Countdown to Midnight

Three

Pavel Voronin stood perfectly at ease, looking out the east-facing, floor-to-ceiling windows that formed one whole wall of his spacious private office. From here, forty-four stories up the Mercury Tower, one of six ultramodern skyscrapers that made up the city’s International Business Center, he could see all the way across the frozen Moskva River to the Kremlin’s redbrick walls and spires and beyond. A cloudless blue sky overhead signaled the arrival of a massive wave of high pressure from Siberia, sending temperatures in the Russian capital plunging to well below zero. In the bright sunlight, the Mercury Tower’s bronze-tinted reflective glass glowed like a soaring pillar of fire on Moscow’s skyline.

It was an ostentatious display that mirrored the self-proclaimed status of the building’s prosperous tenants — five-star restaurants, luxury-apartment owners, high-end retail stores, and the business offices of some of Russia’s most successful enterprises.

Including his own Sindikat Vorona, the Raven Syndicate, which now occupied three full floors of the gleaming skyscraper.

Idly, with a thin, cold smile that never reached his pale gray eyes, Voronin gazed down across Moscow’s icy streets, so full of tiny-seeming cars and trucks and scurrying, antlike pedestrians. It was a view he relished — especially since this office had once belonged to Dmitri Grishin, one of Russia’s most powerful and wealthiest oligarchs, the man who had been his mentor for more than a decade.

Grishin had prized both Voronin’s outward polish — the product of the best preparatory schools and universities in the United Kingdom and the United States — and his utter ruthlessness. And he had used the younger man to run his most illegal ventures, culminating in a daring scheme to secretly orchestrate the theft of Russia’s most advanced stealth bomber and then sell it to the highest bidder. In the end, they’d obtained huge sums of ransom money from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. — only to have the aircraft unexpectedly crash and explode deep in Alaska’s uncharted wilderness, making it impossible to return the technological marvel to their own country as promised.

But in this seeming setback, Voronin had immediately seen the opportunity he’d long craved, a chance to permanently end his apprenticeship to Grishin. He’d callously betrayed the oligarch to Russia’s state security services and to the lethal vengeance of the nation’s authoritarian ruler, President Piotr Zhdanov. Then, posing as a patriot appalled by the older man’s “crimes,” he’d helped the Kremlin also retrieve the hundreds of billions of rubles it had paid into some of Grishin’s secret accounts. Of course, now secure in Zhdanov’s good graces, he’d kept for himself the three billion dollars so unwisely paid into other hidden accounts by the American CIA — using it to fund the creation of the Raven Syndicate, his own private military and intelligence “consulting” firm.

His smile widened slightly at the memory of watching Dmitri Grishin’s bullet-shattered corpse drift out to sea. That one small, perfect act of treachery had freed him to pursue his deepest ambitions… and simultaneously provided the wealth he required. In little more than a year, he’d built up a deadly and efficient organization — luring many of Russia’s best-trained special forces soldiers and intelligence specialists away from its vaunted Spetsnaz commando groups, its foreign intelligence agency, the SVR, and its military intelligence unit, the GRU, and into his own service. Poaching so many of their best people hadn’t won him any friends in Russia’s Ministry of Defense or its official intelligence organizations. But he didn’t really give a damn.

After all, thanks to MIDNIGHT, the audacious covert operation he’d first conceived, and to the irreversible strategic changes it promised to unleash on an unsuspecting world, Pavel Voronin had become, as he planned all along, President Zhdanov’s indispensable man.

He turned at a discreet knock on his office door. A specific tone chimed, indicating the visitor waiting outside was his top deputy, Vasily Kondakov, a former colonel in the GRU. He tapped a small icon on his smartwatch, disengaging the door’s security lock. It buzzed open and Kondakov hurried in carrying a manila folder. Nearly as tall as Voronin, the ex-intelligence officer was balding and wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“Well?” Voronin snapped.

“Our courier from the team in Vienna just arrived,” the other man told him. He held up the folder. “With Skoblin’s full report on the Khavari… affair.”

Voronin hid his amusement. In more than a decade of service with the GRU’s notorious Unit 29155, agents under Kondakov’s direct command had been responsible for the deaths of a number of dissidents, defectors, and even foreign nationals deemed dangerous to Russia’s national security. Despite that, he was still oddly squeamish, preferring vague euphemisms like “affair” to blunter, more accurate terms like “hit” or “murder.”

He sat down behind his desk and gestured Kondakov into the lone chair on the other side. “And?”

The other man frowned. “As ordered, Skoblin and his people took Khavari off the board. Quite permanently.”

Voronin nodded. The Iranian shipping official had been under suspicion and surveillance for some weeks. His sudden attempt to arrange what was clearly a covert rendezvous while part of a delegation to an OPEC conference in Austria had triggered the quick decision to kill him. With the final preparations for MIDNIGHT so close to completion, it was imperative to seal any potential security breach. “So what’s the problem, Vasily?”

“Khavari managed to make contact with an enemy agent before they were able to silence him,” Kondakov answered.

Voronin’s lips thinned in irritation. He leaned forward. “Then I assume this agent is dead, too?”

“Unfortunately not,” Kondakov said grimly. “Somehow, he evaded the team’s best efforts to eliminate him. He even took out one of our own people, one Skoblin had posted to guard the northern exit from Kitzbühel.”

“Took out how?” Voronin demanded.

“Skoblin’s team found our agent dead on the road,” Kondakov replied. “He’d been shot four times, at point-blank range.”

Voronin sat back. His jaw tightened. “And has this mysterious paragon of mayhem been identified?”

“Not yet,” the other man admitted. He opened the manila folder and slid several photographs across the desk. Taken through the scope of Skoblin’s sniper rifle and his spotter’s binoculars, they showed only part of the unknown agent’s face. Making identification even more difficult, dark-tinted ski goggles hid the man’s eyes and part of his forehead. “Thanks to your authorization from the president, we can run these pictures through the SVR and GRU databases without giving them the whole story. But I do not expect definitive results.”

Voronin took one of the photos and studied it briefly. He saw Kondakov’s point. It would be almost impossible to match these partial images with that of any known enemy operative. From what little they had to go on, Khavari’s contact could be working for any one of half a dozen Western intelligence agencies. He said as much aloud.

Slowly, Kondakov nodded. He tapped the best photo of the bunch, one that captured more of the man’s profile. “He might be American,” he said hesitantly. “There’s something about that jawline—”

“Working for the CIA?” Voronin said with a snort. “Or one of their other intelligence groups?” He shook his head dismissively. “Not likely, Vasily. I doubt any of their people could have acted so swiftly and ruthlessly against Skoblin’s watcher. The American spy agencies are too risk averse. They frown on the use of unplanned violence by their officers, do they not?”

Again, the other man nodded. The fictional depictions in so many films and thrillers of CIA officers singlehandedly taking out enemy spies and terrorists were a source of private amusement to those in Moscow, who knew how tightly their rivals’ hands were so often tied.

Voronin looked more intently at the photo Kondakov had singled out. “The Israelis, on the other hand, aren’t such old women. They are not at all afraid to act decisively when necessary,” he mused softly. He glanced up. “And Israel is already locked in its own long-standing covert war with Iran. That gives them a strong motivation to cultivate a traitor like Khavari.”

“You think this man could be Mossad?” Kondakov asked.

“The Mossad. Or a member of the Sayeret Matkal,” Voronin said, referring to the special forces unit controlled by AMAN, Israel’s military intelligence service. He leaned back in his chair. “Taking everything into consideration, it’s the most likely possibility.”

“So what now?”

“Tell Skoblin’s team to institute tight surveillance on the Israeli embassy in Vienna,” Voronin ordered. “I don’t want those people able to make a move without us knowing about it. That’s essential in case they try to penetrate MIDNIGHT’s security again — by going after another of Khavari’s government colleagues, for example. We can’t risk further security breaches. Not this late in the game.”

Kondakov looked worried. “It might be better if we turn that task over to the SVR or GRU,” he suggested. “Close surveillance operations are manpower-intensive. And if any of their people are spotted and identified, we might be able to pass it off as just a routine intelligence-gathering effort.”

“Absolutely not,” Voronin said coldly. “Calling in your old comrades or those clowns in the SVR would mean briefing them on the potential gap in our operational security. Right now, President Zhdanov trusts us completely. Which is why we’ve been given a completely free hand to carry out MIDNIGHT as we see fit. Naturally, there are many small-minded men in our government who are jealous of our growing power and influence. They would jump at the chance to discredit me and the Syndicate. So I have no intention of affording them any such opportunity.” His eyes hardened. “Is that clear, Vasily?” Hurriedly, Kondakov nodded.

“Then you tell Skoblin that I want this matter handled entirely in-house,” Voronin directed. “With our own people and our own resources.”

“And if they spot the agent Khavari spoke to?” Kondakov asked.

“I want him terminated,” Voronin said harshly. “Without hesitation. Without delay. And without any more mistakes.”