The Persian Gamble

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  He still had no idea who this brunette really was. He didn’t even know her full name. All Oleg could really say about this woman was that she was fluent in Russian, an accomplished pilot, an expert shot, and as brave as anyone he’d ever met. She had taken a bullet to save their lives and hadn’t cried, hadn’t whimpered, hadn’t complained, had barely seemed bothered by it at all. Given the circumstances and her skill set, he had to assume she worked for the CIA.

  As they entered the house, Oleg was completely unprepared for what he saw. There was blood everywhere. Broken furniture. Shattered dishes. Shell casings. The acrid stench of gunpowder hung thick in the air. Then he saw the bullet-ridden body lying on a blood-soaked carpet, half in the living room, half in the dining room, the handle of a six-inch blade protruding from his chest.

  Oleg swore when he recognized the face. “You’ve killed Zakharov’s brother!”

  “Was he Spetsnaz?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “You might have mentioned that,” Marcus said without emotion. “Give me a hand.”

  Oleg was too stunned to say anything more. He wished he had been more forthright about the home they were breaking into. He had owed Marcus Ryker the whole truth. Ryker had, after all, repeatedly saved his life in the last twelve hours. Indeed, Ryker had saved countless lives by keeping their two countries from going to war. The American had shown astonishing courage under fire, and Oleg owed him a great debt. He’d been intrigued with Ryker ever since he’d first seen him on TV, receiving a medal in the East Room of the White House a week after the Secret Service agent and his colleagues had saved the lives of the American president and the First Family during a terrorist attack on the White House. After that, Oleg had done a good deal of research on the man. The more he learned, the deeper his respect grew.

  So Oleg kept quiet and remained focused on the task at hand, though he promised himself he would not hold out on Marcus again in the future.

  The two men carried Jenny to the second floor and laid her on a bed in a corner room.

  “Grab our gear from the Jeep—all of it,” Marcus said, propping up Jenny’s head with several pillows. “Put it in the master bedroom, and bring me the medical kit. Don’t turn on any lights.”

  Oleg did as he was asked. He returned a few minutes later with all three rucksacks, the sniper rifle, and the AK-47. When he entered the master bedroom, he found Marcus already there, staring at the walls. As Oleg set the gear on the king-size bed, he followed Marcus’s gaze. The walls were covered with framed photos, letters of citation signed by some of the highest-ranking officers in the Russian military, and a half-burnt Afghan flag shot through with multiple bullet holes. Marcus said nothing as Oleg handed him the medical kit. Instead, he headed back to Jenny’s room, removed her boots and socks, and then unzipped and removed her jumpsuit. Now she was lying there in faded blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a navy-blue sweater, all of which were completely soaked through with melted snow.

  “Boris Zakharov’s brother was not just Spetsnaz,” Oleg finally admitted, standing in the doorway. “He was the commander of Directorate C.”

  “Spetsgruppa Smerch,” said Marcus, clearly familiar with the unit.

  “Da,” Oleg said. “The man was a legend. Served with distinction in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Northern Caucasus. You name a hellhole Russian Special Forces were sent to, and he was there. During my brief stint in the army, the mere mention that he was coming to your base was enough to give you nightmares.”

  “Then you ought to sleep peacefully tonight, knowing he is gone,” said Marcus, his voice flat but tinged with an edge of reproach. “The guy was dirty.”

  “The Mercedes in the garage?” Oleg asked.

  Marcus nodded as he stripped off his leather gloves and donned medical ones. “Wanna guess how much that car retails for in the States?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Forty thousand dollars, easy,” Marcus said, examining Jenny’s wounds.

  “That’s a bit steep for a retired general living on a pension.”

  “I’d say,” Marcus agreed, asking for a flashlight and a pair of rubber gloves.

  “You think he was selling drugs or running prostitutes?” Oleg asked, fishing both out of the kit.

  “Probably both. When we’re done, you might want to go through his papers. I doubt you’ll need to dig too deep. All right—here, hold the flashlight.”

  Marcus asked for a pair of scissors, which he used to cut away Jenny’s sweater and T-shirt, revealing an entrance wound on the front of her right shoulder and a much larger exit wound on her back. “Hand me that blanket.”

  Oleg reached for a hand-knit wool blanket lying on a wooden rocking chair and gave it to Marcus, who draped it over Jenny, covering her for modesty as well as warmth, leaving only her wounded shoulder exposed. Then he stepped into the bathroom, filled a glass with water, and returned to the bedroom, where he dabbed and peeled away a few remaining shreds of cloth around the wound. The swelling was beginning to go down.

  “How’d you know all that snow would stop the bleeding?” Oleg asked, scooping up scraps of T-shirt and throwing them into a waste bin in the corner of the room.

  “Something I picked up in the Corps,” Marcus replied as he examined the wound more closely. “The freezing temperature of the snow slows the flow of blood until it coagulates and seals up the hole. That’s the theory, anyway. I’d never actually tried it till today. Not much snow in Kabul or Baghdad. But she was lucky. The bullet went right through the flesh. It came out the other side and didn’t shatter any bones. If it had . . .”

  “She would have needed more than snow.”

  Marcus nodded. “So far there’s no infection, so that’s something.”

  Marcus grabbed a tube of antibiotic ointment from the kit, applied it to two gauze pads, and taped one over the entrance wound and the other over the exit wound. He gave Jenny several shots—an antibiotic, another dose of painkillers, and a sedative. Then he hooked up a makeshift IV to get some fluids and a bit of nutrition back into her system and asked Oleg to go back into the master bedroom and find a clean T-shirt and sweater.

  “Be sure to keep your gloves on,” he warned.

  “You’re worried about fingerprints?” Oleg asked.

  Marcus nodded. Oleg was incredulous but held his tongue. The American couldn’t be serious, he told himself. The man’s blood—and thus DNA—was all over the living room, dining room, and kitchen. Oleg seriously doubted fingerprints would be the thing that gave them away.

  26

  Oleg brought back the items Marcus had asked for.

  Then he stepped into the hallway. His hands were shaking. He desperately needed a cigarette. But he didn’t want to smoke anywhere near Jenny, so he crossed the hallway into the master bedroom, lit a match, and took a long drag. The warm smoke filled his mouth and nostrils and lungs. The familiar sensation was soothing, but it did nothing to calm his nerves.

  The body count resulting from his decision to take out Luganov was mounting, but Oleg didn’t regret what he’d done. He’d acted in defense of his nation, he told himself, to prevent a needless and likely apocalyptic war with NATO. On this, his conscience was clear. He’d never intended to kill Dmitri Nimkov, however. He’d expected President Luganov to be alone. The FSB chief wasn’t supposed to be at the presidential palace, much less joining the president in his private study. But once Nimkov had entered the picture, Oleg had had no choice. Taking out Nimkov was unfortunate but essential. But then who had assassinated Maxim Grigarin? He certainly hadn’t. Nor had Marcus. They’d been nowhere near the Russian prime minister. Nor did they have any motive to kill the man. But someone did, and it was clear they’d used the assassination of Luganov and Nimkov as cover to make their own move.

  Oleg ran through various suspects in his mind, but for the moment he couldn’t see a front-runner. Whoever it was, Oleg knew they were likely coming after him next. Marcus was right. It wouldn’t take long for Moscow to disc
over that Oleg, Marcus, and Jenny hadn’t been killed in the downed G4. They’d been lucky. Extremely lucky. They’d cheated death far too many times that day. How long would it be, he wondered, until their luck ran out?

  Peter Hwang raced through the rain-swept streets of Washington.

  He knew he was driving too fast. He knew he risked a ticket and a hefty fine. But it couldn’t be helped. He was late.

  Turning off Massachusetts Avenue onto Second Street, he nearly sideswiped a pedestrian, then screeched into a lot next to the Hart Senate Office Building and pulled his Saab into one of the last available parking spaces. He didn’t waste time wondering why the place was so crowded in the middle of the night. He’d been summoned by the senator, so here he was. Grabbing his umbrella and briefcase, he made a dash to the Staff Only entrance. There, he showed the Capitol police officers his ID, put his things through the X-ray machine, and cleared through the magnetometer. Sixty seconds later, he bounded up the marble staircase, sprinted down the hall, and burst into the senator’s office, soaked and breathless.

  Robert Dayton sat behind his large oak desk, his feet perched on a credenza. The senior senator from Iowa sported a brown linen suit, a light-blue silk tie with matching pocket square, and blue suspenders. At seventy-one, Dayton was not only a lifelong member of the Democrat Party. He was also widely considered one of the nattiest dressers on Capitol Hill. And he was the ranking minority member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and now actively exploring a run for the Democratic nomination for president.

  The only other person in the room was Annie Stewart. A sharp, articulate, and quite attractive blonde with big green eyes, Stewart was the senator’s foreign policy advisor and longest-serving aide. She’d worked with Dayton since earning her bachelor’s in history from American University and a master’s degree from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service some fifteen years earlier. Privately, Hwang was smitten with her, but while she was friendly and professional, she had not shown him any particular interest, and Hwang hadn’t yet mustered the courage to ask her out.

  Neither the senator nor Stewart acknowledged Hwang as he entered the room. Both were glued to the bank of four TV screens mounted on the far wall. One was transmitting live images from the Senate floor. The other three were turned to CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, though only audio from MSNBC could be heard.

  “What’s going on?” Hwang asked, trying to catch his breath. “Where’s everyone else? What happened to the meeting?”

  When neither answered him, Hwang turned to the monitors and suddenly realized why. For the better part of the last twenty-four hours, he had been tied up in a health care policy conference in Los Angeles and thus in a news and social media blackout. He’d taken the red-eye from LAX and upon landing at Dulles International Airport headed straight for the parking garage and sped into D.C. Now every muscle in his body tensed as he saw the wall-to-wall coverage of the triple assassination in Moscow.

  How was this possible? He and Stewart and the senator had just been in Moscow. They’d just met with Luganov in his office, inside the Kremlin. They’d seen the security. It was airtight. There was no way someone could have penetrated it. And then a single terrifying thought flashed across his brain.

  Where was Marcus?

  27

  As Oleg lit his second cigarette, Marcus entered the master bedroom.

  He had found a laptop in Zakharov’s study. It was not password protected, and since Zakharov had clearly been living here and had no doubt been online recently, there was no risk in using it to connect to the Internet via the dacha’s Wi-Fi. Oleg peered over Marcus’s shoulder as the American pulled up various news websites and scrolled through them, looking for stories out of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

  More details were beginning to leak out about the three assassinations and the manhunt for those responsible. Some two hundred Muscovites had been arrested and hauled in for questioning, and a forty-eight-hour curfew had been imposed on the capital city. Prime Minister Grigarin had not been shot, as Oleg had assumed. Rather, the preliminary assessment of the bodyguards and FSB agents on the scene at the prime minister’s residence was that he was poisoned by something slipped into his tea. Acting FSB chief Nikolay Kropatkin was scheduled to give a press conference in a few hours and was expected to reveal damning evidence that Oleg Kraskin was not only to blame but had been working with at least two collaborators.

  Then Marcus came across a story that hit Oleg harder than he’d have expected.

  “Katya Slatsky, the acclaimed figure skater who competed in three Olympic Games, winning a gold medal and two silver medals, was found dead in her Moscow apartment this morning,” reported Reuters. “Moscow police have ruled the death a suicide. They say she suffered a single gunshot to the right temple. A handgun registered in her name was found at her feet and there was gunpowder residue on her right hand. The skater, widely rumored to be a longtime paramour of the late President Luganov, was thirty-three years old.”

  “They killed her,” Oleg said, half under his breath.

  “Not necessarily,” said Marcus, as a picture of the stunning blonde appeared on the screen. “She had to have been distraught.”

  “No,” Oleg insisted. “They killed her. There was no reason to, but they just did it anyway.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Marcus.

  “She was left-handed,” Oleg said, smoke curling about his head.

  They finished the story, but there were scant details.

  “Look, I need you to search all the Russian news sites for any mention of my name or Jenny’s,” Marcus said, shifting gears. “They’re saying you had two accomplices. We need to know if they’re specifically linking us to you.”

  “All right,” said Oleg, still in a daze. “What’s her last name? I never thought to ask.”

  “It’s Morris,” Marcus replied, “but it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it’s her real name anyway. Just search for Jenny or Jennifer and let me know what you find.”

  “Okay, but where are you going?”

  “I need to shower and give myself a bit of first aid. Then we have to clean up the downstairs and figure out some food. Keep an eye on Jenny, and don’t do anything stupid like turn on your mobile phone or send an email. Got it?”

  Oleg nodded, a bit offended for not being trusted but grateful for a few moments to himself. Everything was moving so fast. In some ways he was at the center of it all. Yet in other ways he was a million miles removed. Never had he felt so alone.

  As Marcus headed to the bathroom, Oleg sat down on the bed and began searching every Russian news site he could find. But his thoughts soon turned to Marina and Vasily. How were his wife and only son? Where were they? Were they safe? Did they know what he had done? Would they ever forgive him?

  Oleg couldn’t imagine how. What he could imagine was FSB thugs bursting into his mother-in-law’s home on the southern edge of St. Petersburg in the wee hours of the morning, arresting them all, and interrogating them for hours. Surely the authorities would suspect Marina knew all about the plot. They might even believe that Yulia Luganova had hatched the plot herself and persuaded her son-in-law to implement it, not to stop her ex-husband from launching a suicidal war with NATO but to take revenge for the cold, even savage way the president had divorced her, banished her from Moscow, and then taken up with Katya Slatsky.

  Neither Marina nor Yulia were involved, of course. Oleg hadn’t told them a word of what he’d been planning. For all the strains in this twisted family, and there were many, Oleg loved these women and his son. Above all, he had done what he had done for them. But he shuddered at the thought they might come to harm because of his actions.

  Then the TASS news service out of Moscow broke a major new story.

  CABINET NAMES PETROVSKY ACTING PRESIDENT

  (TASS NEWS SERVICE — MOSCOW)

  In an emergency vote following the assassination of President Aleksandr Ivanovich Luganov, the Russian cabinet named Mikhail
Borisovich Petrovsky as acting president of the Russian Federation, effective immediately.

  Petrovsky will speak to the country in a live televised address at 9 p.m. Moscow time. He is expected to brief the nation on the events of the last few hours and the manhunt under way to bring the perpetrators to justice.

  The 64-year-old native of Volgograd previously served as the nation’s defense minister.

  His appointment as president was approved on a voice vote of 29 to 0, according to a Kremlin spokesman.

  The cabinet further voted to name Boris Yamirev, 53, as acting defense minister. The three-star general, who commanded the army’s successful 2008 invasion and reacquisition of the eastern provinces of the Republic of Georgia, previously served as deputy defense minister.

  Nikolay Kropatkin, the 42-year-old deputy director of the FSB, was named the security agency’s acting director.

  Each man will serve for sixty days, at which point the cabinet is required to reauthorize their appointments.

  No successor has yet been named to the post of prime minister, but two senior Kremlin officials said an announcement would likely come in the next few days.

  So Petrovsky was taking over, Oleg mused. That hadn’t taken long. And it had been unanimous. But what did that mean for the war? Was the Kremlin going to back down from a head-to-head confrontation with NATO? Or were they already too deeply committed?

  28

  HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  “Please tell me it’s not possible,” Senator Dayton said.

  Pete Hwang started to answer, then realized the senator wasn’t talking to him.