Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (15 page)

That drew nods of appreciation and pleased smiles. Al-Douri had been far more than just another high-ranking Saddam Hussein loyalist on the run. He had also commanded a particularly brutal and effective Sunni insurgent cell, one that had masterminded several dozen car-bombings, murders, and assassinations. Taken together, the lists of names, police payoffs, phone numbers, and weapons caches they had found on his computer should enable the U.S.

military and its Iraqi allies to rip his terrorist organization apart at the seams.

“The files we were especially interested in were buried much deeper,”

Randi went on. “They were also encrypted using a more sophisticated system —one based on high-level KGB codes from the late 1980s.”

“Codes the Soviets passed on to their friends in the Mukhabarat,” the Operations director commented.

She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And what have you found so far?”

“References to a highly classified biological weapons program,” Randi said flatly. “One apparently so secret that it was set up outside the Baathist regime’s

ordinary chain-of-command structures.”

“How far outside?”

“Almost entirely,” Randi said. She laid down her next bombshell with quiet assurance. “There are firm indications that this research was being kept hidden from Saddam Hussein himself. General al-Douri made sure that any reports about it passed solely through his hands… and stayed in his hands.

They were never sent any higher in the Mukhabarat hierarchy.”

That drew low whistles of surprise. The ex-Iraqi dictator had been a believer in absolute one-man rule, with all the strands of significant power held tightly in his own grip. Throughout Saddam’s thirty-year reign, those who thwarted his will or even who might someday pose a threat to his safety were casually butchered. By keeping secrets from his master, the onetime head of the Eighth Directorate had been playing a very dangerous game.

“Was this bio war program intended to produce weapons capable of causing mass casualties?” one of the senior CIA officials asked.

She shook her head. “Apparently not. The Eighth Directorate was set up to develop weapons for use on a smaller, though no less deadly, scale. Its primary mission was supplying the regime with nerve agents, specialized biotox-ins, and other poisons to assassinate opponents both here in Iraq and around the world.”

“What sort of scope are we talking about here?” the same man asked. “A small lab and a few researchers? Or a much bigger effort?”

Randi shrugged. “My guess would be that this program was on the smaller end of things —at least in terms of logistics and lab space.”

“What about its cost?”

“Substantial,” she said tersely. “From what we can see now, probably somewhere on the order of tens of millions of dollars over a one-or two-year period.”

Eyebrows went up around the conference table in Virginia. Even in a regime awash in illicit cash, that was serious money. “And the sources of this funding?” the head of Operations asked grimly. “Diverted from the UN oil-for-food fiasco, I suppose.”

“No, sir,” Randi said quietly. “The money for this program appears to have arrived directly, wired in from a number of anonymous bank accounts around the world. Roughly a million dollars ended up lining our friend al-Douri’s own pocket, but the rest seems to have paid for scientific equipment, supplies, and salaries.”

Nicholas Kaye frowned. “I hardly consider any of this earth-shaking news,”

the heavyset CIA chief grumbled peevishly. “What difference does our uncovering one more outlawed Iraqi science project make?”

Randi smiled sweetly. “Because, sir, this particular secret weapons project does not seem to have been an Iraqi-sponsored program at all.”

There was a moment of stunned silence.

“Explain that,” Kaye demanded at last.

“Al-Douri’s notes are fragmentary and incomplete,” Randi said. “But they clearly indicate that all of the researchers involved were, quote, foreigners, unquote.”

“Then where are these foreign scientists now?” the head of the CIA wondered.

“Long gone,” Randi told him. “Several entries show that they packed up all their equipment and left Iraq before our troops reached Baghdad. Probably via Syria.”

“Let me be sure I understand your theory on this, Ms. Russell,” the Agency’s Operations director said carefully. “Are you suggesting that someone else was using Iraq as a cover for their own illegal biological weapons program?”

Randi nodded. “Yes, I am.” She smiled wryly. “After all, where better to hide a dirty needle than in a haystack already filled with other dirty needles that don’t belong to you.”

“Any strong suspects?”

“Based on the material we found in al-Douri’s computer?” She shrugged.

“Not really. If he knew who was paying him to set up this bioweapons lab inside his organization, al-Douri was very careful not to record that fact. My hunch, though, is that he didn’t know and didn’t much care.”

“Then all we’re left with is another useless, fading, will-o’-the-wisp,” Kaye complained.

“Not quite, sir,” Randi said with forced patience. Behind his back, the heavyset CIA chief was known as “Dr. No” throughout the Agency, both for his general pessimism and his near-automatic impulse to reject any proposal that involved risk or contravened conventional wisdom.

“Go on, Ms. Russell,” the Operations director told her gently, with a faint smile of his own. “For some strange reason, I suspect you have an ace hidden up your sleeve.”

Almost against her will, Randi grinned back at the projection screen. “Not exactly an ace, sir. More like a joker—a real wild card.” She held up a single sheet of paper, a printout from one of the files concealed on their prisoner’s computer hard drive. “After his first meeting with the scientist in charge of this secret program, our friend al-Douri made this rather cryptic entry in his private diary: ‘This man is more a jackal than the noble Teutonic wolf he so proudly claims to be. And like the jackal, he feasts greedily on the carrion abandoned by those who were once his masters.’”

Kaye snorted loudly. “What are we supposed to learn from that sort of Arab poetical gibberish?” he scoffed.

“Not gibberish,” Randi said coolly. “Just a bad pun. He was playing off this foreign scientist’s name. A German scientist. A German biological weapons scientist whose name suggests the word wolf.”

She waited.

“Christ!” one of the other CIA officials said abruptly. “You’re talking about WulfRenke.”

Randi nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“That’s impossible,” Kaye snapped. “Renke is dead. He’s been dead for years. Probably since not long after he disappeared from Berlin.”

“So the German government insists now. But no one has ever seen his corpse,” she pointed out grimly. “And given what we’ve just learned from these computer files, I think we should do our damnedest to find out the truth.”

There were murmurs of agreement around the two video-linked conference tables. Wulf Renke stood very high up in the ranks of the world’s “most wanted” Cold War criminals. Once a member of the East German scientific elite, Renke had been famous for his brilliant research and infamous for his eagerness to test his deadly creations on unwilling human subjects, usually political dissidents and common criminals. Not long after the Wall fell, he disappeared without a trace, vanishing before the German federal criminal police could arrest him.

For years since, the West’s intelligence services had tracked him, chasing down rumors that put the renegade scientist squarely in the middle of various global hot spots or serving a range of unsavory regimes and causes. He was said to have worked for North Korea, Libya, Serbia, and al-Qaeda and other terror networks. But none of those tantalizing and frightening rumors had ever panned out. A growing number of governments were ready to accept Berlin’s contention that Renke was dead—and no longer any threat to the civilized world.

At least until now.

“What are you proposing, Ms. Russell?” the head of the CIA at last asked stiffly.

“That you send me out on a hunt,” Randi said. She bared her own teeth in a tight, amused grin. “A wolf hunt.”

Kaye sighed. “And just where do you propose to begin this search of yours? Syria? Deep in the Hindu Kush? Or somewhere out in the wilds of Timbuktu?”

“No, sir,” she told him quietly. “I think it’s time we started right back at the very beginning.”

Moscow

Despite the bitter cold outside, the Irish Bar on the second floor of the Hotel Budapest was crowded. People were standing two-deep along the polished cherrvwood bar, signaling the busy, white-coated barman for another beer or glass of wine or whiskey. Smiling waitresses circulated through the rest of the room with trays of drinks. Around the smaller tables and in the plush, cush-ioned booths there was a constant buzz of lively conversation, liberally peppered with gusts of boisterous laughter whenever anyone told a particularly funny joke.

Jon Smith sat off in a quieter corner by himself, silently nursing a pint of dark Baltika beer. Listening to the loud, good-humored snatches of Russian, English, French, and German wafting past, he felt strangely disconnected from his fellow patrons, almost as if he were listening to them from a thousand miles away. He had forced a polite smile onto his face, but the expression felt subtly wrong, as though it might abruptly shatter into a thousand pieces. His nerves, he realized suddenly, must be stretched near the breaking point.

At every stage of his journey here —the flight from Berlin, clearing customs at Sheremetevo-2, the cab ride in, and even registering at the hotel’s front desk —he had braced himself for a dangerously raised official eyebrow or for the feel of a policeman’s heavy hand gripping his shoulder. But nothing ominous had happened. Instead, he had been ushered through passport control and then shown to his room at the Budapest with a quiet, disinterested courtesy. There seemed to be more uniformed militia on the streets than he remembered from his previous trips to post-Cold War Moscow, but otherwise there were no obvious signs of any trouble brewing in the capital of the Russian Federation.

Smith forced down another cautious sip of beer and surreptitiously checked his new watch. It was already well past seven-thirty, closer to eight at night. His Covert-One contact was late. Had something fouled up? Fred Klein had been confident that his Moscow-based team was still safely operating below the radar of the Russian security services, but what if he was wrong? For an instant, he considered leaving. Maybe he should duck out and find a sheltered spot so that he could make a secure call to Washington, D.C., reporting the failed rendezvous.

Jon looked up from his beer and again noticed a lithe, attractive woman with curling, shoulder-length dark hair and bright eyes that appeared more green than blue in the bar’s soft lighting. He had spotted her earlier, holding a

tall glass of sparkling wine while talking animatedly with a circle of grinning male admirers. But now she was moving slowly, but surely, in his general direction, stopping along the way to greet other men with a smile, a brief kiss on the cheek, or a murmured endearment. The woman wore a striking, sleeve-less, midnight-blue dress; one that seemed molded to the supple curves of her figure. An elegant, fur-trimmed coat lay draped over one arm.

Probably a paid professional, he thought dispassionately, deliberately looking away before she could make eye contact. There was no point in drawing any unwanted attention. The best of the elite escorts flocked to whichever bars and restaurants drew the greatest number of wealthy foreign businessmen. He had noticed several other young women, all of them quite beautiful, slipping away earlier with paunchy German or British or American executives for what he presumed were discreet trysts upstairs in their rooms. The Hotel Budapest’s Irish Bar appeared to be ground-zero for Moscow’s high-class prostitutes.

“You seem very lonely. And very sad,” a pleasant voice purred softly in Russian. “May I join you for a drink?”

Smith glanced up. The slender, dark-haired woman stood there, smiling engagingly at him. He shook his head quickly. “No, thank you,” he replied.

“Believe me, I’m not looking for any company right now. I was just about to leave.

Still smiling, she sat down unhurriedly next to him. He caught a faint whiff of her perfume, something delicate, fresh, and floral. She raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Really? So soon? Such a pity when the night is still so young.”

Jon frowned slightly. “Look, miss,” he said stiffly. “I think there’s been some mistake — “

“A mistake? Yes, quite possibly,” the dark-haired woman said, now speaking in English with just the faintest trace of an Irish lilt. Her green eyes twinkled, openly amused. “But if so, I believe you are the one who is in error, Mr.

Martin. Where I am concerned, you seem to have gone haring off on the wrong tangent entirely.”

Tangent? Jesus, Smith thought wildly. That was the recognition word for this RV. That, plus the fact that she knew his cover name without being told, meant she had to be his Covert-One contact, the leader of Klein’s small team of operatives in the Russian capital. He felt his face turn bright red. “Hell,”

he

mumbled, embarrassed. “Now I’m in trouble.”

“Very likely,” the dark-haired woman said quietly. Then she relented and extended her hand. “My name is Fiona Devin. I’m a freelance journalist. Our mutual friend, Mr. Klein, insisted that I welcome you to Moscow.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully. He cleared his throat. “Look, Ms. Devin, I’m very sorry about the mix-up. It’s just that I was beginning to sweat. I thought something had gone wrong.”

She nodded. “I had that impression.” She shrugged. “I apologize for the long delay, but I thought it was for the best. This place is like a little bit of

home ground to me, and I wanted to make very sure that there weren’t any unwelcome visitors tagging along behind you. I know most of the regulars quite well, and strangers intruding on my patch tend to stand out.”

“FSB agents or informers, you mean?” he asked, using the acronym for the Russian Federal Security Service.