The Perfect Instinct Page 6

  Bad move.

  Marta stepped forward and launched a left foot and shoe into the center of Elena's back. This violent blow caused the younger fighter's head and arms to fly back as her torso slammed forward and then to the ground again.

  This time, before she could roll and jump back up. Marta was on her with a left knee in the small of her back and a right foot pinning the girl's own right foot to the brick road.

  "You gave away your attack with a clumsy first step Elena," Marta whispered. She settled on English. "You must disguise every motion in combat. Never do what your opponent expects. Never throw a punch as your first move. Never ever do the predictable. Like you did back at the bar. The goal of any and every motion is to disable, destroy, immobilize your opponent and kill if necessary. You need to think four, five, ten steps ahead and always have a plan in mind."

  With this micro-life lesson on violence and combat complete, Marta stood up and allowed Elena to get to her feet. The younger violent woman was angry, pissed. She had dirt from the brick street on her face and clothes.

  "What the hell do you want from me?" Elena spit and growled the words.

  Marta stepped in close, pinning Elena back against her Fiat. She brought her lips up to Elena's left ear. "I'll tell you what happened back there in the bar. You struck a deal with a group of people that involved you delivering something and them paying for the it. And then in the spin of a hat, the deal changed and they wanted something other than what had been previously agreed upon. You reacted to their demands and actions by shattering a knee joint, badly bruising an esophagus and concussing a brain. You still obtained the payment for delivery inside the bag, which is in the car behind you. Correct?"

  Elena wanted to ram a knee up into Marta or take other aggressive action, but decided not to incur any more of the stronger woman's wrath. "I haven't counted it all, but payment is in the bag."

  "What mistakes did you make in this transaction? Be specific." Marta stayed right there.

  "I dealt with the wrong people. I should have held the meeting in another location, probably with others who had my back."

  "Yes. And?"

  "And I should have checked to be sure there were people like you around, whoever you are." Elena still spit venom in the words. "Watching me like a pervert."

  "Exactly. Conduct all your business in secret. If possible, never reveal yourself, your team, your means, your system, your secrets to others. Do this and you will eliminate a significant amount of uncertainty from your business model." Marta stepped back. She had a smile on her face.

  Elena brushed off her face and clothes and wiped some spittle from the side of her mouth. "Thanks for the advice. I'll be sure to follow it in the future."

  "Yes you will. I have a job for you. And when that job is done, I'll have another." Marta nodded and pulled the gun out of her pocket.

  Elena looked at the gun and shook her head. "I don't work for others. Haven't for years. I make my own deals, my own rules. And I don't stick around one place for very long."

  Marta stepped forward and handed Elena the gun. "You will take this job and then the next. You will be excellent and you will amaze yourself with your ability to be in control of the world around you and those populating this mean and cruel and violent planet. You will use that gun and others to protect yourself and what is yours and to kill those who would take from you. Your answer?"

  Elena looked from the gun in her hand to Marta. "Who the hell are you?"

  Marta laughed. "An angel, the devil, I'm nothing to most. And that is the best way to be. Nothing. No one. That way you can move across this globe and make your own rules and be who you want to be. Your answer?"

  "Yes."

  "Good. I'll be in touch, soon." And Marta turned to walk away.

  "How will you find me?" Elena called after her.

  Marta turned back to her, shrouded in the dark of night. "I'll find you Elena Stefanko, 1.9 metres, brown hair, blue eyes, left-handed, scar on right temple, drives blue Fiat sedan." Marta chuckled just a little. "And you'll need to get some bullets for that gun. I'm no idiot."

  Elena lifted the gun up and found the cartridge release. The SIG was empty.

  Marta turned away from the sagebrush of the desert landscape outside her motel room window in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her recollection of meeting Elena years before had taken up a few minutes of time dragging like a snail trudging through molasses as she waited for Lance to call her back. She wasn't worried about him. He didn't need her worrying.

  But she was anxious. Trieste was a little bit of the Wild West right on the Adriatic coastline. He was bound to meet a few interesting characters, and likely kill a few of them in the process of finding out just what the hell is going on with Elena.

  Marta couldn't help but shake her head thinking about all this. The two of them, she and Lance, they could never get too far or too free from the world they were swept into by Seibel. It was always just over the horizon, around the next corner. Even if they disappeared more than they had this past year, retreating from the world into a mountain stronghold, it was always there.

  A phone message or a pager left for Preacher on a roadside post or a letter received at a post office box or a stranger seated in a booth at the far end of a restaurant, it would always come back, the world.

  Now they were bringing a child into this. Was it foolish? More than likely. But then, all of this, everything, is foolish. CIA and KGB and China and the Middle East and terrorism and conflict and power and death. It was like this long before Marta and Lance were recruited by Seibel and would be like this long after they were gone and their kids and grandkids grown.

  She smiled. Kids, grandkids, she liked the sound of the words in her head. She loved the thought of them and having at least a tiny slice of normal, a normal family. She chuckled and picked up the cell phone from the motel room bed. She hated sitting here, waiting. Marta was ready to get back home to Colorado and Lance and their life, for as long as the world would let them.

  Chapter 12

  "You don't talk much." Rodrigo sat across the tiny table from Lance. It was 4:15 a.m. Lance caught five hours of necessary sleep in one of the bunks in the Captain's sailboat - the Santa Maria. Now there was a steaming cup of coffee sitting in front of him.

  "No, not when I don't have much to say," Lance replied and took a sip of the brew.

  Rodrigo took a sip from his cup. "I don't get many calls on that phone. Mind if I ask where you got the number?"

  Lance smiled and looked around the boat. "This is quite a vessel you have here. Very sharp, very clean. I don't know boats well. This one looks like a rather expensive one. Is it yours?"

  Rodrigo's turn to smile. "Yes it is mine and yes, very expensive. Lots of work for many years to earn it."

  "How do you think I got the number?" Lance nodded as he asked.

  "I suspect we have mutual friends, or maybe friends of friends." The Captain nodded as he answered. "Could that be correct?"

  "I suppose. But I don't really have that many friends. I keep to myself mostly."

  Rodrigo sat back. It was a fairly tight little setup. The table was crammed into the side of the cabin and had room for four people to sit cheek to cheek. "I don't really need the details. I just have one question for you."

  "Shoot." Lance sat back.

  "What kind of trouble are you in and will it mean trouble for me?"

  Lance smiled and scooted out of the seat to grab the coffee pot and refill both of their cups. He put the pot back in the coffee maker and sat back down. After taking a sip of the steaming brew, he answered. "That is two questions. But I'll answer both. For the first, I don't really know what kind of trouble I'm in. There was shooting and I needed to run. The police were involved in the chase, but I never had direct contact with them, so I don't expect another run in."

  He tapped the table a few times with his thumb. It was the backbeat for the Blue Oyster Cult tune playing in his head. Always something. "As far as trouble comin
g your way, I'm sure you weighed that before and after picking me up at the restaurant last evening. I suppose that because I called you on a special line. You had to allow me to come, at least temporarily, into your life. But I don't see trouble for you. No one saw me leave the restaurant, get in your car around back or come here to your boat."

  Lance leaned forward. "I'll be on my way in a little while and hopefully won't need you again. Sound good?"

  "Very good."

  The two of them finished their coffee. Lance asked for a tour of the vessel. He wanted to hear the words describing the parts of the sailboat so he could put them in his cranial repository.

  Thirty minutes later, Lance stepped off the boat onto the dock and made his way back onto dry land. It was still dark over the Adriatic.

  Lance had about a thousand and one questions about the long-haired Spanish captain who come to his rescue last evening. The guy was in the bar the evening before, seated in the corner with the woman who gave Lance the address where the ambush was set.

  The Captain kept his head down in the bar, but a mirror across the room gave Lance a clear shot of the face. When the same guy picked him up a few hours later, well that was obviously no coincidence. He now had just less than 28 hours remaining on his 48-hour time limit, but Lance felt pretty sure he would see Captain Rodrigo again before he left town.

  Captain Rodrigo stepped back down the companionway to the cabin and sat down at the table. This was a complication he did not need, especially not today. He was scheduled to set sail at dawn and rendezvous with the pickup just after noon. He was handling this one personally. No hired hands. The last thing he needed was a wild card, a loose cannon in town trying to find the elusive Elena, messing up the exchange. This was the big one. $500k payday. The deal he needed to get him over the top of his secret nest egg goal. Freedom from this life of living forever secrets.

  Rodrigo shook his head ever so slightly while tapping on the side of his coffee cup. How is this crazy stranger tied to the CIA? And how the hell did this wacko have the number for a phone Seibel himself gave him six years ago?

  It had now rang five time in all these years. The last time was two years ago. It was Seibel then. Before that was five years ago. That time, at the other end of the line was Marta.

  As Captain Rodrigo completed the last item on his detailed list of preparations before pushing off from dock at dawn, the phone that had rung five times in six years rang again.

  Damn.

  Chapter 13

  Wyrick hung up the phone handset on his temporary, yet quickly becoming permanent folding table desk. He had no evidence to the contrary, but could tell that Codename: Adriatic2 just lied to him. It was in the spaces between the words spoken nearly 5,000 miles away in Trieste.

  An adult lifetime listening to conversations over secretly placed wiretaps and bugs and pinpoint directional microphones provides sterile insight into the seemingly endless variety of vocal patterns. Wyrick was among the world's elite clandestine communications information gathering professionals. He was Seibel's secret weapon when the CIA's Special Activities Division guru needed information others simply could not get.

  And Seibel always asked Wyrick to do more than simply gather the information for others to review and interpret. He asked him for his take, his insight. Wyrick listened to hundreds of thousands of hours of audio featuring incredibly boring conversations, mundane activities in offices and homes, including cooking, typing, sex, showering, cleaning and anything one could envision happening where humans live and work.

  In listening to all this human interaction, Wyrick became amazingly adept at recognizing lies. Quite often it was the words. They were wrong or rushed or slurred or spoken angrily. But just as often, it was the pattern, the timing, the pauses before or between words. Deceit had a rhythm all its own.

  In any language, mathematics plays a part of the lie equation. Wyrick could hear even the slightest variation in a speaker's vocal pattern. And in so doing, could hone in on the lie within the words. He preferred to hear it all live, but because these conversations were recorded, he could return to any point and examine the speech pattern. And he was almost always right.

  Wyrick didn't record the conversation he just held with Adriatic2. He didn't want any record of the conversation retained. He used one of the Agency's scrambled lines for the brief call. In the case of Adriatic2, it was not the words It was the timing, the casualness with which he spoke.

  Adriatic2 or Captain Rodrigo or Louis Philippi, the young Marine corporal Wyrick originally spied on 18 years ago on behalf of Seibel, was always casual, confident. He carried himself that way. But the way he responded just now when asked about any knowledge or contact with an American 27-year-old white male was wrong. He was too quick to deny any knowledge of the individual.

  Rodrigo was connected in Trieste. His 15-year cover is as solid as any in Europe. He would have heard something, anything. To declare no information about the events of the evening before which involved one of Trieste's preeminent smuggler kingpins was also wrong. It wasn't in the answer. It was the time and distance between the spoken words.

  And Wyrick knew the pattern all too well. He cringed just a tiny bit as he had hundreds, maybe thousands of times over the past year after learning of Braden's deep-cover treachery. How did he miss it, all the lies told by a deep-cover Chinese mole spanning more than 20 years of working together?

  Wyrick pushed that aside yet again and focused on Trieste. If Rodrigo just lied to him, that could mean only one thing -- Lance or Marta had already contacted him. Had to be.

  "What the hell is going on in Trieste?"

  Chapter 14

  Scraggly beard gone, he looked at his reflection in the dirty mirror and nodded. Lance continued to nod. One of his favorites by U2 was into its final chorus. The rousing and rising ending was coming. This live version of the song was right there at the top of his list of all time favorites.

  Wonder why it played now? It usually only came on in his jukebox brain when the action was hot. The tune was playing in his head in Juarez and before that in Lisbon. Both times he was running, moving, shooting, killing.

  He'd been lost in thought while shaving. He was thinking about lanugo, the soft downy layer of hair that covers the baby in the womb. The lanugo should have fallen off their baby this week. An with that soft hair falling away, the pasty white vernix caseosa that protects the baby's skin is growing thicker. Funky stuff going on in there.

  He tossed the cheap razor and shave foam can into the trash and pushed it down under paper towels and other garbage. He put the sunglasses and gloves back on, pulled the brim of the hat down and turned from the mirror. He stepped outside into the mid-morning sunlight and knew right away why his favorite U2 song was playing.

  He'd been careless walking the street during the day. Someone spotted him this morning. Positioned in the parking lot at 45 degree angles were two police cars. A third was on the street 60-feet away. Three officers stood behind open car doors with guns drawn and aimed at him.

  Split-second. No delay. U2.

  Without forethought or consideration of the movement, he dove to the right into a shoulder roll followed by another forward dive and roll once he came back to his feet. He heard the shouts of the men closest to him. Right behind the shout, he heard and then felt the shots. Years and years of reading up on the subject of sound and sound waves gave him an ultra-detailed map of the living world around him.

  Preacher did the math. Way back when, during his first stint at Harvey Point, the secret and secretive CIA spook training facility in the marshlands along North Carolina's coast, he read the research on bullet velocity and human muscle response. Muscle twitch, some refer to it. The answer is always the same. Bullets win.

  A projectile propelled forward by an explosion inside a tight metal tube does so at a speed of approximately 3,200-feet per second. That's fast. A human given a visual cue at the speed of light still has to send a signal from brain through nerve
s to muscles which then have to pull on tendons attached to bone in order to move, even just a tiny bit. The well-aimed speeding bullet is always going to win.

  But Lance also knows the secret to beating this universal law. Movement. Any movement at the time of the firing of the weapon will do. The more, the better. An expert marksman still must adjust aim and predict next movement to keep the target within his or her sights. A human diving and rolling and diving again is a difficult to hit moving target.

  Preacher burst up to his feet and vaulted to the corner of the building as four more shots exploded the brick of the building's facade. The officer closest to him started to move out from behind his open door, making a wide arc around the building's corner. After the officer took a few steps, a voice called out in Italian from around the corner.

  "Do not come any closer. I have my weapon pulled and I will not miss like you. I do not want to make your wives widows and your children fatherless."

  It worked. The officer stopped and stepped backwards to his car as the other officers covered his retreat. This was the delay Preacher needed. He'd already turned and run the other direction into the gas station's front area and then to the street where he turned left and ran up a hill beside a short wall that bordered the street.

  He replayed the scene from 30 seconds ago in his head as he raced across the street, into an alley and out onto another narrow lane that went down to the water to the right and up a steep hill to the left. He went left.

  What he just went through was fine. It happens. Three patrolmen responding to a report of an individual suspected in the shooting and chase the prior evening positioned appropriately to address and apprehend the suspect. Got it. Just doing their job.