Page 12 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

O NCE again, the words Joe was hearing seemed to be coming from far off. This time, it wasn’t translating them from Russian that was giving him problems. It was the meaning of the words themselves.

“Russians planted a bomb?”

David slalomed to the left in order to make way for a police car hurtling in the other direction.

The strobing emergency lights felt like ice picks stabbing into Joe’s eye sockets.

He closed his eyes, but the damage was done.

Cranking down the passenger window, he stuck his head into the cool air and emptied his heaving stomach a second time.

Thankfully, there wasn’t much left to vomit, but the bile still burned his throat and left an acidic taste in his mouth.

“You okay?” David said.

“Peachy,” Joe said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “I somehow bounced my head off the cobblestones.”

“Not somehow. I was coming around the corner when it happened. The second bomb must have detonated. The shock wave tossed you to the ground like a rag doll. A tongue of fire shot out of the door just above your head. You got lucky.”

Joe did not feel lucky, but compared to the bar’s other patrons, he’d won the lottery.

Closing his eyes, he began to massage his temples, but the lack of visual references made his nausea worse.

David was still driving like a bat out of hell and the way he was jerking the steering wheel made the little Lada bounce around like a rowboat in a typhoon.

He opened his eyes just in time to see a motorcycle flash by.

A pair of red brake lights glowed in the distance.

“The bomb,” Joe said. “Tell me about the bomb.”

“Our friends from the bar were waiting outside in an RAF minivan across the street. I thought they were going to help at first, but they didn’t.

Instead, one of them flashed me the bird while the others laughed.

That seemed strange, but I was having trouble thinking clearly.

I knew I had to get the car, but I couldn’t remember where we parked it. ”

“Guess I’m not the only one with a concussion.”

David shrugged. “I haven’t puked yet, so I think I’m okay. Besides, I only got blown up once.”

As medical diagnoses went, this one wasn’t exactly ironclad.

Still, Joe wasn’t in a position to argue.

The throbbing in his head had begun to recede, but he sure as hell didn’t feel up to weaving between traffic at 130 kilometers per hour on A13, a sleepy two-lane road probably rated for less than half that pace.

Excessive speed aside, his teammate wasn’t doing a half-bad job driving.

If only Joe knew what they were chasing.

David redlined the engine, and a boxy silhouette resolved into a knockoff Volkswagen minivan.

“Got you!” David said.

“Back off the gas,” Joe said. “If you get too close, the driver will be able to see us in his rearview mirror.”

David dutifully reduced his speed, and the minivan pulled ahead.

“There,” Joe said once the minivan was about fifty yards in front of them. “That’s the perfect distance. Now, walk me through how a drunk flashing you the middle finger makes him and his crew Russian operatives.”

“Right,” David said, nodding. “So when I came around the corner to get you, the agitators from the bar were standing by the van, but they weren’t just watching. I had the windows down so I could hear them.”

“Hear them?”

“Yeah. They were catcalling. Mocking the survivors and yelling insults. It was as if they wanted to be noticed.”

Joe frowned.

While the men’s behavior was callous, trying to read the purpose behind a belligerent drunk’s actions was a fool’s errand. Small slights often led to exaggerated outcomes when mixed with alcohol. There was a reason rowdy bars employed bouncers. “I’m still not following.”

“The men wanted to be heard and seen,” David said, enunciating the words as if he were speaking to a child. “They could have gotten away before anyone saw them, but didn’t. The agitators wanted to be remembered.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It makes no sense if the men were what they seemed to be—Latvian nationalists picking a fight with their ethnic Russian countrymen. I’ve got a hunch they’re something else.

That second explosion was a doozy. It seemed to surprise the agitators as much as it did you.

The shock wave knocked one of them into the van, and he let loose a string of curses. ”

Joe thought he was beginning to see. “In a different language?”

David shook his head. “Same language. Different accent.”

“Russian?”

“Exactly.”

Joe massaged his temples. It was thin, but he could see where David was heading with his theory. “You think the bombing was a false-flag operation?”

The minivan picked up speed as it exited Daugavpils proper for the more sparsely populated outskirts.

David kept pace.

“Daugavpils is unique among Latvian cities in that there are more ethnic Russians here than Latvians, right?” David said.

“Yep.”

“And the ethnic Russians and Latvians don’t always get along, right? Especially after the coup in Riga a couple of years back?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Mostly low-level stuff, but there’s definitely been an uptick in race-related crimes in Daugavpils. Latvian nationalists are naturally suspicious of their fellow citizens. Especially since some provinces openly supported the Soviet-instigated coup.”

“Exactly,” David said. “The coup failed for a number of reasons, not the least of them being world opinion. Images of unarmed Latvian citizens gunned down by Soviet paramilitary forces didn’t play well on the nightly news.

I’m not saying this is the only reason the Soviets backed down, but the narrative that innocents were being killed was a powerful one. ”

“Powerful enough for the Russians to give it a try?”

David nodded. “Think about it—Latvians of Russian descent get blown up by their own countrymen. If the Latvian government can’t protect its citizens who are of Russian descent—”

“Then the Russian government might just have to do it for them,” Joe said, waving away the argument. “I get the theory, and I agree that what you’ve laid out is certainly possible. What I don’t understand is why we’re chasing a van full of potential Russian operatives.”

“Ah, sorry,” David said. “I left out part of the story. The man that was smashed against the van was hemorrhaging pretty heavily. I think he got hit by a piece of shrapnel. Something big. I’m betting that he’ll need a trauma center.”

Joe was preparing to ask what that had to do with anything when he saw a road sign and put two and two together. A road sign for the Soviet air force base that was now a Russian facility. “You want to see where they take him for help?”

“Exactly,” David said, flashing him a smile. “Now that we’re out of Daugavpils, the nearest civilian hospital is in Preili, which is another twenty-five miles to the north. But if you’re a Russian operative—”

“You’ll want to use the level-one trauma center at the former Soviet air base in Lociki. That’s pretty good thinking for a theater major.”

“Like I said, I only got blown up once. Okay, here we go—moment of truth.”

The minivan zoomed up to the turnoff for the air base. Continuing straight on A13 meant the Preili hospital and back to square one. Right meant the air base and a potential validation of David’s theory. For a long moment, the Volkswagen’s silhouette hung motionless.

Then the minivan’s turn signal activated.

The right-turn signal.