The Kremlin Conspiracy

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  They crossed into Polish airspace almost immediately, then flew over Belarus and entered Russian airspace around eleven thirty that evening. Marcus said nothing and talked to no one as he looked out the window at the lights of Smolensk, Yartsevo, Safonovo, and Vyazma in succession. When he felt the plane bank slightly to the north, Marcus checked his watch, waited ten more minutes, then unbuckled his seat belt, got up, walked over to the door, ripped it open, felt the blast of whipping winds and bone-chilling cold, and threw himself into the night air without saying good-bye.

  There was no hesitation. In the Marines he’d done it hundreds of times, and it all came back quickly. Just after takeoff, the team from Langley had suited him up in a black military-grade jumpsuit and a black balaclava, Nomex flight gloves, an HGU 55/P ballistic helmet, night vision goggles, a rucksack of clothes, a sidearm, water, a handful of protein bars, and a small first aid kit—everything he might need to survive for the next twenty-four hours if his linkup were delayed for any reason.

  Now, as he hurtled toward the ground from forty-five thousand feet, Marcus could not see a thing. The frigid late-September sky was thick with clouds, and there was no moon. There were no cities within fifty miles, no towns or hamlets or lights of any kind. Nor could he hear a sound, save the steady hiss of the oxygen flowing from the tank on his back, and his heart pounding wildly. If someone had told him twenty-four hours earlier he’d be jumping out of a plane anywhere in the world, he would have thought them mad. He’d certainly never imagined jumping into Russia, much less out of the side of a G4. Yet now he felt an exhilaration that had eluded him for far too long.

  Marcus flashed back to the first time he’d ever jumped out of a plane. It had been summer. It had been a Cessna. It had been with Elena when they were only seventeen. They had done it without telling their parents and had even forged their parents’ signatures on the permission forms—a move they both admitted had been wrong. Yet nothing the two of them had ever done to that point compared with the rush they’d felt that day.

  But Marcus didn’t have time to think about his wife just then. He checked his altimeter. He was already below four thousand feet. It was almost time. Seconds later, he passed below three thousand, then two thousand. Only then did he break through the clouds. Now he could see the clearing they’d chosen and the edges of the forest all around it. The moment he did, he pulled the rip cord and felt the chute eject. The harness tightened under his armpits and groin. The problem was, he was still coming in hard in a densely wooded section of pines. If he didn’t change course, he would likely be impaled on one of the trees or get caught in the branches and find himself stuck four or five stories above the ground.

  He did a series of S-turns, pivoting 180 degrees each time, then back again nearly but not quite another 180 degrees, into the wind. This helped him correct his course and aim for the clearing. But it was going to be close. He could see the tops of the pines rushing toward him, and he prayed there might be time for one or two more turns.

  There was. When he cleared the edge of the forest, he was at four hundred feet, then three hundred. Through the night vision goggles, he could see the ground rushing up at him. It was grassy but also somewhat hillier than he’d expected. He made one more S-turn as he passed below a hundred feet. Now he was headed for one of the flatter sections of the field. As he reached fifteen feet, it was time to flare. Marcus pulled hard on the toggles above his head, both at the same time. He pulled them down to his waist, radically readjusting the shape of his canopy and thus dramatically slowing his rate of descent. The maneuver worked like a charm. Exactly like he’d been taught. Exactly like he’d done so many times. An instant before touching down, he lifted his feet and literally hit the ground running. His jumpmaster back at Parris Island would have been proud.

  Marcus came to a complete stop, pulled off his helmet, and shut off the oxygen tank on his back. Scanning the horizon in every direction and seeing no one, he quickly gathered up his chute and stuffed it back into the pack. Then he powered up the satphone and sent a text to Nick Vinetti consisting simply of the letter X. A moment later came the reply—the letter Y. Satisfied, Marcus stripped off the Nomex flight suit and redressed in gray slacks, a black crewneck sweater, Rockport work shoes, and a black leather jacket he’d stuffed into the rucksack he’d strapped to his chest.

  Fifteen minutes later, a midnight-blue Mercedes SUV pulled to the edge of the clearing and killed its lights. Marcus chambered a round in his automatic pistol, waited a moment, then approached the car cautiously. It was a formality, of course. If the driver or its occupants were FSB and had seen his highly illegal descent, he’d probably be dead already. When the driver’s-side door opened, it wasn’t an FSB agent who stepped out. It was Jenny Morris, bundled up in a navy peacoat and beige scarf, and she had news.

  WESTERN RUSSIA, 150 MILES FROM THE BELARUSIAN BORDER—26 SEPTEMBER

  “Luganov’s plane took off two hours ago,” Morris said as she drove.

  “Heading east?” Marcus asked as he sipped the coffee she’d brought him in a travel mug.

  “Heading east. Pyongyang.”

  “Check,” he said, nearly burning his tongue and deciding to wait until the coffee cooled a bit. “What else have you got?”

  “Quite a bit,” she said. “NSA has intercepts of communications between various Russian base commanders and logistics officers giving orders that match almost precisely some of the written orders the Raven provided.”

  “The Raven?”

  “That’s the code name the Agency gave your mole.”

  “Randomly generated?”

  “Not exactly,” Morris conceded. “When I sent back the eyes-only cable to the director with my write-up of your report, I gave your guy that moniker. Guess it stuck.”

  “So why the Raven?”

  “Does it matter?” she asked.

  “Don’t we have like a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the safe house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I guess we have plenty of time, Agent Morris, don’t we?”

  After bouncing around over some rocky terrain, they turned onto a real road, and the ride smoothed out. Morris glanced at him and smiled. “I guess we do,” she said. “But call me Jenny, okay?”

  “Jenny—got it. So why the Raven?”

  “It’s a biblical reference, actually,” she said, “but don’t tell anyone at Langley. They probably think it has something to do with Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “What’s the biblical connection?” Marcus asked.

  “The Old Testament tells a story about this prophet named Elijah. He was on the run from a wicked king,” she explained.

  “Ahab,” Marcus said.

  Morris seemed surprised. “Exactly. Elijah had no food, no water. But God provided for him—led him to a small brook on the east side of the Jordan.”

  “And then commanded the ravens to bring him bread and meat each morning and evening,” Marcus added.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I guess you know the story.”

  “I do,” Marcus said.

  “My grandmother taught it to me when I was a little girl,” Morris said as she blew down the desolate country road at more than eighty miles per hour. “She used to say, ‘Jenny, God always knows what we need, and if we’ll just trust him, he’ll provide from the most unlikely of sources.’”

  “Like a raven,” said Marcus.

  “Like a raven,” she agreed.

  Later, as they drove east toward Moscow on the M-9 highway, Marcus asked where she was from.

  “I’m afraid that’s classified, Mr. Ryker.” She smiled.

  “Call me Marcus, okay?”

  “Okay, but it’s still classified.”

  “So, you could tell me . . .”

  “But then I’d have to kill you,” she finished.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to get in line.”

  They laughed. Marcus knew it was Agency protocol for field agents and certainly station chiefs not to reveal
personal details. He thought it was probable that Jenny Morris wasn’t even her real name. But whoever she was, and wherever she’d grown up, Marcus now knew she had a grandmother who’d taught her the Scriptures when she was little, and she’d liked those Bible stories. She’d remembered those stories. And all these years later, she was drawing on those stories in a time of great danger.

  It was almost three in the morning when the Mercedes SUV pulled to a stop.

  The rain had started nearly an hour ago. Thunder rumbled overhead and jagged sticks of lightning stabbed the moonless night sky. Marcus wiped the fog from his window and tried to get his bearings. To one side of the street, he saw a giant crater where an apartment building once stood. Morris pointed to the other side of the street.

  “That’s us,” she said. “Ninth floor, apartment 9D. Grab your stuff and meet me in the lobby. I’ll take you up, but I need to park in a garage around the corner.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Marcus said.

  “No, you go inside and stay dry. I’ll just be a minute.”

  There was no point arguing with the woman. She had the same air of authority Marcus remembered from some of the other CIA agents he’d worked with in the Service. So he opened the passenger door, grabbed his rucksack and parachute pack from the back, and dashed inside. As he did, he noticed the number on the side of the building—20 Guryanova Street—and in an instant he knew where he was.

  From inside the dry lobby, he looked back at the crater and closed his eyes. He could envision the massive explosion emanating from the basement. He could see the nine-story building teetering at first, then collapsing so quickly that no one could have possibly gotten out in time, especially those who had been sleeping, which would have been nearly everyone.

  He had studied the case years before during a Secret Service training class in Beltsville, Maryland. One of his instructors had spent an entire day discussing the series of apartment bombings in Moscow and around Russia that had occurred in the fall of 1999. They’d studied crime-scene photographs. They’d read forensic reports translated from Russian. They’d watched interviews with key participants and even a Frontline documentary on the bombings that had run on PBS. At first Marcus hadn’t seen the crimes as relevant to his protection duties. But the instructor had argued that anyone doing advance work for the president, the VP, or a foreign leader had to consider every possible method of assassination, no matter how bizarre, no matter how unlikely. Sure, a would-be assassin might use poison or a sniper rifle or a suicide vest to take out his subject, if he—or she—could get close enough to the target. But might not the same sick mind choose to kill hundreds or thousands of people in a high-rise apartment building or an office building in order to take out their target?

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the instructor had stressed over and over again, “you’ll never play effective defense unless you truly understand how to play offense. The only way to properly guard your protectee is to think like an assassin. Until you do that—until you get into the mind of evil and see the world through the eyes of a killer—you’ll never know how to counter all possible moves.”

  The apartment bombings had never been solved, Marcus recalled. And apparently, at least one of the buildings had never been rebuilt—the one directly across this very street. Russian authorities had blamed the attacks on Chechen terrorists, but Marcus’s instructor was unconvinced. “Look at the evidence,” he’d said. “The bombs were made with military-grade explosives available only to the government. We know that not only from analysis of the bombs that exploded but also from the unexploded ordnance found by police in an apartment building in Ryazan.”

  Marcus remembered asking his instructor who else could have done it. In the fall of 1999, it had certainly seemed like the Chechens were to blame. Every Russian was already horrified by the atrocities going on in Chechnya. But looking back, the instructor had asked a simple but profound question: Who benefited from the bombings? Certainly not the Chechens. Grozny was carpet-bombed that very month. There was, however, someone who did benefit. Who was it who had stepped into the spotlight in the wake of the apartment bombings? Who went on TV to very publicly order the Russian invasion of Chechnya? Who saw his name ID soar, and his approval ratings with it? Who but Aleksandr Luganov, the Russian prime minister and former head of the FSB, a man who not only had access to the explosives used in the bombings but also clearly benefited in the aftermath.

  Lo and behold, once Luganov had ordered the bombing of Chechen cities, the apartment bombings suddenly stopped. Luganov was elected president of Russia soon after. Was it really possible, Marcus had wondered so long ago, that Luganov had ordered some of his loyalists to blow up Russian apartment buildings so that innocent Russians would die and he could blame it on the Chechens, order retaliation against Chechnya, and see his approval ratings soar into the stratosphere so he could be elected the new czar of Russia? It had all seemed rather far-fetched at the time. Yet what would the people of eastern Georgia say now? Or those who lived in Crimea? Or eastern Ukraine or Syria?

  Five minutes later they reached the ninth floor. Jenny Morris unlocked the door to the three-bedroom apartment and hung her soaking-wet coat in a shower stall. Marcus tossed his stuff in one of the bedrooms and headed back out into the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” Morris asked as she dried her hair with a towel.

  “The basement,” he said. “I just want to check things out, make sure no one has left a present for us. Don’t worry. I won’t be long.”

  CIA SAFE HOUSE, MOSCOW—26 SEPTEMBER

  Morris let him sleep for four hours, but that was it.

  There was work to be done. She told Marcus to join her at the kitchen table. Then she explained that she was going to administer a polygraph test and record the lengthy and critical conversation they were about to have. He was not happy, but she did not care.

  “You know the stakes,” she said matter-of-factly. “And you know the drill. So let’s get this done.”

  Marcus didn’t work for the government. He wasn’t on the federal payroll anymore. They couldn’t tell him what to do. But neither did he have anything to hide. He knew the polygraph test was the Agency’s way of verifying that the information he had provided was genuine and that he didn’t have any ulterior motives. So although he wasn’t thrilled about the prospect, he shrugged and allowed her to continue.

  Morris attached several sensors to Marcus’s body that would track his heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate, and temperature and feed the data to a laptop. She started with a few control questions designed to establish a benchmark of his honesty.

  “Is your name Marcus Johannes Ryker?

  “Yes.”

  “Do you currently live in Washington, D.C.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you presently in the city of Moscow?”

  “Yes.”

  She carefully watched the lines on the display showing data from the sensors. She had told Marcus to look straight ahead, not at her or the laptop’s display, but he glanced over and saw that the lines were all flat. Next she asked Marcus to answer several questions untruthfully in order to see if the sensors would properly pick up the minute but distinct changes in his physiology indicating his body’s unique response to lying. Once she was satisfied the machine was functioning as it should and that Marcus was cooperating appropriately, Morris moved on.

  “Did this source take the initiative to make contact with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “He reached out to you first?”

  “Yes.”

  “You weren’t the one to initiate contact?”

  “No.”

  “Did you meet the source in your room at the Hotel National?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the source provide you with pictures of classified documents, purportedly from the Kremlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you look at all fifty-three of the photos on the phone?”

  “Yes.”r />
  “Are the documents authentic?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Please keep your answers to yes or no,” Morris instructed. “Do the documents look authentic to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the source tell you he believes President Luganov is preparing to invade a NATO country?”

  “Yes—well, no—actually three NATO countries.”

  “Just yes or no, please,” Morris reminded him. “Is President Luganov preparing to invade three NATO countries?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you believe your source?”

  Marcus paused. He wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  Morris tried again. “Did the source seem credible to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe he was sent to set a trap for the U.S. or NATO?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe anyone in the Russian government directed the source to reach out to you?”

  Marcus paused again. It was a good question. He wasn’t entirely sure, but he said, “No.”

  On the display, the lines jiggled. Morris looked up sharply and asked the question again. Marcus again answered no, and this time the lines stayed quiet.

  “So you believe the source reached out to you of his own free will?” she continued.

  “Yes.”

  “When the source left your presence, did you immediately contact the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you give the Samsung phone containing the photos to Mr. Vinetti?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you show the phone or its contents to anyone else prior to meeting with Mr. Vinetti?”

  “No.”

  “Did you inform anyone else—prior to contacting Mr. Vinetti—about the phone, its contents, or your meeting with the source?”

  “No.”

  Marcus began to relax. This wasn’t going too badly, he decided.

  As it turned out, those questions were just the warm-up act.