Rasputin's Shadow

66

My relentless little nag was kicking and screaming inside my head, insisting we were missing something.

I turned to Larisa. “Why isn’t he in touch with your guys? If only to say ‘mission accomplished.’ Why has he gone dark?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t trust our setup at the consulate. Maybe he thinks he can do a better job at getting the device out of the country.”

“Maybe, but… why rebuild it in the SUV once it was dismantled?” I asked. “Why not document Sokolov taking it apart, film him doing it using any smart phone, then pack it all up in some crates and ship it out? Easier than trying to smuggle a car out with all that stuff in it. And why test it now?” The most obvious answer was troubling. “He’s planning to use it. Here. Soon.” I turned to Sokolov. “Tell me again. You said he was asking you about range, power.”

Sokolov nodded. “He wanted to know how strong it was. If it could go through walls or glass, or reach a basement.”

I asked, “And? Can it?”

Sokolov shrugged. “It’s microwaves. Like I said before, if a phone signal can get through, so can this.”

I didn’t like where this was going. It was all sinking in with alarming clarity. “He’s gonna use it. That’s why he wanted to set it up in a clean car. That’s why he’s asking about what it can get through.”

“That’s not what he was tasked with,” Larisa said.

“How do you know?”

“Come on. We’re not at war. And using something like this, here-that’s terrorism. That’s an act of war.”

“Maybe he’s been tasked by elements within the Kremlin or in the intelligence services who have a different agenda,” I countered. “Or maybe he’s decided to go rogue and work freelance. I can think of several countries and groups who’d love nothing more than to unleash this here. And they’d pay handsomely for it.”

“He’s an agent of the state,” she insisted.

“You’re saying he can’t be bought?”

She didn’t have an answer.

“You need to call your people,” I told her. “Find out if he’s still dark. And if he is, let them know what we’re thinking. Tell them they need to do all they can to help us shut him down. Warn them about the consequences of him using it. Ask them if they really want to start a war.”

Larisa pulled out her phone and hit her speed dial.

KOSCHEY PULLED OUT OF the Hertz lot at Newark Airport in a silver Dodge minivan. Within minutes, he was back on I-95, heading south.

It didn’t take him long to move the bulky equipment out of the Suburban and into the people carrier. He’d just told the overworked and harassed car-rental attendant that he needed to swap his stuff over from the old car to the new one, and did so in a quiet corner of the lot without attracting any undue attention. To any passing onlooker, it would have looked like he was a record producer moving some studio gear around, or a computer geek ferrying around some servers.

He’d need to connect the power cable to the engine, but he would do that later. Then he’d do one last test to make sure he’d done it right, but that was easy enough to accomplish.

There would be plenty of potential guinea pigs en route.

LARISA HUNG UP AND looked at me, grim-faced.

“Koschey’s still dark,” she said. “No one’s heard from him. Not even at the Center.”

“As far as you know,” I remarked.

“My feeling is, there’s no plan.”

I asked, “Would they tell you if there was?”

“I have no way of being sure,” she said.

I fumed. “If he’s gone, there’s nothing we can do about it now. But if he’s not gone, if he’s still around-then my gut says he’s planning to use it.” I looked at Larisa. “You tell me. You really think he’s on his own?”

She nodded. “I do.”

“Then we can worry about the geopolitical implications later. Right now, we need to find him and stop him.”

“How?” Aparo asked. “What are we going to do? Get Homeland Security to raise the threat level to red and check every black SUV in the country? Assuming he hasn’t moved it into some other vehicle?” He turned to Sokolov. “He can do that, right? Now that you’ve done it once, he can do it again?”

Sokolov nodded. “Yes. In fact, that was part of the exercise. To make sure it could be done quickly. Which it can; it’s just a matter of putting the right plugs in the right sockets. The only fixed connection to the car is for the power supply, which is just one cable.”

“Which convinces me even more that that’s what he’s up to,” I said.

I could see the problems we’d be facing in getting other agencies to react to this.

“We have another problem,” I added. “We’ll need to convince the suits that this is real. Which isn’t going to be easy.”

“My guys know it’s real,” Larisa offered. “I need to call my handler at Langley. They can help track Koschey down.”

Which brought up another problem. “Do they know we have Sokolov here?”

“I had to tell them.”

I tightened up. “I’m amazed they haven’t swarmed in here already to take him off our hands.”

“They will,” she said, though her tone didn’t seem thrilled at it. “Any minute now, I imagine.”

My insides were roiling.

I couldn’t let that happen. We might need him. And I didn’t want him to end up under their roof. But I had more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.

Aparo said, “The threat’s still too vague to act on. We need to hone it down.”

The possibilities I was picturing were endless, and each new one seemed more terrifying to imagine than the last.

“He could use it anywhere,” I said. “A concert at the Garden. A big sports event in a packed stadium. Rockefeller Center. What are the big events in town this weekend?”

“He could go for Wall Street,” Aparo added. “The New York Stock Exchange. A hit like that would crash the markets big-time.”

Then I thought that if this was going to be a terror strike, there was a far more crippling set of targets he could go for. “The Capitol,” I suggested. “The White House.”

Sokolov’s attention perked up. “He asked me about bulletproof glass,” he said.

“What?”

“He asked me if it could go through it. Something about three-inch glass.”

“Blast-proof. The kind they use in major government buildings in DC,” I said.

I could already see it. A packed session on Capitol Hill-then, out of the blue, senators and congressmen start ripping one another’s eyes out with security officers shooting indiscriminately, the whole thing broadcast live on C-SPAN.

Or even worse.

A Secret Service detail going haywire during a press conference on the White House lawn and gunning down everyone in sight, including the president of the United States.

“I need to call someone,” I said. “We can’t just do nothing.”

“Who?” Aparo asked.

I thought about it, then said, “Everett.”

Will Everett was an SAC at our DC field office and ran its counterterrorism division. We’d known each other for a few years and worked well together. I needed someone with a bit of an imagination for this. Someone who knew me and knew I wasn’t prone to flights of fancy. Someone who wouldn’t think I was stoned when I told him what was going on.

As I reached for my phone, I wasn’t even sure I could be fully open with Everett. I thought it might be better if I sounded him out first. Just let him know something was in play, could be nothing, could be serious. And play it by ear depending on his reaction.

The conversation ended up being much shorter than I anticipated. He was having a busy day. A lot of liaising with the Secret Service and DC police.

The White House Correspondents Dinner was taking place in less than three hours’ time.