Basically, the president knew, they were all tired of stumbling around in the dark. Right now all they had were tiny bits and pieces of data—the accelerating wave of mysterious deaths both here in the States and abroad, whispers of intensifying Russian military preparation, and the steady drumbeat of Russian propaganda decrying the “dangerous instability” in countries around its borders. Unfortunately, everyone lacked the broader evidence and analysis needed to tie those bits and pieces into a clear-cut pattern, into something that would convincingly reveal what Dudarev and his generals were really planning. Without that clear blueprint, no one in Europe or elsewhere would be willing to confront Moscow.
Castilla turned to William Wexler, his new national intelligence director. “Can we alter the orbit of our surviving Lacrosse satellite to obtain good coverage over these Russian frontier districts we’re most concerned about?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. President,” the trim, handsome former senator admitted reluctantly. “Lacrosse-Five was the newer of the two satellites. Lacrosse-Four has been up too long. It just doesn’t have enough maneuvering fuel left to reach the required orbit.”
“So how long will it take to launch a replacement for Lacrosse-Five?” Castilla asked.
“Too long, sir,” Emily Powell-Hill, his national security adviser, interjected flatly. “The CIA says six weeks, at a minimum. If I had to put serious money on it, though, I would bet that three to five months is probably a more realistic time-frame.”
“Good God,” the president muttered. By that time, the Russians could have marched the troops and tanks they were hunting for all the way to Siberia and back again. He looked across the table at Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What’s your evaluation of the destruction of our satellite, Admiral? Was it an accident—or a deliberate attack to blind us?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the wide, powerfully built Navy officer said carefully. “Space Command has only been able to conduct a preliminary analysis of the images our early-warning satellites picked up. However, General Collins and his staff report that the explosions they observed onboard the Russian COSMOS-8B vehicle were extremely powerful.”
“Powerful enough to knock out another satellite hundreds of kilometers away?”
“Frankly, I doubt it, Mr. President. Given their different orbits, the odds against so many fragments from COSMOS-8B hitting Lacrosse-Five seem, well, astronomical,” Brose said drily. Then he shrugged. “But I’m only guessing. As of this moment, we don’t have the data to prove anything one way or the other.”
Castilla nodded grimly, seething inside. Without proof that the Russians had acted intentionally, the United States had no practical recourse but to write off the suspicious loss of a multibillion-dollar spy satellite. His mouth tightened to a thin, angry line. “What about our KH-series photo-recon satellites?” he demanded.
“We’re already running significant numbers of orbital passes over the target areas,” Emily Powell-Hill replied. “But cloud cover is the big problem. The weather is incredibly bad over most of the Ukraine and the Caucasus right now. Even with our thermal sensors, we’re not able to pick up much detail through the heavy cloud masses blanketing those regions.”
Left unsaid in all of this, Castilla realized gloomily, was the fact that even the best satellite photographs required skilled interpretation and analysis to reveal usable data, and too many of the best U.S. photo interpreters were fatally ill or already dead.
Charles Ouray, the White House chief of staff, spoke up from his end of the table. “Then why not take a stab at aerial reconnaissance? We have radar-equipped aircraft. Can’t we fly them near the Russian border?”
“Physically, yes,” Secretary of State Padgett said abruptly. “Diplomatically, no. With so many of their key political and military leaders dead or dying, the governments of the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the other former Soviet republics are increasingly fragile. In the present circumstances, none of them will risk provoking the Kremlin by allowing us to use their airspace for reconnaissance flights. So far, every request we’ve made, through every channel, has been rebuffed.”
Again Castilla nodded. The nightmare scenario he and Fred Klein had been worrying about over the last few days seemed to be moving closer to reality. If the Russians were behind this new disease, as seemed increasingly likely, they were using it very effectively to sow confusion and chaos. The big question was: How far was Dudarev willing to push his present advantage? Would he be content to weaken the fledgling democracies around Russia? Or did he have something far more ambitious in mind?
The door to the Situation Room opened and an aide, a young, serious woman wearing horn-rimmed glasses, hurried in, moving quickly to where William Wexler sat making notes. She leaned over and whispered something in the intelligence director’s ear. His tanned face turned pale.
“Is there something I should know about, Bill?” Castilla asked sharply.
Wexler cleared his throat, looking uncomfortable. “Quite possibly, Mr. President,” he admitted. “I’m afraid that the CIA has just lost one of its clandestine action teams, a group of field officers operating in Berlin. The first reports are very sketchy, but it appears that gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosives ambushed our people on a public street. The head of the CIA’s Berlin Station is on his way there right now, but things look very bad. Very bad, indeed. There don’t appear to be any survivors.”
“Jesus,” Charles Ouray whispered.
“Amen, Charlie,” Castilla said softly. His shoulders bowed slightly, momentarily feeling the weight of more deaths, of more gold stars for the marble memorial wall at CIA headquarters. Then he frowned. First the Lacrosse satellite and now this vicious massacre of American intelligence officers. Were they connected in some way? He turned back to Wexler. “What was this clandestine action team’s mission?”
The national intelligence director looked baffled. “Their mission, Mr. President?” he repeated uncertainly. He shuffled through the papers in front of him, clearly trying to buy time.
An awkward silence followed. No one else sitting around the Situation Room conference table had much respect for the former senator. At best, they considered him a nonentity. At worst, they viewed him as a liability, as one more bureaucratic obstacle for the already-fettered U.S. intelligence community to overcome.
“I’m not sure I have the details of their assignment,” Wexler admitted at last, reddening in embarrassment. He turned to his aide, the woman who had first brought him the news. “Did Langley ever relay any of that information to us, Caroline?”
“They were tracking a former East German biological weapons scientist, sir,” she said quietly. “A man named Wulf Renke.”
Castilla sat back in his chair, feeling as though he had been pole-axed. Renke! Good God, he thought in astonishment. Renke was the renegade son of a bitch that Fred Klein’s Moscow-based Covert-One unit suspected of having created the strange illness they were investigating.
Quickly, the president excused himself, put his chief of staff in charge of the meeting, and left the Situation Room. As the door closed behind him, he heard more wrangling break out. He frowned deeply, but kept walking. Taken as a whole, his national security team was remarkably competent, but their tempers and patience were definitely beginning to fray as they faced the nightmare of being forced to act blindly, without adequate intelligence. And right now, he simply could not afford to spend any more time riding herd on them.
Upstairs in the Oval Office, Castilla picked up one of the phones on his desk and punched in a special number known only to himself.
“Klein, here,” the head of Covert-One said somberly, answering the call on the first ring.
“Have you heard the news from Berlin?”
“I have,” Klein replied grimly. “I’m scanning the first CIA and local police reports right now.”
“And?”
“The link with Wulf Renke is highly significant,” Klein agre
ed slowly. “As is the extremely violent reaction to the CIA probe.”
“Meaning the Russians are afraid of what we may learn about him?” Castilla asked.
“Or from him,” Klein pointed out. “If Renke was working safely under lock and key in one of their own Bioaparat facilities, they would have far less reason to fear our learning that he is still alive and on the loose.”
“You think he’s running his own operation at a laboratory outside Russia?”
“Let’s say that I consider it a very strong possibility,” Klein replied. “I’ve been studying Renke’s file. He strikes me as a man who would never willingly put himself in a position where others held too much power over him. If he is creating a weapon for the Russians, I believe that he will be working for them at a safe distance.”
“Have you passed this theory of yours on to Colonel Smith?” Castilla asked.
“No, sir,” Klein said quietly. “I’m sorry to say that I have very bad news of my own to report. Sometime over the past hour, we’ve completely lost contact with our team in Moscow. For all intents and purposes, Jon Smith, Ms. Devin, and Oleg Kirov all seem to have dropped off the face of the earth.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Berlin
The street in front of Ulrich Kessler’s villa was deserted. Set at regular intervals, wrought-iron lamps cast pools of soft light across the snow-covered sidewalks and illuminated a handful of silent cars parked along the empty street. Off in the darkness on either side of Hagenstrasse, more lights glowed among the pine, oak, and birch trees, marking the location of other houses that were set well back from the road.
About one hundred meters down the street from the driveway to Kessler’s home, CIA officer Randi Russell stood motionless in a patch of deep shadow between two large oak trees. She breathed out slowly and gently, letting her pounding heart settle down after her long, painful sprint through the Grunewald forest. Her pupils were adjusting to the dim light, expanding as she carefully scanned her surroundings, looking for any signs of watchers posted to observe the immediate area. Nothing moved. Nothing stirred. There were no suspicious silhouettes or shapes lurking between the parked cars or among the trees and shrubs bordering the quiet street.
Good enough, she thought coldly. Sometimes even the bad guys made mistakes.
Randi slid the Beretta back inside her concealed shoulder holster. This time, she left her ski jacket almost completely unzipped. Then she stepped out of the shadows and strolled up the sidewalk, walking fast and making no effort to hide her movements. With a bit of luck, anyone spotting her would think she was just another local coming home after work, some light shopping, or a late afternoon walk.
Not far up the street, she passed a silver-colored Audi. It was parked beside the pavement in a spot that offered a good view of the entrance to Kessler’s property. From a distance, the car appeared undamaged. It was only when Randi got close that she spotted the small, neat hole blown through the rear window. As she walked past, she used her peripheral vision to check out the interior. Inside the Audi, a brown-haired young woman sat folded over the steering wheel, not moving. Dark smears of dried blood streaked the dashboard and the inside of the windshield.
Randi carefully averted her eyes, pushing away her feelings of sorrow and regret. The dead woman was her lookout, a bright, perky, just-graduated CIA trainee whose name was Carla Voss. From the look of things, the young woman must have died without ever spotting her killer.
The back of Randi’s neck tingled, anticipating the impact of a bullet. The muscles around her right eye twitched slightly. Stay cool, she told herself sharply, and forced herself to keep strolling as though she had seen nothing strange at all. If any of the men who had murdered the rest of her team were watching right now, reacting suspiciously would be a dead giveaway. With the emphasis on dead, she thought grimly.
Forty meters from Kessler’s driveway, she turned aside while reaching into the pocket of her jeans as though looking for her keys. Then she pushed open a small gate set in the high stone wall and entered the spacious front garden of the neighboring villa. Wide gravel paths meandered between barren flowerbeds now mounded with snow. Up at the house, a light shone over the door, but the rest of the building—built to look like a Renaissance Italian palazzo—was dark. She was in luck. The owners were not yet home.
Now that she was out of sight, it was time to move faster. Randi sprinted across the garden, staying off the gravel paths to avoid making too much noise. She ran straight for the length of wall that marked the edge of Kessler’s property. Barely slowing down, she leaped up, caught the edge of the stone wall with her gloved hands, and then swung herself up onto the top. For a moment, Randi lay still, pressed flat against the rough surface of the mortared stones. She was conscious of her pulse pounding in her ears, but ignored it, focusing instead on any faint sounds that might be rising from the grounds next door.
At first she heard nothing, just the wind keening through the tree branches overhead. But then she began to pick up different sounds, first the soft crunch of someone prowling back and forth on gravel and concrete, and next the muffled, static-laden squawk of a brief radio transmission. Her best guess was that these noises were coming from roughly twenty to thirty meters away.
Slowly, Randi swung down off the wall on the other side. She dropped lightly to the ground, spun around to face the direction from which she had heard the sounds, and crouched low, drawing her pistol in the same motion with a quick, fluid, and lethal grace.
Her eyes narrowed. She was in good cover among the tall trees and flowering bushes planted around Kessler’s Edwardian-style home. Although lights glowed behind several of the villa’s second-floor windows, casting elongated rectangles of faint illumination across the open lawns near the house, this narrow fringe of woods was wrapped in almost total darkness. Staying low, she slid cautiously to the right, edging around broad tree trunks and snow-crusted shrubs, carefully watching where she put her feet to avoid snapping any fallen branches and twigs.
Suddenly Randi froze and crouched even lower, trusting to the shadows to stay hidden. Not far ahead, no more than a few meters away, she had seen something moving, a brief glimpse of a figure outlined by the light from Kessler’s house.
She peered intently through the tangle of underbrush and the maze of low-hanging branches. She was looking at a man, a short, heavyset man in a suit and a thick wool overcoat. He was pacing slowly up and down along the driveway. In one big, beefy hand, he held a small tactical radio. In the other, he gripped a pistol fitted with a silencer. He looked nervous. Despite the cold, his forehead glistened with sweat.
Randi looked past him. There were two cars parked in the space between the villa and the garage. One was a dark red Mercedes sedan. The other was the black BMW she had shot up during the brief, brutal action along Clayallee. Another man in black clothes and body armor sat slumped against the side of the BMW. Blood-soaked bandages were wrapped tightly around his extended right leg. He was either unconscious or dead.
She nodded, knowing now that she had guessed right. Renke’s assassins must have driven straight here after wiping out her surveillance team. The other black-clad gunmen must still be inside dealing with Ulrich Kessler.
The heavyset man they had left outside on guard turned again on his heel and paced back toward the two cars. He checked his watch, swore worriedly, and then lifted the radio to his mouth. “Lange, this is Mueller,” he said tensely. “How much longer?”
A harsh voice crackled over the radio. “Five minutes. Now sit tight and stay off the air. Lange out.”
Listening, Randi made up her mind. She was going to have to go in after these bastards. There was no time to call for a new backup team. And waiting here to ambush Renke’s men when they came out of the house was a non-starter. If she was lucky, she might be able to drop one or two of them before they nailed her, but those silenced submachine guns they carried gave them too much firepower to face in a stand-up fight out here in the o
pen. Inside, in a close-quarters battle, she would actually have slightly better odds of surviving.
A quick, self-conscious grin flashed across her lean, taut face. “Better” in this case was probably only the difference between “no chance at all” and “one chance in a thousand.” Then her grin faded. Any chance at all was still more than the other members of her team had gotten.
Intently, Randi studied the short, paunchy man called Mueller as he nervously paced up and down. Should she try to take him prisoner? No, she decided coldly. That would be far too risky. If he managed to shout or radio a warning to his heavily armed comrades inside Kessler’s house, she was as good as dead.
Still watching Mueller parade back and forth in increasing agitation, she put one hand in her coat pocket and pulled out a noise suppressor of her own. It screwed tightly over the muzzle of her Beretta.
Ready now, she took careful aim, sighting coolly down the barrel. Phut. Phut. Her pistol coughed twice. The metallic noise of the bolt crashing back as the weapon fired seemed to hang forever in the hushed evening air. In reality, she knew, both sets of sounds would be almost inaudible to anyone more than ten meters away.
One round hit Mueller in the chest. The second tore open his throat. The heavyset man went down in a heap and lay twitching and gurgling, bleeding his life away across the cold concrete. He was dead in seconds.
Randi swiveled rapidly, swinging the Beretta to cover the man she had wounded earlier. Her finger tightened on the trigger, ready to fire, and then gradually eased off. He had not moved. Hurrying now and staying low, she raced out from under the trees and across the open driveway, careful to keep the cars between her and the house. She reached the BMW and dropped to one knee beside the silent, motionless man. He sat as before, propped up against the side of the black car, with his shattered leg stretched out in front of him.