streets around the fenced-off area towards the mouth of the Havel River.
She, of course, had taken into account the possibility that this was some sort of a trap, but she thought it much more likely the phone had been dumped here. She couldn’t know for sure until she found it, but it was her hope to find a weapons cache, or some other intelligence that she could take to authorities so they could track down Haz Mirza and any surviving members of his cell.
She wasn’t doing any of this tonight for Shrike International, nor was she doing this for Rudy Spangler. This was Annika going rogue, for the first time in her career, with the unwitting accomplices in the van on the lakeshore helping her find information that would lead to the capture of an on-the-loose terrorist before he could perpetrate another attack.
She’d devoted her adult life to intelligence work, and it would culminate, she hoped, in finally stopping the last remnants of the cell she had been keeping tabs on for over a year, now that their leader had proven a willingness to act.
Just outside the main building she pulled out her phone and dialed Moises. She was surprised when he did not immediately answer, and more surprised when the call went to his voice mail.
This wouldn’t be the first time she’d had comms trouble in the field, however, so she pushed any worry she had to the back of her mind. Thinking it over carefully, she decided to press on ahead, knowing she could be only meters away from the phone and whatever else Mirza had left here in the abandoned factory complex.
She entered the main building finally. Her flashlight was off but held at the ready, both to help her avoid obstacles and to use as a blunt instrument if she encountered someone. There was a little light here and there when the moon shone through the clouds and the lake mist, and then through the massive shattered windows high on the concrete walls, enough for her to pick her way carefully around the trash and debris on the floor.
Still, her footfalls made noise, amplified by the cavernous hallways and other empty spaces around her. If there had been any hint whatsoever from the audio feed from the passive receivers in the phone, she wouldn’t have dared go forward, but so far, anyway, Moises and Yanis hadn’t called to report any issues.
Soon she found herself in the middle of a large, open room, a factory floor where the grain was milled and mixed and packaged. She could smell the river and knew it was just past the far wall, so she pressed on, but it was darker here; the moonlight came and went with the cloud cover through the windows high over the catwalks and just under the ceiling, some three stories above her.
There was a hole in the floor on the west side of the room, and she nearly fell into it. As she moved around it and continued forward, she recognized it as a staircase, perhaps down into a basement level, and she shuddered, hoping like hell she wouldn’t have to go down there to find the phone.
She kept going, slow, careful steps in the low light, making her way to the middle of the large factory floor. But after a long period of heavy cloud cover, shrouding the scene in near total darkness, Annika saw no choice but to take a chance and turn on her flashlight for the first time.
She clicked the tail cap, and a white beam shot out across the dusty space.
And instantly she screamed out in surprise, her cry echoing all around.
Men stood on a metal catwalk twenty meters in front of her, one story off the factory floor. They all had rifles pointed at her, and when she dropped her flashlight to the floor, they turned on their weapon lights, blinding her with thousands of lumens.
“Don’t move!” a man shouted in English, and she recognized an American accent.
She heard rushing footsteps behind her now, and soon a pair of armed men appeared on her shoulders and yanked her forward.
Yet another pair of men were there, on the ground level below the men on the catwalk. They wore rifles on their chests, and the bearded man on the left held a pistol in his right hand.
She was brought directly to the man on the right.
“Your name is Dittenhofer, and you and I need to have a little convo.”
She had no