The Solomon Effect

by C. S. Graham

  “What will happen to the boy?” asked Tobie. They were in another militia van on their way back to the helipad.

  Andrei took a new pack out of his pocket and shook out a cigarette. “I’ll leave a couple of militiamen at their farm for a few days, just in case. But I don’t think anyone will bother him. He’s told us what he knows.”

  “They could be mercenaries,” said Jax, his thoughts obviously running along a different track entirely.

  “They could be,” Andrei agreed.

  A lot of Special Forces people left the service as soon as they could, taking their training and selling it for big bucks to private ‘security companies.’ Often they worked for the U.S. government. But sometimes they didn’t. Tobie said, “How do we find out who these guys were working for?”

  “If they really were in the American military, their prints should lead us right to them.”

  Tobie felt her stomach clench as the Ansat came into view, its main rotor slowly beating the air. “And if they weren’t? We’re at a dead end, aren’t we?”

  The militia driver braked beside the waiting chopper. Andrei drew the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and said, “Not necessarily.”

  Jax paused with his door half open. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Andrei dropped the half-smoked cigarette in the snow and ground it beneath his heel. “It means there’s someone I think Ensign Guinness might like to meet.”

  Carlos Rodriguez rode the Ural to within two hundred meters of the Polish border. Abandoning the motorbike in a ditch, he cut through a nearby stand of birch until he came out on a Polish road. He thumbed down a trucker, then caught a series of rides that brought him to Gdansh—which had once been the German city of Danzig but was now very, very Polish.

  He booked a flight to Washington, D.C., then found a quiet coffee shop and put in a call to Boyd.

  “The Russians have the kid,” he told Boyd without preamble.

  There was a moment’s tense silence. Boyd said, “Tell me what happened.”

  Rodriguez stared across the concourse to where a woman in a short skirt and high black boots was helping a toddler take off his coat. “They had his house staked out. It was a trap.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was close enough. “They got my entire team.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.” It was important that every man be dead; dead men don’t tell tales. “No one captured. And they were all sterile.”

  Boyd’s voice was a gravelly rasp. “You must be losing your edge, to fall into a trap like that.”

  Rodriguez tightened his jaw. “It was an FSB operation. They had their first team in there.”

  Again, a fierce silence. Boyd said, “When can you get back here?”

  “My flight leaves in an hour.”

  “We’ll talk when you get here,” said Boyd, and hung up.

  Rodriguez glanced again at the woman. As if conscious of showing too much leg, she’d crouched down. He turned away.

  The failure to kill the boy was a concern, but not too much of a problem at this point. If the boy had found someone to listen to his tale earlier in the week, he would have done some real damage. But now? No one would have time to put the pieces of the puzzle together before Saturday night.

  It was the loss of Salinger and Kirkpatrick that really stung. Rodriguez didn’t like to lose men. He didn’t like to lose, period. He still wasn’t exactly sure what had gone down in the stables of Yasnaya Polyana. But he knew who to blame for it. And once Boyd’s little operation was over, Rodriguez would see that they paid for it.

  Both of them.

  62

  Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October

  3:10 P.M. local time

  Her name was Dr. Svetlana Bukovsky. A small, slim woman with gray-streaked brown hair and fiercely intelligent gray eyes, she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Dressed in a brown tweed skirt, brown sweater, wool tights, and sensible shoes, she met them at the doorway of her office at Immanuel Kant State University in Kaliningrad.

  “What a pleasure it is to actually meet you, Ensign. I’ve been following your career with interest for months.”

  Tobie found her hand seized in an unexpectedly firm grip. “You have?”

  Andrei said, “Dr. Bukovsky teaches here at the University, now. But before that, she spent more than twenty years working with the KGB. Her specialty is remote viewing.”

  “How did you—” Tobie broke off, her gaze flying to meet Jax’s.

  “How did I know you’re a remote viewer?” Andrei gave an enigmatic smile and turned to Jax. “Come. Let us leave them to their work.”

  Tobie said, “I don’t really need a tasker.”

  They sat across from each other at a table made of golden oak. Tobie’s chair was comfortably padded, the room dimly lit and soundproofed.

  A perfect RV room.

  Dr. Bukovsky said, “I know. But it is always easier for others to accept one’s results, don’t you agree, when one has the mechanics of a more controlled viewing in place?”

  “Somehow, I can’t see the United States government giving much credence to a viewing I did with a KGB scientist in Kaliningrad.”

  A soft smile touched the older woman’s eyes. “Is that so important at this point?”

  Tobie hesitated, aware of the clock ticking relentlessly toward Halloween. She blew out a long sigh. “All right.”

  She closed her eyes, let her breathing slow and deepen as she relaxed down into her Zone. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.

  The Russian rested the palm of one hand on a plain envelope that lay on the table before her. “The target is written here. Tell me what you see.”

  Tobie closed her eyes again. After her experience in Bremen, she knew a moment of uncertainty, a worry that her gift had somehow deserted her. But this time, the images came. Faint at first. Blurred flashes that slowly solidified. She said, “I’m getting the sense of something rectangular. It’s like a box, or a case. A metal case. It’s…shiny. Like an aluminum case.”

  “What’s in the case? Can you see?”

  “Something cylindrical. Yellow.” She began to sketch the images on the pad that lay before her. “It’s a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. The cylinder is also metal. But I get the sense…” She hesitated. “It’s as if it’s not real. It’s an illusion.”

  It made no sense, but now was not the time for analysis. The Russian said, “Can you back away from it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now tell me what you see.”

  “The aluminum case is lying on a desk. A wooden desk. Well polished. The room is rather small, paneled in the same wood as the desk. I get the impression of comfort. Luxury.”

  “Move above the room, then look down and tell me what you see.”

  “A railing. White. White walls. It’s like a house, but it’s not a house. There’s water. Sunlight.” She started a new sketch, the outlines of a sleek bow and decks slowly taking shape. She said, “It’s a boat.”

  “Can you move around it?”

  Tobie shifted her perspective again. Coming around the stern, she could see the name of the boat written in a flowing script. “There’s an ‘h.’” She frowned. “No. Maybe it’s an ‘l,’ or an ‘f’.” She shook her head. She always had a hard time with script. “I can’t read it.”

  “That’s all right, October. Back away from the boat now and tell me what you see.”

  Tobie took a deep breath and smelled the briny bite of the sea. “Water. Calm water. Reflections of lights. City lights. There’s a stretch of silvery wood. A dock.”

  “Keep moving back.”

  “I’m getting a sense of a wide-open area. Grass. Beyond that are trees. No. Not trees. Columns. A row of columns. Pavement. It’s a building, or a house. A large house.” She sketched it quickly. An Italianate villa with a terrace overlooking the water. She went back over her drawing, adding arched windows, wide French doors, the feathery fronds of palm trees. />
  Dr. Bukovsky said, “Can you move back more?”

  Tobie tried to focus on the surrounding houses, the street. But the farther she moved away from the boat, the more indistinct and disjointed the images became. She managed to draw a rough sketch of a bridge. But in the end, she shook her head in frustration and leaned back in her seat.

  “The target,” she said, pushing her hair off her forehead with one splayed hand. “What was it?”

  Wordlessly, Dr. Bukovsky held out the plain envelope.

  Tobie ripped it open. On a single sheet of white paper, someone—Andrei?—had written, “The current position of the pathogen from U-114.”

  “I guess that explains why the viewing I tried in Bremen didn’t work,” said Tobie, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the university building. The snow had stopped, but a bitter wind had kicked up, stinging her cheeks and making her eyes water. She turned up the collar of her jacket. “I was trying to RV an atom bomb that didn’t exist.”

  Jax squinted over at the Tatar, who waited, unsmiling, next to a sleek silver Mercedes S-Class drawn up at the curb. They were booked on the next flight to Washington, D.C. “I suppose we can take this as some kind of proof that the pathogen does exist. Even if we don’t have a clue where it is.”

  “You know it’s someplace that has palm trees and boats,” said Andrei, a smile tightening the skin beside his eyes. “That should narrow your search.”

  Jax studied the Russian’s enigmatic face. “You’re being way too cooperative, Andrei. Why?”

  “Can you think of a better way to find out if that pathogen has left Russia?”

  “Are you telling me you believe in remote viewing?”

  Andrei shook a cigarette from a nearly empty pack. “Why? Don’t you?”

  When Jax didn’t answer, the Russian huffed a soft laugh. Resting the cigarette on his lower lip, he reached inside his jacket for a sheaf of papers folded into thirds. “Here. Some light reading to pass the time on your flight.”

  Jax took the papers. “What’s this?”

  Andrei struck his lighter, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “You remember you asked about Martin Kline?”

  “You found something on him?”

  “Who told you he came to Russia?”

  “Someone who was at Dachau.”

  Andrei nodded to the papers in Jax’s hand. “Those are copies of some old World War II intel reports from the field, including a transcript from the debriefing of one of the Communists liberated from Dachau. According to his report, the Americans took Dr. Kline.”

  “What makes you so sure your Dachau survivor was right, and mine was wrong?”

  “Because this man wasn’t just repeating a rumor. He says he helped load Kline’s papers and medical samples on a truck. A U.S. Government truck.”

  “He could have been mistaken,” said Tobie.

  Andrei glanced over at her. “He might have been. Which is why I’ve also included a report from an agent we had at Fort Strong, where your government processed the high-value Germans it took to the States after the war.”

  “Operation Paperclip,” said Jax, his fingers tightening around the papers.

  Tobie looked from one man to the other, not understanding. “What’s Operation Paperclip?”

  Miami, Florida: Friday 30 October 10:30 P.M. local time

  The 110-foot Hargrave yacht Walker’s ex-wife had christened the Harlequin rocked gently against the private dock at the base of Walker’s Miami garden.

  Lifting the aluminum case onto the master stateroom’s built-in desk, he eased it open. Nestled within the gray foam padding lay a fluorescent yellow steel tank, thirteen inches long, of the kind normally used as an emergency air supply by SCUBA divers. Within it waited six cubic feet of deadly air under 3,000 dpi.

  Walker didn’t often smile, but he smiled now. There weren’t many men in history who could truly be said to have changed the world. But he was about to join their ranks.

  He snapped the case shut and left it there, behind the locked door of the Harlequin’s stateroom.

  63

  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Friday 30 October

  Early that morning, General Gerald Boyd took the train up to Boston to visit his daughter, Taylor, now in her second year at Harvard Law School. They had lunch, and a fudge sundae at Billings and Stover, then went for a walk along the Charles. They were sitting on a bench in Harvard Yard when he got a call from Colonel Lee.

  “There’s a new development,” whispered Lee.

  “Excuse me, honey,” Boyd told his daughter, smiling apologetically. “This’ll just take a minute.” Standing, he strolled away some fifteen feet and said to Lee, “Now what?”

  “I thought you should know the Russians have sent the fingerprints of Rodriguez’s team to Division Thirteen. If they start looking into Rodriguez’s files and see—” The man’s voice cracked.

  “Calm down, Colonel.” Boyd squinted up at the banks of heavy white clouds ripe with the promise of snow. Lee was rapidly becoming more of a liability than an asset. If Rodriguez would get his ass back to the States—

  “We need to talk,” said Lee.

  Boyd glanced over at Taylor. She was slim, like her mother, with fine light brown shoulder-length hair and a dimple that appeared in one cheek as she watched a squirrel grab an acorn and run. Whenever he thought of her, he still pictured the little kid in pigtails he used to take fishing. He had to keep reminding himself she was all grown up now. He said, “All right. I’m tied up the rest of the day, but I can meet you at the Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730 tomorrow morning.” If Rodriguez wasn’t back by then, Boyd would just have to take care of the Colonel himself.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Boyd slipped his phone away, then walked back toward Taylor, a smile on his face. “How’d you like to drive your old man to the train station?”

  Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October

  Jax barely managed to send Matt an urgent request to look into possible links between Kline and Paperclip, before the flight attendant’s warning voice crackled over the intercom and their plane pushed away from the gate.

  “Operation Paperclip,” said October, watching him put away his phone. “Tell me about it.”

  He glanced at the staid German businessman sitting in the aisle across from them, and kept his voice low. “Paperclip was the code name for a project dreamed up at the end of World War II by Allen Dulles.”

  “Who was…?”

  “Dulles? He was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence. Basically, the idea was to sneak Nazi scientists into the United States.”

  “Why would the United States want to import Nazis?”

  “Because we were already gearing up for a fight with our new rivals, the Russians.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “Even before the war was over, both the Americans and the Russians had competing intel teams ready to fan out over the German countryside and grab any kind of scientific booty they could get their hands on. And the biggest prizes of all were the German scientists themselves. At first the U.S. government just took the guys they nabbed back to places like Fort Hunt in Virginia, with the idea of interrogating them and then sending them home. But the more they learned about German advances in everything from rocketry to aeronautics, the more they wanted to keep them.”

  “Isn’t that, like, slave labor or something?”

  “Sort of. But a lot of these guys had wives and kids in the parts of Germany taken over by the Russians. They struck a deal: they’d work for the Americans if the U.S. government would get their families out of harm’s way.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “The problem was, some of the people they wanted to keep had been real Nazis—I mean Party members. And the U.S. had laws against the immigration of former Nazis. So Dulles and his boys basically drew up fake dossiers on those guys. The really, really bad Nazis had to be smuggled in through the ratlines and given false identities
. The program went on for years, even after presidents like Truman and Eisenhower thought it had been shut down.”

  “How many scientists are we talking about?”

  “The official number is sixteen hundred. But who knows? A lot of the relevant documents are still classified.”

  “After sixty years? But…why?”

  Jax gave a soft laugh. “The government likes to pretend it classifies stuff for ‘national security’ reasons. But the truth is, most of that shit is kept under wraps because it’s embarrassing—either to some very important people or to the government itself.”

  “But Kline wasn’t a nuclear physicist. He was just a doctor. Why would they want him?”

  “Because we had a huge chemical and bioweapons program going ourselves. It wasn’t quite as crazy as what happened in Germany under Hitler, but there was some pretty ugly stuff going on.”

  He expected her to say, I don’t believe it. Instead, she was silent for a moment, her gaze fixed on the thick white clouds on the other side of the window. When she spoke, her voice was a hushed whisper. “This is starting to sound really, really scary.”

  “No shit.”

  Washington, D.C.: 31 October, 6:25 A.M. local time

  Rodriguez pushed through the doors from Customs and Immigration into a nearly deserted corridor, and put in a call to Boyd.

  “It’s about time you got here. Colonel Lee is becoming a problem,” said Boyd, his voice gravelly with annoyance. “He’ll be at Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730. Can you make it?”

  Rodriguez glanced at his watch. “I can make it.”

  64

  By the time their connecting flight from Berlin touched down at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., it was Saturday, October 31.