Dire Straits (7 page)

Two-and-a-half, actually. And by
the time they pulled into Galveston, Sally had found a buyer for her boat—Derek. Sally was thirty-five, had married a man twenty-five years older than her when she was thirty. The man, who she said was a nice enough guy, had several million dollars rattling around in the bank and several million more in the stock market. Then, while eating at Joe’s Stone Crab, he’d fallen right off his chair, dead before he hit the floor from a heart attack. Sally inherited the millions, a big modern house overlooking the ocean, and the boat. She decided she wanted a bigger boat and she wanted some time alone to “grieve,” so she decided to sail it to Texas where she had some family, see if she could sell the boat while she was there. Then she thought she might want to spend a few months in Europe. Did he want to come?

It was a double entendre, and not a very subtle one. Sally was like that. Derek figured her husband must have thought he’d died and gone to heaven when they hooked up. Maybe he even knew she was screwing him for his money. Maybe he didn’t even care. But Derek politely declined, saying he had a job to get back to.

Standing on the dock, he said, “I’ve got to fly back east.”

She smiled and kissed him, a lingering kiss. “You never really did tell me what you were doing in Cuba.”

“Stealing kayaks,” he said. “I told you. Big black market in Cuban kayaks. Didn’t you know?”

“I’ll get the paperwork going on the boat. Call me.”

“Absolutely.”

He caught a flight from Galveston to Houston to Washington DC. He was met at the airport by a muscular man with a gray crew-cut in a dark suit that didn’t hide the fact that he pumped a lot of iron and probably used a lot of steroids. He didn’t say anything as he drove Derek to a bland office building in Maryland where Derek was ushered into a small room with two plastic chairs and a Formica table.

A thin blond man in a gray suit and black and silver tie entered and sat opposite him. “Hello, Derek. Have a nice vacation with Mrs. Kendall?”

“Bought her boat. I’m going to have to fly back down to Galveston to sail it back here.”

“Yes, we’re aware of that.” The man, whose name was Richard McGee, was the man who had sent Derek to Cuba. “Just one more fuckup in a long line of them, apparently. Why don’t you start at the beginning.”

So Derek did. The first time through, McGee didn’t ask any questions. The only time he said anything was when the subject of the Russian woman came up. McGee looked to a spot near the wall and said, “Get that.”

Derek said, “Hidden camera?”

McGee nodded. “Continue.”

Derek did. Finally, once the story made it to Sally Kendall, Derek stopped. McGee said, “Oh, let’s keep going.”

Derek shook his head. “Sorry. Nothing to tell.”

“Plenty to tell. You’re being … debriefed. But maybe you already were.”

“Jealous?”

“You were forty miles from shore. You didn’t have to stay on the boat. What did you tell her?”

“Black market in Cuban kayaks.”

McGee stared at him. “You failed at your mission.”

Derek leaned forward. “Your Cuban network was totally compromised. And it was compromised before I showed up in Havana. I’m lucky I’m not in a Cuban prison with a car battery wired to my nuts.”

McGee nodded.

Derek stared at McGee. “I’ve got a question for you, McGee. Did you know your network was compromised when you sent me in there? Was I bait? Was the real mission to find out if and how much your Cuba network was compromised?”

McGee stared back at him, giving away nothing.

Derek knew the answer, though. He shook his head. “The odds of me getting into that facility and finding something useful sucked. And you know it. But the odds of me getting hung up if your network was compromised—they were pretty damned good, weren’t they?”

McGee blinked a moment. “You will be given a polygraph.”

“Of course. Let’s continue with this little game, shall we? I hope you’re happy with my mission. Hope you found out what you wanted.”

McGee didn’t respond, but led him back through the story, asking questions, asking more questions, picking at thing, asking the same questions in different ways. Finally McGee leaned back in his chair and said, “Why did you leave the Army, Derek?”

“You guys asked me that when I signed up. I was done with the chain of command. I thought I had skills the Agency could use.”

“You’re more resourceful than I would have guessed under stress, but you’re not much of a spy.”

“Thanks.” It was something Derek had been thinking about. He supposed it depended on the nature of the mission. Plots within plots. If the Agency sent him in to blunder around and they viewed him as largely expendable, then he’d been a fantastic spy. Particularly if they got the extra bonus of him actually getting out of the country when everything fell to pieces. If they really wanted proof of biological weapons manufacturing, then it had been a miserable failure.

If it had been entirely up to him, he would have skipped trying to talk his way into the facility and done a black-bag job in the middle of the night, snuck out of the country and picked up a boat five miles off-shore. It wasn’t terribly subtle, but then again, neither was he.

The door opened and a woman handed McGee a notebook. McGee handed it to Derek. “Take a look.”

Derek opened it. It contained about a hundred photographs of women. Mostly headshots, mostly taken while the person wasn’t looking. Beneath each photograph was a number. He went through the photographs, finally stopping at 14E. “Her,” he said, tapping the photograph. It was the woman he thought was Russian who had saved his ass in Havana.

McGee said, “Her name is Irina Khournikova. Spent a little bit of time in Spetznaz. Now she is newly assigned to the FSK.”

Derek had to think about that for a moment. “FSK?”

“
Federalnaya Sluzhba Kontrrazvedki
. Less than a year ago, better known as the KGB. She joined the FSK and, as far as we know, was assigned to Cuba. Which, given the deteriorating relationship between Cuba and Russia, probably means they didn’t expect much out of her.”

Irina Khournikova, he thought. Well, he supposed that was good to know. He didn’t expect to ever run into her again. “Can I go home now?”

“Yes. Get some sleep. Come into the office to write up your report tomorrow. We’ll schedule the polygraph. Then fly down to Galveston and get your boat. I assume you want some time off to deal with all that.”

“I do.”

“Make it a good report, Derek. We’re trying to figure out what to do with you.”

Derek got to his feet. “Any ideas?”

“Maybe Pakistan. Only we’ll send you semi-official.”

Derek winced. “Pakistan?”

“Yeah. Enjoy. The Asian folks want a bioterror expert on the ground. I’m glad to get you out of my hair. By the way, the U.N.’s been asking about you, too. You might want to take them up on their offer. Running around Iraq doing weapons inspections.”

Back to Iraq? But Derek understood what McGee was saying.
You fucked up, buddy. We’re trying to unload you.

“We’ll see,” Derek said.

Three days later he was back in Galveston standing on the deck of his new home, a fifty-two-foot Criss-Craft Constellation. Sally was going to ride back with him to Miami before she headed to France and Italy for a few months. Derek thought it was going to be an enjoyable couple days.

As they pulled out of Galveston, Derek in a pair of cut-off denim shorts, Sally in an orange string bikini, Sally said, “Are you going to keep the name?”

“Nope.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“What will you name it?”

He grinned. “
The Salacious Sally
.”

“I like that,” she said, leaning against him.

“I thought you might.”

“And when you get back to wherever you’re going? Back to Cuba, stealing kayaks?”

“No, I’m out of the kayak black market for now.”

“Then what?”

He thought of his next assignment: looking for evidence of biological warfare agents among civilian casualties in Pakistan. Digging up bodies in mass graves.

“Gravedigger, maybe,” he said.

The End

“The Kremlin is the dwelling of phantoms.”

—Marquis de Custine

“You can’t put a shovel in the soil of Russia without hitting bone.”

—Daniel Silva, “The Defector”

Novosibirsk, Russia

The Russian agent, Grigori
Sidorov, was dying and he knew it. He barely made it back to one of the UAZ Patriots his team had come in, stumbling in the dark over uneven, potholed concrete.
Should have brought a fucking Vodnik,
he thought through his pain, referring to the Russian Army’s assault vehicle. He flung open the driver-side door with the last of his strength and tumbled behind the wheel.

Behind him the warehouse burned.
All dead
, he thought, and fumbled with the keys to the Patriot. Glancing down in the gloom, he saw that the hand clenched against his gut was scarlet with blood. The pain was immense, unlike anything he had experienced. It seemed to stretch into infinity, some bizarre, unending sensation that took away all other sensations.
How did I make it this far?

His breathing was ragged; each lungful felt like daggers slicing through his chest. Each heartbeat pumped out more blood, pulsing against his hand. Glancing up, he saw three shadowy figures advancing on his location. Beards covered their faces, but the AK-47s were clear enough, backlit by the fire.

Grigori’s blood-soaked fingers twisted at the ignition, but he couldn’t get a grip. No time.

He twisted, nearly screaming, hands reaching for his satellite phone. This op had gone tits-up and he needed to… needed to…

Grigori got hold of the phone and jabbed the button that would send a scrambled, blast message back to Lubyanka in Moscow, headquarters of the
Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
—the Federal Security Service, or FSB.

The old KGB joke popped into his head, inappropriate: The Lubyanka had a great view—all the way to Siberia.

All the way to Novosibirsk
, he thought.
All the way to hell.

“Morozko,” he gasped, identifying himself by his code word, the folk tale of Old Man Winter. “Operation … ambush …” He could feel his life seeping away. The pain from the gunshots to his gut, the shrapnel in his back, was fading, replaced by a cold numbness. “Morozko,” he muttered, no longer finding the codename amusing. “…all dead.”

The men surrounded the Patriot, AK-47s raised, aimed through the windshield.

Grigori raised his fist, thumb tucked between his first and second fingers in the Russian version of “flipping the bird.”

Grigori’s dying words were,
“Po’shyol ‘na hui, mu’dak.”
Fuck you, asshole!

The three men emptied their guns.

Moscow, Russia

Pavel Botkin’s heart raced
. He hated this part of the job. In truth, he was terrified. He was a chubby man with a round face and red hair. His ears stuck out like handles on a pot. Broken veins in his cheeks and nose indicated a fondness for vodka, although he was rarely out-and-out drunk. With his job, blind drunk could be lethal.

There were ten canisters. Each was round, about the size of a grapefruit. They were refrigerated.

Yakov Shos stalked into the part of the building where Pavel was preparing the weapon. Shos was almost as frightening as the canisters, Pavel thought. Yakov Shos was a brutal man and looked it. Appearances were not deceiving. He looked like the sort of man who could gut you with a knife and not feel a bit of remorse as you lay bleeding on the floor. Shos was built like a blade. His head was shaved and his face was all planes and angles. His dark eyes snapped out from beneath a ledge of brow. He had been an operative with the FSB for years before making his fortune with the Bratva, the brotherhood, what some called the Mafiya.

Shos headed the Red Hand, something a little different, something darker, more grand and glorious, far more ambitious.

Pavel knew that Shos was a killer, that the man had taken the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds of people.

But what really frightened Pavel right now was that Shos did not seem afraid of the canisters.

“When will this be ready?”

Pavel swallowed. Pavel was a bomb maker. This corner of the building was his work area. In his fifties, Pavel had been well trained by the Russian Army. He had served in the hellhole of Afghanistan as a young man and was delighted to see the Americans mired in that most miserable of places on the planet.

“It’s not the kind of thing you rush.”

“Our people are here. Make it ready.”

Shos turned and strode back to the far end of the building, what had originally been a garage for school buses, to discuss matters with two men who had come in with a truck. Pavel did not know where this was destined to go. He was a bomb maker, a technician. He was not a strategist. Shos told him what to do and he did it. He was well paid and he was a devout follower of the Red Hand, believing that Russia could be returned to the glory and power of the days of the Soviet Union. He longed for the days when the world media stopped saying there was only one superpower in the world.

Pavel reached into the special refrigeration unit and withdrew the canister. It was cold and slippery in his hands. It was lighter than expected, made of some sort of acrylic. Crossing to his bench, he studied the device. It was a special bomb, one that was designed in such a way that the canister would explode without incinerating the contents. The contents would be dispersed into the air, where it would spread.

He was reaching toward the device when one of the goddamned crazy men honked the truck’s horn, loud and long. “C’mon! We’ve got to get going!”

Startled, Pavel dropped the canister on his workbench. It hit with a crunch and he slammed his hands down on it to keep it from bouncing or rolling onto the floor where it would undoubtedly shatter. Sweat broke out on his forehead and his breath caught in his chest. Were they insane?

He slowly inserted the canister into the device, securing it in its cradle. With great care he sealed the weapon. On cursory inspection it looked a little bit like a small microwave oven. The keypad on the front would allow a timer to be set. A hit of the On button would arm the device.

Pavel wiped his hands on his pants. It would be good to get this over with. Turning, he whistled the men over. “All yours!”