The Lone Patriot

by JT Brannan

  If Clark Mason was doing back-door deals with Mikhail Emelienenko, then that was something that everybody should be worried about.

  4

  What a waste of time, thought Nikolai Shekin as he followed the middle-aged man toward the Duma bathroom. It was obvious that the guy was a drunk, a poor slob out by himself, trying to drink away whatever sorrows he had with a trusty bottle of vodka. Nothing unusual about that; it was the Russian way.

  There was nothing at all remarkable about the man himself, either. Average height, average build, average clothes, average hair, average face; a complete nonentity. And yet Shekin knew that this was exactly what his instructors had told him to watch out for; true professionals would never do anything to get noticed, they would try and be as nondescript as possible.

  Which made Shekin’s job extremely hard, of course; the obvious ones weren’t worth picking up, as they were barely dangerous at all, while the dangerous ones were almost impossible to identify in the first place. And in his first few years of working for the Moscow surveillance unit of the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti – the feared FSB, Russia’s federal security service – Shekin had picked up many nondescript individuals, hoping they were dissidents or foreign agents. So far, however, they had all been exactly what they looked like – normal people going about their ordinary, boring, day-to-day lives.

  And so it would prove with this man, Shekin was sure, stumbling as he was from table to table on his way to relieve himself after too much alcohol.

  But despite his years on the team, Shekin was still the junior man, and therefore still got all the shit jobs – this time literally, he thought in distaste as the bathroom door opened and the smell from inside broke through the thick cigarette smoke outside.

  Shekin waved away the stench, braced himself, and entered.

  A few questions, a quick check of the man’s papers, and they could both be on their way.

  Cole knew the man was right behind him, could feel his animal presence without having to turn around. He didn’t sense sakki, the killing intent that emanated from someone bent on doing harm; and yet he didn’t allow himself to relax either. The man was a trained professional, and Cole sensed a fellow predator.

  The restroom was small; there were two other men at the urinals, and the single cubicle was also occupied.

  Cole approached the last remaining urinal, heard a short, barking cough from the man who had entered behind him.

  He turned, saw the man shake his head. Cole, playing the role of the confused drunk, nodded mutely and moved to one side, muttering in Russian under his breath.

  ‘Out,’ the agent said to the others, who had also turned to look at him; Cole could see they were about to argue but, at the flash of a badge and gun underneath the thick leather jacket, they quickly zipped themselves up and fled. Cole didn’t think they’d even had time to finish, but getting their pants wet would certainly be preferable to being hauled off to jail, and he didn’t blame them in the slightest.

  Cole hadn’t had the chance to make out the details on the badge, but it was clear that the man was, as he’d first suspected, operating in a professional capacity. Cole guessed FSB, as that was the country’s internal security service, one of whose tasks it was to root out enemy agents like him. But it could have been a variety of other alphabet soup agencies, all of which were dangerous, and – even in ‘democratic’ Russia – rightly feared by the general population.

  ‘Stay there,’ the agent told him, before striding past to bang on the cubicle door. ‘FSB,’ he announced in a gravelly voice that belied his youthful looks. ‘Out.’

  It was testament to how the organization was perceived that – whatever the man inside the cubicle had been doing just a few short moments ago – within five seconds, he was out and gone, terror writ clear across his face.

  ‘What do –’ Cole said in Russian, stumbling drunkenly over the words.

  ‘Be quiet,’ the man instructed him and, playing the game, Cole did as he was told. The agent held out his hand. ‘Papers,’ he ordered.

  Cole fumbled in his pockets, realizing that he might just get away with it. His identification papers were in perfect order, created by the expert team at Force One. The men and women in the forgery department were the best in the business, Cole knew; if they weren’t, he wouldn’t have hired them in the first place.

  Maybe it was just a routine stop; Cole was an unknown, single man of about the right age to be a foreign agent, drinking by himself in the same bar as the woman a suspected American operative had been sleeping with. Cole could be a nobody, of course; but he could also be the exact man the FSB were hoping to catch, the man who had come to Moscow to rescue that same American operative.

  From the stance of the man, the way he held himself, even from the relaxed way he breathed, Cole could tell that – despite his brusque, officious attitude – he obviously didn’t really expect the drunk in front of him to be of any real interest.

  This would suit Cole just fine – he had no desire to get into a fight. He was confident in his ability to deal with this FSB officer, but that wasn’t the point; if he was forced to escape, they would know that someone was here, and he would lose the valuable element of surprise that covert work demanded.

  Cole hiccupped and reached into his pockets, fumbling around for his papers. He sensed the FSB agent tensing as he did so and reminded himself that – despite the man’s seeming disinterest – he was still dealing with a professional. The agent understood that – instead of withdrawing identification papers as requested – Cole could just as easily withdraw a weapon. His momentary tension was obviously the result of experience, and Cole reminded himself not to underestimate the man.

  Eventually, Cole pulled the papers from his jacket pocket and presented them to the agent proudly, a grin on his drunken face. ‘Here,’ he said in slurred Russian. ‘Here are my papers.’

  The FSB officer took them, examined them with one eye while keeping the other on the man in front of him.

  Disinterested but professional, Cole thought again.

  But professional could be okay; Cole had nothing on him that might give him away.

  The agent spoke into a microphone hidden up the sleeve of his jacket, calling in Cole’s false identity to the vast computer networks at the Lubyanka for a real-time check. But Cole still wasn’t overly concerned; he was confident that his papers would check out just fine.

  ‘Hands against the wall,’ the agent instructed, and Cole did as he was told. Moments later, he felt the strong, callused hands of the man patting him down, a thorough search for weapons or surveillance devices. All he found were a near-empty wallet, a bunch of house keys, and a cellphone. The keys would actually open the door of an address registered to Andrei Golovko – the man Cole was pretending to be – but Cole doubted things would ever get that far; the FSB agent seemed to be relaxing more and more.

  The agent’s hand went to his ear, to shield the speaker from interference, and Cole guessed that he was getting an update on his papers from the technical team at the Lubyanka. Cole stayed where he was, hands against the wall.

  ‘Received,’ the agent confirmed, before dropping his hand to his side and turning to Cole. ‘Okay,’ he said, holding out Cole’s possessions. ‘You can go. But stay out of Duma, you understand?’

  Cole nodded, reaching out for his things. He allowed himself to let his own relief show; after all, any Muscovite stopped by the FSB and allowed to go on their way would be grateful.

  So, he thought, his surveillance was done for the night, but at least he hadn’t been compromised completely; he could still continue the next day. It would make things more difficult perhaps, but not impossible.

  But then the door opened, and another man entered the restroom; older, more intense, and obviously much more experienced than the first.

  ‘Wait,’ he ordered sharply as he took the scene in, noting the things that the agent was in the process of handing back to Cole. ‘Let me check that
cellphone.’

  Shit, Cole thought, his heart sinking. He’d been so close . . .

  But now there was nothing else to do but act.

  5

  ‘What’s happening?’ Bruce Vinson asked, peering over the shoulder of Aoki Michiko as she tapped away furiously at her keyboard. She was seated at the main terminal of Force One’s operations center; a version of the White House Situation Room, only this one was smaller, more secure, and possibly even more advanced.

  ‘My father’s activated the sensor on his cellphone, the one that alerts the extraction team that he might have been compromised,’ Michiko replied, careful to keep her voice steady, to cover up the fact that she was both anxious and very, very afraid.

  It was strange, really – when she’d first met Mark Cole, she had been hell-bent on killing him. She’d even tried to shoot him in fact, with a 9mm submachine gun. But then he’d ended up shooting her instead; luckily his aim had been good enough to hit her in the shoulder and not anywhere more vital, but it had still hurt like a sonofabitch.

  She’d once believed that – back when he’d been known as Mark Kowalski – Cole had raped her mother, and been responsible for her death. He was therefore also the cause of her burakumin status; she was a child of rape and therefore stigmatized in Japan, and the Omoto-gumi had subsequently become the only place she felt welcome. She had worked for them, stolen for them, made millions for them.

  But then Cole had come for her in Japan, and she had learned the whole thing was a lie; Cole and her mother, for however short a time, had been in love, and she was a child of love, not of violence.

  He had rescued her from the Yakuza, and brought her here to America; and so the man she had once hated with all her heart, who she had longed to kill, was now her friend and protector.

  Her father.

  But now here he was, out on another operation, and although she had no right to do so, she silently cursed him for his inability to delegate certain responsibilities. Which other commanding officer got as involved in physical operations as Cole did? Most were content to plan and organize, to cheer from the sidelines.

  Not so her father, who believed he was still the best. And having seen him in action in Japan, with her own eyes, she thought that he just might be right.

  And yet he wasn’t getting any younger, and the thought of losing him now – after everything that had happened – was terrifying.

  But she dared not let on to Vinson that she was allowing her emotions get in the way of her work. Despite the director’s recent support, she couldn’t forget that he had advised against bringing her in to Force One in the first place. He was happy for her to work upstairs for the Paradigm Group, of course; with her computer skills, he saw that she could be invaluable to the Washington think-tank’s continued success. But he was less than happy with allowing her unfettered access to the classified information held within the bowels of the Force One operation. She had been a key member of an organized criminal group, after all, and Vinson felt that not enough time had passed for her to prove her loyalty.

  That attitude had changed with her vital behind-the-scenes work investigating the attacks on Britain, of course – Vinson was himself English, and doubly valued her contributions – but she still felt that she was being watched very carefully, and Michiko was determined to give him no further cause to doubt her.

  ‘The extraction team are standing by?’ Vinson asked, watching the flashing beacon that represented Cole’s location as it remained stationary on the Google Earth image of Moscow that covered her computer screen.

  Michiko nodded. ‘Yes, Barrington has confirmed they’re ready and waiting to go.’

  ‘How far are they from Mark’s current location?’

  ‘It looks like he’s in a small building between Nikitskiy and Mokhavaya, from what I can tell it’s a small bar called Duma. The safe house is a couple of blocks from the Lubyanka metro station, so it’s only two kilometers from the bar on foot; five by car though, due to the one-way system, it’ll take them fifteen minutes to get there if my father pushes the panic button.’

  Michiko took a quick sip of tea, trying to hide her panic; she knew all too well that fifteen minutes was too long, that anything could happen to Cole within that time.

  But he’d only sent a warning transmission. He hadn’t pressed the panic button, the one that would get Barrington and her team on location as fast as they could, all guns blazing; not yet anyway . . .

  ‘Okay,’ Vinson said. ‘What’s the status of the team?’

  ‘They’re holding fire, as per their orders,’ Michiko responded. ‘Barrington says that Cole hasn’t contacted her verbally, to give her further instructions, indicating he’s not in a position to speak openly.’

  Michiko saw Vinson make some brief mental calculations, then pull up the secure phone from her desk, dialing a number from memory. ‘It’s me,’ he said when the call was answered only moments later. ‘Leave two people, move four to the vehicle and start moving in. But stay well under the radar for now.’ There was a brief confirmation, and Vinson put the phone back down.

  Michiko knew what he was doing; Navarone was the primary reason for the operation, but the last thing anyone wanted was for the Russians to gain another captive. It made sense to try and preclude that from happening. And yet Vinson had no wish for Barrington and her team to be compromised either; if it was a false alarm, a great deal of time might be wasted in terms of getting another extraction team on-site in Moscow.

  Vinson sighed, and sat down in a swivel chair next to Michiko.

  ‘Right then,’ he announced, ‘now let’s wait and see what happens, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ Colonel Vladimir Dementyev confirmed over the secure line, ‘the president will still be there as expected. Is everything in place?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel,’ the other man confirmed, ‘everything has been arranged just as you instructed.’

  ‘Good,’ Dementyev said, turning in his leather-backed chair to look out over the forested expanse of Butovskiy lesopark that filled most of the view from his office window. The location of the headquarters of the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, Russia’s foreign intelligence service better known by the acronym SVR, suited Dementyev perfectly. Born in the Taiga regions of the east, he had never quite become accustomed to the urban bustle of central Moscow. The Yasenevo district was much more peaceful and yet – at a distance of under thirty kilometers – was only a forty-five-minute car journey away from his masters in the Kremlin. ‘It is of vital importance to the state,’ he continued, ‘that your mission be carried out to the letter.’

  ‘Of course, Colonel. That is understood.’

  The man’s confidence pleased Dementyev, although of course he already knew that he could be trusted. As a member of the SVR’s own elite Spetsnaz-trained special operations group – a unit known only as Zaslon, ‘the shield’ – the man was a deep-cover operative trained in all manner of espionage and insurgency tactics. Dementyev had used him over the years for some of the SVR’s most sensitive tasks, and he had always come through successfully.

  ‘Your men have not started to ask questions?’ he asked the Spetsnaz Major.

  ‘No,’ came the reply. ‘They do not suspect that their orders are not official, they trust me completely.’

  ‘That is good,’ Dementyev said, ‘that is good. It is critical that nobody suspects our involvement, at least not in the beginning. After a certain stage, it will cease to matter; but for now, we cannot show our hand to the world, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Colonel. Rest assured, nobody suspects a thing, and nor will they.’

  ‘Excellent. We will check again with one another at the same time tomorrow.’

  Dementyev replaced the telephone on his desk and settled back into his chair as he steepled his fingers together, eyes scanning across the treetops to the high-rise buildings just discernable beyond. He ignored the signs of the urban city though, preferring to just see the trees, remembering the vast Taiga
forests of his youth. The small park outside his twentieth-floor window could hardly be compared to the thousands of square miles of tree cover that surrounded his home town of Plesetsk, but he was a man of vast imagination, and it would do for now.

  It wasn’t even that he had liked Plesetsk when he was there, he reflected. On the contrary, he couldn’t wait to leave. For what was there in that small work settlement for an ambitious young man? Even the infamous Plesetsk Cosmodrome, which at the time was the busiest space port in the world – used originally for launching rockets, and then military satellites – wasn’t actually administered from Plesetsk itself, but instead from the nearby town of Mirny. The young Dementyev had played bandy – the Russian version of ice hockey – for the local team, but that had been the extent of the excitement available. And so when he had been conscripted into the military – a horror for most young men – he had leapt at the opportunity.

  He had survived the institutional bullying, the chaos of the Soviet army system, and his intellectual brilliance – an innate characteristic, as he had never been adequately schooled – was soon discovered by his superiors. This intelligence scared those military officers, but he was soon found by recruiters from the KGB who decided to look past his unimpressive background and his lack of party membership, and bring him into the fold of the First Chief Directorate. This was the section responsible for foreign operations and intelligence activities, and Dementyev soon showed himself to be a capable officer.

  The young KGB officer was trained and schooled, his natural aptitudes honed to a razor’s edge by his mentors; and when the Soviet Union fell, he was still too junior to be targeted in the purges that followed, and was therefore able to continue his career within the SVR, the direct successor to the First Chief Directorate.

  His thoughts were momentarily interrupted by a knock on his door, as a secretary brought him his black tea, but as soon as she was gone, Dementyev was peering out once more over the trees.