Randi slid the earphones on and listened closely while the tech replayed the signals they had intercepted. She heard only a shrill, high-pitched whine broken by patches of static. One eyebrow rose. “Encrypted?”
“Highly encrypted,” the tech told her. “At a guess, whatever encryption software these guys are using is more sophisticated than anything I’ve ever heard before—with the possible exception of our own stuff.”
“Interesting.” Randi commented.
He grinned. “Yeah, isn’t it, though? I suppose the NSA might be able to break that noise apart into the clear, but doing it could take weeks.”
“Did you at least manage to trace the telephone number Kessler called?” Randi asked him.
The tech shook his head. “Nope, I’m afraid not. Whoever set up the communications network he dialed into sure knows how to play the game. Every time we started getting close, the signal skipped over to a new number, automatically resetting our trace.”
Randi frowned. “Could you set up a system like that?”
“Me?” He nodded slowly. “Sure.” Then he shrugged. “But I’d need several weeks, a ton of money, and almost unlimited access to the proprietary switching software for several different telecom corporations.”
“Which means our Professor Renke has some other very influential friends watching his back,” Randi said slowly.
The second CIA technician glanced at Randi with a wry smile of her own. “I guess you knew what you were doing when you planted all those other bugs in Kessler’s study.”
Randi nodded easily. “Let’s just say I had a hunch that it would be useful to have a fallback when dealing with these people—whoever they are.”
“Well, the audio-pickups worked beautifully,” the second tech assured her. “I’ve got recordings of the whole call from Kessler’s end. And once I clean up some of the ambient noise and enhance the sound, we’ll be able to hear everything the other man said, too.”
“Can you isolate and play back the sounds you picked up when he punched in that first telephone number?” her male colleague asked.
“No sweat.”
“Outstanding.” He swiveled back to face Randi. “Then we’re in business. See, every time Kessler pushed one of the buttons on his phone it generated a unique tone. Once we put all those tones together in the right order, we’ll know that first number he called.”
Randi nodded her understanding.
“And that gives us a little piece of string that we can follow through the telecommunications maze these guys have created,” the tech went on seriously. “It’ll take some time, but by using that first number we can start tracking back through that maze, eventually tracing all the way to the real number hidden at its core.”
“Which must belong to a telephone line tied directly to Wulf Renke,” Randi said coolly. Her eyes hardened. “And then the professor and I will have a private little chat about these powerful backers of his, right before we toss him into a cell for the rest of his miserable life.”
“What about Kessler?” the second CIA technician asked.
Randi smiled thinly. “Herr Kessler can sit and stew a while longer. He’s already hit the panic button. Now we’ll wait and see just who shows up on the doorstep to collect him.”
Moscow
Impatiently, Erich Brandt prowled back and forth across his office. He was on a secure line to Berlin. “You have your orders, Lange,” he snapped. “Now carry them out.”
“With respect,” the other man said quietly, “my men and I did not come here to commit suicide.”
“Go on.”
“The Americans are surely watching Kessler’s house,” Lange explained. “And as soon as we make our move, they will close in on us.”
“You are convinced this is a CIA operation?” Brandt asked, forcing himself to restrain his anger.
“I am,” Lange said. “As soon as I received your alert, I began checking with some of our other sources inside the government here.”
“And?”
“There is a real Isabelle Stahn and she is a special prosecutor for the Ministry of Justice,” Lange said. “But Frau Stahn is currently on maternity leave and not expected back for duty until sometime next month. Nor is there any record of an internal investigation with Kessler as the focus.”
“So you think the Americans tricked him into pleading for our help,” Brandt said grimly.
“Yes,” Lange agreed. “And by now they will be trying to trace that call he made to Renke.”
Brandt stopped pacing. If the Americans found Renke, they would also discover the HYDRA facility. And if that happened, the length of Brandt’s own life would be measured in hours at best. “Will they succeed?”
“I do not know,” Lange said slowly. Brandt could almost hear the other man shrug. “But that is precisely the sort of technical intelligence task at which both the NSA and CIA excel.”
Brandt nodded reluctantly, knowing that his subordinate’s assessment was accurate. As a rule, Americans made pitiful field agents, but their skill with machines and electronics was almost unsurpassed. His gray eyes turned ice-cold. “Then you must destroy this CIA surveillance unit before it is too late.”
“We cannot destroy what we cannot find,” Lange told him bluntly. “The Americans could be working from a vehicle or building anywhere within a mile radius of Kessler’s villa. My team and I do not have the time to drive aimlessly all over Grunewald in the hopes of stumbling across them. To focus on a valid target, we must have more information on the CIA operations here in Berlin, and we must have it soon.”
Brandt nodded. Again, Lange was right. “Very well,” he said coldly. “I will contact Malkovic immediately. Our patron has a special contact in Cologne, a man who should prove most useful in this matter.”
Chapter Thirty
Huge housing projects lined Moscow’s Outer Ring Road, surrounding the city with row after row of drab gray blocks—soulless hives built by Communist bureaucrats as lodging for the faceless masses drawn to the Soviet capital in search of work. Nearly two decades after the death of the system that created them, these housing projects were still home to hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s poorest citizens.
Jon Smith and Fiona Devin made their way carefully up the interior stairwell of one of these apartment buildings. A few bare lightbulbs dangled from wiring, providing small, irregularly spaced patches of wavering light in the darkness. The concrete stairs were cracked and chipped and horribly stained. In several places along the staircase, whole sections of rusty iron railing had sheared away from their supports.
The air was thick with unpleasant smells—the eye-stinging odor of cheap disinfectant, the scent of boiled cabbage from apartment kitchens, and the odor of urine and dirty diapers from darker corners piled high with sacks of uncollected garbage. Over everything there hung the sour reek of far too many people forced to live cheek-by-jowl without enough hot water to stay truly clean.
The tiny two-room flat they were seeking was on the fourth floor, at the far end of the building, past row upon row of identically grimy and battered doors. Smith and Fiona were here to visit the parents of Mikhail Voronov, the seven-year-old boy who had first contracted the terrible disease they were tracking.
At first glance, Jon found it difficult to believe that the silent, withdrawn woman who opened the door at their knock could possibly be the boy’s real mother. She seemed far too old, more a grandmother than the comparatively young woman she must be. Her hair had gone gray. Her face, probably already thin, was now horribly gaunt and deeply lined. But then he saw her eyes, full of ever-renewed sorrow and left raw and red by constant weeping. They were the eyes of a woman, always poor, who had now been robbed of her one real treasure—her only child. Even two months later, she was still clad all in black, still in mourning.
“Yes?” she asked, plainly surprised to find two well-dressed foreigners standing on her doorstep. “How can I help you?”
“Please accept our deepest sympath
ies on your tragic loss, Mrs. Voronova. And please accept our most sincere apologies for intruding in this difficult time,” Smith said quietly. “If it were not absolutely necessary, we would not dream of bothering you this way.”
He showed her his forged UN identity card. “My name is Strand, Dr. Kalle Strand. I’m with the World Health Organization. And this is Ms. Lindkvist.” He indicated Fiona. “My assistant.”
“I do not understand,” the woman said, still puzzled. “Why are you here?”
“We’re investigating the illness that killed your son,” Fiona explained gently. “We’re trying to find out exactly what happened to Mikhail, so that others may someday be saved.”
Slowly, comprehension dawned on the woman’s grief-ravaged face. “Oh! Of course. Come in! Come in! Please, enter my home.” She stepped back from the door and motioned them inside.
It was a bright winter morning outside, but the outer room she showed them into was only dimly lit, illuminated by a single, overhead fixture. Thick drapes blocked the lone window. A single-burner electric stove and a washbasin occupied one corner of the tiny room, while a threadbare sofa, a pair of battered wooden chairs, and a low table took up most of the rest.
“Please, sit down,” the woman said, indicating the sofa. “I will bring my husband, Yuri.” She reddened. “He is trying to sleep. You must excuse him. He is not fully himself. Not since our son—”
Clearly unable to say anything more without weeping, she turned and bustled away through a door into the flat’s only other room.
Fiona silently nudged Smith, indicating the framed picture of a small, smiling boy propped up on the low table. It was wreathed in black ribbon. Two small candles flickered on either side of it.
He nodded tightly, regretting the need to deceive these poor, sad people in any way—even for a good cause. But it was necessary. From what Fred Klein had said last night, it was more urgent than ever that they obtain hard evidence about the origins of this cruel disease. One by one, the props were being knocked out from under the West’s intelligence services right at a time when their best work was most needed. And one by one, the new republics surrounding Russia were being fatally weakened by the loss of their most talented political and military leaders.
The dead boy’s mother came back into the room, now accompanied by her husband. Like his wife, Yuri Voronov was more a shambling grief-ridden shadow than a living being. His bloodshot eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and his hands trembled constantly. His clothes, smelling of stale sweat and alcohol, hung loose on a stooped frame that seemed to be visibly wasting away.
Seeing Smith and Fiona waiting for them, Voronov slowly straightened up. With an embarrassed smile, he smoothed down his sparse, spiky hair and made a painfully correct and polite effort to welcome these two foreigners to his home, offering them tea in lieu of anything stronger. While his wife began heating water in a kettle on their small stove, he sat down across from them.
“Tatyana has told me you are scientists,” Voronov said slowly. “With the United Nations? And that you are studying the illness that took our little boy?”
Smith nodded. “That’s right, sir. If possible, we would very much like to ask you and your wife questions about your son’s life and about his overall health. Your answers may help us learn how to fight this disease before it kills other children in other parts of the world.”
“Da,” the other man said simply. “We will do whatever we can.” He blinked back tears and then went on. “No one else should have to suffer as Mischka did.”
“Thank you,” Smith said quietly.
Then, while Fiona took detailed notes, Jon led the two Russians through a painstaking inquiry into their son’s past medical history and theirs, trying to find some angle that Petrenko, Vedenskaya, and the others might have missed. For their part, the boy’s parents answered patiently, even when most of Smith’s questions turned out to duplicate those they had already been asked a dozen times.
Yes, Mikhail had suffered the usual childhood ailments in Russia, measles, mumps, and occasional bouts of the common flu. For the most part, though, he had been a healthy, reasonably happy child. Neither of his parents had ever used illegal drugs, although his father shamefacedly admitted to drinking too much “now and then.” No, no one in the Voronov’s immediate or extended family had a history of serious chronic illness—no strange cancers or birth defects or other crippling disorders. One grandfather had died relatively young in a tractor accident on a collective farm. But the other grandparents had lived well into their late seventies before finally succumbing to a mixture of common, garden-variety ailments among the elderly—a heart attack, a stroke, and a case of severe pneumonia.
At length, Smith sat back feeling completely frustrated. So far, he could see nothing that might explain how or why Mikhail Voronov had contracted the previously unknown disease that had killed him. What linked this boy to the others who had also fallen ill in Moscow?
Jon frowned. He strongly suspected that the answer, if there was one, lay buried somewhere in their genetic makeup or in their biochemistry. Checking his theory meant obtaining DNA, blood, and tissue samples from the victims’ surviving relatives. It would require unfettered access to sophisticated science labs capable of running the necessary tests. Although Oleg Kirov was sure he could safely smuggle anything they collected back to the United States, doing so would take time. And conducting those tests would require even more time—time they might not be given.
Smith sighed. If you’ve only got one shot left, he told himself, you’d better take it while you can and hope for the best.
To his relief, both of Mikhail Voronov’s parents were eager to give him the blood and other samples he wanted. Somehow he had feared more resistance to the idea of being poked and prodded by needles.
“What else can these poor people do now that would give more meaning to their lives?” Fiona murmured softly, while she helped him sort out the test kits, syringes, Dacron-tipped swabs, and other pieces of medical equipment provided by one of Kirov’s contacts in the black market. She looked up at Smith with a serious expression. “You’re offering them another chance to fight back against the disease that murdered their child. Most parents I know would gladly walk through fire for that opportunity. Wouldn’t you?”
Smith nodded slowly. Humbled, he turned back to the Voronovs. “Let’s start by obtaining samples of your DNA.” He offered them each a long swab. “Now, what I’d like you to do—”
To his surprise, before he could give them any instructions, both Russians began using the swabs to scrape away at the insides of their mouths, collecting the soft tissue cells that were the most useful for DNA analysis. Jon stared at them in astonishment. “Have you done this before?” he asked quietly.
Both of them nodded.
“Oh, yes,” the boy’s father told him. He shrugged. “For the big study.”
“And so did little Mischka,” his wife recalled softly. Tears welled up in her eyes. “He was so proud that day.” She looked across at her husband. “Do you remember, Yuri? How proud he was?”
“I do.” Voronov wiped at his own eyes. “Our boy was a brave little man that day.”
“Pardon me?” Fiona said carefully. “But which study was this?”
“I will show you.” Voronov rose to his feet and went into the back bedroom.
For a moment, they heard him rummaging around among some papers, and then he returned, holding out a large, handsomely embossed certificate of appreciation. He offered it to Smith.
With Fiona reading over his shoulder, Jon scanned the ornate script. Essentially, the certificate thanked the Voronov family for their “vital participation in the Slavic Genesis study conducted by the European Center for Population Research.” It was dated the year before.
He exchanged a startled glance with Fiona. She nodded slowly in dawning comprehension. So someone had been collecting DNA from these people; and collecting it only months before the Voronov’s seven-year-o
ld son contracted a previously unknown disease—a fatal disease that destroyed systems and organs throughout the body.
For a moment longer, Smith sat still, staring down at the certificate in his hands. His eyes narrowed. Now, at last, he knew what they might be looking for.
Zurich Airport
Nikolai Nimerovsky paused briefly at the door to the Alpenblick Bar, looking for his contact. His gaze roved over the mostly solitary business travelers seated at different tables and stopped when he saw a pale, gray-haired man sitting with a copy of yesterday’s International Herald Tribune conspicuously open before him. He moved closer, noting the man’s black leather briefcase—virtually identical to the one in his own hands—and the small, double-helix lapel pin in his plain blue sport coat.
The Russian drew even nearer, conscious that his pulse was speeding up. Years of service as a clandestine agent for Ivanov’s Thirteenth Directorate had taught him caution. He stopped in front of the gray-haired man and motioned to the empty chair. “Do you mind?” he asked in American-accented English.
The other man looked up from his newspaper. His eyes were appraising. “Not at all,” he said slowly. “My flight is almost ready to leave. I’m only in transit.”
Sign, Nimerovsky thought, hearing the slight emphasis on the last word. He sat down and set his briefcase on the floor next to its counterpart. “So am I. My flight has only a short layover here in Zurich. The world grows ever more connected, does it not?”
Countersign.
The gray-haired man smiled slightly. “So it does, friend.” He folded his newspaper, stood, picked up one of the two briefcases, and then left with a polite, disinterested nod.
Nimerovsky waited a few moments more before retrieving the briefcase the other man had left behind from under the table. He opened it quickly. It contained a sheaf of papers, business magazines, and a small gray plastic box marked “SC-1.” Inside that heavily insulated box, the Russian knew, nestled a tiny glass tube. He closed the briefcase.