The Fallen: A Derek Stillwater Thriller (8 page)

Derek was in a very awkward position when a broad-shouldered woman in a dark suit stepped into the freezer, followed by two other men. Derek recognized the woman.

Sarah Macklin, the bureau’s lead agent during the summit. Like most of the staffers at the resort, he had sat through a few briefings she had run on what to expect. He was not encouraged by her presence.

“Michael Gabriel?”

He nodded. “Yeah? Who’re you?”

She held up her identification. “Will you please step out of there?”

“Uh, sure. Wait a second, I’m almost—”

“Now, Mr. Gabriel.”

Taking his time, he joined the wires, closed the panel, turned on the power, and looked at the indicators. The power came back on. With it he heard the whir of the compressor kick in.

“Mr. Gabriel—”

“Just finishing this up,” he said, “or we’re going to lose a few thousand pounds of meat.” He flashed Macklin a wry grin. “Wouldn’t want to give all the leaders of the free world a case of salmonella poisoning, now, would we?” He screwed the panel shut.

“What’s this all about?” he asked, squeezing out from behind the shelving. “Hey, one of you guys help me shove this—”

Macklin’s gun was out, as were Creff’s and Snyder’s. “Dr. Derek Stillwater, please drop your tools and tool belt and place your hands on top of your head.”

Oh shit.

“Hey, I don’t—”

“Do it!”

Damn.

He cautiously slipped the screwdriver into his tool belt and held out his hands. “I’m going to unbuckle this, all right? I’m not going to do anything crazy. Okay? Ease down. Easy. I’m reaching down to unbuckle the belt.”

He slowly dropped his hands to the buckle of his tool belt and unlatched it. The belt with a few of his tools slid away. He held it up in his right hand. “I’m going to put this right here next to my toolbox. Okay? Right here. Everything’s cool.”

Slowly he let the belt down.

“I’m coming forward. Slowly.”

He did, hands held up.

“On your head.”

He placed his hands on top of his head. Stepping backward, Macklin said, “Creff, pat him down.”

Creff holstered his sidearm and deftly searched Derek. Creff pulled out Derek’s wallet and flipped through it. “Michael Gabriel, it says.”

“He’s Derek Stillwater. Dr. Stillwater, you’re supposed to be dead. Hands behind your back. Creff, cuffs, please.”

“Hey, this isn’t nece—”

Creff jerked Derek’s arms behind his back and slapped handcuffs tightly around his wrists.

Derek protested. “Take it easy! I’m one of the good guys.”

“That remains to be seen,” Macklin said. “Now, step outside.”

“I want you to make a call to Secretary James Johnston. His personal cell phone number is—”

“Can it, Stillwater.” She stepped out of the freezer. Creff gave him a shove so he followed her out into the corner of the kitchen area. The freezer was near the service walkway that ran beside the kitchen. Derek stumbled out of the freezer and into the hallway, dropping momentarily to his knees.

“Hey, go easy!”

Creff stepped up, caught him beneath his armpits and boosted him to his feet. “ ‘Hey’ yourself, asshole!”

Derek turned to face Creff and froze. Standing behind Creff was Richard Coffee. Coffee recognized him at the same time.

“That’s Coffee! Hey, look—”

Coffee recovered fast, hand slipping inside his white catering jacket. He pulled out a matte black semiautomatic with a slender, cylindrical silencer on the muzzle. With an eerie calm, he fired the gun.

There was a pop, not loud, and Creff’s head snapped back and he fell to the floor.

Another pop, and Snyder went down.

Agent Macklin was struggling for her gun, eyes wide, when Coffee shot her in the face.

Derek, arms cuffed behind his back, tried to turn and run, but Coffee was on him in an instant. Squinting, Coffee spun him around, flung open the freezer door and shoved him in. He followed the move by smashing the barrel of his gun against Derek’s head.

Derek’s world exploded into sizzling reds and blacks and golds, but he didn’t lose consciousness. He struggled to sit up, but everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. The freezer door closed. When it reopened, Coffee dragged Macklin’s body in, followed shortly afterward by the bodies of Bill Creff and Joe Snyder.

Coffee disappeared for a moment. Derek’s vision doubled, tripled,
then returned to normal, though his skull throbbed and blood leaked down his forehead. Not as bad as Macklin, he thought, and turned away from the sight of her obliterated features.

Suddenly the door swung open and Coffee stepped through again. He reached down and hauled Derek to his feet. He slammed him against the stainless steel door and pressed the barrel of the gun under his chin.

“Not dead after all.”

Derek didn’t reply.

“Are you frightened, Derek? Knees shaky? Is this how Nadia felt when you tortured her to death? Helpless?”

Derek’s mind raced. The still-hot barrel of the silenced gun burned into his jaw. “She’s—not—dead.”

Coffee’s face twisted in unexpected shock. He smashed the butt of the gun against Derek’s jaw. “What did you say?”

Stumbling to the cold metal floor, Derek tried to suck air into his lungs. His pulse hammered in his ears, blood roaring through his veins. “She’s not dead,” he said, wondering if the blow had broken his jaw. His speech seemed a little slurred. “They have her. The FBI.”

“She’s dead! You murdered her!”

Coffee was in his face. The icy control he so casually wore was only a thin veneer over insanity. Derek stared up at him, feeling calmer. “She’s not dead, Richard. She’s at Guantanamo with the rest of The Fallen Angels we captured in Alexandria.”

“You lie!” The gun rose and fell again. This time Derek slumped to the floor, his vision blurring, unable to get up with his arms behind his back.

“You lie!”

Derek shook his head and instantly regretted the movement. “No,” he grunted out. “She’s alive. Just like I am.”

Coffee spun in circles like a child unsure which direction to go. He flexed his arms in frustration, staring down at Derek at his feet. He raised the gun, aimed it—

He glanced at his watch and seemed to reconsider. “Fucker!” he coughed. “I’ll be back for you later! You will tell me the truth about Nadia.” Coffee reached down and ripped Derek’s Iridium phone off his belt, dropped it to the floor and stomped it into pieces.

And Coffee was gone, the metal door of the freezer slamming shut behind him. Derek heard a metallic clank, then nothing.

Nadia Kosov, thought Derek. We really do get punished for our sins. Nadia Kosov had been Richard Coffee’s common-law wife. She had tried to first recruit Derek to The Fallen Angels, and when that didn’t work, tried to kill him. Derek had overpowered her and interrogated her—that was the official word for what amounted to torture—only she had accidentally died before revealing what she knew.

Derek was using this knowledge to keep Coffee at bay. He was using what must be a last desperate hope in Coffee’s diseased brain to barter for his life.

If Coffee knew the truth, if he abandoned all hope that Nadia might be alive in a maximum-security prison cell somewhere, then he would put a bullet in Derek’s head without blinking an eye.

Derek had some slim hope that their old friendship would at least make Coffee hesitate to kill him. But it was a hope as slim and as fragile as swamp grass and just as likely to bend, break, or pull from the muck as it was to hold. It was not something Derek wanted to wager his life on.

He stared at the pile of corpses, wondering which one had the keys to the handcuffs. Ignoring the lightning bolts of pain jolting through his skull, he squirmed toward the agent who had cuffed him.

Irina Khournikova stood outside the entrance to the International Center with one of her fellow FSB security agents, Ivan Petrovitch. Coming toward the resort was a fleet of Sikorsky VH-3D helicopters painted green and white. She counted ten. These were Marine Helicopter Squadron-1, the personal helicopter transport for the White House, which were being used to fly the summit leaders from Peterson Air Force Base to the resort.

Ivan brushed back his thinning gray hair with a large hand and said, “It feels a bit like a show of power.”

“Fairly standard transportation at these summits. And easier to control than limousines.”

“Da. I suppose.” Ivan was in his late fifties, a grizzled old veteran of the FSB, and before that the KGB, and unlike many in the bureau, Irina trusted him.

Irina checked her watch, noting that everything was proceeding right on schedule. That was good. It made everybody’s life in the security detail easier. Still, she felt uneasy. She thought about Derek Stillwater, undercover. She had spent much of the last eight months studying what her government knew about the DHS troubleshooter.

If Stillwater was to be trusted, and she suspected he was, he had good reasons to want Richard Coffee either dead or behind bars. Not nearly as good as her own reasons. Her lover, Lt. Col. Sergei Dobrovnik, had been assassinated in Chechnya by Coffee, who had then been known as Surkho Andarbek.

It had been her job to root out the Chechen assassin, but it had become personal. And when it was discovered that Andarbek was actually a CIA agent— a rogue CIA agent, it was believed— the matter had become ever so much more complicated. She had spent years trying to
track the mysterious Andarbek, who had moved in and out of Russia, Chechnya, and Georgia with ease. She had become an expert— as big an expert as anybody on the planet, she supposed— on The Fallen Angels, the name of Andarbek’s group of operators. They headquartered in the Georgian mountains, bought or stole weapons, sold them to whoever needed or wanted them.

Over time they evolved into something else, a weird cultlike group of apocalyptic terrorists.

The first of the helicopters— Marine One— that carried the president of the United States and his staff, settled onto the expanse of lawn in front of the Cheyennne Center. A marine honor guard stood at attention, and a small military band played “Hail to the Chief” as President Langston deplaned, waving to a small contingent of the press.

Irina glanced upward at the roofs of the buildings, mentally checking off the Secret Service sharpshooters she saw at different points of the compass. She shifted her gaze to the Secret Service guards who walked alongside the president in their dark suits, eyes covered with sunglasses, bodies stiff with the focus of their attention.

President Langston stood listening to “Hail to the Chief,” and when it was finally finished, he saluted and led the U.S. contingent through the entrance of the Cheyenne Center.

Another helicopter landed, then another, and another.

Inside the Cheyenne Center, she knew, the president would be preparing for a short speech in the main banquet hall. There would be a few other speeches, then the leaders, their translators, and Sherpas would move to the International Center’s private room for a smaller, intimate series of meetings.

If she were The Fallen Angel, that is where she would make her move. She didn’t think a man with the tactical experience— even brilliance— of Richard Coffee would try something at the main gathering of the leaders, with seven hundred people in a banquet hall and dozens of security experts. It was too large and unwieldy a group to try and control, unless Coffee had something else in mind, like a bombing.

Ivan turned and said, “Here is our leader,” and stiffened his posture.

The fifth helicopter landed and Russian President Pieter Vakhach descended the stairs, waving at the press. Vakhach was a blade-thin hawk
of a man, balding, and elegant. The U.S. military band broke into a version of the Hymn of the Russian Federation. It was a slow, but rousing march and Vakhach stood at attention as the band played.

Ivan said, “Ahhh. The old cold warrior in me gets chills hearing a U.S. military band playing our national anthem.”

“Maybe you’re coming down with the flu, Ivan.”

He laughed. “Da. Perhaps. Well, things have begun, have they not? The world’s leaders will talk for hours and accomplish nothing, and money better spent on other things will be wasted on security and endless chatter. Dull, boring, and routine.”

“Let us hope, Ivan. Let us hope.”

As they turned to go back inside the International Center, Irina happened to note the expression of Mikhail Alexandrov, the lead FSB agent who would be escorting Vakhach into the Cheyenne Center. She had been discussing things with him when she ran into Stillwater. Alexandrov was an odd one, a throwback to the KGB, a brutal, but efficient, security technocrat. With his cheap suits, bad English, and square head, he had a nickname throughout the FSB— Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown after the cartoon character who was always called a “blockhead.” But nobody in the FSB had the balls to call Charlie Brown a blockhead. To be caught like that might not just end your career, but probably your life, gutted like a deer and floating down the Moscow River past the Vorobievy Hills.

In all the years she had worked for Mikhail Alexandrov, she had never seen him smile. But he was smiling now, as he led President Pieter Vakhach toward the doors of the Cheyenne Center.

President Langston appeared at the podium on the stage at the front of the main banquet hall of the Cheyenne Center. Standing in a row on either side of him were the eight leaders of the Group of Eight, plus the president of the European Union. The banquet hall was filled, nearly seven hundred government leaders and administrators from twenty countries. Seated at the front tables closest to the stage were an additional thirteen leaders and their Sherpas from countries with a vested interest in the summit.

The crowd was surprisingly supportive of President Langston, in large part because of the loss of his wife and children in a terrorist attack months before. They rose to their feet in a wave of applause.

Langston nodded, waited a moment for the applause to die down, and raised his hands. “Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the Group of Eight Summit. I hope everybody had comfortable and safe trips here to this beautiful spot in Colorado, my home state. I hope you enjoy your accommodations and will enjoy your stay here. I know I’m looking forward to a good round of golf, and my friend Prime Minister Hollenbeck has promised to help me with my putting.”