by Trevor Scott
“I’ve got something you want,” Jake said, “and you need to keep me alive long enough to find out where I’ve hidden them. That about do it for you?”
Petrova laughed out a breath through his nostrils. “Yeah, that’s about it.”
Jake reached into his pocket and found the Alexandrite gem that had fallen from the metal box. When it hit the light it changed color instantly from a purplish-red to a vibrant green under the fluorescent lights overhead.
Nearly gasping, a smile crossed the weathered face of the little man. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
They were, Jake had to admit. “More so than diamonds or rubies or emeralds. But why the grand ruse, Victor? Why didn’t you just send your men to find the gems yourself? Wait. Let me guess. You either feared the polar bears would eat your men, or they would be enveloped by the glaciers.” No smile from Jake. He returned the gem to his pocket and watched Petrova’s eyes move along with Jake’s hand.
“Now what fun would that have been, Jake?” Petrova shook his big head side to side. “I thought you knew me better than that.”
“Right,” Jake said. “Why do the easy when the elaborate would be so much more fun? You like to fuck with people. You have to do it. Can’t breathe without finding ways to screw with the minds of others each and every day. Let me know when I’m getting close.”
Petrova’s head had swayed from shoulder to shoulder as Jake talked. Impatient and impertinent. “You were a pain in the ass in Volgograd. But you cracked then and you’ll eventually tell me where to find my Alexandrites.”
Shocked, but Jake tried not to show it. He had been held captive in that historic city for two weeks during the Cold War, beaten and starved and beaten some more. Jake had given them information, anyone would have, but everything he had given them was crap. Not one fraction of actionable intelligence of any kind. He knew it and Victor Petrova knew it. Jake had always guessed that this man had been around somewhere during his captivity, but it had never been confirmed. Until now.
“Sure, I’ll give you the location,” Jake said. “And then another and another and another. Your men will be running around like true Munchkins searching for a pot of gold.” Okay, maybe he shouldn’t have mixed his metaphors so drastically.
“I’m a little person,” Petrova said, exasperated. “Get over it. Move on. Tell me what I need to know.”
This was going about as well as Jake had guessed it would. “You’re a fuckin’ troll,” Jake finally said. “But I’ll take you to it. Only you.”
One of Petrova’s eyes closed. His perplexed look. “Why would you do that?”
“Because then we’re going to split it fifty/fifty.”
“Why not just take them all for yourself?”
“And have to kill every little person in Europe who happens to bump into me? What would that do to your population?”
Now Petrova finally smiled. “You’re right. I would hunt you down like a pig.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“We have a deal?” Jake asked.
The little Russian glanced at his screens and then back to Jake. “Why not. There’s enough there for both of us.”
That was too easy, Jake thought. But then Victor Petrova was the master of disinformation. He would say just about anything at this point to get him one step closer to the box of Alexandrites.
Suddenly an Elvis song shot from Petrova’s cell phone. Hound Dog. The Russian picked up and listened carefully. Then he glanced at the window, which showed only fog. He turned his head and mumbled something into the phone, but Jake could only pick up a couple of Russian words. He turned back and slapped his phone shut, then jumped down from his chair and shuffled across the hardwood floor toward the door.
“Let’s go,” Petrova said. “Elvis is leaving the building.”
The two little guards escorted Jake behind their boss, a man grasping each of Jake’s hands. Strangely enough, he felt like a dad with his kids at the zoo.
31
They were all on the move. The local police had cut off any road leading to Victor Petrova’s estate, which wasn’t hard, since only one road lead out there. Two police boats were in the water; one with two police officers and another with Toni, Colonel Reed, and a police officer at the wheel. All of the others, including the SWAT unit, had driven by vehicle, slowly, through thick, dense fog. There would be no air support, though, and that bothered Anna.
Set up now outside the main gate of Petrova’s compound, Anna gave the order for SWAT to crash through the gate. The other vehicles followed closely behind and set up a defensive position near the main house. Officers flowed out of vehicles in all directions to cut off any escape.
Anna and Kjersti stood back at their vehicle monitoring radios. Wind blew across the open grass yard, nearly knocking both from their feet.
Anna knew the plan wasn’t perfect. She had wanted to send police officers around the outside fence, but knew any breech of the fence would surely tip off Petrova. So she had agreed to the direct approach. She watched as SWAT flowed into the house, the huge garage, where dogs barked loudly, and into the surrounding forest.
Within a couple of minutes, reports started coming in from various officers. Not good.
“Petrova has to be here,” Kjersti said. She got onto her radio and ordered something in Norwegian. Then she heard back and shook her head.
“What are they saying,” Anna asked her.
“The place is entirely empty. Not one person found.”
Kjersti’s radio squawked, followed by a man speaking English. “We found a backpack in the woods. Also, a canoe hidden in the bushes down by the lake.”
“What about Petrova’s boat?” Anna asked into the radio. The fog was still so thick they couldn’t see the water from their position.
“The dock is empty,” the man said.
Great. They left by boat. She got onto her radio and asked for the position of their two boats. “How many could fit on Petrova’s boat,” Anna asked Kjersti.
“I don’t know. It’s a twenty-one foot power boat with a two-hundred-twenty-five horse inboard. Perhaps six.”
“Six normal-size people?”
“I see where you’re going,” Kjersti said. “Maybe ten like Petrova.”
Finally she got her response from the two police boats. The heavy winds were rocking them all over the place. They were perhaps one hundred yards from the dock. Could barely see even that. Anna ordered them to fan out and search for the missing Petrova boat.
“Where are they heading?” Anna asked Kjersti.
Kjersti hunched her shoulders. “Sweden. But not by boat.”
“How far can they get on this lake?”
“Hamar. Hell, almost to the Oslo airport. It’s a hundred miles long. But in this fog they could be anywhere.”
“If you had to guess,” Anna pled.
“There’s not much on the southern end of the lake. The highway comes up against it down there. If he had a car waiting, he could pick up the highway and cross into Sweden. But if I were him, I would get off somewhere near Hamar. The Swedish border is closer there. That’s assuming he’s going to Sweden. I mean, he will find no refuge there.”
A man hurried across the grass toward them. He carried a backpack and set it at Anna’s feet, opening it for her to see. But she didn’t need to see what was in there. She thanked the man and he went away.
Kjersti said the obvious. “That’s Jake’s backpack.”
“So he got here first and is now with Petrova.”
“But he wouldn’t have brought the box,” Kjersti said. “He’d use that for bait. What do you think Jake has planned?”
That was the problem. Anna didn’t have a clue. She simply shook her head.
●
The speed boat cruised along at a remarkable pace, considering the fog and wind. It wasn’t maxed out, but enough to bring tears to Jake’s eyes as he focused his attention on the men surrounding him. They were all little people like Vic
tor Petrova, who sat on a bench seat next to Jake. There were five other men, one at the wheel, standing on a platform to see over the bow, and the other four spread out on the benches across from Jake and Petrova. Must have been part of Petrova’s inner circle, Jake guessed. Then he noticed his backpack at the feet of one man. They had found the one in the garage. He wondered if they had removed his back-up weapon from there.
“I hope your man knows where he’s going,” Jake yelled into Petrova’s ear.
Petrova smiled. “He not only know this lake. He has the best GPS navigation available.”
“Where are we going?”
The Russian raised his brows in delight. “I see you noticed your backpack. My men found it and search it completely. They found this.” Petrova removed a gem from his pocket and delicately opened his fingers, making sure the wind did not send the Alexandrite flying. “You should have looked more carefully.” He laughed and put the gem back in his pocket.
“They are beautiful,” Jake said.
“We found the bullet hole in your backpack. You must have been carrying the metal box inside.”
Jake wasn’t sure of his point, so he said nothing.
Petrova continued. “You asked me where we’re going. To get what’s mine.”
“You don’t know where we’re going,” Jake said, “but we’re making damn good progress.”
“Right. That, and we’re getting away from your friends.”
“What do you mean?”
The boat slowed somewhat, as if the pilot was preparing to maneuver around something.
Petrova studied Jake’s eyes, obviously trying to read him. “You probably don’t know. Your friends just raided my estate. Although I don’t know why. Perhaps they think I’m trying to acquire a deadly Soviet-era flu virus to unleash on the world. I have no idea where they get their intel. They’re often wrong these days.”
Now Jake smiled. “You’re the master of deception, Victor. While still playing KGB, you orchestrate this elaborate plan within a plan. You pretend as though a cabal in the Soviet government is trying to turn back the clock, away from the Gorbachav reforms, by an assassination attempt during the Reykjavik Summit. In the process you implicate a bunch of your political enemies, who end up magically disappearing. Then you feed the Americans a bullshit story about a MiG pilot trying to defect and who subsequently crashes in the remote Norwegian islands. You send your hand-picked team to find the crash site to extricate the metal box from the MiG. You probably told your men that it was a deadly biological weapon, since you had stamped the box with biohazard. Let me know when I get something wrong.”
Petrova simply stared ahead, not looking at Jake.
He continued. “You didn’t have a great fix on the location of the MiG crash site, though. Your men did find it, but they could not relay the location back to you. That had to drive you crazy. Horseshit communications of the late 80s. Let me back up. You also leaked the crash to the Americans, hoping they would send a crew to Svalbard also, which we did. You wanted the Americans to eventually find the site so they could independently verify the plot. You expected your men to get there first and take the bogus biohazard box back to you. But I checked on your whereabouts during that timeframe. You weren’t even in Russia. Your diplomatic passport had you in Oslo at the time. You were waiting for your men to show up in Oslo with the box, which you would have taken from them and started fencing. I’m guessing you would have also killed these men to keep them quiet. But you had a problem.” Jake stopped to look for a reaction. Nothing. The guy was a rock.
“Yes,” Petrova said. “What was my problem?”
“You didn’t expect the Americans to shoot it out with your men. You didn’t expect all of them to die on Spitsbergen. You didn’t calculate the climate. Snow cover was at a low point in history. Immediately following the crash, though, and the area got more and more snow and ice, completely covering the MiG, your dead men, and your precious gems. You redirected satellites at that time to try to find the crash. No luck. You even sent other teams looking for the crash site in nineteen ninety-two and again just before you left the KGB. Nothing. The Soviets abandoned their settlement in Pyramiden on Svalbard, but the Russians recently re-established the mining operation there. Which was fortuitous, considering the more recent summer they’ve had in Svalbard. The glacial range has melted this year even lower than it had been in the late eighties. When one of the Russian miners found the crash site, you got wind of it and set your plan in motion.”
The boat picked up speed again. The fog was not as thick in this area, so Jake could see the shore on both sides of them. Headlights from cars slowly crept along a highway on the right side—the road he had traveled from Hamar.
“Where are we going?” Jake asked again.
“To get my gems,” Petrova answered.
“How do you know I didn’t leave them at my hotel in Lillehammer?”
Petrova shook his head. “My men already checked. They also checked the car you stole in Sweden.”
Great. They had found that. Not completely unexpected, though.
“You going to finish your little yarn?” Petrova asked.
“Just about through. This brings me to me. I kept on asking myself why you would send me to Svalbard to find this box. Of course you first picked Colonel Reed, knowing the two of us had a personal relationship that wouldn’t allow me to say no to him. You used the colonel to get me. You already knew that I knew the man who had died on Svalbard, because your men in Volgograd tortured me for two weeks, and one of the questions that kept coming up dealt with my relationship with Captain Steve Olson. That made no sense to me at the time, since Steve had taken a job in Oslo and died in a car crash. I should have known, but didn’t, that the car crash story was a cover. So you could have beaten me to death I would have told you nothing else.”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying,” Petrova said.
“Right. But, still. You could have sent your men to Svalbard.”
“Trust is a delicate balance to maintain. And I knew that I was under scrutiny from not only the Russian SVR, but the American Agency and the Swedish SAPO. Not to mention your girlfriend’s Interpol and local police. I can’t fart without someone testing the air quality. Besides, life gets quite boring if you can’t fuck with people. You came to me one night in Stockholm while I sipped single malt and listened to Don’t Be Cruel.”
Jake thought about that. Petrova had played on Jake’s sense of duty. “You knew I’d find the biohazard box and would turn it over to the Agency. But then why send the helicopter to shoot us out of the sky.”
Petrova shook his head vehemently. “Those weren’t my men. They were with Russian SVR.”
Christ. He had shot and killed agents with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. “Did the SVR think we had the flu virus or the Alexandrite.” He already knew the answer to this, but he had to ask anyway.
Petrova laughed. “The SVR couldn’t find its own ass with both hands and two mirrors. They thought it was the virus, of course.”
“And the men on the train?”
Shrugging, Petrova said, “They were mine. We knew you had the gems by then. It just took us a while to track you down.”
Which is also why he knew where he was going, Jake guessed. “You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”
“Yes, I did. To get my Alexandrites. You dumped them somewhere between Falun, Sweden and Hamar, Norway. Now you will bring me to them.”
Okay, the guy wasn’t an idiot. “That’s a large area, Victor.”
One of the little men stood up for a better look, and Jake made his move. With one fluid motion, he rushed the man, grasped him by the collar and pants, and threw him overboard. The other men, dumbfounded, suddenly realized what had happened and pointed their guns at Jake.
“No,” Petrova yelled.
The boat slowed and turned to the left.
Jake looked back and saw the man bobbing up and down behind them, his tiny arms wav
ing and his voice barely audible in the wind.
“What was the point of that?” Petrova asked Jake.
Moving back to the bench, Jake took a seat again. “It just looked like fun.” Really, he had gotten rid of one MP5 automatic submachine gun. He was sure the guy would have dropped the rifle to the bottom of the lake as soon as he hit the water.
“That was just cruel.”
“That means a lot coming from you, Victor.”
They picked up the wet little guard, without a rifle, and continued down the lake toward Hamar.
32
Toni Contardo had heard over the radio that Jake was probably with Victor Petrova and his men in the boat, somewhere in the fog ahead of them. But by then Petrova had gotten a good lead on them. They could have been miles ahead by now. Toni had made sure to tell Anna to redirect some assets along the road between Lillehammer and Hamar. That had angered the Interpol agent. She had already done that.
Now, with the fog lifting somewhat, the police officer driving the boat was able to pick up the pace. Yet they still had not even caught a glimpse of Petrova’s boat. Sitting solemnly next to Toni, Colonel Reed shifted his head away from the wind and caught Toni staring at him.
“Jake will be fine,” the colonel said, barely above the sound of the motor and the swift breeze.
“Why did you get him involved in the first place?” Toni asked him. She thought she had already asked him this before, but her thoughts were clouded now by the task at hand—finding the little madman.
The colonel lowered his jaw and said, “Petrova suggested it. When he mentioned that our mutual friend Captain Olson had died there, I should have been suspicious. After all, how would he know that?”
That was easy to know. “The KGB had a file on all of our military attaches at each of our embassies—just like we have on them. When Captain Olson and CIA officer John Korkala suddenly no longer worked there, no cover story would have slipped past Victor Petrova. He knew our men had something to do with his own men not coming back from the Arctic.”