by Mark Henshaw
It had taken her an hour to carve up the twenty bars of soap she’d found upstairs in the bathroom closet using the box grater that had been in one of the kitchen cabinets, and she had a large bowlful of green shavings to show for her work. A storage can from the garage and a siphon pump had allowed her to extract three gallons of gasoline from the Tiguan. Had it been warmer, she would have used motor oil instead, as gasoline would have started to evaporate after a few hours and reduced the volatility of the end product; but the Russian cold was her friend in that respect.
Napalm had been one of the simpler incendiaries the Agency had taught her to make. It would be harder to make the fuse than the jellied gasoline, but not overly so. The several gallons of household bleach she’d found in the basement would provide her with all of the potassium chlorate she would need for that and there was no shortage of granulated sugar in the pantry.
She’d worried about building an ignitor until she realized that Lavrov’s men would provide that for her when they came.
Barron wouldn’t be happy with what she was about to do, she was sure, but if Lavrov’s men were coming, then the safe house was lost to the Agency anyway. Its only useful purpose now would be to send a message to the general that neither Kyra nor the Agency intended to go out so quietly.
Kyra fetched a large metal pot from its home under the counter and turned on the stove. She uncapped the first bottle of bleach and began to pour it into the pot.
New GRU headquarters
“Your report, Colonel?” Lavrov leaned back in his chair, using his shoulder to hold the phone to his ear. Russian breweries had not mastered the art of the twist cap and opening a bottle took both of his hands.
“We have completed raids on four of the homes that your source identified,” Sokolov said. “All were abandoned, all sanitized. If they truly were CIA safe houses, the evidence of it was thoroughly removed before the custodians left. Impressive, given how little time they must have had.”
“Indeed,” Lavrov said. “It does not matter, Colonel. I expect they will all be abandoned and stripped except one, and it is that one you must find.” The bottle top finally came loose and the general took his first taste. The brew inside was bitter and not quite as cold as he liked it.
“There are six more on the list you gave me, General,” Sokolov advised. “It takes several hours to plan and conduct a proper raid on each one to make sure no one evades capture. It will take at least another day, possibly two to target them all.”
“Understood. No delays, Colonel.”
“Yes, sir,” Sokolov said.
Kyra’s safe house
Kyra set the plastic bucket down and peeled the latex gloves off her hands. The napalm was plastered in every major room of the house. Running the improvised string fuse to each incendiary site was going to take another half hour. Setting up the front, mudroom, and back doors to ignite the entire system would take less than a minute.
An hour later and the job done, Kyra looked to the clock. She still had twelve hours before she had to go out on the street.
The coffee had long since stopped doing its job and Kyra wanted to stumble back up the stairs to the bedroom. She would need some sleep and then some food in her stomach for what came next. But it was not safe to stay, as tempting as the soft bed was. Kyra might easily wake up to find the Spetsnaz standing over her, or, more likely, the house burning around her if the ignition system worked as she’d planned.
She could sleep in the Tiguan after she’d found some hidden field miles from here. Her last chore here was to turn on the shortwave transmitter, tuned to the frequency she’d used to talk to Lavrov last night, and leave it on. Then she would drive out. The Spetsnaz would come—
A telephone rang.
Her mind hazy from lack of sleep, she needed several seconds to realize that it wasn’t any ringtone on her cell. No, it was the house phone. Headquarters? she thought. Langley surely had the number, but Barron wouldn’t be so stupid as to call her on an open, unencrypted line.
She stumbled off in search of a handset, finally finding one on the sixth or seventh ring, having lost count. The caller ID showed nothing.
Answer it? she wondered.
Why not? Jon’s voice in her mind said. You’re heading out the door anyway and not coming back.
She picked it up, then froze in place, realizing too late that she didn’t know how to answer a call in Russian or whether there was any kind of security phrase assigned to this location.
The caller saved her the embarrassment. “You are American?” the man asked. His voice was disguised, digitized somehow.
Kyra said nothing. “You must leave house if you are American,” the voice said, the man’s English accented and broken. “They are coming to your safe site. You have maybe one hour, maybe more, but they come and they arrest you. You must leave now.”
She heard a click on the other end, then a dial tone, and she stared at the phone in her hand. Kyra set it back in the cradle.
It had not been some mistaken caller dialing the wrong number. The man had expected that an American would answer, which meant he’d known that he was calling a safe house. That, together with the fact that he had been able to get the telephone number, which was unlisted, yelled that the caller was someone who had access to official information.
But he’d spoken quickly, not waiting for a response from her, but simply had spilled what he knew and cut the call. Worried that someone might hear him? she wondered. Then she understood. The caller hadn’t merely been someone with access to official information. No, counterintelligence information.
There was a mole in Lavrov’s operation. Someone knew about Lavrov’s operations against the Agency.
Someone Maines didn’t give up? Someone he didn’t know about? she wondered. Or maybe just someone Lavrov hadn’t arrested yet, but that seemed unlikely. If there was anyone in a position to know about his counterintelligence operation, Lavrov would have been a fool not to neutralize that traitor first. No, there was someone in the Kremlin, maybe the GRU, who was moving against Lavrov and who wasn’t on whatever list Maines had given up.
Kyra checked the caller ID again and cursed the empty display. The caller might have been someone who could help her find out what had happened to Jon. The ID might have given her somewhere to start, some bit of information she could have used to reconnect with the Russian caller, whoever he was.
The quiet of the house seemed hostile to her now, the shadows of the hallway oppressive. Maybe one hour, she repeated in her mind.
The adrenaline surge cleared her mind and her vision. She ran across the hallway to the equipment room, threw the door open, grabbed for the satellite phone, and began stabbing at the keypad. The call connected, encrypted, and she heard an American accent for the first time in days.
“Operator.”
“This is site GRANITE,” Kyra announced. “I have reason to believe this location will be raided within the hour. All remaining equipment and papers will be sanitized and I am evacuating.”
“Roger, copy that,” the male voice on the other end said. “To which other site will you evac?”
Kyra sucked in a deep breath. “None of them. All sites in this area have been compromised.”
The man on the other end was professional enough to keep his thoughts to himself about that. “Copy that, all sites in your immediate area compromised. Are you requesting evac from the country?”
“Negative. I’m heading for the embassy.”
“Copy that, good luck and stay safe.” The operator disconnected the call.
Kyra pulled the crypto card from the phone and stuffed it in her pocket. Breaking down the sat phone and its antenna took her less than a minute. That job done, she sat down in front of the classified computer and launched the program that would wipe the hard drive. The machine made her confirm twice that she really wanted the program to execute. She told it yes both times and the machine obediently began to overwrite every file on the system.
The fil
e-deletion utility reported that it needed ten minutes to chew up all of the encrypted data on the hard drive.
Ten minutes. It had been almost forty-five minutes since the anonymous Russian had called. She looked out the windows toward the main road, saw nothing. Kyra pulled the chair to the window, sat down, and stared out, waiting for the enemy to come. The watch on her wrist showed the seconds passing by more slowly than she had ever thought possible.
• • •
The hard-drive utility reported that it had finished its work on time, which Kyra thought was no small miracle. She powered the machine down, pulled the removable hard drive from its chassis, and fed it and the sat phone’s crypto card into the industrial shredder in the storage closet connected to the room. The sounds of grinding metal were, at once, the most hideous and beautiful noise Kyra had ever heard as the shredder turned the drive platters into shavings. The shredder finished dining on the storage device and the card, and Kyra powered it down.
She ran for the garage.
• • •
It truly was an enormous house by Russian standards, and if it was a CIA safe house, Anton Semyonovich Sokolov could not fathom why the Americans had chosen it. The gates and fence provided no true security from the security forces, as the Spetsnaz had just proven by climbing the iron spikes, and the relative wealth on display could only draw attention. Perhaps the Agency had expected that to deflect suspicion, a daring move in a mind game that had stretched on for decades. Or, perhaps, some mindless bureaucrat had simply had money to burn. Whatever the logic, Lavrov’s source had rendered it moot and cut through the illusions that had kept the building secure.
The sun was behind the trees and the house itself cast a long shadow that reached to the gate, giving the Spetsnaz a dark trail to follow as they ran across the lawn, carbines raised. There was no obvious movement inside the house itself, which was mostly dark. There was a light visible on the upper floor and one in the kitchen, but the rest of the windows were black. The size of the building itself had required every man at his disposal for the raid and two dozen, four teams, were moving into position to enter the house, the rest positioned on the ground to catch anyone who tried to run.
“All teams in position,” the team leader called out over the radio.
Sokolov frowned. “No response from inside?”
“Nyet, Colonel.”
The GRU officer scanned the compound, then looked through his field glasses at the house itself. The light inside let him see into a room on the upper story, and some secondary illumination cast a glow into one of the front rooms on the main level, but there was no movement anywhere. He pursed his lips. Something was amiss, he was sure, but he could not see it.
“Proceed,” he said, finally giving the order.
• • •
At the front, the team leader nodded to the officer heading the stack of four positioned by the door. The lead man nodded, drew back with the heavy sledge in his hands, and slammed the breaching tool forward into the knob. The door shuddered, but held fast. The man pulled back and swung the sledge again, this time battering it against the middle hinge. The door shook again but stayed fixed in place.
“Front door is reinforced,” the team leader reported, speaking into the microphone clipped to his uniform.
“Rear entry is reinforced,” his radio announced. The team behind the house was having no better luck.
“Side entry is reinforced.” A different voice this time, same report.
“Garage door breached, garage entry to the house is reinforced and door is secured with a keypad.”
• • •
So it is a safe house, Sokolov told himself. Or the owner is very paranoid. Probably a criminal who should be arrested anyway. He raised his field glasses. Still, there was no movement inside the house.
“All teams, proceed with ballistic breach—”
“This is team four,” Sokolov’s radio announced. “The doorframe of the garage entry is reinforced with heavy metal. Hinges are nonstandard. Ballistic breaching round likely will not penetrate. Permission to perform explosive breach.”
Sokolov’s eyebrows went up. The teams all had specialized breaching rounds that vaporized on impact to protect the shooters and teams from ricochet. “Team four, is solid slug an option?”
“Nyet. The first slug almost certainly would not penetrate, and likely would ricochet. I would prefer not to risk that, given that we are standing in an enclosed space.”
Sokolov’s eyebrows went up at that news. They had not run into this particular problem at any of the other reported safe houses. Those had all had wooden doors, solid oak to be sure, but nothing the men hadn’t been able to breach with sledges or shotguns. The specialized shotgun rounds were preferable, as a solid slug fired point-blank from a twelve-gauge shotgun could overpenetrate a door, blowing through the wood and killing a suspect on the other side. That assumed the door was even composed of wood. Someone willing to install a hardened metal doorframe likely would not use a wooden door. The entry likely was a metal plate covered with wood veneer. His teams were trained to fire two rounds at a knob, three at a hinge, just to be sure the chosen weak point of the door was destroyed. Fired into a metal door, those rounds might go in every direction but into the house itself.
Armored against a ballistic breach? Someone is paranoid indeed, he thought. A metal door suggested that they had found one of the Main Enemy’s primary facilities outside his embassy. “All teams, prepare for explosive breach at your discretion,” he ordered through his own mic.
• • •
The team leader in the mudroom pulled a flexible linear charge from his pack. Doing the math in his head, he began to run lines of detonation cord the length of the door, top to bottom by the hinges. One line would have taken apart a hollow door, two would tear apart anything made from particleboard, and three could cut through solid wood. Not knowing how thick the metal core at the door’s center might be, he opted to tape six lines onto the barrier. If that failed, getting through the door would require a specialist to cut through the door with a plasma torch. His team would have to resign itself to guarding the room and preventing any escape while the other teams swept the house.
He ordered his men out of the mudroom, attached the blasting cap, and connected the firing line.
• • •
The team leader at the front door nodded to the stack lead and the line of men while he pulled a two-inch-square block of Semtex from his pack. He fastened the putty brick to the doorknob with a loop of detonation cord connected to the explosive with uli knots. Loose ends of detcord hung down and he tied them into a square knot. He tied in the blasting cap and connected his own firing line, then fell back to his own safe position. Then he tied the detcord line into the fuse initiator.
“First team, breaching charge in place. Standing by to breach.” The other teams reported back within seconds, their own charges fixed and ready to fire.
“Go,” Sokolov ordered.
• • •
The team leader ripped the cotter pin from the initiator, a hard, sharp pull.
The detcord ignited, followed by the Semtex, and flames and smoke exploded from the door, with simultaneous eruptions coming from the rear and side of the house. The explosion inside the garage was deafening and the team leader out front hoped that his counterpart hadn’t miscalculated the explosive required. Overloaded breaching charges had deafened more than one soldier performing such duties.
The front door slammed open and the stack of soldiers rushed forward, carbines raised. They entered the house, pushing through the gray haze—
• • •
The stack leader felt the pressure wave of the igniting gasoline before he smelled it. The room went up in an instant, flames spreading across the floors and walls in every direction. He saw lines of flame travel out of the room into the kitchen, the hallway, the library, faster than he could move.
A large glass jar, sealed with a lid and filled with a co
lored gelatin, sat in the middle of the room, the flames not quite touching it.
“Fall back!” he ordered. “All teams! Evacuate the building now!”
His stack turned and filed out as fast as they could move. The team leader still on the porch jumped the railing and ran with them across the lawn toward Sokolov’s position.
• • •
Inside the front room, the glass jar heated enough to ignite the napalm inside. The makeshift bomb exploded, glass and burning jellied gasoline spreading out to fill the room in a fraction of a second. Identical explosives went off in the kitchen and by the rear and side doors.
The gas trails Kyra had laid down led the open flames to every other room in the house, where the napalm she’d spread across the walls and floors lit off, each starting a small inferno. On the second floor, the gas fumes that had collected since her departure ignited, sending a mild fireball through the upper floor, igniting the napalm puddles and everything else flammable they touched.
With less than a minute, the funeral pyre for Moscow Station was burning against the dusk, smoke rising high enough to be seen from the Kremlin.
• • •
A mile away, Kyra lay prone in a copse on a small knoll, looking at the abandoned estate through her own field glasses. The building was nothing more than a house-shaped flame with men in tactical gear standing at a safe distance, helpless to do anything but watch the immolation.
One man was dressed in civilian clothes, a business suit and overcoat, no hat, and speaking into a phone. She could not make out his features from this distance, but his profile was different enough that she could tell that it wasn’t Lavrov. She’d hoped he would be here to see the safe house burn in person, but she was sure that he’d get the message all the same.
She pushed herself up to standing and walked back to the Tiguan. She tossed the field glasses inside, crawled in, started the engine, and drove across the green field between her and the road, not caring if the soldiers in the distance could hear the engine.
CIA Operations Center
The exact moment of the excited phone call had been a surprise, but the call itself was not. Barron entered the bullpen, his eyes immediately drawn to the array of monitors that covered the front wall. At the moment, they were mated together to display a single image, in this case a live video feed from an orbiting satellite controlled by the National Reconnaissance Office.