Hunt the Lion Read online

  PRAISE FOR CHAD ZUNKER

  “A gritty, compelling, and altogether engrossing novel that reads as if ripped from the headlines. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Chad Zunker is the real deal.”

  —Christopher Reich, New York Times bestselling author of Numbered Account and Rules of Deception

  “Good Will Hunting meets The Bourne Identity.”

  —Fred Burton, New York Times bestselling author of Under Fire

  OTHER TITLES BY CHAD ZUNKER

  The Tracker

  Shadow Shepherd

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Chad Zunker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503903074

  ISBN-10: 1503903079

  Cover design by Jae Song

  To Liz Pearsons and Gracie Doyle,

  who saw something in the early pages

  and took a chance on an unknown.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and often I found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  They are like a lion hungry for prey, like a fierce lion crouching in cover.

  —Psalm 17:12

  ONE

  At two in the morning, a cold mist hung in the Moscow air, and the streets around Sam were all but still. Only a few isolated cars passed by every couple of minutes. A scattering of late-night wanderers, mostly vagrants who probably had nowhere else to go tonight, was out on the sidewalks along Chistye Prudy, a clean-water pond in Moscow’s Basmanny District. Sam exhaled a nervous breath. He was five thousand miles away from his apartment back in DC. A million miles away from a life that had just started to make sense to him a month ago, then had everything flipped upside down on him within a twenty-four-hour period.

  Nothing made sense to him now.

  Sam Callahan, CIA agent?

  Rushing across the street, Sam stepped up onto the opposite sidewalk and carefully approached the ten-foot-high white-stone wall that surrounded the block-wide town house property. As an extra measure of security, a decorative row of razor-sharp steel points lined the top of the wall. They weren’t quite rolls of barbed wire, but Sam knew they conveyed the same message: Stay the hell out!

  His heart racing, Sam paused, searched both ways up and down the sidewalk to make sure he was in the clear, and waited for further instructions. He knew there were usually guards at each corner of the property. Men dressed in military fatigues and holding black assault rifles. There were also guards roaming inside and outside the building. At least one guard was inside a small room on the ground floor at all times, where he monitored a dozen different security cameras. If that wasn’t intimidating enough, Sam had also seen surveillance photos of several guard dogs. Highly trained black muscle-bound Dobermans ready to tear off his flesh. This gave him extra pause. Dogs had never been too kind to him. Of course, the only ones Sam had ever encountered while growing up on the streets had been trained guard dogs he had run into while breaking and entering somewhere.

  He tried to swallow the thick knot that sat in the back of his throat. Although he’d been secretly training for countless hours with Marcus Pelini’s clandestine CIA squad back in DC, Sam still found it hard to fathom that he’d suddenly been dropped into the center of this powerful foreign city. And with an intricate plan for him to carry out a covert intelligence operation that, if he was successful, was supposed to somehow make America a safer place. CIA? He was just a twenty-six-year-old rookie lawyer fresh from Georgetown Law and still wet behind the ears. Still the scared orphan boy who had lived for several years as a homeless teenager, where he’d survived the streets by stealing wallets, purses, and even cars, and who’d eventually done a three-month juvie stint.

  Now, after only a few weeks of training, Sam was supposed to feel equipped enough to carry out a covert CIA operation? This was crazy.

  “Get ready,” Roger instructed in his earpiece.

  Roger and four other members of the group, including Pelini, were inside a safe house a mile away, with all the windows blacked out, surrounded by computers and surveillance equipment. Sam had visited the safe house upon his arrival from London for a final equipment check. Two more agents, Luis and Mack, were supposed to be out on the streets somewhere, providing him with backup in case things went badly. Sam had been unable to spot either of the men.

  Adjusting his black-framed glasses that sent a live video feed to the safe house, Sam stepped back to give himself some room to maneuver and set his own mental countdown clock. He had only thirty seconds, or he was toast. Jabber—a hacker on their team who ran their computers—would be freezing the security cameras temporarily, giving Sam the briefest of windows to pass undetected through the property. However, Jabber couldn’t leave the cameras frozen for long, or the video guard might notice and place the property on full lockdown. It had to look like a momentary camera glitch, with everything going back to normal just seconds before the guard became concerned.

  “Green! Go!” Roger ordered.

  With more adrenaline racing through him, Sam ran straight for the stone wall and leaped, his gloved hands reaching up and clasping the very top of the wall. He quickly pulled himself up, carefully avoided being jabbed by the row of sharp steel points, flipped his legs over on the
other side, then scaled down until his shoes met the wet grass. Pivoting, he surveyed a familiar scene—one he’d memorized in dozens of surveillance photos—a massive resort-style pool area, enveloped by well-landscaped grounds. A Russian tycoon named Vladimir Zolotov owned the property.

  Tucking his head low, Sam sprinted toward the far corner of the town house property—the place with the most shadows. He hurdled a set of bushes, then dove up onto a stone ledge, where he rolled and regained his balance. Roger was in his ear, urgently counting down, “Eight, seven . . .” Sam took off again, praying he’d reach the corner of the building before a guard or a dog suddenly popped into his view. “Three, two . . .” He reached the back corner, grabbed on to the cream-colored edges of the stone building, pulled himself up off the grass, and began climbing just as Roger yelled, “One!” in his earpiece.

  “Cameras are live again,” Roger stated. “Keep moving, Callahan.”

  Sam tried to catch his breath, his heart pounding away. He stared a hundred feet straight up to the very top of the massive Moroccan-style town house. Using the architectural details to his advantage, Sam began climbing the back corner of the building, one careful reach of his hand and slide of his foot at a time. The wet mist in the air made the climb more difficult than his hundreds of practice sessions back in the dank warehouse in DC. With no rope harness or safety gear to protect him in a fall, he could rely only on the tacky grip of his special rock-climbing shoes, the strength of his gloved fingers, and his uncanny ability to steady his frantic mind.

  About thirty feet up, Sam paused, heard a noise below him. Staring down, he silently cursed. He spotted the silhouette of a guard and a guard dog directly beneath him. The guard had stopped to light a cigarette. Sam could see the flame of the cigarette lighter and the flicker of the man’s bearded face in the glow. The huge Doberman seemed at ease, sitting perfectly still right next to the guard, which was good. The dog wasn’t yet tracking him, but Sam knew the dog’s heightened hearing would likely pick up one false move. He’d be pumped with bullets and then fed to the canines. He held his breath for what felt like two minutes, his fingers trembling as they tightly gripped the edge of the building. Finally, the guard and dog both moved along, out of sight.

  Sam exhaled, reached up again, continued to climb. Even though it was cold, beads of sweat were already pouring down his face and stinging his eyes.

  “How you doing, Callahan?” Roger said in his ear.

  “Hanging in there,” he whispered back, only slightly amusing himself.

  Roger chuckled. “Indeed.”

  Continuing to climb higher, Sam stopped every ten feet to calm himself. His shoulders throbbed. Although he’d practiced this climb nearly every day to exhaustion for the past month, nothing could truly prepare him for doing it live, inside Moscow, in the middle of the night, with guards and dogs below him, and his adrenaline spiking off the charts. Not even Pelini could manufacture that feeling in a warehouse. Sam’s fingers felt like they were on fire.

  When he reached the sixth floor, he paused again to catch his breath, steady himself. He pivoted his head around for a moment and looked out over the vast city. He could see the colorful Saint Basil’s Cathedral glowing in bright lights inside Moscow’s famous Red Square near the banks of the Moskva River. On his own, Sam had done his share of personal study on Moscow. Although he wasn’t there as a tourist—he was planning on being there for only a few hours, after all—getting a certain lay of the land made him feel more comfortable.

  “Need to get a move on, Sam,” Pelini said in his ear.

  “I’m working on it,” he snapped.

  He reached up again, pulled himself a few feet higher, and could now see a balcony edge right above him—the top level of the building. He was almost there. As he reached for the top of a stone railing, his right foot unexpectedly slipped off the edge, shooting a charge through him. He barely got a hand around a column to keep himself from dropping more than a hundred feet to his certain death. As both feet dangled beneath him, he swiftly reached up with his other hand and clasped the balcony column.

  “Careful there, cowboy,” Roger encouraged him.

  His heart beating so fast that he thought he might pass out, Sam quickly pulled himself up and secured his feet again. Peeking up and over the stone railing, he made sure a guard with a gun wasn’t standing there waiting to greet him. Then he pulled himself over the railing and dropped to the stone floor on the other side.

  Already exhausted, Sam still had a long way to go.

  He scanned the top level of the town house. As expected, he was in the very back corner of a massive open-air garden, with hundreds of plant features and three huge water fountains that were all currently running. Zolotov probably had some amazing parties on top of his home—it was as if he owned an oasis in the middle of an urban jungle. Sam searched for any shadows of movement but spotted nothing. From Pelini’s advanced surveillance, Sam knew the security guards didn’t usually tour the very top of the building. The only way to the top was by heavily secured and camera-monitored stairs or elevator. Zolotov probably never thought anyone would be stupid enough to climb a hundred feet straight up the side of a building guarded by a squad of armed men and ruthless dogs in the dark of night.

  He was wrong.

  Sam was that stupid.

  TWO

  Sam quickly located his designated target. An eight-foot circular opening sat directly in the middle of the top-level garden, completely surrounded by a four-foot-high stone wall. Peeking over the stone wall, he stared down through thick metal safety netting deep inside the town house, finding exactly what the architectural plans and surveillance photos had suggested—an eight-foot-wide glass cylinder had been constructed in the very center of the home, stretching from the first floor all the way up to the top of the residential tower. Sam took in the massive hundred-foot-long green ivy hanging in the center of the glass cylinder interwoven with tens of thousands of colorful flowers.

  Apparently fascinated with rain forests, Zolotov had decided to build his own version that he could view on every floor of his home. Although Sam knew bright lights usually lit the glass cylinder during daylight hours—showcasing its staggering beauty—the tube was currently dark. This was critical if he was to proceed to the next bold step in the operation. A step that was maybe even more dangerous than his climbing a hundred feet straight up the outside of the building.

  “You’re two minutes behind,” Roger mentioned in his ear.

  “Then how about we trade spots?” Sam countered.

  “Just pick up the pace some, okay?”

  Wearing a black jacket with numerous pockets holding all his special-ops gear, Sam unzipped a pocket on the left side and pulled out a pair of heavy-duty industrial metal cutters. He then carefully snipped away at the metal netting that protected anyone from falling inside the glass cylinder. When he’d cut out a square big enough to slip through, he set the heavy netting over to the side. From a larger jacket pocket, he located a small black metal box with a thick metal carabiner sticking out of one end. The carabiner was attached to a thin steel wire coiled inside the box—the strongest wire on the planet, he’d been told. The high-tech wire would definitely hold his six-foot, 175-pound frame; he’d done this drill with this very same equipment more than a hundred times already back in DC.

  Still, that was just a drill.

  This was live, with men with assault rifles nearby.

  Pulling up on his jacket, Sam used straps to secure the black box to a vest that was tight to his body. Grabbing the carabiner from the metal box, he pulled out the coiled wire, wrapped the carabiner five times around one of the thick steel beams that held the hanging-plant feature in place, then clipped the carabiner and the wire securely to the beam. He tugged twice and felt safe.

  He was set and ready.

  Another deep breath filled with nerves.

  Climbing up over the stone wall, he sat on the edge, dropped his legs through the eight-foot opening
. He gripped one of the steel beams with both gloved hands and slowly lowered himself down inside the cylinder. Steadying himself, Sam let go of the steel beam and began floating in the air. When he made sure he had no sway, he reached down to his vest and pressed a button on the side of the fancy box. The wire began to uncoil slowly, and smoothly lowered him deeper into the cylinder. Hanging beside the flowered ivy, he was careful not to bump it, or the curved glass wall on the opposite side.

  When he’d lowered himself to the sixth floor, Sam paused, suddenly feeling exposed and uneasy. It was dark both inside the glass cylinder and inside the interior of the town house. One flick of the lights in a hallway, and he’d be caught hanging there like a human piñata waiting to be clobbered.

  The same thought kept flashing through his mind.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  Taking a moment to peer through the glass, he could make out a few night-lights on in the hallway that circled the tube but very little else. According to the floor plan, the sixth level was Zolotov’s master bedroom suite. Nearly two thousand square feet with a bedroom, a changing room, a reading room, an exercise room, a meditation room, and a spalike bathroom. Zolotov’s wife—his third in six years—had a closet that was bigger than Sam’s entire apartment.

  He waited a moment to see if he spotted any movement on the sixth floor. The town house remained quiet. Pushing the button again, Sam lowered himself deeper into the building, cruising past the fifth and fourth floors without pause. Again, he saw no signs of movement. Sam finally eased down to his target level—the third floor, which housed Zolotov’s office suite. He unzipped a pocket along the right side of his jacket and pulled out a small handheld device that had a powerful fist-size suction cup on one side. Grabbing the handle, Sam carefully pushed the suction cup against the glass wall of the cylinder. He then pushed a button on the device’s handle, and the suction cup gradually sucked tightly to the glass. He wiggled it several times to make sure it was securely in place.

  From another jacket pocket, he extracted a second handheld device that with a push of a button revealed a sharp jagged blade on one end—a blade he’d been told could cut through dinosaur bone, if necessary. Sam had often wondered how they’d come to that conclusion but didn’t ask. His heart was beating so fast, his hands were shaking. He looked away from his hands, hoping the team back in the safe house didn’t notice his growing nerves. This was the next huge hurdle in completing the mission. It had to go perfectly. One false move, and he might as well stick the blade in his own gut to avoid the trouble of the guards and dogs.