The Kremlin Phoenix

by Renneberg, Stephen

  What are they doing here? he wondered.

  The more senior of the two, a stocky, broad shouldered major of the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation, waved the Serb soldiers back. “Enough!” he snapped. “We’ll take him!”

  * * * *

  Present Day

  “The American intelligence agencies have always known about it,” Valentina said. “Before the collapse, the Soviet Union kidnapped dozens of senior Allied pilots – mostly American – shot down in every war since Korea, to learn about allied air power. Your father was the only pilot post-Soviet Russia kidnapped, because he was unique. He was a stealth pilot, the most valuable pilot ever captured.”

  “How could they do it, without us hearing about it?” Craig said, scarcely able to believe her farfetched story.

  “No government would risk nuclear war for a handful of pilots.” She shrugged. “They were expendable.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “We were investigating your employer, Goldstein, McCormack and Powell. We did extensive background checks on everyone who worked for them, looking for a way to recruit someone on the inside . . . it was an accident we found your name in an Interior Ministry database.”

  “My name?” Craig said surprised.

  “You were listed as the son of an occupant of an Interior Ministry facility. Upon admission, bureaucrats routinely recorded the names of the occupants’ wives and their children, their dates and places of birth. They’d been doing it for decades for Russian detainees. They simply followed the same procedure for your father. Yegor Demidoff was our lead investigator. He found your father’s case had been closed for years. The dossier was stored in an old archive, inactive and forgotten. He bribed a certain individual to see the file one night. No written notes, no copies were allowed, however, Yegor was able to steal just one photo of your father. It’s the only proof we have.”

  “I want to see that dossier.”

  She smiled incredulously. “That’s impossible!”

  “Make it possible. You have enough money now to bribe a thousand informants. Get me a copy.”

  “Some things are better left in the shadows,” Valentina said. “It would not be in the interests of either of our countries for that dossier ever to be released. Besides, I don’t know who the informant is.”

  “Someone must know.”

  “Only Yegor knew who the informant was, to protect him.” She hesitated, then added. “There have been leaks. Either my organization is being watched, or there is a spy among us.”

  “A double agent?”

  She shrugged fatalistically. “It is Russia. It is our way. It is why I cannot help you.”

  Craig fell silent for a moment, then asked, “Is my father still alive?”

  “All I know is, he was taken to Russia for interrogation because of his knowledge of American stealth technology. If Yegor were still alive, he could tell you more.” Valentina reached out and touched Craig’s hand sympathetically. “After all this time, he must be dead. All of them must be.”

  “Demidoff said my father was a traitor. What did he mean?”

  “He said that to control you.”

  “But is it true?”

  Valentina withdrew her hand. “No one can resist torture forever, and you must understand, Russia and China are desperate to catch up with America’s stealth technology. Your father and his aircraft were a gift from the sky. They were never going to let him go. He would have told them everything he knew – eventually.”

  “I want proof he’s dead,” Craig said, suppressing his anger.

  “There is none.”

  “We made a deal. Until you prove he’s dead, you haven’t lived up to your part of the bargain.”

  “I’ve done all I can,” she said simply.

  “Your country has a history of locking political prisoners away for decades. Why not a prisoner of war? My old man was a survivor. Unless they murdered him, he’s still alive.”

  “Your father is dead,” she said, then nodded to Fenenko. Again, the other men held Craig down while Fenenko searched his clothes, finding the photo of Colonel Balard in Craig’s wallet.

  “What are you doing?” Craig demanded. “That’s mine.”

  “No it isn’t” Valentina said. “It doesn’t exist. You can’t tell this story to anyone, and if you do, you have no proof.” She stood up, indicating their business was concluded.

  “This is not over!” Craig yelled, starting to rise, then Fenenko cracked the butt of his gun over Craig’s head, knocking him out.

  “You didn’t need to do that!” Valentina said angrily.

  “It’s better this way!” Fenenko said, pulling the hood over Craig’s head.

  Several of the men helped Fenenko carry Craig to the car, then they drove him back to London. Almost two hours later, Fenenko stopped the car on Edgeware Road and removed Craig’s hood. “Cricklewood station is that way,” he said pointing, then pushed Craig out of the car and drove off.

  Craig started toward the station, but soon waved down a cab.

  “Where to chum?” The cabby asked as Craig climbed in.

  “You know any good Swiss banks?” No American bank would do, not for what he had in mind. He now had a purpose, driven by a simmering anger that would not easily be quenched.

  The cabbie shrugged. “Sure, but they won’t be open this time of day.” Craig glanced out the window, seeing the first signs of dawn beginning to appear in the sky.

  “Take me to the biggest Swiss bank. I’ll wait until it opens.”

  The cabbie raised his eyebrows, then turned back to the wheel. “Right you are, Guv’ner.”

  * * * *

  “It was close,” Detective Woods said as Nikki regained consciousness, “but you’re going to be all right.”

  Pain drummed relentlessly through her head, easily the worst hangover of her life. She was in a private hospital room and her face was covered in fresh bandages. Outside, two armed police officers guarded her twenty four hours a day.

  “My . . . face?” she stammered, too weak to raise her hand.

  “You’ve got a few broken bones and a couple of beautiful black eyes, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed,” Woods assured her. “The doctor said in a couple of months you’ll be as good as new.”

  Tears formed in her eyes. “Craig?” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Did you tell the man who did this, where Craig went?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Don’t worry. We’ve got him under surveillance in London. We know he’s innocent.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s a long story. Are you OK to talk?”

  She nodded weakly.

  “Can you tell me why he’s gone to London?”

  “He’s . . . looking . . . for his father,” she said, surprised at the effort needed to speak.

  “His father?”

  A white coated doctor appeared beside Nikki’s bed. “Detective! I told you, she needs rest!”

  Nikki closed her eyes and drifted back to sleep, only vaguely aware of Detective Woods’ voice speaking to her from a great distance.

  “Why is he looking for his father?”

  * * * *

  Sergeivich Moroshkin parked his white Fiat in front of the country house shortly before sunset. A financial expert, he was a member of Valentina’s SK unit who was working undercover at the Russian embassy as part of an economic delegation, although it had already been noticed that he was more interested in embassy affairs than economic relations with Great Britain.

  “Welcome Sergeivich,” Valentina greeted him as he entered the house, “We were beginning to worry.”

  “They’re watching me. I couldn’t get away from the Embassy last night without arousing suspicion.”

  “Why would they suspect you?”

  “Someone inside SK must have told them what I’m really doing.”

  Valentina fell silent, wondering who would betray them. Their u
nit was a relatively small, tight knit group. “I can’t believe we have a traitor.”

  “I’m finding it difficult to believe we don’t have one,” Moroshkin said meaningfully.

  She showed him into the sitting room. A new personal computer sat on the table beside a shrink wrapped box full of computer software. Moroshkin quickly loaded and configured the software.

  When he was finished, he said, “I’m ready. Where are the codes?”

  Valentina handed him the MLI master list she’d taken from Craig.

  “This is a great day for our people!” Moroshkin exclaimed enthusiastically. As soon as he tried to access the first London account, a message suddenly flashed across the screen.

  ACCESS DENIED!

  “What happened?” Valentina asked surprised.

  “I must have made a mistake,” Moroshkin said uncertainly.

  He carefully re-entered the account number and security code, with Valentina double checking every keystroke over his shoulder. When he tried to execute a transaction, he was greeted by the same message.

  ACCESS DENIED!

  Moroshkin scowled. He tried another account and password combination. The computer connected to another bank’s central computer.

  ACCESS DENIED!

  With growing unease, he tried several more accounts.

  ACCESS DENIED! . . . ACCESS DENIED! . . . ACCESS DENIED!

  “These are the wrong codes!” Moroshkin declared angrily, waving the sheet of paper at Valentina. “You’ve been tricked!”

  * * * *

  In the basement of the Russian Federation Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens, computers from the Special Communications and Information Service – the Spetssvyaz – had been scanning police radio signals for a day and a half, ever since they’d received a high priority order from Moscow to search for the key word – Balard. Late that afternoon, receivers on the Embassy roof, and at the Ambassador’s residence, intercepted a routine radio transmission from Metropolitan Police detectives answering a query from New Scotland Yard’s headquarters at the Broadway: they reported there’d been no sign of Balard since he’d checked in to the hotel the day before.

  The Spetssvyaz computers automatically triangulated the source of the broadcast to a quiet street in Norfolk Garden. A few minutes later, signals intelligence analysts in Moscow determined there was only one hotel within visual range of the radio transmission point, and forwarded the intercept, the hotel name and the address to a secret group in GRU headquarters at Khodinka, Moscow.

  Minutes later, a text message appeared on Nogorev’s phone advising him of the address of what was now his primary target. Nogorev knew it would be a simple matter to use the hotel register to determine which room Craig Balard occupied.

  Chapter 5

  January 14, 2278

  “I don’t understand what went wrong!” Mariena said. “We know Craig Balard got our last message, because he wasn’t killed in New York.”

  “And our sensors detected the timeline reset!” Zikky added.

  “Maybe he kept the money and ran?” Wilkins suggested.

  “But he went to London to meet Valentina Petrovna,” Mariena said, nodding to several wall panels. One displayed Craig’s English death notice, the other a passage from Prime Minister Gundarovsky’s autobiography detailing Valentina’s failed mission in London, a passage that had not existed before the last timeline reset.

  “Whether he was killed in New York or London, we’re screwed either way!” Zikky said disconsolately.

  “Someone got to him, before he could give the master list to Valentina Petrovna,” Dr Mariena Del Rey said thoughtfully as she gazed through the floor to ceiling pressure window at the dead Earth one and a half million kilometers away. The planet was shrouded in swirling black clouds and perfectly haloed by the sun, one hundred and fifty million kilometers further on. The light sensors in the window filtered out the blinding harshness of the sun’s light encircling the Earth, while the bright solar halo emphasized what a freezing, radioactive cinder Earth had become, now enveloped by a choking, ash filled atmosphere incapable of supporting even single cell organisms.

  “But you don’t know how he died, or why,” Wilkins said, “so we’re flying blind.”

  “That’s true,” Mariena conceded as she turned back towards them. “That’s why we have to find a way to let him speak to us.”

  “That’s impossible!” Zikky said. “The tachyon array can only send signals into the past, and even if it could send signals forward in time, there’s no way 21st century technology could build one.”

  Mariena shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. It’s much easier to send a signal forward in time, than backwards. We’re already doing the hard part.” As Chief Science Officer of the Solar Explorer III, she understood the tachyon based communications technology better than any of them.

  Captain Wilkins looked puzzled. As a pilot and astrophysicist, his mind went straight to the obvious means of speaking to the future. “Their propulsion technology is too primitive to use time dilation to send a message forward in time, if that’s what you have in mind,”

  Mariena shook her head. “No, I’m not thinking of a relativistic solution. There might be a simpler, low tech way.” She turned to Commander Zikky. “What can we upload from Montreal? What data?”

  “The Montreal Data Center is a mirror of the Canadian and the US data exchanges. It has everything they had,” Zikky replied. Unlike Canada, the United States and much of Eurasia, the Quebec Republic had not been destroyed in the war, leaving its data repository intact and still linked to the civilian satellite communications system. Secession and neutrality had saved the republic’s major cities from direct attack, but not from the frigid radiation storms that followed.

  “Does it have the complete social history of the 21st century?” Mariena asked.

  “Sure,” Zikky said, then his eyes widened as he realized what she was thinking. “Yes! It does!” He grinned, jumped to his feet and pointed at her emphatically. “And that’s why you would have been the first woman to walk on Pluto – if they hadn’t screwed everything up!”

  She smiled. “I haven’t given up that hope, yet.”

  * * * *

  Craig watched the television in his hotel room with growing dismay. The pictures from a news helicopter showed a river of cars snaking bumper-to-bumper along the motorway towards a column of smoke. At the base of the column, a Bentley burned furiously in front of several police cars parked across the road to keep onlookers at a safe distance. Along the shoulder of the road, a fire engine raced towards the scene. “Among the dead was prominent London banker, Albert Bridgeworth, and three as yet unnamed former SAS troopers . . .”

  Craig switched the TV off with a heavy heart. He was sorry Bridgeworth had not got away, and now he knew the assassin had followed him to London.

  When he’d returned to his hotel room after spending the day in London’s financial district, he remembered Valentina’s warning that the British Police were tailing him. He avoided the main entrance in case it was being watched, sneaking instead through the narrow back street behind the hotel. He didn’t try to spot the detectives, for fear that even one look would reveal his return. He simply slipped up the back stairs, then once inside his room, retrieved the flash drive he’d hidden in the base of the curtain lining.

  Craig inserted the small device into Nikki’s computer and checked his new Swiss account. It had exactly ten Swiss Francs in it, just enough money to open an account. He then checked the MLI master list and accessed an on-call cash investment account in Frankfurt containing over twenty billion Euros. Experimentally, Craig tried transferring the entire balance to his Swiss account.

  A moment later, a short message flashed onto the screen: TRANSACTION COMPLETE.

  Craig’s hands started shaking as he realized what he’d just done. “I’m in business!” he whispered, scarcely able to believe how easy it had been.

  For the next forty minutes, he worked thro
ugh each account on the master list, transferring the balances to his numbered account. When he finished, he silently converted his account balance from Swiss Francs to US Dollars.

  “Holy shit!” he muttered to himself, as the shock of having just completed the largest robbery in history hit him. He stood up, breathing deeply and pacing, trying to calm his nerves. “Get a grip, man!”

  Craig returned to the computer and studied the two pieces of paper he’d brought back from the Swiss Bank. One contained his account number, the other his password, neither of which he had any hope of memorizing. He logged into his Swiss bank and reset his account’s password to a fourteen digit number he would remember; his and Nikki’s birthdays combined. He then scribbled a simple note on a piece of hotel stationary and slid it, and the account number into an envelope, which he addressed to upstate New York. Satisfied, he sealed the envelope and slipped it into his pocket to post later.

  “We need to talk,” Mariena said.

  Startled, Craig jumped backwards, tumbling off his chair. “Don’t you ever knock?” He yelled as he climbed to his feet.

  “I know you’re there! We found the date stamp of the transfers you made from MLI’s New York account.”

  “How the hell did you do that, so fast?” He stood up and approached her, now used to her eyes not following him. “And, of course, you can’t see me!”

  “You have a Twitter account. Use it. Hashtag 90045884, to speak to me.”

  “What?” Craig asked, walking back to stand in her new line of sight. “You’re kidding! Twitter?” It made no sense.

  “If you’re speaking, I can’t hear you. Send a Twitter to that hashtag, and we’ll see it.”

  We who? Craig wondered as he stepped toward Mariena and tried touching her, but his hand passed right through her arm as if she wasn’t there.

  She turned to her left. “Anything? . . .” She returned her gaze towards the window. “I know you don’t understand, but if you want to communicate with me, you must use hashtag 90045884.” She sighed. “I knew they were stupid in the 21st century, but this is ridiculous. Maybe he’s gone?”