He shrugged. “Perhaps one of the American agents got a message out of Volosgrad before their capture. It is irrelevant.”
“The chess pieces?” Catherine shook her head. “No. That’s doesn’t make any sense. There was nothing at Volosgrad to connect—”
“It does not matter. It is done. If the Americans do not already know about Operation Perun, they soon will. They must already suspect what we are planning. We must act while the element of surprise is on our side. The operation will commence in one week, whether the Firebird is ready or not.” His lips curled in a faint smile. “I would prefer if it was, of course, but a pyrrhic victory is better than no victory at all.”
Catherine heard the note of finality in his voice. She knew there would be no dissuading him from this path.
It was a pity, really. She had already given him so much. With the Consortium, his dream of an empire to rule the world had already become a reality, but she knew that he would never consent to ruling from the shadows. “Very well. If it is what you wish, I will push Alexei harder.”
“That is not why I am sending you there.”
“I don’t understand. If not that, then why?”
He held her gaze. “None of the captured Americans were viable candidates.”
Catherine’s eyebrows drew together. “Are you certain? All the evidence indicated that the team leader would be a match.”
“Perhaps he is, but the Americans did not send him.”
This revelation, while discouraging, was not entirely a surprise. Using her influence as the head of the Consortium, Catherine had been given extraordinary access to key figures in the American government, including President Chambers himself. Subsequently she had learned everything there was to know about a special operations unit that did the jobs no one else could do. The information confirmed what SVR operatives had been reporting for years regarding the role of this team—the Chess Team—as the tip of the spear for American forces. She had also learned their identities—most notably the team leader King, who it was believed possessed unique genetic attributes necessary to the success of the Firebird project.
Acting on the information she had supplied, the SVR had set a trap, leaking information about increased activity at the Volosgrad facility in the Ural Mountains. They had hoped to draw the Chess Team to them. The chess pieces were the logical first choice for such a mission, but evidently the Americans had sent another group of agents in their stead. That had always been the flaw in the plan, as far as Catherine was concerned.
“Then I do not understand. Firebird cannot proceed without King. He is the only source of genetic material we’ve identified.”
“No. Not the only one.” Her mentor was as impassive as a statue.
The declaration hit her like a gut punch. “Me? You would sacrifice me?”
“I would sacrifice everything and everyone.” His voice was flat and dispassionate, but then he put on a patronizing smile. “Do not worry, my Ice Queen. The procedure is painful, but the damage is not permanent. You will make a full recovery, I promise. You know this is true.”
Anger—an emotion that she rarely felt—flashed through her, melting the ice in her veins. “This was always your plan. To use me this way.”
“You know that is not true. You are as a daughter to me.”
She spat out a laugh. Publicly, the Russian President was known to have two daughters, but that, like everything else in his public life, was a carefully constructed fiction designed to create an illusion of normalcy. The rarely seen young women were actresses hired to play the part of daughters, as was the woman who posed as his ex-wife and made occasional benign yet critical statements about him and their life together.
“How long have you been with me? Twenty years? We did not even know this was possible until just a few years ago.”
He was not wrong about that.
Although the Firebird project had its genesis in research begun nearly seventy years earlier, at the dawn of the Atomic Age, the breakthrough had come just five years ago. A man named Richard Ridley, the head of a leading bio-gen firm, had offered to share research with the Russian government in exchange for their help in tracking down a unique genetic population that Ridley had called ‘the Children of Adoon.’ The subsequent search had produced a very short list of candidates who met an additional criterion, a list that included King—a.k.a. Jack Sigler. However, Catherine’s mentor had revealed that she was also a child of Adoon.
Had he known about her true genetic potential all along? It had never occurred to her to ask. She doubted he would tell her the truth unless doing so somehow served his purpose.
He was right about one other thing, too. The procedure he was ordering her to undergo would not kill her. And if it worked as the scientists promised it would, she would rule the world at his side. The pain—not just that of the invasive procedure that awaited her at Volosgrad, but also from his callous betrayal—was a small price to pay.
She took a breath to regain her frosty composure. “Very well. Will you see to my travel arrangements, or am I to also gather the firewood for the altar?”
She knew he would grasp the significance of the reference. In the Bible, God had commanded Abraham to make a human sacrifice of his son Isaac. In what seemed like a particularly cruel twist, the elderly patriarch had directed Isaac to gather wood and build the altar upon which he would be slaughtered.
Before the President could answer, an electronic trilling noise signaled an incoming telephone call. A look of irritation flitted across his face—he had explicitly instructed his aide that there should be no interruptions. He broke eye contact with her and looked at the blinking light. His frown deepened as he lifted the receiver to his ear and pressed the button to accept the call.
“Da?”
He listened intently for nearly a minute, then said, “Call me again in one hour. Use a different phone.”
He returned the receiver to its cradle and turned back to Catherine. “You chose an apt metaphor, my child. Like Abraham, my faith had been rewarded.”
15
Moscow, Russia
She had been a child when the Soviet Union collapsed. She had not even been a glimmer in Peter Machtchenko’s eye when the most egregious of the legendary crimes against humanity committed on the premises of ‘the Lubyanka’ had occurred. Still, the imposing neo-baroque structure had always filled Asya with dread. It was like the dark tower from The Lord of the Rings movies, a place forever haunted by the ghosts of its many victims. The stories of what had happened behind those yellow brick walls were drilled into the collective consciousness of all Russians. Those walls had contained the offices of the KGB and the various agencies that preceded it, and the notorious prison for political dissidents, which had occupied a sizable portion of the complex. There was an old joke that the Lubyanka was the tallest building in Moscow, because you could see Siberia from its basement.
Much had changed since the fall of the USSR, but many of those changes were merely cosmetic. The statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky was gone from Lubyanskaya Square. He had been the founder of the Cheka, the earliest incarnation of the secret police bureau, and the man responsible for tens of thousands of political executions in the early years of the Communist regime. The statue had been replaced by the Solovetsky Stone—a chunk of granite commemorating the victims of the infamous GULAG prison system—but the building, with all its ghosts, remained. Moreover, it was still the official headquarters of the state security bureau, though the sheer size of the agency had necessitated expansion into a neighboring building, an ugly gray structure that looked like a massive cinder block.
Asya had changed, too. She was Bishop now, a deadly warrior, but the Lubyanka still made her nervous, particularly given the reason that she had returned after so many years away.
The two-and-a-half-hour flight from Yekaterinburg to Moscow, and the subsequent eight hours of cooling her heels in a room at the Hotel Metropol, had given her a little time to get over her surprise
at the last-minute change to the op. The unexpected addition of two new ‘pawns’—her parents—had left her anxious. She was not entirely clear on why King had elected to bring their parents along, and he had not given her an opportunity to ask. She suspected it had nothing to do with the mission Admiral Ward had given them, and everything to do with King’s personal obsession with the woman who looked like their long-dead sister.
Bishop was glad for a chance to spend time with her parents, particularly with her mother, whom she felt she barely knew, but the circumstances were troubling. The team’s primary mission, at least as far as she was concerned, was finding Thomas Duncan. And that mission had gone completely off the rails. Her anxiety had only deepened when, just minutes after the reunion, King had directed them all to bundle up in their newly acquired winter clothes before heading out to Lubyanskaya Square.
Against the dull backdrop of gray snow and damp macadam, the yellow brick façade seemed to glow like a warning light. She pulled her coat tighter, even though the frigid air was not the source of the chill that tingled in her extremities. “I do not like this.”
Peter glanced over at her. “Do you remember the first time we were here? I took you to the ballet.”
Although she had not thought about it in a long time, the memory arose unbidden. The trip had been a birthday present—her tenth. Peter, her father, had been a transient figure, always moving in and out of her life. He had been ‘away on business,’ her grandmother had always told her. Eventually he had decided to settle down and see to her upbringing. At her grandmother’s insistence, she had begun taking ballet lessons almost as soon as she could walk, and she had shown great promise as a dancer. For her birthday, Peter had taken her to the Bolshoi Theatre to watch a performance by the famed dance troupe. They had ridden the Metro to Lubyanka Station and walked to the Bolshoi, which was just a few blocks away. She recalled that they had also visited Detsky Mir, the enormous toy store that bordered the square. Strangely, although it was right across the street, the Lubyanka building was absent from her memory of that day.
“You danced around the apartment for weeks afterward,” Peter went on. “Telling everyone how you were practicing for the Bolshoi.”
She knew he was just trying to put her at ease, but the memory brought up a strange stew of emotions that were equally unwelcome. She looked over at her mother and saw the sadness in the woman’s eyes. Lynn had completely missed out on her daughter’s childhood. She also felt King’s scrutinizing stare. “What? I dreamed of being ballet dancer. So what?”
“It’s not that,” King admitted. “I was just trying to wrap my head around it all. How did you keep Asya a secret from me? I must have been…what, six or seven when she was born?” He turned to Lynn. “You’d think I’d have noticed a baby bump.”
“You weren’t a very observant child, dear,” she replied. “But surely you remember that I spent a few months with your grandmother.”
King’s forehead creased. “Not really.”
“We told you Nona was sick and that I was going to take care of her. A little white lie. Just like when we told you she lived in Germany.”
“We tried our best to keep it a secret from everyone,” Peter supplied. “We thought the KGB had forgotten about us, but my former handler, Vladimir—the man that is helping us get into Lubyanka—warned me that Moscow was thinking about waking the sleepers. That was back when President Reagan was pushing hard for his Star Wars program. The Politburo believed the United States was actively seeking first-strike nuclear capability. We feared that Moscow would perhaps use your mother’s pregnancy as leverage to force us back into the life, so we kept it a secret from everyone. When it was impossible to hide any longer, she traveled to Russia to have Asya, while I stayed with you and…Julie.”
Bishop did not fail to notice how his voice had caught, just for a second, at the mention of her older sister. Maybe I am being selfish, she thought. Julie was also their daughter.
“We had to leave Asya with your grandmother and get things back to normal as soon as we could, but I made it a point to check in on her whenever I could. It got a lot easier to do that after the Cold War ended, but we still had to be careful. Technically, we were still spies, liable for arrest if discovered. And even though the Soviet Union went away, there was always the possibility that the Russian government might try to reassert their influence.”
“It must have been quite a juggling act,” King said.
“It was. We couldn’t have done it without help, especially from Vladimir.”
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you can trust the guy,” King murmured.
“You do not,” Peter replied. “But you need to trust me, Jack. I’ve been playing this game a long time. I know what I’m doing.”
The plan, Peter explained, was for the four of them to join the guided tour of Lubyanka. Once inside, Peter and Bishop would slip away from the group and make their way to the basement to search one of the many archival rooms that preserved the record of intelligence gathering activities going back more than fifty years. Because of a long-standing, and probably not unwarranted, deep distrust of electronic data storage methods, the information was all in hard copy form—hand-written notes, typed reports, photographs—all filed and indexed.
“You’re saying the entire history of the KGB is kept in boxes in the basement?” King asked, skeptically.
Peter shook his head. “Of course not. Highly classified documents on active operations are kept in secret locations that I doubt even Vladimir could get us into. This archive is more of a research and reference library. If an agent needs information about a particular subject who had been investigated previously, they can just go to the archive and request it. Vladimir said he would leave a set of credentials at a dead drop inside the building. That will get me most of the way in.
“Asya, you’ll watch my back while I’m in the archives. Lynn and Jack, you cover for us with the tour group. If anyone notices that we’re gone, tell them that I suffer from dementia and wandered off, and that Asya went looking for me. They’ll probably lock the place down until I’m found, but by then we should already have what we’re after.”
“And if they decide to detain us?” Bishop asked.
“I doubt that will happen, but we’ve all had training in how to stand up to interrogation. The key is to keep it simple. This isn’t Soviet Russia anymore. We’re just a family of Russian ex-pats visiting the Rodina. It’s not even a lie.”
King made a deferential ‘after you’ gesture. “Let’s get this done.”
After they made their way inside, Peter excused himself to visit the restroom, where Vladimir had left credentials that would get him into the archive rooms. When he returned, they joined the queue for the museum tour.
Despite now being in the belly of the great yellow beast, as she caught snippets of conversations and studied signs and posters written in Cyrillic, Bishop began to feel strangely at home. She had spent the last few years surrounded by Americans, immersed in their culture and language. Even though she liked most of it, she always felt like a visitor. She wondered if her parents were feeling the same way.
The tour began with the museum docent delivering a perfunctory monologue about the history of the building and its role in the early years of the Soviet Union. The tour group included visiting Americans and Koreans, accompanied by hired tour guides who quietly translated for their respective groups and provided additional commentary. Managing the multilingual crowd kept the docent occupied, and Bishop was not at all surprised when Peter tapped her on the arm, indicating that the time had come to break away from the group.
She did not acknowledge the signal, but counted to ten and then, when she was certain that no one was paying attention, turned and slipped away. Peter had, by design, gotten a head start. She had to set a brisk pace to keep him in sight. She walked with her head high, projecting a confidence that she did not quite feel.
If you look like you know exactly where you ar
e going, Peter had instructed her, no one will stop you. No one likes to borrow trouble by interfering in someone’s business. It was a universal truth, and even more so in the Russian consciousness.
Peter navigated the halls with the familiar surety of someone who had worked there for years, and maybe he had, before taking his assignment in America. Maybe nothing much had changed. He approached an unmarked door, produced a key to unlock it and then went through, but not before turning back to make eye contact with her. He made a casual ‘come here’ gesture, and then stepped through.
He was waiting for her in the cramped stairwell just beyond. The dark stained concrete and musty smell suggested a route that was seldom used, but Bishop knew that such neglect was commonplace, particularly in government buildings.
“We’ll stick together from here on,” he told her. “We’re visiting from the St. Petersburg office. I’m the senior agent and you’re my aide. Got it?”
She nodded.
“Good. Follow me.” He started down the stairs with the same authoritative stride.
“May I ask you something?” she said, her whisper barely audible over the rapid-fire tapping of their footsteps.
He glanced over his shoulder with a faintly perturbed frown. “Can it wait?”
It was not, strictly speaking, a ‘no,’ so she forged ahead. “This is about Julie, isn’t it? King thinks the SVR faked her death so they could abduct her and turn her into a spy.”
“If that’s your question, then yes, it is about Julie. The rest…I don’t want to believe it, but part of me thinks that’s exactly what happened.”
“If it is,” Bishop pressed, “then what do you think you will find here? Surely if anything was going to be classified as top-secret, the detail of that operation would be.”
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