The Cold Edge (2 page)

It took the captain fifteen minutes to find the rock overhang. He had gone right past it a few times, since the snow had drifted against the front. Eventually he was able to pull the snowmobile and the trailer entirely under the rock. With some clarity of thought, he decided to bury the cube in the back of the crevasse. He had no idea what it was, but if the Soviets had sent four officers to pick it up, it must have been important.

Satisfied that he would be safe there until morning, he pulled out his sleeping bag and crawled inside boots and all. Wrapped up and curled into a ball, he was chilled for a moment but eventually started to warm. His thoughts drifted like the snow to his wife and two small children. He would have to endure. Have to make it through the night. Have to. For them.

Then he went to sleep for the last time.

Oslo, Norway
Present Day

The hotel door slammed with a resounding thud, startling Jake Adams from his nap. He looked around and found himself on the floor in the center of the room, an empty bottle of Schnapps a foot from his head. His mind drifted back, remembering vaguely how he had checked into the posh Grand Hotel on Oslo's most favorite Karl Johans Gate, the pedestrian enclave between the country's Parliament and The Royal Palace, across from the national theatre.

The room was mostly dark, with only a sliver of light at the edges of the curtains. His eyes tried to adjust to the movement—legs and feet. He knew those nice black leather pumps. Had purchased them for his girlfriend Anna at a shop in Vienna, his current place of residence.

The shoes stopped a yard away and the right foot started tapping on the low-pile gray carpet.

Jake rolled to his side and finally caught the expression on Anna's face. Disturbed? Concerned? No, definitely pissed off.

“What?” Jake said, scratching the hair on his bare chest. Coming to a sitting position, head spinning, he realized he had no clothes on at all. “What?” he repeated.

Her foot stopped tapping, but she crossed her arms over her chest. Okay, now she was mad as hell.

“I thought we were on vacation,” Jake protested. He knew he should have just kept his mouth shut at this point. Take the ass chewing like a man. Usually he knew precisely when he screwed up, but now he was baffled beyond the norm.

“Vacation assumes you have worked,” Anna finally said in German.

Damn. She spoke English during normal conversation, mostly to learn the idioms and idiosyncrasies of the language, muttered perfect, sensual French during sex, and her native Austrian German when she was either working or royally pissed off at him for some reason or other. Her German could travel anywhere from kinder-kind to Hitleresque. Now he thought he saw a small mustache forming above tight lips.

“That's cold,” he said, sticking with English. “Listen, I made a hundred thousand Euro on that last case.”

“Three months ago,” she said, still in German.

Okay, so it wasn't about the money. He should have known that much anyway. As an officer in the Interpol stationed in Vienna, Anna made less per year than he had hauled in for one-month of work. Maybe that did piss her off. Maybe it was the fact that he had done nothing in the last three months but drink beer, wine and schnapps, when he wasn't out at the range shooting his guns, walking to stay in shape, and lifting weights. All right, most of the walking was from the apartment the two of them had shared over the past two years to the bar six blocks away, the trip always faster on the way there than the way back.

“You look like hell, Jake,” she said. “Take a shower and get dressed.” A tear streaked her alabaster face, rolling off the high cheek bone until she caught it with her fingers and briskly wiped it away.

Jake got to his feet, unsure what to do, and even more unsure if he could stay standing. He had not neglected her. Had not taken her for granted in any way. If anything, the reverse was true. She had traveled so much in the past year, they had spent more time away from each other than together. Yet he knew when it was time to fold the cards and shut up. He shook his head and made his way to the bathroom. Hadn't he just taken a shower that morning? What time was it now? He caught a look at the clock radio on the nightstand just as he entered the bathroom. Crap. No wonder she was pissed. He was supposed to meet her at 1800 at the restaurant downstairs. It was 1830 now.

He took a quick shower, toweled off and came back in the room. Anna had picked up after him and placed his fresh clothes on the bed.

As she glanced at his clean, naked body, Jake thought he saw a new attitude in Anna. Maybe she had calmed down.

She sat onto the end of the bed and threw his underwear at him, which he caught and slipped on.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I must have overslept.”

“Passed out.” English. That was better.

“Tomato potato.”

“That's not the way it goes,” she said.

Putting his pants on, he said, “That's my way. Why'd you want to meet me downstairs at the bar anyway?”

“I didn't. The restaurant.”

She had a point. Although they were technically connected. “Right. Why don't I take you someplace nicer. I'm sure Oslo has a decent JapaChinese place. Tai? Indian?” He strapped his watch to his left wrist. “Where have you been for the past three hours?”

“Shopping.”

“You have no bags.”

“Shopping is not buying.”

“It is when you go,” he reminder her as he stretched a polo shirt over his head and then combed out his longer than normal hair with his fingers. Jesus, he had let his hair get long again.

“Must you always be a smart ass, Jake?”

“That's rhetorical, right? That's like asking me to piss sitting down.”

A slight smile crept up the right side of her mouth. Okay, he had her now. She was cooling down.

Reaching his hands to her, he said, “Come on. I'll buy you some Sushi.”

“Sushi with a hangover?”

She put her hands out and Jake pulled her up from the bed and into his arms. They kissed and she pulled away from him.

“Hangover assumes I still don't have a shine on,” he said, knowing she had pulled away because of the alcohol on his breath.

“You've got to slow down, Jake. It's not good for you.”

No shit. Maybe that was the point. He was bored out of his skull. “I know. I need to get back into the game.”

A knock on the door surprised Jake, but Anna didn't seem to flinch. Maybe she had ordered room service.

After hesitating another moment, Anna went to the door, looked through the peep and opened the door.

Jake expected to see some room service dude. Instead, there stood a man in his late 50s, gray hair in a military flat top, and dressed in nice tan Dockers and tight black polo shirt that showed the guy was still full of muscle and vitality. Even though it had been ten years since Jake had seen the man, that time passed would not hide his ex-commander, Colonel Russ Reed.

“Jesus,” Jake said, his head shaking. “What the hell you doing here, colonel?”

The two of them embraced like brothers, for that's what they had been, first in Air Force intelligence stationed in Germany, and later, when the colonel retired and Jake moved on from the military early, where their paths crossed many times in the old CIA. Jake had spent much of his CIA time in Western Europe, and Colonel Reed had been assigned at various embassies in Eastern Europe. Although they hadn't seen each other in years, they had talked on the phone and corresponded by e-mail.

Anna closed the door and stared at Jake.

“I'm sorry, Russ,” Jake said. “This is Anna, my—”

“We've met,” the colonel said.

Jake was rightfully confused. But then he remembered that Anna had opened the door without hesitation. She had recognized him. His head swirled and he had a feeling the alcohol was only part of the problem.

“Have a seat, Jake,” Colonel Reed said. It was more of a order than a request.

He would have protested, but Jake felt like shit and maybe close to throwing up. Reluctantly, he sat on the end of the bed. “What is this some kind of intervention? I admit I've been drinking too much. But come on. . . .”

Anna pulled a chair from a small table, took a seat, and cast her gaze on the colonel. “You want me to talk?” she asked the colonel.

“Let me start,” Colonel Reed said.

He remained standing, his fully-expressive, ruddy face his only tell. Something was seriously disturbing him, Jake could see.

“I contacted Anna in Vienna,” the colonel continued. “You had mentioned she worked for Interpol, and more specifically The Public Safety and Terrorism Sub-Directorate.”

Jake looked at Anna and said, “That wasn't exactly a secret. After all, your mother and father in Zell am See know that much.”

She didn't say a word.

“Anyway,” the colonel said, “you had also told her about my background. So Anna knew, to a certain extent, where I was coming from. As you might know, there's been a huge shake-up in the U.S. intelligence community.”

Jake knew. Nearly a decade ago the old CIA, FBI, NSA, ATF, and nearly every other alphabet soup agency had been swallowed up in one major intelligence agency, the new Agency. The Agency also included members of the military intelligence community. Unfortunately, the expected streamlining had also developed at times into an even more cumbersome bureaucracy. Jake had been called back to the new Agency, which he had never really been a part of, on a number of occasions over the years. And it was always the same old mantra—your country needs you. Each time had almost cost him his life.

“What's the Agency need this time?” Jake asked callously. “Who do you need killed.”

Colonel Reed laughed. “You're still a funny guy, Jake. But it's nothing like that.” His eyes shifted toward Anna and then settled back on Jake.

“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “You could have just dropped by our flat in Vienna. Oslo is kind of out of the way. A connection too far. You convinced Anna that she and I needed a vacation in Norway in August. But why?”

Anna leaned back in her chair, her expression defiant yet defeated.

“Well,” Colonel Reed said. “Glad to see your training hasn't entirely been washed away by schnapps.”

“Did you come here to insult me, or tell me I just won the Megabucks Lotto?”

The colonel hesitated, selecting his words. “You remember a guy named Captain Steve Olson?”

“Of course. You only had seven officers at any one time under your command in our tactical intel squadron. Steve and I hung out a lot. But you know that. What about him? He was reassigned as a military attaché here in Oslo until he died in a plane crash.”

“There was no plane crash,” the colonel muttered.

Jake's mind tried to recall the circumstances of his old friend's death, but it had been nearly two decades ago, and too much had happened between then and now. “A cover story,” he finally surmised.

“Right.”

“Okay. . .so how did Steve die?”

“We don't know for sure,” the colonel said somewhat reticently. “But we might know now.”

Glancing at Anna, Jake said, “And how does this impact Anna and Interpol?”

“It doesn't,” Reed said. Perhaps too forcefully.

“It doesn't but it does,” Jake said. “Otherwise you wouldn't have asked her to be here. You would have just called me in Vienna and told me what you're going to tell me right now. Come on, Russ, before my buzz wears off.”

“Right to the point. I always liked that about you, Jake. All right. Steve and the assistant Oslo station chief, John Korkala, went missing together back in October of 1986. They had heard of a plane crash on Spitsbergen Island in Svalbard and went to investigate. Last the CIA heard they were following four KGB officers. Something went wrong up there, because not one of the six ever left that island.”

Thinking of the scenario, Jake tried to remember the Svalbard Archipelago. He had flown over the islands once during a mission. To call them remote would be like calling the sky blue.

“Svalbard made news recently,” Jake said. “The Norwegian Seed Bank.”

“Exactly.”

The Norwegian government had recently completed a cave-like structure under the permafrost where they would store as many species of seeds as possible, just in case the world decided to blow itself up. Then the Norwegians could come to the rescue and help the world re-plant and survive. Of course, they might not have taken into consideration that whole Nuclear Winter, and the fact that they would need someone to till the soil, fresh water, etc.

“So, what happened to Steve?” Jake asked. “You sure the Ruskies didn't just kidnap him?”

“We weren't entirely sure, but his failsafe intel had never been put to the test.”

All intel officers were given a piece of information that could be exploited after a little intimidation or torture. None of the officers knew what their own failsafe response entailed. That was the only way the other side knew the officer was not lying, especially under drug-induced lie detectors.

“Interesting. But now you know. Who turned?”

“A retired Soviet intel officer with GRU. He told me about a MiG going down in Svalbard in October of 1986.”

“You believe him?”

“Yes. His brother was the MiG pilot.”

“So officially that makes seven,” Jake said.

“Seven?”

“Seven dead in Svalbard.”

“Right.”

“So, this Soviet GRU officer told you more.” It wasn't a question.

“Yes. This officer has been going to Spitsbergen every August for the past five years to search for his brother. This has been an unusually warm summer up there.”

“Global warming,” Anna finally said.

“That or fairies and dwarves,” Jake said. “He found something?”

The colonel smiled. “Last week. The tail section from his brother's plane.”