The 14th Colony: A Novel (48 page)

“And you must explain about Siberia and the Americans.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

Malone opened his eyes.

Snow covered his face, more trickling down the opening at his collar. Someone was shaking him, calling his name. He recognized the face. One of the agents from McDonald’s. Cold lay tight around his temples and he struggled with numbed senses, but just feeling anything seemed a good sign considering what he recalled happened.

The barn had exploded, covering both him and Cassiopeia. He was lying next to her, the other agent rousing her awake. He pushed himself up. His head ached, his neck stiff. Everything flashed woozy. His mouth was dry, so he sucked in some of the snow. His breath clouded around him in puffs of distress and relief. He checked his watch. A little after 5:00
A.M
. They’d been out a few hours.

“We waited as long as we could,” one of the agents said. “Then we came and found you.”

Cassiopeia sat up and stared at him. “That hurt.”

“You got that right.”

“What happened?” an agent asked.

He hobbled to his feet and sucked in more cold air, trying to rid the staleness from his lungs. “Zorin did not appreciate being trapped underground. So he blew his way out. You didn’t hear it?”

“We were ten miles away, inside a building.”

“What about the other two we took down?” Cassiopeia asked.

“Both dead,” an agent reported. “We’re still trying to determine how they tracked Zorin.”

Not all that hard, really. As Cassiopeia had surmised earlier, they knew generally about weapons caches, just not the details, especially any booby traps. So they kept watch and got lucky. But they weren’t the problem anymore.

He stared over to where the barn once stood. “We need to take a look at something.”

His adrenaline, sluggish at first, now pricked and prodded him into alertness. He borrowed one of the agent’s flashlights and led the way through the dark, finding the underground entrance from earlier, its cover gone, leaving a neat hole in the ground.

“That metal hatchway kept the explosion directed upward, like a cannon, instead of outward,” he said. “Otherwise we’d be dead.”

It had to be a bomb shelter of some sort, or perhaps a facility built specifically by the KGB. His head still spun, so he stopped a moment and allowed the cobwebs to clear.

“You two keep an eye out up here,” he called out. “And nobody heard the explosion?”

“This is the middle of nowhere. The next farm is several miles away.”

He climbed down into the blackness, hoping for no more booby traps. At the bottom he found a half-open metal door, which he closely examined, determining that nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

He eased the door open and pointed his light inside.

A switch was affixed to the rounded outer wall, a conduit leading up to overhead bulbs. He wondered about flicking it on but decided, what the hell, and did.

The tubes shone bright.

He switched off the flashlight.

Cassiopeia followed him inside.

He was impressed with the array of stored materials. Anything and everything an enterprising spy might need. Inside an ice cooler lay bricks of plastic explosives, which explained how Zorin had managed to free himself. He took inventory of the small arms, rifles, and ammunition along with survival supplies.

But no RA-115s.

A table did stretch down one side of the shelter, its top empty, nothing there to indicate that nuclear weapons had once been here.

“Just great,” he muttered. “He’s gone and we still have no idea if he’s a threat or not.”

Being unable to hear the conversation earlier now became a big problem. He banged his palms against the wall in impotent fury. Anger surged in him like nausea, filling his throat. He’d messed up. Big time. The two agents on site should have been included as backup. But he was trying to keep the information trail contained. The mockery of the shelter seemed evident, and though roomy he still did not like the enclosed feeling. With nothing further to be learned, they climbed back to ground level.

“Is the other car still up there in the road?” he asked one of the agents.

He was told that it was, so he and Cassiopeia broke into a trot, finding it parked in the lane beyond where trees blocked the path. She seemed to know what he was after and they both stared into the rear windows. The nylon bag, there earlier, was gone.

“So they apparently needed a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a hasp lock,” she said.

That they did.

The other two agents caught up to them.

“Is our car here?” he asked one of them. “Back near the highway.”

“Didn’t see one.”

Just wonderful.

“He has several hours’ head start,” Cassiopeia said. “So he’s certainly wherever he meant to be by now.”

“Even worse, no one has been looking for him.”

Time to report the bad news.

*   *   *

Stephanie sat at the small desk inside her hotel room. She’d returned here from the Justice Department, after calling Danny and telling him that he should open a fortune-telling business. He’d just chuckled and said it didn’t take a psychic to read these people. Sleep had proved impossible. Outside, four stories below, amber lights illuminated the hotel’s main entrance, taxis and cars-for-hire coming and going. Light snow had fallen through the night, leaving remnants but little ice. That would hurt later today. Better weather meant more crowds, more distractions, more opportunities for Zorin.

Her phone rang.

“I hope it’s good news,” she said, answering.

“It’s not,” Cotton said.

And she listened to what happened.

“We have cameras all over this city,” she said to him. “I’ll have the footage checked. That car has to appear somewhere.”

“Assuming Zorin is coming into DC. He may be planning an aerial attack from the outside.”

“We have the skies covered better than the ground.”

“I’ll leave that to you. We’re headed back to the White House.”

She ended the call and decided to play out her deal with Fox, dialing Litchfield’s cell phone. The moron answered quickly and she told him that they had nothing and Zorin was still on the loose.

“No proof he has a nuke?” Litchfield asked.

“Afraid not.”

“Fox will want to keep to the schedule.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll be at the White House around ten,” he told her. “If there’s any change let me know and I’ll make sure he acts immediately.”

“You’ll be the first call I make.”

She clicked off the phone, hating herself for even appearing to cooperate. She still planned to quit later today. The thought of working for these people turned her stomach. Hell, Litchfield was bad enough. She could find something else to do somewhere. Maybe she’d follow Cotton and move overseas. That had always carried an appeal to her.

Her phone rang again.

Luke.

Finally.

She answered and a woman’s voice greeted her.

“My name is Sue Begyn. My father is Lawrence Begyn. Luke Daniels came to talk to him.”

Nothing about this seemed good. “How do you have Luke’s phone?”

“He’s been hurt. I finally managed to get his phone from a nurse. You were the last call he made, so I just redialed. Do you know Luke?”

Dread swept through her.

“I’m his boss. Tell me where you are.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Zorin felt better. They’d managed to steal Malone’s car and make their way into DC without incident. Dawn had arrived with weak sunlight and a gusty wind driving leaden clouds in low. They’d removed all five weapons and any electrical evidence that the bombs had ever been in the shelter. On the trip into town he’d explained to Kelly what had happened at the dacha, leaving out nothing about the American, Malone. Kelly had then told him some astonishing information, and he could now easily understand how Andropov had been excited about a historical tidbit from an obscure American Revolutionary War society, stumbled upon forty years ago by an astute Soviet attaché.

A truth, like Kelly had said, that people had simply forgotten.

They’d parked in a garage adjacent to Union Station among a zillion other cars. Hopefully, no one was looking for theirs or, if they were, they would not think to check there. Inside its trunk lay four RA-115s, ready to be activated. An idea had occurred to him back at the shelter, a way to divert attention and occupy the Americans, tossing them one last false feeling of security.

Before finding an open diner, they’d scouted St. John’s Church and discovered something astonishing. The building was closed for renovations and had been for the past year, an extensive remodeling that involved scaffolding stretching up to the top of its bell tower. No services were being held there today. Kelly had worried about that, thinking they would have to make their entrance early before people arrived. Now that would not be necessary, the entire perimeter enclosed by a tall temporary fence. Once past that he should not be disturbed. The lack of anyone around the site had also offered an opportunity to hide, among the debris, the nylon bag they’d retrieved from the rental car.

Lafayette Park sat just across the street from the church. Past that stood the White House, only three hundred meters away. The impressive building had been lit in the early morning, readying itself for a new president to assume office. Finished with their survey, they’d quickly retreated several blocks away to the diner and ordered breakfast, which had just been delivered.

“There’s something else we must discuss,” Kelly said, his voice low.

The tables were rapidly filling with customers straining to be waited on. Zorin caught snatches of tourist conversations, political debates, and gossip. Once again he was surrounded by the main adversary. But this was no ordinary Sunday morning. History was about to be made.

And in more ways than one.

He worked on his eggs, sausage, and toast.

“We won’t be leaving here today, will we?” Kelly asked, his voice low.

He stared up at his comrade. No purpose would be served by lying. “I won’t.”

“From the moment I opened the door and saw you,” Kelly said, “I knew that my time had come, too. Then that incident at my house told me things. I’m too old to go on the run, looking over my shoulder every second. Wondering if today is the day they finally find me.”

He understood that paranoia. Every foreign service officer experienced it. Living a lie came with the liability of the truth. But there’d always been a bailout. If exposed, or in trouble, all you had to do was make it back home to the USSR.

But that option no longer existed.

“We have nowhere to go,” he muttered.

Kelly nodded. “No one wants us, Aleksandr. We are all that’s left of what once existed.”

He thought back to military school, then the KGB training center. Never then would he have imagined that he would be the last man standing.

“I realized,” Kelly said, “that this was a one-way mission for you. I want you to know that it’s a one-way ticket for me, too. When it goes, I’ll go with it.”

“You are a good and loyal officer.”

“I was born into the KGB,” Kelly said. “My parents were both officers and they raised me to be one. I’ve known no other life, though I’ve lived a fiction for a long, long time.”

He’d also lived that contradiction.

Which was not good.

He was surprisingly hungry, the diner filled with an inviting smell of brewing coffee. So he motioned to the waitress that he’d like another order.

Kelly smiled. “The condemned always seem to be able to eat.”

“Now I understand why. There’s a peace in knowing that it will all soon be over.”

“My one regret,” Kelly said, “is that I never married. I would have liked to have experienced that.”

“My wife was a good woman who died far too young. But now I’m glad she’s gone. I might not have had the courage to do what must be done, if she still lived.”

Then there was Anya.

He should call and say goodbye. He’d been putting that off, knowing that he could not tell her the truth. She’d volunteered to look for the journal. The fact that it was now irrelevant mattered, and she should be told. He still carried the cell phone he’d acquired in Irkutsk, switched on the past few hours, but she’d not, as yet, tried to contact him either.

“You brought all five for a reason,” Kelly said.

That he had, and one rested at his feet, beneath the table, safe inside its stylish aluminum case.

“It’s time you tell me why.”

“We need to ensure that the Americans are occupied,” he said. “Now that I know your intentions, there is something you can do to ensure our success. A penultimate surprise for the main adversary.”

Kelly seemed to like that. “Tell me.”

*   *   *

Cassiopeia walked into the Blue Room. She and Cotton had come from Virginia straight here, to the White House. The oval-shaped space lived up to its name, adorned with striking blue carpets and matching draperies. Doors opened into adjacent rooms and another set with glass overlooked the south lawn where a portion of the Rose Garden could be seen, along with magnolia trees veining a pale sun. The furniture had been removed, replaced with rows of cushioned chairs facing a podium before the room’s only fireplace. A television camera stood opposite the podium near the exterior doors. No one was inside, all of the doorways blocked by velvet ropes.

“A lot will happen in here soon.”

She turned and saw Danny Daniels.

“We didn’t get to say much when you were here a few hours ago,” he said.

“It’s good to see you again,” she said.

The president stepped beside her.

“Cotton is speaking with Edwin,” she said. “I decided to come have a look.”

“It’s an impressive space. Today it will usher in a new president.”

“You don’t sound excited.”

“I’ll miss this job.”

“And your plans for the future?”

She knew about him and Stephanie, one of a handful who were privy to the truth. That closed circle included only the president, the First Lady, and Edwin Davis. She’d gained entry by accident through another crisis a few months ago. Cotton had sensed she knew something, but she’d resisted all his efforts at learning more. If nothing else, she could definitely keep a secret.