by Saul Herzog
“Oh, you’ve made yourself perfectly clear.”
Roth was losing his temper. “How long are you going to hold one mistake against me, Lance?”
“One mistake? Oh, please. You’re lucky you’re still breathing, Roth. I swear that on my life. The number of times I’ve pictured blowing your brains out.”
Roth slammed his fist on the table. “You shut up and listen,” he said.
Lance made for the door.
“That’s right,” Roth said. “Walk out.”
Laurel was taken aback. She’d never seen Roth like this before. His face was red and his voice was loud enough that someone out in the corridor would be able to hear him.
“I don’t work for you, Levi.”
“Don’t you even care that this thing is going to kill people?”
“This thing is dangerous,” Lance said, “but they won’t use it. They can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’d be no way of controlling it.”
“What if they don’t want to control it?” Roth said.
Lance said nothing.
“That’s right. Walk away. Like you always do,” Roth said.
“What did you say?”
Laurel stepped between them. It looked like it was taking all the willpower Lance had not to knock Roth’s lights out.
“Fuck you, Levi.”
Roth stood up and stared back at him defiantly.
“Fuck me? Look at you. Standing there like this has nothing to do with you. But this thing arrived with your name on it, Lance.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“The most virulent thing we’ve ever seen, and your name’s right on it.”
Laurel put her hand on Lance’s chest to hold him back.
“Sit down,” she said. “Hear us out.”
He looked at her, then back at Roth.
“Just sit down,” she said again.
He didn’t sit, but he took a breath. “You really have no idea who sent this?” he said.
“That’s why we need you,” Roth said. “To find whoever sent it. And talk to them.”
Lance shook his head. “This thing could be from anyone. I already told you it’s Russian. For all we know, it could be a trap. Did you think of that?”
“Of course I thought of that.”
Lance started putting on his coat. That was it. Roth was going to let him walk out.
“No,” Laurel said.
“Laurel,” Roth said.
“I’m not going to let him just leave.”
She wanted him. She wanted to be his handler. She wanted to get him back in play. She hadn’t joined the CIA to sit on her hands.
“This vial is a warning,” she said.
“I don’t care,” Lance said.
“It’s going to lead to deaths.”
“Then find out who made it and stop them,” Lance said.
“You know what’s going to happen,” she said.
“It’s the same thing that always happens,” Lance said. “It’s the way of the world. War, war, war. Death, death, death. It never changes. And I’m done fighting it.”
Laurel shook her head. “Are you really going to pretend you don’t give a shit?”
“Come on, Laurel,” Roth said. “Let him go.”
“No,” Laurel said. “Whoever sent that vial wants to talk to him. They’re offering to talk to him. And only him.”
“I don’t know who they are,” Lance said.
“You don’t know who they are? So what? They’re offering, and people are going to die. This thing ever gets out, it will be game over.”
“I’m sorry,” Lance said, making for the door.
Laurel raised her voice. “No,” she cried.
He turned and looked back at her.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Please.”
He was still holding the papers she’d given him. She knew what she was doing. He was looking at her and seeing Clarice.
“Don’t leave,” she said.
18
Tatyana flew back to Moscow on a Challenger 605 that was cleared to land at Khodynka Aerodrome. The airport was closed and the land sold to property developers, but the GRU still made use of the concrete, 1400-meter-long runway because air traffic control was too scared to order them not to. Located seven kilometers from Red Square, and literally steps from GRU headquarters, it was too convenient not to use.
Tatyana was the only passenger on the flight. She stepped out of the plane into the frigid cold of a Moscow morning and searched for the car.
The Military Intelligence Directorate screwed up a lot of things. It got its agents killed at an alarming rate. It practically forced western governments to issue wave after wave of sanctions on the beleaguered Russian economy. It spent more resources trying to hack the World Anti-Doping Agency than it did protecting domestic financial systems.
But there was always a car. Always black. Always with blacked out windows. And despite everything that might happen between the two nations politically, always German.
Today it was a BMW.
The GRU headquarters, a massive edifice that contained as much concrete as four olympic stadiums, was referred to by its occupants as the aquarium.
Tatyana was dropped outside despite her request to be taken home first, and began the arduous process of passing through the layers of security, getting into the rickety elevator, and making her way to the office of her boss, Igor Aralov.
Igor’s office was located on the northwest corner of the eighth floor, and overlooked the field in Khodynka where, on the Thirtieth of May 1896, the last Emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, had been crowned. On that day, half a million people gathered for the festivities. When word spread that free gifts were being handed out, the crowd got out of control. The resulting stampede led to 1,389 people being crushed to death. The gift that caused the stampede was one bread roll, one piece of sausage, one pretzel, and one gingerbread cookie per person. Despite the tragedy, the bodies were cleared, the festivities continued, and the Tsar and his wife appeared before a jubilant crowd at the central pavilion as planned. The night of the coronation, after learning the full extent of the tragedy, the royal couple attended a celebratory ball at the French embassy. The feelings of the French ambassador trumped those of the Russian people.
It was impossible to get to Igor’s office without passing an enormous oil painting of the event. It hung in the anteroom, which was also decorated with a red carpet and an imposing, antique desk.
At the desk sat Igor’s secretary, Agniya Bunina.
There were many things to be scared of at GRU headquarters, and for Tatyana, this woman was among the foremost. In her late sixties, she had snow white hair, a mole shaped like a fly above her mouth, and eye-glasses Tatyana was sure were made of real ivory.
“He’s expecting me,” Tatyana said.
Agniya looked up at her over the rims of her glasses. “Agent Aleksandrova,” she said. “Welcome home.”
Tatyana eyed her cautiously. Agniya wasn’t normally one for pleasantries.
“Thank you,” she said.
Behind Agniya were two armed guards, standing at attention, their eyes glazed over as perfectly as if made of wax.
“Take a seat,” Agniya said.
Tatyana was tired, she badly wanted to get home to her apartment and run a bath, but the slightest hint of impatience would only make the wait longer.
She sat down and waited. Agniya completely ignored her, working fastidiously on her computer.
After ten minutes, Agniya got up from her chair and entered Igor’s office. It was only then that Tatyana allowed herself to think the worst. Her little excursion in Istanbul had been discovered. Or the missing vial had been reported. Or someone on the American side let something leak.
Agniya came out of the office and looked at Tatyana.
“The direktor will see you now,” she said.
Tatyana smiled meekly and went into the office.
Calling her darling was no accident. He did it with all his widows. It was a point of pride, like there was a relationship there that went beyond the merely professional. Igor was one of those men who saw his agents as his own personal property, his pets, and to a large extent he was correct. He’d created them. He’d recruited them. He ran them. They owed everything to him. Widow was his term. It started out as black widow and got whittled down.
“Worse has happened,” Tatyana said.
“Quite so,” Igor agreed.
He had an unlit cigar in his hand and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. Tatyana set herself the challenge of getting the meeting over with before he lit it.
“I sent a full report from Istanbul,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” Igor said, uninterested.
He ran his tongue over his ripe lips. They were so red one could be forgiven for thinking he was wearing makeup. But Igor was a man who steered clear of adornment of any kind. He knew instinctively it drew attention to a body no one wanted their attention drawn to. Not other men at the banyas and steam baths he frequented. Not the women whose company he paid so handsomely for at the strip clubs off the Garden Ring. And certainly not Tatyana.
He picked up a gold-plated cigar lighter from his desk and lit the thing. Blue smoke billowed from it.
“I’m afraid there’s been a development in Yekaterinburg,” he said.
“Yevchenko?”
“Yes.”
“He started production.”
“Yes he did.”
“The idiot.”
“He was following orders.”
“His directorate doesn’t know the first thing about working with those microbes. It should have been left to the scientist at the institute. What’s her name?”
“Doctor Sofia Ivanvna.”
“Yes,” Tatyana said. “That’s why she was set up, isn’t it? Given the institute? So things would be done correctly?”
“Well they weren’t done that way.”
“Why not?”
“There are some questions about Ivanovna and her team. Questions about their reliability. Their patriotism.”
“Patriotism?” Tatyana said. This wasn’t good. If the doctor was drawing suspicion, it wouldn’t be long before that suspicion spread to her. She would have to warn Sofia.
“They never wanted to develop bioweapons,” Tatyana said.
Igor looked at her. “Well, they should have put those feelings aside in the defense of the Motherland, wouldn’t you say?”
“Of course,” Tatyana said, remembering who she was speaking to.
“NATO has been boxing us in for two decades. We’re surrounded by a ring of advanced missile systems. We need new weapons.”
“But taking production out of the scientists’ hands. That was a mistake. Now we have casualties to deal with.”
“Yes we do.”
“And cover up.”
“That is correct.”
“How many?”
“So far, four,” Igor said.
“Four,” Tatyana said. It was tragic, but acceptable, she supposed. Inevitable, even. When you were dealing with something this dangerous, people died.
“Hundred,” Igor continued.
“Hundred?”
“Four hundred,” Igor said again.
“Four hundred deaths?” Tatyana gasped.
Igor nodded. “At least.”
Tatyana was standing by the door. Distance was something she tried to maintain in that office. There was a reason the directorate insisted Igor’s secretary be a woman in her sixties.
He’d screwed the daughters of so many generals it finally caught up to him. They hadn’t been able to strike him directly, his position afforded him certain protections, but they’d succeeded in getting the old battle ax assigned permanently to his office. Of course he’d fucked her too, but no one seemed to care about that.
Tatyana stepped closer to the desk and sat on the ornate wooden chair. She felt numb.
“How did this happen?”
Igor licked his lips again. “We’re looking into it.”
“Was there an attack?”
“No. Just an accident.”
“An accident? Four hundred people, Igor.”
“Like Reactor 4.”
In the aquarium, all accidents were compared to the one accident that could never be forgotten. Chernobyl Reactor Number 4. The accident that brought down the entire communist system.
“But four hundred? It can’t be. Are you sure?”
“There’s no doubt.”
“We never knew it was this lethal, did we?”
“The scientists had an idea,” Igor said. “But Yevchenko didn’t fucking listen.”
19
Ramstein Air Base was located southwest of Frankfurt, about halfway between Mainz and the French border, and was as large as a city. Over fifty-thousand American service members were stationed there, along with their families, support staff, and civilian and military contractors. All told, the base had a population roughly equal to that of Savannah, Georgia.
The site was initially selected by Hitler’s Luftwaffe when a new autobahn bridge collapsed in 1940. It was discovered that the swampy land was unsuitable for a bridge that size, rendering a large new section of highway on the far side unusable.
The Luftwaffe used the abandoned stretch of road as a runway and it was taken over as such by the advancing American forces during the final months of the war.
After the Second World War, the surrounding land became the largest single-spot construction site on the planet, with the American military employing over a quarter million European laborers to drain thousands of acres of swampland.
Because of its vast size, the base was frequently used for operations the American government wanted to keep secret, or keep off domestic soil.
During the 1950’s, it was used to house NATO’s underground combat operations center, a 37,000 square foot control room from which a full air war could be waged against the Soviet Union. The bunker’s massive switchboard, complete with eighty teletype machines, was capable of coordinating in real time with the Pentagon, NATO Supreme Headquarters, and dozens of strategic air bases around the globe.
In 2015, it emerged the base was being used as a massive drone control center, with hundreds of pilots remotely piloting drones over Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia. The German government was furious, stating that their territory was being used to circumvent American constitutional restraints that would have made the strikes illegal if conducted from US territory.
In the same year, a Serbian tabloid reported the base was being used to funnel massive quantities of illegal weapons to Syrian rebels. Again, the German government was caught off guard, and while the operation was a clear violation of German arms laws, there was nothing they could do about it because their investigators weren’t permitted onto the base without American authorization.
Another thing the Germans didn’t know was that the base housed an advanced CIA laboratory specializing in the analysis of substances deemed too dangerous to bring back to the continental United States.
The vial from Istanbul fit this bill, and it was there that the analysis Roth ordered had been carried out.
A team of four technicians worked overtime on the report, calculating virulence by infecting rats with such minute amounts of the substance that doses were measured in Daltons, or twelfths of the mass of a carbon-12 atom.
The technicians worked in an underground, lead-lined lab using state of the art containment practices and protective clothing made to a higher specification than what NASA had commissioned for its manned spaceflight missions.
The head of the lab, a man named McKinsey, arrived at work before dawn. He liked the winter and walked to work across a forested portion of the base in snowshoes that had been sent by his mother, shipped all the way to Germany from her home
in Baudette, Minnesota. He was surprised when he arrived at the security perimeter to find that the shutdown routines from the night before hadn’t been run correctly. He called the lead technician, Thomson, but there was no answer on his cell. He tried his house and Thomson’s wife said he’d never come home the night before.
The technicians at the lab, as employees of the CIA with top-level clearances, were subject to a rigorous security regime. If any of them left the base, the head of the lab was immediately informed. McKinsey checked the email on his phone but there was nothing from the base notification service.
It wasn’t like Thomson not to be available, he was a steady man, reliable, but everyone had their moments.
It wasn’t until he called Prout, Rutherford, and Aston, the other three technicians, and none of them picked up, that McKinsey began to worry.
This was a serious protocol breach, and he was required to pass it up the line to base command.
But before he did, he went down to the lab to make sure he wasn’t over-reacting. The lab had an airlock procedure that would have required him to suit up before entering, but it also had video cameras connected to screens in a control room that gave him a clear view of what was going on inside without requiring a full suit up.
He went to the control room and scanned the cameras.
The lab was empty.
Then his eye stopped on something unusual. It was a shoe.
Someone was lying on the ground.
20
Novouralsk was a closed city about fifty miles from Yekaterinburg. When it was founded during the Second World War, it was known simply as Sverdlovsk-44. Mail was sent to Sverdlovsk where the 44 postcode designated it as military.
No one who lived in the city was allowed to divulge its existence to outsiders. Residents were severely restricted and were prohibited from traveling abroad or communicating with the outside world. The city appeared on no road signs or railway timetables. In order to travel there, special papers from the KGB were required.
Its existence was not admitted by the Russian government until 1994, when satellite imagery made a mockery of attempts to keep a city of a hundred thousand secret any longer. Although its existence was no longer denied, the city remained enclosed in a security perimeter, watched by armed guards in towers.