The Lone Patriot

by JT Brannan

  This was no time to be thinking about the past.

  He wondered where they were going, wondered if he was doing the right thing. Shouldn’t he be with Barrington, following Dementyev?

  Maybe; but this way, they had both bases covered. Julie and Gary would follow Dementyev, and he would follow – or at least ride along with – Irina.

  In the meantime, Ken and Daw would take the news van around to the other side of the compound to pick up Devlin, who was already working his way through the trees to a rendezvous on the country lane where they’d been dropped off two nights before.

  He tensed as the car slowed, realized that it was coming up to the main gate out of the compound. From his position under the car, he saw legs approaching and started to worry that the guards would check under the car.

  But almost immediately, the car began to pull away, and Cole understood that Dementyev must have given orders for both vehicles to pass right through, just in case the place was under some form of attack. As if to confirm his suspicions, the moment the car was past the gateposts, the driver put his foot to the floor and the vehicle accelerated away from the compound at high speed.

  Cole clung on for dear life, hoping that the journey would be a short one.

  ‘What the hell is going on back there?’ Dementyev asked Yasenevo’s head of security over the radio.

  ‘We have a car on fire, specialists are tackling the blaze now. Impossible to tell at this stage what caused it.’

  ‘Any further activity?’

  ‘None,’ came the reply, ‘although everything is now in lockdown, as a precautionary measure. Probably just a faulty gas tank, but it pays to be careful.’

  Of course it did; they were words to live by.

  Dementyev’s bodyguard had just told him about another incident outside the gates, some sort of Australian news team, and he wasn’t a man who believed in coincidences. Were the two things linked? And coming on the back of that foreign agent who’d escaped the night before, and the loss of Veronika Galushka, and – from reports of the SUV that had been involved in her capture – the presence in Moscow of a possible commando team, his danger radar was raised to a precipitously high level indeed.

  ‘Find that news van,’ Dementyev told the security chief. ‘Bring them back in for questioning.’

  As the man had just said, it paid to be careful.

  10

  Four hours later, Cole was thirty-eight thousand feet above sea level, cruising in the Aeroflot Boeing 747 on his way to Athens.

  The journey to Sheremetyevo had almost killed him. It was only about thirty miles, which had lasted just over an hour, but it had been an hour of pure hell. Despite the traffic, the car had accelerated hard when it could, and the wind passing underneath the vehicle had threatened to tear him off on more than one occasion.

  There’d been snow in places too, where the roads hadn’t been fully cleared; there were tracks for the tires, but the snow down the center had piled up high, and Cole had been dragged through it, the freezing cold snow pushing down past his coat and shirt. He was forced to pull himself higher and higher, his head turned sideways and pressed against the pipework, at the same time careful to avoid the steaming exhaust.

  At several points, he had thought he just couldn’t take it anymore, had even thought about just dropping to the road and rolling away while he still had some strength left in him, before he was forced from the car, unable to move, an unavoidable target for the cars and trucks that followed.

  But he had gritted his teeth and held on, and finally, mercifully, the vehicle had rolled to a stop in a huge covered parking lot and – hardly caring anymore if he was discovered or not – he eased his grip free, his fingers barely responding to his mental commands for them to uncurl. But finally they let go, and he collapsed to the concrete floor beneath him, frozen and exhausted.

  He still didn’t know where the hell he was, and for a few moments, his mind was so cold and numb that he wouldn’t have comprehended his location even if he had been able to see it.

  But gradually – as he saw a pair of female legs get out of the car and start walking away – he came to his senses, realized that he still had a job to do.

  He shook his head to clear it of the fog, then rolled from under one vehicle, to another, to another; and when he’d gone far enough, he shuffled back to the next row and waited until the coast was completely clear; and then he rolled out and stood up, rising next to the door of the parked car as if he was just getting out and shutting it, a completely natural action.

  He realized his clothes were soaking wet, but luckily they were dark, and it was unlikely anyone would immediately realize. But he would have to get out of them soon, or else there was a danger of hypothermia; he was still suffering slightly from the effects of the tunnel a few nights before, and this hadn’t helped at all.

  From the signs, he saw that he was at an airport, and from the distance traveled, he knew that it must have been Sheremetyevo.

  What was Irina doing here? Where was she going?

  He saw her walking to the elevators with a small cabin bag, watched as the car he’d ridden under pulled away from the parking lot.

  He looked around, saw that the lot was empty except for him and Irina, and for a moment, he thought about taking her down, right here.

  But she might not talk, and then Cole’s chance to find out what she was doing, where she was going, would be gone.

  There was also the chance, he had to admit, that he would not be able to take her; he was frozen and exhausted, his reserves spent, while Irina – apparently one of Russia’s most capable assassins – was completely fresh.

  No, he knew the correct thing to do was follow her.

  But it had been hard; she was a pro, and it took all of Cole’s skill and concentration to avoid being seen. When Irina took the elevator, he decided to take a risk, overtaking her by racing for the stairs and making it to the departures lounge before her.

  He’d used the time to call Michiko, see if she could get a hit on the airport systems, cross-reference the images they had of her as Elizabeth Morgan, the IDs she’d used when she’d escaped back to Russia, see if there was anything similar on the Sheremetyevo databases.

  He gave her the name ‘Irina’ too; he didn’t think that the assassin would use the name to fly under, but it might help the Force One technicians find out more information on who she really was.

  He’d also tried to get in touch with Barrington, but hadn’t had any luck; the signal was constantly busy.

  Cole hadn’t seen Irina for a while; she’d already moved through security, while he still didn’t have a ticket, unaware of where he should buy one for.

  He’d used the time to buy clothes from the stores, changing into the new ones and throwing the old ones away. He bought a cabin bag too, knowing that it would look strange to board a plane with no luggage at all.

  But time was running out, and Cole was just about to buy a ticket for any destination he could, just to get past security so that he could see which gate she was in, when Michiko called him back.

  She was confident that the woman he was after had booked a ticket to Riga International Airport in Latvia; using a facial recognition program using the available pictures she had of the assassin, Michiko had interrogated the data from Sheremetyevo and found a potential match – a ‘Tatiana Armanskaya’ had passed through security just twenty minutes before, and the scanned photograph from her passport provided a significant match to the data set.

  It was good enough for Cole, and he was about to hang up and get himself a ticket when Michiko stopped him. ‘But wait,’ she’d said. ‘I checked flights out of Riga too, I interrogated passport data from bookings over the next twenty-four hours and I found the same person, only this time the passport is in the name of Kristīne Ozoliņš. Different name, same facial characteristics, according to the data I’m using.’

  ‘You’re good,’ Cole told his daughter, impressed at her foresight. ‘How conf
ident are you?’

  ‘Seventy-five, eighty percent,’ she told him. ‘But that’s pretty good, as far as these things go.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, his mind working furiously as he processed the information, figuring out what he should do. ‘Where’s she going?’

  ‘Athens,’ Michiko said, ‘flying out at seventeen-ten, Air Baltic flight via Vienna. She’s literally jumping from one flight to another in Riga, the Moscow flight gets in just a couple of hours before. Including the stop in Vienna, she’ll be in Athens at oh-two-thirty-five tomorrow morning, local time.’

  ‘Any bookings onward from Athens?’

  ‘Not that I’ve found so far,’ Michiko said, ‘although I’m still looking. But at the moment, it looks like Athens is her final destination.’

  ‘Unless she leaves at Vienna,’ Cole thought out loud.

  ‘I’ve checked already, no facial matches from passports going anywhere else – not from Vienna, or from any other Austrian airport.’

  ‘Vienna might be her final destination, Athens just a decoy.’

  ‘Might be,’ Michiko agreed.

  Cool shook his head, tried to collect his thoughts. He had three options – he could follow onboard the flight to Riga, in case the secondary ticket was just a diversion; or else he could fly direct to Vienna, and see what she did there when she arrived; or he could make his way straight to Athens, where he’d have a little time to set up a proper surveillance operation.

  But was Athens her final destination?

  His gut told him it was; and with no other evidence, he decided to follow it.

  ‘I’ll fly directly to Athens,’ he told Michiko, the decision made. ‘Get Bruce to set up a liaison with our CIA station there, will you? Oh, and notify our people in Riga and Vienna, make sure she does get on those flights; if she doesn’t, have her followed.’

  ‘Okay, Mark,’ she’d confirmed. ‘Good luck.’

  Using the false identification documents he still had with him, Cole had booked his ticket to Athens International.

  It had then been a question of avoiding Irina seeing him while they waited to board. They were at different gates, but he knew that there was the possibility that their paths would cross. He looked different to how he had in London when they’d first met – his hair was dyed a different color, his teeth were fixed to make his mouth a different shape, his eyes were a different shade due to contact lenses, and he was wearing heavy spectacles. They were subtle changes, but enough to look significantly different.

  Of course, he’d managed to recognize Irina, even though she’d changed her appearance, and there was no reason to suppose that she wouldn’t be able to do the same thing to him. Appearances could change, but a person’s aura was hard to mask.

  Cole prided himself on his ability in that area; to as much as it was possible, he could mask who he really was, what he really was. But on more than one occasion, the woman he now followed had seen right through him. He remembered a conversation he’d had with her in a London hotel room, when she’d been able to tell – just from the look in his eyes – that he was a killer. The realization that she was not fooled by his practiced façade had chilled him to the bone, and he was careful not to underestimate her now. Despite his changed appearance, if she saw him there, she would know it was him.

  And what would happen then?

  He didn’t want to know, and was grateful that he had decided not to travel on the same flight as her; that would have entailed standing in line with her, waiting to board, and then getting on the airplane itself, too close to her for comfort.

  But as he’d waited to board his own flight, he’d wondered, for a moment, whether he wanted her to see him. Did he want the recognition? The confrontation? Did he just want to be near her again? Were the feelings not nervousness, or fear, but . . . something else?

  The thought had haunted him, followed him onto the airplane.

  Why was he following her anyway?

  Was it personal? Did a part of him want payback for her betrayal?

  But as he sat there, flying south over Moldova near the Black Sea coast, he told himself that he was there for a good reason.

  Irina had been in a meeting with Dementyev, the author of Project Europe, directly before coming here. Surely it was somehow related? A pro-Russian prime minister had just been elected in Greece, street violence was starting to become an excuse for Russian forces to move in there, and – if he remembered correctly – the Russian prime minister, Boris Manturov, was also flying out to congratulate his Greek opposite number this week. Was it a coincidence? Or was it another part of Dementyev’s plan?

  But as the plane continued on its route to Athens, Cole couldn’t help but wonder if he really was following her for the right reasons.

  11

  At the same time that Cole had been clinging to the underside of Makarova’s car on the way to Sheremetyevo, Ken Walgren was frantically maneuvering the news van through the traffic on the MKAD ring road.

  ‘Are they still there?’ he asked, unwilling to take his eyes off the road ahead of him.

  ‘Yeah,’ Daw Chaiprasit replied, seeing them in the large wing mirror on her side of the van. ‘Two of them that I can see, black Landcruisers, moving in on us.’

  She didn’t have to wonder for too long how they’d been found – an Australian news van in Moscow wasn’t the best of camouflage. She also didn’t have to wonder about why they were being pursued – Gary Hart had blown up one of the cars parked at Yasenevo, and the suspicious minds at SVR would immediately think that they’d had something to do with it. Nobody liked coincidences, and intelligence officers liked them the least of all, especially Russian intelligence officers for whom suspicion was a way of life.

  Devlin waited patiently in the back of the van, his rifle primed and at the ready; at Walgren’s word, he would kick open the rear doors and let the Russians have it.

  If they got that close; but as Walgren gunned the accelerator and the van blasted past a string of slower cars, Chaiprasit hoped that maybe they wouldn’t.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Walgren said, and Chaiprasit’s gaze turned to the nearby on-ramp, watching with horror as three police cars streamed onto the highway next to them. They turned on their sirens, blaring loud even over the sound of the van’s straining engine, and the other road-users began to move out of their way, clearing a path to their target.

  ‘Mike,’ Chaiprasit said to Devlin in the back, ‘I think you better get ready.’

  ‘So this is Akvadroma,’ Dementyev said with distaste as he got out of the ZiL limousine.

  Not only had he never visited the foreign agent at the secret prison, he had never visited the facility himself at all. He had no interest in interrogating prisoners himself, or seeing how information was coerced, beaten and tortured out of them. He deemed himself above that sort of thing, although he had always been more than willing to use whatever intelligence was gained through those unsavory methods.

  He had used ‘tactical questioning’ in the field as a younger man of course, when his duties as an agent had deemed it necessary; but that had been quick, spur-of-the-moment stuff and not the prolonged agonies forced on the prisoners of places such as this.

  Back when the whole of the KGB had been headquartered in the Lubyanka, as a junior officer he had sometimes been ordered to descend into the bowels of that building, to its infamous dungeons, in order to fulfil some minor duty or other, and the screams of those unfortunate men and women haunted him still.

  This building filled him with that same feeling of dread, and the sensation disturbed him greatly.

  Akvadroma was originally intended to be a water park, construction having started in 1997 in preparation for the World Youth Games a year later. It had not been finished in time, but work on the site had carried on until 2002, when it had finally been abandoned.

  It had supposedly been purchased by a developer five years later, with plans to turn it into a shopping mall. That buyer, however, had really been th
e SVR, who had transformed the abandoned water park into the most secretive of prisons, to house men and women that the state never wanted to be found. The ‘developer’ put in plans to the city office from time to time, but they were forever rejected, explaining the ruined nature of the site.

  The amusing thing was, it was almost in the heart of Moscow, just off the Aminyevskoye highway between the central and outer ring roads, and only fifteen kilometers from Yasenevo. It was hidden in plain view.

  The structure covered nearly half a million square feet – nine levels above-ground, a decayed monstrosity of twisted steel and ruined concrete, overgrowing now with weeds and vegetation, and three below-ground. There were empty, cracked concrete basins of never-finished swimming pools, broken stairs going nowhere, great concrete pillars supporting nothing, broken glass covering everything, and everywhere the smell of decay, the sense of abandonment, the great, cloying, overwhelming feel of despair.

  It looked haunted, Dementyev decided, even during the day, and he could well understand why the local population chose to stay away. The site was patrolled by SVR troops masquerading as private security hired by the developer, but they rarely had any work to do; sometimes they had to chase away kids, trying to show off to their friends by climbing about the eerie ghost-site, but that was about it. The drug addicts and the homeless who used to populate the structure had been moved on a long time ago.

  The prison itself, of course, was located in the three subterranean levels. When the ‘developer’ had bought the site back in 2007 and closed it off for preliminary redevelopment work, it was a specialist team from the SVR who had gone in to outfit the basement as its new covert interrogation and holding facility.

  As Dementyev entered the forbidding site, he hoped that things would be more pleasant downstairs, although the cynic in him told him that this was very unlikely to be the case.

  ‘Woah,’ said Gary Hart as they pulled over near the abandoned waterpark. ‘What the hell is this place?’