It was the woman’s turn to look startled. “Brighton Beach? You?”
“My parents emigrated to the United States in ’82. I was born two years later.”
“My God!” She shook her head. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“How can I believe you? This is impossible!”
“Unlikely, yes,” he said, grinning. “Not impossible. Brighton Beach is probably the largest colony of transplanted Russians in the U.S. You know the intersection of Brighton and Coney Island Avenue?”
Her eyes opened wider. She nodded.
“Remember the subway/el tracks? They come down in a big curve overhead, right above the intersection … right? Q train for local service, the B train for weekday express. And when the train comes through, it sounds like thunder!”
“I used to walk under that overpass on my way to school!”
“Public School 253.”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“I went to the same school …”
For several more minutes, Akulinin dredged up memories of his own childhood in Brighton Beach, enough to convince the woman that they had indeed grown up in the same neighborhood. He wondered if he’d ever seen her; she looked to be a couple of years younger, but they might well have attended the same school during the same years, just a few classes apart.
What were the chances of running into her here?
He asked her what had brought her back to Russia—and Tajikistan.
“My … my parents moved back to Russia when I was thirteen,” she told him. There obviously was some pain associated with the memory. “A business opportunity for my father. There was … some trouble. Financial trouble. My mother was sick. He got into debt with some very bad people.”
“Mafiya?”
She nodded. “After my mother died, my father sent me to work with a man he knew, a friend, Dr. Shmatko. He is a pathologist with the Science Academy here in Dushanbe.”
“Why?”
“Those men, the ones he owed money? They offered to settle some of his debt if I would go to work for them. Photographs … movies … to be posted on the Internet, you know?”
Akulinin nodded. He did know. The Russian Organizatsaya was heavily involved in the sex trade, both prostitution and pornography. White slavery in the twenty-first century, vicious and sick.
“So I came here and trained as a diener with Dr. Shmatko.”
“Diener. A morgue attendant?”
She nodded.
“That’s horrible!”
“It’s not so bad.” She shrugged. “My … clients don’t talk back, and never give me trouble. The pay is … not too bad, and Dr. Shmatko is teaching me a lot, so that I can go to school and be a doctor myself one day. But first I hope to save enough to get back to the United States someday. It’s … life is hard, here.”
“What about your father? Where is he?”
She shrugged. The expression on her face, behind her eyes, was heart-wrenching. “I don’t know. It’s been two years now. I stopped getting letters, oh, two or three months after he sent me away. I think … I think …”
She was trembling, on the verge of tears.
“It’s okay. What’s your name?”
“Maria. Maria Alekseyevna. My friends … my friends call me Masha.”
It was, Akulinin knew, a common Russian nickname for Maria. “I’m Ilya,” he told her. “I might be able to help you.”
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here. You’re not army, are you?”
“Not exactly.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re a spy! Who do you work for?”
“I really can’t—”
“You’re with the American CIA! Right?”
“Something like that.” He looked at the corpses on the nearby tables. “I am here to photograph these bodies. So … are you going to turn me in?”
“Of course not! It isn’t every day a girl gets to meet a real-life James Bond! Especially one who grew up in her old neighborhood!”
He pulled out his mini camera and walked over to one of the stainless steel tables. He’d managed to get a shot of one of the bodies earlier, while Charlie was sparring with the Russian officer, but not the others. One of them, in fact, was still anonymously wrapped up in an olive green body bag. He took several more photos of the first two from different angles. The two bodies already removed from the body bags were male Caucasians, still dressed in civilian clothing. Both were heavily tattooed on their arms. One sported a bushy Stalinesque mustache; the other was clean-shaven, his wide-open eyes pale gray against a bright red mask. There was a lot of blood, with deep gashes in their faces and arms.
“This one had a bullet wound,” Masha pointed out, touching the skull of the mustached man and turning it so he could see. “Left temple. Definitely fatal.”
“I … see.” Akulinin wasn’t particularly bothered by death, but the young woman’s casual attitude was a bit disturbing.
“Did Vasilyev tell you anything about these guys?”
“No. Just that he wanted complete path workups, and for them to be checked for radiation. I don’t know why.”
“Well, I can help with that much.” Pocketing the camera, he reached down and pulled up the cuff of his uniform trousers, revealing the small radiation counter strapped to his ankle. Unfastening the chrome-colored device, he held it up, peered closely at a switch on the side, and flicked it.
“It was set to transmit data … somewhere else. Now it will play what it picks up for us, and record it for transmission later.”
Holding the counter like a wand, he passed it over the body in front of him. There was little reaction over the man’s face and shoulders, but his hands, both of them, elicited a sharp clattering static from the device.
“Interesting,” Akulinin said. He stepped over to the other table, passed the counter over the body, and got the same response.
“What does it mean?” Masha asked.
“That these two guys were handling a leaking crate not too long ago.”
“A crate of what?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“These two are Organizasiya, you know. Mafiya.”
He looked at her, surprised.
She touched one blood-smeared arm. “The tattoos.” Reaching across, she swiftly unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tugged it open. His chest, as well as his upper arms, was a solid mass of intricate tattoos. He could see a rose on the body’s chest, a skull, a dagger or sword, delicately interwoven floral designs …
“They often start off as prison tats,” she told him, “but they also get them to mark advancement within the gang, special achievements, punishments, anything like that. It’s a part of the whole culture of the Vory v Zakone, the Russian underworld. Someone who knows the language can actually read a man’s history with the mafiya.”
The second body had tattoos as well.
He frowned. “I’d like to check the third body, too.”
“Give me a hand here,” Masha said. She was already unzipping the body bag.
Awkwardly, Akulinin helped her, peeling the body bag open and sliding it down. He looked at the man’s head and blinked in surprise. “Shit!”
“What’s the matter?”
“What the hell is a Chinese doing here?”
NSA HEAD QUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 1010 HOURS EDT
Rubens glanced at his wristwatch, confirming what he already knew. “Damn,” he said. “I have to go. Now.”
“Give our love to the NSC,” Marie told him. “I’ll call you when we regain signal.”
“Do that. I’ll be out of touch while I’m in the meeting, but leave me messages and keep trying.”
“Of course, sir.”
He didn’t like leaving now. He was strongly tempted to delegate the NSC meeting to Gene Lenard, his operations director.
Gene was a good man, well able to be Rub
ens’ representative—but the position of deputy director of the NSA was, unfortunately, as much political as it was practical. If Rubens personally failed to attend this meeting, the other people present would assume the issues on the agenda were not of high importance to Desk Three or the NSA. Those people included the chairman of the National Security Council, his senior aide, and his longtime political enemy Debra Collins, deputy director of operations at the CIA. If Rubens wasn’t there this morning, he could wake up tomorrow and find that the CIA was in charge of Haystack—and he had eight operators on the ground over there right now, two of them out of touch.
If he left right now, he should be able to make the meeting in time, allowing for traffic on 295 into town and for the security check at the White House.
“While I’m gone, I want a full workup on Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. I want to know where his office is, including architectural plans, blueprints, whatever you can find. Does he have a safe in his office? A computer? Find out.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should be back around two, two thirty,” he told her.
Rubens checked out through several security desks, picked up his car in the VIP parking area, and threaded his way out of the maze of lots and gates surrounding the towering central buildings of the NSA’s Fort Meade complex, long known to insiders as the Puzzle Palace. Canine Road swung him right onto 32 West, and he took the almost immediate cloverleaf onto 295 South, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Traffic was light and he hit the pedal, accelerating swiftly past the slower vehicles. Any touch by police radar would trigger a transponder in the car, one that flagged him as having special clearance.
Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin would be okay Ruebens mused. Dean was a longtime veteran of the agency, a former Marine sniper who simply never got flustered, who was always in the game. Rubens ranked him as Desk Three’s best operator. Akulinin was younger and less experienced. He’d come on board with Desk Three just a year and a half ago, during that Russian mafiya affair up in the Arctic, but he was quick, he spoke fluent Russian—it was his first language, after all—and he knew the culture. Both men were smart and resourceful, and they got results.
He was more concerned about Lia DeFrancesca. She, too, was a damned good, experienced operator, and her team in Berlin, her on-site backup, was first rate. But the China Ocean Shipping Company was big and it was dirty, an immense commercial giant that was an arm of the Chinese Navy and the Beijing government. Lia wasn’t simply up against Feng Jiu Zhu in Berlin. She was squaring off against the government of the People’s Republic of China.
COSCO had been involved in illegal gunrunning before.
On March 18, 1996, undercover agents with the U.S. Customs Department and the BATF had accepted delivery of a trial shipment of two thousand fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles from Chinese representatives as a part of a sting operation tagged Operation Dragon Fire. Those weapons had been smuggled into Oakland, California, on board the COSCO container vessel Empress Phoenix.
In the history of U.S. law enforcement, there had never been a bigger seizure of fully automatic weapons. The Chinese said that the weapons were for the California street gang market, and that other military-grade weapons were readily available as well, from grenade launchers to Red Parakeet shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems.
What the Crips and the Bloods would have done with weapons like that was something to ponder.
More recently, the NSA had tracked a COSCO freighter from Shanghai to Karachi, in Pakistan, with a cargo of weapons-related goods. The cargo included specialty metals and electronics used in the production of Chinese-designed Baktar Shikan antitank missiles.
There were plenty of other cases, too.
The NSA had been watching Mr. Feng for almost two years now, turning up a great deal of rather scandalous information about his private life but only hints and whispers about his professional connections. The CIA thought he was clean, though he was closely connected with Wang Jun—a senior executive in China’s Poly Technologies still wanted for his role in the Empress Phoenix affair. Rubens disagreed. Considering Feng’s former position in Chinese military intelligence, his reported dealings with people believed to be associated with several Islamic terror groups, including Pakistan’s Harkatul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Palestinian Hamas, and al-Qaeda itself, the man couldn’t possibly be clean. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck …
Contacts within Israel’s Mossad were concerned about a Palestinian operation known as Nar-min-Sama, variously translated as Fire of Heaven or, possibly, as Fire from Heaven. There was a code name associated with this operation—al-Wawi, the Jackal. Not even the Mossad yet knew who the Jackal was, but believed that he was orchestrating some sort of strike against both Israel and unnamed targets in the West.
There was also the matter of Lebed’s suitcase nukes to consider, as well as concerns about nuclear weapons from Iran or North Korea reaching any of a number of Islamic extremist groups.
Feng had recently traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an unlikely, landlocked destination for a high-ranking executive of a maritime shipping company. From there he’d flown to Cairo, where he’d met with several men believed to be associated with Hamas, before going on to Berlin. The NSA had monitored numerous cell phone calls to all of those places, as well as Karachi, Kabul, and Dushanbe.
Connect the dots, Rubens thought, and a rather disturbing picture appeared, one involving transporting something from the heart of Central Asia south to Pakistan’s major port, then by ship to the Middle East—Cairo, perhaps, or Israel, or just possibly northern Europe.
That’s why Rubens wanted an operator inside Feng’s organization, someone who could get a lead on some of these mysterious business contacts of Feng’s, and someone who might have the opportunity to bug Feng’s computer and phone.
If anyone within the NSA’s Deep Black service could handle the job, it was Lia, but that didn’t make it any easier for Rubens to walk out of the Art Room at a critical moment in her op.
No, the dots didn’t make a pretty picture at all—and Lia and her team might be right at ground zero.
ADLON HOTEL
PARISER PLATZ
CENTRAL BERLIN, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY, 1625 HOURS LOCAL TIME
Lia was sitting on her bed in her hotel room when the knock sounded at her door.
“Sounds like opportunity knocking, Lia,” CJ told her.
Lia was alone in her room. CJ was still watching from down on the street, while Castelano and Daimler were in their room up on the seventh floor, but all three—as well as the Art Room crew—were linked in through her communications implant. She was careful of what she said while in the room. Though a sweep earlier had failed to turn up any electronic listening devices, Feng’s people might have still managed to bug it.
“Coming,” she called out. She’d changed out of her heels, skirt, and low-cut blouse in favor of more comfortable—and practical—clothing: blue jeans, a black pullover, and tennis shoes. Her hat, however, rested on the hotel room desk, its hidden camera set to provide Desk Three with a clear view of the entire room. Swiftly, she pulled her weapon from her open suitcase—a 9 mm SIG SAUER P226 Blackwater Tactical—and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, tugging the pullover down to conceal it.
She unlocked the door. “Yes?”
It was one of the maroon-jacketed hotel bellhops. “Fräulein Lau?”
“Yes.”
“I have two packages for you,” he said in passable English. He handed her a manila envelope—that would be the promised COSCO contract—and a small white box tied with red ribbon.
“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the box.
“I don’t know, fräulein. I was told to give you both of these. And I’m to wait for you to sign something and return it.”
“Wait a moment.”
Closing the door, she took the envelope back to the desk and opened it. As expected, it
was from Feng, three copies of two close-spaced printed pages—more of a letter of agreement than a full-blown contract. She scanned through it quickly, murmuring aloud the pertinent paragraphs for the benefit of the Art Room.
“Looks good and as promised,” she said, completing the document. She picked up a pen and signed all three copies. Two went back into the envelope for return to Feng. She looked at the white box for a moment, then decided to wait until she’d given the envelope back to the bellhop.
She opened the door and handed him the envelope and a generous five-euro tip. “Here you go. Thank you.”
“Danke, Fräulein Lau!”
Lia returned to the desk and picked up the box. “So, is Mr. Feng making a play for me already?” she asked. “Too big for a diamond ring.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to propose marriage,” CJ said. “Are you going to open it?”
“It’s also too small to be a bomb,” she added.
“But not too small to be a listening device of some sort,” Tom Blake said. “Be careful what you say, Lia.”
She didn’t reply, but she set the package in front of her hat, directly beneath the camera, and began opening it.
A moment later, she pulled the contents out and dangled them for Desk Three’s inspection. “Oh, my.”
There was a handwritten note inside the package. For the beach tomorrow, it read, and it was signed Jiu Zhu.
“Are you actually going to wear that?” Marie Telach asked.
“What is it?” CJ said. “I’m blind out here, you know.”
“A bikini,” Lia said. “A very small bikini.” She frankly had her doubts that she would fit into that top. It was electric blue, what there was of it, three triangles of rather sheer blue cloth with black borders and some spaghetti-thin black string.
“It’s too small to hide a listening device, at least,” she said. “Too small to hide much of anything.”
“Another fine item of female apparel from Testosterone Fantasies Are Us,” Marie put in. “You’re not actually going to wear those postage stamps in public, are you?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Lia said. “I’ll have to see if this sort of thing is in my new job description.”
09.Deep Black: Death Wave Page 6