Krásnaya Plóshchad, as Red Square was known in Russian, was not named after the red flag of communism, but in fact had taken its name from the nearby Saint Basil’s Cathedral, the word Krásnaya meaning both ‘Red’ and ‘Beautiful’ in Russian. The beautiful cathedral’s nickname was passed on to the square, its original name Pozhar, or ‘burnt-out place’ apparently unappealing to the locals. With ‘Beautiful’ being an archaic interpretation of Krásnaya, the more modern ‘Red’ Square was the translation adopted by the locals and the world. But with the Kremlin occupying one side, the headquarters of the second most powerful country in the world hell-bent on world domination, the enemy of democracies everywhere, Red Square became synonymous with the blood soaked coloring of the communist standard, the hammer and sickle adorned crimson flag of the USSR.
West gazed at the spires of Saint Basil’s Cathedral as a platoon of goose-stepping soldiers smacked by, undeterred by the snow covered stone. One of his tails was on foot now, the other back in the car, unauthorized vehicle traffic forbidden in Red Square, and a black Volga traveling at walking speed would be rather noticeable.
Which meant he now had a chance.
The car was now at least a radio call behind him. The question was whether or not it was still at the other end of the square, near the Resurrection Gates, or was repositioning for the opposite end of Red Square and his assumed ultimate destination.
West faked a slip on the ice, taking a knee, and with a glance behind him, he saw the black car stopped at the gates, the tailpipe still giving away the engine’s idling.
He continued forward, toward the opposite end of the square, his eyes on the colorful spires of Saint Basil’s, built almost 500 years ago under orders from Ivan the Terrible. It originally contained eight churches that surrounded a central ninth church, a tenth added a few decades after the initial construction. The colorful spires were meant to resemble the flames of a bonfire and have no parallel in Russian architecture. It is widely considered the most beautiful and unique building ever constructed in the country.
And it was almost destroyed by Stalin. Plans were drawn up to have the church removed to enlarge Red Square, but legend has it that when a scale model was shown to Stalin, and the church was lifted from the model, he immediately cried for it to be put back. Though it was built to be a church, the atheist communists confiscated it in 1928 and to this day it remains a federal property housing a division of the State Historical Museum.
It was beautiful.
West never tired of seeing it, and had to chuckle at how many people back home thought that it was actually the Kremlin. Even news reports and supposedly learned magazines would mislabel it. The actual Kremlin was a large palace to his left, surrounded by deep red walls built mostly by Italian masters over fifty years before ground was broken on the cathedral. The sixty-eight acre site was massive, impressive, and thanks to an uninformed Western media, mostly unknown to the average American.
But to people like West, it represented everything he was fighting against. The very walls represented a closed society, the brick a symbol for the separation of the government from its people, those who chose to speak out against this lack of freedom and transparency quickly whisked away to a gulag in Siberia, usually never to be seen again.
A quick glance to his left showed the car gone, it now beginning the trek around the huge Kremlin walls to reposition at the other end.
West smiled to himself, then pulled his sleeve up to look at his watch, holding it high in front of his face so there was little chance of his tail missing it.
“Shit!” he exclaimed out loud before turning back toward the Resurrection Gates at a jog. He passed his tail who had spun around as soon as West had to avoid having his face seen. West looked at his watch again, then shook his head, picking up the pace a little, covering the cobblestoned square quickly, his body protesting as his aging bones felt every abuse the previous night had bestowed.
He didn’t dare look back, but he was sure he could hear footfalls behind him. His tail had obviously been ordered to follow on foot as the car tried to catch up, unable to turn around as the mighty traffic loop was one way.
Now the question was whether or not ten dollars was worth a cabby waiting about fifteen minutes. As he passed the Resurrection Gates his heart sank, the cab nowhere in sight.
“Shit!” he muttered as he began to slow. A horn honked and he turned to see a cab rolling to a stop, the driver waving through a rolled down passenger side window.
West waved and jogged to where the vehicle had stopped, climbing in the back.
“Sorry I late, I stuck behind plows.”
“No problem, but can you get me to Narodnogo Opolcheniya Street as fast as possible? I have a meeting I’m going to be late for.”
The man seemed to hesitate. West handed over the promised tenner and the gas was floored. West casually looked out his window to see his tail shouting into a radio, stomping his feet in anger. West had to wonder if he had just crossed the line. If he had, the KGB would be out to pick him up, meaning his picture would be circulated throughout the city within hours.
He just prayed an extraction could be set up quick enough to get them all out of Moscow and the USSR.
Because Siberia wasn’t nice any time of year.
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Present Day
Chris Leroux rubbed his eyes. He’d kill for a Red Bull right now, the ‘wings’ it gave you definitely needed. But he had made a promise to Sherrie and he intended to keep it.
There’s no way I’m risking a nookie cut-off.
But she was away on an op and he was knocking himself out trying to trace the data packet sent by Aslan Islamov, their Chechen drug lord turned Russian intermediary. So far he had had no success, the packet scrambled and bounced off of dozens of servers randomly, some of the pieces bouncing back, some going into the ether, others successfully reaching destinations on public servers and unsecured home PCs, Malware previously installed by questionable websites, unbeknownst to their owners, then pushing the data to other servers.
Top secret communications using the public’s unsecured home PCs.
It was a tactic used by terrorists, criminals, and governments.
Nearly untraceable.
Data would be injected into the network, the thousands or hundreds of thousands of infected computers would poll that network location, pulling any data it might find, then transmit it randomly across the internet and to each other, only one of the destinations the actual destination.
Impossible to detect the needle from the haystack.
His head dropped on his desk and he could feel himself drifting.
She’s not here, maybe just one Red Bull?
He smelt something.
His eyes opened, still shielded by his crossed arms his head was resting on. He took a deep breath.
Sherrie!
His head popped up from his desk as he turned. Sherrie was standing in the door of his cubicle, smiling at him.
“Sorry to wake you,” she said, stepping toward him and giving him a kiss.
“I wasn’t asleep. Ten more seconds though and I would have been.”
She sat down in the spare chair, dropping her previously unnoticed carryon bag beside her.
“Did you just come from the airport?”
She nodded.
“I wanted to see you before you got home.”
“How’d you know I was here?”
“I called your detail.”
He frowned.
“No privacy.” He looked at her exhausted form. “You look as tired as I feel.”
She nodded, smiling slightly.
“I was playing escort to some female senator. My God can that woman party. I don’t think she stopped until four in the morning, then was up again at seven. Non-stop. But she’s safely back in Washington.”
“Was there a threat?”
“Yeah, but turned out to be nothing, at least for now.” She lo
wered her voice and leaned in. “I can tell you one thing, they’re scared about something.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Whispered conversations, worried looks. Nobody came out and said anything that I overheard, but I think it’s Crimson Rush.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. We’re at DEFCON Four and Director Morrison had me provide him the dossier on that Delta Sergeant Major you worked with during the New Orleans crisis.” He lowered his voice even further. “I think they’re picking up the ex-Soviet General.”
Narodnogo Opolcheniya Street, Moscow, USSR
February 7, 1982
West sat on a bench, enjoying the view, sipping a god-awful cup of coffee. It was a welcome respite from the cold, regardless of its questionable origins. Hundreds of uniformed young men, and an equal number of old, streamed up and down the street and in and out of Military Unit 35576, or as it was known to the few in the know, the Soviet Army Academy. And to even fewer? The Military-Diplomatic Academy of the Soviet Army. It was the equivalent to The Farm where spies or operators were trained for the clandestine service. Most likely it would or already had produced the agent that would kill him some day.
And it was where his good buddy Sergie worked.
As part of the training they worked with actual agents. Sergie was counter-intelligence with the highest security clearance outside of the high command. And even then, need-to-know extended to the underlings. West had no doubt Crimson Rush was ultra-top secret, and Sergie’s reaction at the mere mention of it proved he knew what it was, or at least its importance.
A man sat down beside him, opening a broadsheet, ruffling its pages, his own coffee sitting beside him. West ignored him, sipping his bitter brew, feeling the rush of warmth surge through his core, the harsh Soviet cold halting it from travelling any farther, his extremities still quite frigid.
“It’s all arranged,” said the man as he flipped a page. “Extraction for one plus four, tonight, twenty-one-hundred hours. Location is on page twelve, Echo-Six encryption protocol.”
The man folded his paper, stood up and dropped it on the bench, merging into the heavy pedestrian traffic.
It was bold, it was brazen, and it made perfect sense. The Soviets would never expect two CIA agents to meet ten feet from the walls of their spy school, which meant it wasn’t carefully watched. Why should they? There were thousands of trained troops here, with hundreds on the street at any time. It was one of the more busy military installations in the city.
Which made it perfect.
The best cover is no cover, in the open, where they least expect you, and are least likely to be looking.
Meetings like this happened all the time in front of important government installations, the arrogance of the KGB, who did the exact same thing in the West, forcing the assumption it could never happen here.
West hadn’t acknowledged the man the entire time, instead he had continued his casual observation of the pedestrian traffic, carefully watching, without obviously watching, a side entrance to the Academy where he knew Sergie would be exiting at the end of his work day.
A figure emerged from the gate, stepping out to the curb and stomping his feet several times, his alcoholic body already feeling the cold. West drained his turpentine and rose, picking up the paper and dropping the cup into a nearby garbage can.
Sergie’s path would take him in the opposite direction, past at least one seedy bar, then home to his ‘loving’ family on any normal evening. West just wondered if Sergie considered this a normal evening. After all, he was supposed to have stolen the Crimson Rush intel and be prepping to leave the country at any given moment.
Ten minutes of walking and Sergie was rubbing his hands all over himself, trying to keep warm. He stopped in front of a bar, eyeballing the entrance, then like a good alcoholic, entered.
West followed him in, taking a seat at a corner table and ordering a coffee and a house-plate, which normally consisted of crusty bread, some type of sausage, and if he were lucky, real butter, but most likely some type of lard spread.
He flipped his paper to page twelve and looked for the fifth paragraph, the “Echo” paragraph, ‘E’ being the fifth letter in the alphabet. He skipped to the sixth sentence after that. He then added his own unique assigned increment, which happened to be seven. The seventh word started with a Cyrillic ‘R’. As part of each mission he was given a set of three locations to memorize that were safe houses. He was never to go to them unless it was prearranged, and that prearrangement involved telling him which one to go to. Today, ‘R’ meant he was to go to the second address on his list, which made sense based upon his extremely detailed knowledge of the city. It was less than five minutes from Sergie’s apartment on foot, and if he wasn’t mistaken—which he was sure he wasn’t—it was a warehouse of some sort, which usually meant many possible egress points.
He refolded the paper as his order arrived. Taking a sip of his coffee, he sighed in appreciation at the dramatically higher quality than the previous attempt he had been drinking. He quickly finished his food, one eye on Sergie in the back corner downing several shots of vodka as he warmed up.
Alcohol is a coolant, you idiot.
Sergie finished his drinks and rose, tossing some Rubles on the table. West scarfed the last of his meal down, letting Sergie leave ahead of him, his path known. He downed the rest of the not-too-bad coffee, placed a few bills under the glass then left. Sergie was at the end of the street with a none-too-subtle tail car following him, stopping at the side of the road then moving forward every hundred feet.
West kept pace with the tail car until Sergie turned off the main road, cutting toward his apartment. West turned down a parallel street and broke out into a jog, covering the distance to the next street quickly, then turning left to catch up to his target. As he reached the street Sergie would be on, he slowed down, catching his breath, his lungs expelling warmed air that immediately froze in the frigid conditions, a constant reminder of where and when he was.
He crossed the street as Sergie arrived, oblivious to the fact he had two tails. West kept his pace, slightly faster than Sergie’s as the tail car rounded the corner.
“Don’t look back,” he said as he approached Sergie. “You have what I want?”
“Da,” whispered Sergie, suddenly tensing up.
“Relax or you’ll get us both killed,” admonished West. Sergie regained his easy stride, his shoulders once again slumping in the defeat that was his life. “Have everyone ready in the lobby for eight-forty-five tonight. Don’t bring anything except your cash. Tell your family that it’s a surprise you’ve been saving up for, and that they’ll find out when they get there. Understood?”
“Da,” whispered Sergie.
“You will use the rear exit and turn right. Keep walking until I meet you. You will greet me as a friend named Boris. We will joke about the surprise, but not reveal it. The hints will be that it is a pet dog.”
“My family has always wanted a dog.”
“I know, you told me last time I was here. That is the surprise, but we can’t tell them, we must keep them excited so if you’re seen, it won’t look suspicious.”
“Okay.”
“Good, I will see you tonight, eight-forty-five. Don’t be late.”
West continued walking past Sergie, then turned left, away from Sergie’s destination and away from his tail’s watchful eyes. There was no doubt now that Sergie was under surveillance, which meant they suspected him of something.
West just hoped they didn’t spring their trap tonight.
Sochi, Black Sea, Russia
Present Day
Colonel Kolya Chernov sat at a plastic table in the corner of a small patio, one of many lining Sochi’s Ordzhonikidze Street, sipping his coffee. At another table sat his target, former Major General Levkin, he too enjoying a coffee in the early morning sun, the temperature slightly brisk but tolerable. An unknown man was at the table with the General, chatting animatedly about how he
supported Putin’s moves to curtail gay rights, and how he respected Ahmadinejad for taking the issue head-on in New York City several years ago.
“They don’t have the problem,” said the man, “they solved it by killing them off. Now you don’t have the genetic mutation that causes it. We need to do the same!”
The General said nothing, merely nodding his head, several of his security detail seeming to distance themselves slightly from the table.
Chernov put his coffee down, his blood boiling over something he hadn’t given a second thought to until Putin passed the new laws to placate the hard right that was his base. Chernov believed in equality for all and didn’t care what you did in the privacy of your bedroom. And that was key for him. He hated public displays of affection, regardless of sexual orientation. A peck on the cheek was fine, even a small kiss of greeting or thanks. But tongue down the throat displays should be saved for when no one could see you.
Kids today!
He swiped his finger across the display of his iPad, the camera image from the heavily modified TrackingPoint gun mounted on the adjacent roof swinging. The weapon had been introduced with much fanfare recently, a nearly fully automated weapon that would allow novices to make shots previously possible only by marksmen. As soon as it had been released the Russians had secured several copies and modified it extensively, something he was certain every military in the world, and terrorist organization, was now doing.
Cold Warriors (A Special Agent Dylan Kane Thriller, Book #3) Page 9