by Flynn Vince
So, from now on, his life would be ruled by the unknown. How heavily was Krupin’s treatment facility guarded? How could they gain access to the building? Hell, was he even there or would they be charging a bunch of medical personnel and a couple of bemused janitors?
Their campsite finally descended into shadow, forcing Rapp to slip on a down jacket as he inflated their raft. A little help preparing would have been useful, but Azarov was dozing in a pile of leaves near the shore. Better to have him rested than screwing with foot pumps and weapons checks.
• • •
“I’m sorry,” Azarov said, appearing from the trees. “I didn’t think I’d sleep that long.”
“The good life can be destructive,” Rapp said pointing to a few cold sausage links and something that resembled a Russian Pop-Tart.
“And I’m its most willing victim,” he said, walking over to the food. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No. We’re pretty much packed up.”
The Russian sat on a log and took a bite of sausage, studying the wide, slow moving river. “It’s funny. More and more when I try to look back on my life, I wonder what happened. You chose this. I stumbled into it.”
“One last mission.”
He nodded. “I never cared about any of the others. Or anything, really. I joined the Soviet athletics program because I had no choice and my parents saw it as a way to get me out of poverty. I joined the military because I needed work and because I was good at it. When Krupin recruited me, I agreed because it paid better than Spetsnaz and because he’s not a man you say no to. It’s interesting how we came from opposite directions to end up in the same place.”
“Yeah?” Rapp said absently, shoving a few critical items into a waterproof bag with some rocks. He’d dangle it off the side of the raft and if they were discovered, subtly cut it loose.
Azarov picked up another sausage and gnawed thoughtfully on one end. “Your life has been driven entirely by passion. The death of your young love prompted you to join the CIA. Then your love of country and rage at the people attacking it kept you there.”
Rapp slid a rifle between a cooler and the side of the raft, but didn’t respond. It made sense that Azarov would know a great deal about him—the SVR undoubtedly had everything from his college transcript to his shoe size. It made for an odd conversation with the man who had tried to kill him multiple times.
“I have a lot of explaining to do to Cara,” Azarov continued. “It’s forced me to take stock of who I am.”
“And?”
“I can’t even remember the names and faces of many of the men I’ve killed. Do you think that’s evil? Or is it something worse?”
Rapp sat on the edge of the boat and examined the Russian for a moment. Now was not the time for introspection. Maybe he’d made a mistake. Maybe he shouldn’t have left Coleman screwing around with the Latvian insurgency.
“Krupin will be different.”
“Revenge,” Azarov said. “An opportunity to look into his eyes and see them go blank for what he did to Cara. Would you believe it if I told you that he’s the first person I’ve ever hated? It’s a strangely uncomfortable feeling.”
“Yeah,” Rapp said, standing and starting to drag the boat toward the river. “It is.”
CHAPTER 48
EAST OF ZHIGANSK
RUSSIA
RAPP stayed in the shadows, circling to the east and keeping his eye on the dilapidated buildings and military refuse piled up around them. They’d spent two days on the river and then another eight hours bushwhacking through dense woods and wet marshes to get there. Now, though, he was starting to wonder if all that effort had been wasted.
Skies were clear and the afternoon sun left little hidden. Even in the unrelenting glare, there was nothing to suggest that this facility was anything more than what it looked like—a graveyard for damaged and obsolete military equipment. The fact that his satphone signal seemed to be getting jammed was the only thing giving him hope that the Agency eggheads hadn’t completely whiffed this one. Irene had surrounded herself with quite a brain trust but sometimes they had a tendency to get lost in their data and assumptions. Great in a warm, dry office in Langley, but often not worth shit in the real world.
He finally picked up movement in his peripheral vision and crouched lower as a man became visible weaving through the debris. He was wearing the dirty, ragged clothing of a workman, strolling past a partially collapsed warehouse with a complete lack of urgency. It made sense that there would be someone posted to the area—a coordinator of shipments, cataloger of inventory, and deterrent to anyone looking to scavenge weapons.
Rapp used a set of compact binoculars to examine him in more detail. He didn’t have the Asian features of the people who inhabited the area, but that didn’t mean much. He had a wiry build in place of the bulk normally associated with someone working in this environment but, again, what did that prove? That he wasn’t a big eater? He seemed a little more interested in the tree line than expected. Again, though, so what? Maybe he was a fucking bird watcher.
A twig snapped to Rapp’s right and he eased back deeper into the trees, going for a knife instead of the unsuppressed Russian weapon the Agency had provided. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t be necessary. Azarov had been circling the facility in the other direction and probably made the sound intentionally to warn of his approach. Rapp picked up a small stick and broke it audibly. A moment later, the Russian was crawling up alongside.
“If this really is a high tech medical facility, then Krupin’s done a hell of a job camouflaging it. Are we wasting our time?”
Azarov shook his head. “I passed a building north of here that has a man standing by the entrance.”
“A guy passed me a few minutes ago, too. Could just work here.”
“Except I know this man. Badden Voronin. One of Krupin’s elite guard.”
Rapp surveyed the cinder block and steel of the buildings, the debris that offered a thousand places for a security force to hide, and the weapons that looked inoperable but might be locked and loaded. Irene’s eggheads scored again. The question was what could he do about it?
• • •
The rust-streaked door was clearly heavier and newer than anything on the buildings surrounding it. Voronin was seated beneath an overhang constructed of multiple layers of corrugated metal that had been left shiny on the underside. Rapp scanned the scene, lingering for a moment on a pile of tangled steel and debris just past the edge of the improvised roof. “Look right,” he whispered. “See the horizontal line in that pile of junk?”
Azarov nodded. “I’d guess that’s actually two walls joined together at that line. The top part can be pushed over.”
“If they went to the trouble of building a barrier like that, you can bet they put something heavy behind it.”
“Agreed.”
“Now that you’ve seen the place, how many people do you think we’re up against?”
In his previous life, Azarov would have been involved in setting up these kinds of security measures. Still, he took some time to think about it.
“Outside, I’d guess five or less. Krupin has a passion for secrecy, and if he’s sick that passion will have become an obsession. Having said that, there would be no reason for him to reveal the purpose of this place to the exterior guards.”
Rapp nodded. “If it were me, I’d just play it off as some kind of beyond-secret military research facility. But inside, it’d be hard to hide what’s really happening.”
“Correct. Inside, I’d expect to find the head of his personal guard and Nikita Pushkin. Perhaps a handful of other men who have demonstrated blind loyalty in the past.”
“Okay then. We have a building with one visible ingress point, about forty meters square. Heavy door that I think we can assume is locked. Unknown interior layout. One guard visible, probably another with a fixed machine gun placement just out of sight. At least one more guard roaming who’s going to come up behind us
if we start shooting. Probably more. Maybe a lot more. Did I miss anything?”
“You didn’t say anything about the men we speculate are inside.”
“Hard to imagine we’ll make it that far.”
“Again, I agree. Even if we kill Voronin and his exterior team, how do we breach the door?”
Rapp had taken a careful mental inventory of the mothballed military equipment at the facility, with just that question in mind. His preference would be to find something capable of blowing the entire building into the stratosphere and getting the hell out of there. Krupin wasn’t that stupid, though. Either there had never been that kind of matériel stored there or he’d had it removed.
“Could the CIA get heavy explosives to us?” Azarov asked, obviously thinking along the same lines.
“They barely got that raft onto the river bank.”
“Then as much as I want to see Krupin dead—as much as I need to see him dead—I don’t see a path forward.”
“Unacceptable.”
“We could wait for him to come out,” Azarov suggested.
“That could be days or even months from now. By then Europe’s major cities could be gone and NATO could be shelling Moscow and St. Petersburg.”
“Guard changes? Men coming out and others going in?”
Rapp shook his head. “Like you said, the guys inside know he’s sick and the ones outside probably don’t. My guess is that the men he has with him went in before his first treatment and won’t leave again until he’s cured or dead.”
“Then we’re back to having no path forward.”
The wind gusted, rattling the discarded metal and whistling through the buildings. Badden Voronin glanced up as the roof over him strained against the bolts securing it, then went back to scanning the area.
“Krupin made you into a ghost story that his enemies told to each other,” Rapp said finally. “The whole point was that you were a boogeyman hiding in the shadows. How much would someone like Voronin know about you?”
“Very little,” Azarov said. “We’ve met, but Krupin provides information only on a need to know basis—sometimes going so far as to intentionally create confusion, even in his allies. He considers the people closest to him the greatest threats and is quite effective at keeping them off-balance.”
It was exactly what Rapp wanted to hear. “Would Voronin know you quit?”
Azarov seemed to realize what he was being asked and considered his answer carefully. “My leaving would have been a humiliation for Krupin. And the fact that he didn’t immediately punish my betrayal could have made him seem weak.”
“And even if he did say something to Voronin, it could have just been disinformation. He’s not a man who goes around telling his security people his long game.”
“It’s possible. But it’s just as possible that Voronin is under orders to kill me on sight. In fact, after what happened to Cara, I’d say it’s likely.”
Rapp had read Azarov’s psych evaluation and one thing stood out—the man’s passion for order and predictability. He’d been too valuable for Krupin to risk in any operation that wasn’t completely nailed down. Winging it just wasn’t part of his world.
“Likely is different than certain.”
“Mitch, I—”
“Listen to me. These assholes are afraid of you. And they have no way of being a hundred percent sure what your real relationship with Krupin is.”
“I think you’re being overly optimistic.”
It was probably true, but there was no point in acknowledging it. “This’ll work, Grisha. All you have to do is go out there and sell it.”
CHAPTER 49
WHEN they emerged from the trees, Badden Voronin immediately slammed his assault rifle to his shoulder. Azarov’s stomach clenched but he made sure it wasn’t outwardly visible. To his left, Rapp seemed utterly unconcerned about their situation. The CIA man had spent his life fighting unpredictable enemies motivated by religion and visions of glorious martyrdom. A far cry from the calculating, wealth- and power-obsessed men whom Azarov had targeted.
Voronin remained nearly motionless, tracking them with minuscule adjustments of his weapon. He was an extremely gifted former Spetsnaz officer whose loyalty to Krupin was utterly unshakable. It would take only a slight twitch of his finger to succeed in doing something so many men had died trying to achieve.
But his finger didn’t twitch. And the wall next to him didn’t drop to reveal the machine gun placement that was inevitably behind it. He just stood there, wide-eyed, reeling through what he’d been told and trying to calculate how it fit with what he now saw with his own eyes. He was desperately asking—as Azarov himself had done so many times—what did Krupin expect of him?
“Badden,” Azarov said.
The calm greeting seemed to pull the man from his trance. “Colonel Azarov. What are you doing here?”
The hint of fear in his voice bolstered Azarov’s confidence. He wasn’t a man to be afraid of a fight. No, his concern was that he might fail his president and country. That he had missed some subtlety to Krupin’s orders that would allow him to act decisively.
“We had information that the CIA may have found this site,” Azarov said. “That they sent a team to try to assassinate the president. Another cowardly attack like the one they carried out in Moscow.”
The man’s eyes widened and flicked to Rapp before looking past them into the woods.
“I think it’s nonsense,” Azarov continued. “But the president wouldn’t be the president if he didn’t send me out into the wilderness for days to search for nothing.”
Normally, he wouldn’t have been so talkative, but under the circumstances, it seemed appropriate. And it worked. Krupin was a man prone to asking the impossible of his people, often for no fathomable reason. Voronin, who may have been living for months beneath that corrugated overhang, would understand this better than most.
He lowered his rifle and a moment later, a young man appeared from cover to Azarov’s right. They had been correct about the weapons placement.
“Colonel,” he said respectfully.
Azarov recognized him but couldn’t put a name to the face. He ignored the greeting and instead just pointed toward the door. It was what Cara called the moment of truth—usually in reference to a new recipe that would turn out inedible or to a wave that would throw him from his board and suck him under.
Voronin hesitated for a moment and then turned to punch a code into the keypad.
“Stop!”
The desperate shout came from a man Azarov had known since he was quite young. One of Krupin’s most trusted guards, but one who had aged to the point of losing his edge in combat situations.
“Pavel!” Azarov called, turning to see the man sprinting toward them with speed he wouldn’t have thought him capable of. “The president has you out here in the—”
“Kill him! Kill Grisha now!”
The door was already sliding open and Voronin, true to his nature, made no effort to defend his own life. Instead, he slammed his fist into a panic button that started to close it again. Azarov lunged forward, grabbing the man from behind and twisting his head one hundred and eighty degrees as bullets began sparking off the metal next to him.
He shoved Voronin’s body across the threshold and dropped to the ground, rolling right as the door closed on the man’s limp shoulders. He could hear the electric motor straining as he passed over the body of the other man, killed by Rapp in some way that was neither immediately evident nor important.
He saw Pavel go down, but not from the impact of the shot that Rapp had just taken at him. The old man was still impressive, sliding behind cover as Rapp struggled to achieve his normal accuracy with the unfamiliar Russian pistol.
A shot from an unknown source hit only a foot away from Azarov, sending shards of metal into his arm as he crawled over Voronin and slipped inside the building. He lay on his side, firing over the corpse in an effort to provide Rapp cover. The CIA man was stay
ing just ahead of the rounds of a still invisible sniper and he went high, diving through the narrow gap as the door continued to pulse, trying to break through the blockage and fully close.
A moment later Rapp had rolled to his feet and was kicking at Voronin’s torso as Azarov continued to fire around him. His weapon ran out of ammunition and he shouted at Rapp, who threw him his weapon and continued trying to work the body out of the doorway.
He finally succeeded clearing Voronin’s shoulders, allowing the door to travel farther, stopping again on his skull. One last kick and the barrier finally was able to slam home.
Rapp picked up Azarov’s empty weapon and inserted another magazine before firing two rounds into a keypad attached to the wall. He was rewarded with a cascade of sparks that would likely make entry impossible for the men outside. The fact that it would make escape equally difficult was something they’d have to worry about later.
• • •
The hallway was narrow and devoid of exits, forcing them to trade caution for speed in search of room to maneuver. Azarov was bringing up the rear, his footsteps inaudible through the ringing in Rapp’s ears.
Despite their precarious tactical position, Rapp slowed when the wall to his right turned to glass. On the other side was a large room full of patients, all meticulously secured to their beds. Some were unconscious, others were hooked up to IVs, and a few had machines breathing for them. The ones who didn’t look like they were on death’s door had their eyes on him, shouting silently and straining at their bonds.
He’d seen a lot in his time at the Agency, but nothing like this. Azarov had called it. Krupin was performing medical experiments on his own citizens in hopes of extending his life. Rapp locked gazes with a muscular, tattooed man in his early fifties, causing him to thrash even harder, rocking his bed back and forth on the tile floor. Whoever he was, he understood that the two filthy men on the other side of the glass represented a shift in the balance of power. And he wanted to be part of that shift.