“A virtue Kharzin is sorely lacking.”
“In the short term, we estimate he could macerate and extract at best a liter or two of weaponized LUCA. But it’s still enough to light a fire somewhere, a fire that would quickly become a storm.”
So the only question remains: Where does he strike that match?
To answer that, Tucker had only one hope.
In the shape of a deadly assassin.
And so far, she was not being cooperative.
9:12 A.M.
“Felice Nilsson could have scrubbed her credit cards,” Harper told him over the phone.
Tucker spoke to her as he crossed in long strides from Bukolov’s lab and headed across Fort Detrick’s campus for his dormitory. “Like I said from the start, Harper. It was a long shot.”
Three days ago, he had informed Sigma about his radioed conversation with Kharzin and the conspicuous absence of a certain someone to that deadly party in the mountains of Africa. Kharzin had claimed Felice was on another assignment, which even back then struck him as odd. She had been Kharzin’s point man in the field from the start, hounding Tucker since he’d first set foot aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway. Then as Kharzin’s team closed in for the kill, she was suddenly pulled off and reassigned.
Why? And to where?
Tucker had proposed that perhaps Kharzin had pointed that particular blond spear in a new direction, sending her in advance to prepare for the next stage of his plan—and likely to execute it, too.
“It was a good idea,” Harper said. “To search for her whereabouts by placing a financial tracer on her. But so far we’ve failed to get any hits from the documents you photographed aboard the train. Not the four passports, not the five credit cards, not even the bank routing numbers you managed to find. She likely received a new set of papers.”
Sighing, Tucker ran through his steps that day as he broke into her berth. He had carefully sifted through her belongings, photographed what he found, and returned everything to where he’d found them.
“Maybe I wasn’t careful enough,” he said. “She must have gotten wise to my trespass.”
“Or she could have just gone to ground and is keeping her head low. We’ll keep monitoring.”
1:22 P.M.
Tucker briefly visited Bukolov after lunch and discovered the doctor was working with an engineer, devising an aerosol dispersal system for his acid solution, which to him looked like a backpack garden sprayer. But he heard phrases like flow rate composition and contaminant filter thresholds, so what did he know?
Bukolov had little time to chat, so Tucker left and decided to do something more important.
Standing on a windswept wide lawn, he hauled back his arm and whipped the red Kong ball across the field. Kane took off like a furry arrow, juking and twisting as the ball bounced. He caught up to it, snatched it in his jaws, and did a little victory prance back to Tucker’s side, dropping the ball at his toes. Kane backed up, crouching his front down, his hind end high, tail wagging, ready for more.
It was good to see such simple joy—though obsession might be the better word, considering Kane’s current deep and abiding love for that rubber Kong ball. Still, the play helped temper the black cloud stirring inside Tucker.
If only I’d been more careful . . .
Tucker exercised Kane for another few minutes, then headed back to their dorm. As he crossed the lawn, his phone rang. It was Harper again.
“Looks like you have a future career as a cat burglar after all, Captain Wayne. We got a hit on Ms. Nilsson.”
“Where?”
“Montreal, Canada. Hopefully you and Kane are up for a little more cold weather.”
He pictured Felice’s face, remembering Utkin in the sand, bloody and crawling.
“I’ll grab our long johns.”
43
March 28, 10:23 A.M.
St. Ignace, Michigan
Right back where I started . . .
Tucker stood on the hotel balcony, staring out at the frozen edges of Lake Huron. Snow sifted from a low morning sky. The rest of the view could best be described as brittle. It was below freezing with the forecasted promise of the day climbing a whole two degrees.
He’d started this adventure in Vladivostok, a frozen city by the sea.
And here he was again: cold and facing another assassin.
Bukolov called from inside the room. “Some of us don’t have the hardy constitution of a young man. Perhaps if you close the balcony door, I won’t catch pneumonia before your tardy guest arrives in the area.”
He stepped back inside and pulled the slider and latched it. Kane lifted his head from where he curled on the bed.
“But for the hundredth time, Doc: you didn’t have to come.”
“And for the hundredth time: you may need my expertise. We have no idea how Kharzin plans to utilize his weaponized LUCA. And my solution has had no real-world field test. We may have to improvise on the fly. Now is not the time for inexperienced guesswork.”
It had been two days since Sigma’s cyber net had detected the credit card hit in Montreal. Unfortunately, Felice still remained a ghost, leaving only the occasional financial bread crumb behind: at a gas station outside of Ottawa, at a diner in the small town of Bracebridge. Her movements seemed headed straight for the U.S. border. Immigrations and Customs were alerted, but the northern border of the United States was an open sieve, especially in the dense woods nestled among the Great Lakes. She could easily cross undetected.
This was confirmed yesterday when they got a hit here in St. Ignace, the northernmost city in Michigan. Ominously, she had made a single purchase from the local Ace Hardware & Sporting Goods.
A plastic backpack sprayer.
Tucker stared toward their hotel room’s closet. Inside rested the battery-powered chemical dispersant rig engineered by Bukolov and filled with his acid slurry.
Since then they had had no further hits indicating her whereabouts.
Was she still in town? Had she moved on?
Waiting in the wings, ready to mobilize in an instant, were fourteen two-person helicopter teams, each armed with their own canisters of the kill-switch solution. Six of these teams were located in Michigan; the other eight in the surrounding states.
Whether this was enough manpower or resources for the situation, Tucker didn’t know, but he left it to Harper’s best judgment. Harper feared that alerting the authorities at large would invariably turn into a brute-force manhunt that Felice would easily spot. If that happened, she would bolt, scrubbing those cards. They would never get a second chance at her. They had to do this right the first time and as surgically as possible.