Red Cell (3 page)

Like the North Koreans kept the USS
Pueblo
in Wonsan Harbor, SEBIN would keep Kyra Stryker in Los Teques prison.

The asset froze in midwave. He had realized his error.

Six blocks to the nearest safe house.

Kyra ran.

SEBIN raid teams exploded from the dark. Men in black balaclavas, helmets and armor, heavy boots, with sidearms and carbines, all yelling in Spanish. Three teams, maybe six men each, had taken positions at both sides of the bridge in the trees where the darkness gave them almost perfect cover. One fire team erupted up from the bridge midpoint itself, where the soldiers had lain in a space under the dirty grates. There would be more, probably spotters in nearby buildings, maybe on the rooftops. Kyra would have been trapped from the moment she set foot on the bridge.

The first team, the group that had been hiding under the bridge crawlspace, was trying to climb out through the grates. The bridge was narrow and their gear was bulky. It would take them thirty seconds to get to the shore.

The second team was on the other side of the river, twenty meters away. They were already on the bridge, but the team climbing up from the crawlway would block them off. Team two wouldn’t be in play for almost a full minute.

The third team on her side of bridge was at the bottom of the embankment, just above the canal and behind the trees only ten meters away, but they had to climb through the brush that covered the earthen wall to reach her. It would take three seconds for the closest soldier to reach the top of the embankment, which was already too late. Kyra would be almost thirty meters away.

She was already running at full speed and no soldier encumbered by a rifle and other gear was going to catch her. She aimed for an alleyway to her left and prayed that another team wasn’t waiting in the dark.

She turned the corner and she saw no light at the other end.
No light, no SEBIN
, she realized.
No exit.
Kyra tried to stop, skidded on the slick, dirty concrete, and knew she was going to hit the wall. She put her arms up to soften the impact. Her body hit the wall. She pushed away and made her legs move again.

The second alley was another ten meters away. Kyra covered the distance in three seconds. She reached the opening and then saw the man in black gear standing behind the corner begin to raise his weapon. Kyra was still moving at full speed and couldn’t have stopped
on his order if she’d wanted to. She raised an arm, put a palm-heel strike into his throat at full speed and the contact sent her tumbling to the wet ground. The soldier got the worst of it. Her momentum and the slick concrete were enough to take him off his feet. He flipped over and landed on his back, breaking ribs on both sides, snapping a collarbone and tearing his rotator cuff. It would be months before he would be able to raise his weapon again.

The sound of several sharp cracks cut through the noise of the
autopista
traffic.
“Idiota!”
someone shouted. Kyra sprinted into the darkness, praying that she didn’t trip on garbage or a homeless man or some other detritus.

She heard footfalls behind her, at least a half dozen she thought, but she didn’t turn her head to see. Judging by the sound, they were entering the alley as she was leaving it.

Kyra slowed just a bit as she came out of the alleyway. It was past midnight and the sidewalk largely empty of pedestrians. She turned right and kept running, not sure of her next waypoint. El Museo de los Niños was north of her position, maybe two hundred meters. Kyra set course for it and accelerated back to her full speed. Her breathing was now ragged, her heart pounding as hard as she had ever felt it. Only one arm was swinging like it should.

She reached the
museo
. It was an strange building, modern South American architecture, a thousand odd angles surrounded by trees and kiosks and signs. Plenty of places for a fugitive to break visual contact with her pursuers. She sprinted around the building. The footfalls behind her were more distant now, almost getting lost in the street noise of the cars still on the road. A siren sounded somewhere and she wondered whether it was meant for her. The raid teams would be screaming over encrypted radios for support. The target had escaped the net and vehicles were certain to enter the equation at some point if the chase went on long enough. She had to keep them guessing about her direction.

Kyra ran through the complex, obstacles and handrails rushing past so quickly that she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to turn fast enough to avoid one if she saw it too late as she came around a corner. She passed the museum proper and raced out onto the street.

Four blocks to the safe house.

She needed to get enough distance between herself and the raid teams so no one would see her enter the safe house, or it wouldn’t
be safe for long. She turned right onto the Avenida Bolívar. It was an eight-lane freeway lined by trees on both sides with a concrete median running down the center. It was also well lit, which would give away her position once the raid teams came out of the alley. She needed to be on the other side of the street when that happened. Traffic was light at this early hour, in that it wasn’t a complete wall of gridlocked cars.

Her hand ached to hold that Glock.

Kyra saw a large break in the traffic. She waited until the cars got closer, then turned suddenly and sprinted onto the street. Crossing the eight lanes took almost three seconds, her timing had been perfect, and the traffic closed up behind her. The raid teams would have to find their own break in the cars to cross without getting hit. Kyra angled right again, then ran north up a side street until she reached the Avenida México intersection. She turned east. Her legs and lungs were both burning now. Her right arm still wouldn’t come up higher than her stomach.

Three blocks to the safe house.

The
avenida
curved to the northeast. Kyra followed the bend and saw the Galería de Arte Nacional ahead to her right. She looked behind her and saw no one. The raid teams were probably still looking for a break in the Avenida Bolívar traffic. She ran left in between two large buildings, found a concrete doorway, and leaned against one of the pillars to catch her breath. She didn’t want to stop long, but the adrenaline would carry her only so far. Her bad arm was starting to ache a bit and Kyra knew that she was running up against the limits of her endurance. Her chest was heaving and her legs burning. She hadn’t paced herself, had probably just run a six-minute mile, and the exertion was catching up to her.

She looked back down the
avenida
and saw no one. Then she listened. In the distance, more than one engine was racing faster than it should, tires screeching. Kyra stumbled back onto the sidewalk and started running again, north this time.

Two blocks to the safe house.

Kyra passed only a few pedestrians over the next hundred meters. She looked back. The SEBIN teams were nowhere she could see and she started to relax. They had been out of visual contact too long. They could find her now only if one of the cars got lucky or if she made a mistake, a favor she didn’t intend to grant.

She reached the Avenida Urdaneta and looked west. The high-rise
was there. Kyra ran toward the building, half-stumbling now. Her leg muscles were starting to give out. She looked down an alley and saw a car blitzing along on a parallel street far too fast. They were close.

One block to the safe house.

The sounds of the cars were louder now and her endurance was fading quickly, faster than she had expected. She couldn’t stay on the street much longer or one of the cars would find her. Her arm ached now, like the pain was deep in the bone, and it was becoming harder to ignore.

Kyra reached the edge of the apartment building and ran up the side street. The safe house was on the fourth floor and the building had a service entrance on the east side. She reached the door, then fumbled in her pants for the key that the deputy chief of station had slipped her before she’d left for the meeting. Her hands were wet from the rain, both shaking hard from the adrenaline rush. She tried to use her right, but it was numb at the fingertips and she had to switch to the left.

She finally jammed the key into the lock, the door opened, and Kyra slammed it open with her body. She closed it behind her, locked it, and leaned back against the entry.

She knew she wasn’t safe, not yet. But she was off the street and that was something. Finding her now would involve a door-to-door search of a dozen square blocks or more. Caracas was all skyscrapers and shantytowns with little in between. There would be tens of thousands of apartments in the search radius. The SEBIN had no picture of her to show the locals and no guarantee that she had stopped running so soon.

Four flights of stairs.
Her aching lungs and thigh muscles hurt so much that the thought made her want to cry.

Move.
Kyra willed herself forward. She could hardly think at all.

She found the stairwell entry ten feet down the hall. Kyra climbed the four stories, almost pulling herself upward on the handrail the entire distance with her good arm. She managed not to fall into the hallway, then staggered toward the safe house apartment. The hall was empty.

Kyra found the right number, fumbled the keys again, and finally managed to open the door. She stepped inside, closed the door, and threw the dead bolt. Her heartbeat finally slowed a bit. Her lungs still burned, but she was catching her breath, finally. Her legs were weak and she wanted to collapse onto the floor.

Safe.
Not really, she knew. But as safe as she could be right now.

The keys fell from her hand onto the wood floor. She left them and searched for the light switch.

The safe house apartment was maybe a thousand feet square, just a single bedroom, a bathroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen, all clean and bare-bones. She found the bed and fell onto it.

Kyra had forgotten about the arm. She felt pain erupt from her right side as she landed on the mattress, and the agony was more intense, more sharp than anything she had ever felt. She cried out, then stifled it, afraid that the neighbors would hear her. She didn’t know how thin the walls were. With her good arm she pushed herself back up to sitting and finally looked down at the aching limb.

There was a hole in her leather jacket, midway between her shoulder and elbow. Kyra pulled the jacket off, carefully, but movement was agony now. The dark stain on the back of her arm was surprisingly large. Deep red, almost black where it mixed with her shirt, it ran all the way down to her wrist.

She knew there would be only one way of getting the shirt off without serious pain. She pulled a Leatherman from her pocket, held it in her left hand, and opened the knife blade with her teeth. She slipped the blade under her collar and pulled it to the right, then around the junction where the sleeve met the shoulder. She cut the sleeve loose. It slid off her arm and fell with a wet noise onto the floor.

There was a tear across her triceps, skin and muscle torn loose in a shredded horizontal line. She couldn’t see the bone at the bottom of the gory furrow only for the blood. Adrenaline had masked the pain.

When—?

The brain has a gating mechanism that had kept her mind focused on the more immediate pain, and the adrenaline had kept her from feeling the gunshot wound. Her brain got its first look and switched its focus from her tortured lungs and legs. The pain from the laceration detonated across her upper body, cutting off her thoughts, and Kyra had to stifle an open scream.

The first aid kit would be in the bathroom. Kyra stumbled in, trying to keep her arm from moving, and found the large duffel bag under the sink. CIA security, former Boy Scouts she was sure, always came prepared. The trauma kit was designed more for a war zone than a metropolis. Trying to focus through the haze, Kyra found the two items she needed most. The first was a roll of QuikClot gauze. The second was a
morphine syringe. She stabbed herself with the needle in the arm, just above the wound and had to suppress another scream as it entered her torn flesh. She depressed the plunger, then pulled the needle out. It was the longest ten seconds of her life.

Her arm began to numb and her body finally began to stop shaking and relax. Kyra felt the pain begin to fade and steeled herself for the next bit of self-surgery. She balled up a wad of QuikClot in her left hand, the only one she could still feel, and packed it into the wound. The cloth stopped the bleeding almost on contact.

The morphine worked fast. She hadn’t been able to think when she dosed herself, hadn’t checked the amount. Whatever the dosage, it had been enough. Too much, maybe.

She rolled the gauze around her arm to hold in the wad she had stuffed into the tear in the arm. It was an ugly wrap job, but both the drug and the cloth did their job and a pair of butterfly clips finished the task.

Kyra staggered back into the bedroom and almost collapsed before reaching the bed. She pulled herself off her knees onto the mattress and rolled onto her back. She rifled through her jacket and found the encrypted cell phone the deputy chief of station had given her two hours before.

The morphine and stress release were going to knock her unconscious, she knew. She had maybe a minute to call before she passed out in a haze. Her arm was entirely, mercifully numb.

A pair of sirens sounded outside the window. She couldn’t judge the distance but they seemed to come from different points.

Not safe here,
she thought. She didn’t know the last point at which the SEBIN had seen her, and therefore the point that would mark the center of the enemy’s search. They could be nearby, going high-rise to high-rise, floor by floor. The SEBIN could come crashing through the safe house door. They could be outside, in the hall, on the stairwell. The walls wouldn’t keep them out.

The room seemed to shrink around her. Kyra felt the panic rising inside her chest, the stress of the last few minutes finally catching up. Her good hand started shaking, this time not from shock or pain.