The Emperor's Revenge

THIRTY-FIVE

Once Juan was certain the Oregon was out of danger, he hung up the phone and stared at Admiral Zakharin with a steely gaze.

“You’re lucky no one on my ship was injured,” he said.

“What about the Oregon?” Eddie asked.

“Some damage, but Max thinks we can get everything back in working order within a day or two at a maintenance facility. He’s sending the destination to Tiny so we can meet up with them.” Juan didn’t say that their destination was Naples so that the admiral wouldn’t overhear it.

“Why did you think ShadowFoe hadn’t disabled the disarming codes like you did?” Gretchen asked.

“I’m sure when Zakharin’s predecessor found out we’d discovered ours, they began to do a much more thorough job of hiding it. Besides, ShadowFoe thinks like a hacker. She might not have specifically looked for something like a kill code. I, on the other hand, think like a spy.”

Linc nodded at the admiral. “What do we do with him?”

“Well, I was going to have him escort us back to the airport,” Juan said. “But I don’t think that’s necessary now.” He looked pointedly at Gretchen, who was huddled over the accounting ledger with her phone, snapping photos.

“Just about done here,” she said, then trained her eyes on Zakharin. “This is a lot of incriminating evidence you have here. I’ve just uploaded it to the servers at Interpol. We’ll keep the information to ourselves, unless, of course, there’s reason for us to release it to — I don’t know — the Kremlin?”

Juan smiled mirthlessly. “I don’t think the current leadership in Moscow would forgive reading in the news about a Russian admiral turning his naval base into a personal piggy bank, especially when he isn’t sharing all the profits.”

Zakharin glared at them. “What do you want now?”

“You’ve probably built up substantial savings from your activities here — enough to fund a generous retirement at a very nice beach resort, I imagine. So this is where it ends. No more ships will be refitted here.”

Zakharin’s eyes bugged from his head. “What? You want me to give up a multimillion-dollar business?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” Zakharin focused on the vial of clear liquid in Eddie’s hand.

“No, we’ll share your illicit moneymaking with the public and expose what really goes on here.”

“And expose yourselves at the same time.” The admiral grinned. He obviously thought he held the ace.

Juan walked over to Gretchen and picked up two file folders that were under the one she was using.

“You mean these?” He slammed the files on the desk. Each of them said OREGON on the cover. He had removed them from the vault when he took the Achilles files. “No sense in leaving these lying around here.” Juan had noticed the one piece of up-to-date equipment in the admiral’s office was a high-capacity-level P7 paper shredder, the kind the CIA used to destroy classified documents.

He dropped each file on the Oregon into the shredder. The machine whined as it tore the paper into particles smaller than a grain of sand.

“I still know.”

“All you know is the name of a ship that can be easily altered. And I don’t think you’ll be able to share the information if Moscow decides to send you to the same Siberian prison that the previous base commander went to.”

Zakharin slumped back in his chair, knowing he’d been beaten. He nodded at Eddie’s vial. “Can you at least put that away?”

“This?” Juan said, taking the vial from Eddie. He approached the admiral, who cringed back in his chair. Juan raised it over Zakharin, then tipped the contents into his own mouth.

Zakharin let out a gasp.

“What?” Juan said in feigned confusion. “It’s just water.”

The admiral gaped. “You tricked me?”

“Although I’m sure the Russian security services would love to get their hands on a binary poison, none exist, as far as I know.” He looked around at Eddie, Linc, and Gretchen. “You guys ever heard of one?”

They all shrugged and shook their heads, much to their amusement and Zakharin’s chagrin.

“Come on,” Juan said, urging the admiral to his feet. “I’m sure you want to escort us safely off the base personally. Remember, while the binary poison might not work, my gun still does.”

As expected from the weaselly admiral, he didn’t put up any resistance to letting them go peacefully. Just in case, though, Juan had Tiny get the wheels up on the plane and fly out of Russian airspace as soon as they were aboard.

The first person he called, once they were in the air, was Langston Overholt at the CIA. Juan told him about the Achilles’s sinking of the Narwhal and the attack on the Oregon.

“Max said he got it all recorded. Apparently, it’s a bit fuzzy because of the distances involved, but it was definitely the Achilles.”

“Can you see the ship’s name in the video?” Overholt asked.

“At fifteen miles? I doubt it.”

“Then we can’t do anything.”

“Are you kidding?”

“See it from my perspective, Juan. You want me to inform Europe’s navies that Maxim Antonovich, one of the richest men in Russia, sank a Dutch cargo vessel in the middle of the Mediterranean with a railgun hidden on his luxury yacht? They’d laugh so hard, they’d drool their wine on their shirts.”

“What about the video?”

“With special effects these days? Easily doctored. You know that. And we can’t exactly explain where the video came from, can we?”

“What about an inspection of some kind?”

“To look for what? Weapons that pop up out of the decks? They’d have to tear the ship apart to find them. They’d risk being made fools of and angering one of the richest men in the world. Imagine if Germany called me up and told me that Paul Allen’s Octopus sank a fishing trawler with a phaser. I’d want incontrovertible proof before I even considered asking to take a look at the yacht. The investigation alone could take months before we moved on it.”

Juan fumed. “So we do nothing? Antonovich gets away with murder, not to mention taking our money?”

He looked at the photo of Antonovich that Murph had found on the Internet. The billionaire hadn’t been seen in public for years, so it wasn’t a recent picture. He was in his sixties, with a bit of a stomach, salt-and-pepper hair, and a crescent-shaped port-wine stain on his left cheek. According to the CIA, his patronage and loyalty to the Kremlin had come under suspicion recently, leading to his reclusive and paranoid behavior.

Now he was funding a more sinister operation. Perhaps he got frustrated with his progress in changing Russia and was on to other ambitions. Whatever was going on, Juan was sure of one thing. Antonovich and his people were behind it.

“I do nothing,” Overholt said. “You keep going. Personally, I think you’re right that something bigger is going on here. It’s bad enough that Antonovich seems to have built his anti-Oregon and assembled his own crew of mercenaries that can take on the same types of missions that you can. Now we’ve found out that there was an attack on an electrical substation outside Frankfurt last night, so there just might be a connection between the bank heist and the European electrical grid, like you thought. I’ll send you the details. And we’ll keep sifting for evidence about the threat to the financial system, including the latest bank failure in France. We haven’t received any ransom demands as of yet, so unless we crack the virus that was installed at Credit Condamine, we don’t have much to go on. What’s your next step?”

Juan thought about it and texted a question to Max. Then, without waiting for a reply, he answered his old mentor.

“Well, with the Achilles vanished and the Jaffa Column at the bottom of the Med, it looks like we’re fresh out of leads right now. There’s no way to complete Napoleon’s message without it.”

Overholt cleared his throat. “It’s not like you to give up so easily.”

Juan’s phone buzzed and he glanced at Max’s response.

Close to the limit but manageable.

“I said we’re out of leads right now. That should change in the next couple of days.”

“Why?”

Juan texted back Start prepping Nomad, then answered Overholt.

“Because we’re going to dive on the wreck of the Narwhal and raise the column.”