Knowing that, they dared not stop moving.
“What’s the plan?” Kowalski asked.
Until now, Gray had been running on pure adrenaline, but Kowalski was right. They needed to think strategically.
Whoever had staged this attack had cleverly assumed they might make a break for the other ferry terminal. With the causeway being the closest access to the other island, it was easy enough to set up the ambush at this choke point and wait for their targets to come to them.
“They’ll certainly be watching the ferry terminal,” Gray said, planning aloud. “That means we’ll have to find another means to reach Hong Kong.”
“What about Seichan? Are we just going to leave her?”
“We have no choice. If the gangs have her, we don’t have the firepower to go after her, even if we knew where she was being taken. And it’s not as if we can move about Macau inconspicuously.”
“So we run?”
For now.
Gray had slowly sidled back toward the waterfront. He nodded to a marina a few blocks away. “We need a boat.”
He shifted into the flow of carousing partiers still cruising along the beachfront, Kowalski in tow. Once they reached the marina, he turned into it. Lanterns decorated the waters around the moored yachts and motorboats. They marched along the docks until they found a sleek midnight-blue speedboat being prepped by a middle-aged couple, who from their accents appeared to be British expats, a husband and wife, likely on their way home after the festival.
Gray stepped over to them. “Excuse me.”
The two stopped in midargument.
Gray grinned sheepishly as they looked over. He ran fingers through his hair as if his next words pained him to admit.
“I was wondering if you were heading back to Hong Kong and might be willing to help out a pair of guys who lost their shirts playing pai gow. We don’t even have enough left over for a ferry ticket back to Kowloon.”
The man straightened, clearly suspicious, but also a little drunk. “You’re Yanks,” he said, with no less surprise than if they’d been Lilliputians. “Normally I would say yes, my good chaps, but you see—”
Gray showed them his pistol, while Kowalski parted his duster to reveal his AK-47.
“How about now?” Gray asked.
The man sagged as if the air had been let out of him. “You know my wife will never let me live this down.”
She crossed her arms. “I told you we should have left sooner.”
The husband shrugged.
After tying and gagging them aboard a neighboring dark yacht, Gray chugged their craft out of the marina. Once clear, he opened the throttle and set off across the dark waters toward Hong Kong.
As the lights of Macau receded behind them, Gray stepped away from the helm. “Take the wheel.”
Kowalski, a former seaman, gladly took his place, rubbing his palms in anticipation. “Let’s see what this baby can do.”
That normally would have worried Gray, but he had greater concerns.
With this brief respite, he unbuttoned his satellite phone from his jacket pocket. He saw he had multiple voice mails from Sigma command. Earlier, he had turned the ringer off before taking that meeting back at the Lisboa. Since then he’d never had a safe moment to turn it back on.
Rather than listening to the recordings, he simply called up Sigma command in D.C. The phone had DARPA’s latest encryption software to discourage unwanted eavesdropping.
Kat Bryant immediately picked up. “About time you checked in.”
“Been a little busy.”
From the tone of his voice, she picked out something was wrong. “What happened?”
He gave her a thumbnail version of the night’s events.
Kat asked a few probing questions, quickly assessing the depth of the quicksand. “Gray, I can’t get you help. Certainly not in time to do any good, not with her already in their hands.”
“Understood. That’s not why I was calling. I just wanted to give Sigma a situation report.”
In case things went south from here.
“We’re having our own crisis out here,” Kat said. “That’s why I was trying to reach you. Director Crowe wanted you and your team to travel to Mongolia.”
Mongolia?
She told him a sketchy story of a downed satellite and a last image that showed the East Coast burning.
“I can’t head there,” he said as she finished. “At least not now.”
“Of course. The circumstances have changed.” Her next words were laced with worry. “But what are you going to do out there, Gray? You have no resources. And the criminal organizations in Macau are notoriously ruthless and well funded.”
“I have a plan.”
“To do what?”
Gray stared across the waters ahead toward the distant glow on the horizon.
“To fight fire with fire.”
5
November 17, 6:04 P.M. EST
Washington, D.C.
Jada held her breath.
What am I doing here?
It felt like she had fallen through Alice’s looking glass.
To her side, Painter Crowe placed his hand on a security pad inside the elevator. A blue line scanned his palm, and the elevator cage began to drop into the earth.
Their jet had made the cross-country trip in less than five hours. After landing, they had been whisked by private car to the National Mall, stopping at the majestic Smithsonian Castle, a flag waving from its highest tower. As she had stepped out of the car, she had looked with new eyes at the historic building with its jumble of redbrick parapets, turrets, and spires. Completed in 1855, the structure was considered one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival in the United States and now served as the heart of the many museums that made up the nation’s Smithsonian Institution.
Having grown up in Congress Heights, a poorer area southeast of D.C., she had visited the Castle countless times as a girl. Admission to the museums had been free, and her mother, a single parent, encouraged her daughter’s education in every way she could.
“I never knew this was under here,” Jada said in a hushed voice as the elevator dropped into the subterranean world beneath the Castle.
“These levels were once bunkers and fallout shelters. Back in World War II, it even served as home to a scientific think tank. After that, it was abandoned and forgotten.”
“Such a prime piece of Washington real estate as this?” She offered Painter a crooked grin.
He smiled back. For someone two decades older than her, he was a fine-looking man, with his dark hair laced by a single snowy lock and those blue eyes. After their long conversation during the flight here, she also found him remarkably smart, with a wide swath of knowledge on many subjects—with the exception of the history of jazz. But she could forgive him that lapse, especially when those blue eyes danced in sunlight.