“Shouldn’t be, but you never know,” Cal said as the door opened and the stairs descended. “Let’s make this fast.”
The small leather satchel he carried as he stepped out into the biting cold held five million dollars’ worth of diamonds. They weren’t his diamonds, and it wasn’t his money that had bought them: it belonged to the CIA, or, more properly, the US government. But the US government didn’t pay ransom.
Unless it decided it wanted to. Then it employed private contractors like Cal to do the dirty work, thus keeping its official nose clean.
Ezra strode past him, taking up a position far enough to his right that even a spray of bullets couldn’t get them both at the same time. The missile launcher on his shoulder was aimed squarely at the trucks. The AK-47 slung on its strap over his shoulder was for stragglers if the missile launcher should prove less than one hundred percent effective.
Eyes narrowed against the blowing snow, Cal started walking toward the trucks.
He’d done a lot of things he didn’t want to do in his thirty-four years of life. One way or another, most of them had been for money.
Getting Rudy Delgado out of Kazakhstan was about to be one of them.
Rudy was a computer hacker. One of the best. Ten years before, under the cover of his legitimate day job as an IT specialist for the CIA, he’d gone into the system, found and publicly exposed dozens of clandestine operations that at that time had been under way in the Middle East, with the justification that he opposed the United States’ presence there. The public uproar had been enormous. The private backlash had cost serving officers their lives.
Having thus royally screwed the pooch, Rudy had fled the country, eventually winding up in Russia. In the years since, he’d continued working in IT, only for that country’s security services. It had been a sweet deal: Rudy did what the Russian government wanted, and they protected him from the Americans and let him live.
Only Rudy being Rudy, he’d gotten ambitious. He’d hacked his way into their classified files and started poking around.
The Russians being the Russians, they hadn’t liked that.
Nor had they liked what he’d found.
Rudy had fled again.
This time everybody and his mother was after him.
He’d wound up in Kazakhstan, where, via his specialty, the Internet, he dropped a bombshell on his former bosses at the CIA: he knew what had caused the crash of Flight 155 outside of Denver last year. He was prepared to trade the information, plus provide irrefutable proof of what he claimed, for a ride back to the States and a guarantee of immunity from prosecution once he got there.
His former bosses took the deal, but a complication arose. Rudy was arrested for some minor offense in Chapaev and wound up in the custody of the Kazakhstani government.
Which decided, clandestinely, to auction him off to the highest bidder.
The CIA won, and thus here Cal and company were.
Just another day at the office.
Three men emerged from the cab of the center truck and walked toward Cal. Two were tall and straight in their military uniforms. The third, the one in the middle, was short, round, bespectacled Rudy.
It was, in Cal’s opinion, a poor trade for five million dollars’ worth of diamonds, but what the US government did with its money wasn’t his call to make.
“Salaam.” Cal greeted the soldiers in their language, bowing his head in accordance with the custom. They nodded curtly. Not great believers in small talk, apparently, he observed to himself, which made them his kind of guys.
The soldier on the left held out his hand for the satchel. Cal handed it over. The soldier opened it up, thrust a gloved hand inside, rooted around. Apparently satisfied, he grunted, “Zhaksa,” which meant “good,” and closed the satchel back up again.
The soldier on the right, who’d had a hand wrapped around Rudy’s arm, thrust Rudy toward Cal. As Rudy stumbled forward, the soldiers turned around and left, striding swiftly back toward the trucks.
Cal grabbed Rudy’s arm in turn and started hustling him back toward the plane, which waited with steps down and engine running just ahead of them. The fuselage gleamed silver where the headlights struck it; the logo—a circle with two wavy lines under it—painted on the sides and tail gave it the look of a sleek corporate jet, which Cal supposed was the point.
The truth was he didn’t really give a damn about the plane’s aesthetics, especially not now—these crucial few seconds, where the Kazakhs had the diamonds and he, Ezra, and Rudy were still outside the jet, were the most likely time for an attack.