Deep Black

59

The first thing Dean noticed about the CIA officers was that they smelled like they hadn’t taken showers in about a month. They were dressed almost identically in dark blue suits. Creases checkered the clothes like bizarre spiderwebs. Both seemed to have tried shaving a day or so ago, with mixed results.

Using an apartment several blocks from the Kremlin as a command post, the two men were coordinating eight surveillance teams trying to find an assassin believed to be targeting Russian president Alexsandr Kurakin. Two of the teams were currently inside the Kremlin.

Dean shared the common Western misperception that the Kremlin was a single building; in fact, it was a complex of roughly ninety acres that included a number of Russian government buildings as well as old cathedrals and ancient palaces, many of which were open to tourists. The president’s office, formerly in the Senate, had been moved the year before to the Arsenal, displacing the Kremlin guards; it was off-limits and equipped with a variety of devices to disrupt surveillance and eavesdropping, including a copper skin inside the president’s suite that made it almost impossible to place a conventional bug or fly there.

Nonetheless, the CIA could track Kurakin’s position to within a few feet, even within his office suite, by using a variety of sensors, both preplaced and handheld. (“Handheld” simply meant that the devices were mobile and placed into position for a specific task; in this case it included a van’s worth of equipment that homed in on microwave frequencies.) The NSA had penetrated the computer that kept the president’s appointments calendar, which was not in code or cipher. But knowing where he was and would go was not the same as being able to protect him. While it was not difficult to get inside the Kremlin, getting close to the Russian president was at least as hard as it would be to get close to the American president.

“We’ll know when they get him. That’s the only thing I guarantee,” said the officer-in-charge, Al Austin. He had flaming red hair and a sardonic, almost demonic, laugh. His breath smelled of coffee that had been made a week before and continually reheated. “They want us to catch his bullet. It’s a friggin’ joke.”

Austin was exaggerating his assignment for sarcastic effect, but not by much. They were to detect any “actual physical threat” against Kurakin and pass the information back to the Art Room, from which it would then go to the White House and back to Kurakin.

“Why don’t we just have the post office mail him a letter?” said Dan Foreman, the other agent. He was bent over a laptop screen on the floor; three other CPUs were piled nearby. Four twenty-inch flat screens and one that had to be at least thirty-six inches were arranged on a low table against the wall. The large one showed a grid map with position markers on it; the others had a variety of data and, in one case, a video image. A satellite dish sat next to the window, nestled among thick cables that ran to the roof above.

“How do we know they want to kill him?” asked Dean.

“We don’t,” said Austin. “Who’re you?”

Dean told him he was on temporary assignment for the NSA and had been shanghaied.

“Welcome to the friggin’ club,” said Austin. “We’ll have a little ceremony later where we prick our thumbs and mix our blood.”

“If I were going to kill the president, I’d use a Secret Service agent,” said Dean.

“No shit,” said Freeman. “But if you have a way of infiltrating Kurakin’s bodyguards, let us know. We’ve tried. Believe me. Bastards won’t even have a drink.”

“They’re almost all related to him. The two who are with him all the time are cousins he grew up with,” said Lia. “I doubt they’d give him up.”

“Nah. Anybody’s going to kill him, they’ll Oswald him,” said Austin.

“Meaning what?” asked Dean.

“Sniper. Oswald — Lee Harvey. Get it?” Austin shook his head. “Jeez, Lia, your boyfriend’s slow.”

“I thought she was queer,” said Foreman.

“That’s just what she told you to get you off her back,” said Austin. “Probably the nicest letdown you ever got.”

“What’s the intelligence on the sniper?” asked Lia.

“Intelligence? There is none,” said Austin. “Talk to your friggin’ boss. This is his show.”

“We can check his route, places he’s going to be,” said Dean.

“I see the agency continues to maintain its high IQ standards,” said Austin. “How high can you count, Charlie Dean?”

“He uses both hands, which is twice as many as you do,” said Lia.

“Yeah, one of ’em’s always occupied,” said Foreman.

“I used to be a sniper,” said Dean.

“Yeah, I once studied law,” said Austin. “Look, Lia, you guys want to help, spell Foreman on the sit map, OK? He needs some sleep. I do, too.”

“I hadn’t realized you were a couple,” she said.

“You’re just sharper than a pickax today,” said Austin. “Excuse me while I take a shower.”

The grid map on the large CIA flat screen was a dedicated locator map tracking the Russian president and IDing, when possible, those around him. The information was correlated from a number of inputs that were being routed into a satellite in geosynchronous orbit and then downloaded into a pair of satellite dishes the size of television receivers on the roof. Under other circumstances the information would have been sent to the CIA “bunker” inside the Moscow embassy, but since the Russians knew about the bunker it was likely they would take steps to isolate it when the coup started.

The Russians also knew about the satellite, and so there were two contingency plans in case its transmissions were blocked. One involved an elaborate routing system through secondary satellites and telephone lines; the other, even more desperate, called for a special balloon launch from the Zamoskvoreche district. The fact that the balloon would fly over the Church of the Resurrection added nothing to the odds in favor of success.

Additional signal intelligence interpretation was being handled back in Crypto City and provided on an as-needed basis.

“All we have to worry about is what happens outside the Kremlin,” she told Dean. “Inside is moot — unless we’re part of his security team we’ll never be close enough to detect something before it happens.”

“So we look for the sniper.”

“Yes,” she told Dean. “They already have.”

“You think they know what they’re doing?”

Her answer was to pound the keyboard of one of the laptops. A map of the city appeared with several dotted lines in yellow.

“He has a meeting at the new Education Building down here at two P.M. These are his likely routes. After that, he’s supposed to go to a senior citizen housing project for a dedication. He’ll be there at five.”

“What’s it look like?” asked Dean.

She pounded the keys again. A 3-D view appeared on the screen. Dean leaned down to look at it, brushing lightly against her arm. She didn’t react; neither did he.

“That would be a pretty good place for an ambush,” he said.

“Where would the sniper be?”

“I’d have to see it in person.”

“Let’s go there,” said Lia.

“I thought we were going to watch their gear.”

“Bullshit on that. I guarantee they’ve had more sleep in the past forty-eight hours than we’ve had in a week.” She went to the door of the bathroom, listening for a moment before pushing in. Dean, who was standing behind her, saw Austin sitting naked on the toilet bowl.

“Hey!” he said.

“We’re going to check the housing site for snipers. We’ll be back.”

“Shit!”

“Yeah, I can smell it from here.”