Dark Territory

by Leo J. Maloney

  He folded his fingers on the table and offered a nod at Alex’s plate. She dug into her eggs and watched his face.

  “Are you a tourist, Alex?” he asked.

  “I’m a photographer, actually.”

  “How interesting.”

  Alex raised her coffee cup to her lips, but kept her eyes on his.

  “Are you a spy, Uri?”

  He jerked his head back and laughed, but she caught the twitch at the corner of his eyes. Her father had taught her that: use an apparently innocent verbal ambush, then ignore the protests and watch for the telltale signs. He was a spy all right, probably FSB, the modern version of the KGB. Or maybe GRU, military intelligence.

  “What makes you ask that?” he said.

  She raised one shoulder. “Oh, I don’t know. You look like one of those dudes from the Jason Bourne flicks.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “No, I am simply a boring accountant.”

  “Of course.” She jabbed a sausage with her fork and bit off the end.

  The waitress returned with Uri’s breakfast. He carefully unfolded a white cloth napkin onto his lap and joined Alex in devouring eggs.

  “So, Alex,” he said between bites. “When do you plan to get off?”

  “That’s a rather personal question.” Another trick of the trade from her dad. Hit him with an idiom and you’ll find out quickly how deep his language skills are. If he gets it, he’s probably spent lots of time in the States. But Uri didn’t, and his handsome forehead creased.

  “It is? I apologize …”

  “Irkutsk.” Alex smiled again as she lied. “I might shoot something from the windows, but mostly I plan to relax.”

  “Very good. I am also going to Irkutsk.”

  I’ll bet you are, she thought. Or anywhere else I say that I’m going. She wondered if he’d been set on her tail due to the Hyo affair, but somehow she didn’t think so. If he were really after her, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near her, or even smiled at her back at her car.

  Just then Sasha came back through the dining car, and when he saw that she was sitting with a man, he gave her an admonishing grandfatherly look. She returned it with an expression that said, It’s not my fault I’m cute, and he passed by with his nose turned up.

  “Well, it’s a long ride,” said Alex as she finished her breakfast and dabbed at her lips with her napkin. “Maybe we’ll cross paths again.” As she shouldered her backpack and slipped out of the booth, Uri raised himself up an inch in politeness.

  “That would be pleasant,” he said. “I have heard they play cards here at night.”

  “Be careful with me,” she said. “You might lose your shirt.” With that, she turned and headed back to her berth, hoping for a very boring, very restful, three days of nothing.

  * * * *

  The meal took its toll, as well as the previous long mission nights with keyed-up nerves and no sleep. She slept for another two hours—on her back with her head on a brocade pillow, stocking feet facing the door—covered up with the quilt, but loosely gripping her knife underneath. It was a delicious nap, like being rocked in a cradle, with the sounds of the clicking train wheels and warm winter light seeping through the closed curtains.

  But around 1:00 pm, she snapped her head up, fully awake. Her sliding door was locked, but someone outside was turning a large iron key in the hole. The door hissed open and Sasha the conductor stepped inside. He closed the door and stood there staring down at her, with a very strange expression on his slabby face.

  “What is it, Sasha?” Alex sat up on her elbows.

  “That man that you ate your meal with,” he said in a heavy whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “He is dead.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spartan kicked Dan Morgan in the groin.

  The blow, delivered with the top of her foot where the laces criss-crossed her boxing shoe, lifted him off his feet about an inch and gushed a grunt from his lungs. Thankfully, he was wearing a cup under his suit, but the blow surprised him. It surprised her too.

  “Why’d you let me do that?” Spartan demanded in an accusatory tone. She stood back and jammed her fists to her hips, with a hard rubber training blade clutched in her right hand. Her spiky blond hair looked particularly wild today, and she was wearing black spandex leggings and a cut-off black tee, showing her muscled arms coiled with tattoos.

  “I didn’t let you,” said Morgan as he winced and re-adjusted his cup. “I screwed up. Thought you were going to use the knife.”

  “I was, but you’ve got a blade too.” Spartan rolled her eyes. “You’re the one who’s always telling us if you see a blade, use your feet first.” She jutted her square jaw at his duds. “I think it’s that suit. You can’t fight in a tie.”

  “Oh really?” Morgan cocked his head and twirled his own training blade in his fingers. “Seems to me I also told you to always train in your street clothes. Think you’re gonna have time to jump in a phone booth and switch to that Super Girl outfit?”

  “What’s a phone booth?”

  “Never mind.” Morgan got himself back into his fighting stance while he snorted, “Kids.”

  Spartan did the same, leading with her left foot, and she instantly brought her right knife hand up in an overhead arc and started to lunge. But Morgan charged her, KravMaga style. He twisted to the right while launching his left shoulder hard into her right collar bone, snapped his left arm up under her knife arm to trap it, and slammed his right knee into her solar plexus. She bent over with a hiss as he speared his right elbow down on the nape of her neck, whipped his knife hand under her head, raked his training blade across her throat, and dropped her on the mat, facedown.

  “Damn it!” She cursed as she pounded the mat with a fist.

  “See?” Morgan stood over her, grinning. “Never underestimate your elders. We’re sneaky.”

  The gym door opened, and Diesel stuck his head inside. He’d been letting his brush-cut black hair grow longer, gelling it back, which made Morgan think he’d been watching episodes of Mad Men. Diesel looked down at Spartan and back up at Morgan.

  “Hate to screw up your Twister tournament, but we’re wanted in the War Room.”

  “Now?” Spartan looked up from the mat. “I was just about to get revenge.”

  Morgan sneered down at her. “You talk a good game for a corpse.”

  “On the double, Morgan,” Diesel said. “There’s a fire and your daughter’s been playing with matches.”

  Morgan jerked his chin back. The last he’d heard, Alex had pulled off a nice clean hit and was on the Trans-Siberian, headed for an easy exfil. Something had clearly gone off the rails, but he was careful to never let his teammates at Zeta Division see his fatherly concerns. So he just gripped Spartan under her armpit and hauled her up.

  “Okay, let’s hustle,” he said as he took Spartan’s knife as well as his own and dropped them in a large copper urn, where all sorts of fighting implements were jammed inside like deadly umbrellas.

  The three operatives quick-marched past the rows of analyst cubicles and into the War Room, where Zeta Division chief Diana Bloch and her director of operations, Paul Kirby, were already ensconced in their head-honcho leather chairs at the right side of the large circular conference table. Across the way, Peter Conley was tipped back in a chair, reading the morning’s Boston Globe and resisting the urge to cross his flying boots on the tabletop. To the left, Lincoln Shepard was hunched over his Alienware laptop, wearing the ever-present white Bluetooth headset that seemed grafted to his skull. At Shepard’s elbow sat Karen O’Neal, Zeta’s top analyst and Shepard’s not-so-secret paramour.

  Morgan grabbed a chair across from Conley, while Spartan and Diesel found other seats. Morgan and Conley had worked as operational partners at CIA for more than two decades before coming over to Zeta. They had a mind-mel
d thing going and Morgan wanted to be able to see Conley’s eyes. He glanced up at the War Room’s curved ceiling, where a large skylight displayed a phony blue sky. Above that, a flock of Canadian geese cruised by with light honks and languid flapping. In about twenty minutes, the same geese would fly by again.

  “Close the door and hit the countermeasures, Diesel,” Diana Bloch murmured as she perused a report.

  Diesel jumped up, pulled the door, pressed a button on the near wall and a light hum permeated the space. The War Room was a multi-million dollar SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, designed to defeat all types of electronic surveillance. This one was also wired for sound so all briefings could be recorded. Diana looked at her watch.

  “Non-standard briefing,” she said to no one. “Oh nine hundred hours, sixteen April, two thousand eighteen.” She looked over at Paul Kirby. “Take it, Mr. Kirby.”

  Kirby pushed his wire-rimmed glasses back up over the bump in his nose and cleared his throat. “As of last night, Agent Morgan …” He looked over his glasses at Dan Morgan and added, “Junior … was clear and mobile aboard exfil transportation, traveling west in the UTC-plus-nine Russian zone. However, an encounter with an unknown factor appears to have exposed her to some scrutiny.”

  Diesel raised a finger. “What’s UTC?”

  Kirby frowned at the interruption. “Universal Time Coordinated.”

  “It’s like Zulu time for civilians,” Peter Conley said to Diesel.

  “Diana,” Morgan said, “can we get this brief in plain English?”

  Kirby’s faced flushed and he leaned forward to defend his turf, but Diana waved him off.

  “All right,” she huffed as she dropped her file folder. “Alex pulled off her mission very well and boarded the Trans-Siberian last night, her time. This morning, two things occurred. One, while at breakfast in a dining car, she spotted a passenger who gained her interest and she captured his image. Two, she was joined at breakfast by a man we now believe was an FSB agent. However, that encounter appeared to have been of a passing interest nature, initiated by him.”

  “What do you mean, passing interest?” Spartan asked.

  “He liked her,” Diana said.

  “So he hadn’t made her,” said Morgan.

  “Sounds like he wanted to make her,” Diesel quipped. Morgan shot him a glare and Diesel raised his hands and said, “Sorry, bro.”

  “So far,” said Peter Conley, “doesn’t sound like much of an emergency.”

  “I’m not finished.” Diana skewered Conley with one of her warning glances. “Apparently, this FSB man is now deceased.”

  “Jesus,” Morgan groaned.

  “Oh boy,” said Conley. “Murder on the Orient Express.”

  “Did Alex take this guy out?” Morgan asked Diana.

  “Negative,” said Shepard. He was tapping away on his laptop, but as always he was able to split-brain his tasks—fully engaged in a conversation while working. “She left him in the dining car, went back to her berth and was informed after the fact by the train conductor.”

  “Any name on the dead dude?” Conley asked.

  “Introduced himself to Alex as Uri Yankovski,” Shepard said. “Probably a cover.”

  Diana gestured at Karen O’Neal. “Run that, Karen.” O’Neal pecked at her own laptop.

  “Why’d the train conductor inform Alex about this guy’s demise?” Morgan asked Shepard.

  “Because he’d just seen her breaking bread with him in the dining car. There’s also one railroad cop on the train—standard procedure—he and the conductor took Alex to a toilet where they’d found the corpse. She did her squeamish college girl act, insisted that she didn’t know the guy, and that he’d probably just had a heart attack. But she says his eyeballs had burst vessels and she smelled walnuts. The conductor and the cop put him on ice and sent her back to her bunk.”

  Peter Conley looked at Morgan and said, “Walnuts.”

  Morgan nodded. “Somebody made Uri eat cyanide.”

  “Shepard,” Diana said, “let’s see that image.”

  The War Room’s semi-circular wall monitor glowed with Alex’s iPhone photo of the elderly man in the dining car booth. Of the large man facing him, only a slice of the back of his head and one shoulder could be seen.

  “Hey, that’s Albert!” Peter Conley laughed.

  “Albert who?” Diesel’s brow furrowed; he was trying desperately to keep up.

  “Looks just like that poster of Einstein in my cubicle,” Conley said. “But without the tongue.”

  “That’s why Alex took the shot,” Shepard said. “But it turns out the resemblance goes deeper than just face.”

  “Just brief it and dispense with the theatrics, Shepard,” Paul Kirby sneered. He had to say something or become utterly superfluous.

  Shepard’s cheeks reddened, but he complied and carried on. “That man is Dmitry Kozlov, age seventy-six, and until just recently a top-level aerospace scientist with Russian Space Command. Kozlov’s crowning achievement was the design and deployment of a communications satellite called Laika II, still in orbit. But the satellite’s actually a camouflaged MIRV platform.”

  “What a merve?” Spartan asked.

  “Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle,” Shepard said. “In other words …”

  “A bunch of nukes they can drop on our heads whenever they want,” Conley cut in.

  “That’s right,” Shepard said, “but it gets better, or worse, depending on Kozlov’s intentions. The old man’s daughter was Svetlana Kozlov, an independent journalist, and no fan of the current Kremlin regime. She was doing a bunch of corruption stories for the Financial Times. Putin’s thugs murdered her a couple of months ago, and right after that, Kozlov was forced to retire.”

  Conley emitted a long low whistle, like a bomb falling from the sky. “So, we’ve got ourselves one pissed off, elderly, genius mourner.”

  “And perhaps a perfect target for defection,” Paul Kirby offered.

  “All alone on a train, with Alex,” Diana added. “Could be an opportunity.”

  “He’s not alone,” Dan Morgan muttered. He was staring intently at the monitor, his dark eyes narrowed like lasers.

  “I’ve got a make on Uri Yankovski,” said Karen O’Neal. She spun her laptop around to show everyone the image on her screen. It was a surveillance shot of Yankovski sitting at a European café somewhere and looking much like he had on the train with Alex. “It’s a cover name; real name Sergei Tolstoyev. But he wasn’t FSB; he was GRU.”

  “Military Intelligence,” Diana said. “Makes sense. They’re afraid Kozlov’s trying to defect or escape, so they put someone on him from inside Defense.”

  “No,” Dan Morgan said flatly. He was still squinting at the image of Kozlov and seemed to be mentally drifting, but he softly snapped a finger at Lincoln Shepard and said, “Can you crop in closer on the guy he’s with?”

  “There’s nothing much there, Cobra,” Shepard said. “Just the back of his …”

  “Give it to me.” Morgan’s tone was sharp and unyielding.

  Shepard worked his magic and the monitor filled with a blurry image of curly blond hair and one ear. Then he slewed his cursor, clicked and tapped, and the image became crystal clear. No one else in the room spoke as Morgan rose from his chair and leaned across the table, staring.

  “What up, bro?” Conley asked with concern as he followed Morgan’s gaze. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I have,” Morgan muttered, then pointed. “See that thick white scar on the back of his upper ear? I gave it to him.”

  “Explain yourself, Morgan,” Diana snapped.

  He turned to her and splayed his palms on the table. “That’s not just some muscle Kozlov hired to help with his baggage,” Morgan said. “That’s Maxim Kreesat, a.k.a. the Ghost.
He’s a former officer with an outlawed Serbian special forces team called the Shadows, now freelance mercs. The two of us once had a heated argument, with knives.” He looked back up at the monitor. “And now he’s on a train, with Alex.”

  “That’s simply a coincidence, Morgan,” Kirby huffed, then huffed again when Conley couldn’t manage to restrain a disbelieving laugh.

  “Yes,” Diana agreed unconvincingly. “Whatever he’s doing on that train with Kozlov, it has nothing to do with Zeta Division or …”

  “What Alex’s extraction plan?” Morgan interrupted as if Bloch had been spouting nonsense syllables.

  “She is scheduled to debark at Omsk,” Kirby said. “From there, an asset is taking her into Kazakhstan. We’ve negotiated her exfil with the Chinese; General Kung, to be specific. Nothing could be more secure, Morgan.”

  “If she makes it that far,” Morgan said, but he was ignoring Kirby and focusing only on Bloch. “What do you always say about coincidence, Diana?”

  “That there is no such thing.”

  “That’s right. Cancel the Chinese gambit. I’m going to get her myself.”

  “The hell you are,” Kirby snorted.

  Morgan turned on Kirby with a look that threatened to set his balding head on fire. “Think of it this way, Paul. Whatever happens to Alex, happens to you next.”

  Kirby shrunk back in his chair. “Insubordination is highly …” But then he trailed off.

  Morgan turned back to Diana. “I’m either going over to Logan right now and catching the next Aeroflot, or you’re giving me Conley, the Gulfstream, and Linc to cover my ass. Your call.”

  Diana sat back and thought, while five pairs of operative and analyst eyes blinked at her like those of begging children. Paul Kirby had warned her numerous times about hiring the daughter of a top agent, but she hadn’t listened, and now it had come to this. She could fire Morgan right there and then, but he’d still go off on his own. And who could blame him? At least keeping him partially tethered was always better then letting him completely off-leash.

  “All right.” She ignored Morgan’s expectant glare and turned to his lifelong partner. “Conley, take this fretting parent, and Mr. Shepard as well, and go warm up your jet.”