Chapman frowned. He wasn’t scared of Schroeder, and if he was worth anything, he wouldn’t be the kind of person who would beat around the bush and tell half-truths to cover his own ass. That was the only reason he was sitting in this room. “Not very. Whoever is behind this is as professional as they come. Expert at covering their tracks. We can hope that they’ll make a mistake, but that’s all that is: hope.”
“That’s what you got? Hope?” said Schroeder in a voice laden with anger. “Hope gets us all of nothing. People are scared. And they’re right to be. They should be terrified. It’s gonna happen again, and who’s to say it won’t happen on American soil again next time?”
“Not us, that’s for damn sure,” said Chapman ruefully.
Schroeder stared intensely at Chapman. “I know you have contacts, Buck,” he said in a low voice. “You’ve delved much deeper into the intelligence rabbit hole than me or anyone else in this group.”
Chapman looked at Schroeder, taken aback. He was right, of course. Chapman had worked in extralegal intelligence for over ten years, collecting information from sources that ranged from shady to outright criminal. He often tapped in to his eyes and ears in the underworld—it was what made him such an asset. But this time, even in the criminal underworld, all he’d heard was crickets. “I’ve exhausted all the resources that I had in this, Bill,” he said. “I’ve done everything I can.”
“Don’t give me that crap,” said Schroeder. “It’s time to pull out all the stops, Buck. This cannot go on. Not on our watch.”
“Jesus, Bill, what do you think I’ve been doing for the past—”
“Do more,” said Schroeder. “The lines you wouldn’t cross before? It’s time to cross them. Do you understand what I’m saying, Buck?”
“I do,” said Chapman, his heart sinking.
He left the situation room with his mind a jumble of thoughts and misgivings. There were lines he hadn’t crossed, had told himself he wouldn’t cross. He knew that some doors, once opened, couldn’t be shut again. But what was he supposed to do? How could he hold anything back in a situation like this? And now Schroeder was pushing him as well.
Chapman walked out into the parking lot to make the fifteen-minute drive back to CIA Headquarters. He called his second-in-command at the CIA Crisis Response Team, Cynthia Gillespie.
“Talk to me, Cyn.”
“Waiting on updates from Paris, Buck. Just like when you last called, twenty minutes ago. I told you, if something turns up, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Make sure to do that,” he said.
“Are you coming back now?” she asked.
“I just have to make one quick stop.”
Chapman hung up. As he drove listlessly down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, he wondered how fast he could get ahold of a secure phone line.
CHAPTER 2
Budapest, December 27
“I’m here to see Roman Lubarsky.”
The voice was self-assured, brash even; if the accent had not given away that he was not from Budapest, but rather from America, then surely the characteristic lack of subtlety would have been plenty to identify the nationality of the speaker.
“I’m afraid Mr. Lubarsky isn’t seeing anyone at the moment, sir,” said the girl at the hardwood and brass reception desk, offering him a “what-can-you-do?” shrug and a practiced look of commiseration from across the counter, and motioning him out of the wood-paneled, red-carpeted foyer into the brisk grey morning.
“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me,” the man said, then grinned. She did not smile back at his comment. He was approaching middle age, but still handsome in that rough American way, with a chiseled jaw, a full head of dark hair with grey streaks, and a trim mustache with a goatee. He was not tall, but had broad shoulders that were emphasized by his grey pinstripe suit. He had an expensive-looking black leather briefcase in his right hand, which she had noticed when he’d walked into the lobby. She had also noticed that he was unusually fit and vigorous. The kind of man who could cause a lot of trouble if he wanted to—of one kind and the other, she couldn’t help thinking, looking him up and down. She shut those thoughts out. She had to look at him as a security risk and nothing more, and those thoughts only compounded the danger. Under his suit jacket she could see a well-concealed gun holster. Barely perceptible, but it was the kind of thing she was paid to notice.
She could tell she wouldn’t get rid of him easily, but this wasn’t the first person who had insisted on coming in off the street to see the boss. He was definitely not the first one who had come in packing heat. But she knew how to deal with this type.
“Mr. Lubarsky does not receive anyone without an appointment,” she told him. She leaned in closer, resting her weight on her right elbow on the counter, as if to say something confidential, just between him and her. “Trust me, sir,” she said. “It will do no good to insist.” As she spoke, she reached down discreetly with her right hand and pushed the tiny button hidden on the underside of the counter.
“I’ve got a standing appointment with Lubarsky,” said the man coolly.
“It’s not in my book,” she said, pointing at the leather-bound planner and shrugging to signal her utter incapacity to do anything about this situation.
“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me anyway.”
This was getting tiresome. Her tone took on an edge of annoyance. “I insist, sir, that even if you are His Holiness the Pope himself, Mr. Lubarsky will not—” She was interrupted as Marko and Lyudmil emerged from the louvre door next to the reception desk and flanked the American. She couldn’t help grinning slightly as the balance of power shifted in her favor, and became altogether less subtle.
“This guy giving you trouble, Rositsa?”
“Some men just can’t take no for an answer,” she said, teasing the man by looking straight into his eyes as she spoke. She loved having the muscle behind her.
The man did not stop smiling. “Some men just know when not to fold.”
“Come on, asshole,” said Lyudmil, grabbing the man’s left arm. “The lady has had enough of you.”
The American, totally unfazed, did not move. Instead, he reached into his breast pocket. The two men seemed alarmed by the gesture and began to move to restrain him, but relaxed when they saw him pulling out a business card. The American proffered it to them, holding it between two outstretched fingers. Marko took it, examined it, and then handed it to Lyudmil. They nodded between them.
“Please follow us this way, sir,” said Marko. “We apologize on behalf of the girl. Mr. Lubarsky will see you very soon.”
The three disappeared into the louvre door into the employees-only area of the ground floor. The girl from reception looked down and the counter and saw that they had left the card. She picked it up and looked at it curiously. On it was no name—in fact, no words at all. All there was on the rich white stock was a simple black ink drawing of a snake, a cobra, coiled and ready to strike.
CHAPTER 3
Budapest, December 27
Dan Morgan, Code Name Cobra, was taken into a back room of the lobby of the Sárkány, where the bare concrete walls and fluorescent lighting stood in stark contrast to the elegant wood paneling and soft, old-world incandescents of reception. There was no stage dressing here, just the bare essentials. He had been led there by the two hulking grunts in black suits who had come, originally, to kick him out and maybe leave him in the back alley with a couple of cracked ribs and internal bleeding. Instead, they were taking him to their boss.
One of the two, tall and broad-shouldered with a jutting chin, scowled down at him while the other, a squat and wide man who might have been mistaken by an ape if he weren’t wearing such a dapper suit, tried to take his Walther. No guns in the hotel, he said, though of course he meant no guns that weren’t in their possession.
“The gun stays with me,” said Morgan.
“Are we going to have to take it away from you?” said the tall one.
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“From my cold dead hands.”
“You do not let us have the gun, you do not see Mr. Lubarsky.”
“You can tell Lubarsky that if he wants to see me, he’d best not take my gun away. Consider it a token of good faith on his part.”
The two looked at each other, and then at him like they wanted to take turns wringing his neck. Then the short, squat one picked up the phone and exchanged a few words with Lubarsky, presumably, on the other end. Then he hung up and said to Morgan, “He will allow you to carry your gun upstairs.”
“How gracious of him,” said Morgan.
“Any funny business,” he said, “and you leave this hotel in little tiny pieces, is it clear?”
“Crystal.”
They x-rayed his briefcase, scanned him for bugs, and then escorted him back to the lobby. Then they ushered him to an elevator that they opened with a key. The interior was red-carpeted and wood-paneled to match the lobby, and it had only two floor buttons, unmarked. The short one turned another key and pressed the top button.
The elevator was not large, and Morgan was wedged uncomfortably between the two guards. The cabin began its ascent, the movement imperceptible but for a gentle tug at Morgan’s gut and at the Samsonite he held in his right hand.
The elevator stopped as discreetly as it had started, after what seemed like not enough time to cover the necessary distance. The doors slid open, right into the penthouse foyer.
The first thing to hit him was the smell. It was a heady mixture of stale vomit, food fresh and rotting, alcohol, and sweat mingled with a few other bodily odors. Obscene squeals and moans from a pornographic movie emanated into the foyer, and it seemed like a very appropriate soundtrack. The room was decorated in the most expensive poor taste achievable. He briefly wondered how much worse the décor would seem to his wife Jenny’s professional eye—only a fleeting thought, before his mind began to formulate his reaction in case things took a turn for the worse.
It was automatic, part of his training. Possibilities played in his head in short clips of sudden violence. The bigger one would go down with a well-placed elbow to the nose; that would be enough to knock him out. He’d likely draw his gun for the other, but he could not count on doing it fast enough, and might have to improvise. Morgan’s training and experience gave him a keen sense of his environment, and this one provided more than enough for him to work with: here a bronze bust of Elvis that could easily crack open a man’s skull, there a gold-framed mirror whose shards could slice open a carotid in a pinch.
A guttural voice spoke from the next room, in Russian. The short one responded in kind, and Morgan made out, in his speech, the word “Cobra.” The man in the other room responded.
“Go on,” said the short one thickly. “He is waiting.”
Morgan stepped through a columned arch, and the scene that had been only suggested by the acrid and intensifying smell appeared before him, inspiring in him alternately nausea and rage. The Sárkány was elegant and expensive, and the penthouse, on a good day, was by far the best in the hotel. But whatever class the place might have had was subsumed into the filth of the man he had come to see.
“Lubarsky.”
“Merry Christmas, Mr. Cobra!” said Lubarsky jovially. “Please, call me Roman. Have a drink. Make yourself at home.”
Empty bottles of top-shelf champagne and vodka lay strewn about along with two upturned velvet-upholstered chairs. Slumped on the bed, half-covered by a stained white sheet, was a woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place on a high-fashion runway. Her head lay slack on the bed, her white-blond hair hanging off its side, her eyes eerily blank. Another woman, black with high cheekbones and wearing mussed up lingerie, was huddled over an end table from which she had pushed off a wrought iron lamp. She was frantically cutting with a razor at a small mound of cocaine. Victims of human trafficking, most likely. Morgan knew what women went through to become playthings for the rich and unscrupulous. It disgusted him and made him wish he could kill Lubarsky right then.
“I think I’ll call you Lubarsky,” said Morgan.
The man himself was naked, rolls of flesh pendent between his open legs, his back hair so thick he might as well have been wearing a sweater. Greasy black locks clung to the sweat on his forehead and his tiny eyes were open wide, red and manic, with pupils so dilated that they almost reached the outer edges of the iris.
“Do you want to tell me how long you’ve been on this bender?” Morgan asked.
“I take it that’s my money in that suitcase?” He snorted.
“Answer the damn question, Lubarsky.”
The Georgian looked at him with murder in his eyes. No ego like that of a successful arms dealer. “Are you telling me what to do in my own hotel?”
“You and I have things to do today, and I want to know that you’re in good goddamn shape to perform.”
Lubarsky looked at him as if he were about to lunge for his throat, then burst into a hacking, hoarse laugh. “Why all business, Cobra? Sit down. Have some cocaine. Have a whore. I just got these two fresh from a new shipment.” He looked at the woman who had been huddled over the table snorting coke. “You! Come here.”
She did her best to slink over, stumbling over a stray shoe.
“What is your name, sugar?” asked Lubarsky.
“My name is anything you want, baby.” She spoke in a lewd, sedated tone, rendered especially cartoonish by her heavy accent. There was no emotion in her red, heavy-lidded eyes.
“Ha ha, you see, they are well trained.”
“I’ll pass,” said Morgan.
“Are you sure?” Morgan scowled at him. “Fine, fine. You are a modest man. I cannot say I understand. But suit yourself.” He waved absently at the woman, and she stumbled away. “Have a drink then. I have a single malt from the highlands—”
“I don’t drink.”
Lubarsky laughed his hideous laugh again and it made Morgan want to break his nose. “That’s the trouble with you assassin types. Always with the discipline. You make obscene amounts of money, but you never do anything obscene with it!”
“I hear Novokoff can really put away the vodka.”
“Yes, true,” he said, laughing. “But that is like milk of his mother to Novokoff. He has the resistance of an ox. It doesn’t count as debauchery if he does not become drunk.”
“Speaking of the devil—”
“Yes, yes, I have not forgotten the business, Cobra. Your end first.”
Morgan pushed aside a bottle and set down the briefcase on the table in front of Lubarsky.
“It’s all in there,” he said.
Lubarsky opened it and looked through the stacks of bills inside, a smile widening on his face.
“You are a man of your word, Cobra.”
Morgan wasn’t interested in compliments. “Novokoff?”
“It is set up for today, like we discussed.”
“Where?”
Lubarsky snorted. “He will not say until we are on the road. He is a paranoid bastard.”
“I’m guessing he learned it the hard way,” said Morgan. “Twenty years in the KGB will do that to a man. You don’t get to be his age in this business without a healthy paranoia.”
“And your side of the bargain?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it. All loaded up in a freezer truck and ready to go wherever he is,” said Morgan.
Lubarsky grinned his hideous yellow grin. “I tell you, Cobra, you are in the wrong business. This high-tech junk—biological weapons and nerve gas and smart bombs—they are crap business. All the special transportation, the lack of supply. And it’s all middlemen, middlemen, middlemen. Never a direct sale. The percentage is shit. The good business is in selling Kalashnikovs and grenades to African warlords. Get paid in diamonds, and no fucking middlemen.”
“But you’re still gracing us with your presence today, Lubarsky?” said Morgan.
Lubarsky laughed. “I am making an introduction. Whole other animal. Little exposure
, cash up front. Plus,” he added, “for Novokoff, I do this.”
“How sweet of you.”
“It is good for business. Not to mention, I’m scared shitless of the bastard.” He seemed serious all of a sudden. “You do not mess this up, you hear me, Cobra?”
“You’re telling me? Screw you, Lubarsky. Are you even planning on putting on some goddamn clothes?”
Lubarsky laughed. “You know, I like you, Cobra. I believe this is—how do you say?—the start of a wonderful friendship.”
Morgan looked at him disdainfully and hoped powerfully that he might have the opportunity to kill this man before this was over.
CHAPTER 4
Budapest, December 27
Dr. Eugenia Barrett, Zeta Division’s own engineering wiz, opened the metal crate slowly and deliberately, and a thin mist poured out from inside, like a liquid overflowing over the lip of a glass. Morgan crouched for a better look and ran his hand along the flowing mist. It felt cold to the touch. The crate itself was a reinforced metal cube that stood about waist high, sitting strapped into the back of a small refrigerated truck. Morgan looked inside, and the mist slowly dispersed to reveal four rows of metal cylinders.
“This is the real thing,” said Barrett. “A tiny whiff of this stuff will kill a grown man in forty seconds. Same if you get any on your skin. Violent convulsions, projectile vomiting.” She was speaking in a tone that was a disconcerting mixture of pride and fascination. “The good news is you probably wouldn’t be conscious for most of it.”
“Yeah, I got the CliffsNotes stateside,” said Morgan, shuddering. He looked down at the sixteen canisters, the mist from the refrigeration still playing around them. He had lost count of how many times he had been close to death in his life, but few dangers even came close to the chilling prospect of being killed by nerve gas.
“I’d say that, in this case, you could use the refresher.” She gestured toward the canisters, each of which was about as tall as a fire extinguisher, though about half as thick. They were made of polished metal, rendered cloudy by a thin layer of frozen condensation. “To remove a canister,” she said, as she put on heavy temperature-resistant gloves, “you twist, then pull.” With gloved hands, she gripped one corner canister, turned it a hundred and eighty degrees, and pulled. “Why don’t you put on your gloves and hold this, so you can see what it feels like?”
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