Moscow Mule (A Thom Hodges Romantic Thriller Book 1)

by Owen Chance

  “Your staffer,” Plankov laughed at the title, “is missing? I’m sorry to hear this, Paul, but I have no idea where he might be. You might check the gay sex clubs. I hear he likes them. Now if you’ll excuse me, I am very busy today.”

  The line went dead. Plankov knew everything, Anderson suspected. Where Thom was, and Petrov, too, and why the embassy’s infrastructure was currently under attack. But before he could wonder much longer, the lights flickered back on. The generator had been fixed. The ambassador walked over and unfastened the steel security wall locking him in his office. He opened the outer door and was greeted by a small battalion of Marines and his deputy at their center. “Mr. Ambassador,” the man said, “Something has happened in Washington.”

  4.

  Grant Adams was rushed into the bunker three floors below the Naval Observatory, second in security only to the one five stories below the White House. A few of the vice president’s staff were already seated at the conference table in the bunker’s central zone, a room lined with screens showing satellite footage of the White House and the Washington metro area, as well as radar screens of jets already scrambling up and down the Eastern Seaboard. The agents closed the door behind Adams, who barked, “What the hell is going on?” The two men and two women around the table — chief of staff Sullivan Andrews, as well as the vice president’s military, national security, and communications advisors — stood, and the vice president waved them to be seated, “Someone better tell me the status of my family.”

  The communications advisor pointed to a small screen behind her, “They’re safe, sir. We’ve grounded their plane at the Norfolk Naval Station for the time being, but they were well on their way to North Carolina before the White House was attacked.”

  “The White House was attacked!” Adams raised his voice, “What the hell is going on? Is the president safe?”

  “Yes, sir,” the national security advisor to the vice president spoke, and Adams gestured for her to continue. “Approximately 26 minutes ago, a group of foreign agents entered the residence of the White House disguised as contractors. They ambushed the First Family’s core detail and entered the First Couple’s bedroom. Fortunately, President Myers had been taken to the Situation Room unexpectedly. Apparently, our embassy in Russia was also attacked, though we’re unsure if the two events are related. But the president is safe.”

  Adams sighed in relief. “Were any of our agents killed?” Sullivan shook his head, “No, sir. Only wounded, and not fatally, but…”

  The vice president interrupted his chief of staff, “Well that’s good. What’s our plan of action? When can I get to the White House?” Adams’ chief of staff and advisors hung their heads. “What?” Adams asked, and Sullivan lifted his eyes to face him. “President Myers’ husband was killed,” Sullivan said, “The assailants thought they were getting to Myers herself, but only the First Gentleman was in the room. He died on the bedroom floor.”

  5.

  The Russian filling the doorway nodded at Thom, opening his mouth slowly, “Hello.” His voice betrayed his physical presence. It was filled with genuine care. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Where am I?” Thom ignored his question. Thom felt like shit, but wondered if he was about to die in this stranger’s house. The man forced a smile, “You are on my farm. The closest town is Kashira.” Thom closed his eyes to conjure the Russian map. The Company once had an agent in Kashira, a tiny village on the Oka River about 95 miles southeast of Moscow, who’d been found in the river, tied to a large rock and drowned. Thom opened his eyes again, and the man carried a tray towards him. “Some soup my wife made. You need to eat.” He handed the tray to Thom, and beside the bowl was the cardboard sign reading pedik pedik pedik (faggot faggot faggot). Thom stared at it, horrified at what it said. “This was around your neck,” the man said, “when I found you in my wheat field.”

  A glance passed between them, and Thom knew this man would not kill him. The man smiled at Thom, “Eat. You need your strength if we’re going to sneak you back to your embassy.”

  Chapter Twenty

  1.

  “Please, sit,” Ambassador Anderson said to his deputy, Howard Walton, sweeping his arms to the set of sofas at one end of his office. Natalie, out of breath, followed Walton, and Anderson cocked his head as if he was about to ask if she was okay. “Just a lot going on today,” she said, anticipating his question and taking her seat beside the ambassador with her notebook at the ready for the meeting about to unfold.

  “Tell me,” Anderson told Walton, who sighed. “Unfortunately, sir, we know very little about what has transpired over the last few hours. Just after noon in Washington, a group of terrorists entered the residence. We believe they were trying to assassinate the president, but she was in the situation room given the attack on our own infrastructure here in Moscow. Secret Service stopped the terrorists before they could spread out to other parts of the White House, but not before Mr. Myers was fatally shot.”

  The ambassador was visibly shaken, but he managed to ask, “Is this connected to our own attack?”

  “The simultaneity would point to yes, but we’ve been unable to find any evidence of break-in here,” Walton explained. “Our best guess thus far is that some Russian hackers wanted to annoy us, sir, nothing more. Plus, we’ve identified the terrorists in Washington. They were Venezuelan agents.”

  The United States and Russian Federation agreed on very little. But over the last decade, Venezuela had become a common foe. To the United States and her NATO allies, Venezuela represented some of the greatest human rights violations in recent memory; the government regularly blocked foreign aid and openly shot political dissidents in the streets. To Russia, Venezuela represented a continued economic strain; the country purposefully under-valued its oil exports in order to undercut other oil rich nations, and in particular, the Russian Federation, who for the last quarter century had provided the Western world with one of the most stable oil supplies.

  The Russians explicitly supported their plan for a stronger United Nations by evoking the danger of rogue, but wealthy nations like Venezuela. But Venezuela, Anderson wondered, why would they want to provoke the United States?

  2.

  When Thom woke again, his body still ached, but he felt, too, as if he could bolt straight out of this farmhouse and run the 95 miles back to Moscow. The man sat in the chair beside Thom’s bed and laughed at the brightness in the American’s eyes. “I do not know how my wife makes that soup. I know it’s mostly goat marrow and the root of some weed she grows in the garden. She only gives it to me when I am sick or when I get bucked from a horse. It always makes me sleep like the dead and then rise like a king.”

  Thom laughed, but moaned when the laugh hit one of his ribs. It was likely broken. “I’m not sure I feel like a king yet,” he said, rubbing the sore spot on the side of his chest where a bruise was blossoming like a cotton plant on his father’s ranch. “I need to get back to Moscow tonight.”

  “Da, da. I figured as much. And if you are a wanted man, as I suspect a naked American turning up in my wheat field might be, it would be best to not endanger my children longer than necessary. I have a work van that I take into Moscow every weekend to supply a baker with flour. I will make my run in a few hours. You should rest until we go.”

  The man handed Thom a cup of tea, and left the American to rest for the journey ahead of them.

  3.

  It was nearly dawn by the time Petrov reached the drain pipe dumping out onto a field 14 miles from Moscow’s city center. For 14 miles, he had trudged naked through a steady flow of the city’s piss and shit and garbage, holding a gun in one hand but quickly abandoning the towel he’d been wearing at the bathhouse. For 14 miles, he had stopped at every turn in the shit tunnel to peak around the corner to make sure it was clear. After 14 miles of drudgery, he was cold, covered in that shit, and more of a wanted man than he’d ever been before. As he stood under the corroding lip of the giant drai
n pipe, Petrov couldn’t help but laugh at himself, at his whole situation, and whipped a laughter tear away from the edge of his right eye, smearing a splattering of shit stuck to his face. Petrov stepped up into the field and saw a nearby pond on the edge of a farm.

  He jumped into the clear, cold water and stayed below the surface until he couldn’t hold his breath any longer. When Petrov swam to the pond’s shallow edge, he rubbed his skin raw with gritty dirt from the pond’s floor, all he could do to wash off the journey he’d just taken.

  As it was ever nearer dawn, Petrov knew he had to be quick. He slunk to a barn, beyond which was a still-dark house. Perhaps, he hoped, this was the homestead of an elderly couple who no longer rose early to tend to their fields and animals. The barn gave evidence to this hope. No horses neighed, no cows mooed, no sheep moaned as they rose with the sun. In a dusty cupboard of the barn, Petrov found a farm hand’s summer uniform: faded chinos and a pale blue linen shirt. He threw these on, glad they somehow fit, and when he went to close the cabinet, his hand came across something else: a pair of keys.

  Just outside the barn, Petrov found the old truck, a Soviet model long out of production. But it turned on with just a little coaxing, and soon Petrov was heading slowly down the farm’s long dirt driveway, so as not to kick up dust or make too much noise. When he came to a paved road, he turned right, not towards Moscow, but further away from it.

  4.

  “If you’ll give me the room,” Vice President Adams said to his top-level staffers gathered around the bunker’s conference table, “I need to call the president.” The advisors excused themselves but chief of staff Sullivan Andrews remained. “Sully,” Adams said, “I should make this call in private.”

  “Before you call Meredith, sir,” Sully said, but Adams erupted, “Goddamn it, Sully! She is the president of the United States and you will show her the respect her office demands.”

  Normally Sullivan would have turned his head and rolled his eyes. Adams hated when he disrespected the president. But now was not the moment to push his boss. He had another agenda to pursue, and having the vice president on his side was crucial. “Yes, sir. I apologize.” Adams nodded, and Sullivan continued, “Sir, if this was the Venezuelans, as inexplicable and unexpected as that may be, now is the opportune time to convince the president to back the Russian plan. Our countries share a distrust for Venezuela, and this may be just the action the president needs to see to understand a more peaceful world is worth making strange bedfellows.”

  “Opportune time?” Adams cocked his head, “I think you mean opportunistic. Her husband was just murdered! I’m not taking that to the president now, Sully, and I’m ashamed you’d suggest it. What has gotten into you?”

  Sullivan Andrews rapped his knuckles twice in quick succession on the tabletop before them. “Sir, sometimes you have to pull the thread. It’s not always so bad if the whole world unravels.”

  5.

  For nearly three hours, on a journey that normally took under two, Thom felt every bump on every back road between Kashira and Moscow. He’d instructed the farmer to a safe house two blocks from the embassy, connected to the subterranean basement where his office was by a series of key-coded tunnels running alongside Moscow’s sewer and subway systems. When they reached the safe house, a plain looking apartment building with a side entrance facing the alley way, the man got out of the driver seat and opened the back door of the old van, as if he was making a routine delivery, which in a way he was, though this was in no way routine. He lifted the sacks of flour he’d laid atop the van’s floor, then opened a simple hatch, out of which Thom stumbled free.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Thom said, and the man flashed the kind smile that had betrayed him from the beginning, a smile that started in the left side of his face and moved right until he was beaming. “Must the Levite thank the Samaritan?” the man asked, reaching out his giant hand to shake Thom’s.

  Thom made his way through the safehouse and below the surface of Moscow. The ambassador had only shown him this path once, but Thom was C.I.A. He had committed the turns and key codes to memory on the spot. When he finally entered the embassy two floors below where he’d be noticed, he walked to his office. The door was open, and inside, Thom found his mainframe and network completely wrecked. Who the hell knows I’m even working down here? Thom wondered, and assembled a list in his head: the ambassador, his assistant Natalie, and his security chief McKesson. Thom quickly reconnected the central CPU and as he waited for the system to boot, he noticed a picture propped up beside him.

  It was of himself and Petrov walking down an alley on the second day of whatever their relationship was now. Someone had taken a tiny point, a needle or a safety pin, perhaps, and scratched the words The thread is loose, Thom. Beside the picture was Petrov’s watch, a aerospace model his father had given him, plated now with blood.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  1.

  Thom held the watch in his hands and began to cry.

  The torrent and force of the tears escaping his eyes surprised Thom. They landed on the clothes he had borrowed from the farmer cum savior: jeans far too big for him, a deep blue, light weight and perfectly knit sweater with a thick white stripe across his chest, old leather boots caked forever with Russian river mud. As the computer finally hummed to life, Thom wiped his red eyes on the sleeve of the sweater. He should have known, but he knew as soon as he logged into his administrative account. The hard drive had been wiped completely clean. And not only this, the network had been compromised. Whatever evidence he’d been collecting over the last month was gone, and there was no way to retrieve it.

  Even worse: whoever had carried out this job knew exactly what Thom had been up to. As he shut down the computer and closed the office behind him, heading straight to the ambassador’s office hoping Anderson was still there at this late hour, Thom wasn’t sure who they, or he, could trust.

  2.

  Grant Adams did not have time to respond to his chief of staff because there was a knock on the door. “Sir,” his lead agent said, “President Myers has summoned you to the White House stat.” But he couldn’t let it go. “This conversation isn’t over, Sully,” he said, though if what he suspected was true — that Sullivan Andrews, one of his most trusted advisors and friends, had been compromised — Adams wasn’t sure what he could do.

  When the vice president and his team arrived at the White House, it was, naturally, simultaneously on lock down and in chaos. The attack had happened not three hours before, and the residence hummed with both F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents, agents snapping pictures and agents taking notes, agents guarding every doorway and hallway cordoned off with yellow tape, and agents stationed at laptops set up in the residence’s living room monitoring everything from traffic patterns along the Eastern Seaboard to Venezuelan chatrooms and message boards. Grant Adams and his staff were led not to the crime scene, however, but five stories below to the secure bunker deep beneath the White House. When the vice president stepped off of the elevator and through a secure doorway, through which even his top-level advisors were not allowed to follow, President Myers was there to greet him.

  “Madame President,” he took hold of both of her hands, “I’m so incredibly sorry for what happened to Maxwell. Tell me: what can I do for you?” Adams noticed she’d been crying, but if he knew anything about the president for whom he worked, it was that she was strong, not easily shaken, and more than sometimes, quick to anger. His knowledge of her did not betray him now.

  “Grant,” she spat, “Thank you. Really, thank you. But I’m mad as hell and want to know how this happened. And what we can do about it, which is why I asked you here so quickly. Forgive my brevity.” He nodded, and they walked to a set of chairs in this subterranean office that looked more like a hip loft in Seattle or London than a basement in America’s capital. They sat, and Myers continued, “You had brought that Russian plan to me, and it seemed ridiculous at the time, but we have to fight common e
nemies like the Venezuelans. I want you to push for the repeal of Article 5 in Madrid, Grant.”

  3.

  The clock on the ambassador’s desk read 1:15 in the morning, but Anderson was still going over the initial report of the attack on the embassy’s infrastructure. The Venezuelan assassination of the president’s husband was, naturally, taking precedence for American security forces. And though the report pointed to a likely over-zealous but routine hacker, Anderson couldn’t help but feel that the events in Washington and the events in Moscow were somehow related.

  “Sir?” Thom said meekly, knocking on the ambassador’s open door. Anderson jumped up, “Thom! Thom! Where have you been?” He ran to the doorway from behind his desk and, upon reaching his young friend, paused, looking him up, then down, then up again, “And what the hell are you wearing?”

  In his left hand, Thom held Petrov’s watch. “Sir, there are some things I need to tell you. Can we sit?”

  And they sat.

  4.

  The vice president was rarely a man rendered speechless, but as President Myers laid out her desire to back the Russians in neutering NATO in the immediate wake of her husband’s murder, he found himself dumbfounded. He couldn’t easily reveal his knowledge of Russia’s true desire. President Vasily and Foreign Minister Plankov were mad men. They wanted a weak and un-allied Europe and North America not for greater peace across the globe, but in order to restore Russia to the country’s imperialist past: building the empire back to what it once was by taking over Balkan states now independent. And who knew, Adams thought, if they would stop there?