The Moscow Vector

Chapter Eight

Darkness had fallen across Baghdad. In the eastern half of the city, bright lights shone along the wide, modern avenues, gleamed from the windows of barricaded government ministries, and illuminated the still-crowded bazaars.

West of the Tigris River, the cramped alleys of the Sunni-dominated Ad-hamiya district were lit only by the dim lamplight spilling from tiny shops and shanty teahouses, and out through the latticed windows and gates of older homes. The night air was cool and crisp with just a hint of the clean smell of rain lingering from a brief storm earlier that evening. Men in traditional Arab kaffiyehs, checked pieces of cloth worn over the head, lounged in small groups outside the teashops, smoking cigarettes and exchanging the day’s news and gossip in low voices.

Abdel Khalifa al Dnlaimi, a former colonel in Iraq’s once-feared Intelligence Service, the Mnkhabarat, walked unsteadily down one of the narrow alleys. He was much thinner now than in his days in power, and his hair and mustache were streaked with gray. His hands trembled. “This is madness,” he hissed in Arabic to the woman following modestly in his footsteps with a full shopping basket in her arms. “This place is still a stronghold of the mujahideen. If we are caught here, death would be a kindness —and one we would not be granted either quickly or easily.”

The slender woman, cloaked from head-to-toe in a shapeless black abaya, drew a step closer, narrowing the gap between them. “Then the trick is not to get caught, isn’t it, Abdel?” she said coolly in his car in the same language.

“Now shut up and foens on your job. Let me worry about the rest.”

“I don’t know win I’m doing this,” Khalifa grunted sourly.

“Oh, I think you do,” the woman reminded him. Her voice was ice-cold.

“Or would you really rather face a war crimes tribunal? With your choice of the gallows, firing squad, or a lethal injection? The ordinary people you and your thugs terrorized for so many years haven’t exactly been forgiving, have they?”

The former Mukhabarat officer swallowed hard and fell silent.

The woman looked ahead over his shoulder. They were drawing nearer to a large, two-story mud-brick house, one built around an inner courtyard in the traditional Iraqi style. Two hard-faced young Iraqi men stood in the open courtyard gate, carefully eyeing passersby. Kach guard held a Kalashnikov AKM assault rifle casually at the ready.

“All mission teams, this is Raid One,” the woman murmured in Arabic, speaking into the throat microphone concealed beneath her abaya. “Source One and I are moving into position now. Are you set?”

In turn, other voices ghosted through the small radio receiver fitted in her right ear. “Sniper teams reach. Targets zeroed in. Assault teams ready. Extraction team ready.”

“Understood,” she said softly. She and Khalifa were only meters away from the gate now. “Stand by.”

One of the AKM-armed guards stepped out into the alley, blocking their way. His eyes were narrowed in suspicion. “Who is this woman, Colonel?” he growled. “The general summoned you to this meeting. Only you. No others.”

Khalifa grimaced. “She is my wife’s cousin,” he stammered uneasily. “She was afraid to walk home from the market alone. She has heard the Americans and their pet Iraqi dogs, the Shia collaborators, are raping women caught on their own, without a man to protect them. But I only agreed to bring her this far.”

The woman lowered her dark eyes modestly.

The guard moved closer, still frowning. “You have compromised our se-curitv,” he muttered. “The general will need to know this. Bring the woman inside.”

“Raid One, this is Sniper Lead,” she heard over her radio. “Just say the word.”

The slender woman looked up again with a faint smile on her lips. “You may fire when ready, Sniper Lead,” she said quietly. “All teams move now.

Now!”

The guard’s eyes widened in sudden alarm at the expression he saw on her face. He began raising his Kalashnikov, thumbing the firing selector off safe.

There were two soft thuds. Both guards crumpled in a mist of blood, shot through the head by high-powered rifle rounds fired from a rooftop more than a hundred meters away. Before they even finished falling, a group of six men who had been lounging outside one of the nearby tea stalls rose briskly and moved toward the open gate, bringing silenced Heckler and Koch MP5SD6 submachine guns out from under their loose-fitting jackets. Two of the gunmen dragged the bodies into the courtyard and dumped them in the deep shadows near one wall. Then they turned and sauntered back to stand at the gate in place of the dead sentries. No one looking out from the house would see anything amiss.

The woman pulled her own weapon, a 9mm Beretta pistol fitted with a silencer, out from under the food piled in her shopping basket. Together with Khalifa and the four other men, she drifted silently into the courtyard, carefully staying in the concealing shadows. She checked her watch quickly. Less than thirty seconds had passed. Faint sounds of music, the eerie keening of a popular Arab male singer broadcast on Syrian State Radio, filtered out through the shuttered windows of the house.

Satisfied, she signaled the assault team toward the front door of the house.

Moving in pairs, the four men sprinted up the steps. Covered by the others, the point man gently tested the solid wood door, making sure it was unlocked.

He nodded once to his teammates and held up three fingers to signal the beginning of a three-second countdown.

They tensed. One. Two. Three.

Suddenly the point man kicked the door open and burst inside, followed closely by his comrades. There were a few muffled shouts, but they were immediately cut short by the harsh stutter of silenced submachine guns.

The woman crouched near the open door, holding her pistol ready. Trembling openly now, Khalifa waited with her. The former Mukhabarat colonel was praying frantically under his breath. Ignoring him, she listened closely to the staccato reports pouring through her radio earphone.

“Hallway secure and front rooms secure. Two hostiles down.”

“Back rooms secure.”

Another submachine gun chattered briefly.

“Staircase secure. One enemy down.”

There were more shouts somewhere inside the house, followed by yet another quick burst of silenced gunfire.

“Top floor secure,” a calm, confident voice said over the circuit. “Two more hostiles down. We have one prisoner. Raid One, this is Assault One.

The house is clear. No friendly casualties.”

The woman rose to her feet. “Understood,” she said again quietly into the throat mike hidden by her abaya. “Source One and I are coming in.” She motioned Khalifa ahead of her with the Beretta.

Inside the house, bodies littered the tiled floors, along with spent shell casings. Most had been shot while reaching for their weapons —a mix of Soviet-made assault rifles and pistols. The faintly metallic smell of blood blended with other odors, harsh, unfiltered tobacco, cheap aftershave, and boiled chicken. A radio somewhere still played music.

With Khalifa in tow, she took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time and made her way to an expensively furnished room at the back of the house.

Thick carpets covered the floor. There were imported teak tables, chairs, and a desk topped with a softly humming portable computer. The machine appeared undamaged. She smiled.

One man wearing a robe and slippers lay facedown on one of the carpets with his hands bound behind him with strong plastic twist ties. Two of the attackers stood close by, covering their lone prisoner with their submachine At her signal, they rolled him over.

The woman stared down intently, mentally comparing the hawk-nosed, bearded visage before her with the file photographs she had studied. Angry, red-rimmed eves stared back at her. She nodded in satisfaction. They had captured Major General Hussain Azziz al-Douri, onetime commander of the Mukhabarat’s Eighth Directorate, the unit directly responsible for developing, testing, and producing Iraq’s biological weapons.

“Good evening, General,” she said politely, with a faint smile on her lips.

He glared back at her. “Who the devil are you?”

The woman flipped back the hood of the abaya, revealing her short blond hair, straight nose, and firm chin. “Someone who has been hunting you for a very long time,” CIA officer Randi Russell told him coolly.

Large flakes of wet snow drifted down from a dark, overcast sky. Spinning lazily in the calm, cold air, they settled softly across the plaza surrounding Dresden’s floodlit Semper Opera House. A thin white blanket softened the stark outlines of the equestrian statue of King Johann of Saxony rearing high above the open square.

People bundled up in overcoats hurried across the plaza with their umbrellas hoisted high to ward off the falling snow, joining the excited crowds gathering outside the brightly lit entrance to the Opera House. Placards and banners posted around the city announced this evening’s premiere of a new, ultra avant-garde version of Carl Maria von Weber’s Freischutz, the first real German opera.

Jon Smith stood in the shadows near the long-dead Saxon king’s statue, carefully observing Dresden’s self-anointed aficionados of high culture stream across the square. Impatiently, he shook the wet snowflakes out of his dark hair. He hunched his shoulders, feeling the cold bite through his thin windbreaker and black turtleneck.

He had arrived on the city’s outskirts roughly an hour before, dropped off by a Hamburg-based truck driver from whom he had bummed a ride all the way from Prague across the Czech-German border. Two hundred euros in cold, hard cash had more than satisfied the trucker’s curiosity about why an American businessman needed so long a lift. He had allowed Smith to ride in the sleeping berth at the back of his cab, safe from any prying official eyes.

Fortunately, crossing the frontier had proved uneventful. Now that the Czech Republic was part of the European Union, there were very few active checkpoints between the two countries.

But moving any deeper into Germany or getting a plane back to the States or anywhere else would take a lot more than luck. The murderous ambush on the road to Prague’s airport had cost him both his laptop computer and his carry-on bag. European hotelkeepers and airport security officials alike frowned on people arriving without luggage. More important, he needed new identification. Sooner or later, the Czech authorities would start casting a wider net for the American doctor and army officer who had missed his plane to London and vanished so mysteriously. They might even tie him to the bullet-riddled corpses found near the road to the airport.

Smith spotted a short, bearded man in evening dress and a bright red scarf walking slowly toward the statue. He wore a pair of thick glasses that reflected the dazzling lights silhouetting the Opera House. The newcomer also carried a colorful program for Mozart’s Don Giovanni conspicuously beneath one arm.

Jon moved out to intercept him. “Are you here for the performance?” he asked quietly in German. “They say the maestro is in top form.”

He noticed the little man relax slightly. Maestro was the recognition word Fred Klein had given him when Smith called to arrange this emergency rendezvous.

“So I understand,” the short, bearded man replied. He tapped the program under his arm. “But I prefer Mozart to Weber myself.”

“That’s quite a coincidence,” Smith said pointedly. “So do I.”

The little man smiled tightly. His blue eyes were bright behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Those of us who love Europe’s greatest composer must stick together, my friend. So take this, with my compliments.” He handed the taller American his Don Giovanni program. Then, without another word, he turned on his heel and walked away, vanishing into the crowds milling around outside the Semper’s arched entrance.

Smith headed in the opposite direction. While on the move, he flipped open the program and found a thick manila envelope clipped to one of the pages. Inside it, he found another American passport, this one made out in the name of John Martin. It bore a current German customs stamp and his picture. The envelope also contained a credit and debit card in the mythical John Martin’s name, a train ticket to Berlin, and a numbered tag from the left luggage kiosk at Dresden’s Neustadt station.

Jon grinned to himself, reassured all over again by this evidence of Fred Klein’s levelheaded thoroughness. He pocketed the various documents, discarded the opera program in a trash bin, and then strode briskly toward the gleaming lights of a nearby tram stop.

Half an hour later, Smith jumped lightly down from the rear door of a yellow electric tram. He was just across from the Neustadt Bahnhof. A pyramid of modern steel girders and glass rose high above the weathered, pollution-stained stone facade of the original railway station. He dodged a pair of taxi-cabs that were crawling along the snow-choked street looking for fares, and entered the almost-deserted station.

At the left luggage kiosk, a sour-faced night clerk took the tag from him, rummaged through the back room, and came grumbling back carrying a brand-new overnight bag and a laptop computer case. Jon signed for them and moved off to the side of the counter to inspect his new acquisitions. The overnight bag contained an assortment of clothing in his sizes, including a warmer black wool coat. Gratefully, he shrugged out of his battered windbreaker and donned the heavier coat. The computer case included both a rugged, high-speed laptop and a portable scanner.

Smith glanced up at the departure board. He had almost an hour before the next train to Berlin was scheduled to leave Dresden. His stomach growled, reminding him that it had been far too many hours since his last meal —a couple of pieces of dry toast and jam at the police station in Prague. He closed both cases, slung them over his shoulder, and walked through the station to a small cafe located near the platforms. A sign in German, French, and English invited patrons to make use of the restaurant’s wireless Internet connection while enjoying coffee, soup, and sandwiches.

He had just enough time to kill two birds with one stone, he thought gratefully. He seated himself at an empty table in the corner and ordered black coffee and a bowl of Kartoffelsuppe, creamy potato soup flavored with marjoram and slices of pork sausage.

Smith waited for the waitress to leave and then powered up the new laptop and scanner. While sipping his coffee, he pulled out the identity card he had retrieved from the corpse of the broken-nosed man in the Divoka Sarka and studied it closely. The name on the ID card meant nothing, he suspected. But in the right hands the photograph might yield useful information.

He flipped open his phone and hit the preset code for Covert-One’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

“Go ahead, Colonel,” Klein’s calm voice said.

“The RV went off without a hitch,” Smith reported. “I’m at the station waiting for my train now.”

“Good,” the head of Covert-One said quietly. “You’re hooked into the Hotel Askanischer Hof, right on the Ku’damm. You should be able to rest up there inconspicuously for a day or so while we consider how to proceed.”

Smith nodded to himself. The Kurfurstendamm, once the heart of West Berlin, was still a bustling center of commerce and tourism. Even in the winter, it should be easv enough to blend in discreetly with the other travelers who would be thronging the district’s streets and restaurants. “What’s my cover as this John Martin character?” he asked.

“Ostensibly, you’re a pharmaceuticals salesman spending a few days in Berlin after attending a sales conference,” Klein told him. “Think you’ll have any problems fitting into that?”

“Nope,” Smith said confidentlv. “There’s just one more thing for now.”

“Go ahead.”

“I have an image to scan and send you,” Smith said. “A picture of the guy who murdered Valentin Petrenko and who tried to kill me twice. He’s dead now, but his photo might be worth running through various databases.”

“Quite probably, Colonel,” Klein said drily. “Very well. Send it along.

We’ll be standing by.”

Near the Russo-Georgian Border

The isolated town of Alagir sits at the northern end of the Ardon Valley, deep in the rugged foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Roughly seventy kilometers to the south lies the snow-choked, nine-thousand-foot-high Roki Pass into the disputed Georgian territory of South Ossetia. The mountains themselves, jagged masses of stone, snow, and ice that gleamed palely beneath a rising moon, climb in a solid wall across the entire southern horizon.

Bright arc lights flared across the Alagir railroad yard, turning the black night into an eerie, sharp-edged mimicry of day. Sweating despite the freezing cold, Russian combat engineers clad in winter-pattern camouflage uniforms swarmed around the long freight train crowding the yard. They worked in teams, quickly unchaining the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of T-72 tanks, self-propelled 122mm howitzers, and wheeled BTR-90 and tracked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles that were bolted onto flat cars behind the train’s three powerful locomotives.

Other troops worked fast to guide the newly unloaded armored vehicles onto ramps leading to a long row of enormous flatbed trucks. These were specialized tank transporters, which would ferry them farther up the cliff-lined valley. Vehicles fitted with snowplows and salt and sand dispensers waited at the head of the convoy, ready to lead the heavily laden trucks up the winding, ice-covered roads into the mountains.

Bundled in his own greatcoat, Colonel-General Vasily Sevalkin, commander of Russia’s Northern Caucasus Military District, stood near his staff car. watching the operation with undisguised satisfaction. He checked his watch and then raised a single gloved hand to signal one of his subordinates, an engineer officer.

The engineer major hurried over, snapped to attention, and saluted.

“Well?” Sevalkin asked.

“We will be finished here in less than an hour, sir,” the major reported crisply.

“Very good,” Sevalkin murmured, pleased to hear his own estimate confirmed. This new convoy of tanks, self-propelled guns, and infantry carriers would be long gone from Alagir before the next American satellite pass. And the freight train itself, now loaded with prefabricated decoy vehicles, would be plainly visible moving through the rail junction near Beslan — to all appearances only another routine shipment of militarv equipment to the Russian forces fighting Chechen rebels west of here.

The Russian general smiled thinly. Soon he would have the arms, ammunition, and men of two full-strength motor-rifle divisions, the 27th Guards and the 56th, securely hidden within striking range of the small Republic of Georgia. Although both divisions were largely equipped with older, second-line tanks and other military hardware, their weapons were far superior to anything that could be mustered by the rag-tag Georgian armed forces just across the border.

With a casual wave, Sevalkin dismissed the major back to his duties and climbed into his car. “Take me to the forward HQ at Vladikavkaz,” he told his driver. Then he sat back against the seat, pondering the likely events of the next several days and weeks. His orders from Moscow for this top-secret deployment claimed it was only a “special mobility and readiness exercise.” The general snorted softly. Only a fool would believe the Kremlin really intended so large a movement of troops and equipment—nearly forty thousand men and more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles —as a simple field maneuver. Certainly not in the middle of the notoriously harsh Caucasian mountain winter, with its howling winds, subzero temperatures, and blinding snowstorms.

No, Sevalkin thought, Dudarev and the others had to be planning something bold, some decisive action that would rock the world back on its heels in wonder. May it come soon, he decided grimly. For too long now, he and others like him had watched in depressed silence while Russia’s strength and influence faded, diminishing with every passing vear. But soon that would all change. When the orders were at last issued to begin restoring his country to its rightful place on the world stage, he and the soldiers under his command would be ready to do their duty.

Chapter Nine

Sam Castilla sat at the big ranch-style table made of New Mexico pine that served as his desk, briskly working his way through more than a dozen, multi-page legislative and policy analysis papers marked Urgent. Even with a top-notch White House staff serving as a filter, the amount of paperwork that required his personal attention was staggering. He scrawled a few quick comments on one memo and then turned immediately to the next. His eyes, neck, and shoulders all ached.

One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a wry grin. It was the age-old problem of the presidency. Delegate too much power and responsibility and you wound up derided by the press as a “caretaker chief executive” or tangled up in some damned foolish scandal sparked by overeager subordinates. Try to exercise too much control and you found yourself drowning in a sea of mean-ingless memoranda better handled by a junior clerk—or wasting precious time setting the daily schedule of the White House tennis courts, like poor Jimmy Carter. The trick was to find the right balance. The dilemma was that the right balance was always shifting.

There was a soft rap on the open door of the Oval Office.

Castilla took off his titanium-frame reading glasses. He rubbed briefly at his tired eyes and then looked up. “Yes?”

His executive secretary stood in the doorway. “It’s nearly six o’clock, Mr.

President. And Mr. Klein is here,” she said pointedly, not bothering to hide the look of disapproval on her waspish face. “I’ve put him in your private study, just as you asked.”

Castilla hid a smile. Ms. Pike, his long-suffering personal assistant, took her role as the dragon guarding his schedule seriously—very seriously. She made no secret of the fact that she thought he worked too long, exercised too little, and allowed his limited free time to be wasted by far too many political cronies presuming on old friendships. Like the rest of the White House staff, she was not privy to the Covert-One secret. That was his burden alone. And so, not knowing how else to classify Fred Klein, she lumped the pale, long-nosed spy chief in with the rest of the “good-time Charlie” time-wasters.

“Thank you, Estelle,” he said gravely.

“The First Lady is expecting you for dinner in the residence tonight,” she reminded him sharply. “Promptly at seven.”

Castilla nodded with a slow, easy grin. “Never fear. You can tell Cassie that I’ll be there come hell or high water.”

Estelle Pike sniffed. “I certainly hope so, sir.”

Castilla waited until she left. His smile faded. Then he rose quickly from behind his big desk and strode across the Oval Office to the adjoining study. It was filled with comfortable furniture and crowded bookcases. Like his den upstairs in the White House family quarters, this small room was one of the few that fully reflected his own tastes. A balding, medium-tall man in a rumpled blue suit stood next to the fireplace, admiring one of the several paintings of the Old West hanging on the study’s walls. He held a battered leather briefcase in one hand.

Hearing the door open, Nathaniel Frederick Klein turned away from his contemplation of a Remington original on loan from the National Gallery. It showed a small, ragged, and weary U.S. Cavalry patrol making a last stand around a dried-up desert waterhole, desperately firing their single-shot, black powder Springfield carbines from behind a rough barricade of their dead horses.

“Seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” Castilla said quietly. “Too many hostiles and not enough help.”

“Maybe so, Sam,” the head of Covert-One replied. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then again, nobody rational ever claimed that being the world’s only superpower was going to be easy. Or particularly popular.”

The president grimaced. “True enough. And it beats the alternative. I guess I’d rather we were the decent, but unloved, five-hundred-pound gorilla than the pitied and hapless ninety-eight-pound weakling.” He nodded his head toward a nearby black leather couch. “Go ahead and sit down, Fred.

We’re facing one hell of a situation, and I need your input.”

Castilla waited while Klein sat and then lowered himself stiffly into an upholstered armchair on the other side of a low coffee table. “Have you seen the list of sick intelligence and policy analysts?” he asked.

Klein nodded grimly. Over the past two weeks, more than a dozen of the government’s top experts on Russian and former Soviet bloc military, political, and economic affairs had collapsed, falling deathly ill either at home or at work.

“Well, I’ve been getting updates all through the day,” the president said somberly. “Three of our people have already died. The rest are in intensive care and fading fast. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that nobody—not at the hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control, or USAMRIID—has been able to identify this disease they’ve got, much less how to treat it successfully. So far the doctors have been trying every combination of treatments they can think of—antibiotics, anti-viral agents, anti-toxins, and chemo-and radiation therapy—without any positive results. Whatever is killing our people is completely outside our medical experience.”

“Nasty,” Klein murmured. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were troubled. “But this isn’t the first time this mystery illness has popped up, Sam.”

Castilla raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Over the past forty-eight hours or so, we’ve picked up reports of several other people who died of a previously unknown disease, one with identical symptoms,” Klein told him quietly. “In Moscow. More than two months ago.

No details leaked out to the West because the Kremlin clamped a tight security lid on any news of the outbreak.”

The president’s square jaw tightened. “Go on.”

“Two of my best Covert-One field operatives, Fiona Devin and Jon Smith, were separately approached by Russian doctors who had been involved in treating the victims. Unfortunately, both men were silenced before they could provide us with copies of the relevant medical records and other evidence. The first died on a Moscow street two nights ago, supposedly of a heart attack. The second was murdered in Prague yesterday.”

“By the Russians?”

Klein frowned. “Perhaps.” He snapped open his briefcase and handed Castilla a black-and-white print of the ID card photo transmitted earlier by Smith. It showed the image of a narrow-faced man with cold, dead eyes. “This fellow commanded the hit team in Prague. When I ran this picture through our computers, he turned up in half a dozen intelligence and law enforcement databases, usually with a ‘Most Wanted/Apprehend with Utmost Caution’ tag attached.”

The president read the name printed at the bottom of the photo. “Georg Dietrich Liss? A German?” he asked in surprise.

“An East German,” the head of Covert-One corrected. “When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, his father was a high-ranking officer in the communist government’s Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. The elder Liss is currently serving a long prison sentence for various crimes against the German people.”

Castilla nodded. He tapped the photo in his hand. “What about the son?”

“Also a member of the secret police,” Klein answered. “He served as a junior officer in the Stasi’s ‘Filiks Dzierzynski’ regiment, a sort of elite Praetorian

Guard force for the East German government. And there are rumors that he was part of a ‘black ops’ death squad used by the regime to murder political dissidents and even foreign journalists whose reporting proved too embarrassing.”

“Charming,” the president said in disgust.

Klein nodded. “Liss was a very nasty piece of work. By all accounts, he was a cold-blooded sociopath of the first order. Berlin issued a warrant for his arrest not long after reunification, but he fled Germany before the local police could take him into custody.”

“So who’s been paying his keep for the past fifteen years?” Castilla asked.

“Most recently, we think he was employed by an organization called the Brandt Group,” Klein said. “They’re a very shadowy, freelance intelligence and security outfit based in Moscow.”

“Moscow again.” The president tossed the photo down onto the coffee table. “And just who pulls the strings on this Brandt Group?”

“Our data is very sketchy,” Klein admitted. “We don’t know much about the organization or its real sources of funding, though they appear to have considerable resources. But there is a lot of back channel chatter claiming that Brandt Group agents sometimes work for the Russian government on a contract basis, conducting deniable surveillance and even assassination operations against Chechen exiles and other troublemakers living outside the Kremlin’s immediate reach.”

“I Icll,” Castilla growled.

“And there’s more,” Klein said. He leaned forward in his chair. The expression on his face was grave. “I’ve been making discreet inquiries. What looks verv much like this same illness is apparently affecting the top Russian specialists in every major Western intelligence agency—the UK’s MI6, Germain’s BND, the French DGSE, and others.”

“We’re being blinded,” Castilla realized suddenly. “This disease is being used as a weapon. by killing our best intelligence analysts, someone is hoping we’ll find it more and more difficult to understand exactly what’s happening inside Russia.”

“It’s possible, even probable,” Klein agreed. He opened his briefcase again and held a single sheet of paper filled with names and locations. “We also started scanning news sen ices and medical databases around the world, looking for other reported cases showing similar symptoms. It’s taken some digging, but this is what we’ve found so far.”

The president took the new list and studied it in silence. He whistled softly.

“The Ukraine. Georgia. Armenia. Azerbaijan. Kazakhstan. All former Soviet republics bordering Russia.”

Klein nodded again. “And in each and every case, the men and women getting sick are among the key military and political leaders in those countries. From what I can see, most of those replacing them are significantly less competent —or more closely aligned with Russian interests.”

“Son of a bitch,” Castilla swore out loud. He scowled. “That sly son of a bitch Viktor Dudarev. The Russians already tried to screw around with the last Ukrainian presidential election —and failed. Having to back down so publicly must have rankled something fierce. Well, maybe the Kremlin is playing the same game again, but this time on a much bigger scale.”

“The pattern is certainly suggestive,” Klein said slowly.

The president glanced at his old friend. The ghost of a crooked smile crossed his broad face. “Meaning, don’t go off half-cocked, because we don’t have any real evidence yet, right?”

“That is ultimately your call,” Klein pointed out. He cleared his throat softly. “But I submit that we are very long on theory and very short on hard facts at the moment. In the present world circumstances, I’m not sure how an unsupported American suggestion of Russian dirty work would be received.”

“No kidding,” Castilla said. His broad shoulders slumped, as though they were being weighed down by an immense burden. “Fairly or unfairly, we’re perceived as having cried ‘wolf too often over the past few years. As a result, our old friends and NATO allies are readv to believe we’re prone to exaggerat-ing dangers —and equally ready to cut and run from us at the first whiff of controversy. We managed to rebuild some of our credibility in the aftermath of the Lazarus crisis, but it’s still an uphill fight.”

The president frowned. “One thing’s certain. Nobody in London, Paris, Berlin, or Warsaw is going to thank us for risking a new round of the Cold War.” His eyes fell on an antique globe in the corner of the room. “And with our troops, ships, and aircraft tied down all around the damned planet, we’re sure as hell not in good shape for any open conflict with the Russians. Not on our own, anyway.”

Castilla sat silently for a few moments more, contemplating the situation.

Then he shook his head sharply. “So be it. We can’t undo the recent past.

Which means we’ll just have to find the proof we need to convince our allies to act with us, if necessary.” He sat up straighter. “That first disease outbreak in

Moscow seems likely to be the key.”

“Agreed,” Klein said. His eyes were cold. “Someone is certainly determined to eliminate anyone who tries to tell us about it.”

“One more thing is clear,” Castilla continued. “I can’t rely on the CIA to take the lead on this. They’re not prepared to operate effectively in Moscow— at least not clandestinely.” He snorted. “We’ve been so focused on trying to play nice with the Russians these days, trying to keep them as our allies in the war on terror. Langley has spent its time and energy building working relationships with their security services, instead of recruiting networks of deep-cover agents inside the Kremlin. If I ask the Agency’s Moscow Station to reverse gears now, at such short notice, the odds are that they’ll only muff it.

And then we’ll end up with so much diplomatic egg dripping down our faces that no one will believe a word we say.”

His exes gleamed for an instant. “That leaves you and your outfit, Fred.

Front and center. I want a priority investigation by Covert-One. But it’s got to be quick, and it’s got to be quiet.”

Klein nodded his understanding. “I have a small but excellent team already in place in Moscow,” he agreed. Thinking hard, he drew a handkerchief out of his coat pocket, took off his glasses, and polished them. Then he slipped the wire-rims back over his ears and looked up. “Plus, I have another top-notch field operative on stand-by. He’s tough, resourceful, and he’s worked in Russia before. Best of all, he has the medical training and scientific expertise to make some sense out of whatever information they uncover.”

“Who have you got in mind?” Castilla asked curiously.

“Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith,” Klein said softly.

Halfway between the industrial city of Kharkiv and the capital of Kiev, Poltava occupied three hills in the middle of the vast and otherwise almost featureless Ukrainian steppe. Its central streets and avenues radiated outward from a circular plaza. And set in the very center of this open expanse lay the Iron Column of Glory, ringed by small cannons and topped by a golden imperial eagle. Erected in 1809, this towering monument commemorated Czar Peter the Great’s decisive victory over the invading Swedes and their Cossack allies a century before, a victory that had ensured Russia’s lasting domination over the region.

Large neoclassical government buildings constructed during the nineteenth century ringed this round park. Their upper-floor windows looked out toward the Iron Column.

Leonid Akhmetov, chairman of Poltava’s regional group of parliamentary deputies, stood staring out the window of his office. The burly, white-haired politician and business oligarch glowered out at the golden eagle and then swung awav. I le shul the blinds with a muttered curse.

“You do not approve of the view?” his visitor, a slender, thin-faced man in a drab suit, asked sardonically. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of Akhmetov s ornate desk.

Akhmetov frowned. “Once I rejoiced in it,” he grunted dourly. “But now that column is only a reminder of our shame, of our abandonment to the ef-fete West.”

Both men were speaking in Russian —the first language of nearly half of Ukraine’s people, most of them concentrated in the country’s eastern industrial regions. Two recent presidential elections, the first of them overturned by allegations of fraud, had split the country into rival factions, one heavily authoritarian and favoring renewed ties to Moscow, the other more democratic and more oriented toward Europe and the West. Akhmetov and his cronies were among the local leaders of the pro-Russian faction. They controlled most of Poltava’s industries and businesses.

“Mother Russia never truly abandons her loyal sons,” the thin-faced man said quietly. His eyes hardened. “Just as she never forgives those who betray her.”

The taller, heavier oligarch flushed red. “I am no traitor,” he growled. “My people and I were ready to move against Kiev months ago, right up to the moment that your President Dudarev reached his ‘accommodation’ with the new government. When the Kremlin pulled the rug out from under us so suddenly, what real choice did we have but to make our own peace with the new order?”

The other man shrugged. “The accommodation you condemn was only a minor tactical retreat. We decided the time was not yet right for an open confrontation with the Americans and the Europeans.”

Akhmetov’s eyes narrowed. “And now it is?”

“Soon,” the other man told him quietly. “Very soon. And you must do your part.”

“What must I do?”

“First? We want you to organize a public demonstration, one coinciding with Defenders of the Motherland Day, February 23,” the thin-faced man said. “This must be a mass rally demanding full autonomy from Kiev and closer ties to Mother Russia —

The oligarch listened closely and with mounting excitement while the visitor from Moscow outlined his orders from the Kremlin.

An hour later, the man from Moscow left the Poltava Region Administrative building and strolled calmly toward the Iron Column of Glory. Another man, taller, with a broad, friendly face and a camera slung around his neck, detached himself from a small group of schoolchildren studying the monument and joined his shorter colleague from the Russian FSB’s Thirteenth Directorate.

“So?” he asked.

“Our friend Akhmetov has agreed. In six days, he and his supporters will gather here in this plaza, at the base of the column,” the thin-faced man reported.

“How many?”

“At least twenty thousand. Perhaps twice that number, depending on how many of his workers and their families obey their orders.”

“Very good,” the broad-faced man said, smiling openly. “Then we can assure them a warm reception—and a demonstration to a horrified world of just how far Kiev will go to suppress peaceful unrest among its troublesome ethnic Russians.”

“And you have all the information you require?”

The bigger man nodded coolly. He tapped his digital camera. “The images I need for detailed planning are stored in here. The rest is a mere matter of mathematics.”

“You’re sure?” the thin-faced man asked. “Ivanov will insist on absolute certainty and precision. He wants a cold-blooded massacre, not a pathetic fizzle.”

The other man grinned back. “Relax, Gennady Arkad’yevich. Relax. Our masters will have the excuse they need. Give me enough explosive— especially RDX—and I could send that so-called Iron Column flying to the moon.”

Chapter Ten

The ancient and beautiful Umbrian town of Orvieto perched high on a volcanic plateau above the broad Paglia valley, roughly halfway between Rome and Florence. The sheer cliffs ringing the town had acted as a natural fortifi-cation for millennia.

Below those cliffs, a side road broke away from the main highway, the cam tostrada, and wound west up the flanks of a low ridge facing Orvieto. Several ultramodern steel-and-glass buildings sprawled across the ridge, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with tight rolls of razor wire.

Signs at the main gate identified the complex as the headquarters of the European Center for Population Research. The Center’s stated purpose was the study of historical European population movements and genetic drift.

Scientists assigned to the different labs inside the compound routinely fanned out across the continent and North America, sampling the DNA of various communities and ethnic groups for a wide array of historical, genetic, and medical research projects.

Early in the gray, damp morning, a black Mercedes sedan passed through the gate and parked near a large building set slightly apart from the others.

Two men wearing fur hats and dark-colored coats got out. Both were tall and broad-shouldered. One, blue-eyed with high Slavic cheekbones, stood waiting impassively near the car while the second man strode toward the building’s locked main entrance.

“Name?” a voice asked in thickly accented Italian from an intercom set beside the solid steel door.

“Brandt,” the big man said clearly. He turned slightly toward the security cameras set to cover the entrance, letting them scan first his face and then his profile.

There was a brief pause while the images captured by the cameras were matched against those on file in the security system computer. Abruptly, the intercom crackled to life again. “You are cleared to proceed, Signor Brandt,” the voice said. “Please enter your identifier code.”

The big man entered a ten-digit code sequence on the keypad next to the door and heard the multiple locks sealing it click open, one after another.

Once inside, he found himself in a gleaming, brightly lit corridor. Two hard-faced men, both cradling submachine guns, stood watching him closely from the adjacent guard station. One of them nodded politely toward a coat rack.

“You may leave your coat, hat, and weapon there, Signor.”

He smiled thinly, faintly pleased to find that the rigorous security procedures he had decreed were applied even to him. He found that a reassuring contrast to the bad news he had received earlier from Prague. He shrugged out of his coat and then stripped off the shoulder holster containing his Walther pistol. He hung both of them on a hook and then doffed his fur hat, revealing a shock of pale blond hair.

“We’ve informed Dr. Renke of your arrival,” one of the armed guards told him. “He is waiting for you in the main lab.”

Erich Brandt, the man code-named Moscow One, nodded calmly. “Very well.”

The main lab took up nearly half of the building. Computers, boxlike DNA sequencers and synthesizers, chromatography cells, coffee-grinder-sized electroporation machines, and sealed tubes of reagents, enzymes, and other chemicals crowded a line of black-topped benches. Other doors led into isolation chambers used to culture the required viral and bacteriological materials.

Technicians and scientists wearing sterile gowns, gloves, surgical masks, and clear plastic face shields hovered around the equipment, carefully moving through the rigidly prescribed set of steps necessary to produce each unique HYDRA variant.

Brandt stopped near the door and stood watching the complicated process with interest, but very little real comprehension. Although Wulf Renke had tried explaining the intricacies involved several times before, Brandt had always found himself lost in a sea of scientific jargon.

The tall, blond-haired man shrugged. Did it really matter? He had the skills necessary to kill coldly and precisely, and HYDRA was a weapon much like any other. Boiled down to its non-scientific essentials, the mechanisms of HYDRA’s manufacture and killing power were cruelly simple in theory, though complicated in execution.

First, one obtained a sample of the intended victim’s DNA—from a piece of hair, a fragment of skin, a bit of mucus, or even from the oils left in a fingerprint. Then came the painstaking process of sorting through key sections of the gene-filled chromosomes, looking for specific patches of the genetic sequence that were unique to each individual and also associated with cell replication. Once that was done, one prepared single strands of so-called cDNA—complimentary DNA—creating precise mirror images of the chosen target patches.

The next step required altering a relatively small, single-stranded DNA virus active in humans. Using various chemical processes, it was possible to strip out everything except the genes associated with its protective protein coat and those that allowed the virus to penetrate into the very heart, the nuclei, of human cells. The carefully crafted patches of cDNA obtained from the victim’s genome were added and the altered virus was looped into a ring, creating a self-replicating plasmid.

After that, these viral plasmids could be inserted into a benign strain of E. coli, bacteria, one found commonly in the human gut. Then all that remained was to culture and concentrate these modified strains of E. coli, building up a useful amount of the material, and the HYDRA variant was ready for delivery to the selected target.

Essentially, invisible, odorless, and tasteless, these bacteria could easily be administered to the person marked for death through any combination of food or drink. Once ingested, the modified bacteria would lodge in the gut and begin multiplying rapidly. As they grew, they would constantly throw off the genetically altered viral particles, which would be carried by the bloodstream throughout the body.

Brandt knew that these viral particles were the key killing component in HYDRA. By their very nature they were designed to pierce the walls of human cells. Once inside a cell, each particle would inject the edited patches of cDNA into the nucleus. In anyone but the intended target, nothing else would happen. But inside the selected victim, a far deadlier process would he-gin unfolding. As soon as the cell nucleus began replicating itself, those mirror-image patches would automatically attach to the pre-selected portions of chromosomal DNA, blocking any further replication. The whole intricate process of cell division and reproduction —absolutely essential to life —would come to a screeching halt—much like a zipper jammed by a piece of cloth.

As more and more cells became infected and stopped reproducing, HYDRA victims would suffer aches, high fevers, and skin rashes. The failure of the fastest-replicating cells —hair follicles and bone marrow —produced symptoms resembling the wasting and anemia seen in radiation poisoning. Ultimately, of course, the cascading destruction extended to whole organs and systems, leading inevitably to a lingering and painful death.

There was no cure. Nor could HYDRA be detected by any practical means. Doctors, trying desperately to isolate the cause of this unknown disease, would never think to look at the ultra-common, seemingly harmless, and non-infectious bacteria hidden away inside each victim’s gut.

Brandt smiled with pleasure at the thought. Undetectable, unstoppable, and incurable, HYDRA was the perfect assassin’s weapon. In many ways, he thought sardonically, Renke and his team were crafting microscopic versions of the precision-guided bombs and missiles of which the Americans were so fond of boasting, with the exception that HYDRA would never create any embarrassing collateral damage.

Wulf Renke, a much shorter, thinner man, turned away from one of the DNA sequencers and came toward Brandt. He stripped off his gloves, face shield, and then his surgical mask, revealing a head of short-cropped white hair and a carefully trimmed Vandyke beard and mustache. From a distance, he appeared jovial, even kind. It was only up close that one could see the callous, unblinking fanaticism in Renke’s dark brown eyes. The scientist divided all of humanity into two very unequal parts: those who sponsored his research and those on whom he could test the advanced biological and chemical horrors that were his forte.

He extended his hand with a slight smile of his own. “Erich! Welcome!

Come to collect our new batch of toys in person?” He nodded toward an insulated cooler filled with carefully labeled small clear vials. Packs containing dry ice lined the cooler. To reduce the risk that their bacterial hosts would run out of nutrients and start dying off, the HYDRA variants were kept frozen for as long as possible. “There they are, all packed up and ready for transport.”

“I am here to collect the Phase II variants, Herr Professor,” Brandt agreed quietly, shaking hands. “But we have other matters to discuss as well. Private matters,” he said meaningfully.

Renke raised a single, thin white eyebrow. “Oh?” He glanced over his shoulder at the other technicians and scientists busy in the lab before turning back to look up at the bigger man. “Then perhaps we should adjourn to my office.”

Brandt followed him to a windowless room just down the central hallway.

Shelves of books and other reference materials crowded one wall. Besides a desk and a computer, the tall, blond-haired man was not surprised to see a narrow cot and an untidy pile of blankets in one corner of the small room.

Renke was famous for his lack of interest in the material comforts so important to others. He lived almost entirely for his research.

Once the door was closed behind them, Renke swung around to face his much larger colleague. “Well?” he demanded. “Apart from collecting the next HYDRA variants, what else brings you here from Moscow so urgently?”

“Two things,” Brandt told him. “First we face a significant security breach.”

Renke’s face froze. “Where?”

“In Prague, tracing back to Moscow,” the bigger man said flatly. He ran through what he had learned about the successful attack on Petrenko and the second failed attempt to kill the American doctor, Lieutenant Colonel Smith.

The frantic emergency signals from the shocked survivors of his Prague team had reached him shortly after his arrival in Rome the night before.

As Renke listened closely, his lips curled downward in a frown of displeasure. He shook his head in disgust. “Liss was sloppy,” he said. “Unpardonably sloppy.”

“True. He was both imprecise and overconfident.” Brandt’s gray eyes were ice-cold. “At least his death at the hands of the American saves me the effort of eliminating him as an example to Ilionescu and the others.”

“Has this man Smith turned up yet?”

“Not yet,” Brandt said shortlv. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “But he missed his scheduled flight to London and now the Czech authorities are searching for him, too. If they find him, I have other sources in Prague who will alert me.”

“It’s been nearly twenty-four hours,” the scientist pointed out. “By now Smith could easily be across the Czech border. In fact, he could be almost anywhere in the world.”

Brandt nodded grimly. “I am well aware of that.”

Renke frowned again. He stroked his neat white beard. “What do you know about this American?” he asked at length. “Despite their appalling errors, Liss and his men were professionals. How could an ordinary doctor have disposed of them so easily?”

“I do not know,” the taller man admitted slowly. “But clearly Smith is far more than he appears on the surface.”

“An agent, you mean? For one of the American military intelligence organizations?”

Brandt shrugged. “Perhaps.” The blond-haired man scowled. “I’ve had people digging into Smith’s background, military service record, and medical credentials ever since Liss first reported his meeting with Petrenko, but the work is necessarily slow. If he is connected to one of the American intelligence agencies, I don’t want to risk revealing our interest in him. That could tip our hand prematurely.”

“If he is a spy, your caution may come too late,” Renke said coldly. “The Americans could already be probing deeper into our field tests in Moscow.”

Brandt stayed silent, holding his temper in check. No useful purpose would be served by reminding the scientist of his own role in pushing for those first experiments.

“Have you notified Alexei Ivanov?” Renke asked after a moment. “After all, the Thirteenth Directorate may have a file on Smith. At a minimum, our friends in the FSB should be alerted to tighten their security in and around Moscow.”

Brandt shook his head. “I’ve told Ivanov nothing about the American thus far,” he said quietly. “He knows that Petrenko and Kiryanov are dead, nothing more.”

The scientist raised an eyebrow. “Keeping Ivanov in the dark? Is that wise, Erich? As you say, this is a very serious breach of operational secrecy. Surely that overrides any question of professional jealousy or embarrassment?”

“And direct orders from our patron trump all other considerations,” Brandt reminded him coolly. “He expects us to clean up our own messes without running to the Kremlin like frightened children. In this case I feel inclined to obey him. The Russians are too heavy-handed. Their intervention might only make matters worse. As it is, I have enough manpower to handle the situation if the Americans start poking and prying.”

Renke pursed his lips. “What do you need from me, then?”

“A complete list of those in Moscow whose knowledge of the first HYDRA outbreak could prove dangerous to us or to the project. With Smith still on the loose, we can’t take the chance that Petrenko and Kiryanov were the only ones inclined to disobey the orders to keep silent.”

Renke nodded slowly. “I can prepare such a list.”

“Good. Send the names to me as soon as possible.” Brandt flashed his perfect teeth in a tight, cold smile. “We must be read}’ to remove any remaining loose ends, should the need arise.”

“Yes, that is true,” Renke agreed. He looked up at the bigger man. “And the second development you wanted to discuss?”

Brandt hesitated. He turned slowly, suspiciously examining the crowded bookshelves and plain furniture around him. Then he glanced back at the scientist. “You’re sure this office is clean?”

“My security team sweeps it even dav,” Renke said calmly. “They are loyal to me and to no other. You may speak freely.” He smiled primly. “From your uneasiness, I presume you have news concerning our secondary venture?

This so-called ‘insurance policy’ against treachery that our Russian friends are so interested in possessing?”

Brandt nodded. “That’s right.” Despite the scientist’s assurance, he lowered his voice slightly. “Zurich has confirmed the first payment to our accounts.

But I need to have the special material we promised him in hand before Ivanov will approve the second funds transfer.”

Renke shrugged. “That isn’t a problem. I finished the required variant weeks ago.” He crossed the room and touched a stud on one of the bookcases.

It swung back noiselessly, revealing a hidden wall safe and freezer. He entered a code and then pressed his right thumb to a fingerprint scanner built into the safe door. It cycled open in a puff of condensation. The scientist put on an insulated glove and then reached inside. He drew out a single clear vial. “Here it is. You can pick up a carrier and some more dry ice on your way out.”

Brandt noticed a rack containing other vials inside the safe. His gray eyes narrowed.

Renke saw him looking and smiled. “Come now, Erich. We have known each other for years. Surely by now you have realized that I always take precautions to assure my own safety—no matter for whom I work.”

Chapter Eleven

Jon Smith drained the last of his coffee and set the cup back down on the round, cloth-covered table. Out of habit, he discreetly studied the people seated around him in the Hotel Askanischer Hofs quiet, tastefully furnished breakfast lounge. This was his first real chance since arriving late last night to

take a closer look at some of his fellow guests. Most were somber-faced business travelers, busy reading the morning newspapers or jotting down notes between distracted bites of toast, muesli, or soft sweet rolls, for upcoming meetings. There were two older couples sitting together, tourists taking advantage of reduced winter rates in the German capital. No one in the elegant little room raised any warning bells in his mind.

Momentarily reassured, he left a couple of euros on the table as a tip, rose to his feet, and walked toward the door. Black-and-white-framed photos of the famous authors and actors who had stayed at the Askanischer Hof during its long history—including Arthur Miller and Franz Kafka —stared down at him from the wall behind a highly polished bar.

Outside in the lobby, the desk clerk intercepted him. “A package has just arrived for you, Herr Martin,” he murmured politely. “By special courier.”

Smith signed for the sealed legal-size envelope and took it back up to his room. The address label showed that it had been sent from Brussels by Wald-mann Investments, LLC, one of a number of front companies Covert-One used for clandestine shipments around the world. He whistled softly at the sight of the time stamp on the envelope. Although it had been shipped well before dawn, somebody still had to have been really hustling to get this package to Berlin so early in the morning.

Jon sat down on a comfortable blue sofa next to the window, ripped open the security seals, and spread the documents it contained across the surface of an ornate 1920s-style coffee table. One was a Canadian passport, also made out in the John Martin name with his picture. Scuffed, travel-stained, and well worn, it included smudged exit and entry stamps showing that he had visited a number of different countries in Europe—Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania—over the past several years. A packet of business cards identified him, in the Martin persona, as a resident scholar at an organization called the Burnett Institute, a privately held public-policy think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia. A single piece of paper headed DESTROY AFTER READING held a brief biography of the fictional John Martin.

The envelope also contained a valid business visa for Russia, attesting that he had been invited to Moscow by a private firm for “consultations on comparative national health and social insurance systems.” And an enclosed itin-erary showed that he was booked on a Lufthansa flight to the Russian capital later that morning.

For a moment longer, Smith sat staring at the array of forged travel documents spread before him. Moscow? They were sending him to Moscow? Well, Daniel, old pal, he thought wryly, how do you like your first look at the lions’ den? Then he flipped open his cell phone.

Klein answered his call on the first ring. “Good morning, Jon,” the head of Covert-One said. “I assume that you’ve just received your new identity package?”

“Sound assumption, Chief,” Smith said drily. “Now, do you mind telling nie exactly what the hell is going on?”

“Not in the least,” Klein replied. His voice was deadly serious. “Consider mis a mission briefing. But before we begin, you should know that your orders come straight from the highest level.”

Meaning the president himself, Smith realized. Unconsciously, he sat up straighter. “Go ahead.”

He listened in growing astonishment while Klein ran through the list of dead or dying intelligence specialists, military leaders, and politicians in the U.S., its Western allies, and the smaller countries surrounding Russia. “My God,” he said when the other man finished. “No wonder my meeting with Petrenko stirred up such a hornet’s nest.”

“Yes,” Klein agreed. “That’s our evaluation, too.”

“And now you want me to dig into the first cases of this disease—the ones Petrenko told me about,” Smith guessed.

“Correct. If possible, we need hard data on its origin, mechanics, and methods of transmission,” Klein said. “And we need it soon. I have the unpleasant sensation that events are moving very fast just now.”

“That’s a pretty tall order, Fred,” Smith said quietly.

“I realize that. But you won’t be alone on this mission, Colonel,” Klein promised. “We already have a team in place—a very good one. They’re standing by for your arrival.”

“How do I make contact with them?”

“You have a reservation at the Hotel Budapest, not far from the Bolshoi Theater,” the head of Covert-One told him. “Check in and be at the bar there by seven this evening, local time. You should be approached before seven-thirty.”

“And how do I spot my counterpart?” Smith asked.

“You don’t,” Klein replied softly. “This will be a strictly one-way RV. You sit tight and wait. Your contact will identify you. The recognition word is tangent”

Jon felt his mouth go dry. A one-way rendezvous meant that he would fly into Russia without the names, covers, or even physical descriptions of the Covert-One agents based there. Klein was not taking any chances—even though Smith would be using the John Martin cover identity and not his own name. That way, if the Russian security services arrested him at the airport, he could not be forced to betray any other operative. In the circumstances, the procedure was a sensible precaution, but that somehow struck him as rather cold comfort.

“How solid is this Martin cover?” he asked tersely.

“Pretty solid under the circumstances,” the other man said. “If things go sour, it might hold up under pressure for around twenty-four hours, given decent luck.”

“So I guess the real trick is to avoid giving the boys in the Kremlin any reason to start chipping away at Mr. Martin’s fake Canadian resume?”

“That would be best,” Klein agreed levelly. “But remember that we’ll be standing by, ready to provide you with as much help as we can from this end.”

Smith nodded. “Understood.”

“Then good luck, Jon,” Klein said. “Report from Moscow as soon as possible.”

Captain Carlos Parilla, U.S. Army, kept his face carefully blank as he listened intently to the troubled voice on the other end of the phone. “Yes, yes, I understand, Vitaly,” he said when the caller finished speaking. “I will relay the news to my superiors at once. Yes, you’re absolutely right, this is a horrible development.”

He hung up and exhaled. “Jesus!”

His boss in the U.S. Embassy’s Defense Attache Office, a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, looked up from his computer in surprise. The straight-laced Parilla was known throughout the Kiev-based embassy staff for his refusal to swear or blaspheme, even under extreme stress. “What’s up, Carlos?”

“That was Vitaly Chechilo from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry,” Parilla reported grimly. “He says General Engler is in the hospital up in Chernihiv— in intensive care. It looks as though he’s contracted the same unknown bug that killed General Marchuk yesterday.”

The Marine colonel’s eyes widened. Brigadier General Bernard Engler was the head of the Special U.S. Military Mission, a team of American officers assigned to assist Ukraine in modernizing and reforming its defense forces.

Still worried by the scattered intelligence reports they had been receiving of unusual Russian military maneuvers near the border, Engler had gone up to Chernihiv yesterday to try to prod Marchuk’s lackluster successor, Lieutenant General Eduard Tymoshenko, into taking sensible precautionary measures.

The colonel picked up the phone and punched in a number. “Patch me through to the ambassador. Now.” He put one hand over the receiver and looked across the room at Parilla. “Contact the hospital in Chernihiv directly and get a confirmation on the general’s condition. Then pass the word along to the duty officer in Washington. We’re going to need a replacement out here pronto!”

Parilla nodded. With its commander ill and possibly dying, the American military mission here would be largely paralyzed. As a one-star general, Engler commanded a significant level of attention and respect inside Ukraine’s government and armed forces. His subordinates, mostly junior officers, did not carry the same amount of clout with their rank-conscious counterparts.

With potential trouble brewing along the Russo-Ukraine frontier, it was imperative that the Pentagon send someone else to fill the general’s post as soon as possible.

The Army captain frowned, checking the time in Washington, D.C. It was still the middle of the night there. Even under the best possible circumstances, the Pentagon bureaucracy might take days to sift through all the can-didates and name a replacement for Bernard Engler. Even a successor of the same rank and skill would need days, perhaps even weeks, to begin absorbing all the ins and outs of this country’s complicated military and civil affairs.

And until the new man found his feet, the job of coordinating U.S. and Ukrainian defense policies would be significantly more difficult.

Chapter Twelve

CIA officer Randi Russell sat wearily at the head of a large table deep inside the fortified U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital’s Green Zone. She fought down the sudden urge to rub her tired eyes. A secure satellite-link videoconference with the top brass at Langley was not a wise time to reveal ordinary human frailty. Phil Andriessen, the head honcho at the Agency’s Baghdad Station, slouched in the stiff-backed chair next to hers. Both of them faced a video projection screen. It showed the image of several serious-looking men wearing business suits, starched dress shirts, and carefully knotted ties seated at a similar table in a conference room on the seventh-floor of the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters.

Behold one of the miracles of modern technology, Randi thought caustically. We bounce signals off satellites orbiting high above the earth, erasing a gulf of thousands of miles and hours of relative time with remarkable ease — and we do it all only so we can hold yet another interminable, indecisive meeting.

On the Virginia end of the conference, Nicholas Kaye, the Director of Central Intelligence, leaned slowly forward in his seat. Now in his sixties, Kaye was a jowly, heavyset man. Decades ago, he had served briefly in the Agency before retreating to the calmer waters of academia and high-priced Beltway Bandit think tanks. Brought in largely as a caretaker replacement for David Hanson, his over-aggressive, scandal-plagued predecessor, the DCI’s mannerisms were sometimes as ponderous and ill defined as his decision-making process. “I understand that this former Iraqi Mnkhabarat officer you’ve captured, General Hussain al-Douri, is still refusing to cooperate?”

Andriessen nodded tiredly. “That’s correct, sir. So far, he’s stone-walling our interrogation team pretty successfully.”

One of the other men at Langley, the deputy director for Operations, interjected, “At the moment, I think we’re all rather more interested in those Eighth Directorate files you captured with General al-Douri. Your first reports indicated they seemed to contain critical intelligence on a top-secret biological weapons program. One previously unknown to us. Is that still your assessment?”

“Yes, sir, it is,” Andriessen said. He indicated Randi. “Ms. Russell here can brief you more fully on what we’ve learned. Since her special-ops team snatched al-Douri in the first place, she’s been in charge of exploiting the information we collected at his safe house.”

The head of the Baghdad Station leaned over and murmured a sotto voce warning in her ear. “Now play it cool, Randi. Don’t piss these guys off—not when you’re angling for permission to go hunting so far out of our theater of operations.”

She nodded tightly. “Don’t worry, Phil. I promise I’ll be a good little girl.”

Andriessen grinned at her. “Sure. And maybe the moon is made of green cheese.” He turned on her mike. “Go ahead.”

“We’ve been able to decode and read almost every file on the hard drive of his personal computer,” Randi told the CIA senior managers watching and listening to her from thousands of miles away. “Naturally, we’ve already funneled the day-to-day insurgent operations material to III Corps and the Iraqi Special Forces. And for once, our friends in uniform have been very grateful.”

That drew nods of appreciation and pleased smiles. Al-Douri had been far more than just another high-ranking Saddam Hussein loyalist on the run. He had also commanded a particularly brutal and effective Sunni insurgent cell, one that had masterminded several dozen car-bombings, murders, and assassinations. Taken together, the lists of names, police payoffs, phone numbers, and weapons caches they had found on his computer should enable the U.S. military and its Iraqi allies to rip his terrorist organization apart at the seams.

“The files we were especially interested in were buried much deeper,”

Randi went on. “They were also encrypted using a more sophisticated system —one based on high-level KGB codes from the late 1980s.”

“Codes the Soviets passed on to their friends in the Mukhabarat,” the Operations director commented.

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And what have you found so far?”

“References to a highly classified biological weapons program,” Randi said flatly. “One apparently so secret that it was set up outside the Baathist regime’s ordinary chain-of-command structures.”

“How far outside?”

“Almost entirely,” Randi said. She laid down her next bombshell with quiet assurance. “There are firm indications that this research was being kept hidden from Saddam Hussein himself. General al-Douri made sure that any reports about it passed solely through his hands… and stayed in his hands.

They were never sent any higher in the Mukhabarat hierarchy.”

That drew low whistles of surprise. The ex-Iraqi dictator had been a believer in absolute one-man rule, with all the strands of significant power held tightly in his own grip. Throughout Saddam’s thirty-year reign, those who thwarted his will or even who might someday pose a threat to his safety were casually butchered. By keeping secrets from his master, the onetime head of the Eighth Directorate had been playing a very dangerous game.

“Was this bio war program intended to produce weapons capable of causing mass casualties?” one of the senior CIA officials asked.

She shook her head. “Apparently not. The Eighth Directorate was set up to develop weapons for use on a smaller, though no less deadly, scale. Its primary mission was supplying the regime with nerve agents, specialized biotox-ins, and other poisons to assassinate opponents both here in Iraq and around the world.”

“What sort of scope are we talking about here?” the same man asked. “A small lab and a few researchers? Or a much bigger effort?”

Randi shrugged. “My guess would be that this program was on the smaller end of things —at least in terms of logistics and lab space.”

“What about its cost?”

“Substantial,” she said tersely. “From what we can see now, probably somewhere on the order of tens of millions of dollars over a one-or two-year period.”

Eyebrows went up around the conference table in Virginia. Even in a regime awash in illicit cash, that was serious money. “And the sources of this funding?” the head of Operations asked grimly. “Diverted from the UN oil-for-food fiasco, I suppose.”

“No, sir,” Randi said quietly. “The money for this program appears to have arrived directly, wired in from a number of anonymous bank accounts around the world. Roughly a million dollars ended up lining our friend al-Douri’s own pocket, but the rest seems to have paid for scientific equipment, supplies, and salaries.”

Nicholas Kaye frowned. “I hardly consider any of this earth-shaking news,” the heavyset CIA chief grumbled peevishly. “What difference does our uncovering one more outlawed Iraqi science project make?”

Randi smiled sweetly. “Because, sir, this particular secret weapons project does not seem to have been an Iraqi-sponsored program at all.”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Explain that,” Kaye demanded at last.

“Al-Douri’s notes are fragmentary and incomplete,” Randi said. “But they clearly indicate that all of the researchers involved were, quote, foreigners, unquote.”

“Then where are these foreign scientists now?” the head of the CIA wondered.

“Long gone,” Randi told him. “Several entries show that they packed up all their equipment and left Iraq before our troops reached Baghdad. Probably via Syria.”

“Let me be sure I understand your theory on this, Ms. Russell,” the Agency’s Operations director said carefully. “Are you suggesting that someone else was using Iraq as a cover for their own illegal biological weapons program?”

Randi nodded. “Yes, I am.” She smiled wryly. “After all, where better to hide a dirty needle than in a haystack already filled with other dirty needles that don’t belong to you.”

“Any strong suspects?”

“Based on the material we found in al-Douri’s computer?” She shrugged.

“Not really. If he knew who was paying him to set up this bioweapons lab inside his organization, al-Douri was very careful not to record that fact. My hunch, though, is that he didn’t know and didn’t much care.”

“Then all we’re left with is another useless, fading, will-o’-the-wisp,” Kaye complained.

“Not quite, sir,” Randi said with forced patience. Behind his back, the heavyset CIA chief was known as “Dr. No” throughout the Agency, both for his general pessimism and his near-automatic impulse to reject any proposal that involved risk or contravened conventional wisdom.

“Go on, Ms. Russell,” the Operations director told her gently, with a faint smile of his own. “For some strange reason, I suspect you have an ace hidden up your sleeve.”

Almost against her will, Randi grinned back at the projection screen. “Not exactly an ace, sir. More like a joker—a real wild card.” She held up a single sheet of paper, a printout from one of the files concealed on their prisoner’s computer hard drive. “After his first meeting with the scientist in charge of this secret program, our friend al-Douri made this rather cryptic entry in his private diary: ‘This man is more a jackal than the noble Teutonic wolf he so proudly claims to be. And like the jackal, he feasts greedily on the carrion abandoned by those who were once his masters.’”

Kaye snorted loudly. “What are we supposed to learn from that sort of Arab poetical gibberish?” he scoffed.

“Not gibberish,” Randi said coolly. “Just a bad pun. He was playing off this foreign scientist’s name. A German scientist. A German biological weapons scientist whose name suggests the word wolf.”

She waited.

“Christ!” one of the other CIA officials said abruptly. “You’re talking about WulfRenke.”

Randi nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“That’s impossible,” Kaye snapped. “Renke is dead. He’s been dead for years. Probably since not long after he disappeared from Berlin.”

“So the German government insists now. But no one has ever seen his corpse,” she pointed out grimly. “And given what we’ve just learned from these computer files, I think we should do our damnedest to find out the truth.”

There were murmurs of agreement around the two video-linked conference tables. Wulf Renke stood very high up in the ranks of the world’s “most wanted” Cold War criminals. Once a member of the East German scientific elite, Renke had been famous for his brilliant research and infamous for his eagerness to test his deadly creations on unwilling human subjects, usually political dissidents and common criminals. Not long after the Wall fell, he disappeared without a trace, vanishing before the German federal criminal police could arrest him.

For years since, the West’s intelligence services had tracked him, chasing down rumors that put the renegade scientist squarely in the middle of various global hot spots or serving a range of unsavory regimes and causes. He was said to have worked for North Korea, Libya, Serbia, and al-Qaeda and other terror networks. But none of those tantalizing and frightening rumors had ever panned out. A growing number of governments were ready to accept Berlin’s contention that Renke was dead—and no longer any threat to the civilized world.

At least until now.

“What are you proposing, Ms. Russell?” the head of the CIA at last asked stiffly.

“That you send me out on a hunt,” Randi said. She bared her own teeth in a tight, amused grin. “A wolf hunt.”

Kaye sighed. “And just where do you propose to begin this search of yours? Syria? Deep in the Hindu Kush? Or somewhere out in the wilds of Timbuktu?”

“No, sir,” she told him quietly. “I think it’s time we started right back at the very beginning.”

Chapter Thirteen

Despite the bitter cold outside, the Irish Bar on the second floor of the Hotel Budapest was crowded. People were standing two-deep along the polished cherrvwood bar, signaling the busy, white-coated barman for another beer or glass of wine or whiskey. Smiling waitresses circulated through the rest of the room with trays of drinks. Around the smaller tables and in the plush, cush-ioned booths there was a constant buzz of lively conversation, liberally peppered with gusts of boisterous laughter whenever anyone told a particularly funny joke.

Jon Smith sat off in a quieter corner by himself, silently nursing a pint of dark Baltika beer. Listening to the loud, good-humored snatches of Russian, English, French, and German wafting past, he felt strangely disconnected from his fellow patrons, almost as if he were listening to them from a thousand miles away. He had forced a polite smile onto his face, but the expression felt subtly wrong, as though it might abruptly shatter into a thousand pieces. His nerves, he realized suddenly, must be stretched near the breaking point.

At every stage of his journey here —the flight from Berlin, clearing customs at Sheremetevo-2, the cab ride in, and even registering at the hotel’s front desk —he had braced himself for a dangerously raised official eyebrow or for the feel of a policeman’s heavy hand gripping his shoulder. But nothing ominous had happened. Instead, he had been ushered through passport control and then shown to his room at the Budapest with a quiet, disinterested courtesy. There seemed to be more uniformed militia on the streets than he remembered from his previous trips to post-Cold War Moscow, but otherwise there were no obvious signs of any trouble brewing in the capital of the Russian Federation.

Smith forced down another cautious sip of beer and surreptitiously checked his new watch. It was already well past seven-thirty, closer to eight at night. His Covert-One contact was late. Had something fouled up? Fred Klein had been confident that his Moscow-based team was still safely operating below the radar of the Russian security services, but what if he was wrong? For an instant, he considered leaving. Maybe he should duck out and find a sheltered spot so that he could make a secure call to Washington, D.C., reporting the failed rendezvous.

Jon looked up from his beer and again noticed a lithe, attractive woman with curling, shoulder-length dark hair and bright eyes that appeared more green than blue in the bar’s soft lighting. He had spotted her earlier, holding a tall glass of sparkling wine while talking animatedly with a circle of grinning male admirers. But now she was moving slowly, but surely, in his general direction, stopping along the way to greet other men with a smile, a brief kiss on the cheek, or a murmured endearment. The woman wore a striking, sleeve-less, midnight-blue dress; one that seemed molded to the supple curves of her figure. An elegant, fur-trimmed coat lay draped over one arm.

Probably a paid professional, he thought dispassionately, deliberately looking away before she could make eye contact. There was no point in drawing any unwanted attention. The best of the elite escorts flocked to whichever bars and restaurants drew the greatest number of wealthy foreign businessmen. He had noticed several other young women, all of them quite beautiful, slipping away earlier with paunchy German or British or American executives for what he presumed were discreet trysts upstairs in their rooms. The Hotel Budapest’s Irish Bar appeared to be ground-zero for Moscow’s high-class prostitutes.

“You seem very lonely. And very sad,” a pleasant voice purred softly in Russian. “May I join you for a drink?”

Smith glanced up. The slender, dark-haired woman stood there, smiling engagingly at him. He shook his head quickly. “No, thank you,” he replied.

“Believe me, I’m not looking for any company right now. I was just about to leave.

Still smiling, she sat down unhurriedly next to him. He caught a faint whiff of her perfume, something delicate, fresh, and floral. She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Really? So soon? Such a pity when the night is still so young.”

Jon frowned slightly. “Look, miss,” he said stiffly. “I think there’s been some mistake — “

“A mistake? Yes, quite possibly,” the dark-haired woman said, now speaking in English with just the faintest trace of an Irish lilt. Her green eyes twinkled, openly amused. “But if so, I believe you are the one who is in error, Mr.

Martin. Where I am concerned, you seem to have gone haring off on the wrong tangent entirely.”

Tangent? Jesus, Smith thought wildly. That was the recognition word for this RV. That, plus the fact that she knew his cover name without being told, meant she had to be his Covert-One contact, the leader of Klein’s small team of operatives in the Russian capital. He felt his face turn bright red. “Hell,” he mumbled, embarrassed. “Now I’m in trouble.”

“Very likely,” the dark-haired woman said quietly. Then she relented and extended her hand. “My name is Fiona Devin. I’m a freelance journalist. Our mutual friend, Mr. Klein, insisted that I welcome you to Moscow.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully. He cleared his throat. “Look, Ms. Devin, I’m very sorry about the mix-up. It’s just that I was beginning to sweat. I thought something had gone wrong.”

She nodded. “I had that impression.” She shrugged. “I apologize for the long delay, but I thought it was for the best. This place is like a little bit of home ground to me, and I wanted to make very sure that there weren’t any unwelcome visitors tagging along behind you. I know most of the regulars quite well, and strangers intruding on my patch tend to stand out.”

“FSB agents or informers, you mean?” he asked, using the acronym for the Russian Federal Security Service.

Fiona Devin nodded again. “The hard-faced lads up at Lubyanka Square are not yet quite so active and all-powerful as when they called themselves the KGB, but they do get around all the same.”

“And now President Dudarev is doing his best to restore the bad old order,”

Smith commented.

“Too true,” she agreed somberly. “Czar Viktor has certainly surrounded himself with a very nasty bunch of cronies. The Russians call them the siloviki, the men of power. Like Dudarev himself, they’re all ex-KGB with a taste for absolute control and a real knack for putting the fear of Stalin into anyone foolish enough to get in their way.”

“No kidding,” Smith said grimly, thinking back to the bridge in Prague and Valentin Petrenko’s murder. “Plus, they use surrogates like this so-called Brandt Group for some of their dirty work.”

“So it seems, Colonel,” she said coolly. “But keep in mind that the Brandt Group also works for the highest bidder, not just the Kremlin.”

“Oh?”

Her eyes grew colder. “I’ve done a bit of investigative work on the Group.

Oh, I admit that they’re a fine match for Dudarev and his siloviki. Mostly ex-Stasi, like their boss, a vicious creature named Erich Brandt—with a smatter-ing of Romanian Securitate and Serbian secret police thugs thrown in for good measure. But they’ll take any assignment, no matter how dirtv, if the fee is big enough.”

Her mouth tightened into a thin line. “Rumor has it that the Brandt Group provides security for some of the biggest drug lords and Mafiya crime bosses in Moscow. One set of parasites guarding another. The Group’s ties to the Kremlin keep the police conveniently looking the other way, no matter how many innocents are murdered by the Mafiya bosses they protect.”

Smith heard the deep anger and pain in her voice. “Including someone you knew?” he guessed.

“My husband,” Fiona said simply. “Sergei was a Russian. One of the optimistic entrepreneurs who believed this country could remake itself as a prosperous democracy. He worked hard, built up his business—and then the hard men arrived, demanding the lion’s share of his profits. When he refused, the Mafiya bastards shot him down in the street.”

She fell silent, plainly unwilling to say more now.

Smith nodded, recognizing a boundary he should not cross. Not yet. To fill the silence, he stopped a passing waitress to order a glass of shampanskae, a sweet sparkling wine from Moldova, for Fiona and another beer for himself and then turned back to her. He hesitated briefly, not knowing quite how to proceed. “I’m assuming Fred Klein told you why I’m here, Ms. Devin,” he said at last, and then winced inwardly, hearing suddenly how pompous that sounded.

“I’ve been thoroughly briefed by Mr. Klein,” she confirmed easily, choosing to show mercy by ignoring this second gaffe. “Besides, I’ve had my own brush with the news of these mysterious deaths. Three nights ago, Dr. Nikolai Kiryanov was on his way to meet me when he disappeared. Now I suspect he was trying to pass on the same sort of information your friend Petrenko brought to Prague.”

“And I understand that Kiryanov turned up in the morgue the next morning?” he asked, recovering.

Fiona frowned. “Not quite. I never saw his body. The poor man had already been cremated.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. “That quickly?”

She nodded. “Well now, the cause of death was listed as ‘heart attack.’ I suppose cremation must have seemed a convenient way to make sure no one could check up on that.”

“And since then?”

“I’ve been poking and prying and asking pointed questions wherever and whenever I can,” she told him.

“Sounds pretty dangerous —in the present circumstances,” he commented.

One side of Fiona Devin’s generous mouth ticked upward in a lopsided smile. “The authorities here may not like it much,” she said. “But remember that asking awkward questions is precisely what they expect a Western reporter like me to do. And they know that Kiryanov could have told me at least a tiny bit of what happened with those poor people. If I got wind of a juicy story like those deaths and then simply sat back on my hands, they’d grow more suspicious still.”

“Have you had any luck?” Jon asked.

She shook her head disgustedly. “Not a bit. I’ve haunted the corridors of the Central Clinical Hospital until I can smell the disinfectant they use in my sleep, and all to no avail. I’ve run straight into a solid wall of obstruction and evasion. Naturally, the staff there all deny that any mysterious disease outbreak ever took place.”

“Naturally,” Smith said drily. “What about prowling through their medical records?”

“Strictly forbidden,” Fiona Devin said flatly. “The hospital director insists that the medical records of all current or former patients are strictly off-limits.

Going over his head to get the necessary authorizations from the Ministry of Health could take weeks.”

“Or forever.”

She nodded. “Far more likely. One thing is quite clear, though: The doctors and nurses there are all utterly on edge. You can sense the fear rolling off them under all that horrid carbolic soap. Believe me, they aren’t going to talk to a foreigner or anyone else about what happened, no matter what kind of in-ducement is offered to them.”

Smith thought that over. If the hospital was a dead end, he was going to have to explore other angles. From what Petrenko had said, it sounded as though the Kremlin orders quashing talk about the strange deaths came later—after the mini-epidemic had run its lethal course. Before then, the hospital’s doctors had been trying everything in their power to diagnose and treat their sick patients. Even though the Russian hadn’t explicitly mentioned doing so, he was willing to bet that Petrenko and his colleagues had shared the data they had gathered with other medical professionals. At least until the Kremlin clamped a lid on the situation. One of the first principles for anyone fighting an unknown disease was to spread the information across a wide spec-trum, bringing as much competent brainpower and lab time as possible to bear on solving its deadly mysteries.

Well, Smith knew people in some of the leading Russian medical and scientific institutions—top-notch scientists who were sure to have been consulted about this illness. Sure, they would have received the same cease-and-desist orders from on high, but with luck he might be able to persuade one or more of them to give him access to their case records or lab test results.

Fiona Devin nodded slowly when he ran that idea past her. “Approaching them could be risky, though,” she pointed out. “You’re masquerading as John Martin, a harmless and inconsequential Canadian social scientist. But you won’t be able to use your cover when dealing with people who already know you by sight and reputation. If just one of them panics and runs off screaming about being approached by Colonel Jonathan Smith, the American military disease specialist, some very loud alarm bells will start ringing inside the Kremlin.”

“True,” Smith agreed quietly. “But I don’t see many other real options, Ms.

Devin.” He pushed his untouched second beer to the side. “You’ve seen the lists of those who’ve been hit with this illness. We really don’t have time for anything subtle or indirect. Somehow I must find a way to make contact with the Russian experts who are likely to have the information we need.”

“Then at least let us run some quick checks on these possible sources first,” she said. “My team and I know the ground here better than you do. Maybe we can weed out those who are too close to Dudarev’s regime—or too openly frightened by it—to be worth questioning.”

“How long will you need for this vetting process?” he asked.

“Several hours, starting from the moment you give me the names and institutional affiliations of those you’re interested in,” Fiona said firmly.

Smith raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That fast?”

She grinned at him. “I really am very good at my job, Colonel. And I’ve got some decent sources, both inside the government and out of it.”

Almost against his will, he found himself grinning back at her. Now that her earlier mood of tightly repressed anger and sorrow had faded, her natural air of buoyant self-confidence had come bubbling back to the surface. It was infectious. “So, how do I get in touch with you again?”

Fiona pulled a business card out of her small handbag and quickly jotted down a telephone number on the back. “You can safely reach me through that secure number, day or night.”

He slipped the card into his shirt pocket.

“In the meantime, I’ll keep the pressure on the Russian medical bureaucracy from my end,” she promised. “I have an interview set up tomorrow morning largely for that very purpose. With Konstantin Malkovic.”

Smith whistled softly. “The financier? The guy who made billions in commodities and currency speculation?”

Fiona nodded. “The very one.”

“He’s an American, isn’t he?”

“A naturalized American,” she agreed. “Much as I am myself, for that matter. But Malkovic is Serbian by birth, and he’s invested heavily in Russian industries over the last several years. He also donates large sums to the charities trying to rebuild this country’s antiquated health care systems. And all of that investing and donating has bought him close ties to these new lads in the Kremlin. No matter how much Dudarev and the other ‘men of power’ long to bring back the old ways, they’re not utter fools. They walk softly around a man with so much money to throw around.”

“And you hope to persuade Malkovic to start asking a few awkward questions of his own about this disease?” Smith guessed.

“Indeed, I do,” Fiona agreed. “He’s said to have quite a temper, and he’s used to getting his own way.” A look of devilish delight danced in her bright blue-green eyes. “So I would very much hate to be the first Russian official forced to refuse his requests.”

Chapter Fourteen

Four requisitioned passenger buses crammed full of Russian soldiers crawled along a narrow, deeply rutted track, an old logging road, slowly winding their way deeper into the pitch-black forest. Overhanging branches scraped loudly along the sides and windows of the darkened vehicles.

Up at the front, Captain Andrei Yudenich crouched beside the driver, holding on to the back of the man’s seat to keep his balance. He peered out through the cracked and dirty windshield, again trying vainly to get a better idea of just where he and the crews of his tank company were being sent. He grimaced, deeply disquieted by recent events.

So far, this twenty-four-hour-long journey from their barracks outside Moscow had been a nightmare of misdirection. Their original orders had sent them south by rail toward Voronezh, ostensibly as the first stage of a battalion-sized deployment to Chechnya. But once there, they had been switched onto another train, this one heading back west to Bryansk. From there, Yudenich and his tank crews had been bundled onto these old buses and sent lumbering off into the woods, following a confusing succession of newly plowed country roads.

A soldier in a white camouflage smock suddenly loomed up ahead, illuminated by the wavering beams of the headlights. He was standing on a mound of snow piled up by the side of the logging road. A bright red armband and glowing baton identified him as a member of the Commandant’s Service—a special Army-level unit that served as field security and traffic control troops.

The white-smocked soldier waved his baton abruptly, pointing imperiously to the right. Obeying his signaled order, the buses turned off the logging track one after the other and rumbled up an even narrower path, one newly hacked out of the forest, judging by the fresh-cut stumps visible on either side.

Frowning openly now, Yudenich clung tighter to the back of the driver’s seat, swaying up and down as the heavy vehicle bounced through deep ruts.

Several minutes later, they pulled into a clearing and stopped.

More field security troops in red armbands, with assault rifles held ready, swarmed around the buses, shouting, “All out! Everyone out! Move! Move!”

Yudenich was the first one through the open doors. He dropped lightly onto the rock-hard, frozen earth of the clearing and then saluted the nearest officer—a captain like himself. His tank crews tumbled out of the buses behind him, hurriedly forming up in ranks under the chivying of their sergeants and his lieutenants.

‘Tour orders?” the other man snapped.

Wordlessly, Yudenich dug the thick sheaf of papers out of the breast pocket of his field jacket.

The other captain flipped them open and studied them in the light of a small shielded flashlight held by an orderly. “I see that you’re part of the Fourth Guards Tank Division,” he commented. He handed the orders back and then studied a list on his clipboard. “Right. You and your company are posted to Cantonment Fifteen, Barracks Tents Four through Eight.”

“Cantonment Fifteen?” Yudenich asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.

“Off through the trees over there, Captain,” the other man said tiredly, nodding toward the forest beyond the clearing. “You’ll be guided.”

Obediently, Yudenich looked in that direction. His mouth fell open. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, he could see that they were standing on the outskirts of an enormous military encampment, one built right in among the trees. Huge panels of infrared-and radar-absorbent camouflage netting were strung overhead, and coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see, apparently encircling the whole camp. Teams of heavily armed guards —Interior Ministry troops by their uniforms —and growling dogs nervously prowled the perimeter.

“What the devil is going on here?” he asked quietly.

“You’ll be briefed when you need to know,” the captain told him. He shrugged. “Until then, you communicate only through your own chain-of-command. Clear?”

Yudenich nodded.

“Good,” the other man said grimly. “And make sure your boys don’t go wandering off. Anyone who crosses the perimeter without authorization gets a bullet in the neck and a shallow grave hacked out of the snow and frozen mud. No formal court-martial. No appeals. No mercy. Understand?”

Yudenich nodded again, shivering suddenly under his heavy camouflage jacket.

Erich Brandt stepped off the steep escalator and walked into the vast, echoing underground hall of the Novokuznetskaya Metro station. Throngs of tired-looking shift workers heading home surged around him. Even this late at night, subway trains rumbled loudly through the tunnels, arriving and departing in warm gusts of oil-scented air every two or three minutes. Moscow’s underground railway system was the best in the world, carrying nearly nine million passengers a day—more than the London Underground and New York’s subways put together. And in contrast to the dreary utilitarian hubs of the West, many of the Metro stations were gems of art and architecture. As a means of demonstrating the growing power and culture of the now-dead Soviet Union, each had been built in marble and decorated with sculptures, carved reliefs, mosaics, and enormous hanging chandeliers.

For an instant, Brandt stood still, eyeing the khaki-colored bas-reliefs lining the walls. They depicted soldiers and military leaders, ranging from stout Mar-shal Kutusov, who had fought Napoleon at Austerlitz and Borodino, to panels caned to show heroic Second World War Soviet Naval Infantrymen leaping ashore from assault boats to join the climactic battle at Stalingrad. On the high curved ceiling overhead, occasional mosaics showed smiling factory workers and farmers reveling in their happy, idyllic lives as servants of the Communist State.

The big, blond-haired man snorted wryly. The Novokuznetskaya station had been constructed in 1943, at the height of the brutal Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany. Its art celebrated certain victory over Hitler and his fascist minions. Trust Alexei Ivanov to choose this as a place to meet his unwelcome East German colleague. For all his reputed subtlety as a spymaster, the head of the Thirteenth Directorate had a blunt, heavy-handed sense of humor.

After a moment, Brandt spotted the gray-haired Russian intelligence chief sitting calmly on a marble bench and went straight over to sit beside him.

Both men were much the same height.

“Herr Brandt,” Ivanov said quietly.

“I have the special HYDRA variant you requested,” Brandt told him.

“Show me.”

The blond-haired man opened his briefcase, revealing a small, soda-can-sized thermos. With his thick leather gloves still on, he unsealed the metal cylinder in a puff of vapor, pulled out a small vial full of clear frozen liquid, and then handed it over.

Ivanov held the vial up to the light. “A lingering death with so innocent an appearance. Remarkable,” he murmured. Then he glanced at his companion.

“But how can I be sure that this tube contains anything more lethal than ordinary tap water?”

“In all candor, you cannot. Not without using it against the intended target. You will have to trust me.”

The head of the Thirteenth Directorate smiled grimly. “Trust is not something I grant easily to anyone, Herr Brandt. Especially not with more than a million euros’ worth of state funds involved.”

The ex-Stasis officer returned the same thin, cold smile. “That is understandable, but unavoidable. You asked for a means of ensuring the continued cooperation of my employer—or for taking vengeance on him should that prove necessary. Renke and I have met your request. Whether you believe us or not is up to you. Under the circumstances, our price is entirely reasonable.”

Ivanov grunted. “Very well, you’ll have your money. I’ll authorize the second wire transfer to Switzerland tonight.” He held the vial up to the light again

and then looked narrowly at Brandt. “What if our scientists instead used the material this contains to reverse-engineer the HYDRA technology? Then we would no longer need you, Professor Renke, or your master.”

“You could try that, I suppose.” The blond-haired man shrugged his massive shoulders. “But Renke assures me that such an attempt would inevitably fail. Your researchers would only recover a few broken fragments of unusable genetic material drifting in a sea of dying bacteria.”

The head of the Thirteenth Directorate nodded slowly. “A pity.” He slid the vial back into the thermos. The thermos itself went into his own coat pocket.

Brandt said nothing.

“One thing more, Herr Brandt,” Ivanov said abruptly. “I want your personal assurance that your security for HYDRA is still intact. Now that we are entering the final phases of our own military preparations, absolute secrecy is vital.

The Americans and their allies must not discover what is about to happen.”

“Both Kiryanov and Petrenko are dead,” Brandt said flatly, hiding his concerns about the missing Colonel Jon Smith. “There are no other outstanding threats to HYDRA,” he lied.

“Good.” Ivanov smiled again, but his dark brown eyes were completely de-void of any warmth or amusement. “And you understand that we will hold you personally responsible for any failure?”

Brandt nodded tightly, feeling droplets of sweat beginning to form on his forehead. “Yes.”

“Then I bid you good night, my friend.” The gray-haired chief of the Thirteenth Directorate rose heavily to his feet. “For now we have nothing more to discuss.”

Chapter Fifteen

Warm in her full-length, fur-lined coat, Fiona Devin came out of the Borovit-skaya Metro station and turned south. She walked carefully along the icy pavement, moving gracefully around the other pedestrians on their way to work in the lingering darkness. Though it was morning by the clock, the long winter night still gripped the city. Not far ahead, a large mansion rose above the street, set on a massive stone base. Pillars and ornate carvings decorated the building’s white facade and a perfectly proportioned rotunda topped its roof. To the east, Moscow’s streets and other buildings fell away, sloping downhill toward the red walls and towers of the Kremlin.

She smiled narrowly to herself. She was not surprised that Konstantin Malkovic had set up shop in one of the Russian capital’s most beautiful and conspicuous locations. The Serbian-born billionaire was famous for both his self-aggrandizement and his lavish spending. This mansion, Pashkov House, had been built in the late eighteenth century for a fantastically wealthy Russian officer, Captain Pyotr Pashkov, a man determined to own the grandest private home in all of Moscow, one perched on a hillside overlooking the Kremlin itself. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the building had become an annex of the adjoining Russian State Library, the repository of roughly forty million precious books, periodicals, and photographs.

Shortly after deciding to make Moscow one of the centers of his global business empire, Malkovic had donated more than twenty million dollars to help restore the sagging fortunes of the aging and antiquated Russian archives. One of the strings attached to his grant had been permission to set up a suite of offices on the top floor of the Pashkov House. Protests by a few architectural purists had fallen on newly rich and newly deaf official ears.

Bells from the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, recently rebuilt after its destruction by Stalin, began pealing, echoing across the surrounding neighborhoods. It was just after nine. Her interview with the billionaire was scheduled to begin in ten minutes.

Moving faster now, Fiona strode up the broad stone steps and into the main hallway. There a bored-looking functionary checked her name against the register and directed her up the main interior staircase. Two unsmiling security guards waiting at the top carefully examined her identification, closely studied her camera and tape recorder, and then motioned her through a set of detectors, checking her for weapons and traces of explosives.

A second pair of employees, both pretty young women, took her in tow.

Speaking politely in hushed tones, they briskly ushered her through the busy semi-chaos of a large outer office full of desks, computers, and people entering data or issuing buy and sell orders for stock markets across Europe. One of the women took her coat and vanished. The other escorted her into a slightly smaller, immaculately decorated room —Konstantin Malkovic’s private office.

Along one wall, three tall windows offered a spectacular view of the Kremlin’s floodlit walls, turrets, and golden domes. Centuries-old Russian Orthodox religious icons, priceless originals, stood in niches built around the rest of the room, carefully lit by recessed lights shining down from the high, intricately painted ceiling. A thick Persian rug covered the floor in muted splen-dor. Malkovic’s elegant eighteenth-century desk faced away from the windows. A flat-screen computer and a set of slim, ultramodern phones seemed to be the room’s only concession to the twenty-first century.

The billionaire himself rose to his feet from behind his desk and came around it to greet her with an outstretched hand. “Welcome, Ms. Devin! Welcome!” he said, smiling broadly, revealing a full set of perfect white teeth.

“I’m a great admirer of your work. That last article in The Economist—the one on the competitive advantages of Russia’s flat tax system—was particularly good.”

“You’re far too kind, Mr. Malkovic,” she said calmly, taking the offered hand and smiling back. She recognized this effusiveness as one of the routine tactics he employed on those whom he hoped to influence. “After all, I only wrote a few thousand words of analysis about its likely effects. But I’ve been told that you had a hand in crafting the new tax code itself?”

He shrugged. “A hand? Nothing so direct.” His eyes twinkled. “Oh, perhaps I spoke a word here. And perhaps another small word there. Nothing excessive, though. As a mere man of business, I never interfere too deeply in any nation’s domestic politics.”

Fiona let the polite fiction pass unchallenged. According to her sources, this man could no more resist meddling in political affairs than could a starv-ing lion lie down quietly beside a nice fat lamb.

Malkovic was taller than she had expected, with a mane of thick white hair left long on top but cropped short at the sides and neck. High cheekbones and pale blue eyes marked his Slavic ancestry. The clipped tones and slightly flattened vowels of his English reflected the years he had spent in Britain and America, first as a student at Oxford and Harvard and later as a wildly successful businessman, investor, and commodities speculator.

“Please, do sit down,” he told her, indicating one of the two embroidered armchairs set at angles in front of his desk.

When Fiona took one, Malkovic sat down casually in the other. “Some tea first, perhaps?” he asked. “It’s still quite cold outside, or so I understand. I came in very early this morning myself—several hours ago, actually. The world financial markets, alas, follow an unholy schedule in our day and age.”

“Thank you, yes. Tea would be lovely,” she said, hiding her amusement at hearing his scarcely veiled boast about the long hours that he worked.

Almost immediately, another of Malkovic’s secretaries brought in a tray with a sterling silver samovar, two tall clear glasses, and two small crystal bowls, one containing slices of fresh lemon, the other a dollop of jam to sweeten the strong tea. The woman poured for them and then left quietly and quickly.

“And now to business, Ms. Devin,” he said amiably, after they had both taken a few cautious sips of steaming tea. “My staff tells me that you are especially interested in the role I see for myself and my companies here in the new Russia.”

Fiona nodded again. “That’s quite right, Mr. Malkovic,” she replied, settling down into a familiar role, that of a journalist in search of a good story.

It was not difficult. Over the past several years, she had built a well-deserved reputation as a talented, hard-hitting reporter. She specialized m following and explaining the often-complicated interaction of Russian politics and economics. Her work appeared regularly in leading newspapers and business journals around the globe. Conducting this interview — with the largest and most influential private investor in Russian industry—would have been a natural for her, even without her ultimate interest in using the billionaire as one more means of prying open the secrets of the state medical bnreaucrac v tor Covert-One.

And, on the surface at least, Malkovic himself was an easv man to interview. Ever-charming and apparently perfectly relaxed, he answered her questions about his plans and business dealings readily and without evident evasion, choosing only to dodge a few probes that even she realized were too personally intrusive or that might reveal closel) held propnetan information useful to his competitors.

Nevertheless, Fiona sensed that the billionaire was always m hill control of himself. He chose his words with precision, plainly determined to influence the way she saw him and the wav he would appear to her readers whenever this interview was published. She shrugged inwardly. This was the great game, the eternal dance for any journalist—especially a freelancer working without the clout provided by a major newspaper, magazine, or television network.

Ask too many tough questions and your subjects refused to speak to you again.

Ask too few and you wound up writing puff pieces that could have been churned out by any second-rate public relations firm.

Slowly and carefully she brought the conversation around toward politics, focusing delicately on the growing authoritarianism of the Dudarev government. “Surely you see the risks of arbitrary rule to any investor, especially a foreign investor?” Fiona said at last. “I mean, you’ve seen what happened to the owners of the Yukos oil cartel —prison for some, disgrace for the rest, and the forced sale of all their holdings. Every dollar or euro you invest here could be snatched away by Kremlin decree in the blink of an eve. It laws or regulations can be made and unmade at the whim of a few, how can you plan ra-tionally for the future?”

Malkovic shrugged expansively. “There are always risks in anv venture, Ms. Devin,” he said genially “Believe me, I know that very well. But I am a man who looks to the long-term, beyond the shallow day-to-day twists and turns of fortune. For all its many faults, Russia remains a land of great opportunity. When Communism collapsed, this country gave itself over to capitalist excess—to its own Gilded Age of greedy tycoons and business oligarchs. So now, quite naturally, the pendulum has swung back a bit in reaction, toward tighter state control over life and politics. But that same pendulum will eventually swing back toward the moderate middle. And those of us who were wise enough to stand by Russia through the difficult times will reap enormous rewards when that day comes.”

“You seem very confident of that,” she said quietly.

“I am confident,” the billionaire agreed. “Remember, I know President Dudarev personally. He is no saint, but I believe that he is a man determined to give this countrv the law and order it craves. To restore a sense of discipline and decency. To break the power of the Mafiya and make the streets of Moscow and other cities safe again.”

He raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I would have thought that you, of all people, would appreciate the vital importance of that, Ms. Devin. Your husband’s untimely death was a great tragedy. It would not have occurred in a society better able to safeguard the lives and property of its citizens —the kind of society I believe Russia’s new leaders honestly hope to build here.”

For a moment, Fiona stared back at Malkovic without speaking, aware of a wave of cold anger rising behind her tightly controlled features. Even after two years, the memories of Sergei’s murder were still very much a raw wound in her psyche. To hear the subject raised so casually, especially as a rhetorical prop for Dudarev’s growing tyranny, seemed a kind of grotesque sacrilege.

“I helped bring my husband’s killers to justice myself,” she said at last, speaking with a calm, even voice that masked her true feelings. For months, she had hunted those who ordered her husband’s death, piecing together evidence of their crimes at considerable risk to her own life. In the end, the public outcry she raised by her articles had forced the authorities to take action.

The men most responsible were now serving long prison sentences.

“So you did,” Malkovic agreed. “And I followed your courageous crusade against the Mafiya with great admiration. But even you must admit that your task would have been easier if the police here were less corrupt, more efficient, and better disciplined.”

Fiona hid a frown. Why was the billionaire suddenly throwing her husband’s murder back in her face? This man never said anything without a purpose, so what was his goal in trying to force her off-balance now? Was this his way of warning her off the uncomfortable subject of Russia’s gradual slide back to a police state? Was he trying to distract her from asking any more inconvenient or embarrassing questions about his business connections to the Dudarev regime?

If so, she would have to move quickly, before he decided to cut this interview short on one pretense or another. “There may be worse things than police corruption and incompetence,” she told him. “This growing cult of official secrecy, for example—secrecy I consider to be obsessive, unnecessary, and even dangerous. Especially when it concerns a serious matter of public health and safety.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not quite following you, Ms. Devin. To what ‘cult of secrecy’ are you referring?”

Fiona shrugged. “What else would you call trying to hide the news of a deadly new disease, not only from the Russian people themselves, but also from the world’s public health agencies?”

“A new disease?” Malklovie leaned forward, suddenly wholly intent. His eyes were troubled. “Go on,” he said quietly.

He listened carefully while she ran through the gist of what she and Smith had learned separately from Kiryanov and Petrenko, though she concealed her knowledge that the two doctors had been murdered. Or that this mysterious ailment was now spreading outside Russia itself. When she finished, he pursed his lips in dismay. “Do you have any evidence to confirm these rumors of a strange new illness?”

“Evidence? Not yet. None of the other doctors involved will talk to me and all of the important records are under lock and key,” Fiona said, shaking her head. She frowned again. “But you see the danger, I hope. One way or another the word is bound to leak out. If the Kremlin —or even just an official in the Ministry of Health —is covering up the beginning of a new epidemic in a foolish attempt to avoid public panic or international embarrassment, the con-sequences could be catastrophic.”

Malkovic grimaced. “Indeed. The economic and political costs could be horrendous. The world community and the financial markets would not easily forgive a nation caught hiding something that might turn out to be another epidemic as bad as AIDS—or worse.”

“I was thinking more of the possible cost in human lives,” Fiona said softly.

A wintry smile touched his lips, “‘louche, Ms. Devin,” he said. “I stand, or rather, sit rebuked.” He looked at her with a new measure of respect. “So what is it that you really want of me? I assume all of your questions earlier were simply window dressing, a means of maneuvering our conversation onto the question of this apparent medical cover-up.”

“Not entirely,” she said, blushing very slightly. “But yes, I am hoping that you’ll exert your influence with the appropriate ministries to shed some light on this mystery disease.”

“So you expect me to help von break open this story, this news scoop of yours?” Malkovic asked drily. “Out of the pure goodness of my own heart?”

Fiona smiled back at him, intentionally matching the billionaire’s wry expression. “You are famous for vour philanthropy, Mr. Malkovic,” she said.

“But even if you were not, I suspect that you are quite adept at measuring the value of good publicity.”

“And the cost of bad publicity, too,” he said with a brief, sardonic laugh.

Then he shook his large head slowly in a gesture of surrender. “Very well. Ms.

Devin, I will do what I can to pry open a few official doors for you, even if only in my own best interests.”

“Thank you,” she told him, closing her notebook and rising gracefully to her feet. “That would be most kind. Your staff knows how to contact me.”

“No thanks are necessary,” Malkovic said, politely standing up with her. A dour expression settled on his face. “If what von have told me this morning is true, we may both be acting in time to remedy a terrible, almost unforgivable mistake.”

Jon Smith followed a path heading deeper into the quiet, tree-lined square called Patriarch’s Pond. His shoes crunched softly on the icy snow still covering the walkway. There were very few other sounds. This far in among the trees the roar of traffic from the busy Sadovaya Ring road was muted, reduced to a faint hum. In the distance, children laughed and shouted, busy building forts and hurling clumps of snow at each other among the white-covered shapes of playground equipment. Strange sculptures, distorted images of creatures popular in nineteenth-century Russian fables, peered out at him from between tree trunks and bare, twisted branches.

He reached the edge of the large, shallow ice-covered pond at the center of the square and stopped for a moment, standing with his hands in his pockets as some protection against the below-zero temperatures. In the summer, this small, secluded patch of parkland was a favorite picnic spot for Muscovites, full of smiling crowds, sunlight, and singing. On this gray, overcast winter day,

it showed a gloomier, more desolate face.

“The devil appeared here once, you know,” a woman’s voice said lightly from behind him.

Smith turned his head.

Fiona Devin stood not far away, framed between two leafless lime trees.

Her cheeks were flushed in the cold and she wore a stylish fur hat atop her dark hair. She drew nearer.

“The devil?” Smith asked. “Literally or figuratively?”

Amusement glinted in her blue-green eyes. “Fictionally, only. Or so one hopes.” She nodded toward the pond. “The writer Mikhail Bulgakov set the first scene of his classic The Master and Margarita at this place. In it, Satan himself arrives right here, ready for a romp through the atheist Moscow of Stalin’s era.”

Smith shivered suddenly, from the cold seeping through the lining of his black wool coat, or so he hoped. “What a great place for a rendezvous, then,” he said with a quick grin. “Frozen, bleak, and cursed. We’ve hit the perfect Russian trifecta. Now all that’s missing is a sleigh and a pack of howling wolves hot on our trail.”

Fiona chuckled. “Soulful pessimism complete with gallows humor, Colonel? You may fit in here better than I thought.” She moved closer, coming right up to stand beside him at the edge of the snow-covered pavement. The top of her head came up to his shoulder. “My people have finished vetting that list of doctors and scientists you gave me,” she said abruptly, lowering her voice. “Now I’m ready to brief you.”

Surprised, Smith whistled tunelessly under his breath. “And?”

“Tour safest and surest bet is Dr. Elena Vedenskaya,” she said firmly.

Smith nodded slowly. Just as with Petrenko, he had met Vedenskaya at different medical conferences over the past several years. He had a vague memory of a rather plain, prim woman somewhere in her early fifties —a woman whose skill, dedication, and competence had carried her right to the top of her male-dominated profession. Vedenskaya now headed the Cytol-ogy, Genetics, and Molecular Biology department at the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology. Since that was one of Russia’s top scientific institutions for the study of infectious disease, she was sure to have been involved in trying to identify the mystery illness whose origins they were now tracking.

“Is there any particular reason that you think I can trust her?” he asked.

“There is,” Fiona told him. “Dr. Vedenskaya has a good record as a friend of democracy and political reform,” she said quietly. “Going all the way back to her student days when Brezhnev and the other Communist Party bosses ruled the Kremlin roost.”

Smith looked at her sharply. “Then she must have a KGB/FSB security dossier as long as my arm. With the Kremlin keeping tabs on suspect scientists, she’ll be right at the head of their surveillance list.”

“She would be,” Fiona agreed. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Fortunately, her file no longer reflects reality. As far as the FSB is now aware, Elena

Vedenskaya is a thoroughly reliable and apolitical servant of the State.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. “Somebody cleaned out her dossier? Mind telling me how that little miracle of excision took place?”

“I’m afraid that’s on a strictly need-to-know basis, Colonel,” Fiona told him calmly. “And you do not need to know. For quite obvious reasons.”

He nodded, accepting the mild reproof. “Fair enough,” he said. “How do you suggest I contact her? Through the Institute?”

“Definitely not,” she said. “It’s highly likely that all landline calls into Moscow hospitals and research facilities are being monitored.” She passed him a small slip of paper with a ten-digit number written in a neat, feminine hand. “Fortunately, Vedenskaya has an unlisted cell phone.”

“I’ll call her this afternoon,” Smith decided. “And try to set up a dinner meeting for tonight, at some restaurant well away from her lab. Making this look like a purely social call between old colleagues seems the safest way to approach her.”

“Sensible,” Fiona agreed. “But make the reservation for three.”

“You’re planning on coming?”

“I am,” she said. One side of her mouth tilted upward in an impish smile.

“Unless, that is, you were hoping to woo the good doctor with your masculine charm.”

Smith reddened. “Not exactly.”

Her smile grew wider. “Very wise, Colonel.”

One hundred meters away, two men sat in the front seat of a silver BMW

parked along the side of a narrow street. One, a German named Wegner, leaned forward, taking pictures through the dark, tinted windshield with a digital camera equipped with a high-powered telephoto lens. The other entered a series of commands into the small portable computer perched on his lap.

“I’ve got a connection,” the second man announced. His name was Chernov and he had served as a junior officer in the old KGB. “I can send the images whenever you’re ready.”

“Good,” his companion grunted. He snapped another quick set of pictures and then lowered the camera. “That should do it.”

“Any idea who the man is?”

The cameraman shrugged. “None. But we’ll let someone else puzzle that out. In the meantime, we stick to our orders: Follow the woman Devin and report any and all contacts she makes.”

Chernov nodded sourly. “I know. I know. But this is getting too risky. I thought you’d lost her for good on the Metro this morning. I had to drive like a madman just to pick up your trail and hers.” He frowned. “I don’t like it.

She’s asking too many questions. We should just terminate her.”

“Kill a journalist? An American?” the man with the camera said coldly.

“Herr Brandt will have to make that decision himself—when the time comes.”

Not far away, a tall, barrel-chested man stood, slowly rocking back and forth in the shelter of a doorway. He wrapped his arms around himself, hug-ging his shabby coat tighter for warmth. His pants were faded and patched. At first glance, he seemed to be nothing more than one of the many poverty-stricken old-age pensioners who often wandered Moscow’s streets in an alco-holic daze. But beneath his bushy, silver eyebrows, the tall man’s gaze was clear, even penetrating. He frowned, carefully memorizing the BMW’s license plate. This situation was growing more complicated and dangerous at a dizzying pace, he thought grimly.

Chapter Sixteen

Thick clouds rolled west through the slowly darkening skies above the elaborate spires of the Kotelnicheskaya high-rise. A few tresh Hakes of snow spun through the air, brushing gently against the windows of the Brandt Group’s penthouse office suite. Krich Brandt himself stood at the window, looking down through the lightly falling snow at the busy city streets far below.

He could feel the tension growing in his thick neck and powerful shoulders. He had always disliked these periods of enforced idleness —the time spent waiting for subordinates to report or for superiors to issue new orders.

Part of him craved the physical and emotional release of action, reveling in sudden violence as though it were a drug. But years spent stalking enemies, first for the Stasi and then later for his own pleasure and profit, had taught him both the necessity and the means of controlling those cruder instincts.

He swung around at the sound of a rap on his open door. “Yes!” he snapped. “What is it?”

One of his subordinates, like him a former Stasi officer, came in carrying a file folder. The slim, hatchet-faced man looked worried. “I think we have a new security breach,” he said tightly. “A serious one.”

Brandt frowned slightly. Gerhard Lange was not ordinarily a man prone to a show of nerves. “In what way?”

“These were transmitted by the team conducting surveillance on that American reporter,” Lange told him, opening the folder and fanning out a set of black-and-white images across his desk. They showed the American woman talking animatedly with a lean, dark-haired man. “Those pictures were taken roughly two hours ago, during what appeared to be a clandestine rendezvous at Patriarch’s Pond.”

“And?”

“See for yourself.” Lange slid another document across the desk. “This was just faxed by one of our informants.”

The sheet was a summary of a U.S. Army service record—that of Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith, M.D. It included a blurry, slightly-out-of-focus photograph.

Brandt stared down at the picture. Silently, he compared it to the images taken by his surveillance team. He scowled. There was no possible doubt. This was the same man. Smith was in Moscow—and he was in contact with the freelance journalist whose persistent inquiries were causing them concern.

The blond-haired man shivered slightly. Despite his solemn pledge to Alexei Ivanov, HYDRA’s operational security was continuing to fray around the edges.

He looked up from the damning pictures. “Where is Smith staying?”

Lange shook his head wearily. “That is our first problem. We don’t know.

We’ve checked the passenger manifests from every airport and railway station in the Moscow region. His name does not appear on any of them.”

Brandt sat down behind his desk. “So Smith arrived here under a cover identity,” he mused. “And he is using forged documents that were solid enough to deceive the Russian immigration authorities.”

“Almost certainly,” Lange agreed. “Which makes him a spy, either for the CIA or for one of the other American intelligence organizations.”

The blond-haired man nodded grimly. “So it seems.”

“The FSB could help us,” Lange suggested tentatively. “If we had access to the Interior Ministry’s passport registration forms for the past couple of days, we could run a search program to cross-index Smith’s picture with — “

“And hand our Russian friends the excuse they need to take over this end of the HYDRA operation?” Brandt shook his head. “No, Gerhard. We’ll manage this matter ourselves. I do not want the FSB, especially Ivanov’s Thirteenth Directorate, involved in any way, shape, or form. Not yet. Clear?”

Lange nodded reluctantly. “Clear enough.”

“Good.” Brandt glanced through the photos taken by his surveillance team again. He tapped one showing the two Americans deep in conversation. “This journalist, Ms. Devin, is the key to finding Smith. He’s contacted her once.

He’s almost sure to do so again. Where is she right now?”

The other man shrugged gloomily. “That’s our second problem. We’ve lost her.”

Brandt stared back at him. “Lost her? How?”

“After meeting Smith, she led Wegner and Chernov on a merry chase across half of Moscow,” Lange reported. “First by doubling back on different Metro lines a couple of times, and then finally by ducking into the shops inside the Petrovskiy Passage. They think she may have changed her hat or coat to alter her appearance and then slipped away unnoticed in the crowds.”

Brandt nodded stiffly. In a city this size, there were any number of ways to shake off a tail —if you knew you were being followed and if you knew what you were doing.

“They’re headed back to her flat, hoping to regain contact,” Lange went on carefully. “But she may have gone to ground.”

“Quite probably,” Brandt growled. He frowned. “Two years ago, she managed to elude several Mafiya hit teams, all while operating on her own. This woman may be an amateur, but she is most assuredly not a fool. She probably spotted Wegner and Chernov following her. By now, she’s undoubtedly safely tucked away in a hotel somewhere, or staying with friends.”

Lange sighed. “If so, we’re left with no effective way to track down Smith.

Whether you like it or not, we will have to request assistance from the Thirteenth Directorate.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Brandt said, thinking hard. “We have an alternative.”

The other man looked puzzled.

“Smith is here for a purpose,” Brandt reminded him. “And we know what that purpose must be, correct?”

Lange nodded slowly. “He’s trying to learn what Petrenko wanted to tell him in Prague. Or worse, gather evidence to verify what Petrenko did tell him.”

“Exactly.” Brandt showed his teeth. “Tell me, Gerhard, what is the best way to hunt a wild animal, especially a dangerous predator?”

His subordinate said nothing.

“Water is the key,” Brandt told him. “All animals must drink. So you find its watering place and then yon wait, with your rifle at the reach, for the creature to come to yon.”

I le pushed aside the surveillance photos and Smith’s service record and paged through the materials stacked neatly on his desk, looking for a printout of the most recent message from Wnlf Renke. The scientist had sent him the list he had asked for at their last meeting —the names of the other doctors and scientists in Moscow whose knowledge of the first HYDRA onthreak could prove dangerous.

Brandt handed Renke’s list to Lange with a thin-lipped smile. “Somewhere on here is the American’s watering hole. Focus first on anyone who attended international conferences where they might have met Colonel Smith. Sooner or later, he will have to contact one of those men or women. And when he does, we’ll be there ahead of him, waiting to make our kill.”

Located on the shared border of the New Arbat and Tverskaya districts, the Kafe Karetny Dvor occupied a charming older building, a rare survivor ot the drab concrete excesses of Soviet-era urban redevelopment. The Moscow Zoo and another of Stalin’s mammoth “Seven Sisters,” the Kudrinskava apartment high-rise, were close by, just on the other side of the wide Sadovaya Ring road. On hot summer evenings, the restaurant’s patrons sat outside in its shaded interior courtyard, eating salads and drinking wine or vodka or beer.

In colder weather, customers savored the spicy Azerbaijani cuisine served in its intimate, warm, and cheerful dining rooms filled with green, hanging plants.

Seated in a booth in a far corner of the main room, Smith saw Fiona Devin come through the front door. She stood poised there for a moment, brushing the snow off her coat while gracefully turning her head, first in one direction and then another, obviously looking for him. Relieved, he rose to his feet.

With a casual nod, she headed in his direction, striding nimbly through the crowded, smoke-filled restaurant.

“I presume this is your companion, at long last,” Flena Vedenskaya said calmly, watching this attractive, elegantly dressed woman approach with dark, expressionless eyes. She stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up to greet Fiona just as she joined them.

In appearance, the Russian research scientist was as plain as Smith had remembered. Her narrow, lined face, pallid skin, and stiff, iron-gray hair pinned up in a tight bun made her look at least ten years older than she really was.

Her drab skirt and blouse were clearly chosen more for comfort and convenience than for style. Still, her mind was just as sharp and incisive as he had recalled, and here in her home city she showed few traces of the reserved shy-ness he had observed at their last encounter—a molecular biology conference in Madrid.

“Ms. Devin, this is Dr. Elena Borisovna Vedenskaya,” Smith said, carefully introducing them formally.

The two women nodded to each other coolly, but politely, and then sat down, choosing opposite ends of the semicircular booth. After a brief hesitation, Smith slid into the side closest to Vedenskaya. Without demur she moved over to the middle, making room for him.

“I’m sorry I’m late, Jon,” Fiona said quietly. “I ran into a few … complications. Somewhere along the way I picked up a pair of unwelcome guests— door-to-door salesmen, I think—that I wanted to avoid.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. In Covert-One voice code the term “door-to-door salesmen” was used to describe a hostile surveillance operation aimed at the agent. “These guys weren’t selling anything you were interested in?” he asked, choosing his words carefully to avoid spooking the Russian doctor sitting beside him.

“No. At least, I don’t think so,” Fiona told him. Her voice betrayed just the slightest hint of uncertainty. “It’s possible they were only paying me a routine visit. There are a lot of pushy salesmen around Moscow these days.”

Smith nodded his understanding. As Dudarev and his cronies tightened their control over Russia, journalists, especially foreign journalists, were increasingly subject to random, and often painfully obvious, police and FSB surveillance. It was a method the authorities used to distract and intimidate the media without imposing more overt restrictions that might draw protests from the outside world.

They all fell silent as a youthful pair of smiling waiters arrived, each bearing a tray of plates and bowls heaped with food. Working with practiced efficiency, the servers set these dishes out across the table and departed. A third waiter, older than the others, followed right on his companions’ heels bringing their drinks: a bottle of slightly fizzy Moskovskaya vodka and another containing sweetened apple juice.

“To save time, we ordered before you arrived,” Dr. Vedenskaya told Fiona.

The gray-haired woman raised a quizzical eyebrow. “I hope this was all right?”

“Quite all right,” Fiona replied with an answering smile. “I don’t know about anyone else, but personally I’m absolutely famished.”

Delicious aromas wafted up from the array of dishes laid before them. Suddenly ferociously hungry, the three of them took turns serving themselves, choosing from a wide assortment of Azeri specialties. Some plates held steaming slivers of satsivi, chicken breasts marinated in a creamy garlic sauce. Others were piled with sweet peppers stuffed with a mixture of minced lamb, mint, fennel, and cinnamon. There were also small bowls of dovgra, a thick, hot soup made with yogurt, rice, and spinach. While they were finishing these starters, more dishes arrived, mostly various shasliks, skewers of lamb, veal, and chicken soaked in onion, vinegar, and pomegranate juice, grilled over glowing embers, and served with thin sheets of lavash, a form of unleavened bread.

With the edge taken off their appetites, Elena Vedenskaya held up a glass of vodka. “Za vashe zdarov’e! Your health!” she said and downed the clear, cold liquor in one large gulp, following it immediately with a chaser of apple juice.

Smith ami Fiona followed her example, savoring a combination oi sharply contrasting flavors that perfectly complemented the highly spiced food they were eating.

“So now,” the Russian scientist said quietly when they set their empty glasses down. “To business.” She looked narrowly at Fiona. “Our mutual friend here,” she nodded at Jon, “tells me that you are a journalist.”

“I am.”

“Then let us understand one another, Ms. Devin,” Vedenskaya said firmly.

“I do not wish my name to appear splashed across the front pages of some lurid tabloid.” She smiled thinly. “Or even a respectable newspaper.”

Fiona nodded easily. “That’s perfectly reasonable.”

“Although I do not like the government that pays my salary, I am very good at my job,” the gray-haired woman continued. “And it is important work. Work that saves lives. So I have no great desire to lose my position unnecessarily.”

Fiona looked across the table at the scientist. “Then I give you my word that I will leave your name out of any story I write,” she said seriously.

“Believe me, Dr. Vedenskaya, I’m far more interested in learning the truth about this mysterious disease than I am in selling the story to a newspaper or magazine.”

“If so, we have at least one thing in common,” the Russian woman said drily. She turned back to Smith. “On the telephone you said that you believed this same illness was now spreading outside Russia.”

He nodded grimly. “Without more data on the first outbreak here, I can’t be absolutely sure, but the symptoms appear identical. And if it is the same unidentified disease, this news blackout ordered by the Kremlin is essentially killing people.”

“Fools! Dolts!” Vedenskaya swore acidly. She pushed her half-filled plate to the side and lit another cigarette, plainly trying to buy a few moments to regain her composure. “This cover-up is an act of criminal folly. I warned the government about the dangers of its decision to keep these strange deaths a secret. So did my colleagues.”

She scowled. “We should have been allowed to consult with the other international health authorities as soon as the first four cases were recognized.”

Her narrow shoulders slumped. “And I should have said something, or done something, to pass the warning on myself. But, then, as weeks passed without anyone else falling ill, I allowed myself to hope that my initial fears of a larger epidemic had been exaggerated.”

“There haven’t been any new cases here in Moscow?” Fiona asked.

The Russian research scientist shook her head firmly. “None.”

“You’re sure?” Smith asked, surprised.

“Quite sure, Jonathan,” Vedenskaya said. “True, the government has forbidden us to reveal the facts of the outbreak to the outside world. But we remain under explicit instructions to continue our own research. The Kremlin is still deeply interested in learning more about this disease: what causes it, how it is transmitted, the methods by which it kills its victims, and for some way to slow or reverse its cruel and inexorable progression.”

“But Valentin Petrenko told me that he’d been ordered to call off his probe into those first four deaths,” Smith said with a frown.

“Yes, that is so,” Vedenskaya agreed. “The hospital investigative teams were shut down, probably to control the flow of information. Instead, all research work surrounding this illness is being conducted in other, higher-level facilities, my BIO-CGM section at the Institute among them.”

“Including the Bioaparat labs?” Smith asked quietly, referring to the collection of heavily guarded science complexes that were said to be the center of Russia’s top-secret biological weapons research. If, as Klein and President Castilla suspected, the Russians were using this strange disease as a weapon, the scientists and technicians working for Bioaparat had to be involved in some way.

The gray-haired woman shook her head gravely. “I do not know what goes on behind the barbed wire at Yekaterinburg, Kirov, Sergiyev Posad, or Strizhi.” Her mouth tightened. “My security clearances do not reach that high.”

Smith nodded his understanding. He frowned, trying vainly to make these new pieces of information fit into the puzzle. If this new illness was a Russian-made weapon, and it was already being used against important people in the West and other countries, why was the Kremlin so insistent that its own top civilian scientists continue their research?

There was a short, uncomfortable silence.

“I brought copies of my case notes as you requested,” Vedenskaya told Smith at last. She prodded the heavy winter coat bundled beside her on the seat. “They’re there, hidden inside a selection of old medical journals. I will give them to you after we leave. It is too public here.”

“Thank you, Elena,” Smith said gravely, with genuine gratitude. He looked sidelong at her. “But what about the blood or tissue specimens taken from the victims? Is there any way you could smuggle samples of those out to us?”

“It would be impossible,” she answered shortly. “Your friends Petrenko and Kiryanov saw to that. All biological specimens are now kept under strict lock and key. No one can obtain them without a signature and signed forms from the Ministry authorizing specific experiments or tests.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us?” Fiona asked at last. “Anything at all?”

Vedenskaya hesitated briefly, looked sideways to make sure no one else was in earshot, and then answered in a lower voice, one that could barely be heard over the loud clatter of dishes and conversation from the rest of the restaurant.

“I heard a rumor, a rumor that greatly disturbed me — “

The two Americans stayed silent, waiting for her to go on.

The Russian woman sighed. “One of the hospital orderlies, a man who had spent main years as a political prisoner in a labor camp, claimed that he saw that madman Wulf Renke examining one of the dying patients.”

Startled, Smith sat up straighten “Renke?” he muttered in disbelief.

“Wulf Renke? Who is he?” Fiona asked.

“An Fast German scientist. Basically, a biological weapons expert with a verv ugh’ reputation for coming up with new and especially nasty ways to kill people,” Smith told her. He shook his head. “But it couldn’t have been him.

Not really. That bastard has been dead for years.”

“So it is said,” Vedenskaya said softly. “But this orderly knew the German well … painfull} well. While a prisoner, he was forced to witness a series of vicious experiments Renke conducted on other inmates at his camp.”

“Where is this man now?” Fiona pressed her. “Can we talk to him?”

“Only if von can summon the spirits of the dead,” the gray-haired woman told her curtly. “Unfortunately, he fell beneath the wheels of a tram —shortly after he began telling the story of what he had seen in the hospital.”

“He fell? Or was he pushed?” Smith wondered grimly.

Vedenskaya shrugged. “They say he was drunk when it happened. For all I know, that could be true. Almost all Russians are drunk at one time or another.” She smiled bitterly through the smoke curling from her cigarette and then tapped her empty vodka glass with a single, tobacco-stained finger.

Outside, the snow flurries were coming down harder now, beginning to cover the heaped mounds of older, smog-blackened snow and ice. Fresh flakes dusted the streets and parked cars, steadily accumulating in a layer of white powder that sparkled faintly under the street lamps and in the wavering beams of passing cars.

Still fastening his thick parka, a young-looking man with a long, slightly crooked nose left the Kafe Karetny Dvor. He stood motionless for a moment, waiting for a break in the evening traffic, and then crossed the street at an angle. Once there, he walked rapidly east along Povarskaya Street, brushing through throngs of pedestrians hurrying along the pavement beneath bobbing umbrellas. Most were loaded down with purchases made during an evening’s shopping among the Arbat District’s trendy boutiques and galleries. He carried his own furled umbrella cradled casually under one arm.

A couple of hundred meters up the street, he paused to light a cigarette, standing right next to a large black luxury sedan idling along the curb. Instantly, the car’s rear side window slid silently down, revealing little of the darkened interior.

“Vedenskaya is still inside the restaurant,” the young man muttered.

“And she is with the two Americans?” a voice from inside the sedan asked quietly.

“Yes. I’ve left one of my men in there to keep an eye on them. He’ll report the moment they get up to leave. From the look of things, I’d say that will be soon.”

“Your team is ready?”

The young man nodded. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. The tip glowed bright red in the darkness. “Perfectly ready.”

Erich Brandt leaned forward slightlv, just far enough so that a tiny bit of light from the street lamps fell across the harsh lines of his square-jawed face.

“Good.” His icy gray eyes gleamed briefly. “Then let us hope Colonel Smith and his friends have enjoyed their meal. After all, it will be their last.”

Chapter Seventeen

Smith held the door open for Fiona Devin and Elena Vedenskaya and then followed them out of the Kafe Karetnv Dvor. After the warmth inside the Azeri restaurant, the freezing night air cut deep, biting through every layer of his

clothing. He gritted his teeth to stop them from chattering and hunched his shoulders, grateful at least for his thick wool coat.

Together they walked a short distance up Povorskaya Street and then stopped in a small huddle on the sidewalk to make their farewells. Other pedestrians edged around them, hurrying onward toward their homes or errands. Occasionally, cars drove past on the street, rumbling by in a procession of bright headlights mixed in with the occasional blare of an angrily honked horn and the faint crunch of studded tires rolling over fresh drifts of new-fallen snow.

“This is for you, Jonathan,” Vedenskaya murmured, reaching into the recesses of her coat and pulling out a thick plastic binder. “Use the information it contains wisely.”

Silently, Smith took the binder and opened it. It was full of dog-eared medical journals, some in English, others in Russian and German. He flipped open the cover of one, a months-old copy of The Lancet. Neatly folded inside were several pages crowded with Cyrillic typescript, evidently a selection of the gray-haired Russian scientist’s case notes. He looked up with a quick, grateful nod, knowing how much she was risking by smuggling these out to him. “Thanks. I’ll make sure this data gets to the right people.”

“That is good. With luck, lives can still be saved.” She looked fiercely at Fiona Devin. “You remember our agreement?”

“I do,” Fiona told her quietlv. “No names will be used in any news article 1

write. Dr. Vedenskaya. Of that vou may be sure.”

The other woman nodded back, this time with an austere smile. “In that case, I shall wish vou well — “

Suddenly she reeled forward, almost knocked off her feet by a man who crashed straight into her from behind. He had been walking too fast, striding with his head well down and his collar turned up against the falling snow. She only saved herself from falling by grabbing Smith’s arm. Angrily, she let go and whirled around. “You there! Watch where you’re going, why don’t you?”

Abashed, the man —young, with a slightly crooked nose —stepped back quickly, “lzvinite! Excuse me!” he muttered. Grinning foolishly, he retrieved the umbrella he had dropped in the collision and reeled off down the street, walking now with exaggerated care.

Vedenskava sniffed, disgusted. “Drunk!” she said. “And this early in the evening! Bah. Alcohol is our national curse. Fven the voung poison themselves.”

“Are you all right?” Smith asked.

Still tight-lipped with anger, she nodded. “Yes. Though I think the lout must have poked me in the leg with that damned umbrella of his,” she said, rubbing at the back of her left thigh. Then she shrugged. “But it’s nothing serious.”

“Still, I think it’s high time we all went our separate ways,” Fiona said worriedly, following the apparent drunk with her own narrowed eyes. “We have what we need. There’s not much point in standing around out here in the open, risking more unwanted attention.”

Smith nodded. “Makes sense.” He turned back to Vedenskaya, patting the binder she had given him. “Look, I’ll keep you posted by private e-mail on what we learn — “

Smith stopped in midsentence. The Russian woman was staring at him with an expression full of horror. “Elena? What is it?” he asked quickly.

“What’s wrong?”

She drew in a single deep, shuddering breath and then choked, gasping for air. Jon could see the muscles in her neck straining as she struggled to speak.

Her eyes were wide open, grotesquely bulging almost out of their sockets, but her pupils were constricted, reduced to tiny black pinpoints. Her knees sagged.

Shocked, Smith reached out.

But before he could catch her, Elena Vedenskaya collapsed, crumpling to the snow-covered pavement like a rag doll. Her arms and legs jerked wildly, flailing and twitching as she writhed, apparently gripped by a series of eerily silent convulsions.

“Call an ambulance! Now!” Smith snapped to Fiona.

“I’m on it.” She nodded crisply, pulled out her phone, and punched in 03, Moscow’s medical emergency number.

Jon dropped to his knees beside the stricken woman. The wild, frenetic spasms were fading, leaving her lying contorted on her back. He set aside the plastic binder, yanked off one of his gloves, and then laid two fingers against her neck, feeling for her pulse. It was very fast and very weak, fluttering like a broken-winged bird. Not good. He leaned forward, putting his ear to her nose and mouth. She was not breathing.

Christ, he thought bleakly. What the hell had just happened to her? A heart attack? Not likely, given what he was seeing. A stroke or seizure? Maybe.

Another, infinitely more frightening possibility flickered vaguely at the back of his mind, but he shook his head, knowing he did not have the time or the information he needed to chase down that fugitive thought. A firm diagnosis would have to wait until later. In the meantime, he had to do his best to keep her alive until the Russian paramedics could arrive.

“One of the hospitals is dispatching an emergency medical team, Colonel,” he heard Fiona Devin report over the babble of shocked voices from a rapidly gathering circle of onlookers. “But it might take five minutes or more to reach us.”

Smith nodded, frowning. Five minutes. For most medical situations, that was a good response time—very good, in fact. But under these circumstances, it might as well be an eternity.

Working fast, he stripped off his coat, bundled it up, and shoved it under the older, gray-haired woman’s shoulders, tilting her head back to help open her airway. Then he pulled her jaw forward with one thumb, shifting her tongue out of the way. He listened again. She was still not breathing. Gently, he turned her head to the side and probed the back of her throat with his fingers, searching for any obstruction, any lump of mucus or bit of food, that could be choking her. There was nothing.

Grim-faced, Smith cradled Elena Vedenskaya’s head in his arms, pinched her nose shut with his fingers, and began rapid mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, blowing hard enough to see her chest rise. Every so often, he paused and put his ear to her mouth and nose again, checking to see if the Russian woman was breathing on her own yet. But she still lay paralyzed, staring up at the sky with eyes that never blinked.

He kept working, forcing air into her lungs. Breathe, Jon willed silently.

Come on, Elena, breathe. Two or three minutes went by in a blur of frantic activity. A siren keened in the distance, drawing closer.

Under his fingertips, Vedenskaya’s pulse faded, staggered on for a few more irregular beats, and then stopped. Hell. He switched to CPR, cardiopul-monary resuscitation, alternating mouth-to-mouth breathing with short, powerful compressions on her sternum in an increasingly frantic effort to restore her breathing and restart her heart. Nothing worked.

Fiona knelt beside him. “Any good?” she asked somberly, carefully speaking in Russian.

Smith shook his head in frustration. “I think she’s gone.”

Several of the bystanders staring down at Vedenskaya overheard them and crossed themselves rapidly, from right to left in the Russian Orthodox manner.

One or two took off their hats in a show of respect for the dead woman. Others began edging away. The drama was over.

“If so, we should leave, Colonel,” Fiona suggested softly. “We really can’t afford any official complications.” She picked up the binder containing Vedenskaya’s case notes from the pavement. “Not now.”

Smith shook his head again, still continuing his CPR. Rationally, he knew that Devin was right. By now, Elena was almost certainly beyond anyone’s help. And getting embroiled in a militia investigation of her death would put them both at risk. For one thing, his John Martin cover was not designed to stand up to intense scrutiny. But he was a doctor first, before he was an intelligence agent. He had an ethical duty to aid this stricken woman. So long as he kept pushing oxygen into her lungs and doing his best to restart her stopped heart, she still had a chance, however slim.

And then, suddenly, it was too late to duck out anyway.

With its siren still wailing, a red-and-white ambulance braked to a stop along the curb. As the siren died away, the rear doors of the vehicle popped open and a slim, sallow-faced man in a rumpled white doctor’s coat jumped out with a black medical bag clutched under one arm. Two burly paramedics scrambled out in his wake.

The doctor waved Smith aside with one dismissive hand and bent down beside the body to conduct his own quick, almost cursory, examination.

Wearily, Jon stood up, brushing the snow off his knees. He looked away from Vedenskaya’s contorted corpse, fighting down a sense of failure and abiding sorrow. Patients died. It happened. But it never got any easier. It always felt like a defeat.

The sallow-faced Russian doctor felt for a pulse. Then he sat back on his heels and shrugged. “Poor woman. It’s much too late. There’s nothing I can do for her.” He nodded to the paramedics standing nearby with a portable stretcher they had pulled out of the ambulance. “Well, go ahead, boys. Get her into the ambulance. Let’s at least get her away from the prying eyes of the morbidly curious.”

The two big men nodded silently and clumsily bent down to begin preparing the body for transport.

Still shaking his head, the white-coated doctor climbed back to his feet.

He turned slowly, contemptuously surveying the small and rapidly shrinking crowd of onlookers. His gaze swung toward the two Americans. “Which of you can tell me what happened to her? A heart attack, I suppose?”

“I don’t think so,” Smith said flatly.

“Why not?”

“She collapsed quite suddenly, suffering convulsions and muscle spasms—within a second or so after experiencing what appeared to be complete respiratory failure,” Smith answered rapidly, running through the symptoms he had noted. “Her pupillary muscles also showed signs of extreme contraction. I tried mouth-to-mouth first, and then CPR when her heart stopped, but unfortunately neither technique produced any beneficial result.”

The doctor raised an eyebrow. “Cogently summarized. I gather you have medical training, Mr. —?”

“Martin. John Martin,” Smith replied stiffly, mentally kicking himself for slipping so naturally and unconsciously into medical jargon that did not fit his cover identity. Clearly, Elena Vedenskaya’s horrifying death had rattled him more than he realized. He shrugged. “No, no medical training. But I have taken a couple of first-aid courses.”

“Only first-aid courses? Really? You show remarkable aptitude.” The doctor smiled in polite disbelief. “Still, it is fortunate that you are here.”

“Oh? In what way?” Smith asked carefully.

“Your training and your observations will be very helpful in filling out my report on this tragic incident, Mr. Martin,” the other man said calmly. He nodded at Fiona Devin. “That is why I must ask you and this charming companion of yours to accompany us to the hospital.”

Fiona frowned.

“Don’t worry, this is only a matter of routine,” the doctor said, holding up a hand to stifle any protests. “I assure you that any inconvenience will be temporary.”

The two paramedics finished strapping the dead woman onto their stretcher and heaved her up between them. “Watch out for her left leg,” Smith heard one of them mutter brusquely to the other. “You don’t want to get any of that stuff on your hands.”

Stuff? Jon felt his blood run ice-cold. He remembered the young “drunk” who had collided with Vedenskaya, “accidentally” jabbing her with the tip of his rolled-up umbrella. Suddenly all the damning symptoms he had cataloged fell into place: respiratory collapse, convulsions, her constricted pupils, and finally, complete heart failure.

Jesus, he thought grimly. She must have been injected with some kind of deadly, fast-acting nerve agent, probably a variant of Sarin or VX. Even a drop of either toxic compound on bare skin could kill. Pumping VX or Sarin directly into the bloodstream would be even more lethal. He looked up quickly and saw the sallow-faced doctor watching him with a cold, calculat-ing expression.

Smith took a step back.

With a slight smile, the white-coated man pulled a small, compact pistol out of his white coat—a Makarov PSM, a Russian-made knockoff of the Walther PPK. He held the weapon down low at his side, aiming straight at the American’s heart. Slowly he shook his head. “I hope that you will resist the temptation to act unwisely, Colonel Smith. Otherwise, we will be forced to kill both von and the lovely Ms. Devin. And that would be a terrible shame, would it not?”

Bitterly angry with himself for missing the warning signs of this ambush.

Smith grimaced. The other man was just outside his reach. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the ambulance driver, as big and hard-eved as the others, had climbed down out of the cab. This man now stood close behind Fiona Devin, holding a pistol pressed hard into the small of her back.

Her face had gone pale, either with anger or fear or a mixture of both emotions.

Smith forced himself to stand verv still. Carefullv, he showed his open, empty hands. “I’m unarmed,” he said tightly.

“A rational decision, Colonel,” the doctor said approvingly. “No one would benefit from any useless heroics.”

The first two paramedics roughly slid Elena Vedenskaya’s blanket-wrapped bodv into the back of the ambulance. They swung away and stood waiting for further orders.

“Into the vehicle, please,” the sallow-laced man said quietly. “Ms. Devin first.”

Numbly, Fiona climbed into the ambulance. The stretcher occupied the central aisle, leaving two narrow benches, one on either side. She scooted down the left-hand bench, going all the way to the end. One of the burly paramedics crowded in after her, dropping heavily onto the bench on the far side. Once seated, he drew his own pistol to keep her covered.

“And now you, Colonel.” The white-coated man nodded inside. “Sit next to Ms. Devin. But make sure you keep your hands in sight at all times. Otherwise, I fear Dmitri might get jumpy and then, sadly, you would end up as dead as poor Dr. Vedenskaya there.”

Still coldly furious with himself, Jon obeyed. He slid down the bench toward Fiona. The dark-haired woman glanced at him with an unreadable expression in her blue-green eyes. She still held the binder containing Vedenskaya’s notes.

“No talking,” the paramedic growled in thickly accented English, emphasizing his order with the muzzle of his pistol.

She shrugged slightly and looked away, saying nothing further.

Smith winced inwardly. Their predicament was largely his fault. If he had not stayed so long in his futile effort to save Elena Vedenskaya’s life, they might have been able to evade this trap before it snapped shut on them.

The slender, sallow-faced doctor scrambled up into the cramped interior and sat down facing the two Americans, squashed up next to his much bigger subordinate. With a slight, cynical smile, he kept his own pistol aimed at Jon’s chest.

The second paramedic and the big, hard-eyed driver slammed the doors shut, sealing the four of them inside.

Moments later, the ambulance lurched into motion. They were pulling out from the curb. The siren and flashing blue light came on again, clearing a path through the light evening traffic. Slowly, the emergency vehicle swung through a wide U-turn, evidently heading back toward the much-busier Sadovaya Ring road.

Smith could feel ice-cold sweat trickling down his ribs. Somehow he had to find a way to break them out of this moving prison —and soon. He had no illusions about their fate if he failed. Once they arrived wherever they were being taken, he and Fiona Devin were as good as dead.

Chapter Eighteen

Not far down Povarskaya Street, the tall, silver-haired man sitting hunched over behind the wheel of a boxy dark blue Russian-made Niva 4x4 utility vehicle cursed softly as he watched the two Americans being bundled uncere-moniously into the back of the ambulance. His jaw tightened.

Sighing, he made sure his shoulder belt was tightly fastened, and then reached down to turn on the ignition. There were said to be patron saints for fools and madmen. If so, he earnestly hoped they would look down with favor on him, because there was certainly no time left to do anything subtle or sensible.

The Niva’s powerful engine roared to life. Without hesitating any longer, he shoved the vehicle into gear, stamped down on the gas pedal, and accelerated away from the curb, aiming straight for the front side of the ambulance just as it turned across Povorskaya Street.

Inside the ambulance, Smith sat rigidly still, carefully eying the pistol aimed in his direction. His mind raced, rapidly concocting and then discarding a series of wild-eyed schemes to escape from their captors. Unfortunately, every plan he came up with only seemed likely to get them killed sooner rather than later.

Suddenly the driver up front shouted something in alarm. Jon felt Fiona Devm tense up.

An engine roared close by, growing ever louder. Brakes squealed piercingly. Car and truck horns blared out panicked warnings. And then Smith felt an enormous, |oltmg hang as some other vehicle slammed into the ambulance at high speed. The impact hurled him right off the bench. He fell forward across Vedenskaya’s body. There were more startled shouts from the others around him.

Hit broadside, they were sliding across the road, spinning out of control amid an earsplitting shriek of tearing metal and the tinkling crash of shattering glass. First-aid kits and other medical gear tumbled out of storage compartments. \ sharp, stinging reek of spilled gasoline and the acrid stench of torn and burning rubber rolled through the cramped interior.

Still spinning, the ambulance crashed into the side of an old, rust-eaten Volga sedan parked along the street and rocked to a stop, lying canted over at an odd angle with its blown front tires propped up high on the curb. The deafening noise died away.

Smith looked up.

The first sudden impact had tossed the doctor backward, smashing his head hard against the metal interior. He looked dazed. Rivulets of blood dripped clown the side of his lean, pale face. But he still held onto his Makarov PSM.

Reacting fast, Jon shoved himself upright onto his knees.

The doctor’s eyes widened. Snarling, he raised the pistol. His fingers curled around the trigger, already starting to squeeze it.

And then Smith lashed out, chopping down with the edge of his right hand to knock the barrel away]ust as the Makarov fired. At such close quarters, the sound was shattering. In a spurt of flame, the small-caliber 5.45mm bullet punched a hole in the floorboards, smacked dully into the road below, and ricocheted awav.

In that same instant, Jon drove his left fist into the other man’s face.

The punch slammed the Russian doctor’s skull back against the wall with tremendous force. More blood spattered across the metal. The white-coated man groaned in agony. His eves rolled up into the back of their sockets and he slumped forward, starting to lose consciousness. The small pistol thudded onto the bench beside him

Smith reached for it and then froze

With the back of one big hand, the burly paramedic had already knocked Fiona Devin sprawling. She lay curled up at his feet, with the red mark left by his hand plainly visible on her pale cheek. Now he sighted carefully down the barrel of his own pistol, a larger, 9mm Makarov. He was aiming right at Smith’s face.

And then the dark-haired woman moved, uncoiling with astonishing speed.

While rising to her knees, she yanked a slender, black-handled switch-blade out of a sheath concealed in one of her elegant leather boots. At the touch of a button on its hilt, a four-inch stainless-steel blade flicked out, glint-ing cruelly in the light. Acting with cold determination, she stabbed the big man in the neck. The long, narrow blade plunged deep, severing his trachea and one of his carotid arteries in a single powerful thrust.

Horrified, the Russian paramedic dropped his pistol. His hands pawed frantically at the terrible wound. Jets of bright-red blood spurted across the ambulance, pulsing wildly at first with every heartbeat but diminishing fast as his life force ebbed away. Still clutching desperately at the gaping hole in his neck, the dying man slid slowly sideways. He sagged to the floor beside Elena Vedenskaya’s blanket-wrapped corpse. The blood stopped pumping from between his locked fingers. He quivered once and then at last was still.

White-faced herself, Fiona quickly wiped her knife on the back of the dead man’s coat. Her hands shook slightly as she retracted the blade and slipped the knife back into her boot.

“You’ve never killed anyone before?” Smith asked quietly.

She shook her head. “No.” She forced a sickly smile. “But I’ll worry about it later … assuming, of course, that we live through the next few minutes.”

He nodded. The doctor and one of the two paramedics were down, but they were still facing at least two more enemies. “Can you handle a gun?”

“I can.”

Smith scooped up both pistols and handed her the smaller Makarov PSM.

Quickly, he checked the 9mm pistol, making sure the safety was off and that it had a round chambered. Fiona did the same with hers.

There was a loud rap on one of the closed rear doors. “Fiona?” a deep voice boomed from outside the wrecked ambulance. “This is Oleg. Are you and Dr. Smith unharmed?”

Jon whirled around with the Makarov raised, ready to open fire. But the dark-haired woman laid a hand gently on his wrist, pushing the weapon down.

“Don’t shoot,” she said quietly. “He’s a friend.” Then Fiona raised her own voice. “Yes, we’re fine. And free.”

“What of the others? Those who took you captive?”

“They’re out of commission,” Fiona reported shortly. “One permanently.

The other is still alive, hut he’ll have the devil of a headache later on.”

“That is good!” The doors were yanked open. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a full head of silver hair stood there. In one hand, he held a pistol fitted with a silencer. With the other, he motioned them out. “Come!

Quickly! We have very little time before the militia arrives.”

Smith stared at the other man in astonishment. There was no mistaking that haughty, large-nosed profile, one that could easily have appeared on an ancient Roman coin. “Kirov. Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “Major General Olcg Kirov of the Russian Federal Security Service.”

“Not anymore, Doctor.” Kirov shrugged his powerful shoulders. “I have been retired, put out to pasture, as you Americans say,” he said drily. “The men in the Kremlin decided that I was not sufficiently loyal to their dreams of restoring the old order.”

Jon nodded tersely. A few years before he had worked closely with the tall, barrel-chested FSB officer, joining in a desperate hunt to track down a container full of deadly smallpox stolen from one of Russia’s biological weapons facilities. Since then he had often wondered how Kirov, so closely tied to his country’s political reformers, was faring under the rule of President Dudarev and his hard-line cronies.

Now he knew.

“Small talk and career news will have to wait until later,” Fiona broke in.

“Right now we should be moving.” She waved a hand at the street. “As it is, we’re drawing a crowd.”

“True,” Kirov agreed, glancing briefly over his shoulder. Cars that had braked hard to avoid the crash he had caused were scattered randomly across the street. A few of the drivers were climbing out of their stalled vehicles to stare at the tangled wreckage. Others who had heard all the noise were spilling out of the neighboring apartment buildings, restaurants, and cafes.

Several of the onlookers were speaking excitedly into their cell phones, pre-sumably summoning the militia and emergency medical assistance.

Kirov looked back at the two Americans. “You have what you came for?

Those notes Dr. Vedenskaya brought for you?”

“They’re right here,” Fiona said, gingerly retrieving the bloodstained plastic binder from where it had fallen during the crash.

Smith turned grimly toward the dazed white-coated man huddled in one corner of the ambulance. The doctor was groaning softly now, drifting right on the edge of full consciousness. “Let’s take that son of a bitch with us. I have a few questions to ask him. For one thing, just how the hell he knew my real name and rank.”

The former FSB officer nodded. “An excellent question. If nothing else, it would also be useful to learn who issued his orders and where he was taking you.”

Together he and Smith dragged the sallow-faced man out onto the street.

Clotting blood matted the sparse hair on the back of their prisoner’s head. His eyes were half-closed and clearly unable to focus. Propping the injured man up between them, Smith and Kirov half-carried, half-dragged him around the side of the ambulance. Fiona walked beside them, still keeping a wary eye on the small, but growing crowd of the curious drawn to what must have seemed a terrible accident.

Jon whistled softly. The collision had smashed in the whole front end of the emergency vehicle, reducing it to a mangled mass of twisted steel and broken glass. Still tangled in their seat belts, the two men who had been riding in front were slumped back against the seat. Both held weapons in their hands.

Both had been shot dead at pointblank range.

He glanced at Kirov. “Your work, I presume?”

The other man nodded somberly. “It was regrettable, but necessary. I had no time for half-measures.” He indicated the dark blue Niva slewed across the street beside the wrecked ambulance. “Come. Our chariot awaits.”

Smith stared at the small SUV, noting the 4x4’s smashed grill, dented hood, and broken headlights. He arched an eyebrow. “You think that piece of junk is still in good running condition?”

“Let us hope so, Jon,” Kirov said with a bleak smile. “Otherwise we could be in for a very long, cold, and conspicuous walk.”

The Russian propped their dazed captive up against the Niva’s side. He tugged the rear passenger side door open. “Let’s get him inside. Ms. Devin will sit up front by me. You take the back seat and keep your weapon aimed at our guest here. Make sure he stays down on the floor and out of sight.”

Smith nodded. He turned toward the bleary-eyed ambulance doctor. “In you go, pal,” he growled, using the barrel of his Makarov to prod the wavering man toward the open door.

Crack.

Their prisoner’s head exploded, torn open by a high-velocity rifle round.

Blood and bits of shattered bone sprayed across the Niva’s upholstered interior. The dead man slid slowly down the side of the truck.

“Get down! Take cover!” Smith roared. He dived for the snow-covered asphalt just as another rifle bullet smashed the window right above his head.

Splinters and shards of broken glass cascaded across the back of his neck and bounced off the street beside him.

Kirov and Fiona Devin raced for cover and dropped flat behind the boxy Russian-manufactured 4x4.

Panicked by the sudden burst of gunfire, the civilians who had been drawn to the accident scene fled, scattering in all directions like a flock of terrified geese. Some ducked out of sight behind the cars parked along the street. Others stumbled back inside the surrounding buildings.

Caught out in the open, on the wrong side of Kirov’s vehicle, Smith rolled away to the right, heading for the shelter offered by the wrecked ambulance. A third 7.62mm round slapped into the street only inches away. It sent chunks of torn asphalt flying and then tumbled away past his ear, buzzing loudly like a malevolent, lethal wasp.

Panting with fear and exertion, Jon threw himself off to the side, rolling even faster now. He made it back to the mangled emergency vehicle and stopped moving. A fourth rifle bullet punched through torn metal and car-omed off the ambulance’s steel frame, showering him with sparks and tiny, jagged pieces of near-molten steel. Wincing, he brushed them away.

Smith thought fast, considering their options. Now what? So long as they stayed hidden behind solid cover, they were relatively safe from this unseen sniper. But that left them pinned down, unable to move or fight back effectively, and he could hear sirens closing in on them from several different directions.

He shook his head. Staying to surrender to the Moscow militia was not an option, not with Elena Vedenskaya’s case notes in their possession and four enemy agents sprawled dead across the street. He shifted his grip on the 9mm Makarov, mentally preparing himself to make a quick dash back to where Kirov and Fiona Devin were taking cover.

One hundred and fifty meters up Povorskaya Street, Erich Brandt knelt down beside the open door of his black Mercedes sedan. Another man lay prone on the road next to him, peering intently through the telescopic sight of a long-barreled Dragunov SVD sniper rifle.

“They’re all in good cover,” the marksman reported coolly. “But at least I managed to nail Sorokm.”

Brandt scowled. The “doctor,” an ex-KGB officer named Mikhail Sorokin, had been one of his most reliable agents, a coldly professional killer who had never muffed an assignment. Up until now, that was. Then he shrugged, pushing awav the momentary sense of regret. Although it had irked him to order Sorokin terminated, he had not been given any real choice. He would not risk leaving any of his operatives alive in enemy hands. “Can you flush the Americans out into the open?”

The other man shook his head slightly. “Not soon enough.” He shrugged.

“If they move anywhere on the street, I will kill them, but I cannot hit what I cannot see.”

Brandt nodded tightly.

The sniper pulled his eye away from the scope and looked toward his superior. “Do we wait for the militia to arrest them? Their first squad cars will be here in a matter of minutes.”

Brandt pondered that. Thanks to Alexei Ivanov, he carried official credentials that would pass muster with the local police. If the militia took any prisoners, they could certainly be cowed into handing them over to him. But w hatever the immediate outcome, the surlv, suspicious chief of the Thirteenth Directorate would discover that he had been lied to, and that at least one American intelligence officer was already exploiting the Moscow-based breach in HYDRA’s operational security.

The blond-haired man grimaced. If so, it would be better by far to present the Russian spymasrer with a fait accompli in the form of Smith, Fiona Devin, and their unknown accomplice—dead if necessary, alive and under interrogation if possible. He glanced down at the sniper waiting patiently for his orders.

“We’ll cut off their first avenue of retreat,” he decided. “Disable their get-away vehicle.”

The other man nodded calmly. “Easily done, Herr Brandt.”

He put his right eye back against the telescopic sight, shifted his aim slightly, and squeezed the trigger. The SVD sniper rifle fired, barely kicking up as its long, well-balanced barrel recoiled gently against his shoulder.

Smith scrambled to his feet and crossed the short open space between the ambulance and Kirov’s all-wheel drive SUV at a dead run. Another shot rang out. Still running flat-out, he dived forward, rolled on his shoulder, and came up crouching behind the Niva’s battered front end. He held the Makarov in a two-handed shooter’s grip, ready to fire immediately if any target presented itself in range.

“Very acrobatic, Doctor,” Kirov called wryly. The silver-haired Russian and Fiona Devin were King prone a couple of meters away. “I envy you your youthful agility.”

Smith forced himself to grin back, mainly conscious of the pulse pounding in his ears. The sniper zeroing in on them was too damned good. And he was close enough to put his rounds almost anywhere he chose with absolute precision.

The 4x4 rocked suddenly, hit by yet another 7.62mm round. It tore into the engine compartment, hit the block, and ricocheted up and out through the crumpled hood. Within seconds, the marksman switched targets and fired again, this time sending a heavy slug straight into the Niva’s fuel tank. Gasoline spilled out through the punctured metal, dripping onto the street at an ever-increasing rate. The next bullet hit the dashboard, smashing instruments and tearing through wiring.

The rifleman was destroying the Niva, Smith realized abruptly— methodically putting rounds into every key system and component. “They’re trying to make sure we can’t bug out,” he told the others grimly. “We’re being held in check here for the militia to deal with.”

Fiona nodded. She bit her lip. “Does anyone have any bright ideas?”

“We leave,” Kirov said simply. “Right now.”

Fiona stared at him in disbelief. “And just how, precisely, do you propose that we do that?” she demanded. “This street will be swarming with militia in a minute or two. We won’t get two blocks on foot. And the closest Metro station is at least a kilometer away.”

“We liberate a car,” Kirov replied, almost smugly. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Take a look. We have plenty of options to choose from.”

Smith and Fiona turned around. The Russian was right. There were at least half a dozen vehicles scattered across the road, deserted by their panicked owners when all the shooting started. Most had been abandoned so hurriedly that the keys were still in the ignition. Some still had their engines running.

Jon nodded quickly. “Good idea.” He glanced back at Kirov. “But we’ll need a distraction, something big. Otherwise that sniper out there will drop us one by one before we’ve gone even ten meters.”

The Niva shuddered again, hammered by another high-velocity round into the fuel tank. The sickly sweet stench of gasoline grew stronger. Leaking fuel spilled out from under the vehicle, slowly melting a meandering path through the dirty snow piled up around its tires.

“Very true,” Kirov agreed. He reached into his coat pocket and calmly pulled out a packet of matches. He bared his teeth in a quick, predatory grin.

“Fortunately, the means for such a distraction are close at hand.”

He struck a single match and used it to light the whole book, which blazed up in an instant. Then, without hesitating, the former FSB officer tossed the flaming matchbook under the Niva, right into the biggest puddle of gasoline.

It went up with a soft whoosh. Bright white flames leaped high, igniting the gallons of fuel still sloshing in the bullet-torn tank. In seconds, the whole back end of dark blue 4x4 was fully engulfed in fire.

From his position up the street, Brandt saw the flames erupt suddenly beneath the Niva, spreading fast until the whole vehicle was alight. Black smoke boiled outward from the pyre. “Excellent work, Fadayev,” he told his marksman.

Smith and the others were trapped. With luck, that fire would flush them out of cover, right into the sights of his waiting sniper. If not, the loss of their get-away car at least robbed the Americans of any real chance to escape the militia speeding to the scene.

But then, as the cloud of smoke began spreading fast, Brandt’s smile faded.

Buildings and whole swathes of the street behind the burning sport utility vehicle were disappearing from view, shrouded in smoke. The pall created bv the fire was acting as a screen, hiding the fugitives from view. “Do you have any targets yet?” he demanded.

“Negative. The smoke is too thick,” the prone marksman said. He took his eye away from the scope on his rifle and looked up. “What are your orders?”

Brandt listened to the sirens growing louder. His face darkened. The Russians would be here in moments. At last he snapped, “We’ll leave them for the militia and pick them up once they’re in custody. Smith and his friends won’t get far on foot.”

Smith lay flat behind the blazing 4x4. This close to the flames, he could feel the heat searing his face. Smoke from the inferno stung his eves. He breathed shallow ly, trving hard not to drag too much of the acrid fumes into his lungs. Visibilitv around them dropped to just a few meters as the smoke cloud billowed across the street. He glanced at Kirov and Fiona.

The Russian nodded in satisfaction. “Now we go.”

Without waiting any longer, they turned and loped awav. Kirov led them toward a small two-door car, a dingy, off-white Moskvitsh that had clearly seen more than its share of accidents and harsh winters. Its worn-out, lawn-mower-sized engine sputtered and coughed, left stuck in idle when its driver fled.

Jon nodded to himself, approving the other man’s choice. Of all the cars left abandoned on the street, the Moskvitsh was the cheapest, the least colorful, and the least noticeable. There were tens of thousands just like it on Moscow’s streets. Even if someone spotted them commandeering the little car, the militia would have a verv difficult time picking it out among all the rest.

Fiona climbed into the narrow back seat, while Smith and Kirov settled themselves in front, with the older man in the driver’s seat. The Russian slammed the gearshift into reverse and backed up fast, cranking the steering wheel hard over. The Moskvitsh swung round through an arc and ended up facing away from the direction it had been going.

Kirov drove east at an easy clip, deliberately staying below the posted speed limit.

“Oleg,” Fiona warned suddenly, leaning forward over the Russian’s big shoulder. She pointed ahead through the dirty windshield. Flashing blue lights were coming into view, rushing up the road toward them at high speed.

“We have company.”

The first militia squad cars were converging on the scene of the reported accident and gun battle.

Kirov nodded coolly. “I see them.” He spun the steering wheel again, turning right onto a narrower side street. He drove on a bit farther and then pulled over to the curb, parking right next to the Mongolian embassy. The elegant nineteenth-century building now housing Lithuania’s embassy was just across the street. The ex-FSB officer reached down and flicked the little car’s headlights off. He left the engine running.

Smith shifted around in the cramped seat, craning his neck to peer out through the Moskvitsh’s small rear window.

In seconds, the first militia squad car flashed past their side street without slowing, still racing west up Povorskaya Street. Others followed in its wake, one after another, tearing along with their sirens wailing.

They all breathed out in relief. Slowly, Kirov reached down and put the Moskvitsh in gear again. Then he pulled out and drove away, heading south, deeper into the Arbat district.

“What’s our next move?” Smith asked quietly.

The older man shrugged. “First, we look for a place to ditch this stolen car, discreetly if possible. And then we find a safe house for you and Ms. Devin.”

“And after that?”

“I try to think of some way to smuggle the two of you out of Russia as soon as possible,” Kirov said flatly. “After what happened tonight, the Kremlin will mobilize every element of the state security apparatus to hunt you down.”

“We’re not leaving, Oleg,” Fiona Devin said firmly. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Fiona!” Kirov protested. “Don’t be a fool! What can you possibly hope to accomplish by staying in Moscow?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said stubbornly. “But I do know that we still have a job to do here. And so long as that is true, I have no intention of tucking my tail between my legs and running.”

Fiona held up the bloodstained binder. “Those bastards back there murdered Elena Vedenskava to prevent her from passing these medical records to us. Right?”

Both men nodded slowly.

“Well, then,” the dark-haired woman told them grimly. “As I see it, that means that Colonel Smith and I had better do our best to uncover the secrets thev contain.”