Klein nodded again. “And in each and every case, the men and women getting sick are among the key military and political leaders in those countries. From what I can see, most of those replacing them are significantly less competent—or more closely aligned with Russian interests.”
“Son of a bitch,” Castilla swore out loud. He scowled. “That sly son of a bitch Viktor Dudarev. The Russians already tried to screw around with the last Ukrainian presidential election—and failed. Having to back down so publicly must have rankled something fierce. Well, maybe the Kremlin is playing the same game again, but this time on a much bigger scale.”
“The pattern is certainly suggestive,” Klein said slowly.
The president glanced at his old friend. The ghost of a crooked smile crossed his broad face. “Meaning, don’t go off half-cocked, because we don’t have any real evidence yet, right?”
“That is ultimately your call,” Klein pointed out. He cleared his throat softly. “But I submit that we are very long on theory and very short on hard facts at the moment. In the present world circumstances, I’m not sure how an unsupported American suggestion of Russian dirty work would be received.”
“No kidding,” Castilla said. His broad shoulders slumped, as though they were being weighed down by an immense burden. “Fairly or unfairly, we’re perceived as having cried ‘wolf’ too often over the past few years. As a result, our old friends and NATO allies are ready to believe we’re prone to exaggerating dangers—and equally ready to cut and run from us at the first whiff of controversy. We managed to rebuild some of our credibility in the aftermath of the Lazarus crisis, but it’s still an uphill fight.”
The president frowned. “One thing’s certain. Nobody in London, Paris, Berlin, or Warsaw is going to thank us for risking a new round of the Cold War.” His eyes fell on an antique globe in the corner of the room. “And with our troops, ships, and aircraft tied down all around the damned planet, we’re sure as hell not in good shape for any open conflict with the Russians. Not on our own, anyway.”
Castilla sat silently for a few moments more, contemplating the situation. Then he shook his head sharply. “So be it. We can’t undo the recent past. Which means we’ll just have to find the proof we need to convince our allies to act with us, if necessary.” He sat up straighter. “That first disease outbreak in Moscow seems likely to be the key.”
“Agreed,” Klein said. His eyes were cold. “Someone is certainly determined to eliminate anyone who tries to tell us about it.”
“One more thing is clear,” Castilla continued. “I can’t rely on the CIA to take the lead on this. They’re not prepared to operate effectively in Moscow—at least not clandestinely.” He snorted. “We’ve been so focused on trying to play nice with the Russians these days, trying to keep them as our allies in the war on terror. Langley has spent its time and energy building working relationships with their security services, instead of recruiting networks of deep-cover agents inside the Kremlin. If I ask the Agency’s Moscow Station to reverse gears now, at such short notice, the odds are that they’ll only muff it. And then we’ll end up with so much diplomatic egg dripping down our faces that no one will believe a word we say.”
His eyes gleamed for an instant. “That leaves you and your outfit, Fred. Front and center. I want a priority investigation by Covert-One. But it’s got to be quick, and it’s got to be quiet.”
Klein nodded his understanding. “I have a small but excellent team already in place in Moscow,” he agreed. Thinking hard, he drew a handkerchief out of his coat pocket, took off his glasses, and polished them. Then he slipped the wire-rims back over his ears and looked up. “Plus, I have another top-notch field operative on stand-by. He’s tough, resourceful, and he’s worked in Russia before. Best of all, he has the medical training and scientific expertise to make some sense out of whatever information they uncover.”
“Who have you got in mind?” Castilla asked curiously.
“Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith,” Klein said softly.
February 17
Poltava, Ukraine
Halfway between the industrial city of Kharkiv and the capital of Kiev, Poltava occupied three hills in the middle of the vast and otherwise almost featureless Ukrainian steppe. Its central streets and avenues radiated outward from a circular plaza. And set in the very center of this open expanse lay the Iron Column of Glory, ringed by small cannons and topped by a golden imperial eagle. Erected in 1809, this towering monument commemorated Czar Peter the Great’s decisive victory over the invading Swedes and their Cossack allies a century before, a victory that had ensured Russia’s lasting domination over the region.
Large neoclassical government buildings constructed during the nineteenth century ringed this round park. Their upper-floor windows looked out toward the Iron Column.
Leonid Akhmetov, chairman of Poltava’s regional group of parliamentary deputies, stood staring out the window of his office. The burly, white-haired politician and business oligarch glowered out at the golden eagle and then swung away. He shut the blinds with a muttered curse.
“You do not approve of the view?” his visitor, a slender, thin-faced man in a drab suit, asked sardonically. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of Akhmetov’s ornate desk.
Akhmetov frowned. “Once I rejoiced in it,” he grunted dourly. “But now that column is only a reminder of our shame, of our abandonment to the effete West.”
Both men were speaking in Russian—the first language of nearly half of Ukraine’s people, most of them concentrated in the country’s eastern industrial regions. Two recent presidential elections, the first of them overturned by allegations of fraud, had split the country into rival factions, one heavily authoritarian and favoring renewed ties to Moscow, the other more democratic and more oriented toward Europe and the West. Akhmetov and his cronies were among the local leaders of the pro-Russian faction. They controlled most of Poltava’s industries and businesses.
“Mother Russia never truly abandons her loyal sons,” the thin-faced man said quietly. His eyes hardened. “Just as she never forgives those who betray her.”
The taller, heavier oligarch flushed red. “I am no traitor,” he growled. “My people and I were ready to move against Kiev months ago, right up to the moment that your President Dudarev reached his ‘accommodation’ with the new government. When the Kremlin pulled the rug out from under us so suddenly, what real choice did we have but to make our own peace with the new order?”
The other man shrugged. “The accommodation you condemn was only a minor tactical retreat. We decided the time was not yet right for an open confrontation with the Americans and the Europeans.”
Akhmetov’s eyes narrowed. “And now it is?”
“Soon,” the other man told him quietly. “Very soon. And you must do your part.”
“What must I do?”
“First? We want you to organize a public demonstration, one coinciding with Defenders of the Motherland Day, February 23,” the thin-faced man said. “This must be a mass rally demanding full autonomy from Kiev and closer ties to Mother Russia—”
The oligarch listened closely and with mounting excitement while the visitor from Moscow outlined his orders from the Kremlin.
An hour later, the man from Moscow left the Poltava Region Administrative building and strolled calmly toward the Iron Column of Glory. Another man, taller, with a broad, friendly face and a camera slung around his neck, detached himself from a small group of schoolchildren studying the monument and joined his shorter colleague from the Russian FSB’s Thirteenth Directorate.
“So?” he asked.
“Our friend Akhmetov has agreed. In six days, he and his supporters will gather here in this plaza, at the base of the column,” the thin-faced man reported.
“How many?”
“At least twenty thousand. Perhaps twice that number, depending on how many of his workers and their families obey their orders.”
“Very good,” th
e broad-faced man said, smiling openly. “Then we can assure them a warm reception—and a demonstration to a horrified world of just how far Kiev will go to suppress peaceful unrest among its troublesome ethnic Russians.”
“And you have all the information you require?”
The bigger man nodded coolly. He tapped his digital camera. “The images I need for detailed planning are stored in here. The rest is a mere matter of mathematics.”
“You’re sure?” the thin-faced man asked. “Ivanov will insist on absolute certainty and precision. He wants a cold-blooded massacre, not a pathetic fizzle.”
The other man grinned back. “Relax, Gennady Arkad’yevich. Relax. Our masters will have the excuse they need. Give me enough explosive—especially RDX—and I could send that so-called Iron Column flying to the moon.”
Chapter Ten
Near Orvieto, Italy
The ancient and beautiful Umbrian town of Orvieto perched high on a volcanic plateau above the broad Paglia valley, roughly halfway between Rome and Florence. The sheer cliffs ringing the town had acted as a natural fortification for millennia.
Below those cliffs, a side road broke away from the main highway, the autostrada, and wound west up the flanks of a low ridge facing Orvieto. Several ultramodern steel-and-glass buildings sprawled across the ridge, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with tight rolls of razor wire.
Signs at the main gate identified the complex as the headquarters of the European Center for Population Research. The Center’s stated purpose was the study of historical European population movements and genetic drift. Scientists assigned to the different labs inside the compound routinely fanned out across the continent and North America, sampling the DNA of various communities and ethnic groups for a wide array of historical, genetic, and medical research projects.
Early in the gray, damp morning, a black Mercedes sedan passed through the gate and parked near a large building set slightly apart from the others. Two men wearing fur hats and dark-colored coats got out. Both were tall and broad-shouldered. One, blue-eyed with high Slavic cheekbones, stood waiting impassively near the car while the second man strode toward the building’s locked main entrance.
“Name?” a voice asked in thickly accented Italian from an intercom set beside the solid steel door.
“Brandt,” the big man said clearly. He turned slightly toward the security cameras set to cover the entrance, letting them scan first his face and then his profile.
There was a brief pause while the images captured by the cameras were matched against those on file in the security system computer. Abruptly, the intercom crackled to life again. “You are cleared to proceed, Signor Brandt,” the voice said. “Please enter your identifier code.”
The big man entered a ten-digit code sequence on the keypad next to the door and heard the multiple locks sealing it click open, one after another. Once inside, he found himself in a gleaming, brightly lit corridor. Two hard-faced men, both cradling submachine guns, stood watching him closely from the adjacent guard station. One of them nodded politely toward a coat rack. “You may leave your coat, hat, and weapon there, Signor.”
He smiled thinly, faintly pleased to find that the rigorous security procedures he had decreed were applied even to him. He found that a reassuring contrast to the bad news he had received earlier from Prague. He shrugged out of his coat and then stripped off the shoulder holster containing his Walther pistol. He hung both of them on a hook and then doffed his fur hat, revealing a shock of pale blond hair.
“We’ve informed Dr. Renke of your arrival,” one of the armed guards told him. “He is waiting for you in the main lab.”
Erich Brandt, the man code-named Moscow One, nodded calmly. “Very well.”
The main lab took up nearly half of the building. Computers, boxlike DNA sequencers and synthesizers, chromatography cells, coffee-grinder-sized electroporation machines, and sealed tubes of reagents, enzymes, and other chemicals crowded a line of black-topped benches. Other doors led into isolation chambers used to culture the required viral and bacteriological materials. Technicians and scientists wearing sterile gowns, gloves, surgical masks, and clear plastic face shields hovered around the equipment, carefully moving through the rigidly prescribed set of steps necessary to produce each unique HYDRA variant.
Brandt stopped near the door and stood watching the complicated process with interest, but very little real comprehension. Although Wulf Renke had tried explaining the intricacies involved several times before, Brandt had always found himself lost in a sea of scientific jargon.
The tall, blond-haired man shrugged. Did it really matter? He had the skills necessary to kill coldly and precisely, and HYDRA was a weapon much like any other. Boiled down to its non-scientific essentials, the mechanisms of HYDRA’s manufacture and killing power were cruelly simple in theory, though complicated in execution.
First, one obtained a sample of the intended victim’s DNA—from a piece of hair, a fragment of skin, a bit of mucus, or even from the oils left in a fingerprint. Then came the painstaking process of sorting through key sections of the gene-filled chromosomes, looking for specific patches of the genetic sequence that were unique to each individual and also associated with cell replication. Once that was done, one prepared single strands of so-called cDNA—complimentary DNA—creating precise mirror images of the chosen target patches.
The next step required altering a relatively small, single-stranded DNA virus active in humans. Using various chemical processes, it was possible to strip out everything except the genes associated with its protective protein coat and those that allowed the virus to penetrate into the very heart, the nuclei, of human cells. The carefully crafted patches of cDNA obtained from the victim’s genome were added and the altered virus was looped into a ring, creating a self-replicating plasmid.
After that, these viral plasmids could be inserted into a benign strain of E. coli, bacteria, one found commonly in the human gut. Then all that remained was to culture and concentrate these modified strains of E. coli, building up a useful amount of the material, and the HYDRA variant was ready for delivery to the selected target.
Essentially, invisible, odorless, and tasteless, these bacteria could easily be administered to the person marked for death through any combination of food or drink. Once ingested, the modified bacteria would lodge in the gut and begin multiplying rapidly. As they grew, they would constantly throw off the genetically altered viral particles, which would be carried by the bloodstream throughout the body.
Brandt knew that these viral particles were the key killing component in HYDRA. By their very nature they were designed to pierce the walls of human cells. Once inside a cell, each particle would inject the edited patches of cDNA into the nucleus. In anyone but the intended target, nothing else would happen. But inside the selected victim, a far deadlier process would begin unfolding. As soon as the cell nucleus began replicating itself, those mirror-image patches would automatically attach to the pre-selected portions of chromosomal DNA, blocking any further replication. The whole intricate process of cell division and reproduction—absolutely essential to life—would come to a screeching halt—much like a zipper jammed by a piece of cloth.
As more and more cells became infected and stopped reproducing, HYDRA victims would suffer aches, high fevers, and skin rashes. The failure of the fastest-replicating cells—hair follicles and bone marrow—produced symptoms resembling the wasting and anemia seen in radiation poisoning. Ultimately, of course, the cascading destruction extended to whole organs and systems, leading inevitably to a lingering and painful death.
There was no cure. Nor could HYDRA be detected by any practical means. Doctors, trying desperately to isolate the cause of this unknown disease, would never think to look at the ultra-common, seemingly harmless, and non-infectious bacteria hidden away inside each victim’s gut.
Brandt smiled with pleasure at the thought. Undetectable, unstoppable, and incurable, HYDRA was the perfect ass
assin’s weapon. In many ways, he thought sardonically, Renke and his team were crafting microscopic versions of the precision-guided bombs and missiles of which the Americans were so fond of boasting, with the exception that HYDRA would never create any embarrassing collateral damage.
Wulf Renke, a much shorter, thinner man, turned away from one of the DNA sequencers and came toward Brandt. He stripped off his gloves, face shield, and then his surgical mask, revealing a head of short-cropped white hair and a carefully trimmed Vandyke beard and mustache. From a distance, he appeared jovial, even kind. It was only up close that one could see the callous, unblinking fanaticism in Renke’s dark brown eyes. The scientist divided all of humanity into two very unequal parts: those who sponsored his research and those on whom he could test the advanced biological and chemical horrors that were his forte.
He extended his hand with a slight smile of his own. “Erich! Welcome! Come to collect our new batch of toys in person?” He nodded toward an insulated cooler filled with carefully labeled small clear vials. Packs containing dry ice lined the cooler. To reduce the risk that their bacterial hosts would run out of nutrients and start dying off, the HYDRA variants were kept frozen for as long as possible. “There they are, all packed up and ready for transport.”
“I am here to collect the Phase II variants, Herr Professor,” Brandt agreed quietly, shaking hands. “But we have other matters to discuss as well. Private matters,” he said meaningfully.
Renke raised a single, thin white eyebrow. “Oh?” He glanced over his shoulder at the other technicians and scientists busy in the lab before turning back to look up at the bigger man. “Then perhaps we should adjourn to my office.”
Brandt followed him to a windowless room just down the central hallway. Shelves of books and other reference materials crowded one wall. Besides a desk and a computer, the tall, blond-haired man was not surprised to see a narrow cot and an untidy pile of blankets in one corner of the small room. Renke was famous for his lack of interest in the material comforts so important to others. He lived almost entirely for his research.