Page 87 of Gryphon

“Are you okay?” he repeated.

“I don’t know!”

Jeremy glared around while trying to yank his arm out of the soldier’s grasp who kept a firm hold on him.

Général Vachon waved the soldier aside. “It’s okay. Leave him be.”

Jeremy almost fell onto his face between the man releasing him and his efforts to reach Miranda. Not quite falling into Meg, he stopped a step away.

“Why aren’t you okay?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t. I said I didn’t know. You need to ask the general.”

Jeremy turned, then planted himself firmly between them as if he was trying to be Andi, Holly, Mike, and Taz all at once. “Well?”

“She’s fine. I simply need to talk to her.”

“And who are you?”

“NATO Général Pierre Vachon.”

Jeremy glanced over his shoulder at her. “Didn’t we already have one of those?”

“Kurbanov was a fake general,” she told him.

“Really?” Jeremy blinked once, twice. “You know, that makes sense in a strange way. He never used his ID, always following someone else through security checkpoints. You never invited him on the plane with us, did you? Yet he joined in with—”

He spun to look at the general, then back at her.

“Holly, Mike, and Tad!”

“They’re okay. At least Holly and Mike are. I would assume that they’d have mentioned if Tad wasn’t.”

“Oh.” Jeremy took a deep breath, shook himself like Meg after a bath, and scratched Meg on the head. He turned to the general. “Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“No.”

69

“Holy hell, mate. That’s beautiful.” Holly wanted to take it out of his hands and give it a hug.

“Russian Orsis T-5000. Chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum.” Max had extracted the impossibly nasty-looking rifle from the case in the back of his SUV, which they’d parked a hundred meters from the crest of the Chronicle Monument.

“Where did you lay your hands on that?”

“Oh, got it from this guy who hated to let it go.”

“I can only imagine.” It was Russia’s newest sniper rifle. First shown in 2011, it had risen to be the sniper rifle of choice at the very top levels of the Russian clandestine services. She’d never actually seen one in the flesh. Only two ways a Russian sniper would let go of such a weapon, a lot of money or…

“I talked him out of it with this,” he tapped the other case. “In 2014.”

Holly sighed happily when she cracked it open. Inside lay the TAC-50 that she knew best. Both rifles reached past a kilometer and a half with ease. In 2014. That meant Max must have been among the Georgian volunteers to fight the Russian takeover of Crimea and far eastern Ukraine. At least one sniper had returned to Moscow in a box, without his rifle.

Mike dragged her aside. “Do you trust Tad?”

Holly couldn’t answer at first. “I thought you were the one who checked out his credentials.”

Mike shook his head. “I did. They came back clean. But…I’ve got an itch.”

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