Smith headed in the opposite direction. While on the move, he flipped open the program and found a thick manila envelope clipped to one of the pages. Inside it, he found another American passport, this one made out in the name of John Martin. It bore a current German customs stamp and his picture. The envelope also contained a credit and debit card in the mythical John Martin’s name, a train ticket to Berlin, and a numbered tag from the left luggage kiosk at Dresden’s Neustadt station.
Jon grinned to himself, reassured all over again by this evidence of Fred Klein’s levelheaded thoroughness. He pocketed the various documents, discarded the opera program in a trash bin, and then strode briskly toward the gleaming lights of a nearby tram stop.
Half an hour later, Smith jumped lightly down from the rear door of a yellow electric tram. He was just across from the Neustadt Bahnhof. A pyramid of modern steel girders and glass rose high above the weathered, pollution-stained stone facade of the original railway station. He dodged a pair of taxicabs that were crawling along the snow-choked street looking for fares, and entered the almost-deserted station.
At the left luggage kiosk, a sour-faced night clerk took the tag from him, rummaged through the back room, and came grumbling back carrying a brand-new overnight bag and a laptop computer case. Jon signed for them and moved off to the side of the counter to inspect his new acquisitions. The overnight bag contained an assortment of clothing in his sizes, including a warmer black wool coat. Gratefully, he shrugged out of his battered windbreaker and donned the heavier coat. The computer case included both a rugged, high-speed laptop and a portable scanner.
Smith glanced up at the departure board. He had almost an hour before the next train to Berlin was scheduled to leave Dresden. His stomach growled, reminding him that it had been far too many hours since his last meal—a couple of pieces of dry toast and jam at the police station in Prague. He closed both cases, slung them over his shoulder, and walked through the station to a small café located near the platforms. A sign in German, French, and English invited patrons to make use of the restaurant’s wireless Internet connection while enjoying coffee, soup, and sandwiches.
He had just enough time to kill two birds with one stone, he thought gratefully. He seated himself at an empty table in the corner and ordered black coffee and a bowl of Kartoffelsuppe, creamy potato soup flavored with marjoram and slices of pork sausage.
Smith waited for the waitress to leave and then powered up the new laptop and scanner. While sipping his coffee, he pulled out the identity card he had retrieved from the corpse of the broken-nosed man in the Divoká Sárka and studied it closely. The name on the ID card meant nothing, he suspected. But in the right hands the photograph might yield useful information.
He flipped open his phone and hit the preset code for Covert-One’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
“Go ahead, Colonel,” Klein’s calm voice said.
“The RV went off without a hitch,” Smith reported. “I’m at the station waiting for my train now.”
“Good,” the head of Covert-One said quietly. “You’re booked into the Hotel Askanischer Hof, right on the Ku’damm. You should be able to rest up there inconspicuously for a day or so while we consider how to proceed.”
Smith nodded to himself. The Kurfürstendamm, once the heart of West Berlin, was still a bustling center of commerce and tourism. Even in the winter, it should be easy enough to blend in discreetly with the other travelers who would be thronging the district’s streets and restaurants. “What’s my cover as this John Martin character?” he asked.
“Ostensibly, you’re a pharmaceuticals salesman spending a few days in Berlin after attending a sales conference,” Klein told him. “Think you’ll have any problems fitting into that?”
“Nope,” Smith said confidently. “There’s just one more thing for now.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have an image to scan and send you,” Smith said. “A picture of the guy who murdered Valentin Petrenko and who tried to kill me twice. He’s dead now, but his photo might be worth running through various databases.”
“Quite probably, Colonel,” Klein said drily. “Very well. Send it along. We’ll be standing by.”
Near the Russo-Georgian Border
The isolated town of Alagir sits at the northern end of the Ardon Valley, deep in the rugged foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Roughly seventy kilometers to the south lies the snow-choked, nine-thousand-foot-high Roki Pass into the disputed Georgian territory of South Ossetia. The mountains themselves, jagged masses of stone, snow, and ice that gleamed palely beneath a rising moon, climb in a solid wall across the entire southern horizon.
Bright arc lights flared across the Alagir railroad yard, turning the black night into an eerie, sharp-edged mimicry of day. Sweating despite the freezing cold, Russian combat engineers clad in winter-pattern camouflage uniforms swarmed around the long freight train crowding the yard. They worked in teams, quickly unchaining the tarpaulin-shrouded shapes of T-72 tanks, self-propelled 122mm howitzers, and wheeled BTR-90 and tracked BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicles that were bolted onto flat cars behind the train’s three powerful locomotives.
Other troops worked fast to guide the newly unloaded armored vehicles onto ramps leading to a long row of enormous flatbed trucks. These were specialized tank transporters, which would ferry them farther up the cliff-lined valley. Vehicles fitted with snowplows and salt and sand dispensers waited at the head of the convoy, ready to lead the heavily laden trucks up the winding, ice-covered roads into the mountains.
Bundled in his own greatcoat, Colonel-General Vasily Sevalkin, commander of Russia’s Northern Caucasus Military District, stood near his staff car, watching the operation with undisguised satisfaction. He checked his watch and then raised a single gloved hand to signal one of his subordinates, an engineer officer.
The engineer major hurried over, snapped to attention, and saluted.
“Well?” Sevalkin asked.
“We will be finished here in less than an hour, sir,” the major reported crisply.
“Very good,” Sevalkin murmured, pleased to hear his own estimate confirmed. This new convoy of tanks, self-propelled guns, and infantry carriers would be long gone from Alagir before the next American satellite pass. And the freight train itself, now loaded with prefabricated decoy vehicles, would be plainly visible moving through the rail junction near Beslan—to all appearances only another routine shipment of military equipment to the Russian forces fighting Chechen rebels west of here.
The Russian general smiled thinly. Soon he would have the arms, ammunition, and men of two full-strength motor-rifle divisions, the 27th Guards and the 56th, securely hidden within striking range of the small Republic of Georgia. Although both divisions were largely equipped with older, second-line tanks and other military hardware, their weapons were far superior to anything that could be mustered by the rag-tag Georgian armed forces just across the border.
With a casual wave, Sevalkin dismissed the major back to his duties and climbed into his car. “Take me to the forward HQ at Vladikavkaz,” he told his driver. Then he sat back against the seat, pondering the likely events of the next several days and weeks. His orders from Moscow for this top-secret deployment claimed it was only a “special mobility and readiness exercise.” The general snorted softly. Only a fool would believe the Kremlin really intended so large a movement of troops and equipment—nearly forty thousand men and more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles—as a simple field maneuver. Certainly not in the middle of the notoriously harsh Caucasian mountain winter, with its howling winds, subzero temperatures, and blinding snowstorms.
No, Sevalkin thought, Dudarev and the others had to be planning something bold, some decisive action that would rock the world back on its heels in wonder. May it come soon, he decided grimly. For too long now, he and others like him had watched in depressed silence while Russia’s strength and influence faded, diminishing with every passing year. But soon th
at would all change. When the orders were at last issued to begin restoring his country to its rightful place on the world stage, he and the soldiers under his command would be ready to do their duty.
Chapter Nine
The White House
Sam Castilla sat at the big ranch-style table made of New Mexico pine that served as his desk, briskly working his way through more than a dozen, multi-page legislative and policy analysis papers marked Urgent. Even with a top-notch White House staff serving as a filter, the amount of paperwork that required his personal attention was staggering. He scrawled a few quick comments on one memo and then turned immediately to the next. His eyes, neck, and shoulders all ached.
One corner of his mouth twisted upward in a wry grin. It was the age-old problem of the presidency. Delegate too much power and responsibility and you wound up derided by the press as a “caretaker chief executive” or tangled up in some damned foolish scandal sparked by overeager subordinates. Try to exercise too much control and you found yourself drowning in a sea of meaningless memoranda better handled by a junior clerk—or wasting precious time setting the daily schedule of the White House tennis courts, like poor Jimmy Carter. The trick was to find the right balance. The dilemma was that the right balance was always shifting.
There was a soft rap on the open door of the Oval Office.
Castilla took off his titanium-frame reading glasses. He rubbed briefly at his tired eyes and then looked up. “Yes?”
His executive secretary stood in the doorway. “It’s nearly six o’clock, Mr. President. And Mr. Klein is here,” she said pointedly, not bothering to hide the look of disapproval on her waspish face. “I’ve put him in your private study, just as you asked.”
Castilla hid a smile. Ms. Pike, his long-suffering personal assistant, took her role as the dragon guarding his schedule seriously—very seriously. She made no secret of the fact that she thought he worked too long, exercised too little, and allowed his limited free time to be wasted by far too many political cronies presuming on old friendships. Like the rest of the White House staff, she was not privy to the Covert-One secret. That was his burden alone. And so, not knowing how else to classify Fred Klein, she lumped the pale, long-nosed spy chief in with the rest of the “good-time Charlie” time-wasters.
“Thank you, Estelle,” he said gravely.
“The First Lady is expecting you for dinner in the residence tonight,” she reminded him sharply. “Promptly at seven.”
Castilla nodded with a slow, easy grin. “Never fear. You can tell Cassie that I’ll be there come hell or high water.”
Estelle Pike sniffed. “I certainly hope so, sir.”
Castilla waited until she left. His smile faded. Then he rose quickly from behind his big desk and strode across the Oval Office to the adjoining study. It was filled with comfortable furniture and crowded bookcases. Like his den upstairs in the White House family quarters, this small room was one of the few that fully reflected his own tastes. A balding, medium-tall man in a rumpled blue suit stood next to the fireplace, admiring one of the several paintings of the Old West hanging on the study’s walls. He held a battered leather briefcase in one hand.
Hearing the door open, Nathaniel Frederick Klein turned away from his contemplation of a Remington original on loan from the National Gallery. It showed a small, ragged, and weary U.S. Cavalry patrol making a last stand around a dried-up desert waterhole, desperately firing their single-shot, black powder Springfield carbines from behind a rough barricade of their dead horses.
“Seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” Castilla said quietly. “Too many hostiles and not enough help.”
“Maybe so, Sam,” the head of Covert-One replied. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then again, nobody rational ever claimed that being the world’s only superpower was going to be easy. Or particularly popular.”
The president grimaced. “True enough. And it beats the alternative. I guess I’d rather we were the decent, but unloved, five-hundred-pound gorilla than the pitied and hapless ninety-eight-pound weakling.” He nodded his head toward a nearby black leather couch. “Go ahead and sit down, Fred. We’re facing one hell of a situation, and I need your input.”
Castilla waited while Klein sat and then lowered himself stiffly into an upholstered armchair on the other side of a low coffee table. “Have you seen the list of sick intelligence and policy analysts?” he asked.
Klein nodded grimly. Over the past two weeks, more than a dozen of the government’s top experts on Russian and former Soviet bloc military, political, and economic affairs had collapsed, falling deathly ill either at home or at work.
“Well, I’ve been getting updates all through the day,” the president said somberly. “Three of our people have already died. The rest are in intensive care and fading fast. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that nobody—not at the hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control, or USAMRIID—has been able to identify this disease they’ve got, much less how to treat it successfully. So far the doctors have been trying every combination of treatments they can think of—antibiotics, anti-viral agents, anti-toxins, and chemo-and radiation therapy—without any positive results. Whatever is killing our people is completely outside our medical experience.”
“Nasty,” Klein murmured. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were troubled. “But this isn’t the first time this mystery illness has popped up, Sam.”
Castilla raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Over the past forty-eight hours or so, we’ve picked up reports of several other people who died of a previously unknown disease, one with identical symptoms,” Klein told him quietly. “In Moscow. More than two months ago. No details leaked out to the West because the Kremlin clamped a tight security lid on any news of the outbreak.”
The president’s square jaw tightened. “Go on.”
“Two of my best Covert-One field operatives, Fiona Devin and Jon Smith, were separately approached by Russian doctors who had been involved in treating the victims. Unfortunately, both men were silenced before they could provide us with copies of the relevant medical records and other evidence. The first died on a Moscow street two nights ago, supposedly of a heart attack. The second was murdered in Prague yesterday.”
“By the Russians?”
Klein frowned. “Perhaps.” He snapped open his briefcase and handed Castilla a black-and-white print of the ID card photo transmitted earlier by Smith. It showed the image of a narrow-faced man with cold, dead eyes. “This fellow commanded the hit team in Prague. When I ran this picture through our computers, he turned up in half a dozen intelligence and law enforcement databases, usually with a ‘Most Wanted/Apprehend with Utmost Caution’ tag attached.”
The president read the name printed at the bottom of the photo. “Georg Dietrich Liss? A German?” he asked in surprise.
“An East German,” the head of Covert-One corrected. “When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, his father was a high-ranking officer in the communist government’s Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. The elder Liss is currently serving a long prison sentence for various crimes against the German people.”
Castilla nodded. He tapped the photo in his hand. “What about the son?”
“Also a member of the secret police,” Klein answered. “He served as a junior officer in the Stasi’s ‘Filiks Dzierzynski’ regiment, a sort of elite Praetorian Guard force for the East German government. And there are rumors that he was part of a ‘black ops’ death squad used by the regime to murder political dissidents and even foreign journalists whose reporting proved too embarrassing.”
“Charming,” the president said in disgust.
Klein nodded. “Liss was a very nasty piece of work. By all accounts, he was a cold-blooded sociopath of the first order. Berlin issued a warrant for his arrest not long after reunification, but he fled Germany before the local police could take him into custody.”
“So who’s been paying his keep for the past fifteen years?” Cas
tilla asked.
“Most recently, we think he was employed by an organization called the Brandt Group,” Klein said. “They’re a very shadowy, freelance intelligence and security outfit based in Moscow.”
“Moscow again.” The president tossed the photo down onto the coffee table. “And just who pulls the strings on this Brandt Group?”
“Our data is very sketchy,” Klein admitted. “We don’t know much about the organization or its real sources of funding, though they appear to have considerable resources. But there is a lot of back channel chatter claiming that Brandt Group agents sometimes work for the Russian government on a contract basis, conducting deniable surveillance and even assassination operations against Chechen exiles and other troublemakers living outside the Kremlin’s immediate reach.”
“Hell,” Castilla growled.
“And there’s more,” Klein said. He leaned forward in his chair. The expression on his face was grave. “I’ve been making discreet inquiries. What looks very much like this same illness is apparently affecting the top Russian specialists in every major Western intelligence agency—the UK’s MI6, Germany’s BND, the French DGSE, and others.”
“We’re being blinded,” Castilla realized suddenly. “This disease is being used as a weapon. By killing our best intelligence analysts, someone is hoping we’ll find it more and more difficult to understand exactly what’s happening inside Russia.”
“It’s possible, even probable,” Klein agreed. He opened his briefcase again and held a single sheet of paper filled with names and locations. “We also started scanning news services and medical databases around the world, looking for other reported cases showing similar symptoms. It’s taken some digging, but this is what we’ve found so far.”
The president took the new list and studied it in silence. He whistled softly. “The Ukraine. Georgia. Armenia. Azerbaijan. Kazakhstan. All former Soviet republics bordering Russia.”