Last Chance to Die

36



An hour and a half later, the two men that Alex Zogas had dispatched from the Lithuanian Chess Society turned onto Raymond Radkay’s street. Slowing down, they allowed their car to run at idle speed while they checked the other partially built homes in the development for vehicles. There were none. They switched off the car’s headlights and dialed Radkay’s number. “Hello.”

They hung up, increasing their speed toward the house. There was a light on in a first-floor window. They pulled into the driveway, got out, and walked to the front door. It was locked. The bigger of the two men took a short crowbar from under his coat and placed it in the jamb. Following a short, quick pull, a loud metallic crack echoed through the empty neighborhood and the door was pushed open.

Inside, it was completely dark. Both men drew their guns and stepped into the foyer. As they approached the stairs, a shot rang out. The muzzle flash had been to their left. Instinctively, they moved away from each other, firing in the direction of the blast. They leapfrogged toward the shooter, continuing to fire. Then, during one of the pauses, they heard a body hit the hardwood floor. One of them snapped on a flashlight and saw that Radkay had been hit once in the chest. “Okay, let’s get him out of here.”

After carrying the body out to their car and putting it in the trunk, they tossed their handguns in, too.

Five minutes later Kate and Bursaw pulled up to Radkay’s house in the two Bureau cars, and Vail came out. He jumped in with Kate, who had one of the GPS cell phones open in her hand. “Looks like they’re heading for 95 South. Where did you put the tracker?”

“I taped it to the small of Radkay’s back. They’ll have to strip him to find it. Just make sure you keep enough distance between us so you can’t see them. Then they won’t be able to see us.”

She handed Vail the phone. He picked up the radio mike. “Luke, have you got them?”

“I’ve got them five-by.”

“Just stay behind us, I’ll watch the screen.”

“Any trouble inside?”

“Just picking Radkay up and dropping him while they were shooting at us.”

“I know Radkay didn’t mind, but for you I would strongly recommend therapy.”

The two men from the LCS got in the right lane of 95 South and maintained the speed limit. It took them over an hour to reach Route 30, exiting onto the eastbound ramp.

“The two last night must have been going to the same spot,” Bursaw said over the radio. “Think they’re going to that lake again?”

“If they’re not, that means last night was a contingency plan, which would be impressive.”

“It would be if they weren’t dead. Besides, these people are chess masters—supposedly. Chess is contingency planning at its purest.”

Vail watched the cell phone as the car drove past the turnoff where the shoot-out had taken place the night before. “They just passed the lake turnoff,” he told Bursaw.

“So far so good.”

After another fifteen minutes, Vail said, “Okay, they’re turning off.”

When Kate reached the point where they had turned, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road, and Bursaw parked behind her. He got out and climbed into their backseat. “Up there by the mailbox is where they turned in,” Vail said. “It looks like private property.” Glancing at the cell phone, he said, “They stopped about a quarter of a mile in.”

“How about getting the Richmond office out here?” Kate asked.

Vail said, “The king of Sparta once said, ‘The Spartans do not inquire how many the enemy are but where they are.’ ”

“And I believe none of them survived,” Bursaw said.

Kate said, “I’m calling Richmond.”

“Go ahead and get them started this way, but last night it took them a long time. Right now we’ve got to find out where they’re putting that body and catch them doing it. We’ll finally have some hard evidence.”

After identifying herself, Kate told the Richmond duty agent that they needed all available agents to their location immediately. She hung up. “I assume we’re going to surprise these two.” she said.

“We’ll have to walk in to do it. Luke, have you still got that shotgun in your trunk?”

“After last night I don’t go anywhere without it. I also have something else that could prove useful—the night-vision goggles we took off those two. And one more instrument of comfort.” All three of them got out and went back to Bursaw’s trunk. He held up an MP5 submachine gun. “When you called today, I took this from the gun vault. Not that I expected any problems with you along.”

Vail handed Kate a pair of the goggles. “You and Luke wear these.” He helped her put them on and adjust the straps. “Keep them flipped up until we get off the road, or the headlights along here will blind you.”

Vail took the shotgun, and all three of them started loading extra ammunition into their pockets.

They turned up the winding dirt road, and Vail checked the phone screen to make sure the two men they’d been following were still stationary. “Evidently they’re at their destination.” He reached over and pivoted Kate’s goggles into place. “All right?”

“Wow, yeah, I’m good.”

As quietly as possible, Vail chambered a buckshot round. Then he checked the phone and pointed up the road. Quietly but quickly they started walking. There were some stands of trees, mostly hardwoods, now bare. A few minutes later, they followed a turn in the road, and in the distance both Kate and Bursaw, through their goggles, could see a stone cottage sitting on a small rise about seventy yards away. Thirty yards from it was an old-fashioned water well. It had a waist-high wall around it, constructed of the same type of stone as the cottage. The car they had followed was parked next to the well, and the two men were taking Radkay’s body out of the trunk.

Beside the well was a small, newly constructed shed. One of the men carried something from it that looked like a bag of cement. Through his goggles Bursaw could see that the man had taken out a pocketknife and was cutting open the top of the bag. He then went to help carry the body.

Bursaw described everything to Vail in whispers.

“That’s probably lye. It’ll eventually destroy all traces of the body. Let’s go.”

When they got to the top of the rise that the old house sat on, Vail glanced over at Bursaw, who because of the goggles didn’t notice the red laser dot on his own chest. Vail jumped into him just as a rifle shot came from the house, which was now at their ten o’clock. At the same time, Kate dove to the ground. Quickly Vail crawled next to Bursaw. “Are you hit, Luke?”

“Left shoulder.”

Vail pulled his friend’s coat open, and after finding the bullet hole in his shirt, he carefully tore it open. “It’s not bad.” Another shot came from the house. Vail called over to Kate. “You all right?”

“I’m okay.”

There was a small amount of cover provided by the uneven terrain, so Vail crawled forward a couple of yards to find a firing position but immediately started taking handgun fire from the two men at the well. He came back to Kate and Luke’s position. “This is an ambush. They were expecting us.”

“How?” Kate asked.

“Probably my call to the club. Radkay would have used a code name.”

From a second window in the house, a barrage of automatic-weapons fire ricocheted around them. “I guess we had a wrong head count. There are at least four of them. And they’ve got us pinned down in an L-shaped crossfire. Right now they can’t hit us. If they had waited another ten yards before springing this, we’d all be well-diving by now. In a minute they’re going to figure out that if the two in the house can keep us pinned down, the two at the car can start moving up to our position and pick us off.”

“So?” Kate said, with a little more urgency than she intended.

“When your position becomes indefensible, there’s only one option. You have to—”

Bursaw said, “Don’t say it.”

“Attack.” Vail picked up the MP5 and handed it to Kate. “You know how to use this, right?”

“I fam-fired it at the range a few times.”

“Well, you’re about to get a lot more familiar with it.” Vail started ejecting the buckshot rounds from the shotgun and replacing them with deer slugs. “Luke, you think you can fire this into their car, one round every ten to fifteen seconds? It’ll sound like a howitzer when it hits and keep their heads down so Kate can move.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll go after the two in the house. Once I start shooting and moving toward them, Luke, you fire. Kate, you’re going to have to move when we shoot and get down when we stop. If you don’t, that rifle probably has a night scope along with the laser, and they’ll be able to find you. Even though your two targets are at our twelve, you should flare off to like one o’clock so you’re not coming straight into them. Then, when you get there, you’ll be on their flank rather than head-on.” He could hear her breathing. “You ready for this, Kate?”

She chambered the first round and flicked off the safety. “This is getting close to being worse than our last date in Chicago, but I’ll be fine.”

Vail said. “Luke, you set?”

He rolled onto his side and passed Vail two more of his Glock magazines. “Hands down, this is the worse date I’ve ever been on with you.”

Vail crawled around Bursaw and watched the cottage that was to their ten o’clock. Then he was up, running and firing. Behind him the shotgun exploded, the massive slug thudding into the car that the two LCS men were using as cover, causing them to squat further down. Kate was off at a dead run in the one o’clock direction Vail had suggested.

Keeping low, Vail used the same slightly indirect route, approximately toward nine o’clock, that he had suggested to Kate, running to the stone house in an arc that swept away from both Bursaw’s and Kate’s positions. That would force the two gunmen in the house to shift their points of aim away from the other agents, so they could fire at Vail. If the sniper rifle that had hit Bursaw was resting on something to keep it steady, Vail’s path would completely disrupt its accuracy as it tracked him.

The front of the house had a single door with a window on each side. The scoped rifle was being fired out the right window and the assault rifle the left. When Vail got to within twenty yards of the house, the automatic weapon opened up on him.

Inside, Alex Zogas said in an urgent whisper, “Karl, did you get him?”

“I think so.”

Outside, Bursaw’s shotgun boomed again, followed by the thud of the slug hitting the car. Within the house the two men’s focus shifted back to Bursaw and Kate, trying to reestablish them as targets.

Suddenly Zogas noticed the doorknob turning. He snapped his fingers to get Karl’s attention, pointing at the door. Karl nodded and backed up a few steps from the window and toward the door to establish a better angle to shoot through it. Then he opened fire, expending the entire clip into the door. Zogas had taken the rifle off the window rest and stepped back himself, ready to fire.

A single shot came through Karl’s window, hitting him in the face, throwing him back into the wall, where he crumpled to the floor. Zogas could see that he was dead. He backed up a few more steps with the rifle held on his hip, waiting for Vail.

Kate got up from the ground where she had found cover in what looked like a deep wheel rut. She could see one of the men through her night goggles. She was far enough off to his left that he hadn’t seen her yet. She was hoping that Bursaw could track her through his goggles.

As quietly as possible, she walked toward the gunman. But somehow he sensed her movement, turning quickly and firing blindly. She was in the open now and had no choice but to be aggressive. Flipping up her goggles so as not to be blinded by her own gunfire, she quickened her stride, walking steadily toward him, firing two- to three-round bursts. She wasn’t sure exactly where he was, so she would have to fire out the clip in hopes of hitting him. If not, she still had her handgun.

The killer fired back, and now she knew exactly where he was. She adjusted her fire with the next couple of bursts. Then, with a sickening clank, the gun’s bolt locked back, indicating that her MP5 was empty. But the final burst had found the gunman, at least one of the last three rounds hitting him in the stomach. She dropped the submachine gun and started to draw her sidearm when the second man came around the car and leveled his gun on her. “Kale,” he spit out at her in a guttural foreign tongue, a derogatory term every woman recognized no matter the language. Her only option now was to try to finish drawing.

Then a single shot rattled through the cold night. The Lithuanian fell to the ground dead. A head shot had blown out a good portion of his left temple. She had the presence of mind to flip down her goggles.

The first man she’d hit in the stomach got to his knees and raised his gun. Kate took careful aim and fired three rounds into him. He fell back, his legs at impossible angles under him. She went over and checked him for a pulse. He was dead.

The adrenaline vanishing from her body, Kate started shaking and sank to her knees. She replayed in her mind what had happened. At the time, because her life was about to end, it hadn’t registered. Now, in slow-motion memory, she watched a tiny red dot settle onto the right side of the gunman’s head. And then the shot. “Luke!” she yelled down the rise to Bursaw. “They’re both dead! Hold your fire!”

She worked her way back to Bursaw’s position, keeping her Glock in her hand, watching the stone house. “You get them both?” he asked.

“Just one. Steve must have shot the other one,” she said. “Hold on, let me see if he needs any help.”

She moved quickly but cautiously to the cottage. There was a small light on inside. When she opened the door, she immediately saw the sniper rifle sitting on its firing stand at the window oriented toward the car. Vail was kneeling over Zogas’s body, searching his pockets. The Lithuanian lay on his back, his chest and abdomen covered with blood. She walked up to Vail’s side. “You all right?”

“Fine, you?”

“I assume that last shot was yours.”

“Can you go get Luke out of the cold? I’ll turn up the heat in here.”

“Sure.”

By the time she got back with Bursaw, Zogas’s body had been rolled over and Vail had turned on more lights. He was searching the other man’s clothing. Kate sat Bursaw in a chair. Vail came over and helped him off with his coat and shirt. Examining the wound, he said, “How’s it feel?”

“I don’t know whether it’s the cold or the endorphins, but not bad.”

Vail prodded it a little more roughly now. “Looks like just meat, no bone.”

Kate found a couple of clean towels and gave them to Vail. He pressed them against the wound. In the distance they could hear what sounded like a single siren. “Luke, I think your ride is here,” Vail said. “Kate, can you hold this in place? I’m going to make sure the ambulance finds us.”

Vail hurried down to the road and was surprised to see John Kalix getting out of his car. “Put on your flashers so everyone will know where we’re at,” he told Kalix. “Where’d you come from?”

They started back to the house. “Everybody all right?”

“Luke got dinged, but he’ll be okay.”

“When Kate called Richmond, she told them to call me. I’ve had this thing up over a hundred. I don’t ever want to do that again. How about the bad guys?”

“Four dead, including Zogas.”

“I’m sorry, who’s Zogas?”

“He’s the leader of the Lithuanians.”

“The Lithuanians?”

“They’re tied in to the Russians. I’ll explain everything when we get Luke taken care of.”

As they reached the house, more sirens could be heard in the distance. Kalix went inside. “Luke, how you doing?”

He said to Kalix, “I’m begging you, John, make Vail go back to Chicago.”

Kalix said, “Kate, how about you?”

“You should have seen her,” Bursaw said. “Charging the enemy, taking them out with that MP5. It was definitely ladies’ night out there.”

“One of them anyway,” she said, looking at Vail.

“Well, Bannon,” he said, “if you think you’ve had trouble getting a date up until now, wait until the guys hear about you machine-gunning men who cross you.”

“Actually, I’m thinking about reloading right now.”