A woman wearing high-heeled boots had traded places with the driver and driven the van up the driveway toward the home. The tracks led to the door, where she’d likely lured Hanna outside. The man had probably pounced on his sister from behind in the darkness, and, based on the greenish hue of the blood trail, had taken a knife to the guts for his trouble. Hanna had been subdued just outside the back door. The drag marks left by her feet led to the van, which indicated that she’d been unconscious, either knocked out, drugged, or both.
Where would they take her? That was the psychology of tracking; learn from the spoor and anticipate your prey’s next move.
Raife needed to get inside the head of whoever had taken her. The tracks were only a few hours old, but Raife didn’t have any leads as to where they might be headed. He was in an unfamiliar land, didn’t speak the language, and had no local network on which to rely.
Raife walked back inside the farmhouse, and this time his eyes were up, looking for anything he’d missed on his first pass. He didn’t have to look far.
A piece of paper was on the small kitchen table, torn from a notebook. On it was written a URL of seemingly nonsensical letters, numbers, and symbols followed by two additional sets of similarly random alphanumeric combinations without the URL designation.
A user name and password. The Dark Web.
Feeling a vibration, Raife reached in his pocket and answered the phone.
“Tell me,” he said.
“It’s not good. Did you find Hanna?”
“I’m at her place now. She’s been taken.”
Raife heard his friend pause on the other end of the line.
“I know who did it and where she is,” Reece said.
When Reece was finished relaying the information he’d learned from the interrogation of Dimitry Mashkov, Raife’s eyes moved back to the paper in his hand.
“He’s hunting her,” he said.
“Or, he’s using her as bait. Come back, and I’ll talk to Vic about mounting an operation to get her out.”
“There’s no time for that. He wants me, or he wants you, probably both. See what you can do about it through official channels. In the meantime, I’m going to book a hunt.”
CHAPTER 54
Medny Island, Russia
ALEKSANDR SAT AT HIS desk in his fortress on Medny. The island was first sighted in 1741 by Vitus Jonassen Bering, a Danish cartographer employed by the Russian Navy. It wasn’t until a few years later that Yemelyan Basov explored and hunted the island, bringing back a host of valuable furs to Kamchatka and on to trading posts throughout Russia.
Aleksandr looked at a seal pelt on the wall.
Fitting, he thought.
Native Aleuts had moved to the island in the late 1800s and set up a whaling station. Relying on harpoons, they hunted whales and seals until the government moved the settlement to neighboring Bering Island. It was a frontier post with Cold War military significance up until 2001, when it was abandoned.
The Zharkov family dacha on the Black Sea would not do for what Aleksandr had in mind so, when the opportunity presented itself, the entrepreneurial young intelligence officer had leased the island from the government. He needed a remote outpost to partake in his most dangerous of games. Siberia was remote. An island in the Bering Sea was even more so.
Hunting the woman from Montana had ended in a most unsatisfying manner. He hadn’t been able to feel the pleasure of releasing his arrow into his quarry. She’d also managed to kill two of his best dogs. No matter, Sergei had others to take their place. Luckily for him a plane was about to land at a remote strip in Kamchatka. There, six new prisoners from the Central African Republic would be transferred to an Mi-8 transport helicopter for the flight to Medny Island. They would provide ample opportunity to sharpen his skills before the ultimate chess match.
Americans were so easy to manipulate. Hanna Hastings had served her purpose.
Aleksandr had received word that an American had arrived in Romania and traveled to her farmhouse. It wouldn’t be long before he put the pieces together and connected via the Dark Web using the note left on his sister’s table. The trap was baited. Now it was time to wait. His prey would come, and Aleksandr would finally put himself to the test against the most worthy of adversaries.