The Doomsday Testament

III

The six men in black overalls sat bathed in dim red light in the rear compartment of a large van parked on Vasilevskiy Island diagonally across the Neva from the Hermitage museum. Their leader was very pleased that the vast, imposing building on the far riverbank wasn’t tonight’s target. When it had become clear that what his client sought was in St Petersburg he had reconnoitered the six buildings of the main complex and discovered exactly what he’d known he would: the Hermitage was as tough a nut to crack as the Bank of England or Fort Knox. Fortunately, he didn’t have to crack it. Like every major museum in the world, the Hermitage is home to far more treasures than it can ever display at one time and those treasures are dispersed among its sister museums. It also holds several thousand items whose origins and ownership have been subject to dispute since the end of the Second World War. As greedy for retribution as he was for power, Stalin insisted that Germany’s art and historic artefacts should make up part of the blood price to be paid for Mother Russia’s suffering. When his generals closed in on Berlin, special NKVD trophy brigades spread across the country plundering carefully chosen paintings, books and sculptures, taking home with them between three and twelve million artworks, depending on who you believed, including paintings by Botticelli and Van Dyck. Some of those artefacts were almost certainly not far from where he sat with his assault team, but tonight only one of them interested him. He looked at his watch. 01:55.

‘Get ready.’ He pulled a black ski mask over his head. The others followed suit, automatically checking their weapons and equipment.

Dimitriy Yermolov stifled a yawn and struggled to keep his eyes open. Time to take another look around. If one of the supervisors came in — admittedly unlikely — and discovered him even half asleep he’d be out of a job by morning, and then who’d pay to put his wastrel son through university? He was getting too old for this night work, but what else could he do? The New Russia had been just as tough on Dimitriy as the Old Soviet Union had. That was the problem with being an honest man in a country where corruption was an essential element of any successful career. It didn’t matter whether it was turning a blind eye to some Mafia drug dealer from Kazakhstan or keeping your mouth shut about a party functionary selling off state alcohol, it was the same old stink. Trouble was, being a lowly security guard, even in one of Russia’s most prestigious museums, didn’t pay well and never had. And let’s face it, this was just a sideshow compared to the Hermitage across the water. Don’t get him wrong, the Menshikov Palace was impressive enough, a glorious Baroque mansion house overlooking the river in one of the world’s prime locations. It was probably the oldest surviving building in the best city in Russia. Forget Moscow, ‘Piotr’ had always been the capital and always would be, and he loved it, even if that bastard Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had also been born here. But compared to the State Museum or the Winter Palace, the Menshikov was just a collection of pretty rooms really, with the odd Old Master here and there to give it a wafer-thin veneer of distinction. Nobody would rob this place.

The leader looked at his watch again. ‘Two minutes.’ He’d put together a team of five Russian-speaking professionals carefully selected for their skills and ruthlessness and with ancestral DNA linking them to the mountain passes where the Kremlin’s conscript army fought their perpetual savage war against the mujahideen fighters and the Black Widows of Chechnya. Add a few shouted words of classroom Chechen and you’d created a terrorist smokescreen that would keep the investigators busy for months if things went wrong. They were all mercenaries, but each was a special forces veteran. Between them, the six men had served in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan and a few other places the world wasn’t supposed to know about.

The security systems protecting the Menshikov Palace differed from those of the Hermitage only in scale. Each floor had its cameras, alarms and motion sensors, infrared and laser. The instant an alarm was triggered the whole building would go into lockdown and in less than ten minutes the place would be crawling with St Petersburg cops. The only weakness was during those vital minutes between alarm and response, when the museum’s security guards were expected to deal with any developing crisis. At the Hermitage, several dozen guards were on duty during the hours of darkness. At the Menshikov Palace, the men on the night shift numbered just six, and the red dots on the laptop in front of him showed him precisely where they were.

Dimitriy used his radio to inform Yuri in the control room that he would be patrolling the lower floor and basement for the next fifteen minutes. He heard the other man’s knowing chuckle. ‘Sure, Dimi, see if you can shoot some of those fucking rats when you’re at it.’ Dimitriy smiled. This close to the river the black rats that swarmed from the sewers and culverts in summer were forever tripping the alarms or chewing through the electric cables. Not that he was going to shoot anything. He’d never used the heavy six-round RSA Kobalt revolver that hung so uncomfortably in the holster at his waist. They’d put poison down, but the slippery bastards seemed to thrive on it. He wandered cheerfully through the pillared main hall and under the big staircase, allowing the torch beam to wash over the portrait-covered walls under the eyes of the classical statues and busts of stern-eyed tsars. His rubber-soled shoes made no noise on the stone floor. Sometimes being alone in the palace could be a little spooky, but tonight he felt he was among friends.

‘One minute. Night vision. Lights off.’ Inside the van the leader felt the tension grow as if it were a gathering thunderstorm. Each man locked his goggles in place and stared ahead, wound tight but lost in his thoughts, mentally going through his movements over the next ten minutes. Three months they’d been training for this. Three months of sweat and endless repetition — all for ten minutes that would change all their lives. Yet success or failure depended on a man they had never seen who sat in an office seven thousand miles away.

The security system that protected the Menshikov was as good as any in the world, but, like every security set-up, the alarms and the cameras and the detectors and the automatic door locks were all controlled by a central computer heavily dependent on technology and software originally developed in the United States. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, senior US government officials held secret talks with the heads of the country’s top-ten computer manufacturers. The White House was, and is, concerned about the use of computer technology for recruitment and secure encrypted communication by al-Qaida and its associated terrorist networks. Post-9/11, the big corporations also recognized that the world had changed, particularly when it was made clear that the lucrative government contracts that helped boost their stockholder profits were dependent on a new level of cooperation. In return for increased research and development funding they agreed to provide privileged access to, and information on, all new and forthcoming technological developments. The most significant effect of this pact was to provide a small offshoot of the National Security Agency with the ability and technology to infiltrate, and if necessary control, any computer on the planet. Of course, the client couldn’t buy the US government, but he did have the resources to identify and purchase the services of a software developer and computer engineer at the heart of the new system: a man whose pension arrangements had been boosted by multi-million-dollar payments to a private bank on the Cayman Islands. By now the engineer would have remotely entered the Menshikov computer system and made the necessary undetectable change to its emergency reaction procedures.

‘Thirty seconds.’

In a major incident, the computer controlling the Menshikov’s security system would automatically restrict access to all areas of the museum, securing every door and window. A similar reaction would take place in the event of a power cut. In this case, the leader knew it would take ten minutes for the museum’s emergency generator to provide enough power for the system to be reset. Loss of power wouldn’t be enough to trigger a mass call-out of police, unless it was accompanied by an emergency signal from the control room. Which was why the lights were about to go out in this particular sector of St Petersburg.

‘Ten.’

A red dot crept slowly across the screen of the laptop. One of the guards was on the move, but the others were exactly where he wanted them.

‘Nine.’

He looked around the van at the intense eyes staring at him from behind the night-vision goggles.

‘Eight.’

His hands ran over the equipment on the belts and harnesses strapped to his body. Stun grenades, taser electric dart gun, Russian-made GSh-18 pistol and ammunition.

‘Seven. Remember, from now on we speak only Russian.’

He closed his eyes and, for the final time, visualized the interior of the museum and the route he needed to take from the van to the side door.

‘Six.’

‘Street clear,’ the mercenary seated beyond the partition beside the van driver announced.

‘Five.’

He reached for the door handle.

‘Four… Three… Two… One… Go!’

They leapt from the van into the darkness, and as he sprinted towards the Palace he could see — half a mile away — the spot-lit frontage of the Hermitage dappling the calm waters of the Neva. He didn’t need to hear the soft thud of boots on the tarmac to know the five men were following close on his heels. Seventy-five paces to the side entrance. Ignore the CCTV cameras, which would still be powered by their batteries, but would be sending their pictures to blank computer screens. The double oak doors. This was the moment of truth; what the client had paid all those millions for. The minute the power had been cut the computer would normally have locked down the entire museum, but the state-of-the-art software uploaded by the engineer had reversed the procedure. The Menshikov Palace was wide open and there for the taking. Still, he couldn’t resist a soldier’s prayer as he turned the handle. Now!

The six men burst inside where the familiar interior was bathed by an eerie underwater green in the prism of the night-vision lenses. No orders were needed. Three men to take care of the guards, two, including the armourer, to follow him to their target. The security staff would still be under the impression that they were in lockdown and would stay in position until the back-up generator restored power. Thanks to the client this was the third power cut they’d experienced this week and they’d have no reason to be concerned.

A harsh voice sounded in his earphone. ‘Item Six still outside rear of building.’ The two men left behind in the van were continuing to monitor the guards’ movements. The sixth guard was a nuisance, no more. Not even that, if he stayed out of the way.

Moving purposefully, but not running, he reached the end of the corridor and turned right, with the two men keeping pace and the others peeling off. Behind the mask he couldn’t help smiling. He recognized a Rubens, a Caravaggio and a Raphael. A hundred million dollars and then some and he couldn’t lay a finger on them.

‘Item One down.’ This was the operative tasked with dealing with the guard at the front entrance. If everything had gone to plan he would have first stunned the man using his taser then disabled him with a spray that would keep him unconscious for at least two hours.

‘Item Three down.’

He reached the stairway leading towards the cellars.

Even in the most well-protected buildings a man who knows his way around will find a route in and out that bypasses all that tiresome security. Especially a man who needs a smoke.

Dimitriy Yermolov cursed when the lights went out. Bloody power company again. Things were better under the fucking Communists. He had arranged for Yuri to unlock the steel door leading from the basement to the gardens and had been enjoying a quick Sobranie. Standing in the dark under the old linden tree beside the door, he lit another cigarette and felt a complete idiot. The power cut would have over-ridden the instruction and locked him out until the back-up kicked in. He thought of calling Yuri, but that would just make him look stupid. Even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good, his hand automatically reached for the handle. It turned easily. Strange…

‘Item Five down.’ Which only left the fool outside to the rear of the building. Maybe he’d been checking some earlier alert. Well, he could stay outside.

They reached the cellar level and he turned right. Below the Baroque splendour of the palace lay a rabbit warren of former kitchens and wine cellars from the days when the fabulously rich Prince Alexander Menshikov had entertained his friend the Tsar. Now they were disused boiler rooms and storage areas that held a share of the 95 per cent of the treasures the Hermitage didn’t have the space, or the will, to display. There were literally dozens of rooms, but he had studied floor plans of the museum and he knew precisely where he was going. They reached the door he was looking for. Still seven minutes before the power returned.

As he walked though the corridor between the cellars, Dimitriy was more puzzled than alarmed by the ease with which he’d been able to get back into the building. ‘Dimitriy to control. Dimitriy to control.’ He tried to call Yuri to let him know he was back inside, but the basement was a notorious radio blackspot. No reply, no real surprise.

The commander studied the long corridor of packing cases and badly wrapped parcels. ‘Row four, section B,’ he said to himself. He’d memorized the shape, size and number of the package he sought and it took him no more than a minute to track it down. Despite the tight schedule, he allowed himself a few seconds to enjoy the moment. Finally this was the reward for years of searching, planning and training and the client’s enormous investment. He knew he could probably carry it alone, but he gestured to the man beside him to help. Then, a moment of unfamiliar doubt.

‘Hold it,’ he said. The other operative stepped back, his surprise hidden by his night-vision gear. ‘Let’s make sure we got what we came for and not some old guy’s favourite piss pot.’ He produced a knife from his belt and levered free the lid of the packing case with a splintering of nailed wood. The object inside had been packed in straw and he pulled it aside to reveal a glint of gold. Exactly what he expected to see. He grinned at the other man, then replaced the lid, hammering in the nails with the butt of the knife.

Behind them, the armourer had been working to place a series of what appeared to be large upturned soup plates among the boxes and crates, linked by wire to a central mechanism that sat on the cellar floor and included two tubes of liquid, a large battery and an old-fashioned mobile phone. ‘I’m done,’ he announced.

‘Good work,’ the leader said. ‘Cover the rear.’ He inspected the bomb. The explosion would conceal what they had stolen. If the security guards were lucky, they’d survive along with most of the main palace, but the six Russian anti-tank mines would sure blow the hell out of the east wing and the cellars.

‘Go.’ He picked up one end of the packing case as his subordinate manhandled the other. The case felt heavier than he’d imagined, but it was nothing for two fit men. They sidled through the door of the cellar and made their way to the stairway, followed by the armourer. Before they reached it a sharp order rang out in Russian and they were blinded by a searing light.

Dimitriy had been approaching the cellar when he heard the voices. His first thought had been to go for help, but logic told him these men wouldn’t be here if Yuri and the rest of his shift were still free. Still he could have turned and walked away, but this was what he was paid for. He pulled the gun from its holster, checked the ammunition and flicked off the safety catch.

‘Halt! Stay where you are or I shoot.’

The shout and the beam from the powerful torch froze the men in place. ‘Shit,’ the leader muttered beneath his breath. He squinted into the glare past his black-suited subordinates and saw a fat man in an ill-fitting blue security guard’s uniform standing by the cellar entrance pointing a gun in his direction. Black patches of sweat stained the armpits of the tunic and the guard was breathing hard, but he held the pistol steady and from here the mouth of the barrel looked like a cannon.

‘Take it easy, friend. Nobody needs to get hurt here,’ the leader called. The pistol swung towards him. In a whisper, he ordered, ‘Get ready.’

Dimitriy was angry. The night-vision goggles puzzled him, but the dark boiler suits and ski masks told him only one thing. He had watched and wept when the Moscow theatre siege ended in explosions, clouds of poisoned gas and gunfire. He had no doubt the rescuers had been incompetent, but the reason 129 innocents had died was because men like these brought terror into his country. ‘Move and I shoot,’ he warned and he meant it. The torch moved between the three men, the light magnified and eyeball-scorching in the lens of the goggles, but the leader saw his opportunity. The armourer partly shielded the mercenary carrying the other end of the crate. ‘Hit him when you get a clear shot,’ he said calmly in English.

‘What did you say?’ Dimitriy demanded. ‘You—’ He didn’t have the opportunity to finish the sentence. The man in the centre of the trio moved faster than he’d ever seen a man move and he flinched at the muzzle flash before the bullet from the GSh-18 hit him low in the belly. Despite being half-blinded by the torch the soldier had had a clear aim and he believed to his last heartbeat that he’d fired a killing shot. But Dimitriy wasn’t just a fat man in a bad suit. He had once been a thin man wearing the uniform of the Guards Airborne Assault Brigade among the super-heated rocks of the Panshir Valley and as his body absorbed the energy of the bullet he got off a round that took the other man in the right eye and dropped him in a spray of blood and brains. Dimitriy knew the damage the bullet had done to his insides but, even with his strength failing, he tried to raise the gun for a second shot just as the armourer fired his first. The 9mm parabellum round left the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 1,100 feet per second and hit the cylinder of Dimitriy’s Kobalt revolver. It struck at an angle which made the grotesquely misshapen bullet ricochet upward with a force that blew off most of Dimitriy’s lower jaw and part of his left cheekbone before hurling his body off the door jamb into the cellar.

‘Fuck,’ the leader cursed, now struggling to hold the crate on his own. He willed himself to be calm. Everything had turned to shit, but that was nothing new in his world. The key was to keep a lid on it and to get the fuck out before things got worse. He shouted an order to the armourer. ‘Make sure of that bastard and get back to help me with this.’ But before the man was halfway to the cellar door he took another glance at his watch. They had just over one minute before the lights came back on. The clock was ticking, their timings out. ‘Belay that. He’s dead or close enough. We need to move now.’

Abandoning their comrade’s body they struggled up the stairs and through the museum. The others were waiting in the van as the leader and the armourer pushed the packing case into the rear. They didn’t ask where the third man was, they didn’t have to.

‘Drive,’ the leader shouted into his throat mike.

Inside the cellar Dimitriy was only vaguely aware of his terrible wounds. His world came and went in alternating waves of trauma-induced shock and agonizing pain. He still had eyes though, and his conscious mind identified a sight that had been common enough in the Russian-occupied rear area of Afghanistan. The object in front of him was certainly a TM-57 anti-tank mine. Normally it would take the weight of a large vehicle to detonate it, but he noted the wire leading from it to the contraption in the centre of the floor. He knew the damage it would do. Dimitriy began to claw his way towards the trigger mechanism.

When the assault team reached the outskirts of the city, the leader ordered the driver to stop the van. He nodded to the armourer, and the bomb maker retrieved a mobile phone from the breast pocket of his overall. By now the men had removed their masks and they leaned forward in anticipation as the armourer punched in the number. When the signal reached the phone it would complete a circuit which would mix the two explosive liquids and send an electric charge to the anti-tank mines.

Dimitriy studied the mechanism with the bemused concentration of a drunk man peering at a keyhole. He was lying in a pool of his own blood and his vision had begun to fade. He knew he hadn’t got long. He looked at the mobile phone. It was of a type more familiar to his son, but some instinct told him to remove the battery. He reached out towards it. Maybe now they would give him a raise.

The leader opened the van door and listened for the familiar muted thunder of the explosion. After two or three anxious minutes he turned accusingly to the armourer.

‘I can go back…’ the man offered.

The leader shook his head. The helicopter would be at the rendezvous and they could be in Finland and home free within the hour. He banged on the partition between the rear and the driver’s seat and the van took off.

‘We’ve got what we came for.’