Day of Wrath

CHAPTER FIVE LOOSE ENDS

“Bornestangen light bears three two five.”

Captain Pavel Tumarev grunted in reply, studying the radar scope. The Don radar set was stepped down to its shortest range setting, for maximum detail. Even then, he could see three other ships, one in the channel ahead of him and two others in the outbound channel approaching him, but separated by a goodly distance. Star of the White Sea was in her place, on the starboard side of the crowded channel.

Bergen was one of the busiest ports in Scandinavia — a hub for North Sea oil exploration, fishing, and bulk cargo transport. Norwegian radar stations watched all the merchant traffic and Channel 13 crackled with directions from Bergen traffic control.

Tumarev’s ship had been under positive control since passing Sjerkaget light, but if he collided with something, traffic control wouldn’t take responsibility for it.

“Bornestangen light bears three three zero,” reported the port bearing taker.

“Range to Venten Mountain?” Tumarev asked. There was an edge to his question. The radar operator was supposed to report the range every half minute, but he was late.

“Fifty-three hundred meters.”

His first officer looked up from the chart table. “Navigator recommends immediate turn to three three five degrees.”

“Come left to three three five,” ordered Tumarev. “Watch the current.”

They were on an ebb tide, and it might push them out of the channel if they didn’t pay attention.

Tumarev scanned the bridge, then stepped out on the port bridge wing to watch the ship swing. He sensed someone follow him out and knew it was Dietrich Kleiner, Arrus Export’s “senior representative” on board. A nice enough fellow, Tumarev thought sourly, as long as you didn’t try to talk to him or mess up somehow.

Kleiner had ridden his ship many times, always into Bergen.

He always departed at that port — often without saying so much as a word. When he did speak, he used Russian, but it was clear from more than his name that the man was German.

Tumarev grimaced at his own understatement. Kleiner, he thought, exhibited the same Teutonic craving for precision, lust for power, and contempt for Slavs that had led his damned country into two world wars and ruin.

The German was shorter than the Star’s captain, which was saying something, but stocky instead of just small. He weighed at least ten kilos more, and as far as Tumarev was concerned, it was all mean. He was also younger, in his mid-thirties instead of his fifties, and showed none of the traditional respect due a ship’s master.

Kleiner didn’t make every trip on the Star, praise God, but when he did he was everywhere. He seemed to know how a merchant vessel should be run, and wasn’t shy about telling the captain when he thought Tumarev or his crew were slacking. Losing their Arrus Export charter was the most pleasant thing he promised.

Satisfied they were back on course, Tumarev risked a glance at his unwelcome passenger. The German was watching him with a scowl — almost as though he were disappointed the Russian hadn’t put Star of the White Sea on the rocks.

Tumarev shrugged and went back inside. This close to the end of the fourteen-hundred-mile run from Pechenga, he had more important matters to attend to. Kleiner and his superiors at Arrus Export paid him well to carry their various cargoes out of Russia without asking inconvenient questions. But they didn’t pay him enough to spend all his time worrying about licking their boots.

Although Bergen lay at the end of a twisted forty kilometer channel, it was an excellent deepwater port. Ships of every type and size crowded the harbor — with oil tankers and container ships anchored below the same steep slopes that had once seen Viking longships unloading plunder and Hanseatic League merchantmen taking on mounds of salted fish.

Tumarev followed traffic control’s instructions to Pier 91A and moored Star of the White Sea portside to a weathered concrete pier sheathed with wood and rubber fenders. It was late in the day, nearly 1800 hours, but the captain saw cranes waiting for his ship.

He gave the boatswain his orders.

Almost before shore power was secured, Tumarev saw the hatch covers being removed, with Kleiner standing next to the boatswain like an unwelcome shadow.

The Russian captain lit an American cigarette and, with his ship safely tied up, relaxed for a few moments, curiosity for once eclipsing his natural laziness. He stood in a shadow and tracked Kleiner while the German watched the first jet engine they were carrying being hoisted out of the Star’s hold. The ship had other cargo aboard — mostly dried fish and scrap metal — but his contracts with Arrus were always clear.

Their shipments always got top priority.

Once the first crate was lifted off the ship, Kleiner hurried to the dock and greeted a tall, dour-looking man in a suit’. Tumarev spat to one side. The Norwegian had the look of an inspector or customs official, and he had scant use for either sort.

Like their counterparts in Russia, the local bureaucrats often seemed to exist only to make his life difficult and to skim off a percentage of his already meager profits in tariffs, taxes, and fees.

To his surprise, the Russian sea captain actually saw a thin smile cross Kleiner’s lips as he shook the newcomer’s hand. Then the Norwegian official showed his teeth, too — the kind of greedy smile one often saw on the face of someone about to receive an expected gift.

The German produced a large manila envelope and passed it to the official, then turned away, heading back up the gangplank.

Tumarev, absorbed in the transaction, almost forgot to turn away himself, but he was sure he hadn’t been seen. He was also sure that whatever Arrus Export’s crated jet engines had been listed as on his ship’s manifests, they would appear as something else entirely at their ultimate destination.

Tumarev also noticed that the engines were not being unloaded to the pier. Instead, the cargo handling cranes were swinging them — he could see three of the five crates now — directly into the hold of another ship on the other side of the pier, in 91B. He squinted at the name painted below her superstructure.

Baltic Venturer. She appeared to be both newer than the Star and bigger by half. She was also moored portside to, with her bow out.

Line-handling crews and a tug were already standing by.

The Russian snorted. Evidently, Kleiner’s employers weren’t planning to waste any time in moving their newly transshipped cargo out of Norwegian territorial waters. But then they never did.

Well, it was none of his business, Tumarev reminded himself.

He had a ship to take care of. Left to her own devices, Star of the White Sea would probably take them all to the bottom in a cloud of rust. He tossed his cigarette over the side and went below to remind the engineer about the need to check their starboard fuel pump.

When he came back on deck an hour later, the Baltic Venturer was already underway — steaming back down the narrow, winding channel toward the open North Sea.

Spring was slowly giving way to summer all across Moscow — heralded by blue, cloudless skies and longer, hotter days. Red-tinged sunlight streamed through the window in Helen Gray’s fifth-floor office, dancing on dust motes swirling in the warm air.

Colonel Peter Thorn sat in a chair with his back to the window, letting the late afternoon sun relax shoulders that were still stiff from a long day spent in cramped airplane seats and uncomfortable airfield waiting rooms. Covering the thousand miles between Kandalaksha and the Russian capital had required first hopping a military cargo flight to Arkhangelsk, and then waiting for the once-a-day commercial flight south. For now he was content to wait for Helen to finish the phone call she’d received within minutes of their return to the embassy.

He stretched his legs out and accidentally bumped into Alexei Koniev’s feet. “Sorry, Major.”

Koniev chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Colonel. Rabbits do not complain about their teeming warrens. Why should we be any different?”

Thorn nodded. The MVD officer’s imagery was apt. One person could work comfortably in Helen’s narrow office. Two people might squeeze in for a short time without driving each other crazy. But three was very definitely a crowd. When added to her desk, computer, bookshelves, and filing cabinets bulging with case files, two extra chairs left barely enough room to breathe.

His gaze drifted to the framed pictures on Helen’s walls and desk. One showed her parents, brother, and two sisters. Two familiar faces smiled back at him from another photo — an older man in U.S. Army dress blues and the stars of a major general and a silver-haired woman wearing an elegant evening dress.

Sam and Louisa Farrell.

They were two of the most important people in his own life.

Major General Sam Farrell had been his mentor and commanding officer for most of his years with Delta Force. Thorn knew his old friend had called in every favor he was owed to keep him in the Army after the Teheran raid. Farrell had retired the year before, but he still carried a lot of weight in the special warfare and intelligence communities. And Louisa Farrell had first introduced him to Helen.

Which brought him to the last picture — the one Helen kept prominently displayed on her desk. It was a picture of them together — a picture taken in those heady, happier days when she’d taken her first steps unaided after being wounded. Back in the days when marriage, a life together, had seemed the logical and inevitable next step to both of them.

Thorn shied away from that thought, uncomfortably aware that he didn’t have any pictures of Helen displayed in his own barren office at O.S.I.A or even in his empty town house in the Virginia suburbs. They were all packed away somewhere in envelopes.

He had lived his whole life as a uniformed nomad — always ready to move on to the next post, to the next duty station.

Permanence had never been part of the package. By the time he’d begun to accept the possibility, she was gone — to Moscow and this legal attach assignment.

“Khorosho. Da. Spasibo.” Helen hung up her phone and looked up at her two colleagues.

“So what’s the word?” Thorn asked.

She shrugged. “You want the good news first, or the bad news?”

“The good news.”

Helen nodded toward the phone. “That was Titenko — the deputy head of the organized crime directorate. He finally ran a militia patrol past Grushtin’s dacha earlier this afternoon.”

“And?” Koniev leaned forward.

“He’s there,” she said. “They spotted a brandnew BMW outside.

It’s registered in Grushtin’s name.”

Thorn smiled wryly. “Nice can-especially for a guy whose salary is just a couple of hundred dollars a month.” He straightened up. “So when do we pay Captain Grushtin a visit?”

Helen frowned. “That’s the bad news. Titenko won’t let us move without backup from an SOBR team.”

Thorn mentally paged through the briefing papers he’d read.

SOBR was the Russian-language acronym for the Special Detachments of Rapid Deployment — the MVD’S organized crime SWAT unit.

“The SOBR?” Koniev said impatiently. “For God’s sake, why?

We’re talking about bringing one man in for questioning — not assaulting a drug lord’s mansion!”

Helen shook her head. “General Titenko and the rest of your superiors aren’t so sure about that, Alexei. After reading the report we filed from Kandalaksha, they’ve seized on the heroin angle to explain why Grushtin sabotaged that plane. If he is working for a smuggling syndicate, there’s no telling what kind of firepower he could have hidden in that dacha.”

In theory, Thorn agreed with this Titenko’s caution. Rushing an operation without adequate recon or backup was a good way to get yourself killed. And he could understand why the Russians were so eager to believe the An-32 crash was drug-related. Since returning from Kandalaksha, he’d seen some of the reports crossing Helen’s desk.

Heroin transshipments from Southwest Asia and China through Russia to the West were on the rise. And it would make sense for the smugglers to use Russian Air Force bases as transfer points. With the right officers in their pockets, they wouldn’t find it very difficult to slip large quantities of heroin onto cargo aircraft ferrying in supplies, spare parts, and personnel. As chief of maintenance at Kandalaksha, Nikolai Grushtin was ideally placed to recover such shipments from any number of different hiding places aboard the aircraft arriving at the air base.

Of course, Thorn realized, pinning the blame on the Mafiya also made good political sense. It made the crash an entirely Russian tragedy — turning away any suggestion that the American nuclear arms inspection team might have been the intended target.

Well, he still wasn’t so sure. An air base in the far northern reaches of Russia seemed awfully far from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. And the connection between the heroin they’d found in Colonel Gasparov’s bag and Captain Nikolai Grushtin was still entirely theoretical. As far as he was concerned, it would stay that way until he had a chance to question the Air Force maintenance officer himself.

He cleared his throat. “Okay, so we wait for backup. Just when is this SWAT team available?”

Helen glanced out the window and then checked her watch.

“Not until later tonight — after dark.”

Colonel Peter Thorn crouched low beside the dark BMW parked outside Grushtin’s country home. He risked a cautious glance around the bumper.

Birch trees gleamed silver in the pale light cast by the rising moon.

Patches of shadow flickered in and out of existence as a cool wind stirred the trees. The sky overhead was full of stars.

Moscow’s lights were a distant orange glow on the northern horizon.

They were thirty kilometers south of the city. The dacha itself was just meters away — separated from the rutted dirt lane by an unpainted wood fence and a stretch of weed-choked open ground.

Thorn pulled back into cover.

“Anything?” Helen Gray whispered in his ear.

“Nothing new,” he reported softly. “The lights are on, but the curtains are drawn.”

Koniev appeared out of the darkness, bent low, and dropped to the ground beside them. He unsnapped the holster at his side and drew an automatic pistol — a 5.45mm Makarov PSM. “The SOBR team is almost in place. They will go in first — on my signal.

Are you ready?”

Thorn nodded tightly, aware that his pulse was accelerating.

He glanced again at Koniev’s pistol. His own hands felt empty — too empty. Neither he nor Helen was armed. The Russian authorities frowned on foreigners — even foreigners with military or law enforcement connections — carrying weapons. Koniev had only bent the rules at the An-32 crash site because Helen had been the only woman quartered among hundreds of men. Once they’d come back to Moscow, her sidearm had gone straight back into an embassy lockbox.

The Russian MVD major risked his own look around the BMW’s bumper. He clicked the transmit button on a handheld radio.

“Tri. Dva. ODIN!”

The shadows came alive.

SOBR commandos wearing dark ski masks, jeans, running shoes, and bulky body armor charged out of concealment, covering the short distance from their hiding places to the dacha in seconds. One smashed in the front door with a sledgehammer — covered by two more armed with AKS-74U submachine guns.

The door crumpled, torn off at the hinges, and they poured inside.

At the same time, others broke in through the groundfloor windows.

More commandos armed with night scopes and sniper rifles swept their weapons through tight firing arcs — looking for targets on the upper floor.

The area fell silent again.

Suddenly, Koniev’s radio crackled with a hurried report from inside the dacha. His face fell. He stood up.

Thorn stood with him. “What’s wrong, Major?”

“They found Captain Grushtin,” Koniev said heavily.

Helen joined them. “Good.”

The Russian MVD officer shook his head tiredly. “No, not good. Come with me.”

Thorn and Helen exchanged a troubled look before following Koniev inside.

The dacha’s front room was packed with evidence of Grushtin’s illicit activities. A Japanese-made television set, VCR, and high-end stereo system filled an imported Scandinavian entertainment center on one wall. Personal computer components sat atop a handsome oak desk in the opposite corner. An expensive Persian carpet covered the hardwood floor.

A stepladder lay on its side on the carpet, next to a high-peaked officer’s cap and two empty vodka bottles.

Four SOBR commandos were inside the room, cradling their weapons in their gloved hands. All of them were staring up at the ceiling.

Thorn turned his own gaze upward.

Wearing his full Russian Air Force dress uniform — right down to his polished brown boots — Captain Nikolai Grushtin dangled from the rafters of his own ceiling. His face bulged out over the noose tied tight around his neck. Dark stains down the back of his uniform trousers showed where he had voided his bowels in death.

Thorn sighed. “Oh, hell.”

“Hell, indeed,” Koniev echoed him. He turned away and snapped out a question to the ranking SOBR trooper in the room. The commando stiffened to attention, hurriedly replied, and then carefully handed him a folded piece of paper.

“A suicide note?” Helen asked grimly, turning away from the body dangling above them.

“So it seems,” the MVD major said cautiously. “The assault team found it on the desk over there. Right by the computer.”

Holding it by the edges, he carefully unfolded the piece of paper.

Thorn looked over his shoulder. Scrawled Cyrillic characters filled the page above a signature. The writing looked shaky, uneven.

There were splotches where the ink had run. Were they tear stains? Or sweat?

Koniev frowned. “It’s dated yesterday.” Still holding the note, he began translating. ““I, Nikolai Grushtin, write this last testament and confession in great turmoil of soul and mind. Once a loyal officer in our noble Air Force, I end my days as a murderer, a drunkard, and a peddler of drugs. I accuse Colonel Anatoly Gasparov of leading me down this evil path. It was he who played on my weaknesses until at last I succumbed — selling my honor for money and the things money could buy.

Together, we conspired to smuggle heroin into our beloved motherland — auctioning it off to the highest bidder among Moscow’s many criminal gangs.

““But then the devil named Gasparov played me false,’” Koniev continued reading out loud. He could not hide the contempt in his voice. ““He told me he no longer needed me. That he had other men who would do what I had done — and for less.

Enraged, I resolved to take my revenge. So I sabotaged his aircraft by installing contaminated fuel filters and by ensuring the fuel itself was impure. I cared nothing for the others whose lives I took.

““Now, however, I am haunted by their ghosts and by the knowledge that my crimes must soon come to light. I am ashamed of what I have done, and of what I have become. I cannot live with that shame … ”” Koniev’s voice tapered off. He looked up. “It ends there.”

Thorn swung away and stared up at the corpse suspended from the rafters. Was this it? Had John Avery and all the others died simply because of a falling out between two greedy drug smugglers?

He’d seen enough combat to know how thin the line between life and death really was — and how often survival depended more on sheer luck than on skill or virtue. But the deaths of the O.S.I.A arms inspection team members now seemed especially meaningless.

He tore his eyes away from Grushtin’s body and turned to Helen. “What do you think?”

She looked equally troubled. “It seems plausible. At least on the surface.” She glanced at Koniev. “We need other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting, Alexei. And an autopsy. As soon as possible.”’ The MVD officer nodded rapidly. “I will arrange it.” He snapped out another string of orders to the senior SOBR trooper and then rejoined them.

“The commandos will touch nothing until a crime scene unit arrives.”

Thorn nodded toward the personal computer on Grushtin’s desk. “You should also have somebody take a close look at the files on that machine, Major. If we’re lucky, this bastard may have been keeping track of their suppliers and maybe even their customers.”

“Good idea, Peter,” Helen said quietly. Her hand rubbed at her left leg, unconsciously tracing the faint scar left by the bullet that had severed her femoral artery two years before.

He knew what she was thinking and remembering. A partially wrecked laptop computer had been the only real prize they’d netted from the raid where she’d been so badly wounded. But her sacrifice had not been in vain. The captured computer had yielded encryption software that had allowed them to tap into a deadly terrorist group’s e-mail communications network.

Almost against his will, Thorn found himself staring back up at the grotesquely bloated face of Captain Nikolai Grushtin. Had the dead man told them the truth in his apparent suicide note?

Or had he taken other, darker secrets with him to the grave?

Helen Gray took a shallow breath and looked away from the stainless steel autopsy table — refocusing her attention on cracks in the room’s green wall tiles and then on the bright fluorescent lights overhead.

She had witnessed many autopsies in her years with the FBI — first as a student at the academy and later as a field agent. But she’d never been able to get used to the cold, clinical butcher’s work required to extract useful information and evidence from a corpse.

The attitude of the doctor conducting this autopsy, a bored and cynical militia coroner named Rachinsky, only reinforced her dislike of the whole procedure. Right from the start, he’d made it clear that he regarded the process as a colossal waste of time and effort — and that he intended going through the motions only to keep them off his back.

Helen was also aware that outside observers might reasonably conclude that Peter, Koniev, and she were doing much the same thing — going through the motions. So far all the evidence supported the conclusion the Russian government was eagerly drawing: that Nikolai Grushtin had single-handedly caused the An-32 to crash as an act of vengeance directed at his fellow drug smuggler, Colonel Anatoly Gasparov.

Certainly the story fit all the known facts.

The MVD’s experts had compared the suicide note with other samples of Grushtin’s handwriting found in his dacha. It matched. They judged the shaky, uneven nature of the writing to be the result of severe emotional distress — probably compounded by the massive amount of alcohol he had apparently imbibed just before hanging himself.

And nothing other experts had found in the dead Air Force captain’s personal computer files shed much more light on his dealings with Gasparov. There was no list of heroin suppliers or buyers — no day-to-day journal revealing any more details of their freelance smuggling network. Only a slim file containing his financial records had proved to be of interest. It showed four separate wire transfers of $250,000 each to a Swiss bank account in his name. The first payment had been made in early April, the last on May 24.

Unfortunately, none of the file entries indicated the ultimate source of Grushtin’s funds.

Helen looked back toward the table in time to see the coroner step back with a disgusted look on his thin, unshaven face. The overhead lights glittered off his wire-rim spectacles.

Rachinsky snapped off the overhead microphone and snorted.

“As I knew all along, this man was a genuine suicide.” He stripped off his latex gloves and tossed them toward a waste bin in one corner of the room. “You should not have wasted my time. For God’s sake, there are three thousand murders a year in Moscow now. That’s eight a day! I have better work to do than confirming what should have been blindingly obvious to any police cadet!”

Helen kept a tight grip on her temper. “Nevertheless, we’d all appreciate a more detailed explanation of your findings, Doctor.”

She glanced across the table at Peter Thorn and Alexei Koniev.

“Right, gentlemen?”

They both nodded.

Koniev added an explicit warning. “This is a matter of the highest importance to the government, Rachinsky. I’m sure you would not want any hint that you had done anything less than your best work to reach the wrong ears in the Kremlin …”

“Oh, very well,” the Russian coroner groused. Moving with an ill grace, he yanked on a new pair of surgical gloves and motioned them closer.

Rachinsky roughly pulled Grushtin’s head to one side, exposing a deep groove across his neck where the noose had been. He spread the gouge apart with two fingers. “You see these marks?

The black-and-blue speckling along this line?”

Helen studied the groove carefully — noting the tiny marks the coroner had indicated. “What are they?”

“Minute areas of bleeding caused by the rupture of small blood vessels in the skin.” Rachinsky shrugged. “They show this man was alive when the noose tightened.”

“What else?” Koniev asked.

“These areas of postmortem lividity.” The coroner pointed to purplish areas on Grushtin’s face, above the neck, and then to others on his arms and legs. “Again, the areas where the blood has pooled and settled are consistent with a death by hanging.”

Helen shook her head. “I’m not questioning the fact that Grushtin died that way, Doctor. I’m asking you what makes you so sure he inflicted that death on himself?”

“What makes me sure of that?” Rachinsky stared at her in disbelief.

“The man was drunk beyond description. He must have known he would be arrested soon. There are no signs of other injuries. More to the point, he left a note in his own handwriting! So what else could it be but suicide?”

Helen frowned. Everything the militia coroner said made sense, but something still nagged her about Grushtin’s apparent suicide. It seemed so convenient — almost too convenient. It was like being handed a perfectly wrapped package — one the Russian government was only too ready to accept.

She summoned up a mental image of the Russian captain’s body dangling from the rafters of his dacha. Something about that image seemed wrong, or incomplete, somehow. Something about the stains on the dead man’s uniform trousers … She looked up at Rachinsky. “Captain Grushtin lost control over his bowels while dying, didn’t he, Doctor?”

The coroner’s thin face registered his distaste. “Yes. He expelled feces. What of it? That’s quite common — especially in a death of this kind.”

Helen pressed further. “Were there any signs of urine? Any evidence that he lost control over his bladder at the same time?”

“No.” Rachinsky shook his head. “But the two things do not always occur together. Usually, but not always.”

“Usually …” Helen repeated. She let that sink in before going on.

Maybe the inconsistency meant nothing, but she wanted to make absolutely certain. “Then I would like you to examine that area again, Doctor — more thoroughly this time.”

“I will do no such thing!” Rachinsky said flatly. “Nothing in the facts of this case warrants such an absurd, even ghoulish reexamination. I’ve given you my medical finding, and that should be enough!”

“No, Doctor.” Koniev moved closer to the coroner, his mouth tight with barely suppressed anger. “Your finding is not sufficient. Not in this case. Not when it is now clear that your initial examination was incomplete.” He stabbed a finger repeatedly into at Rachinsky’s chest, emphasizing each point. “You will do as Special Agent Gray requests. Is that clear?”

The militia doctor stepped back-away from the MVD officer’s prodding finger. He licked his lips nervously, glanced briefly at the three grim faces in front of him, and then shrugged. “Very well, Major. If it will convince you of the perfectly obvious — so be it.”

“Rachinsky picked up a scalpel and moved slowly down the autopsy table to stand poised over Grushtin’s pelvic cavity.

Helen was sure she heard him mutter something about “a crazy, sex-starved American bitch” in Russian before he started cutting, but she chose to ignore it.

After making several short, swift incisions, the coroner leaned forward to take a closer look at his handiwork. Suddenly, he turned deathly pale. “Mother of God!”

“What is it, Doctor?” Helen asked sharply.

Rachinsky stared up at her, still horror-stricken. “There are massive burns and major scarring inside this man’s urethra. It’s completely obstructed.”

Helen fought down a sudden sense of triumph. Her instincts had been on target. “What might cause injuries like that?”

The militia doctor shook his head slowly in dismay. “I have not seen such things for a long time.” He stopped, and quickly checked the overhead mike to make sure it was still switched off before going on.

“Not since the Chekists … you understand?”

Helen nodded, knowing Rachinsky was making a coy reference to KGB torture during the Soviet era. Russia had still not come to terms with the atrocities routinely committed under its abolished communist government. Too many of the same people were still employed by the KGB’s successor agencies. “We need specifics, Doctor.”

The coroner nodded rapidly, now apparently eager to make up for his earlier intransigence. “Of course.” He flipped on the mike again, dictating his new findings onto tape. “Upon closer scrutiny, it is now clear that the subject, Nikolai Grushtin, was tortured for a prolonged period of time. Perhaps by means of severe electrical shocks applied to the inside of his genitals. Or possibly by a superheated wire inserted into the same region.”

Helen winced at the gruesome images evoked by Rachinsky’s dry, matter-of-fact evaluation. Grushtin’s involvement in the downing of the An-32 certainly warranted punishment, and probably even the death penalty. But no one deserved the kind of agony the Russian Air Force captain had apparently suffered before dying.

Moving with more energy and interest than he’d shown before, the coroner examined Groshtin’s legs and arms more carefully, turning them first one way and then another under the bright lights. He reddened.

“Find anything else, Doctor?” Koniev asked dryly.

“Perhaps,” Rachinsky admitted reluctantly. “It is difficult to tell with the postmortem lividity, the pooled blood, but there may be faint traces of bruising around the wrists and ankles. Very faint. As though whoever bound him took great pains to avoid leaving evidence.”

Helen motioned Peter and Koniev off into the corner, leaving the now thoroughly embarrassed militia coroner to continue his work. She lowered her voice. “Well, now we know why Captain Grushtin wrote and signed that suicide note.”

Koniev nodded grimly. “Somebody is covering their tracks.

Somebody capable of great evil. Somebody with enormous resources.

Somebody who found out we were interested in Grushtin almost as soon as we knew ourselves.”

“But is that somebody here in Moscow? Or back at Kandalaksha?” Helen asked.

Koniev’s mouth turned downward. “Who can say? All we know now is that this affair is far more than a murderous quarrel between two heroin smugglers.” His shoulders slumped.

“Grushtin was our only solid suspect. Even now that we know he was murdered, I don’t know where to begin looking. There are more than two hundred Mafiya syndicates in Moscow alone — any one of which might be involved in this matter.”

“Kandalaksha,” Peter said suddenly.

“Kandalaksha?” The MVD officer looked curiously at him.

“You seem very certain. Explain that, please, Colonel.”

“Gladly.” Peter ticked his reasons off one by one. “Okay. Kandalaksha is at the center of everything we’ve investigated. First, the O.S.I.A inspection team plane takes off from there — and it crashes.

Second, one of the men killed aboard that plane is carrying two kilos of pure heroin — which he apparently picked up somewhere on the base.

Third, the man who sabotaged the plane was stationed at Kandalaksha.”

“But not as a regular maintenance officer,” Helen chimed in abruptly, remembering their interrogation of Lieutenant Chernavin.

“Grushtin was supposed to be working on some kind of secret project, right, Peter?”

He nodded, smiling crookedly at her. “Exactly. A special engine project. One Chernavin seemed to believe an American military officer should know about. But General Serov’s aide certainly seemed mighty pissed when the kid mentioned it to us.”

“You think there is a connection?” Koniev asked. “That this project is somehow tied in to Gasparov’s heroin smuggling?”

“I really don’t know, Major,” Peter admitted. “Not for sure.

What I do know for sure is that something big and nasty is going down at that air base. Something Grushtin was willing to kill to conceal …”

“Something that meant he had to die once we started zeroing in on him,” Helen finished for him.

“Yep.”

Koniev nodded slowly. “It makes sense.” He sighed. “I will file another request with the Ministry of Defense this evening. We will need its authorization to conduct an in-depth investigation on the air base.”

“I really wish you didn’t have to do that, Alexei,” Helen said slowly.

“Yes,” the MVD major agreed sadly. “It seems evident that the men we are hunting have allies somewhere inside my own government. And that they will doubtless know of our decision to return to Kandalaksha within hours. But we must have permission to enter the base. How else can we proceed?”

Helen nodded her reluctant agreement and saw Peter doing the same thing. She had the uneasy feeling that following the proper channels was keeping them at least one step behind the bad guys, but what other options were open to them? Once you started cutting corners to obtain results, you were on a slippery slope — headed toward the dangerous paradox of breaking the law to uphold the law. No. She and Koniev were officers of the law — and that meant obeying the law, even if that put their investigation at risk.

Rolf Ulrich Reichardt leaned forward from the back seat to check the time on the dashboard clock of his Mercedes-Benz sedan. It was nearly midnight. He sat back-staring out the window at the rows of tombstones crowding the cemetery to his right. During the 1930s, Kalitnikovskoe had been infamous as a dumping ground for the bodies of those murdered in the KGB’s Lubyanka Prison. Did the man he had come to meet remember that? The German rather suspected he did. Felix Larionov, “the Lariat,” was known for his heavy-handed sense of irony.

Johann Brandt, acting as his chauffeur and bodyguard for this covert meeting, stiffened suddenly. “They’re here.”

Reichardt peered through the windshield and saw two cars pull up and park just across the darkened street. Both were brand new Mercedes.

Russia’s criminal classes had a well-developed appreciation for fine German automotive engineering.

Three hardfaced men in black leather jackets and slacks climbed out of the first car and fanned out — scanning the immediate area for any signs of trouble. They were heavily armed.

One carried a shotgun. The other two cradled Uzi submachine guns.

Satisfied, one turned and flashed a thumbs-up toward the second Mercedes. Its high-beams flashed once.

Responding to the prearranged signal, Reichardt and Brandt climbed out of their car and walked slowly toward the middle of the street. Except for a briefcase carried by Brandt, they were unencumbered, and they were careful to keep their own hands in plain view. The rear doors of the second Mercedes popped open.

Two men stepped out and came forward to meet them.

Both were well dressed and middleaged, but one, a wiry, white-haired man, bore jagged scars on his face that testified to a hard life. A brightly colored tattoo on the back of his left hand showed he had spent time in the Soviet prison system.

Reichardt recognized Felix Larionov from earlier business dealings.

The vory v zakone, the “thief professing the code,” controlled several of Moscow’s most powerful and active criminal gangs. The second man, fleshier and softer-looking, was Larionov’s sovetnik, his “adviser” — a term meaning everything from legal counselor to second-in-command.

Larionov stopped just out of arm’s reach. He nodded once.

“Herr Reichardt.”

“Vor,” Reichardt said politely, carefully masking his irritation at having to come hat-in-hand to this criminal for help. The unexpected persistence of Major Alexei Koniev and his two American colleagues was proving extremely troubling. Gasparov’s heroin smuggling had proved a remarkable stroke of luck — one he had been quick to seize on. Ordinary police investigators would have been quite satisfied to close their case with Grushtin’s apparent suicide.

The memory of the Russian officer’s screams brought him a brief moment of pleasure. Orchestrating Grushtin’s death had seemed a masterstroke — the capstone on the intricate heroin smuggling cover story he had so rapidly contrived to blind the official inquiry into the An-32 crash.

Reichardt’s mood darkened again. But Koniev and these two Americans had not taken the gift he offered them. Instead, they were coming dangerously close to piercing the security screen he had erected around his activities at Kandalaksha. That could not be tolerated or ignored.

Not any longer.

It especially irked him to involve others outside his control in the Operation, but time was short, and his resources, though enormous, were not inexhaustible. He looked steadily at Larionov.

“Can your people handle the disposal of these packages for me? The ones we discussed over the phone?”

The Russian smiled thinly. “They can.” Then he held up a cautionary hand. “But the proper question, Herr Reichardt, is whether or not I will order them to undertake such a task.”

“Of course. My apologies.” Reichardt gritted his teeth. Beggars could not be choosers, he reminded himself coldly. His own security teams were still scattered around the world. He needed the Russian Mafiya chieftain’s assistance and manpower — for now. “Will you accept this commission, Vor?”

“You can assure me this work is not done at the behest of any government?” Larionov asked. The refusal to perform any work for the authorities was an integral part of the Russian thieves’ code.

“Yes,” Reichardt said firmly. “This is a private endeavor. And so I swear it.”

“Then so I accept it,” Larionov agreed. He motioned toward his adviser. “I believe Kiril told you our price?”

Reichardt nodded slowly. Two hundred thousand American dollars plus expenses was well over the ordinary fee for such services, but it was reasonable — given the short notice, relative importance of the targets, and the fact that he insisted on having one of his own men in direct command.

At his signal, Brandt stepped forward and opened the briefcase he carried for the Russian’s inspection. It contained bundles of small-denomination greenbacks and a stack of airline tickets.

“Good.” Larionov smiled more broadly, showing a set of yellowing, tobacco-stained teeth. “Then our business here is concluded.

My boys will rendezvous with this man Kleiner of yours in Murmansk tomorrow evening.”

Prince Ibrahim al Saud looked up impatiently as his personal secretary, Hashemi, brought Massif Lahoud into his private office.

The Egyptian-born head of the Persian Gulf Environmental Trust looked weary. He had traveled half the night from Damascus to Riyadh and from there to Taif. Under other circumstances, Lahoud’s report could have been made in a five-minute phone call, but Ibrahim maintained a single, inflexible rule in these matters. Where possible, his subordinates would never discuss their involvement in terrorist activities electronically. Phone calls, faxes, and electronic mail could all be intercepted, and Ibrahim had a high regard for the code-breaking abilities of intelligence organizations like Israel’s Mossad and the American National Security Agency.

“Well?”

“The Radical Islamic Front agrees to your condition, Highness. One of our freelance Syrian operatives attended the meeting. They have contacted Afriz Sallah and hired him for this operation. Everything is proceeding according to plan.”

Ibrahim smiled. “Very good, Mr. Lahoud. Then I authorize you to release the necessary funds from the trust’s private account.

Take the usual security precautions.”

Lahoud nodded. “Of course, Highness.”

When he was gone, Ibrahim sat back in his chair. A single prearranged order from Lahoud would set events in motion. The funds released from the trust’s account would flow through an intricate network of dummy accounts set up in half a dozen banks — some in the Middle East, some halfway around the world. By tomorrow, the Radical Islamic Front would have the cash it needed to arrange the assassination of the American Undersecretary of State for Arab Affairs. And if anyone ever tried to trace the ultimate source of the Front’s money, they would find only the equivalent of an empty desert — with all the tracks filled in by the wind.