by David Poyer
The oars wove and dipped like dragonflies. Orangeish globes slowly rose above the far shore, became pedestal sconces at a waterfront bar. A slant of wet black stone rose to pilings. Across the narrowing water came the shouts and screams of a rowdy crowd and the bass bumping from a not very good hard rock screamer band.
The chant stopped. The low torpedo they followed curved smoothly and slid beneath an overhanging structure hung with arcs of vibrating scarlet luminescence. The drag against their wet clothes lessened as something slid over the sky. Then came voices and the hollow clunk of fiberglass against wood.
When hands reached down and voices called he could not move or speak in response. The hands found the nylon towlines and unwrapped them. They dragged them up from the black water into air that had to be chilly but felt tropical. He crouched shuddering on all fours, panting and trying not to lose consciousness. Concrete was rough under slime beneath his hands. Something hot ran down his neck. He heard Jack Byrne’s voice, low and unnatural. “Who the fuck are you?” and de Cary’s answer, “Lafayette, I am here.”
“Jack. Jack?”
A grunt, then hacking as if Byrne’s pancreas was coming up. “What the . . . what the fuck, Lenson?”
“That was for the bridesmaid.”
“Never touched the fucking bridesmaid . . . was all over me, though . . . Just fucking drown me. Fucking swallowed half the river.” More coughing, then, “Jesus, that’s cold. Where the . . . what just happened?”
“We bought the Moscow Rowing Club a new shell.”
“And where . . . we going now?”
“Figured you’d have a suggestion. Someplace the FSB doesn’t know about.” He had to stop, he was gagging. Boone Clinic had insisted his shot card be up to date. He hoped it covered whatever he’d just swallowed.
“Right. Out of country ASAP. I know a . . . a safe house. Just got to . . . make a call.”
Headlights came on. An engine started. Henrickson trotted toward them from a parking lot, carrying blankets. Dan tried to get to his feet but halfway up his muscles seemed to lose power. The concrete came up and slammed into the side of his head. Then the black river rolled over him, freezing, smothering, and he didn’t think any more at all.
III
PLAN B
9
Warsaw, Poland
The first thing he did at the apartment was pull off his clothes and head for the shower. Their night swim had been two days before, but he still felt filthy. In those forty-eight hours they hadn’t had more than quick spongedowns with toilet paper in the rocking, jolting W/C compartments of a series of local trains.
He ached all over. His feet were so swollen from sitting up for two days he had to pry off his shoes. Fortunately there were three bathrooms in the apartment, which was beautifully furnished with polished parquet floors, Afghan rugs, and modern paintings that looked real, not prints or reproductions. It was in a secure building with its own guards. The other tenants, Byrne said, were expats or Poles, all wealthy.
The marble-lined shower was big enough to play handball in. The fixtures were gold-plated and the water exquisitely hot. He lathered from head to toe, and when it was soaked through he carefully peeled the bandage off his ear. It itched, which was good. He let it air. He found a woman’s razor in a cabinet and shaved.
When he came out, wrapped in a heavy bathrobe—it was tight in the shoulders and short, and he guessed it belonged to the same woman as the razor—Byrne and Henrickson and de Cary were sitting in their underwear in the kitchen eating cheese and bread. There was a bottle of white wine, too. The kitchen was filled with shining German appliances and tall bottles of peppers, onions, and olives, floating in saffron-tinted oil. “How’s the ear?” Byrne asked him.
“Okay. How’s the hands?”
“Skinning over. Anything in the place, help yourself. I know the girl who lives here. State Department. Air Force Reserve, flies to London every month for her weekend drills.”
“She mind if we smoke?” Monty asked him.
Dan said, “I didn’t know you smoked, Monty. Wait a minute. You don’t.”
“I might start.”
“For a Polish cheese, this is not bad,” said de Cary.
Byrne scratched his crotch. “I guess you could. Only thing to watch is—see that balcony?”
“That one?” de Cary turned.
“No, the far one. See the roof below it? The gray pebbly one, with all the antennas? No, don’t look!”
“We see the antennas,” Dan said. “What about it?”
“That’s the Russian embassy. Right next door. So the balcony’s off-limits, okay?”
“Thanks for getting us out, Jack,” Dan told him. “We’d probably still be locked up in the Embassy.”
He’d come to with the raw fire of brandy in his mouth, someone’s undershirt tied over his bleeding ear, and his head lolling in the back seat of a Lada. He’d sputtered and spat out the taste, as all the tension and terror had swept back in a rush.
Their first stop after the rock bar had been a hole-in-the-wall flat five stories up in what smelled like an old brewery. Byrne said it was a joint safe house, shared by several agencies. This use would burn it, but there were towels and canned food, bottled water, clean clothes, money, and most important, false passports. The airports would be watched, so they’d have to go by train. Security was laxer on rail travel.
So for two days they became drunken Polish vodka dealers. Byrne spoke Polish, Henrickson broke up his Russian to sound foreign, and Dan and de Cary simply sat with bottles in their laps looking stone drunk. This was an excellent disguise on a Russian train; the only difficulty was when another drunk wanted to share. They’d headed east first, then north, before turning west again, buying local tickets at each change, and staying in third class with the farmers and families. They’d crossed the border near Pskov, handing over bottles of Wyborowa with their documents; the border guards spent more time examining the labels than their passports. They’d felt safer in Estonia, but still kept to themselves in first-class compartments through Riga and Kaunas. Dan was impressed with the trains. They looked romantically old-fashioned, with wood and glass and velvet curtains, but were clean, cheap, and on time. Byrne found an Internet café at one stop, and a van was waiting for them at the Wschodnia station. It had taken them to the Embassy clinic for exams and shots, then to this apartment.
“Thanks for getting me out,” Byrne told him. “I’d be in the Lubyanka, sweating out how much I could take before I told them—well, I’ve had access to data we wouldn’t like to become public knowledge. By the way, they’re apeshit over there. The Russian government is enraged. We’re being portrayed as escaped spies.”
“You are an escaped spy,” Dan pointed out.
“Un espion echappe,” de Cary put in. “Unfairly we will be tarred with that same brush. By the way, I should very much like to inform my superiors of my location. So far as they know I am still in Moscow.”
“No calls from here . . . not with those antennas next door.”
“Those are comm antennas, not surveillance antennas,” Dan told him.
“Not that I don’t believe you, but let’s play it safe, all right? I’ll take you over to the main building. There are secure phones there . . . or would you rather go to the French Embassy?”
“Anywhere will do.” De Cary shrugged. “It will not need to be on a secure line.”
The bread was fresh and crusty. The cheese was wonderful. He got up and searched the fridge and came up with apple juice in a cardboard box. He munched and took a sip of juice. He closed his eyes and felt like melting through the chair and running all over the Italian tile.
“When you guys are ready, I’ll take you over,” Byrne said, getting up.
The Embassy was a warren, with shabby covered walkways connecting small back buildings. Their contact’s office was in one. Byrne hadn’t said what the bald man’s job was, but since he’d picked them up at the train station in civvies, Dan assumed h
e was the Agency resident. Adding to that impression was the huge Rottweiler that had sat in the back of the van with them as they edged through the streets of Warsaw. Bone, the man called him. Bone didn’t bother them, but he didn’t beg to be petted, either. He carried himself like a professional; courteous, but detached. The kind of dog a man owned when he had reason to carry a gun but wasn’t allowed to. Today when Byrne knocked, the bald man was sitting at a terminal, in a sweater vest with his collar open. A suit jacket hung behind the door. “Hey, Jack. Dan, right? Look better than you did this morning. Coffee, guys?”
Dan said sure.
“Where’s le capitaine?”
Byrne: “At his embassy. Any news out of Moscow?”
“Merle says they declared two of our guys non grata. Out of the attaché’s office.”
“Not Siebeking—”
“No, no, two others—actually one was sort of tangentially involved. With what Jack was doing, not what you were doing.”
If the expellees were from the attaché’s office, and Siebeking hadn’t known what they were doing, somebody wasn’t telling the whole truth. But there was no point going there with this guy. Later, though . . . “Speaking of that, I’d like to figure out who let us go in overt at the same time a covert mission was working the same tasking,” Dan told him. “I realize it’s probably beyond my need to know and over my pay grade, but I’d just like to raise the issue.”
“It’s not uncommon, to run two ops,” Byrne told him, in the tone of a dad explaining to a six-year-old how the motor makes the car go.
“Without letting your right hand know?”
“Even that.”
“My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that the FSB set you up with Komponent from the start,” the bald man mused.
“They were never in earnest about selling?”
“Not to us. They make the kind of deal you were suggesting, which by the way I don’t have any idea where you got the blessing to offer Dvorov that—” He waited but Dan didn’t say, so he went on, “—they agree to that, and bing, they lose downstream sales from every rogue regime that fronts a seacoast.”
“They’d never have passed that up,” Byrne said. “They’d have agreed to Dan’s deal, taken the money, then sold it to the others under the table. Or set up a subsidiary company, a cut-out.”
“Oh, not only that,” the bald man said. “Now they have this big spy scandal, they can double their price. Now it’s super-secret technology even the U.S. wants.”
Dan rubbed his face, reveling in the feeling of clean skin, but suddenly depressed. He’d been naive. Dangerous secrets had a way of bleeding through any barrier, like virus particles passing through a filter. The money passed it, going the other way.
“Anyway, Jack said you needed a secure line?” The Agency guy powered down the computer and took the jacket off the door. He pushed the red Tri-Tac phone toward Dan. “Going over to Visas. You can close the door. Jack?”
“I’ll go with you.”
Dan thanked him again for the use of the apartment. When they were gone he punched in his access code, then numbers from memory, computing the time in his head: it’d be about 07 in Virginia Beach. His CO answered on the first ring. “TAG, Captain Mullaly.”
“Good morning, sir. Commander Lenson. Can we initiate and go secure?”
Hiss. Beep. When they were scrambled Mullaly said, “Dan. I got a message saying you were out of Russia?”
Beep. “Yessir, I’m at the embassy in Warsaw.”
He filled Mullaly in on what had gone wrong. “There’s a possibility Komponent was playing us from the start. So you might want to question whoever gave you the word that they were willing to sell. To us, I mean. Bottom line, sir, Plan A’s not going to work. With all the outrage they’re putting out, the Russians aren’t going to lease us anything with supercavitating technology. They’re treating this like a major spy case. The intel resident says they’ve expelled two of our staff in Moscow.”
“What about unexpended funds?”
He frowned, not following. “Unexpended funds, sir?”
“The money Henrickson put in for. The thirty thousand.”
“Oh. Um, Captain, I’m afraid all those funds were . . . expended.”
Silence. Then Mullaly said, sounding exasperated, “Well, I’m glad you’re both okay, but Monty told me you weren’t going to spend that. That it was for a bona fide.”
“Well, sir, if we hadn’t used it—say, maybe we could charge it off to Navy Intel. Get reimbursed. Should I ask Captain Byrne how to do that?”
“Maybe. But if I take the hit, that gives me a chip the next time I need something from . . . I’m thinking out loud, sorry . . . let me think about that. But right now we’re at the end of the quarter and that puts me over budget.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Well, you did what you thought you had to. You’re probably right, we’re not going to make any time with Dvorov. So we’d better cut our losses and bring you guys home. See if there’s Space-A out of Warsaw, okay? If there isn’t call Dawn and have her cut you four tickets back.”
“Four, sir? There’s just Monty and me—”
“Got another call coming in. See me when you get back.”
“Aye, sir.” He hung up and sat gnawing his lip. “Shit,” he muttered.
A tap on the door, and Byrne put his head in. “Done?”
“I guess.”
Byrne came in holding two pastries. “Raspberry.” He put one in front of Dan and got himself fresh coffee from the maker. “Merle come back yet?”
“No.”
“Everything okay?”
“It’ll work out. My CO’s ticked about my spending all our walking around money. He’s thinking about asking your guys for reimbursement. It’s thirty grand.”
“Hell, he can have it out of my pay,” Byrne said. “I owe you, Dan. I could have been behind those charges for ten, fifteen years.” He added, “Though I wasn’t too happy about it out in the middle of that river.”
“You’d have done it for me.”
“I’d certainly have tried.”
They sat together for a few seconds. Then Byrne cleared his throat. “In fact, thinking about it, seems to me you’re in the wrong end of this business.”
“What end?”
“Yeah, the Navy always needs ship drivers. And I know, backbone of the Fleet, iron men in wooden ships, all that. But basically, any idiot can drive a ship. Left rudder, right rudder, all back full. Not a lot of nuance. Ever thought about the intel community?”
Dan decided not to respond to the blackshoe taunts. He said patiently, “I know you can put in for it. At least, when you’re a jaygee, or a lieutenant.”
“The rules say that, but the nice thing about spookdom is, the rules are not always the rules. If you know what I mean.”
“I’m starting to guess.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, I’ve followed your career, okay? You’re technically savvy. I mean, the Tomahawk program, you found out why they were crashing. You work well in mixed teams. Like the black ops thing in Desert Storm, going into Iraq. Like Korea—yeah, I heard what you did in the Strait. You’re better known than you think.
“We could do better for you than the surface line community is doing. We’d send you to Defense Intelligence College, get you your master’s in intelligence policy. Then put you in operations. We lost a lot of the old guard when the Wall came down. People felt like, well, the Soviets are gone, I can take early retirement. And we downramped our accession pipeline then, too.
“Now the mission’s global again, and we’re stretched thin. The current DNI’d be real interested in somebody like you. So interested—” Byrne gave it a beat, “—I’d guarantee you’d make captain on your first board.”
Dan blinked. Captain was more senior than he’d ever expected to get, even as a dreamy-eyed mid fresh out of Annapolis. He made himself take a minute. Because it was a tempting offer.
“Jack, I appreciate it
, but I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a pookah spook. I know the job you guys have to do. And that you only get noticed when something goes completely to shit. But, call me an idiot, but I’m still hoping for another command.”
“Another destroyer? You already had one, Dan.”
“Well, a deep draft next, I guess. A cruiser, or one of the new Burke class. I miss going to sea, Jack.”
“We go to sea. Half our billets are large-decks, task forces, strike groups. We play in mission planning and post-strike analysis. You’d be on a carrier . . . but you’d be at sea.”
Dan regarded him, knowing the one thing Byrne hadn’t mentioned, that he couldn’t without prejudicing his argument. The line Navy guarded no privilege more jealously than ship command. Over the years, rather than yield it to such Johnny-come-latelies as engineers and oceanographers, it had created separate promotion stovepipes for medical officers, legal officers, meteorologists, intelligence officers. They called these “the restricted line.” Restricted line types competed among themselves for promotion, and led their own organizations. But they didn’t command.
“So you’re thinking . . . let me guess. That the difference would be that you wouldn’t command.”
“You took the words, Jack.”
“Let’s get realistic. Are they ever going to trust you with a ship again? After what happened to Horn?”
He tensed in his chair. “She’s still afloat. I brought her back.”
“She glows in the dark, Dan. She’ll stay behind that wire at the Navy Yard for twenty years.”
“I stopped the—”
“I know, you’re not supposed to talk about it. But you and I know they haven’t forgiven you for that, or for the Congressional, or for second-guessing them on a few other occasions. Including what happened at the White House. You know Niles is being talked about for CNO. It was Nick Niles who put you out to pasture at TAG, right? You think he’s going to give you another shot?”
