The Moscow Vector Read online

  Once the door was closed behind them, Renke swung around to face his much larger colleague. “Well?” he demanded. “Apart from collecting the next HYDRA variants, what else brings you here from Moscow so urgently?”

  “Two things,” Brandt told him. “First we face a significant security breach.”

  Renke’s face froze. “Where?”

  “In Prague, tracing back to Moscow,” the bigger man said flatly. He ran through what he had learned about the successful attack on Petrenko and the second failed attempt to kill the American doctor, Lieutenant Colonel Smith. The frantic emergency signals from the shocked survivors of his Prague team had reached him shortly after his arrival in Rome the night before.

  As Renke listened closely, his lips curled downward in a frown of displeasure. He shook his head in disgust. “Liss was sloppy,” he said. “Unpardonably sloppy.”

  “True. He was both imprecise and overconfident.” Brandt’s gray eyes were ice-cold. “At least his death at the hands of the American saves me the effort of eliminating him as an example to Ilionescu and the others.”

  “Has this man Smith turned up yet?”

  “Not yet,” Brandt said shortly. He shrugged his massive shoulders. “But he missed his scheduled flight to London and now the Czech authorities are searching for him, too. If they find him, I have other sources in Prague who will alert me.”

  “It’s been nearly twenty-four hours,” the scientist pointed out. “By now Smith could easily be across the Czech border. In fact, he could be almost anywhere in the world.”

  Brandt nodded grimly. “I am well aware of that.”

  Renke frowned again. He stroked his neat white beard. “What do you know about this American?” he asked at length. “Despite their appalling errors, Liss and his men were professionals. How could an ordinary doctor have disposed of them so easily?”

  “I do not know,” the taller man admitted slowly. “But clearly Smith is far more than he appears on the surface.”

  “An agent, you mean? For one of the American military intelligence organizations?”

  Brandt shrugged. “Perhaps.” The blond-haired man scowled. “I’ve had people digging into Smith’s background, military service record, and medical credentials ever since Liss first reported his meeting with Petrenko, but the work is necessarily slow. If he is connected to one of the American intelligence agencies, I don’t want to risk revealing our interest in him. That could tip our hand prematurely.”

  “If he is a spy, your caution may come too late,” Renke said coldly. “The Americans could already be probing deeper into our field tests in Moscow.”

  Brandt stayed silent, holding his temper in check. No useful purpose would be served by reminding the scientist of his own role in pushing for those first experiments.

  “Have you notified Alexei Ivanov?” Renke asked after a moment. “After all, the Thirteenth Directorate may have a file on Smith. At a minimum, our friends in the FSB should be alerted to tighten their security in and around Moscow.”

  Brandt shook his head. “I’ve told Ivanov nothing about the American thus far,” he said quietly. “He knows that Petrenko and Kiryanov are dead, nothing more.”

  The scientist raised an eyebrow. “Keeping Ivanov in the dark? Is that wise, Erich? As you say, this is a very serious breach of operational secrecy. Surely that overrides any question of professional jealousy or embarrassment?”

  “And direct orders from our patron trump all other considerations,” Brandt reminded him coolly. “He expects us to clean up our own messes without running to the Kremlin like frightened children. In this case I feel inclined to obey him. The Russians are too heavy-handed. Their intervention might only make matters worse. As it is, I have enough manpower to handle the situation if the Americans start poking and prying.”

  Renke pursed his lips. “What do you need from me, then?”

  “A complete list of those in Moscow whose knowledge of the first HYDRA outbreak could prove dangerous to us or to the project. With Smith still on the loose, we can’t take the chance that Petrenko and Kiryanov were the only ones inclined to disobey the orders to keep silent.”

  Renke nodded slowly. “I can prepare such a list.”

  “Good. Send the names to me as soon as possible.” Brandt flashed his perfect teeth in a tight, cold smile. “We must be ready to remove any remaining loose ends, should the need arise.”

  “Yes, that is true,” Renke agreed. He looked up at the bigger man. “And the second development you wanted to discuss?”

  Brandt hesitated. He turned slowly, suspiciously examining the crowded bookshelves and plain furniture around him. Then he glanced back at the scientist. “You’re sure this office is clean?”

  “My security team sweeps it every day,” Renke said calmly. “They are loyal to me and to no other. You may speak freely.” He smiled primly. “From your uneasiness, I presume you have news concerning our secondary venture? This so-called ‘insurance policy’ against treachery that our Russian friends are so interested in possessing?”

  Brandt nodded. “That’s right.” Despite the scientist’s assurance, he lowered his voice slightly. “Zurich has confirmed the first payment to our accounts. But I need to have the special material we promised him in hand before Ivanov will approve the second funds transfer.”

  Renke shrugged. “That isn’t a problem. I finished the required variant weeks ago.” He crossed the room and touched a stud on one of the bookcases. It swung back noiselessly, revealing a hidden wall safe and freezer. He entered a code and then pressed his right thumb to a fingerprint scanner built into the safe door. It cycled open in a puff of condensation. The scientist put on an insulated glove and then reached inside. He drew out a single clear vial. “Here it is. You can pick up a carrier and some more dry ice on your way out.”

  Brandt noticed a rack containing other vials inside the safe. His gray eyes narrowed.

  Renke saw him looking and smiled. “Come now, Erich. We have known each other for years. Surely by now you have realized that I always take precautions to assure my own safety—no matter for whom I work.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Berlin

  Jon Smith drained the last of his coffee and set the cup back down on the round, cloth-covered table. Out of habit, he discreetly studied the people seated around him in the Hotel Askanischer Hof’s quiet, tastefully furnished breakfast lounge. This was his first real chance since arriving late last night to take a closer look at some of his fellow guests. Most were somber-faced business travelers, busy reading the morning newspapers or jotting down notes between distracted bites of toast, muesli, or soft sweet rolls, for upcoming meetings. There were two older couples sitting together, tourists taking advantage of reduced winter rates in the German capital. No one in the elegant little room raised any warning bells in his mind.

  Momentarily reassured, he left a couple of euros on the table as a tip, rose to his feet, and walked toward the door. Black-and-white-framed photos of the famous authors and actors who had stayed at the Askanischer Hof during its long history—including Arthur Miller and Franz Kafka—stared down at him from the wall behind a highly polished bar.

  Outside in the lobby, the desk clerk intercepted him. “A package has just arrived for you, Herr Martin,” he murmured politely. “By special courier.”

  Smith signed for the sealed legal-size envelope and took it back up to his room. The address label showed that it had been sent from Brussels by Waldmann Investments, LLC, one of a number of front companies Covert-One used for clandestine shipments around the world. He whistled softly at the sight of the time stamp on the envelope. Although it had been shipped well before dawn, somebody still had to have been really hustling to get this package to Berlin so early in the morning.

  Jon sat down on a comfortable blue sofa next to the window, ripped open the security seals, and spread the documents it contained across the surface of an ornate 1920s-style coffee table. One was a Canadian passport, also made ou
t in the John Martin name with his picture. Scuffed, travel-stained, and well worn, it included smudged exit and entry stamps showing that he had visited a number of different countries in Europe—Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania—over the past several years. A packet of business cards identified him, in the Martin persona, as a resident scholar at an organization called the Burnett Institute, a privately held public-policy think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia. A single piece of paper headed DESTROY AFTER READING held a brief biography of the fictional John Martin.

  The envelope also contained a valid business visa for Russia, attesting that he had been invited to Moscow by a private firm for “consultations on comparative national health and social insurance systems.” And an enclosed itinerary showed that he was booked on a Lufthansa flight to the Russian capital later that morning.

  For a moment longer, Smith sat staring at the array of forged travel documents spread before him. Moscow? They were sending him to Moscow? Well, Daniel, old pal, he thought wryly, how do you like your first look at the lions’ den? Then he flipped open his cell phone.

  Klein answered his call on the first ring. “Good morning, Jon,” the head of Covert-One said. “I assume that you’ve just received your new identity package?”

  “Sound assumption, Chief,” Smith said drily. “Now, do you mind telling me exactly what the hell is going on?”

  “Not in the least,” Klein replied. His voice was deadly serious. “Consider this a mission briefing. But before we begin, you should know that your orders come straight from the highest level.”

  Meaning the president himself, Smith realized. Unconsciously, he sat up straighter. “Go ahead.”

  He listened in growing astonishment while Klein ran through the list of dead or dying intelligence specialists, military leaders, and politicians in the U.S., its Western allies, and the smaller countries surrounding Russia. “My God,” he said when the other man finished. “No wonder my meeting with Petrenko stirred up such a hornet’s nest.”

  “Yes,” Klein agreed. “That’s our evaluation, too.”

  “And now you want me to dig into the first cases of this disease—the ones Petrenko told me about,” Smith guessed.

  “Correct. If possible, we need hard data on its origin, mechanics, and methods of transmission,” Klein said. “And we need it soon. I have the unpleasant sensation that events are moving very fast just now.”

  “That’s a pretty tall order, Fred,” Smith said quietly.

  “I realize that. But you won’t be alone on this mission, Colonel,” Klein promised. “We already have a team in place—a very good one. They’re standing by for your arrival.”

  “How do I make contact with them?”

  “You have a reservation at the Hotel Budapest, not far from the Bolshoi Theater,” the head of Covert-One told him. “Check in and be at the bar there by seven this evening, local time. You should be approached before seven-thirty.”

  “And how do I spot my counterpart?” Smith asked.

  “You don’t,” Klein replied softly. “This will be a strictly one-way RV. You sit tight and wait. Your contact will identify you. The recognition word is tangent.”

  Jon felt his mouth go dry. A one-way rendezvous meant that he would fly into Russia without the names, covers, or even physical descriptions of the Covert-One agents based there. Klein was not taking any chances—even though Smith would be using the John Martin cover identity and not his own name. That way, if the Russian security services arrested him at the airport, he could not be forced to betray any other operative. In the circumstances, the procedure was a sensible precaution, but that somehow struck him as rather cold comfort.

  “How solid is this Martin cover?” he asked tersely.

  “Pretty solid under the circumstances,” the other man said. “If things go sour, it might hold up under pressure for around twenty-four hours, given decent luck.”

  “So I guess the real trick is to avoid giving the boys in the Kremlin any reason to start chipping away at Mr. Martin’s fake Canadian résumé?”

  “That would be best,” Klein agreed levelly. “But remember that we’ll be standing by, ready to provide you with as much help as we can from this end.”

  Smith nodded. “Understood.”

  “Then good luck, Jon,” Klein said. “Report from Moscow as soon as possible.”

  Kiev, Ukraine

  Captain Carlos Parilla, U.S. Army, kept his face carefully blank as he listened intently to the troubled voice on the other end of the phone. “Yes, yes, I understand, Vitaly,” he said when the caller finished speaking. “I will relay the news to my superiors at once. Yes, you’re absolutely right, this is a horrible development.”

  He hung up and exhaled. “Jesus!”

  His boss in the U.S. Embassy’s Defense Attaché Office, a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, looked up from his computer in surprise. The straight-laced Parilla was known throughout the Kiev-based embassy staff for his refusal to swear or blaspheme, even under extreme stress. “What’s up, Carlos?”

  “That was Vitaly Chechilo from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry,” Parilla reported grimly. “He says General Engler is in the hospital up in Chernihiv—in intensive care. It looks as though he’s contracted the same unknown bug that killed General Marchuk yesterday.”

  The Marine colonel’s eyes widened. Brigadier General Bernard Engler was the head of the Special U.S. Military Mission, a team of American officers assigned to assist Ukraine in modernizing and reforming its defense forces. Still worried by the scattered intelligence reports they had been receiving of unusual Russian military maneuvers near the border, Engler had gone up to Chernihiv yesterday to try to prod Marchuk’s lackluster successor, Lieutenant General Eduard Tymoshenko, into taking sensible precautionary measures.

  The colonel picked up the phone and punched in a number. “Patch me through to the ambassador. Now.” He put one hand over the receiver and looked across the room at Parilla. “Contact the hospital in Chernihiv directly and get a confirmation on the general’s condition. Then pass the word along to the duty officer in Washington. We’re going to need a replacement out here pronto!”

  Parilla nodded. With its commander ill and possibly dying, the American military mission here would be largely paralyzed. As a one-star general, Engler commanded a significant level of attention and respect inside Ukraine’s government and armed forces. His subordinates, mostly junior officers, did not carry the same amount of clout with their rank-conscious counterparts. With potential trouble brewing along the Russo-Ukraine frontier, it was imperative that the Pentagon send someone else to fill the general’s post as soon as possible.

  The Army captain frowned, checking the time in Washington, D.C. It was still the middle of the night there. Even under the best possible circumstances, the Pentagon bureaucracy might take days to sift through all the candidates and name a replacement for Bernard Engler. Even a successor of the same rank and skill would need days, perhaps even weeks, to begin absorbing all the ins and outs of this country’s complicated military and civil affairs. And until the new man found his feet, the job of coordinating U.S. and Ukrainian defense policies would be significantly more difficult.

  Chapter Twelve

  Baghdad

  CIA officer Randi Russell sat wearily at the head of a large table deep inside the fortified U.S. Embassy in the Iraqi capital’s Green Zone. She fought down the sudden urge to rub her tired eyes. A secure satellite-link videoconference with the top brass at Langley was not a wise time to reveal ordinary human frailty. Phil Andriessen, the head honcho at the Agency’s Baghdad Station, slouched in the stiff-backed chair next to hers. Both of them faced a video projection screen. It showed the image of several serious-looking men wearing business suits, starched dress shirts, and carefully knotted ties seated at a similar table in a conference room on the seventh-floor of the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters.

  Behold one of the miracles of modern technology, Randi th
ought caustically. We bounce signals off satellites orbiting high above the earth, erasing a gulf of thousands of miles and hours of relative time with remarkable ease—and we do it all only so we can hold yet another interminable, indecisive meeting.

  On the Virginia end of the conference, Nicholas Kaye, the Director of Central Intelligence, leaned slowly forward in his seat. Now in his sixties, Kaye was a jowly, heavyset man. Decades ago, he had served briefly in the Agency before retreating to the calmer waters of academia and high-priced Beltway Bandit think tanks. Brought in largely as a caretaker replacement for David Hanson, his over-aggressive, scandal-plagued predecessor, the DCI’s mannerisms were sometimes as ponderous and ill defined as his decision-making process. “I understand that this former Iraqi Mukhabarat officer you’ve captured, General Hussain al-Douri, is still refusing to cooperate?”

  Andriessen nodded tiredly. “That’s correct, sir. So far, he’s stone-walling our interrogation team pretty successfully.”

  One of the other men at Langley, the deputy director for Operations, interjected, “At the moment, I think we’re all rather more interested in those Eighth Directorate files you captured with General al-Douri. Your first reports indicated they seemed to contain critical intelligence on a top-secret biological weapons program. One previously unknown to us. Is that still your assessment?”

  “Yes, sir, it is,” Andriessen said. He indicated Randi. “Ms. Russell here can brief you more fully on what we’ve learned. Since her special-ops team snatched al-Douri in the first place, she’s been in charge of exploiting the information we collected at his safe house.”

  The head of the Baghdad Station leaned over and murmured a sotto voce warning in her ear. “Now play it cool, Randi. Don’t piss these guys off—not when you’re angling for permission to go hunting so far out of our theater of operations.”