The last twenty-four hours had been tense and exhausting, but he suspected the next twenty-four hours would be even worse.
Just getting into Moscow had involved calling in a stack of chits. Like an old friend from his time in Kosovo, an Apache helicopter pilot with the U.S. army's 82nd Airborne Division who'd taken his retirement from the army and risen up the ranks of an international air-freight company--and was willing to add a fourth crew member to a Moscow flight. And another old friend, a wily KGB careerist named Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin, who'd been in Kosovo at the same time and became one of Middleton's most-valued sources inside Russian intelligence.
They'd gotten him into Moscow, but Middleton knew that if anything went wrong, they wouldn't be able to get him out.
Now Middleton found himself staring at the display window of an antiquities shop across the street from the old Praga Restaurant. The shop window was a jumble of dusty curios--brass kaleidoscopes and bad copies of icons and Russian-made Victrolas and shabby oil paintings.
He wasn't inspecting the antiques, of course. He was watching the reflection in the plate glass. But so far he hadn't detected any followers. It was only a matter of time before Russian intelligence took notice of a foreigner walking the streets of Moscow. A foreigner who'd somehow managed to slip into Russia without leaving any fingerprints in the databases. If he were brought in for questioning . . .
Well, it was better not to think about that possibility.
Middleton pulled opened the heavy front door. A shopkeeper's bell tinkled pleasantly. No electronic entry alert here. The place looked, even smelled, a century old, musty and mildewed. Middleton half expected to see Aleksandr Pushkin, who once lived on this very street, browsing the wares.
Behind a crowded dusty glass counter was an elderly man with a pinched, severe face and oversized round black-framed glasses.
"Dobryi dyen'," the clerk said.
"Good afternoon," Middleton replied. "I'm interested in icons."
The clerk raised his eyebrows, and his big round glasses rose along with them. "Ah? Anything in particular, sir?"
"I'm particularly interested in the Novgorod school."
The flash of recognition on the old man's face disappeared quickly. "Yes, of course, sir," he said. "They are some of our finest. But there are very few and they're quite costly."
"I understand," Middleton said.
"Please," the clerk said, gesturing toward a maroon velvet curtain that divided the front of the shop from his back office. "Please to follow me."
It was dark in there, and even mustier, and dust motes swam in an oblique shaft of light that came in from between the curtains.
The Russian took out a battered leather briefcase from a file drawer and popped open the clasp. Inside, the case was lined with black egg-carton shell foam. Set snugly in a cutout at its center was a brand-new SIG Sauer P229, a compact semiautomatic pistol, with a matte black finish.
Middleton checked it quickly, pulled back the slide and was satisfied. "Chambered for 9mm," he said.
The old clerk nodded, pursed his lips.
Middleton peeled five hundred-dollar bills from the roll of cash in his front pocket and set them on the counter. The Russian scowled and shook his head. He held up two fingers. "Two thousand," he said.
"That was not the deal," Middleton protested.
"Then I am so sorry that we cannot do business today," said the Russian.
Middleton sighed, then put down another fifteen bills. He hated being held up this way, but it wasn't as if he had a choice. "I assume you'll throw in a box of ammo," he said.
The Russian produced an ancient-looking, dog-eared box of Winchester cartridges from another drawer. About twenty or thirty bucks back home. "Today we make special deal," the clerk said. "Only five hundred dollars."
Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin was a Russian bear of a man, short and rotund, with a neatly trimmed goatee that adorned a fleshy, ruddy face. He extended his short arms and gave Middleton a hug.
"Garrold!" Korovin exclaimed. This was as close to "Harold" as Korovin was able to say. He escorted Middleton into a large, comfortable room that looked like an English gentleman's club. Oriental carpets covered the floor; here and there were leather chairs in which doddering old men snoozed behind tented copies of Pravda. Except for the choice of newspaper, it could have been Boodle's in London.
Actually, it was a men's club of sorts, only the men were old KGB officers. In this nineteenth-century townhouse on a narrow street off Pyatnitskaya Street, former and retired Russian intelligence officers gathered over vodka and sturgeon and cabbage soup to reminiscence about the bad old days.
"Ruslan Maksimovich," Middleton said, stumbling slightly over the unwieldy patronymic. "Thanks for seeing me on such short notice."
In a lower voice, Korovin said, "I trust my friends at the airport treated you with the proper deference."
Korovin, who'd spent more than three decades in the KGB, was a legendary operative who knew how to pull strings that most people didn't even know existed. His web of contacts extended even into the facilities maintenance operations at Domodedovo Airport, where a refueling crew had smuggled Middleton off the cargo plane and into central Moscow. A risky infiltration, to be sure, but Middleton knew he could trust Korovin to make the plan go off flawlessly.
The old KGB man's directions had been precise. And they'd been relayed to Middleton using the simplest, yet most modern, of all spy trade-craft techniques: Korovin had written an email, but instead of sending it, he'd saved it as a draft, on a Gmail account for which both men had the password. The email account was one of many set up by Wiki Chang, back at the Volunteers' small office headquarters in Virginia. Intelligence agents no longer needed things like microdots and burst transmitters, not when they could use the good old Internet.
"It went far more easily than I expected, to be honest," Middleton said.
"From me you should expect only the best," Korovin said. "And I hear you made a purchase at Volodya's shop on the Arbat, yes? He has the finest selection of icons in all of Moscow."
"Pricy, though," Middleton said.
"Well, after all, it is a sellers' market, my friend," Korovin said.
"I didn't dicker," said Middleton.
Korovin led him to the dining room, dark and dismal and mostly empty. They sat at a small table, which was already set with mineralnaya voda and dusty-looking tumblers and shot glasses.
A waitress shambled over with a tray. An old crone with thinning white hair and pale gray eyes who looked to be in her eighties, she wore a long black shirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Probably, Middleton thought, a pensioner from some back office at the Lubyanka. With fumbling hands, she set down an assortment of zakuski, Russian appetizers like beet salad and mushroom "caviar," smoked fish and pickled onions. Then she unsteadily filled their shot glasses with a domestic brand of vodka.
Korovin slid a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, lit it with an old Red Army lighter and then offered a toast to their work in Kosovo. The two intelligence operatives had played a behind-the-scenes role in that ugly conflict a decade earlier, a role the world would never know about.
Ten years ago, they'd seen how close the Kosovo conflict had brought the two superpowers to war. The Russians backed the Serb guerrillas, and NATO and the Americans defended the ethnic Albanians, even though there was plenty of "ethnic cleansing"--that grotesque euphemism--on both sides. When Russia finally agreed to abandon the Serbs in exchange for a separate role in the peacekeeping process, NATO reneged on the deal. The Russian forces found themselves taking orders from a U.S. general. They felt humiliated and double-crossed. The tensions could well have boiled over into a war between two nuclear powers were it not for the quiet, back-channel efforts of a few intelligence officers like Korovin and Middleton.
Now, the two men drank and then Korovin poured again. But before he could offer another flowery toast, he gave Middleton a sideways glance. "I thought you were retired, Garrold.
"
"I thought I was too," Middleton said.
"Yet you needed to enter my country off the books. Which tells me that you have gone active again."
"In a manner of speaking." He gave his Russian friend a quick, sanitized version of the work that the Volunteers had been doing and then told him about the bizarre incident on the Cote d'Azur that had activated the Volunteers once again. "I need some information."
"Ah." Which might have meant yes, absolutely. Or the opposite.
"Information about thermobarics."
"It's easier to get you the explosives than it is to get you information about the explosives. Safer, anyway."
"Well, let me ask, in any case," Middleton said. "I had my associate look into the records of a shipping company that delivered some merchandise to an outfit in Florida. I think it was explosives. He contacted me on the flight and told me that a number of shipments labeled 'construction items' were sent from Albania to Moscow to Mogadishu to Algiers and finally to the U.S. The company realized he was into their system and blocked him out, but not before he got me the names of all the freight forwarders involved."
"You're looking at me rather knowingly, friend. I believe I am nervous now."
Though Korovin didn't look nervous. He looked amused in that indulgently conspiratorial way former Soviet army officers and KGB operatives slip on their faces like bank robbers do a ski mask.
"And you want to hear a funny coincidence?" Middleton asked.
"No, I do not."
"All the shipping companies were incorporated by a single law firm in Moscow. And guess who they also represent? Your boss, Arkady Chernayev."
Arkady Chernayev was the richest man in Russia, perhaps in the world. He divided his time between his estate in Knightsbridge, London, and a mansion on the outskirts of Moscow. Not to mention a dozen other properties around the world, several private planes and three obscenely large yachts. Chernayev had gotten rich in the oil business during the free-for-all in the last days of the Soviet Union.
"No, not boss." A scowl.
"Ruslan, you've done private security work for him. Don't even bother trying to deny it. My sources on this are impeccable."
Korovin looked away, then busied himself by sectioning a herring with the delicacy of a cardiac surgeon performing a coronary bypass. He placed each slice of herring atop squares of black bread, then looked up. "That was long ago," he said finally, his expression hardened. "Why is this so important to you?"
"Because if Chernayev is behind this, which I'm beginning to believe, I think he's channeling money or explosives or both to a dangerous fanatic named Devras Sikari. The point of contact for their interests was Tampa, Florida."
"Then let's say, for the sake of argument, that you are correct. This is why you wanted a weapon? Because you think you will shoot your way in to Chernayev's dacha? Do you know how many bodyguards this man has surrounding him at all times? And just one of you?"
Middleton shrugged, said nothing.
"And for what? You plan to kill Chernayev and hope to survive?"
"Kill him? No, of course not. I need to talk to him. Can you tell me anything about him?"
"He's grown reclusive. He had some financial problems."
"The richest man in the country?"
"Not any more. Wealth comes and goes like the tide, my friend . . . but he's on the rebound now, we hear. No one knows what his good fortune is. I can't give you first-hand knowledge . . . Tell me, what is this about?"
Middleton had a thought--Sindhu Power. Lowering his voice, he went fishing. "Because of the copper bracelet."
A nervous smile flitted across Korovin's face, then disappeared. "I have no idea what you are talking about."
"I think you do."
Korovin snubbed out his cigarette, then slid another one from the pack and lighted it. When he next spoke, it was through a mouthful of smoke, his voice muzzy. "The copper bracelet," he said. "This is nothing more than what we call skazki. Folk tales. What you call old wives' tales. Stories told by frightened old men to inflate their own importance."
"Try me," Middleton said.
"No. The copper bracelet is no more. That snake was killed long ago. Decades ago."
"Amuse me."
"It originally described some old scientific process. But then the name came to refer to a cult. A cult of madmen--fanatics, as you say--that rose from the ashes of the Second World War. You know of the Norsk Hydro plant?"
Middleton shook his head.
"This was a factory in Norway jointly owned by Norsk Hydro and I. G. Farben."
"The giant Nazi corporation."
"Yes. It was destroyed by the Allied forces and the Norwegian resistance movement. One of the most remarkable sabotage acts of the war."
"What did the factory make--weapons?"
"In a way, yes. The copper-bracelet system produced heavy water. It was a revolutionary way to produce nuclear material."
Middleton thought immediately of Felicia's insights and her encrypted message to him. Heavy water. Sikari's patents.
"The Nazis needed it to make an atomic weapon. But once the factory was destroyed, the Nazi atomic bomb program was ended. The story, Garrold--the skazka--is that the plant may have been destroyed, but some of the records of the technology survived. A group of Russians and Germans--successors to the Nazis, you could say--have been hoping for someone to reconstruct the science behind it."
"Connection to Chernayev?"
"None that I've ever heard of."
"Well, I need to find out. How can I reach him?"
"I--" Korovin fell silent as the doddering old waitress approached. She said something to him in a quiet voice.
"You will please excuse me," Korovin said, rising from the table, his knees cracking. "There is a call for me on the house phone."
Ruslan Korovin followed the waitress across the dining room and into the small antechamber next to the kitchen. There, in an antique wooden booth, an old black phone was mounted on the wall. Korovin picked up the phone, heard nothing. He depressed the plunger a few times, then turned to the waitress and said, "The line is dead."
"Yes," the waitress said. Her voice sounded strangely deeper, stronger. "It is dead." She slid a latch on the kitchen door, locking it.
Suddenly she lunged at him, vising his neck in the muscled crook of her elbow. Korovin struggled, gasped, but this woman--who was surely not an old woman, he now knew--had overpowered him. She twisted his head one way, his torso another.
There was a terrible loud snap and Korovin sank to the floor, and the last thing he saw was the copper bracelet on his attacker's left wrist, barely visible under the dainty ruffle of her sleeve.
7
LISA SCOTTOLINE
Devras Sikari needed time to think, and when, as now, he wasn't in his beloved Kashmir, he would come here to his second favorite place in the world--his colonial farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania.
Specifically, to the chicken coop.
Sikari was sitting in his director's chair in the pasture, watching his chickens enjoy the sun. He loved his little farm, some ninety acres, with its backyard quarter horses and tiny flock of pullets, and though he was Indian by-way-of Belgravia, he felt his most relaxed in this unlikely spot. Here he could shed his dinner jackets and Hermes ties, take off his clothes like so much costuming, and finally become himself. It made little sense, even to him. Sikari wasn't raised in the country, but to him, this farm was home away from home.
The air had a raw October nip, but his baggy jeans and old flannel shirt kept him warm, with a waxed jacket still dusty from the morning's ride. When he crossed one leg over the other, a red cashmere sock peeked from the top of his scuffed Blundstones. In his hand was a Phillies mug with bad coffee, which he had brewed himself. His housekeeper could make coffee the way he liked it, but it was her day off, so Sikari was stuck with his own swill. He took a sip and it tasted bitter and now, cold. He shook his head at the irony. He had patented a formula that would st
ump most nuclear physicists, yet he was defeated by Dunkin' Donuts.
SQUAWK! went one of the hens, startling Sikari from his thoughts. His attention shifted back to the brood.
"Settle, Yum-Yum," he said softly, though the pullet only blinked in response, a flash of a perfectly round, golden eye. Yum-Yum was an Araucana, an ill-mannered bird with brilliant plumage of russet, rich brown and flecks of black. Sikari kept three Araucana, because of their unusual greenish-blue eggs, and he also had a pair of brown Sussex's that reminded him of England, as well as some docile Bard Plymouth Rocks, a spoiled American breed, and a dramatic black-and-white Wyandotte named Princess Ida. All of his hens had been named for his private passion, the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, though the Bard Rocks looked so much alike that he simply called them the Women's Chorus. His farm manager tolerated his naming the hens, thinking Sikari an eccentric multimillionaire, which suited his purposes. His staff believed he was an international reinsurance executive, and he paid them well enough to ask no questions.
Sikari eyed the chickens and the sight cheered him. Some of them clustered together on the soft dirt around their coop, roosting together wing-to-wing, their feet tucked under them and their chubby feathered breasts forming a scalloped edge. Others were lying flat on their sides, their heads resting in the dirt as if it were an earthen pillow, their yellow feet splayed out straight. Sikari had never known that chickens did such a thing. The first time he'd seen them lying down that way, he'd thought they were all dead. It made him think again of Kavi Balan, and for a moment he watched the chickens without really seeing them, deep in thought, his coffee forgotten.
Sikari had to deal with the fact that things had not been going well for him. Everything had been in place--the geology, the personnel, even the Scorpion--but Middleton was still alive and Kavi Balan was dead. That alone was a major disruption. Sikari had been grooming Balan to be his number one, but now his plans had gone awry, the past nine years wasted. The situation was unstable, which threatened his future and his fortune, and stole his peace of mind. He had been mulling over the solution, but had yet to come to a final decision. Time had passed without him acting, but he trusted that his path would become clear, in due course. Sikari was a deliberate man, and that was one of the reasons he was so successful. Put simply, he planned, where others did not. His modus operandi was goal-oriented behavior, whether his goal was losing weight or building weapons of mass destruction.