“Spy shit. There’s a secret here these jokers need to keep quiet. I haven’t figured it yet, but I’m working real hard on it.”
“We’re the good guys, we’re the last great hope, but if you publish, Ms. Reilly, you do a lot of harm. A lot of harm. We’re very uncomfortable with that.”
“See, in the old days, they just said, ‘We’ll kill you,’ ” said Swagger. “Now they say, ‘We’re uncomfortable with that.’ ”
“There’s no need to talk of killing,” said Renn. “Look, I’m not just asking for favors, I understand the quid pro quo that underlies every political transaction. I’m authorized to tell you that if you cooperate with us on this, all sorts of good stuff can happen. We can make selected deliveries of very hot intel for Reilly. When you get back to D.C., you can have the phone numbers of some very important folks who, at our request, will always call you back. Not saying you’re a failure now, no, not at all, but we can move you into the big leagues. You’d be stunned how many of D.C.’s leading journalists have been helped along by us.”
“What’re you going to get me,” said Swagger, “a new rocker?”
“Any one you want, even the deluxe version. But how about if we get your pal Nick Memphis off the Bureau shit list and back on the A team? Deputy director? That’s what he wants, right? What about if some real nice scoops fall Nikki’s way at FOX 5? That can happen. Does Miko want to go to Harvard, then Harvard Law? We hear she’s smart enough, but it isn’t just about being smart. We can make it happen. Yale, Princeton, Virginia. Where does she want to go? Be a shame for her to have to end up as a Boise State commuter student. What I’m saying is, if you’re good to us, we’ll be good to you. That’s all. If you say yes, you can drive out of here—that is, when I give you your distributor cap back. You go on back to your lives, and the good stuff starts happening. No monitoring, no observing, nothing like that. The whole thing runs on the honor system, because we know you’re honorable.”
“What if we say no?” said Reilly.
“Ouch,” said Renn. “I’d hoped that wouldn’t come up. You asked, so I guess I’ll answer. I’ve got five guys. Heavy-metal guys from some Moscow gangs. Dumber than stumps but packing a ton of heat. Boy, they love that 74, don’t they? To me it doesn’t hold a candle to the AR, but don’t tell them that. Anyhow, Jesus, don’t make me do this. It would be so tragic. These boys, you know, they like this shit. I’d have to let them loose. I have a secret to protect. It has to be protected. Here you are, standing on a pedestrian bridge in a Carpathian tourist trap, unarmed, and suddenly you’ve got six real bad operators on your case. I guess by the time I got them back here, you’d have at least an hour head start. I suppose you’d try and hide in the mountains, but an old guy with a stainless-steel ball where his hip used to be and a grandmother, over rough country, in what is basically complete wilderness, I don’t like your chances. Plus, we have a dog. I’d hate to see it happen. Guys, it’s up to you.”
Swagger looked at Reilly, who nodded.
“Tell him good,” said Reilly. “So he understands.”
That was it. He turned back to the younger man.
“We ain’t here for God, country, and baseball, and excuse me, I don’t think you are neither. We’re here for Mili Petrova, who was betrayed by everyone and everything. Nobody stood for Mili. She was all alone. Still she found a way to get her job done. But then the big boys got to her and crushed her and her memory. Now, seventy years later, you fucking birds come along, and you’re the same action. Crush Mili. Destroy Mili. She’s so goddamned inconvenient. Mili’s nothing. Mili’s disposable. Nobody cares, nobody knows, nobody gives a damn. Not this time. This time she’s got some pals. That’s us, the old man and the old lady. So if you want to go all black ops on us, we’ll go black ops. You better be good, sonny, because I may be old, but I’m still who I always was. I’m the sniper.”
CHAPTER 38
The Cave
The Carpathians
JULY 1944
A bird tweeted from the trees nearby, except it wasn’t a bird at all, and with a crash and a stumble, a large body broke free in the clearing. It was the Peasant.
“Sergeant Mili,” he called in Ukrainian, “I have returned.”
Mili felt a surge of pure bliss. He wasn’t dead at all. Nobody could kill him. He smiled as he shambled closer. From inside the cave, she heard the Teacher stir, as the mild clamor had awakened him. The Teacher came out.
“He says the Germans are gone,” he translated.
“The Germans are gone?”
The Peasant began unpacking his sack, explaining in Ukrainian what he’d brought, though Mili could see for herself: bread, salted beef, vegetables.
Then he said something about the Germans—Mili understood the word—and the Teacher grabbed him, yelling in Russian, “How do you know the Germans have left?”
The Teacher translated the Peasant’s story: “I have been lying in brush for days. It was horrible. I made it to the outskirts of the village and took my chances with a man, and he’d lost sons to the Nazis. He volunteered to help. But he was bringing me food, and they nabbed him not a hundred meters from where I hid. They beat him and dragged him off, but I was too close to move. I had to wait that long day for them to come for me. They never did. I don’t know why.”
He went on with his story. He had lain there all night, and the next morning the Germans had sent out more patrols but also started their burning operation. They burned for days, and the Peasant watched as the flames came nearer and nearer to his hiding place. He had no idea why this burning was happening, though he knew that at nightfall he’d have to make a run for it. But at midafternoon yesterday, the German officer was called to his communications hut, and several minutes later the Germans commenced an emergency evacuation. They’d waited until two panzerwagens were loaded with troops, which headed out immediately. The stragglers all arrived, and the third panzerwagen left.
“Yes, we noted the same thing. I was almost discovered when the signal to withdraw came. I don’t know what it means,” said Mili. “Were you able to get a weapon, any weapon?”
“This, only this. No rifles about, but I’m told this fell off a German truck two years ago, early in the war, and an old lady recovered it.” He pulled his treasure from his bag.
It was an M24 hand grenade, the famous potato masher, a gray metal can affixed to a wooden shaft with a screwcap at the end, which, removed, allowed access to the twine pull-fuse inside.
“It’s no sniper rifle,” she said. “But it’s a weapon.”
The Teacher said, “Sergeant Petrova, it’s not enough. It’s just—”
“Here’s the plan,” she said. “You have a pistol. It’s small but lethal at close range. With that I’ll get close enough.”
“You have to be very close.”
“I will shoot him or one of their officers. I will shoot Germans until I run out of ammunition, then I will pull the cord on the grenade and join Dimitri and my father and brothers.”
“It seems folly to me,” said the Teacher. “You will not kill Groedl. At best, you kill a few Germans. In a war where millions have died, what’s a few more or less Germans in exchange for someone like you, with all you have to contribute?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
If she waited until the Russian offensive and turned herself in to the army, her failure at her mission might doom her. Her failure at Kursk might catch up with her. Her traitor-antagonist in Moscow might destroy her. There was no going back.
“I have to finish my job,” she said. “Survival is not the concern here.”
“All right, then,” he said, sighing. “Try this for a plan. You kill Groedl. We all escape. We are all glorious heroes. We meet every year on your dacha outside Moscow and eat caviar and drink very fine champagne and laugh ourselves sick because life with a full belly is the best revenge.”
“That’s a fairy tale,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” said the Teacher. ?
??It can happen. It’s only a matter of guns.”
They looked at him.
“I know where there are guns,” said the Teacher. “Lots of them.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv IV
The four P.M. Mossad meeting on EconIntel was before the director himself, as well as the section chief and several other department heads. It was organizational theater, full of balding late-middle-aged men in open collars, smoking like fiends, arguing and sniping at each other with the brio that office warfare brings out.
Finally it was Gershon’s turn.
“Brother Gold, you’ve been so quiet. You didn’t even try to devastate Cohen’s suggestion that the Japanese Red army has booked a week at a Sea of Galilee spa.”
“I’ve been to that spa,” said Gershon. “Believe me, an attack by the Japanese Red army would improve the food.”
Cohen was quick on the defense: “How would Gershon know? Linda would never let him go to the buffet. It’s nothing but yogurt and raisins for Gershon.”
“People, people,” said the director, to quell the laughter and keep Gershon and Cohen from chewing each other alive with zingers for the next twenty minutes.
“All right,” said Gershon. “I do have a situation. Not a crisis, not an emergency, not a catastrophe, but a situation.”
“Enlighten us while I eat my knishes,” said Cohen.
“Item one: an unheard-of firm buys a great deal of platinum in South Africa, surreptitiously flies it to Astrakhan on the Caspian. Item two: it turns out that this same firm, called Nordyne GmbH, out of Lausanne, Switzerland, has also quite recently acquired a defunct ceramics factory in Astrakhan, spent several million refurbishing the place, spent several hundred thousand fencing it, and has hired a Chechen security team for twenty-four-hour surveillance and protection. Bad boys, shooters, heavily armed. Ready to repel commandos.”
“Why would commandos be interested in ceramics in Astrakhan?” asked Cohen.
“Why would Jews be interested in ceramics in Astrakhan?” asked the assistant director.
“Because,” said Gershon, “that same firm has just spent yet more money, all of it, by the way, nearly untraceable so far, acquiring the following equipment from various surplus industrial manufacturing suppliers. From the Poles, a fractional distillater; from the Turks—the Turks!—a crystallization reactor; from the British, a filtration system; from the Swedes, a ten-thousand-cubic centimeter drying tunnel; and from the Germans, metal bending equipment. As well as belts, electric motors, bins, the bric-a-brac of manufacture. However, a quick check of local job-shop printing manifests turns up no links to Nordyne Ceramics, meaning no quote sheets, no catalog, no printed packaging, no advertising, and by inference, no sales force.”
“A world without salesmen,” said Cohen. “Perhaps they should get the Nobel Peace Prize!”
Laughter, and Gershon almost responded with “A salesman named Herzl put us here,” but he knew that would set off a crazed war of quips and cracks and instead took a breath.
“Another development,” said Gershon. “It seems whoever is running this plant hasn’t hired Russians but has brought in a Chechen workforce, about twenty women, related to the same bunch that handles the security. I learn this from the indefatigable Precious Metals Industry Reporter, which is worth every penny of the $4,775 yearly subscription fee I don’t pay. Consider: the Chechen women will be isolated, keep to themselves, may even live on-site, under the watch of the gunmen-boyfriends. They won’t be circulating in Astrakhan proper, and they won’t be part of familial and clan networks, so the yakkity-yak factor is eliminated. More security, cleverly thought out, but not so high-profile as to capture attention.”
“What does platinum have to do with all this?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” said Gershon.
“There’s not enough data to blow it up,” said the director, again to laughter. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Platinum, I do know, is remarkable for its catalytic abilities,” said Gershon. “I have to call a chemist for more details, but it has an odd capacity, with its very presence, to change something into something else. By magic rays or something, I wish I knew. Are there any geniuses here?”
“I flunked high school chemistry in Passaic,” said Cohen. “Does that help?”
“Gershon,” said the director, “take a day off tomorrow and come back the next day with all the possibilities of platinum as a catalyst. You need to get out more, anyway.”
“I will, I will. I merely call your attention to the fact that a chemical manufacturing concern of unknown sponsorship and product involving a great deal of tradecraft and security expertise has been set up not far, by sea, from the Iranian port of Bandar-e Anzali. I consider that suspicious. Whatever product they are manufacturing could be of some threat to the state of Israel, and once in Iran, by either official or unofficial action, it could be deployed against us by any number of means. Moreover, as we know, our intelligence assets in that country are focused on Tehran, their nuclear facility, and certain military installations. As for the huge land of the interior, we have no feet on the ground, and if anyone in that vast region wants to cook up a nasty surprise, we might be the worse for it. As I say, a situation, not an emergency. But I would like to have a satellite flyby authorized for a closer look at this plant; I would like to assign consular personnel in Switzerland to investigate Nordyne GmbH; I would like to suggest that intelligence concerning Nordyne GmbH be sought in our barter sessions with cooperating agencies; and I would like to suggest that we all brush up on our high school chemistry, especially Cohen.”
CHAPTER 39
The Carpathians
Above Yaremche
THE PRESENT
Though it wasn’t easy going, at a certain point they found a hiker’s channel, not quite a path but a kind of groove in the forest where others had traveled below, and in a shorter time than he expected, they hit a path that headed south by iPhone compass at about the three-thousand-foot mark. His hip began to throb, his elbow was already sore.
“Make the call,” he said.
She fished the satellite phone out of her bag, dialed. “Stronksi,” she said.
She handed the phone to Swagger, who waited a second for the callback.
“Yeah?”
“Okay,” Swagger said, “we have done got ourselves in it, bad. I do need a way out.”
“Where are you?”
“I am about three thousand feet up the east face of a mountain that more or less faces Yaremche. We’re at a path, we have to know which way to head.”
“Call you back. Stay put.”
“Let me emphasize we are in a kind of hurry. Guys with guns after us. We are unarmed.”
“I copy,” said Stronski.
The time ticked by.
Swagger said to Reilly, “I have to have a talk with you.”
“Go ahead.”
“The whole point of Jerry Asshole’s deal wasn’t to buy us off but to bluff us into coming up here. If they kill us down there, it’s a flap and a half. What story was she working on, what’s going on, what did they find out, who’s murdering reporters and old snipers? That’s the last thing they need, that’s why they didn’t do it down there, and believe me, we were easy.
“He wants us up here, he wants to whack us up here. We go into a hole in the ground or a cave, we are never seen again. It’s at least days, maybe weeks, before they come looking for us, months before they give up. The whole thing is defused. It’s a mystery. I’m thinking time is important to them, they have to stop you now, at this time, and whatever comes out in five years doesn’t matter.”
“I get it.”
“So you have to get your war mind on. You can’t be a reporter, not and survive. It ain’t fair, is it? Well, pardon my français, but fuck fair. Fair don’t exist no more.”
The phone rang. Bob answered, listened. Then broke contact. “Stronski’s got a chopper on hire. There’s no way he can pick us up out of the forest or on the slope
of the mountain; he can’t get his rotors close enough to the incline and he doesn’t have a winch. He’ll hit it and go down. So what we have to do is make it toward something called Natasha’s Womb, a narrow canyon through a gap, but just in front of it there’s a nice clearing where the bird can set down. He thinks it’s about four or five miles, due south, but he says the path is pretty good and there’s no rough climbing or anything. He’ll move there in a few hours and look for us.”
“Can we outpace those guys? I don’t see how.”
“They’ve still got to come up, they’ve still got to decide which way to go, they’re city boys, probably in eight-thousand-dollar silk suits and Gucci loafers.”
“I can’t believe you know what a Gucci loafer is.”
“If it turns out they’re closing on us, I will try and figure out some way to hold them back and let you get to the clearing.”
The path was not treacherous, but neither was it a sidewalk. Gnarly roots protruded, rocks bulged upward demanding detours, the earth itself was not only uneven but uneven randomly, so a sudden misstep could put a hurtful strain on already stressed ankles.
Reilly’s satellite phone rang again.
“It’s for you,” she said, handing it over, and Swagger looked at the number and saw that it was Jimmy Guthrie.
CHAPTER 40
The Carpathians
Ginger’s Womb
JULY 1944
Deneker the explosives genius plotted it out very carefully. He would place three 10-pound units of Cyclonite at one-third intervals about the base of the northern cliff. He would run det cords of equal length from each No. 8 detonating cap, so that when ignited, the det cord would ignite each chunk of explosive simultaneously. The cliff would topple and block the passage of any vehicle, at least until the Russians managed to get heavy construction equipment to the canyon, which he doubted they’d bother with.