The Moscow Vector

  Fiona frowned. “I don’t see it, Colonel.” She shook her head. “You’ve already pointed out that there isn’t any clear link between those poor people—no friendships, no family ties, nothing that would explain why they fell ill and died so horribly.”

  Smith nodded. “That’s true. Elena, Valentin Petrenko, and the other Russian scientists studying the outbreak were completely unable to identify any ordinary connection between the four victims.” He tapped the notes again. “But what if the link between them is something more subtle, maybe a shared genetic or other biochemical trait—some weakness or preexisting condition that made them especially vulnerable to this new disease?”

  “Do you really believe it might be possible to discover this shared trait?” Kirov asked. “Even now?”

  Smith nodded again. “Yes, I do.” He looked at the other man. “But it won’t be easy. First, we’ll have to find a way to interview the families of the victims. If we can persuade them to let us take blood, tissue, and DNA samples, a series of lab tests ought to be able to pinpoint any areas of similarity.”

  “And somehow you plan to do all of these things while you and Ms. Devin are on the Kremlin’s Most Wanted list?” Kirov commented drily.

  “Yep, that’s about the size of it.” Smith forced a grin onto his lean face. “What’s that old saying? Something like ‘If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have signed on to be a soldier’? Well, we all signed on the dotted line, so I guess this is where we start earning our pay.”

  Berlin

  Set in and around a forest and several small but beautiful lakes, the Grunewald district was one of Berlin’s most elite and expensive suburbs. The older houses here were set far apart from each other, surrounded by immaculately landscaped grounds, stone walls, hedges, and patches of woodland.

  A small utility truck in the red-and-white colors of Deutsche Telekom, the German telephone company, was parked along Hagenstrasse, one of the wider residential streets in the Grunewald. It was very late in the afternoon and the pale winter sun, already low on the horizon, threw long black shadows across the road. It was bitterly cold and very few people were out and about in the frosty air. A paunchy jogger, wrapped up in the rhythms of the music pulsing through his headphones, puffed across the street in front of the truck and kept going, grimly focused on finishing his doctor-ordered exercise. He soon vanished in the growing darkness among the trees. An elderly couple, out for an afternoon stroll, tottered past, tugging their unhappy, shivering terrier behind them. Then they too turned a corner and were gone.

  Inside the truck cab, Randi Russell sat slouched behind the steering wheel. She wore thin leather gloves, a plain black baseball cap to hide her short blond hair, and drab gray workman’s coveralls that concealed her slender figure. She checked her watch impatiently. How much longer was she going have to wait?

  One side of Randi’s generous mouth twisted upward in a wry grin as she looked down at her gloves. If she had to sit here idly much longer, she might just be tempted to start chewing through the leather just to get at her fingernails.

  “The servants are on the move,” a young woman’s voice reported suddenly in her headset. “Looks like they’re finally heading out for the day.”

  Randi sat up straighter, watching an old, dented Audi pull slowly out of the driveway not far ahead of her. The pair of illegal Slovak immigrants that Ulrich Kessler paid to clean his house, cook his meals, and maintain his garden were on their way home to their own flea-ridden flat on the far side of Berlin. The Audi turned left on Hagenstrasse and drove off past her truck. Her eyes followed its taillights in her side mirror until they disappeared.

  “What about our boy Kessler himself?” she asked, speaking softly into the mike clipped to her coveralls.

  “Still in his office,” another voice, this one male and older, reported. It belonged to the CIA officer assigned to keep an eye on the BKA building in which Kessler worked. “But he’s definitely confirmed as one of the guests for a big shindig the Chancellor is throwing at the Staatsbibliothek this evening. According to our file, Kessler is a champion brown-noser. He won’t miss the chance to mingle with the Who’s Who of German politics, so you should be clear to go in.”

  “On my way,” Randi said coolly. Now that she was free to act, her nerves were noticeably steadier. “I’m moving onto the grounds now.”

  Without waiting any longer, she put the utility truck in gear and turned into the driveway that curved through the tall trees surrounding Kessler’s villa. The house itself, built in the early 1900s, was a replica of an Edwardian-era English country manor, all the way from its gleaming white, ivy-cloaked walls to the wide veranda running the length of its second story.

  Randi pulled around to the side of the house and parked next to a large garage that must have once served as both a carriage house and stables. She slid out of the truck and stood still for a moment, watching and listening. Nothing stirred either inside the house or outside among the trees.

  Reassured, she quickly fastened an SAS-pattern assault vest over her gray coveralls. This vest’s Velcro-sealed pouches and pockets contained a collection of small tools and electronics gear, not the usual assortment of weapons and spare ammunition. With that done, she walked back around the house, heading straight for the front door. It was the only way in that she could be sure was not on a security latch or a deadbolt.

  Randi stopped, knelt down to briefly examine the lock, and then fished the appropriate set of lockpicks out of one of her vest pockets. She slipped them into the tiny opening and stopped. “I’m at the door, Carla,” she murmured into her radio, speaking to her lookout. “Once I give you the word, I want to hear a running thirty-second countdown. Clear?”

  “Understood,” the younger woman answered. “The thirty-second clock is set.”

  “You with me, Mike?” Randi asked, this time addressing the electronics specialist assigned to her forced-entry team.

  “Standing by, Randi,” the technician replied calmly.

  “Good.” She risked a quick glance over her shoulder. Anyone passing by on the street would be able to spot her, though only if they looked carefully. All the more reason to stop fussing around, Randi told herself sternly. She took a deep breath, felt the crisp, clean oxygen flood her system, and then breathed out. “Here goes.”

  Using both hands, she delicately maneuvered the picks into the lock mechanism. After several seconds of careful jimmying, she felt it click open. With a soft sigh of satisfaction, she slid the pick set back into her vest and stood up. “Listen closely, guys,” Randi said quietly. “My forced-entry is commencing…now!”

  Without hesitating any longer, she pushed the door open, walked inside Kessler’s house, and immediately pulled the door closed behind her. She was in a broad entry hall lit by a chandelier high overhead. Doors opened off the hall on either side, leading into other rooms—a lounge or sitting area on the left and what might be a formal living room on the right. A wide, curving staircase swept up to the second floor.

  “Thirty seconds,” the lookout’s voice said through her headset, distinctly and steadily repeating the numbers flickering past on her digital stopwatch.

  Randi swiftly scanned the hallway, searching for the burglar alarm control panel. There it was! She spotted a small gray plastic box fixed at eye level, just to the right of the door. A tiny red light blinked on the front face above a ten-digit keypad, indicating that the alarm had been triggered as soon as she came through the front door. Her eyes narrowed. At best, she had thirty seconds while the alarm system cycled through a hold period designed to give the homeowner enough time to enter his security code on the keypad. After that, the alarm would go off, immediately alerting the closest Berlin police unit that a break-in was in progress.

  Instantly, she tugged open another Velcro pocket and brought out a small power screwdriver. With the quick press of a button on the side, it whirred into motion, swiftly spinning in reverse to pull out the first of the two screws holdin
g the front plastic panel closed.

  “Twenty-five seconds.”

  The first screw dropped into Randi’s gloved hand. She shifted the screwdriver to the next. It spun back out easily. She popped off the front panel and peered inside past a tangle of colored cables connected to a circuit board, looking for the tiny printed strip that would identify the alarm system.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  Randi felt her mouth drying out. Where was that damned ID tag? She was running out of time here. At last, she spotted the small box of text, glued to the rear wall of the control box. “Mike! The system is a TÜRING 3000.”

  “Understood, Randi,” the CIA technician told her. “Go with Card Five. Detach the green cable you see and plug it into the new card at Position One. Then do the same with the black cable at Position Two. Got it?”

  “Got it,” she confirmed, pulling a specially preconfigured system card out of one of her vest pouches.

  “Ten seconds.”

  Moving rapidly, Randi followed the directions she had been given, shifting cables from the old circuit board to the new one she had brought with her. Her pulse was racing now, thudding wildly in her ears. A fear-filled voice inside her own head began complaining that she wasn’t working fast enough, that the alarm was about to go off no matter what she did. She did her best to ignore it, concentrating instead on the task at hand.

  “Five seconds. Four. Three—”

  The second cable snapped into the card held in her gloved hand. New commands flowed immediately from the card to the alarm control box, mimicking instructions that would have been sent remotely by Kessler’s security company to reset the system after any false alarm. The red light shifted to green.

  Randi breathed out in relief. Now, when she was finished inside the house, she could simply reverse the process, replace the panel, and exit through the front door, without leaving any obvious evidence that the alarm had ever been tampered with.

  “I’m clear,” she reported quietly. “Commencing my recon now.”

  Moving confidently, Randi began a thorough search of Kessler’s villa, starting with the rooms at ground level and then continuing up the stairs to the second floor. One thing struck her right away. Ulrich Kessler was an art collector, a serious collector with a taste for extremely expensive original works of modern art. Unless she missed her guess, he had pieces by Diebenkorn, Kandinsky, Klee, Pollock, Mondrian, Picasso, and several other famous twentieth-century painters hanging in places of honor on the walls of various rooms.

  She paused at each one and took a digital picture. “Not bad for a simple civil servant, Herr Kessler,” she murmured, recording the image of what looked very much like an original de Kooning. Although it was difficult to pin down precisely how much these paintings were worth, she was willing to bet their total value was somewhere well above ten million dollars. No wonder he was so widely known for his unwillingness to invite work colleagues to his home.

  Randi shook her head in disgust. From all appearances, the Bundeskriminalamt official had been remarkably well paid for his role in protecting Professor Wulf Renke. Close examination of the images she was photographing for CIA-retained art experts should provide an intriguing look at the details of Kessler’s finances. And those were details that she knew he would be very, very unhappy to have dragged out into the open.

  Replacing the camera in her vest, she moved on, prowling carefully first through the German’s bedroom and then through a connecting door into what appeared to be his private study. Set at the very back of the villa, this was a large, lavishly furnished room with windows that looked out over the surrounding trees toward the bright lights of Berlin’s busy city center.

  From the doorway, Randi surveyed the study through narrowed eyes, quickly noting the computer and telephone sitting on an elaborately carved antique desk, the walls lined with bookcases, and another expensive painting—one that she strongly suspected concealed a small safe. She resisted the urge to begin rummaging through desk drawers or trying to break into the safe.

  The BKA official was corrupt, but he was not an idiot. The odds were very much against discovering any hidden document conveniently labeled “My Secret Life and Wulf Renke.” She was also sure that Kessler would have set hard-to-find telltales and possibly even other electronic alarms to protect his most prized information. Disturbing those would only put him instantly on his guard.

  Instead, Randi began pulling open various pouches on her equipment vest, revealing an assortment of miniaturized listening devices. She smiled coldly. Suspicious or not, Herr Ulrich Kessler was about to discover that there were other ways to learn his most closely held secrets.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Moscow

  It was the evening rush hour and hundreds of Muscovites worn out after a long day’s work packed the steep escalators serving the Smolenskaya Metro Station. Among them were three people, one of them a tall, strong-looking man in his mid-fifties. He carried a heavy canvas duffel bag slung over one shoulder and wore a martyred expression as he patiently shepherded his doddering, elderly mother and his equally ancient father off the escalator.

  “We’re almost outside, little mother,” he said gently. “Just a little farther now.” He looked back over his shoulder at the older man. “Come now, Papa. You must do your best to keep up.”

  Up at the top, a growing crowd of increasingly unhappy Metro riders were pressing up against the barriers leading to the street, restlessly waiting for a chance to run their magnetic tickets through the machines and leave the station. But most of the ticket-readers were shut down, forcing everyone in the crowd to funnel through the three barriers that were still in service. Exasperated murmurs swept through those milling in line when they saw the reason for the slowdown. Squads of gray-coated militiamen were deployed at every entrance and exit. They were busy carefully checking the faces of everyone entering and leaving the Smolenskaya station. From time to time, they pulled people away in ones and twos for closer questioning—often, but not always, lean, dark-haired men or slender and attractive, black-haired women.

  After scrutinizing the identity papers of the most recent pair hauled before him, Militia Lieutenant Grigor Pronin tossed the cards back and then waved the worried-looking man and woman away. “Fine,” he growled. “Everything’s fine. Now move along!”

  He grimaced. He and his entire unit had been tied up in this ridiculous manhunt for hours, stuck here on pointless, glorified sentry duty on orders from the Kremlin. No Chechen terrorist had ever looked anything like the photographs he had been shown. Meanwhile, he thought bitterly, Moscow’s real criminals must be having a field day—mugging, shoplifting, and stealing cars to their black hearts’ content.

  Pronin swung round in irritation at a sudden outbreak of loud cursing and swearing from the barrier. People were pushing and shoving one another near one of the ticket machines. He scowled. What the devil was wrong now? The militia officer stalked closer, angrily laying one hand on his holstered sidearm.

  The crowd at the barrier saw him coming and fell silent. Most stepped back a pace or two, leaving three people still gathered around the machine. One, a tall, silver-haired man, seemed to be trying to gently urge a plump, much-older woman through the narrow opening. Stooped over a cane, an elderly man with long whiskers and dirty, matted white hair leaned heavily against the railing on the other side, feebly motioning the woman on. Two medals pinned to his dirty coat proclaimed him a veteran of The Great Patriotic War against Fascism.

  “What’s the trouble here?” Pronin demanded grimly.

  “It’s my mother, sir,” the silver-haired man said apologetically. “She’s having trouble with her ticket. She keeps sticking it in the wrong way round.” He turned back to the woman. “Now see what you’ve done, little mother? The militia have come to see what the fuss is about.”

  “Never mind that,” Pronin said brusquely. He reached across the barrier, grabbed the magnetic card from the old woman’s shaking hand, and inserted it
himself. The barrier slid aside, allowing her to hobble through, followed soon after by her son. Almost immediately, a horrid odor assailed the militia lieutenant’s nose, a rank, acrid stench that made him gag.

  He stepped back, astonished by the smell. “Good God,” he muttered in shock. “What’s that stink?”

  The other man shrugged sadly. “I’m afraid it’s her bladder,” he confided. “She doesn’t have very much control over it these days. I try to get her to change her diaper more often, but she’s very stubborn, you see—much like a little child, really.”

  Disgusted, Pronin waved the trio through his waiting men. So that was what old age could be like, he thought darkly. Then he turned back to survey the crowds, already dismissing the depressing incident from his mind.

  Once they were safely outside the Metro station, the old woman painfully made her way over to a bench and sat down. The two men followed her.

  “I swear to God, Oleg,” Fiona Devin muttered crossly to the tall man masquerading as her son. “I’m going to be sick all over myself if I don’t get out of these foul-smelling clothes and all this damned padding…and soon!”

  “I am sorry,” Kirov said ruefully. “But it is necessary.” One of his bushy eyebrows rose in wry amusement. “On the other hand, my dear, you must admit that a bit of vomit would add a very nice touch of authenticity to your disguise.”

  Leaning hunched over on his cane, Jon Smith tried hard not to laugh. The glued-on theatrical whiskers and wig he was wearing itched abominably, but at least his coat and worn trousers were only stained with machine oil and ground-in dirt and not anything worse. Fiona, swaddled in layers to make her look fat and then stuffed into horribly soiled garments, had it a lot worse.

  Smith noticed other shoppers and pedestrians giving them a wide berth, quickly walking away with wrinkled noses and averted eyes. Even in the open air, the smells emanating from them were still pungent. He nodded. These get-ups, uncomfortable and demeaning though they were, were proving remarkably effective.