The plane touched down at Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow, a harsh, stark structure that could have been located anywhere from Paris to New York City. Without the need to wait for luggage, I made a single stop to exchange two hundred dollars into rubles and stepped out to the curb to flag down a taxi.
The driver, an older man with tufts of graying hair and a handful of teeth in his entire head, made no attempt at small talk after learning I spoke only English, and he drove me the twenty minutes to the closest metro station, relieving me of a hundred rubles. From there I ducked underground and hopped a train toward downtown, moving slowly, acting as nonchalant as I could manage.
Inside me, two emotions fought for the upper hand, both threatening to explode out at any moment. The first was anxiety. The Bloks had known exactly what we were doing from the moment things got started. There was a better-than-not chance they knew I was on the ground, using an alias to book the ticket be damned. I had done my best at countersurveillance the entire time, using every reflective surface I could to monitor my tail, eyes darting back and forth, hidden behind my sunglasses, but I was far from infallible, especially in a city I didn’t know well.
The other emotion was anger, a bear in hibernation within me, a cranky monster that was ready to finally explode forward and claim what it had been waiting so long for. Five long years I had managed to keep it dormant, removing all major stressors, cleansing my life of any remnants from the past. Everything that I had encountered in recent weeks, though, starting with being shot at and encompassing every site and person from my past, had brought it all rushing back, five years of residual animosity heaped in with it.
I chose a corner seat in the last car in the train and put my back to the wall, removed my sunglasses, and counted the minutes in my head. My posture slouched and I pretended to doze, all the while watching every face that entered and exited, filing away anything suspicious.
If somebody was tailing me and using a team approach, there would be no way for me to know it. Being stuck in the corner of an underground train would be the worst possible place in the world for me, at least for the next hour or so anyway, but there was nothing I could do about that.
Most of the crowd departed the train at Red Square, tourists and sightseers off for a morning of roaming the country’s most famed attraction. I remained in place as a new wave of people entered, carbon copies of the people headed away from the Square, off to cross the next item from their to-do lists.
Two stops after the Square, I exited the train and surfaced three blocks west, taking my time, roaming in and out of a handful of different shops. I bought a glass bottle of what appeared to be tea in one, a candy bar and a newspaper in another. All three items were plastered in Russian writing, none of it decipherable to me, though that was hardly the point.
Six minutes before nine o’clock, local time, I appeared on the northwest corner of Red Square and walked along the outer edge of it. To my right was the sprawling expanse of the Kremlin outfitted in dark brick, a single spire of an oversized clock tower rising from the center. Scads of guards could be seen manning every gate, standing at attention, oblivious to the blustery winds already pushing across the Square.
Large handfuls of tourists were clumped up into herds around the outside of it, guides in garish outfits explaining the building and its architecture in a dozen different languages, pictures being taken by the hundreds.
In front of me rose Saint Basil’s Cathedral, its multicolored domes twisting up toward the sky. The gray overcast of the early morning did nothing to diminish its magnificence as it sat like a dazzling beacon on the end of a sea of brick and concrete, beckoning people to it.
As inviting as the structure may have appeared, my destination lay much closer, sitting alone on a bench halfway between the two landmarks. Hunched over in a wool overcoat, collar flipped up to the ears, he tossed out small bits of bread crumbs as a flock of pigeons hopped around before him and snatched them up.
Six years had passed since I’d last seen Xavier Doss. Like with me, the first hints of middle age were starting to set in, though he could still pass for late twenties if need be. His cocoa-colored skin was free from lines save a few crow’s feet around the eyes, and his dark hair was shorn close to his scalp.
I slid down onto the bench beside him without extending a hand in formal greeting; the gesture would have been far too obvious to anybody that might be watching. The bench seat felt cold beneath me as I settled onto it, watching the birds hop around in front of me.
“X.”
“Hawk,” he replied, flinging another clump of bread crumbs onto the ground. “Nice haircut.”
A half smile tugged at my mouth as I kept my gaze aimed forward, watching throngs of tourists and government workers all scurry by, heavy coats and dark colors already starting to make their first appearances of the season. If I was staying longer than a day or two I would have to purchase something much the same, as my suit jacket was already proving inadequate to the brisk wind blowing over us.
“Thanks for meeting me,” I said. “I didn’t even know for sure if the line was still good.”
“Just barely,” X said simply. His voice was free of judgment or accusation, not even a hint of curiosity. I had asked for the meeting, and therefore whatever transpired therein was going to be on me.
Xavier and I had worked together briefly during our initial training at the agency. As former military personnel with fight training, I was winnowed toward being a field agent, bouncing around the globe, mixing things up on the ground. Coming from the Ivy League and three years spent on Wall Street, Xavier was made an analyst. He was inserted into the Moscow branch of an American brokerage house, used to monitor any suspicious financial dealings going on in Asia.
While his skill set might not have aligned exactly with my current mission, he was an ally, which was what I needed most at the moment. Even if he couldn’t help me directly, I knew he wouldn’t do anything to get me killed, either.
“You still involved?” I asked.
“Six more months,” he said, twisting away a crust of bread and tossing it, three pigeons diving toward it at once.
I nodded. That would put him at almost ten years in, which was the standard career mark for most people abroad. After that they either circled back home for a nice cushy desk job or left the agency entirely, a sparkling letter of recommendation in their dossier.
“Congratulations. Moving home or moving on?”
“Home for now,” X replied, his face aimed away from me, his gaze shifting every few seconds, no doubt scanning the crowd as much as I was. “Maybe on thereafter, haven’t decided yet. Just need to get out of here.”
“Too cold?” I asked.
“Too white,” he corrected. “The snow, the people, all of it. Time to be closer to normality for a while.”
The words weren’t exactly what I wanted to hear, issued as a subtle hint for me not to do something that could potentially jeopardize his last bit of time in-country.
“Point taken,” I said. “I guess I’ll just jump right in—you can decide if there’s any way to assist me or if we stand and walk in opposite directions, part as friends.”
A small snort rolled out of X. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” I said. “Regardless of what happens in the next five minutes, I’ll buy you dinner in Washington the next time I’m there.”
A long moment of silence passed as he considered the proposal. He twisted the last bit of bread in two and tossed both pieces out, wiping his hands clean against each other.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
At this point I wasn’t even sure where that was, so I started where I knew I could get the biggest punch. Hopefully it would be enough to draw him in.
“I found who killed my family.”
He cocked an eyebrow in my direction for a split se
cond before shifting back to watching the square. “I wasn’t aware you were looking. Last I heard, you were off playing mountain man.”
There was no way of telling if my plan had any effect on him at all, hardly the response I was hoping for.
“I wasn’t. They found me.”
“Aw, hell,” he muttered beside me, a trace of a groan present in his voice.
Seizing on it as the opening I needed, I jumped ahead to the opposite end of the story, hoping the two would be enough to make him care about the middle. “What do you know about Krokodil?”
“Aw, hell,” X repeated, shaking his head. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, a sour expression on his face. “The simplest way of putting it is the evil, ugly younger sibling of meth. Truly vile stuff, the kind of thing you wish could be un-invented.”
My eyebrows rose a bit on my forehead. I had never encountered Krokodil, but I had seen enough encounters with meth in the States and abroad to know it was pretty abhorrent, the low-class form of crack. Saying this stuff was even worse took things to an entirely new level.
“Why? What have you got?” X pressed.
“The last case I was working was the Juarez cartel out of Mexico,” I said. I left out the part about my leaving and why, all information he already knew.
He had sent flowers to the funeral. I don’t remember much from that time, but I remember they were nice.
“Couple years back a crew out of Vladivostok, the Bloks, came in, said to be looking for a North American partner.”
“And they took over the Juarez cartel, kept the distribution network for themselves,” X finished.
“You know them?” I asked, focusing in on a young couple walking hand in hand across the concrete, both wearing knee-high black leather boots. I watched them a moment before moving on, shaking my head.
“Naw,” X said, “Vlad is five-and-a-half thousand miles from here. This isn’t like the States, where giant networks have fingers throughout the whole country. Here, everybody has their square they snatched up after the Cold War when things were going to shit. For the most part they keep to it, operating within their own territory.”
“But I’m guessing by the way you put that together, if they have a chance to expand, they move in and take over,” I added.
“Like parasites,” X said. “They keep to themselves, but they’re always on the watch for opportunities, always have their guard up on their own situation.”
It made sense. Everything from looking to expand across the ocean to the way they’d muscled out the Juarezes tracked with what X was saying. Nothing about their actions was malicious or personal; that was just how business was done.
“How big you talking?” X asked.
I lifted my palms to the sky and let them fall back to my thighs, letting him know I wasn’t exactly sure. Another gust of wind blew in from the west, raising goose pimples along my arms and sending a shiver down my spine.
“Enough to feed California,” I said. “And all signs seem to indicate they’re ready to move now.”
“Aw, hell,” he repeated once more, running a hand back over his head, his close-cropped hair sounding rough against his palm. “What’s your next move?”
“Heading across right after this,” I said.
I didn’t bother to say that I would need some help. I didn’t have to. The fact that I had called and asked for a meeting five thousand miles from my final destination should have made that obvious.
In my periphery, I could see X’s head bob a few inches, a rapid-fire movement up and down. His lips pursed out as if tasting something bitter, his expression matching it.
“You know you’re alone on this, right?” he asked. “If you find the mother lode, you call us and we’ll send the cavalry, but until then we can’t be involved. That’s not how things work here.”
I nodded in agreement. I had known that since getting on a plane the day before, since deciding to come to Russia a few hours before that. They had an international agency to run, one that was predicated on respecting the host countries we visited. If ex-agents began running rogue operations under the official banner, DEA access would be cut off completely, something that could ill afford to happen.
“That being said,” he continued, “there is a bay of lockers on the second level of the rail station eighteen blocks from here. Automated pass keys. Little care package inside that might help you on your journey.”
My first reaction was to smile, or to reach over and shake his hand, but I managed to keep both in check. I nudged my chin downward an inch in thanks, already mapping out the eighteen blocks from here to there in my head.
“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“I know,” he replied. “But if you really want to thank me, be right. And remember this conversation when you confirm it.”
Once more I nodded in affirmation, his point clear. This was the kind of thing that could submarine his career, or it could fast-track him out of the country. There was no way I would do the former, but if I could help bring about the latter I would.
“I’ll see you soon,” I said, rising from the bench and walking back the way I’d come, not once looking back as I went.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
As far as secret pass codes go, X’s choice left a little something to be desired. While our history together wasn’t terribly deep or nuanced, he could have managed something better than H-A-W-K-T-A-T-E. If anybody had been watching on his end, that would have effectively ended things for me right there.
As good fortune would have it, nobody had.
The care package that was stowed away was a simple black briefcase, leather, the combination lock on either side reset to triple-zero. Without bothering to open it, I pulled it from the locker and made my way downstairs, purchasing a firmenniy ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway line to Vladivostok. I paid in cash, using most of my remaining rubles, without giving a name or anything that could be tracked.
Using the train was much slower than returning to Sheremetyevo and catching a one-way to Vladivostok, though it was worth it to maintain the anonymity. By this point the Bloks, if not a host of other people, were bound to know I was in-country. On paper, I had been in Moscow for only a couple of hours, meaning the odds of me headed elsewhere yet weren’t good. Their guard would be down for the time being; they’d loosely monitor the airports, waiting for me to catch a plane back.
Halfway across Russia, I contacted Pally and asked him to book my alias a flight from Moscow to Kiev, set to board later in the day. I deliberately chose a city that was close enough to be believable, hoping that they might be lulled into thinking I caught a phony trail, was following it up in neighboring Ukraine.
With any luck, by that point I would be on the ground in Vladivostok and moving into position as the cover of night fast approached.
I waited six hours into my journey, long after the city lights of Moscow had faded, the snow-covered Urals whipping by outside my window, before finding a private sleeper stall. Until that time I remained in a public coach, watching every person who came and went, monitoring anybody whose gaze lingered, anyone who passed through more than once. Just twice did my radar pick up even the slightest hint of suspicion, each time confirming the target was not a threat.
Tucked away in my own space, I flipped each of the numbered combination codes to 4-5-1, the numerical correspondents to the acronym DEA. While not the most sophisticated system in the world, it worked efficiently for purposes such as this, when there was no call for passing along a combination, for putting anything into writing.
The silver clasps both flew open, and the top lifted back with the slight cracking sound of new leather prying upward. The matching scent came with it, the familiar smell of premium cowhide mixed with cold metal.
One look inside and I instinctively lowered the lid back into place, checking the doo
r for a long moment, making sure nobody was about to enter. I sat waiting, my breath held, feeling a bit less apprehensive now that I knew what was inside the case just a few inches from my hand.
Outside, the world continued to move past, the foreground whipping by in fast succession, the peaks in the distance remaining stationary. The terrain reminded me of Yellowstone in wintertime: everything shrouded in white, pine trees weighed down with large tufts of snow.
Raising the lid once more, I assessed what lay inside, a veritable cornucopia of needed items. If somehow the next twenty-four hours passed and I was still breathing, I would make it a point to repay X in any way I could, over and above helping him get free of his Russian exile.
Framing the top and bottom of the case were a pair of Heckler & Koch Mark 23 handguns, a noise suppressor screwed into the end of each. One at a time I raised them and checked the slide and the feed, noting by their weight that they were already loaded.
An extra pair of magazines sat beside both of them, twelve rounds each, giving me a total of forty-eight bullets. There was no way of knowing how many I might need, but it was a reasonably safe assurance that I would be lucky to even get that many shots off before meeting my end.
Besides, trying to carry more than one spare magazine each would just be cumbersome.
Beside the guns was a Garra II folding knife, a nod from X to our previous life together, a joke going back to our first days in training. With one hand, I snapped the weapon open and examined the curved blade, a serrated edge on the inside, a razor sharp hone on the outside. While I had often preferred the straight-ahead style of the Marine K-Bar, many in my class had assumed I preferred the Garra for its hawksbill blade.
At the moment, I was just happy to have anything at all.
I placed the knife down and picked up the boxy gray satellite phone beside it. I thumbed it on and scrolled through the directory, finding a single number programmed in. Assuming it to be his, I closed out of the phone book and rested the phone in my lap, then pulled out the last item in the case.
Cold Fire Page 21