Black Wolf: A Dreamland Thriller

by Dale Brown

  The doors opened. Danny had to push himself in, squeezing against a pair of middle-aged women who looked at him as if he were the devil. They said something in Moldovan that he didn’t understand. He smiled as if it were a compliment, though he guessed it was anything but.

  The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. A man got out. The two women got out on the seventh. Danny stepped to the side, watching the man he thought might be the doctor. The man stared at the doors, studiously avoiding his gaze.

  It might be because I’m black, Danny realized. In America, the fact that he was black would hardly be noticeable, in most contexts anyway. But in Moldova, as in most Eastern European countries, people of African descent were relatively rare.

  He took out the control unit for the MY-PID, looking at it as if setting up an app. He tilted it slightly, then pressed the button to activate the video camera. Turning to his right, he held the camera up, getting a good view of the man’s profile.

  Most of the occupants emptied on the twelfth floor. Only he and the fat man remained as it continued upward. Danny realized he hadn’t pushed the button. He glanced at the panel; they were heading toward the twentieth floor.

  He reached over and hit 23. Leaning back, he smiled at the man. He didn’t smile back.

  The doors opened on the twentieth floor. Danny stepped back, watching the man leave.

  “He got out on the twentieth floor,” he told the others, pulling the earphone back up and turning the MY-PID back onto active coms. “I have an image on the video.”

  “All right. You sure that’s him?” asked Nuri.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It took me too long to get into the building.”

  “You want us inside?” asked Flash.

  “Hang back,” said Danny, stepping out into the hallway as the elevator stopped. He found the stairs a few paces away and descended to the twentieth floor.

  There was only one door in the hall, plain and brown. There was a list of names on a sign next to it.

  Danny took out the MY-PID control unit and pointed the camera at the sign.

  “What’s that say?” he asked.

  “Dr. Acevda, Dr. Bolinski, Dr. Kulsch, Dr. Nudstrumov, Dr. Zvederick.”

  “No Ivanski?”

  “Rephrase question.”

  “Is there an Ivanski?”

  “Negative.”

  “Check to see if there is any correlation between Ivanski and any of those doctors,” Danny told MY-PID. “In the meantime, tell me how to ask to make an appointment.”

  The computer gave him the words. He repeated it twice but couldn’t get the pronunciation right.

  “Danny, I can do it,” said Nuri from outside. “I’m almost there.”

  “It’s all right,” said Danny. “I just want to see if we can get images of the doctors. There’s no sense you coming in, too. The fewer of us he sees right now, the better.”

  The door opened into a reception room. Several men and women were scattered among a dozen and a half chairs lining the walls. A television sat in the corner but it was off. The receptionist’s desk was next to a closed door that led to the interior offices.

  The woman asked in Moldovan if she could help him.

  Danny started to ask for an appointment, but midway through the words failed him; he switched to English.

  “I wanted to make a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “My throat.”

  The woman asked him if he could speak any Moldovan. Danny pointed to his throat. She pointed at a seat, then picked up the phone and called someone inside.

  The patients were middle-aged and older, most a lot older. Danny wondered if he could fake a sore throat. He tried a cough, wincing.

  A few minutes later a nurse came through the door and walked over to him. Danny rose.

  “You speak English, yes?” she said. Her accent was thick but the words understandable. She was in her early twenties, with an expression somewhere between concern and light annoyance. “How can we help you?”

  “Yes, my throat hurts,” said Danny. “I was hoping—”

  “This is a specialist clinic, for diseases of endocrines.”

  “Endocrines?”

  “Glands. Disorders with the metabolism,” said the nurse. “Diabetes, and things more complicated. I’m sorry, but for a sore throat we could only recommend cough drops.”

  “I see.”

  She put her hand to his forehead. She had to stretch to do it. Danny caught a slight scent of sweat.

  “No fever,” she said.

  “It’s just my throat.”

  She frowned. “I can send you to another clinic. These doctors. Very good.”

  “OK, thank you,” he said.

  She went over to the desk and asked the receptionist for a card. Danny sat back in his seat, realizing he’d forgotten to plant a bug.

  Spycraft 101, he reminded himself. Another course he’d skipped.

  He was being watched. It wasn’t necessary to plant it here—he could do it in the hall where it would be less conspicuous.

  “Go to these doctors,” said the nurse, returning. “There is a nurse who speaks English.”

  “Thank you very much,” he said, taking the card.

  25

  Chisinau, Moldova

  The Black Wolf had considered this job many times. He hadn’t wished for it but sensed that someday it would come. And now it had.

  He didn’t like Nudstrumov at all. In the beginning he was neutral, but over the years he had come to despise him. He had a certain haughty way of acting. Like the other day, when he kept him waiting. He had made it seem as if it was nothing, undeliberate, but the Black Wolf knew better. He knew.

  He would take him leaving his office, going from the door to the car. It was easier than the house, where there would be some inconvenience getting in. The office, though, was all routine. Nudstrumov parked in the same place, left at the same time, always at ten past three. He was a most punctual man.

  The Black Wolf chose his weapon—a Dragunov SVD-S with a folding butt, very common and untraceable. Technically not a sniper rifle, but he would be shooting from only across the street. The semiautomatic gun and its lead core bullets were extremely accurate.

  He had already scoped the roof of the building across the street. Getting away would be as easy there as anywhere else.

  It was all a matter of planning.

  He checked his watch. It was past one. He had less than two hours to get into position.

  26

  Chisinau, Moldova

  Two doctors worked at the clinic on Thursdays. One was a woman. The other was a man in his sixties named Andrei Nudstrumov.

  Nudstrumov had an extensive medical background that did not intersect with Dr. Ivanski’s at all. He had come to Romania from Russia five years before, applying for medical certification. His background was extensive and he was granted “all honors,” as the registering agency called it.

  He was an endocrinologist. Ivanski had been a general practitioner.

  Still, Nuri was sure the two men were the same. Danny remained unconvinced, even when the short fat man who’d driven the Mercedes didn’t come out of the clinic after an hour. In the meantime, MY-PID trolled across the Internet, picking up data on Nudstrumov. He’d used a credit card a few months before, not far from the town Danny had visited. He’d bought gas, eaten breakfast and dinner, and purchased merchandise, all in a small town about seven kilometers south of the town Danny had visited.

  MY-PID then correlated that series of purchases to a somewhat similar set by a third man—or at least a third name. This man had been making regular visits to the area over the past seven years. The match was not perfect—there were a few additional charges in the mix—but several things immediately jumped out at Nuri as he looked at the pattern: the visits were only once a year, at the same time of year, and the card was only used for those visits.

  The man’s name was Rustam Gorgov. According to the records, he own
ed property in the area—a large farm about two kilometers outside of town.

  So why did he stay at a motel?

  “Maybe he’s got his mother-in-law at the farm,” said Flash. “That would do it.”

  Flash and Danny were sitting together in the front seat of the rented Dacia, five blocks east of the building where the clinic was. Flash’s car was parked right behind him. Nuri was several blocks away in the opposite direction. They were waiting to follow the doctor out of the clinic.

  “You sure these are all the same person?” Danny asked Nuri.

  “Of course not,” said Nuri. “But here’s what I think. Ivanski stayed in Moldova after the camp was closed. But he didn’t practice medicine, for whatever reason. At some point either he got antsy or needed money. He adopted Nudstrumov’s identity.”

  “Or he was Nudstrumov, and living in Russia,” offered Danny.

  “Exactly. He buys the property under the Moldovan name, but for some reason decides he can’t practice as Ivanski. He already had his credentials, but maybe it’s the connection to the place he didn’t want known. In any event, Ivanski more or less disappears, and we have Nudstrumov.”

  “And Rustam Gorgov?” asked Danny.

  “Totally fictitious—the computer hasn’t found any other data on him at all. I’m sure there’s more. We just haven’t found it.”

  “Where’s the connection to the assassins?” asked Flash.

  “We don’t know yet,” said Nuri. “That’s why we keep looking. But there’s definitely enough that’s suspicious.”

  “Maybe he’s just trying to keep an affair quiet,” said Flash. “Or he’s a drug dealer on the side.”

  “He may grow marijuana on that farm,” said Nuri. “It’s a cash crop in Moldova. We have to check it out.”

  “Man, I wish we’d do something more than check things out,” said Flash. “I’m getting—stale, I guess.”

  Danny turned and looked at Flash. Like him, Flash was action oriented—give him a clear-cut assignment, and he was good to go. This was far more nebulous—this was like wandering through a fog and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no clear-cut path to the right door.

  God, he thought, we’re miles and miles away from getting a real handle on this.

  “The doctor may take us to some other connection,” said Nuri. “We have to be a little patient.”

  “The problem is time,” answered Danny.

  “I can follow the leads here,” answered Nuri. “You can get back to Kiev.”

  “We may do that.” Danny glanced at his watch. It was five to three. The doctor should be leaving soon.

  Nuri checked the signal on the tracking device, to make sure it was working. The radio signal was being sent through a commercial GPS satellite system, and was accurate to within roughly a third of a meter. Adapted from a commercial design used to track trucks over the highway, the device worked extremely well in open areas. Inside cities it could be problematic, however, as the larger buildings and other obstacles occasionally shielded the signal.

  Nuri was sure they were tantalizingly close to figuring this out. All they needed was one more strategic bit of information and they’d know where and who these guys were.

  They might already have it. He had originally thought the doctor was an unlikely choice to be the leader of the assassin group, but the fact that he had at least two other aliases gave him some hope. Underlings, he reasoned, had no need for multiple names.

  Nuri didn’t buy most of the speculation about the human experiments. He thought Stoner was probably involved, but wondered if the helicopter crash hadn’t somehow been arranged. That wasn’t something the Agency would be too ready to admit or even investigate—it implied that whatever intelligence they’d gathered in the Revolution operation—Danny’s name for it—had been tainted, fed to them by a double agent.

  Stoner.

  Maybe Stoner had felt the Agency was closing in. Maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Or occupation.

  Becoming an assassin, Nuri thought—well, there was a money-making retirement option he had never thought of.

  His watch beeped. It was 3:00 P.M.

  At exactly 3:05, MY-PID announced that Dr. Nudstrumov was coming out of his clinic and heading toward the elevator.

  “Bankers’ hours,” Flash told Danny. “See ya in a bit.”

  Danny waited as Flash got out of the car, then put his signal on and checked the traffic. He pulled out behind a bright red Fiat and drove toward the building. He wanted to time it so he got there just as the doctor was getting into his car. But he’d been a little too anxious; he was a block away before Nudstrumov finally got into the elevator to go down to the lobby.

  “I’m going to pull into the lot,” Danny told the others. “Flash, hang back.”

  “Yeah, copy that.”

  “Nuri?”

  “Right.”

  A panel truck turned into the lot just ahead of Danny, then stopped, waiting for a car that was pulling out. Danny stopped, still in the roadway. He glanced in his mirror anxiously—the last thing he wanted right now was a car accident.

  The truck finally pulled ahead. Danny took his foot off the brake. The door to the building was on his right.

  “Subject exiting building.”

  There he was, just ahead on the right. He was short and rotund, not particularly distinguished looking. If you were Hollywood, he thought, and you were going to cast someone in the role of assassin mastermind, Dr. Nudstrumov wouldn’t be it.

  Nudstrumov glanced over his shoulder as he began walking to his car. Danny got a glimpse of his face. He looked somewhat annoyed, not quite angry but not relaxed either.

  The doctor kept walking, his chubby legs stroking quickly. A car on Danny’s left started to pull out into the aisle. Danny stopped, waiting for her to go—he’d pull in, then wait for the doctor to leave before following.

  He looked back at the doctor. He was only a few meters from his car now. He had his keys in his left hand.

  Suddenly the doctor seemed to spin to his left. Danny thought for a moment that he had recognized him through the car window somehow. Then in the next moment the right side of his forehead exploded, bursting into a red splatter of blood.

  “Shit!” yelled Danny. “He’s been shot! Nudstrumov’s been shot!”

  27

  Chisinau, Moldova

  The first shot had been low, deadly but not instantaneous lethal. The second hit home perfectly, exploding Nudstrumov’s skull.

  A thing of beauty.

  But the Black Wolf knew he couldn’t stop to admire it. He had to move.

  He pulled the rifle back, quickly folding the stock and dropping it into the box. He slapped it closed and picked it up. He already had his backpack on.

  A person got out of the car across the street, near the lot where he’d shot the doctor. The Black Wolf saw him through the window from the corner of his eye.

  He turned and focused.

  A black man.

  Familiar.

  Familiar. He focused—narrowed his vision so the man was right next to him, features large in his brain.

  He was very, very familiar. Yet he couldn’t quite identify him.

  Why did he know him?

  No time for that: Go! Go! Go!

  28

  Chisinau, Moldova

  Danny leapt out of the car. His first instinct was to run to Nudstrumov, even though he knew it was too late to help him. He took a step, then dove to the ground, belatedly realizing that he, too, would be in the killer’s sights.

  Or could be.

  The shot had come from across the street. There was another building—several.

  One of the rooftops.

  “Danny, what’s going on?” asked Nuri.

  “Somebody just shot the doctor. They must have been across the street.”

  Danny jumped to his feet and began running.

  “Where? Where?”

  “From the roof, maybe. It had to be
a rifle—the shot came down from above, and it was pretty high-powered. There’s no one in the lot that could have shot him.”

  Danny crossed the street. There was no one nearby or in the cars, and the shot had definitely come from above.

  He reached inside his jacket for his Beretta, then thought better of it. If the police responded and saw a man with a gun, they’d jump to conclusions—and shoot before asking questions.

  There were three buildings, all butting up against each other. All three were five-story buildings. There were storefronts on the ground floor, offices and apartments above.

  Would there be a fire escape?

  He walked quickly to the end of the block, turned, then began to trot. An alley ran behind the buildings. He turned down it.

  “Danny, where are you?” asked Flash over the radio.

  “I’m behind the buildings across the street. Just east of the lot.”

  “I’m turning down the side street now,” said Flash. “I’ll be behind you.”

  “Good.”

  The alley was lined with garbage cans and old cars. There were balconies on the right, fire escapes on the left. Two children were playing soccer at the far end, banging the ball against a rusted chain-link fence.

  Danny looked up to his left.

  How long would it take a shooter to get down from the roof or one of the upper apartments?

  A minute, maybe two, assuming he planned it right. And these guys always planned it right.

  But where would he have gone? No one had passed him. The buildings on the right, though only three and two stories, were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. To get past them you’d have to go through them. Or maybe over them.

  He turned so he had the back of the building in view and sidled in the direction of the kids. Any second, the killer could appear over the side.

  Danny put his hand near his gun, ready, just in case.

  “I need words to ask the children if they saw someone,” Danny told MY-PID.

  The computer spat out a phrase. Danny yelled it to the kids, but they didn’t react, too consumed in their game.