The Italian pulled open the envelope just far enough to see the thick sheaf of high-denomination euro notes it contained. He smiled greedily. “Quite correct, as always.” Then he stuffed the envelope away inside his own coat. “Once again, it is a pleasure doing business with you, Signor Brandt. I look forward to your next visit.”
Within minutes, Brandt, Malkovic, and their six heavily armed bodyguards were speeding away along the Via Appia Nuova, beginning the next leg of their journey to Orvieto.
Sheremetevo-2 International Airport, Outside Moscow
Night had already descended on the birch and pine forests surrounding Sheremetevo-2. Lit by harsh white lights, the airport’s approach roads sliced through the darkness with rigid precision. Long lines of cars, trucks, and buses were backed up along those roads, waiting to pass through the special militia checkpoints set up outside the single passenger terminal, an ugly block of steel and concrete. Away from the terminal, armored scout cars manned by elite Ministry of the Interior commandos patrolled Sheremetevo’s perimeter fence.
The Kremlin’s orders were explicit. Under no circumstances were the two American fugitives to be allowed to escape from Russia. As part of the manhunt for them, security around the airport had been tightened to levels not seen since the height of the Cold War.
A TransAtlantic Express 747-400 cargo plane sat on the tarmac at the other end of the airport. Packages, boxes, cartons of overnight mail, and other pieces of heavy air freight were being taken off a number of different trucks, strapped onto standard-sized pallets, and then loaded into the 747’s main deck cargo holds.
Squads of gray-coated militiamen prowled through the loading area, keeping a wary eye on the activity going on around them. Their officers had firm instructions to arrest anyone attempting to stow away aboard any of the cargo aircraft that flew out of Sheremetevo-2.
Senior Lieutenant Anatoliy Sergunin stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the heavy pallets as large scissor-lift loaders picked them up off the concrete and slid them into the enormous TranEx aircraft. Waiting cargo handlers guided the pallets in through the 747’s hatches, rolled them into position, and then locked them down to the deck. For the first several hours of his shift, Sergunin had found the whole process fascinating. Now he was merely bored and cold and tired.
“Gate Security reports that another vehicle is on its way over, sir,” his sergeant reported, listening to the detachment’s radio.
Surprised, Sergunin checked his watch. This aircraft was scheduled to depart in less than an hour. By now, all of the freight assigned to the 747 should already have arrived. Sorting and securing the various sizes of packages onto pallets was a complicated and time-consuming process, one governed by the absolute need to safely balance the aircraft’s load. He turned around and looked away across the vast stretch of darkened tarmac. Sure enough, he could see a pair of bright headlights coming toward them at high speed.
He glanced at his sergeant. “What kind of cargo is this new vehicle carrying?”
“Two coffins, sir.”
“Coffins?” Sergunin repeated in amazement.
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said patiently. “It’s a hearse.”
A few minutes later, Sergunin stood off to the side of the hearse, which had come from a Moscow mortuary, observing the proceedings closely. The driver, wearing a white smock, wrestled each of the heavy metal caskets out of the back of his vehicle and onto a folding gurney. The coffins were sealed by tape as proof that they had already been x-rayed and cleared by Customs.
Sergunin’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. Customs officials could be bribed. And what better way to smuggle two fugitive spies out of Russia than in a pair of coffins? Especially aboard an aircraft that was bound first for Frankfurt, then Canada, and finally on to the United States? He laid his hand on the butt of the pistol holstered at his side. Huge rewards were promised to anyone who captured the two wanted Americans, and equally serious punishments were ordained for anyone who let them escape. Under the circumstances, even excessive caution was warranted.
The militia officer waited until the mortuary worker finished his awkward task. Then he approached the tall, silver-haired man. “You are in sole charge of this material?”
The big man, who stood mopping the sweat off his forehead with a red handkerchief, nodded. “That’s right, Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly. “Twenty years in the business, and never a single complaint from any of my passengers.”
“Spare me the jokes and show me the shipping warrants for these…corpses,” Sergunin snapped.
“Always happy to oblige the authorities,” the man said, shrugging. He handed over a clipboard. “As you see, everything is in order.”
Sergunin read through the documents with a skeptical eye. According to the paperwork, the caskets contained the bodies of a husband and wife—both quite old when they were killed in a car accident. Although the dead man and woman were Russian citizens, their children, émigrés now living in Toronto, were paying to have the bodies shipped to Canada for burial there.
The militia officer frowned. The story was feeble. He looked up at the silver-haired hearse driver and tossed the clipboard back. “I want those coffins opened for inspection,” he demanded.
“Opened?” the big man asked. He sounded surprised.
“You heard me,” Sergunin told him coldly. He drew his pistol and thumbed off the safety. With his free hand, he signaled his sergeant and a waiting squad to close in around the hearse. “Open them up,” he said. “And do it now.”
“Easy there, Lieutenant,” the man said quickly. “If you want to see inside, that’s fine with me.” He shrugged again. “But I should warn you, neither stiff is exactly a wholesome sight. They’re both a real mess, in fact. A bus hit the car they were driving head-on. There wasn’t much our cosmetics girls in the back room could do to pretty them up.”
Sergunin ignored him. He stepped forward and rapped one of the caskets with the muzzle of his service pistol. “This one first. And be quick!”
With a sigh, the hearse driver obeyed. First he cut through the customs tape with a pocketknife. Then, one by one, he flipped open the latches holding the lid shut. Before going any further, he looked over his shoulder at the militia officer. “You really sure you want to see this?”
Sergunin snorted, holding his pistol ready. “Get on with it.”
With one last expressive shrug, the other man lifted the casket lid.
For a moment, Sergunin stared down into the coffin. His face turned deathly pale. He was looking at a corpse so terribly mutilated and burned that it was impossible to tell whether or not it was that of a man or a woman. Empty eye sockets and teeth grinned back at him out of a skull only partly covered by scraps of blackened flesh. Withered hands, twisted into claws by intense heat, were raised above the shattered body in what appeared to be a last, grotesque appeal for help.
Retching, the militia officer swung away and was violently sick all over his boots and the tarmac. His sergeant and the others backed away in disgust.
The big man closed the lid of the coffin. “There was a fuel tank fire after the crash,” he murmured apologetically. “Maybe I should have mentioned that first.” He moved to the second coffin and took out his penknife.
“Stop,” Sergunin gasped, still mopping at his mouth with the back of his hand. Desperately, he waved the driver back from the unopened casket. “Hurry up and get those damned horrors aboard that plane. And then clear off!”
With an effort, the lieutenant straightened up and staggered away, looking for somewhere private to clean the humiliating mess off his boots. Equally repulsed, his sergeant and the other gray-coated militia busied themselves with inspecting the other pieces of air freight left in the area. So when the hearse drove away into the darkness ten minutes later, neither Sergunin nor his subordinates noticed that the man who was now behind the wheel was much shorter and had light brown hair.
One hour later, with the 747-400 flying
west at more than thirty-five thousand feet above the ink-black Russian countryside, Oleg Kirov tugged off the cargo netting surrounding the two coffins. He wore a TranEx flight crew uniform. With the netting out of the way, he knelt down beside one of the caskets and began quickly unfastening a series of screws set into the bottom. Once the last screw dropped out into his hand, he pried open the edge of a panel running the length of the coffin. It clattered onto the cargo pallet, revealing a hidden compartment roughly six feet long, two feet wide, and barely a foot high.
Slowly and painfully, Fiona Devin wriggled out through the narrow opening and slid to the deck of the aircraft. She wore an oxygen mask coupled to a small metal cylinder.
Gently, Kirov helped her sit up and take off the oxygen mask. “Are you all right?”
She nodded weakly. “I’ll live, Oleg.” She smiled faintly. “But if I wasn’t claustrophobic before, I certainly will be in the future.”
“You are a brave woman, Fiona,” Kirov said seriously. “You humble me.” He kissed her lightly on the forehead and then turned away to open the hidden compartment in the second coffin.
Jon Smith crawled out through the opening and fell onto the deck. His muscles, already bruised and battered by Brandt and his thugs, felt as though they were on fire. Wincing, he stripped off his oxygen mask and took a deep, shuddering breath. He saw Kirov and Fiona looking down at him with concern and forced a twisted grin onto his face. “Never again,” he said with heart-felt passion. “Never, ever again. The savings just aren’t worth it.”
They both looked blank. “Pardon, Colonel?” Fiona said, puzzled.
Smith pushed himself up into a sitting position. He motioned toward the cramped compartments concealed inside the coffins. “No more super-economy class for me. Next time I’ll pay full fare,” he explained.
Kirov chuckled. “I will be sure to pass your complaints on to the management, Jon.” He turned more serious. “Or you can do that yourself, as soon as you are ready.”
“Do we have secure contact with Covert-One?” Smith asked.
“We do,” Kirov replied. He nodded back up the darkened cargo deck toward the cockpit. “I’ve patched through the TranEx system, using one of our own scramblers. Mr. Klein is standing by.”
Ignoring his aches and pains, Smith levered himself upright. Fiona did the same. With Kirov coming behind to help steady them, the two Americans hobbled forward, feeling their knotted muscles gradually starting to loosen up. By the time they reached the cockpit, Jon was walking on his own.
The 747’s pilot and copilot sat in their seats, apparently intent on monitoring the aircraft’s controls. Neither seemed to take any notice of their unexpected “guests.”
“As far as they are concerned, we do not exist,” Kirov explained quietly. “It is safer for them that way.”
Smith nodded his understanding. Once again, Fred Klein had demonstrated a remarkable ability to pull strings from his position in the shadows. He took the headset offered by Kirov. “Smith here.”
“It’s very good to hear from you, Colonel,” Klein’s familiar voice said. Even at a distance of several thousand miles, his relief was audible. “I was beginning to get rather worried.”
“Me, too,” Jon admitted. “The thought of you having to handle all that extra, death-related paperwork brought tears to my eyes.”
“I’m touched,” Klein said drily. “Now, what can you tell me about this disease?”
“First, that it’s not a disease—not in the classic sense, anyway,” Smith said seriously. “My best guess is that we’re facing a very sophisticated biological weapon, a weapon set up to attack individual genetic sequences. Based on the symptoms, I’ll bet that Renke is engineering each variant to interfere with cell reproduction in some fashion.” He sighed. “I don’t know how the victims are infected, but it could be as simple as introducing it into their food or anything they drink. And once this weapon is inside the person who’s been targeted, I doubt that there’s any way to stop the process or to reverse it. Of course, in anyone but the intended victim, this material would be completely harmless.”
“Which is why those who get sick don’t seem to be infectious to anyone else around them,” Klein realized.
“Bingo,” Smith said. He frowned. “Basically, Renke has invented the perfect precision weapon.”
“Assuming you can gain access to your target’s DNA,” Klein commented.
“Yeah. And that’s where this Slavic Genesis study comes in,” Smith told him. “The researchers at the ECPR have been sampling DNA in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, and the other former Soviet republics for years. If we dig hard enough, I’m pretty sure that we’ll learn that most of those who’ve been killed were also participants in one or more ECPR projects.”
“What about those who weren’t part of these research studies?” Klein wondered. “How is this illness being tailored for use against so many of our intelligence analysts and military people? Or the Brits, the French, and the Germans, and others?”
Jon shrugged. “If it came down to that, Fred, I could isolate your DNA from your fingerprints on a dirty glass—or from hair clippings given to me by your barber. It’s not as easy or as cost-effective, but it can be done.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting that Renke or the Russians or Malkovic have been bribing every barber and bartender in Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin to collect samples for them, are you?” Klein asked wryly.
Smith shook his head. “No, sir. Not en masse.”
“Then how?”
Jon stiffened suddenly as a horrible possibility occurred to him. “Take a good hard look at anyone with unrestricted access to the OMEGA medical database,” he advised grimly.
There was a long silence on the other end as Klein considered his suggestion. OMEGA was a top-secret program designed to ensure the ability of the U.S. government to continue functioning in the event of a catastrophic terrorist attack on Washington and its suburbs. The OMEGA medical database was just one small part of that much larger program. To assist in identifying the dead from any large-scale attack, it contained tissue samples taken from tens of thousands of American government and military personnel.
“Good God,” the head of Covert-One said at last. “If you’re right, this country is in even graver danger than I had first supposed.” He sighed. “And it also seems that we’re running out of time faster than I had anticipated.”
“Meaning?” Smith asked.
“Meaning this is not just a biological weapons threat, Jon,” Klein said quietly. “Those rumors Kirov passed on from his FSB contact were solid. It now appears almost certain that Dudarev and his allies in the Kremlin are ready to launch a major military campaign, one designed to take advantage of the confusion caused by this new weapon.”
Smith listened closely while the other man brought him up-to-date on the most recent military and political developments along Russia’s frontiers. If anything, the Pentagon’s time estimate struck him as optimistic. Russian tanks and aircraft could begin rolling to the attack at any moment. His blood ran cold, thinking about the carnage that would be caused by a war of the scope Klein feared. “What countermeasures are we taking?”
“The president is scheduled to meet with representatives of our key allies in less than twenty-four hours,” Klein told him. “His goal is to persuade them that we must act to deter Russia before it is too late, before the first bombs fall.”
“Will they listen to him?”
The head of Covert-One sighed again. “I doubt it.”
“Why not?”
“We need evidence, Colonel,” Klein said flatly. “The problem is still the same as it was when I ordered you to Moscow. No matter how persuasive they may be, we need more than theories. Without better proof that the Russians are behind this disease, we cannot persuade our allies to act—or force the Kremlin to stand down by ourselves.”
“Listen, Fred, get us to Italy with the right equipment, and we’ll do our damnedest to find tha
t evidence,” Smith promised.
“I know you will, Jon,” Klein told him somberly. “The president and I are counting on the three of you.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Washington, D.C.
Nathaniel Frederick Klein looked up from his desk to the large monitor on the wall of his office. It was set to display a computer-driven map of Europe. A small icon blinked on the map, showing the position of the aircraft carrying his three agents. He followed its progress for a moment, watching as it slowly slanted southwest through Hungarian airspace, en route to the U.S. Air Force base at Aviano, in the northeast corner of Italy. Another aircraft icon indicated the heightened alert status of the U.S. fighter wing based there.
He touched a key on his computer and saw more aircraft icons appear on the map, some in Germany, others in the United Kingdom. Like the icon at Aviano, they depicted the tactical fighter, bomber, and refueling wings alerted by Sam Castilla for possible emergency deployment to Ukraine, Georgia, and the other threatened republics around Russia.
Klein took off his glasses and rubbed wearily at the bridge of his long nose. Right now, no American combat aircraft were going anywhere. The F-16s, F-15s, and refueling tankers were just sitting near runways or in their hardened shelters, waiting. Approached quietly through back channels, the NATO allies were expressing grave doubts about allowing the use of their airspace for any U.S. military deployment to the east. Ironically, the conference the president had summoned for tomorrow morning was now working against him because it gave the French and Germans and others an excuse to delay any decisions until after their representatives reported back. Perhaps even more important, none of the countries that were threatened by Russia were willing to invite U.S. forces into their territories.
Renke’s DNA-based weapons had done their work well, Klein decided sourly. Too many of the best and bravest political and military leaders in Ukraine and the other smaller states were dead. Those who were left alive were too frightened of angering Moscow. They were paralyzed, fearing the blow that might be about to fall—but unwilling or unable to take actions that might deter a Russian attack. If the United States could prove that what it said about Dudarev’s actions was true, they might find the courage to decide. Otherwise, they would not, preferring the uncertainty of inaction to the perils of action.