by Scott McEwen
“They’ll be well taken care of,” the colonel said. “May I ask you for the passport you were issued in Paris?”
“Yes, sir.” Gil took the passport from his coat pocket and gave it to the colonel, who passed it off to a major, who tucked it away inside his own coat. “Is my government aware of my arrival, sir?”
“I believe so,” the colonel said. “I’m told someone from your embassy will call on you this evening. Before that, the president would like a private word with you over an early lunch—if you’re feeling up to it.”
Gil cleared his throat. “President Putin, sir?”
The colonel met his gaze. “Will that be all right with you, Master Chief?”
“Absolutely, sir. I’m just a little shocked the president of Russia would bother meeting with a virtual nobody such as myself.”
The colonel smiled and continued walking. “You give yourself too little credit, Master Chief. You’re a very accomplished soldier. We have been following your career rather closely here in Moscow over the past eighteen months—ever since your mission into Iran last year.”
Gil went on alert. “I’ve never been to Iran, Colonel. I’m afraid you have me confused with someone else.”
The colonel laughed. “Perhaps we do.”
They walked along in silence the final few yards to the Kremlin Palace, where Gil was led inside and shown to a small suite. The room was much like a hotel room, but instead of a bed, there was a black leather sofa.
“I assume you would like an opportunity to shower and change your clothes before your meeting with the president.”
“Very much so,” Gil said. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“There is a change of clothes in the closet. I’ll return for you in half an hour.”
Savcenko stepped out, pulling the door to, and Gil dropped down on the sofa, stretching his arms across the back of it and extending his legs. “Holy shit,” he muttered. “Six hours ago, I was in a Turkish whorehouse, and now here I sit in the fucking Kremlin getting ready to break bread with Stalin Junior. My wife would never believe this.”
47
MEXICO CITY,
Mexico
Tim Hagen sat on his hotel bed dressed in his pajamas, drinking Dos Equis beer and wondering how the president of the United States had responded to the video clip. He laughed drunkenly, thinking of how shocked the big, bad commander in chief must have been the moment he realized that his tryst with the Korean girl had been recorded for posterity. Hagen knew the CIA might soon move to take him out, but that wasn’t going to do the president any good. In the morning, he would set up a delayed upload that would require him to enter a password every twelve hours. After one missed entry, the video would upload automatically to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Ustream, and a half dozen other websites. Within twenty-four hours, the video would go viral, and the president would go down in flames as the most humiliated world leader in history.
Hagen went into the bathroom to take a leak, and when he came back out, he found both of his Mexican bodyguards standing in the bedroom doorway waiting for him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, fear surging through him.
“Nothing,” said the head bodyguard, taking a silenced .380 Walther pistol from beneath his shirt. “Sit down on the bed.”
“What? What the fuck is going on?” Hagen asked in dismay.
The other bodyguard stepped forward and took him by the arm. “Have a seat, señor.”
“You guys can’t do this,” Hagen said, beginning to cry as he sat down on the edge of the bed. “You work for me. Whatever they’re paying, I’ll quadruple it! We can go to the bank in—”
“Be quiet.” The head bodyguard called into the other room in Spanish, and two beautiful, young Mexican women with long, raven hair came in wearing nurses’ uniforms. One of them was pushing a wheelchair.
“What the hell is going on?” Hagen demanded, swallowing hard. “You guys are supposed to protect me!”
“The señoritas are going to get you ready to leave,” the bodyguard told him. “Don’t give them any trouble, and we won’t give you any trouble. Okay?”
One of the women rolled up the sleeve of Hagen’s pajamas and tied off the arm with a rubber hose while the other prepared a hypodermic needle.
“Don’t do this,” Hagen said, tears welling in his eyes. “Please, don’t do this.”
The young woman smiled at him as she sat down beside him and poked the syringe into his vein, injecting him with 10 cc of Thorazine. Hagen’s eyes rolled back in his head a few seconds later, and he flopped over on the sheet mumbling.
Next they took a pair of clippers from their medical bag and buzzed off all of his hair, sweeping it carefully from the sheet and flushing it down the toilet. The bodyguards then lifted Hagen into the wheelchair, and the women lathered his head with shaving cream, giving him a skillful straight-razor shave that left him completely bald and without a single nick. Then they shaved off his eyebrows and plucked out his eyelashes. After applying a little bit of movie makeup to give him a pallid complexion, he looked exactly like a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy.
Hagen was vaguely aware of what was happening to him, but it was difficult to move his arms and legs, and he could hardly keep the saliva in his mouth, much less form any words.
His “nurses” gently put his slippers on his feet, folded a blanket neatly over his legs, and hooked him up to an IV tube. Then they twisted their hair up beneath their nurses’ caps and wheeled him down the hall to the elevator.
There weren’t many people in the hotel still awake at that hour, but those who were saw only a rich American dying of cancer as he was rolled through the lobby to the main exit. One tourist paused on his way in to hold the door as the women wheeled Hagen out to a waiting handicapped van.
Hagen had no idea how much time had passed by the time he began to come around, but when his vision finally began to clear, he found himself strapped to the wheelchair facing a bright blue swimming pool beneath the hot Mexican sun.
“How are you feeling, Señor Hagen?” asked a Mexican man with bulging dark eyes. “The girls gave you a shot of adrenaline to help bring you around.”
Hagen recognized the man as Antonio Castañeda. “What are you going to do me?”
“Nothing,” Castañeda said, sipping from a glass of tequila. “It was only my job to get you here. My associate Mariana is going to come over and ask you some questions now. I expect they’ll be rather pointed questions, and I expect you to answer them to the very best of your ability. Is that understood, señor?”
Hagen nodded, remembering from somewhere in his foggy memory banks that Castañeda was known for toying with his victims before he killed them. “I understand.”
“Good.” Castañeda looked across the patio and made a come-here gesture with his hand.
Agent Mariana Mederos appeared, and Castañeda got up to give her his chair. “The gentleman is all yours, hermosa.”
“Thank you,” Mariana said dryly.
Hagen looked at her. “Who are you?”
“I’m with the CIA,” she said. “That’s really all that matters. I have some questions for you to answer.”
“And then what?” Hagen said. “I get a bullet in the head?”
“Mr. Hagen, I wasn’t sent here to kill you. I’m not an assassin. It’s my guess you’ll eventually end up back in the US, where you’ll be prosecuted for treason.”
“You can’t use this interrogation as evidence against—” He chuckled sardonically. “It doesn’t matter. Pope sent you.”
Mariana took her sunglasses from the top of her head and put them on. “I need the names of everyone involved in the attempt to take over the CIA, as well as those who had any hand in exposing the Paris operation.”
Hagen cast a glance across the patio, where Castañeda sat talking with an American man he
recognized vaguely. His two former nurses were sunbathing naked on the far side of the pool.
“And if I refuse to give you the names?”
Mariana frowned. “I thought Señor Castañeda already covered that with you.”
Hagen looked down at the water. “He didn’t go into specifics . . . but that doesn’t matter, either. The names you want are Ken Peterson, Senator Steve Grieves, Ben Walton, Max Steiner, and Paul Miller. Steiner and Miller are already dead, but Pope knows that.” He looked at her inquisitively. “Do you even know why the Green Beret is here with you?”
She ignored the question, thinking the Thorazine must still be tweaking his thoughts.
“Who sent Jason Ryder to kill Pope?”
“Ryder worked for Peterson.”
“How much of the plot does Grieves have personal knowledge of?”
“You’d have to ask Peterson about that. Grieves and I never spoke of it. There was no need. Our personal business was strictly political.”
Mariana questioned him for a couple more minutes. Then she stood up and walked back across the patio.
Daniel Crosswhite stood up from where he’d been talking with Castañeda. “Got everything you need?”
“Yeah. He’s confirmed our intel.” Crosswhite walked off, and she turned to Castañeda. “Your help in this matter has been valuable. Thank you. I expect someone to be in touch soon with instructions on where to deliver him.”
Castañeda smiled at her. “Can I get you something to drink, Mariana?”
“No, thank you,” she said, glancing across the patio, where Crosswhite was crouched in front of Hagen’s wheelchair. “What’s he doing?”
“I believe he’s carrying out the rest of Señor Pope’s instructions.”
“What? He doesn’t have any instructions from—”
Crosswhite looked into Hagen’s eyes. “You tried to kill my best friend, you fuckin’ cocksucker.”
Hagen stared back at him, smirking. “There’s no need to make this personal, is there, Danny?”
“The fuck there isn’t,” Crosswhite said. “If you had time, I’d tell you a story about a young girl who got her throat cut.”
Hagen shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Who hired Ryder?”
“I already told Pope’s bitch.” Hagen saw Mariana coming back in their direction. “Why don’t you just get it over with?”
Crosswhite reached out to flip the break levers on the wheelchair. “Adios, puto.”
“Don’t!” Mariana shouted.
Crosswhite stepped behind the wheelchair and pushed it over the edge at the deep end of the pool. There was a mild splash, and Hagen went straight to the bottom.
Mariana froze in place, utterly aghast. “What the fuck do you call that?”
“Swimming lesson.” Crosswhite looked into the water at Hagen’s shimmering image twelve feet down. “Doesn’t look like he’s doin’ too good, does it?”
48
THE MOSCOW KREMLIN
Gil was now dressed in a suit and tie with a black leather overcoat that fit him perfectly. He had spent the past couple hours on a private tour of the Kremlin with Colonel Savcenko, and they now stood outside admiring the giant bronze Tsar Cannon on display near the Dormition Cathedral. Cast in 1586 as a defensive weapon for the Kremlin, “Russia’s Shotgun” was an 890 mm bombard that weighed thirty-nine tons—nine tons more than a Sherman tank.
“Hell of gun,” Gil said. “Has it ever been fired?”
“Not in battle. Though there is evidence inside the bore that it has been fired at least once.”
A contingent of five men rounded the corner of the cathedral and began walking in their direction. Gil recognized President Putin immediately.
“The president does speak English,” Savcenko said, “so you can speak directly to him, but he will probably choose to speak to you through me.”
“I understand.” Gil girded himself for what he expected to be a weighty interview.
President Putin approached appearing quite serious, though not entirely unfriendly. His pale blue eyes were almost lifeless, but his face conveyed a certain calm, and Gil sensed no immediate danger.
“Master Chief Shannon,” Putin said in his gentle voice, offering his hand with a kind, though not overly cheerful, smile. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. President.” Gil matched his grip, which was firm and confident but in no way aggressive or challenging. “Colonel Savcenko has been giving me a tour. This is a fascinating place, sir.”
Putin nodded, holding Gil’s gaze. “The Kremlin has a rich history.”
“I’ve begun to see that for myself, sir.”
“Are you hungry?”
Gil could sense Savcenko’s mild discomfiture at being left out of the loop, and he realized that Putin must be breaking with the norm by speaking in English. He took that as a favorable wind. “Yes, I am, sir.”
“This way,” Putin said with a wave of his hand. He said something to Savcenko in Russian, and the colonel began interpreting for Gil as they walked along. “You and Major Dragunov have been on an adventure.”
“We have, sir. Major Dragunov is a brave man, a fine soldier. I’m proud to have worked with him. Unfortunately, Sasha Kovalenko is a brave man as well, and he got away.”
“What will your superiors say when you return?” Putin asked pointedly. “About deviating from the mission?”
Gil decided to gamble on the favorable wind. “I’ll probably get my ass chewed, Mr. President.”
Upon hearing the translation, Putin paused midstride to look at Gil, almost cracking a smile, though not quite.
Gil kept a military bearing. “I’m not exactly sure how that translates into Russian, sir.”
Putin chuckled, in spite of himself, and Gil saw they were going to get along.
A short time later, they were served in an ornate dining room in the Kremlin Palace, just the two of them, with the translator off to the side and Putin’s security men standing at parade rest at four points around the room.
“I have never eaten in here,” Putin remarked, placing a linen napkin into his lap.
Gil did the same with his own napkin, noting a portrait of Joseph Stalin on the far wall and feeling the infamous dictator’s eyes boring into him.
“It seems to be a day of firsts, sir.”
“It does,” Putin said. “Vodka?”
Gil hated vodka. “Please. Thank you, sir.”
Putin signaled for the male waitron to pour Gil a drink and dipped his spoon into a bowl of borscht.
Gil did the same.
Putin looked up from his bowl and spoke directly to Gil in English: “Have you ever eaten borscht?” The soup was made from beets, potatoes, and cabbage.
“No, sir,” Gil said, wiping his chin with the napkin. “But it’s very good.”
They continued with small talk throughout the first course and most of the second, which consisted of meat and potatoes. Not until the third course—tea and cake—did Putin come around to the events of the past forty-eight hours.
Savcenko turned to Gil with a stern look and translated, “You are aware of the awkward position this rescue has put me in?”
Gil set down his cup of tea. “I am, sir.”
“Why do you think your superiors allowed you to leave Turkey with those women?” Putin’s eyes were once again cold and lifeless.
“May I speak freely, Mr. President?”
“Of course.”
“I think they let us take off because they knew I’d burn down half of Istanbul if that’s what it took to get those girls out.” Gil sipped his tea. “Now, that’s an exaggeration, of course, but Colonel Savcenko tells me the GRU has been following my career for the last year and a half. And if that’s true, sir, then
they must have told you by now that I can be very determined when I want to be.”
Putin smiled. “It has been mentioned.”
“Well, with that being said, Mr. President, I’m guessing my superiors decided it was probably easier to let me have my way than to risk me making things worse.”
Putin sat back, attempting to read Gil’s demeanor. “You don’t think they allowed it in order to put me into an awkward position?”
Gil shrugged. “It’s possible, sir. Your government and mine have been at odds over Ukraine for some time now. But that’s politics, Mr. President. I don’t know much about it, and I’m very careful not to involve myself in it. I’m a Navy SEAL, sir. I go where I’m told and do what I’m told.” But even Gil was hard-pressed not to laugh. “Well, sir, that last part’s not entirely true, but I think you understand my point.”
Putin sat nodding, unable to entirely suppress his own smile, speaking directly in English once more. “Here in Russia, things would be very different for you.”
“I am entirely aware of that, Mr. President, and if my actions have put you in an awkward position, I hope you will accept my sincere apologies. I cannot, however, apologize for bringing those girls home. It was the right thing to do, sir, and I do not regret having done it.”
Putin raised his hand to the translator to silence him. He looked at Gil for a long a moment. “You are a man of principles.”
“I’m not sure if that’s it or not, sir. My father was a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. Toward the end of the war, he was sent on a mission north of the DMZ. He was forced to kill innocent women and children on that mission, and he never forgave himself for it. After the war, I watched him drink himself to death. I’m not a psychologist, sir, and I don’t spend too much time thinking about it, but I suppose it’s possible that I feel some inner need to make up for the people he killed.”
Putin added a shot of vodka to his tea and sat back in the chair. “Tell me about the pregnant woman you brought back from Iran.”
