Agent in Place

Before he put his hand on the trunk, however, he saw a line of at least a dozen large-caliber holes in the rear of the Hyundai. Blood ran freely out the back, and this told him Walid had been hit by the shooting at the checkpoint.

He shined a flashlight in and saw two dead men, both riddled with bullets.

Court moved back to the driver’s-side door, reached in, and put the sedan in neutral. It began rolling forward down the hill instantly, picking up speed as it went.

It veered to the left somewhat, but rolled over broken concrete and rebar on the sidewalk and then angled back, plunging once again down the middle of the four-lane street.

Court didn’t wait to watch it roll away. Instead he turned off the lights of the UAZ and helped Yasmin and Jamal inside. He climbed behind the wheel, ignored the smeared blood on the driver’s-side window, and looked down the hill, just as a pair of Syrian Arab Army trucks pulled into the intersection two hundred yards on.

The Hyundai rolled towards them, picking up speed.

Men bailed out of the trucks and began shooting at the vehicle. They had no idea they were shooting at an unoccupied car.

“Hit ’em.” Court urged the sedan on as he turned the UAV to the right and bumped up onto the low concrete rubble there.

The Hyundai missed the Syrian trucks off to his left, but the soldiers there kept firing into it as it continued along the road lower down the hill. A round struck the gas tank and the vehicle exploded in a fireball but kept rolling downhill while the Syrians climbed back into their trucks to pursue it.

Court turned away again, focused in the terrible light, doing his best to pick the safest line through the wreckage of an apartment building.

It took him nearly a minute, but he made it through the destroyed building, then out into an alleyway on the other side. Without his headlights he scraped obstacles every few seconds, but he made it to the end, turned right, picked up speed, then ran over obstruction after obstruction.

The bumps flung Yasmin and Jamal into the air in the backseat. The baby cried, but Court knew he had to put distance between himself and the last place the Hyundai was seen as fast as possible.

Out of the wreckage of the bombed-out neighborhood, Court pulled out into light southbound traffic on a two-laned north-south road. He turned on his headlights. A caravan of military trucks raced towards him, but they passed by, and three NDF militiamen standing by their vehicles at an intersection a mile to the south barely looked up as he passed.

Somehow he’d done it, but he’d only managed to get out of the district where the kidnapping had occurred.

He still had to get himself, a terrified young girl, and a crying infant out of Syria before the sun came up.

Yasmin sat in the back of the truck, feeding Jamal from a bottle.

Court turned back to her as he drove. “I need to make a phone call.”

She looked up at him. “To tell your friends that we’ve survived so they can throw you a party when we get to safety?”

Court smiled, and turned back to the road. “Yeah, but I’m sure it will be a great party.”

He could feel Yasmin looking at him for a long time. “You okay?” he asked.

“Monsieur,” she replied, “your head is bleeding badly.”

“Yep,” he replied, but he didn’t know what he could do about it at the moment.



CHAPTER 50



Vincent Voland stood alone in the soft rain, his tweed suit soaked through. Boyer and his three associates had left the property; Voland assumed they would go to the road and hitch a ride, but he could not be certain. None of the five men who’d been allowed to leave the farmhouse had made eye contact with any of the others, and aside from a few mumbles here and there between the mercenaries, there had been no words.

But Voland did not leave. He could not leave.

He stood still now in a grove of winter pear trees south of the farmhouse, along the driveway that snaked to the east to the road a quarter mile away.

As soon as he’d left the house he tried making a call on his mobile phone, but just as before, there was a jammer in the area that prevented him from getting a signal. So he stood there, watching, waiting to see what would happen, positioning himself as close to the driveway as possible while remaining out of sight.

He heard the gunfire in the house peter out after five minutes, and then for another five it was utterly still, until one final crack of a gunshot rang out. And then, the smell reached him, and he realized somehow a fire had started in the building. In the darkness and misty rain he didn’t see anything for the next few minutes, but eventually smoke began pouring from the attic vents and the chimney and out ground-floor windows. He began praying for Rima and Bianca to find some way out, either on their own—which he knew was likely too much to wish for—or at least in the custody of the Syrians and Drexler.

But they never came out.

Thirty minutes after Voland exited the farmhouse a sedan raced up the driveway, past his position, then skidded to a stop on the wet stones alongside the side door. Black-clad commandos began rushing out of the building and piling into the car. A second vehicle arrived soon after.

Sebastian Drexler himself appeared, running out of the house, rubbing his eyes and falling to the ground, coughing and choking.

Behind him, more men, Syrians all.

But no women. No Rima. No Bianca.

Voland watched Drexler get control of his coughing fit, and then he stood and began shouting at one of the commandos. This man was tall with curly black hair; he was the one who shot Tarek. Voland took him as the leader, but this was just a guess, because there were no known photographs of the Syrian operative called Malik.

The sixty-five-year-old Frenchman standing in the mud, in the rain, told himself that if he only had a rifle or a rocket launcher, he’d extract payback on Drexler and Malik right now. They were only fifty meters away.

It would be so easy.

But even he did not believe this. No . . . he had surrendered tonight—rightly or wrongly, this was a simple fact. And the untrained husband-and-wife heart surgeons, who didn’t belong in the world of espionage and rebellion, had both died fighting for what they believed.

Voland wanted to be sick.

He was close enough to see everyone on the driveway climb into the sedans and then race away from the house. The roof of the building was fully engulfed in flames now, and it was clear the entire place would burn to the ground before the fire department came.

And it was Drexler and the Syrians who had escaped. Not Rima. Not Tarek. Not Bianca.

No one else would be leaving that building with their lives.

He assumed Drexler himself must have killed Bianca, somehow doing it right under the noses of the other men.

As soon as the last of the three vehicles raced back down the driveway, Voland stepped out of the pear trees and up to the driveway. He told himself he should be running into the burning building, screaming the names of the women, pulling them out on his back.

But again, just as his thoughts of shooting the madmen who’d caused this all drifted away, so did his fantasies of coming to the rescue.

A portion of the burning roof overhang collapsed down on the parking circle, right on top of Voland’s car.

He turned away from the farmhouse and towards the road, hundreds of meters distant through the trees. He shuffled as he walked . . . because he had nowhere to go.

His mobile phone rang in his pocket, and this startled him. Whoever had been jamming the signal must have shut down their equipment. Quickly he snatched it up to his ear, hoping against hope it was Rima telling him she’d made it out somehow.

“Yes?”

But it was the voice of the Gray Man. “I’ve got them. We’re ten klicks south of Mezzeh, clear for now, but I have over one hundred klicks to go to the border and less than four hours before daylight. Tell me where to—”

Voland had stepped off the driveway and begun walking through wet grass towards the winter pear again, because of approaching lights and fire truck sirens on the driveway ahead. As he did this he interrupted the American. “There has been an . . . an event.”

“What kind of event?”

Voland sniffed, cleared his throat. “She’s dead. Bianca is dead. They are all dead.”

A pause. “Tarek? Rima?”

“As I said. They are dead.”

“Dammit! How?”

“I tried to help them. Rima and Tarek. But they wouldn’t listen.”

“Was it Drexler?”

“Bien s?r it was fucking Drexler, along with Malik, a Syrian government assassin, and his team. Guns, night vision, communications jammers. They burned the house down to embers. They slaughtered everyone!”

Another pause on the line, but not for long. The American said, “Well . . . they didn’t slaughter everyone, did they, Voland?” Vincent Voland had expected to hear just exactly what he heard next. “I cannot fucking wait to hear the explanation of why you didn’t die in that fire with the rest of them.”

“I . . . I swear to you. I tried. I fought with them to understand we were outnumbered. I told them it was futile to—”