Tom Clancy's Op-Center--Dark Zone

by George Galdorisi

  “We will dissolve the shadows,” Klimovich said, even though he knew that Lytvyn was right. Chances were good the killer would never be caught.

  Another silence, more heavy breaths, and finally Lytvyn replied, “I have never put faith in platitutdes, sir.”

  “Then … put it in me.”

  “I will try. I will … try.”

  The captain thanked him and ended the call. Sometimes, more than an order, the compassion of a respected superior was enough to temper rash behavior. Klimovich hoped that was the case now. But he wasn’t sure. The same ungovernable impulses were also what made Lytvyn such an effective agent. Youth, the desire for instant gratification, and the lack of immediate oversight were a dangerous combination. For most soldiers, that meant nothing more impulsive than a visit to a tavern or a brothel. But a confident—bordering on cocky—field agent was not most soldiers.

  Klimovich set his cigar in the ashtray and went to the computer. He opened a file called “Long Journey” to continue reviewing what intelligence they had, whether they could launch their ambitious attack against the Russians with a delayed or an attenuated data flow.

  Of course we could, Klimovich thought. Of course we will.

  He decided to go to a subfile and bring up the virtual-reality program for the attack, see where additional modifications might be needed. Watching the computer-generated figures, he took heart. This was the basic program, not interactive. These were cyphers facing Russian conscripts; they were not Ukrainian patriots. That reality would represent an undefinable quality of courage that no computer program could capture.

  Watching the battle play out, Klimovich thought of his own hatred of the Russians, felt his own fighting spirit rise. He thought of the real endgame, the one no one knew. The one he and Admiral Volodymyr Berezovsky had conceived.

  Patience, Lytvyn, he thought. The ultimate victory will be ours.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  New York, New York

  June 2, 2:46 PM

  Off busy Third Avenue, Forty-ninth Street was an eclectic street in a most eclectic city.

  Three consulates anchored by the iconic Manhattan eatery Smith & Wollensky. It was a street of banners. The flags of three nations are suspended above the street, along with the flag of the quaint Amster Yard, a hidden courtyard garden, and the flag of a Spanish restaurant beside it; farther east, an apartment terrace flew the rainbow colors of the LGBT community.

  The consulate general of Ukraine in New York was located midway between Third and Second Avenues on the south side of the street. It was just a short walk from the United Nations and the East River, where joggers, dogs, and tourists mingled and flowed like the waters of the tidal estuary itself. A black iron gate fronted the pale stone façade that perpetually looked as if it were in need of a good hosing down. One had to walk down a short flight of steps to enter. The consulate was neither as warm nor as welcoming as the shade-tree-fronted Consulado General del Perú, the leaves throwing a changing set of masks as the sun moved quickly and with an ascending staircase that seemed proudly above, not below, the traffic both vehicular and human.

  The pedestrians were as eclectic as the structures. The majority were people headed to the embassies for work or assistance. The rest were mostly upscale residents walking their dogs or headed to offices. A few were delivery people, mail carriers, and sanitation workers.

  One was none of those.

  Fedir Lytvyn noticed him standing to the west, toward Third Avenue, when he went outside for a smoke. He didn’t really need the smoke; he needed a reason to disobey the Fox and go outside. He needed to see who was watching the embassy and from where.

  The man—older, it seemed, wearing a pale-blue windbreaker against an unseasonable chill—was standing in front of the low fawn-colored metal fence of the Consulate General of Nepal. He was looking at a map of the city. Lytvyn didn’t have to see the details to know that’s what it was; glossy maps were always being unfolded around the U.N.

  Lytvyn stood behind the fence, facing the Peruvian Consulate, though he kept his eyes shifted to the left, toward the man. The man who didn’t flip the map or move from that spot.

  Because he isn’t a tourist, Lytvyn thought. He is watching us.

  He was watching from well beyond where the security cameras of the Ukrainian Consulate could see him. Had he been there that morning? Had he been a spotter who informed someone that Galina was leaving?

  The Russians didn’t usually have observers like that. All of their meetings with Ukrainians were in coffee shops or parks, street corners or buses. Very little actual, constructive work was done at the U.N.

  Lytvyn flicked his cigarette to the street and stood a moment longer. He had let Klimovich believe that he wouldn’t go out. He had not actually committed to following that course of action. There could be no harm in taking a walk around the block on a sunlit spring day. Buy more cigarettes, see who this man was.

  Taking out his cell phone, pretending to check messages, Lytvyn passed through the gate and crossed the street. Still studying the screen but, in fact, watching the man—who still hadn’t moved—the young man walked toward the Mexican restaurant. He intended to take the man’s photograph, see if their facial-recognition database had anything on him.

  As Lytvyn reached an angle where he could swing the cell phone around and snap a flurry of shots, the man finally moved. He turned suddenly and walked quickly to Third Avenue, arriving as the walk sign turned green, and hurried crossing the street. The Ukrainian assumed that the man was hurrying to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, which was located on Sixty-seventh Street. If so, he would have sought a cab or even entered a waiting car on the corner. He had done neither. That actually seemed to reinforce his guilt: the spotter didn’t want to implicate his countrymen.

  Without seeming to run, Lytvyn hastened across Third Avenue while he still had the light. He remained across the street as the man walked quickly toward Lexington. Dodging pedestrians, both men were doing a strange, synchronized dance that was apparent only to them—and, Lytvyn hoped, would mean nothing to the NYPD when he caught up to this man and forced him to give any information he had about the murder of Galina Petrenko. Lytvyn didn’t have a weapon and wouldn’t need one; there were locks in martial arts that were easily applied, caused unimaginable pain—wrist and elbow joints forced to work in ways they weren’t designed to—and obtained information quickly and without attracting attention.

  What bullshit story will you give me? Lytvyn wondered, with rising determination to find out. He stuffed his cell phone into the back pocket of his jeans, out of harm’s way, and kept his hands open, moving, preparing, as he power-walked ahead. A cautionary part of him—a cautionary particle of him—knew that he could be taking bait that would lead him into a trap. A larger part of him didn’t care. A still larger part was confident that he would be all right regardless: he was in public, and he would remain in public. And he knew how to stop a man—hard, fast, and permanently if he was accosted with fists, knife, or gun. It was all second nature to him.

  The man turned down Lexington on the east side of the street. Now he was on the same side as Lytvyn. The Ukrainian couldn’t figure out where the man was headed—until, at the corner of Forty-sixth Street, when the light turned, he hurried across the avenue. Grand Central Terminal, Lytvyn thought. The man wouldn’t be going for a train to Connecticut or upstate New York; he’d want something to get him away fast, and the maze of subway lines that intersected here was extensive.

  Lytvyn followed, watching the crosstown traffic to make sure no one swung onto Lexington and suddenly, accidentally, overshot the grid and struck him. The young man began to jog as his quarry reached the side entrance between Forty-fourth and Forty-third Streets. That wing of the terminal wasn’t heavily traveled, but if he made his way to the main concourse and ditched his windbreaker it would be difficult to find the man again. He could go straight through and out the other side, turn left on
to busy Forty-second Street, or go right into the Metropolitan Life Tower and head north along Park Avenue. Apart from the man’s options, the cluster of police and National Guard troops gathered there, protecting the terminal, would make it impossible for Lytvyn to accost him.

  You will not get that far, the Ukrainian screamed inside.

  The man stopped long enough to yank open one of the heavy brass-framed glass doors that opened into the terminal. Now Lytvyn ran. He had tracked people before, as far back as his university days, when he suspected that his girlfriend, Halyna, was seeing another student, the footballer Stepan. His craft had evolved naturally over those few days. It ended when he found them together at the Olimpiyskiy National Sports Complex, going to a Dynamo Kiev match. There it wasn’t the crowd outside the park that had stopped Lytvyn from doing more than confronting Halyna and Stepan. It was the emotional stab of the two of them noticing him in unison, with uncaring eyes, that pierced his heart and made him turn him away.

  That ache, that loss, had lain dormant for years, and Lytvyn knew damn well it was back and helping to drive him now. He didn’t care. This man would be stopped.

  Lytvyn stepped wide around a homeless man sitting in the street, staring ahead vacantly; he could be an accomplice. He reached the northernmost door and thought that he saw the target only a few meters ahead; it was difficult to see inside because of the way the light struck the glass door, reflecting the street and obscuring the inside. He reached for the handle. The big brass bar was on the right side, swinging the door to the left.

  There was a two-meter-wide space between the entrance and the wall to the right. Lytvyn smelled, then saw, the woman standing there, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She was rummaging through a red handbag, apparently looking for a lighter. She stood a few inches taller than he and was dressed in a red pantsuit, a floral-pattern head scarf, and large oval sunglasses. As he had been trained to do, Lytvyn took in all the details in less than a single stride, with a single mental snapshot.

  She looked up and her red mouth pulled into a big, welcoming smile.

  “Fedir!”

  That held his attention an instant longer. Long enough for her to jump toward him, throw one hand behind his neck, kiss him … and, with the hand that had been in her bag, withdraw a nondescript six-inch blade from between his ribs and jam it straight into his heart.

  If the young man had been less focused on pursuit, his martial-arts training would have kicked in. Lytvyn would have turned ninety degrees toward the aggressor, brought his arms up—elbow to elbow, bent in front of him—creating an intervening wall of bone and flesh. He would have relaxed his knees, dropped his center of gravity, assumed a powerful stance to stop the attacker cold. He could have pressed her back to the wall, rotated his arms to pin and disarm her.

  Instead, Lytvyn felt the wickedly sharp pain on the left side of his chest, was aware of his heart momentarily going a little mad, felt his breath stop, and lost strength in his legs. His arms moved toward the pain but drooped; she had him, holding him, pinning him, still kissing him. He tasted her lipstick, smelled her strong perfume, did not see, only felt, a second terrible pain in an exposed portion under his throat as someone else joined the embrace. A man with one strong arm around his back, the other up against his jaw. The newcomer, too, cheered the young man’s name.

  “Fedir!”

  To passersby, they were family or friends reunited. Absorbed in cell phones or music, or rushing to catch a train; no one would think anything of the three bobbing up and down in celebration. No one would notice the blood being absorbed by the close proximity of the killers.

  Lytvyn felt himself fall. He did not feel himself hit the rust-colored tile that was speckled with white. By the time a pool of red began seeping from under his dead body, the killers were already gone, covered with loose-fitting New York Mets shirts the woman pulled from the handbag. It covered their bloody clothes down below the waist.

  The man turned left and headed back up Lexington. Before the woman left the shadowy overhang of the terminal awning, she paused to give the homeless man money. As she did, she used tissues to wipe off her lipstick, folded the sunglasses into her bag, and yanked off her head covering. Then she turned right, headed toward the subway entrance at Lexington Avenue and Forty-second Street.

  They would meet again late that night for one more preemptive strike, to remove the ambassador, who was still a potential liaison with the enemy.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Op-Center Headquarters, Fort Belvoir North,

  Springfield, Virginia

  June 2, 3:40 PM

  Chase Williams was huddled with Roger McCord, his intelligence director, reviewing the latest data pertaining to the western Russian frontier. It had come from a variety of electronic intercepts, satellite data, and open-source media collected by the NSA, the CIA, and the National Reconnaissance Office. Brian Dawson had been there for the first few minutes of the meeting before grabbing a go-bag from his office and leaving by helicopter for Fort Bragg. There he would link up with Mike Volner; the two would be in New York in time for dinner—which would be a couple of street-vendor hot dogs near the place where Galina Petrenko was murdered.

  Williams was leaning back in his chair, looking at the new wall monitor that was wirelessly linked to every tablet and computer in Op-Center. Smartphones were excluded from the mix since, by charter, private calls could not be subjected to potential scrutiny.

  “So there is absolutely nothing to support the Ukrainian plan, as Ambassador Flannery understands it,” Williams said, looking at the multiple windows that included images, data, and transcribed HUMINT reports from frontline observers.

  “Nothing as yet,” McCord replied.

  McCord, a former marine, was sitting in an armchair that was too soft to suit his six-foot-two-inch frame. But he had come back from lunch to find the team chin-deep in this matter and had gone to work with Paul Bankole to grab as much as they could, quickly, from as many sources as possible. The international crisis manager had continued to dig while McCord presented what they had to Williams. The forty-four-year-old embodied the saying “Once a marine, always a marine.” Though he held a PhD in international affairs from Princeton, his bearing was no different from when he had been a battalion exec in Iraq: outwardly calm, inwardly alert for any and every kind of incoming. He watched people with eyes that were like little machines, missing nothing; when he listened, it was not just for words but for inflections. He was single, a difficult man to get close to, and Williams was the only one who had made inroads.

  “The Russians may only be chest-thumping,” Williams said. “They do that more often than they invade.”

  Before McCord could reply, Anne Sullivan walked through the open door.

  “They’re also killing,” she said. “There’s been a second murder in Manhattan.”

  Williams sat up. McCord didn’t seem to react, though Anne knew they were both crunching the news. She always felt conflicted delivering reports like that to her boss. On the one hand, someone had died. But, on the other hand, Op-Center consumed information the way her Land Rover guzzled gas. Even bad news was information, another tessera in the mosaic.

  “The victim was also attached to the Ukrainian Consulate—Fedir Lytvyn, twenty-nine,” she went on. “He was stabbed in the heart and also had his throat cut, probably with a finer weapon.”

  “Like a credit card,” Williams said.

  “Exactly like that,” Anne said. “The NYPD is looking into it, saying there are ‘earmarks of a calling card’ in both killings. Nothing was taken, but that may have been a matter of haste: the man was killed in the Lexington Avenue side vestibule of Grand Central Terminal. No security cameras inside; the police are collecting footage from other sites two blocks in either direction. They’re also asking for anyone who may have seen Lytvyn and whoever he was with to come forward.”

  McCord flipped through material on his tablet. On the way back from lunch, he had been briefed by Ban
kole on everything that had taken place in the earlier meeting.

  “Galina Petrenko and Fedir Lytvyn are the only known operatives attached to that mission,” McCord said. “But.”

  “But?” Williams pressed.

  “It’s like fighting a brushfire,” McCord said. “You cut a much wider firebreak than you actually need.”

  “Meaning?” Williams asked, then answered his own question. “The ambassador?”

  McCord replied, “If I were the Russians, I’d go after him. There’s no telling what he might do now that one, possibly two acquaintances, friends—whatever they are—have been butchered.”

  Anne and Williams exchanged a look. Williams nodded.

  “I’ll let Brian and Mike know,” she said, then left the room.

  “Let’s go back for a second,” Williams said, swiveling toward the other man. “If the Ukrainians aren’t up to something, why provoke Moscow and get knocked around like this? It’s not like these deaths benefit Ukraine in any way. It’ll be a blip in a pair of news cycles.”

  “Which lends support to what Galina told Flannery—that an attack on Russia, in Russia, is imminent,” McCord said.

  “Right.”

  “But here’s a—well, let’s call it a more elusive idea,” McCord said. “What if Moscow wants this Ukrainian business shut down because they’re not planning to do a damn thing with these armored assets except put them on the border. Maybe Russia doesn’t want to be attacked, provoked, and forced to respond.”

  “Since when?” Williams asked.

  “Since Crimea, then the military support of Assad in Syria,” McCord said. “Putin’s ability to borrow money is nonexistent. He’s started tapping household savings in Russian banks—and that’s just to maintain their current level of activity. They’re already covering Crimea’s annual budget deficit of nearly two billion dollars. Take more territory, you take on more debt.”

  “But, knowing this, Kiev—or someone in a position of power—is obviously worried about something,” Williams said.