by Cap Daniels
“Is this your car?” Penny snatched the keys from my hand. “A boat, a plane, and a BMW. I’ve hit the boyfriend trifecta!”
I huffed and stuck out my bottom lip. “It looks like I’m the passenger…again.”
Clark said, “I’ll take the plane and meet you guys at Miami Executive so we won’t have to drive back here after meeting with my dad.”
“Perfect,” I said. “We’ll meet you there in an hour.”
The flight would take less than fifteen minutes, but the drive across Card Sound Road and through Homestead would probably take an hour, unless Penny drove like Anya. If that were the case, we might beat Clark.
As we crossed the bridge over Jewfish Creek, I told Penny how I’d spent my first weeks aboard my first boat anchored less than a mile from there.
“What happened to your first boat?” she asked.
You promised you wouldn’t lie to her.
“Anya set it on fire and sank it with an incendiary grenade.”
“I guess it was never boring having her around, huh?”
I laughed. “No, boring would not be how I’d describe those days.”
“You miss her, don’t you?”
Women ask some of the most unexpected questions at some of the most bizarre times.
“I used to miss her,” I confessed, “but not anymore. That part of my life is over. I have you now, and I’ve never been happier.”
“That’s a good answer, but I’m not convinced it’s the truth.”
I paid for a spot on the ramp at Executive to leave my airplane, and we collected Clark.
An hour later, we arrived at the marina, and I handed the key fob and a credit card to Penny. “I’ll get us a place on South Beach and call you in a couple of hours. Have fun.”
Clark and I walked past where the young Cuban receptionist should’ve been, and into Dominic’s office.
“What a surprise!” Dominic embraced Clark in an overdue fatherly hug and shook my hand welcomingly. “Come in, come in. I get the feeling you two weren’t just in the neighborhood and decided to drop in.”
“No,” I admitted. “We need to have a talk.”
“Sure. Would you like a drink?”
He headed for a small bar in the corner of his office.
“Scotch would be great.”
He poured three glasses and returned to his seat. “Okay, so let’s hear it.”
I wasted no time. “I have to find Anya.”
Dominic took a long swig of his cocktail. “Well, that’s quite the icebreaker.”
“I don’t see any sense in beating around the bush.”
“Nope, there’s rarely any bush beating with you, and I like that. So, why the urgency to find her?”
“I originally wanted to find her to give her two million dollars, but—”
“Whoa!” he said. “What do you mean, give her two million dollars?”
“Dr. Richter left me almost everything he owned, including over two million dollars because he had no living heirs. But she is his daughter.”
“I’m obviously a little behind the power curve here, but you said you originally wanted to find her for that reason. What’s the reason now?”
I took a long, slow breath. “I think she may have killed him.”
“Killed who?” he said.
“Dr. Richter. I think she may have killed him. I saw her through the window of his hospital room only minutes before he died. By the time I got there, she was gone, and he was dead.”
He pulled off his glasses and stuck the stem into the corner of his mouth. “That’s some theory you have there, Chase. Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because you’re my handler, and I need your help.”
“Okay,” he said, placing his glasses on his desk. “What do you need?”
“I need to talk with Michael Pennant and find out what he knows about her. I need to know if she’s still alive.”
“Still alive?” He poured himself another drink.
“Yeah, I need to know if she’s still alive. I can’t be certain of—”
Dominic held up his hand. “Just hold on a minute, Chase.” He walked to the window, gazed out over the water, and slowly swirled his drink.
I wordlessly asked Clark what was going on. He shrugged and joined me in watching his father stare into the distance.
“You won’t be talking with Pennant,” Dominic finally said.
“But he’s our only—”
“Shut up and listen,” he scolded. “She’s still alive as far as we know, but she won’t be for long.”
I leaned toward the desk as Dominic turned from the window and bore holes through my eyes. I’d never heard him raise his voice before then, and I wasn’t sure what was going on, but whatever it was, it had the man more upset than I’d ever seen him.
“I don’t know what brought you two here with this idea about Anya killing Richter, but it wasn’t her.”
“But I saw her in the hospital in Birmingham the day Dr. Richter died.”
“No, you didn’t. You saw who you thought was her. You saw someone who you were supposed to believe was her. It wasn’t Anya. It was Norikova.”
When I’d learned Anya wasn’t who she’d claimed to be, I was told by the CIA that her real name was Ekaterina Norikova, a Russian SVR captain. So much deception had occurred that it was impossible to sort out reality from the tangled web of lies.
I wanted to ask a thousand questions, but Dominic stopped me before I could begin.
“Just wait, okay? Sit there and wait a minute.”
He stomped toward the corner of his office, and after pressing several numbered keys on a cipher lock, he pulled a door open. I watched him step inside the space and spin the dial of an old iron safe. He returned to his desk with three thick folders bound with twine and tossed the first one onto my lap.
“How’s your Cyrillic?” he asked.
“Poor at best,” I admitted as I opened the file. It was clearly a Russian case file written entirely in Cyrillic, but that wasn’t the disturbing part. Paper-clipped inside the front cover were photocopies of two black-and-white pictures. One was Dr. Richter, and the other was me.
I scanned the first two pages. “I can’t make out more than ten percent of this, Dominic. I’m going to need some help.”
He shoved the two remaining files toward the edge of his desk and spun his chair to face the window.
I closed the file and placed it on his desk, and then took the first of the two remaining files. The same photocopies clung to the inside cover, and the documents inside were translated copies of the original Russian file.
Having a white-hot steel shank driven through my chest would’ve felt better than reading the documents. Details of my life, my training, and my weaknesses and strengths were spread out in front of me like a roadmap to my psyche. A similar dossier on Dr. Richter followed mine. His portion represented over five decades, while mine was less than two dozen pages. At the end of Richter’s section were several more photocopies. I recognized the woman in the pictures immediately. It was Katerina Burinkova, the same beautiful woman whose image adorned the nose of Dr. Richter’s P-51 Mustang. Burinkova was Anya’s mother, and the woman he’d loved.
I closed the file and exchanged it for the remaining one on the desk. It could only contain one thing—the SVR’s operational plan to infiltrate American covert ops. I imagined I was about to experience the Earthly equivalent of standing before Saint Peter as he reads off my list of sins at the Pearly Gates. My mouth felt like the Sahara Desert, and my heart pounded like thunder.
Chapter 9
Gang Aft A-gley
Sometime in the seventeen hundreds, poet Robert Burns wrote “To a Mouse” as an apology to a family of mice whose nest he’d destroyed while plowing a field. Little did he know when he wrote the line, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley,” that three hundred years later we’d still be quoting him. Well, sort of quoting him.
The fi
le resting in my lap, each page burning the very depths of my mind, contained one of the most diabolical and best-laid plans ever devised by mouse or man.
The world around me dissolved into melting blurs of reality as I digested every word of Colonel Viktor Tornovich’s plan to train Corporal Anastasia Burinkova, a sirota—an orphan—to find, seduce, and recruit America’s newest rising star in covert ops, namely, one Chase Fulton.
The plan was perfectly designed, right down to the most intricate detail. Reading the script for my own seduction was like watching hidden-camera video of my most private moments. The words, phrases, and sounds Anya made that left me utterly defenseless against her seduction were scripted, practiced, and perfected months before she ever whispered in my ear or let me brush her long, blonde hair. The tone and pace of her voice when she said, “YA lyublyu tebya,” had been rehearsed a thousand times before I ever heard her confess her love for me. Every intimate moment she and I spent was predestined, scheduled, practiced, and perfected long before the love I had for her was born.
The file went on to detail the long-term extent of the scheme. Anya was to marry “the American” and bear his children, all the while routinely reporting every detail she could glean back to Moscow. She had been ordered to spend the remainder of her life pretending to be in love with me, solely for the purpose of gathering intelligence on our operations. I could never fathom dedication of that magnitude.
If she hadn’t been shot, would I have ever learned the truth?
As devastating as phase one of the plan had been, the second phase felt like my heart had been ripped from my chest and crushed to a bloody pulp. Phase two detailed the platonic, paternal seduction of Dr. Robert Richter. The Russians had known all along that Anya was Richter’s daughter, but she believed otherwise. The physical resemblance was undeniable, but the strategists in the Kremlin used that morsel of genealogy to further convince Anya that she was destined for this duty to the Rodina.
She would continuously bait the trap to lead me into sharing details about her with my mentor, Dr. Richter, until he was convinced that she was, in fact, his daughter. That the lie was actually the truth made the grift immeasurably easier to sell. Richter would believe every word because he wanted to believe it, and Anya would play her role as the good soldier, never knowing the lie she was selling was the God’s honest truth.
Colonel Tornovich’s ruthlessness seemed to have no limits. He would destroy the heart and soul of a great American and implant his agent so deeply inside American covert ops that Richter himself would succumb to Anya’s scheme. Reading how Tornovich wanted to destroy Dr. Richter made me hate the Russian Colonel even more. I’d put a bullet in his forehead in the mountains of Virginia, but after seeing the exhaustive strategies he’d planned to destroy Dr. Richter, I wanted to have him resurrected so I could kill him again.
I replayed the interrogation I’d put the colonel through and tried to recall his answers. He’d lied even at the moment of his death. He had clung to the lie that Anya had actually been Norikova, but that hadn’t been true. Tornovich had been so bound by his determination and duty to the Kremlin that he kept planting disinformation in my head even as I pulled the trigger and ended his life. Without the file, I would’ve never known the truth. I would’ve never been able to decipher the insanely intricate web of deception Tornovich had woven.
The next section of the file answered the myriad questions surrounding the identity of Anya and Norikova. I’d believed they were one and the same, but just like everyone else who thought that, I’d been sorely mistaken.
The file detailed the second agent, Captain Ekaterina Norikova, the half sister of Anastasia Burinkova. Norikova had been the result of an affair with a senior official of the Communist Party. Anya’s mother gave birth in a hospital in Moscow, and the baby was immediately whisked away into state custody, raised in the home of the communist bureaucrat, and later served as a foreign intelligence officer in the SVR. The nearly identical appearance of Anya and her half sister was precisely the ace in the hole the Kremlin needed to keep Tornovich’s plan in place, even after the original plan had “gang aft a-gley.”
Just when I thought I could never despise anyone more than I detested Tornovich, Dominic turned from the window and reached for the file. “There’s more.”
I handed him the file and glanced into my empty glass. Clark appeared and wordlessly refilled my tumbler. I poured the contents into my mouth and felt it burn its way down my throat, past where my heart had once been.
“Chase,” began Dominic, “today is the day you lose what is left of your innocence. Some things are done in the name of preservation of freedom that are, under normal circumstances, neither palatable nor fathomable, but when done for the purpose of liberty, are absolutely necessary.”
I didn’t know where he was leading me, but I believed his speech was designed to prepare me for information even more devastating than what I’d read in the files.
“You’ll never read what I’m about to tell you in any file. No one other than me will ever brief you on this information. The theory you came in here with, as crazy as it sounds, is solid. What you think you saw in Birmingham makes sense.”
“Wait a minute. You said what I thought I saw in Birmingham. I know what I saw.”
“No, Chase, you don’t. Just like almost everything else in our world, almost nothing is as it appears. What you saw was a thin, beautiful blonde through a second-story hospital window. Your mind identified that woman as Anya, but it was not. We know that with certainty.”
“How can you possibly know that?” I demanded.
“We know it wasn’t her because Anastasia Burinkova is in the Black Dolphin Prison, just south of Orenburg near the Kazakhstan border. The woman you saw was Ekaterina Norikova, and you did, in fact, witness her kill Robert Richter.”
I drove my fist into the top of his desk. “Why hasn’t she been arrested?”
“We don’t arrest foreign intelligence officers, Chase. It’s not how things work. But she has been detained and is being held overseas by some friends of ours.”
“Friends?”
“Yes, friends. Friends who are very good at detaining people who don’t necessarily want to be detained.”
“You’re not going to tell me who has her, are you?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid not. At least not yet.”
I took a long breath, trying to digest what I was learning. I glanced at Clark, and for the first time since I’d met him, he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
Did he know this information, and has he been keeping it from me? Did he bring me here under the guise of it being my idea? Is he a coconspirator?
Dominic witnessed the silent exchange. “Clark, if you don’t wish to be here for this, that’s perfectly understandable, and I don’t want you to feel any obligation—”
Clark didn’t let his father finish. “How long have you known?”
Dominic cast his eyes to the floor. “Days.”
“How many days?” he growled.
“Clark,” Dominic said. “This sort of thing is very sensitive and can’t be widely disseminated. These are matters that must be handled with the utmost secrecy.”
Clark stood and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Look at this man, Dad. He has done every damned thing you’ve ever asked, and a thousand more. He’s never once shied away from any mission, regardless of the dangers or the cost. He’s given you his life to throw in front of any enemy you can find, and you’ve let bureaucratic bullshit stop you from telling him the truth. I’ve been in this game for seventeen years, and I’ve worked with and against some of the best operators on Earth—from countless countries—and I’ve never soldiered beside another man who had the courage and valor of Chase Fulton. He deserves the truth from you and from the people you work for, regardless of how devastating it may be.”
I felt bad for thinking Clark may have been manipulating me. He would always be the most solidly loyal and dependable for
ce in my life. His inability to look me in the eye wasn’t a result of something he was hiding from me; it was anger and disgust with the heartless system sticking in his craw.
Dominic tried to defend his position. “It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is,” Clark said, having regained his composure. “You’ve got good people working for you who are getting torn apart, inside and out, over bullshit that’s being kept from them. You say you’ve known this information for days. How many days? And when were you planning to brief him on any of it?”
I was flattered Clark would stand up for me, but the conversation was getting out of hand. “Okay. Enough,” I said. “The point is you’re briefing us now, so let’s hear the rest. But no more lies, and don’t you dare hold anything back.”
Dominic wore a look of embarrassment coupled with suppressed anger. His face was red, but his clenched jaw had turned the edges of his lips white. His nostrils flared as he took long, slow breaths, an exercise I’d used many times to calm my mind when things were on the verge of chaos.
My phone chirped, but I ignored it.
Dominic didn’t. “Why don’t we take a break and you answer your phone?”
I didn’t move. “Why don’t you tell me the rest? The phone can wait.”
He pushed back away from his desk and crossed his legs. “The Israelis have Norikova. After Anya got shot, Tornovich’s plan went all to hell.”
“Stop there,” I said. “Tell me what happened in the hospital. Anya was alive and breathing when I dropped her at the door exactly as you arranged. You told me she was dead, and that was a lie. Why?”
He sighed in resolution. “You’re right. I lied to you, but I had no choice. By that point, the CIA discovered what was happening, and they took over. It was out of my control. Anya was stabilized and moved to another hospital where she recovered from her injuries. She was an extremely high-value asset in the hands of the CIA, and she started talking.”
“Bullshit. Anya wouldn’t just start talking. She’s not that weak. What did they do to her?”