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Baxter said, “Yes.”
They waited.
Volkov took a reportfrom the two men: “We’re inside the motel room. Nobody in here. There’s a connecting door, so we have two rooms. We’re going to move out into the hallway.”
“Let me know when you command that wing,” Volkov said.
“Moving now.”
A moment later, Volkov and Step heard the roar of an automatic weapon, and not one of theirs. That was followed by another burst that Volkov was sure was a Mini. The exchange was brief, but at the rate of fire of modern weapons, a lot of lead had been blown downrange.
Volkov, urgently: “Six, report. Report. Six, report.”
Long silence.
Step, slouched in the passenger seat, said, “I don’t think Vanya and Dima will be reporting. I think they’re dead.”
In the motel,Kaiser had been waiting for the door to open and when it did, he pulled the trigger on his M4, hosing down the door and the thin walls on both sides of it. When he stopped firing, there was a gap of absolute silence, deepened by the fact that both he and Baxter had been semi-deafened by the gunfire. Nothing was coming back at them and Kaiser punched out the magazine and slapped another one in place, dropped to his stomach and poked at the shattered door with his gun barrel. A man lay on the other side, thoroughly chopped up, a gun by his outspread arm.
As Kaiser moved his barrel to cover the rest of the room, lookingfor the second body, the next door down the hall began to open and Baxter saw it and said, “John, there’s...” But then he saw the gun barrel leading a man through the doorway and he pointed the Uzi and squeezed the trigger, aiming it like he would a Super Soaker, and squirted out the full magazine into the door and wall beside it.
He was accurate enough; Kaiser had rolled and turned, his gun aimed down the hall, and he blurted, “What?’’
Baxter said, “Gun...”
Kaiser crawled down to the door, did a quick peek inside, then turned and stood. “Got him,” he said. He stepped back to look in the first room, slapped Baxter on the back and said, “Good job, buddy. Saved both our lives. Get that guy’s gun, his goggles, and his magazines. I’ll strip my guy. Block the door with a couch when you’re back out.”
He went back to the first man. Baxter stood in the doorway looking at the man he’d killed, and said aloud, “Oh, my God.”
The man he was looking at had been alive and vital one minute earlier, and now he was dead, and Baxter had killed him. Standing there, looking at the body, he had a moment of clarity about Letty and Cartwright: “Better you than me,” he said.
He fiddled with his Mini for a moment, dropped the magazine, and snapped another one in place, pulled the charging handle and let it snap forward to get another round in place.
“Better you...”
And Step had said,“I don’t think Vanya and Dima will be reporting. I think they’re dead.”
“Silence. One more word...” Volkov went back on the radio. “Two, where are you now?”
“In the trees, thirty meters above the driveway entrance.”
“I’m coming down the hill to join you,” Volkov said. “We’ve taken casualties.”
“I will watch for you. Come quietly.”
Volkov had another Mini on the floor behind the passenger seat, along with a pair of night-vision goggles. He checked the Mini’s magazine, put another magazine in his jacket pocket, switched on the night-vision goggles and pulled them over his head. He said to Step, “You will wait here. I’m going to meet Ilya, to assess the situation.”
“You don’t need to go anywhere to assess it,” Step said. “You have only two men left. One is in a terrible position at the front of the hotel; you should pull him out. The other... I don’t think you should join him. There has already been shooting near the end of the driveway.”
“This is necessary,” Volkov said. “You will wait here, but move over to the driver’s seat in case we have to go quickly. If we call you, come fast.”
“I will listen for your call,” Step said.
Volkov wasn’t often directly involved in what spy novelists called “wet work”; he was a supervisor and an executive, not a blue-collar worker. But he was desperate to stop the hacking. The top authorities at the GRU knew what the threat was, and he’d been sent to stop it.
If it wasn’t stopped... he would just as desperately need the money he’d stashed in case of such a failure. He was thinking Costa Rica, or possibly Chile. He’d been stationed at the Russian embassies in Venezuela and Guatemala and spoke decent Spanish.
Still, he’d prefer not to run, so here he was, walking down a dark highway with a gun in his hand, above an obscure motel in Santa Ynez, California.
