The Atlantis Stone

CHAPTER 12

On the top floor of the SVR headquarters building in Moscow, General Alexei Vysotsky put down the report from Washington. He took a deep breath to calm his rising blood pressure. Three FSB agents, dead in the home of two of Harker's operatives. Volkov had poked a stick into a hornet's nest.

That meddling bastard has done it now. What the hell was he thinking?

It was late in the afternoon. Outside Vysotsky's window, a sea of leafy green treetops stretched all the way to the Moscow river flowing past the walls of the Kremlin. It was the best time of year in the city, when the arctic cold of winter was gone and the brutal heat of summer had not yet arrived. Most of the time in Russia it was too hot or too cold.

Vysotsky set the report down and opened the left-hand bottom drawer in his desk. He took out a bottle of vodka and a tumbler, filled the eight ounce glass and drank half of it down. Vysotsky considered vodka a good replacement for water. He couldn't drink as much as when he was young but he could still hold his own with the best of them. As long as he didn't overdo it, vodka helped him think when he was confronted with an annoying problem.

Like Volkov.

Volkov was doing everything he could to curry favor with Vladimir Orlov. He wanted the Federation president to think Alexei was unfit to run Russia's powerful foreign intelligence service and never missed a chance to undermine Vysotsky and SVR. Alexei suspected him of sabotaging two operations that had gone bad but couldn't prove it. Volkov wanted to establish a new KGB, with himself as Director. It wasn't hard for Alexei to imagine Volkov's motivation. It was exactly what he wanted for himself.

Vysotsky was certain Orlov saw through Volkov's manipulations, using them to keep the two intelligence agencies at odds. The oldest trick in the Russian political book was to divide and control.

Now Volkov had stepped over the line. He'd sent people to break into the home of an active American intelligence operative. Worse, he'd involved Elizabeth Harker's Project.

Besides, Alexei thought, if anyone is going to do any breaking and entering in America it's going to be on my orders, not his.

Why had Volkov done it? It was the last straw. It was time to do something about him but it wasn't going to be easy. He needed to pry Volkov out of Orlov's favor.

Alexei set the half empty glass of vodka down and closed his eyes, letting himself slip into a light meditative state where thoughts and bits of information mixed without interference. Vysotsky's mind was highly visual. He'd learned to trust the random association of images and ideas that surfaced during these sessions with himself.

The tension in his muscles eased as he relaxed. Images and thoughts began to flow.

The report from Washington… The face of Selena Connor… Elizabeth Harker's green eyes… Volkov, unsmiling… A report from an informant… FSB activity in Holland… A Russian archaeologist murdered in Amsterdam...

Alexei's eyes snapped open. He had spies planted throughout the ranks of the FSB. A week before, one of them had reported that Volkov was sending agents to Amsterdam. The informant hadn't known why.

A few days later a routine report from the SVR residency in Holland noted the death of Yuri Sokolov, an academic researcher from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He'd been identified as a man found beaten to death three days earlier in his hotel room. There was no indication in the report of who had done it or why, or what Sokolov was doing in Amsterdam in the first place.

Until this moment, Alexei hadn't put the two pieces of information together.

It can't be coincidence. Volkov's men killed him. Why?

Vysotsky decided to find out.