by Flynn Vince
He’d been offered an opportunity to participate in Krupin’s sham medical trial but refused. His situation was hopeless and he wanted to go quickly surrounded by his family and in possession of all his faculties. A brave man looking to spare his family the pain and burden of a lingering death.
“Are you getting anywhere?” Cara said. “I’ve been watching the news about Russia. Isn’t that funny? I don’t think I’ve ever watched the news in my life. But now I feel like I’m part of it . . .” Her voice withered and he could picture her taking a labored sip from the cup next to her. “Imagine, Grisha. Me. Mixed up with Maxim Krupin and the CIA. Maybe they could make a TV show about us. It’d be like that movie with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.”
“Mr. and Mrs. Smith.”
“How do you know that? You sleep through every movie I put on.”
“You taught me to surf. Maybe it’s time I teach you to fight.”
“I don’t think it’d suit me. Maybe I could just play your adoring secretary. Like the one James Bond had. What was her name? Moneypenny. That’s it.”
A woman appeared on the sidewalk below and Azarov watched the wind attack her umbrella. It seemed like Krupin would send a somewhat more formidable operative to drag off the dying soldier, but it wasn’t certain. Force was his preferred method, but in this case perhaps he felt that secrecy was more important.
Azarov felt a distinct wave of disappointment when she passed by without giving the house a second look. As she disappeared into the mist, Maxim Krupin disappeared with her.
“Moneypenny was M’s secretary,” he said. “Not Bond’s.”
“Know-it-all.”
He leaned into the window, scanning up and down the street. Once again it was devoid of life.
“I understand Claudia visited you yesterday.”
“With her daughter,” Cara confirmed. “Have you met them? So sweet. Anna’s—”
An unexpected knock on the door caused him to lose focus on what she was saying.
“Dr. Kennedy just came in,” he lied. Again. “Can I call you back?”
“Sure. But you need to be more interesting next time. I’m pretty sure the boredom of lying in this bed is going to kill me before the liver does.”
“I’ll work on it. If you promise to get some rest.”
He disconnected the call as a second knock sounded, this time insistent enough to cause dust to float from the old wood. Azarov looked around the room, taking in its details again. The entire space was perhaps four meters square with a small table in the center and a rudimentary kitchen along the north wall. A pullout sofa partially blocked the door to a minuscule bathroom. The only window was the one he was sitting at.
If Krupin had found him, there would be no escape. Rapp wasn’t going to come to the rescue again and Nikita Pushkin wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of Costa Rica. He’d have no fewer than thirty men, multiple attack helicopters, and satellite coverage.
In light of all that, there seemed to be no reason not to answer.
Azarov crossed the room and opened the door, not bothering to even put a hand near his weapon. Instead of Pushkin and a Spetsnaz team, though, he found a lone man in his late twenties. He wore sunglasses despite the gloom and his damp shirt strained to contain a physique sculpted more for appearance than athletic prowess. He was prettier than most, but still identifiable as a member of one of the gangs that infested this part of Russia.
“Can I help you?” Azarov asked, already knowing the answer. He was new in town and had used a significant amount of cash to rent a room that was barely better than sleeping outside. This young thug would assume he was on the run—from the police, from people to whom he owed money, from the military. A man on the run was easy prey.
“The landlord made a mistake,” he said, entering without an invitation. “The rent is actually double the amount he told you. And it would be best if you paid me my half in cash on the first of every month.”
He squared off with Azarov, tensing slightly to make his muscles ripple under the cloth constraining them. “The first installment is due now. My mother needs a new heater for her apartment.”
His eyes were blue and clear, his hair full, and his skin smooth. Azarov’s gaze fell to the tattoos snaking around his thick forearms. High-quality artwork from a shop that would follow professional hygiene standards.
“Do you talk or are you some kind of idiot?” the young man said as Azarov fixed on the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. Disappointing, but not catastrophic.
“Hey! I’m fucking talking to you!”
A powerful hand shot out and grabbed the front of Azarov’s shirt, breaking him from his trance. He raised his gaze from the man’s chest to his face, examining the furious expression without really seeing it. “You wouldn’t happen to know your blood type, would you?”
He released his shirt. “Are you on drugs or something?”
Azarov didn’t answer, instead reached out and closed the door.
• • •
Azarov pulled a broken cigarette from the pack and held a lighter to it. The blood-soaked tobacco resisted the flame at first, but finally it caught and allowed him to draw the smoke into his lungs.
He remembered being poor before being taken by the Soviet athletics machine. People helped each other then. There had been a sense of community built around lives mired in despair and hopelessness. So much had changed since then. And so much had stayed the same.
The blood beginning to penetrate the cracks between the floorboards needed to be addressed. People tended to mind their own business in this part of the country, but if a crimson rain started in the apartment below, the police would be called. There were towels in the bathroom and a few threadbare blankets on the sofa. They’d be enough.
He picked up his phone and dialed Joe Maslick, who was on the outskirts of Novosibirsk, surveilling a woman afflicted with leukemia. She was an intentionally low-priority target, leaving him with the time to act as the CIA’s coordinator for this operation.
“Go ahead,” the American said, picking up the call.
“I need a courier to take an item to Dr. Kennedy. Time is of the essence.”
“You got something?”
Azarov looked at the dead man lying at his feet and at the large hole in the right side of his back. A sloppy job, but considering it had been done with a folding knife and a few YouTube videos, a respectable one.
“Yes, but nothing related to the task at hand.”
“How big and heavy?”
Azarov put his cigarette out on the linoleum tabletop and walked to a small refrigerator. The liver, with a significant amount of flesh still clinging, was lying next to a carton of eggs. “Let’s say a thirty centimeter cube weighing perhaps three kilos.”
“Understood.”
“It will need to be transported in a cooler with ice.”
“Could you repeat that?”
“A cooler. With ice.”
Maslick didn’t respond immediately, but when he did he didn’t ask questions. A good soldier through and through.
“It’ll be at least three hours before I can get anyone there. Then onto a private jet from the local airport. Call it another twelve hours to Langley.”
“That’ll be acceptable. But no longer.”
CHAPTER 31
RIGA
LATVIA
“LEFT up ahead.”
Coleman turned onto a traffic-choked street as Rapp scanned the sidewalk through his open window. The scene seemed almost surreal. The day before he’d been mugging a group of Russian soldiers and then escaping into the woods on horseback. Now he was looking out on cafes packed with people talking, laughing, and gesturing with wineglasses.
No one in Riga seemed the least bit worried about the troops building on their eastern border. Latvia was a NATO nation that had prospered since its break with Russia, working toward a free, modern, and westward-leaning future. For many, their Soviet past was just ink in history books and rambling
stories from their elders.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Coleman said.
“What?”
“That all this could be gone in a few days. And for what? A sick old man trying to cling to power for another few months.”
They’d made the long drive partially to stay out of airports that were easily monitored by the Russians, but also to give the Agency and military intelligence time to reexamine their data through the filter of Krupin’s illness. What they’d come up with wasn’t encouraging.
Coleman let out a long breath that spoke volumes. The threats posed by the terrorist groups across the Middle East were massive and ever evolving, but completely different in scope than those posed by Russia. It was a country with a sophisticated military machine made up of more than a million professional soldiers armed with cutting-edge equipment. And that was leaving aside the nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out the majority of life on the planet.
They continued in silence through the city to an office park in the suburbs. It was intentionally nondescript, a place designed to house bookkeepers and host meetings about marketing laundry detergent. The only hint of its real purpose was the two guards monitoring the entrance to the underground parking garage. The uniforms were the expected ill-fitting polyester, but everything else about them screamed spec ops.
Coleman handed their passports through the window and after a careful examination the gate went up. Inside, a man armed with an MP5 waved them into a parking space and then waited for them to get out. He motioned for them to raise their hands to be searched but Rapp shook his head.
He seemed unsure what to do, finally calling someone on his radio. After a brief conversation in Latvian, he indicated for them to follow and led them into a sea of gray carpet, green walls, and drop ceilings.
The need for anonymity became clear when Rapp and Coleman entered a large conference room filled with people milling around nervously. As expected, Kennedy’s counterparts from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia were there, as were a number of generals. The surprise was the presence of those country’s top politicians. Obviously President Alexander had made some personal calls.
Coleman knew a number of them from his consulting days and waded in, shaking hands and exchanging greetings. The former SEAL was received warmly but all eyes were on Rapp as he leaned back against a wall. The president of Latvia finally called the meeting to order and everyone settled into seats.
“I don’t know if any of you have met Mitch Rapp personally,” he said. “But I think we all know him by reputation. Also, I assume it’s been impressed on you that in the context of this discussion, he speaks for the American government.”
Rapp pushed himself off the wall and the focus on him intensified.
“How much have you been told about Russia’s military moves over the past weeks?”
“We know about the increasing threat to Ukraine,” Latvia’s president responded. “We assume that this meeting is about our potential involvement should that country be invaded. And while we’re sympathetic to their plight, we’re in a difficult situation with regard—”
“It’s not about that,” Rapp said.
The man fell silent with an expression that suggested he wasn’t accustomed to being interrupted.
“The Russians aren’t going to try to take the rest of Ukraine. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in about forty-eight hours, we expect them to mount a simultaneous invasion of your three countries.”
Not surprisingly, everyone started talking at once. Rapp held up a hand and they fell silent. “The Russians have been moving viable men and equipment from Ukraine to the forces on your borders. In the last twenty-four hours we’ve also seen a significant increase in Russian submarine activity in the Gulf of Finland.”
“I don’t understand,” the president of Estonia said. “This makes no sense. We’re NATO countries. I understand that Maxim Krupin has been behaving erratically recently but this would be insane. How could it possibly benefit him?”
A great deal of thought had been put into whether to tell them about Krupin’s illness and the decision had been to keep it quiet. It would almost certainly leak, which could generate a destabilization of Russia as Krupin and Sokolov faced off against their internal opponents. Kennedy and Alexander had decided that an invasion of the Baltics would be easier to handle than a full-scale meltdown at the Kremlin.
“We don’t know.”
“What are America and NATO going to do about this?” one of the generals demanded. “Our militaries are no match for Russian forces and we have only token foreign troops stationed here.”
“I’m not going to stand here and blow smoke up your ass,” Rapp responded. “NATO isn’t going to do anything. Krupin’s been smart. The fake troop buildup in Ukraine blinded us and the wind down of exercises in Poland has us off-balance. We—”
“Do you have proof of any of this?” the president of Estonia interrupted.
“That’s the problem with these kinds of things. The attacking force tends not to take out ads on TV. It’s unlikely that even their field commanders know yet. All this is being done under the cover of readiness exercises.”
“Then you’re just speculating.”
“This isn’t politics,” Rapp said. “Sticking you head in the sand and making fancy speeches isn’t going to do you any good when Russian tanks are rolling across your borders. Even if you don’t care about your countries, think about yourselves. Because Andrei Sokolov is going to line everyone in this room up against a wall and use you for target practice.”
“How long have you really known about this?” the Estonian president shouted. “Did you wait until the last minute to tell us so that you’d have an excuse not to live up to your agreement to protect us? America doesn’t want to involve itself in a fight in Europe. You want to fight amongst yourselves fueled by the Russian propaganda machine!”
“Calm down,” someone Rapp didn’t recognize said. “The Americans’ motivations are of little importance at this point. If what we’re being told is true, then we need to make plans.”
“Plans?” came the panicked response. “For NATO turning its back on us while the Russians invade? What—”
“You have a strategy that you developed in conjunction with the Agency and Scott’s company,” Rapp said, talking over the man. “We’re recommending that you implement it. The hope is that it’ll take away Krupin’s incentive to attack.”
A stunned silence descended over the room and all eyes slowly moved to a man sitting on the right side of the table. He was in his early sixties, wearing an army uniform that had been modified to accommodate the arm he’d lost years ago in battle. Rapp had dealt with him a few times in the past—a tough, smart military man with little patience for politics. His purpose in life was to defend his country and, like Rapp, he considered all other subjects too trivial to worry about.
“General Strazds?” the Latvian president prompted. “What do you think of all this?”
The man looked around the table and then at Rapp, collecting his thoughts before speaking.
“I have concerns. First let me say that I don’t think the Americans have been duplicitous in this and I think Mitch believes what he’s saying. However, what he’s asking us to do would largely destroy not just our political and military institutions, but our economies and much of our infrastructure. We created this contingency plan to face an imminent threat from the Russian—something we’re not seeing. The troops on our borders have become something of a permanent fixture and the movements from Ukraine can be explained any number of ways. I agree that Krupin has been unusually erratic lately, but a war with NATO? With all due respect to Mitch and Dr. Kennedy, this seems unlikely. Certainly too unlikely to purposely implode the Baltics. We’d be doing Krupin’s job for him, wouldn’t we? No need for him to spend a dime or lose a single man. We’d bring ourselves to our knees.”
“Obviously the NATO countries understand the sacrifice you’d be making,” Rap
p said. “And we’re willing to commit to seeing the damage done to your countries put right. No matter how much it costs, it’d be cheaper than war.”
“I appreciate that, Mitch, but the damage you’re asking us to do won’t be so easily fixed and the other NATO countries have their own problems to deal with. I’m concerned about their actions matching their words.”
Rapp watched as the Baltic leadership nodded and whispered among themselves, knowing that he’d lost them. General Strazds was well respected for a reason and his analysis was dead on given the intel he was working with.
“I have a piece of information that I’ m not authorized to tell you,” Rapp said, silencing the group again. Coleman’s face fell and he used his finger to make a subtle slashing motion across his throat.
“Before I share it, I want to make something very clear. It’s not to leave this room. If it leaks, I’ll use all the Agency’s resources to track down which one of you was responsible and I’ll kill you.”
“Are you threatening us?” the Estonian president asked, his earlier panic turning to indignation.
“If any of your English skills aren’t up to understanding what I’m saying, you should get someone to translate because you don’t want to miss this. If you screw me, one day you’ll wake up in the middle of the night to find me standing over you with a silencer pressed to your head. President Alexander won’t be told anything about it and Irene Kennedy’ll figure out how to blame it on the Russians.”
Before the Estonian could speak again, General Strazds interjected. “Based on Mitch’s history, I think we should take him at his word. If anyone here isn’t confident in his or her ability to stay silent, now would be a good time to leave.”
No one made a move for the door so Rapp continued.
“Maxim Krupin has brain cancer. At best it’s extremely serious, at worst it’s terminal.”
Another uproar prompted General Strazds to take charge of the Baltic side of the discussion. About time. With this many politicians in the room, getting them to shut the fuck up was half the battle.