Savage Son (James Reece #3) - Jack Carr Page 0,145
a way to contact me. I’ll run any request you have up the chain but know that even that access could be extremely valuable to you and your organization.”
“And if I don’t agree?”
“Then there’s my short-term fix,” Reece said, giving the Winkler Sayoc a spin in his palm.
“You Americans are too trusting, Mr. Reece. How do you know I won’t agree and just have you killed when my detail arrives or change my mind a month from now and send hit teams to kill you wherever you are?”
“Because you are a practical man. I killed your son for you, and this alliance will help us both. If you have your men kill me, I have a friend who is even better in the woods than I am. Your son killed his sister. Put her head in a bottle of formaldehyde. He’ll finish you off and, trust me, he won’t be as kind about it as I would be. And, if you betray me later, I found you once in the middle of Siberia. Don’t think I can’t or won’t do it again. I kind of like it out here.”
The elder Zharkov weighed his options.
“I accept your offer, Mr. Reece. My son was a killer. We are hunters. I give you my word that no harm will come to you. I will guarantee your safe passage as far as Africa. From there you are on your own.”
“And, Ivan, if you fuck me, I’ll track you down and kill you in your own kitchen. Not only that, I’ll kill your sons. All of them. I will erase the Zharkov name from existence. Your legacy will be that an American wiped your bloodline from the earth.”
EPILOGUE
“Deep in the forest a call was sounding…”
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Baltimore, Maryland
REECE WAITED ON A darkened section of street, rain pelting his rented Chevy Tahoe half a block down from the long-term storage facility in Baltimore, Maryland. The engine was on to keep the defroster working but his lights were off. The facility was ringed in barbed wire and security cameras; signs advertised a guard. He observed the entrance for an hour. No one came or went. It was open 24/7 if you had the right keys and an ID. Reece had waited until well after midnight to cut down on the number of people he might encounter. In this part of the city that didn’t necessarily make it safer, but Reece wanted to be alone.
He’d been back in the States for six weeks, debriefing at an off-site CIA annex in Northern Virginia. They needed him close by as they figured out what to do. A team of American mercenaries—well, technically not mercenaries as none of them had accepted payment—had invaded a sovereign country and killed the Russian deputy director of their Foreign Intelligence Service, who just happened to be the son of the head of one of the most powerful organized crime syndicates in Russia. One of these mercenaries had stayed behind and traveled deep into the interior, killing an American defector from the Central Intelligence Agency. Everything was being kept very low-key as the CIA and executive branch figured out how best to play it.
The Associated Press had picked up a story of the slaying of a Russian intelligence official that first appeared in the Moscow daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta and on television from the state-owned news agency Novosti. The mafia-related assassination received little mention from U.S.-based mainstream media, who were all much more concerned with the circus surrounding the upcoming presidential election.
Receiving even less attention was the admission of a red-haired male to a level 2 trauma center in Anchorage with a mysterious piece of shrapnel in his leg. Alaskans were notorious for serious injuries that came as a matter of course as a result of the inherently dangerous professions that drew people to America’s forty-ninth state. The emergency surgery that saved his life was even covered under Tri-Care.
In a not-so-random visit, the White House log indicated that the day the mercenaries departed for Russia, the director of Central Intelligence made an unscheduled 3:00 a.m. visit to the president’s residence. A meeting took place in the Situation Room, a meeting in which only two people were present. It lasted thirty minutes. The next hour, an Ohio-class special operations capable SSGN submarine was diverted from a national tasking off North Korea and positioned off the coast of Russia. Because of the sensitivities that enshroud the subsurface fleet, this move went unnoticed and unreported by