by Rick Acker
The men saw him and quickly became silent.
“Gentlemen, as you know, we have tasted victory this week. The first stage of our mission is complete. Allah has now given us the weapon with which to strike down our enemies. In two weeks, that weapon will be ready to use.” The men glanced at each other, nodding and murmuring in approval.
“But we have also tasted defeat,” Elbek continued. “We lost Shamil, Umar, and Mamed. They are in Paradise, but we who remain are diminished. We are also endangered—the interrogation building is compromised, and the prisoner was rescued by the enemy. We cannot tell how much they know or guess about us and our plans.
“In two weeks, none of this will matter. But for now we are vulnerable, and they are searching for us with all their strength. We must make that search as difficult as possible. Here is what we will do . . .”
“Before we get started, I’m going to give you one last chance to bail out,” Agent Gomez told Ben. “Having classified information will subject you to a lot of rules and regulations that can be a real pain to follow. What I tell you today will probably give you headaches down the road.”
“I’d love to have headaches down the road,” Ben replied. “That’s the point.”
“Fair enough,” said Agent Gomez with a smile. “Our best guess is that we’re dealing with the Vainakh Guard. They’re a fairly new group and they operate out of the mountains of southern Chechnya. To our knowledge, this is their first confirmed operation in the US. It’s a very disturbing development.”
“So what are they?” asked Ben. “Criminals? Terrorists?”
“Both, we think. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about them. There’s a fair amount of smuggling and arms trading that goes on in that area, and we think they may be involved in it. The Russians also blame them for several attacks on convoys and patrols in the Argun Valley, though these appear to be mainly defensive strikes intended primarily to keep authorities away from their bases and smuggling routes.”
“‘Arms trading,’” Ben repeated. “Do you think that’s what they’re doing in Chicago—picking up a new weapon to sell?”
“Could be,” said Agent Gomez.
“But they could also use it?”
“It’s possible, and I can’t think of a group I’d less like to have a weapon like Dr. Ivanovsky described to you. The Vainakh Guard is a new kind of terrorist group, and they’re potentially much more dangerous than traditional groups like Hamas or al-Qaeda. Imagine . . .” He searched for the right analogy. “Imagine an inner-city gang: streetwise and tough, but loosely organized and not very well trained. That’s Hamas. They recruit religious fanatics and teach them how to make crude bombs, handle outdated assault rifles, do some basic hand-to-hand fighting, and stuff like that. They’re kids, really—half-trained, wild-eyed kids.
“Al-Qaeda is on another level. They proved on 9/11 that they’re capable of organizing an operation beyond anything Hamas can do. But they’re still basically religious fanatics with minimal training.
“Now imagine a professional army. That’s the Vainakh Guard. Most of them are former Spetsnaz commandos. They’re the cream of the crop from the old Red Army, specialists in carrying out guerrilla operations and assassinations in Western societies. They have a decentralized but highly efficient command structure that makes them really tough to infiltrate. Also, any member who’s been identified by law enforcement either vanishes or is immediately cut off from the group. They’ve been giving the Russians fits for years now, though they’ve kept a low profile and haven’t tried any major operations.”
“What kinds of things have they done?” asked Ben. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, despite the fact that it was well cushioned.
Agent Gomez looked down at the file spread in front of him. “Other than what I already described, it’s been mostly little stuff—small-scale infiltration of military facilities, breaches of government and business-security systems, and attacks on soft targets in secondary urban centers.”
“Soft targets?”
“Targets with light security: shopping centers, train stations, office buildings—that sort of thing. There may be more incidents that we don’t know about. These were minor attacks, and they might not all have been picked up as terrorist incidents. Here in the US, a lot of what they do might be classified as vandalism or petty crime.”
“So they could have been doing the same thing here for a while, but it just slipped under the radar screen—is that what you mean about this being their first confirmed operation here?” Ben asked.
Agent Gomez nodded.
Ben frowned. “Why would a group like this be into such petty stuff? And if they are, why are they such a threat?”
“Because we do not think they are ‘into petty stuff,’” Agent Ignatev interjected, leaning forward and speaking in precise, clipped tones. “We think they have been testing our defenses—seeing how security systems react to certain kinds of incidents, which threats we spot and which ones we miss, how quickly we respond, and so on.”
“In which case there’s probably a major attack coming, right?” Ben looked at the two agents, hoping they would disagree with him.
“That is why we need to speak to Dr. Ivanovsky as soon as possible,” replied Agent Ignatev.
“Ben! It is very, very good to see you!” Dr. Ivanovsky said. His face wore a happy smile that vanished into a bandage covering a bullet wound and surgical incision on the left side of his head. If the shot had struck a few millimeters to the right, it would have killed him or at least left him severely brain damaged. Other bandages on his torso covered other wounds. One bullet had collapsed a lung and nicked an artery, and he had nearly bled to death on the way to the hospital. Another bullet had lodged in his spine, where it was likely to stay for the rest of his life; its location made it impossible to remove safely.
He had hovered near death for twenty-four hours, but had recovered rapidly since then. “He’s a tough old guy,” one of his surgeons had commented to Ben and Agent Ignatev when they arrived. “Very determined. I think he decided he was going to live, and then he just did it.”
Ben walked over to Dr. Ivanovsky’s bedside and placed his hand lightly on the old man’s shoulder. “It’s great to see you too,” he said. “I’m glad they finally let me in.” He had insisted on meeting alone with Dr. Ivanovsky, at least initially.
“Yes. I argued very much about this. I said, ‘I have the right to my lawyer.’ And they said, ‘You are not arrested; you have no right to speak to your lawyer. Also, this is about terrorism.’ But I said, ‘This is not Soviet Union! This is America—everyone must have lawyers!’ So they let you come. This is good. We have many things to speak about.”
“We do indeed. I haven’t even heard what happened to you on the morning you were shot. The morning you were supposed to come to my office so we could talk about what to do.”
Dr. Ivanovsky looked down. “Yes, okay. I went to the judge’s secretary and she gave me the judgment paper. Then I went to the American Union Bank and I showed this paper to them and they took me to the room with the safe-deposit boxes and gave the key to the box to me. I looked inside the box. There was the lab notes on the procedures to make Variant D and a paper with information for a company named Illinois Cryostorage. So I drive there and show them the paper, and they show me the liquid-nitrogen freezer that Nicki’s brother rented. Inside is the container of the organisms. So I took everything and I began driving to my friend who has very powerful sealed ovens for making experiments with very hot metals and gases and other things. He said he will let me use the oven, but I did not tell him why. I just explained this is very, very important, and he said okay. I planned to make the container very hot to kill the organisms. Then I planned to bury it someplace that no one will find. The notes I planned to burn.”
He glanced up at Ben, then dropped his eyes again. Ben watched him impassively, waiting for h
im to continue. The Russian shrugged his narrow shoulders. “After this, I remember nothing. I was driving on the road, and then I wake up here with much pain. The doctors say maybe I never remember more because of the injuries.”
“I see. And you planned to come to our meeting after burning these notes?”
“Yes, this was my plan,” confirmed Dr. Ivanovsky. “I . . . This was my plan.” He glanced at Ben again, but said nothing more.
Ben suppressed the urge to point out that his client’s plan might have worked a lot better if he had shared it with Ben and asked for his help. “Well, we’re meeting now, and the main item on our agenda is still the same: How do we stop this Variant D from escaping? Our only real option at this point is to work with the federal government to—”
“No!” said Dr. Ivanovsky, shaking his head as vigorously as his injuries would allow. “I have explained this to you before. I do not trust the government to have Variant D. But you are right that we must stop it from escaping. This is very, very important. First, you must—”
“Stop. Wait,” interrupted Ben. “You can’t do this on your own anymore. It’s time to turn this over to professionals.”
To Ben’s surprise, Dr. Ivanovsky nodded. “Yes, I think the same thing. This detective”—he groped for the name—“Spassky. Did you find him? Maybe he can help us to get more professionals.”
“I didn’t find him, but the FBI did. They rescued him on the same morning you were shot. Those are the professionals I’m talking about. They helped Sergei Spassky. Why won’t you let them help you?”
“Help me?” exploded Dr. Ivanovsky. “They make me prisoner here in my hospital bed. Look outside this room and you see men with guns. They ask me many questions with drugs in my blood making my thoughts confused. This is like in the old Lubyanka.”
“Lubyanka?”
“KGB headquarters.”
“You really think you’re being treated like a KGB prisoner?” Ben asked incredulously.
His client nodded stubbornly.
Ben pointed at the door. “Those men are there to keep terrorists out, not to keep you in. And I’ll bet the drugs in your system were put there by the doctors as part of your treatment.”
“I am sure KGB had similar explanations. And why they will not let me speak with my lawyer?”
“That bothers me some,” Ben conceded.
“You see, I told you—they are all the same!”
“No, but even if they were, so what?” Ben responded. “It would be better for this weapon to be in the hands of the KGB than in the hands of terrorists.”
“But best for it to be in my hands and then destroyed,” countered Dr. Ivanovsky. “We should not speak of this again. I have decided this.”
“You still think you can handle this?” Ben asked in disbelief. “Look at yourself! Look at what you’ve done! You single-handedly alerted Russian criminals to the fact that the key to an Armageddon bug was sitting in a forgotten safe-deposit box. I managed to stop them from giving the bug to terrorists, but you took care of that too, didn’t you? You decided to go behind my back and do things by yourself again—and you not only delivered the bug to the terrorists on a silver platter, you nearly got yourself killed in the process. Don’t you think that maybe, just maybe, you should trust someone else’s judgment for a change?”
“I have decided it,” Dr. Ivanovsky repeated, his face frozen in a stony, defiant frown.
“You have decided?” said Ben. “You have decided? And who gave you the right to make that decision? Who gave you the right to make life-or-death decisions for thousands, maybe millions, of people? You think you’re God?”
“You have no place to say such things! I am in church every Sunday. I pray to God and—”
“But you don’t trust him, do you?” interrupted Ben. “You don’t trust the FBI, you don’t trust the military, you don’t trust me—not when it really matters, anyway—and you don’t even trust God, do you? At the end of the day, when things are really on the line, the only person you trust is yourself. Isn’t that right?”
“I do not need to answer such questions from you!” shot back Dr. Ivanovsky, almost yelling. “You are my lawyer, and you will help me with this thing or you will not help me. This is all we must speak about.”
Ben took a deep breath to calm himself. “I’ll help you, but not like this. I will do everything in my power to ensure that Variant D is never used, but the way to do that is to work with the government. Not against them. I will not help you try yet again to handle this on your own. That hasn’t worked before, and it won’t work now.”
“Then we have nothing more to speak about. You are not my lawyer anymore. Go away.” He turned to face the wall until Ben left the room.
“That could have gone better,” Ben said as he crossed the hospital parking lot with Agent Ignatev and Elena.
“I had hoped that he might be a little more flexible after what happened to him,” said Elena.
“So had I,” said Ben. “He’s stubborn, but he’s not stupid. Maybe I pushed him a little too hard. I wish I’d had more time to work on him.”
“We do not have more time,” replied Agent Ignatev. “If there is a way to get more information from him, you need to try it now.”
Ben shook his head. “No, that bridge is burned to the ground. He wouldn’t even look at me when I left his hospital room. Have you guys managed to get anything out of the Brothers?”
“Do you know where they are?” asked Elena.
Ben gave a dry smile. “Did you try the Chicago River?”
“Yes.”
Anton Brodsky didn’t like Vetlugorsk much. It was a small, featureless town made up of small, featureless buildings constructed during the Brezhnev era. Its inhabitants were mostly middle-aged factory workers and their fat, unattractive wives. The town’s one redeeming feature was a vodka distillery, which kept the local liquor store and bars well stocked.
Anton had a cousin in Vetlugorsk who had agreed to hide him until Dmitry decided it would be safe for them to return to America—or to at least regroup in one of Russia’s larger cities. Anton had no idea when that would be, so he sat in his cousin’s extra bedroom day after day, drinking local vodka and watching soap operas. His favorite was General Hospital. The dubbing was particularly bad and he could make a game out of guessing what the characters were really saying by reading their lips.
Winter had come early to Vetlugorsk this year. The winds howled off the steppe, bringing swirling snow and leaden skies. The townsfolk wrapped themselves with sweaters, coats, and scarves until they were shapeless gray blobs, scurrying along the windy streets like giant woolen tumbleweeds.
The cold and snow were a blessing for Anton, though. While doing his compulsory military service, he had learned to cross-country ski and enjoyed it. He had not been able to ski much when he lived in big cities like Moscow and Chicago, but Vetlugorsk was surrounded by empty, snow-covered fields. His hosts were relieved to have him out of the house for at least part of the day, so they managed to find a set of secondhand skis and ski boots that fit him. He spent hours crisscrossing the stubbled fields and empty white grasslands outside of town.
Most mornings he would pack a couple of sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, a bottle of vodka, a gun, and a box of bullets into a knapsack. He would drive off in the family’s second car and spend the short sunlit hours outside. When he got tired of skiing and drinking, he would shoot at the sparse wildlife (mostly crows and rabbits) or road signs until he ran out of bullets. Then he would drive back to the house, turn on the TV, and open a new bottle of vodka.
When he went skiing, he always parked the car along the same lonely stretch of road. And when he came back half-drunk in the early dusk, he never checked for bombs or mechanical tampering. Neither fact escaped the notice of certain watchful eyes.
Elena checked her voice mail as she and Oleg Ignatev
drove to Anthony Simeon’s office to interview him.
“Anything?” Oleg asked her when she turned off her cell phone.
She shook her head. Investigators had found an address scribbled on a scrap of paper in the pocket of one of Sergei’s guards. They had raided the building at that address, but it was empty and completely, meticulously clean: no fingerprints, no paper, no hair, no trash. In a word, no evidence. The building was also in a sparsely leased light-industrial park and conveniently had no neighbors to interview. Forensics experts and other investigators had scoured the building and neighborhood for two weeks but didn’t find anything. “Whoever cleaned out that building was very thorough. There aren’t even tire marks in the parking lot.”
Oleg nodded, but remained silent. He was normally an analyst, not an investigator, and therefore had nothing to contribute on this point. “Do you think we will be able to get any additional information from Anthony Simeon?”
“Maybe. When we interviewed him before, we were primarily interested in finding Sergei Spassky. We knew there was a chance that his clients were involved because of Sergei’s work on the Ivanovsky lawsuit, but that’s all we knew. Of course, we didn’t know about the link between the Chechens and the Brothers, so we didn’t ask him about that.”
“And now he is probably the only one left that we can ask.”
When they had returned to the Dirksen Building after Ben’s failed interview with Dr. Ivanovsky, they had found two overseas transmissions waiting for them. One was from an FBI legat and the other from the CIA station chief in Moscow. Both reported the same information: all three of the remaining Brothers had been killed in nearly simultaneous attacks inside Russia. Their lawyer was now the last lead.