Death Wave

4

Halt!”

“Is Podpolkolnik Pyotr Vasilyev here?” Dean asked, putting a singsong Indian accent into the Russian words. The Vympel soldier blinked and lowered his AK a fraction.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“This is IAF Wing Commander Salman Patel,” Akulinin told him, “and I am Major Golikov. We are on Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s staff, and we need to speak with Colonel Vasilyev immediately!”

“I … that is … he …”

“Stand at attention when a superior addresses you!”

Akulinin barked.

“Sir! Yes, sir!” The senior sergeant snapped to attention, but with the rifle at port arms across his chest.

“Guard this door, Senior Sergeant. Make certain that no one comes through!”

“Yes, sir!”

Unlike their American counterparts, Russian enlisted personnel were trained not to think, to follow orders immediately and unquestioningly. By playing the role of a Russian senior officer, with bluster, anger, and a hefty dose of stage presence, Akulinin forced the noncom into his accustomed role — that of an automaton that did not ask questions, did not make waves.

The morgue was a large and cluttered room, with several metal tables under cold fluorescent lights, concrete-block walls lined with filing cabinets, and a central area taken up by a huge refrigeration unit cooling the morgue slabs behind massive, sealed doors. Half a dozen soldiers were gathered around three tables just around the corner of the refrigerator. Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev was engaged in an intense discussion with a young, blond, white-smocked woman, presumably the morgue attendant.

Dean and Akulinin joined the group, moving unobtrusively into the rear of the group. One soldier glanced at Dean’s Indian uniform curiously. Dean grinned back and winked, and the soldier shrugged, then turned away; if the guard at the door had let an Indian Air Force officer in, obviously he was permitted to be there.

Far more often than not, Dean had learned, a person could get into nearly any restricted area without being questioned so long as he acted as though he had a perfect right to be there.

“I want these bodies examined thoroughly,” Vasilyev was telling the attendant. “In particular, I want them inspected for radiation.”

“Do you mean a Geiger counter?” the woman asked Vasilyev. “To scan them for radiation? Or do you want a pathology workup, looking for cellular damage from radiation?”

“Both.”

“We do not have Geiger counters at this facility, Lieutenant Colonel,” she told him. “As for tissue sampling and microscopy — that requires a pathologist, and Dr. Shmatko is not here.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t see that that is any of your concern, sir.”

“Young woman, you will cooperate with me! Where is this Shmatko?”

She looked angry. “Gone until tomorrow. An autopsy in Tashkent.”

“There will be radiation detectors at the air base,” Vasilyev told her. “I will have one sent here, with a trained operator. You will send a message to Shmatko and tell him he is needed here at once. Do you understand?”

“I understand, sir — but that won’t get the man here one minute sooner. Tashkent is three hundred kilometers away.”

“Just do it!” Vasilyev looked around, angry. He saw Dean, saw Dean’s uniform, and his eyes widened. “What are you doing here?”

“Sir! Wing Commander Patel, special liaison to the Russian forces in Tajikistan.”

“That tells me who I am about to put under arrest,” Vasilyev growled, “but it does not answer my question. What is an Indian Air Force officer doing in a restricted Russian military facility?”

“Sir! Group Captain Sharad Narayanan, at the Ayni Air Base, sent me to find you. There are reports of Pakistani infiltrators at Ayni, at Farkhor, and at Dushanbe! He told me to deliver the message verbally, since our electronic lines of communication may be compromised!”

“Pakistanis! What Pakistanis?”

“He didn’t tell me, sir,” Dean replied, “but Group Captain Narayanan is a relative of India’s national security advisor. A nephew, I believe. He may have intelligence passed on from the IB that has not yet reached your desk. Sir.” The IB was the Intelligence Bureau, India’s equivalent of the CIA.

Vasilyev scowled. “You Indians see Pakistanis behind every rock!”

“Yes, sir. The problem is that Pakistanis hiding behind rocks may have nuclear weapons, and they hate India. A certain amount of paranoia is called for, wouldn’t you say?”

Dean hoped his Russian was getting through clearly enough. Was “paranoia” really paranoia in Russian, a borrowed word identical to the English? He wasn’t sure, and down here in the basement he didn’t have Desk Three’s linguists online to help him out.

He thought it was right, though. The word was so quintessentially Russian.

In any case, any minor slipups in grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation could easily be blamed on the fact that he really was a foreigner — one reason they’d created this particular legend for him back at Fort Meade.

As he answered Vasilyev’s questions, he glanced past the man’s shoulders and across the room at Akulinin. His partner was standing next to one of the autopsy tables, his left hand cupped around an unseen device. No one else was paying him any attention. As they’d planned, while Dean played the decoy, Akulinin was surreptitiously photographing the bodies.

“The IB,” Vasilyev said with an unpleasant smile, “is run by naive and easily excited children.”

“Sir!” Dean snapped back. “The Intelligence Bureau is the oldest and best-established intelligence service in the world!”

It was a somewhat dubious claim, one based on the idea that the IB had been created by Major General Sir Charles MacGregor in 1885 to monitor a possible Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan. Still, the Indians believed it — and the IB was widely believed to be one of the five best intelligence services in the world.

“If you say so, Wing Commander.” Vasilyev’s unpleasant smile widened. “Right now, however, I need to see some identification from you.” He nodded at an aide, a captain, who stepped forward, his hand out.

Dean reached into his pocket and produced his wallet, extracting his Indian military ID card, a second card issued by the Tajikistan Military Authority, and a third card giving the phone number of Air Vice Marshal Subarao’s headquarters office. Any call going to that number would be rerouted to Desk Three, as had happened to that unfortunate watch stander at Ayni a few hours before.

“Air Vice Marshal Subarao will vouch for me, sir,” Dean said, handing the cards over. He reached into another pocket and pulled out a folded-up sheet of paper, covered by close-spaced Hindi characters. “And my orders, sir.”

“You will come with us,” Vasilyev told him. “You are not the only one around here afflicted by a certain amount of healthy paranoia.”

“Yes, sir.” He was relieved to hear the Russian use that word.

Akulinin stepped back behind the shelter of the central refrigerator unit and watched the gaggle of Russian soldiers crowd out through the door leading to the alley at the back of the hospital. One of them had Charlie Dean in tow, practically at gunpoint.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot he could do about that at the moment, and, in any case, the mission always came first.

Always.

The last of the soldiers banged out through the swinging doors, and Akulinin stepped out from his hiding place. As Dean had predicted, they’d paid no attention to him whatsoever once they’d spotted Dean’s IAF uniform.

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said at his back. “Aren’t you supposed to be going with the rest of them?”

He turned and found himself looking down at the pretty, blond morgue attendant. Her hands were on her hips, and her pale blue eyes had a no-nonsense glare about them. Her smock and rubber gloves were smeared with shockingly red streaks of fresh blood.

“Ah, no, actually,” he told her. “I’m with … a different unit. The 201st. I came along to get some photographs.”

“You have authorization, I suppose?”

“Um … no, actually. Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev has it.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“Of course.” Akulinin glanced up at a large clock hanging on one concrete block wall. It was just past 7:10. “You’re here awfully late. Are you the night shift?”

“I’m working late, actually,” she said. “Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev phoned me from Ayni and said he was on the way.”

He gave her his most radiant smile. “Really? So what time do you get off?”

“You can turn off the charm, Major,” she told him. “It won’t work. You still haven’t told me who you are or given me your authorization to be here.”

He cocked his head to one side. “That is an interesting accent there.”

“What about it?”

“It sounds American, actually.”

She sighed, took a step back, and began peeling off her gloves. “That’s because I am an American. Russian American. My parents moved to a place called Brighton Beach in Brooklyn when I was three.”

Akulinin started. “Really?” He hesitated. He could get into serious trouble dropping his cover, but he couldn’t simply ignore what the woman had just said. “Then you and I might be neighbors,” he said, shifting to Brooklyn-accented English.

It was the woman’s turn to look startled. “Brighton Beach? You?”

“My parents emigrated to the United States in ’82. I was born two years later.”

“My God!” She shook her head. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“How can I believe you? This is impossible!”

“Unlikely, yes,” he said, grinning. “Not impossible. Brighton Beach is probably the largest colony of transplanted Russians in the U.S. You know the intersection of Brighton and Coney Island Avenue?”

Her eyes opened wider. She nodded.

“Remember the subway/el tracks? They come down in a big curve overhead, right above the intersection … right? Q train for local service, the B train for weekday express. And when the train comes through, it sounds like thunder!”

“I used to walk under that overpass on my way to school!”

“Public School 253.”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“I went to the same school …”

For several more minutes, Akulinin dredged up memories of his own childhood in Brighton Beach, enough to convince the woman that they had indeed grown up in the same neighborhood. He wondered if he’d ever seen her; she looked to be a couple of years younger, but they might well have attended the same school during the same years, just a few classes apart.

What were the chances of running into her here?

He asked her what had brought her back to Russia — and Tajikistan.

“My … my parents moved back to Russia when I was thirteen,” she told him. There obviously was some pain associated with the memory. “A business opportunity for my father. There was … some trouble. Financial trouble. My mother was sick. He got into debt with some very bad people.”

“Mafiya?”

She nodded. “After my mother died, my father sent me to work with a man he knew, a friend, Dr. Shmatko. He is a pathologist with the Science Academy here in Dushanbe.”

“Why?”

“Those men, the ones he owed money? They offered to settle some of his debt if I would go to work for them. Photographs … movies … to be posted on the Internet, you know?”

Akulinin nodded. He did know. The Russian Organizatsaya was heavily involved in the sex trade, both prostitution and pornography. White slavery in the twenty-first century, vicious and sick.

“So I came here and trained as a diener with Dr. Shmatko.”

“Diener. A morgue attendant?”

She nodded.

“That’s horrible!”

“It’s not so bad.” She shrugged. “My … clients don’t talk back, and never give me trouble. The pay is … not too bad, and Dr. Shmatko is teaching me a lot, so that I can go to school and be a doctor myself one day. But first I hope to save enough to get back to the United States someday. It’s … life is hard, here.”

“What about your father? Where is he?”

She shrugged. The expression on her face, behind her eyes, was heart-wrenching. “I don’t know. It’s been two years now. I stopped getting letters, oh, two or three months after he sent me away. I think … I think …”

She was trembling, on the verge of tears.

“It’s okay. What’s your name?”

“Maria. Maria Alekseyevna. My friends … my friends call me Masha.”

It was, Akulinin knew, a common Russian nickname for Maria. “I’m Ilya,” he told her. “I might be able to help you.”

“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here. You’re not army, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re a spy! Who do you work for?”

“I really can’t—”

“You’re with the American CIA! Right?”

“Something like that.” He looked at the corpses on the nearby tables. “I am here to photograph these bodies. So … are you going to turn me in?”

“Of course not! It isn’t every day a girl gets to meet a real-life James Bond! Especially one who grew up in her old neighborhood!”

He pulled out his mini camera and walked over to one of the stainless steel tables. He’d managed to get a shot of one of the bodies earlier, while Charlie was sparring with the Russian officer, but not the others. One of them, in fact, was still anonymously wrapped up in an olive green body bag. He took several more photos of the first two from different angles. The two bodies already removed from the body bags were male Caucasians, still dressed in civilian clothing. Both were heavily tattooed on their arms. One sported a bushy Stalinesque mustache; the other was clean-shaven, his wide-open eyes pale gray against a bright red mask. There was a lot of blood, with deep gashes in their faces and arms.

“This one had a bullet wound,” Masha pointed out, touching the skull of the mustached man and turning it so he could see. “Left temple. Definitely fatal.”

“I … see.” Akulinin wasn’t particularly bothered by death, but the young woman’s casual attitude was a bit disturbing.

“Did Vasilyev tell you anything about these guys?”

“No. Just that he wanted complete path workups, and for them to be checked for radiation. I don’t know why.”

“Well, I can help with that much.” Pocketing the camera, he reached down and pulled up the cuff of his uniform trousers, revealing the small radiation counter strapped to his ankle. Unfastening the chrome-colored device, he held it up, peered closely at a switch on the side, and flicked it.

“It was set to transmit data … somewhere else. Now it will play what it picks up for us, and record it for transmission later.”

Holding the counter like a wand, he passed it over the body in front of him. There was little reaction over the man’s face and shoulders, but his hands, both of them, elicited a sharp clattering static from the device.

“Interesting,” Akulinin said. He stepped over to the other table, passed the counter over the body, and got the same response.

“What does it mean?” Masha asked.

“That these two guys were handling a leaking crate not too long ago.”

“A crate of what?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“These two are Organizasiya, you know. Mafiya.”

He looked at her, surprised.

She touched one blood-smeared arm. “The tattoos.” Reaching across, she swiftly unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tugged it open. His chest, as well as his upper arms, was a solid mass of intricate tattoos. He could see a rose on the body’s chest, a skull, a dagger or sword, delicately interwoven floral designs …

“They often start off as prison tats,” she told him, “but they also get them to mark advancement within the gang, special achievements, punishments, anything like that. It’s a part of the whole culture of the Vory v Zakone, the Russian underworld. Someone who knows the language can actually read a man’s history with the mafiya.”

The second body had tattoos as well.

He frowned. “I’d like to check the third body, too.”

“Give me a hand here,” Masha said. She was already unzipping the body bag.

Awkwardly, Akulinin helped her, peeling the body bag open and sliding it down. He looked at the man’s head and blinked in surprise. “Shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“What the hell is a Chinese doing here?”

Rubens glanced at his wristwatch, confirming what he already knew. “Damn,” he said. “I have to go. Now.”

“Give our love to the NSC,” Marie told him. “I’ll call you when we regain signal.”

“Do that. I’ll be out of touch while I’m in the meeting, but leave me messages and keep trying.”

“Of course, sir.”

He didn’t like leaving now. He was strongly tempted to delegate the NSC meeting to Gene Lenard, his operations director.

Gene was a good man, well able to be Rubens’ representative — but the position of deputy director of the NSA was, unfortunately, as much political as it was practical. If Rubens personally failed to attend this meeting, the other people present would assume the issues on the agenda were not of high importance to Desk Three or the NSA. Those people included the chairman of the National Security Council, his senior aide, and his longtime political enemy Debra Collins, deputy director of operations at the CIA. If Rubens wasn’t there this morning, he could wake up tomorrow and find that the CIA was in charge of Haystack — and he had eight operators on the ground over there right now, two of them out of touch.

If he left right now, he should be able to make the meeting in time, allowing for traffic on 295 into town and for the security check at the White House.

“While I’m gone, I want a full workup on Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. I want to know where his office is, including architectural plans, blueprints, whatever you can find. Does he have a safe in his office? A computer? Find out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I should be back around two, two thirty,” he told her.

Rubens checked out through several security desks, picked up his car in the VIP parking area, and threaded his way out of the maze of lots and gates surrounding the towering central buildings of the NSA’s Fort Meade complex, long known to insiders as the Puzzle Palace. Canine Road swung him right onto 32 West, and he took the almost immediate cloverleaf onto 295 South, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Traffic was light and he hit the pedal, accelerating swiftly past the slower vehicles. Any touch by police radar would trigger a transponder in the car, one that flagged him as having special clearance.

Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin would be okay Ruebens mused. Dean was a longtime veteran of the agency, a former Marine sniper who simply never got flustered, who was always in the game. Rubens ranked him as Desk Three’s best operator. Akulinin was younger and less experienced. He’d come on board with Desk Three just a year and a half ago, during that Russian mafiya affair up in the Arctic, but he was quick, he spoke fluent Russian — it was his first language, after all — and he knew the culture. Both men were smart and resourceful, and they got results.

He was more concerned about Lia DeFrancesca. She, too, was a damned good, experienced operator, and her team in Berlin, her on-site backup, was first rate. But the China Ocean Shipping Company was big and it was dirty, an immense commercial giant that was an arm of the Chinese Navy and the Beijing government. Lia wasn’t simply up against Feng Jiu Zhu in Berlin. She was squaring off against the government of the People’s Republic of China.

COSCO had been involved in illegal gunrunning before.

On March 18, 1996, undercover agents with the U.S. Customs Department and the BATF had accepted delivery of a trial shipment of two thousand fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles from Chinese representatives as a part of a sting operation tagged Operation Dragon Fire. Those weapons had been smuggled into Oakland, California, on board the COSCO container vessel Empress Phoenix .

In the history of U.S. law enforcement, there had never been a bigger seizure of fully automatic weapons. The Chinese said that the weapons were for the California street gang market, and that other military-grade weapons were readily available as well, from grenade launchers to Red Parakeet shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems.

What the Crips and the Bloods would have done with weapons like that was something to ponder.

More recently, the NSA had tracked a COSCO freighter from Shanghai to Karachi, in Pakistan, with a cargo of weapons-related goods. The cargo included specialty metals and electronics used in the production of Chinese-designed Baktar Shikan antitank missiles.

There were plenty of other cases, too.

The NSA had been watching Mr. Feng for almost two years now, turning up a great deal of rather scandalous information about his private life but only hints and whispers about his professional connections. The CIA thought he was clean, though he was closely connected with Wang Jun — a senior executive in China’s Poly Technologies still wanted for his role in the Empress Phoenix affair. Rubens disagreed. Considering Feng’s former position in Chinese military intelligence, his reported dealings with people believed to be associated with several Islamic terror groups, including Pakistan’s Harkatul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Palestinian Hamas, and al-Qaeda itself, the man couldn’t possibly be clean. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck …

Contacts within Israel’s Mossad were concerned about a Palestinian operation known as Nar-min-Sama, variously translated as Fire of Heaven or, possibly, as Fire from

Heaven. There was a code name associated with this operation — al-Wawi, the Jackal. Not even the Mossad yet knew who the Jackal was, but believed that he was orchestrating some sort of strike against both Israel and unnamed targets in the West.

There was also the matter of Lebed’s suitcase nukes to consider, as well as concerns about nuclear weapons from Iran or North Korea reaching any of a number of Islamic extremist groups.

Feng had recently traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an unlikely, landlocked destination for a high-ranking executive of a maritime shipping company. From there he’d flown to Cairo, where he’d met with several men believed to be associated with Hamas, before going on to Berlin. The NSA had monitored numerous cell phone calls to all of those places, as well as Karachi, Kabul, and Dushanbe.

Connect the dots, Rubens thought, and a rather disturbing picture appeared, one involving transporting something from the heart of Central Asia south to Pakistan’s major port, then by ship to the Middle East — Cairo, perhaps, or Israel, or just possibly northern Europe.

That’s why Rubens wanted an operator inside Feng’s organization, someone who could get a lead on some of these mysterious business contacts of Feng’s, and someone who might have the opportunity to bug Feng’s computer and phone.

If anyone within the NSA’s Deep Black service could handle the job, it was Lia, but that didn’t make it any easier for Rubens to walk out of the Art Room at a critical moment in her op.

No, the dots didn’t make a pretty picture at all — and Lia and her team might be right at ground zero.

Lia was sitting on her bed in her hotel room when the knock sounded at her door.

“Sounds like opportunity knocking, Lia,” CJ told her.

Lia was alone in her room. CJ was still watching from down on the street, while Castelano and Daimler were in their room up on the seventh floor, but all three — as well as the Art Room crew — were linked in through her communications implant. She was careful of what she said while in the room. Though a sweep earlier had failed to turn up any electronic listening devices, Feng’s people might have still managed to bug it.

“Coming,” she called out. She’d changed out of her heels, skirt, and low-cut blouse in favor of more comfortable — and practical — clothing: blue jeans, a black pullover, and tennis shoes. Her hat, however, rested on the hotel room desk, its hidden camera set to provide Desk Three with a clear view of the entire room. Swiftly, she pulled her weapon from her open suitcase — a 9 mm SIG SAUER P226 Blackwater Tactical — and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, tugging the pullover down to conceal it.

She unlocked the door. “Yes?”

It was one of the maroon-jacketed hotel bellhops. “Fräulein Lau?”

“Yes.”

“I have two packages for you,” he said in passable English. He handed her a manila envelope — that would be the promised COSCO contract — and a small white box tied with red ribbon.

“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the box.

“I don’t know, fräulein. I was told to give you both of these. And I’m to wait for you to sign something and return it.”

“Wait a moment.”

Closing the door, she took the envelope back to the desk and opened it. As expected, it was from Feng, three copies of two close-spaced printed pages — more of a letter of agreement than a full-blown contract. She scanned through it quickly, murmuring aloud the pertinent paragraphs for the benefit of the Art Room.

“Looks good and as promised,” she said, completing the document. She picked up a pen and signed all three copies. Two went back into the envelope for return to Feng. She looked at the white box for a moment, then decided to wait until she’d given the envelope back to the bellhop.

She opened the door and handed him the envelope and a generous five-euro tip. “Here you go. Thank you.”

“Danke, Fräulein Lau!”

Lia returned to the desk and picked up the box. “So, is Mr. Feng making a play for me already?” she asked. “Too big for a diamond ring.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to propose marriage,” CJ said. “Are you going to open it?”

“It’s also too small to be a bomb,” she added.

“But not too small to be a listening device of some sort,” Tom Blake said. “Be careful what you say, Lia.”

She didn’t reply, but she set the package in front of her hat, directly beneath the camera, and began opening it.

A moment later, she pulled the contents out and dangled them for Desk Three’s inspection. “Oh, my.”

There was a handwritten note inside the package.

For the beach tomorrow, it read, and it was signed Jiu Zhu.

“Are you actually going to wear that?” Marie Telach asked.

“What is it?” CJ said. “I’m blind out here, you know.”

“A bikini,” Lia said. “A very small bikini.” She frankly had her doubts that she would fit into that top. It was electric blue, what there was of it, three triangles of rather sheer blue cloth with black borders and some spaghetti-thin black string.

“It’s too small to hide a listening device, at least,” she said. “Too small to hide much of anything.”

“Another fine item of female apparel from Testosterone Fantasies Are Us,” Marie put in. “You’re not actually going to wear those postage stamps in public, are you?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Lia said. “I’ll have to see if this sort of thing is in my new job description.”

In fact, she knew, in a sense it was, since keeping Feng happy — being “eye candy,” as Rubens had described it — was as precise a description of the job as was possible.

She knew one other thing, too. If this was supposed to be her working outfit, she was going to have a hell of a time hiding any SIGINT devices inside — to say nothing of her P226.