Road Of Bones

EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)

PROLOGUE

Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russian Federation

Yakutsk Airport was small by Western standards. One of its two runways was a parking lot for aircraft, while the other handled both arrivals and departures, moving seven hundred passengers per hour at peak efficiency. The international terminal, built in 1996, was showing signs of age. The domestic terminal, meanwhile, was constructed sixty-five years earlier, in Stalin’s time.

Tatyana Anuchin and Sergey Dollezhal were going international, a Ural Airlines flight to Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport in Rome with 160 other passengers and crew aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M—Russia’s equivalent of the Boeing 727. The aircraft had a cruising range of twenty-seven hundred miles, which meant a stop for fuel in Chelyabinsk before proceeding on to Italy. With time on the ground, that meant nine more hours before they cleared Russian soil.

Before they were safe.

“You need to relax,” Dollezhal said.

“I’ll relax in Rome,” Anuchin replied. “Better yet, in London.”

“You give them too much credit,” he chided. “We have a good lead.”

“Oh, yes? Why not hire a car, then?” she challenged. “We’ll make it a holiday.”

“All I am saying—”

She cut him off, hissing, “They’re not as stupid as you give them credit for. They must know that we’re running by now.”

And unarmed, since they had left their weapons in the car at long-term parking, to avoid any problems with airport security. Anuchin felt naked without the MP-443 Grach semiauto pistol she had carried with official sanction for the past nine years, used twice in the line of duty.

All that was behind her now that she was running with Dollezhal.

“We board in twenty minutes,” he remarked.

“And they could just as well be waiting when we land in Chelyabinsk, with two damned hoºurs to kill.”

“It was the best connection we could manage,” he reminded her.

“I know that, but it isn’t good enough.”

“You say I give them too much credit for stupidity, Tanni,” he said, using her nickname. “I think you make them omniscient when they’re not.”

“We’ll see,” she answered, thinking to herself that twenty minutes was a lifetime.

* * *

“SPREAD OUT and sweep the terminal. Eyes sharp,” Valentin Grushin said.

“And if we spot them?” Pavel Antonov inquired.

“No shooting in the terminal,” Grushin replied. “No shooting, period, unless they leave no other choice. Remember they’re wanted for questioning.”

Mikhail Krylov snorted at that. “They may prefer to be shot.”

“It’s their choice, then,” Grushin said. “Just follow your orders.”

They fanned out to cover the terminal, three hunters seeking their prey. Outside the terminal, watching the exits, their fourth man—Fyodor Dushkin—sat at the wheel of a Lada Riva sedan, waiting to signal if the targets slipped past them somehow.

If they were even at the airport now.

Grushin trusted the tip they’d received, but the caller had mentioned no flight in particular, no destination. By now, the targets could have flown the coop on any one of nine airlines, with destinations ranging from China and Thailand to Egypt, Tunisia and most of Europe.

What they would not do, if they were sane, was try to hide in Russia. That was tantamount to slow and painful suicide.

Grushin was tasked to find and seize the targets, not pursue them if they managed to fly out of Yakutsk Airport. If he missed them, his part in the hunt was finished.

But his trouble would have just begun.

The people who employed him paid for positive results in cash. Their currency for failure was a very different proposition altogether.

As he moved along the concourse, Grushin watched for uniformed Militsiya officers, acutely conscious of the PP-2000 machine pistol that he wore beneath his long coat on a leather sling. The weapon measured only 13.4 inches with its stock folded and weighed about five pounds with a fully loaded magazine of forty-four 9 mm Parabellum rounds. For this job, Grushin had foregone the 7N31 +P+ armor-piercing loads, but had some in the car, in case the hunt became a chase on wheels.

In which case, he supposed, they likely would have failed.

A crackle from the tiny earbud that he wore almost made Grushin jump. Krylov’s voice telling him, “I’ve found them. Ural Airlines.”

Flushed with instantaneous relief, Grushin changed course and walked more rapidly across the terminal.

* * *

“SON OF A BITCH!” Dollezhal spit the words as if they tasted foul. “I know that man in the blue windbreaker.”

Anuchin found the man he was referring to and felt her heart skip as she realized that he was watching them.

Five minutes left until their flight was called for boarding, and the chance was lost to them. How many other trackers were there in the terminal, converging on them even now?

“Let’s go,” Dollezhal said urgently.

“Go where?” she countered. “He’s already seen us.”

“Seeing’s one thing,” he replied. “Holding’s another.”

Fearing that they were already lost, she nonetheless stood and shouldered her carry-on with the laptop inside. There was nothing in it to hang them if she had to ditch it, running. All the details were inside her head and in her companion’s, ready for bullets to scramble and wipe out the warning they carried.

Even now, they didn’t run, but walked with purpose, swiftly, Anuchin having no idea of Dollezhal’s plan or destination. When they missed their flight, as they were bound to do, what avenues remained?

“In here,” he said, ducking into a men’s restroom without looking back.

Cheeks flaming from childish embarrassment, Anuchin followed, prepared to ask what he was doing when he clutched her arm and pulled her away from the door.

“Find a stall,” he commanded. “Lock it. Put your feet up.”

As if that would help, when the man had seen them both enter. Still, she followed instructions, chose the middle of nine toilet stalls, closed the door and secured its cheap latch. Then she climbed up on the seat, crouching awkwardly over the bowl.