by Gayle Lynds
Experience a heart-pumping and thrilling tale of suspense!
Originally published in THRILLER (2006),
edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author James Patterson.
New York Times bestselling writer Gayle Lynds has been called the “queen of the spy novel.” And for good reason. In this tense Thriller Short, Lynds’s character Liz Sansborough is put to the ultimate test, one that involves a character who goes by the rather ominous sobriquet of the Carnivore.
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The Hunt for Dmitri
Gayle Lynds
CONTENTS
The Hunt for Dmitri
GAYLE LYNDS
Gayle Lynds did not intend to start a series. When she wrote her first book, Masquerade, in the mid-1990s, she was simply creating a modern espionage thriller. But in those early post-Iron Curtain days, not only was there serious discussion in Congress about dissolving the CIA, the New York Times eliminated its regular review column titled, “Spies & Thrillers.” Within book publishing, the spy novel was declared as dead as the cold war.
Still, Masquerade became a New York Times bestseller. A great adventure story, it was infused with fascinating doses of history and psychology. In an odd way, Sarah Walker, the heroine, was Lynds. Both were magazine journalists, but Sarah had the misfortune to have an uncle who was a notorious assassin called the Carnivore, although she did not know this. In the novel, Asher Flores, the hero, is a CIA man of the fascinating ilk—charming, terribly smart, with the soul of a rogue. Together, Sarah and Asher must unearth the Carnivore.
Lynds went on to publish two more stand-alone thrillers, Mesmerized and Mosaic, and collaborated with Robert Ludlum to create the Covert-One series. Through it all, she continued to receive mail from fans who wanted her to bring back Sarah, Asher and the Carnivore. So The Coil, a novel about the Carnivore’s only child, Liz Sansborough, was born. A former CIA operative, Liz had played a pivotal role in Masquerade, just as Sarah and Asher would play pivotal roles in The Coil.
Liz and Sarah are two matched flames, not only in appearance but in spirit, with quick wit and the sort of personal courage that is both admirable and sometimes daunting. Costarring with Liz in The Coil is Simon Childs of MI6. For him, the “M” means maverick. Hotheaded and coolly charming, Simon reflects Lynds’s endless fascination with politics—he’s a penetration agent in the antiglobalization movement.
Lynds’s latest espionage thriller is The Last Spymaster, and will be followed by another book in the Carnivore series. The Hunt for Dmitri is part of that continuum.
It’s a Liz Sansborough story.
Which means the Carnivore must appear, too.
THE HUNT FOR DMITRI
The French never got enough credit. The Germans never got enough control. The Romanians had a guilt complex. And the Americans hadn’t a clue. As the good-natured slanders continued, Liz Sansborough, Ph.D., peered around the Faculty Club for her close friend and colleague Arkady Albam. He was late.
The dimly lit bar was packed, every table filled. The rich aromas of wine and liquor were intense. As glasses clinked, a world atlas of languages electrified the air. Academics all, they were celebrating the conclusion of a highly successful international conference on cold war political fallout, post-9/11, which she had helped to organize. Still, there was no sign of Arkady.
The economist from the University of London grinned pointedly at Liz—the only American in their group. “I hear Russia’s economy is so rotten that the Kremlin has had to sack dozens of its American moles.”
“Only because we don’t sell ourselves cheap.” She grinned back at him. “Moscow can afford to keep your MI6 turncoats on the payroll forever.”
As laughter erupted, the sociologist from the Sorbonne nodded at the empty bar stool beside Liz and asked in French, “Where’s Arkady? He isn’t here to defend his country!”
“I’ve been wondering, too.” Liz’s gaze swept the lounge once more.
Arkady was a visiting scholar in Russian history, on campus here at the University of California at Santa Barbara since January. They had met soon after he arrived, when he sat beside her at a mass faculty meeting, peered at the empty seat on his other side, then introduced himself to her. “I’m the new kid,” he said simply. They discovered a shared European sensibility, a love of movies, and that each had pasts neither would discuss. In her mind, she could see his kindly wrinkled face, feel the touch of his fingertips on her forearm as he leaned toward her with an impish smile to impart some piece of wisdom or gossip.
The problem was, he was elderly—almost seventy years old—and so unwell the past week that he had missed all of Monday’s events, including his own seminar. He had phoned to tell her, but stubbornly refused to see a doctor.
As the lighthearted banter continued, and more people arrived, there was still no Arkady. He was never late. Liz speed-dialed his number on her cell phone. No answer again. Instead of leaving another message, she toasted her colleagues farewell and wound through the throngs to the door. His apartment was only minutes away. She might as well look in on him.
The night sky was dull black, the stars pinpricks, remote. Liz hurried to her car, threw her shoulder bag across the front seat, turned on the ignition and peeled out, speeding along streets fringed with towering palms until at last she parked in front of Arkady’s building. He lived in 2C. In a rare admission, he had joked once that he preferred this “C” to the one that referred to the Cellar, Soviet intelligence’s name for the basement in the Lubyanka complex where the KGB executed dissidents and spies and those who crossed them. He barely escaped, he had told her, then refused to say more, his profile pinched with bad memories.
Liz ran upstairs and knocked. There was no answer. His drapes were closed, but a line of light showed in a center gap. She knocked again then tried the knob. It turned, and she cracked open the door. Just inside, magazines were strewn in piles. A lamp lay on its side, its ceramic base shattered. Her chest tightened.
“Arkady? Are you here?”
The only sound was the ticking of the wall clock. Liz opened the door wider. Books lay where they had been yanked from shelves, spines twisted. She peered around the door—and saw Arkady. His brown eyes were wide and frightened, and he seemed small, shriveled, although
he was muscular and broad-chested for his age. He was sitting in his usual armchair, drenched in the light of his tall, cast-iron floor lamp.
She drank in the sight of him. “Are you all right?”
Arkady sighed. “This is what greeted me after the last seminar.” He spoke English with an American accent. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?” He still wore his battered tweed jacket, his gray tie firmly knotted against his throat. His left hand held a blue envelope, while the other was tucked inside his jacket as if clutching at his heart. He was a man of expressive Rus disposition and ascetic Mongol habits and was usually vibrant and talkative.
She frowned. “Yes, but you didn’t answer my question. Are you hurt?”
When he shook his head, experience sent her outside to the balcony again. A gust of wind rustled the leaves of a pepper tree, cooling her hot face. As she inspected the street and parked cars, then the other apartment buildings, uneasy memories surged through her, transporting her back to the days she had been a CIA NOC—nonofficial cover operative—on roving assignment from Paris to Moscow. No one at the university knew she had been CIA.
Seeing nothing unusual, she slipped back inside and locked the door. Arkady had not moved. In the lamplight, his thick hair and heavy eyebrows were the muted color of iron shavings.
“What happened, Arkady? Who did this? Is anything missing?”
He shrugged, his expression miserable.
Liz walked through the kitchen, bedroom and office. Nothing else seemed out of place. She returned to the living room.
Arkady rallied. “Sit with me, dear Liz. You’re such a comfort. If I’d been blessed with a daughter, I’d want her to be you.”
His words touched her. As a psychologist, she was aware of her desire for this older man’s attention, that he had become a surrogate father, a deep bond. Her real father was her most closely guarded secret: He was an international assassin with a code name to match his reputation—the Carnivore. She hated what he had done, what he was. That his blood flowed through her veins haunted her—except when she was with Arkady.
She sank into her usual armchair, where only the low reading table separated them. “Have you phoned the sheriff’s department?”
He shrugged. “There’s no point.”
“I’ll call for you.”
Arkady gave his head a rough shake. “Too dangerous. He’ll be back.”
She stared. “Too dangerous? Who’ll be back?”
Arkady handed her the blue envelope he had been holding. She turned it over. The postmark was Los Angeles.
“Ignore that,” he told her. “The letter was sent originally from Moscow to New York in a larger envelope. A friend there opened it and put the letter into another big envelope and mailed it to Los Angeles. That’s where my address was added.”
Liz pulled out folded stationery. Inside were three tiny dried sunflowers. In Russia, an odd number of blooms was considered good luck. The writing was not only different, it was in the Cyrillic alphabet—Russian.
“Dearest,” it began. She peered up at him.
“It’s from my wife, Nina.” He looked past her to another time, another life. “She wouldn’t escape with me. We’d never had children, and she knew I could take care of myself. She said she’d rather have me alive far away than dead in some Moscow grave.” He paused. “I suspect she knew I’d have a better chance alone.”
Liz took a long breath. With the stationery in one hand, and the sunflowers on the palm of the other, she bent her head and read. The letter recounted the ordinary life of an ordinary woman living on a small pension in a tiny Moscow flat. “I’ve enclosed three pressed sunflowers, my love,” the letter finished, “to remind you of our happy times together. You are in my arms forever.”
Liz gazed a moment longer at the dried blossoms, now the color of desert sand. She folded the letter and slid the flowers back inside.
Arkady looked at her alertly, as if hoping she would say something that would rectify whatever had happened, what he feared might happen.
“It’s obvious Nina loves you a lot,” she told him. “Surely she can join you now.”
“It’s impossible.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Nina and I decided before I left that if either of us ever suspected our mail was being read, we’d write that we were enclosing three sunflowers. Some snooper must’ve thought they’d fallen out, so he covered himself by adding them. The mistake confirms what Nina surmised, and it fits with this.” He gestured at the damage around them. “I thought I was being followed yesterday and today. The vandalism proves he’s here. And it’s a message that he can have someone in Moscow scrub Nina to punish me if I try to escape now. He knows I know that.”
Liz remembered an official statement during the Communist show trial of Boris Arsov, a Bulgarian defector: The hand of justice is longer than the legs of the traitor. A few months later, Arsov was found dead in his prison cell. The Kremlin had been relentless about liquidating anyone who escaped. Even today, some former operatives prowled the globe for those they felt had betrayed the old Soviet Union.
“You expect him to kill you,” she said woodenly.
“You must go, Liz. I accept my fate.”
“Who is this man?”
“A KGB assassin called Oleg Olenkov. He’s a master of impersonation and recruiting the unsuspecting. Even after the Soviet Union dissolved, he hunted me. So I decided to become Arkady Albam—I thought he’d never look for me in academia. But for him, eliminating me is personal.” He peered at her. “My name is actually Dmitri Garnitsky. I was a dissident. Those were desperate times. Do you really want to hear?”
“Tell me.” Liz’s eyes traveled from window to door and back again. “Quickly.” As her gaze returned to Arkady, a small, strange smile vanished from his face. A smile she had never seen. For an uncomfortable instant, she was suspicious.
* * *
Day after day in the bitter winter of 1983, Moscow’s gray sky bled snow through the few hours of light into the black well of night. From their flat, Dmitri and Nina Garnitsky could hear the caged wolves in the zoo howl. Across the city, vodka poured until bottles were empty. Meanwhile in Europe, Washington was deploying Pershing missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. A sense of helpless desolation shrouded Moscow, escalating the usual paranoia. The Kremlin became so convinced of a surprise nuclear attack that it not only secretly ordered the KGB to plan a campaign of letter bombs against Western leaders but also to immediately erase Moscow’s dissident movement.
Dmitri was the city’s ringleader. Still, he managed to evade surveillance and disappear for a week to print anti-Soviet pamphlets on an old press hidden in a tunnel beneath the sprawling metropolis. Nina was with him in the early hours before sunrise of that last day, making fresh cups of strong black tea to keep them awake.
Suddenly Sasha Penofsky hurtled in, snow flying off his muskrat shapka hat and short wool coat. “The KGB has surrounded our building!”
“Tell us.” Dmitri pulled Nina close. She trembled in his arms.
“That KGB animal, Oleg Olenkov, is under specific orders to get you, Dmitri. When he couldn’t find you, he decided to go ahead and arrest our people. They took everyone to Lubyanka.” He swallowed hard. “And there’s more. The KGB wants you so much that they brought in a specialist to wipe you. He’s an assassin with a reputation for never failing. They call him the Carnivore.”
Nina stared at Dmitri, her face white. “You can’t wait. You have to leave now.”
“She’s right, Dmitri!” Sasha turned on his heel and ran. He had his own escape plans. No one knew them, just as no one knew Dmitri’s. It was safer that way.
“I’ll tell them where your cell met, darling.” Nina’s voice broke. “I’ll be fine.” They would interrogate and release her in hopes they could find him through her. But if they believed she was also a subversive, her life would be at risk, too.
His heart breaking, they rushed down the tunnel
. He shoved up a manhole cover, and she climbed out. His last sight of her was her worn galoshes hurrying away through the alley’s fresh snow.
Dmitri paced the tunnel five minutes. Then he accelerated off through the bleak dawn, too, carrying a lunch pail like any good worker. The cold pierced to his marrow. Little Zhigulis and Moskvich cars roared past, a stream of bloodred taillights. He watched nervously. He knew Olenkov by sight but had never heard of the Carnivore.
On the other side of Kalininsky Bridge, he was running down steps toward a pedestrian underpass when the skin on the back of his neck suddenly puckered. He glanced back. Walking behind were a young couple, an older man with a briefcase and two more men alone, each carrying lunch pails like his. One had a mustache; the other was clean-shaven. All were strangers.
When an evergreen hedge appeared on his right, he yanked open a wooden gate and slipped into a small park beside an apartment building for the privileged nomenklatura. The skeletal branches of a giant linden tree spread overhead like anemic veins. He grabbed a snow-covered lawn chair, carried it to the trunk and jumped onto the chair. Reaching up to a hole in the trunk, he pawed through icy layers of leaves until he found his waterproof bundle. In it were rubles, rare U.S. greenbacks and a good fake passport.
But as he pulled it out, Dmitri heard the quiet click of the gate. He stiffened. Turned awkwardly—and looked at a pistol with a sound suppressor aimed steadily at him. Pulse hammering, he raised his gaze, saw the mustache. The gunman was one of the workers behind him in the underpass.
“You are Dmitri Garnitsky.” The man spoke Russian with a slight accent and stood with feet planted apart for balance, knees slightly bent. About six feet tall, he was muscular but not heavy, with a bland, expressionless face and nearly colorless eyes. There was something predatory about him that had nothing to do with his weapon.
Dmitri tried to think. “Nyet. I don’t know—”
Abruptly, the gate swung open again. The gunman tensed, and his head moved fractionally, watching as the notorious Olenkov marched in, impressive in his mink shapka hat and black cashmere overcoat. He was taller and broader—and smiling. He unbuttoned his coat and removed a pistol, which he, too, pointed at Dmitri.