The Moscow Vector

Chapter Thirty-Six

The wide boulevards and narrow alleys of Baku, the largest and most sophisticated city in the Caucasus region, stretched for miles along the shore of the Caspian Sea. As billions of euros and dollars poured in to finance new oil and natural gas ventures, Baku was more than ever a city of striking contrasts. It was both a bustling, prosperous twenty-first-century boomtown of glittering steel-and-glass skyscrapers, and also an ancient metropolis of mosques, royal palaces, and bazaars set amid a maze of shaded cobblestone lanes.

On a hill rising just outside the walls of the Old City lay the ugly concrete building that housed Azerbaijan’s president and his staff. Scowling Azeri soldiers patrolled the surrounding streets, making sure that visiting oil company representatives and curious tourists looking for the nearby Baku Philhar-monic and the state art museums kept moving along.

Deep inside the Presidential Administration building, one of the household staff emerged from a central elevator. He was pushing a heavy cart piled high with covered dishes. Troubled by what appeared to be a threatening buildup of Russian troops in neighboring Dagestan, the republic’s Defense Council was meeting in emergency session. As the night wore on, the generals and government ministers had ordered food sent in from the kitchen.

Two hard-eyed men in dark suits stepped forward. “Security,” one said. showing an identity card. “We’ll take that from here. Only authorized personnel go any farther.”

The waiter shrugged wearily. “Just make sure you get their orders right,” he said, handing over a sheet showing the meals requested by each member of the Defense Council. Yawning, he turned back into the elevator.

Once the doors closed, one of the security service officers quickly lifted the lids of the dishes on the cart, comparing them with the list now held in his hand. He stopped once he found the bowl ofpiti, a stew of mutton, chickpeas, fat, and saffron. He turned to his comrade. “This one,” he said quietly.

“Looks delicious,” the other man said with a quick, cynical grin.

“So it does,” the first man agreed. He glanced swiftly up and down the corridor to make sure no one was looking. Satisfied, he took a vial out of his pocket and stirred the liquid it contained into the stew. The vial went back into his coat pocket while his colleague slowly trundled the cart up the corridor. Another HYDRA variant was moving toward its chosen target.

The outlook of those sitting around the crowded White House Situation Room conference table was unreservedly bleak, President Sam Castilla realized, observing the grim, set faces of his national security team. Most were deeply worried that the United States could soon be facing a serious clash with Russia, but no one felt confident enough in the available information to offer any solid suggestions on how to handle the terrifying diplomatic and military crisis they feared might be rushing toward them.

Basically, the president knew, they were all tired of stumbling around in the dark. Right now all they had were tiny bits and pieces of data —the accelerating wave of mysterious deaths both here in the States and abroad, whispers of intensifying Russian military preparation, and the steady drumbeat of Russian propaganda decrying the “dangerous instability” in countries around its borders. Unfortunately, everyone lacked the broader evidence and analysis needed to tie those bits and pieces into a clear-cut pattern, into something that would convincingly reveal what Dudarev and his generals were really planning. Without that clear blueprint, no one in Europe or elsewhere would be willing to confront Moscow.

Castilla turned to William Wexler, his new national intelligence director.

“Can we alter the orbit of our surviving Lacrosse satellite to obtain good cov-erage over these Russian frontier districts we’re most concerned about?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. President,” the trim, handsome former senator admitted reluctantly. “Lacrosse-Five was the newer of the two satellites. Lacrosse-Four has been up too long. It just doesn’t have enough maneuvering fuel left to reach the required orbit.”

“So how long will it take to launch a replacement for Lacrosse-Five?”

Castilla asked.

“Too long, sir,” Emily Powell-Hill, his national security adviser, interjected flatly- “The CIA says six weeks, at a minimum. If I had to put serious money on it, though, I would bet that three to five months is probably a more realistic time-frame.”

“Good God,” the president muttered. By that time, the Russians could have marched the troops and tanks they were hunting for all the way to Siberia and back again. He looked across the table at Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What’s your evaluation of the destruction of our satellite. Admiral? Was it an accident—or a deliberate attack to blind us?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the wide, powerfully built Navy officer said carefully.

“Space Command has only been able to conduct a preliminary analysis of the images our early-warning satellites picked up. However, General Collins and his staff report that the explosions they observed onboard the Russian COSMOS-8B vehicle were extremely powerful.”

“Powerful enough to knock out another satellite hundreds of kilometers away?”

“Frankly, I doubt it, Mr. President. Given their different orbits, the odds against so many fragments from COSMOS-8B hitting Lacrosse-Five seem, well, astronomical,” Brose said drily. Then he shrugged. “But I’m only guess-ing. As of this moment, we don’t have the data to prove anything one way or the other.”

Castilla nodded grimly, seething inside. Without proof that the Russians had acted intentionally, the United States had no practical recourse but to write off the suspicious loss of a multibillion-dollar spy satellite. His mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “What about our KH-series photo-recon satellites?” he demanded.

“We’re already running significant numbers of orbital passes over the target areas,” Emily Powell-Hill replied. “But cloud cover is the big problem. The weather is incredibly bad over most of the Ukraine and the Caucasus right now. Even with our thermal sensors, we’re not able to pick up much detail through the heavy cloud masses blanketing those regions.”

Left unsaid in all of this, Castilla realized gloomily, was the fact that even the best satellite photographs required skilled interpretation and analysis to reveal usable data, and too many of the best U.S. photo interpreters were fatally ill or already dead.

Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff, spoke up from his end of the table. “Then why not take a stab at aerial reconnaissance? We have radar-equipped aircraft. Can’t we fly them near the Russian border?”

“Physically, yes,” Secretary of State Padgett said abruptly. “Diplomatically, no. With so many of their key political and military leaders dead or dying, the governments of the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the other former Soviet republics are increasingly fragile. In the present circumstances, none of them will risk provoking the Kremlin by allowing us to use their airspace for reconnaissance flights. So far, every request we’ve made, through every channel, has been rebuffed.”

Again Castilla nodded. The nightmare scenario he and Fred Klein had been worrying about over the last few days seemed to be moving closer to reality. If the Russians were behind this new disease, as seemed increasingly likely, they were using it very effectively to sow confusion and chaos. The big question was: How far was Dudarev willing to push his present advantage?

Would he be content to weaken the fledgling democracies around Russia? Or did he have something far more ambitious in mind?

The door to the Situation Room opened and an aide, a young, serious woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hurried in, moving quickly to where William Wexler sat making notes. She leaned over and whispered something in the intelligence director’s ear. His tanned face turned pale.

“Is there something I should know about, Bill?” Castilla asked sharply.

Wexler cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “Quite possibly, Mr.

President,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that the CIA has just lost one of its clandestine action teams, a group of field officers operating in Berlin. The first reports are very sketchy, but it appears that gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosives ambushed our people on a public street. The head of the CIA’s Berlin Station is on his way there right now, but things look very bad. Very bad, indeed. There don’t appear to be any survivors.”

“Jesus,” Charles Ouray whispered.

“Amen, Charlie,” Castilla said softly. His shoulders bowed slightly, momentarily feeling the weight of more deaths, of more gold stars for the marble memorial wall at CIA headquarters. Then he frowned. First the Lacrosse satellite and now this vicious massacre of American intelligence officers. Were they connected in some way? He turned back to Wexler. “What was this clandestine action team’s mission?”

The national intelligence director looked baffled. “Their mission, Mr.

President?” he repeated uncertainly. He shuffled through the papers in front of him, clearly trying to buy time.

An awkward silence followed. No one else sitting around the Situation Room conference table had much respect for the former senator. At best, they considered him a nonentity. At worst, they viewed him as a liability, as one more bureaucratic obstacle for the already-fettered U.S. intelligence community to overcome.

“I’m not sure I have the details of their assignment,” Wexler admitted at last, reddening in embarrassment. He turned to his aide, the woman who had first brought him the news. “Did Langlev ever relay any of that information to us, Caroline?”

They were tracking a former East German biological weapons scientist, sir,” she said quietly. “A man named Wulf Renke.”

Castilla sat back in his chair, feeling as though he had been pole-axed.

Renke! Good God, he thought in astonishment. Renke was the renegade son of a bitch that Fred Klein’s Moscow-based Covert-One unit suspected of having created the strange illness they were investigating.

Quickly, the president excused himself, put his chief of staff in charge of the meeting, and left the Situation Room. As the door closed behind him, he heard more wrangling break out. He frowned deeplv, but kept walking. Taken as a whole, his national security team was remarkably competent, but their tempers and patience were definitely beginning to fray as they faced the nightmare of being forced to act blindly, without adequate intelligence. And right now, he simply could not afford to spend any more time riding herd on them.

Upstairs in the Oval Office, Castilla picked up one of the phones on his desk and punched in a special number known only to himself.

“Klein, here,” the head of Covert-One said somberly, answering the call on the first ring.

“Have you heard the news from Berlin?”

“I have,” Klein replied grimly. “I’m scanning the first CIA and local police reports right now.”

“And?”

“The link with Wulf Renke is highly significant,” Klein agreed slowly. “As is the extremely violent reaction to the CIA probe.”

“Meaning the Russians are afraid of what we may learn about him?”

Castilla asked.

“Or from him,” Klein pointed out. “If Renke was working safely under lock and key in one of their own Bioaparat facilities, they would have far less reason to fear our learning that he is still alive and on the loose.”

“You think he’s running his own operation at a laboratory outside Russia?”

“Let’s say that I consider it a very strong possibility,” Klein replied. “I’ve been studying Renke’s file. He strikes me as a man who would never willingly put himself in a position where others held too much power over him. If he is creating a weapon for the Russians, I believe that he will be working for them at a safe distance.”

“Have you passed this theory of yours on to Colonel Smith?” Castilla asked.

“No, sir,” Klein said quietly. “I’m sorry to say that I have very bad news of my own to report. Sometime over the past hour, we’ve completely lost contact with our team in Moscow. For all intents and purposes, Jon Smith, Ms.

Devin, and Oleg Kirov all seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The street in front of Ulrich Kessler’s villa was deserted. Set at regular intervals, wrought-iron lamps cast pools of soft light across the snow-covered sidewalks and illuminated a handful of silent cars parked along the empty street.

Off in the darkness on either side of Hagenstrasse, more lights glowed among the pine, oak, and birch trees, marking the location of other houses that were set well back from the road.

About one hundred meters down the street from the driveway to Kessler’s home, CIA officer Randi Russell stood motionless in a patch of deep shadow between two large oak trees. She breathed out slowly and gently, letting her pounding heart settle down after her long, painful sprint through the Grunewald forest. Her pupils were adjusting to the dim light, expanding as she carefully scanned her surroundings, looking for any signs of watchers posted to observe the immediate area. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. There were no suspicious silhouettes or shapes lurking between the parked cars or among the trees and shrubs bordering the quiet street.

Good enough, she thought coldly. Sometimes even the bad guys made mistakes.

Randi slid the Beretta back inside her concealed shoulder holster. This time, she left her ski jacket almost completely unzipped. Then she stepped out of the shadows and strolled up the sidewalk, walking fast and making no effort to hide her movements. With a bit of luck, anyone sporting her would think she was just another local coming home after work, some light shopping, or a late afternoon walk.

Not far up the street, she passed a silver-colored Audi. It was parked beside the pavement in a spot that offered a good view of the entrance to Kessler’s property. From a distance, the car appeared undamaged. It was only when Randi got close that she spotted the small, neat hole blown through the rear window. As she walked past, she used her peripheral vision to check out the interior. Inside the Audi, a brown-haired young woman sat folded over the steering wheel, not moving. Dark smears of dried blood streaked the dashboard and the inside of the windshield.

Randi carefully averted her eyes, pushing away her feelings of sorrow and regret. The dead woman was her lookout, a bright, perky, just-graduated CIA trainee whose name was Carla Voss. From the look of things, the young woman must have died without ever spotting her killer.

The back of Randi’s neck tingled, anticipating the impact of a bullet. The muscles around her right eye twitched slightly. Stay cool, she told herself sharply, and forced herself to keep strolling as though she had seen nothing strange at all. If an)’ of the men who had murdered the rest of her team were watching right now, reacting suspiciously would be a dead giveaway. With the emphasis on dead, she thought grimly.

Forty meters from Kessler’s driveway, she turned aside while reaching into the pocket of her jeans as though looking for her keys. Then she pushed open a small gate set in the high stone wall and entered the spacious front garden of the neighboring villa. Wide gravel paths meandered between barren flowerbeds now mounded with snow. Up at the house, a light shone over the door, but the rest of the building—built to look like a Renaissance Italian palazzo —was dark. She was in luck. The owners were not yet home.

Now that she was out of sight, it was time to move faster. Randi sprinted across the garden, staying off the gravel paths to avoid making too much noise.

She ran straight for the length of wall that marked the edge of Kessler’s property. Barely slowing down, she leaped up, caught the edge of the stone wall with her gloved hands, and then swung herself up onto the top. For a moment, Randi lay still, pressed flat against the rough surface of the mortared stones.

She was conscious of her pulse pounding in her ears, but ignored it, focusing instead on any faint sounds that might be rising from the grounds next door.

At first she heard nothing, just the wind keening through the tree branches overhead. But then she began to pick up different sounds, first the soft crunch of someone prowling back and forth on gravel and concrete, and next the muffled, static-laden squawk of a brief radio transmission. Her best guess was that these noises were coming from roughly twenty to thirty meters away.

Slowly, Randi swung down off the wall on the other side. She dropped lightly to the ground, spun around to face the direction from which she had heard the sounds, and crouched low, drawing her pistol in the same motion with a quick, fluid, and lethal grace.

Her eyes narrowed. She was in good cover among the tall trees and flowering bushes planted around Kessler’s Edwardian-style home. Although lights glowed behind several of the villa’s second-floor windows, casting elongated rectangles of faint illumination across the open lawns near the house, this narrow fringe of woods was wrapped in almost total darkness. Staying low, she slid cautiously to the right, edging around broad tree trunks and snow-crusted shrubs, carefully watching where she put her feet to avoid snapping any fallen branches and twigs.

Suddenly Randi froze and crouched even lower, trusting to the shadows to stay hidden. Not far ahead, no more than a few meters away, she had seen something moving, a brief glimpse of a figure outlined by the light from Kessler’s house.

She peered intently through the tangle of underbrush and the maze of low-hanging branches. She was looking at a man, a short, heavyset man in a suit and a thick wool overcoat. He was pacing slowly up and down along the driveway. In one big, beefy hand, he held a small tactical radio. In the other, he gripped a pistol fitted with a silencer. He looked nervous. Despite the cold, his forehead glistened with sweat.

Randi looked past him. There were two cars parked in the space between the villa and the garage. One was a dark red Mercedes sedan. The other was the black BMW she had shot up during the brief, brutal action along Clayallee. Another man in black clothes and body armor sat slumped against the side of the BMW. Blood-soaked bandages were wrapped tightly around his extended right leg. He was either unconscious or dead.

She nodded, knowing now that she had guessed right. Renke’s assassins must have driven straight here after wiping out her surveillance team. The other black-clad gunmen must still be inside dealing with Ulrich Kessler.

The heavyset man they had left outside on guard turned again on his heel and paced back toward the two cars. He checked his watch, swore worriedly, and then lifted the radio to his mouth. “Lange, this is Mueller,” he said tensely. “How much longer?”

A harsh voice crackled over the radio. “Five minutes. Now sit tight and stay off the air. Lange out.”

Listening, Randi made up her mind. She was going to have to go in after these bastards. There was no time to call for a new backup team. And waiting here to ambush Renke’s men when they came out of the house was a non-starter. If she was lucky, she might be able to drop one or two of them before they nailed her, but those silenced submachine guns they carried gave them too much firepower to face in a stand-up fight out here in the open. Inside, in a close-quarters battle, she would actually have slightly better odds of surviving.

A quick, self-conscious grin flashed across her lean, taut face. “Better” in this case was probably only the difference between “no chance at all” and “one chance in a thousand.” Then her grin faded. Any chance at all was still more than the other members of her team had gotten.

Intently, Randi studied the short, paunchy man called Mueller as he nervously paced up and down. Should she try to take him prisoner? No, she decided coldly. That would be far too risky. If he managed to shout or radio a warning to his heavily armed comrades inside Kessler’s house, she was as good as dead.

Still watching Mueller parade back and forth in increasing agitation, she put one hand in her coat pocket and pulled out a noise suppressor of her own.

It screwed tightly over the muzzle of her Beretta.

Ready now, she took careful aim, sighting coolly down the barrel. Phut.

Phut. Her pistol coughed twice. The metallic noise of the bolt crashing back as the weapon fired seemed to hang forever in the hushed evening air. In reality, she knew, both sets of sounds would be almost inaudible to anyone more than ten meters away.

One round hit Mueller in the chest. The second tore open his throat. The heavyset man went down in a heap and lay twitching and gurgling, bleeding his life away across the cold concrete. He was dead in seconds.

Randi swiveled rapidly, swinging the Beretta to cover the man she had wounded earlier. Her finger tightened on the trigger, ready to fire, and then gradually eased off. He had not moved. Hurrying now and staying low, she raced out from under the trees and across the open driveway, careful to keep the cars between her and the house. She reached the BMW and dropped to one knee beside the silent, motionless man. He sat as before, propped up against the side of the black car, with his shattered leg stretched out in front of him.

While she held her pistol aimed at his head with one hand, she felt for a pulse with the other. Nothing. And his skin was already growing cold. There, lying on the concrete beside him, Randi saw an empty syringe. Her mouth tightened in disgust. That had undoubtedly contained an overdose of mor-phine or some other fatal drug. Renke’s men must be under orders not to leave any wounded behind them —not even their own.

Then she saw something else, a black angular shape, set on the hard ground next to the dead man. It was his submachine gun. His comrades must have left the weapon beside him, waiting for the lethal drug with which they had injected him to take effect.

Scarcely daring to believe her luck, Randi unscrewed the silencer from her Beretta and shoved the pistol back into her shoulder holster. Then she reached across the corpse and snagged the abandoned submachine gun.

Moving quickly and confidently, she examined the weapon, a Heckler &

Koch MP5SD, found a nearly full thirty-round magazine, yanked back on the cocking handle to chamber a 9mm round, and set the firing selector for three-round bursts.

Pleased, she patted the weapon with one hand. At least now she had firepower parity with the bad guys. Of course, that still left her outnumbered by at least three-to-one, Randi reminded herself coolly—by trained killers. Trained killers wearing body armor.

Then she shrugged. Waiting longer was not going to make this any easier.

She took one more deep breath, counting down inside her own head. Three.

Two. One. Now!

Randi jumped to her feet and dashed for the side of Kessler’s villa, half-expecting a sudden burst of gunfire from one of the lighted upstairs windows.

Instead, there was only silence. She reached the house and flattened her back against the wall, listening hard for the startled shouts that would tell her that she had been spotted.

Still nothing.

With the MP5SD tucked firmly against her shoulder, Randi glided forward again, edging around the corner until she had a view of the front door.

She kept going, caught up in an adrenaline rush that made her intensely aware of every nerve ending, and of even the smallest movements around her.

Every sense seemed magnified. All the pain from the cuts, scrapes, and bruises she had taken earlier seemed to fade away. She could hear even the tiniest sounds—the crunch of her boots on snow, the faint tick of one of the car engines as it cooled, contracting slowly in the freezing air, and the distant wail of fire, ambulance, and police vehicles speeding toward the carnage on Clayallee.

She reached the front of the house.

The front door was already starting to open. Bright interior light spilled through the rapidly widening crack. For a fraction of a second, time seemed to come to a full stop. What should she do? Then, equally abruptly, the world spun back into motion. She only had time to act, not to think.

Furiously, Randi hurtled forward and hit the door with her right shoulder, slamming it all the way open with enormous force. The heavy door jarred back against her as it crashed into someone on the other side. There was a sudden, loud, surprised grunt as the powerful impact knocked whoever it was backward into the villa’s broad entry foyer. Her shoulder went numb for a brief moment and then flared into white-hot agony. Moving too fast to stop easily, she skidded across the tiled floor, rebounded off a wall, and spun around to cover the corridor.

One of Renke’s gunmen —lean, dark-eyed, and with dark blond hair—was sprawled just a couple of meters away. Still dazed by the unexpected blow he had taken, the man pushed himself up onto his knees. His submachine gun lay on the floor beside him. Blearily, he glanced up and saw her staring back at him. His mouth fell open in astonishment, and he grabbed for his weapon, trying frantically to aim it in her direction.

Randi shot him first, squeezing off a quick, three-round burst at pointblank range.

Two rounds slammed into the gunman’s torso. Unable to penetrate his armor, the copper-jacketed slugs splattered across the bulky vest instead, smashing vital internal organs with enormous impacts that threw the dark-eyed man back against the nearest wall. Her third bullet hit him right in the face and tore his head apart.

“Karic?” a startled voice called out from above.

Caught equally off-guard, Randi swung round and looked up the great curving staircase that led to the villa’s upper floor. A second black-clad gunman loomed there, peering over the railing. He raised his weapon first, taking rapid aim.

She threw herself backward just as the submachine gun stuttered. Rounds cracked through air all around her, blowing huge craters in the floor. Pieces of broken tile flew in all directions. Ricochets tumbled wickedly across the corridor.

Desperately, Randi rolled away across the foyer, trying to get out of the line of fire without being hit. A sharp-edged sliver of tile sliced across her cheek, drawing blood. Another burst from the staircase smashed two antique chairs on either side of a gold-framed mirror, turning them into heaps of splintered wood and torn fabric. The mirror itself exploded, sending broken glass riving.

More gunfire knocked one of Ulrich Kessler’s ill-gotten pieces of art, a Diebenkorn, off the wall and sent the tangled wreckage skidding across the foyer. It had been reduced to a few tattered shreds of stained canvas clinging to a bullet-mangled frame.

“Damn,” she muttered grimly. While the gunman above her kept shooting, this wide-open entrance to Kessler’s home was quickly becoming a death trap.

She had to do something to change the situation, and she had to do it fast.

Abruptly, Randi stopped rolling. Ignoring the bullets lashing the corridor around her, she brought her submachine gun on line, aiming straight up at the large chandelier hanging above the foyer. Frowning in concentration, she squeezed the trigger. The MP5SD hammered back against her shoulder.

The chandelier exploded, smashed into a thousand glittering shards by her burst. Fragments of shattered glass and crystal spiraled away through the air and cascaded down across the tiles. Immediately, the lights went out, plunging the foyer into darkness.

Right away, the gunman at the top of the stairs stopped shooting, holding his fire to avoid giving away his position.

Randi grimaced. This guy was too good. She had been hoping to draw a bead on his muzzle flashes in the dark. Instead, the gunman seemed perfectly content to hold his ground in silence, waiting for her to make the fatal mistake of trying to charge up that staircase.

It was a Mexican standoff, she thought coolly. She could not get up those stairs without getting killed, and Renke’s hired killers could not come down without suffering the same fate. Well, maybe she could hold them here long enough for the German police to arrive.

Then Randi shook her head, angry with herself for being overconfident.

There were at least two of the gunmen left alive. While one kept her pinned down, the other could easily sneak up behind her. After all, this grand, sweeping staircase was not the only way down from the upper floor.

She sat up cautiously, thinking hard about that.

When Randi had broken into Kessler’s house the day before, she had spent more than an hour combing through it from top to bottom, exploring every room and corridor while looking for incriminating evidence against the corrupt BKA official and planting an array of hidden listening devices. In the process, she had come across another staircase toward the back, a much smaller and drabber piece of construction.

These stairs, concealed behind a nondescript door near the kitchen, had originally been intended for use by the servants employed by ever)’ upper-class family in the early 1900s. In those davs, household staff were expected to go about their daily labors unobtrusively, staying out of the grand public spaces reserved for their masters and their guests whenever possible.

In the darkness, she grinned suddenly. The odds were that Renke’s men had not yet found those back stairs. Their whole attention would be fixed here, at the front of the villa.

Randi flipped the firing selector on her submachine gun to safe and slung the weapon across her back. Then she rolled back onto her stomach and crawled quietly away down the pitch-black hallway that led toward the rear of the house. As she glided away across the floor, she carefully brushed the debris of spent shell casings and bits of broken tile and glass out of her path. If her plan was going to work, it was absolutely essential that she avoid making any noise that could betrav her movements to that unseen gunman lurking at the top of the stairs.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Upstairs, in Ulrich Kessler’s study, Gerhard Lange scowled. “Mueller,” he hissed into his radio. “Come in!”

But only static crackled through the small receiver set in his ear.

“Mueller,” the former Stasi officer said tersely, repeating his attempt to contact the man he had left on guard outside. “Reply!”

Again, there was no answer.

Angrily, Lange abandoned the futile effort. Mueller was either dead, a prisoner, or already fleeing the scene as fast as his fat legs would carry him. In any case, he and Stepanovic were very much on their own.

He glanced across the room to where Kessler’s bodv lav twisted and contorted on the carpet next to an ornate, intricately carved desk. His lips curled in contempt. Against all logic, the weak, cowardly fool had actually imagined that they had come to rescue him.

What now, though? Lange bleakly considered his own options. His orders from Brandt had been explicit. Destroy the CIA team spying on Kessler. Kill Kessler himself and, after that, destroy the house itself. Leave only ashes for the German police to sift, Brandt had said, destroying any evidence that might link the dead man to Wulf Renke. Everything had seemed to be going according to plan, at least until that maniac crashed through the front door into the foyer, killed Karic, and then managed to survive Stepanovic’s return fire.

The former Stasi officer cursed softly. Mueller must have missed one of the American agents watching the perimeter of Kessler’s property. Now this unknown American had them trapped up here, trapped with a corpse and a room full of incriminating evidence. But waiting meekly for the police to come and arrest them was not an acceptable option. Erich Brandt had a very long arm and any man who failed him so miserably would not live long enough to regret it, even in the supposed security of a Berlin jail cell.

No, Lange decided coldly, he and Stepanovic would have to break out past this lone American, trusting that their weapons and body armor would help them survive a headlong rush down those stairs. But first he would carry out Brandt’s orders to the fullest possible extent. If nothing else, setting the villa on

fire should provide a useful distraction when they made their escape. Shrugging, he picked up the heavy petrol can again and continued sloshing the flam-mable liquid across the carpet, drapes, and desk as he backed out through the open door and into the upstairs corridor. He had already thoroughly drenched Kessler’s corpse with petrol. A single match would set the whole room ablaze.

Striding upward through the darkness on cat-quiet feet, Randi Russell reached the top of the servants’ staircase. She went prone on a small landing and peered down the barrel of her submachine gun, poised and ready to open fire. The door out into the main second floor corridor was just ahead of her. It was closed, but light glimmered faintly through a narrow gap at the bottom.

Randi frowned. Some of the upstairs lights were still on. That was bad. It meant that once she went through that door, she would be out in the open, lit up and left without any real cover—a sitting duck for anyone who happened to be looking in her direction.

A faint smell eddied under the door, growing stronger with every second.

Her nose wrinkled at the familiar, cloying reek. Gasoline fumes? Inside the house? Her eyes widened as understanding dawned. Renke’s men must be planning to burn Kessler’s villa to the ground to cover their tracks!

Frowning, Randi jumped back to her feet. Whatever she was going to do, she had better do now. Her only chance would be to move fast and keep moving. Still holding the MP5SD’s pistol grip with her right hand, she reached out for the doorknob with her left. It turned easily. The latch clicked and the door began slowly swinging open, creaking loudly on hinges that had not been oiled for far too long.

Go! She took a short, sharp breath, kicked the door open all the way, and immediately threw herself out into the hallway. She rolled on her shoulder to get well away from the open door and came up on one knee, already sighting down the long corridor toward the top of the staircase.

There, in the faint glow filtering out into the hall from several of the adjoining rooms, she spotted movement—a squat black shape silhouetted against the deeper black of the unlit foyer. It was a dark-haired man, bulky in body armor, and he was already spinning round to face her. He had a weapon in his hands.

Too late, you son of a bitch, Randi thought icily. She pulled the trigger of her submachine gun, firing a series of rapid, three-round bursts. The MP5SD chattered, bucking hard against her grip as it punched 9mm rounds toward the gunman.

Near misses tore sections of the railing behind him to pieces, sending jagged, flame-bright sparks flying as bullets ripped through brass and shattered marble. Other bullets struck the dangling remains of the ruined chandelier.

More fragments of glass and crystal broke away to smash onto the tile floor far below.

Hit repeatedly by several rounds that splattered across his Kevlar vest with bone-crushing force, the dark-haired gunman stumbled back, hunched over in agony. He crashed into the weakened section of railing and then screamed in sudden terror as it bent and gave way under his weight.

Randi kept shooting, grimly holding the submachine gun on target as it kicked higher with each burst.

With his arms flailing wildly in a vain effort to regain his balance, the wounded man toppled through the gap, hammered backward by more hits on his armor. Still screaming shrilly, he vanished into the darkness. His eerie, horrified wail ended abruptly in a dull, meaty thud.

Breathing out, Randi eased off on the trigger. Her submachine gun fell silent.

“Scheisse!” a voice growled behind her.

Oh, hell.

She twisted in place, urgently trying to bring the MP5SD around far enough to bear on the slender, thin-lipped man she saw framed in the open door to Kessler’s study. Like the others, he wore black clothing and Kevlar armor. His submachine gun, though, was slung across his back, freeing his hands to carry a large, rectangular metal gasoline can. They were less than ten meters apart.

Snarling, the man dropped the can. Gasoline splashed out across his legs and dripped onto the hall carpet as it crashed down. He yanked a Walther semiautomatic pistol out of the holster at his side.

At such close range, the pistol looked enormous. White flame spurted out of its muzzle as the gunman fired.

Randi felt the bullet rip past her head, so close that the hot gases trailing behind it slapped her hard in the face. Her ears rang. The salty-sweet taste of fresh blood filled her mouth. Desperate now, she shot back without aiming, just trying to spray enough rounds in the right direction to drive this new enemy into cover.

One slug hit the gasoline can.

The container rocked under the powerful impact and toppled over. More fuel sprayed high through the air. A spark leaped from the torn metal.

With a soft whoosh, the gasoline ignited. Rivulets of fire raced outward in every direction, feeding on every drop of spilled fuel, setting everything in their wake ablaze.

The thin-lipped man looked down in horror as his gasoline-soaked pants burst into flame. His face twisted in panic as he dropped the Walther to swat wildly at the roaring blaze. But then a mad, inhuman shriek ripped from his throat as the flames seared his fuel-stained hands and flashed up his arms, reaching for his face. In less than a second, he turned into a human torch, wreathed from head-to-foot in fire. Shrieking and screaming in torment, the dying man blindly staggered forward toward her. The flames were consuming him alive.

Sickened, Randi took careful aim and shot him through the head. The burning man tumbled to the floor and lay still. The flames roared higher, spreading up the walls and across the carpet. Thick, choking smoke boiled upward.

Through the open door, she could see Kessler’s study was already fully engulfed in fire. Through the swirling smoke and flame, she could see another blazing corpse —this one lying twisted near the big antique desk. No doubt that was Kessler himself, she thought darkly, fighting down the urge to be sick.

And with him went the faint, flickering clues she had hoped might lead her to professor Wulf Renke’s new lair.

Abruptly, Randi tossed the submachine gun aside and scrambled to her feet. She needed a closer look at the man she had just killed. She turned and sprinted back down the hall. Without slowing down, she skidded into one of the villa’s guestrooms, snatched a heavy wool blanket off the bed, and dashed back the way she had come.

The flames and smoke were even thicker now.

Still running, Randi draped the blanket over her head, shut her eyes tight, and leaped straight through the curtain of fire. For just a split-second, she felt a wave of intense, scorching heat. Then she landed heavily on the floor and crouched down beside the dead man. Staying low to keep below the dense pall of lung-searing smoke rolling through the hallway, she whipped the heavy blanket off her head and swiftly smothered the flames that were charring his clothing and flesh.

Wincing in pain, she ran her hands over the still-smoldering corpse, ran-sacking pockets and pouches in a desperate hurry. She found what looked like a cell phone, strangely twisted and blackened by the fire, and shoved it into one of her jacket pockets. Then she did the same with a set of scorched papers, a passport, and a wallet.

The flames roared louder. Large flakes of burning paint broke loose from the ceiling and drifted down around her, tumbling end over end in the boiling currents of superheated air. The carpet, walls, and ceiling were a solid sheet of fire.

It was time to leave.

Hurriedly, Randi wrapped the charred wool blanket around her head and shoulders and hands. Coughing now as the raw, acrid smoke bit deep into her lungs, she staggered upright and plunged back into the flames, sprinting fast toward the main staircase.

Again, she felt a wave of intense scorching heat. This time she smelled burning wool. But then, suddenly, she was out of the wall of fire. Frantically, Randi tossed the smoldering blanket aside and threw herself onto the floor, rolling over and over down the hallway while slapping at the smaller flames that were burning through her jeans and jacket.

Once they were snuffed out, she scrambled back to her feet and ran on, racing down the stairs at full speed, leaping down them two and three at a time. Behind her, the fire spread rapidly, growing ever stronger and hotter as it fed on Ulrich Kessler’s expensive antique furniture, his precious books, and all of his priceless works of art.

Coughing harder now, Randi reached the ground floor, found the front door, and staggered outside, into the infinitely welcome cold, fresh air.

Wearily, she turned and looked back. The whole second floor of the villa was on fire. Orange, red, and white tongues of flames leaped and danced madly, exploding out through shattered windows and erupting toward the heavens through holes torn in the steep slate roof.

Feeling strangely numb, Randi stared at the inferno for a few moments more. She was trembling in reaction, shaking hard as the shock of her narrow escape set in. She had come way too close to dying in there, she realized suddenly. Her right hand closed slowly on the cell phone and papers she had retrieved. It scarcely seemed possible that these bits and pieces of scorched debris contained any information that was worth the risks she had just run. Or the lives of three good men and women, the members of her slaughtered surveillance team.

She sighed. If nothing else, she owed it to them to find out.

Slowly and painfully, Randi turned away from the burning villa and limped off into the darkness.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Vladik Fadayev followed the road all the wav up to the top of the little hill and pulled over to the shoulder. He killed the headlights and shut off the engine of his small, Russian-made Lada, listening carefully as it coughed and sputtered to a stop. He had earned enough money in his years with the Brandt Group to afford a better car, but the lean, hollow-cheeked sniper preferred his rusting, often-dented Lada, for all its many faults. Newer vehicles stood out, especially the expensive Western makes, and Fadayev liked to be able to blend anonymously with his surroundings.

He pulled a long, heavy flashlight out of the glove box, pushed the door open, and then stepped lightly out onto the hard-packed, frozen dirt. For a minute, he stayed where he was, shining the beam around the road and into the woods on either side. To his trained eye, it was easy enough to see what had happened here. Tire marks showed where Brandt’s big vehicles had stopped suddenly. Spent shell casings glittered in the bright light, half-buried in the trampled snow under the trees where the Group’s gunmen had opened fire from ambush.

Fadayev snorted in disgust. Leaving those casings behind for anyone to find was sloppy. Real professionals prided themselves on making a hit and then moving on without leaving any telltales behind that could link them to their work. But he supposed Brandt and the others had been in too much of a hum to police the area properly.

The sniper shook his head slowly. He did not much care for this new contract Brandt had accepted. Urged on by their mysterious employer, the big, gray-eyed German was always pushing for speed, taking risks with the lives of his men to produce quick results. Fadayev frowned. This constant haste was not safe. It was not sound. He preferred the old days, back when the Brandt Group did most of its well-paid work discreetly and without so much fuss, eliminating a political dissident here, and kidnapping and murdering a business rival there.

He turned in the other direction, noting the deep gouges in the snow and dirt leading straight down the slope. That was where the GAZ jeep he had spotted earlier had plunged to its doom. Broken branches and pieces of torn metal and shattered glass strewn across the slope painted a trail of destruction that ended at the lip of a steep-sided gully.

Fadayev reached into his car and grabbed his pistol off the seat, a heavy old 7.62mm Tokarev. Though he preferred killing at a distance, the pistol was a better choice of weapon to take down that slope. It was handier at close range than his SVD rifle, and more suited to finishing off a wounded man—which was the most he expected to do in the circumstances. He shoved the Tokarev into the pocket of his winter camouflage smock.

Slowly at first, and then with increasing confidence, Fadayev made his way down the slope, picking his way through the trees until he drew near to the edge of the ravine. He paused briefly, pulled the pistol out of his pocket, and went forward with the flashlight in one hand and the Tokarev ready in the other.

Cautiously, he peered down into the gully.

The wreckage of the GAZ jeep lay tilted on its side about ten meters below, sitting at an odd angle in the middle of a pile of large boulders.

Splintered saplings and crushed underbrush showed where it had rolled over and over down the side of the ravine before smashing into those rough-edged rocks.

The beam from Fadayev’s flashlight picked out more than a dozen bullet holes along the vehicle’s torn and dented chassis. A few shards of glass stood in its windows, but otherwise they were only dark openings into the ravaged interior.

The sniper sighed.

Climbing down into that ravine in the dark was not a job he relished. It would make more sense to wait for daylight. After all, the dead man inside that jeep was not going anywhere, nor were any of the identity documents or other papers he might be carrying. But orders were orders, and Brandt was not a patient or forgiving man these days. No, it was better to get this job over quickly, Fadayev thought. Then, at least, he could turn around and drive back to the comfort of his apartment in Moscow.

It took him several minutes to reach the bottom.

Probing the rough ground ahead with his flashlight, the sniper moved confidently toward the wrecked jeep. He climbed over a pair of boulders and dropped easily into a little hollow, and then leaned carefully against the side of the vehicle, craning his neck to peer inside.

His eyes widened.

There was no one there. A shoulder safety belt dangled empty in the driver’s seat. Which meant…

Fadayev froze suddenly as he felt the ice-cold muzzle of a pistol press firmly against the back of his neck.

“Drop your weapon,” a stern voice commanded.

Numbly, the sniper obeyed. The Tokarev clattered against the rocks.

“Very good,” the voice said coolly. “And now, get rid of the flashlight.”

Again, Fadayev did as he was told, still completely bewildered by his failure. No enemy had ever managed to take him by surprise before. He was always the hunter, never the hunted. The flashlight fell to the ground at his feet and rolled away. It ended up shining off into the tangle of boulders and underbrush in front of him. He swallowed hard. His mouth had gone complete!)’ dry.

“Excellent,” the voice said, with a hint of bleak humor. “You may live through this night after all.”

“What do you want with me?” Fadayev croaked.

“A great many things,” the man behind him said flatly. “We will start with a few basic, easy-to-answer, questions. Remember, though, that this is a game with two simple rules. Rule Number One: If you tell me the truth, I will not Kill you. Rule Number Two: If you lie to me, I will blow your spine right out through the front of your throat. Is that clear?”

Fadayev nodded nervously. “Yes, that is very clear,” he stammered.

“Good,” the other man told him. The muzzle of the pistol pressed even harder against the back of his neck. “Then let us begin — “

Deep in a command bunker beneath the Defense Ministry building, the senior officers responsible for defending Ukraine against air and missile attack sat around a horseshoe-shaped table, listening closely while a middle-aged colonel briefed them on recent developments. Together, they commanded an array of MiG-29 and Su-27 fighter regiments, long-range surface-to-air missile batteries, and early warning radar sites.

“We have evidence of increasing activity at fighter and bomber bases within easy striking range of our country,” the briefer said seriously. “We have intercepted air-to-ground transmissions and ground controller replies that may show new aviation regiments deploying to airfields around Bryansk, Kursk, Rostov, and others.”

One of the officers sat forward. “But these transmissions are not conclusive?” he asked sharply.

“No, sir. They are not,” the briefer admitted. “But in several cases, we have overheard pilots identifying themselves from new air units and requesting landing instructions at these bases. In each case, the controllers have sharply reminded them to maintain strict radio silence and to follow the visual cues they were given earlier, before leaving their original bases.”

“That is certainly suggestive,” another Air Defense force major general said grimly. He commanded one of the MiG-29 regiments stationed near Kiev. “No rational commander asks his pilots to fly into a new base on radio silence for training purposes. Not in the winter! Not unless he is willing to lose aircraft and pilots in otherwise avoidable accidents. Why should the Russians do that unless they are trying to hide their movements from us?”

The colonel conducting the briefing nodded. “Yes, sir. And in fact, all Russian military transmissions have fallen off dramatically over the past twenty-four hours, those involving air, ground, and missile forces… the lot of them.”

Faces around the table frowned. Transitioning to radio silence was a security measure sometimes employed to conceal forces massing for combat. In peacetime, it was faster, easier, and safer for aviation, tanks, artillery, and infantry units to communicate with each other and with their headquarters using radio signals.

“Are there any other signs of possible imminent action?” one of the missile complex commanders asked quietly.

“The Russians are flying significantly more sorties very near and along our common frontier,” the colonel told him. “In several cases, they have ‘accidentally’ penetrated our airspace—sometimes by as much as twenty or thirty kilometers.”

“They’re testing us,” another of the generals said bluntly. Thick-necked and in his early fifties, he commanded a key radar site near the eastern Ukrainian town of Konotop. “They’re probing our defenses to evaluate our detection capabilities and to find out how fast we can react to hostile aircraft crossing into our territory. In all probability, they have electronic intelligence aircraft flying close by during these ‘accidents,’ monitoring our radar frequencies, communications, and intercept patterns.”

He turned toward the head of the table, where the gray-haired commander-in-chief of the Air Defense Force, Lieutenant General Rustern Lissenko, sat with his head down, apparently listening to their discussion while intently examining the notes prepared by his staff. “What is your impression, General?”

Lissenko said nothing.

“General?”

One of the officers sitting next to him reached over and gently touched Lissenko on the shoulder. The gray-haired man fell forward onto his notes. Tufts of his hair fell out, revealing a virulent rash across his scalp. He began shaking, clearly wracked by a skyrocketing fever.

There were astonished gasps around the room.

The colonel who had touched Lissenko stared down at his hand in horror.

Then he grabbed for the nearest command phone. “Connect me to the medial center! This is an emergency!”

An hour later, a short, nondescript Air Defense Force captain stood at the window of his small office. He looked down into the Ministry’s inner courtyard, watching the panicked activity below in undisguised satisfaction. Doctors and medical technicians wearing biohazard suits were busy shepherding a long line of worried-looking generals into waiting ambulances. So many high-ranking soldiers and political leaders had fallen ill over the past week that no one still in authority in Kiev was taking any more chances. Everyone present at the command conference had been ordered into strict quarantine.

He smiled. Three days ago, he had added the contents of a vial to General Lissenko’s customary breakfast, a bowl of kasha, or seasoned porridge. Now, the results of this one, simple act far exceeded his expectations. In effect, the

Ukrainian Air Defense Force had just been decapitated, stripped of its most senior and experienced officers at the worst possible moment.

The captain, Ukrainian by law but a Russian by ethnicity and loyalty, turned away from the window and picked up a phone. He dialed the secret number he had been given weeks before.

“Yes?” a quiet voice asked.

“This is Rybakov,” the captain said calmly. “I have good news to report.”

The Kremlin

Russian President Viktor Dudarev looked across his desk at the stocky, gray-haired man standing before him. He frowned. “Castilla is organizing a meeting of his allies to discuss ways to confront us? A secret meeting? You are sure about this?”

Alexei Ivanov nodded coolly. “The report from our special asset in the White House is quite detailed. And reliable sources inside the other invited governments confirm this report.”

“When?”

“In less than two days,” the head of the Thirteenth Directorate answered.

Dudarev rose from behind his desk and stalked over to one of the windows of his private office. For a moment, he stood peering down into the floodlit courtyard below. Then he glanced back at Ivanov. “How much do the Americans know?”

“Not enough,” Ivanov assured him. “At most, they have rumors and speculation.” He shrugged. “But we know that they are probing ever more desperately, seeking the answers they lack.”

The Russian president nodded curtly. He glowered. “Your courier with the HYDRA variant has arrived in the United States?”

“Yes,” Ivanov confirmed. “He is in New York now, en route to Washington, D.C.”

“Good.” Dudarev turned back to look out the window. His own distorted reflection stared back at him from the glass. His scowl deepened. “Signal our mole. I want Castilla out of the way at the earliest possible moment. I want him dead or dying before he can conduct this secret conference of America’s allies.” He swung back to Ivanov. “Is that clearly understood?”

“It is,” the other man assured him quietly. “It will be done.”

Chapter Forty

Randi Russell stiffened suddenly, feeling a wave of pain race through her body. For a few terrible seconds, the pain was so intense that the third-floor conference room around her seemed to turn red. Her forehead felt both boiling hot and freezing cold, all at the same time. Slowly, she breathed out through her clenched teeth, forcing herself to relax. The pain ebbed slightly.

“Stings a bit, doesn’t it?” the embassy doctor said cheerfully, taking a close look at the cut he had just finished stitching up.

“If by ‘a bit,’ you mean ‘a hell of a lot,’ well then, yes,” Randi said drily.

“It does sting.”

The doctor shrugged, already turning away to pack up his medical gear.

“If I had my say-so, we would be having this conversation in a hospital emergency room, Ms. Russell,” he told her calmly. “You have enough cuts, scrapes, and minor burns for any three people, let alone one young woman.”

Randi eyed him. “Are any of my injuries disabling?” she asked pointedly.

“In and of themselves? No,” the doctor admitted reluctantly. He shrugged again. “But if you ever slow down long enough for your body to figure out how badly it’s been hurt, you’re going to wish you were lying quietly in a nice, soft hospital bed, hooked up to an IV loaded with the best painkillers on the market.”

“So I guess the trick is to keep moving,” Randi said, grinning crookedly.

“Well, Doctor, I should be able to manage that. I’ve never been really comfortable just sitting still.”

The doctor snorted. Then he shook his head, accepting defeat. He set a small, capped medicine bottle down on the table in front of her. “Look, Ms.

Russell, if the pain you’re suffering ever does spill over that rather high thresh-old of yours, at least promise me that you’ll take two of these pills. They’ll help you cope with it.”

She looked at bottle and then back up at him. “What are the side effects?”

“Minimal,” he said with a slight smile. “Nothing beyond a slight drowsiness.” As a parting shot, he added, “But you should probably be careful when operating heavy machinery—which includes firing automatic weapons, chasing down bad guys, and burning down expensive villas.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Randi told him coolly.

Once the doctor was gone, she tossed the bottle of painkillers into the closest wastepaper basket. Then she pushed herself up out of her chair and limped over to where Curt Bennett, the head of the special technical team sent out from Langley, was busy trying to pry his way deeper into Wulf Renke’s secure communications network. The short, fidgety man was using a combination of the first telephone number her surveillance team had unearthed —the one registered in Switzerland —and other numbers, these taken from the memory of the scorched and blackened cell phone she had captured at Kessler’s house a few hours before.

Randi leaned over his shoulder. The computer screen in front of Bennett was filled with what looked, to her untutored eye, like a mishmash of strings of random numbers and symbols. Solid lines connected some of them. Others were linked by dotted lines. Still others sat alone in splendid isolation.

“How’s it going?” she asked quietly.

The CIA analyst looked up at her. His eyes were bloodshot, but they still gleamed brightly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m making progress,” he promised. “But whoever created this network was reallv v<-‘rv good. It’s a remarkably complicated web of different phone numbers, with a great many loops and blind alleys built into it. Still, I’m beginning to be able to trace some of the patterns.”

“And?”

“So far I’ve identified numbers belonging to accounts that are registered in several different countries,” Bennett told her. “Switzerland, Russia, Germany, and Italy—for a start.”

Randi frowned. “Can you tie any of them to Renke?”

“Not yet,” the CIA expert said. “Most of those accounts look like fakes to me. Basically, I suspect they’re the electronic equivalents of a post office box rented by someone using a fake name and fake ID.”

“Damn.”

“All is not lost,” Bennett reassured her. He raised an eyebrow. “Let’s say you found that real-life post office box. What would you do next?”

“I’d put a tail on anyone who came to collect mail from it,” Randi said.

“And I’d trace any mail forwarded from it.”

“Exactly.” The CIA specialist grinned toothily. “Well, we can do the same thing electronically. As calls pass through those different numbers, we can track them, following them up the ladder to the next set of accounts and so on.”

“How long will it take you to zero in on the core numbers?” Randi asked quietly. “The ones connected to honest-to-Cod phones?”

“That’s difficult to estimate,” Bennett said. He shrugged. “Maybe a few more hours. Maybe a couple of days. To a large extent, it depends on the traffic through this secure network. Now that we’re inside the outer layer, the more calls the bad guvs make using their system, the more information we acquire.”

Randi nodded. “Then keep on it, Curt,” she said grimly. “I need to know where Renke is hiding out. As soon as possible.”

She turned awav, seeing another CIA staffer hurrying into the conference room. “Yes?”

“Langley thinks it may have a name for that last man you shot inside Kessler’s house,” the other woman told her quickly. “That scorched passport you grabbed was definitely a fake, but they were able to match what was left of the photograph with one already in the archives.”

“Show me,” Randi snapped. She took the TOP-SECRET message sent from CIA headquarters. At the top, there was a scan of an old, black-and-white photo, one that showed a thin-faced man with dark hair. He was wearing a military uniform, an East German officer’s service jacket with the four dia-monds of a captain on his shoulder straps. She compared this picture with her mental image of the black-clad gunman who had tried so hard to kill her just a few short hours ago. She nodded tightly. It was the same man.

Her eyes moved down to the text of the message. “Gerhard Lange,” she read aloud. “A former captain in the East German Ministry of State Security.

After the fall of the DDR, initially taken into custody by the Bonn government in connection with several political murders in Leipzig, Dresden, and Last Berlin. Released for lack of evidence shortly thereafter. Believed to have emigrated to Serbia one month later. Rumored to have worked as an internal security consultant for the Milosevic regime from 1990 to 1994 before emigrating again, this time to Russia. No further information on file.”

“Well, well, well,” Randi murmured. “It appears that the good doctor Renke prefers working with his fellow countrymen. I wonder how many other former Stasi goons he has at his beck and call.”

Bernhard Heichler sat numbly at his desk inside the headquarters of the Bundesamtes fiir Verfassunsschutz, the BfV. He stared down at the urgent reports from Berlin, reports that could easily lead to absolute disaster for him. He groaned aloud and then stopped abruptly, appalled by how far the sound seemed to carry in this strangely silent building.

At three o’clock in the morning, the offices of the BfV were almost completely deserted, inhabited only by a skeletal night shift of counterintelligence officers and clerical staff. His continued presence would undoubtedly draw raised eyebrows and lead to sardonic comments, especially from his own subordinates in Section V. Heichler was widely known as a man who craved routine and who ordinarily despised grandstanding. Seen in that light, his decision to stay so late at the office to monitor new developments in yesterday afternoon’s massacre of three American intelligence officers in Berlin would strike many of his colleagues as evidence that he was angling for yet another promotion.

No one would guess Heichler’s real reason for wanting to read those classified Berlin police reports first, before anyone else in German counterintelligence.

He read through them again, still in disbelief. Police forensics teams had managed to connect the weapons used in the murder of the CIA agents with those found —along with six more bodies —in or around the burned-out home of a high-ranking official in the Bundeskriminalamt. Heichler swallowed hard, fighting down the acid taste of bile. What kind of hellish conspiracy was he now caught up in?

His phone chirped suddenly, frighteningly loud in the unnatural quiet of his office. Startled, Heichler snatched the receiver off its cradle. “Yes? What is it?”

“An incoming call from America, I lerr I leichler,” the operator said. “From Herr Andrew Coates, a senior aide to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He wants to speak to the ranking officer in Section V.”

“Put him through,” Heichler said harshly. His hands trembled. “Hello?”

“Bernhard?” a familiar voice said into his ear. Coates was the liaison between the CIA and Germany’s confusing array of foreign and domestic intelligence organizations. He and Heichler met fairly frequently to exchange information. “Boy, am I glad that you’re still there! Listen, I wanted to bring you up-to-date on our investigation, and to let you know that we’ve had some good news. One of our people survived that goddamned ambush. Not only that, but we’re pretty sure that she’s managed to get her hands on some crucial evidence that will lead us to the bastards who ordered the attack — “

Heichler listened in growing terror while his counterpart in the CIA shattered any hopes he had harbored of easily escaping the noose of treason and betrayal drawn so tight around his neck. Somehow he managed to make it through the ensuing conversation without screaming. When the American at last hung up, he sat staring into space for several minutes.

Then, slowly and reluctantly, with hands that shook harder than ever, Heichler picked up his phone one more time. If the Americans captured those responsible for butchering their field officers in Berlin, they were sure to uncover evidence that would lead them right back to the BfV— right back to him. Once again, he thought despairingly, he had no real choice. None at all.

Chapter Forty-One

Konstantin Malkovic sat calmly at the breakfast table in his luxury apartment, which occupied the top floor of a building overlooking the Kitay Gorod financial district. He sipped the last of his morning tea while reading through summaries of the overnight trades made by his commodities brokers in the United States and Asia. For the first time in the past several days, the billionaire felt able to concentrate on the routine operations of his far-flung business empire. Brandt had the two Americans—Smith and Devin—safely in his grip, and last night’s late news reports from Berlin were also extremely satisfying.

HYDRA was once again completely secure.

Quietly, one of his servants appeared, holding a phone. “Mr. Titov is on the line, sir.”

Malkovic looked up in some annoyance. Titov was responsible for manag-ing the Moscow offices in his absence. What was so important that it couldn’t wait until he arrived at Pashkov House a bit later in the morning? He took the phone. “Well, Kirill?” he demanded. “What’s the problem?”

“We have received an e-mail addressed to you personally,” Titov told him.

“It is marked urgent. I thought you should know about it.”

With an effort, Malkovic suppressed his irritation. Like many Russians who had grown up under the old Soviet system, Titov had difficulty acting on his own initiative, without explicit orders from his superior. “Very well,” he sighed. “Read this e-mail back to me.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot,” Titov said carefully. “It appears to be coded using the SOVEREIGN encryption program.”

Malkovic frowned. The SOVEREIGN cipher system was one reserved for the most sensitive communications, those involving his most secret and illegal enterprises. Only Malkovic and a few of his most trusted subordinates possessed the ability to decode these messages. “I see,” he said, after a pause.

“You were quite right to bring this to my attention. I will handle the matter myself.1!

After breaking the connection with Titov, he rose from the breakfast table and went back into his study. With a few quick keystrokes on his computer, he brought up the e-mail and ran it through his decryption program. It was a frantic report sent by one of his top operatives in German}-, a man who controlled the various puppets and spies Malkovic had planted in several of that country’s most important government ministries.

Malkovic read through the message in increasing alarm. The hunter-killer team sent by Brandt to Berlin had been wiped out. Worse, this man Lange and his men had failed in their primary mission. The Americans were still hot on Renke’s trail. The HYDRA secret was in greater jeopardy than ever.

Coldly, the billionaire contemplated the likely reaction to this news by the Russian president. He grimaced. Dudarev’s threats had been explicit. Could the details be kept from him? The Russian leader had his own sources of information, and one way or another, he would soon learn of this disaster. When he did, it would be unwise in the extreme for Malkovic to rely on his forbear-ance. With his armies already on the march toward their unsuspecting enemies, too much was at stake for Dudarev to easily forgive failure.

Still scowling, Malkovic deleted the damning message and shut down the computer. For a short time longer, he sat moodily staring at the blank screen, mulling over possible courses of action. HYDRA could still be salvaged, he knew, but the work would be best done personally—and from well beyond Dudarev’s reach.

Abruptly, with his decision made, he pushed away from his desk and stalked over to a wall safe concealed behind a centuries-old icon of St.

Michael the Archangel. Keyed by his fingerprints, the heavy metal door swung open, revealing an assortment of CD-ROMs, folders of photographs, and a small box full of audiotapes of surreptitiously recorded conversations.

Together, this material documented his secret transactions with the Kremlin.

It also included a detailed summary of everything he had learned about Russia’s military plans.

Quickly, the billionaire began transferring the contents of the safe to one of his briefcases. Once he was safely outside Russia, he would be able to use this information to renegotiate his agreements with Dudarev, securing iron-clad guarantees of his personal safety in return for bringing HYDRA to completion. Malkovic smiled thinly, imagining the Russian president’s outrage at being blackmailed by his confederate. Then he shrugged. Fortunately, like him, Dudarev was fundamentally a cold-eyed realist. Their alliance had never rested entirely on the basis of mutual trust.

Jon Smith was drowning, sinking down and down through the waters of a bot-tomless black pool. His lungs were on fire, straining against the increasing pressure as he tumbled deeper and deeper into the crushing depths. He writhed in a desperate attempt to claw his way back up to the surface. Then, to his horror, he realized that his hands and his feet were frozen, completely im-mobile. He was pinioned and helpless, falling ever faster headfirst into nothingness. There was no escape.

“Wake up, Colonel!” a harsh voice demanded suddenly.

Smith shuddered and gasped, retching as another bucketful of ice-cold water hit him right in the face. He coughed violently and then doubled up in pain. Every nerve ending felt raw. Warily, he forced his eyes open.

He was lying on his side in a puddle of freezing water. His hands, bound behind his back, were numb. So were his feet, tied together tightly at the ankles. A rough, worn stone floor stretched away into darkness. For a long moment, nothing he could see made any sense. Where was he? What the hell •lad happened to him? He could hear what sounded like a woman moaning softly nearby. Slowly, wincing involuntarily at the agony it cost him to make even the slightest movement, Jon turned his head to look upward.

A tall, blond-haired man stood there, staring down at him with an appraising look in his winter-gray eyes. The tall man studied him for a bit longer in silence. Then he nodded in cruel satisfaction. “Now that you are conscious, Colonel, we can begin —all over again.”

Unwelcome memories rushed back, flooding into Smith’s pain-clouded mind like a rising river bursting through a weakened dam. The gray-eyed man was Erich Brandt. And he and Fiona Devin were Brandt’s prisoners. They had been dragged into this dank cellar not long after the ambush that had killed Oleg Kirov.

The cellar itself lay below the ruins of a church, part of a Russian Orthodox monastery that had been closed by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. Jon remembered seeing hundreds of bullet holes pockmarking the walls and hearing the tall German explain, with grim amusement, that this chamber had been used by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, as a place of execution for political prisoners during one of the dictator’s brutal purges. Now the monastery’s grounds and its buildings, what was left of them, were wholly abandoned, slowly being swallowed up by the surrounding forest.

The terrible hours since they were brought here had passed in an endless procession of torment as Brandt and two of his grim-faced henchmen took turns interrogating them. Every question they asked was punctuated by pain, either by a short, sharp punch to the ribs or the head, or an open-handed slap to the face, or by the application of electric shocks. In the brief intervals between these sessions, Jon and Fiona had been drenched with freezing water, and bombarded by a dizzying succession of shrill, earsplitting sounds and blinding strobe lights—all as part of an effort to disorient them and weaken their resistance.

Brandt had been watching him closely. The blond man smiled coldly. He nodded to the other men standing unseen behind Jon. “Our American friend here is ready. Help him back into his seat.”

Two pairs of rough, callused hands grabbed Smith under the arms as Brandt’s underlings hauled him bodily upright out of the icy puddle of water.

They shoved him back into a chair and then again looped a leather strap around his chest, binding him to the sharp-edged wood frame. The strap tightened unmercifully.

Jon gritted his teeth. He glanced to his left.

Fiona Devin was strapped into a chair next to him. Her hands and feet were also bound. Her head lolled. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth.

“Like you, Ms. Devin has been … uncooperative,” Brandt said easily. A humorless smile appeared on his face and then vanished swiftly without leaving a trace on his lips or in his eyes. “But I am a forgiving man, so I will grant you both another chance to save yourselves more of this unnecessary pain.”

He snapped an order over his shoulder to one of his men. “She looks fhirstv, Yuri. Give her another drink!”

His subordinate, a brawny, shaven-headed man, obeved, tossing a bucket full of cold water into Fiona’s face. She choked and spluttered, leaning back against the chair in a vain effort to avoid the deluge of freezing water. After a

few seconds, she slowly opened her eyes. Noticing Smith looking at her with evident concern, she forced a wry, painful grin. “The service here is really rather awful. Next time, I’ll choose different accommodations.”

Brandt snorted. “Very amusing, Ms. Devin.” He turned back to Smith.

“Now, Colonel, let me try being reasonable one last time.” His voice hardened. “Who do you work for? The CIA? The Defense Intelligence Agency?

Some other organization?”

Jon braced himself for the blow he knew was coming. He raised his head, staring the former Stasi officer straight in the eyes. “I’ve told you before,” he said tiredly, surprised at how shirred his voice sounded. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith, M.D. I work for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute — “

But instead of hitting him, Brandt spun around and slapped Fiona hard across the face. Her head rocked back. Blood from a new cut inside her mouth spattered off into the darkness. The sound of the blow echoed like a gunshot in the damp silence of the cellar.

“You’re a dead man,” Smith growled through his clenched teeth, shocked by what he had just seen. He strained uselessly against the wide leather strap holding him in place.

Brandt swung back with a sly, satisfied grin on his face. “Oh, didn’t I tell you, Colonel? The rules have changed. From this moment on, Ms. Devin will suffer for each of your lies, not you.” He shrugged. “The pain she endures ‘n the process will be on your conscience, not on mine.”

Christ, Smith thought bleakly, feeling light-headed. The big, gray-eyed bastard had read him perfectly. He had been tortured before, and he knew the limits of his own endurance. But how long could he sit helpless and watch another person being brutalized to satisfy his own stubborn pride?

“Pay me no mind, Jon,” Fiona Devin said quietly, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “This murdering bastard will kill us both no matter what we tell him, or don’t tell him — “

Yet another open-handed blow from Brandt’s hard hand rocked her head to the side.

“You will be silent, Ms. Devin!” he said coldly. “My conversation is with the colonel here, not with you. You had your chance to tell me what I wished to know. Now it is his turn.”

Smith raged inwardly, maddened by his inability to stop this devilish game. If he could just get free, even for a second, he thought desperately… but realistically he knew there was no chance of that. He also knew that Fiona was right. They were both going to die here in this dark, dank cellar, this place already haunted by the ghosts of hundreds of others murdered by men like Brandt and his thugs. The only real question remaining was whether or not they could win at least one small last victory by denying the Stasi officer the information he demanded.

He closed his eyes briefly, steeling himself to endure the long, pain-filled, and bloody hours to come. Then he opened them and looked up again at Brandt in front of him. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith, M.D.,” he repeated steadily, in a stronger voice than he would have thought possible.

“And I work for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases…”

Brandt stared down at the lean, dark-haired American in frustration. He had been sure that Smith was on the edge of breaking. He had sensed it. But now he could see the man’s resolve stiffening. Meanwhile, time was moving on. Sooner or later, a militia patrol would discover the carnage inside the Zakarov dacha. And sooner or later, they would find the wreckage of that bullet-torn GAZ jeep lying in a ravine by the side of the road. Once either of those things happened, Alexei Ivanov would start asking some very awkward questions.

He rubbed his jaw. At least Fadayev had finally called into the Group’s headquarters, reporting that the driver was definitely dead and that he had retrieved the dead man’s identity papers. If nothing else, Brandt thought, that would make it slightly more difficult for Ivanov to connect the two incidents.

But only slightly.

His phone rang suddenly.

Scowling, Brandt yanked the device out of his pocket. “Yes?” he snapped irritablv, walking back toward the stairs out of the cellar, moving out of earshot of the two prisoners. “What is it?”

“Your man Lange has bungled his assignment,” Malkovie told him bitterly.

“And by now the CIA must have penetrated very deeply into our communications network.”

Brandt listened in stunned disbelief while his employer ran through what he had learned about the disaster in Berlin. Lange dead? Along with all of his handpicked team? It scarcely seemed possible.

“We have no choice now,” Malkovie said flatlv. “We must transfer the key elements of the HYDRA lab to a new location—without further delay. I intend to oversee the work myself, and I want you there, too. Both for security purposes and to make sure that Professor Renke appreciates the need for immediate action.”

Brandt nodded, understanding what the other man really wanted. He wanted personal protection against any danger. The billionaire was frightened to death of what the Russians might do once thev learned that all of his fine promises to them about HYDRA’s operational security were worthless.

His jaw tightened. Malkovie was right to be afraid. “When do we leave?” he asked harshly.

“My personal jet is scheduled to take off in just under three hours,”

Malkovie said. “But first I want you to shut down all of your operations in Moscow. Make arrangements for your key people to rendezvous somewhere °utside Russia. Dump the communications system. And wipe your files, all of tnem. Understand?”

Yes.” Brandt considered the work necessary to implement those orders.

He nodded again. “It can be done.”

“Make sure of it,” the other man told him coolly. “I will not tolerate any Mlore mistakes.” The phone went dead.

Brandt spun on his heel. “Yuri!” he growled. “Over here!”

Openly curious, the brawny, shaven-headed man ambled over. “Yes?”

“We’ve got new orders,” Brandt told him brusquely. “I’m heading back to Moscow straight away. Close up shop here, sanitize the area, and follow me when you can.”

“What about the Americans?”

Brandt shrugged. “They’re useless to us now. Finish them.”

Chapter Forty-Two

With their hands still tied behind them, Jon Smith and Fiona Devin were hustled up the stairs and out of the cellar at gunpoint. They came up into the ruins of the church, a square stone building topped by the broken remains of a central onion-shaped dome. Gray light from an overcast sky streamed in through empty windows and gaps in the dome. Small patches of weathered, fading paint on the moss-covered walls were all that was left of the bright frescoes of saints and scenes from the Old and New Testaments that had once decorated the church interior. Everything else of value—the marble altar, the golden taberna-cle, chandeliers and candelabras—had long since been carted away.

Brandt wheeled at the main door to the church and sketched an ironic salute. “And here I will say farewell to you, Colonel. And to you, too, Ms. Devin.” His teeth flashed white in the gloom. “I will not see either of you again.”

Jon said nothing, staring back at him with an impassive face. Show no fear, he told himself. Don’t give the bastard any satisfaction. He noticed that Fiona had the same faintly bored look on her bruised face. She glanced at Brandt with no more interest than she might have shown if he were a common house buzzing against a window.

Visibly irked by their lack of reaction, the gray-eyed man turned on his heel and left. Not long afterward, they heard the engine of his Ford Explorer roar into life and listened to its thick tires go crunching away across the snow and ice.

“Go on!” one of the two gunmen still guarding them growled. He gestured with his pistol, a 9mm Makarov, pointing toward a smaller, arched doorway at the side of the church. “Out through there!”

Smith glanced at him, not hothering to hide the contempt he felt. “And if we refuse?”

The gunman, the shaven-headed man Brandt had called Yuri, shrugged carelessly. “Then I will shoot you here. It makes no real difference to me.”

“Do as the man asks,” Fiona murmured. “If nothing else, we buy a little more time. And at least we get the chance to breathe a bit of clean air.”

]on nodded slowly. In the end, resisting here would make no real difference to their fate, and perhaps it would be better to die outside —under the open sky—than here in this musty pile of stone.

Of course, not dying would be even better, he thought wryly. Cautiously, he tried again to loosen his bonds, straining his wrists hard against the length of heavy-duty plastic cable binding him and then relaxing, trying to stretch them out slightly. Over time, the constant expansion and contraction might create a point of weakness that would let him break free. He sighed. It was a technique that might succeed, but only if he were given an uninterrupted ten or twelve hours to spend working awav at the cable. Unfortunately, his remaining life span was probably measured in minutes at best.

“Come!” the gunman snapped again. His comrade, shorter and with a mop of coarse brown hair, prodded them forward from behind with the muzzle of his submachine gun.

Smith and Fiona stumbled out through the little door, down a few cracked stone steps and out across a snow-covered patch of waste ground. It was largely overgrown with weeds and brambles and little clumps of saplings. A few paths wandered off through the old and gnarled trees, heading for darker heaps or broken stone —all that was left of a small hospital, a school, a refectory, cells for the monks, and other buildings. The remnants of a stout stone wall could be seen rising beyond those ruins.

They were pushed and shoved down a path running off to the left, one that led through an open gate in the monastery wall and out into a small, equally neglected, and overgrown graveyard. Many of these markers had fallen over and lay half-buried in the snow. Others were pockmarked with old bullet scarv probably made decades ago by NKVD execution squads amusing themselves while off-duty. All were surrounded by clumps of tall dead grass and Leeds.

Looming up on the far side of the graveyard, Jon could see a shallow open pit, probably once used to burn rubbish. Cans of gasoline and a collection of dirtv, oil-soaked rags were stacked at the rim of the pit. He stopped abruptly, digging in his heels. Their planned fate was clear. He and Fiona were going to be herded down into that pit, shot to death, and then their bodies would be doused in gasoline and burned.

From somewhere behind him, he could hear the two gunmen murmuring to each other. By the sound of it they had dropped back several meters behind Iheir two captives.

Smith grimaced. They were out of time and out of options. And if they were going to die anyway, it was better to go down fighting. In that same moment, he heard a muffled gasp from Fiona and knew that she, too, had seen the waiting pit and the gasoline. Jon glanced across at her. “Are you with me?” he said quietly, jerking his head slightly to indicate Brandt’s thugs coming up behind them.

Now there were tears in her eyes. But she lifted her chin and nodded bravely, ‘“lb the bitter end. Colonel.” Then she actually managed a very slight smile.

Smith grinned back appreciatively. “That’s the spirit. Let’s see if we can lure them in within reach. I’ll take the guy on the left. You take the one on the right,” he murmured under his breath. “Trip yours if you can. Otherwise just kick the hell out of him and then keep kicking. Okay?”

She nodded again.

“No talking!” the shaven-headed man snapped. “And keep moving!”

Smith refused to move. He stood still with his back to the two gunmen, waiting. His skin crawled, anticipating the sudden smashing impact of a bullet. Jnst come a little closer, he thought grimly. Just a bit closer.

He heard footsteps crunching across the snow, drawing nearer. He tensed, preparing himself to spring. A shadow fell across his shoulder.

Now!

Jon whirled around, lashing out with his right foot in a lightning-fast kick.

Out the corner of his eye, he saw Fiona making the same move.

It was no good.

Brandt’s men must have been waiting and watching for one last desperate escape attempt. With contemptuous ease, they evaded the kicks wildly aimed in their direction. Both quickly stepped back well out of range, grinning cruelly.

Thrown off balance by his sudden movement, Smith stumbled. With his hands still tied behind his back, he could not recover and wound up falling forward onto his knees. Panting, Fiona dropped to the snow at his side.

The shaven-headed man slowly wagged a mocking finger at them. “That was very stupid.” Then he shrugged. “But it doesn’t really matter, I suppose.

Nothing does—in the end.” He signaled to his colleague. “Kill them here, Kostya.”

Nodding coolly, the brown-haired man moved forward, raising his submachine gun.

Surprised at his own calmness, Smith forced himself to stare straight into the other man’s narrowed eyes. He had fought the good fight. What else could he do but take what was coming as bravely as he could? He could hear Fiona murmuring words softly under her breath, possibly a prayer of some kind.

The gunman’s finger tightened slowly on the trigger. A breath of wind ruffled through his mop of coarse brown hair.

Crack.

And the gunman’s chest blew apart in a spray of blood and bone, blown open from front to back. The submachine gun fell out of his nerveless hands.

His body swayed and then crumpled sideways, collapsing in a clump of brush between two grave markers.

For a split second, no one moved.

The other man stared in absolute astonishment at the mangled corpse of his comrade. Recovering suddenly, he threw himself down.

Crack.

A second high-velocity round smashed the snow-covered cross right behind where Brandt’s bald henchman had been standing. Snow and shattered pieces of marble flew away from the point of impact.

Smith rolled to the left, into the shelter offered by a headstone that appeared on the verge of toppling over but that was somehow still standing-A sculptor had carved the likeness of a sleeping mother and child deep into its surface. Fiona followed him. Together, they crouched low on their knees, being very careful to keep their heads well below the top of the monument.

“What the devil is going on?” Fiona whispered. Her eyes were wide and her face had gone very pale. The red handprints, welts, and cuts left by Brandt’s crueltv were plain on her smooth clear skin.

“Damned if I know,” Smith said softly, putting his mouth close to her ear.

An eerie silence descended across the weed-choked cemetery. Cautiously, Smith turned his head, studying the terrain more closely. The graveyard lay at the bottom of a little bowl, with gentle slopes rising all around. The ruins of the monastery crowned one of those shallow hills. Groves of birch and pine trees covered the other elevations.

i He heard the sudden crackle of dry brush not far off, the sound of someone slithering closer through the dead weeds and grass. Brandt’s surviving gunman was stalking them, Jon realized coldly, inching carefully from cover to cover to avoid drawing fire from the marksman lurking somewhere among the trees.

From the noise, Brandt’s man was swinging wide to their left, crawling through the crowded tangle of crosses and grave markers that still separated them from him.

Smith leaned closer to Fiona. “You go off that way,” he muttered, jerking his chin to the right, away from the ominous, crackling sounds coming steadily and stealthily closer. “Go a few meters. Once you’re behind another big marker, make some noise. As much noise as you can. Understand?”

Wordlessly, Fiona nodded back. Without waiting any longer, she rolled rapidly away across the hard-packed earth and snow.

And Jon moved himself, rolling to the left as quietly as he could. He crossed a small gap and readied the next pair of headstones over, one leaning Irunkenly against the other. He stopped behind the largest, a solid slab of dark-colored stone, and listened intently. More weeds rustled. The shaven-headed gunman was coming closer, creeping slowly through the snow and tall grass.

Quickly, Smith twisted around onto his back, lying with his legs drawn up to his chest, coiled and ready to strike. With luck, he might get one chance, he knew. But only one. If he muffed it, he was a dead man.

Off to his right, he heard a sharp thud, then another, and another, and finally what sounded like someone weeping in sheer terror and frustration.

Fiona was playing her part well, he realized, mimicking the noises that might be made by a frightened woman desperately crawling away through the cemetery in a panic.

Jon held his breath, waiting.

Flat on his belly, Brandt’s man wriggled out from around the weathered edge of the tall stone slab, moving faster now that he thought he had pijJ pointed the position of the two Americans, with the 9mm Makarov pistol held ready in his right hand. His head swung sharply toward where Smith lav watching him.

Jon saw the other man’s eyes widen in utter dismay. In that instant, he kicked out with both feet, smashing them as hard as he could straight into the gunman’s face. He felt a sickening crunch and saw the man’s head snap backward under the force of the blow. Droplets of blood spattered across his boots.

Smith kicked out again.

The shaven-headed man writhed backward, away from the American’s second attack. Below his glaring eyes, his face was a gruesome mask of fractured bone and shattered teeth. Enraged and in agony, he rolled up onto his feet, taking careful aim at Smith’s head.

And a third rifle shot rang out, echoing sharply across the little hollow.

Hit in the back, the man screamed once, clawed desperately at the huge hole torn through his stomach, and then folded over, hanging limp across the tall stone slab. His head and hands trailed in the weeds. More blood slid down the marker and pooled on the ground, staining the white, ice-crusted snow a sickly pink.

Slowly, painfully, Jon sat up. He inched away from the dead man and leaned his head back gratefully against the ice-cold stone of another grave marker, waiting for his nerves to stop twitching.

“Colonel?” a soft voice called out. It was Fiona Devin. “Are you still in one piece?”

“I seem to be,” he called back, not bothering to conceal the relief in his own voice. He caught a flicker of movement among the trees on the slope rising above them and sat up straighter. The movement resolved itself into the figure of a tall, silver-haired man, striding down the little hill toward them with a Dragunov SVD rifle cradled casually in his arms and a wide grin wreathed across his broad, large-nosed face.

Jon stared in total disbelief. He was looking at a man who should be dead.

He was looking at Oleg Kirov.

“How in hell …?” he asked, when the other man drew nearer.

For an answer, the Russian pulled open the torn winter coat he was wearing. Underneath, he wore a bulk} black vest. It was pockmarked and stained with what appeared to be smears of once-molten copper. He patted it affec-Honatelv. “British-made body armor, Jon,” Kirov said with satisfaction. “Some of the best in the world.”

“Which you just happened to decide to wear last night?”

Kirov shrugged. “Before I became a spy, I was a soldier. And what soldier in his right mind would go out on sentry duty without the proper equipment?”

He grinned again. “Old habits die hard, my friend, and old soldiers die even harder.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Ten minutes after turning off the Beltway that ringed Washington, D.C., Nikolai Nimerovsky glanced down at the odometer of his rental ear, a plain white Ford Taurus, checking how far he had come. Five miles. He was getting close to his destination. He looked hack up at the little country road stretching ahead of him. On either side, thick stands of trees choked by underbrush were lit by the car’s headlights and then disappeared in the predawn darkness.

A small signpost loomed up out of the blackness on the right, marking a turnoff that his map indicated meandered deeper into this state park until it came out a few miles away in a new housing subdivision.

He pulled off onto the shoulder and got out, holding the briefcase he had been given in Zurich. Following the instructions given to him in Moscow, he found the dead drop easily enough. It was a hollow tree just a few yards from the signpost. Acting quickly, he slid the briefcase into the tree trunk, made sure it was not visible from the road, and then walked unhurriedly back to his car.

Along the wax, he punched in a local phone number on his cell phone. It rang three times before someone answered.

“Yes?” a voice snapped, sounding irritated at being woken up so early in the morning.

“Is this the Miller residence at 555-8705?” Nimerovsky asked carefully.

“No,” the person on the other end said tartly. “You’ve dialed the wrong number.”

“I’m very sorry,” Nimerovsky said. “My apologies.”

There was a sudden click as the person he had called hung up.

Smiling now, the Thirteenth Directorate agent climbed back into his rental car and drove away. His mission was complete. The HYDRA variant had been delivered.

Curt Bennett swore suddenly and violently, He bent forward, peering even more closely at the computer screen in front of him, while his fingers raced across the keyboard sitting in his lap.

Randi looked up from her end of the long conference table. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. The CIA technical analyst was not ordinarily a profane man.

“Trouble?’ she asked.

“Big trouble,” Bennett confirmed tightly. “The network we’ve been probing is going dead.”

Randi hurried to his side. “Dead in what way?”

“In every way,” Bennett told her. He nodded at the screen. Most of the cell phone numbers whose ownership he had been tracing were now showing up in red, indicating they no longer belonged to active accounts. While she watched, the others shifted to red, too.

“Professor Renke and his friends are pulling the plug,” Randi realized.

“Not only that,” Bennett said. He tapped a key, switching to a new screen.

This one showed long columns of information—date and time stamps and locations—all broken down by separate telephone numbers. One by one they were disappearing, vanishing into the ether. “They’re also purging the database records of every call made or received by those numbers.”

Randi whistled softly. “I thought that was supposed to be basically impossible.”

The CIA analyst nodded. “Yeah, it is.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and frowned. “Unless, of course, you happen to have access to the proprietary software and top-level security codes used by all of the different telecom companies involved in completing those calls.”

“So who would have that kind of high-level access?”

Bennett shook his head. “Before now, I would have said nobody.” He watched the rest of the screen fade to black and then turned away in disgust.

“Most of those companies are fierce competitors. They don’t share that kind of data.”

“A third party, then,” Randi suggested. “Someone from the outside who can hack in past their safeguards.”

“Maybe,” the analyst admitted. He looked troubled. “But anyone able to break into those phone company computer systems so quickly and easily could do just about anything else he wanted to them.”

“Such as?

“Loot their corporate bank accounts. Steal the private account information for tens of millions of customers. Crash whole switching subroutines so badly that it might take weeks before anyone in the affected areas could make a phone call.” The analyst shrugged. “You name it.”

Randi nodded slowly, thinking very fast. “And yet,” she pointed out, “even with all of that incredible power at their fingertips, the only thing that these guys seem to have done with it is piggyback their own secure communications network onto those systems.”

“No kidding,” Bennett said. He looked frustrated. “None of it makes any sense. Why go to so much trouble to protect just one man, even if he is a top-notch weapons scientist?”

“I’m beginning to think we’re looking at something bigger than that,”

Randi told him grimly. “Much bigger.” She nodded toward the analyst’s computer. “How far did you get before Renke’s friends pulled their disappearing act?”

“Not far enough,” Bennett admitted. “I thought I was seeing some significant patterns in the data, but I can’t be sure of how close I was to the core.”

“Show me,” Randi ordered.

Quickly, the CIA specialist called up the results of his work, displaying them graphically on his screen as a series of separate circles—groups of apparently related phone numbers —with thicker or thinner lines showing the frequency of calls made betw een them. Each circle also carried a tag identifying the approximate geographic location assigned to each set of numbers.

Randi studied the layout carefully, seeing the patterns Bennett had uncovered. Most of the calls made using this secret network seemed to originate in either one of two places. Moscow was the first. She nodded to herself. No real surprise there, considering Wulf Renke’s past affiliations. But the second concentration seemed to make far less sense. It showed a flurry of phone calls made from and to Italy, especially to a group of numbers registered in a section of Umbria, north of Rome.

Umbria, she thought, bewildered. That was a region of ancient hill towns, olive groves, and vineyards. What could be so important to Renke or his backers in Umbria?

“Ms. Russell?”

Randi looked away from the screen. One of the junior-grade CIA officers attached to the Berlin Station stood there. Like her murdered lookout, he was another of the many highly intelligent, but woefully inexperienced rookies who had been rushed through training at Camp Peary after 9/1I as the Agency rushed to rebuild its human intelligence capabilities. She searched her tired mind for his name and found it. Flores. Jeff Flores. “What is it, Jeff?”

“You asked me to work on that scrap of paper you found on Lange,” the young man said quietly.

She nodded. Besides Lange’s passport, wallet, and phone, that torn and badly blackened bit of paper had been the only piece of hard evidence that she had rescued from the chaos inside Kessler’s villa. Unfortunately, that piece of paper had seemed completely worthless as a source of information.

At first glance, it was much too scorched to be legible. “Were you able to make out anything?”

He looked worried. “It would be simpler to show you what I found.” The younger man glanced cautiously at Bennett. “In my office, I mean.”

Curbing her impatience, Randi followed him down the embassy’s third-floor corridor to a small windowless cubicle. Flores’s desk and a locked filing cabinet for classified disks and documents took up most of the floor space.

She looked around with a dry smile. “Nice digs, Jeff. It’s always a delight to see patriotism and self-sacrifice rewarded.”

He grinned back, but his eyes were still troubled. “My instructors out at the Farm always told me that you got a choice after putting in your first hventy years in clandestine work: either the Medal of Freedom or a desk with a view.”

“Hate to break it to you the hard way,” Randi told him, “but they were Pulling your leg. It takes at least thirty years of service to get a window.”

She turned serious. “Now fill me in on this document that has you so spooked.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said. “I scanned that paper, or what was left of it, into our system here. Once it was in digital form, I was able to do a pretty decent job of washing off the burn marks electronically and then enhancing what was left. I’ve recovered about forty percent of the original text.”

“And?”

Flores entered his combination for his filing cabinet and pulled out a single sheet. “This is a printout of what I could read.”

Randi studied it in silence. It seemed to be part of a long list of license plates and various car and truck makes and models. Her eyes narrowed. Several of those plate numbers and descriptions sounded familiar. Then her eye dropped down the list to SILVER AUDI A4 SEDAN, BERLIN LICENSE: B AM 2506. She had walked by that car yesterday evening, sitting with a bullet hole in the rear window and the body of poor Carla Voss splayed across the steering wheel.

She looked up suddenly in shock.

“They’re all ours,” Flores confirmed. “Every single one of those vehicles is either leased to or owned by the Agency and assigned to the Berlin Station.”

“Christ,” Randi murmured. “No wonder Renke’s hit team spotted us so easily.” Her jaw tightened as she tried to control her growing anger. “Who could put together a list like this?”

Flores swallowed hard. He looked as though he had a bad taste in his mouth. “It would have to be somebody here, someone in the Station itself, I mean. Or back at Langley. Or else with the BfV.”

“The BfV?”

“Germany is an allied host country,” the young man pointed out. “It’s policy to keep their counterintelligence folks posted on most of our activities.”

“Just peachy,” Randi said acidly. “Now, who else knows about this?”

“No one.”

Randi nodded. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.” She picked up the printout.

“I’ll take this copy, Jeff. And I want the original, too. Make sure you wipe everything else you’ve done off your hard drive. If anyone else asks, you play dumb. Tell them you didn’t make any progress and then I pulled you off the assignment. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said somberly.

Randi stared down at the damning list in her hands. Another pattern, a very ugly pattern of betrayal and treachery, was becoming disturbingly clear.

Someone with access to the results of her hunt for Wulf Renke was working for the enemy.

President Sam Castilla listened with increasing concern to Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In preparation for tomorrow’s secret conference with America’s allies, he had asked the admiral to brief him on the latest warning signs that the U.S. militarv was beginning to detect in and around the Russian Federation. The president needed to be able to make the strongest possible case and nothing he heard was particularly helpful in that. But neither was it reassuring. Although no one inside the Pentagon was very happy with the overall quality of intelligence available to them, it was clear now that growing numbers of Russia’s best-equipped and trained army and aviation units had completely dropped off the Defense Department’s situation maps.

“Meaning what, exactly?” Castilla asked.

“Put bluntly, Mr. President, we don’t have the faintest idea of where these divisions and other combat units are right now, where they’re headed, or what thev might be planning.”

“How many soldiers are we talking about here?”

“At least one hundred and fifty thousand troops, thousands of armored vehicles and self-propelled guns, and hundreds of front-line fighters and bombers,” Brose told him grimly.

“Enough to start one hell of a war,” the president said slowly.

“Maybe several wars,” Brose admitted. “At least given the relative combat power of the other countries around Russia. Of all the former Soviet republics, only the Ukrainians have a reasonably strong and well-equipped army and air force.”

“Or they would, if it weren’t for the fact that their best leaders have been hit by this damned disease,” Castilla realized.

Brose nodded his large head ponderously. “Yes, sir, that’s true. Right now, from what I’ve seen of the confusion they’re in, the Ukrainians would have a devil of a time putting up much of a fight. As for the rest?” He shrugged.

Even at the best of times, the Kazakhs, the Georgians, the Azerbaijanis, and the others can’t field anything more than lightly armed militias. If the Russians are planning to hit them, those militias won’t stand a chance against modern armor and crack assault troops.”

“The Russians thought that in Grozny, too,” Castilla pointed out, referring to the first major hattle of the ongoing Chechen war. Overconfident Russian troops storming the city had been slaughtered by coordinated ambushes by Chechen guerrillas. Taking the city had finally required a massive campaign, one that had left tens of thousands of civilians dead and Grozny in ruins.

“Grozny was more than ten years ago,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said quietly. “The Russian Army and Air Force have learned a lot since then— both from their own experiences, and from watching our forces in action in Iraq. If they really are going to war to reclaim their old territories, thev won’t make the same mistakes this time.”

“Damn.” Castilla looked straight across his big pine desk at Brose. “All right, Admiral,” he asked, “what’s your best estimate for when the balloon might go up —assuming that our worst fears are right?”

“All I have is a guess, Mr. President,” the other man warned him.

“In the absence of facts, I’ll settle for anything I can get,” Castilla said drily.

Brose nodded. “Yes, sir. I understand that.” His eyebrows knitted together as he concentrated. After a moment, he looked up somberly. “In my view, Mr.

President, the Russians could be ready to strike any time within the next twenty-four to ninety-six hours.”

Castilla felt cold. Time was evidently running out faster than he had imagined.

One of the secure phones on his desk beeped. He snatched it up. “Yes?”

It was Fred Klein. “Colonel Smith and Ms. Devin are alive—and they’re in contact,” the head of Covert-One reported, quietly exultant. “What’s more, I believe they have uncovered a major piece of the puzzle.”

“But do they have the hard evidence we need?” the president asked carefully, aware of Admiral Brose sitting within earshot.

“Not yet, Sam,” Klein admitted. “But Jon and Ms. Devin are confident thev know where to go to acquire that evidence. First, though, we’ve got to get them safely out of Russia.”

Castilla raised an eyebrow. The last he had heard, Klein’s agents were on the Kremlin’s Most-Wanted list. Security officers at every Russian airport, I train station, harbor, and border crossing were already on the highest possible alert. “Good grief. That’s not going to be easy, is it?”

“No, sir,” Klein told him firmly. “It won’t.”

Snow was falling across the empty fields and wooded hills, swirling in drifts as gusts of wind blew harder from the east. There was no sight of the noon sun beneath the heavy mass of clouds covering the sky. Safe from any possible observation by American photo-reconnaissance satellites, long lines of T-90 and T-72 tanks, BMP-3 fighting vehicles, and heavy self-propelled guns crowded the narrow roads and logging tracks that wove south through the forests toward the frontier.

Hundreds of vehicles sat motionless, already thickly blanketed by the fast-falling snow. Thousands of men stood at attention in formation beside them, I waiting for the signal to move.

Suddenly a white flare soared up from the south and burst beneath the overcast sky. Whistles blew shrilly up and down the waiting columns of men.

Instantly, the rigid formations dissolved, with tank crews, infantry squads, and gun crews all swarming onto their vehicles.

Captain Andrei Yudenich pulled himself up onto the low, rounded turret of his T-90 tank and then dropped lightly into the open commander’s cupola.

With an ease born of constant practice, he donned his headset and plugged it into the tank’s radio gear. Glancing down, he checked the settings, making sure his microphone was set on intercom. Like the other units assembled here, the 4th Guards Tank Division was still under strict orders to maintain radio silence.

For Yudenich and his men, the last twenty-four hours had passed in a blur, consumed by the frantic work—fueling up, stowing ammunition and food, and running last-minute maintenance on ever)- major system — necessary to prepare their tanks and other vehicles for possible combat. No one yet knew Rnite why they were really here, but rumors of imminent war had swept through the huge camouflaged cantonments with increasing frequency and conviction. And the claims by some senior officers that this was all just an elaborate readiness exercise sounded increasingly hollow.

The captain looked up, seeing another flare arc through the skv. This one was red. He keved his mike. “Stand by. Driver, engine start!”

Immediately, the T-90’s powerful diesel engine roared to life, echoed by all the others in the column. Clouds of thick black smoke drifted away across the white fields and dark woods.

And a third flare soared high, this one green.

Yudenich watched closely, waiting for the tanks ahead of his to start moving before ordering his own driver to advance. One by one, starting from the front, the massive armored vehicles clanked into motion, treads squealing and clattering as they headed south, rumbling toward new assembly areas that lay within closer striking range of the Ukrainian border.

The clock was running on a countdown toward war.

Chapter Forty-Four

Ciampino Airport lay on the outskirts of Rome, only fifteen kilometers from the center of the city. Plowed fields, parkland, suburban homes, low-rise apartment buildings, and light-industrial areas surrounded the small, single-runway airport. Eclipsed by its larger rival, Fiumicino, Ciampino was now used primarily by low-cost international charter flights and smaller private, government, and corporate aircraft.

Shortly after three in the afternoon, local time, a twin-engine corporate jet broke through the thin layer of overcast, flew parallel to the Via Appia Nuova in a gradual descent toward the airport, and then dropped lower. It touched down only meters after clearing the boundary marker, braked hard, and slowly taxied past the small terminal used by arriving and departing charter flights.

At the end of the runway, the jet swung left and pulled up on the section of concrete apron ordinarily used by cargo aircraft. Two Mercedes sedans were Parked there, waiting.

Eight men, all dressed in winter clothing, emerged from the aircraft. Six of them formed a tight ring around the seventh, an older, white-haired man who Was already striding purposefully toward the parked cars. The eighth man, much taller and with pale blond hair, moved forward to intercept the lone Italian customs official coming to greet them.

“Your papers, Signor?” the customs officer asked politely.

The bloncl-haired man reached inside his coat and took out his passport and other documents.

Smiling politely, the Italian scanned through them quickly. He raised an eyebrow. “Ah, I see that you are assigned to the ECPR. We see mam of its staff here at Ciampino. Tell me, what is your work for the Center?”

Erich Brandt smiled mirthlessly. “Auditing and quality control.”

“And what of those other gentlemen?” the customs officer asked, nodding toward Konstantin Malkovic and his bodyguards as they climbed into the waiting sedans. “Do they also work for the Center?”

Brandt nodded. “They do.” He reached inside his heavy coat again, this time for a white letter-sized envelope. “Here are their required papers. I think you will find that everything is in order.”

The Italian pulled open the envelope just far enough to see the thick sheaf of high-denomination euro notes it contained. He smiled greedily. “Quite correct, as always.” Then he stuffed the envelope away inside his own coat.

“Once again, it is a pleasure doing business with you, Signor Brandt. I look forward to your next visit.”

Within minutes, Brandt, Malkovic, and their six heavily armed bodyguards were speeding away along the Via Appia Nuova, beginning the next leg of their journey to Orvieto.

Sheremetevo-2 International Airport, Outside Moscow Night had already descended on the birch and pine forests surrounding Sheremetevo-2. Lit by harsh white lights, the airport’s approach roads sliced through the darkness with rigid precision. Long lines of cars, trucks, and buses were backed up along those roads, waiting to pass through the special militia checkpoints set up outside the single passenger terminal, an ugly block of steel and concrete. Away from the terminal, armored scout cars manned by elite Ministry of the Interior commandos patrolled Sheremetevo’s perimeter fence.

The Kremlin’s orders were explicit. Under no circumstances were the two American fugitives to be allowed to escape from Russia. As part of the manhunt for them, security around the airport had been tightened to levels not seen since the height of the Cold War.

A TransAtlantic Express 747–400 cargo plane sat on the tarmac at the other end of the airport. Packages, boxes, cartons of overnight mail, and other pieces of heavy air freight were being taken off a number of different trucks, strapped onto standard-sized pallets, and then loaded into the 747’s main deck cargo holds.

Squads of gray-coated militiamen prowled through the loading area, keeping a wary eve on the activity going on around them. Their officers had firm instructions to arrest anyone attempting to stow away aboard any of the cargo aircraft that flew out of Sheremetevo-2.

Senior Lieutenant Anatoliy Sergunin stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the heavy pallets as large scissor-lift loaders picked them up off the concrete and slid them into the enormous TranEx aircraft. Waiting cargo handlers guided the pallets in through the 747’s hatches, rolled them into position, and then locked them down to the deck. For the first several hours of his shift, Sergunin had found the whole process fascinating. Now he was merely bored and cold and tired.

“Gate Security reports that another vehicle is on its way over, sir,” his sergeant reported, listening to the detachment’s radio.

Surprised, Sergunin checked his watch. This aircraft was scheduled to depart in less than an hour. By now, all of the freight assigned to the 747 should already have arrived. Sorting and securing the various sizes of packages onto pallets was a complicated and time-consuming process, one governed by the absolute need to safely balance the aircraft’s load. He turned around and looked away across the vast stretch of darkened tarmac. Sure enough, he could see a pair of bright headlights coming toward them at high speed.

He glanced at his sergeant. “What kind of cargo is this new vehicle earning?”

“Two coffins, sir.”

“Coffins?” Sergunin repeated in amazement.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said patiently. “It’s a hearse.”

A few minutes later, Sergunin stood off to the side of the hearse, which had come from a Moscow mortuary, observing the proceedings closely. The driver, wearing a white smock, wrestled each of the heavy metal caskets out of the back of his vehicle and onto a folding gurney. The coffins were sealed by tape as proof that they had ahead) been x-rayed and cleared by Customs.

Sergunin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Customs officials could be bribed.

And what better way to smuggle two fugitive spies out of Russia than in a pair of coffins? Especially aboard an aircraft that was bound first for Frankfurt, then Canada, and finally on to the United States? He laid his hand on the butt of the pistol bolstered at his side. Huge rewards were promised to anyone who captured the two wanted Americans, and equally serious punishments were ordained for anyone who let them escape. Under the circumstances, even excessive caution was warranted.

The militia officer waited until the mortuary worker finished his awkward task. Then he approached the tall, silver-haired man. “You are in sole charge of this material?”

The big man, who stood mopping the sweat off his forehead with a red handkerchief, nodded. “That’s right, Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly. “Twenty years in the business, and never a single complaint from any of my passengers.”

“Spare me the jokes and show me the shipping warrants for these … corpses,” Sergunin snapped.

“Always happy to oblige the authorities,” the man said, shrugging. He handed over a clipboard. “As you see, everything is in order.”

Sergunin read through the documents with a skeptical eye. According to the paperwork, the caskets contained the bodies of a husband and wife—both quite old when they were killed in a car accident. Although the dead man and woman were Russian citizens, their children, emigres now living in Toronto, were paying to have the bodies shipped to Canada for burial there.

The militia officer frowned. The story was feeble. He looked up at the silver-haired hearse driver and tossed the clipboard back. “I want those coffins opened for inspection,” he demanded.

“Opened?” the big man asked. He sounded surprised.

“You heard me,” Sergunin told him coldly. He drew his pistol and thumbed off the safety. With his free hand, he signaled his sergeant and a waiting squad to close in around the hearse. “Open them up,” he said. “And do it now.”

“Easy there, Lieutenant,” the man said quickly. “If you want to see inside, that’s fine with me.” He shrugged again. “But I should warn you, neither stiff is exactly a wholesome sight. They’re both a real mess, in fact. A bus hit the car they were driving head-on. There wasn’t much our cosmetics girls in the back room could do to pretty them up.”

Sergunin ignored him. He stepped forward and rapped one of the caskets with the muzzle of his service pistol. “This one first. And be quick!”

With a sigh, the hearse driver obeved. First he cut through the customs tape with a pocketknife. Then, one by one, he flipped open the latches holding the lid shut. Before going any further, he looked over his shoulder at the militia officer. “You really sure you want to see this?”

Sergunin snorted, holding his pistol ready. “Get on with it.”

With one last expressive shrug, the other man lifted the casket lid.

For a moment, Sergunin stared down into the coffin. His face turned deathly pale. He was looking at a corpse so terribly mutilated and burned that it was impossible to tell whether or not it was that of a man or a woman.

Empty eye sockets and teeth grinned back at him out of a skull only partly covered by scraps of blackened flesh. Withered hands, twisted into claws by intense heat, were raised above the shattered body in what appeared to be a last, grotesque appeal for help.

Retching, the militia officer swung away and was violently sick all over his boots and the tarmac. His sergeant and the others backed away in disgust. rITie big man closed the lid of the coffin. “There was a fuel tank fire after the crash,” he murmured apologetically. “Maybe I should have mentioned that first.” He moved to the second coffin and took out his penknife.

“Stop,” Sergunin gasped, still mopping at his mouth with the back of his hand. Desperately, he waved the driver back from the unopened casket.

“Hurry up and get those damned horrors aboard that plane. And then clear off!”

With an effort, the lieutenant straightened up and staggered away, looking for somewhere private to clean the humiliating mess off his boots. Equally re-pulsed, his sergeant and the other gray-coated militia busied themselves with inspecting the other pieces of air freight left in the area. So when the hearse drove away into the darkness ten minutes later, neither Sergunin nor his subordinates noticed that the man who was now behind the wheel was much shorter and had light brown hair.

One hour later, with the 747–400 flying west at more than thirty-five thousand feet above the ink-black Russian countryside, Oleg Kirov tugged off the cargo netting surrounding the two coffins. He wore a TranEx flight crew uniform. With the netting out of the way, he knelt down beside one of the caskets and began quickly unfastening a series of screws set into the bottom. Once the last screw dropped out into his hand, he pried open the edge of a panel running the length of the coffin. It clattered onto the cargo pallet, revealing a hidden compartment roughly six feet long, two feet wide, and barely a foot high.

Slowly and painfully, Fiona Devin wriggled out through the narrow opening and slid to the deck of the aircraft. She wore an oxygen mask coupled to a small metal cylinder.

Gently, Kirov helped her sit up and take off the oxygen mask. “Are you all right?”

She nodded weakly. “I’ll live, Oleg.” She smiled faintly. “But if I wasn’t claustrophobic before, I certainly will be in the future.”

“You are a brave woman, Fiona,” Kirov said seriously. “You humble me.”

He kissed her lightly on the forehead and then turned away to open the hidden compartment in the second coffin.

Jon Smith crawled out through the opening and fell onto the deck. His muscles, already bruised and battered by Brandt and his thugs, felt as though they were on fire. Wincing, he stripped off his oxygen mask and took a deep, shuddering breath. He saw Kirov and Fiona looking down at him with concern and forced a twisted grin onto his face. “Never again,” he said with heart-felt passion. “Never, ever again. The savings just aren’t worth it.”

They both looked blank. “Pardon, Colonel?” Fiona said, puzzled.

Smith pushed himself up into a sitting position. He motioned toward the cramped compartments concealed inside the coffins. “No more super-economy class for me. Next time I’ll pay full fare,” he explained.

Kirov chuckled. “I will be sure to pass your complaints on to the management, Jon.” He turned more serious. “Or you can do that yourself, as soon as you are ready.”

“Do we have secure contact with Covert-One?” Smith asked.

“We do,” Kirov replied. He nodded back up the darkened cargo deck toward the cockpit. “I’ve patched through the TranEx system, using one of our own scramblers. Mr. Klein is standing by.”

Ignoring his aches and pains. Smith levered himself upright. Fiona did the same. With Kirov coming behind to help steady them, the two Americans hobbled forward, feeling their knotted muscles gradually starting to loosen up. By the time they reached the cockpit, Jon was walking on his own.

The 747’s pilot and copilot sat in their seats, apparently intent on monitoring the aircraft’s controls. Neither seemed to take any notice of their unexpected “guests.”

“As far as they are concerned, we do not exist,” Kirov explained quietly. “It is safer for them that way.”

Smith nodded his understanding. Once again, Fred Klein had demonstrated a remarkable ability to pull strings from his position in the shadows.

He took the headset offered by Kirov. “Smith here.”

“It’s very good to hear from you, Colonel,” Klein’s familiar voice said. Even at a distance of several thousand miles, his relief was audible. “I was beginning to get rather worried.”

“Me, too,” Jon admitted. “The thought of you having to handle all that extra, death-related paperwork brought tears to my eyes.”

“I’m touched,” Klein said drily. “Now, what can you tell me about this disease?”

“First, that it’s not a disease—not in the classic sense, anyway,” Smith said seriously. “My best guess is that we’re facing a very sophisticated biological weapon, a weapon set up to attack individual genetic sequences. Based on the symptoms, I’ll bet that Renke is engineering each variant to interfere w ith cell reproduction in some fashion.” He sighed. “I don’t know how the victims are infected, but it could be as simple as introducing it into their food or anything they drink. And once this weapon is inside the person who’s been targeted, I doubt that there’s any way to stop the process or to reverse it. Of course, in anvone but the intended victim, this material would be completely harmless.”

“Which is why those who get sick don’t seem to be infectious to anyone else around them,” Klein realized.

“Bingo,” Smith said. He frowned. “Basically, Renke has invented the perfect precision weapon.”

“Assuming you can gain access to your target’s DNA,” Klein commented.

“Yeah. And that’s where this Slavic Genesis study comes in,” Smith told him. “The researchers at the ECPR have been sampling DNA in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and the other former Soviet republics for years. If we dig hard enough, I’m pretty sure that we’ll learn that most of those who’ve been killed were also participants in one or more ECPR projects.”

“What about those who weren’t part of these research studies?” Klein wondered. “How is this illness being tailored for use against so many of our intelligence analysts and military people? Or the Brits, the French, and the Germans, and others?”

Jon shrugged. “If it came down to that, Fred, I could isolate your DNA from your fingerprints on a dirh glass —or from hair clippings given to me by your barber. It’s not as easy or as cost-effective, but it can be done.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting that Renke or the Russians or Malkovie have been bribing even barber and bartender in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin to collect samples for them, are you?” Klein asked wryly.

Smith shook his head. “No, sir. Not en masse.”

“Then how?”

Jon stiffened suddenly as a horrible possibility occurred to him. “lake a good hard look at anyone with unrestricted access to the OMEGA medical database,” he advised grimly.

There was a long silence on the other end as Klein considered his suggestion. OMEGA was a top-secret program designed to ensure the ability of the U.S. government to continue functioning in the event ot a catastrophic terrorist attack on Washington and its suburbs. The OMEGA medical database was just one small part of that much larger program. To assist in identifying the dead from any large-scale attack, it contained tissue samples taken from tens of thousands of American government and military personnel.

“Good God,” the head of Covert-One said at last. “If you’re right, this country is in even graver danger than I had first supposed.” I Ic sighed. “And it also seems that we’re running out of time faster than I had anticipated.”

“Meaning?” Smith asked.

“Meaning this is not just a biological weapons threat, Jon,” Klein said quietly. “Those rumors Kirov passed on from his FSB contact were solid. It now appears almost certain that Dudarev and his allies in the Kremlin are ready to launch a major military campaign, one designed to take advantage of the confusion caused by this new weapon.”

Smith listened elosely while the other man brought him up-to-date on the most recent military and political developments along Russia’s frontiers. If anything, the Pentagon’s time estimate struck him as optimistic. Russian tanks and aircraft could begin rolling to the attack at any moment. His blood ran cold, thinking about the carnage that would be caused by a war of the scope Klein feared. “What countermeasures are we taking?”

“The president is scheduled to meet with representatives of our key allies in less than twenty-four hours,” Klein told him. “His goal is to persuade them that we must act to deter Russia before it is too late, before the first bombs fall.”

“Will they listen to him?”

The head of Covert-One sighed again. “I doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“We need evidence, Colonel,” Klein said flatly. “The problem is still the same as it was when I ordered you to Moscow. No matter how persuasive they may be, we need more than theories. Without better proof that the Russians are behind this disease, we cannot persuade our allies to act—or force the Kremlin to stand down by ourselves.”

“Listen, Fred, get us to Italy with the right equipment, and we’ll do our damnedest to find that evidence,” Smith promised.

“I know you will, Jon,” Klein told him somberly. “The president and I are counting on the three of you.”

Chapter Forty-Five

Nathaniel Frederick Klein looked up from his desk to the large monitor on the wall of his office. It was set to display a computer-driven map of Europe. A small icon blinked on the map, showing the position of the aircraft earning his three agents. He followed its progress for a moment, watching as it slowly slanted southwest through Hungarian airspace, en route to the U.S. Air Force base at Aviano, in the northeast corner of Italy. Another aircraft icon indicated the heightened alert status of the U.S. fighter wing based there.

He touched a key on his computer and saw more aircraft icons appear on the map, some in Germany, others in the United Kingdom. Like the icon at Aviano, they depicted the tactical fighter, bomber, and refueling wings alerted by Sam Castilla for possible emergency deployment to Ukraine, Georgia, and the other threatened republics around Russia.

Klein took off his glasses and rubbed wearily at the bridge of his long nose.

Right now, no American combat aircraft were going anywhere. The F-16s, F-15s, and refueling tankers were just sitting near runways or in their hardened shelters, waiting. Approached quietly through back channels, the NATO allies were expressing grave doubts about allowing the use of their airspace for any U.S. military deployment to the east. Ironically, the conference the president had summoned for tomorrow morning was now working against him because it gave the French and Germans and others an excuse to delay any decisions until after their representatives reported back. Perhaps even more important, none of the countries that were threatened by Russia were willing to invite U.S. forces into their territories.

Renke’s DNA-based weapons had done their work well, Klein decided sourly. Too many of the best and bravest political and military leaders in Ukraine and the other smaller states were dead. Those who were left alive were too frightened of angering Moscow. They were paralyzed, fearing the blow that might be about to fall —but unwilling or unable to take actions that might deter a Russian attack. If the United States could prove that what it said about Dudarev’s actions was true, they might find the courage to decide. Otherwise, they would not, preferring the uncertainty of inaction to the perils of action.

He put his glasses back on. Almost unwillingly, Klein found himself staring again at the small dot representing the plane carrying Jon Smith, Fiona Devin, and Kirov, as though he could somehow urge the 747 to even greater speed by sheer willpower.

“Nathaniel?”

Klein looked up. His longtime assistant, Maggie Templeton, stood in the doorway that separated their two offices. “Yes, Maggie?”

“I’ve finished running that search you asked for,” she told him quietly, walking all the way into the room. “I cross-checked every file we had on OMEGA with the FBI, CIA, and other databases.”

“And?”

“I found one serious correlation,” Maggie told him. “Take a look at your in-box.”

Klein obeyed, using his keyboard to call up the documents she had downloaded and sent to his computer. The first was a local news story from the archives of The Washington Post, dated roughly six months ago. The second was a copy of an updated police investigative report covering the same incident. The last was a personnel file from the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

He compared them quickly. One eyebrow rose. He looked up. “Very good work, Maggie,” he said. “As always.”

Before she left his office, he had already hit the button that would connect him to President Castilla’s private line.

The president answered it on the second ring. “Yes?”

“Unfortunately, Colonel Smith was right,” Klein told him flatly. “I’m convinced that OMEGA has been compromised.”

“How?”

“Six months ago, the metropolitan police found a body floating in one of the canals near Georgetown,” Klein said, reading the relevant facts from the Post story. “Eventually, they identified the dead man as a Dr. Conrad Home.

According to the police, Dr. Home appeared to be the victim of a routine mugging that went very badly wrong. But no one was ever arrested for his murder and there are no pending leads.”

“Go on,” Castilla said.

“It turns out that Home was a senior researcher at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center,” the head of Covert-One told him.

“With clearances for the OMEGA medical database,” Castilla guessed bleakly.

“Exactly,” Klein said. He went through the police report, noting key details. “Home was divorced, with huge, court-mandated alimony and child-support payments. His bank balances were always near zero. And his colleagues often heard him complaining about the lousy pay given to government-employed scientists. But the detectives searching his apartment after the murder found several thousand dollars in cash and thousands more in brand-new furniture and consumer electronics. There were also indications that he had been shopping around for a brand-new car, probably a Jaguar.”

“And you think he was selling access to the tissue samples in the database?” Castilla interjected.

Klein nodded solemnly. “Yes, I do. What’s more, I think he got greedy—or that he was simply too indiscreet—and that he was murdered to keep his mouth shut.”

Castilla sighed. “So what you’re telling me is that Professor Renke and his patrons could already have the DNA for every key player in our government?”

“Yes, sir,” Klein replied grimly. “Including yours.”

The U.S. Air Force base at Aviano lay in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, roughly fifty kilometers north of Venice, right at the foot of the Italian Alps.

From the flight line at Area F, Mount Cavallo dominated the northern horizon, towering nearly twenty-three hundred meters above the surrounding highlands. The pale rays of the rising moon glittered off vast expanses of snow and ice covering the mountain’s rugged slopes.

With its engines howling as the TranEx pilot reversed thrust, the 747 rolled down the long, main runway at Aviano, braking hard as it passed rows of hardened aircraft shelters. Each had its blast doors open, revealing brightly lit interiors where hangar crews were busy prepping the F-16s of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing for a long flight east into possible combat.

At the end of the runway, the massive cargo aircraft swung off onto a wide stretch of concrete apron and came to a full stop. A truck equipped with a set ot mobile stairs appeared and maneuvered into position at the 747’s forward door. As soon as thev were in place, Smith hurried down them, with Fiona Devin and Kirov following close behind.

A young Air Force captain in a green flight jacket stood waiting for them at the bottom. He carried a helmet with night-vision goggles clipped to the visor.

“Lieutenant Colonel Smith?” he asked, rather dubiously eyeing the three apparent civilians, all of whom looked verv much the worse for wear.

Jon nodded. “That’s right.” He grinned at the worried expression on the younger officer’s face. “Don’t worry. Captain. We’ll try not to bleed all over your nice shiny aircraft.”

The Air Force officer looked abashed. “Sorry, sir.”

“No problem,” Smith told him. “Are you ready for us?”

“Yes, sir. We’re right over that way,” the captain said, nodding toward a large black helicopter sitting off by itself across the concrete. Smith recognized it as an MH-53J Pave Low, one of the world’s most advanced special missions aircraft. I heavily armored, bristling with weapons, and crammed hill of sophisticated navigation systems and electronic countermeasures. Pave Lows were built to carry commandos deep into enemy-held territory, flying as low as thirty to forty meters off the ground while dodging enemy radar detection and surface-to-air missiles.

“What about our gear?” Smith asked the captain.

“Your clothing, weapons, and other equipment are already stashed aboard the bird, Colonel,” the younger man assured him. “Our orders are to get von and your party airborne as soon as possible.”

Five minutes later, Smith, Fiona, and Kirov were strapping themselves into seats in the twenty-one-ton Pave Low’s gray-painted rear compartment. One of the helicopter’s six crewmen handed around helmets and earplugs. “You’ll need them when we crank this baby up,” he said cheerfully, hooking them into the intercom system. “Otherwise, the noise will pretty much pound your brains into mush.”

Overhead the huge rotor blades began turning, spinning faster and faster as the two turbo-shaft engines rewed up. Bv the time the engines were at full power, the whine and roar were deafening. The aircraft rattled and shook, vi-brating and rocking from side to side.

Through the intercom. Smith heard the flight engineer, a sergeant with a thick Texas drawl, running through the checklist with the MH-53J’s pilot and copilot. “Ready to taxi,” the sergeant said at last.

The helicopter crept down the taxiwav.

The three Air Force crewmen in back with Smith and the others leaned out through the open hatches and rear ramp, watching carefully through their night-vision goggles. In flight, their job was to help warn the pilots of any obstacles that could endanger the helicopter —mostly trees and power lines.

Slowly, the Pave Low lifted off the runway. Wind whipped up by the pounding rotors screamed through the crew compartment. Smith tightened his seat belt. He noticed Kirov helping Fiona with hers and hid a grin.

For a few minutes more, the huge black helicopter hovered in place while the crew finished its last-minute navigation and systems checks. Then, with its engines howling, the MH-53J spun right and flew south at nearly one hundred and twenty knots, racing low over the Italian countryside with all of its running lights off.

Erich Brandt struggled to control his mounting impatience. The main HYDRA lab was a hive of activity as Renke shepherded his assistants through the time-consuming task of crating up their DNA databases and specialized equipment. The work was necessarily complex, but once it was complete, the scientist and his team would be able to vanish, and then restart their lethal production line in a new and even more secure location. Almost as important, any American agents investigating the European Center for Population Research would find only an ordinary lab dedicated to routine genetic analysis.

He turned to Renke. “How much longer?”

The scientist shrugged. “Several more hours. We could cut that time significantly, but only at the cost of leaving precious equipment behind.”

Standing at Brandt’s side, Konstantin Malkovic frowned. “How much delay would that cause in reopening your lab?”

“Perhaps as much as several weeks,” Renke told him.

The billionaire shook his head firmly. “I have promised Moscow that HYDRA will be back in operation by the time their armies go into action.

Even with Castilla already marked for death, our Russian allies want the abil-itv to act directly against others in Washington if the new president is also stubborn and refuses to accept their fait accompli.”

“Dudarev will still deal with you?” Renke asked curiously.

Now it was Malkovic’s turn to shrug. “What choice does he have? The secrets of the HYDRA weapon are mine, not his. Besides, I’ve promised him that our security problems are being resolved. Once your equipment and scientists are safely out of Italy, what proof can Washington possibly find in time —especially with its agents in Moscow already dead? Anyway, once the shooting starts, it will be far too late for the Americans to intervene.”

The financier’s secure cell phone beeped suddenly. He flipped it open.

“Malkovic here. Go ahead.” He glanced at Brandt. “It’s Titov, reporting from Moscow.”

Brandt nodded. Malkovic had left the manager behind to monitor developments in the Russian capital.

Malkovic listened intently to his subordinate’s report. Slowly, his face tightened to a rigid, expressionless mask. “Very well,” he said at last. “Keep me informed.”

He flipped the phone closed and turned back to Brandt. “It seems that the Moscow militia have found two bodies outside that old, ruined monastery you use for vour dirty work.”

“Alas for poor Colonel Smith and Ms. Devin,” the former Stasi officer quipped, with grim amusement.

“Save your sympathy for them,” Malkovic snapped icily. “Smith and Devin are still alive. The dead men were yours.”

Brandt stared back at his employer in shock. Smith and Devin had escaped? How could that possibly be true? For a moment, he felt a shiver of superstitious dread course down his spine. Who were these two Americans?

Chapter Forty-Six

With its rotors churning, the Pave Low helicopter swept low over a steep, wooded ridge and dove into the broader valley beyond. Treetops flashed by only meters below. Bathed in moonlight, a narrow river, the Paglia, snaked south, roughly paralleling the wide autostrada and the railway. Vineyards, groves of gnarled olive trees, and rows of tall, shapely cypresses spread across the gently rolling landscape. Patches of square black shadow marked the location of old stone farmhouses. Lights that seemed to float in the sky ahead outlined the towers and spires of Orvieto, set high on its volcanic plateau. More lights gleamed on a shallow ridge west of the city.

“ECPR in sight,” one of the pilots commented. “Two minutes out from in-filtration point.”

Gradually, the MH-53J began decelerating, slowing as it began its approach to the designated landing zone. Occasionally, the nose of the helicopter flared higher as the pilots climbed sharply to avoid colliding with taller trees or the telephone and power lines crisscrossing the Paglia valley.

Jon Smith hung on tight to a strap dangling from the ceiling. His stomach lurched.

“Hell of a ride, isn’t it, Colonel?” one of the crewmen commented, flashing a quick grin over his shoulder. “Beats the best roller coaster in the whole wide world!”

Smith forced himself to smile back. “I was always more partial to the bumper cars myself.”

“That’s a sure sign you were meant to be a ground-pounder, Army-type, sir,” the same crewman said with a laugh, again craning his head out through the open hatch to keep a careful eye on their flight path. “Begging your pardon, of course.”

“Guilty as charged, Sergeant,” Smith said, smiling more genuinely now.

He hung his head in mock surrender.

Fiona Devin, sitting across from Jon, offered a sympathetic shrug. Beside her, Oleg Kirov appeared to be deeply asleep, leaning back against the bulk-head with his eyes closed.

The Pave Low slowed further, turning more to the west as it crossed the ridge well to the north of the ECPR compound. It slid lower, flying over a spur of forest spilling down across the slope. Tree branches swayed and rocked behind the large helicopter, pummeled by its powerful rotor wash.

“LZ dead ahead. One hundred feet, fifty knots,” the flight engineer drawled out.

Smith let go of the strap and sat up straighter. His right foot nudged the bag wedged under his seat, making sure that it was still in easy reach. It contained an assortment of clothing, weapons, and other equipment drawn from U.S.

Special Operations Command caches stored at Aviano. He glanced up and saw Kirov and Fiona making their own preparations for landing. The silver-haired Russian gave him a quick thumbs-up.

Guided by constant chatter from his crew, the Pave Low pilot edged slowly forward and brought his big helicopter safely into their landing zone, a wide clearing in the woods. The ridge running south toward the ECPR compound rose off on the left, a dark mass against the paler, moonlit sky. The wheels thumped down. Immediately, the engine noise began fading, descending rapidly from a shrill, howling roar, to a deepening whine, and then to absolute dead silence. The rotors slowed and stopped turning.

The helicopter crew had orders to wait here until Smith or one of the others called for a pickup. But the six Air Force officers and enlisted men aboard the big MH-53J were also under strict orders to sit tight and do nothing else. Once their feet touched the ground, the improvised Covert-One team would be completely on its own. If they met with disaster while breaking into the ECPR labs, this mission had to be completely deniable by the U.S. government.

Smith unbuckled his seat belt with a feeling of intense relief. It wasn’t that he minded hazardous, nap-of-the-earth flying so much, he told himself, it was just that he preferred having his fate in his own hands. He bent down and tugged the heavy duffel bag out onto the metal deck. Fiona Devin and Kirov followed suit. Together, they slung the bags over their shoulders, trotted down the ramp, and moved off to the east, heading straight across the clearing and into the deeper darkness among the trees.

Jon led the way, pushing up the gentle slope at a fast walk until they were well away from the helicopter. Near the top of the ridge, they entered another clearing, this one much smaller. A little heap of roughly hewn stones, mostly covered by moss and bracken, lay in the center of the clearing. Were those tumbled stones all that remained of an ancient shrine? he wondered. This was an old, old land, fought over for thousands of years by the Umbrians, Etruscans, Romans, Goths, Lombards, and other peoples. Their ruins and tombs dotted the landscape, buried in some places by new towns and cities, swallowed up by forests and ivy in others. Seen by moonlight, the small open space glowed eerily.

“This will do,” Smith whispered to the others. “We’ll change into our gear here, before moving closer to the Center.” He lowered his duffel bag to the ground and knelt to unzip it. Swiftly, he started tugging out articles of clothing and equipment and handing them out to his companions.

Shivering in the cold night air, the three shifted out of the ordinary street clothes and shoes they had been wearing, rapidly donning dark-colored sweaters and jeans. Camouflage sticks blackened their faces and foreheads.

Comfortable hiking boots and thick leather gloves gave better protection and traction for their feet and hands. Night-vision goggles offered them the ability to see in the dark once the moon went down. Padded cases stuffed inside the duffel bags contained a collection of high-tech digital cameras, lightweight tactical radios, laser-surveillance equipment, bolt-cutters, and other tools.

“No body armor?” Kirov asked, pulling an assault vest studded with equipment pouches out of his duffel. He slipped both arms through the vest and zipped it up, checking the fit.

Smith shook his head. “Nope. Armor’s too heavy and too bulky for what we’re supposed to do. If possible, we want to get inside the Center, find out what the hell’s going on in there, and then get out without being spotted. But if we have to run, we’re going to want to run fast.”

“And if someone starts shooting at us?” Kirov asked drily. “What then?”

“Try very hard not to get hit,” Jon advised, with a quick grin. He handed the Russian a 9mm Makarov pistol and three spare magazines, then took a SIG-Sauer sidearm for himself, along with extra ammunition. Both men slung Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns across their backs. Spare thirty-round clips went into pouches on their vests.

Fiona Devin slid a lightweight Glock 19 pistol into the holster belted around her waist and then stood back, watching the two men finish checking their weapons. “That’s quite an arsenal you requested from Fred Klein, Colonel,” she said with a slight, impish smile. “Didn’t you just tell Oleg we were here to walk softly?”

Smith nodded. “Yep.” He patted the pistol at his side. “But frankly, I’m getting tired of being outgunned. This time, if someone starts shooting at us, I want enough firepower along to hit back hard and fast.”

Groves of age-bent olive trees and ancient vineyards surrounded the European Center for Population Research, running right up to the edge of the fifty-meter-wide clear space maintained all the way around its chain-link perimeter fence. Most of the compound’s modern steel-and-glass buildings were totally dark this late at night. The sole exception was a large laboratory set apart from the rest. Lights glowed behind the blinds on every window. And bright white arc lights and television cameras mounted on its flat roof covered every square centimeter of the approaches to the lab. Between the cameras and the complete absence of any cover, no one could hope to get across the fence and up close without being spotted first.

About one hundred meters from the lab, a slender woman wearing black from head-to-foot lay prone in a shallow drainage ditch bordering one of the old vineyards. Camouflage netting studded with leaves and twigs broke up her silhouette and concealed the pair of image-intensifer binoculars she focused on the building. Even in the silver moonlight, she was effectively invisible from more than a few meters away. Once the moon slid behind the horizon, the only wax anyone else would ever spot her was by walking right through her camouflaged hide.

Suddenly the black-clad woman stiffened, alerted by soft, dry, rustling sounds coming from somewhere behind her. Moving with extreme caution to avoid making any noise herself, she swung around and propped up her binoculars on the edge of the ditch, intently surveying the shadow-filled vineyard for any signs of movement. She held her breath, waiting.

There. One of the shadows changed shape, gradually becoming a man crouching near a row of bare and gray vines that had been pruned back to lie dormant for the winter. Seconds later, another man flitted across the vineyard and joined the first. Then a third figure appeared. This one was a woman.

She focused the binoculars, first on one man’s face and then on the other.

One of her eyebrows rose in utter disbelief. “Well, well, well … look who the cat dragged in,” Randi Russell murmured coolly to herself.

Sighing, she put down the binoculars and then slowly and carefully stood up, abandoning her concealed position. She kept her hands away from her sides, palms out. Startled by her sudden appearance, the three people crouching among the vines swiveled in her direction. The two men drew their pistols with lightning-speed.

“Please try not to kill me, Jon,” she said quietly. “It’s not like you have a surplus of friends as it is.”

Stunned, Smith eased off the trigger. “Randi?” he said in amazement.

“What the hell are you doing here?’

The slender CIA officer came closer, emerging from the darkness. She crouched down beside them with a grimly amused expression on her smooth, good-looking face. “Since I was here first, it seems to me that should be my question … not yours.”

Almost against his will, Jon grinned back at her. She had a point. He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

He thought fast, trying to come up with a plausible story, one that Randi could choose to believe. She was the sister of his dead fiancee, and an old friend to whom he owed his life several times over, but she also worked for the CIA—which meant she was not privy to the closely held Covert-One secret.

Until that changed, he was forced to find ever more inventive ways to dodge her awkward questions.

“Some people high up in the Pentagon have asked me to track down the origin of this mysterious disease,” Jon said at last. “The one that’s been killing our intelligence analysts and key leaders in the former Soviet republics. We’re sure now that the illness is man-made, a sort of genetically targeted assassination weapon.”

“But why you exactly?” Randi demanded.

“Because I was the one first approached by a Russian scientist, a colleague of mine, at a medical conference in Prague,” Smith told her. Quicklv, he briefed her on Valentin Petrenko’s claims and the murderous attack used to silence him. “When I passed the word back to Washington, they sent me to Moscow to check out his story, figuring that I had the contacts and the expertise to nail down the facts.”

Randi nodded reluctantlv. “That almost makes sense, Jon,” she admitted.

She looked skeptically at Kirov, whom she had gotten to know years before while working as a field officer in Moscow. “I assume this is where Major General Kirov of the Russian Federal Security Service comes in?”

The big, silver-haired man shook his head with a smile. “It’s just plain Oleg Kirov these days, Ms. Russell. I’m retired.”

Randi snorted. “Yeah, I just bet you are.” She waved a hand at the submachine gun slung across his back. “Most pensioners don’t go wandering around the Italian countryside at night while armed to the teeth.”

“Oleg has been working with me,” Smith explained. “As a sort of private consultant.”

“So who is this?” Randi asked pointedly, nodding toward Fiona Devin.

“Your secretary?”

Jon winced, seeing Fiona stiffen angrily. “Ms. Devin is a freelance journalist based in Moscow,” he said quickly. “She was already investigating the first disease outbreak when I arrived.”

“A journalist?” Randi said in disbelief. She shook her head. “Let me get this straight, Jon —you actually brought a reporter along on a covert mission?

Don’t you think that’s earning this whole Pentagon media-embedding program a bit too far?”

“I am not exactly here as journalist,” Fiona said coldly, speaking for the first time. The trace of her Irish accent was stronger now. “Not anymore.”

“Meaning what?” Randi demanded.

Smith filled her in on the various attempts made by Erich Brandt, acting for Konstantin Malkovic, to kill them. He ended by telling her about the orders issued by the Kremlin for their immediate arrest. “In the circumstances, Oleg and I thought she should stick with us,” he finished lamely, realizing how improbable that all sounded.

There was a moment’s silence.

At last Randi threw up her hands. She stared hard at Jon. “Am I really supposed to believe this cockamamie story of yours?”

“As wild as it sounds, it is the truth,” he said stoutly, glad that the darkness hid his red face. Well, at least part of the truth, he told his abraded conscience silently.

“So I guess the three of you just waltzed out of Moscow, right under the noses of half the militia and the FSB?” Randi asked sardonically.

“I have friends in shipping,” Kirov said calmly.

“Right,” the CIA officer said drily. She looked all three of them up and down, clearly noting all of their weapons and other equipment. “And these friends of yours… in shipping … just happened to be able to provide you with all this nifty hardware?”

Smith grinned at her. “Not quite. That was my part. Remember, I have friends in the Air Force.”

“Naturally.” Randi sighed, apparently accepting defeat, at least temporar-ily. “Okay, Jon. I give up. You three are just the pure, accidental heroes you claim to be.”

“Then perhaps it’s your turn to tell us what you’re doing out here in the dark, Ms. Russell,” Fiona Devin suggested coolly.

For a second, Randi bristled. Then, surprisingly, she smiled. “My what big teeth you have, Ms. Devin.” She shrugged. “It’s pretty simple, actually. You’re hunting for the source of this genetically aimed biological weapon. Well, I’m hunting the man who undoubtedly created it.”

“Wulf Renke,” Smith said quietly.

“That’s the guy,” Randi agreed flatly. She ran through the long and bloody trail that had led her all the way from Baghdad to Berlin, and then, finally, here to Orvieto. “I had to guess at the end,” she admitted. “The phone network we were tracing went dead before my technical experts could nail down any specific locations. But when I did some research on my own, this place popped out as the best fit for Renke in Umbria. There are other medical research facilities around, but the KCPR seemed a natural —plenty of money, plenty of scientists from all parts of Europe working together, and all the top-of-the-line equipment his black little heart could desire.”

“So you hopped a flight down here?”

“To Rome, and then up here by car,” the CIA officer confirmed. “I’ve been in position since early this afternoon.”

Smith heard a strained note in her voice, one that he had been noticing for a while. “You keep saying ‘I,’ Randi,” he commented. “Where’s the rest ot \our team?”

“There is no team,” she said grimly. “Just me. And nobody at Langlev or anywhere else knows where I am right now. Al least I hope not.”

Now it was Smith’s turn to be surprised. “You’re working without a net?

Without any Agency support? Why?”

Randi grimaced. “Because Renke, or maybe this Malkovic bastard you mentioned, has a mole somewhere high up, someone who’s been feeding him everything I’ve learned.” Her mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “Playing by the rules has cost the lives of three good people already. So now I’m not taking any more chances.”

Smith, Fiona, and Kirov nodded slowly, understanding both her reasoning and her fury. Betrayal by someone in your own ranks was the ultimate nightmare for every intelligence agent.

“We should join forces, Ms. Russell,” Kirov told her quietly. “It is unorthodox, I admit, but when we are faced by such dangerous enemies, working together is only common sense. And time is very short. We cannot waste any more of it arguing among ourselves.”

Jon and Fiona nodded in agreement.

Randi stared at them for a long, painful moment. Then she nodded slowly.

“All right, you people have a deal.” Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. “After all, this isn’t exactly the first time Jon and I have stumbled across each other in the field.”

“No, it isn’t,” Smith said quietly.

“Perhaps you’re fated to be together,” Fiona Devin suggested, with just a hint of mischief in her voice.

Randi snorted softly. “Oh, sure. Jon and I are a regular dynamic duo —the Mutt and Jeff of the espionage business.”

Smith wisely decided to keep his mouth shut. This was one of those wonderful moments when anything he said was bound to land him in hot water.

Or maybe even boiling water, he thought warily, eyeing the tight-lipped expression on Randi’s face.

But then she shook herself back to the present. “You’d better come and see what we’re up against. Because, believe me, whatever you heroes have in mind is not going to be easy.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

A large display map of Russia and its neighbors occupied one concrete wall of the elaborate command center buried far below the surface of the earth. Symbols scattered across the map showed the current position and readiness of the major military units slated for ZHUKOV. The room itself was filled with rows of consoles, each equipped with the latest secure communications to allow staff officers to maintain constant contact with the troop commanders in the field.

Russian President Viktor Dudarev stood at the back of the room watching as the array of generals, colonels, and majors moved unhurriedly through the intricate work of bringing his long-held plans ever closer to reality. One of the last yellow symbols—depicting the two divisions assembled secretly in the snow-bound Caucasus Mountains—turned green.

“Colonel-General Sevalkin reports that his command is in position,” Major Piotr Kirichenko, his military aide, murmured. “All ZHUKOV ground forces are now deployed to their final pre-war bivouacs. The senior commanders will begin briefing their regimental and battalion leaders in twelve hours.”

Dudarev nodded in satisfaction. The decision to hold back those operational briefings until practically the last possible moment had been his, one intended to prevent leaks that could jeopardize ZHUKOV’s success. He glanced at Kirichenko. “Are there any signs of a reaction among our targets?”

The younger man shook his head. “No, sir. Intelligence confirms that the Ukrainian and other armies are still in their peacetime quarters, with absolutely no sign of any higher alert status.”

“What about the Americans or NATO?”

Kirichenko frowned slightly. “We are picking up fragmentary signs that American aircraft squadrons at bases in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom may have been ordered to higher readiness, but there is no indication of any significant movement of those planes toward our frontiers.”

Dudarev turned to the stocky, gray-haired man standing behind him. He raised an eyebrow. “Well, Alexei?”

“So far the Americans have been denied any permission to move aircraft eastward,” Ivanov confirmed. “The European governments have their heads well down in the sand. Each is waiting to see what, if anything, Castilla can prove about our intentions.”

“And he will find it very difficult to prove anything from an intensive care ward,” the Russian president said with a cold smile. “In the meantime, let us hope that the Europeans continue to choose wisely over the next twenty-four hours. By the time they wake up to the new balance of power on this continent, it will be far too late.”

“See the problem, Jon?” Randi murmured. They were lying next to each other in her camouflaged hiding place overlooking the brightly lit ECPR

building she had picked out as Wulf Renke’s lab facility.

Smith slowly lowered the powerful binoculars she had lent him. He handed them back to her with a tight, worried nod. “Yeah, I do. The damned place is practically a fortress.”

“A fortress is right,” Randi agreed, ticking off on her fingers the defenses she had observed. “We’re talking about lights, remotely controlled security cameras, motion sensors, bullet-proof windows, a solid steel main door, bank-vault quality locks —plus maybe a dozen highly alert armed guards inside.”

He nodded again, grimly this time. “I think it’s time we held a council of war.”

Jon and Randi slid cautiously out of the shallow drainage ditch and faded back into the vineyard. Kirov and Fiona had set up some of their gear in a spot where a small fold in the ground offered concealment from the cameras and lights mounted on the lab building. They had their heads close together, studying the dozens of digital surveillance photos the CIA officer had shot during her long afternoon and evening vigil.

Kirov glanced up when Smith and Randi returned. “We’ve definitely come to the right place,” he said somberly. “See for yourself.”

While Jon watched, the Russian clicked through several color images taken with a telephoto lens. The first showed two black sedans arriving at the lab building. The next set showed a large group of men climbing out of the cars and moving toward the lab. Kirov zoomed in on two of those men.

Smith whistled softly, staring at the familiar faces of Erich Brandt and Konstantin Malkovic. The sight of the ex-Stasi officer’s cold gray eyes raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Jon’s jaw tightened. While he and Fiona Devin were being tortured, Jon had promised to kill that arrogant bastard. That was a promise he meant to keep. He looked away, fighting to regain a measure of control over his anger. This was a time for coolly rational thought, not aveng-ing blood lust. “Are Brandt and Malkovic still inside?” he asked.

“They are,” Fiona said. She sounded surprisingly calm. “Ms. Russell’s ad-mirably complete set of pictures shows no one else entering or leaving.”

“That’s one piece of good news anyway.” Smith squatted down on his haunches. The others grouped themselves around him. “The bad news is that our first plan —to run a quick sneak-and-peek into that compound, looking for evidence —isn’t going to fly. Their security is too tight. We’d be spotted the second we started toward the perimeter fence.”

Kirov shrugged. “Since we know where Renke’s lab is, I suggest we strike now, without worrying about stealth. Our enemies have done us the favor of putting themselves in one place,” he said coldly. “We should take advantage of their error.”

“I’d like to kick in the door,” Smith agreed. He grinned tightly. “But only if we had a full company of infantry, with a couple of M1AI Abrams tanks for fire support. And even then we’d be sticking our hands into a meat-grinder.”

“The building is that closely guarded?” the Russian asked.

Jon nodded. “It is.”

“There are F-16s based at Aviano,” Randi said coolly. “They could be here in an hour. Maybe less.”

“You want to call in an air strike?” Smith asked.

“Why not?” The CIA officer’s eyes were hard. “One laser-guided bomb would solve a great many problems.”

Jon understood her feelings. The vicious genetic weapon set in motion by the men inside that lab, Renke, Brandt, and Malkovic, was already responsible for dozens of cruelly painful deaths around the world. It was incredibly tempting to contemplate watching a single massive explosion engulf them in flame. But there were too many arguments against an air strike, both practical and political.

Sighing, he shook his head in regret. “The president would never approve an F-16 strike, Randi, and that’s how high up the decision would have to go.

Most of the Center’s work is legitimate scientific research, and there’s too much chance of collateral damage. Can you imagine how the EU would react if we dropped bombs on friendly territory, especially without permission or even consultation?” He frowned. “Our alliances are already too fragile as it is.”

“Destroying that lab would also destroy the evidence we need—the evidence that the Russians have been involved in creating and using this new weapon,” Fiona pointed out quietly. “So would killing these men, or at least all of them. We may need their testimony to make our accusations against the Kremlin stick.”

Kirov nodded heavily. “Ms. Devin is right. Whatever we do, we must try to take at least one of these men, Renke or Malkovic especially, alive.”

“Spiffy,” Ranch said, shaking her head. “This gets better and better.” She turned back to Smith. “Okay, Jon, you claim that you’re tied in w ith the Pentagon. Why don’t you whistle up a commando unit? Like the Delta Force or the SEALs?” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder toward the ECPR compound. “Kicking in doors is what thev train for, isn’t it?”

“Believe me, I’d like nothing better,” Jon told her softly. “But there aren’t any Delta Force or SEAL teams in striking range. They’re either in the States refitting and training, or tied up in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” One side of his mouth curved up in an ironic grin. “I’m afraid you’re looking at the only special-ops team available … and it’s the four of us.”

“What about the Italians?” Fiona broke in. She nodded at the darkened landscape around them. “This is their country. Don’t thev have special police or Annv units capable of raiding that lab?”

Smith thought about that. The Italians had two very highly regarded countcrterrorist units, the GIS (Groupe Interventional Speciale) and NOCS (Nucleo Operativo Gentrale de Sicurezza). And this was their jurisdiction.

Why not ask Fred Klein and the president to kick the responsibility over to the government in Rome? But how far would the Italian government be willing to go without seeing anything more than vague and circumstantial evidence?

Then another, even more unpleasant thought, occurred to him. He looked around at the others. “We know, from Randi here, that Malkovic is already being tipped off by someone in Germany, or maybe even inside Langley. But what if Malkovic has another mole—this one in the Italian security services?”

“It seems likelv,” Kirov growled. “This financier has shown himself to be a man with a near-infinite capacity for corrupting others, in Russia, Germany, and many other countries. I doubt very much that he would leave himself blind and deaf here in Italy.”

Fiona frowned. “That’s pure speculation, Oleg.”

“Yes, it is,” Smith agreed. “But even if Malkovic doesn’t have a secret source in Rome, bringing the Italians into this operation would take some prettv fancy diplomatic maneuvering—”

“For which there is no time,” Kirov said suddenly and forcefully.

The others looked at him in surprise.

“Our enemies must know that their cover here is tattered and perhaps even on the verge of falling apart completely,” Kirov explained. He showed his teeth. “Think, mv friends. Why else do you think a man like Malkovic would come all this way, especially now, with events in my country moving so fast toward war?”

“Renke and his pals are getting ready to pull another disappearing act,”

Smith realized.

“Could they really pull that off?” Randi asked curiously.

“Sure,” Smith said. He rubbed at his jaw, thinking it through out loud. “All Renke really needs to set up shop again somewhere else are his DNA samples, any special equipment he’s using, and a few of his trained technicians. Most of the equipment and other material would probably fit in one small truck or a couple of vans.”

“Then it’s simple,” Randi said coldly. “We wait until they drive out of here, and then we jump them.”

“Look more carefully at your photographs, Ms. Russell,” Kirov advised.

“Do vou see any trucks or vans outside that lab?”

She shook her head reluctantly. “No.”

“But there is a large stretch of bare concrete, is there not?”

Jon saw what the Russian was getting at. “Hell,” he muttered. “Malkovic and Renke are going to fly the stuff out.”

Kirov nodded. “Probably by helicopter to a jet waiting at Rome or Florence or any one of several other nearby airfields.” He shrugged his big shoulders gloomily. “Malkovic’s native Serbia is not far from Italy, not much more than an hour’s flying time across the Adriatic Sea. Libya and Syria are also within casv reach. As arc am number of other unsavory regimes that might offer so rich a man refuge.”

Frowning, Smith summed the situation up. “Which means if we wait too long, Renke will vanish again —with everything he needs to restart Malkovic’s genetic weapons business.”

“So we can’t go in. We can’t bomb them. And we can’t wait for them to come out. Mind telling me what other options we do have, Jon?” Randi said sharply, reining in her temper with difficulty.

Smith gritted his teeth, feeling equally frustrated. “I don’t know.” He shook his head grimly. “But we’ve got to find a way to push these guys off their game, to make them react to our moves for a change.”

Unable to bear inaction any longer, he stood up and began pacing around their small campsite. There had to be something they could do, some angle they could play, to get at Malkovic and his subordinates, to pry them out of that fortified lab before it was too late.

Abruptly, Jon stopped and stood still, waiting while the faint glimmering of a wild idea took on real form and substance. Maybe Randi had already given them the hook they would need. A fierce gleam appeared in his eyes. He swung round to Kirov. “I need your phone, Oleg!” he snapped.

“Now!”

Nodding, the Russian tossed him the last of their Covert-One secure cell phones. “Use it wisely,” he suggested drily.

Smith grinned back at him. “Acting wisely is the last thing on my mind right now.”

He moved off out of earshot and punched in the code for Covert-One headquarters.

Fred Klein listened intently while he summarized the situation they faced.

“An ugly dilemma, Colonel,” he said quietly when Smith had finished. “Do you have a plan?”

“Yes, I do. But we need action from Washington to make it work. And we need it as soon as humanly possible.”

“What do you want me to do?” Klein asked.

Smith told him.

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. At last, Klein spoke again, sounding troubled. “You’re asking me to skate very close to the line on this one, Jon.”

“I know I am.”

Klein sighed. “The president and I can probably conceal Covert-One’s existence from those involved here in Washington, but I’m worried about Ms.

Russell. She already knows far more about our activities and access than is prudent. What you suggest may very well give her enough information to break through this organization’s cover.”

“She’s already suspicious as hell, Fred.”

“There is a wide gulf between suspicion and certainty, Colonel,” Klein said tartly. “And I would prefer to keep Randi Russell on the proper side of that gulf.”

Smith shrugged his shoulders. “What choice do we really have?”

“None,” the head of Covert-One admitted at length. “All right, Jon. Stand by where you are. I’ll let you know when we’re reach to kick things off back here.”

“Standing by,” Smith acknowledged.

The line went dead.

Joint U.S.-Gennan Intelligence Secure Videoconference Large television monitors in Washington, D.C., Langley, Virginia, Berlin, Bonn, and Cologne flickered simultaneously to life, linking groups of men and women seated around conference tables separated by thousands of miles and hours of relative time. Those in Germany looked tired and nervous. It was already past midnight when they had been hurriedly summoned back to their various offices for what was being billed as an extraordinary emergency briefing by the new U.S. Director of National Intelligence, William Wexler.

Wexler himself appeared cool and collected. His body language radiated absolute confidence and conviction in what he was about to say. As he spoke, he looked straight into the camera, maintaining the illusion that he was making eye contact with everyone else on the secure circuit.

What none of those joining in this satellite-linked videoconference knew was that a feed was also going straight to the White House. And Fred Klein, watching the transmission with President Castilla from the Oval Office, cynically suspected one reason for Wexler’s apparent ease was because the former senator was used to delivering televised speeches that he either did not understand or did not believe.

After a few preliminary formalities, Wexler jumped straight to the core of the matter. He spoke clearly and concisely. “Intelligence agencies of the United States have now definitively identified the production site of the biological weapons being used against us, against our NATO allies, and against countries around the border of the Russian Federation.”

Those listening and watching sat up straighter.

The screen split, with half showing a satellite photo taken months before.

It depicted a large fenced-in complex spread across what appeared to be a low ridge. One of the several buildings was circled. “These weapons are being secretly manufactured at a laboratory near Orvieto, in Italy,” Wexford said firmly. “A lab that is part of the European Center for Population Research, the ECPR.”

Shocked murmurs spread through the background audio feed.

Wexler overrode them. “The intelligence confirming this target is clear and irrefutable. Accordingly, the President of the United States has authorized an immediate all-out military assault on this clandestine weapons facility.”

The German and American intelligence officials fell silent, plainly stunned by what they were hearing.

The satellite photo disappeared, replaced by a map showing Italy and the seas around it. Another circle appeared on this map, enclosing a graphic of ships positioned in the Mediterranean Sea, off Italy’s western coast. “A U.S.

Marine Corps quick-reaction force is now prepping aboard the ships of the Sixth Fleet,” Wexler continued. “This force will be in position to conduct the raid within two hours. Several teams from our Special Operations Command are already in place several kilometers to the north and south of Orvieto— preparing to set up roadblocks on the main highway.”

One of the Germans spoke up. A crawl beneath the screen identified him as Bernhard Heichler, a high-ranking officer in the Bundesamtes fiir Verfassunsschutz. “What do the Italians think of this riskv plan of yours?” he asked stiffly.

“To ensure complete surprise, this assault is being made without the knowledge or consent of the Italian government,” Wexler replied coollv.

Heichler’s mouth fell open, a reaction shared by many of his colleagues, of both nationalities. “Then why are you giving us this information?”

With a slight smile, Wexler dropped his next bombshell. “Because the man responsible for creating this biological weapon is Professor Wulf Renke,” he told them. “One ot your own countrymen, and a dangerous criminal von have long hunted.” Speaking firmly and forcefully, he outlined what U.S. intelligence now knew about Renke, including his escape from German justice with Ulrich Kessler’s assistance.

“We would like you to form a task force of experts to assist us in exploiting every scrap of intelligence our Marines lay their hands on,” Wexler said carefully. “Their mission will be to ferret out any critical information contained in the lab’s phone logs, computer files, and shipping records, and to interrogate the prisoners we intend to capture.” He smiled winningly. “Now? Are there any questions?”

Immediately, a confused babble of voices broke out, with everyone trying to speak at once.

Castilla hit the mute burton on his remote. The agitated voices fell silent.

He turned toward Klein, with a thin smile on his broad, blunt face. “Looks like that little stunt of ours just tossed a coyote right into the middle of some real nervous cattle.”

“Yes, sir,” Klein agreed.

“You think this will actually work the way Colonel Smith hopes?” Castilla asked quietly.

“I hope so,” Klein said, equally quietly. “If not, Jon and the others are not likely to survive the next several hours.” He checked his watch. The furrows on his high forehead grew deeper. “One way or the other, we should know very soon.”

Chapter Forty-Eight

Estelle Pike sat primly at her desk in the antechamber outside the Oval Office, typing up one of President Castilla’s handwritten action memos to the National Security Council. Her eyes flicked rapidly from the screen in front of her to the scrawled notes on her desk, and then around the rest of the room.

The other desks and workstations were empty. She smiled slightly. One by one, she had found errands for her assistants to run in widely scattered parts of the White House office complex.

A white-gloved steward entered the room, carrying a covered tray.

She stopped typing and looked up with a frown. “Yes? What is that?”

“The president’s meal, ma’am,” the steward told her politely.

Estelle Pike nodded to the empty corner of her desk. “You can leave it there. I’ll take it in to him in a moment.”

One of the steward’s eyebrows went up in astonishment. The president’s secretary was well known and widely disliked among the White House household staff for her strict insistence on protocol and rank. She only rarely, if ever, volunteered for duties she considered beneath her station.

“The president is extremely busy, Anson,” she explained coolly. “He does not wish to be disturbed at the moment.”

The steward looked at the closed door behind her and then shrugged. “Yes, ma’am. Please don’t wait too long, though. Otherwise the salad will start to wilt.”

Estelle Pike waited until the door closed behind him and then bent down to open her purse. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, she found the small sealed glass vial she had retrieved earlier from the Maryland countryside. Then, moving calmly and precisely, she opened the vial, lifted the silver cover off Castilla’s salad and sprinkled the liquid contents liberally over the tossed greens, salsa, sour cream, cheese, and pieces of grilled chicken. She dropped the vial back into her purse and stood up, reaching for the tray.

“That won’t be necessary, Ms. Pike,” a quiet voice said from behind her.

Startled, she froze and then slowly turned around toward the door into the Oval Office. Nathaniel Frederick Klein stood there, framed in the open doorway. His narrow, long-nosed face was impassive. Two uniformed Secret Service agents stood reach on either side of him, both with drawn weapons.

“What is the meaning of this, Mr. Klein?” Estelle Pike demanded icily, trying to brazen it out.

“The meaning, Ms. Pike,” Klein said bluntly, “is that you are under arrest.”

“On what grounds?”

“The attempted assassination of President Samuel Adams Castilla will do for a start,” he replied. His eyes were cold. “No doubt other charges will arise as we dig deeper into vour conduct and background.”

Later, sitting across from a visibly shocked Castilla, Klein slid the glass vial across the president’s big pine table desk. “We’ll have what remains of the contents analyzed, but if Jon Smith’s suspicions are accurate, I doubt that we’ll find much of use inside.”

Grimly, Castilla nodded. His mouth turned downward. He shook his head in disbelief. “Estelle Pike! She’s been with me for years, ever since I came to the White House.” He looked up at the head of Covert-One. “What made you suspect her?”

Klein shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Suspicion is too strong a word, Sam. Once we learned how easily this targeted biological weapon might be administered to its victims, I had a quiet chat with the head of your Secret Service detail. They’ve been monitoring every aspect of White House food preparation ever since. Ms. Pike’s domain was the only potential gap in our security, so it was one I’ve had closely ohserved. When she started finding reasons to send her people awav after vou called down to the kitchens for that salad. I thought it would he a good idea to see what she might he planning.”

Castilla tapped the vial gently. His eyes were still troubled. “But why? Why would she do this?”

“I rather think we will find that your Ms. Pike has a great many hidden depths,” Klein said flatly. “I’ve sometimes wondered about her. Her position here at the White House gave her access to an enormous range of secret information. And her background —widowed at an early age, no family, no real friends—well, it just seems too convenient, too perfect. If I wanted to create a legend, a cover, for a deep-penetration mole, that’s exactly the sort of thing I would work toward.”

“You think she’s a Russian spy?” the president asked.

Klein nodded again. “Almost certainly.” He stood up. “But we’ll find out for sure. You can count on that.”

“I do, Fred,” Castilla said with a grateful smile. “I always do.” Then his smile slowly faded. “Just as I am counting on Colonel Smith and the others.”

Konstantin Malkovic stared down at the decoded message on his laptop in dismay. “Impossible!” he muttered. He turned to Brandt, who was standing at his shoulder. “How could this be?”

“The Americans are closer to us than we realized,” Brandt snapped, reading through the urgent warning sent by the financier’s agent in Germany.

“That’s all.”

“But what can we do?” the other man asked. His voice, usually a deep baritone, now sounded shrill.

Brandt stared at his employer in disgust. Malkovic was crumbling in front of him. All of the rich man’s bluster, all of his famous self-confidence, was largely a charade, the gray-eyed man realized coldly. Oh, the Serbian-born financier was brave enough when he was winning, or when he speculated in abstractions —like currencies, or oil and natural gas, or other men’s lives —but he was a physical coward, a man who flinched when his own life was in peril.

Like mam greedy men, always hungry for more power or for more money, he was fundamentally hollow inside.

“We must evacuate at once,” Brandt said carefully. “Professor Renke’s DNA databases and his design files are ready to go. We’ll take them, and Renke, and leave now.”

Malkovic stared back at him in confusion. “But his equipment—”

“Can be replaced,” Brandt said brutally.

“What about Renke’s assistants? His lab team?” the financier stammered.

“The helicopters won’t arrive until it is too late, and we don’t have room for them in the cars.”

“No,” Brandt agreed coolly, looking out into the main lab where the scientists and technicians were still working hard, preparing their expensive machines for a move that would now never be made. He shrugged his powerful shoulders. “We’ll have to leave them behind. Along with the Italian security guards.”

Malkovic paled. “What? Are you mad? When the Marines storm this building, they will be captured and then they will talk.”

“No,” Brandt said bluntly. “They won’t.” He drew the Walther pistol from his shoulder holster and inspected the weapon quickly. As a last measure, he checked that he had a full fifteen-round magazine, and then slid the clip back in.

The financier looked sick under the lab’s bright fluorescent lights. He sat down heavily, staring at the sterile tile floor between his feet.

Turning slightly, Brandt waved one of the bodyguards over.

“Yes, Herr Brandt?” the man said, sounding bored. “What is it?’

“Order the staff to assemble in the lounge, Sepp. Everyone, without exception.” The former Stasi officer lowered his voice slightly. “Then tell Karl and the others that we have some necessary killing ahead of us. And ask Fyodor to bring his cases from the car trunk. We will need his explosives after all.”

For the first time, the bodyguard’s dull eyes flickered to life. “It will be a pleasure.”

Brandt nodded coolly. “I know. That is why I find you and your comrades so useful.” For a few seconds, he watched the man move away and begin herding the fatigued scientists and technicians out of the main lab.

Renke came over. A slight tightening around his mouth betrayed his supreme irritation at seeing his assistants ushered away, leaving their work un-finished. “What are you playing at, Erich?” he demanded.

“Read that,” Brandt told him flatly, nodding toward the message still displayed on Malkovie’s laptop.

The scientist skimmed through the warning of an imminent American assault. One thin, white eyebrow slid up in mild, annoyed surprise. “Unfortunate,” he murmured. Then he looked back over his shoulder at Brandt. “We’re leaving?”

“Correct.”

“When?”

“Within minutes,” the gray-eyed man said. “Retrieve what vou need from your office as quickly as you can.” He nodded coolly toward Malkovic, still sitting slumped over in his chair. “Take him with vou. And keep an eye on him, Merr Professor. His resources and connections are still of use to us.”

With that, Brandt swung away, stalking toward the lounge with his pistol out and ready.

Renke watched him go for a moment and then looked down at the shaken billionaire. “Come, Mr. Malkovic,” he snapped. “This way.”

Numbly, the taller man got to his feet, grabbed his briefcase and laptop, and followed the w eapons scientist down the central corridor.

Inside his windowless office, Renke crossed quickly to the bookcases concealing his combination wall safe and freezer. After entering his code, he pressed his thumb to the built-in fingerprint scanner. Cold vapor puffed out as the door swung open.

Cunfire erupted inside the building, muffled by thick, soundproofed walls. There were high-pitched wails and shrieks. When the quick fusillade ended, only a few agonized moans broke in the sudden, eerie silence, along with the sound of a man weeping in sheer terror. A pistol barked three times.

The silence became absolute.

“\ly Cod!” Malkovic groaned. “The Marines are here already!” He shrank back against the nearest wall, clutching the briefcase containing information on Dudarev’s military plans and the Russian leader’s involvement in HYDRA to his chest as though it would protect him from American bullets.

Renke snorted. “Calm yourself. That was only Brandt eliminating my unfortunate assistants.” He donned a heavy glove and pulled out the rack of vials inside the freezer. Carefully, he lowered them into an insulated cooler.

He smiled down at the rows of his specially crafted HYDRA variants in satisfaction. Labels on each clear glass tube bore different names, many of them Russian. In less than forty-eight hours, the material inside Malkovie’s briefcase would be useless as a means of pressuring Viktor Dudarev. Once Russian troops and tanks crossed the border, the Kremlin leader would no longer fear the exposure of his plans. He would be free to act against the trembling financier as he saw fit.

Still smiling to himself, the scientist shut and sealed the container.

Malkovic was doomed, whether or not he realized it yet. But the undetectable and incurable weapons in those vials would give Wulf Renke a firm grip on Dudarev and his cronies for the rest of their lives.

Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith crouched low behind the front end of the car rented by Randi Russel, a dark green Volvo four-door. It sat sideways across the two-lane road, blocking the main route running around the base of Orvieto’s rugged volcanic plateau. The road, the Strada Stratale No. 71, split here, with one fork heading toward the train station, the lower town, and then on eastward toward the foothills of the distant Apennines. The other climbed gradually up the side of the massive rocky outcropping and entered the cliff-top city of Orvieto itself.

Smith looked to his left. The plateau loomed there, a huge black shadow against the starlit sky. Just beyond the intersection, the ground rose steeply in a grassy slope dotted with stands of small trees and withered bushes. It ended abruptly in a sheer wall of cracked and crumbling tufa, a type of limestone, and basalt.

He glanced to his right. Kirov was a couple of meters away, kneeling behind the Volvo with a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun gripped in both hands. The Russian saw him looking and gave him a cool nod to show that he was ready. Beyond the road there, the ground descended in a gentle slope covered in barren fruit trees and vines. Small lights from distant farmhouses glowed here and there across the valley.

“Here they come,”Randi Russell whispered over the radio. The CIA officer was stationed in cover a little bit farther down the road, on a low rise that offered a view of the well-lit ECPR compound, roughly a kilometer away. She was their forward observer. “I count two cars. Both black Mercedes, moving fast.” She hesitated and then went on. “Looks like you were right, Jon. Maybe you’re getting better at this soldier stuff.”

“Understood,” Smith said softly.

Despite the knowledge that he was facing imminent action, part of him relaxed slightly. Randi had argued vehemently for setting up their ambush much closer to the Center. She had wanted to make sure that Malkovie, Renke, and their subordinates couldn’t slip past them by taking one of the other, smaller country lanes that crisscrossed the vallev. But Jon had vetoed her idea, pointing out that hitting the enemy too close to that fortified lab building only offered them the chance of retreating back into its impenetrable protection. And then, once Malkovie and the others realized the U.S. Marine assault they had been warned about was only a gigantic bluff, they would be free to follow their original scheme and fly out to safety.

Instead, Smith had gambled that Brandt would lead his employers this way, since this road offered the fastest means of putting distance between them and the ECPR. And once they crossed the north-south autostrada near the Orvieto train station, the fugitives would be able to cross the Apennines on little-used secondary roads and make for Italy’s Adriatic coast.

He tensed, hearing the noise of powerful car engines drawing nearer. He yanked back on the cocking handle of his MP5, forcing a 9mm round into the chamber. One hand made sure that the weapon’s firing selector was set for three-round bursts. He crouched lower, staying out of sight behind the heavy Volvo.

The approaching engines grew louder.

Headlights suddenly washed over the Volvo, throwing its strangely distorted shadow farther up the slope. Tires squealed sharply as the lead Mercedes braked hard to avoid crashing into their improvised roadblock. A second later, more brakes squealed as the second black sedan swerved abruptly and stopped in the middle of the road to avoid slamming into the first.

Immediately, both Smith and Kirov stood up from behind the Volvo, level-ing their submachine guns at the lead car, just fifteen meters away. There was more movement higher up the slope. Fiona Devin jumped up from her own hiding place, a half-buried limestone boulder that must have tumbled from the cliff face centuries before. Peering intently through her dock semiautomatic’s front and rear sights, she took careful aim at the second car.

“Come out of the car!” Smith shouted, with his eyes narrowed against the glare of the headlights. “Now! With your hands up!”

His pulse roared in his ears. This was the critical moment. Their need to take prisoners if possible outweighed every other consideration, even their own safety.

The two Mercedes sedans just sat there, angled awkwardly across the road.

He could not see any movement through their darkly tinted windows.

“This is your last warning!” Jon snapped loudly. “Get out of the damned cars! Now!” His finger tightened on the trigger.

One of the lead car’s back doors popped open. Slowly, a man, one of Malkovic’s bodyguards, climbed out and stood facing them. He kept his empty hands spread carefully apart at shoulder height. “I am unarmed,” he said, speaking in heavily accented English. “What is it that you want? Are you with the police?”

“No questions,” Kirov growled. “Tell Malkovie and the others to get out!

They have ten seconds before we open fire!”

“I understand,” the other man said quickly. “I will tell them.”

The bodyguard half-turned, just as though he was going to lean back in through the open door and talk to those inside. But then, moving with incredible speed, he whirled back around. One hand darted inside his heavy wool coat and came out gripping a pistol-sized Uzi submachine gun.

Smith and Kirov fired at the same time.

Hit by several rounds that tore right through him, the bodyguard toppled backward. He was dead before he hit the ground.

But in that same instant, the driver of the lead Mercedes stamped down hard on the accelerator. The black sedan roared ahead, aiming straight for the front end of the Volvo. The second Mercedes swung back behind the first and accelerated, too.

Too late, Smith realized his mistake. Those bastards had sacrificed a man to decoy him out of position. He swung the barrel of the MP5 through a short arc and fired again, this time aiming straight into the first oncoming car’s engine compartment. His bullets punched huge holes though the hood. Sparks and pieces of shredded metal danced up under the series of impacts.

Beside him, Kirov started shooting, aiming for the tires. Further uphill, Jon could see flame jetting from the muzzle of Fiona Devin’s Glock as she fired at the second sedan, pulling the trigger as fast as she could. Like the Russian, she was aiming for its wheels, trying to immobilize their enemies before they could break past the roadblock and race off into the night.

Jon stood his ground behind the Volvo for a split second longer, seeing the speeding Mercedes loom up out of the darkness in front of him like a maddened elephant. He fired one more three-round burst. More torn metal flew away from the black sedan’s engine compartment.

But then it was time to go.

Smith dove away from behind the parked car, landed on the hard surface of the road with a teeth-rattling jolt, and then rolled frantically off into the grass. Behind him, the Mercedes slammed into the Volvo’s front end with an earsplitting crash. Locked together for a brief moment by the impact, the two cars slid up the road in a grinding spray of broken glass, shattered fiberglass, and crumpled metal. Slowly, the Volvo spun away from the crash, opening up the right-hand fork of the Y-intersection.

With a scream of rending steel, the first Mercedes scraped past and rattled away, heading uphill toward Orvieto. Chunks of torn tread from three blown tires scattered behind it, bouncing and tumbling across the road in what looked like slow motion. Sheets of glowing sparks whirled across the gravel and asphalt surface. And then the second black sedan, also running on its metal wheel rims roared past the mangled Volvo, grinding slowly after the lead car.

Smith rose to one knee. He opened fire again, walking bursts up the road toward the fleeing vehicles. Kirov stood close by, shooting calmly, still aiming low. Fiona came sliding down the slope toward them, snapping a new magazine into her pistol. Her face was a mask of frustration.

“They’re getting away,” she yelled.

Kirov fired another burst, holding the submachine gun on target as it sprayed copper-jacketed rounds uphill. Then he shook his head. “No,” he told her. “Look.”

With a final, coughing roar from its dying engine, the first Mercedes sputtered to a stop about two hundred meters up the road. Four men scrambled out and sprinted uphill, still fleeing toward Orvieto. One of them had a shock of thick white hair and ran awkwardly, clutching a briefcase in both hands.

Another, taller, had hair that glowed pale blond in the moonlight. “Malkovic and Brandt,” Smith realized. He jumped up. “Let’s go!”

Ahead of them the second sedan careened off the road, trying to pass the stalled first car. Instead, it bottomed out in the soft soil, lurched forward a few

more meters, and then ground to a halt. Four more men jumped out of this one. Two fanned out across the road, weapons in hand, evidently intending to act as a rearguard for their retreating comrades. The last two, one of them a slender man with a white beard carrying another case, hesitated for a moment while looking up the long, open stretch ol road leading to Orvieto. Then they turned instead and faded uphill off the road, moving in among the trees and bushes growing at the base of the cliffs.

Jon heard footsteps pounding up the road behind him and whirled around, raising his MP5.

Randi Russell came loping out of the darkness, pistol in hand. “That was Renke!” she growled, pointing to where the two men had disappeared among the shadowed trees. “You and Kirov and Devin take the rest of them. I’ll go after Renke!”

Smith nodded quickly. “Good luck.”

Randi clapped his shoulder as she ran past him. “You, too!” Then she turned and began climbing the slope.

Jon stripped the spent magazine out of his submachine gun and slapped in a fresh clip. He turned to Kirov and Fiona. “You ready?”

They nodded, eyes alight—gripped, like him, by the strange exultation, verging on madness, of combat.

“Right, then,” Smith snapped, already starting to move up the road. “Let’s finish this!”

Chapter Forty-Nine

Smith ran up the left side of the road while Kirov and Fiona moved up on the right. Far ahead of them now, still illuminated by the moonlight, he could see Malkovic and Brandt and their two bodyguards hurrying away, straining to reach the top of the plateau before their pursuers came within range. Renke and one of the other gunmen had vanished up the slope to the right, disappearing among what looked like small orchards of peach and apple trees and rows of grapevines that were planted right up to the base of the cliffs. Small yellow signs by the side of the road pointed in that direction, identifying the area as Tombe del Crocifisso del Tufo, the site of an ancient Etruscan necropolis, a city of the dead.

It was the men lurking up ahead who most concerned Jon now. Two of Brandt’s gunmen had stayed behind while the others fled, probably under orders to kill or at least delay the Americans chasing after them. One had dropped into cover among the bushes and trees on the downhill slope.

The other was hiding somewhere to the right, in the rocks and brush higher up.

Smith frowned. Charging straight up the open road toward those guys was a really good way to get killed. Courage under fire was one thing. Suicidal madness was quite another.

He slowed down and then dropped to one knee, carefully scanning the tangled vegetation along both sides of the road over the barrel of his submachine gun. Kirov and Fiona went prone off to his right, peering ahead with their own weapons ready.

“See anything?” Jon hissed.

Kirov shook his head. “No.” He glanced over at the American. “But we have to keep moving, my friend, despite the risks. All this shooting will soon draw the police.”

Smith grinned back at him. “You don’t think the Carabinieri will buy our storv about being tourists out for a midnight stroll?”

Kirov snorted. He hefted his MP5 and ran a quick finger over the dark camouflage paint smeared across his cheeks and forehead. “For some reason, Jon, I doubt it,” he said drily.

“Then we’d best cut the chitchat and get going,” Fiona said, sounding both amused and irritated at the same time. She scrambled to her feet and started up the road again, staying close to the verge. “I’ll draw their fire. Then you two shoot them.”

Startled, Kirov turned, putting out a hand to stop her. “No, Fiona. Let Jon and me handle this. We were trained as soldiers. You were not. The risk is too great.”

“Oleg is right,” Smith agreed.

She shook her head impatiently. “No, he’s not, Colonel. And neither are you.” Fiona showed them the pistol in her hand. “I can’t count on hitting anything with this at more than twenty or thirty meters. Those submachine guns you’re both earning give you an edge at longer range. So let’s make use of that.”

Jon grimaced. Reluctantly, he shrugged at Kirov. “She’s right.”

The Russian, scowling himself, nodded heavily. “Yes. As she is so often.”

He dropped his hand, though not without a gruff plea. “But please do not get yourself killed, Fiona. If you do, I — “

His voice thickened and then fell silent.

Smiling now, Fiona patted Kirov gently on the head. “Yes, I know. I’ll be as careful as I can.” Then she walked on ahead, crouching slightly.

The two men waited a few seconds and then followed her, staying low, moving cautiously through the grass on the edge of the road and keeping to the shadows wherever possible.

One of Brandt’s gunmen, Sepp Nedel, lay hidden behind a little pile of weathered, brush-covered rocks. He peered down toward the road, watching for any signs of movement over the sights of his Micro-Uzi. He settled the weapon’s folding stock firmly against his shoulder, waiting calmly. Shooting Renke’s unarmed scientists had been a pleasant enough diversion, but this duel against armed opponents was more to his taste.

There was a faint stir among the bushes across the road. Nedel sneered.

That was typical of Fyodor Bazhenov, nervous and twitchy as alwavs when holding a gun. ‘Hie onetime KGB man was competent enough with explosives. But he was a menace to himself and others in the field.

Something flickered at the edge of his vision. Someone was coming up the road. The German tightened his grip on the Uzi and shifted his aim. Now he could see a black-clad figure drifting closer, crouching brief!}’ from time to time to watch and listen. A scout, Nedel thought. The correct move was obvious. Let this one pass unharmed and then kill the others who would come later.

The scout drew nearer.

He held his fire. Something about the moving figure’s shape intrigued him. Then he realized what it was. The American scout was a woman! Nedel bared his teeth in the darkness, anticipating even more pleasure once he had eliminated her companions.

Suddenly another Uzi stuttered harshly, spitting bullets down the road.

Pieces of asphalt and shredded grass and dirt exploded all around the black-clad woman. She fell forward and lay still.

Nedel swore silently. Bazhenov had panicked.

Suddenly he saw the Russian poke his head out above the bushes, trying to get a clearer shot. The demolitions expert brought his submachine gun up, aiming intently at the motionless figure curled up beside the road.

And then another weapon fired, this one from farther down the hill.

Hit in the face, Bazhenov screamed shrilly once and then fell sideways, sprawling out from the bushes to lie in a heap. A second burst tore him apart.

Instantly, the black-clad gunman who had killed him leaped to his feet and raced toward the fallen woman. He dropped to her side, apparently fumbling for a medical kit in one of the many pouches on his assault vest.

Nedel nodded slightly to himself. That was a worthwhile target. Slowly, with great care, he rose up from behind his little pile of rocks. He stared down the short barrel of his Uzi, breathing shallowly, waiting until the sights settled on the kneeling man and hung there. His finger tightened on the trigger …

Lying prone about one hundred meters away, Smith fired. The MP5 chattered loudly, punching back against his shoulder. Three spent cartridges flew away into the grass. Hit twice, once in the neck and once in the shoulder, Brandt’s gunman slumped forward. Black in the pale light, blood pulsed across the rocks briefly and then stopped flowing.

Grim-faced, Jon sprang up and sprinted forward to where Kirov knelt beside Fiona Devin.

She was already sitting up when he got there. “I’m okay,” she insisted, pale and plainly a bit shaken, but smiling with relief nonetheless. “They missed me.”

“You say they missed?” Kirov growled. He reached out and touched a long tear through the dark cloth covering her upper left arm. A thin trickle of blood welled up from a bullet graze there. “So what is this?”

“That?” Fiona said, grinning back at him. “That’s nothing but a scratch.”

“You were lucky,” Smith told her bluntly. His heart was still pounding.

Like Kirov, he had been sure that she was dead or badly wounded.

She nodded calmly. “Indeed I was, Colonel.” She looked down ruefully at the radio clipped to her equipment vest. It had been smashed, either by a bullet or by a rock when she dove for cover. She stripped off the now-useless headset. “But it looks as though I’ll have to rely on you two to make any calls for me.”

Abruptly, bright white light flared through the night behind them, throwing their shadows ahead up the slope. They whirled around, in time to see a huge fireball rising in the west. Shards of twisted steel and shattered concrete spun away from the center of the explosion, soaring hundreds of meters into the night sky before tumbling back to earth. The sound of the blast reached them in that same moment, a rumbling, thunderous freight-train roar that died slowly, leaving only a stunned silence in its wake.

“There went Renke’s lab,” Smith said bitterly, staring at the pillar of flame still rising from the ECPR compound. “Along with most of the evidence we needed.”

Kirov nodded somberly. “All the more reason to capture Malkovic and Brandt, then.” He shrugged. “But at least we no longer have to worry so much about being stopped by the police.”

“No kidding,”Jon agreed absently, still looking at the fires consuming the shattered ruins of Renke’s weapons lab. “Every municipal police and Carabinieri squad in Orvieto will be swarming over that compound in ten minutes or less.” He leaned down and helped Fiona back to her feet. “We’d better not waste the opportunity.”

Together, the three Covert-One agents turned and sprinted east along the road, running flat-out now toward the top of the plateau.

Pushing carefully through a tangle of vines, Randi Russell saw the sudden glare light up the slope around her, casting its stark illumination across a landscape of tall grass, leafless fruit trees, waist-high rail fences, and eroded terraces covered in brush. She dropped flat, waiting until the flash faded and the hillside returned to darkness.

In the sudden silence following the explosion, she heard a quick murmur of startled voices from ahead and off to her left. Cautiously, she rose and moved forward again, heading in that direction. The voices fell silent abruptly.

Randi came to a rail fence and crouched lower. In the faint moonlight, the terrain ahead looked far more open. It was difficult, however, to make out details. There was a succession of what appeared to be grassy mounds with gray stones set in the top, but the areas between these mounds were bathed in impenetrable shadow. It was time to get a better look at what lay ahead of her, she decided. She raised her image-intensifier binoculars. Set to amplify even the smallest amount of ambient light, whether from the stars or the moon, they turned night into effective day.

Immediately, the landscape leaped into clearer focus.

She was looking at what appeared to be a rectangular grid of streets.

Small houses built of large blocks of quarried tufa, a form of pitted gray limestone, lined these narrow, stepped roads cut into the hillside. Some of their roofs were conical, others were flat, but almost all of them were covered in grass and hard-packed earth. Low, dark, trapezoidal openings gaped in the center of each building. Letters in some archaic script were carved on the large stones set above the empty doorways. Beyond the buildings she could see a path with railings leading up shallow steps to an empty parking lot.

This was the old Etruscan city of the dead, Randi realized, remembering the quick research she had done on her flight down from Germany the day before. Some of the tombs here were nearly three thousand years old. Excavated beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the vases, drinking cups, weapons, and armor found inside were now on display in a museum next to Orvieto’s cathedral.

She frowned. Renke and his bodyguard must be hiding somewhere in the necropolis, probably with the intention of slipping away back down the hill when all the shooting died down. Not a bad plan, Randi thought coldly.

Anyone trying to hunt for them up and down those narrow streets would be exposed, a sitting duck for anyone shooting from cover inside one of the tombs.

She stuffed the binoculars back into one of her equipment pouches and slid under the bottom rail of the fence, moving slowly to make sure she did not snag any of her gear. Then she wriggled toward the tombs through the long grass, gliding quietly from one patch of shadow to another.

Periodically, Randi stopped moving to listen, trying to ferret out the slightest sound that could tell her where her enemies were lurking. But she heard nothing, only the sound of police and fire and ambulance sirens speeding toward the explosion-ravaged ECPR compound.

At last she made it to the position she had been aiming for, a small stand of scrub trees growing out of the slope above the necropolis. From here, she could look down into most of the streets, especially the lanes that ran back toward the Orvieto road.

Again, Randi dug out her binoculars. Methodically, she swept them across the ancient cemetery, focusing first on the entrances of tombs that she thought offered the best vantage points. Unless she missed her guess, Renke and his bodyguard would have picked a hiding place that would let them spot anyone entering the tomb complex from the road or the parking lot.

Her binoculars slid slowly past a tomb opening about halfway up the central street, paused, and then came back. Was that paler shape inside the darkness just a chunk of fallen stone or a trick of the moonlight?

Randi held her breath, waiting patiently. The shape moved slightly, taking on form and definition. She was looking at the head and shoulders of a man, a clean-shaven man who was crouched just inside the low opening, peering down the street toward the entrance to the necropolis. He shifted position again and now she saw the weapon in his hands.

She held still. Was Renke inside the tomb with this man? Or had the weapons scientist chosen another lair?

The bodyguard looked back behind him for a moment, apparently listening to something being whispered to him, nodded, and then turned back to his post.

Randi smiled thinly. Wulf Renke was there, crouching patiently in the darkness, waiting for his chance to slip away and disappear again, as he had so many times before. That was the answer she had been hoping for. She put her binoculars away and crawled down the slope, staying low and angling away from the street where Renke and the other man were concealed.

She dropped quietly into the little lane that marked the northern boundary of the necropolis and crossed it quickly, slipping into the shelter of one of the small square mounded tombs. Then she slid her Beretta back into the holster on her hip, snapped the flap shut, and used both hands to haul herself up onto the grass-covered roof of the burial chamber.

From there, Randi made her way from rooftop to rooftop, jumping lightly across the narrow gaps between buildings until she reached the flat-roofed tomb just north of Renke’s hiding place. She drew the 9mm pistol, crawled to the corner, and looked down over the edge.

There, just a few meters away, lay the low open door where she had seen the scientist’s lookout. She took aim with the Beretta, waiting while her eyes adjusted. Gradually, the blackness took on different shapes and shades, again revealing the head and shoulders of the sentry crouching there with his submachine gun. Her finger tightened on the trigger and then eased off slightly.

She decided to give this guy the chance to be smart.

“Drop the weapon!” Randi called softly.

Taken completely by surprise, the guard reacted instinctively. His head jerked up and he spun desperately, bringing his Uzi up to fire.

She shot him in the head.

Before the Beretta’s sharp, ringing report stopped echoing back from the stone walls around her, she was in motion. She rolled off the roof, landed in a crouch on the street, and brought her pistol back up, aiming straight at the opening to the crypt.

There was no noise. No sign of movement from inside.

“Wulf Renke!” Randi said quietly in perfect German, pitching her voice just loud enough to be heard inside the tomb. “It’s over. You’ve got nowhere left to run. Come out now, with your hands up, and you’ll live. Otherwise, I will kill you.”

For a moment, she thought he would stay silent, refusing to talk. But then the scientist replied. “So those are my two choices?” he said calmly. “I either meekly surrender to you and face prison? Or else I die at your hands?”

“Correct.”

Renke snorted. “You are wrong,” he said bleakly. “You forget, there is always a third option. And that is the path I choose.”

Suddenly Randi heard a faint crunch from inside the tomb, followed by a startled gasp and then a long, drawn-out sigh that ended in absolute silence.

“Oh, hell,” she murmured, already moving toward the entrance.

She was too late.

Wulf Renke sat slumped over on one of the stone benches used by the Etruscans for their dead. His eyes stared back at her, rigid and unblinking. Foam had dripped out of his slack mouth and into his neat, white beard. The fragments of a broken glass ampule lay on the ground at his feet, next to an insulated carrying case. The air inside the burial chamber smelled faintly of almonds.

The fugitive biological weapons scientist had committed suicide, probably with cyanide, Randi thought grimly. She bent down and entered the tomb.

When a quick search of Renke’s pockets produced nothing of value, she took the case and backed out again, into the narrow moonlit street.

Inside the container, she found a row of glass vials packed in dry ice. And when she read the labels on each vial, her eyes widened in absolute astonishment and horror. At a guess, Randi decided that she was looking at lethal disease variants keyed to the precise genetic makeup of Viktor Dudarev, his senior ministers, and many of Russia’s highest-ranking military commanders.

Quickly, she slammed the lid back down, grabbed the case, and then raced away through the cramped streets of the city of the dead.

Chapter Fifty

Smith slid quietly through the shadows thrown by a row of tall pine trees. He came out on the edge of a small public park dominated by the foundations of an Etruscan temple—not much more than a few stone steps, a raised, grass-covered platform, and the circular bases of what must have once been towering columns. The main road up had turned sharply as it climbed and entered Orvieto and now he was facing south.

He dropped to one knee, signaling Kirov and Fiona to come ahead. They ghosted through the trees and joined him.

The bulk of the medieval city loomed on their right, a maze of little, twisting streets and low, irregularly shaped stone houses that were mostly between eight and nine hundred years old. Arches crossed the streets in many places, linking the ancient houses, and turning the narrow lanes into alternating pools of wan silver moonlight and Stygian darkness.

The eastern end of the plateau fell away on their left, plunging steeply toward the lights of Orvieto Scalo, the lower town. A wide terrace ran along this edge, all the way to the tall, round, open-topped bastions and massive outer stone walls of the Fortezza dell’Albornoz, a papal fortress built in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries.

“Which way would Brandt and Malkovic go?” Jon murmured. “West into the old city?”

“Not into the old city,” Fiona said flatly. “That’s a dead end for them. The only real way out from there leads straight back toward the Center compound, and that road will be swarming with Italian police and emergency crews.”

“Ahead,” Kirov said firmly. He pointed to a small sign with an arrow, pointing the wav south along a tree-lined avenue to the Piazza Cahen and the Stazione Funicalore—the station for the funicular railway connecting Orvieto with the lower town. “Their only realistic hope of escape is to beg, buy, or steal another car, and the only place to do that safely is down below, near the main train station. That funicular railway is probably closed for the night, but there must be other roads or tracks down from this side of the city.”

Smith nodded tightly. “Sounds reasonable.” He stood up. “Okay, I’ll take the left flank. Oleg, you take the right.”

“And I’ll tag along like a good little girl, safe in the middle,” Fiona said, smiling slightly to take the sting out of her words.

Spread apart in a skirmish line, the three of them crossed the little park, skirting the raised platform of the ruined temple, and kept moving south, sticking close to the left edge of the wide road leading into the open square called the Piazza Cahen.

“But where is Professor Renke?” Konstantin Malkovic forced out between panting gasps, still clutching his briefcase to his heaving chest. He was sitting propped up with his back against the locked doors of the funicular station.

Sweat matted his thick mane of white hair and ran in rivulets down his terrified face.

“Either dead or a prisoner,” Brandt snapped. “He should have kept up with us.”

Coldly furious with himself and with his panic-stricken employer, Brandt contemplated his options. They were increasingly limited. With Renke gone and the HYDRA lab destroyed, his usefulness to the Russians would last only so long as the Americans were kept in the dark about the invasion plans for Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics. The gray-eyed man glanced sidelong at Malkovic’s briefcase. It contained information that must not be allowed to fall into American hands. And the financier himself was rapidly becoming a liability.

At this point, Brandt suspected, the only way he could win back his own life from the hard men in the Kremlin would be to eliminate Malkovic for them and then hand over the briefcase and all of its contents. He raised his Walther pistol, then stopped himself. Not here, he decided. The square was too open and the sound of a shot would echo across the city. No, he would kill the older man later, Brandt thought grimly, when they were safely away from this damned medieval maze. Once they were high up in the Apennines, it would be a simple matter to hide a bullet-riddled body where it might never be found.

Bending down, he roughly yanked Malkovic back to his feet. “Come on!”

he snarled. “There’s another road down, just around the corner of that fortress.”

Trembling both with fear and fatigue, the older man obeyed.

In that instant, one of his two remaining men crouched lower, hissing, “Herr Brandt! The Americans! They’re here!” He raised his submachine gun, using the Uzi’s short black barrel to point toward the entrance to the Piazza.

Startled, Brandt spun round with his pistol ready. In the dim light, he could just make out three black-clad figures entering the square. The}’ were less than a hundred meters away. “Kill them!” he snapped.

Smith saw a sudden flurry of movement near the funicular railway station, a small, modern building, on the eastern edge of the square. There were four men there. Two were in cover behind a row of terracotta planters, with their weapons out. Brandt, taller and blond-haired, crouched behind them. The fourth man, Konstantin Malkovic, was turning to flee, scuttling wildly away from the station. He disappeared into the darkness, heading for the tall arched gateway leading into the papal fortress.

“Down!” Jon roared, trying to warn Kirov and Fiona. He dove for the pavement. “Get down!”

And then Brandt’s gunmen started shooting, firing on full automatic.

Bullets ripped through the air all around Smith, cracking past low over his head. Others ricocheted off the paving, spinning wildly away in every direction. Chunks of concrete and torn strips of asphalt spattered across the square.

He rolled away, frantically trying to throw off their aim.

A few meters away, Fiona Devin cried out suddenly and went down. She lay curled up, with her teeth tightly clenched, clutching at her right thigh.

Blood welled up between her locked fingers. Grim-faced with worry, Kirov hurled himself toward her, ignoring the 9mm rounds screaming around him.

The two Uzis fell silent. Both gunmen had expended their full twenty-round magazines in just a couple of seconds. Each man crouched low, desperately slapping in a fresh clip.

Smith stopped rolling. Either they started fighting back or they were dead.

His eyes narrowed and he took rapid aim at the row of planter boxes. He pulled the trigger, firing as quickly as he could while swinging the barrel from one end of the little train station to the other. The MP5 stuttered loudly, punching rounds toward Brandt and his men. Hit by one of his bursts, a terracotta planter exploded, sending pieces of shattered pottery, dirt, and bits of shredded bark and leaves swirling through the air.

The gunman crouching behind that planter toppled backward and lay still. His Uzi clattered to the pavement.

One down, Smith thought grimly. He shifted his aim again, swiveling toward Brandt’s second gunman. Brandt himself was next to his subordinate, down on one knee with his semiautomatic pistol out.

The three men opened fire at the same time.

Again, bullets hammered the paving and the air around Jon. One round tore a line of fire across the top of his right shoulder. Another near miss ripped through his assault vest, sending a torn equipment pouch tumbling away across the Piazza. Bits of broken plastic and glass littered the ground in its wake, all that was left of a handheld laser surveillance kit. A ricochet punched off the pavement and slammed into his left side, hitting with enough force to crack one of his ribs.

Deliberately, Smith fought down his fear-laced instincts to duck or to dive away from the incoming fire. Instead, his finger tightened again and again on the trigger. The MP5’s barrel jumped and bucked against his grip. Jon clenched his jaw against the searing pain from his cracked rib, and kept shooting, forcing the submachine gun back onto his targets.

Multiple 9mm rounds smacked into the funicular station, shattering glass, punching through the locked doors, and gouging huge craters in the brown basalt walls. The rest of the planter boxes blew apart. Brandt and his gunman crumpled and fell, one heaped on top of the other.

The cocking handle slammed forward as Smith fired the last of the thirty rounds in his magazine. Reacting swiftly, he snatched out the old clip, tugged a new magazine out of his ammunition pouch, and slid it into the MP5. Then he yanked back on the handle, chambering a new bullet.

He scanned the front of the station, finger on the trigger, looking closely for any sign of movement from the three bodies littering the torn pavement.

Nothing stirred. There was only a sudden strange silence —the total absence of noise after the staccato, clattering roar of so much gunfire.

“Jon!” Kirov called to him. The Russian was crouching over Fiona Devin, working frantically to staunch the bleeding from the wound in her thigh. “I need your help,” he said bleakly.

Smith rolled back to his feet, staggering slightly as a new wave of pain from his cracked rib ripped through him, and then hurried over to the wounded woman. Fiona was still conscious. But she was pale and shivering, starting to go into shock.

He glanced across at Kirov. The Russian was just as pale. “Go after Malkovic, Oleg. He ran into the fortress over there,” Jon said softly. “I’ll take care of her.”

Kirov shook his head angrily. “No, I — “

“I’m a doctor, remember?” Smith said urgently. “Let me do my job. Now you go and do yours. If Malkovic escapes, everything we’ve done has been in vain. Now move!”

Kirov stared back at him for a second longer. He scowled darkly, but then he nodded. Without saying anything more, he bent down and touched Fiona’s forehead gently. Then he grabbed his submachine gun, jumped to his feet, and loped away, heading for the fortress gate.

Smith went down on his knees beside Fiona and began examining the in-jury, pulling the torn cloth of her jeans away carefully to get a good look at both the entry and exit wound. He felt around her leg with his fingers, pressing hard in places to check for any pieces of broken bone. She hissed sharply through gritted teeth.

“Sorry,” Jon told her quietly. He tore open a field dressing kit and shook out a pressure bandage. Then he began wrapping it tightly around her wounded leg. She winced again. Next, he stripped off his assault vest, balled it up, and used it to elevate her wounded leg.

“How bad is it?” Fiona asked softly.

“You were lucky,” Smith replied flatly.

She forced a smile. “That’s the second time tonight you’ve told me that, Colonel. Somehow I don’t feel quite as fortunate this time around.”

Jon smiled back at her. “All luck is relative, Ms. Devin.” He turned serious.

“Somehow the bullet that hit you missed every major blood vessel and the bone itself. Your thigh muscle is torn to hell, but it should heal nicely—once we’ve got you in a decent hospital.”

Once he had finished stabilizing Fiona, he shook open another field dressing, pulled up his sweater, and then used pieces of adhesive tape to strap his cracked rib, holding it in place. With that taped down, Smith used another length of bandage to form a sling for his left arm and looped it around his neck.

Randi Russell’s excited voice suddenly came through his headset. “Jon,” she said quickly. “Renke’s dead, but I’ve got some of his materials. I’m heading up the hill now. What’s your situation?”

Smith keyed his mike. “Brandt is dead, too. But Malkovic slipped away and Ms. Devin is wounded.” Speaking quickly, he briefed her on the rest of the situation, including their location in the Piazza Cahen. “How soon can you get here?”

“Give me five minutes,” she promised.

“Understood,” Smith said. “Come as fast as you can. And whistle up the Pave Low helicopter using the codes I gave you. Tell them to stand by to extract us.”

“Where will you be?” Randi asked.

“I’m going after Malkovic myself. I’ll keep you posted. Out.” He picked up his weapon, stood up, and looked down at Fiona. “Randi will be here soon.

Will you be all right until then?”

Still pale, she nodded. “I will. Now go help Oleg run that bastard down.”

“And you sit tight. No trying to walk on that wounded leg of yours,” Smith said firmly. “That’s an order.”

Then he turned and sprinted away across the Piazza.

Erich Brandt swam up through the darkness, fighting against the pain that threatened to drown his senses. His eyes blinked open as he came back to full consciousness. He was lying on the pavement with a dead weight pressing down across his legs. The hot, copper)- smell of fresh blood filled his nostrils.

He turned his head slightly, wincing at the agony that caused him. More blood dripped onto the Piazza.

One of his men lay heaped on top of him, plainly dead—shot multiple times.

Brandt carefully raised his own hand, gingerly touching his forehead. A crease torn there stung like fire. He felt broken bone grate beneath the loose flap of skin. His vision darkened and he jerked his bloodstained fingers away hastily. It would not do to think too closely about what this head wound might mean.

He heard footsteps racing toward him and closed his eyes until thev were only narrow slits. Breathing shallowly, he watched a lean, dark-haired man go running past, with one arm in an improvised sling and the other holding a submachine gun.

It was Smith, Brandt saw in amazement. Somehow the American had escaped from Russia, and now here he was in Orvieto, hot on Malkovic’s heels.

The realization jolted him into action. Slowly, he inched his way out from under the corpse. He found his pistol and then crawled away, staying low to the pavement until he reached the shelter of some trees and shrubs planted near the high arched gate that opened into the Fortezza dell’Albornoz. Once in cover, the gray-eyed man stood up and then staggered on, following in Smith’s wake.

Using both hands, Fiona levered herself up into a sitting position, being careful to keep her bandaged leg stretched out in front of her. The effort left her feeling dizzy. She waited a few moments for her head to stop whirling and then looked up, staring out across the moonlit square. Frightened voices were calling out to each other in the city behind her, as Orvieto’s citizens tried to make some sense of all the explosions and gunfire ringing through their ancient town.

Fiona frowned. She looked down at her watch, wondering where Agent Russell was. If the local police got there before the CIA officer arrived to help her, she was in real trouble. Neither Klein nor President Castilla could break the Covert-One secret to explain her actions, and she suspected the Italian authorities would look severely on a supposed freelance journalist caught wandering around their country armed to the teeth.

She studied the bullet-riddled funicular railway station, noting the two corpses sprawled across the Piazza in front of its shattered windows. Her eyes narrowed sharply. Two corpses? There should be three.

For an instant, Fiona sat rigid, feeling ice-cold. One of Brandt’s men, maybe Brandt himself was on the loose … and without her radio, she had no wav to warn the others. Painfully, she pushed herself to her feet and hobbled slowly toward the fortress.

Smith found Kirov and Konstantin Malkovic standing together on the upper ramparts of the fortress. The cliff face fell away sharply below the walls, plunging almost vertically through a tangle of scrub trees and bushes to the lights of Orvieto Scalo and the autostrada below. The financier had his hands high up in the air. An opened briefcase lay at his feet.

The Russian held his submachine gun pointed casually at the older, white-haired man. He glanced over his shoulder at Jon. “Mr. Malkovic has agreed to cooperate with us,” he said drily. “It appears that he bitterly regrets his unwise decision to assist President Dudarev in his various conspiracies.”

“I’m sure he does,” said Smith, equally drily. “What’s in the briefcase?”

“Important information for our government,” Malkovic said eagerly.

“Fvervthing that I’ve been able to learn about Russia’s military plans.”

For the first time in days, jon felt some of the weight lift off his shoulders.

With Malkovic alive and talking, and with evidence of Dudarev’s plans to invade his smaller neighbors, it was just possible that the United States might be able to fend off open hostilities with Russia.

“Drop your weapons,” a harsh, pain-filled voice said suddenly from behind them. “Do it now. Or I will shoot.”

Smith stiffened. He knew that voice. But Brandt was dead. He’d shot the bastard himself.

“You have three seconds,” Brandt said coldly. “One. Two — “

Drained by the sudden reversal of fortune, Smith let go of his submachine gun. It clattered against the parapet. Beside him, Kirov did the same, carefully setting down his own MP5.

“Excellent,” the German told them. “Now turn around … slowly. And keep your hands up where I can see them.”

They obeyed.

Brandt stood there, just a few meters away along the battlement. His face was a horrible mask of dried blood. Bone gleamed white from a jagged cut across his forehead. He held his pistol in a one-handed grip, constantly shifting his aim slightly to cover them each in turn.

“Erich!” Malkovic said gladly, starting forward. “Thank God!” He smiled broadly. “I knew that you would save me from these men.”

“Get back,” Brandt growled, jabbing his pistol at the financier.

The smile faded from Malkovic’s face. “But Erich, I — “

“You thought you would live through this night?” The former Stasi officer sneered. “Well, I’m afraid that your speculations were in error this time. One might even call it a fatal miscalculation.” He shrugged, still holding his weapon on the three men. “Dudarev may not reward me for killing you. But your death should at least protect me from the worst of his anger.”

“You intend to kill us all?” Kirov asked bluntly.

Brandt nodded. “Naturally.” He stepped back a few paces, widening the gap between them, making it impossible for any sudden rush to reach him before he shot them all down. “The only question is which one of you dies first.”

Again the Walther’s muzzle swung from one man to the other. Then it settled on Jon and stayed there. “You, Colonel,” Brandt said coldly. “You are the first.”

And then Smith saw a lithe, pale-faced shape loom up out of the darkness behind Brandt. He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said quietly. “Remember that I once promised that you were a dead man?”

Brandt smiled icily. “Yes, you did, Colonel.” He took careful aim at Jon’s head. “But you were wrong about that, as about so much else.”

A gunshot rang out, deafening at pointblank range.

Brandt’s smile froze. Slowly, very slowly, he twisted and then fell sideways, toppling over the edge of the parapet. There was a short silence, and then a dull, crunching thud.

Smith scooped up his submachine gun, walked toward the parapet, and looked over. There, about twenty meters below, he saw Brandt’s broken corpse splayed out across the gravel path running along the foot of the fortress walls.

He shrugged. “I never said I would be the one who would kill you,” he murmured to the dead man.

He looked back over his shoulder.

Fiona Devin stood there, slowly lowering her Glock. The bandage wrapped around her right thigh was dark, stained with fresh blood.

“I thought I ordered you to stay put,” Smith said mildly.

She smiled at him, with a gleeful light dancing in her eyes. “So you did, Colonel. But I’m a civilian, and I never was much good at following orders.”

“Fortunately for us,” Kirov said gruffly, coming forward to take her gently in his arms. “Thank you, my dear, dear Fiona,” he said simply. He bent down to kiss her.

Grinning, Smith looked away to keep an eye on the trembling financier. In the distance, he heard the muffled clatter of rotor blades growing louder.

Their ride home was on the way.

Epilogue

Navigation lights blinking steadily, the 747-200B that served as Air Force One, the president’s official aircraft, flew steadily east through the night sky over Europe. The cloud cover below the aircraft was unbroken, but at this altitude the night sky was ablaze with stars. Relays of U.S. F-15 and F-16 fighters flew close by, providing continuous protection. More lights blinked in the sky some distance behind Air Force One. Two mammoth KC-10 tankers were on station there, making sure the escorting fighters were always fueled up and readv for immediate action.

“Our ETA is one hour, Mr. President,” the steward said, standing at the open door to the fully equipped cabin that served as his airborne office.

President Sam Castilla looked up from his desk. “Thank you, James.”

When the door closed behind the steward, he turned to Fred Klein, who was sitting patiently on a small couch. “Ready for the big show?”

The head of Covert-One nodded. “Yes, sir.” He smiled. “Let’s hope your performance is appreciated.”

Castilla grinned. “Oh, I think it will be —though probably not in a friendly-way.” He picked up the intercom phone on his desk. “General Wallace? This is the president. You may initiate that hot-line call to Moscow we talked about earlier.”

Both Klein and the president waited for several minutes while the communications staff aboard Air Force One made contact with the Kremlin. At length, an American voice spoke up, coming over the speakers hooked up inside Castilla’s office. “President Dudarev is standing by, sir.”

“Good morning, Mr. President,” Castilla said cheerfully. “I apologize for disturbing you so early, but the matter I’d like to discuss is fairly urgent.”

Dudarev’s smooth, calm voice came clearly over the secure circuit. “The hour is not a problem for me, Mr. President,” the Russian leader said politely.

“I often work very late these days … an unfortunate fate which I am sure we both share.”

Castilla snorted quietly. Slick, very slick, he thought. But now it was time to drop the hammer. “Yes, I’m sure you’re extremely busy just now, Viktor,” he said coolly, deliberately deciding to use Dudarev’s first name. Bluntness could be just as much a weapon of statecraft as could subtlety and indirection.

“Plotting unprovoked wars of aggression against your smaller and weaker neighbors is just so darned time-consuming, isn’t it?”

There was a moment’s frozen silence before the Russian replied. “I really don’t understand what you are driving at, Mr. President.”

“Let’s cut the crap, shall we?” Castilla said forcefully. He winked at Klein.

“Hell, I’ve seen your mobilization schedules, operational plans, and target lists. I’ve even heard audiotapes with your voice on it discussing those same plans. And Ukrainian police units and bomb disposal squads have already found the explosives your agents rigged in Poltava, for your little piece of phony ‘anti-Russian terrorism.’”

“I do not know who could have provided you with these monstrous fabrications,” Dudarev said stiffly.

Castilla leaned forward in his chair. “Your good friend, Mr. Konstantin Malkovic, Viktor. That’s who.”

“Malkovic is a capitalist and a speculator who does business in my country,” Dudarev snarled. “Beyond that, I know nothing about him.”

Castilla shrugged. “That’s not a lie that’s going to stick, Viktor. I’d advise you to come up with some other story, real quick.” He glanced out the window, catching a brief glimpse of the blinking red and green navigation lights of his fighter escort. “Let’s talk instead about the fact that you’re going to turn around those three hundred thousand or so troops you’ve massed near Ukraine, Georgia, Kazahkstan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and send them marching back to their peacetime barracks … and pronto.”

“Can I speak candidly, Mr. President?” Dudarev asked grimly.

“By all means,” Castilla told him, grinning across the small cabin at Klein.

“I always enjoy candor. Especially since I hear it so rarely from you.”

“If I really did have so many tanks, soldiers, and aircraft ready for war, why would I abandon my plans so easily? Do you think your voice is so frightening?”

“Not in the least, Viktor,” the president said easily. “I just don’t think you’re ready for an all-out conflict with the United States—and with NATO. You’ve been thinking in terms of a lightning campaign against weak and disorganized local forces, not a slugging match with the most powerful alliance in history.”

“But you have no defense agreements with Ukraine or Georgia or the rest,”

Dudarev pointed out sharply. “Nor any forces stationed on their territory. And somehow I do not believe that your country —or your allies —will oppose us so seriously. No one in London or Berlin or Paris or New York will support a war against Russia for the sake of a few bare-assed Azerbaijanis and the like!”

“Maybe not,” Castilla agreed. He straightened up. “But they will if your attacks put Americans at risk, especially political leaders who are pretty well known and respected.” He paused modestly. “Like me, for example.”

“What?” the Russian leader demanded. “What are you talking about?”

Castilla checked his watch. Outside, the noise of the 747’s four big engines was changing as the jet began its gradual descent. “I think you should know-that I’ll be on the ground in Kiev in a little less than forty-five minutes. And that I don’t expect to be leaving Ukraine for a few days. Their new leaders and I have a lot of business to transact, especially negotiating a mutual defense treaty.”

“Impossible.”

“Not in the least,” Castilla said carefully. His voice hardened. “Ukraine is an independent country now. I guess you forgot that one little fact, Viktor.”

Dudarev said nothing.

“And so are the other former Soviet republics,” Castilla continued.

“Which is why a host of U.S., NATO, and Japanese senior officials, including my secretaries of State and Defense, are going to be visiting those countries over the next several days. And if a single Russian bomber, tank, or foot soldier crosses those borders, I can guarantee that you’re going to wind up dragging your country into a war it cannot afford—a war that it will most certainly lose.”

“You are insulting,” the Russian leader snapped.

“On the contrary,” Castilla said coldly. “I’m being remarkably patient. But let me assure you that neither my country nor I will ever forget or forgive your decision to unleash the HYDRA weapon on us.”

“HYDRA?” Dudarev asked, but for the first time there was a discernible note of uncertainty, perhaps even of fear. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

The president ignored him. “There’s an old, old saying that when you lie down with a dog, you get up with fleas, Viktor. Well, Professor Wulf Renkc was one damned, dirty dog, and now you have one hell of a case of fleas. When we caught up with Renke, we found something very interesting in a little case he was carrying—a whole set of glass vials filled with some kind of liquid.”

Dudarev said nothing.

“Now, the interesting thing about these vials is that many had Russian names on them—and one of them was yours, Viktor.”

Even across the thousand miles separating them, Castilla could hear the other man suddenly swallow hard.

“But I’m a civilized man, unlike you,” the president went on, not bothering to hide his utter contempt for the Russian leader. “So I’ve decided not to see how you like the taste of your own weapon when it’s thrown back at you. Instead, well, we’ll just hang on to these so-called HYDRA variants for the time being. As a form of insurance against any future bad behavior by you or by your pals in the Kremlin.”

“That is blackmail,” Dudarev growled.

“Blackmail is such an ugly word, Viktor,” Castilla said calmly. He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I’ll let you know when I think of a better one. Da svidaniya.”

He pushed a button on his phone, cutting the hot-line connection. Then the president looked across at his old friend. “Well?”

“I think you enjoyed that, Sam,” Klein said, grinning crookedly. “But then, for a politician, you’ve never been the most diplomatic fellow around.”

“Nope, I’m not,” Castilla agreed contentedly. “But what I’m really going to enjoy is watching Czar Viktor’s pedestal start wobbling. Hell, I may even decide to give it a few, well-timed kicks myself. With a bit of luck, the Russians will get a chance to make a new start for themselves one of these days in the not too distant future.”

“You think Dudarev’s regime is going to be in serious trouble?” Klein asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I do.” The president nodded seriously. “Once the word of what Viktor and his chums were up to leaks out, there’ll be hell to pay inside Russia. Some very influential folks will be mad at him for almost dragging them into a war, and others will think he’s a weakling for backing down at the last minute. This fiasco will be the first real chink in his armor.” He shrugged. “Once that sense of invulnerability wears off a would-be dictator, it’s pretty much the beginning of the end. It’ll take a while, and my guess is that he’ll cause us some more trouble before he goes down, but I’d say that Dudarev just gave his political enemies a big piece of the rope they’ll use to hang him.”

Camp Five, one of the several maximum-security facilities at Guantanamo Bay, was reserved for high-level terrorist detainees, most often senior members of al-Qaeda or other dangerous terrorist groups. It was also used, on rare occasions, to house “ghost detainees”—those men and women whose names were kept out of any official records for security and intelligence purposes.

U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Henry Farmer knocked politely on the wire-mesh door of the cell occupied by Prisoner Number Six. “Time for your lunch, sir,” he said, sliding a tray through the slot at the bottom of the door.

Number Six, a tall, white-haired man with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes, sat up wearily from his bunk and padded over to collect the tray. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. He tried to smile. “I’ll hope that the chef has taken a refresher course since yesterday’s disaster.”

“Maybe so,” Farmer said with a disinterested shrug. “Just to let you know, your next session with those fellas from Langley is scheduled for a little later this afternoon.”

The prisoner nodded moodily. His discussions with the CIA debriefers were never very pleasant. He carried the tray back over to his bunk and then began eating.

Farmer watched him in silence for a moment, then turned, and went on with the rest of his duties.

Later that afternoon, the sergeant found the time to go for a stroll along the beach. He found a stocky, gray-haired man waiting for him, a man whose passport and sober business attire proclaimed him to be Klaus Wittmer, a visiting representative of the International Red Cross.

“Was there any trouble?” the gray-haired man asked.

Farmer shook his head. “Not a peep.” He tossed something to Wittmer, who caught it one-handed and held it closed in his palm. “And the rest of my payment?”

“Will be made on schedule,” the gray-haired man assured him placidly.

Once the American noncom was trudging away down the beach, Alexei Ivanov, the head of Russia’s Thirteenth Directorate, opened his palm. An empty glass vial glinted there, reflecting the warm Caribbean sun. Frowning, Ivanov stared down at it for a few seconds more. A futile gesture, he thought grimlv, but then what other options are open to us now?

Abruptly, the Russian spy chief turned and tossed the vial out into the bay, well bevond the waves lapping gently at the shore. Then he, too, turned and walked away.

The last HYDRA variant had been delivered.

The small Vietnamese restaurant on King Street, across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., was a favorite among those who appreciated good food, reasonable prices, and quiet, unpretentious service. In other words, Jon Smith thought wryly, studying the menu, it was not fashionable —just popular.

“Is this seat taken?” he heard a familiar voice ask.

Smith looked up with a welcoming smile. A slender, pretty woman with short, golden hair stood there. She smiled back, but he thought her eyes looked wary. “Hello, Randi,” he said, getting up to greet her. “I was afraid the boys at Langley had decided to lock you up after all.”

Randi Russell shrugged. “The seventh-floor quill-pushers can’t seem to make up their minds,” she said calmly. “Half of them, including the DCI, think I’m a lone-wolf menace to the Agency who ought to be slung out on my rear end before I cause a major scandal. The other half of them, including my boss in Operations, think nailing Renke was worth cutting a few corners.”

He waited until she sat gracefully and then took his own chair. “So which half do you think will win?”

“Oh, the Agency will keep me on,” she said confidently. A slight smile creased her lips. “The top-echelon gins will compromise, just like thev always do. So I’ll probably wind up with another few pages of scathing comments in my personnel file—and maybe an extra week’s leave that I’ll never find the time to take.”

Smith laughed. “You’re getting cynical.”

“I was born cynical, Jon,” she told him. “That’s why I fit in so well at the CIA.” She picked up the menu in front of her and then put it back down. “You heard the Germans have finally confirmed the identity of their mole?”

“Heichler, right?” he guessed. “The guy who shot himself the day after we grabbed Malkovic?”

She nodded. “It took a lot of digging, but thev managed to trace a whole slew of cash payments to him from one of Malkovic’s front companies.”

“I heard about Malkovic, too,” he told her quietly. “I guess Guantanamo Bay isn’t quite as secure as everyone thinks it is.”

Randi raised an eyebrow. “Word gets around fast in those rarefied circles you travel in —whatever circles those are. With so much egg on people’s faces for letting the Russians get to him before we were through wringing him dry, I thought the details of his death were strictly top-secret.”

“I may have a few friends who tell me things the) shouldn’t,” Smith admitted.

She snorted. “Spare me.” Randi picked up her menu again. “I understand that Ms. Devin is out of the hospital and up and around,” she said casually.

“So I hear,” he said carefully.

“I don’t imagine she’ll be very welcome back in Moscow.”

Jon grinned. “Not exactly.” He looked across the table at her. “But it seems that Fiona is the type who always manages to land on her feet. Apparently, she’s already wangled a job at some prestigious think tank headquartered in New York.”

Actually, he knew that it was Fred Klein who had arranged the assignment for Fiona, since it would give her useful cover for other Covert-One missions.

“New York’s not very far from here,” Randi commented coolly.

“Nope, I suppose not,” Smith agreed. Then he took pity on her. “But it’s an awfully long way from Moscow and air tickets aren’t cheap. So I have a funny feeling that Oleg Kirov’s clients are going to find their consulting bills going up.”

She looked narrowly at him. “Kirov?”

He nodded. Once Klein was convinced that the Kremlin had no knowledge of the part played by Kirov in recent events, he had allowed the Russian to go back to his own country. So the former FSB officer was still in play as a deep-cover Covert-One asset.

“Oleg Kirov?” she asked again, still skeptical. “And Ms. Devin?”

Smith crossed his heart. “Honestly. No lie.”

“Gee, that’s nice,” Randi said innocently. Then, smiling to herself, she sat back in her chair, studying the menu with real interest now. “So, what do you recommend?”