by Thomas Waite
Galina nodded again. “It failed because Oleg’s father gave me a small but powerful gift.”
“And you were able to use it?”
“I had no choice. A man was going to—” Galina stopped herself from adding any details, though surely the child had sensed the threat to her own life as well as her mother’s when Galina had used the “powerful gift.” But the child also looked fragile as an ancient ceramic doll.
“You must see that there is very little time for me. They have reason to arrest me now. They will give reasons for doing more than that.” She looked purposely at the back of Alexandra’s head, as much as to say, “and to her, too.”
“You know the means we’ve used in the past to communicate?” Lana asked.
“Yes, I do.”
“We will return to that now,” Lana said. Holmes was nodding. Nobody in the room seemed to need to go longer—and they all knew there was a risk of interception. The signal could even be traced. Better to keep it to minutes.
“I will contact you soon.”
“Immediately,” Galina said, raw panic in her voice for the first time. “The second missile, us. Everything is on the line.”
“We know,” Lana said.
The link ended. No one said a word for a full beat. Holmes spoke first: “We must get her out of there. I believe her. What about you?” He looked at the two voice analysts.
“She’s either the very best liar we’ve ever encountered, or she’s for real,” the senior of the two said. The woman next to him nodded.
So did the psychiatrist. “Very difficult to assess much at this remove and with such brief exposure to the subject.”
All the caveats Lana had come to expect from the psych corps, but she still wanted to hear his thoughts, which made his preamble all the more frustrating.
“But I would say she’s genuinely frightened. Did you see the way she held her daughter? Both arms around her, like the camera itself were a weapon.”
“Which it could be if we fail her trust,” Lana said. “There’s no telling for sure if she’s just been exposed.”
“But you have no doubts about Bortnik herself?” Holmes asked her.
“I always have doubts,” Lana replied, “but very few about her.”
“Find out which coastline she’s near,” Holmes said. “We may be able to pin it down with the signal, but then again, that’s not always bankable. It’s going to be difficult to exfiltrate them. We are stretched beyond the limit here.”
“But we will, right?” Lana said.
“Yes, we will,” Holmes agreed assertively. “Somehow. But a big military operation, like the way we got you out of Saudi Arabia last year, is going to be terribly hard to pull off. We’re all dealing with sea-level rise, while Russian security services are on full alert from the New Siberian Islands to Tartus.” The latter was on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. It contained a small Russian naval base, the country’s southernmost, and the only one outside Russia proper.
Before her colleagues even filed out of her office, Lana was back on the IRC: “We’re committed to getting you and your daughter. You must tell me where you are.”
In seconds, as promised, Galina fired back. “I’m hiding in Sochi. I want to get out of here. I’ve been seeing water getting higher and boats leaving. Should I find a place to charter one?”
“We’ll need to coordinate that. Please don’t make any arrangements yet. Just find a safe place for the night, but a place where we can be in touch. Okay?”
“Yes. I’ll try.”
She sounded nervous, Lana thought. Who can blame her?
Lana ran the chartering business by Holmes right away.
“I was thinking of something like that,” the deputy director said. “A very low-key effort that would take advantage of the challenges that every seaport is having. Boats are heading out to sea everywhere to try to avoid the destruction that will come with being moored on a coastline. But we’ll have one of our people handle the charter. For security reasons, Bortnik can’t be risking that kind of move.”
“So send in the navy? I could talk to Jensen.” Reminding Holmes that her number two at CyberFortress had been a navy cryptographer.
Holmes was shaking his head. “If we send a military unit in there and they get caught taking them out, the Russians might claim it was an invasion. I don’t want to even think about what that could mean. And let’s not forget, the way this is playing out the Russians are likely to be the world’s preeminent power.” He looked out his window. “If they aren’t already.”
“But I have to go.”
“That’s right, and you will go precisely because you’re not military. Let’s face it, Lana, if you get caught, they’ll love you to death just like they loved Snowden, in hope that you’ll eventually turn the world over to them. But your expertise is not in exfiltrating operatives and smuggling them into our arms on the high seas. We’ve got to find a private citizen, preferably a shady character, who knows how to operate below the radar screen, in every sense, in the middle of chaos and vast surveillance.”
“A drug smuggler?” Oh, my God, she thought. He’s been leading me there all along. “Donald Fedder?”
“What do you think?” Holmes asked her.
“My ex?” She was so flabbergasted she had to confirm that she and Holmes were talking about the same person.
“Yes, that Donald Fedder.”
“He’s a flake.”
“Not as much as you might think. I’ll get to that in a minute. Just tell me what you think of him, other than he’s a flake. Then I’ll tell you what we think of him.”
“Well, he’s a great sailor. There’s no questioning his seamanship. He could sail without electronics. Hell, he could sail without a rudder. But I think there’s plenty to question about his character. He just got out of prison, you know.”
“I do, but he spent a great deal less time behind bars than you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s been working with the DEA since his arrest. But he had to go through the courts and get sentenced and do some time to establish his bona fides. All the time you thought he was incommunicado in prison, though, we had him back down in Colombia moving drugs with FARC. The drugs ended up in the ocean but the intelligence he gave us on FARC was remarkable. It’s a key reason some of FARC’s top guerilla leaders have died in targeted strikes.”
“You are—” Lana almost blurted “shitting me.” But what Holmes had just said would explain why Doper Don looked like he’d spent his four years in a country club: he’d been cruising the Caribbean.
She had to sit down. “That guy never breathed a word of this to me.”
“There’s a reason he was recently paroled, Lana.”
“Does he have any training with guns, that sort of thing?”
“Quantico. The full course.”
“To be honest, Bob, till this moment I just considered him a ne’er-do-well.”
“All the better. Has he said anything notable about what’s going on?”
“Yes, at first he told our daughter that it was nothing but a conspiracy theory of the military-industrial complex.”
Holmes laughed. “Oh, boy, was he ever jerking your chain. Anything else?”
“Yes, last night he sang a different tune to Emma. He said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”
“He’s playing it all to script, except now you need to know.”
“So you’re planning to have Donald Fedder, with me aboard, smuggle Galina and her kid out of Russia?” It sounded so improbable to Lana that she could hardly form those words into a sentence.
“It’s not ideal, but given exigencies here and our resources, we don’t have a lot of options. Fedder has been thoroughly tested. He’s pulled off tougher coups than t
his.”
“Will there be any backup?”
“Yes, but they can’t sail away with Galina and her daughter. You can. So can Doper Don.”
“That’s my nickname for him.”
“I know. He told us. Lana, it’s everybody’s nickname for him now, except we use it ironically. I suspect you will, too. Right now, you two need to talk privately. Your daughter cannot know any of this until you and Don bring the Bortniks back here safely.”
“I’ll go home and talk to him now.”
“No, I’d suggest you go down the hall to the SCIF. That’s where he’s waiting. We’ll leave you two alone to sort things out.”
“He’s here, in a SCIF?”
“Correct.”
“Who’s in charge?” Lana asked.
“You’re in charge of the operation,” Holmes said. “But he’ll be the captain of the ship.”
“That leaves room for conflict.”
Holmes shook his head. “There’s no room for conflict, only success. You know the stakes.”
“Does he?”
“Yes. He’s not the man who left you, Lana. He’s the man who wants, more than anything, to come back.”
“To me?” That was news to her.
“To you, his daughter, and his country.”
Lana stood, feeling numbed by the news, and started down the hall. Each step made her feel like she was boarding a pirate clipper, about to ship out with Blackbeard himself.
She went through security and found Don sitting alone at an empty conference table in the windowless room. Despite her every instinct, she smiled when he looked up.
CHAPTER 20
FROM THE REST AREA in Sochi, Galina found an apartment building’s satellite dish and intercepted its signals, which had made it possible to comply with Lana Elkins’s request for a video link. But it was dangerous to spend so much time in one place and she desperately needed to head north to get out of the city.
Before leaving the rest area, though, she dug through an overnight bag, searching for Tylenol. Poor Alexandra’s joints and bones were hurting so bad. Six tablets so far today, and it was still only late afternoon. Galina shook her head because what Alexandra really needed was a doctor who could prescribe serious painkillers for her leukemia.
She found the Tylenol and a bottle of pineapple juice. Alexandra took two more tablets.
Galina hoped her daughter could hold them down. Her stomach was souring on acetaminophen; she’d vomited within minutes of her last dose two hours ago.
Looking left and right, Galina pulled onto a highway, feeling as obvious in the Macan as a goldfish in a bowl. She hoped to find a fishing village where boats were coming and going and chaos reigned because of sea-level rise, a crowded frenetic place where she and Alexandra could get lost among the panicky faces. That way if Lana Elkins failed her—and Galina would give her twenty-four hours, period, to exfiltrate them—she could use PP’s money to charter a boat and get Alexandra help in a country where the child was not the subject of a police search.
That was what outraged Galina the most: the authorities had announced—on television, radio, and the Internet, including social media—that both mother and daughter were wanted for the “brutal murder of Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov,” who was described as a “decorated war hero.”
Hero? Not how Galina thought of him. Beast was more like it. Probably had been a beast in Chechnya, too. So many were.
But it wasn’t about Sergey the Beast, anyway. It was about Oleg and his operation.
The late-model cars breezing by—cabriolets and six-figure coupes—worried Galina. She needed peasants, poor people who were not wired into the news of the day. She wondered if even among the impoverished there were people who fit that description anymore. And what did she know of the peasantry? She knew plenty about the sophisticated airs of Moscow’s nouveau riche who patronized the city’s finest restaurants and clubs—and also gobbled up whatever absurdities the Kremlin dished out. But she’d sooner trust her fate to a man riding a donkey than a celebrant of the capital’s splashy soirees.
She whizzed past Dendrariy, a picturesque part of greater Sochi, which stretched up and down the coast. The region’s renowned funicular caught Alexandra’s attention, as it undoubtedly had captured the eyes of millions of children before her.
“What is that, Mama?”
She told her, explaining, “It’s like a car on a cable. It goes all the way up the mountain. There’s a beautiful arboretum up there.”
“What’s that?”
Galina was encouraged that her daughter was energetic enough to ask questions. “It’s a pretty yellow-and-white building surrounded by the most colorful flowers and plants.”
“Can we go on the funicular and see the flowers . . . someday?”
Galina could have cried when Alexandra added “someday” so tentatively, as though she already knew how hopeless it would be to ask to stop now for anything resembling fun or beauty. They were on the run, that was clear even to a leukemia-stricken six-year-old.
Still, Galina said, “Yes, someday we’ll go. I promise,” knowing full well that if they ever escaped Russia, they would never come back.
But America had funiculars, too. She thought they called them trams, and America would welcome them and give them a home if Lana Elkins, to whom Galina had entrusted their lives, could actually find them safe passage out of the country.
In searching for a rural seaport, Galina was forging a backup plan, a redundancy, like you’d find in any sound computer software. Nobody with a conscience would bet the life of their child entirely on a stranger.
She soon spotted moorages, but they catered to cabin cruisers and large sailboats, whose hulls had risen with the sea and now shadowed the docks from heights she’d never seen before. Despite that, most of the slips were still occupied; the affluent boat owners were less concerned, perhaps, about their weekend pleasures than a fisherman who depended on his vessel for his livelihood.
She was surprised to see bearded men—Muslims, if she were not mistaken—walking alongside the road. More of them as she drove farther north, one with prayer beads in his hand. Headscarves on some women, too.
Galina checked her odometer—about fifty kilometers away from the heart of Sochi. She felt like a rube. How could she not know that Muslims lived in this region? She would have checked online right then but she planned to keep her phone power off unless she absolutely needed it.
Dimly, from a source she could not readily place, she recalled that there was, indeed, a sizable Muslim population up there.
Yes, that’s right, she thought. During the Olympics it was a reason given—not in the most overt terms—for heightened security.
That could be good, she realized. There might be people among them who despaired of the official Russian propaganda line, who might not even avail themselves of it. People who could sympathize with a woman who had killed a “hero” of the Chechnya war in which so many Muslims were ruthlessly tortured and murdered, including scores of children.
Galina took stock of her other resources. She had a bundle of cash and a gun. No bullets, but a gun. As a last resort, brandishing an unloaded derringer might be better than having no weapon at all, especially in the hands of such a notorious hero-slayer. Her reputation might not only precede her, but clear a path for them as well.
She glanced in the rearview mirror to see what such a murderer looked like.
Tired, she decided at once. Very tired.
The sun was going down across the sea. She didn’t dare look for an established hotel or inn. She passed billboards for a number of them with their locations and distances noted, but ignored them.
She had not seen the frantic small seaport she’d been hoping for, but the more Muslims she spotted, the more she considered a much different plan.
Farther north of Sochi she sp
otted a village from the road. She had to make a decision soon or she might find herself driving aimlessly through the night, when she would be able to see little.
Galina exited onto a freshly paved but extremely narrow road. Not hard to imagine that it had been resurfaced with macadam to accommodate vehicles other than carts pulled by beasts of burden—not all of them animals in the annals of Russia’s often brutal past.
When she found herself driving too directly toward the town, she turned onto a winding forest two-track through lush deciduous trees, still leafy in the subtropical climes of the coast.
She came to a place where the trees to her left thinned enough to provide a vantage point for the village. Alexandra, after her brief burst of energy, had slumped in her seat and gone to sleep.
Easing her door open and closed, Galina walked past the branches until she could see the small harbor in all its simple splendor. She counted twelve fishing trawlers, their nets off-loaded, apparently replaced by boxes and bikes and suitcases glowing golden in the day’s dying light.
Three sailboats sat moored a few hundred feet away in what appeared to be a protected inlet. Beautiful vessels. The two sloops and ketch ranged in size from about ten to twenty meters. Peering closely, she saw a small gathering on the ketch, the largest of the three. She thought fishermen, desperate to flee with their families, might be more likely to help her than yacht owners who appeared to be riding out the crisis in party mode.
The water here also had risen almost to the docks, making them look unusually low next to the boats.
As she looked at the sun setting across the dark waters of the Black Sea, she realized that not too many years ago she could have sailed straight out from the Russian coastline to escape the country’s territorial waters. Not now, not since Russia had annexed Crimea, laying even greater claim to the Sevastopol naval base. Now Russian territorial waters had many zigs and zags, which complicated navigation to international waters.
After checking on Alexandra, she hurried back to surveil the town and port, pleased with her viewpoint. Ten minutes passed before there was any sign of life below. Then four men walked out of a small building, not much bigger than a shed. She caught only a glimpse of small rugs inside, but enough to realize they’d been offering their sunset prayer. The sight elated her and gave her hope.
