“Can we track this Web site somehow? I’m not that great with technical things.” Shaw nodded, made a call to Frank. He put his phone away and finished his wine. “We’ll see what he comes up with.”
“So are we staying in Dublin?” she asked.
He shook his head. “We’re flying out tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Germany. A little town called Wisbach.”
CHAPTER 76
THERE IS NEVER A GOOD DAY to bury someone. Even when the sun is shining and the air is warm, there is nothing whatsoever positive about laying a cold body in the cold earth, particularly someone with three bullet holes that cut her life short by at least four decades. And in Wisbach there was no sun, no warmth. The rain was coming down in sheets and buckets as Shaw and Katie sat in the car at the graveyard that was set next to a small church.
They’d flown into Frankfurt that morning and driven over. Going through airport security in Dublin the alarms had sounded when Shaw had stepped through the metal detector. The wand the security guard ran over him homed in on his left arm.
“Roll up your sleeve, sir,” the guard had ordered, an edge to his voice.
When his gaze hit the row of metal staples revealed under the bandage, he flinched.
“Damn, does that hurt?”
“Only when I roll up my sleeve,” Shaw answered.
At the gravesite the rain had turned the mound of fresh earth next to the six-foot-deep hole into a mud pile. Anna’s coffin and the people here paying their respects were under a large tent set up next to the gravesite to keep them reasonably dry.
Shaw had decided not to join the mourners. He’d spotted Wolfgang Fischer’s lumbering figure, Natascha next to him. Neither looked very tall today. They seemed bent, destroyed. So Shaw just sat in the car. And watched them lower the coffin into the grave. Wolfgang nearly collapsed with grief. It took several men to get him back to the car.
Next to him Katie felt tears slide down her cheeks as she watched. Thank God, she thought, that I don’t have to write death lines about this. She looked at Shaw. His gaze was impassive, his eyes dry.
“It’s so sad,” she said.
Shaw didn’t answer. He just kept watching.
Half an hour later the last person had left and the gravediggers moved in, tempest and all, to plant Anna in the earth of Wisbach for good.
Shaw got out of the car. “You remember what to do?”
She nodded. “Just be careful.”
“You too.”
He shut the door, glanced around, and headed to the hole in the earth, trying not to think about the much bigger one in his heart.
He pulled some euros from his pocket and asked the diggers, in German, to give him some time alone here. No doubt happy to be relieved of their wet duty, they took the money and fled.
Shaw stood next to the grave and looked down at the coffin. He did not want to visualize Anna inside that box. She didn’t belong there. He spoke in quiet tones to her, saying things he should have said while the woman was alive. He had many regrets in his life. The most devastating by far was not being with Anna when she needed him most.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m sorry. You deserved a lot better than me.”
He grabbed a shovel and spent the next half hour filling in her grave. He felt it was his task to perform, no one else’s. He was soaked through to the skin by the time he was done, but didn’t seem to notice.
He looked at the headstone. It gave Anna’s full name, Anastasia Brigitte Sabena Fischer. Her dates of birth and death. And the phrase at the bottom in German, “May our beautiful daughter rest in peace.”
“Rest in peace,” Shaw said. “Rest in peace for both of us, Anna. Because I don’t see peace ever coming my way again.”
He knelt down in the mud, his head bowed.
As he did so the two men stepped clear of the trees, guns in hand.
The car horn instantly split the silence of the cemetery and then Katie slid down in her seat.
Startled, the two men ran straight at Shaw.
A split second later the rear glass of the car Katie was in was shattered by a gun blast.
CHAPTER 77
IN A BLUR OF MOTION, Shaw erupted forward like a blitzing linebacker, knocking both men to the ground. In another instant his pistol was stuffed nearly down one man’s throat as his partner lay unconscious next to him.
A moment later the men in black swooped in.
Katie sat back up in the car, flicking glass off her. She looked anxiously over at Shaw. When he rose from the ground clutching one of the gunmen, she breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out of the car.
Twenty feet behind the car Frank stood over the dead man who’d tried to kill Katie. She joined him.
Frank said, “Sorry we cut it so close. Bastard got the shot off before we could nail him.”
Later, they sat in an empty barn outside of Wisbach. The two would-be killers were manacled together back to back in the middle of the straw floor.
Frank, Katie, and Shaw stood together in an informal powwow.
“Thanks for agreeing to back us up on this,” Shaw told Frank.
“Hey, other than keeping the world safe and secure, I’ve got lots of time on my hands.”
They’d already run the pairs’ prints through the usual databases and gotten zip for their troubles. Their interrogation so far had resulted in a cascade of foul language from the man who’d ended up chewing on Shaw’s gun barrel. By contrast, his partner, a beefy man with a stoic expression, hadn’t said a word. He looked like he might not even speak English. They’d tried several other languages out on him but his silence remained golden. They had no IDs. Two pistols and a gutting knife were the only things of interest found on their persons. The dead man had been similarly sterilized.
“Not even a cell phone,” Frank said.
“Means they were going to rendezvous with someone after they killed me and Shaw,” Katie said. “Probably close by.”
Frank turned to Shaw. “What now?”
“Keep pounding away at these two until they pop. We’ll be in touch.”
Frank put a hand on Shaw’s shoulder. “Look, Shaw, watch your back. My gut’s telling me something is off here.”
“Off how?” Katie asked.
“Off as in it seems like they’re always a step ahead of us.”
As they drove down the road Shaw said gloomily, “I was pretty sure they’d be watching Anna’s funeral in case we showed. That’s why I called in Frank for an assist. But it didn’t score us anything.”
“They might talk at some point.”
“I doubt they know much beyond being paid to kill me and you. These people have been really good about covering their tracks.”
“They’ll make a mistake. They always do,” she said confidently.
“Oh, you think so?”
“I know so.”
He stopped the car. “Why are you so sure all of sudden?”
Katie could barely contain her excitement. “Because I just thought of a brilliant way to flush them out.”
CHAPTER 78
BY NOW THE ENTIRE WORLD was convinced that China was behind the Red Menace for reasons as yet unknown, and that Russia had wiped out The Phoenix Group in retaliation. And no matter how many denials issued from Beijing and Moscow, this belief remained largely unshaken.
Elaborate theories were cropping up everywhere, in both digital and real ink, as to why China would have done such a thing. They ranged from wanting to turn the world against the only country in Asia that was a true rival both economically and militarily to China’s ascension to the top spot in the global pecking order, to fears in Beijing that Russia’s slide back to autocracy posed a real threat to the region’s stability. How making Russia even angrier and more dangerous than it supposedly was would alleviate that threat was still a puzzle. Yet when people wanted to believe something badly enough facts and logic never proved to be difficult obstacles.
Whatever the rea
son, it was true that both nations were now mobilizing. The two countries shared an enormous border to the east of Mongolia, along with a much smaller wedge of land between Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Russian army units along with armor and air support were being marshaled at both of these sites. It was also rumored that Gorshkov was contemplating going straight through Mongolia in a planned invasion of China, which would have made it a much shorter route to Beijing, despite some political and topographical problems. The Chinese, knowing this full well, had set up thick walls of men and machines at each of these points. Yet war did not seem imminent. Indeed, it was clear that both countries well knew that such a contest would result in them both losing, so closely matched were they. But it was also believed, though no public statement had been made, that both China and Russia had signed long-term deals with unnamed defense contractors to rearm so that if they indeed did go to war years from now, they could each wipe out the other in grandly impressive style.
In response to these developments, many Western countries, the United States included, were doing the same thing, namely rearming. The Pentagon, always unafraid it make its intentions public, announced that the Ares Corporation, taking the lead position with several other major defense contractors in tow, had been awarded a series of no-bid contracts that had long been percolating to rebuild its tank and artillery divisions, upgrade its electronic intelligence-gathering infrastructure, reconfigure its missile defense systems, retool several aircraft carriers, ballistic missile subs, and destroyers, bring online several thousand heavily armored personnel carriers and other troop vehicles, and upgrade the nearly brand-new, and apparently already obsolete, Raptor combat aircraft. It was only American-based Ares, the Pentagon stated, the original manufacturer of much of this weaponry, with its myriad areas of expertise and global management capability, that could carry out this enormous task to the exacting standards demanded by the U.S. military complex.
A Pentagon source said, “This will ensure that the U.S. military retains its position as the number one fighting force in the world for decades to come.”
The Congress had quickly passed a spending bill to pay for all this, which the president had just as quickly signed.
In several newspapers, a source who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to say what he was about to, reported that the Ares Corp. contracts were for eight years and added up to nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money. This would ratchet the U.S. military budget up to over $800 billion a year, dwarfing even annual Social Security payouts and making it by far the biggest expenditure of the budget. But, fortunately, it would not technically increase the enormous budget deficit and national debt, because some clever bureaucrats backed by equally slick members of Congress were able to get the additional defense funding pushed through on a supplemental spending bill that technically was not included in the official budget. And in Washington, D.C., technical was all that mattered.
“So the next generation can worry about reality,” remarked one political insider who requested anonymity, citing a desire to remain a political insider.
After signing the defense spending bill in a grand White House ceremony the embattled president, his reelection chances still hurting from him being painted as soft on Russia, called a press conference where he said, in the most unmistakable terms, “Now anyone seeking to harm the interests of the United States of America will find us superbly prepared to do whatever is necessary to defend ourselves to the fullest. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.” He immediately shot up eleven percentage points in the next poll. There was nothing like saber-rattling to win the voters over.
Ares Corp. released a new ad campaign that had been carefully crafted and polished for months. It didn’t tout the new contract or the dollars involved. That was deemed too crass by the top New York ad agency that created the message. The narrator merely said, “The United States of America and the Ares Corporation. Together, we are unbeatable.” It was quite a statement and its underlying message crystal clear: Ares had just put itself on equal footing with the world’s only remaining superpower. This simple narrative was followed by classically styled black-and-white video shots of aircraft flying, tanks rolling, ships sailing, and a platoon of soldiers marching. This was all set to the tune of a very popular song.
It was said that the people in the focus groups previously set up to gauge the emotional impact of the commercial were left weeping in their seats. It was whispered in certain ad circles that it was the best fifty million dollars Nicolas Creel had ever spent.
Everything was all going exactly as planned by Creel and Pender.
All except for one little unexpected bump in the road that would turn out to make things even better.
At midnight, Mongolian time, a Russian field general received a set of garbled orders that he took to authorize a probing attack into China. Being an enthusiastic commander who had never seen combat before and who possessed a personal hatred of all things Chinese, he immediately launched said probing attack without bothering to request clarification from up the chain of command. His artillery roared, hitting previously designated targets, while overhead MiGs rocketed into Chinese airspace with authority. And the MiGs promptly ran into Chinese combat aircraft that, ironically enough, had been legally reverse engineered by the Chinese from the MiG family of aircraft under license from Russia. So in essence the pilots on both sides were flying in the same planes. In keeping with this equality, the ensuing dogfights culminated in a draw, with each side losing two aircraft apiece.
The Chinese, a bit ticked off to say the least by this Russian punch in the face, immediately launched a counterattack. For the next six hours the two armies fired off everything they had at each other.
When it was over, in addition to the lost aircraft the “probe” resulted in a rural Chinese town being pulverized and two thousand citizens killed. Ten tanks, twenty armored personnel carriers or APCs, forty artillery pieces, and nine hundred Chinese uniformed grunts were also wiped out as a million rounds of various Russian ammo rained down on them even though far more missed their mark than hit it.
On the Russian side, six hundred civilians unfortunately caught right between the two armies perished, most of them still in their beds when the ordnance struck their homes. Along with this collateral carnage, eight tanks were blown up, six choppers shot down, twelve APCs flattened, 412 soldiers lay dead, and an entire artillery battery vaporized by a direct rocket attack that ignited an adjacent fuel dump. As an interesting side note, this conflagration also claimed the life of the Russian field commander who’d started the whole thing in the first place based on orders that, on further review, had instructed him merely to launch such an attack only on the occasion of him being attacked first.
It really was in the details, it seemed.
The breathless and shell-shocked armies retreated back to their respective home turfs to regroup and contemplate what the hell had just happened.
If this was to be the beginning of World War III, it was truly an inauspicious start.
CHAPTER 79
NICOLAS CREEL, along with the mother superior, ceremoniously lifted the first spade of dirt for the new orphanage to the cheers of the Italian press and public. That done, and the heads of tiny, grateful orphans patted, special treats given out to them, a brief statement read to the press, and the hands of the mayor and other dignitaries shaken, Creel retreated to the Shiloh to relish how well things were going.
The Russians had attacked China and the Chinese had counterattacked. As Creel searched the Web for stories on the latest incident, he saw with glee that there were already thousands of them, with more pouring in every minute. This would only cement his contracts with the two countries and encourage other nations on the fence about rearming to jump down on the side of muscling up. He would be only too glad to accommodate them.
While it was true that the Americans, Brits, and French were leading diplomatic efforts to forge a cease-fire and re
conciliation between the two Asian lands, Creel knew it was too little too late. A summit-level conference had been set for this week in London. Yet the two warring nations had not even agreed to attend. And even if they did, which was unlikely after this latest incident, it wouldn’t matter.
The phone call he received wiped the smile off his face. It was Caesar. The hit at the cemetery in Wisbach had not gone according to plan. In fact, it had gone as not according to plan as it was possible to be.
“One man dead, two others arrested,” Creel said, repeating back Caesar’s report. “I’m assuming the men you hired know nothing useful?”
“Nothing,” Caesar said firmly. “I know this is a setback, but we’ll get them, Mr. Creel, I guarantee it. We’re close. Really close.”
“That’s what I thought a while back, Caesar. And look at us now.”
He clicked off, took a deep breath, looked out the porthole in the direction of where the new orphanage would spring up, and phoned Pender. “Pour it on, Dick,” he ordered. “I want to see the media stream full of vitriolic ammo to support the war.”
“Without actually having a war,” Pender said warily.
“A cold war,” Creel said impatiently. “I make the most money when shots aren’t fired.”
“But shots have been fired.”