Smith and Fiona froze in their tracks.
“Put your hands up, please,” the tall man ordered quietly in English. “Otherwise my men and I will be forced to shoot you here and now. And that would be regrettably messy, would it not?”
Slowly, Smith raised his arms, keeping his palms out to show that he was unarmed. Out the corner of his eye, he saw Fiona doing the same thing. All the color had drained out of her face.
“A sensible decision,” the blond man approved. He smiled coldly. “I am Erich Brandt. And you are the notorious Colonel Jonathan Smith and the lovely, though equally notorious, Ms. Devin.”
“Smith? Devin? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jon said stiffly. “My name is Strand, Dr. Kalle Strand. And this is Ms. Lindkvist. We are scientists working for the United Nations.” He knew it was a futile gesture, but he wasn’t willing to concede everything so easily to the other man. Not yet anyway. “Who are you exactly? Criminals? Thieves? Kidnappers?”
Still smiling, Brandt shook his head. “Come now, Colonel. Let’s not play such silly games. You’re no more a Swede than I am.” He took one step closer. “But I do congratulate you. Very few men have ever evaded me for so long.”
Smith said nothing, trying hard to tamp down his anger at having been herded into this trap so easily. The cars coming up to the front of the dacha had mostly been a feint, he realized bitterly—a means of prodding them out here into the open.
Brandt shrugged. “Stoicism is also a trait I admire. But only to a degree.” He jerked the barrel of his submachine gun toward the dacha. “Inside. Move.”
Slowly, Smith and Fiona backed up.
There were three other gunmen inside the house now. They were holding Madame Zarkova and her three servants—the maid, the young man from the kitchen, and an older man with a few strands of hair plastered across his bald scalp—as prisoners in her sitting room.
Still seated regally in her high-backed armchair, the older woman stared in outrage at Brandt. “What is this nonsense?” she demanded angrily. “How dare you invade my home!”
The former East German secret policeman shrugged. “A regrettable necessity, Madame,” he said smoothly. “Unfortunately, these people”—he indicated Smith and Fiona—“are spies. They are enemies of the State.”
“Ridiculous,” Zarkova scoffed.
Brandt smiled again. “You think so?” He turned to his men. “Bind their hands. And then search them. Be very thorough.”
Conscious of the several weapons pointed straight at him, Smith stood still, reluctantly submitting as his hands were roughly bound behind his back with a length of plastic cable—flex-cuffs of the same kind used on insurgents and terrorists captured by U.S. troops in Iraq. He heard Fiona hiss in pain through her clenched teeth as the same thing was done to her.
Once they were tied up and helpless, Brandt’s men frisked them expertly, checking every place a weapon or any other piece of useful equipment might be hidden. Smith bristled, angrier and angrier inside, both with them and at himself, as the search went on, growing ever more intrusive. The blond wig came off, revealing his dark hair, and he was forced to spit out the cheek inserts that had altered the shape of his face. He knew it must be far more humiliating for Fiona than it was for him.
Brandt stood watching without visible reaction as his men first found Jon’s 9mm pistol, then Fiona’s 5.45mm Makarov PSM, their elements of disguise, their forged passports and other papers, and, finally, their high-tech Covert-One-issue cell phones. They set the weapons and other equipment on a coffee table in front of him. Only when one of the men pulled Fiona’s concealed switchblade out of her right boot, did the blond-haired man show any serious interest.
He picked up the knife, touched the button on its slender black hilt, and saw the long, deadly blade flick out. One pale eyebrow went up in surprise. He turned to Fiona with a dry smile. “I saw the gruesome wound this little toy of yours inflicted on one of my men, Ms. Devin. And Dmitri was a trained assassin. Clearly, you are something more than a mere journalist.”
She shrugged defiantly. “Think what you like, Herr Brandt. I’m not responsible for your fevered imagination.”
Brandt chuckled. “Brave words, Ms. Devin. But empty words, I suspect.” He turned back to Madame Zakarova, who sat watching the proceedings with a fierce scowl. “You see?” he said, still smiling. “Weapons. Disguises. Forged passports. And sophisticated communications devices. Tell me, Madame, are these the normal accoutrements carried by Swedish medical researchers—or are they devices better suited to foreign spies?”
“Spies,” the older woman admitted quietly, turning paler.
“Just so,” Brandt said calmly. He reached into a pocket inside his camouflage smock, took out a pair of thin latex gloves, and then began slowly and methodically putting them on. Everyone in the room watched him in silence, unable to pull their eyes away. “Your late husband was a high-ranking member of the Party in the old days, Madame. You are not a simple member of the uneducated masses. Tell me, what was the penalty for espionage and for treason?”
“Death,” she whispered. “It was death.”
“Exactly right,” the German told her. He finished donning the gloves and then glanced toward the visibly frightened servants sitting lined up on one of the sofas—a slim-legged nineteenth-century antique richly embroidered in a bright fabric of blue and gold. “Which of you is Petr Klimuk?”
The older, bald-headed man hesitantly raised one hand. “I am, sir,” he muttered.
Brandt smiled thinly. “And you are the one who contacted us, when you heard that your mistress was going to meet with these foreigners?”
Klimuk nodded, more eagerly now. “That’s right,” he said. “Just like you asked me to do earlier today. You promised that if I reported anyone snooping around asking questions about her husband, I would get a reward.”
“So I did,” Brandt admitted coolly. “And so you shall.”
Then, without hesitating, the gray-eyed man took Smith’s Makarov off the coffee table in front of him, thumbed off the safety, aimed, and shot Klimuk in the forehead at point-blank range. Blood splashed across the back of the sofa, staining its richly colored fabric an ugly red.
While the other servants were still staring at their dead colleague in horror, Brandt swung the pistol slightly and fired two more times. The maid and the younger man both slumped back against the sofa, each killed by a single shot.
The former Stasi officer turned away. There was no expression whatsoever on his face.
Madame Zakarova sat motionless in her high-backed chair, looking at her murdered servants with an ashen face. “Why?” she spat out furiously. “Why kill them? They were not spies. Yes, Klimuk and the others were ignorant and foolish, but they had done nothing to deserve death.”
Brandt shrugged. “Very few people ever do.” He raised the Makarov and fired again.
Shot through the heart, the older woman fell back in her chair. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, forever locked in an expression that mingled anger, contempt, and the first horrified realization that she too was marked for death.
Carefully, Brandt set the pistol down on the floor and then kicked it away under the sofa. He glanced at Smith. “When the militsia arrive, they should find the fingerprints on that weapon of great interest, don’t you think? Your fingerprints, naturally.” He shook his head in wry amusement. “You Americans are so violent, so trigger-happy. No wonder you are so widely disliked throughout the world.”
“You’re nothing but a black-hearted, murdering bastard!” Fiona told him fiercely, speaking through gritted teeth.
“Yes, I suppose that I am,” Brandt said calmly. Then he stared back at her with his cold gray eyes. “And now you are my prisoner, Ms. Devin. Think about that, why don’t you?”
He swung back to his watching men. “Bring them,” he snapped. “Let’s go.”
With gunmen prodding them from behind and others watching warily from the front, Smith and Fiona were
hustled out through the door and shoved into the backseat of one of the three vehicles parked outside the dacha—an all-wheel-drive Ford Explorer. Brandt and one of his men climbed into the front seat. One of the remaining gunmen scrambled into the Volga brought by the Americans, while the others got into the third car, another big four-wheel-drive Ford.
In convoy, with the Explorer transporting Brandt and the two Americans in the lead, the three vehicles turned across the patch of gravel and drove away from the dacha, bumping slowly down the rutted track leading back to the road. Once on the road, they turned right, not left, and sped up.
Ignoring the pain from his abraded wrists, Smith sat up a little straighter. They were heading west through the darkness. Trees, high, mounded snow-banks, and brush-choked turnoffs to old logging tracks appeared briefly in their high beams and then vanished behind them into the night.
He glanced at Fiona to see if she had noticed. She nodded slightly. Brandt and his men were not taking them back to Moscow.
Why not? Smith wondered. If the former Stasi officer was working for Malkovic, and the billionaire was working with the Kremlin, why not simply hand them over to the Russians for interrogation? Were Brandt and his wealthy employer playing a double game of some kind?
Vladik Fadayev lay perfectly still among the clumped birch trees lining the road. Thanks to his snow parka and twig-laced camouflage netting, anyone looking at the lean, hollow-cheeked sniper from more than a couple of meters away would only have seen one more snow hummock among many in the woods.
Despite the bitter cold, Fadayev was content. As a younger man he had spent two years in combat in Afghanistan’s rugged mountains and foothills, killing mujahideen warriors at long-range with his much-loved SVD rifle. The experience had taught him to enjoy the difficult and dangerous game of hunting other men. After the Red Army abandoned its long war against the Afghans, peace had come as a tremendous letdown. All in all, the sniper reflected, he was fortunate to have found employment with a man like Erich Brandt—a man who appreciated his special skills and found many different ways in which to employ them.
One by one, the taillights of Brandt’s three vehicles disappeared around a bend. The sound of their engines faded into the night.
Fadayev stayed motionless, waiting.
His patience was rewarded.
A big boxy GAZ Hunter lumbered out of the woods ahead of him. Gears shifting noisily, the Russian-made jeep swung sharply west onto the narrow road and accelerated. Snow and broken boughs and branches slid off its roof and hood, tumbling across the lane in its wake.
The sniper smiled. He spoke quietly into his radio mike. “This is Fadayev. You were quite right. The Americans had company. And now you are being followed.”
Smith fought to control his expression when he heard the report crackling over the tactical radio hooked to the Explorer’s dashboard. Beside him, he heard a soft, in-drawn breath from Fiona. They both knew Oleg Kirov had been spotted. And now they were powerless to warn the Russian that he was in danger.
Brandt leaned forward and took the mike. “Understood, Fadayev. We’ll deal with the situation from this end. Out.” He looked over his shoulder at the two Americans. “That will be your colleague, I imagine.”
Neither moved a muscle.
Brandt smiled at the sight of their carefully impassive faces. “I am not a fool,” he said calmly. “You are both professionals. I knew that you would never go into a danger zone without support.”
To hide his sudden feeling of despair, Smith stared out the window. In the dark, it was difficult to see much of anything, but he thought they were just coming up a little rise, following the road as it wound along a low, densely wooded hill. Off on their left, the ground fell away in a gentle, tree-covered slope, cut here and there by steeper-sided ravines that were choked with boulders, brush, and scrub timber.
In the seat ahead of him, he heard Brandt using the radio again. “All vehicles, halt,” the tall man said flatly. “Deploy for action to our rear.”
Immediately, the big car they were in slowed, pulled over to the side just past a blind curve, and stopped. The Volga and the second Ford Explorer did the same, pulling up right behind them. Doors slammed open, and Brandt’s men spilled out onto the narrow road, rapidly fanning out among the trees with their automatic weapons ready.
In the silence, Jon and Fiona heard the noise of another car coming up the hill behind them. Awkwardly, they swung round in the seat to stare through the back window.
Smith felt his jaw tighten. What could he do? Grimly, he ran through possible courses of action. But, with his hands bound behind his back there seemed very little he could achieve. Sure, he might be able to hurl himself across the front seat at Brandt and the driver, but would that create the kind of distraction needed to give Kirov a real fighting chance? He shrugged mentally. Though the action seemed futile, it was his only real option. Furtively, he flexed his arms and legs, trying to loosen stiff muscles before he made his move.
“Be still, Colonel,” Brandt said coldly. “Or I will put a bullet into your brain.”
Warily, Smith glanced over his shoulder.
The gray-eyed man sat there staring straight at him, aiming a pistol squarely at his head.
Suddenly, sooner than any of them had expected, the oncoming GAZ-manufactured jeep came racing around the corner. It was moving fast in a blaze of headlights.
Brandt’s men opened up instantly, firing their submachine guns on full automatic. The stuttering, clattering roar of gunfire shattered the frozen hush of the winter night. Bullets hammered the speeding jeep, punching enormous holes through its chassis and sending pieces of torn metal flying. Its windshield blew inward, shattered into a thousand separate bits by 9mm rounds fired at close range.
Without slowing at all, the bullet-riddled jeep veered sharply off the road and plunged wildly down the wooded slope. Still skidding downhill at high speed, the Hunter slammed into a birch tree with an earsplitting crash, spun away, and then slowly toppled sideways over the edge of a ravine. The pale beam of one headlight lit the overhanging trees and brush for a few seconds longer and then winked out, again leaving the hillside cloaked in absolute darkness.
When the light vanished, Jon and Fiona exchanged horrified glances. Neither of them had any real hope that Kirov could have survived the murderous ambush and crash they had just witnessed.
Brandt waited until the two Americans turned away in sorrow. Still holding his pistol on Smith, he picked up the radio mike. “Fadayev? This is Brandt. We’re finished here. Listen, get back in your car and come up the hill after us. I want you to investigate the wreckage of that jeep and to retrieve any documents carried by the driver. See if you can learn the name of the man we just killed. Understand?”
A flat, emotionless voice crackled back across the radio. “I understand.”
Brandt nodded. “Good. When you’re finished, report back to Group headquarters in Moscow. The rest of us will proceed to the monastery.”
He listened for the sniper’s acknowledgment and then signed off.
The gray-eyed man looked across the seat at Smith and Fiona. He shrugged. “So much for your friend.” Then he smiled coldly. “And soon we can begin the painful process of finding out just who employs you and how much you have already told them—”
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Six
Baku, Azerbaijan
The wide boulevards and narrow alleys of Baku, the largest and most sophisticated city in the Caucasus region, stretched for miles along the shore of the Caspian Sea. As billions of euros and dollars poured in to finance new oil and natural gas ventures, Baku was more than ever a city of striking contrasts. It was both a bustling, prosperous twenty-first-century boomtown of glittering steel-and-glass skyscrapers, and also an ancient metropolis of mosques, royal palaces, and bazaars set amid a maze of shaded cobblestone lanes.
On a hill rising just outside the walls of the Old City lay the ugly concrete building that house
d Azerbaijan’s president and his staff. Scowling Azeri soldiers patrolled the surrounding streets, making sure that visiting oil company representatives and curious tourists looking for the nearby Baku Philharmonic and the state art museums kept moving along.
Deep inside the Presidential Administration building, one of the household staff emerged from a central elevator. He was pushing a heavy cart piled high with covered dishes. Troubled by what appeared to be a threatening buildup of Russian troops in neighboring Dagestan, the republic’s Defense Council was meeting in emergency session. As the night wore on, the generals and government ministers had ordered food sent in from the kitchen.
Two hard-eyed men in dark suits stepped forward. “Security,” one said, showing an identity card. “We’ll take that from here. Only authorized personnel go any farther.”
The waiter shrugged wearily. “Just make sure you get their orders right,” he said, handing over a sheet showing the meals requested by each member of the Defense Council. Yawning, he turned back into the elevator.
Once the doors closed, one of the security service officers quickly lifted the lids of the dishes on the cart, comparing them with the list now held in his hand. He stopped once he found the bowl of piti, a stew of mutton, chickpeas, fat, and saffron. He turned to his comrade. “This one,” he said quietly.
“Looks delicious,” the other man said with a quick, cynical grin.
“So it does,” the first man agreed. He glanced swiftly up and down the corridor to make sure no one was looking. Satisfied, he took a vial out of his pocket and stirred the liquid it contained into the stew. The vial went back into his coat pocket while his colleague slowly trundled the cart up the corridor. Another HYDRA variant was moving toward its chosen target.
The White House
The outlook of those sitting around the crowded White House Situation Room conference table was unreservedly bleak, President Sam Castilla realized, observing the grim, set faces of his national security team. Most were deeply worried that the United States could soon be facing a serious clash with Russia, but no one felt confident enough in the available information to offer any solid suggestions on how to handle the terrifying diplomatic and military crisis they feared might be rushing toward them.
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