The Solomon Effect

17

Burrowing deep into her jacket, Tobie stepped off the flight from Copenhagen into an icy Baltic wind and found herself staring into the muzzle of a machine gun.

A stony-faced circle of guards herded the flight’s passengers across the nearly deserted tarmac to an ugly Soviet-era terminal. A row of battered booths controlled the passage from the immigration hall to customs, but only one booth was manned. Waiting in the endless line with her bag clutched to her side, Tobie had plenty of time to watch the way the tall, thin guard was subjecting each passenger to a ruthless scrutiny.

Something was wrong.

Despite the frigid atmosphere of the room, she suddenly felt hot. CIA personnel were typically assigned to embassies, a position that conveniently provided them with diplomatic immunity. Intelligence personnel without diplomatic passports were said to be under “unofficial cover.” In this case, “unofficial” basically meant exposed.

Without the immunity afforded by a diplomatic passport, Tobie was just an ordinary foreign national. And while the Cold War might be over, some things hadn’t really changed in Russia. If the Russians knew or even suspected her connection to the CIA, she could disappear into a system that would treat her like-well, like the U.S. treated the guys they sent to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and a couple dozen other secret prisons scattered from Afghanistan to Rumania to Morocco. When the guard finally raised his head and called out, “Next,” Tobie jumped.

“Sdrasvytye,” she said with a smile as she stepped up to the booth.

The guard stared at her passport, his dark bushy eyebrows drawing together in a frown. She expected him to say, “And what is the purpose of your visit?” But he didn’t say anything. His frown deepening, he swung away to peck at his computer’s keyboard.

“You will wait to one side,” he said, jerking his chin toward the cinderblock wall behind him.

Tobie stopped breathing. “Is there a problem?”

“You wait,” he told her, already motioning to the next person in line.

A stirring at the edge of the room drew her around. A barrel-chested man with short-cropped dark hair, full lips, and a crooked nose strode across the chipped linoleum floor, his face set in harsh lines as he walked up to her. He was casually dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans, but there was no doubt from the way everyone deferred to him that this was one seriously scary individual.

“Ensign October Guinness?” he snapped.

Ensign? Holy shit. How did he know that? Tobie’s voice shook. “Da.”

He said in Russian, “Come with me, please.”

Andrei Gorchakove had graduated from the Academy and joined the KGB in the dying days of the once-mighty Soviet empire.

Like most Russians, he remembered those chaotic years with bitterness and shame. Ironically, both the Americans and Osama bin Laden liked to take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Andrei himself thought the fault lay with the slow bleed of the Afghan War and the environmental disaster at Chernobyl. But whoever or whatever the cause, there was no denying that the breakup of the Soviet Union had brought terrible hardship to them all-or at least, to most of them.

Bereft of the ideology that had guided them for nearly a century, the Russian people had stumbled through a dark and terrible period as the millennium drew to a close. The state collapsed. Hordes of ruthless oligarchs calling themselves capitalists gobbled up the wealth of the country and brought a once-proud nation to her knees. KGB men like Andrei were forced to take jobs as bodyguards and day laborers, just to stay alive.

But they had a saying in Russia: There’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man. In the end, the men of the KGB decided they’d had enough. The oligarchs were thrown into prison, or fled to places like England and Israel. A new war against the Chechens united the people and fired them with patriotism; the downward slide into poverty and despair was brought to an end. Once again, Mother Russia was beginning to stand tall.

Now, thanks to the Americans’ own misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the United States that was feeling the strains of overreach, while the revenues from soaring oil prices gushed into Russia’s coffers. There had been a time, Andrei knew, when the Americans had made the mistake of thinking that Russia was finished-that they could treat their erstwhile rival like a conquered nation. In that, they had erred. Andrei had no idea why they had sent this young woman, this Naval ensign, to Kaliningrad, now. But by the time he was finished with her, he would find out.

He ushered her into a frigid, windowless room with a steel table and one metal chair. Her checked bag lay open on the table, the clothes strewn across the metal surface. “Pa-zhalista,” he told her. “Sit down.”

She sat, her face ashen and drawn with fear, her gaze following him as he went to stand on the far side of the table. She was young, no more than twenty-five, dressed like most Americans in jeans and sports shoes, with a navy V-necked sweater pulled over a button-down shirt.

He tossed a file on the table before her. “I see you’re a linguist. You speak Russian, Arabic…many languages.”

She swallowed hard, but said nothing.

He pressed his palms flat on the tabletop and leaned into them. “We have computers, too, you know. And according to our records, you were given a psychological discharge from the Navy a year ago. Yet, this past summer, you were recalled to active duty and given a promotion to ensign. This is correct?”

“Y-yes.”

“Why?”

“You mean, why was I recalled?”

He nodded.

“I-” Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again. “I don’t think it’s a secret that the United States military has a hard time making their recruitment quotas these days. They needed me back.”

“Despite the fact they’d decided you’re crazy?”

Her eyes narrowed, and he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d hit a raw nerve. “I’m not crazy,” she said in a tight voice.

Andrei allowed a hint of a smile to touch his lips. He pushed away from the table to wander the room. “I ask myself, Why is this attractive young American woman traveling alone to Kaliningrad Oblast?”

He was aware of her watching him closely. She said, “You don’t get a lot of tourists?”

“Some. Mainly Germans who come to see the lost homes of their parents or grandparents, or to visit the beaches and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit. Tell me, Miss Guinness; are you German?”

She shook her head. “Irish. Among other things.”

He nodded. “Your father was Patrick Guinness?”

He saw the confusion in her eyes. Confusion and fear, as she wondered how he knew about her father. A decorated Vietnam vet, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Guinness had died when his daughter was still in kindergarten. Andrei suspected he knew more about what had happened to her father than she did.

She swallowed again. “Yes.”

“You are to meet someone here?”

The sudden shift in topic obviously disconcerted her. She hesitated, uncertain how to answer. Despite the frigid temperature of the room, he saw a sheen of perspiration form near her hairline.

He said, “There is another American arriving this morning on a flight from Berlin. A man calling himself Jason Aldrich. You wouldn’t know him by any chance, would you?”

Her eyes widened, but she said nothing. As he watched, a bead of sweat rolled slowly down the side of her face. She had dark brown eyes and honey-colored hair. An unusual combination-especially for someone who claimed to be Irish.

Andrei leaned his shoulders against the wall, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his black designer jeans. “You’re not very well trained, are you?”

“I’m a linguist.”

The sound of the door opening behind her jerked her head around. A man walked into the room, flanked by two armed soldiers. Just above medium height and leanly built, he wore a pullover cashmere sweater and a black leather jacket that had the effect of making him look European rather than American. But then, that was one of the things they taught you in spy school-how to blend in with the natives.

He drew up just inside the doorway, his expression inscrutable as he gazed first at the woman, then at Andrei. “Jesus Christ,” said Jax, smoothing the cuffs of his jacket as the soldiers stepped back. “What the hell is going on here, Andrei? The Cold War is supposed to be over.”

Rodriguez was at the Kaliningrad airport when the call came through from Borz Zakaev.

“We may have something. Last night, at a village near Ayvazovskaya, a kid matching Stefan Baklanov’s description stole some clothes. A militiaman chased him, then lost him in the woods.”

Rodriguez shoved a stick of gum in his mouth and watched as a baldheaded Dane pushed open the battered doors from the Customs and Immigration hall. “Where is this Ayvazovskaya?”

“Southeast of Kaliningrad.”

“Could be him.” Rodriguez glanced at his watch. The passengers on the Aeroflot flight from Berlin would be coming out at any moment. He said, “We should be done here soon. Let me know when you have something positive. Once we get the little shit, all we need is the U-boat’s big boom, and we’re outta here.”

Borz gave one of his deep laughs. “You don’t like Kaliningrad?”

“I don’t like Russia.”

“Neither do I,” said Borz, and hung up.