Primary Threat

by Jack Mars

  “It is big organization,” Albert said. “Which branch?”

  Zelazny shook his head again, more forcefully this time. He kept shaking it and shaking it. He was like a head shaking machine.

  “Chevsky has special clearances. He works across branches, has no permanent mandate. Everything is secret. He keeps an office near the Kremlin, in the Special Annex. The building they call the Breadbox. He meets directly with Marmilov, God help him. They are working on a project. I do not know what it is. I do not want to know. This attack by the Serbs was part of it. What part, I cannot say. Misinformation, maybe. Fear. Terror. Confusion.”

  Zelazny fell to his elbows. His body made a forty-five-degree angle to the dock now. He was still on his knees, with his butt in the air. His hands balled into fists. His back extended and lengthened, as if he were going through a muscle spasm. His eyes squeezed shut and his mouth opened wide in a silent scream. He looked like a man in agony.

  “Oh my God,” he whispered. “I know I’m going to die.”

  Luke looked at Albert and Ed.

  “Do we believe any of this?”

  Albert shook his head. “No.”

  “It’s true!” Zelazny said. “Please. Look in my phone. You will see Chevsky’s nickname—frog.”

  “Why do you call him frog?” Albert said.

  “Like the scorpion and the frog. He is the frog. Marmilov is the scorpion. Look! He is in my contacts. Maybe there are still texts. I often delete them, but I forget sometimes.”

  “You forget to delete dangerous messages?”

  Albert looked at Luke and Ed. He shook his head.

  Ed shrugged. “We use burner phones for that. Use them once, then toss them.”

  “They are not dangerous messages,” Zelazny said. “Meet me nine p.m. How are things coming? Good. Coming along. We never say anything important, or even interesting. We meet in person for that.”

  “Where do you meet?” Albert said.

  Zelazny’s shoulders slumped. “If I tell you, I am dead.”

  Albert shoved the barrel of the gun against Zelazny’s head. Hard. Luke could hear the soft THUNK it made, metal against skull bone.

  “If you don’t tell me now, you are also dead.”

  Luke shook his head. This was a sad display, but he almost smiled at it. It was play acting at this point, that’s all it was. Zelazny was going to tell them everything, just as Albert had said. He would be relieved to get it over with. But he needed to feel like all choice had been taken from him.

  “Three seconds,” Luke said.

  “Two,” Ed said.

  “One,” Albert said.

  Zelazny’s hands shook. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  “Talk,” Luke said. “Or we’re done here.”

  “We meet different places,” Zelazny said. “Always at night. Sometimes Gorky Park, where we walk and talk. But more often a small footbridge over the Moskva, not far from Red Square. You can see Moskvoretsky Bridge from there. But this bridge is a bit to the south. It is old, and closed, in an area overgrown with bushes and weeds, and with concrete barriers at each end. Perhaps the bridge is condemned, I don’t know. Grass grows down the middle of it. It is nearby to his office and convenient for him. He works night and day. He seems to feel safest on this bridge.”

  “How do you communicate these places?” Albert said.

  Zelazny shrugged. “Simple. One word. Gorky or Moskva. But it is reversed. If we say Gorky, it means Moskva. If we say Moskva, it means Gorky. That’s how we fool them, the ones who are watching.”

  He looked up at them and tried to smile, but his face broke and he only started crying again.

  “Give me the telephone,” Albert said.

  Zelazny handed it up without hesitating. The light from the phone’s screen shone in the darkness. Luke spotted a blur of Cyrillic words. Albert clicked his way through screens. He looked up at Luke and smiled.

  “You met him most recently, code word Moskva, when?”

  “A week ago,” Zelazny said.

  “This means Gorky Park?”

  Zelazny nodded.

  “Why did you meet?”

  “He gave me the update on the Alaska project. He told me it was about to go forward, and to be prepared to receive and edit content to his specifications.”

  “And code word Gorky, when was last time?”

  “Two days ago. The content was coming, and he told me how he wanted it, and what to do with it. It was a very brief meeting.”

  “It’s all here,” Albert said. He gazed down at Zelazny. “You’ve been cooperative witness. A very good boy. But you were stupid to leave messages undeleted. This is very dangerous.”

  Zelazny kneeled with his head bowed. “You don’t know what’s coming now. You don’t know anything.”

  “What’s coming?” Albert said.

  Zelazny shook his head. “I don’t know. Something terrible. There is always something terrible coming. Men like you. You will never understand how terrible everything is.”

  He seemed completely spent.

  Luke would love to hang around here and explore Zelazny’s ideas about terrible things, but they should probably save the philosophical discussions for another time. It was getting late, and the sooner they could find out what they needed, and get out of this country, the better Luke would feel.

  It occurred to him, not for the first time, how exposed he felt when he was out of contact with the SRT. Swann and Trudy were his lifelines, and they couldn’t play any part in this. It was just he and Ed, in a long tunnel.

  Albert shook his head. He looked at Luke. “It’s okay? Enough?”

  Luke nodded. “Good.”

  Luke and Ed turned to go back to the car. They moved along the creaky dock in the silent darkness.

  “What do you think?” Luke said quietly.

  Ed shrugged his big shoulders. “I don’t know, man. It’s dicey. They probably watch this guy. Maybe not twenty-four/seven, but enough. If we talk to his friend, afterwards I think we better be ready to get right back on that…”

  CLACK!

  The sound was barely a sound. It could have been a heavy branch snapping.

  Luke and Ed stopped and looked back.

  Zelazny was dead at the end of the dock. Luke couldn’t see the details, but he knew what he was looking at. Albert reached out with his foot and pushed Zelazny’s corpse into the river. There was a small splash. Then the dark water and the smoke took him. And just like that, he was gone.

  Albert came up the dock. He looked at them both. His face was blank. “He will arrive Moscow tomorrow or next day. Always they find bodies like this.”

  Luke’s mouth hung open. He found himself in an odd place—he could not think of a single thing to say. A phrase occurred to him, something Trudy Wellington sometimes said in jest: Words fail me.

  “What did you do that for?” Ed said.

  Albert blinked. A sound escaped him, almost like a laugh, but there was no humor in it. “This is Russia. I don’t kill him, he talks to the next ones who find him. Week later, I’m dead.”

  He shook his head. “Americans can go home after this. I must live here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  11:20 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (3:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  The New Stage

  Bolshoi Ballet

  Tverskoy District

  Moscow, Russia

  The show was almost over.

  Oleg Marmilov sat in the darkness of his private balcony two stories above the main seating area and the orchestra pit. His view was splendid. To his left, the white balustrade disappeared into the dark. On stage, there was an explosion of lights and sound, beautiful young dancers leaping and frolicking. The Bolshoi Ballet was putting on Le Corsaire, the story of Byron’s pirate Conrad, the production faithful to Marius Petipa’s 1899 revival in Saint Petersburg.

  It was an astonishing spectacle, a display of technical prowess from the dancers, as well as lights, staging, and set design, not
to mention exquisite music from the live orchestra. It was the kind of thing Marmilov loved—a return to greatness for Russia.

  Nothing in the West could match the grandeur of Russian theatre at its finest. The only shame was that this production had been relegated to the New Stage, a lovely venue in its own right, but nothing compared to the original theatre.

  Unfortunately, the Bolshoi Theatre proper was closed for repairs. Over time, it had succumbed to wear and tear, and the Soviets had repeatedly delayed maintenance on it. Soviet society was certainly an accomplishment in itself, but its rejection of the great cultural triumphs of previous eras was a disgrace. Thankfully, they hadn’t quite seen fit to tear the Bolshoi down. In the meantime, no one yet knew the extent of the damage or when the theatre might open again.

  Marmilov glanced to his left.

  Sitting with him was a twenty-three-year-old painted whore named Tamara. She was beautiful, slim, with dyed blonde hair and ruby painted lips and black cat’s eyes makeup. She wore a $6,000 Oscar de la Renta gold leaf cocktail dress Marmilov had provided her for the occasion. A $700 brown raccoon fur jacket from Elena Furs was draped over her chair. Together with the pocketbook and the shoes, she was wearing nearly $10,000 worth of clothes and accessories, while watching the best ballet company in the world stage a legendary ballet from Russia’s proud past.

  And of course, she looked like she would prefer to be nearly anywhere else. He could see it in her eyes. She was bored out of her mind. Should this go on much longer, she was prepared to become petulant.

  If Marmilov told her she could go back to the hotel suite to watch overwrought romantic dramas on TV and gossip with her other young whore friends on the telephone, she would leave at once, and be relieved to do so.

  He shook his head at the thought of it. The so-called young women these days behaved like small children.

  Marmilov didn’t blame her. The collapse of the Soviet Union had destroyed the education system and poisoned the minds of the young people. They had become untethered from their history, and infected by the degeneracy beamed in by satellite from the decadent West.

  But all of this would be fixed, and soon. Marmilov would see to it.

  A shadow appeared on his right, and Marmilov nearly flinched. He was ever mindful of how things were done in Soviet times, and often enough, how they were still done today. Nothing was guaranteed—not one more moment of life, not one more breath.

  An image flashed in his mind of the unfortunate Mr. Lincoln, the American president, at Ford’s Theatre, wasting his last moments watching a bit of mindless slapstick called Our American Cousin.

  Marmilov was wiser than that. His own personal gunmen, vetted by him, with loyalty sworn to him, and whose private lives were under constant surveillance, protected this balcony. Marmilov and his young date were safe.

  He turned to the man hovering over him.

  “What?”

  “Sir, everything is ready,” the man whispered. He glanced down at the stage, mindful that his voice not disrupt the proceedings.

  “TV is ready?”

  The man nodded. “Yes. Except…”

  “What is it? Simply tell me.”

  “The producer seems unavailable.”

  Marmilov nodded. He let out a breath. It was a frustration, but frustrations were inevitable. Marmilov’s life was a minefield of frustrations, from slaughtered Serbian commandos, to poor maintenance on landmark theatres, to young whores who would prefer to eat pastries and watch television than spend a night at the ballet.

  The producer was Leonard Zelazny, of course. Marmilov knew right away what his being unavailable meant. He had gone missing, and not for the first time. He was drunk, and in all likelihood, engaging in immoral acts with other men of his ilk. Zelazny was a valuable asset—creative, intelligent, highly skilled, and obedient. But he was living on borrowed time.

  “He has completed his task?”

  The messenger nodded. “Yes.”

  “And do we need more from him?”

  The messenger shrugged. “He has always been available before, to facilitate should there be technical concerns.”

  “Have there ever been any?”

  The man shook his head. “No.”

  Marmilov nodded. “Good. Send someone to find him, in the usual dens of corruption that he frequents. When he is found, bring him to me. I want to speak with him. In the meantime, move forward as planned.”

  The man nodded. “As you wish.” He turned to go.

  Marmilov grabbed the man’s shirt sleeve.

  “As soon as the video emerges,” he said. “Mere moments later, you leak the intelligence document. Moments. One-two punch. No time to respond. Is that understood?”

  The man’s eyes were hard now. “Of course.”

  He disappeared as abruptly as he had come.

  Marmilov made no sign, but inwardly he smiled. His heart skipped a beat. It was an exciting and terrifying night. Putin would be scandalized in front of the world tonight, and perhaps he would be arrested.

  He was the most powerful man on Earth, but tonight—within the hour—they would begin to see exactly how far that power extended. Who were his friends? Who would leap to defend him? The Americans, to preserve the world order? Maybe. But that didn’t matter. Who inside Russia? Would no one step up for the Russian President?

  This was a mad gamble, Marmilov recognized that. But now was the time for such gambles. Putin had been a phase, perhaps even an era. It had been a time of resurrection and reconstruction. But it was moving too slow. It was not restoring old glories. And it had put into place a corrupt cabal—cronies, Mafiosi, capitalists, who would stymie further progress in the name of lining their own pockets.

  It could be that the time of Vladimir Putin was at its end. The end couldn’t come quickly enough for Oleg Marmilov.

  He turned to the beautiful Tamara once more. Later tonight, if all went according to plan, he would celebrate by helping himself to her ripe young body.

  “How are you enjoying the show, my dear?”

  She gave him a pained smile. “Very nice.”

  “Wonderful dancers, eh? A beautiful reminder of Russian greatness.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Beautiful.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  3:55 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (11:55 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time)

  Headquarters of the Special Response Team

  McLean, Virginia

  “Something’s happening in Russia,” Trudy Wellington said.

  Swann didn’t look up from his computer screen.

  “Yeah?” he said. “What’s that?”

  They were sitting in the conference room. Swann had a bank of three laptops laid out in front of him on the table. Across from him, and a little bit down, Trudy had one. Swann was monitoring the tiny GPS units embedded into the heels of both Luke’s and Ed’s shoes. He had the signals superimposed on a digital map of Moscow.

  Luke and Ed were still together, and had just moved back into the city center, at the pace of a car on a highway—maybe sixty miles an hour.

  It was a boring assignment, and Swann was tired. He had slept more than ten hours last night, and still hadn’t shaken off the trip to Alaska and back. It was hard for him to believe that Ed and Luke had gone to Rome, and then on to Moscow, almost immediately after coming back from Alaska. They were like supermen.

  He looked up at Trudy. She looked as tired as Swann felt. She was a beautiful woman on most days. Today she was a beautiful woman with her hair tied up in a bun, her mouth hanging slack, and puffy dark pouches under her eyes. She was watching something on her screen.

  “There’s another video,” she said. “Same deal as before, Al Jazeera is playing it on TV in Middle Eastern countries. It looks like it’s already been picked up by other news outlets. Here’s a right-wing Ukrainian TV channel showing the same video.”

  Swann glanced across at her. He hoped that Trudy wasn’t going to make him play a game of twenty questions.

 
; “What is it a video of?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know yet. It shows Vladimir Putin sitting at a wide desk, talking and joking with someone off screen. It’s kind of a worm’s eye view, as though someone was holding the camera below his line of sight, and filming him without his knowledge. The conversation is in Russian, and so far the subtitles are in Arabic. But there’s a graphic headline embedded on the video, and I know enough Russian to know what it says.”

  “And?” Swann said.

  “It says, Putin ordered attack on America? Phrased like a statement, but with a question mark at the end, probably just to give journalistic cover.”

  Swann reached to his right and pulled up an internet browser on one of his other laptops. Instantly his fingers were flying across the keyboard, operating with a mind of their own. One of his eyes watched what the fingers were doing. The other eye watched Luke and Ed’s GPS blips. Now they were in Moscow, not far from Red Square, and no longer moving at all.

  “Should we talk to Don?” he said. “I was never in favor of this communication blackout. I think we should take a chance and try to get in touch with them.”

  “And tell them what?” Trudy said.

  “I don’t know yet,” Swann said. “But the Russians aren’t all-knowing. I think I can sneak a call in there without them seeing it, if we do it fast enough.”

  “And as long as Albert Strela even has his cell phone on,” Trudy said.

  Swann shrugged. “Naturally.”

  He didn’t like being out of contact. He didn’t like having to make contact through Albert Strela, supposedly a valuable CIA asset, but a compete unknown to the SRT. Really, what did anyone know about Strela?

  Swann had seen a bare-bones dossier—aside from hearsay and maybes, there was almost nothing in it. No background, no place or date of birth, no education, no military record. Just: former pimp, former murderer-for-hire, turned American informant.

  It was likely that Albert Strela was not really his name. It was possible he had killed a dozen or more people. It was possible he had spent five years in a high-security prison in Siberia, sentenced to an unknown number of years for unknown crimes, and then had been released suddenly and without explanation.