Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (16 page)

Fiona Devin nodded again. “The hard-faced lads up at Lubyanka Square are not yet quite so active and all-powerful as when they called themselves the KGB, but they do get around all the same.”

“And now President Dudarev is doing his best to restore the bad old order,”

Smith commented.

“Too true,” she agreed somberly. “Czar Viktor has certainly surrounded himself with a very nasty bunch of cronies. The Russians call them the siloviki, the men of power. Like Dudarev himself, they’re all ex-KGB with a taste for absolute control and a real knack for putting the fear of Stalin into anyone foolish enough to get in their way.”

“No kidding,” Smith said grimly, thinking back to the bridge in Prague and Valentin Petrenko’s murder. “Plus, they use surrogates like this so-called Brandt Group for some of their dirty work.”

“So it seems, Colonel,” she said coolly. “But keep in mind that the Brandt Group also works for the highest bidder, not just the Kremlin.”

“Oh?”

Her eyes grew colder. “I’ve done a bit of investigative work on the Group.

Oh, I admit that they’re a fine match for Dudarev and his siloviki. Mostly ex-Stasi, like their boss, a vicious creature named Erich Brandt—with a smatter-ing of Romanian Securitate and Serbian secret police thugs thrown in for good measure. But they’ll take any assignment, no matter how dirtv, if the fee is big enough.”

Her mouth tightened into a thin line. “Rumor has it that the Brandt Group provides security for some of the biggest drug lords and Mafiya crime bosses in Moscow. One set of parasites guarding another. The Group’s ties to the Kremlin keep the police conveniently looking the other way, no matter how many innocents are murdered by the Mafiya bosses they protect.”

Smith heard the deep anger and pain in her voice. “Including someone you knew?” he guessed.

“My husband,” Fiona said simply. “Sergei was a Russian. One of the optimistic entrepreneurs who believed this country could remake itself as a prosperous democracy. He worked hard, built up his business—and then the hard men arrived, demanding the lion’s share of his profits. When he refused, the Mafiya bastards shot him down in the street.”

She fell silent, plainly unwilling to say more now.

Smith nodded, recognizing a boundary he should not cross. Not yet. To fill the silence, he stopped a passing waitress to order a glass of shampanskae, a sweet sparkling wine from Moldova, for Fiona and another beer for himself and then turned back to her. He hesitated briefly, not knowing quite how to proceed. “I’m assuming Fred Klein told you why I’m here, Ms. Devin,” he said at last, and then winced inwardly, hearing suddenly how pompous that sounded.

“I’ve been thoroughly briefed by Mr. Klein,” she confirmed easily, choosing to show mercy by ignoring this second gaffe. “Besides, I’ve had my own brush with the news of these mysterious deaths. Three nights ago, Dr. Nikolai Kiryanov was on his way to meet me when he disappeared. Now I suspect he was trying to pass on the same sort of information your friend Petrenko brought to Prague.”

“And I understand that Kiryanov turned up in the morgue the next morning?” he asked, recovering.

Fiona frowned. “Not quite. I never saw his body. The poor man had already been cremated.”

Smith raised an eyebrow. “That quickly?”

She nodded. “Well now, the cause of death was listed as ‘heart attack.’ I suppose cremation must have seemed a convenient way to make sure no one could check up on that.”

“And since then?”

“I’ve been poking and prying and asking pointed questions wherever and whenever I can,” she told him.

“Sounds pretty dangerous —in the present circumstances,” he commented.

One side of Fiona Devin’s generous mouth ticked upward in a lopsided smile. “The authorities here may not like it much,” she said. “But remember that asking awkward questions is precisely what they expect a Western reporter like me to do. And they know that Kiryanov could have told me at least a tiny bit of what happened with those poor people. If I got wind of a juicy story like those deaths and then simply sat back on my hands, they’d grow more suspicious still.”

“Have you had any luck?” Jon asked.

She shook her head disgustedly. “Not a bit. I’ve haunted the corridors of the Central Clinical Hospital until I can smell the disinfectant they use in my sleep, and all to no avail. I’ve run straight into a solid wall of obstruction and

evasion. Naturally, the staff there all deny that any mysterious disease outbreak

ever took place.”

“Naturally,” Smith said drily. “What about prowling through their medical records?”

“Strictly forbidden,” Fiona Devin said flatly. “The hospital director insists that the medical records of all current or former patients are strictly off-limits.

Going over his head to get the necessary authorizations from the Ministry of Health could take weeks.”

“Or forever.”

She nodded. “Far more likely. One thing is quite clear, though: The doctors and nurses there are all utterly on edge. You can sense the fear rolling off

them under all that horrid carbolic soap. Believe me, they aren’t going to talk to a foreigner or anyone else about what happened, no matter what kind of in-ducement is offered to them.”

Smith thought that over. If the hospital was a dead end, he was going to have to explore other angles. From what Petrenko had said, it sounded as though the Kremlin orders quashing talk about the strange deaths came later—after the mini-epidemic had run its lethal course. Before then, the hospital’s doctors had been trying everything in their power to diagnose and treat their sick patients. Even though the Russian hadn’t explicitly mentioned doing so, he was willing to bet that Petrenko and his colleagues had shared the data they had gathered with other medical professionals. At least until the Kremlin clamped a lid on the situation. One of the first principles for anyone fighting an unknown disease was to spread the information across a wide spec-trum, bringing as much competent brainpower and lab time as possible to bear on solving its deadly mysteries.

Well, Smith knew people in some of the leading Russian medical and scientific institutions—top-notch scientists who were sure to have been consulted about this illness. Sure, they would have received the same cease-and-desist orders from on high, but with luck he might be able to persuade one or more of them to give him access to their case records or lab test results.

Fiona Devin nodded slowly when he ran that idea past her. “Approaching them could be risky, though,” she pointed out. “You’re masquerading as John Martin, a harmless and inconsequential Canadian social scientist. But you won’t be able to use your cover when dealing with people who already know you by sight and reputation. If just one of them panics and runs off screaming about being approached by Colonel Jonathan Smith, the American military disease specialist, some very loud alarm bells will start ringing inside the Kremlin.”

“True,” Smith agreed quietly. “But I don’t see many other real options, Ms.

Devin.” He pushed his untouched second beer to the side. “You’ve seen the lists of those who’ve been hit with this illness. We really don’t have time for anything subtle or indirect. Somehow I must find a way to make contact with the Russian experts who are likely to have the information we need.”

“Then at least let us run some quick checks on these possible sources first,”

she said. “My team and I know the ground here better than you do. Maybe we can weed out those who are too close to Dudarev’s regime—or too openly frightened by it—to be worth questioning.”

“How long will you need for this vetting process?” he asked.

“Several hours, starting from the moment you give me the names and institutional affiliations of those you’re interested in,” Fiona said firmly.

Smith raised a skeptical eyebrow. “That fast?”

She grinned at him. “I really am very good at my job, Colonel. And I’ve got some decent sources, both inside the government and out of it.”

Almost against his will, he found himself grinning back at her. Now that her earlier mood of tightly repressed anger and sorrow had faded, her natural air of buoyant self-confidence had come bubbling back to the surface. It was infectious. “So, how do I get in touch with you again?”

Fiona pulled a business card out of her small handbag and quickly jotted down a telephone number on the back. “You can safely reach me through that secure number, day or night.”

He slipped the card into his shirt pocket.

“In the meantime, I’ll keep the pressure on the Russian medical bureaucracy from my end,” she promised. “I have an interview set up tomorrow morning largely for that very purpose. With Konstantin Malkovic.”

Smith whistled softly. “The financier? The guy who made billions in commodities and currency speculation?”

Fiona nodded. “The very one.”

“He’s an American, isn’t he?”

“A naturalized American,” she agreed. “Much as I am myself, for that matter. But Malkovic is Serbian by birth, and he’s invested heavily in Russian industries over the last several years. He also donates large sums to the charities

trying to rebuild this country’s antiquated health care systems. And all of that investing and donating has bought him close ties to these new lads in the Kremlin. No matter how much Dudarev and the other ‘men of power’ long to bring back the old ways, they’re not utter fools. They walk softly around a man with so much money to throw around.”

“And you hope to persuade Malkovic to start asking a few awkward questions of his own about this disease?” Smith guessed.

“Indeed, I do,” Fiona agreed. “He’s said to have quite a temper, and he’s used to getting his own way.” A look of devilish delight danced in her bright blue-green eyes. “So I would very much hate to be the first Russian official forced to refuse his requests.”

Near the Russo-Ukrainian Border

Four requisitioned passenger buses crammed full of Russian soldiers crawled along a narrow, deeply rutted track, an old logging road, slowly winding their way deeper into the pitch-black forest. Overhanging branches scraped loudly along the sides and windows of the darkened vehicles.

Up at the front, Captain Andrei Yudenich crouched beside the driver, holding on to the back of the man’s seat to keep his balance. He peered out through the cracked and dirty windshield, again trying vainly to get a better idea of just where he and the crews of his tank company were being sent. He grimaced, deeply disquieted by recent events.

So far, this twenty-four-hour-long journey from their barracks outside Moscow had been a nightmare of misdirection. Their original orders had sent them south by rail toward Voronezh, ostensibly as the first stage of a battalion-sized deployment to Chechnya. But once there, they had been switched onto another train, this one heading back west to Bryansk. From there, Yudenich and his tank crews had been bundled onto these old buses and sent lumbering off into the woods, following a confusing succession of newly plowed country roads.

A soldier in a white camouflage smock suddenly loomed up ahead, illuminated by the wavering beams of the headlights. He was standing on a mound of snow piled up by the side of the logging road. A bright red armband and glowing baton identified him as a member of the Commandant’s Service—a special Army-level unit that served as field security and traffic control troops.

The white-smocked soldier waved his baton abruptly, pointing imperiously to the right. Obeying his signaled order, the buses turned off the logging track one after the other and rumbled up an even narrower path, one newly hacked out of the forest, judging by the fresh-cut stumps visible on either side.

Frowning openly now, Yudenich clung tighter to the back of the driver’s seat, sway-ing up and down as the heavy vehicle bounced through deep ruts.

Several minutes later, they pulled into a clearing and stopped.

More field security troops in red armbands, with assault rifles held ready, swarmed around the buses, shouting, “All out! Everyone out! Move! Move!”

Yudenich was the first one through the open doors. He dropped lightly onto the rock-hard, frozen earth of the clearing and then saluted the nearest officer—a captain like himself. His tank crews tumbled out of the buses behind him, hurriedly forming up in ranks under the chivvying of their sergeants and his lieutenants.

‘Tour orders?” the other man snapped.

Wordlessly, Yudenich dug the thick sheaf of papers out of the breast pocket of his field jacket.

The other captain flipped them open and studied them in the light of a small shielded flashlight held by an orderly. “I see that you’re part of the Fourth Guards Tank Division,” he commented. He handed the orders back and then studied a list on his clipboard. “Right. You and your company are posted to Cantonment Fifteen, Barracks Tents Four through Eight.”

“Cantonment Fifteen?” Yudenich asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.

“Off through the trees over there, Captain,” the other man said tiredly, nodding toward the forest beyond the clearing. “You’ll be guided.”

Obediently, Yudenich looked in that direction. His mouth fell open. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, he could see that they were standing on the outskirts of an enormous military encampment, one built right in among the trees. Huge panels of infrared-and radar-absorbent camouflage netting were strung overhead, and coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see, apparently encircling the whole camp. Teams of heavily armed guards —Interior Ministry troops by their uniforms —and growling dogs nervously prowled the perimeter.

“What the devil is going on here?” he asked quietly.

“You’ll be briefed when you need to know,” the captain told him. He shrugged. “Until then, you communicate only through your own chain-of-command. Clear?”

Yudenich nodded.

“Good,” the other man said grimly. “And make sure your boys don’t go wandering off. Anyone who crosses the perimeter without authorization gets a bullet in the neck and a shallow grave hacked out of the snow and frozen mud. No formal court-martial. No appeals. No mercy. Understand?”