Did this explain why Stephens hadn’t accepted his offer? Marcus couldn’t be sure. Suddenly, though, he was distracted by two MiG fighter jets streaking across the sky. Thirty seconds later, another pair followed, flying low and fast. A shudder rippled through Marcus’s body, but he kept driving, kept processing this question. Why wouldn’t Stephens have wanted the information he and Oleg were offering?
Marcus had told Nick Vinetti that he had critical intelligence to pass along to Stephens and the president. He had no doubt Vinetti had conveyed his full message to Stephens. But perhaps the CIA director and the rest of the NSC had dismissed talk of a deal compared to the value of taking out the three of them in one clean operation, especially without the Russians even realizing they were obliterating the Clarke administration’s exposure on the assassination. Perhaps, too, the NSC had assumed that the intelligence Oleg was offering had to do with the Kremlin threat to the Baltics, a threat that was steadily receding now that Russian forces were pulling back from NATO borders.
Stephens had certainly sounded skeptical about the North Koreans receiving new Russian nukes. He’d sounded even more skeptical that Pyongyang was in the process of selling several of those nukes to Iran. Could such skepticism, combined with a plan the NSC had already set in motion, have made the drone strike a fait accompli from the moment Marcus had dialed the phone? Might Stephens and his team have made a different decision if they’d had more time to process the full implications of what Marcus was offering?
Marcus could not be sure. But one thing was now certain. He and Oleg would have to run, but he had to clear Jenny’s name and get her out of Russia and back to the U.S. alive and well. Could he trust the Agency to bring her in safely if he sweetened the pot and raised the stakes, giving them more information about the Persian gamble to buy Russian warheads from the North Koreans after agreeing never to have or use nuclear weapons? Or by signaling that he and Oleg were still alive, would he make Stephens even more determined to eliminate them after failing the first time?
47
“Pull over somewhere,” Oleg said. “I need a restroom.”
“Hold it,” Marcus replied.
“I can’t.”
“We can’t take the chance of someone seeing you—not here, in your country’s second-largest city.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Valdai National Park. There are cabins there. We’ll hunker down there till we figure out our next move.”
“Valdai? That’s the middle of nowhere.”
“That’s why it’s perfect.”
“But it’s five hours away. I can’t wait that long.”
“You should have gone back at the house.”
“What are you, my mother?”
“Fine, I’ll find a place—but not here in the city.”
The snow had stopped falling, and the temperature was beginning to rise. The roads were becoming a bit slushy though still manageable. They soon saw signs for Pushkin, a municipal town about twenty-five kilometers south of St. Petersburg. There, Marcus exited the E105 highway and wound his way through quiet neighborhoods until he found a park on the edge of town, not closed but certainly secluded. Oleg stepped out to do his business.
Jenny, meanwhile, was sound asleep. The painkillers had kicked in. He felt her forehead. Her fever had come down significantly, but it was still there. Marcus began to rethink taking her to a remote cabin. As soon as night came, the unseasonably frigid temperatures would return, and having her in such a secluded place was probably a mistake. He switched on the car’s GPS navigation system and searched for nearby hotels. By the time Oleg opened the back door—bringing a gust of cold air—Marcus had made his choice.
“Oh, sure, now you tell me,” Oleg said, more pleased than annoyed when Marcus started driving and told him of the change of plans.
Ten minutes later, they pulled into the parking garage of the Tsar Palace on Sofiyskiy Boulevard.
For the moment, Marcus kept the engine—and thus the heat—running. “Stay here with her,” he instructed Oleg. “Try not to wander off.”
He headed into the hotel’s basement alone. When he came back a few minutes later, he held up a set of brass keys and explained they were for a suite on the fifth floor.
“You checked in looking like that?” Oleg asked.
“Of course not. I lifted the keys when the clerk stepped away from the front desk.”
At that, he tapped Jenny to wake her up. Bleary-eyed, she asked where they were. Marcus told her and explained what he’d just done. Then he asked if she knew how to hack into the hotel’s reservations system.
“Probably,” she said, sitting up straight and trying to get her bearings. “But why would I if you already have keys?”
“I want you to list our room as occupied—you know, fake name, fake passport number, credit card, home address, the works. We certainly don’t want them giving the room to anyone else. So can you do it?”
“I told you I could.”
“Good. It’s a nice place, nicer than I’d expected so far from the city. And it’s got lousy security. I didn’t see any surveillance cameras either in the garage or near the stairwell entrance in the basement.”
Jenny pulled out the laptop and used a remote administration tool to hack into the hotel’s Wi-Fi system. Four minutes later, the reservation was set. The three of them moved quickly, gathering their rucksacks and heading into the basement entrance. They took the stairs and avoided running into staff or guests. The moment they reached their suite, they put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and closed the drapes.
The mood on the seventh floor was despondent.
They had failed. The evidence was conclusive, and the Russians were furious.
Richard Stephens glanced at his watch. It was now 7:03 a.m. in Washington—2:03 p.m. in Moscow—and Stephens huddled with Martha Dell, his deputy for intelligence. He explained he’d just gotten off the phone with Kropatkin. The FSB director had been irate, screaming about being misled by the Americans and demanding to know what kind of game Washington was playing.
“I assured him our lead was solid,” Stephens told his staff. “I said the Russians either entered the wrong coordinates or got there too late. Needless to say, he wasn’t buying it, nor was President Petrovsky. In fact, President Clarke can expect a call from Petrovsky within the hour, and neither one of them is going to be happy.”
“You don’t really believe the Russians used the wrong coordinates, do you, sir?” asked Deputy Director Martha Dell.
“No, probably not.”
“Then what happened? How’d they miss him—them?”
“You tell me,” said Stephens, back on his feet and pacing. “I had Ryker on the phone for a good long time. We had a clear signal. It was definitely coming from the satellite phone we gave him, which means the coordinates were real. I don’t get it.”
“Could he have manipulated the signal somehow?” the DDI asked.
“Who, Kropatkin?”
“No, Ryker.”
“How?”
“Well, in theory, Ryker could have been calling from a different location using another phone and routed his call through the satphone we gave him.”
“Is that even possible?” Stephens asked.
“It’s not easy, but yes, it’s possible.”
“Would Ryker know how to do that?”
“I don’t know. He received all kinds of training in the Marines and the Secret Service. I doubt he’d have been trained for that. But Morris would know how. I mean, we taught her.”
“But she’s severely wounded and likely on heavy medication. And if she’s actively helping Ryker, that would suggest she’s now an accomplice. Does anyone buy that?”
“Probably not, but you said it yourself. She’s injured. She’s lost a lot of blood and fluids. She needs painkillers. And she’s in the custody of two admitted assassins. Maybe they’re compelling her to act. Or maybe she just snapped.”
“Okay,” Stephen
s said. “Maybe. But even if that’s the case, why would they do it? Why relay the call?”
Dell hesitated to respond but only for a moment.
“To see if you could be trusted.”
“You think Ryker expected us to give his location to the Russians so they could take him out?” Stephens asked.
“I can’t say if he expected it. But it’s one logical explanation for why he wasn’t calling from the phone we gave him and why the strike didn’t work.”
“So what do we do now?” Stephens demanded. “And what do I tell the president?”
“Sir, we don’t have a choice. We have to make the deal and bring them in.”
“First we try killing them, and then we give them presidential pardons?”
“We don’t have to admit we gave the Russians their coordinates,” the DDI said. “We can tell them the Russians must have intercepted the call. We’re sorry about that, but we’re glad they’re all alive, and now we want them back safely before anything else goes wrong.”
“You think they’ll believe us?”
“Morris might. Ryker won’t. But that’s why you shouldn’t be the one to deliver the message.”
“Then who?”
“Nick Vinetti,” the DDI answered. “They’ve been friends forever. Even if Ryker doesn’t believe the Russians intercepted the call—even if he thinks we tipped them off—he’ll never believe Vinetti was in on it. And he’s right. Vinetti had no idea because we never told him. That makes him the perfect emissary.”
Stephens paced about his office, unsure what to do.
“Look, sir, I believe Marcus Ryker is a traitor to our country. Oleg Kraskin is certainly a traitor to his. As for Jenny Morris, I’ve known her ever since I trained her at the Farm. At this moment I honestly don’t know what her role in all this is, so I’m withholding judgment until I know more. But either way, we don’t have a choice. If it’s really true that the North Koreans have obtained state-of-the-art Russian nuclear warheads, and if there’s even a shred of possibility that the Iranians are angling to buy them, then we’ve got a serious problem on our hands. That’s why you need to persuade the president to make this deal and make it fast. And we need to start working with the Pentagon to spin up options to find those nukes and take them out before it’s too late.”
48
DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, DULLES, VIRGINIA
Pete Hwang had taken an Uber from his apartment before sunrise.
Grabbing his carry-on bag, he raced into the terminal and headed for the Delta counter. There he purchased a business-class ticket on the next flight to London. What he really wanted was a nonstop flight to Berlin, but there simply were no such flights until late that afternoon. Better to spend the day in motion, he decided, getting himself across the Atlantic at least, than spin his wheels in D.C.
“That’ll be $5,618,” said the Delta rep. “I’ll need a credit card and passport.”
Normally Hwang wouldn’t have flinched at such a steep price. He had been a much-sought-after cardiologist and had always had money to burn. But the divorce had taken a toll in more ways than one. His wife—or more accurately, his wife’s attorney—was bleeding him dry. Plus, he’d given up his practice to get into politics and was no longer raking in an income in the mid-six figures. “You know what, let’s make that economy instead.”
The round-trip fare was still over $2,000, but Hwang handed over his American Express card anyway. Marcus Ryker was his friend, and he was in trouble. No one in this city seemed willing or able to help. But Hwang had spent quite a bit of time in Germany over the years. He had a lot of friends there, in government and out. Maybe he could get a lead on where Ryker was. Maybe he could find a way to help.
Stephens reviled the notion of making a deal with Ryker.
But he saw no other way.
Dell was right. For all his many sins, Ryker had never lied to the CIA director, at least not to Stephens’s knowledge. Even if Ryker and Morris had manipulated the satphone signal to mask their true location, that wasn’t lying. It was just good tradecraft.
The fact was, Ryker had been inexplicably candid. To Stephens’s utter shock, Ryker had readily admitted his participation in the plot against Luganov and Nimkov. He had also taken full responsibility for his actions. Was there now any reason to believe he was lying about the North Koreans and the Iranians? The CIA director was skeptical about the nuclear deal Ryker had described. But if he was telling the truth, the Agency needed not just Ryker and Morris but Kraskin as well, and they needed to find them before the Russians did.
There was just one problem. Aside from the near impossibility of finding and establishing communication with Ryker, Stephens first needed to talk to the president. He needed an approval. He needed signed pardons. And he needed them quickly. But Clarke wasn’t at the White House. At the moment, he was speaking on his administration’s new immigration bill to a working breakfast of the National Governors Association at the Washington Hilton.
Stephens called the White House chief of staff and said he needed to talk to POTUS right away. To no avail. She refused to pull the president off the stage, arguing that the highly anticipated and highly controversial speech was being televised live on C-SPAN and most of the major cable news networks and was scheduled to run thirty minutes, followed by another fifteen to twenty minutes of Q&A. After that, he was meeting with the leaders of six Latin American nations, who would then hold an event announcing a new trade deal later that morning, followed by lunch. She could slot Stephens in around three thirty that afternoon, but unless the nation was about to go to war—and they were not—that was the best she could do.
Stephens was going to have to improvise. The hotel was on Connecticut Avenue, some ten miles from CIA headquarters. Depending on traffic, it should take him no more than thirty minutes to get there. Stephens ordered his legal staff to draft the necessary paperwork and send it by secure fax to the Secret Service’s makeshift operations center at the hotel.
Five minutes later, the motorcade consisting of three black bulletproof Lincoln Navigators was racing down the George Washington Memorial Parkway as autumn leaves and the Potomac River blurred by at speeds upwards of eighty miles per hour.
Acting President Mikhail Borisovich Petrovsky did not stand when his FSB director arrived.
Rather he sat behind the desk from which Luganov had ruled Russia with an iron fist since the first day of the first month of the first year of the new millennium.
Kropatkin knew the new president’s first call had been to Pyongyang to get the Dear Leader’s pledge of allegiance to him and his new regime, which had come instantly. Kropatkin also knew no mention had been made of the nuclear warheads about which Petrovsky still knew nothing. The next call had been to Tehran. The Grand Ayatollah’s loyalty to the Kremlin was also immediately forthcoming, though he, too, avoided any mention of the deal with Pyongyang. The next call would be to the president of the United States, and Petrovsky was seething.
“Why did your people not intercept this call Oleg Stefanovich was making?”
“My people find no evidence of such a call, Your Excellency,” Nikolay Kropatkin replied.
“Then why did the Americans give us these coordinates?” Petrovsky demanded. “Why would they intervene in this situation at all?”
“I wish I had a conclusive answer to that, Mikhail Borisovich, but I’m afraid at the moment I have only a theory.”
“Which is what?”
“Perhaps Oleg Stefanovich was speaking on a secure satellite phone—one built by the Americans.”
“With whom?”
“Perhaps with the man we suspect he was in collusion with, an American by the name of Marcus Ryker.”
“And who is he?”
The FSB chief realized Petrovsky hadn’t been read in on the details of the FSB’s investigation. Luganov and Nimkov were the only ones outside of a handful of FSB agents and investigators who had known about Ryker, and no sooner had they been briefed tha
n Oleg had shot them both in cold blood.
“Ryker is a former Marine, a combat veteran who later served in the U.S. Secret Service.”
“Why would you believe this Ryker has any connection?”
Kropatkin gave a quick summary of the case. Kraskin had first met Ryker in Berlin years earlier. Ryker had come to Moscow as the head of Senator Robert Dayton’s security detail and had participated in the meeting with Luganov. Nothing seemed amiss at the time, but then Kraskin mysteriously checked into the Hotel National in the wee hours after the meeting. He claimed to be having a rendezvous with his wife, Marina, who confirmed the story. But Kraskin had asked for a specific room, directly next to Ryker’s room. By sunup, Ryker was making an unscheduled visit to the U.S. Embassy. By that afternoon, Dayton and his delegation were flying back to Washington. And within hours of their arrival, President Clarke had ordered a massive reinforcement of U.S. and other NATO military forces into Poland and the Baltics.
“President Luganov was convinced there was a mole operating at the highest levels inside his government,” Kropatkin finished.
“How could I forget?” Petrovsky said. “I received the brunt of his fury.”
“You did, sir. Some in his cabinet—not you, perhaps, but several ministers—were dismissive of the concern. Several expressed to me in private that Clarke didn’t need a mole to be concerned for the Baltics.”
“But there was a mole,” Petrovsky said. “Luganov was right.”
“He was, sir, and it cost him his life.”
“And you think Ryker was complicit.”
“Thus far the evidence is unclear,” Kropatkin hedged. “We are certain he left the country on Senator Dayton’s plane, but we have no evidence that he ever got to Washington.”
“Get to your point, Nikolay Vladimirovich. I have urgent business to attend to.”
The Persian Gamble Page 18
