by Ward Larsen
“Shoot.”
Slaton eyed her. The grin was still there. He said, “Vladimir Ovechkin is the last surviving member of this little group of Petrov’s. I’d really like to know where he went after Davos.”
“I’ve been doing my best with that.”
“With all due respect, I want more. I want Director Coltrane to do his best. A full court press from Langley.”
“Okay, I’ll pass it on.”
“And there’s something else you should tell him.”
“What’s that?”
“It has to do with what I learned in Milan…”
THIRTY-FOUR
Vladimir Ovechkin was sweating profusely as he got out of the car in front of the villa. He’d been sitting inside for thirty minutes while his security team went over the place, and the car’s air conditioner wasn’t keeping up. Finally, Mikhael, the team leader, had given the all clear.
It hardly seemed necessary.
The villa could not have been more isolated. Sitting alone on a bluff, it was a ninety-minute drive south of Casablanca. The vistas along the ribbon of coastal highway had grown increasingly desolate. Long gone were the resorts, the beaches here too rocky for a decent brochure picture, and what little shopping and dining existed would be a shock to European sensibilities. The adjacent valleys were correspondingly barren, too arid to be farmed, too inaccessible to be populated. The only occasional visitors, Ovechkin had been told, were roving bands of surfers who sought perfect waves by day and lit bonfires in the coves by night. And even for them, October was a low month.
Amid that seclusion, the residence in front of him was an outlier in its own right. The nearest neighbor was a mile distant in either direction, and the main coast road could barely be seen. To make Ovechkin’s solitude complete, his wife had gone to Paris. It had been his idea, and he already regretted it—curiously, not due to the shopping bill that would invariably result. As he got older, Estrella was increasingly a comfort, and Ovechkin found himself having thoughts lately he’d never before entertained—chief among them being that this marriage, his third, might be his last. The notion of hiding out here, with no one to talk to but his security team—who were as thick in the head as they were in the shoulders—was positively anesthetizing. Ovechkin pushed his lamentations away, realizing how ridiculous it was to feel sorry for himself.
Romanov and Ivanovic would certainly trade places with me, he thought.
He walked inside the villa, and was disheartened to find that the air conditioning wasn’t working. The doors and windows were shut tight all around, and there was a musty odor in the main room—he knew the place hadn’t been used in many months. It wasn’t a particularly big residence—five rooms, or so he’d been told. The villa was owned by an acquaintance, a second-tier Siberian timber magnate who was looking to climb higher in President Petrov’s hierarchy of largesse. The man had offered the place to Ovechkin graciously, no doubt hoping to curry favor with someone who was higher in the pecking order. Russia was full of such men—desperate to climb, and willing to contort in any way to make it happen. In truth, the villa’s owner was doing much what Ovechkin himself had done so many years ago. Translating favors and loyalty into a lucrative lifestyle. Unfortunately, the poor bastard who owned the villa, and a hundred others like him, were missing one vital piece of the puzzle: they didn’t realize that the rules of the game were about to change.
“Why isn’t the air conditioner on?” he asked Mikhael.
“There is no air conditioner, sir. I’ve been told it’s generally quite pleasant along the coast, especially this time of year. Apparently it’s been warmer than usual lately. It might also have to do with the generator—the unit I saw would never support such a heavy electrical load.”
Ovechkin closed his eyes for a moment, then strode to a set of wide French doors. He pushed them open, and was instantly enveloped by a cool ocean breeze. Sheer white curtains billowed like luffing sails from either side of the entryway, the air sweeping up the cliffs as if to embrace him. He strolled out onto the broad seaside patio, and could almost feel his blood pressure—which tended toward the high side—fall to diastole. “Maybe this won’t be so bad after all,” he murmured to himself.
His thoughts of relaxation were interrupted by Mikhael. “I should make sure we have enough fuel for the generator. There is also the matter of bringing in food. Can you tell me how long we will be staying?”
“Plan for a week,” Ovechkin said.
Mikhael grunted and disappeared into the villa.
Ovechkin took a seat on a lounger, his bulk crushing the long cushion. The patio swept outward in broad curving lines, and tiered down on the north side where an aqua-blue swimming pool stood in wait. The Atlantic beyond appeared unusually calm. Taken together, the effect was positively tranquilizing. Ovechkin let his eyes drift up and down the coast, and he decided he’d chosen well. It was as if he’d stumbled upon the most pleasant of all the earth’s ends.
* * *
“I recovered the bullet that killed Romanov,” Slaton said.
Sorensen glanced away from the road. “How did you manage that?”
He explained his private investigation in Davos, how he’d tried to guess where the shooter had holed up. “I saw a few good options,” he said, “but they were way up the hill. Reaching them would have required climbing gear, and I guessed that our shooter didn’t have any going in. Chances are, he didn’t know how he was going to set up against Romanov aside from the weapon he was lugging around. Turns out, there’s only one outfitter in Davos—one place where he could have gotten what he needed to climb the mountain.”
“So … you went there too?”
“I was one day behind him, and I got a little lucky—I talked to the same clerk.”
“You actually talked to someone who’s seen this guy? Did you get a description?”
“Not a very good one, but yes.”
“We should tell the police to check the store—it must have cameras. They need to know Romanov’s killer was there.”
“Actually … I’d rather we didn’t take that route.”
After a brief hesitation, she saw the problem. “Right—because you were there too.”
“It was the night after the murder, but yes. I also might have mentioned to the clerk that the guy who’d been there the previous night was a friend of mine. On top of that, I showed up in Capri six days after Ivanovic was killed. The police will piece all that together eventually, but I’d rather not give them a head start.”
He went on to explain how he’d discovered the shooter’s hide, and then used that location, along with a little geometry, to recover the bullet. “I was prying it out of the ground when the authorities got suspicious and came up the mountain after me. I got away, but this is all just one more link chaining me to the whole affair. By now they’ll have found my gear, and maybe the SUV I rented—which, by the way, I put on the company card you gave me. I’m not sure how the CIA pays its bills, but at some point the Swiss gendarmerie will try to track that charge, along with what I bought at the outfitters.”
“Okay, thanks for the heads-up. We’ll make it disappear before there’s any blowback.”
“Good.”
“What did you do with the bullet?”
Slaton had anticipated this question. The spent round was, at that moment, in his suitcase in the back seat, wrapped in soft cloth. It was no longer of immediate use to him, but he knew the technology sections of both the CIA and Mossad would love to get their hands on it. Having not yet made his choice as to who was more deserving—and with both agencies theoretically prominent in his near-term plans—he decided it was a bargaining chip to hold in reserve.
“It’s in a safe place,” he said. “But I did make a stop in Milan—I wanted to show it to an old acquaintance.”
“What kind of acquaintance?”
“A man who knows more about guns than anybody I know. He’s the best in the business.”
“And did
you learn anything?”
“I did. To begin, I figured out how the shooter managed such remarkable accuracy. It’s a guided bullet.”
“A what?”
“It’s been on drawing boards for years—a round that can alter its path in flight. I heard your Sandia National Labs had a project, and I’m sure the Russians were trying to keep up.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. How does it work?”
“I don’t know—not exactly. It either gets a reflected signal or takes some kind of guidance cues. There aren’t any steerable fins, but the jacket seems pliable, and there appeared to be carefully crafted weights inside.”
“Inside?”
“My friend put the spent round under an X-ray machine. Whatever the mechanism, the bullet is somehow able to change direction to track a target.”
“Which means you could shoot someone on a boat from an island three miles away.”
“Or a skier rushing downhill.”
The embassy came into view, and Sorensen steered toward the heavily guarded side entrance.
She said, “So who’s behind it?”
“Hard to say. My gunsmith thinks the gun used was a Barrett fifty cal, which is made in America. But he’s pretty sure the round is a Russian item.”
“Based on what?”
“Based on design characteristics only a gunsmith would understand. I tend to agree with him based on my own findings. The salesman I talked to in Davos mentioned that our shooter had an accent—according to him, either Russian or Latvian.”
“So our shooter is Russian.”
“Almost certainly. I’d guess he’s either current or former Special Forces. And we know he’s carrying a unique weapon system, strictly military grade. No private operator would have access to technology like that.”
“So he’s Russian-sponsored.”
“I can’t see it any other way.”
Sorensen weighed it all as they sat parked behind a van at the security gate. She said, “It strikes me that this assassin, whoever he is, is part of a bigger operation. He’s killed two of the three men who own a small fleet of ships—ships that are right now smuggling something into Saudi Arabia. This must all be connected.”
“I agree.”
“And whatever is going on … it can’t be good.”
“No. It’s not good at all.”
THIRTY-FIVE
“Tell me about the second shot,” asked the man, who was on the left. He wore thick glasses and was nearly bald, a horseshoe of close-cropped hair above his ears. His mouth seemed set in a terminal pout, and his accent was eastern, probably Irkutsk. The sergeant had never liked Siberians.
Having spent much of his life waiting for targets to appear, he was an inordinately patient man. Indeed, the trait had been integral to his meteoric rise in the army. Regrettably, when it came to suffering post-mission debriefings with engineers, his forbearance was more akin to that of a hyperactive child. Today there were two to deal with, the man joined by a woman—a severe-looking matron wearing what looked like a burlap housecoat. God help me, he thought, as he said curtly, “The range was roughly twelve hundred meters. I estimated the target to have been moving at roughly sixty kilometers per hour. Right to left at a fifty-degree angle across the slope of the hill.”
“Exactly fifty degrees?”
The sergeant quelled an impertinent response for, “He was skiing. It is a fluid act, not a straight line.”
“How much higher was your position?” asked the woman.
“I had no way to calculate the precise elevation. I can tell you the tracking unit displayed a declination of twenty-one point three degrees—I remember that much.”
“Did you not write these numbers down?” she asked.
The sergeant held steady. “Twenty-one point three degrees.”
They asked more questions. Atmospheric conditions, the serial number of the gun he’d used, the tracking performance of the targeting pod. With each answer the Siberian scribbled on a diagram he’d been building. From where he sat, the sergeant could see the man had not drawn the mountain, but rather variables and vectors and angle measurements. The three of them had done this dance once before, after the kill in Capri. That had taken four hours. The man began scrawling equations, and referenced a calculator. The housecoat watched him and nodded.
In that computational interlude, the sergeant lost any regrets for his poor academic showing as a schoolboy. Growing up in the wilds of Kamchatka, the business of putting meat on the table had always taken precedence over algebra. Ammunition was not to be tested and experimented with, but utilized as a means to forestall hunger. How simple it had all been then.
As he sat in silence, a discomforting thought recurred. If this new weapon was perfected, would it not undermine the very qualities that had brought him here? With a gun stock on his shoulder the sergeant was the best in the Russian army—a raptor’s eye and steel coolness had lifted him above his peers. Yet could this new gun not be used just as well by the two engineers facing him? Might their technical adeptness and analytical minds prove superior behind the new superbullet? He smiled inwardly, knowing the answer.
No. They could never do what I do.
He forced his attention away from the man with the pencil. The room they’d chosen for the debriefing was essentially a laboratory. He saw benches and test stands, and a chart with the periodic table of elements adorned one wall. The adjacent room was the industrial end of the operation—machines for milling and production, and freshly rifled gun barrels lined up for testing. The entire building seemed tainted by an acrid smell, something between electrical solder and burning plastic. The facility was nested coyly in an industrial park on the western outskirts of Moscow. Its parent company was a well-known arms manufacturer, yet this particular outpost was perhaps its most secretive subsidiary, an off-the-books operation that existed in some administrative eddy between the state and private sectors.
The calculations ended. “Yes,” said the man, “very impressive. Can you tell us where the projectile struck its objective?”
The sergeant groaned. In his own view they were talking about a bullet that was damned good. To them it was a rocket aimed at Mars. “Somewhere fatal. He didn’t get up.”
The man looked crestfallen.
“Enough—you are all geniuses! The damned thing worked, and I can’t tell you any more. Now give me what I came for!”
His flare of temper had the desired effect. The man and woman pressed back perceptibly in their cushioned chairs. A look was exchanged. “Of course,” said the Siberian cautiously. He nodded to his partner.
The woman got up and went to an industrial safe on the far side of the room. She typed a code into a keypad, and after a mechanical clunk she pulled open the door and removed a metal ammo box.
She brought it to the table. “Here you are. The last three cartridges of the prototype production run.” She presented it with something near reverence. The sergeant noted that the box itself looked as though it had never been used—most ammo boxes he’d seen in his day had more dents than a Moscow taxi. Inside, he knew, were the last three special cartridges, each cradled in foam and a custom-fit plastic case. When he’d seen those trappings with the first batch, it had struck him as a ridiculous way to pamper a bullet.
“As you know,” the man interjected, “our project is in a precarious position at the moment. The initial bench tests did not perform as expected. There were spin and stabilization issues, and the guidance software showed faults in certain atmospheric conditions. But you have brought renewed success.” He smiled a Cheshire smile. “Two-for-two. Should these final rounds succeed, we’ll have a good case for having fixed the problems. Continued funding would be almost guaranteed. But I implore you … please record every condition. Altitude, humidity, temperature, light conditions. Write everything down.”
The sergeant took the plastic case. “I’ll be sure to bring my sharpest pencil.” He departed the room without further comment
. No one offered best wishes until they met again.
He made his way through the utilitarian halls, and was ignored entirely by at least a dozen workers on his way out. No one had any idea who he was, nor that the future of their employment in this place rested completely on his proficiency with the contents of the box in his hand.
He reached the exit and paused in the portico between the inner and outer doors. The exterior doors were glass, and he saw a nasty winter blow outside—snow was sweeping sideways in a fierce wind. In the long Russian dusk he saw a young woman scurrying in from the parking lot. She was practically skating over the sidewalk. He set down the box and reached into his pocket. Pulling out his phone, he turned it on and checked for messages. The one he’d been waiting for had finally arrived:
Target #3 arrived as expected. Proceed Casablanca.
He put away his phone and donned his gloves. He pushed open the door just as the woman arrived, and she came inside in a rush, a gust of bitter air swirling through with her. The door closed and they exchanged a cordial smile. The sergeant thought she might have been pretty, although it was hard to say with her hair disheveled and her face furrowed against the cold. But she did smell nice—that much he knew. Something light and floral that somehow overpowered the maelstrom. The sergeant wanted to say something, but before any clever words came together the woman was gone.
He stood there for a moment, still and dispirited. He then picked up the ammo box, tilted his head down, and reached for the door a second time.
Casablanca.
It sounded warm and wondrous.
* * *
Slaton reconnected with his family for the best part of an hour. He began by making only passing mention to Christine of his digressions in Davos and Milan, explanations that must have come off as stilted and rehearsed. He was silence itself on the matter of what was brewing on the Red Sea. Only when Davy was sitting on the courtyard patio, engrossed in a box of toy cars and trucks Bella had brought in, did Christine force the issue.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He looked at her over the round patio table that separated them, on it a sweating ice bucket and bottles of water.