The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  When Dima entered, he was standing at the window behind his desk, staring out at the saints alone knew what. His hands were clamped at the small of his back. As Dima stepped into the carpeted office, Gurin closed the door behind him.

  The space was the polar opposite of Dima’s. The walls were crowded with photos—photos of the director general with every member of the Politburo, either in a group or singly, but pride of place was reserved for Baev with the Sovereign, the leader of Mother Russia, the most powerful man within the Federation. If these photos were meant to intimidate the visitor, they succeeded admirably.

  Dima stood for some time waiting for Baev to turn around. When he didn’t, Dima cleared his throat, said, “You wished to see me, Director General?”

  At the sound of his voice, Baev turned. “Did I?” He appeared to be actually considering this, which unnerved the already-on-edge Dima.

  Abruptly, Baev snapped out of it, “Ah, yes. Dima, do you know why my office is on the first floor?”

  Dima did not answer; an answer was neither required nor expected.

  “Below here is the prison,” Baev continued. “Sometimes I can feel its vibration—the vibrations of pain, of suffering, of men breaking, men on the point of dying, men begging for their lives.” He unfolded his hands from the small of his back, pointed a finger in the air. “When one chooses a life of crime, of dissidence, of betraying the State, there are consequences of the most serious nature. Do you not agree, Dima Nikolaevich?”

  “I do, Director General.”

  “Do you find those vibrations as gratifying as I do, Dima Nikolaevich?”

  Baev grinned, a particularly terrifying sight. He gestured, coughing or laughing, it was impossible to tell which. “Come, come, sit. Be comfortable.”

  Having done just about everything in the first few minutes to ensure Dima’s discomfort, this last was a sublimely ironic statement. Not lost on Dima, the charade made Dima hate Baev all the more. Baev was unspeakably difficult to work for, let alone work with. Dima never knew what he was thinking, never knew what his decisions would be on issues big or small. He had, to put it another way, not even the vaguest inkling of Baev’s process or method. He always came to a meeting in the dark and left it without the light of knowledge he needed.

  Baev had left the window and fastidiously seated himself behind his desk. As he was sitting down, Dima saw a dossier open on the desk. It was a black-jacketed folder, and though he couldn’t see it, Dima knew that it had a red stripe across the upper corner. It was the dossier on Directorate 52123, better known to him—and surely to Baev as well—as the Kobalt dossier.

  He stared at the open folder as Baev tapped it with the perfectly manicured nail of his forefinger. In a low, calm voice, he said: “This dossier is close to both our hearts, Dima Nikolaevich, would you not agree?”

  Dima nodded. “I would, Director General.” No one knew Baev’s given or patronymic names or, more accurately, no one inside the Lubyanka would use them either in front of the director or behind his back. That was an unwritten rule of the FSB as stringently adhered to as insistently refuting the existence of Zaslon.

  “It’s also been not only a priority of yours, but one that has been locked away from the world both inside the Lubyanka and outside. Is this not so?”

  “It is, Director General.”

  “And you have made every effort to keep it that way, is this not also so?”

  “Of course, Director General.”

  Baev’s fist came down on the desk so hard the dossier rose into the air for a brief shaky flight. “Then how the fuck has it been lifted?”

  “Lifted?” Confusion made Dima sound like an idiot.

  “There’s been an infiltration of the SVR server, Dima Nikolaevich!” Baev thundered. “A black infiltration.”

  The modifier black sent a chill through Dima’s bones. Red meant an infiltration from within the FSB. Black meant the infiltration came from outside the Lubyanka.

  He stood up, bent over, placing his own fists on Baev’s desk. “Have we been able to trace the infiltration back via an ISP address?”

  “Don’t be naïve. So far we’ve been led around in an electronic circle.” Baev shook his head. “All we do know is that this is a private enterprise, definitely no hallmarks of it being state-run. And in any case, none of the usual suspects …” he counted off on his fingers “… China, North Korea, Israel, Iran. Forget GCHQ, the British don’t have the expertise. None of them have any knowledge of Kobalt, let alone interest.”

  By this time, Dima’s armpits were shamefully wet. Beads of sweat rolled down his spine. And yet his mouth was as dry as the Gobi Desert. He straightened up and coughed into his fist before he found his voice. “Which means—”

  Baev tapped the Kobalt dossier, this time with a knuckle. “Which means that whoever poached the dossier has penetrated Kobalt’s identity. Find out who that is and terminate them at once.”

  “Eminently, Director General.”

  *

  Ilya Ivanovich Gurin watched Dima’s hasty retreat out of the corner of his eye. Then with a smirk he rose from behind his narrow desk and entered his boss’s office, where Baev was talking low and indistinctly on a mobile phone. He held a hand up and Gurin remained in place by the closed door. Shortly thereafter, Baev’s call ended. He put away the mobile and beckoned Gurin over.

  “You put the fear of God into Dima, sir,” he said as he came to attention before Baev’s desk.

  Baev sat down but did not give his adjutant leave to do so. “For the love of Stalin, Ilya Ivanovich, get your head out of my butt.”

  Gurin, who had endured much worse during his tenure with Baev, said nothing, steeled himself to brush aside whatever he was feeling. There was an office pool as to how long he’d last as Baev’s adjutant. It had taken the last man just three weeks to be fired, and the one before that a little over a month. Gurin had been at it four months already and had pissed off fully nine-tenths of the pool’s participants whose guesses had long expired. There was a sense of pride in this, but also of shame for the verbal abuse he was required to put up with. Every hour of every day that mountain of abuse grew higher, blotting out the horizon that might have been Gurin’s future had he stayed in FSB narcotics, instead of excitedly transferring into SVR where it felt as if he was required to navigate the confusing intrigues at the court of a Byzantine emperor.

  Baev sat back, folded his hands across his stomach, which had not the slightest bulge to it. He watched his adjutant like a hawk circling its prey.

  “A grave disappointment.”

  Gurin leaned forward slightly. “Kobalt?”

  “Dima.” Baev bit his lower lip, always a bad sign. “Kobalt isn’t a disappointment because nothing was expected of her. She’s Dima’s little ‘experiment.’ The SVR—indeed, the entirety of our clandestine services—is not the venue for experiments.”

  “I agree entirely, sir.”

  He snorted. “You know, your nose is starting to feel nice and comfortable up my ass.” He lifted a forefinger. “But mind I don’t fart. You won’t survive.”

  Gurin’s cheeks flamed, despite his best efforts.

  “Two down,” Baev said now. “Two of your recruits—dead.”

  Gurin noted sourly his boss’s use of “your” instead of “the.” Of course, this was his fault; whose else could it be, certainly not the great Baev.

  “Evan Ryder has proved more … formidable than—”

  Baev smiled thinly. “Gurin, Gurin, Gurin, did you not read the dossier on her. It’s quite comprehensive. Thick as a brick. Ryder has been a knife in our belly for years.” He gestured. “You only have to review the notes on the operation outside St. Petersburg to realize how deadly she is. And as difficult to catch as a will-o’-the-wisp.”

  He splayed his fingers on the desktop just as Kusnetsov had done in their last meeting after the shark swim. “My fear, dear Gurin, is that her sister—the defector—will prove just as deadly. Perhaps even to us.” He
ran the top of his tongue around his lips. “What’s your opinion?”

  “Mine?” Gurin looked taken aback.

  “I’m grooming you for bigger things, Gurin, assuming, that is, you can finish the job on Ryder.”

  “I will not fail you, sir.”

  “Good, good, that’s what I want to hear.” He frowned. “But now, what about Kobalt? She screwed up the Omega remit.”

  “That was a big one to screw up,” Gurin said with a nod. “But was it a deliberate screwup? That’s the question.”

  Baev appeared to consider this for some moments, though the hesitation was strictly for Gurin’s benefit. “Never underestimate the Americans.” He was leading Gurin on, so that he would be certain what happened next was the right course of action. “Their current administration is in disarray—and of course we both see our hand in that—but the career shpiony work, spinning their own webs of deceit.”

  “Sir, if I may, I suspect that Kobalt is the most ambitious operation they have thrown at us in quite some time. But how can we trust her? Evan Ryder and Kobalt are sisters. Blood runs deep, sir.”

  Baev nodded as if he had made up his mind. “Intriguing theory, Gurin, in that event, Kobalt was never what Dima Nikolaevich purported her to be: an asset. She’s a black widow that has invaded our web. The very fact that our central server was breached and the Kobalt dossier accessed proves my point. The Americans are checking up, making sure their mole hasn’t been tumbled.”

  He gave his adjutant a rare smile along with his usual penetrating stare. “So, what do you think? Should we dispatch an SVR field agent to terminate Kobalt?”

  “I think that is the wisest course of action,” Gurin said, stepping into the trap Baev had laid for him. “And, in my opinion, the sooner the better.”

  The trap snapped closed, as Gurin’s tone of voice, the hardening of his eyes, his choice of words all clearly confirmed to Baev his adjutant’s preening ambition and his hostility toward Kobalt. His eagerness to get rid of her turned Baev’s stomach.

  The director held his smile, and Gurin’s eyes with his own, for an unnaturally long time without responding to Gurin’s confidently stated opinion; he took inordinate pleasure in watching this greedy underling squirm in discomfort. Finally, he dropped his gaze to the desktop and said, “Yes, yes, Gurin, but one thing at a time. As Minister Kusnetsov reminded me at our last meeting, our target has been, and is now, Evan Ryder. Using convicted killers from the zone as assassins is a recent innovation I myself sanctioned. It’s brilliant—no connection back to the State. And in this case, necessary. It seemed to me too dangerous to use SVR personnel for this termination.

  “But …” His head came up and his torso surged forward, chest against the edge of the desk. “Two dead. You sent two of these ex-cons, these so-called ‘farm hands,’ to Cologne and what happened, eh. Eh?” He pointed a blunt finger. “That’s on you, Ilya Ivanovich. You chose the men; they failed. Just remember it’s the singer not the song.”

  Gurin made the mistake of giving his boss a bewildered look.

  “My idea is sound, it’s been a success time and again,” Baev said in an irritated tone of voice. “It’s your handpicked executioners who failed.” He put his hands flat on the desk. “Now I choose, Ilya Ivanovich, hear me? You will go to the club where you found the first two assassins. You will wait at the bar for a freelancer named Kata.”

  Gurin blinked. “That club is always packed, sir. How will I find this Kata?”

  “Just stay put.” Baev’s smile was as wide as the Cheshire cat’s. “Kata will find you.”

  35

  BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE

  “Omega murdered your husband and abducted your children,” Lyudmila said. “Have you given any thought as to why Omega would do these things?”

  “To get back at me for infiltrating their compound here in Odessa.”

  “Killing your husband, that I can understand. But what has abducting your children gained them?”

  “Maybe it’s you, Bobbi,” Zherov offered.

  They both looked at him.

  “Isn’t it possible that Omega,” he said, expounding on his theory, “wants to draw you to them.”

  “Into a trap,” Lyudmila added.

  Kobalt’s eyes were alight. “That’s precisely what Omega is doing. But they’ve made a mistake that will prove fatal.” She looked tellingly at Lyudmila. “Omega expects me to hunt my children down. They’re counting on my maternal instincts taking over, making me careless. Making me vulnerable. The very opposite is true. I will find their headquarters—”

  “It’s somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains,” Zherov interjected rashly.

  Kobalt shot him a look that would have stopped a charging rhinoceros in its tracks. It certainly shut him up. But Lyudmila was too quick.

  “If the compound was deserted, how did you find this out?”

  Kobalt did not, at this stage, want to share the fact of Marta’s existence or what she had told them. She still didn’t trust Lyudmila’s motives; she was the most enigmatic person Kobalt had ever encountered. Everything about her was obscure, unknowable. She thought quickly. “It’s a best guess. We found scorched fragments of Romanian liturgical literature. There are a number of remote monasteries, churches, and castles once owned by religious leaders in remote sections of the Carpathians.”

  Lyudmila nodded, drew out her cell, and stepping away, made a call. When she returned, she said, “We’ll soon find out whether this lead is good or a dead end.”

  “I have confidence in it,” Zherov said. Kobalt wanted to punch him. He had no idea the deep water they were in with Lyudmila. Like the shark she was she’d chew him up and spit out the inedible parts as soon as look at him.

  Wanting desperately to change the subject, Kobalt said, “You were going to tell me why you came out of hiding.”

  “Not now,” Lyudmila said.

  She rose abruptly and, without another word, went back up on deck. Keeping well away from her crew, she leaned against the port railing, shook out a cigarette and lit up. She was not much of a smoker, in fact she could take smoking or leave it, but the small movements, the precise ritual, calmed her mind, allowing it to work unencumbered.

  She now had more complete information than either Evan or Kobalt had separately. But it remained unclear to her why, if Omega had indeed abducted Kobalt’s children to gain revenge or leverage on her, they had involved Evan? This was not a question she could put to either sister, as neither was aware of the other. A major difficulty was that, unlike Nemesis, she knew so little about Omega. At every step, her people had come up against a stone wall. A couple of them had been killed trying to dig into the organization. But if Kobalt and Zherov were telling the truth, then she was closer to the nerve center of Omega than she’d ever been.

  She had just learned a basic tenet of field work, an area for which she had had no training and had never been cut out for, mainly because she was simply too beautiful, her face too memorable to allow her to get lost in any flow of people, no matter how large. Hers was a supremely ordered mind. Someone ignorant of her inner workings might have mistaken her mind for that of a bureaucrat. She was far too clever and calculating. She could—and sometimes did—eat bureaucrats for breakfast, one of the aspects that made her too dangerous for the Politburo. She was simply advancing too quickly, especially for a female.

  The problem she was currently grappling with was this: plans are by definition fixed, whereas field work was mutable. What she had learned today was basic to field work but was absent from her own training in the FSB. When in the field, you not only had to have a plan B, but also plans C, D, E, and F, in order to ensure success.

  Everything was going according to her clever and calculated plan until Kobalt’s children were abducted, throwing a gigantic spanner in the works. It was as if a moment ago she was hurtling full speed down the highway she had carefully chosen, and now she had been forced to a halt by a tractor-trailer jackknifed across the road.


  She took the smoke deep into her lungs, let it out in a slow stream. She looked across to the Ukrainian frigate. Its decks appeared nearly deserted, but she wasn’t fooled. The Ukrainian Navy was always on alert.

  When she engineered her own extraction from Russia, she had been freed of so many burdens they were impossible to count. For some time before that, she had prepared herself to continue her clandestine work, which was why she had gathered her own private network around her.

  If what Kobalt had told her regarding her children was true, then her plan was back on track—or would be shortly. In Lyudmila’s opinion nothing good ever came from children—they threw you off course, muddled your mind—made you, in effect, crazy—useless for espionage on any level, especially for field work. During the grueling vetting process three and a half years ago she had gone to great pains to query Kobalt time and again about her attachment to the children she left behind. Time and again, Kobalt had assured her she had no attachment to them whatsoever.

  At that moment, she felt a presence behind her. Kobalt. She did not turn from her contemplation of the Ukrainian ship. She was unsurprised.

  She said nothing; she could wait Kobalt out.

  Kobalt cleared her throat, and Lyudmila knew she was nervous. Kobalt was not alone in that—apart from Evan, most everyone was nervous around her. She possessed that kind of heat lightning. Furthermore, she knew how to deploy it.

  “We’re getting under way soon?”

  Lyudmila contrived not to hear her. “Where is Zherov?”

  “Asleep. We’ve had hardly any rest in thirty-six hours.”

  “And yet here you are.” Her voice was tart and clipped.

  “I, uh … I wanted to talk with you.”

  “And here I am.”

  There was a tense silence between them that she knew Kobalt was struggling to understand. I should write a book, she thought, detailing all the ways to keep people off-balance. I’d call it The Little Bitch Book and put it under lock and key so no one but Evan would learn my secrets.