by Jeff Abbott
Sam strolled around. Then he saw the man once known as Ahmad Anwari, inspecting fountains for sale with a buyer, who was talking and gesturing. He looked like his photo in the Magpie’s file, just ten years older. More gray in his hair, the scar on his lip a bright twist of skin.
Sam ambled away from them, toward rows of brightly colored pots. A clerk offered to help him and Sam smiled and said he was just browsing. The young man, bright-faced and friendly, told Sam his name was Nur-Ali, if he needed help. Sam thanked him and the young clerk headed off to another customer.
The breeze, pleasant, smelling of roses and jasmine, stirred the air. Sam took out his cell phone and pretended to make a call, but he snapped a photo of Ahmad as he held the phone up to his ear. He put the phone back in his pocket.
The buyer and Ahmad walked back to the main building. Sam went to the fountains and watched the water dribble in the demonstration model. He waited and studied the pattern in the ripples, and ten minutes later Ahmad approached him. “Hello, sir? Are you looking for a fountain today?”
“These are like some fountains I once saw in Kabul,” Sam said. He kept his voice low, his smile pleasant.
Ahmad just nodded. Waiting.
“Your nursery was recommended to me by my friend Zalmay Quereshi.”
Ahmad didn’t nod this time. “I don’t know that name.”
“I think you knew him when you lived in Afghanistan.”
Ahmad said nothing. As if waiting.
“A woman who worked with Zalmay years ago sent me. We need to speak.”
“About what?”
“Someone gave you a new name. Maybe they even gave you this nice nursery. But you lied to them, didn’t you? You said both the relief workers were dead.”
“That’s not quite accurate,” he said after a moment.
“Then what’s the story?”
The mouth with its cruel scar smiled. “We close tonight at seven. Can you come back then and we can talk?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “I’ll see you at seven.”
Once, one of Sam’s trainers in Special Projects told him that the greatest terror you might face is waking up and it’s all gone wrong and you’re a prisoner. You’re chained, you’re tied. And the worst part is that you’re at someone else’s mercy.
You must not panic.
Sam opened his eyes. The pain rose hard, like a wave.
He remembered.
He’d left the nursery.
He’d gone to Ahmad Douad’s house, picked the elaborate locks, found nothing of interest except cash hidden in a closet. About twenty thousand dollars’ worth, unmarked, nonsequential bills. He’d left the house, the money untouched. Then he’d eaten lunch, tried to call Mila. No answer. No messages from Jimmy; his offer of help had become worthless. No message yet from Jack Ming, trying to find the woman who’d taken his brother from Buenos Aires. He’d looked up Ahmad Douad in the local paper at the library’s online archives. Model citizen. His nursery had done well and he’d contributed plants to a beautification project at a school, donated to a local scholarship to send the kids of Afghan immigrants to college. He seemed like an American success story.
He tried to piece time back together. He’d left the library and then returned to the nursery when it closed at seven. Gotten out of his rental car and walked toward the building and then…then…
“Are you here to kill me?” a voice had asked behind him.
“No,” Sam had said. “Of course not…”
And then the thrum of a Taser, jarring, a heaviness striking his head. The murmur of the fountains, then blackness.
Sam blinked. A blur. His head ached. Anger at himself started to burn in his chest.
Ahmad, standing before him.
He sat in a well-lit room lined with nursery supplies, bags of mulch, stacks of pots. Shears and tools rested on a table, laid out in a frighteningly surgical order.
He tried to move. Arms tied to the wooden chair. Not his feet, though.
Ahmad, speaking to him. In Russian. “What is your name?”
“My name is Sam,” he answered in groggy Russian.
“And now I know what you are,” the voice said, still speaking Russian.
“I just wanted to talk to you,” Sam managed to say. In English.
“So let’s talk. But on my terms.”
“My name is Sam Capra,” Sam said.
“I already looked at your wallet.”
“Does the name Capra mean anything to you?”
“It’s the name of a dead man.” The cruel lip curled. And then he went to the table and picked up the shears. Sam had been wrong—it wasn’t shears. A large knife with an ivory handle. The blade had a slight curve to it.
“Do you know what this is?” Ahmad said.
Sam shook his head.
“It’s the one treasure I brought to America with me. I had the clothes on my back and a few dollars and my family’s pesh-kabz. I wouldn’t leave it behind so the Americans had to let me bring it on the flight. A Pashtun knife.” He examined it in the light again. “Designed to pierce chain mail, that’s how old it is. Imagine what it can do to human flesh. My grandfather’s grandfather used it against British soldiers in the Second Afghan War. My father and I used it against the Soviets. When I was just a teenager I saw him kill wounded Russians with this knife, dragged half-burned out of their tanks or their wrecked choppers. Sometimes the pesh-kabz brought mercy. Sometimes it brought terror.” He watched Sam’s eyes.
“The Magpie, from the CIA, sent me.”
“No, she didn’t,” he said. “You spoke Russian to me.”
“Because you did. I only answered…” Sam stopped, watching the man’s cold glare.
“They used to give me the Russian soldiers to play with,” Ahmad said.
“I only want to know…”
Ahmad put the tip of the pesh-kabz against Sam’s throat. “I want you to talk. In Russian, in English? Which will it be?”
“Look at my driver’s license. My name. Capra. Same as the relief worker with Zalmay. Capra.”
“A card, with a name that is a lie? I have one in my wallet. The Russians, maybe they sent you to find me. To get close to me with your lies.” Ahmad began to walk around Sam, holding the pesh-kabz in one hand. “The Russian commanders, well, the mujahaddin would let them live, because they wanted information. But they would blind them. Cut off their noses, their balls, sew them up neat so they would heal. Cut off both hands, both feet, cauterize the wounds. It was important that they live, just so they could talk. I watched. I took notes. It was like a school.”
A chill descended on Sam.
“What they’d do, before they blinded the commanders…they’d call it ‘taking off the shirt.’ You sit a commander down, and you strip a Russian soldier in front of him, and you make a cut around the soldier’s torso. A nice straight line, all the way around.” He drew it with the handle of the pesh-kabz on his own chest, wrinkling his fern-green nursery polo shirt that featured the Happy Plants logo on the chest. “Then…you pull the skin up, like you are taking off a shirt. All the way.” He smiled, joyless. “The screams would rupture their own vocal cords. Then a bullet to the head, when the point was made. And you make the commander watch every moment.” He kissed the pesh-kabz, then took the knife and cut off Sam’s shirt, ripping the fabric free. And he switched to Russian. “Ah. You have a lot of muscle. That will make it slower. More difficult. Now. Tell me who sent you, and what do they want?”
“I told you. I’m here about my brother. I am CIA; that is why I know Russian.”
He placed the pesh-kabz against Sam’s back, halfway up between beltline and shoulders, and made a small cut.
Sam grimaced, swallowed his scream as the knife began its slow, shallow trail. He spat out the words. “They killed…Zalmay but kept…my brother alive. Why?”
Ahmad seemed amused at Sam’s continued questioning. “Zalmay died because he was a CIA agent.”
The pain of the cut seared ac
ross his back. “Please…please…if someone sent me to kill you, I would have just killed you. I didn’t…Just tell me…”
Sam screamed as Ahmad started cutting again. “I have to give up my nice life here because you’ve found me,” Ahmad said. “That’s not fair. So I have to send a strong message to whoever sent you. Was it the big man? Is that why the questions?” But he said big man in Russian: bol’shoy chelovek.
“The big man, what’s his name?” Sam said, trying to keep the pain at bay.
Shattering sound. A rock, lobbed through the storage building’s window.
Ahmad stared at the window. He called out a boy’s name. “Nur-Ali!”—the name of the young man who’d offered to help Sam while he’d browsed that afternoon.
Ahmad moved to the door. He called out in Pashto, fast, sharp. He stepped outside.
The fight didn’t last long but Sam could hear it: Ahmad’s voice, bright and sharp and surprised, and then a mechanical sound, Ahmad screaming, the impact of him landing against the building. No gunfire. The sound stopped.
If I could find Ahmad, Sam thought, who else could find him?
Sam felt the blood dripping down his back. The door slowly began to open.
16
The Forbidden City
IMAGINE A CITY of nearly a hundred thousand people that for years was never on a map. Never called by its name, and when it finally was, it was given a bureaucratic code based on its region and number: Krasnoyarsk-26. Only during the reforms of Boris Yeltsin was it allowed to give itself a proper name and appear on maps.
A city where people were still not allowed to enter, or leave, without special permission.
Philip Judge sat in the backseat of a Mercedes, parked before the gates of the city.
Железного́рск, said the sign. Zheleznogorsk.
It had been a long journey. Earlier he had flown into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. He had expected there to be a snafu with his visa, given his final destination, and that he was a foreigner headed to a forbidden city. But the man in Zheleznogorsk he was coming to see—Dezhin—had conjured up a next-day paperwork miracle via pressure and bribes. Corruption at its finest. A senior official with Passport Control had arrived, murmuring about a paperwork error—Mr. Cerf had visited the forbidden city before—he apologized for the misunderstanding. There were papers shuffled, stamps made, and the official consulted his phone, no doubt to be sure the bribe had arrived in his bank. After a few moments, and a few additional polite questions about the purpose of his trip, his visa, along with the permission and paperwork to visit Zheleznogorsk, was stamped; he was given the migration card he was required to keep with his passport to check into any Russian hotel; and he was on his way. He did not allow himself to sweat. He did not reflect that he had probably set a world record in navigating a corrupt Russian bureaucracy.
He had then taken a taxi to Domodedovo Airport and then boarded a four-hour flight to Krasnoyarsk, in the heart of Russia. The passenger next to him—a Moscow pharmacist, going home to visit his elderly mother—was intrigued that he was Belgian and kept asking him what the West really thought of Morozov. A spy, Judge thought, sent by Dezhin to watch me.
They landed at Yemelyanovo Airport in Krasnoyarsk, on the southern edge of the vast Siberian taiga. To Americans, Siberia conjured an image of an unpeopled wasteland, but the airport here was bustling, much busier than Judge remembered from his only visit, a few years ago. At the luggage claim he saw a blocky, thick-necked man holding a card that read CERF, and he nodded at the man.
“Dr. Dezhin has sent me to collect you, sir, so you would not have to bother with the bus or taxi to Zheleznogorsk. My name is Vladimir.” He had a voice like gravel, eyes like gray stone, fists like granite.
Judge nodded. He followed Vladimir to a black Mercedes and sat in the back. If this is a trap, it is a neat one.
With traffic, it took a little less than ninety minutes to reach the closed city. It was, to Judge, a bit like driving backward into a time when the Soviets built cities of science to drive their missile and space programs. After the collapse of communism, worries boiled up that unemployed scientists in cities such as Zheleznogorsk would sell dangerous technologies to criminals and terrorists. The city had decided to remain closed in 1996, to keep it small, and to feed the Russian paranoia about technology development. They did not want the West stealing their secrets.
The Mercedes stopped at the black gate at the town’s entrance. A guard checked both Vladimir’s papers and those belonging to Jean-Claude Cerf. Judge was conscious of Vladimir’s stare in the rearview mirror. After a moment, and checked against a list, they were waved through.
The town was much nicer than one might expect of a Soviet industrial city. The crème de la crème of the USSR’s engineers and scientists had been housed here. It was a reminder not of Soviet degradation but Soviet privilege. Lots of offices, lots of blocks of apartments, not very many cafés or stores, and only one theater, with the old-fashioned name of Rodina: Motherland. But the city felt more modern, more quiet, less blighted than other Siberian cities.
He thought of the Big Man for a moment. There were times, oddly, that he missed Sergei, the way you might miss a person who played well against you in a sport. A person who pushed you to your limits.
Vladimir drove along straight streets and turned right into a large complex of buildings near the city’s edge. The town, key to developing Russian military satellite programs, had gotten new life with the creation of GLONASS, the Russian version of GPS, the global positioning system. Here new satelittes were designed, built, and launched, providing both an alternative and an enhancement to the GPS system. A year after offering full coverage of Russia, the GLONASS satellites added full global coverage.
Vladimir parked the limo and escorted Judge through two rings of security. Judge’s mobile phone was confiscated, to be returned to him when he left, and he was frisked. His briefcase was searched. It contained a laptop; printouts of proposals in Russian, French, and English for a security audit of the GLONASS positioning system; and a few toiletries: chewable tablets to relieve indigestion, eyedrops to reduce redness, breath mints, toothbrush in a small plastic container. These items were briefly examined but not confiscated.
Vladimir then walked him through a large design complex. Models of satellites, from the early Soviet six-winged Molniya and Kosmos 1, known in the West as Sputnik 11, hung from the ceiling. A large cubicle space held technicians and designers. Here Zheleznogorsk looked the same as the West: high-end computers on desks, bright young people working on the keyboards and screens, large computer simulations and displays flashing. No one paid any attention to Vladimir and the Belgian.
Vladimir took him into an enclosed office at the end of the hallway. “I will wait outside,” he intoned in his baritone voice, closing the door behind him.
Dezhin sat at the table. It had been cleared of papers and pens, and his computer screen was dormant. He was in his fifties, with a reddened nose bright as a winter berry. His hair was white, smoothed down, and his suit was a good one, a quiet gray. But his eyes were bleary with fatigue. Judge guessed the man had not slept all night.
“Are you afraid of me?” Judge gestured toward the door. “The human mountain out there looks like he wants to kill me.”
“You have made life difficult for me,” Dezhin said by way of greeting. “You may speak freely here. The room has been secured against electronic listening devices. The research heads are paranoid that the West will try to steal their secrets. Like the West doesn’t know how to make or build satellites. So this is where we talk to ensure we cannot be overheard.”
“Thank you for making the time to see me.”
Dezhin gave a brittle laugh. “As if I had a choice. You asked the impossible.”
“Yet you delivered.”
“Only made possible by the fact that you had been here once before.”
“I know it made for a long night for you. But a most profitable one.”
“I must insist to know why you need the…weapon.”
“You didn’t ask before.”
“You had a Russian with you last time. This time you are alone.”
I’m going to kill your president, he thought, but instead he said, “Let me just say that my target is a great enemy of the Russian people, and the reason I can bribe you so well is because an important Russian leader wants him dead.” It was all true.
“Last time I was promised the…weapon could not be traced to this facility. There is so little of it…produced each year.”
“Yes, and when there was suspicion before about where the poison came from, it was aimed at nuclear facilities. Not at you. This will be the same. Listen, before, your cooperation got us what we needed to eliminate enemies who would say lies about Russia. In London, in Paris. Silenced, and dead. You did not panic then, you must not panic now.”
“But after those poisonings, there are more stringent inventory controls. Careful ones. I cannot…”
“You administer the inventory. Simply use less in a design test and say you’ve used more. It’s not my job to solve your problems. That is, after all, Dr. Dezhin, what I am paying you for.”
After a moment Dezhin set a vial of eyedrops down on the desk. It was the same brand as the eyedrops in Judge’s bag.
“Thank you for meeting my specifications.” Judge picked it up and held it to the light. “Polonium-210. Discovered by Marie Curie, who named it for her native Poland.”
Now Dezhin looked at him. “Remember: You’re safe as long as it’s outside your body. Its alpha particles can’t penetrate the skin. But if you breathe it in or ingest it, even a tiny amount…it is over two hundred million”—he paused for effect—“times more toxic than cyanide.”
Judge picked up the eyedrops bottle, held it up to the light. He decided to lecture Dezhin back. “Suspected in the deaths of at least one Russian dissident in London, whose teapot at a posh hotel was supposedly poisoned with it by FSB operatives. He died, in agony, in the hospital of radiation poisoning. And of a crusading Russian journalist in Paris—put in her wine, no suspect ever identified. She drank the wine, boarded a flight to Morocco, thinking she would escape those targeting her. She died in days, also in agony. Has also been suspected in the death of Yasser Arafat. Used only in very special cases. The Big Man loved it.” Bol’shoy chelovek.