by Marc Cameron
The lieutenant seemed to take her question as a sign of admiration. He shrugged. “Good citizens are in danger—”
“It is a simple enough question, Tarasov.” She held the metal box against his camouflaged parka. The black needle pegged to the right. “But I have my answer.”
“Someone had to oversee the rescue, my sweet.” He smoothed the corners of his mustache.
“Stop touching your mouth.”
“You are easily excited,” Tarasov chuckled. “I can appreciate that.” He took a step closer, putting a hand on Aleksandra’s shoulder, then letting his hand slide down to her breast. “May I call you Aleks? Do your friends call you Aleks or Sasha?”
Aleksandra closed the gap between them in a flash, bringing her hand from the pocket of her parka to shove it between his legs. “You will call me Agent Kanatova!” she hissed.
“Ahhh.” Tarasov raised a wicked brow. “ ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ ”
“I would not quote dead Englishmen if I were in your shoes.” Aleksandra gave a little tug, letting the lieutenant feel the hooked blade she had at his groin.
“You would threaten me?”
“I do not threaten.” Aleksandra shook her head. “You are already cut. Give your leg a shake. If you do not hear a little thud, perhaps I have not yet removed anything important.”
Snow continued to sift down around them. She sniffed from the cold.
“What do you want?” Tarasov’s shaggy mustache appeared to wilt as a dawning reality chased away his bravado.
“I want you to shut your mouth and listen to me,” she said. “You must be decontaminated before you leave this site—you and everyone else who has gone inside.”
Aleksandra stepped away slowly, withdrawing the cruel-looking knife. Shaped like a talon, there was indeed fresh blood on the curved blade. She kept an eye on the pallid Tarasov as she took a cell phone from her pocket and punched in the number with her thumb. She’d given him too much to think about for him to try and hurt her anytime soon.
“This is Kanatova,” she said when the other party had picked up. “Polzin’s information was correct. Radiation is confirmed. Someone should tell the Americans.” She shoved the phone back in her parka.
“Wha . . . what are you saying?” Senior Lieutenant Tarasov attempted an angry stomp of his foot, but Aleksandra could see there was no commitment in it. He seemed scared to look down and see how much damage her knife had done. “Radiation? Do you think this is connected to the dead boy at the hospital?”
Of course it was connected, Aleksandra thought, gritting her teeth. What sort of idiot could possibly think a dirty bomb and a college student dead of radiation poisoning could be in any way unrelated? The problem was figuring out how. Instead of voicing her opinion, she nodded slowly, surveying the scene of mangled bodies and destruction. “There is much worse to come, I assure you,” she said, almost to herself.
“Worse than this?” Tarasov’s eyes flew wider under wild gray brows. “Worse than you cutting my . . . worse than radioactive?”
Aleksandra bit her bottom lip fighting the urge to chew on her already horrid fingernails. The chilly air suddenly grew more bitter and metallic. The smell of cooked flesh made her stomach turn flips. “Vitebsk Station still stands. Life muddles on for kilometers in every direction.” She looked directly at the lieutenant. “Oh yes, there are things much worse than this. . . .”
Tarasov tugged at the collar of his uniform. “You spoke of decontamination?”
“The teams are on their way,” Aleksandra said, taking out her phone again.
“What do you intend to do?
“Now?”
“Yes, now.” Tarasov’s hand trembled at the end of his powerful arm, an arm he would have been all too happy to strike her with two minutes before.
“I’m but a lowly civil servant,” she said. “I will call in for orders.”
Kanatova took shallow breaths. Falling snow helped to scrub the chilly air to be sure, but there could still be dangerous levels of radiation floating around her in the darkness. She’d made her next decision before she pressed the buttons on her phone. She knew Mikhail Polzin better than his own wife. She would naturally be the one to pick up this investigation. Her bones ached with dread at the daunting thought. The layers of Russian bureaucracy surrounding his death, stolen Soviet-era weapons, and the detonation of a dirty bomb would be like trying to walk a tightrope in the dark. It could be done, but one would have to be extremely careful—and extremely lucky. She had no time for such things. By the time she got the approvals she needed, it would be too late.
Growing up Russian had instilled in Aleksandra the value of the workaround. If something was against the rules, one found a way around that particular rule. If the bureaucracy of the Russian government would hinder her investigation, she’d simply go to America. They’d surely be neck deep in their own investigation by the time she arrived. Following their discoveries wouldn’t be difficult at all—the silly Americans paraded their best information on the television. CNN would indeed be her source.
CHAPTER 5
Arlington Cemetery
The angry grumble of a motorcycle engine, taken from the open road and confined to an enclosed parking lot, blatted off the walls of the concrete structure. Jacques Thibodaux rolled into the space beside Quinn with his red and black BMW GS Adventure. Jericho stood at the back of his own bike stowing armored kangaroo-leather gloves in a boxy Touratech aluminum side case.
Corps to the core, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Thibodaux was tall and broad as a mountain. The big Cajun was an accomplished mixed martial artist who fought under the name Daux Boy. His square jaw, combined with the black Aerostich Transit jacket, brought the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator to Quinn’s mind. He wore a high and tight flattop, trimmed so precisely that the barber must surely have used a level to get it right.
A veteran of countless deployments, he’d still found time to father seven sons, the youngest of whom was just a few months old. Like Quinn, Thibodaux had been handpicked by Winfield Palmer as a blunt instrument on one of the Hammer Teams. A Marine to his very soul, he was now assigned to Air Force OSI, a branch of the service he and his fellow leathernecks generally considered bus drivers.
Neither Quinn nor the gunny wanted to keep the boss waiting, and three minutes later saw them trudging up the cordoned asphalt road between the Arlington Cemetery Visitors Center and the amphitheater overlooking the Tomb of the Unknowns. Row after row of some three hundred thousand white markers lay in ghostly perfect lines among the leafless trees on either side of the road.
“I gotta tell you, Chair Force,” the big Cajun muttered as he walked beside Quinn, his shadow all but blocking out the sun. “This place always gives me a case of the jumps.”
“It’s hallowed ground,” Quinn mused, thinking of the friends he knew who rested here. He often wondered if they might not be the lucky ones. “Sacred.”
“I reckon that’s it, l’ami,” Thibodaux said. “I get the same feelin’ when Camille drags me to church. Makes me feel all . . . I don’t know . . . mortal and shit. I hate it.” He shot a glance at Quinn. “So, you were followin’ numb-nuts again, weren’t you?”
Jericho nodded. He hadn’t mentioned the fight to anyone but Palmer, but the scabbed cut under his eye and slashed leather on his jacket were evidence enough.
“He’s the damned Speaker of the House,” Thibodaux said, ignoring the damage as if he expected Quinn to show up looking like he’d been dragged behind a truck. “Half the country holds him up as a hero for savin’ us from sleeper spies.”
“I know.” Quinn walked on without looking up.
“I guess the old man still says no to just killin’ the SOB.” Thibodaux’s wife was a devout Catholic and allotted him only five non-Bible curse words a month. For a Marine gunnery sergeant, his language bordered on crystalline.
“Not without more information.”
“How about he’s an orph
an like the rest of the moles, with a history that’s a blank slate before he was fifteen years old?”
“That’s not the point.” Quinn shrugged. “Palmer agrees that Drake’s dirty. He assures steps have been taken to isolate him from anything that could compromise national security. He just wants to know what Drake’s up to—who’s controlling him—before we take any . . . permanent action. He’d like to take him down politically if possible.”
“Roger that.” Thibodaux nodded in agreement. “But this rat bastard is Teflon. We’d have to find him in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. . . .”
Ahead, Winfield Palmer looked down from near the top of the hill, at the base of the white amphitheater. Special Agent Arnie Vasquez of the Secret Service stood under the shadow of the marble colonnade, back a few feet from his boss but within arm’s reach. Quinn marveled at the way the former Marine made executive protection look easy. He knew from experience it was anything but.
As the president’s national security advisor, Win Palmer rated a small but full-time protective detail. As the president’s longtime friend and confidant from their days as cadets at West Point, he got the pick of the litter from the U.S. Secret Service—and he’d chosen Vasquez for his discretion as much as his skill at arms.
“Uurrah,” Thibodaux grunted as they approached.
Vasquez returned the greeting, giving a conspiratorial wink to his fellow Marine. He greeted Quinn with a polite nod. He was, after all, merely Air Force—a wing waxer.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Palmer said. His face turned down in a ruddy frown. He wore a dark suit with a conservative black and yellow striped silk tie. Slightly balding, with close-cropped sandy gray hair and arms folded across his chest, he could have been someone’s father, angry over some house rule infraction.
“The bombings are all over the news,” Quinn offered. “Hitting the U.S. and Russia simultaneously . . . makes things interesting.”
“Interesting is a hell of an understatement,” Palmer said. “The markets have taken a nosedive and banks all over the country have reported long lines of people wanting to withdraw their cash. People don’t feel safe—over a hundred thousand travelers have canceled airline tickets in the last hour alone. Congress is already talking about demanding X-ray body scanners at every port of entry.”
“How do you talk about demanding?” Thibodaux scratched his head. “My experience, you either demand or you don’t.”
“We’re talking about Congress,” Palmer said.
“Do we know where the material came from?” Quinn asked, eyes locked on the precise movements of the “Old Guard” 3rd Infantry soldier marching, machinelike, thirty yards away. Behind the ramrod-straight young man, carved on the front of the white marble tomb was the inscription: Here rests in honored glory, an American soldier, known but to God.
Palmer took a deep breath. “Maybe,” he said. He handed his smartphone to Quinn. “The Bureau got this from the security cameras in Helsinki. It’s dated yesterday.”
Quinn and Thibodaux crowded around the phone to watch a young woman move from the long queue of travelers and step through the metal detector. There was no sound with the video, but from the security screener’s reaction it was clear the machine had alarmed. The video blinked to show a change of cameras. In this view, the girl could be seen lifting her shirt and pointing to a piece of jewelry in her navel. The female security officer administering the secondary screening passed a hand wand over the young woman’s belly, then sent her on her way.
The video complete, Palmer resumed his explanation. “Preliminary reports say the bombs in both California and St. Petersburg were conventional Semtex salted with plutonium. Analysis points to material manufactured by the Soviets. The girl in the video came in from Helsinki yesterday. She died within hours after hitting American soil. According to the story she gave medical staff, she swallowed the material in condoms, believing it was cocaine.”
Quinn rubbed his face, feeling a sudden weariness creep into his bones. “I was in Helsinki earlier this year,” he said. “They have state-of-the-art radiation detectors. I’m surprised she didn’t set off the alarms.”
“Alpha and beta radiation would have been stopped inside her,” Palmer said. “Gamma would have been detected, but if she swallowed the material immediately before passing through customs . . . theoretically she could have made it into the U.S. before she became ‘hot’ enough.”
“Now hang on one damned minute.” Thibodaux grimaced as if he’d just eaten a bitter pill. “You mean to tell me this girl ate plutonium?”
Palmer nodded. “Sources inside the Kremlin tell us a college student in St. Petersburg died of the same sort of radiation poisoning. So far the media hasn’t gotten wind of it, but an art dealer in Manhattan was found dead in her apartment this morning. FBI confirms it was radiation and that she’d been to Helsinki.”
“I’m guessing she had a belly button ring,” Thibodaux said.
“That means more material out there for another dirty bomb,” Quinn said. “Odd. It’s as if they want the mules to be found—otherwise they could have just killed them when they off-loaded the merchandise.”
“Uncertainty spreads terror almost as well as violence,” Palmer said. “But that’s not the worst of it.”
Thibodaux gazed across the field of crosses, shaking his head. “There’s something worse than people eatin’ plutonium?”
“One week ago we received two encrypted texts from an agent in Uzbekistan. The first was five words long: ‘Contact made. Suspect Yaderni Renit.’ ”
Thibodaux’s head snapped around. “A portable nuke?”
Palmer raised a sandy eyebrow. “I had no idea you spoke Russian, Jacques.”
“As a point of fact, I do not, sir.” Thibodaux shook his head. “But I do speak threat. I can understand ‘Kill the Amercanski’ and ‘Let’s cut his ass’ in fifteen languages. Nuclear bombs fall into that category.”
“You said there were two texts?” Quinn prodded. He knew Palmer liked being prompted to ensure people were engaged in the conversation.
Palmer gave a deep sigh. “Looks like he was cut off mid-message. ‘Martel theory appears corre . . .’ ”
“Martel?” Quinn mused. “Like Charles Martel—the Hammer that stopped the Muslim invasion into Western Europe at Poitiers?”
“That’s the one. Charlemagne’s granddad,” the national security advisor said. “Code name for Russian agent Mikhail Ivanovich Polzin. Polzin was known for his belief in the existence of a powerful, man-portable nuke from the Cold War days. If he was correct as the text suggests, Baba Yaga has been found.”
“Baba Yaga?” Thibodaux tilted his head as if trying to call back pertinent memory. “Sounds familiar . . .”
“An evil witch from a Russian fairy tale,” Palmer said. “Intelligence sources back in the seventies picked up chatter about a Soviet nuclear device code-named Baba Yaga. Small and portable enough to be moved by a single man, it was thought to be double the power of similar known devices. Langley believes it to be as much as five kilotons.”
“You said we’re dealing with dirty bombs,” Quinn mused. “A man-portable nuke is another thing altogether. Does your agent in Uzbekistan have any more information?”
“Damned little, I’m afraid.” Palmer tipped his head toward a freshly covered grave in the distance. “I just presented a flag to his mother.”
Thibodaux released a captive breath.
They’d all lost far too many brothers and sisters at arms over the last decade.
“Cooper was a good man,” Palmer whispered. “Worldly-wise and innocent at the same time. His father’s a Virginia state trooper.”
“Wait,” Quinn said. “Are we talking about Riley Cooper? OSI, stationed at Manas?”
“He was one of mine.” Palmer nodded. “We used to hunt birds together when Riley was a boy. . . .”
Quinn gave a low whistle. “I thought I knew Riley Cooper pretty well. He was two years beh
ind me at the Academy, but he beat me to OSI because I did Combat Rescue first. He graduated from FLETC in the OSI Basic ahead of me but came back to visit when we got our B’s and C’s.”
FLETC was the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center near Brunswick, Georgia. B’s and C’s were badges and credentials, presented at graduation from OSI Basic.
“I wish I’d known,” Quinn said, put out that Palmer hadn’t seen fit to mention the death of a fellow agent until now. “I could have attended.”
“The family requested a private ceremony,” Palmer said, sensing Jericho’s concern. “OSI will release a story this afternoon about him being killed by a roadside bomb.”
“Riley Cooper . . .” Quinn shook his head, processing it all. Of course there were others like him. Palmer had made it clear early on that he had a special arrangement with OSI. It stood to reason that other agents Quinn knew would be part of his unit.
“He wasn’t aware of you either,” Palmer said. “If that makes you feel any better.” He motioned for them to follow him up the steps and into the amphitheater proper, taking a seat on one of the long marble benches. A small crowd had formed outside, waiting for the changing of the guard that would happen every half hour, but they were alone inside the amphitheater.
Palmer glanced up from black, spit-shined shoes.
“At any given moment, at least a dozen credible threats against the United States fall across our radar. The Bureau and the CIA investigate the bulk of them with military Special Ops mopping up the pieces overseas. Our alphabet-soup agencies do a damn fine job of mounting a wall of defensive offense. But, as you know, some cases need less bureaucracy. Riley Cooper did jobs for me all over Central Asia. His father is my friend. I watched him grow up, so I knew I could trust him.” Palmer stared back down at his feet, rocking slightly on the cool stone bench. “He wanted to be an Olympic sprinter when he was a kid. Did he ever tell you that?”
“No, sir.” Quinn shook his head. Thibodaux sat completely still.
“He was so very talented,” Palmer went on. “When he talked about going to Virginia Tech, I was the one who convinced him to attend the Air Force Academy. I told him he could make a difference there.” He glanced up at Quinn, eyes brimming with the pain of a leader who sent young men into battle. “ ‘If they question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied. . . .’ ”
