Moscow Mule (A Thom Hodges Romantic Thriller Book 1)

by Owen Chance

  What a fucking mistake, Sullivan thought. He didn’t have the plan because Ambassador Anderson hadn’t sent it over. The Kremlin had personally briefed Sullivan on the plan. “It can’t leave the premises, but I’ll write up an executive summary for you and send it to your phone.” The vice president nodded and left. Sullivan breathed a sigh of relief and returned to his desk, where the information from the flash drive was nearly finished being uploaded to an off-site server.

  3.

  Thom and Petrov couldn’t destroy the listening devices. They dropped the three they found in the bedroom into the tumbler with the one from the bathroom, setting the glass beside the television. Thom picked up the notepad and scribbled, We have to talk. Not here. They couldn’t talk openly anywhere at the hotel, in Petrov’s apartment, which they’d also have to sweep for bugs, or even in their morning breakfast spot, Nude Coffee & Wine. Petrov took the pad and wrote, I know a place.

  They hailed a taxi from the side entrance of the Metropol. Petrov held the door for Thom, who slid across the sedan’s back seat and made room. After he closed the door, Petrov spoke in Russian to the taxi driver so quickly that Thom only picked up an address: 13 Pereulok Building 2. Petrov turned to Thom, “I told him to take the, what do you call it, scenic route.” They drove in a large circle to their destination, following the great bend in the river at the heart of Russia’s capital city. When they pulled into an alley to reach building 2 of the address, no car was tailing them. The taxi stopped. Thom looked up to see a small sign beside a door buzzer reading Mayakovka Spa.

  “Are you taking me to a gay bathhouse?” Thom asked, laughing. Petrov handed their driver his fare plus a sizable tip. “Da, da,” he said, though it was unclear if he spoke to the taxi driver or Thom.

  4.

  President Vasily sat on a bench beside the tennis court surrounded by high brick walls crawling with ivy. He was not winded, but Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov sat beside him, struggling to catch his breath. “Nicholai,” Plankov finally heaved, “How do you play as if we were still at the academy?” The two had long been friends: in childhood, the sons of K.G.B. colleagues and neighbors, then at the military academy in Leningrad, roommates. Plankov had been the best man at Vasily’s wedding, and vice versa. In a small window on the wall high above them, Maria Vasily, Russia’s first lady, waved to them. Vasily laughed and clapped his friend on the back, “You need to lay off the desert, comrade. You’ll never get a woman to love you again if you don’t.”

  Vasily knew Plankov had no desire to marry again. That his friend was a homosexual, in fact. And though he did not care his friend was gay, men like Vasily, and even men like Plankov himself, pretended otherwise. Plankov’s masculine vibrato rang strongly when he appeared on state television or spoke at a banquet, telling stories from the Soviet era on a fishing expedition with the President or drunk around a domino’s table with their friends. Vasily never inquired into Plankov’s love life, though he knew, of course, his friend regularly took lovers, lovers of a certain age. Such behavior would get any other man sent to the camps or shot on the spot. Any other man, that is, except the president’s best friend. Vasily stood and Plankov followed suit. “Dimitri, we need Adams to get the Americans behind the NATO repeal,” the president sighed, “And I don’t know we can count on him.”

  Plankov took a gulp of water from the bottle in his hand. “Don’t worry, Nicholai. I’ve started working another angle.”

  5.

  Petrov pushed a button for the intercom on the panel next to the door. Without speaking, someone buzzed them inside. Petrov and Thom found themselves in a small hallway with a thick glass window, behind which sat a bored looking young man. Petrov paid him, and they were buzzed through another door, where another bored twink handed them each a towel, a locker key, and a small plastic pouch holding a condom and a single-use package of off-brand lube. The place smelled of the lube, Thom thought, and faintly of sweat and disinfectant. Thom was not passing judgement. Back in Washington, Thom and Jason had visited the Crew Club, a bathhouse on 14th Street, together several times early in their relationship. They would get a private room, find a third, and have their fun. Eventually, however, their fun became not being together at all.

  Men came and went in the locker room around Petrov and Thom, men wrapped in thin white towels who looked the couple up and down before stopping at their faces, attempting to discern if they held any interest for Petrov and Thom to follow. Petrov and Thom undressed, put their clothes in a locker and wrapped towels around their own waists. “Follow me,” Petrov said, and Thom followed. Clearly, Petrov had been here before. He led them through a maze of private rooms and dark corners. Past open spaces with a single, dim light over a leather swing hanging from the ceiling and doors open to private rooms where naked men lay, ass up, waiting for a stranger to penetrate them. They passed all different types of men: older and younger, thinner and fatter, hairy and hairless, muscled and twink. Finally, they came to a door which Petrov opened, and they were suddenly in the bathhouse’s interior courtyard, where a man sat smoking a cigarette on a lounge chair and stroking his cock, watching another man give yet another a blow job not three feet away under the rising Russian moon.

  Petrov took Thom’s hand and walked him to the far corner of the courtyard. “Thom,” he said, “We have much to tell each other. I was kidnapped this morning, and I don’t know who put the tracker in me, but it was the second time I’ve been kidnapped. When I disappeared last week, it was because the G.R.U. got a hold of me. They know about you, and what you’re here to do. They want me to turn you.”

  Another man in another white towel entered the courtyard. Petrov and Thom glanced at him. He was attractive, but they weren’t here to pick up a third. They turned back to their conversation. “Petrov, the truth is I’m not here to install new networks at the embassy, but you probably…” Just then, a series of gun shots rang out from the other side of the courtyard. Thom and Petrov turned to see three bodies bleeding out on the ground, the men struggling to breathe. Petrov jumped to his feet, and the towel fell from around his waist. Thom picked it up and slowly stood, handing the towel back to Petrov. The attractive man who had just entered the courtyard held a gun, now pointed straight at them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  1.

  “Thom, please come stand with me,” the man said.

  He spoke English, though not surprisingly, with the slightest Russian accent. But it was so slight and so nuanced that Petrov couldn’t place it, which meant, Petrov thought, this man was likely a covert G.R.U. agent. Petrov knew some of the agency’s training programs at the deepest levels stripped agents of their identities, such as regional accents. Neither Petrov, nor Thom knew who the man planned to shoot, but when Thom reached his side, they didn’t have to wonder much longer.

  “You are going to come with me, Thom. Petrov, you are going to wait here and…” but Petrov interrupted him. “No. No, comrade, you are not taking Thom. He is an American diplomat and you cannot hurt him.” The man grabbed Thom’s arm, and held the pistol up to Thom’s temple, “Can’t I though?” The man laughed. He turned the gun as if to put it in the holster now visible on his thigh beneath the white towel and crossed the courtyard towards Petrov. “As I was saying, Thom you are coming with me. Petrov you are going to wait here. And don’t try to run.” Quickly, he raised the gun and brought it down across the base of Petrov’s neck, who passed out and became the fourth body lying on the courtyard’s floor.

  2.

  “Paul, you need to know this plan isn’t what you think it is,” Vice President Adams told Ambassador Anderson regarding the plan the ambassador had received from Russian Foreign Minister Dimitri Plankov. Anderson twirled an ink pen in his free hand, a habit he’d picked up while onboard a naval destroyer, where, a tech-trained officer, he’d spent a year surveying sonar patterns in the north Atlantic before being recruited by the C.I.A. On the surface, the plan played to Anderson’s diplomatic idealism; the Russians propos
ed simultaneously weakening regionally-focused governing bodies and strengthening the peacekeeping mission of the United Nations. “I don’t have to tell you,” Adams continued, “that the Russians seem to be planning a total…”

  A quick, sharp pop filled the phoneline, and the lights went out in the ambassador’s office. Power surges were not uncommon, but a backup power system independent to the embassy protected calls on the secure phoneline, which was now dead. Anderson knew this was no ordinary outage. He ran to the office’s doorway to release the manual security gate, a fireproof steel frame that locked the ambassador inside his own office and prevented anyone else from entering. Despite this, Anderson walked over to the safe hidden in the urn perched on the bookcase; he opened it and took out the pistol, holding it flat to his side. Someone had cut all power and communications. It was 8:47 in the evening. The American Embassy in Moscow was now dark.

  3.

  Police sirens rang in the distance but grew closer and closer as Petrov woke. He rubbed the throbbing pain in his neck and, for the briefest of seconds, struggled to remember where he was. The towel around his waist had fallen open and as he reached down to close it, Petrov remembered. He shot up and looked around the courtyard for Thom, but he wasn’t there. Three dead bodies laid to one side of the space, their own white towels flapping lightly in the breeze like broken wings where they weren’t held to the brick of the courtyard’s floor by thick, congealed blood.

  Petrov looked to his right hand and realized he was holding a gun. Sirens stopped outside building, car doors opened, then closed, and it would only be a matter of minutes before the police would make their way through the maze of the bathhouse to the courtyard where a triple homicide had just occurred. The police would think, and think they knew, Petrov was the assailant. He knew Thom wasn’t there, and that the agent who kidnapped him would keep the American alive, but for a reason Petrov couldn’t quite pinpoint yet. He knew, too, however, that he had to get the hell out of there.

  Petrov glanced around the courtyard. In one corner, a cement planter holding a dying pear tree and a ring of cigarette butts half covered a sewer grate. He placed the gun in the dirt with the cigarettes and heaved the planter three feet to the right. Thankfully, the sewer grate, like many in Moscow, wasn’t bolted down and Petrov lifted it easily. He peered down inside. Water ran below, and he hoped not too deeply. Petrov tightened the towel around his waist, grabbed the gun, started down the ladder, and reached back into the courtyard to pull the sewer grate back over the hole. He reached the bottom of the ladder and sloshed off through knee-deep sewage, which pointed him in the direction of the Volga River.

  Petrov, nearly naked and holding the gun just used to murder three innocent men at a bathhouse, began to run. It would only be a matter of time until the police figured out he’d hit the sewer and was fleeing underground.

  4.

  The only way for the intruding agent to cut power at the embassy in totality was from within. They had accomplished the first of their tasks, but knew the second, the crucial objective of this assignment, was far more important and that at any moment, a squadron of Marines would be combing the building in night-vision goggles. The agent made their way from the room holding the power grid in the second subterranean basement. They took a series of turns, two rights, then a left, and came to an unmarked door. It was locked. But the agent merely took a key from their pocket and let themselves in. Seven minutes, tops, they thought, until the Marines arrive down here. The agent knew the marines would first sweep the building, ensuring the ambassador, his deputies, and everyone down the chain of command was safe in their offices.

  The agent was in Thom’s office, a small room with no windows hidden deep below the everyday buzz of the embassy. It held little furniture and equipment, save for a computer networking station set up in one corner, a maze of cords and monitors and CPUs. The agent knew these servers were secure, so they didn’t try anything of their own volition. They had never been very good at digital espionage anyhow. From their pocket the agent pulled a flash drive, which their handlers instructed them to simply plug into the main computer terminal. The agent did as they had been instructed. The flash drive simply blinked to life. It stole all the server’s stored data in less than a minute. Then, it crashed the entire system in 47 seconds flat.

  The agent repocketed the flash drive, shut off the lights, and let themselves out of the door just as a small group of Marines made their way into the second subterranean basement. Instead of heading towards the soldiers in the central stairwell, the agent turned right, then left, and let themselves into a secondary set of stairs. They headed up to the main part of the embassy, unnoticed, as if they belonged there.

  5.

  The dew was crisp on Thom’s bare toes. A man stood over him in a light quilted jacket stroking his beard. Thom was passed out, and beaten quite badly. He was also naked, except for the cardboard sign hung around his neck. On it, someone had used a marker to write pedik pedik pedik (faggot faggot faggot) in thick, child-like lettering. The man took Thom into his arms and carried him back to his home across the field, set back from the road where his family had begun to stir awake.

  Chapter 19

  1.

  For a brief moment, Thom thought he was floating inside the softest cloud. He was warm and enveloped in more warmth, floating through space in a light so soft it did not blind him, but reached every part of his body. But when he reached up and felt the throb in his temple, Thom jolted up and immediately regretted this jolt. His body ached everywhere, and his arms were cut up, covered in scabs and bruises where they weren’t bandaged. Where am I? he wondered, and looked around the room in which he found himself.

  He was in a very old house made of thick pine logs, this much he knew. And the wooden floors gleamed, reflecting the morning sun pouring through the window onto the bed where he lay. Underneath a thick down blanket and atop a fluffy white mattress, Thom was naked. Thom’s eyes fixed on a small gilded painting of St. Phanourios, the only art hung on the roughhewn log walls. Phanourios had been a teenage soldier on the Isle of Rhodes who delivered an order of exiled priests to safety. Confronted by the Roman authorities for his crime, Phanourios refused to denounce his faith and protested with silence in reaction to Rome’s demands. Upon execution, Phanourios became a martyred saint, the patron of lost things in the Orthodox church. Beside the bed sat a simple chair, atop which was a glass of water and, hanging over the chair’s back, a simple white nightgown. Thom took the glass off of the chair beside the bed and gulped, then came up for air. As he gulped the second half of cool water from the glass, he heard the floor creak just beyond the closed door.

  “Hello,” Thom said weakly, and the door opened. A stone-faced Russian man now filled the frame.

  2.

  Not 20 minutes after seeing his wife and children off to North Carolina and being cut off from his call with Ambassador Anderson, Vice President Grant Adams’ security detail rushed into his office at the Naval Observatory. “Sir,” the lead agent said, “You need to come with us. We need to get you to the bunker.” Adams waved him off, “I don’t have time for a drill right now.” The agent walked around the desk to where the vice president sat staring out the window. He grabbed Adams’ arm firmly, leaning down, “This isn’t a drill, Sir.”

  3.

  The embassy was now completely dark, which meant the building was on lockdown and the ambassador was sealed inside his own office with just a personal and unsecure cellphone. He wondered why the vice president was so hell-bent against a peace plan offered by the Russians, especially since Anderson had a growing suspicion Adams was actually working on behalf of the Russian Federation. But the ambassador’s thoughts were elsewhere. Thom had not shown up to the embassy for work that morning. This would have been concerning enough, but when lunch went by and Ambassador Anderson still hadn’t heard from his young friend, he grew increasingly worried. Hesitantly, and perhaps carelessly, he pulled out the cellphone from his blazer and c
alled another friend at the G.R.U., the only mole Anderson had left after the deaths of Andrei and Vanessa. And after what Vanessa had shown Anderson right before she died, he had reason not to trust Thom’s new beau, Petrov, even though the level-headed Thom seemed quite smitten by the Russian agent.

  “Looks like you are in the dark, Paul,” the mole said quietly over the telephone, “What’s going on over at your embassy?” The ambassador laughed, “Your guess is as good as mine, but that’s not why I called. I need you to see if an agent of yours is at work today. Petrov Lubyanka.”

  “Petrov Lubyanka,” she said, obviously scanning a computer screen for Petrov’s name, “Petrov Lubyanka, Petrov Lubyanka, da, yes, here he is.” She paused. “His status has been changed to Administrative Leave F3.” Anderson asked what this meant, and his mole laughed, “Well, the only time I’ve seen this designation is for a wanted man inside our ranks. And if that’s true, your boy Petrov is on the run.” Anderson thanked her, hung up, and failed to swallow the worry rising higher in his throat.

  Anderson tapped the cellphone on the edge of his desk but knew what he had to do. He opened the phone, dialed a number few people had, and spoke softly, “Foreign Minister Plankov, I am calling to demand you tell me where you have taken my staffer, Thomas Herschel.”