by Mark Terry
“Coffee, thank you. Black is fine.”
Raisa disappeared into the kitchen. Erica said, “You want to tell me what happened?”
“Somebody tried to kill me. He chased me all over Gorky Park, we fought, I escaped, then he cut me off and I jumped into the goddamned river to keep from getting shot. I got lucky.”
Erica said, “So far you’ve been kidnapped, interrogated, been on the periphery of a terrorist attack, and had an assassination attempt. What’s going on?”
He shrugged. Before he could respond Raisa appeared with a mug of steaming coffee. She had added a lot of sugar and cream. She rattled something off in Russian and Erica said, “She says she put sugar and cream in it because you need the sugars. She will warm soup for you, too.”
Derek took it gratefully and warmed his hands around the mug. She had also brought a plate of black bread, cheese, chunks of salami, and pickled cucumbers.
“Thank you,” he said. Lev approached. He and Raisa exchanged a few words. Erica said, “She told him the guests should eat first. He doesn’t get to eat until you and I have something.”
Derek reached over and took some bread, cheese and salami and took a bite. The coffee and the food seemed to flood his body, bringing a warmth the water in the tub hadn’t seemed to do. Erica helped herself as well, and Lev munched on a cucumber. Raisa returned with a mug of soup, which she handed to him. She sat and nibbled at a piece of bread.
“Will you translate for me?” Derek asked.
“Of course.”
Turning to Raisa, he said, “I’m terribly sorry for intruding on you like this. My apologies. You saved my life. Thank you.”
In turn, Erica translated Raisa’s response: “You are welcome. Did you come to take Lev away?”
Derek shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. But I did want to meet him.”
Raisa spoke. Erica smiled. “She says you seem like a good man, but you have many scars. She was a nurse. She has rarely seen so many scars.”
Derek nodded, thinking how to respond to that. He finally said, “My job can be a little tough. And I was a soldier in the United States Army.”
Raisa nodded and told him that her husband had been in the Russian Army.
Derek drank some soup. It was amazing how quickly he started improving with the warm food and drink. He was thinking what else to ask Raisa when Erica said, “Are you able to travel?”
He eyed her. “To Siberia, right?”
“Yes. We have a job to do.”
“Yeah, but there’s something going on here in Moscow.”
“But Irina was killed in Novosibirsk. That’s where this began.”
Derek finished the soup, watching Lev hold Shrek in one hand, the other holding a chunk of salami. He was reluctant to leave, not just because he felt like shit. There were emotional issues here to be dealt with.
On the other hand, Erica was right. This began in Novosibirsk and it was hard to believe that McGill’s death was just a coincidence.
With a nod Derek set down the soup and thanked Raisa again. She rattled off something in Russian and Erica said, “She said your jacket is very wet and won’t dry out. She has a heavy jacket and hat of her husband’s that you can wear. It should fit. Do you need shoes?”
He had an extra set of shoes in his backpack. No hat, though. “Is it going to be one of those fur hats?” Derek asked.
“An ushanka?”
Raisa laughed. She disappeared and returned with a heavy black leather jacket lined with what looked and felt like rabbit fur. Derek shrugged into it. It fit fine. Raisa handed him a pair of rabbit-lined gloves, which were a little roomy. Her husband must be a big man. Then she held up two hats. One was a black stocking stock and the other was a fur ushanka. She was smiling.
“Won’t your husband need it?”
The woman shook her head. Erica translated, “He died in Afghanistan.”
“I’m sorry.” To Erica, “Does anybody wear these fur hats any more?”
“Not so much, but it might look good on you.”
He took it and settled it on his head. Lev laughed and pointed, his face pink with pleasure. Good enough, Derek thought.
Irina Khournikova woke up as the door to the cell opened. She had lost track of time: of the minutes, the hours, the days, even the weeks. Had it been weeks? She didn’t know, but she thought it had been weeks.
The cell—that’s what she thought of it as—was actually a windowless room with a single door. The floor was concrete, the walls cinder block. Some sort of cellar or basement. There was a single bare light bulb that could be turned off from outside the room. A thin bare mattress on the floor. A toilet, a sink.
The door opened. Irina huddled on the mattress in one corner. She wore no clothes. They had taken them when they brought her here. During the raid on the warehouse, she had been shot twice. One wound on her left thigh. One shot in her side that seemed to have broken two ribs before exiting, taking a chunk of muscle and skin with it.
She had woken here, naked, cold, weak, in pain. They questioned her. Gave her pain medications, tortured her.
At first she fought answering. But that was futile. She couldn’t withstand the pain for long and she couldn’t withstand the drugs at all. She talked.
The door opened and she saw one of her jailers, a Red Hand thug named Igor who had been one of the first to beat her when she started to recover from her wounds. He was thick and blocky, like a rugby player gone to fat, his face jowly, his hair an unruly thick brown that had the texture of steel wool. She despised him and vowed to kill him if she had a chance.
“Time for your shower,” Igor said.
She slowly uncurled from the floor, refusing to cover her nakedness in front of him. Her FSB training had taught her why torturers did the things they did and what they hoped to accomplish by it. Yes, the nakedness made her feel humiliated and vulnerable. But she would wear her nakedness as a cloak.
She walked toward him, envisioning the many ways she could kill him. A spear-hand to the throat. Cupped hands striking his ears. A well-placed upward strike to the nose, slamming the broken cartilage and bone into his brain. Gouge out an eye and choke him to death.
He leered at her. “You’ve lost weight, but it looks good on you. I don’t mind a skinny bitch.”
She ignored him. Now was not the time. Between the exit and where she stood were dozens more armed men and women.
Igor led her down a hallway. They passed three more men and one woman. The woman nodded, hand resting on a gun. “This way, Khournikova.”
Irina followed the woman, whose name was Zoya, to a locker room. Zoya pointed to a bench. “Turn around. I’m going to check your dressings.”
Zoya wasn’t a doctor, as far as Irina could tell, but she had some medical training. Zoya was short and thin, her body hard, almost that of a teenage boy’s. Her blond hair was cut short and close to her skull. Her eyes were dark, deep in their sockets above sharp cheekbones. Zoya peeled back the dressings. “Very good. Almost healed. I think we can skip the bandages. How are your ribs?”
Irina ignored her. Zoya’s lips peeled back from her teeth and she punched Irina lightly in the ribs. The pain was moderate, but Irina gasped and doubled over, crying out, exaggerating the effect. Irina glared at her. “Bitch!”
“In the shower. There’s soap and shampoo.” Zoya pointed to a pair of camouflage pants and a green T-shirt. “Put those on when you’re clean.”
Irina luxuriated in the hot water. She wasn’t sure where they were, but it seemed like an old military base, or perhaps an abandoned school. When she was clean, she looked down at her body and realized the extent that Igor—that pig!—was right. She had lost weight. Some of it she had wanted to lose. It had been more difficult than she thought to lose the baby fat she had acquired during her pregnancy with Lev.
Lev.
For a moment, in the shower, when they wouldn’t be able to tell, she allowed tears to stream down her face. She missed him. He and everyone
else must think she was dead. Were they still looking for her? What had happened to the rest of her team? What was Konstantin thinking? Feeling? Doing?
Finally, back under control, she shut off the water, dried off using the towel Zoya had left her, and pulled on the clothing.
Zoya led Irina from the locker room to an office. A window looked out over a snow-covered field, woods behind it. She couldn’t identify where they were. It could be in Siberia, near Moscow, or for that matter, Colorado or Switzerland, although there was enough Cyrillic and Russian design details to convince her she was still somewhere in Russia.
The man she thought led the group sat behind a desk working on a computer. He was thin and dangerous-looking. His head was shaved, his complexion swarthy, his body seemingly stripped of fat, all muscle and bone. “Thank you, Zoya.” He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit.”
Zoya left and the man said, “Do you remember talking to me?”
“You mean torturing me?”
The man’s eyes were dark. “Questioning you. So you do remember.”
“Why am I still alive?”
He considered her thoughtfully. “Yours skills and background could be useful to us.”
“Who are you?”
“You can call me Yakov. We are the Red Hand.”
Irina knew about the Red Hand. She didn’t know who this man was. The Red Hand was a nationalist terror group. They apparently had no religious affiliation—they were not Muslim, for example. They were xenophobic, believing that Russia should be only for Russians, and pure Russians only. They did not believe ethnic minorities should be allowed in Russia: no Altaics, Balkars, Bashkirs, Yakuts, Volgans, Mordovians, Chechens, Kabardins. Just Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. And even the Ukrainians and Belarusians were looked down upon.
And no foreigners—no Americans, Europeans, Africans, Asians.
Russia for Russians.
And they were willing to kill to make their point. Bombings, primarily.
“What do you want?”
“We asked you many questions. Do you remember what we asked you?”
They asked her many things, not all of which she remembered. They asked her for classified information that she at first resisted, but eventually revealed. They asked her about various people in the FSB. They asked her about her familiarity with investigations, and FSB and government responses to emergency scenarios. They asked her personal questions.
She did not known what they wanted with her, but she knew what they wanted.
They wanted to be in charge. They wanted a return to a Soviet-style Russia with a “Big Boss” in place who would be like Stalin or Lenin.
They believed the modernization and democratization of Russia was corrupt, like a disease. They blamed ethnic minorities, and they blamed Americans and Europeans most of all, for everything they did not like about modern-day Russia.
But she did not know what they wanted with her, so she asked again.
Yakov Shos studied her. “I want you to join us.”
Swallowing hard, Irina blinked. Could she get inside this organization? It was what she should do, but she couldn’t make it seem too easy. “Unlikely,” she said.
Shos nodded. “I can have you killed,” he said. “Perhaps we should have left you in that warehouse to burn. Perhaps I should let Igor have his fun. But I think a woman of your talents and training can be an asset to our organization.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
Shos contemplated her a moment, expression neutral, dark eyes unreadable. Then he said, “Perhaps I can motivate you further.”
“Like I said before: unlikely.”
Shos slid a manila envelope across the battered steel desk.
“What is it?”
“Open it.”
She opened it. Her heart pounded against her ribs and her vision blurred. It was a photograph of Raisa and Lev, walking hand-in-hand in Gorky Park.
“You will do what we tell you to do or he will die.”
11
It was a three-hour flight from Moscow to Novosibirsk, and Derek, whose body clock was already out of sync, had no idea what time it was. He spent part of the airport waiting-time on his laptop, writing up his report for Secretary Mandalevo, encrypting it and emailing it off. He picked up a cup of hot tea, which he drank before getting on the plane. Erica Kirov seemed lost in thought and wasn’t much interested in conversation, which suited him fine. He asked the flight attendant for a blanket, adjusted the ushanka firmly on his head, leaned back and slept his way across Siberia, waking as they descended into Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport.
Their diplomatic/intelligence passports moved them through security quickly and outside the airport they caught a taxi to the Novosibirsk Congress Hotel, which not coincidentally, was where Dr. James McGill had flung himself from a window on the fifteenth floor. They checked into adjoining rooms with the assertion that they would get going on their investigation first thing in the morning.
It was 10:00 PM in Novosibirsk and Derek, body totally looped from jetlag and surviving hypothermia, was wide awake. Derek ordered coffee and soup from room service and waited until it was delivered, cautious about how he answered the door. A little paranoia was now a very good thing. Once he got the food and drink, he locked the door and jammed a chair beneath the knob, barricading the room. He drank the coffee and ate the soup and stripped and stood in the shower as long as he could stand.
Dressed in two pairs of socks, jeans, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt, he fired up his laptop and sat back to think. Out of the corner of his eyes he spied the ushanka Raisa had given him. He fitted it over his head, thinking of Lev’s expression when he had first tried it on. Visiting Google, he typed in, “How do you say daddy in Russian?”
He read the results. “Da,” he said. “Nana.” Daddy.
Still wearing the hat he logged onto a secure website with Homeland Security, working his way to an Identi-Kit program. He spent an hour recreating the features of the assassin who had tried to kill him. When he was satisfied with the results he saved it and emailed it to a friend of his in the Homeland Security Intelligence & Analysis Division, asking for a run through the database. He asked for it to be top priority.
Despite the coffee, exhaustion had caught up with him. He crawled under the blankets with his clothes still on and the ushanka clinging to his head, and promptly fell asleep.
Two hours later, Derek’s phone jangled a blues guitar riff loud enough to drive him out of a deep sleep. Groggy, he fumbled it and for a moment was confused by the rabbit fur he felt next to his head. He abruptly realized he’d fallen asleep with the ushanka on.
Finally getting the phone on he muttered, “Stillwater.”
“Derek, it’s Carter.”
Sitting up, Derek rubbed his head. “Hello.”
“Turn on your laptop and log onto the ‘net. We’re going to have a little conference and show-and-tell.”
“Give me ten minutes.”
“Make it five.”
Derek rubbed his eyes, shook his head and got his ass in gear. Five minutes later he and Carter were having a teleconference over a secure channel. Carter was a hulking bear of a man with a mop of brown hair shot with gray, and a bushy beard. In his forties, he’d been tooling around the wonderful and whacky world of computers since he was about three and his Dad had bought a Radio Shack computer that used a cassette tape for memory and a black-and-white TV as a monitor.
“Ay, Kemosabe. What the fuck you getting into? I ran your photo through the d-bases and we got a couple immediate hits. Here’s the top one. Let me know if he’s your guy.”
A fairly clear photograph of the man who had tried to kill Derek came up on the screen. It wasn’t a mug shot, but a photograph obviously taken with a security camera at an airport, based on the background.
“That’s definitely him.”
Carter leaned into the camera. “Bro, it’s better I probably don’t know, but I hope you’re not fucking around with
this guy.”
“Who is he?”
“That’s the question du jour, my man. Question Du Jour. In the United States, which is where that photo was taken, at Dulles about four years ago, he came in on a French passport with the name Jules Martin.”
“I don’t think he’s French.”
“Neither does Homeland, the FBI or the CIA. Or for that matter, the DGSE, Mossad, MI-6, the BND or your friends and mine, the FSB.”
“You got a lot done in two hours.”
“I’d like to say it’s because I’m a genius, but the fact is, this prick’s red-flagged. He’s an assassin, apparently freelance. Here are a couple more photographs Interpol released. A lot of people would like to bust him.”
More photographs appeared on the screen. Only after studying them did Derek realize they were the same man. It was hard to change the square jaw, although he apparently had done some work to soften his jaw-line using cosmetics or some sort of prostheses. In one photograph he had short-cropped blond hair; in another, long curly brown hair and a beard. Sometimes his skin was deeply tanned, other times pale. In the photographs his age seemed to vary from thirties to late fifties.
“Some sort of master of disguise? I wasn’t sure they existed in real life.”
“He’s pretty good. And his credentials and tradecraft are excellent. He’s been identified—after the fact—on four different passports, Germany, England, France, and Russia. The names, respectively, have been Dieter Engel, Andrew Gordon, Jules Martin, and Mikhail Grechko.”
“Anybody know his real identity? Or nationality? I really got the Russian vibe, but I don’t remember him saying anything.”
“Well, your radar must’ve been working. Although FSB isn’t exactly forthcoming, your guy is probably Russian, although it seems unlikely Mikhail Grechko is his real name. For some weird reason he’s been dubbed the Gekko, which hardly sounds scary. Maybe because it sounds like Grechko.”
“Okay. What do we actually know about him?”
“He’s been credited with nine assassinations worldwide ranging from political leaders to business leaders, and suspected in another dozen. He’s not picky about methods—he’s used close-up headshots, sniper rifles, bombs, garrotes, poisons, and knives.”