Spy Thriller: To Russia for Love: An Espionage and Pulp Fiction Political Thriller

by Kenneth Eade

“There’s no tail!”

  “If was, he gone now,” said Slava, exiting the airport in a flash.

  Brilliant. Now I’ve got to worry about this guy always being underfoot. Maybe, at the very least, I can use him as a translator.

  “Where to boss?”

  “First my hotel. Then, I’ll tell you.”

  The sound of jet engines shook the building as planes screamed overhead, taking off and landing in a steady stream. Natasha’s captors watched her carefully through a two-way mirror. She looked up at the ceiling and could see the blue sky through the skylight, as well as the planes on approach to the airport, and wondered why they had brought her here. They must be planning to move her by plane.

  She touched her earring, and left her cryptic message, “The Captive Knight,” making sure to move her lips as little as possible. Suddenly, one of her guards burst through the door.

  “Who you are talking to?” he demanded, in Ukrainian, which Natasha barely understood.

  “Nobody.”

  “You lie!” he shouted, and slapped her across the mouth.

  A second guard entered.

  “You have transmitter! Where is it?” he shouted.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Then we strip you naked and look everywhere you can hide it!” he responded.

  “Take off clothes!”

  Natasha reluctantly peeled off her clothing, feeling violated by the eyes of these two men and who knows how many others behind the mirror.

  “Give me earrings!” demanded the second guard. Natasha took them off and handed them over, and continued to stand in front of them, covering herself.

  The guard examined the earrings carefully. They were diamond earrings, but seemed to contain strange colored inclusions.

  “This is transmitter!” he screamed. Natasha cringed as the guard dropped the earrings and crushed them under his heel.

  “You dirty FSB pig!” he shouted, and raised his hand to Natasha, then apparently changed his mind. Both guards turned to leave the naked Natasha, standing and shivering with fear.

  Now in his fourth new hotel room, Seth and Slava planned to infiltrate Germinat’s Kiev headquarters. Unfortunately, about all they knew about the Kiev headquarters was its location. The layout of the building, as well as its security system, were unknown factors. Seth could be sure to expect that, after he had broken into his superior’s offices at their main headquarters in St. Louis, that tough security measures had been put in place for all the company’s offices.

  ***

  Slava turned out to be not as much of a burden as Seth had thought. In fact, he was quite an asset. An avid computer hacker, he was able to get into the Germinat Human Resources Department and generate an employee badge for himself and for Seth, copied from the files of two other male employees. The security system was pretty basic. Once inside, they would simply blind the security cameras in the corridors where they sought entry to any room, and do the same once inside the room. Slava searched as many files as he could on the Germinat computers for information that may expose a lead on Natasha, to no avail. They would have to dig deeper.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the dead of night, Seth and Slava entered the offices of Germinat’s Ukrainian headquarters and presented their badges at the security checkpoint. Slava said hello to the guard, who was playing with his cell phone. The guard glanced up from his phone, uninterested, and buried his face back into it, so the two passed his desk with seemingly no effort at all.

  “Chekati!” said the guard, ordering them to wait.

  Seth and Slava froze in their tracks. Seth’s pulse quickened.

  “Pidpisati,” said the guard, annoyingly.

  “Da, Ya zabuv,” said Slava, who turned and signed a clipboard on the guard’s counter, then handed the pen to Seth. The clipboard contained a sign-in form. Seth quickly and carefully examined the sheet where Slava had just signed it, and did so in the same manner.

  Slava and Seth had roughed out a plan to search the offices of the higher executives of the company, but they had no idea what they were looking for. From Slava’s intelligence, he had learned which office belonged to whom, and ran cover for Seth, who was to break into the offices of the English-speaking executives, who were mostly Americans.

  They walked the corridors as if they had been well acquainted with them, heading for the executive offices. On the way, they noticed a night janitor asleep, slumped in one of the chairs in the break room. Taking advantage of this fortuitous event, Slava pulled a hypodermic syringe from his bag and gave the janitor a shot of propofol. That would keep him out for a while. Hopefully, the guard would not be making rounds and would be more interested in the video games on his phone than what Seth and Slava were up to.

  Once he was sure the drug had taken effect, Slava donned the cleaning man’s apron and locked the slumbering custodian away in a nearby utility closet.

  Slava used the janitor’s keys to access the first office, which he proceeded to pretend to clean. Then, he pointed his laser marker at the lens of the interior security camera as Seth entered the office and took a seat at the desk.

  “That’s a handy bag you have there,” whispered Seth.

  “Every secret agent should have one.” Sasha grinned.

  Seth hacked into the computer with little effort, using the same method he had used to break into his boss’ computer at Germinat’s headquarters in St. Louis. All of the records were in English. Nothing stood out as particularly revealing during his search, but there wasn’t enough time for a thorough examination of everything, so he made a copy of all the data on his external hard drive. He also installed a backdoor program which would allow him to access all of Germinat’s computers on the network. He searched through the desk drawers and filing cabinets in the office as well, but found nothing which could indicate the whereabouts of Natasha or the identity of her captors.

  “Let’s move on to the next one,” he instructed Slava. Seth slipped out of the room with his cleaning tools, and Slava switched off the laser and rolled his custodian cart to the next office.

  “Wait,” said Slava, as he examined the door. “This one has security system.”

  Slava pulled a small black instrument from his bag. It had a small antenna with a round base and a USB cable attached to it. He removed a small pad device from the bag and plugged the USB cable into it.

  “Hold these while I disable door sensors,” he instructed Seth, as he handed Seth the pad and antenna.

  “If this is a jamming device, then why worry about the sensors?” asked Seth.

  “In case jamming doesn’t work,” Slava replied.

  Slava slipped a thin piece of metal in the door jamb on the top and bottom where he had located the sensors, then cracked the lock and they were in. He pointed his laser at the security camera and, just as Seth was about to enter, Slava put his hand out.

  “Stop.” Seth froze in his tracks. “Motion detector on wall. Point your laser at camera.” Seth followed Slava’s instruction, as Slava removed another item from his bag of tricks. It was a large piece of cloth, like a sheet, folded into a small square. Slava unfolded the sheet and held it up with his hands. He was so tall that the sheet reached almost all the way to the ceiling.

  “Put radio down, close door and follow me, but keep laser on camera.”

  Seth set the pad and antenna on the floor and closed the door behind them. He walked slowly behind Slava as Slava held the sheet to fool the motion detector. Once Slava was in position in front of the motion detector, Seth had the room to himself.

  The office was a large one that appeared to be that of a high level executive, with plush leather chairs, a fine wooden desk, and a large adjoining conference room.

  Seth found nothing useful from his search of the office, so they moved on to the conference room, repeating the process of bypassing the security system. The motion detectors there appeared at be set to guard one particular wall, which Seth thought was odd. He
removed a painting from the wall and found a wall safe. He removed a stethoscope from his briefcase.

  “I see you have bag of tricks too,” said Slava.

  “Safecracking was one of those skills I had to pick up in my alternate life.”

  “How you learn?”

  “Internet.”

  Seth put on the stethoscope and placed it near the combination dial on the safe, rotated the dial and moved the bell of the instrument around the dial in different places until he could clearly hear the mechanism. Then, he rotated the dial clockwise until he heard two clicks, and repeated the procedure, rotating the dial until it was 180 degrees opposite the position where he had heard the two clicks. He slowly turned the wheel in the opposite direction, noting the number of clicks in his notebook, which corresponded to the number of wheels in the combination lock. That told him how many numbers were in the combination. Now he just needed to find out what those numbers were.

  Seth scribbled a graph on his pad with two lines.

  “No time for making pictures. We have to go,” warned Slava.

  “Not until I get into this safe.”

  Seth set the combination to zero, and listened for the safe’s drive cam to connect to a wheel as he turned the device clockwise. Two clicks told him that he had found the range for the first number, which he wrote on the graph to be between 25 and 31.

  “Hurry up!” Slava called out.

  “I’m almost in.”

  Seth kept listening, resetting the lock, turning it and writing down numbers in his graph.

  “We’re out of time!”

  Just as Slava said that, the safe engaged and Seth popped open the door.

  In the safe were stacks of US dollars and two external hard drives. Slava’s eyes opened widely.

  “Take money!” he said.

  “We can’t.”

  “Good ploy. They will think is burglary.”

  “First of all, we’re not thieves. Second, they’ll know we broke in.”

  “If we get caught, same penalty,” Slava insisted.

  “We have to make a copy of these disks and put them back where we found them.”

  “Hurry up then,” Slava said, disappointed. “We are out of time. Guard will be making rounds soon.”

  They moved slowly back to the office room, where Seth hooked up the disks to copy the data onto his own. Minutes dragged on like hours as they waited for the data to load. Finally, they were on their way out the door and back to the break room to return the janitor to his original napping position. As Slava prepared to drag the unconscious custodian out of the closet, the guard appeared.

  “Sho ti tut rubbish?” he barked at Seth.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Seth froze. He had studied basic Ukrainian phrases, but nothing that could have prepared him for this situation. Slava was still in the utility closet, dressing the janitor. Seth had to respond, and it had to be loud enough for Slava to hear, so as to warn him not to pop out of the closet, so he said the only thing he could under the circumstances.

  “Kavi!” Seth said loudly, with a big smile, as he went for the coffee pot and a Styrofoam cup. The guard stared ahead as Seth poured a cup and offered it to him.

  The security guard grunted, “Humph,” and walked away.

  Abruptly, Slava sneaked out into the room, laughing.

  “Shh! Be quiet! Seth whispered. “And why are you laughing?”

  “Coffee! Brilliant!” Slava snickered.

  “What’s happening with the cleaning guy?”

  “Sleeping. I put him on floor, gave him some vodka and put bottle in his hand. The guard will think he got drunk.”

  “Let’s get out of here before we get caught.”

  ***

  The records from the safe were the most revealing. They didn’t yield any clues of Natasha’s whereabouts, but they did show very clearly what Seth’s ex-company was up to in Ukraine. Ukraine had the most fertile land in Europe, but Ukrainian law forbade farmers from growing genetically engineered crops. As a result of Germinat’s lobbying efforts in Ukraine since 2007, in 2013, several large agricultural associations had drafted amendments to Ukraine’s law on genetically modified foods, for the creation, testing, transportation and use of GMOs, which, not coincidentally, came at about the same time as the agreement, proposed by the European Union, which contained the hidden clause for development of new biotechnologies.

  When then President Victor Yanukovych rejected the European proposal in favor of a $15 billion aid package from Russia with a discount on Russian gas, that ignited the Maidan uprising, which was funded by the current president, Petro Poroshenko, who was known as the “chocolate king,” because of his candy empire, and was one of the richest oligarchs in the country.

  The files contained classified reports from the CIA, indicating that Poroshenko was an American “insider,” and had been as late as 2006. Poroshenko, who had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009 through 2010, as well as Minister of Trade and Economic Development since 2012, reported regularly to the US Ambassador to Ukraine during his tenure as Foreign Minister.

  The United States had long suspected Poroshenko of backing efforts to undermine the rise of former Prime Minister Tymoshenko to power, something which the candy man had stalwartly denied. Poroshenko had thrown in his hat behind the newly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, and happily reported that Yanukovych intended to make clear to Europe that he intended Ukraine to secure an association agreement with the EU. When Yanukovych reversed his path toward Europe in favor of Russia, Poroshenko funded the bloody coup that forced him to flee the country, and now Ukraine was embroiled in a civil war in which Poroshenko had aligned himself with the United States, which was already sending “non-lethal” military aid to Ukraine, and had levied economic sanctions against Russia which had crippled its economy.

  Natasha’s lips were dry and cracked. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. She opened her eyes to darkness and felt the pinch of the handcuffs tugging against her wrists, as she realized she was hanging from them against a cold plaster wall. She had been moved. She pulled at the chains that held her to the wall, and felt a pang of pain as the handcuffs dug into her wrists. Suddenly, a blinding light flooded the room as she strained to see two of her captors, silhouettes standing in the doorway.

  “Are you thirsty?” one of them asked. She could not see his face, but his voice was gruff and unpleasant.

  “Yes. May I please have some water?”

  “You want water? We have plenty of water for you.”

  They seemed to charge at her. One of them unlocked her handcuffs and her limp body crashed to the ground, while the other dragged her by her feet to a small steel table, and hoisted her legs up as the other lifted her by the arms onto the cold metal surface, and fastened the handcuffs to the table as his partner lashed down her ankles. They slapped a damp, moldy smelling rag over her face.

  “Here’s your water!” Gruff said, laughing as he poured water over the rag and onto Natasha’s nose and mouth. She gasped for air, she couldn’t breathe.

  “Tell us what you are doing here, you communist pig!” demanded Gruff, as he poured another bucketful of water on her face. Natasha choked and tried to speak, but she couldn’t. The ugly man pulled the cloth from her face and she coughed and breathed in...

  “I’m just a teacher! I swear!”

  It was clear to Seth now that Natasha had been caught up in something much bigger than he ever could have imagined. The question was whether she was taken by Germinat or whether she had become a pawn in the new cold war between the West and Russia. Either way, she was in serious danger. Seth decided to hold off releasing the material to the public until after he could assure Natasha’s safety.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The records Seth had stolen from the safe contained all of Germinat’s plans to take over the rich farmland of the Ukraine and become the sole seed supplier to Ukrainian farms. They had purchased a large “non-GMO�
� seed plant for $140 million, and had been buying up land by the millions of hectares, taking advantage of the crashing Ukrainian economy. There were also records of Germinat money pouring into the campaign coffers of local and national politicians. Buying favors was old hat for the company – they had been doing it in the States for years.

  Germinat was also buttering up farmers and local politicians with its social development program – giving grants up to $25,000 to help rural Ukrainians. With an average income of $100 or less, these loans would make the rural Ukrainians virtual slaves to the company. Germinat’s ultimate goal was to turn the now rural Ukrainian farm economy, which now consisted of small 4.2 hectare farms, into a factory farm economy, producing wheat and corn. They even had a covert name for it – Operation Breadbasket.

  Germinat had also invested heavily in a new organization called, “The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications,” or ISAA

  A, an organization who had a seat on the US-Ukraine Business Council, along with Germinat, Dupont, Cargill, Syngenta, and the “who’s who” of biotech. As Seth read on, he discovered that the ISAAA was directly sponsored by the US State Department and the US Department of Agriculture. This was not the first time that Seth had discovered collusion between his ex-employer and the US government. The last time he exposed such corruption almost got him killed.

  Now Natasha had been caught up in this quagmire. With her cover blown, the FSB denouncing her as not one of their own, and her questionable value to the Ukrainian side, her time was becoming more and more limited. Maybe exposing them now would blow the whole thing open and lead to her release, he thought. Then again, it may backfire. He had to find her first.

  Seth pulled a list of Germinat’s properties from the secret files, and mapped them. If the company had Natasha, they would be holding her in one of their newly purchased facilities. He and Slava would start at their seed factory first.