by Mark Henshaw
Rostow nodded. The president seemed calm and serious. Arrogance was the one emotion Cooke could read well and Rostow had no shortage of it, but she saw none in him at the moment. The man was trying to be sincere, or at least as honest as he could be. “Kathy, I don’t doubt anything you said. Not one word,” Rostow said. “But the people who sit on this side of this desk don’t get to think small, and cutting big deals with hostile nations to save a person here and there is almost always a mistake. I give Maines a pardon and the next Snowden wannabe will see it and think he can jump ship for Russia or China or who-knows-where the next time his agency does something to offend his sensibilities because he’ll expect us to forgive everything just to shut him up.”
Across the Atlantic, six answers formed in Jon’s mind to rebut the president. He considered what Kyra would say, and fought down the urge to speak.
“I’m not a fan of CIA,” Rostow continued. “I’ve never made that a secret, but I’m not stupid enough to think that this country doesn’t need it or NSA or any of the other agencies, no matter what sins you people have committed in the past. But you can’t run an intelligence community where every officer in it thinks he can toss his secrecy oath out with his classified trash in a burn bag. So Maines gets nothing. And if men die and it goes public, the next Snowdon disciple won’t have any doubts about the price he’ll have to pay for switching teams. Do your best to save our people and our assets. If you can’t, I won’t hold you responsible.”
Cooke didn’t believe he meant the last sentence, but kept her face still. “Yes, sir.”
• • •
Cooke said nothing on the walk to the Agency car waiting outside on West Executive Avenue. She closed the door and the armored vehicle began to move. She picked up the secure phone mounted between the front seats and dialed a number she had learned by heart in the last two days.
“That was not what I was expecting,” Jon said, no pleasantries first. The crypto played games with his voice, stripping it of what little warmth she’d ever heard in it.
“You thought he’d make the deal?” Cooke asked.
“No. Turning us down, that I expected. I didn’t expect Rostow to actually listen to us.”
“He didn’t, until I told him you helped capture that nuke last year,” Cooke said. “Presidents don’t often talk to the people whom they almost killed with their stupidity. That was probably the first time he’s ever shared words with someone his political ambitions directly hurt. I don’t know if it will last, but at least he made his decision on the merits for once.” Cooke watched a class of schoolchildren cross Constitution Avenue, making their way to the Lincoln Memorial.
“So did he turn us down because he really believes in the decision, or is he just trying to put a shank in your ribs?”
“The former, I think. He’s probably right, about not making the deal,” she said. “It would be the clean, easy solution now, but it would set us up for more trouble later.”
“Doesn’t matter now either way,” Jon replied. “And there will always be another Edward Snowden or Edward Lee Howard whether we cut a deal with Maines or not.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Cooke agreed, rueful. “But it’s not the future traitors we have to worry about now, just the one in Berlin today.” She exhaled hard and looked out the car window. The trees along the George Washington Parkway had exploded into their full palette of reds, oranges, and yellows. Along with the temperature, the leaves would start falling soon. “I want you and Kyra to work with Barron and figure out which assets are likely to be first on the Kremlin’s list. Prioritize who needs to be saved—”
“And who we hang out in the wind?” Jon interrupted.
“Something like that,” Cooke admitted. “It might help if we knew what kind of technology Lavrov is selling now, and who the customer is.”
“We’re working on that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Vogelsang Military Base (Abandoned)
Vogelsang Village, the city of Zehdenick, Brandenburg, Germany
65 kilometers north of Berlin
The village of Vogelsang barely qualified for the title. The outpost was a tiny borough, not sixty miles west of the Polish border and home to fewer than a thousand people. Kyra suspected that only the solar-energy farm that dominated the southwestern quarter kept the place on the map. The only other site of interest was a deserted facility to the northwest that the Germans here were trying very hard to forget altogether.
Kyra navigated the Zehdenicker Strasse road that ran through the village center until the small town disappeared around a bend in her rearview mirror. A small railway station made of old brick and flanked by large oaks passed on her left as she paralleled the railroad tracks running north and south.
“There should be a turnoff to the left,” Jon advised, staring at an iPad.
“Paved road?” Kyra asked.
“We’re not so lucky.”
There was no marked crossing, so Kyra turned the truck and drove over the median, bushes scraping the undercarriage and doors until she reached the railroad tracks and bounced the vehicle across those too. She navigated down a slope and onto the cleared dirt pathway that ran southwest along the tree line. The trail darkened under the forest canopy as she made a long turn to the northwest. Kyra stopped the truck after a quarter mile.
“What is it?” Jon asked. The road ahead was open.
“I think we should park back here off the road and walk in through the trees. If there’s anyone in there, they’ll be watching the road.”
Jon didn’t like the idea, but Kyra could see that he had no good argument against it. She pulled the truck off to the side and killed the engine.
Jon stared at the iPad and manipulated the screen with his fingers. “GPS says we’re about a mile off. We could walk it in twenty minutes if we stayed on the road. Stomping through the brush . . . we’ll probably need an hour at least.”
Kyra shrugged and dismounted from the cab. She hoisted her pack out of the truck bed and fit her arms through the straps. “I’ve got no place to be right now,” she observed. “And it’ll take two at least if we’re trying to be quiet. I hope there’s nobody where we’re going, because it’s going to be pretty hard to walk quiet through all of this.” Jon nodded in agreement and took up his own pack. Kyra took the lead, pushing ahead on foot where their truck couldn’t go, Jon following behind.
The Brandenburg woods were so very like Virginia’s that Kyra wanted to get lost in them, thinking that she might see her family’s home on the James River when she finally emerged. She knew better and chased the childish thought out of her mind. There was a place far less welcoming somewhere down the overgrown path that she and Jon were walking.
After a half hour, they switched and Jon took the lead, trampling down the brush. He hadn’t gone a hundred yards before he stopped. “What?” Kyra asked, her voice quiet.
“Concrete wall,” he muttered back. Kyra followed his gaze and saw it, a solid obstruction not quite as tall as herself. The gray concrete was stained by weather but still intact. It ran through the woods perpendicular to the open trail to their right before turning northwest and running parallel off into the distance as far as Kyra could see.
“Actually, that’s good for us,” she offered. “We get behind it and the wall will muffle our sound and hide us from anyone watching the road.”
They approached the wall and Jon stopped, locking his hands together to offer the woman a step up. She put her foot in his hands and he lifted her up until she could pull herself over. “How big was this place?” she asked.
“Twenty-five miles on a side, give or take,” Jon replied. He gave himself a short running start up the wall and pulled himself over. “It’s amazing the spy planes missed it. Vogelsang was the Soviet’s first nuclear missile base outside of Russia. Fifteen thousand men and their families were stationed here. They refused to pull out and leave it until ’94, a good five years after the Wall fell.”
The abando
ned base checkpoint was another half mile up the road, a small brick cabin. Bricks were missing from the wall, large sections of paint or siding still hanging from the sides. A pair of large Douglas firs stood watch where the Soviet guards had manned the post decades before them.
“I can’t decide whether this would be a good place to meet an asset or not,” Kyra remarked, looking around.
“It’s remote,” Jon offered. “The only people who would stumble onto you would be hikers and hobbyists.”
“Or intelligence officers looking for bad men,” Kyra responded drily. “But that’s the problem . . . it’s too remote. There’s no good cover story for being at a place like this, so far out. You’re either here because you’re curious, or you’re doing something you don’t want anyone to see. Nothing in between.”
Jon grunted and trudged on.
Reaching the main complex took another forty minutes. The trail broke open into a glade, then into a small city of crumbling buildings that was a horror film waiting to be made. Some of the buildings still looked to be in decent shape at a distance, while others looked like they were one good storm away from coming apart. Every window she could see was broken, whether from vandals or hard weather, Kyra couldn’t tell. On one windowsill leading into a men’s dormitory, a pair of leather boots sat where their owner had left them or some other visitor had replaced them. Massive hot-water heaters sat rusting outside dormitory buildings, turning green and red from oxidation. Murals still decorated the low concrete walls that ran down roads, showing laborers building fortifications and Soviet flags waving in a nonexistent wind. Cyrillic signs still sat upright, directing nonexistent pedestrians and cars toward the different buildings.
A concrete frieze of Lenin appeared as they turned a corner, the dead Soviet founder dressed in suit and tie, with an overcoat being lifted by an unseen breeze. Chunks of the stone had been torn out, and the bloodred background around the embedded statue had dulled with time and weather. “I’m surprised the Germans haven’t knocked that down by now,” Kyra said.
“Give them time,” Jon answered. “From what I read, the government wants to tear this whole place down.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Kyra asked.
“No,” Jon admitted. “But I’ve been places that made me feel like this.”
“Like where?”
“Auschwitz, for one. The Holocaust Museum, for another,” Jon replied. “Don’t tell our German hosts I said that.”
“I do know how to keep a secret,” she assured him. “We could look around here for days and not find anything. Where do we start?”
Jon pulled out his iPad, checked the map, then oriented himself by looking at the buildings around them. “We’re here, I think,” he said, pointing at a spot in a large cluster of buildings. He moved his finger to a spot a kilometer or more to the southwest, another small village of overgrown buildings. “Strelnikov had a bad knee, so I’d guess he wouldn’t park far from wherever the meeting went down. The main road leads here.”
Kyra dropped her pack onto the concrete walkway and extracted a folding waterproof map case. She opened it and pulled out an old diagram—a Soviet military map of the Vogelsang facility, offered up by the German government at Barron’s request. She held her smartphone over the Cyrillic words, and watched the portable computer translate the foreign-alphabet print into English letters. She held it up next to Jon’s iPad. “Commandant’s office?” she suggested.
Jon shrugged. “Makes sense that the GRU chairman would take the base commander’s old home for himself, I guess.”
Kyra saw a sign with Cyrillic letters in neat rows, arrows next to the words pointing in different directions. She aimed her smartphone at the words. The sign appeared on her screen, the handheld computer thought for a few seconds, and the Cyrillic letters disappeared, overwritten by English in the same size. The top line read Commandant’s Office.
“That way,” Kyra said.
• • •
The commandant’s office was a two-story building with an enclosed red-brick entrance that jutted out from the front. The front steps were half as wide as the entire house, with low brick walls framing the sides. Rusted outlets for lights sat out above the front door, the bulbs long since smashed out. Iron rails topped the entry on three sides, forming a small veranda where the commandant might well have spent his evenings, smoking Cuban cigars and swilling the local beer or something harder shipped in from Moscow. The plaster siding had peeled away from much of the facade, exposing the brown brick underneath. The front door, weathered and split wood, hung open on corroded hinges and Kyra could see through the building all the way to the back. A large dormitory that had housed soldiers of the armored corps stationed at Vogelsang sat off behind some smaller trees a few hundred feet to the right of the house.
“Tire tracks, a few different sets . . . not sure how many,” Kyra said, searching the ground. “Pretty recent, I think. The ground is still a little muddy from the rain.” She climbed the low steps, stopped, and listened. She heard nothing, not even birds in the nearby evergreens.
“This was probably the nicest home on base, back in the day,” Jon observed. “Creeped out yet?”
“It’s just an old building,” Kyra said with a shrug. Central Virginia, home, had more than its share of abandoned old buildings, some as old as the Revolution itself. She extracted a flashlight from her pack and moved quietly inside.
The walls inside had faired little better than those without. The wallpaper was shredded and large chunks of broken drywall exposed the frames and wiring underneath. Fallen plaster crunched under her boots, and she kicked one of the larger pieces through a hole in the timbers of the floor. It rattled as it fell down a few feet. Kyra looked down.
“Footprints,” she said. “Boots by the look of them, but somebody had a pair of dress shoes.” The dust had been disturbed, mostly by shoes with fat treads, but also a pair with a flat sole.
They searched the ground floor and found nothing besides the signs of recent movement across the floor. Kyra used her smartphone to document them with digital pictures before the analysts moved up the stairs to the second floor.
The first two rooms were no different from the ones they’d seen on the ground floor, more entropy at work on the wood and wallpaper, but the third was what they’d come to see. A chair sat in the corner, a wooden stool in the center of the room. Both had only the smallest bits of dust on their seats. A length of cord sat on the floor next to a black hood.
“Bet you ten dollars this is where they arrested Strelnikov,” Kyra offered.
“Sucker’s bet. I’ll keep my money. The ante is too low to be interesting.”
“You think we should bag that stuff,” Kyra asked, nodding at the hood and the rope.
Jon shook his head. “Just photograph the room. If this is where Strelnikov checked out, then it’s a crime scene, technically speaking. I don’t think the Germans would be very happy with you tampering with evidence.”
Kyra shrugged, and photographed the room and its contents. She stared around, looking for any missed details. “There’s nothing else here. I don’t see anything that could tell us what Lavrov is working on.”
Jon’s gaze had become unfocused and Kyra recognized the thousand-yard stare that he fell into when he was thinking. “That Syrian officer wouldn’t have come all the way out here just to talk with Lavrov,” he said, working the puzzle as he spoke. “They could’ve done that at the embassy, or just over a secure phone. He must’ve come to Berlin so Lavrov could show him something . . . or give him something.”
“Maybe Lavrov wanted to show him that he’d caught Strelnikov?” Kyra suggested. “Show him that his operation was secure?”
Jon shook his head. “A photograph would have done that just as well. No need for him to see that in person, or at least not to see only that in person. He must’ve come here for something that Lavrov couldn’t just share remotely,” he suggested. “And Lavrov is a technology dealer
.”
Kyra saw where his line of logic was going. “You think Lavrov brought him here to demonstrate something, or deliver something? A weapon?”
“Or some other piece of technology.”
“Why not do that in Russia?” Kyra asked.
“Good question. I don’t know,” he admitted. “But if the Syrian did come here for a weapons test or a technology demonstration, where would Lavrov set it up?”
Kyra pulled out the base diagram again. “Assuming he wanted to keep the demonstration secure, he wouldn’t want to do it around here. The base is enormous. Anyone could stumble in from a dozen different directions. There’s no way he could secure the place without bringing in a regiment, and that would be hard to hide from the locals.”
Jon stared at the diagram and put his finger down on a spot to the southwest. “The actual missile base? It would be easier to lock down a smaller group of buildings than this main complex . . . and it had its own living quarters, workshops, and hard storage bunkers where everything could be secured. If Lavrov wanted a self-contained space where he could mount up some actual security, that would be the place, because it probably was the most secure place on the base when this place was actually operational. But that’s just me doing some mirror imaging. I’m not a Russian intelligence officer.”
“It sounds logical. Let’s hope that Lavrov is a logical man,” Kyra offered in support.
“You think I’m wrong?”
“No, I’m worried that you’re right,” Kyra replied. “And I’m really worried that his people will still be there.”
