The ash-gray clouds of Moscow in the background exchanged for the sunshine of Los Angeles, a man exiting from the back seat of a taxicab. He was a young man no longer, the full dress Russian uniform he’d worn in the ‘80s now replaced by a business suit—his hair turned silver, tousled rebelliously in the breeze.
And yet. . .the insolence remained. The insolence of a survivor. Far more dangerous.
It was unsettling just how little they knew about Alexei Vasiliev, for a man who had spent more than three decades on the radar of the “Five Eyes.”
And there was precious little in what they did know that gave Greer any comfort with the thought of him having entered the UK.
In the old days, they would have had a team on him from the moment he landed at Heathrow. Stayed with him till he left the country, no matter how long it took.
But those days were no more, and now, under the budgetary pressures imposed by the “war on terror” Greer’s CI shop had found itself in a vise, squeezed thin. He couldn’t have pulled together the resources for that kind of operation if his life had depended on it.
As well it might, he told himself, laying aside the Vasiliev jacket to reveal the one lying just beneath it.
The face of the SVR deputy rezident in London staring back at him as he peeled away the cover sheet.
Hello there, Dmitri, Greer mused, the faintest of smiles creasing his weathered face. He sat there for a long moment, lost in thought—in memory—silence filling his office as he gazed at the photo.
Intelligence work was full of moments just like this one. . .moments of desperate, lonely indecision. Keenly aware that you wouldn’t know what the right choice would be until it was already made.
The Rubicon crossed.
Greer snapped the jacket shut with a sudden, decisive motion, replacing the cover sheet as he stacked both folders neatly atop each other—rising from his seat.
A stray phrase from his grammar school days running over and again through his head as he made his way to the door, locking it behind him—striding purposefully down the halls of Thames House on his way out.
Alea iacta est.
The die was cast. . .
9:01 A.M.
The farmhouse
Chandler, Oklahoma
The morning sun struck Roy Coftey full in the face as he stepped out onto the porch of the farmhouse, looking out over the open prairie toward the east, past the barn—the corral which had once held his father’s herd of cattle.
He could still remember when the barn had been built—an event which had filled him with wonder at the age of nine.
“God’s country,” he heard himself say, scarce realizing he had spoken aloud—his head still pounding from the night before.
It had been years since he’d gotten that drunk. Vietnam, maybe? Perhaps when Jessie had died. . .those dark nights, far too many of them, spent asking “Why?”
“Are you sure you won’t join us for breakfast?” he asked, turning as the screen door slammed shut behind him, the CIA man joining him on the porch.
“No, Roy,” Kranemeyer replied, coming to stand beside him at the top of the steps, the scruff of a five o’clock shadow on his usually clean-shaven face. “You’ve seen the news, everything coming out of Germany. D.C. beckons.”
Indeed he had. He’d be back there soon enough himself, as distant as it had seemed these last few days.
“About last night,” he began heavily, following a few steps behind Kranemeyer as the latter made his way out to his rental, parked in the driveway. “We were drunk. We both said things we didn’t mean—things that. . .are best left forgotten.”
Kranemeyer just looked at him, his hand on the door of the rental, those dark eyes as unreadable as ever. “I wasn’t drunk, Roy. And I said nothing I didn’t mean.”
Darkness. Coftey shook his head, taking a step toward his friend. “You don’t understand, Barney. No matter what happens, no matter what comes down through Congress, what I can or cannot stop—we can’t go down that road again.”
“We did once before, you and I,” Kranemeyer responded, all too clearly unmoved, his eyes holding the senator’s in an unwavering gaze.
“That was different.” The senator looked away, then, taking a deep breath before he went on. It was like looking into an abyss. “The President was guilty of treason, had been responsible for the deaths of CIA officers overseas.”
“And these people will be responsible for the deaths of more. You can see that, can’t you, Roy?” Kranemeyer demanded, a raw edge creeping into his voice. “Just like they have, over and again, all through the years, your war, mine—God only knows how many others in between. Men who have never set foot outside that wire, attempting to cuff the hands of those who do. And sooner or later, it’s going to get people killed. I end up burying my people either way, so you tell me. . .what’s the difference, really?”
The pain of loss, Coftey thought, looking out over the Oklahoma prairie. They’d both buried far too many comrades over the decades. The lot of the soldier, the one they’d accepted for themselves, so many years ago.
“It’s not treason to be wrong,” he said finally, “not even when it comes at the cost of human life. We all—you and I, the Congress, the President himself—serve at the pleasure of the people. We exist only to carry out their will, and in this democracy, they’re entitled to be wrong. But God help us when they are.”
It was a long moment before the CIA man responded, a shadow seeming to pass across his saturnine countenance. “Frankly, Roy, I’d just as soon we helped ourselves.”
6:39 P.M. British Summer Time
High Street Kensington Underground Station
London
Philip Greer could feel his pulse quicken as he heard the train approach, the peculiar rushing sound filling the tube station—a woman jostling against him as she moved closer to the edge of the platform.
The moment of truth.
He was gambling here, and he knew it. Gambling with stakes impossible to even quantify, let alone weigh properly—his eyes scanning the crowd as the train pulled in, its doors opening.
Come on. . .where are you?
It had been years since he’d done this, and yet it all came rushing back—memories of Vienna back in the ‘80s, running counter-intelligence for Six back in the day.
Seconds ticking by as the crowd of evening commuters flooded onto the cars, filling the train. Still no sign.
It made sense that he would wait until the last moment—lessen the time anyone following him would have to board, deny them the cover of the crowd.
Force them to—there. And then he saw him, moving hurriedly toward the train—a short, middle-aged man in a business suit like so many of his fellow commuters, his thinning hair cropped short to the scalp, emphasizing sharply Slavic features. Dmitri Pavlovich Litvinov.
Got you.
Glancing around him to make sure no one else was with him, Greer moved swiftly into his wake—murmuring a soft “pardon me” to a woman holding a child in her arms as he pushed past her, the three of them making it onto the train only seconds before the doors closed.
He felt the train lurch into motion as he cast his eyes about the car, searching for his quarry—his gaze finally falling on a familiar head, barely ten feet down the car.
“Pardon me, is this seat taken?” he inquired quietly, the Russian’s face blanching as he looked up.
“My God,” he heard the man exclaim, swearing beneath his breath as he sat down beside him.
Greer never looked at him, his eyes fixed impassively forward. “Now, now, Dmitri. . .let’s not have a scene, shall we? Neither of us can well afford that, can we?”
The SVR deputy rezident shook his head, his face a study in anger and surprise. “Just tell me what you’re doing here.”
“We have a problem. . .”
7:54 P.M. Central European Summer Time
Transavia Flight 389
Paris, France
“. . .are now on fina
l approach to Charles de Gaulle Airport. Please make sure your seatbelt is fastened. . .”
The man glanced out the window of the Boeing 737 as the voice droned on over the PA system, looking out over the sprawling landscape below. France.
He’d been here so many times over the last thirteen years, but he never wearied of returning—which was not to say he’d ever had any choice in the matter. A beautiful country, which never lost its ability to delight and surprise.
A beautiful country which had spent the last seven decades of its storied history sheltered behind the might of American armored divisions, he thought, his face hardening. Prospering, while his people suffered.
No more.
His flight from Vienna had been as uneventful as his drive across the border from Germany to Austria had been two nights previous. And judging by the continuing reports flooding out of Berlin, his time in-country had been an unmitigated success.
There would be no problem with his Hungarian passport upon landing, any more than there had been crossing any border during these last five weeks in Europe. Freedom of movement, one of the chief ideals of the EU.
Such a beautiful thing.
A smile touched the man’s lips at the thought, a hard smile that never reached his eyes. One had to wonder how long such ideals would last, once the real violence started.
Once Berlin became only a footnote.
But that was none of his concern. His was only to pour gasoline over the heaping piles of kindling. It would be left to someone else to throw the match.
Burn it all down.
Chapter 9
6:32 A.M., July 6th
The apartment
Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Belgium
“. . .not a chance, man. Les Rouches will be back on top next week, you just watch.”
“After the way Club Brugge spanked them last night?” Reza asked, turning back from the refrigerator with an amused smile creasing his swarthy face. “Their team’s no good this season, I keep telling you that.”
“And you’ve been wrong every time,” Driss returned stubbornly, subsiding into silence as he cut into an orange with his pocketknife.
Harry felt himself smile despite himself, spreading butter across his toast with a knife. If one closed one’s eyes, it could all seem so. . .normal. University students, or at least no older, the five of them sharing breakfast around a table. Talking trash about sports, about their friends, their professors. Like anywhere in the world.
This is what people meant when they talked about the “banality of evil.” This.
Thou preparest a table before me, in the presence of mine enemies. . .
A fragment of Scripture, drifting unbidden through his mind as he glanced across the table, his eyes meeting Marwan’s. Surely goodness and mercy. . .
No. He pushed it away, suppressing an involuntary shudder. There was nothing of “goodness” to be found here. And there could be nothing of mercy at the end of this road.
“So,” he began, brushing crumbs from his dark, close-cropped beard as he crammed the last of his toast in his mouth, “this police officer of yours. . .how soon do we leave?”
6:49 A.M. British Summer Time
The Bakerloo Line
London Underground
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Phillip. None. I need you to leave, now. Approaching me like this, in public—this is madness.”
Perhaps so. That was always hard to determine in this business, the line blurring between the insane and the all too real. Phillip Greer leaned back in his seat, lost in thought as the train picked up speed once more, heading out of the Piccadilly Circus station toward Charing Cross. Remembering Litvinov’s words from the night before, the way the man had looked at him when he had dropped Vasiliev’s name.
The look of utter, unfeigned surprise. Or was it?
He’d known the man for a very long time, back to those days in Vienna—those dark, uncertain days as the Soviet system collapsed under its own weight and the world teetered on the brink of a precipice, holding its collective breath.
He had been running CI operations against Russian penetration efforts there at the time—efforts which Litvinov, himself a young KGB field officer, had been a part of spear-heading.
A few years before, one might have foreseen a promising career for Litvinov. He was competent, ambitious, and running and recruiting assets aggressively in one of Europe’s premier spy capitals.
But it wasn’t a few years before, and in those turbulent months, the ground was ever shifting beneath one’s feet—the old edifice of Lenin and Trotsky now shuddering from repeated blows. Threatening to come down and crush all beneath it.
Dark days of the soul, full of fear and doubt.
Litvinov, a communist to the very end—suffering the fate of every true believer who finds his gods to be false, his fellow worshipers. . .frauds. Devastation.
“I believed.” Those two words, stark in their very simplicity, printed in the file Litvinov’s case officer had given Greer following the first meet which had led to the Russian’s eventual recruitment by Six.
Two words, summing up why Dmitri Pavlovich Litvinov had chosen to betray his country.
It had been a short-lived recruitment, as it turned out. As Soviet republics began to break away and soldiers marched into Red Square—with Boris Yeltsin facing down the last Communist hard-liners from atop a tank, the West had begun to let out the breath it had been holding for so very many years.
And in the wake of the USSR’s final collapse, the war “won”, the decision had been made—somewhere high above them all—that paying former Soviet assets was not a worthwhile use of Her Majesty’s exchequer.
Scores of men and women just like Litvinov, simply. . .cut loose. Years of potential insight into the wounded animal that had been Russia in those troubled years throughout the ‘90s, squandered.
It was no wonder that he’d been surprised by Greer’s reappearance—an unsettling apparition from a past he’d no doubt long tried to convince himself was permanently behind him.
But betrayal was never something one left in the past.
And that brought him back to the fundamental question which had been troubling him ever since the previous night—was Dmitri telling the truth?
Greer shook his head, his face drawing up in a tight grimace as he stared out the windows of the train into the stygian darkness of the Underground. If he was—if the SVR’s deputy rezident really wasn’t aware of Alexei Vasiliev’s presence in-country—then this had the potential to be far bigger than even he’d imagined. Far more dangerous.
And the Rubicon was already at his back.
9:09 A.M. Central European Summer Time
Sint-Jans-Molenbeek
Belgium
“Aryn said he’d be ready by the time we got here,” Reza observed, staring at his phone as if expecting that it would provide the answers he sought. He held it up, displaying the last text—nine minutes old, his own unanswered response just below it.
Harry shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the broken concrete of the sidewalk rough beneath his feet as he glanced up at the side of the apartment building.
Aryn Younes. He closed his eyes, visualizing the young man as he had met him at the boxing club on the night of his showdown with Marwan—quiet and reserved, several years older than the other members of the cell. No leader, but dependable in a way the younger men simply weren’t.
Or at least that had been his impression, he thought, glancing at his wristwatch. Because this morning, Aryn’s dependability was nowhere to be found. Where was he?
They were due to meet up with Yassin and the others, soon.
“I’ll go up, see if I can find him,” Reza said after another long, awkward moment. “He lives with his mother–I’ve been to their flat before.”
Indeed. “I’ll come with you.”
“Oh, it’s you,” Aryn said, looking out at them through the cracked door. He reached up to undo the chain
blocking their entrance, pulling it open. “I’m sorry, I know I said I’d be ready when you got here, but things with mother since her last treatment. . .”
“Salaam alaikum, brother,” Harry replied gently, placing his hand on the young Moroccan’s shoulder. “Is she unwell?”
A quick, reflexive nod, as if he scarce trusted himself to speak. “Cancer. Of the liver. Last year, the doctors gave her six months.”
Harry winced, surprised at the surge of emotion that welled up within him at Aryn’s words. “I’m sorry, habibi.”
And he was, despite himself. He knew all too well what it was like to have no one—to be alone in the world. Adrift.
“Is there nothing that can be done for her?”
“The doctors are trying,” Aryn replied with a short, bitter shake of the head, “or they say they are. It was discovered late—Stage Four. She’s. . .been growing weaker these last few weeks, I’ve had to take care of her, I’m all she has.”
“As well you should,” Harry said, squeezing Aryn’s shoulder firmly. “Are you able to join us this morning?”
A nod. “Yes, I just need to change—she’ll be fine for the next few hours.”
“Aryn?” Harry heard a woman ask from the adjoining room. “Do you have visitors?”
“Yes, mother,” the young man replied over his shoulder, his eyes returning to Harry. “Would you sit with her for a moment—while I get ready? She sees so few people these days. . .”
There was a strange, imploring earnestness in his voice—hard to reconcile with what he knew of Aryn. The way he’d seen him, just a few nights before, listening to Marwan in the club. Hanging onto every last radical word.
Yet here they were. They all have families. His own words to Mehreen, a few short months before. And yet. . .
Presence of Mine Enemies Page 14
