by Mark Henshaw
IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT
Your national or local police
General Secretariat of INTERPOL
Lavrov smiled. “You will tell me what I need to know, and once that is done, I will take you to Moscow and see to it that you get a permit for work and residency. I will also help you secure an apartment. That should be enough for you to start building a life.”
Maines’s face twisted in disbelief at the words. “What I know is worth millions of dollars, tens of millions, and I’m only asking for a fraction of that.”
“Mr. Maines, please.” Lavrov shook his head in pity. “I am surprised that someone who has lived in the United States so long should have such a poor understanding of capitalism.” He paused, then leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. Each empty second stretched out in the air. Finally he spoke. “Intelligence secrets are strange things. We collect them at great cost, and they are valuable not because they tell us what to do, but because they tell us what not to do. They prevent mistakes of judgment and save us the costs of wrong guesses. And yet, once such a secret is revealed, it loses all its power. The enemy realizes that we know his secret and changes his behavior. He shuts off the means by which we stole his secrets. We lose the power of the secret itself and some of our ability to gather more through the same means. So the cost of collecting our enemy’s secrets goes up.”
Lavrov leaned forward again, his features hardening. “One does not pay a mole to reveal his country’s secrets. One pays a mole for his access, which is much more valuable. Time destroys the value of any information he gives up, no matter how important. Secrets are just another perishable commodity and a mole is the broker. We pay a broker not for his product, but for his ability to provide that product.” Lavrov leaned back, gathered his thoughts again, then smiled. “Now you have no access and you are a wanted man. So you need my protection and the only currency you have to barter for it is the information you have in your head. And without the ability to acquire more, what you have devalues as we speak. Your value to me diminishes by the hour. So, cooperate now and we will grant you residency with no extradition. From time to time, we will use you to embarrass your government and highlight its hypocrisy, and you will smile and cooperate with our networks and newspapers to do it.”
Maines ground his teeth together, his face flushing red. “I’ll take my information to someone else.”
“A poor threat,” Lavrov advised. “If you will not share your information with us, then your only value to me will lie entirely in the goodwill I will earn from the Germans and the Americans when I walk you out the front door where the German federal police will be waiting.”
Maines’s head was throbbing now. His desire to murder Lavrov right here, smash his brains out against the table, almost overcame his own desire for self-preservation. The driver was still outside the door, and he was probably Spetsnaz, more than a match for a mildly obese CIA officer just past his prime. But this was all beyond his control . . . not how this meeting was supposed to have gone. He couldn’t even walk out of the embassy now. “So why not just toss me in a cell?”
“You’re not a prisoner,” Lavrov told him. “You are just not in a position of leverage.”
“So that guard outside the door is just a free concierge service you offer all of your clients?” Maines asked. He suspected the sarcasm would be lost on the Russian.
“Not at all,” Lavrov said. “He will make sure you do not roam the embassy. You were a CIA officer, and there is always the possibility that you are not a true defector. We don’t want you to steal any more of our secrets than you already have.” The Russian pushed away from the table and smiled. “I do enjoy honesty. Do you not, Mr. Maines? We get so few opportunities to indulge in it. It is a rare delicacy for men of our occupation.”
“I don’t think you want me to indulge in honesty much right now,” Maines warned him.
“So long as you are truthful when you give us the names, the rest I will forgive,” Lavrov replied. “But it is not in your interest for any negotiation to drag on. Time is no friend of yours now. I suggest you make your decision within the next day or so.”
Lavrov stepped outside into the hall and closed the door behind him. Maines heard his footsteps shuffle away from the small room and was left to listen to the buzz of the harsh lights and his own thoughts.
CHAPTER TWO
Office of the Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Liberty Crossing Complex
McLean, Virginia
Kathy Cooke’s new office was quite austere. Six months into her new appointment, the former CIA director had enjoyed little time to arrange it to her liking. Papers sat in manila folders organized in neat stacks on the desk, edges aligned as with a ruler. Personal trophies that meant nothing to anyone but the owner occupied the shelves that other people would have used for books, including several ceremonial weapons that were probably illegal to have in a federal building. There were no diplomas or performance awards hanging on the walls, and the pictures were all of family, with none of the usual vanity photos of the occupant shaking hands with this president or that foreign leader. Humility was a rare trait among senior government officials, but Cooke had learned early on that a healthy dose of meekness tended to save her a lot of trouble later on.
She’d always kept her office at CIA mostly impersonal for the duration of her five-year tenure, in no small part because she’d never expected to hold the job very long. Leaders at that level of government service tended to have short terms in office, usually lasting only until some new president was elected. That she had survived under two surprised her more than anyone else, and Rostow had made it no secret that he’d wanted her out. She hadn’t really wanted to retire from the job, but the president was no respecter of the Agency and Cooke had resisted his maneuvering more to protect the people at Langley than out of any personal ambition. Had Rostow been a better man, she would have been happy to retire. She wasn’t yet fifty, her professional options would have been legion, and she and Jon could finally have gotten on with the personal life they’d kept on hold for too long.
Jon, she thought. Cooke hadn’t seen the chief of CIA’s Red Cell for almost a month now. Langley was just a few miles up the road to the northeast, but her promotion had put more distance between them than the geography. Her schedule was hardly conducive to having any kind of personal life.
Cooke had no idea how her boss had convinced the chief executive to promote her. She hadn’t wanted the job, had even thought about rejecting it when the DNI had called. But she served at the pleasure of the president, even when the man was a hostile, arrogant cuss. The Senate had confirmed her fairly quickly, and the only votes not cast in her favor had been abstentions.
She’d decided to give it three years. Three years would satisfy her sense of duty, she thought, and then she would walk away. But there were still issues to resolve before that happened. The most distressing was the one she could do the least about at the moment.
Cooke stared down at the copy of Der Spiegel. CIA had attached a printed translation of the lead article on the German daily’s front page.
The German Federal Criminal Investigation Office reported today that its officers recovered a drowning victim from the Großer Müggelsee Lake southeast of Berlin. Forensic investigators have identified the victim as retired lieutenant general Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov, director of Russia’s Foundation for Advanced Research . . .
The secure phone rang, interrupting her reading. She knew who was calling and what the subject of conversation would be. She’d told her secretary to block every other call from anyone who ranked lower than herself, which was almost everyone in the intelligence community now. She picked up the handset. “How’s Berlin?” she asked without preamble.
“Depressing.” Clark Barron’s voice was deep, the resonance masked by the digital encryption, but the man’s somber tone came across the line perfectly clear. The CIA director of the Nat
ional Clandestine Service was an unhappy man at the moment. “I’ve got a cable coming your way with the details, but I wanted to give you an informal report first,” he said. “The Bundesnachrichtendienst let me see the body and their forensic evidence. It’s Strelnikov, no question. Coroner says he drowned.” The Bundesnachrichtendienst was Germany’s foreign intelligence service.
“He drowned?” Cooke asked, incredulous. “How does a former Spetsnaz officer drown?” The question was entirely rhetorical.
Barron answered it anyway. “By having someone hold his head under,” he offered. “I think Maines gave him up, but this isn’t the way the Russians do business. They keep suspects stuck in the homeland while they build airtight cases, and then they nail them. They don’t send them abroad to execute them, and they sure don’t move this fast. Doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“Yeah,” Cooke acknowledged. She stared out his window, then shut her eyes tight, wishing the reality away. One of the CIA’s most important assets was dead. The only question now was how the Russians had found him out, and the most likely answer promised more disasters to come.
Cooke shunted her emotions aside and set herself to the business. “Clark, I’m going to send Jon and Kyra out to you. They’re good at pulling things like this apart.”
“Yeah, they are,” Barron confirmed. “How fast can you get them out here?”
“I’ll have them on a plane to Berlin by tonight.”
Cooke couldn’t see the NCS director nod his head on the other side of the Atlantic. “I’ll pick them up. One question . . . do they have a blank check to follow this thing into Moscow?”
“If that’s where the trail leads. Your discretion,” Cooke said. “One more thing, Clark?”
“Yeah, boss?”
“If you get a chance to bring Maines home, you don’t need to be gentle with him on my account.”
“Understood,” Barron replied. “He’ll come home breathing and mentally undamaged. He’ll have to consider anything else a bonus.”
“Roger that,” Cooke said. “Good hunting.” She didn’t wait for her subordinate to hang up the phone before doing it herself. She swiveled her chair around to face her computer and checked the in-box. Barron’s promised cable hadn’t arrived yet. The DNI was waiting for his own briefing and she wasn’t going to deliver it until she had the official report in hand. She was tempted to call over to CIA’s operations center to ask about it, but decided to wait. No doubt Barron had marked up the electronic report with all of the code words and crypts that would send it screaming through the system to his in-box as fast as the system would allow. It would be on her screen within the hour, barring inattention of incompetence of the ops center staff, and, if not, the thrashing they would receive wouldn’t be dished out over the phone.
Cooke exhaled in frustration, checked her watch, and the waiting started again.
Flughafen Berlin-Tegel Airport
Tegel, Borough of Reinickendorf
Berlin, Germany
The morning fog covered the German fields in gray smoke, hiding the fields until the plane was nearly on the ground. Kyra Stryker couldn’t see the sun or sky once the aircraft was on the tarmac, which was slick from a storm that had passed through during the night. Silver puddles were scattered across the blacktop, spraying in all directions as planes and support trucks drove through them.
She had not expected to visit Germany during her career, certainly not during her first ten years anyway. European assignments were so often reserved for senior officers who had served their time in less desirable posts and had the personal connections on Langley’s Seventh Floor to lock up the positions they wanted. Getting the truly prized assignments required both a track record and inside help. Kyra knew she could and would be good at it, but three years’ working in the Red Cell had left her wondering whether she wanted to try.
Kyra exhaled hard. The man next to her looked at her sideways. “Nervous?” Jonathan Burke, the chief of the Red Cell didn’t turn his head to confirm the guess. Jon wore his usual khakis and an oxford shirt, no tie or jacket. He kept both on a hanger behind his office door but she’d never seen him wear them. Only God and the White House get a coat and tie, he’d once said, and she’d never seen the middle-aged man break that rule for anyone else. Few noticed. He avoided people as much as they allowed.
“About the mission? No,” Kyra said after a moment’s thought, surprising herself. “After you’ve been shot at, not much else gets the blood pressure up. It’s hard to care about what people think after someone’s made a serious effort to kill you. But it does get really hard to put up with stupidity.”
“And now you see why people consider me prickly,” Jon said.
“They’re not wrong,” she teased.
• • •
Both customs and the luggage handlers lived up to the myth of German efficiency, and the analysts were in the city within the hour. Berlin fascinated Kyra as it passed by in the window. She’d seen so many cities that had sacrificed their character for modern amenities, but Berlin had retained a look of old history. There were few true skyscrapers jutting above the stone buildings and rounded domes that looked centuries old. It was impressive, she thought, given how much of skyline had been bombed into wreckage by the Allies during the Second World War and how much had been rebuilt while the city served as the front line of the Cold War. These Germans had survived hell itself for decades and Berlin was now the testament to their endurance.
The hotel was a decent choice, and Kyra had breakfast brought up to her room. She rarely slept on planes and the pilot stubbornly had plowed through a series of Atlantic storms, robbing her of what little rest she might have enjoyed. Jon was always telling her not to substitute caffeine for sleep, but time was a zero-sum game in counterintelligence, always working for the hunter or the prey, but never both. Kyra didn’t want to give Alden Maines or the Russians more time. German coffee and energy drinks would solve the jet-lag problem for one day at the cost of shaky hands, but she would manage it.
The U.S. Embassy was close, eight blocks away on foot. The Marine guards ran their IDs and let them pass. Like them, Clark Barron was a visitor with no office in the building of his own. It took some time to find the man and an unused classified space where they could talk.
The conference room was government standard except for the high-backed leather chairs that surrounded the table. The windows gave a view to the north and a small curio case of foreign gifts sat in one of the opposite corners. Relief maps of every continent but their own hung on the walls.
“Good to see you both again. It’s been a while since Pioneer and the Farm,” the NCS director said.
“Better times than this,” Jon agreed. “What can we do for you?”
“To keep it short and blunt, we’ve got a case that makes no sense. And it’ll probably be the most tightly compartmented case you’ll ever get read into at the Agency.”
Barron set a copy of Der Spiegel on the table with a printed translation of one article attached. “Three days ago, the German Federal Criminal Investigation Office pulled a body out of the Großer Müggelsee Lake southeast of Berlin. Forensic investigators identified him as retired lieutenant general Stepan Illarionovich Strelnikov, director of the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research, their version of DOD’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. The Moscow Times ran his obituary today. The Russian government says he drowned while going for a swim.”
Jon pulled the article across the table, turned it around, and scanned the translated page. “It’s not every day that a retired Russian flag officer drowns, is it?”
“Not one who’s the Russian equivalent of a Navy SEAL.” Barron handed the analysts a folder. The first page was Strelnikov’s biography, with a stapled photograph of a man dressed in a Russian general’s uniform, portly, with pronounced jowls, dark eyes, and the dour expression that seemed to be a Russian birthright.
Biographical and Leadership Report NC1232
Leadership
Division/Office of Assessment
STRELNIKOV, Stepan Illarionovich
Professional Biography
• DoB: 19 Nov 1960
• PoB: Volgograd, Volgograd Oblast, Russia
• 1982: Graduate, Moscow State Technical University imeni Bauman
• 1984: Graduate, KGB Higher Communications School, Kharkov
• 1984: Company Commander, 72nd Independent Radio-Electronic Combat Regiment, Bagram, Afghanistan
• 1985: Deputy Chief of Staff, 413th Special Radio-Electronic Combat Battalion, Group of Soviet Forces Germany, Karl Marx Stadt
• 1986: Executive Officer, 4th Special Warfare Brigade (SPETSNAZ), Kabul, Afghanistan
• 1989–1990: Professional status unknown; stationed at Soviet Embassy, Berlin, Germany
• 1990 (Dec)–1991 (Feb): Defense Attache’s office, Baghdad
• 1991–1994: Professional status unknown (Serbia?)
• 1995: Graduate: Military Academy of the General Staff (was: Voroshilov Military Academy)
• 1996: Commander, 11th Radio-Electronic Combat Regiment (Grozhny)
• 1996–1998: Professional status unknown
• 1998–2000: Liaison officer attached to Serbian Army
• 2000–2002: Commander, 7th Independent Undersea Warfare and Special Reconnaissance Regiment, St. Petersburg (SPETSNAZ)
• 2002–2003: Liaison officer (Defense Attache’s office), Baghdad
• 2004–2005: Commanding officer, Voronezh Higher Communications Academy
• 2006–2007: Commanding Officer, Second Directorate (USA & Canada) Main Military Administration (GRU)
• 2008–2012: Senior Military Attache, Caracas, Venezuela; retires from active military service with the GRU, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation
• 2013: Listed as Vice President for Communications Security, “Zelyonsoft” [zelyeniy is Russian for “gold”], St. Petersburg. Strelnikov is introduced at UN conference on global Internet governance as Zelensoft Vice President for Strategic Investment; Strelnikov tells UK/SIS officer at conference he is “retired military.”
