In the parking lot behind the office building, Tacoma moved to a beat-up Toyota sedan. He climbed in and started the engine, then moved out of the lot and onto the circuit road that circled the rental company lots.

  The red and white flashes and the wailing pitch of sirens clotted the air. They were just now getting control of traffic flow out of the airport, and he knew he needed to move. Soon, the airport would all be shut down. He wouldn’t get in trouble, but he would be detained. He was an anonymous soldier now, and that was a gift. If he was detained, he’d be sprung, but that would create an electronic imprint showing various things he didn’t want anyone to know. He would lose the edge he had right now; the operational edge, in-theater, when it matters, when knife blades meet on bloody streets.

  He saw red flashing lights at the exit.

  The Miami police were cutting off the airport exit. They would try to quarantine the facility in order to find those people responsible for the killings. They needed time to scan security footage, arm the officers at the exit, and arrest anyone they believed was involved.

  Tacoma couldn’t afford to be stuck at the airport. If he was captured, the entire operation would be over.

  Perhaps the ones who knew he was coming would be able to get to him before Calibrisi. There was a very real chance that, if caught, he would soon know the feeling of a warm bullet at the back of his head.

  He thought of Billy Cosgrove. He didn’t know him. He’d never met him, but he was here for him. He was here for a lot of people. Tacoma was here for the country he loved.

  Get out of here.

  Tacoma took a quick appraisal of the car he was driving, registering mileage and the various lights on the dashboard. He felt the neck of the steering column, reaching down, running his fingers across a mess of steel and wire, hot and cold.

  Tacoma gassed the car and moved up through the space between two lines of cars, making it through several rows until he hit the back bumper of a car. He gassed it harder now, banging the Toyota against the other car again as a man shouted. But he was moving faster now, and he hit yet another car on the other side.

  People were yelling and screaming as Tacoma pushed the now very dent-covered Toyota up a tight chasm. Tacoma reached to his coat and found the pistol he’d taken off the Russian at the terminal. He steered the Toyota toward the airport exit, driving recklessly. He chambered a round with his teeth.

  In the distance, he saw a lone police officer, positioned near the front of the long lines of cars. He was young, in his thirties, and he had traffic at a standstill. The police wanted to scan every driver and car passenger against security video. They hadn’t synthesized the video yet, but they wanted to quarantine the area immediately.

  Police helicopters appeared in the sky.

  Tacoma put the gun in his right hand and out the window, pushing faster and faster as the lanes opened up, and stopped at where the officer had laid down the quarantine line.

  The officer saw Tacoma, who was now speeding at sixty toward the airport exit. The officer swung a compact black weapon toward Tacoma and Tacoma recognized it. MP5. Tacoma fired as he pushed the Toyota faster, closer and closer, just as bullets rained across the windshield, turning it into a spider web, even as Tacoma lay tucked to the door, praying the steel of the car would insulate him. Tacoma pumped the trigger. The slug struck the officer in the leg, midthigh, and he dropped.

  Tacoma slammed the gas and moved past him—and soon other cars followed. It was a mad rush for the exit. Cars sped past the injured officer, like a piece of carrion, splayed across the tar. Everyone wanted to get away from whatever had just happened at the airport, the chaos of the killing ground they didn’t understand.

  CHAPTER 44

  Tolemaida, Colombia

  Cavalieri landed in Tolemaida and climbed out of the helicopter. A white Porsche Targa was idling, lights on, waiting for him. He got in, slammed the gas, and ran for the highway, knowing he was already late.

  The kill order was simple. A man on a screen. Dmitri Gonz, eighty-three years old, the man considered the godfather of the Odessa Mafia, now living in exile. It was Polk’s ultimate fuck-you to a world he didn’t yet know or understand.

  For Cavalieri, the name meant nothing as he pushed the Targa harder. Cavalieri didn’t think about the reasons why the U.S. government wanted this particular person killed. But they did. It was his job to do it.

  Cavalieri unleashed the Porsche Targa on the highway that ran to Bogota. He had the German sports car revving furiously. He scorched across the outskirts of Bogota on the two-lane highway, weaving in and out of traffic and using the shoulder at times when traffic threatened to slow him to under 100 mph.

  Cavalieri was late and he knew it. He needed to hit the target at a precise time. At approximately 11:10 P.M., the target would be exposed. The problem was, he wasn’t going to make it in time.

  He drove with his left hand as, with his right, he looked at his cell. A CIA app displayed key metrics in print large enough to see, even when driving 100 mph on a crowded road. At the top half of the screen was a map, with a green dot showing Cavalieri’s target in relation to the Porsche, displayed on a gridded digital map.

  He was getting close. A beeping noise indicated he was less than a mile from the target.

  He glanced at the cell.

  Two small digitals were in the upper right corner, and Cavalieri knew what they represented. The first was the number of seconds to target—how long until he was close enough to kill him. The second number showed time to abort—the time Langley believed the operation needed to be stopped, most likely for fear of discovery.

  00:59 was how long until he was close enough to kill the target.

  00:36 was what the application told him was when he had to abort.

  He didn’t have enough time. The target would be a non-live mission thirteen seconds before Cavalieri could even get in range. He slammed the gas pedal and took the Porsche to 140, staying in the breakdown lane, a maniac driving—any police and the operation would be over—yet Cavalieri played the odds.

  The lower half of the cell screen was a series of weapons, represented in green against black, the outlines of the options Cavalieri had to choose from. The first was an AR-15, the figure swiveling around the screen, as if to remind him of all the weapon’s assets. He swiped his thumb as he continued to fire up the road, just at the outer envelope of the vehicle’s capabilities.

  An HK MP7A1 was the next option, and as he kept scrolling the phone while driving, he moved past a silenced pistol, then a compact flamethrower, a pump-action short-barreled shotgun, until he stopped and hit his thumb against the screen.

  SASS M-110—a mobile, compact sniper gun made by Knight Armament.

  Cavalieri hit the screen and a mechanical arm beneath the passenger seat moved in an electric whirr. From the center console, a robotic arm emerged, holding an M-110, loaded, safety off.

  He checked the upper part of the screen.

  00:13 distance to target

  00:08 time to abort

  Cavalieri came onto the road near the park corner at 95 mph, hitting the brakes, grabbing the rifle, and opening the door, all in one motion, lurching from the Porsche even as it fishtailed into a parked minivan. He slammed the tripod down on the ground, then acquired the target 1,806 feet away. As the low, monotone beep sounded from inside the car …

  ABORT

  … Cavalieri pumped the trigger. The old man, standing with his dog, was struck an inch above his ear, the bullet shattering his head and spilling him back in an awkward clump to the street corner in front of a coffeehouse, dark for the night.

  Cavalieri folded up the weapon and climbed back into the Porsche, accelerating away from the area, mission completed.

  CHAPTER 45

  Setai Tower

  Miami Beach, Florida

  Volkov was alone at his condominium, a penthouse in the heart of Miami Beach, atop a recently constructed glass and steel spire called the Setai Tower. The unit had cost Volkov $41 million, $5 million more than the asking price, the premium for being allowed to pay with duffel bags filled with cash. It was certainly an expensive piece of real estate. It was largely unfurnished, glass and concrete, a few walls, two swimming pools, one indoors, the other out, with bold ocean views and a wraparound terrace protected by a glass outer edge, thirty-eight stories up in the turbid, humid, noise-crossed Miami Beach ether.

  There was a bed in the master bedroom, and that was all.

  He opened a pack of cigarettes, lighting one as he walked across the massive empty space. All he could think was that it was the only thing he had that had never seen death. The walls had never been scrubbed, nor had bodies been carried out, or dissolved in chemicals, or incinerated. In a way, it was sacrosanct, like a church to Volkov.

  Marlboro Lights were Volkov’s only vice and the most legal thing he did. Everything else couldn’t be called vice; Volkov’s world was a world of controlled bloodshed and mayhem. Smoking cigarettes was the kindest thing he did.

  He wore only a tank top and shorts. His arms, chest, and back were a gallery of tattoos. Wild colors, guns and knives, animals and numbers, weird symbols. One would need to know Cyrillic to truly understand the messages laid out like a triptych across his body. The tattoos hid scars from bullet holes and knife wounds. It was a gallery of violence, all cut into his pale skin before he was twenty.

  Volkov was bowlegged and muscular. He was handsome in the way a great prizefighter might be, good-looking and also savage. Even if he wasn’t one of the Odessa Mafia’s preeminent men in America, his mere presence tended to rattle people.

  Still, as luxurious as it all was—for Volkov had similar palaces in Manhattan, London, and Las Vegas—no amount of money could erase the hell he’d endured, having his dignity, family, and hope all taken away at such a young age. It was an ocean away, but it never left Volkov, not for a moment. The anger would never leave. It was why he needed to buy the apartment. He needed to look back across the mighty Atlantic to his homeland, so as to say “fuck you.”

  He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth. He looked in the mirror. He was twenty-seven years old now and yet when he looked in the mirror he saw the face of an eleven-year-old boy. He stared for an extra moment.

  * * *

  Volkov was a short, scrawny child with a shy demeanor, and he was always picked on, from the earliest age. He was the runt, the unpopular one, but they were all so wrong. It took him a while, but he proved it. For every punch he endured as a child, Volkov had inflicted ten deaths. He saw the same boy every time he looked in the mirror. Not the overseer of a $14 billion empire. He didn’t see the organization beneath him, taking down towns in a planned geographic push to the west. No, he saw the other boy, an only child in a Moscow tenement, who just wanted to be with his father and mother.

  The memory always started the same way.

  It was his first day at St. Agatha’s, a Catholic school his father and mother had sent him to in order to get away from the public school at the end of the street, where the older boys were always picking fights with him because of his size. The thing was, Volkov wasn’t losing the fights. When the regional principal recommended a different environment, they agreed. St. Agatha’s was two and a half hours away from his home in Moscow. He hadn’t done anything wrong, other than defend himself, but his mother feared for him. His father had a connection and, as if anticipating Volkov’s future behavior, had him committed to a gladiator academy.

  Especially at St. Agatha’s, he was smaller than the others. He was eleven years old when he got there. On the second night at St. Agatha’s, a group of older students came into the bathroom in the dormitory. He tried to hide in one of the stalls, but they saw him and yanked the door open, then pounced on him and beat him. Volkov suffered two broken collarbones, a broken arm, and a severe concussion, not to mention a broken nose and several teeth knocked out. He spent two months in the infirmary. He turned twelve there, at the infirmary; no one said happy birthday, nor were there gifts.

  The four students who’d beaten Volkov up were moved to Kolpino Colony, east of St. Petersburg, a Russian penal center where juveniles were mixed in with adults.

  After Volkov recovered from his injuries he went back to the dormitory. No one said anything, but everyone knew what had happened. Friends of the four thugs talked trash to Volkov. But they left him alone for the rest of the autumn. After a Christmas spent mostly in angry silence, with his guilt-ridden parents, Volkov was sent back, despite his pleas. On his first night back at St. Agatha’s, he was brushing his teeth and was doused from behind by cold water in the same instant he felt a sharp kick at his hip.

  That night, Volkov inhabited the fears of his parents in brutal fashion. He started by slashing the toothbrush in his hand into the eyeball of one of them. He was all of twelve and he killed two boys that night, both seventeen-year-olds, and would’ve killed more, were it not for a pair of proctors who interrupted him, in the bathroom of the dormitory, just after he’d broken his second neck in less than a minute.

  When he was sent, at age twelve, to Kolpino Colony, Volkov entered with a severe disposition, a warrior mentality. He hunted down the thugs who’d nearly killed him. He killed each one, all within a few weeks of arriving at Kolpino. Each killing was untraceable. Volkov knew they would know who did it, but by doing it so ruthlessly and without trace, he thought he might be noticed by someone, somewhere. GRU was what he hoped for.

  But no one noticed.

  Volkov became a leader at Kolpino. By the time he was fourteen he was Kolpino’s most feared inhabitant. He’d grown into a six-foot frame of raw muscle and sinew. In fights, even those not involving him, everyone knew that Volkov would adjudicate. When tested, Volkov was consistent. A knockout punch within a minute. He attacked like a hungry grizzly bear. Everyone at Kolpino feared him, even the guards.

  Then, one day, Volkov escaped. He walked silently out through the big dormitories as everyone, including the guards, slept. It was easy. He walked to the fence and grabbed a piece of barbed wire and pulled with all his might, creating a gap in the fence. Volkov walked southwest, toward Latvia, over empty farmland and woods, always at night. It was spring when he escaped and he kept moving for several weeks, always looking over his shoulder. The entire way, he hid in bushes and stole food at night. It was the best time of his life, before or since, alone in the wilderness, alone in the world, walking through farmland and small towns, a city or two, miles of forest, with nothing. Volkov crossed the Latvian border at Vecumu Mezi, through a blighted forest.

  He lived, homeless, in a small city called Daugavpils, for a year. He settled in with a group of grifters, stealing cars, going for drives, then abandoning the cars. There was little to no profit motive, but they were the first friends he’d ever had. They lived on the outskirts of Daugavpils, squatting in an abandoned rope factory. Sometimes they would go downtown and drink and try and start fights. He was eighteen. Whenever the fights would get out of control, as they often would, and his drunken buddies were outnumbered by a bunch of meth heads, it was Volkov who ultimately stepped in and established the law.

  One day, in Daugavpils, Volkov had an idea, and it was a bold idea.

  He went to the local high school and spied on the students. He started doing it every day there was school. He watched from different vantage points until he found someone who looked like him, someone athletic and tall. Volkov started tracking the student from the school. He followed him for several days, understanding his pattern. He took a week off, then one spring day he waited in an alley along a street of three-family houses, packed closely together, along the student’s route. Volkov came at the student from behind and slashed his neck with a blade, killing him. He dragged the body into the alley and threw it in a dumpster, keeping the boy’s wallet.

  Volkov knew he didn’t have a lot of time, but he needed a little. He went and took photos of himself at the pharmacy, paying with cash from the student’s wallet. In a dirty restroom at the train station, he took the boy’s driver’s license and cut out the dead student’s face pic. He inserted his own. He crossed back into Russia the next day.

  Volkov stole a car and drove to Moscow. He went to his parents’ apartment in the Otradnoye District. He knocked at the door and when his father opened it, he looked at a much older man. When they had sent him off, his father was taller, but now Volkov towered over him. Volkov was only eighteen years old, but he’d been sent away at eleven.

  Volkov’s father let him in and reached out, tears suddenly coming to his eyes.

  “Oh, my son,” he sobbed.

  Volkov shut the door behind him and embraced his father. As he did, he looked into the small living room, where the television was on, providing the only light in the room. He saw his mother, sitting in one of the two fake leather recliners in front of the TV. He hugged his father and kept hugging him, squeezing him tighter and tighter until his father let out a small groan, unable to breathe. Volkov squeezed harder now, until he felt the weak drumbeat of his father’s fists against his back, a low, pathetic yelp coming from him as Volkov broke old, frail bones, then dropped him to the ground and stood on his chest and kicked his father’s skull into a bloody swamp.

  As he stalked to his mother, she held up the receiver of the phone.

  “I’ve already called the police,” she cried.

  Volkov grabbed the phone receiver from her and smashed it into her head at the temple, immediately killing her. He turned just as the police arrived, four officers with guns out. He dropped the phone. This time Volkov was sent to Black Dolphin.

  * * *

  Nathaniel watched his screen as the security feed at the Miami airport went cold. He typed, going back into a source algorithm, then watched as his entire screen went black.