“You look magnificent!”
Her gaze shifted from her own reflection to that of Dima Nikolaevich Tokmakov, a man with an outsized personality. Despite being in his middle years, he was as slender as he had been in his youth. He was good-looking and knew it. His full beard and hair, both thick as hedgerows, were shot through with silver streaks.
She smiled, turned to him, twirling like a runway model.
“I’m proud of you,” Dima said. “You have become everything Leda promised you would.”
“And more,” she said, without a trace of boastfulness.
Dima took her hand, laughing. “We shall see, moya malen’kaya osa.” My little wasp, his private name for her. No one called her by the name her parents had given her. Outside the confines of work, she was known by any number of aliases OT Directorate cooked up for her. Within the directorates, she was known only by her operational name. But Dima called her anything he wanted, depending on his mood.
“There’s nothing little about my sting,” she said. Then with perfect seriousness, “I won’t disappoint you, Dima. Whatever you ask of me will be done.”
His dark eyes gleamed like black opals. “Anything?”
She nodded, matching his expression. She was terrifying when she adopted this particular façade. “Anything and everything.”
His eyes narrowed. “Leda warned me. She thought you had a death wish.”
“And yet,” she riposted, “it’s Leda who is dead, not me.”
Dima grunted. “You dispatched her in extremely imaginative fashion.”
“Her end was ruled ‘death by misadventure.’”
“Well, you saw to that,” Dima smirked. “You two went rock climbing. Her ankle got caught in a rope, she stumbled and slipped off the rock face.” If he was expecting her to give him a clue as to her feelings, he was disappointed. He heaved a sigh; it did not become him. “Leda was one of my most capable operatives. I will miss her.”
“Oh, bullshit, Dima. Who gave me the order to terminate her with extreme prejudice?”
“It was going to be you or her. I found the outcome enlightening as well as edifying.”
She paused for a moment, staring at him fixedly. “You bet against me. How much did you lose?”
“Don’t be absurd,” he scoffed.
She took a step toward him. “I hope it was a shitload, Dima.” Her eyes never left his. “I hope you were duly edified.”
He gave out with a laugh, but it was an uneasy one, laced with an undercurrent of foreboding only she could discern. She could push him only so far, she knew. She might have come close to crossing the line with him. That would be bad for her, considering her ambitions here in the heart of Mother Russia.
She was about to utter a roundabout apology but decided to let the matter die of its own accord.
The door to the anteroom swung inward, and one of Dima’s underlings appeared. “It is time, Comrade Director.” Tokmakov was head of Zaslon, housed deep within the operations directorate of the SVR, the foreign operations arm of the Russian security services. Officially Zaslon did not exist, either inside Russia or without. Even in the rare existing documents it was referred to as Directorate 52123. Zaslon was the almost legendary and most feared black ops organization on the planet, or so the Comrade Director would have his people believe. She had already inured herself to the Russian administration’s triple-speak. You needed to develop a sixth sense to smell out the truth amid the thicket of exaggerations, deliberate disinformation, and outright lies ricocheting around the Kremlin and its environs.
Dima looked up from glancing at his wristwatch. “Ah, so it is.” He offered her a grin. “Showtime!”
As they were about to pass through the door, the underling held out a slip of paper folded in the middle and sealed. “But first,” he said, “there is this.”
“Bah!” Dima almost batted the paper away. “Your timing couldn’t be worse, Feliks. Later perhaps, when—”
“It’s from Operations Directorate.” Feliks held it up. “It’s marked U and A.” Urgent and Actionable.
Dima snorted. “All right, all right.” He snapped his fingers. “Hand it over, if you must.”
“Apologies, Comrade Director.” Feliks’s face was white as a sheet now. His hand trembled. “The U and A is addressed to Kobalt.”
Dima looked at her, his face dark with barely suppressed anger. “Go on, then, Kobalt.” He nodded to her. “See what all this fuss is about.”
Kobalt, his little wasp, took the message and, once Feliks had scurried from the room and closed the door behind him, slit it open, and read. Its contents, like all such U&As, was terse and to the point.
She read it twice before she could get her mind around the intel. Then, like a hammer coming down, it sunk in all at once. She showed it to Dima.
“What do you intend to do?” he said.
“The Omega remit you gave me ended in my being found out.”
Dima clicked his tongue. “You were assigned to infiltrate the Odessa compound of this mysterious group, find out what form of threat they presented to the Federation, inventory their leaders. You failed.”
“I was burned,” she said. “I made no mistake within the compound.”
Dima waved away her words. “You failed to return with the requisite intel.”
“Omega came to our attention because they were recruiting Russian citizens off the street,” Kobalt said levelly, “sometimes against their will.”
“Abducting Russian citizens cannot be tolerated,” Dima needlessly elaborated just to make his point.
“I did find out that Omega is not, so far as I could tell, a terrorist group. They’re a religious cult. A fanatic one, at that.”
“Just as dangerous,” Dima grunted. “In some ways even more so.”
“They also harbor secrets I was working out how to get my hands on when I was burned,” she persisted. “Point being, I brought home vital pieces of intel.”
“With your tail between your legs. That’s a failure, Kobalt. Period, full stop.”
“Which my new plan I was going to present to Director General Baev would rectify.” She pointed to the sheet containing the U&A Feliks had brought her. “Omega is behind this, I know it.”
“Evidence?”
“My gut. This is payback for my getting as far into them as I did. They have no way of knowing what secrets I came away with before I fled. If I were them, I’d suspect the worst. That’s the only logical conclusion to take.”
“So you conclude …”
“I have been given a second chance at them, Dima,” she told him. “A chance to discover who their leader is, where their home base is. That’s my conclusion.”
“You seem certain of the linkage of what just happened and your infiltration of Omega.”
“Nothing else makes sense.”
“I’m not sure. You’ve been back two months now.”
“Their operation took time to plan and execute.” Her eyes sparked with her need. “Dima, you have to trust me on this.”
“Watch yourself, Kobalt,” he snapped, “I don’t have to do a damn thing.”
She had become inured to his mercurial changes of mood, especially when it came to her. She, probably correctly, put them down to sexual frustration. She had lost count of the number of times she had rebuffed his advances. He, like every other man inside the FSB, wasn’t used to being told no by a female subordinate. She knew it rankled him, fostered it, knowing it mitigated her feeling of helplessness being in a male-dominated environment, an organization that furthermore denigrated women every chance it got.
Dima was across the room, having stalked away from her. He stood hands clasped behind his back, staring out the windows. Indigo twilight had settled over the onion domes and, beyond them, the bleak brutalist buildings of Moscow. Yea or nay, which choice would benefit him the most? The Omega remit was a blot on her records and, therefore, on his. He needed that erased, the sooner the better. Her new plan was a good one,
but this divine intervention might just be better.
His expression did not change when he returned to where she was standing, but she saw something shift behind his eyes. “Then this is your new remit. It supersedes all others.”
Kobalt nodded. “And the meeting with Director General Baev—”
“You will meet the head of the SVR another day, this I promise,” Dima said. “I’ll smooth it over with him.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “If you are correct, you will complete your original remit using the opening Omega has provided.” His fingers gripped her shoulder. “Go, my little wasp. Go now.”
4
WASHINGTON, DC
Ben’s entire body contracted, muscles like steel bars.
“What the hell?” he shouted into the interior of his car. “What the hell does she think she’s doing?”
He saw Evan’s Charger slew its back end directly into the steel light post, almost as if it was a designed maneuver. He saw the offside rear door staved in as if by a giant fist, saw the Charger shudder and squeal like a stuck pig. The car’s front end, with Evan in it, stuck out into the road at an almost forty-five-degree angle. But she couldn’t—she wouldn’t—attempt such a thing.
He was running toward the wreck, having braked wildly, thrown his car into park, and hurtled himself the intervening twenty yards. The Charger’s rear left-side passenger door had burst open, a figure impaled so many times Ben could scarcely count the projectiles half-out, spine bent viciously backward, arms dragging on the ground, blood staining the street black, glistening like oil in the sodium lights. Flames danced across the backseat.
In his haste to reach Evan, he stumbled over one of the man’s arms, kicking something forward—his gun, maybe. But there was no time to look, no time to waste. He hauled on the driver’s door, but it was locked. He’d had to do this many times before, from Berlin to Bratislava. Pulling out his utility knife, he swung its blunt butt end to smash the safety glass. Pebbled shards showered down outside and inside the Charger. He pulled the latch, swung the door open. The heat from the flames hit him then as they moved faster, reaching the impaled man, greedily eating through his skin, fat, and muscle. It sounded like the fire was smacking its lips. The stench was revolting.
Evan was unconscious. Blood oozed from a wound along the left side of her skull. That told him it wasn’t deep. Her skull hadn’t been pierced. He fumbled with the seatbelt buckle but couldn’t get it to unsnap. Evan was locked in. The rear of the car was on fire. Perhaps the spreading black pool he’d seen on the ground was actually a mixture of blood and oil. In that case, the wreck could go up in a fireball at any moment.
He squatted down in order to get a better angle on the buckle. That’s when he saw the object he had kicked when he’d stumbled over the man’s arm. It wasn’t his gun after all. It was something small and smooth, glinting in the murky dark as if it were metallic. Something dangled from it. Dimly, he heard sirens wailing in the distance. Without giving the object a closer look, he picked it up and put it in his pocket. Now, from this lower angle he was able to slide the seatbelt’s obstinate metal piece out of the holster. Quickly now, he unstrapped Evan. Scooping her up, he ran with her back toward his car.
“Evan,” he said, and more urgently, “Evan!”
Her eyelids fluttered open, her eyes trying to focus on him.
“Ben?”
“I’m here. I’ve got you.”
Almost to the car.
“Where …” She paused, her tongue emerging to lick her lips. “Where were you?”
“Behind you.”
“I looked for you … I looked but I didn’t see you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have …” But her voice was fading. Her lids at half-mast.
“Evan, Evan! Stay awake!” He was terrified that she’d sustained a concussion.
He reached the car, managed to grab the door handle, maneuvered her gently into the backseat. The sirens were wailing wildly, only a couple of blocks away now.
“Evan!” Her eyes were closed. He slapped her cheek. “Wake up! Look at me.” He nodded, smiling through gritted teeth. “Try to stay awake, okay?”
She mumbled something he couldn’t make out.
He leaned in over her. “It’s important you stay awake, yeah?”
Slamming the door shut, he raced around and slid into the driver’s seat. Throwing the car into gear, he took off in a spray of filthy rainwater.
They were nowhere in sight when the first responders turned the corner and came upon the bloody scene. All there was left to see was the Charger going up in a ball of smoke and flame.
5
KUBINKA, MOSCOW
The rain had abated, replaced by a wind that cut through every layer of clothing like a knife through cheese. May was a capricious month in Moscow. Kobalt hurried across the tarmac at Kubinka military air base. The SVR jet Dima had had prepared for this occasion was fueled and ready. Her heavily armored staff car had completed the approximately forty-three-mile journey in gloaming as the sun struggled to open its bleary eyes and rise amid the city’s blocky high-rises.
A pair of SVR drones were already on hand, standing to either side of the plane’s mobile Jetway. When one of them made to help her, she swatted his hand away. The other drone, his face trying its best to be impassive, handed her a hard-sided briefcase. It was made of titanium and was lead-lined to stop X-rays from penetrating its secrets.
Once inside the plane, Kobalt took a seat at a work desk as the Jetway folded up into the fuselage. There were no other passengers. The pilot and navigator had already been given their instructions and worked out their flight plan.
Kobalt placed the briefcase on her lap. She coded in the release mechanism on the digital lock, snapped open the lid. Inside, set into gray foam, was a 9mm GSh-18 handgun with an eighteen-round magazine and bullets that could pierce body armor. Three knives—a larger one with a serrated blade, a medium-sized dagger, and a small knife that fit in a sheath that strapped around her ankle. Two coils placed one on top of the other, each two feet in length. The first was made of nylon monofilament; the second was a bit thicker and made of steel, twisted into a spiral. Both had small wooden handles at each end.
In a folder set within a snap pouch on the inside of the lid were all the papers needed for her new legend: passports and driver’s licenses for Russia, Turkey, Germany, and America all bore her face and her name: Karin Wagner. She was variously a cultural attaché, an importer-exporter, and a sales rep for a digital marketing firm. Should anyone check, the two businesses had websites, made to look alive and active. Emails, texts, and phone queries would go directly to OT Directorate, who created the docs for her. Keeping the folder out, she closed and locked the case, set it on the seat next to her. Then she set about memorizing Karin Wagner’s bio and CV.
The engines revved up and the jet rolled along the taxiway to the foot of the runway. But abruptly it stopped, the engines powering down. Kobalt—Karin—looked up, saw the flight attendant unsealing the door, then looked out to see the Jetway being redeployed. Moments later, someone carrying a black case ran up the steps and entered the plane.
Anton Antonovich Zherov.
Smiling like a lithe cat who had swallowed an obstreperous canary, he sauntered down the aisle toward her. He was tall and slender, moved with a dancer’s stealth and grace, and possessed a mind like a steel trap. He forgot nothing, thus held grudges until the end of time or got his own back from those who he felt had wronged him. He was a dangerously loose cannon who had never met an order he didn’t disagree with, so much so that spetsnaz had bounced him. The only place for him to wash up was Zaslon, where Dima, indulging his constant shenanigans, took advantage of his adored mentor’s status with Zherov to wring the best out of him.
“So, Natasha”—he never referred to her operational name, preferring to think of her as Natasha Fatale, partner of Boris Badenov in the American cartoon series The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show—“what are we up to?”
“My current le
gend is Karin. Karin Wagner,” she said coolly as he sat down in the seat opposite her.
“To reiterate, what are we up to, Karin?” he enunciated with the exaggerated precision of an elocution teacher.
“Better buckle up, Anton,” she said, as the engines revved up again. And when he had complied: “You mean you haven’t been briefed.”
He shook his head. “Dima said there wasn’t time.”
The jet’s engines rose to a scream as the plane raced down the runway and, lifting off, vanished into a sky thick as cotton wool.
*
“I take it this brief is highly personal,” Anton said, as he crossed one leg over the other, brushed imaginary lint off his trousers.
“It is.” Kobalt stared at him. “So what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Dima’s orders, Natasha.” He smiled his maddeningly skin-deep smile, opaque as porcelain.
“I need you like I need a third tit. We’ll drop you off in Istanbul. You can find your way home from there.”
Instead of answering her, Anton hoisted the case he’d brought onto his lap, opened it, swiveled it around for her to see. The interior looked much like hers, with its dark gray foam bed. But instead of small arms, Anton’s case cradled a Scorpion EVO 3 submachine gun. It fired 9x19mm Parabellum ammunition, with two thirty-round magazines clamped together for faster loading. The stock was currently in a separate bed. It was lightweight, as some of the parts were made of a polymer material. It was a fine concealed carry weapon, lethal as hell, firing in semi-auto, three-round bursts, or full-auto modes.
The Kobalt Dossier Page 4
