Smiling now, the Thirteenth Directorate agent climbed back into his rental car and drove away. His mission was complete. The HYDRA variant had been delivered.
Berlin
Curt Bennett swore suddenly and violently, He bent forward, peering even more closely at the computer screen in front of him, while his fingers raced across the keyboard sitting in his lap.
Randi looked up from her end of the long conference table. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. The CIA technical analyst was not ordinarily a profane man. “Trouble?’ she asked.
“Big trouble,” Bennett confirmed tightly. “The network we’ve been probing is going dead.”
Randi hurried to his side. “Dead in what way?”
“In every way,” Bennett told her. He nodded at the screen. Most of the cell phone numbers whose ownership he had been tracing were now showing up in red, indicating they no longer belonged to active accounts. While she watched, the others shifted to red, too.
“Professor Renke and his friends are pulling the plug,” Randi realized.
“Not only that,” Bennett said. He tapped a key, switching to a new screen. This one showed long columns of information—date and time stamps and locations—all broken down by separate telephone numbers. One by one they were disappearing, vanishing into the ether. “They’re also purging the database records of every call made or received by those numbers.”
Randi whistled softly. “I thought that was supposed to be basically impossible.”
The CIA analyst nodded. “Yeah, it is.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and frowned. “Unless, of course, you happen to have access to the proprietary software and top-level security codes used by all of the different telecom companies involved in completing those calls.”
“So who would have that kind of high-level access?”
Bennett shook his head. “Before now, I would have said nobody.” He watched the rest of the screen fade to black and then turned away in disgust. “Most of those companies are fierce competitors. They don’t share that kind of data.”
“A third party, then,” Randi suggested. “Someone from the outside who can hack in past their safeguards.”
“Maybe,” the analyst admitted. He looked troubled. “But anyone able to break into those phone company computer systems so quickly and easily could do just about anything else he wanted to them.”
“Such as?
“Loot their corporate bank accounts. Steal the private account information for tens of millions of customers. Crash whole switching subroutines so badly that it might take weeks before anyone in the affected areas could make a phone call.” The analyst shrugged. “You name it.”
Randi nodded slowly, thinking very fast. “And yet,” she pointed out, “even with all of that incredible power at their fingertips, the only thing that these guys seem to have done with it is piggyback their own secure communications network onto those systems.”
“No kidding,” Bennett said. He looked frustrated. “None of it makes any sense. Why go to so much trouble to protect just one man, even if he is a top-notch weapons scientist?”
“I’m beginning to think we’re looking at something bigger than that,” Randi told him grimly. “Much bigger.” She nodded toward the analyst’s computer. “How far did you get before Renke’s friends pulled their disappearing act?”
“Not far enough,” Bennett admitted. “I thought I was seeing some significant patterns in the data, but I can’t be sure of how close I was to the core.”
“Show me,” Randi ordered.
Quickly, the CIA specialist called up the results of his work, displaying them graphically on his screen as a series of separate circles—groups of apparently related phone numbers—with thicker or thinner lines showing the frequency of calls made between them. Each circle also carried a tag identifying the approximate geographic location assigned to each set of numbers.
Randi studied the layout carefully, seeing the patterns Bennett had uncovered. Most of the calls made using this secret network seemed to originate in either one of two places. Moscow was the first. She nodded to herself. No real surprise there, considering Wulf Renke’s past affiliations. But the second concentration seemed to make far less sense. It showed a flurry of phone calls made from and to Italy, especially to a group of numbers registered in a section of Umbria, north of Rome.
Umbria, she thought, bewildered. That was a region of ancient hill towns, olive groves, and vineyards. What could be so important to Renke or his backers in Umbria?
“Ms. Russell?”
Randi looked away from the screen. One of the junior-grade CIA officers attached to the Berlin Station stood there. Like her murdered lookout, he was another of the many highly intelligent, but woefully inexperienced rookies who had been rushed through training at Camp Peary after 9/11 as the Agency rushed to rebuild its human intelligence capabilities. She searched her tired mind for his name and found it. Flores. Jeff Flores. “What is it, Jeff?”
“You asked me to work on that scrap of paper you found on Lange,” the young man said quietly.
She nodded. Besides Lange’s passport, wallet, and phone, that torn and badly blackened bit of paper had been the only piece of hard evidence that she had rescued from the chaos inside Kessler’s villa. Unfortunately, that piece of paper had seemed completely worthless as a source of information. At first glance, it was much too scorched to be legible. “Were you able to make out anything?”
He looked worried. “It would be simpler to show you what I found.” The younger man glanced cautiously at Bennett. “In my office, I mean.”
Curbing her impatience, Randi followed him down the embassy’s third-floor corridor to a small windowless cubicle. Flores’s desk and a locked filing cabinet for classified disks and documents took up most of the floor space. She looked around with a dry smile. “Nice digs, Jeff. It’s always a delight to see patriotism and self-sacrifice rewarded.”
He grinned back, but his eyes were still troubled. “My instructors out at the Farm always told me that you got a choice after putting in your first twenty years in clandestine work: either the Medal of Freedom or a desk with a view.”
“Hate to break it to you the hard way,” Randi told him, “but they were pulling your leg. It takes at least thirty years of service to get a window.” She turned serious. “Now fill me in on this document that has you so spooked.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said. “I scanned that paper, or what was left of it, into our system here. Once it was in digital form, I was able to do a pretty decent job of washing off the burn marks electronically and then enhancing what was left. I’ve recovered about forty percent of the original text.”
“And?”
Flores entered his combination for his filing cabinet and pulled out a single sheet. “This is a printout of what I could read.”
Randi studied it in silence. It seemed to be part of a long list of license plates and various car and truck makes and models. Her eyes narrowed. Several of those plate numbers and descriptions sounded familiar. Then her eye dropped down the list to SILVER AUDI A4 SEDAN, BERLIN LICENSE: BAM 2506. She had walked by that car yesterday evening, sitting with a bullet hole in the rear window and the body of poor Carla Voss splayed across the steering wheel. She looked up suddenly in shock.
“They’re all ours,” Flores confirmed. “Every single one of those vehicles is either leased to or owned by the Agency and assigned to the Berlin Station.”
“Christ,” Randi murmured. “No wonder Renke’s hit team spotted us so easily.” Her jaw tightened as she tried to control her growing anger. “Who could put together a list like this?”
Flores swallowed hard. He looked as though he had a bad taste in his mouth. “It would have to be somebody here, someone in the Station itself, I mean. Or back at Langley. Or else with the Bf V.”
“The Bf V?”
“Germany is an allied host country,” the young man pointed out. “It’s policy to keep their counterintelligence folks poste
d on most of our activities.”
“Just peachy,” Randi said acidly. “Now, who else knows about this?”
“No one.”
Randi nodded. “Good. Let’s keep it that way.” She picked up the printout. “I’ll take this copy, Jeff. And I want the original, too. Make sure you wipe everything else you’ve done off your hard drive. If anyone else asks, you play dumb. Tell them you didn’t make any progress and then I pulled you off the assignment. Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Flores said somberly.
Randi stared down at the damning list in her hands. Another pattern, a very ugly pattern of betrayal and treachery, was becoming disturbingly clear. Someone with access to the results of her hunt for Wulf Renke was working for the enemy.
The White House
President Sam Castilla listened with increasing concern to Admiral Stevens Brose, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In preparation for tomorrow’s secret conference with America’s allies, he had asked the admiral to brief him on the latest warning signs that the U.S. military was beginning to detect in and around the Russian Federation. The president needed to be able to make the strongest possible case and nothing he heard was particularly helpful in that. But neither was it reassuring. Although no one inside the Pentagon was very happy with the overall quality of intelligence available to them, it was clear now that growing numbers of Russia’s best-equipped and trained army and aviation units had completely dropped off the Defense Department’s situation maps.
“Meaning what, exactly?” Castilla asked.
“Put bluntly, Mr. President, we don’t have the faintest idea of where these divisions and other combat units are right now, where they’re headed, or what they might be planning.”
“How many soldiers are we talking about here?”
“At least one hundred and fifty thousand troops, thousands of armored vehicles and self-propelled guns, and hundreds of front-line fighters and bombers,” Brose told him grimly.
“Enough to start one hell of a war,” the president said slowly.
“Maybe several wars,” Brose admitted. “At least given the relative combat power of the other countries around Russia. Of all the former Soviet republics, only the Ukrainians have a reasonably strong and well-equipped army and air force.”
“Or they would, if it weren’t for the fact that their best leaders have been hit by this damned disease,” Castilla realized.
Brose nodded his large head ponderously. “Yes, sir, that’s true. Right now, from what I’ve seen of the confusion they’re in, the Ukrainians would have a devil of a time putting up much of a fight. As for the rest?” He shrugged. “Even at the best of times, the Kazakhs, the Georgians, the Azerbaijanis, and the others can’t field anything more than lightly armed militias. If the Russians are planning to hit them, those militias won’t stand a chance against modern armor and crack assault troops.”
“The Russians thought that in Grozny, too,” Castilla pointed out, referring to the first major battle of the ongoing Chechen war. Overconfident Russian troops storming the city had been slaughtered by coordinated ambushes by Chechen guerrillas. Taking the city had finally required a massive campaign, one that had left tens of thousands of civilians dead and Grozny in ruins.
“Grozny was more than ten years ago,” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs said quietly. “The Russian Army and Air Force have learned a lot since then—both from their own experiences, and from watching our forces in action in Iraq. If they really are going to war to reclaim their old territories, they won’t make the same mistakes this time.”
“Damn.” Castilla looked straight across his big pine desk at Brose. “All right, Admiral,” he asked, “what’s your best estimate for when the balloon might go up—assuming that our worst fears are right?”
“All I have is a guess, Mr. President,” the other man warned him.
“In the absence of facts, I’ll settle for anything I can get,” Castilla said drily.
Brose nodded. “Yes, sir. I understand that.” His eyebrows knitted together as he concentrated. After a moment, he looked up somberly. “In my view, Mr. President, the Russians could be ready to strike any time within the next twenty-four to ninety-six hours.”
Castilla felt cold. Time was evidently running out faster than he had imagined.
One of the secure phones on his desk beeped. He snatched it up. “Yes?”
It was Fred Klein. “Colonel Smith and Ms. Devin are alive—and they’re in contact,” the head of Covert-One reported, quietly exultant. “What’s more, I believe they have uncovered a major piece of the puzzle.”
“But do they have the hard evidence we need?” the president asked carefully, aware of Admiral Brose sitting within earshot.
“Not yet, Sam,” Klein admitted. “But Jon and Ms. Devin are confident they know where to go to acquire that evidence. First, though, we’ve got to get them safely out of Russia.”
Castilla raised an eyebrow. The last he had heard, Klein’s agents were on the Kremlin’s Most-Wanted list. Security officers at every Russian airport, train station, harbor, and border crossing were already on the highest possible alert. “Good grief. That’s not going to be easy, is it?”
“No, sir,” Klein told him firmly. “It won’t.”
Near the Russo-Ukrainian Border
Snow was falling across the empty fields and wooded hills, swirling in drifts as gusts of wind blew harder from the east. There was no sight of the noon sun beneath the heavy mass of clouds covering the sky. Safe from any possible observation by American photo-reconnaissance satellites, long lines of T-90 and T-72 tanks, BMP-3 fighting vehicles, and heavy self-propelled guns crowded the narrow roads and logging tracks that wove south through the forests toward the frontier.
Hundreds of vehicles sat motionless, already thickly blanketed by the fast-falling snow. Thousands of men stood at attention in formation beside them, waiting for the signal to move.
Suddenly a white flare soared up from the south and burst beneath the overcast sky. Whistles blew shrilly up and down the waiting columns of men. Instantly, the rigid formations dissolved, with tank crews, infantry squads, and gun crews all swarming onto their vehicles.
Captain Andrei Yudenich pulled himself up onto the low, rounded turret of his T-90 tank and then dropped lightly into the open commander’s cupola. With an ease born of constant practice, he donned his headset and plugged it into the tank’s radio gear. Glancing down, he checked the settings, making sure his microphone was set on intercom. Like the other units assembled here, the 4th Guards Tank Division was still under strict orders to maintain radio silence.
For Yudenich and his men, the last twenty-four hours had passed in a blur, consumed by the frantic work—fueling up, stowing ammunition and food, and running last-minute maintenance on every major system—necessary to prepare their tanks and other vehicles for possible combat. No one yet knew quite why they were really here, but rumors of imminent war had swept through the huge camouflaged cantonments with increasing frequency and conviction. And the claims by some senior officers that this was all just an elaborate readiness exercise sounded increasingly hollow.
The captain looked up, seeing another flare arc through the sky. This one was red. He keyed his mike. “Stand by. Driver, engine start!”
Immediately, the T-90’s powerful diesel engine roared to life, echoed by all the others in the column. Clouds of thick black smoke drifted away across the white fields and dark woods.
And a third flare soared high, this one green.
Yudenich watched closely, waiting for the tanks ahead of his to start moving before ordering his own driver to advance. One by one, starting from the front, the massive armored vehicles clanked into motion, treads squealing and clattering as they headed south, rumbling toward new assembly areas that lay within closer striking range of the Ukrainian border.
The clock was running on a countdown toward war.
Chapter Forty-Four
Rome
/> Ciampino Airport lay on the outskirts of Rome, only fifteen kilometers from the center of the city. Plowed fields, parkland, suburban homes, low-rise apartment buildings, and light-industrial areas surrounded the small, single-runway airport. Eclipsed by its larger rival, Fiumicino, Ciampino was now used primarily by low-cost international charter flights and smaller private, government, and corporate aircraft.
Shortly after three in the afternoon, local time, a twin-engine corporate jet broke through the thin layer of overcast, flew parallel to the Via Appia Nuova in a gradual descent toward the airport, and then dropped lower. It touched down only meters after clearing the boundary marker, braked hard, and slowly taxied past the small terminal used by arriving and departing charter flights.
At the end of the runway, the jet swung left and pulled up on the section of concrete apron ordinarily used by cargo aircraft. Two Mercedes sedans were parked there, waiting.
Eight men, all dressed in winter clothing, emerged from the aircraft. Six of them formed a tight ring around the seventh, an older, white-haired man who was already striding purposefully toward the parked cars. The eighth man, much taller and with pale blond hair, moved forward to intercept the lone Italian customs official coming to greet them.
“Your papers, Signor?” the customs officer asked politely.
The blond-haired man reached inside his coat and took out his passport and other documents.
Smiling politely, the Italian scanned through them quickly. He raised an eyebrow. “Ah, I see that you are assigned to the ECPR. We see many of its staff here at Ciampino. Tell me, what is your work for the Center?”
Erich Brandt smiled mirthlessly. “Auditing and quality control.”
“And what of those other gentlemen?” the customs officer asked, nodding toward Konstantin Malkovic and his bodyguards as they climbed into the waiting sedans. “Do they also work for the Center?”
Brandt nodded. “They do.” He reached inside his heavy coat again, this time for a white letter-sized envelope. “Here are their required papers. I think you will find that everything is in order.”