Burner


 
 
 
 TITLES BY MARK GREANEY
 
 THE GRAY MAN
 ON TARGET
 BALLISTIC
 DEAD EYE
 BACK BLAST
 GUNMETAL GRAY
 AGENT IN PLACE
 MISSION CRITICAL
 ONE MINUTE OUT
 RELENTLESS
 SIERRA SIX
 BURNER
 RED METAL
 (with Lt. Col. H. Ripley Rawlings IV, USMC)
 ARMORED
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 BERKLEY
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 
 Copyright © 2023 by MarkGreaneyBooks LLC
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 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Greaney, Mark, author.
 Title: Burner / Mark Greaney.
 Description: New York : Berkley, [2023] | Series: The gray man; 12
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022041612 (print) | LCCN 2022041613 (ebook) |
 ISBN 9780593548103 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593548110 (ebook)
 Classification: LCC PS3607.R4285 B87 2023 (print) | LCC PS3607.R4285 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041612
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041613
 Cover design by Steve Meditz
 Cover image of male figure by Hayden Verry / Arcangel
 Interior art: Black-and-white Paris map © Nicola Renna / Shutterstock.com
 Book design by Kelly Lipovich, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 pid_prh_6.0_142492537_c0_r0
 
 
 
 Slava Ukrayini
 
 
 
 
 We know they are lying.
 They know they are lying.
 They know that we know that they are lying.
 We know that they know that we know that they know they are lying.
 And still . . . they continue to lie.
 —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN
 
 
 
 CHARACTERS
 COURTLAND “COURT” GENTRY: aka Violator, aka Six, aka the Gray Man; freelance intelligence asset; former CIA contract officer; former CIA Special Activities Division (Ground Branch) paramilitary operations officer
 VITALI PESKOV: president of the Russian Federation
 EDDISON JOHN: attorney-at-law, Castries, Saint Lucia
 DANIIL SPANOV: director of the Security Council, Russian Federation
 IGOR KRUPKIN: Russian financial planner
 ALEXANDER VELESKY: banker for Brucker Söhne Holdings, Zurich, Switzerland
 LUKA RUDENKO: CIA code name Matador; podpolkovnik (major), GRU (Russian military intelligence), Unit 29155
 ULAN BAKIYEV: starshina (first sergeant), GRU (Russian military intelligence), Unit 29155
 EZRA ALTMAN: American forensic accountant
 PETRO MOZGOVOY: intelligence officer, Donetsk People’s Republic Security Service Battalion
 HENRY CALVIN: attorney, Hartley, Hill, and Prescott, LLC, New York City
 SEBASTIAN DREXLER: Swiss freelance intelligence asset
 ANGELA LACY: senior operations officer, Directorate of Operations, CIA
 SUZANNE BREWER: special assistant to the deputy director for operations, CIA
 JAY KIRBY: Director, CIA
 ZOYA ZAKHAROVA: code name Banshee; freelance intelligence asset; former SVR (Russian foreign intelligence) operative; former CIA contract asset
 BRUCKER SÖHNE HOLDINGS: Zurich-based Swiss private bank
 GARNIER ET MOREAU CIE.: Geneva-based Swiss private bank
 DPR: Donetsk People’s Republic; pro-Russian eastern Ukrainian separatist region
 DPR SSB: Donetsk People’s Republic Security Service Battalion; intelligence service of the DPR
 
 
 
 ONE
 
 These Russians weren’t fucking around tonight.
 One dozen men were arrayed on the 281-foot mega yacht, all armed with new polymer-framed AK-12 rifles, two-thousand-lumen tactical flashlights, and communications gear that kept them in contact with one another wherever they were positioned on or around the huge watercraft. The Lyra Drakos stood at anchor, far out in English Harbour off the island of Antigua in the eastern Caribbean, and the sentries on board scanned the black water with their bright beams, made regular radio checks with the night watch on the bridge, and kept themselves amped up through the dark hours with coffee, cigarettes, energy drinks, and speed.
 In addition to the expansive nighttime deck watch, three more armed men slowly circled the vessel in a twenty-seven-foot tender with a 250-horsepower engine. And below the surface, yet another pair patrolled underwater in wet suits, dive gear, and sea scooters: handheld devices with enclosed propellers that pulled them along at up to 2.5 miles per hour. These men carried flashlights, spearguns on their backs, and long knives strapped to their thighs.
 The men and women on board the yacht had been at this high level of readiness for nearly two weeks, and it was grueling work, but the man paying the guards’ salaries compensated them well.
 The owner of the yacht and his security detail were ramped up like this because of two separate incidents the previous month in Asia. Three and a half weeks earlier, a 96-meter ship called Pura Vida sank off the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. The boat had been linked to a Russian oligarch who had somehow managed to avoid having his offshore property confiscated like most of his fellow billionaire countrymen after the invasion of Ukraine began a year earlier. The cause of the sinking had not been revealed by local authorities, but most of the Russians with boats still in their possession presumed it to be sabotage.
 Their assumptions seemed assured just nine days later when a second vessel, a 104-meter yacht with two helicopter landing pads owned by a byzantine collection of shell corporations and trusts but ultimately the property of the impossibly wealthy internal security chief of the Russian president, suffered the same fate in Dubai, sinking to the bottom of Jebel Ali, the largest human-made harbor in the world.
 No one had been killed or even injured in either incident, but the destruction of the property itself was more than enough to have the remaining oligarchs with ships afloat both incensed and on alert.
 The fear here in Antigua, understandably, was that the Lyra Drakos would end up in the bottom of the bay