Black Ghosts

CHAPTER 23

There was bad news waiting for Larry when he got back to the safe house. Joe Falco was sitting in his wheelchair in the living room. On the coffee table was a small metallic object.

“Look what I found,” Joe said grimly, pointing at the object.

Larry picked it up. There was no doubt what it was, an electronic listening device.

“Where?” he asked in a low voice, suddenly conscious of the fact that there could be more of them. He looked around the room.

“Right here under the coffee table.”

“Did you check the rest of the house?”

“Downstairs, yes. It’s clean. Upstairs, I had a problem.” He shrugged apologetically. Larry carried him upstairs and then went back for his wheelchair. Together they made a thorough sweep. There were no more bugs.

“Who could have put it there?” asked Larry, half to himself.

“Beats me. Somebody must have got in while we were at the office downtown.”

Larry tried to think back to all the discussions they’d had in that room. He had to assume the worst, that every word had been passed on to their enemies by whoever planted the bug. He realized he had better call Edward right away. The man might just be walking straight into a bloody trap.

Natalie wasted no time. Less than five minutes after the Volkswagen left the parking spot in front of the apartment building that contained the safe house, she leaned over to Alexi and unzipped his fly. His eyes opened wide and a broad smirk spread across his face. “Aha,” he said. “You want a real man after that American boychik.”

She smiled at him balefully. “Just drive.” Her voice was soft, seductive. By the time she exposed him he was fully aroused. Then his astonishment turned to terror when her other hand opened the switchblade and placed the cold steel blade in the open fly.

“Listen, you creep,” hissed Natalie, “if you don’t want to lose it, do exactly as I tell you. Understood?”

Alexi nodded dumbly, his face white. Unconsciously, he took his foot off the gas and the car began to slow down. “Keep driving,” snapped Natalie, pressing the blade slightly. “Turn right here.”

She directed him along the Leninskij Prospekt toward the outskirts of the city. Within half an hour they were in open country.

Where the hell is this witch taking me? wondered Alexi. And what is she going to do when we get there? Somehow, he suspected it would be nothing very pleasant.

The road skirted a rocky hill. Natalie ordered him to turn on to a track that led from the road to the hillside. Ahead of them, a large trapezium-shaped section, sixty or seventy feet wide and thirty feet high, had been cut into the side of the hill. Across most of it were three dark green metal rolling garage-style doors, tightly closed. At one end was another green door, for personnel, with a small metal viewing slit at eye height. Outside the bunker, a sentry was pacing back and forth in a well-ironed black uniform. When he saw the car approaching, he stopped and readied his machine gun. Natalie told Alexi to stop the car.

“Get out,” she said, reaching over to open his door.

Moving gingerly to avoid injuring himself on the stiletto, Alexi slid out. Once clear of the blade, panic overcame him and he ran blindly along the track toward the road. Natalie, or Major Androva as she was known in this place, shouted an order at the sentry, who casually aimed his Kalashnikov and fired a few rounds into Alexi’s back. He stopped running, a look of surprise on his face, then he turned a pirouette and fell in a heap. Another burst of fire from the sentry’s gun finished him.

“I said stop him, not kill him, you fool!” she shouted at the sentry and ran to where Alexi had fallen. When she reached him, she knew he was not going to answer any of her questions. “Stupid oaf,” she said. She turned on her heels and walked briskly into the bunker.

The guard stared at her, fear in his eyes, no longer sure of his future.

A few minutes later, she was in conference with General Rogov in his private office.

“How are you, my dear?”

“Well, thank you, sir. I have some new information for you.”

“Ah? Proceed.”

“Well, I would have more if our soldiers would listen to orders. I brought a man back who might have had much to say to us, but he was killed just now trying to escape.”

“What did you do to scare him so?” The general smiled. “Never mind. What do you have for us?”

“The American is planning an assault of some kind. He is bringing a squad of men into some airfield somewhere.”

“You didn’t get the exact location?”

Natalie shook her head. “But I can tell you exactly where you can find him.” She told Rogov the address of the safe house.

“Good,” he said. “We will eliminate him there. His little squad will be no threat without its leader.”

“Something else I discovered,” said Natalie, accepting Peter’s offer of a Sobranie. “They are hoping to divert the president’s plane to another airport, to Domodedovo.”

“I see.” Rogov’s face was tense. “What made them choose that particular airport?”

“Edward, that’s the American, he has someone inside our ranks who is giving him information. I think they know we do not control that place.”

“That is correct.” The general clenched his teeth. “We must move quickly. Come.”

Peter strode out of his private office and down the corridor to the control room, Natalie following close behind. Peter called to Yazarinsky, who was sitting idly at a computer console, and summoned him to the large illuminated map of the Moscow region. Most of the area was dominated by red lights, indicating the presence of troop divisions whose men, or at least whose commanding officers, were under his command. Significantly, the area around Domodedovo Airport showed only the green lights of troops loyal to President Konyigin.

“Domodedovo must be secured by all possible means,” said Peter, pointing at the map. “Colonel Yazarinsky, you will devise a strategy and report to me in half an hour.” Peter signaled Colonel Yakov. “Major Androva here will supply you with an address and a description of an American who is becoming a nuisance to us. You will arrest this individual, along with any of his associates, and terminate them. Understood?”

It was only a few minutes after Natalie had left that the call came through. Edward’s first thought, when Larry told him about the bug, was that the whereabouts of the airfield into which his soldiers were to fly would be known to whoever had planted the bug, which could be anyone including the Black Ghosts themselves. But Larry reminded him that he had been at the office when Edward had given the coordinates, and Larry was sure the office was clean.

“How can you be sure?”

“We had it swept several times.”

“What made you do that?”

“We were looking to make sure there were no leaks in the system we had installed. We did a thorough check every morning before the airline people came in. If there was a bug, Falco said we would have found it.”

The next concern was the house on Long Island, which obviously was no longer safe. Larry was already in the office and he was not going back until this thing was over.

But that was not all. Edward remembered that he and Natalie had been sitting at the coffee table when she had suggested hiding the array’s circuit board in her Walkman. This meant they would know, not only that the circuit board they had been supplied was a poison pill, but that the operational circuit board was now in Natalie’s hands.

It hit him like a high-voltage jolt to the stomach. She had the board with her and she must have hidden it somewhere so they couldn’t find it. And he had forgotten all about it. The Black Ghosts needed to get to her in order to get to the board. He had to find her before they did.

He got Igor to call him a taxi and went directly to Natalie’s apartment. She should still be there. She was barely fifteen minutes ahead of him. He stood outside for several minutes, then walked around the block. The place was clean; there was no surveillance on the building. Alexi’s car was nowhere to be seen. Something was not right. He could feel it. He ran up the stairs and knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again, louder. The place was as silent as a tomb.

Edward felt a chill run through his body. He went back downstairs.

The janitor’s office was on the ground floor. He found a bald man in shirtsleeves sitting in the office, watching television, and spiking his tea with vodka. He tried to talk to him, but it was clear from the man’s wondering frown that he did not speak English.

“English,” said Edward. “English?”

“Inglish,” said the man, shaking his head in puzzlement. Then his expression brightened. “Ah, angliski yaziyk!” He stood up and beckoned Edward out of the office and down the hall. He knocked at one of the badly painted doors and a sour-faced, middle-aged woman answered.

The janitor exchanged a few words with her, then she turned to Edward. “I speak English.”

Edward explained to her that he was here to visit a friend and had reason to believe she had come to some harm inside her apartment. Could the janitor let him in to take a look?

After this message had been translated into Russian and answered, the woman asked Edward which apartment it was. Edward gave her the number and she nodded knowingly, an odd expression flickering across her face. She and the janitor exchanged a few more words. Then she shook her head from side to side very purposefully. “Open apartment is against rules, no.” Edward stood there in silence for a moment, wondering what it would take to get inside Natalie’s apartment. “Twenty dollar,” said the woman, as if reading his mind. “And twenty for me,” she added quickly.

Edward handed over the bills, the janitor went to get the keys, and the three of them went upstairs.

The place was deserted. Edward had no way of telling for certain, but he had the strong impression that no one had been in here for some time. There was a staleness in the air.

“Two women living here,” said the Russian lady, her expression still wary. “Which one you want?”

“Natalie,” said Edward. He remembered that the other woman, Sarah, had died in suspicious circumstances, which probably explained the woman’s wary look. He looked around and saw a couple of framed photographs on the mantel. One was of a plump girl with curly brown hair. The other was a photo of Natalie, her blond hair flying, a happy smile on her face. Edward picked it up.

“Here, this is Natalie.”

The man and the woman exchanged a few words, then the woman turned her cold eyes back to Edward. “This is not Natalie. We seen this woman come and go. Natalie short and big, not like this one.” The woman pointed at the other picture, the one Edward thought must be of Sarah. “That Natalie,” the woman said.

The fog lifted and all the pieces came together. The beautiful woman staring at him from the photo, whose body he could still feel and whose scent was deep under his skin, was not, and never had been, Natalie. “Shit,” he said aloud. “What a fool, what a bloody fool.”