Free The Silent Man by Alex Berenson Page B

asphalt with a heavy dead thump.
    Wells was already shifting his focus. Two grenades. Two motorcycles. He braced himself against the side of the minivan and spun. On the far side of the Caravan, by its left rear wheel, another rider stood, his bike between his legs, a pistol in his gloved right hand.
    The pistol jerked twice in succession, crack-crack —
    “John!” Exley screamed, a high hopeless sound—
    Wells fired through the minivan, his only choice, knowing that if he missed, he risked killing an innocent driver in the cars behind the shooter—
    And missed.
    The rider turned toward Wells and fired. The round smashed through the van’s window—
    And missed.
    Wells sprang left, looking for a cleaner shot, a shot that wouldn’t be blocked by the van’s second row of seats. The rider reached under his jacket with his left hand. Wells fired, separated from the guy only by the width of the van—
    The 9-millimeter slug from Wells’s Glock caught the guy full in the chest, tore open his leather jacket. Its force jerked him back, standing him upright. But he didn’t go down. Bulletproof vest, Wells thought. He ducked as the guy lifted his pistol and fired two shots, wild and high, then threw down the pistol and again reached into his jacket.
    Wells slowed himself. Last chance. If he missed this time, the guy would toss a grenade under the van and cook Exley.
    He aimed carefully through the van and squeezed the trigger.
    Crack. Through the van, Wells saw the rider’s face-plate shatter. The guy fell backward, his helmet cracking against the roof of the BMW behind him, dead already.
     
     
     
    WELLS RAN AROUND THE VAN to the driver’s side. Exley lay in the front seat, moaning, slumped forward.
    “John.”
    “Just stay still.”
    Already he could hear sirens. Behind them, the Suburban crackled and burned, throwing off gobs of smoke that stank of gasoline and charred flesh. The agents inside were surely dead. Five dead here this morning. As long as it wasn’t six.
    He didn’t see the wound. He pulled up her sweater. There it was, blooming red on her white shirt, the right side, just above the waist. Maybe the liver, Wells thought. If it was the liver, they’d better get her to a hospital quick before she bled out. He pressed down on it and she moaned again. Her warm blood seeped between his fingers. A bad one.
    He put his hand to her cheek and listened to the sirens draw close. And he wondered who’d done this to them. He wondered who would pay.

6

BLACK SEA
    I n the dark, Grigory Farzadov couldn’t see the waves. But he could hear them, banging against the hull like living beasts. Thump. Thump. Thump- thoomp. In the last hour, their intensity had steadily increased. And yet Grigory didn’t mind. He’d grown up thousands of kilometers from the ocean. He’d never seen the Pacific or the Atlantic. He didn’t even know how to swim. But all his life he’d envied those lucky souls who lived on the water. Now he was one of them. Sort of.
    His cousin wasn’t so sanguine. As the Tambulz Dream —the little fishing trawler that had been their home for a day—rocked sideways, Tajid laid a hand on his stomach and gripped the dirty steel rail that ran around the cabin. He’d already vomited once. Meanwhile Yusuf sat in a corner, cursing under his breath, his eyes dead and flat as ever. Grigory was sure that if he looked hard enough he would see smoke coming off Yusuf ’s head, and smell the faint stink of sulfur.
    Though maybe the smell was just the Black Sea, a famously dank waterway. The sea lay between six countries—Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine—and had possessed a bad reputation for at least three thousand years. Technically, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean formed a single body of water, linked through the Bosphorus, the narrow strait that divided Istanbul. But the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean had little in common with the Black Sea. The complex currents that