Fifteen hours had passed since his escape from Graves. He had no doubt that his name already figured high on every fugitive watch list across Europe. But he knew enough about law enforcement, and more about governments and bureaucracies, not to be overly concerned. It would take awhile for his information to be forwarded to hotels, car rental companies, airlines, and the like. At some point Graves would see to it that his credit cards were frozen, too, but all that was in the future.
Jonathan guessed that he had a window of twenty-four hours to get where he needed to go.
He arrived at Brussels airport an hour later. And thirty minutes after that he was signing the papers to rent a mid-size Audi sedan. The clerk slipped the car keys across the desk. “One last question, sir.”
“Yes?” replied Jonathan.
“You do not plan on driving the car to Italy, do you?”
“Is that not permitted?”
“Of course it is permitted, but we would insist on a higher rate of insurance. Alas, there is much theft there. Rental cars are a prime target.”
“How can you tell which one is a rental car?” asked Jonathan.
“By the license numbers. In Belgium, all rental car plates begin with a sixty-seven. It is the same with each country.”
Jonathan digested the information for future use. Then he answered the clerk’s question. “No, I don’t plan on going to Italy,” he lied. “In fact, I’m going to Germany. Hamburg. I’ve heard it’s lovely.”
“I wish you a safe journey, Dr. Ransom,” said the clerk.
Jonathan nodded and left the counter. Emma had taught him well.
37
“Five days. We don’t know where, when, or how. Only that Robert Russell suspected an impending attack of some kind at a nuclear plant and that he was the nearest thing we have to a seer.” Charles Graves walked briskly across the tarmac toward the waiting aircraft, hands buried in his pockets. A fitful wind blew off the ocean, flinging sea spume into the air. It was nearly two in the afternoon, and despite a clear sky and brilliant sun, the air was chill.
“I do know one thing,” said Kate.
“What’s that?”
“We’ve been wrong all along.”
“About what exactly?”
“Everything.”
Graves pulled up. “I’ll grant you we’ve been a step behind, but I wouldn’t say we’ve been wrong.”
“Really? Then tell me this: who was Emma Ransom after? Ivanov or Mischa Dibner?”
“Ivanov, obviously. And I have a car bomb packed with twenty kilos of grade-A Semtex to prove it.”
“But didn’t Russell think the attack was going to be against Mischa Dibner? I mean, she was the one he’d spoken to about it.”
“His intelligence was incomplete. Happens all the time. He missed one this time. So what?”
“What if we’re both wrong? Remember the clue ‘Victoria Bear’? Maybe that was the target. The Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform. That’s where the UK Safeguards Office is housed and where the emergency meeting with the IAEA was scheduled to take place.”
“And Interior Minister Ivanov? How do you explain his timely arrival at the scene?”
“I can’t,” said Kate. “I’m not there yet. Let’s stay with Mischa. She was inside the building at the time of the blast, but she didn’t stay there. She couldn’t have done.”
Graves nodded, his eyes saying that he was beginning to see where Kate was headed. “How so?”
“The law. In case of a blast or a terrorist act, the law calls for the mandatory evacuation of government buildings in the vicinity. You saw Victoria Street five minutes after the car went up.”
“A bloody debacle. Looked as if half London worked inside those buildings.”
“Exactly. And I’m willing to wager that Mischa and her team from the IAEA were among them.”
“Do we know that for certain?” Graves was no longer doubting, but playing devil’s advocate.
“No.” Kate spoke slowly and with great care. She was walking on quicksand and she knew it. “What if Emma Ransom just wanted to force Mischa and her team out of the building?”
“And the attack on Ivanov was the means to do it?”
“Precisely.”
“Which means there must have been something pretty valuable inside that she wanted to get her hands on.”
“Something that Mischa and her team from the IAEA had brought with them.”
Graves pulled his cell phone from his jacket and placed a call. “Get me Major Evans, Department K.”
Kate stayed at Graves’s side. Department K of MI5 was in charge of protective security for all government offices in the British capital.
“Hello, Blackie. Charlie Graves. Listen, I’ve got you on my cell’s speaker. A bit windy here, so if you could speak up, it would help. I’m with DCI Kate Ford of the Met. We’re tracking down a lead on yesterday’s bombing. Quick question. Anything odd come up during or after the evacuation of our people at One Victoria Street? Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform? Theft of some kind?”
“You could say that,” came a clipped upper-crust voice. “All hell’s breaking loose down here. During the evacuation someone got into the offices of the nuclear safeguards people and nicked some high-grade stuff.”
“Can you give me some more detail?”
“Officially some briefcases and travel bags were lifted from a meeting room on the third floor.”
“Did they belong to the team from the International Atomic Energy Agency?”
“How the devil did you know? The meeting was supposed to be very hush-hush.”
“Go on, Blackie. What was in those briefcases?”
“Take me off speaker,” said Evans.
Graves deactivated the speaker. Kate watched with alarm as his face grew taut. He thanked his colleague and hung up.
“What is it?” demanded Kate. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No one gives a damn about the briefcases and travel bags that went missing. It’s what was inside them. Someone made off with several laptops belonging to the members of the IAEA’s Safety and Security Division.”
“Emma Ransom.”
“Who else?”
“So why the concern? Precisely what was in the laptops?”
Graves swallowed hard and fixed her with a doleful gaze. “Bloody everything.”
38
Lev Timken was not a man that you would care to observe making love. To begin with, he was obese. He was also short, ugly, and as hairy as a Mingrelian bear. But these unappealing physical attributes were nothing compared to his primal grunting. In the throes of passion, the man produced a gut-curdling bark that would make a horny elephant seal blush.
“Can’t you turn down the sound?” demanded Sergei Shvets.
From his position in the backseat of his BMW stretch sedan, Shvets enjoyed an unimpeded view of the advanced communications center built into the dashboard. At that moment the monitor was displaying a high-definition picture broadcast from Timken’s bedroom. “Sound and light,” as the men in Directorate S called it. Shvets had installed similar surveillance systems in one hundred apartments around the city. It was necessary to keep an eye on your adversaries.
His driver obediently lowered the volume.
“Christ, look at him,” said Shvets. “I believe that I’m doing the women of Moscow a favor. He has enough blubber on him to supply a village with oil to last a Siberian winter.”
“And enough fur to make a dozen coats.”
Shvets was parked across the street from Lev Timken’s apartment building on Kutuzovksy Prospekt. The building dated from the 1930s, when Stalin was on his quest to westernize Moscow, and it would not have looked out of place off the Étoile in Paris or the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin.
Timken had made his fortune in the halcyon days of the ’90s, a KGB colonel in charge of weapons procurement and production. When the Communist Party ceased to exist, he claimed o
wnership of a raft of factories producing everything from bullets to bombers and sold their output to the highest bidder, usually budding African despots in need of a competitive advantage to oust their rivals from power. In short order Timken traded his uniform for a business suit and departed Army Southern Command in the unglamorous city of Minsk for the private sector and a shot at the big time in Moscow, or “the Center,” which was how Russians referred to their nation’s capital.
His fortune secure, he moved laterally into politics. A native of St. Petersburg and a former judo champion (weren’t they all, these days?), Timken allied himself to that other son of the north, Vladimir Putin, and rode the diminutive former spy’s coattails to power. It was a meteoric rise. A seat in the Duma. An appointment to the cabinet. Then the move to counselor, and a voice in making the really big decisions.
For the past three years Timken had served as first aide to the president, where his primary function was to hold hands with the myriad Western oil companies brought in to modernize Russia’s aging infrastructure and exploit the nation’s vast oil reserves. His work had met with so much success that he was a front-runner to succeed the president when he stepped down in two years’ time.
“What did we give her?” asked Shvets, eyes drilling the monitor.
“Cyanide.”
“We still use that?”
“Nothing works as quickly. Once the scent fades, it is almost impossible to detect in the blood. It will appear that Timken had a heart attack. Who will doubt it?”
Shvets angled his head to better view the writhing coils of flesh. “How will she administer it?”
“You do not wish to know.”
“Go ahead.”
The driver explained briefly. For once, Shvets had no comment.
Since the eleventh century, Mother Russia had been a land ruled and divided by clans. Stretching over eleven time zones and incorporating over fifty ethnic minorities, Russia was simply too large a landmass for one man, or one family, to govern. Ivan the Terrible relied upon his feudal lords to see his will carried out. Peter the Great, on the caste of noblemen called Boyars. Each granted his supporters large tracts of land in exchange for fealty and in doing so united their aims with his own and guaranteed their loyalty.
It was no different in the twenty-first century.
On the surface, Russia appeared as monolithic as ever. The new, modern Russia was a Western-style democracy boasting a popularly elected president and a bicameral legislature. But appearances were deceiving. Just below the surface, the country was a caldron of competing interests. In place of warlords, there were mafia chieftains. In place of Boyars, there were CEOs. Land was no longer the favored asset, but money, preferably shares of large corporations built on the plundering of Russia’s vast natural resources: oil, natural gas, and timber. And knee-deep in the intrigue was the nation’s intelligence service, the FSB, fighting with everyone else for the president’s favor.
Russia was, and would always be, a country ruled by clans.
Rapacious was the head that wore the crown, and no one was more so than Sergei Shvets, chairman of the FSB. Shvets had long ago set his sights on the pinstriped ermine of the Kremlin. Nothing short of the presidency would do.
On this cool, rainy morning in Moscow, three men stood in his way. One lay comatose in a London hospital bed. Another was touring a natural gas facility in Kazakhstan and was due back later that night. The third, Lev Timken, first aide to the president, was about to die.
Shvets watched as his agent uncoupled herself from Timken and placed her head between his legs. Timken’s mouth fell open, and Shvets could hear the man’s howls even with the volume turned off. Timken arched his back, his eyes bulging in ecstasy. The woman raised her head from his lap and kissed him on the mouth, lifting a hand to massage his cheek.
Shvets shuddered, imagining the capsule entering his own mouth, his teeth gnashing down on it and releasing the poison into him.
Timken pushed away the nude woman and struggled to stand. The woman remained on her knees, watching as Timken collapsed to the floor and lay still.
Sergei Shvets tapped his driver on the shoulder. “Yasenevo,” he said.
He looked out the window as they drove.
One down.
Two to go.
39
The Ristorante Sabatini sparkled like a gem beneath the cloudless Roman night. Rows of tables dressed with white tablecloths bathed in the glow of fairy lights strung overhead. Across the Piazza Santa Maria, the façade of the Basilica di Santa Maria dominated the square. At 11 p.m., the open-air restaurant was packed. Boisterous conversation mingled with the chink of cutlery and the bustle of waiters rushing to and fro to create a convivial, energetic atmosphere.
Yet even among the ranks of satisfied diners, one group appeared to be enjoying themselves more than the others. There were eight persons in all, three men and five women. The men were tanned and elegantly attired, by age and comportment successful professionals. The youngest was forty-five, the oldest sixty, but all were boyishly exuberant in the Italian manner. The women were much younger, barely out of their teens, and beautiful, notable for their sharply tipped, decidedly un-Roman noses and generous, proudly displayed breasts.
A waiter snaked through the crowd and handed a note to the man at the head of the table. “Dottor Lazio, from a friend at the bar.”
Accepting the note, Dr. Luca Lazio tried at first to read it without glasses, failed, and then fished a pair of bifocals from his silk blazer and tried again. Lazio was a fifty-year-old Apollo, his feathered hair a shade too black, his chin a shade too tight. His green eyes quickly abandoned the note and turned toward the interior of the restaurant, where the bar was crowded with clients. Making his apologies, he rose and walked inside.
Seated at the bar, Jonathan watched Lazio approach. Though exhausted, he felt a surge run through his body at the sight of the man who might be able to get him a step closer to Emma. He rose from his stool, and Lazio stopped dead.
“Not who you expected,” said Jonathan.
Lazio wrinkled the note between his fingers. “‘An old friend’ is not exactly what I would have called you.”
“You’re still practicing.” It was a statement, a reminder of a service rendered.
Lazio shrugged, acknowledging the debt. “I haven’t had a drink since we saw each other last. I thank you. Again.” Lazio reached out to give Jonathan a belated hug and a kiss on each cheek.
Lazio was one of the corps of doctors who revolved in and out of the missions run by Doctors Without Borders around the world. Six years earlier he’d worked under Jonathan’s supervision at a camp in Eritrea. When several of Lazio’s patients died of suspicious causes, Jonathan discovered that the Italian doctor had been operating while drunk. He had suspended the doctor pending an investigation. In the meantime, word leaked to the local tribespeople. A mob got up, captured Lazio, and was very nearly successful in administering a punishment of its own. Jonathan had intervened and personally shepherded Lazio onto a plane back to Rome. Grateful for his life, the Italian had promised never to drink again. Given all the circumstances, it was the best outcome Jonathan could expect.
“I’m glad to see you’re recovering,” said Jonathan.
“What are you doing in Rome?” Lazio searched up and down the bar. “And where is Emma? I thought you two only took vacations in the mountains.”
“We make an exception now and then,” said Jonathan. He didn’t add anything about Emma.
“If you don’t mind my saying, you look like you could use some mountain air yourself.”
Jonathan glanced at himself in the mirror behind the bar. He’d been driving for hours and his eyes were sunken, rimmed with circles. “I’m fine.”
“And so,” said Lazio, “tell me, is this a coincidence?”
Jonathan finished his beer, then shook his head. “I called your wife and told her it was an emergency. She told me where I could find you. Apparently she thinks you’re
with some fellow doctors from the hospital.”
Lazio glanced back at his friends. “I am.” He shrugged. “What about you? Still working for peanuts?”
“I’m back in East Africa. Kenya this time.”
“Is that why you’re here? To remind me of what happened?”
“I’m here to ask a favor.”
Lazio found this amusing. “What can I do for the great Dr. Jonathan Ransom?”
Jonathan moved closer to Lazio, close enough to smell his cologne and see the roots of gray beginning to poke from his scalp. “It’s about Emma. She was here a few months ago and had an accident that required surgery. I need to know which hospital treated her.”
“What happened?”
“She was mugged and stabbed.”
“Emma? I’d thought of her as someone who can take care of herself.”
“She can. Usually.”
Lazio fingered the chains at his neck. “So why are you asking me this? Surely she remembers where she was treated.”
“Emma and I aren’t together.”
Lazio considered the request. “Fine,” he said at length. “I’ll help you find the hospital that took care of your wife. It shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll make some calls in the morning.” He motioned toward his table. “Why don’t you join us? The sole is fabulous.”
“I need to find out where she was treated now,” said Jonathan. “Tell your friends you have an emergency. They’re doctors, right? They’ll understand.”
“You’re asking a lot.”
“We’re just beginning here.”
Lazio exhaled loudly. “All right, then, but I have to use the men’s room.”
“Sure,” said Jonathan, putting a hand on Lazio’s shoulder. “But give me your wallet before you go.”
“My wallet?” protested Lazio. “I don’t think so.”
Jonathan dug his fingers into the soft flesh, allowing a measure of his hate for the man to slip through. Lazio grimaced and handed Jonathan his alligator billfold.
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