by Matthew Dunn
When they were out of sight, Will and Sentinel continued deeper into the forest until they reached a small road. Will looked right and saw nothing. He looked left and saw a truck. It was two hundred feet away, and beside it were three soldiers and two more dogs on leashes. All of the soldiers were smoking. The heads of the dogs were twitching left and right.
They walked away from the patrol, keeping the road on their left, until trees obstructed their view of the soldiers. Crossing the road, they entered more forest.
Sentinel grabbed Will’s arm. “They don’t patrol this far away from the border. But stay alert.”
They ran and walked for an hour, moving through forest and open fields, close to snow-covered vehicle tracks, over roads, through more woods and more open ground. Sentinel led the way, constantly changing direction, constantly looking around to check that they weren’t being watched, always choosing routes that gave them cover when it was available.
When they stopped, it was full daylight. More open farmland was around them.
Sentinel’s breathing was fast. “We’re close.”
Will followed his colleague, who now walked carefully ahead. They moved across more fields until they came to a six-bar gate. Beyond the gate was a vehicle track, and in the distance was a solitary farmhouse.
Sentinel moved to one side of the gate and knelt down. “That building’s the safe house. We’ve made up time and are on schedule. The meeting’s not due for another three hours.”
They stayed like that for thirty minutes. Will heard the sound of a vehicle. Moving his head slowly out of his secreted position, he glanced down the track. A pickup was moving along the route, coming toward them. It passed the house, kept driving, and stopped 500 feet away from the building and 150 feet from their position. Will darted a look at Sentinel and saw that he was looking intently at the vehicle. Will glanced back at the truck. A small woman got out. She was dressed in thick dark clothes and wore a head scarf that hid her features, but judging by her posture and movements she was very old. The woman leaned back into the truck and flashed its headlights six times.
Sentinel instantly jumped over the fence. Will followed. They ran along the track and slowed as they approached the vehicle. Sentinel’s gun was raised, but he was not pointing it at the woman; instead he was aiming it at the road beyond. The woman removed her scarf and walked toward Sentinel. She must have been at least seventy-five years old, maybe older.
She smiled and spoke in Russian. “My angel.”
Sentinel lowered his weapon, walked up to the woman, hugged her, and responded in her language, “Polina. I shouldn’t have asked you to come out in this weather.”
Polina shrugged. “I have to unlock the house and get it ready for you.” She rubbed her frail hands against Sentinel’s forearms. “I’ve bought some food for the freezer. Even though I don’t live there anymore, I keep it stocked for your meetings. Would you like me to make you some nice shchi? The hot soup will do you good.”
Sentinel smiled, shaking his head. “You need to be heading home in ten minutes.” He extracted the slim metal case and handed it to the woman. “Oleksandr’s mother made these for you. My Ukrainian friends send you their love.”
Polina took the case, smiling. Then her smile faded. “Please tell them that I’m sorry for their loss. Juriy was a great soldier.” She looked at Will. “Some of us here might live to old age, but in these parts few of us die from it.”
Will saw that the sleeve on one of her arms had risen up to expose an inch of badly scarred skin on the underside of her forearm.
Polina caught his gaze and quickly pulled her sleeve down.
“I didn’t mean to-”
“It’s okay.” She glanced at Sentinel before looking back at Will. “I was nine years old when Majdanek extermination camp was liberated by Soviet soldiers. Some other survivors told me to run away or hide because I had a Nazi tattoo that showed I was a Jew. Instead, I sat in a hut and peeled off the skin with my fingernails until the tattoo was gone. When I finished, I thought everything would be all right.” She smiled, but the look was bitter. “I was a naive child. The Soviets knew that I’d tried to disguise my Jewish identity, and punished me by putting me in Kolyma gulag for fifteen years.” She looked at Sentinel and reached out to him.
Sentinel kissed the old Russian woman’s hand. “Next time I’ll stay longer and make you some soup.”
“I hope so.” She entered the vehicle, turned it around, and drove toward the farmhouse.
Sentinel said, “We need to stay out of the house until he arrives. Then we’ll shoot him and get back into Ukraine.”
Polina stopped the vehicle by the building, paused by the front door as she released the locks, and stepped through the entrance.
As she did so, a massive explosion tore her body and most of the house apart.
Chapter Nine
It had taken them twenty hours to get back to the safe house in Odessa. Sentinel sat on the lounge floor, his head in his hands.
“We’ll get him.”
Sentinel looked up. “When we do, I’m going to be the one who kills him.”
Will nodded and stretched his fatigued back muscles. He hadn’t managed to sleep on the car journey back; all he’d thought about was Polina. He wondered what Sentinel thought of him. It had been Will’s idea to set up the meeting with Razin. “I’m sorry.”
Sentinel shook his head. “Razin’s bomb was meant for us, not Polina.” He bunched his hand into a fist. “We had to try getting him there.”
“Let’s hope he thinks we’re dead.”
“He knows we’re alive.”
Will thought for a moment. “Police records?”
Sentinel rubbed his unshaven face. “He’ll use his FSB status to get access to them.”
Minutes after the explosion, there had been a five-hundred-foot-high column of black smoke rising above the farmhouse. Though the property was remote, it wouldn’t have taken long for emergency services to have been alerted. They’d have conducted a forensic analysis of the scene and ascertained that a conventional bomb had killed one old lady.
“Everything’s different now that he knows we’re after him.” Will studied Sentinel. “What are you going to do?”
For ten seconds Sentinel said nothing. Then, “I’ve thought about every tier-one agent meeting I’ve had since I’ve known Razin-every antisurveillance route I’ve taken to the meetings, every covert communication I’ve made with them, anything that could have compromised their identities.” He shook his head. “ Everything was watertight.”
“That can only mean one thing.”
A breach of security by someone else who had access to their names.
Sentinel clasped his hands together. Now he looked focused. “It’s a long shot, but one of my agents might be able to help. He’s FSB. We need to meet him in Hungary.”
“I can’t join you.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to be elsewhere.”
Anger flashed across Sentinel’s face. “What’s more important than this?”
“Nothing.” Will tried to keep his tone placatory. “But I need to set up my own operation to get Razin.”
Sentinel’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”
“No. I’m going to work this from another angle, but I can’t tell anyone what I’m doing. Not even Alistair’s privy to the full details.”
“You’re in”-Sentinel’s words were measured and clipped-“my territory. Tell me what you’re planning.”
Will shook his head. “It’s because I’m in your territory that I can’t tell you. For decades the Russians have wanted to get their hands on you. If they lifted you and tortured you, my operation would be dead in the water. We’d never be able to stop Razin.”
“May I remind you that I resisted torture for six years.”
“Techniques have become more… sophisticated.”
Sentinel said nothing.
Will said, “Razin might lay low, not risk kill
ing any more agents.”
“Maybe”-Sentinel was hesitant-“though he’s never been one to back off from danger.”
“How did you recruit him?”
He expected Sentinel to stay silent. Instead, the MI6 officer muttered, “I turned his strength into a weakness.”
“Ambition?”
Sentinel nodded. “You’ve clearly read his file thoroughly.”
Will had.
The dossier had shown that Taras Khmelnytsky had been a brilliant student at Moscow State University and had been given the option of a fast-track career in the Russian diplomatic service or a prestigious commission into the military navy. He had refused both and instead joined the 98th Guards Airborne Division as a junior lieutenant. The people who knew him thought he was crazy to do so, but it turned out he was anything but that. He served with the Division’s 217th Guards Airborne Regiment, based in Ivanovo, for three years before he was handpicked to undergo the grueling selection for Spetsnaz GRU. He had passed with distinction and served with the GRU for six years, stationed in Moscow, eventually attaining the rank of major while operating in deniable overseas operations. Unusually, he had then been asked to join Spetsnaz Vympel, which was under FSB rather than GRU control. The GRU had tried unsuccessfully to block the transfer, but it was clear that Razin had been noticed by Russian high command, which wanted to give him as wide-ranging special operations experience and action as possible. In Vympel he had been given further extensive training in marksmanship, unarmed combat, medicine, languages, and infiltration into and exfiltration out of hostile zones. He had seen covert action in a variety of theaters, including the northern Caucasus, and he was ultimately awarded Russia’s highest honor, Hero of the Russian Federation, for single-handedly rescuing a four-man Spetsnaz GRU unit that had been compromised observing a nuclear plant in North Korea and was in danger of being captured and executed. Four years before, the FSB had promoted him to colonel and given him command of their jewel in the crown: Spetsnaz Alpha. At that time he had been thirty-five, the youngest colonel in the entire Russian army.
Sentinel said, “I knew that Razin was totally patriotic to the motherland and had no vices or any other chinks in his armor that could be used to coerce him to work for me.” He smiled. “Anyone else in MI6 would have rightly concluded he was impossible to recruit.” His face turned serious. “But his ambition intrigued me, and I wondered if that could be used against him.”
Will stayed silent.
“My assets found out that Razin was on a brief visit to Africa as a military adviser. I went straight there and sat next to him as he flew from Nigeria to Moscow via Frankfurt in order to return to his duties in Alpha. Halfway during that flight, I placed a letter in his lap. The letter said that I worked for MI6, that I had an idea that could catapult his career to the very highest level, and that I had three very capable men around me on the flight who would slowly cut off his head with their on-board dinner knives if he tried to do anything silly.
“Razin and I got off the plane at Frankfurt, sat in the airport’s Lufthansa business-class lounge, and spoke to each other for one hour.” Sentinel’s voice was very quiet. “I said that I wanted him to be my prime agent for all matters pertaining to Russian special operations activities. He refused, saying that he’d never do anything to weaken the Spetsnaz units or the GRU and FSB. I responded with a lie, saying that, on the contrary, the West needed to see those units grow even stronger in order to justify U.S. and British expenditure on our own intelligence agencies and special forces; that the West needed a new, highly professional adversary now that the so-called war on terror was being won. I concluded that his intelligence would serve him and serve me.” Sentinel paused. “He still gave me no commitment. So I gave him something irresistible that was true: I told him that I had intelligence about a twelve-strong terrorist unit from the northern Caucasus who were based in Moscow and planned to plant bombs in the city. I said that he should use his Alpha men to kill the terrorists and once again be hailed as Russia’s hero; that if he did that for me, and if he gave me the intelligence I needed, I would continue to feed him missions that would inevitably gain him promotion to Russian high command and maybe even beyond.” Sentinel folded his arms. “He agreed to my terms. I had him hook, line, and sinker.”
Though Will didn’t show it, he felt total admiration for the way Sentinel had approached Razin.
Sentinel sighed. “That was three years ago. It all seemed to be working out nicely.” He stared at the wall and frowned. “Why does he want to kill my agents and start a war? How does he benefit from both events?”
Will’s mind raced as he recalled the files he’d read in Langley. “Most of your tier-one agents are high-ranking military or intelligence officers. If they’re all killed, how would that affect Russia’s military capability?”
“It would be an inconvenience, but all of them are replaceable.”
“I thought so.”
Sentinel clearly could see where this was leading. “On the flip side, the agents’ intelligence would give the United States a major advantage in a war with Russia.”
Will agreed. “Advance knowledge of troop movements, the location of mobile strategic missile launch sites, naval deployments, among others. The war would be a one-sided bloodbath.”
Sentinel placed the tips of his fingers together; his eyes were darting left and right. “And yet, America’s military is far superior to Russia’s. Even without my agents, it would still win the war.”
Will remembered Patrick’s words: “Russia has one thing that we don’t: a willingness to sacrifice millions of its countrymen.”
A thought came to his mind.
But before he could articulate it, Sentinel slapped his hands on his legs and expressed the same thought: “Stalemate.”
“Precisely.”
They discussed the fact that if Russia wanted to go to war with the United States, the United States would have no choice other than to react with overwhelming force. The intelligence from Sentinel’s agents would make that reaction precise and swift. But if the agents were dead, Russia would be able to draw out the war and throw millions of bodies at the U.S. military. And at some point during the ongoing massacre of Russians, the United States would have to ask itself if it could keep pushing ahead.
Will nodded. “That’s what Razin’s banking on.”
“Russia can’t be annihilated-”
“-because America won’t have the stomach to do it.”
“So halfway into the war a stalemate is reached.”
“Peace is negotiated.”
“And Russia will honor its heroes.”
Both men stared at each other. Their thoughts were exactly the same, though it was Sentinel who gave voice to them. “The biggest hero of them all would be the man who stepped forward and said that he’d secretly killed my MI6 spies so that Russia wouldn’t be crippled.” He stood up quickly and banged a fist against the wall. “Razin’s not going to lay low or stop; he’s going to make himself that hero. And if he succeeds, he’ll be handed the Russian presidency on a fucking plate.”
Chapter Ten
The sun was setting over Istanbul as Will walked through the Turkish city’s Grand Bazaar. The place was a vast warren of alleys, streets, and covered walkways-some pedestrian, others strewn with heavily laden cars and trucks carrying goods to and from the multitude of shops on either side of the routes. He was surrounded by the sounds of street vendors calling to crowds of shoppers, car horns, distorted transistor radios playing Ottoman folk music, and a nearby mosque giving the aksam call to prayer. Despite being winter, the air felt warm and was thick with the smells of kebabs, gozleme pancakes, roasted vegetables, simit bread, and spices. He passed shops selling clothes and fabrics, tea, dried fruits and nuts, kitchenware, backgammon sets, cinnamon, turmeric, and guns.
As he pushed his way through the crowds, the sound of the call to prayer grew nearer and soon he was by the front entrance of the small sixteenth-century Rust
em Pasha Mosque. Muslim men and women were lined up outside, queuing to enter the beautiful building. He watched them for a while before scanning the route he’d just covered. The place was a throng of bodies, jostling, moving into and out of shops, stopping, and walking. There were too many people for him to be sure that he wasn’t being followed. But he looked anyway, just in case someone looked out of place.
Someone like a twenty- or thirty-something man or woman who could move fast if needed.
Someone whose posture suggested a heightened alertness to his surroundings.
Movement from one shop front to another that was too rapid and had no shopping pattern.
Anything about someone that just looked wrong.
He walked quickly away from the mosque toward the Bosphorus. Streetlamps, shop and residential lights, and car beams were being turned on as dusk fell. The sprawling city became bathed in an electric glow, below a clear sky with a sickle moon and stars.
Reaching the Eminonu docks, he stopped close to the traffic-laden Galata Bridge and waited. The Bosphorus was busy with brightly illuminated ferries, some berthing, others crossing the channel or heading up it to Asia. A gentle sea breeze ran over his face, and for a moment Will enjoyed the sensation. He checked his watch.
He saw the tram; his senses sharpened.
It was one of the modern Bombardier Flexity Swift fleet: two long carriages with concertina breaks halfway along that enabled them to bend with the curvature of the tracks. It was slowing down. Will hurried to a ticket kiosk and bought a token that would allow him to take the tram three stops to Yenikap? station. The tram stopped in front of him. Inside, it was at half capacity.
He walked along the aisle of the front carriage and took a vacant seat next to a middle-aged man. He hoped the journey would take no more than ten minutes. Any longer, and he would risk compromising the person he’d come to meet.
