LITMIR.BIZ

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agents charged with dealings that fell beyond the scope of debt-collecting at the casino.

      After confirming that Colt was still alive, Mikhaylov briefly chastised Viktor Cherkow and the other three SVR agents for having caused so much disruption in the course of abducting the security officer. Afterward he sent them to prepare for their next assignment, raiding Colt’s house to look for the evidence he’d collected against GHC. Once he and Tramelik were alone Mikhaylov told his red-haired colleague, “I hope you managed things a little better on your end.”

      “Everything went smoothly,” Tramelik replied. “Upshaw and Orson are both dead, and it’ll be pinned on Upshaw’s kid. We took care of him, too. Vladik stayed behind to monitor things and keep an eye on the safe house.”

      “What about Upshaw’s cell phone?”

      “I got that, too,” Tramelik reported, “but there’s only one call between him and Colt and that was two weeks ago, before we visited him.”

      “That doesn’t make sense,” Mikhaylov said. “You said Colt called him while he was in his car just this morning.”

      “I know,” Tremalik said. “He must have deleted the call afterward.”

      “I’m not so sure,” the other Russian said. “Ilyin took Colt’s cell phone right after they grabbed him at the airport, and the only call to Upshaw was the same one from two weeks ago.”

      Tramelik frowned. There seemed only one likely explanation. “They must’ve each gotten separate phones for when they called each other.”

      “Smart move if that’s what they did,” Mikhaylov said. “Upshaw didn’t have a second phone on him?”

      Tramelik shook his head. “It’s not like I had time to search through the whole car,” he said. “Besides, when I found the one phone I figured it was the one we were looking for.”

      “You’ll need to get back to Barad and have him sniff around a little more,” Mikhaylov said. “If Colt and Upshaw were exchanging text messages or attachments, that other phone might have the proof we’re looking for.”

      “The car will end up at the police impound yard,” Tramelik said. “If they haven’t gone through it, maybe Barad can beat them to it.”

      “It’s worth a try,” Mikhaylov said. “And when Cherkow gets to Colt’s place he’ll need to look for his other phone, too.”

      “What if Colt kept it in his car?” Tramelik suggested. “We should probably try to get to the impound yard in Albuquerque, too.”

      “Let’s wait and see what Cherkow can come up with,” Mikhaylov said. “Now back to Orson. Did you get hold of his inventions?”

      Tramelik gestured at the cardboard boxes on the nearby sofa. “We obviously couldn’t get to his helicopter, but we took everything from his workshop except his computer.”

      “Why not the computer?” Mikhaylov asked. “There had to be something we could use on it.”

      “I got all that.” Tramelik fished through his pocket and withdrew a key chain loaded with pinky-size flash drives. “I copied everything off the hard drive. I left the computer because I used it to make sure the kid gets blamed.”

      Mikhaylov’s radar went up immediately. “You didn’t plant the heroin?”

      “Yes, along with the kit and syringe, but—”

      “The plan was to make it look like he stole the inventions to buy smack,” Mikhaylov reminded the other man. “You were supposed to shoot him up so everyone would think he went off on a rampage.”

      “That’s still the way it’ll look,” Tramelik insisted. “I just figured it’d be better to underline everything in case the police there are idiots.”

      “What exactly did you do?”

      “Let’s go to the barn,” Tramelik said. “I’ll show you on the computer there.”

      “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL him about the map?” Ivan Nesterov asked Viktar Cherkow as the two men headed past a large, walk-in freezer resting next to the barn and made their way to a small outbuilding twenty yards past the farmhouse. The building had once seen use as a milk shed but the SVR operatives had turned most of the structure into a makeshift weapons depot.

      “Tell him it got left behind in the truck?” Cherkow snapped at the wheelman who’d driven the stolen vehicle they’d used to abduct Franklin Colt. “After the way he chewed us out? Are you crazy? He’d probably shoot us!”

      “Good point,” Nesterov conceded, unlocking the door to the shed.

      “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Cherkow said. “Besides, we already know where we’re going. We don’t need a map!”

      The men entered the shed, where a shelving unit lined the far wall, stocked top to bottom with an assortment of weapons and ammunition.

      “I’m just concerned the police might find it and figure out what we’re up to,” Nesterov said.

      “They don’t have jurisdiction on the reservation,” Cherkow reminded his colleague. “By the time they go through all the red tape to get the tribal police involved, we’ll have been there and left already.”

      “I hope you’re right,” Nesterov said.

      Cherkow detected the other man’s skepticism and gestured at the weapons cache. “Look, if you’re worried we can just load up more firepower and bring along a few more men.”

      “I think that’d be a good idea.”

      “Let’s do it, then,” Cherkow said. He grabbed a wheelbarrow next to the shelving unit and began to fill it with firearms and grenades. “I’ll take care of this. Go round up some more men and get the chopper started. If anybody gets in our way at Colt’s place, they won’t know what hit them.”

      Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      “BARBARA,” AARON “THE BEAR” Kurtzman said as Barbara Price strode into the Computer Room, “what’s Striker’s status?”

      Striker was Mack Bolan’s in-house handle.

      “He’s on his way to check on this Franklin Colt’s wife,” she replied.

      “Sounds like he and the boys had a close call in that flood channel.”

      Price nodded. “It could have been a lot worse.”

      “I hear you.” Kurtzman shook his head wearily. “Two cops dead along with a civilian. And we still don’t know about Colt. Or this Orson guy, for that matter.”

      “Let’s hope the crews come up with something,” Price said.

      Inside the large dimly lit chamber, Kurtzman’s three associates were seated at their respective workstations, eyes fixed on their computer screens as they diligently combed through cyberspace for data that would allow them to lend support to Stony Man field teams. The older two—former FBI agent Carmen Delahunt and one-time Berkeley cybernetics professor Huntington Wethers—were so engrossed in their tasks they didn’t realize Price had entered the room. Akira Tokaido, a young computer hacker extraordinaire, glanced up from his keyboard, however, and nodded a greeting as he dislodged the earbud trailing down to his ever-running MP3 player.

      “Orson’s still MIA,” he reported, “but I cobbled together a little more background on him so we can at least have a better idea who we’re dealing with.”

      “Fire away.” Kurtzman eased into his workstation and set down his mug. There were other seats available throughout the large room but Price remained standing, preferring to pace off some of her nervous energy.

      “Orson came out of Stanford with a Ph.D. in geophysics and tried his hand at think tanks for a few years,” Tokaido reported, glancing at the work file he’d

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