate with only a canvas flap above it to shield the interior from the elements. He pulled the canvas away and swung the case inside, then clambered in after it. “Come on!”

Bianca was some way behind, weighed down with the second case, the medical kit, and the Geiger counter. “Wait, wait!”

“I can’t, I’m not driving!” He held out his arms. “Give me the case, then take my hand!”

She strained to lift the weighty case up high enough for him to get hold of it. He swept it into the trailer, then reached back to grab her hand. “All right, jump in!”

He pulled her up as she leapt at the tailgate, hooking her free arm over it. For a moment she wobbled, then Adam tugged harder and she rolled into the trailer. “Ow! Bloody hell!” she cried.

“Are you okay?”

She clutched her arms protectively across her chest, grimacing in pain. “No, that really bloody
hurt
when you dragged me over that thing!”

“Sorry. But I needed you to come with me.”

“Why?”

“That’s a very good question,” Tony said in Adam’s ear. “What the hell are you doing? The UAV can follow Zykov—it’s tracking you right now.”

“Sevnik isn’t just going to hand the RTG over then and there,” Adam replied. “It’s a rendezvous, but I doubt it’s the end of the journey. If Sevnik was bringing the RTG in by helicopter or in another ATV, he could have delivered it straight to the airport. No, it’s stashed somewhere—somewhere protected from the weather, and where some random hunter won’t trip over it.”

“Okay, we’ll see where this takes us,” said Tony, though doubt was clear in his voice. “Not that we’ve got much choice, now that you’ve jumped in the back of Zykov’s truck!”

“It’ll take us to the RTG. I’m sure of it.” Adam pulled the canvas flap back down, then surveyed the trailer’s interior. It was as bare as the landscape beyond the town, plain metal benches running the length of each side and a small mound of dirty tarpaulins and sheets piled at the far end. He gestured to one of the benches. “You might as well sit down,” he said to Bianca. “This could be a long ride.”

Adam had been right. The drive out of Provideniya and up into the hills took some time. While the Vityaz was extremely capable off-road, it was not fast.

Nor was it comfortable. “I feel seasick,” Bianca moaned after a particularly rough series of lurches almost pitched her from the bench. It was taking the pair’s full effort to stop the cases from skittering about like pinballs.

“At least this is as high as we’re going,” said Adam. He pulled back the canvas to look outside. The Vityaz had reached the end of an especially steep climb and was now on more or less level ground as it rumbled across a hilltop. Provideniya was still visible on the far side of the inlet, though the weather was deteriorating, a light snowfall rendering the view hazy.

“Yeah, but I’m getting the horrible feeling we might never go back down.”

“We’ll be okay.”

“Really?
Really?
We’ve jumped into the back of a snowmobile-tank thing full of terrorists on their way to buy a nuclear weapon, and it’s not as if we’ve got anywhere to hide in here. If they find us, they’ll kill us!”

“Then we’ll have to make sure they don’t find us.” Adam nudged the tarps with one foot. “The only person who knows what’s in here is the driver, and he doesn’t seem to want to get out of his nice warm cab. We can lie under the benches and cover ourselves with these. It’s pretty dark; we should be okay.”

“And if they put the RTG in here, and it has radiation pouring out of an enormous crack in one side?”

“Then we’ll have to hide on the
other
side.”

It took a moment for her to realize that he was joking. “That’s not very funny.”

“But ‘not very’ still means ‘a little,’ doesn’t it?”

A tiny, reluctant smile appeared on her lips. “A
very
little.”

“That’s still enough. Browning’s good at reassuring people. He has to be, considering his line of work. He always had to convince his kids that he wasn’t going to come back home radioactive.”

“Browning has kids?” He nodded. “Is that … does that feel weird to you? Knowing all the everyday little details of somebody’s life when it’s so completely different from yours?”

“It does now that you’ve brought it up. Thank you!”

She smiled again. “Sorry. But once you mentioned his kids, what happened in your mind? How does it work for you? Do you just know the details about them, like their names and their birthdays, or do you … 
feel
how he does about them?”

“I feel it,” he replied, after a moment—one filled with a rush of memories that weren’t his. A summer afternoon in the garden, whooping as he jumped into the paddling pool with his son and daughter and the sluice of displaced water sent a plastic duck whirling across the lawn, Janey and Bobby squealing and giggling at the sight …

Not
his
daughter, or
his
son. Browning’s. It took a conscious mental effort to stop the flow of images and sounds and smells—

“Adam?”

“Yeah,” he said, snapping back. “It’s strange. When I’ve got someone’s persona in my head, some memories bring back emotions. Sometimes really strong ones. But once the persona’s gone, it’s different. I still have the memories I accessed, but … they’re just facts. I was at a
place, I was with a particular person, I did this or that—but I don’t remember how it felt.”

“But you do remember that the persona
did
feel something?”

He nodded. “I remember that Zykov was mad as hell when I took all his money. But the actual anger itself … no, it’s gone.” That thought suddenly took him back to the dock. When he’d seen al-Rais emerge from the ship, a feeling almost of
rage
had struck him, nearly overpowering. It couldn’t have come from one of the personas he had used in the past. But he had never encountered the terrorist leader himself.

As far as he knew.

“Holly Jo?” he said. “I’m going off-comms. Bleep me if anything happens.” He pushed the little bump behind his ear, cutting her off before she could reply. A faint click told him that the radio channel was closed.

“What is it?” asked Bianca.

“Something happened on the dock, when I saw al-Rais. Just for a moment, I got
mad
. Really mad. I was ready to pull out my gun and put a bullet in his head before I got myself back under control. The thing is, I have no idea why.”

“He
is
the world’s most wanted terrorist,” she pointed out.

“No, it’s more than that. It felt … 
personal
.”

She leaned closer, concerned. “You think you might have met him before you joined the Persona Project? Before your memory was …”

“Wiped? I don’t know.” He was silent for several seconds, brooding. “Maybe I had him in my sights once before, and for some reason I didn’t take the shot. If I had … it could have saved lives.” Another pause. “Is that why I volunteered to have my memory erased? Because I felt guilty about missing the chance to take out al-Rais?”

“I don’t know,” Bianca said softly. “But …”

“What?”

“If seeing him provoked a response like that, then
maybe your memories
haven’t
been erased. Not fully, anyway. They might still be there, just buried. There could be a way to get them back.”

“How?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. I’m just the hired help.”

He realized that this time, she was the one not being entirely serious. “I suppose I was asking for that.”

“Just a little. But I don’t even know what they did to you in the first place, so I’m not the one to ask. You’d have to talk to Kiddrick, I suppose.”

“Somehow I don’t think he’ll tell me anything.”

“You could always beat it out of him.”

“Now I’m not even sure if you’re joking.”

“Maybe I’m not!” She grinned. “But I suppose—”

Adam suddenly waved her to silence, hearing something over the Vityaz’s engine. A moment later a bleep sounded in his ear. He reactivated the transceiver. “What is it? Sounds like we’ve got company.”

“You have,” Tony replied. “The UAV just saw a helicopter. A Hind, it looks like.”

“It must be Sevnik. What’s it doing?”

“It flew in for a closer look at your ride, then turned east toward the valley. Landing at the rendezvous point?”

“That’d be my guess too. Tell Kyle to keep a watch on it.”

“Will do. What’s your situation? Why did you go off-comms?”

“Just something I wanted to ask Bianca, that’s all. How far are we from the rendezvous coordinates?”

“About a mile,” said Holly Jo. “You’re approaching a steep hill down to the valley, so you might want to hold on to something.”

“Thanks for the warning. Okay, I’ll leave the link open. Out.”

Bianca’s nervousness had returned in full force. “What’s happening?”

“A helicopter just flew past. Probably Sevnik’s. Looks
like Zykov is about to introduce his buyer and seller for the first time.”