Scorpion Winter

Chapter Twenty-Three

Expo Plaza

Kyiv, Ukraine

The Lianhuay company office was on the ninth floor of an office building across from the Expo Plaza Exhibition Center. There were two security cameras covering the front entrance, but only one at the back. Scorpion used his Leatherman tool to chip a toehold in the wall at the back of the building, then climbed up and disabled the camera. A tap on his Peterson universal key and he was inside.

The building was dark and empty. His footsteps echoed as he climbed the stairs to the Lianhuay office. There was an alarm on the office door, but it was only single channel. It took him less than a minute to disarm it. The door lock was a card reader. He used an NSA card and waited while the software read the magnetic reader setting and opened the lock.

Before entering, he used his flashlight to check for motion detectors. He didn’t see any and went inside. It was hard to tell whose office was whose; the name plaques were in Mandarin, which he couldn’t read. But hierarchy was the same no matter what language it was in, he thought. Li Qiang would have the best office, and so he made his way to a large corner office with window views of the Expo Plaza across the way.

He turned on the desk computer, plugging his NSA drive into a USB port. The NSA software automatically figured out how to log itself into any computer with administrator privileges. It also scanned the password files for account passwords and provided English translation on the fly for all major languages, including Mandarin. While the software was running, he checked the desk drawers. In one of them he found a Chinese M-77B 9mm pistol, checked to see if it was loaded and put it back. He went through the rest of the drawers but found nothing of interest.

He hit the Start and the All Programs arrow and pressed the NSA Ctrl key combination for translation to English. Then he saw it. A client software program on the PC for the CCB Bank. Based in Beijing, CCB was one of the largest banks in the world.

Scorpion accessed the bank’s website with the software client, letting the NSA software provide the user ID and password. There were multiple accounts. This was going to take a while, he thought, settling down to open them one by one. Then he got lucky. In the second account he opened, he spotted an electronic bank transfer of $2,500 in U.S. dollars to an account in Pravex Bank, Kyiv. He didn’t bother with the NSA software, but letter by letter translated the Cyrillic account name. It belonged to Oleg Nikolayevich Gabrilov. He did a Find all search and saw repeated transfers to Gabrilov’s account in amounts ranging from $1,000 to $6,500 over the past two years.

Well well. Scorpion smiled to himself. The only thing better than having a potential Joe’s balls in a vise, he thought, was getting proof he was being paid by the wrong people.

After copying the files to the plug-in drive, he shut down the computer. Before leaving, he used an antiseptic wipe to clean everything he had touched and then rearmed the security camera. Ten minutes later he was out on the snowy street on his way to the Nyvky Metro station.

So it looked like Gabrilov was Li Qiang’s double agent in the SVR. It wasn’t about politics. It was about money. Natural gas. Maybe if he could produce the real assassin, he and Iryna would be off the hook. Maybe.

The street was cold and empty and he shivered inside his coat. Not far from the Metro station he saw an open cafe, stepped inside and ordered chorna kava, black coffee, piping hot, and gulped it down. The TV on the wall behind the counter showed a press conference going on in Washington. The President of the United States was speaking. He was warning Russia not to invade Ukraine. As a precautionary measure, he announced that he had ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to raise the level of American military readiness to DEFCON 2, the second highest level before war.

Scorpion put down his coffee and went back outside, walking as fast as he could to the Metro.

He was running out of time.