by Steve Berry
He checked his watch again and wondered about Anya and her progress in Virginia. She carried a throwaway cell phone he’d purchased in Irkutsk. He carried one, too, and they’d agreed that contact would be made only when necessary. That type of portable technology did not exist in his day, but he’d stayed current, learning to use a computer and work the Internet.
Twenty-seven years separated him and Anya. His first wife died of cancer, his only son before that from a drug overdose. Both deaths hit him hard. He’d been taught all of his life to operate off known facts and assumed realities. Be careful and be prepared. Self-possessed? Absolutely. At his core, though, was integrity, which forced him to always be honest with himself.
Anya, too, was strong, full of lust and anger, two emotions that he understood with great clarity. She’d come into his life a few years ago when he desperately needed someone to share his passions. Thankfully, she was drawn to older men, especially those without pretenses. The day he finally explained his goal and desire her response had been immediate.
“We shall do it together.”
Which had pleased him.
One more check of the watch.
55 hours remained.
He’d thought the American might actually show, but apparently that was not the case.
Which was okay.
Like any good officer, he’d anticipated deceit.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Stephanie wanted to know more about Aleksandr Zorin, so she asked Nikolai Osin to explain.
“He’s former KGB and GRU, and also headed a spetsnaz team.”
Those she knew. Ruthless units of paramilitary specialists who once carried out assassinations, raids, and sabotage. They were created after World War II when the Soviet Union wanted to emulate the success of American commandos. Eventually the Red Army organized “troops of special purpose,” spetsialnoye nazranie, or spetsnaz for short. To lead one of those squads meant Zorin was not a man to be taken lightly. He would be highly trained, far more accustomed to offense than defense.
“And what does Zorin want revenge for?”
“He longs for communism.”
“Move to China.”
“I doubt he has much love for the Chinese. He’s more a Lenin-traditionalist, and a dangerous one. He was also part of the special destinations group.”
Those she also knew. The Soviets trained them to penetrate an enemy either before or just after a war started. Their job would be to disrupt power stations, communications grids, dams, highways, and any other strategic target. They were experts in weapons, explosives, mines, and killing. They were also all pilots, required to be fluent in at least two other languages, English nearly always one of those.
“He served in Afghanistan during our war there,” Osin said. “Quite effectively, too.”
“Nikolai, please tell me what’s really happening here.”
She hoped her conciliatory tone would loosen this spy’s tongue. All of this had started for her with a call from Osin. The initial inquiry had come days earlier from the Kremlin to the White House, the matter then referred her way by President Danny Daniels.
The facts, as originally told, were relatively simple. A former KGB archivist, an old man named Vadim Belchenko, had gone missing. Russian internal security kept tabs on Belchenko, since they’d learned long ago that archivists could be their biggest security problem. Archivists once enjoyed unfettered access to both the highest intelligence and the most sensitive policy papers. They knew everything, so to ignore them could be fatal. That lesson was taught by one named Mitrokhin, who smuggled out 25,000 pages of sensitive documents, which in 1992 made their way westward, offering the clearest picture ever of Soviet espionage and proving that the KGB had evolved into the largest foreign intelligence service in the world.
Sharp of sword, tough of shield.
That was its motto.
And the main way the West knew anything about how dangerous it became was from archivists. So she understood why Belchenko may have been on a watch list. What remained unclear was why this man was so important right now, and how Zorin fit in.
“He is a profoundly troubled man,” Osin said. “He fled east after the Soviet collapse, along with a hundred or so other expatriates. They’ve lived by Lake Baikal without incident for a long time. Lately, though, this calm has changed. Zorin knows Belchenko. They have communicated many times through the years. But never has Belchenko himself gone east.”
That had been Cotton’s mission. To recon the dacha and the village and see if he could locate Belchenko.
“Why not send your own people,” she said. “Why call me?”
“There are several reasons for that. But the most relevant is that this has nothing to do with Russia. It’s an external problem.”
“Care to explain that one?”
“If your agent finds Belchenko, I will gladly. For now, let’s just say that I like to think that we are not enemies, though sometimes it’s hard to know for sure. I was told to involve you as a show of our good faith.”
And, she realized, to also give Moscow some deniability if things went terribly wrong. At least we brought you in from the start would be their line. And he was right about the enemies part. No longer were Russia and the United States open adversaries. But while the Cold War had been over a long time, a more frozen version had slowly come into existence. She sensed, though, that this mess was something more akin to the old days.
“For now,” he said, “let me say that this is a fight that may involve only Zorin and the United States. Or at least that’s our hope. So I thought it prudent to now make you aware of it. We don’t want to see you lose.”
A strange comment, which she added to the growing list of anomalies.
He stared at her through eyes that were surprisingly congenial. “Do you know of Stanislav Lunev?”
Absolutely. A former Soviet military officer and the highest-ranking intelligence operative to ever defect to the United States. He turned in 1992 and remained to this day hidden away. He did, though, write a memoir. Through the Eyes of the Enemy. She’d read it several times. One comment from the book always stayed with her. The best spy will be everyone’s best friend, not a shadowy figure in the corner.
“Lunev’s claims are true,” Osin said.
She knew what he meant. In his memoir Lunev had revealed something shocking. He wrote about a Soviet weapon identified as RA-115. In the United States they called them suitcase nukes. Each weighed about fifty pounds and delivered six kilotons of firepower, which by Hiroshima and Nagaski standards was small. Those bombs had packed punches of sixteen and twenty kilotons. Still, at short range six kilotons could do extreme damage. Congress outlawed the weapon in 1994, but that provision was repealed in 2004. To her knowledge, though, the U.S. did not have any in its nuclear arsenal. The old Soviet Union and the new Russia were another matter. She recalled the concerns from 1997 when a Russian national security adviser claimed on 60 Minutes that more than a hundred RA-115s remained unaccounted for. No one knew if they had been destroyed or stolen. Congress held hearings, where experts differed on whether the weapon even existed.
“Are you saying RA-115s are real?”
He nodded. “The Soviets produced 250. They are about so big.” He used his hands to describe a package about twenty-four inches long, sixteen inches wide, and eight inches tall.
“They were distributed to military intelligence units of the KGB and the GRU, tagged for special operations. After the Soviet collapse, they fell under the jurisdiction of the SVR. There they have remained.”
She wondered about his frankness. This was not the type of information nations shared with one another. Warnings about poor security over Russia’s nuclear weapons dated back to 1990. A congressional act in 1991 provided American technical aid to help eliminate Russian warheads and account for their nuclear material. Thankfully, to date, no rogue bombs had ever surfaced. Eventually, the furor over any potential problems faded and suitcase nukes entered the realm
of movies and television. None was ever seen in real life. Now she was being told that 250 of them existed.
“Our counterintelligence units worked hard to downplay any threat and discredit press attention to the potential containment problem,” he said. “We diffused all of that publicity.”
That they had. She remembered the shadow cast across the 60 Minutes story when it was revealed that, at the time of the broadcast, its producer had written and was promoting a book on the dangers of nuclear terrorism. That same producer had been involved with a just-released movie called The Peacemaker, which involved a missing Soviet nuclear weapon used for terrorism. Talk about casting doubt on credibility.
“You people do stay busy,” she said. “Always up to something.”
He smiled. “I could say the same for you.”
“What does this have to do with Vadim Belchenko?”
“Eighty-four of those RA-115s remain unaccounted for.”
That was startling information, but she kept her cool and simply said, “And you’re just now mentioning this?”
“There is good and bad to this reality. The good is that those weapons are hidden away, in places only a handful of people know. The bad is that one of the people who know is Vadim Belchenko.”
Now she caught the urgency. “And you think Aleksandr Zorin is after one of those suitcase nukes?”
“It’s a possibility.”
They were still driving through Washington’s deserted streets, cruising past closed buildings and empty sidewalks. She’d thought something was seriously wrong from the moment Osin had first called. A second call from Osin had alerted her to the fact that a woman was in the United States, someone who bore careful watching.
“Tell me more about Anya Petrova.”
“As I told you before, she is Zorin’s lover. About twenty-five years younger, police-trained, and seems to share Zorin’s passion for revenge. He sent her here for a reason. Hopefully you’ll determine what that is.”
Her mind went to Luke Daniels, who’d been recruited as Petrova’s shadow. He could handle things.
“An RA-115,” Osin said, “is engineered to last for years, so long as it’s wired to a power source. In case of a loss of power, a battery backup is provided. If the battery runs low, the weapon has a transmitter that sends a coded message by satellite to a Russian embassy or consulate.”
“Has any such signal ever been received?”
He nodded. “Seventy-nine. None was ever followed up on.”
“Which means they’re out of juice and harmless.”
He nodded. “That’s right. Then there are the other five. No signal has ever been received from those weapons.”
“Is it possible they still have power?” She paused. “After twenty-plus years.”
“Zorin apparently thinks so.”
“Go get them.”
“We don’t know where to look. Any records relevant to them are gone. We think Vadim Belchenko purged them.”
“Insurance for a long life?”
Osin smiled. “Probably. Unfortunately, Zorin may have discovered what Belchenko knows.”
Which explained the urgency in finding the old man.
Her phone vibrated.
Normally, she would ignore it, but since only the White House was still in her communications loop she decided to check the display.
LUKE DANIELS.
Which raised more alarms.
“This call could be relevant to what we’re discussing.”
“Please answer it.”
She did, and listened as Luke explained what had happened in Virginia ending with, “I assume you know what I’m doing, so I decided to call you instead of him. I don’t want to hear how I blew it. But I know I will. That woman’s long gone.”
“Where are you?”
“I called a tow truck and they hauled my Mustang to a lot just off I-66.”
He told her where.
“That house,” he said, “bears another look. I don’t want it to sit there wide open for long.”
Neither did she, so she said, “Hold on.”
She faced Osin. He’d been straight with her, and since she was short on resources and did not want Bruce Litchfield to know her business, she had little choice. “I need your help. We have to go to Virginia. It bears on Anya Petrova.”
“Tell me where and I’ll have the driver take us.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Malone never had any intention of meeting Zorin at some observatory. That would be the precise definition of stupidity. So he’d avoided the unusual-looking facility on a rocky hilltop and driven another fifteen miles north to the dacha. The two-laned highway framed by snow paralleled the lakeshore, and he’d passed no cars coming from the opposite direction, which made him wonder even more about Zorin. More than likely, the only thing waiting for him at that observatory was trouble. So he decided to just plunge straight into the lion’s den.
His sense of direction was excellent, thanks in large part to his eidetic memory, a blessing bestowed upon him in the womb. He often wondered where the genetic trait came from and was finally told by his mother that her father had likewise been blessed. He’d actually grown accustomed to never forgetting a detail. He could remember word-for-word essays he’d written in grammar school, and exactly what happened at every Christmas. It had certainly come in handy as a lawyer, then when he worked for the Magellan Billet. Now it helped him keep inventory on the rare books at his shop in Copenhagen. But it also prevented the memories of Cassiopeia Vitt from fading. He recalled every detail of their time together, and that was not necessarily a good thing.
He found the winding lane he recalled seeing from the air that led up to the perch where the dacha waited. He eased the truck off the highway and into the trees, stopping atop a snowy patch of ground. He parked and trekked up toward the house, scrambling from one tree trunk to another through the drifts, his boots crunching atop dry snow. Evergreen boughs and the spiny tentacles of leafless trees reached for the ever-darkening sky. His eyes smarted from the wind and cold. A daily regimen of squats and sit-ups had definitely kept his muscles toned, but the frigid climb taxed him.
He found the top, glancing back and noticing how the snow betrayed his presence with a trail of footsteps. A rusted, waist-high wire fence blocked the way ahead. A draft of icy air off the nearby lake stung his throat. He settled behind a thick pine and gazed at the dacha. Smoke continued to waft skyward from three chimneys. One of the two vehicles that had been there earlier was gone. Strains of folk music floated through the frosty air. He located the source. An outbuilding, this one round, all of wood, no windows and a single door, a thin spire of vapor steadily escaping from the top of its conical roof.
His mission was to search for Vadim Belchenko. He’d been shown a picture taken a few years back. The man was some kind of former KGB archivist. If found, he was to retreat and report the location. The first part would be relatively easy, the second not so much as his cell phone had been destroyed. But he had the truck and could find a phone somewhere.
He stepped over the fence and scampered across a blacktopped area that spread out from the end of the drive to the house, the smoking round building leaking music situated to one side. He negotiated the pavement with care since he could not afford a fall on black ice. He came to the round building’s doorway and quickly entered, assaulted by a welcomed wave of warm, dry air. Another doorway led farther inside, blocked by a fur blanket that hung from its jamb. He peeled back a small section of the blanket—enough for him to see that the building was some sort of sauna. A fire burned in the center beneath a bed of hot stones. An old man sat on the lower level of a series of pine benches that rose against the far wall. He was naked, laid out with his legs extended straight, gnarled hands intertwined behind his head. The features matched the picture he’d been shown.
Vadim Belchenko.
Music swelled from a small CD player that lay on the bench. He slipped inside and approached the old man. The f
ace looked like a bland mask, broad and flat with skin the color of dirty snow. The closed eyes were set back into wrinkled cups of folded flesh. Wet, blondish hair covered the scalp, and the only indications of advanced age came from the sunken chest and cheeks. The older man calmly smoked on a potent-smelling cigar.
He reached down and shut off the music.
Belchenko opened his eyes and sat up. Both pupils were clouded with cataracts.
“My name is Cotton Malone,” he said in English.
Belchenko stared at him. “And what are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to see if you’re okay.”
“Why would I not be?”
“You disappeared and people were wondering.”
“You mean Russian state security was wondering. And why would they send an American to see about me?”
The voice was low and throaty, with no inflection, emotion, or concern.
“That’s a question I’ve been wondering, too.”
Belchenko exhaled a cloud of blue smoke that drifted upward. “Are you a spy?”
“Not anymore.”
The hot air was drying his nostrils, so he kept his breathing shallow and through his mouth. Sweat began to trickle down his spine, leaving a chilly path.
“Let’s just say I’m a part-time spy.”
“We had a few of those in my day. I never cared for them.”
“Where is Zorin?”
“He went to meet with you.”
He hadn’t come to chitchat. In fact, his mission was done. He’d found Belchenko and now he had to report in. But old habits were hard to break, so he had to ask one more question. “Why does the Russian government give a damn what you do?”
“Because I know things, Mr. Malone. And they want to know those things, too, before I die.”
Now he understood. “And you promised to tell them.”
“It seemed a small price to pay in order to stay alive. Once they know, I will have no value. You really do not understand what you have been thrust into, do you?”
