The Solomon Effect (11 page)

Washington, D.C.: Monday 26 October 7:00
A.M.
local time

General Gerald T. Boyd was halfway through his morning workout
routine in one of the Pentagon’s weight rooms when a slim, half-Asian colonel in his early forties sat down on the bench beside him.

Boyd braced his forearm on his thigh and curled the dumbbell up in a slow, controlled motion, his attention all for his breathing and the careful execution of form. Only then did he glance over at Colonel Sam Lee, noting the officer’s bloodshot eyes, the slack jaw of a man roused urgently and too early from his sleep.

“You have something for me?” said Boyd.

A computer geek, the Colonel had been assigned to the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency for the past two years. It was a plum position for a man close to putting in his twenty years; from here, he’d be able to walk into any one of a number of high paying jobs with the private sector when he retired. And he owed it all to Gerald T. Boyd.

“Not as much as I’d hoped,” said Colonel Lee. He was a small man, with short-cropped dark hair and the gentle features of his parents, who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

Boyd watched his own bicep flex and relax, flex and relax. “There’s a problem?”

Lee reached for a fifteen-pound dumbbell. “This Guinness woman is the problem. I started by looking at her passport file.”

“And?” Boyd didn’t really care how Lee got the necessary information on October Guinness, as long as he got it—and was careful to cover his tracks.

“Turns out she’s in the Navy.”

Boyd frowned. “The Navy?”

“An ensign. I thought it would be a piece of cake, accessing her files.”

Boyd waited.

Lee cast a quick glance around and leaned in closer. “Instead, that’s when everything went to shit. The Navy doesn’t have her file.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s been detailed to the CIA.”

“That’s a problem?”

“I don’t know what she’s doing, but whatever it is, it’s a deep dark secret. Special Access shit.”

“So why is she in Russia?”

“I don’t know.”

Boyd switched the dumbbell to his left hand. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it one damned bit. But all he said was, “I need for you to stay on this. I want to know exactly who she is, and why she’s involved.”

A muscle twitched beside the other man’s small mouth. “I’m afraid I may have already stumbled across a trip wire.”

Boyd pushed to his feet and dropped the dumbbell on the rack. “I’ll take care of the Agency. Just get me the information I need.”

Sam Lee glanced down at the dumbbell in his hand, then up again, his shoulders drooping with fatigue and a touch of fear. “Yes, sir.”

Kaliningrad Oblast: Monday 26 October 2:30
P.M.
local time

The Tatar kept a heavy foot on the gas all the way back to the
city of Kaliningrad, his shoulders hunched, his hands clutching the wheel. Sheltered by the row of warehouses, he’d survived the explosion with only a few scrapes and bruises. But the Mercedes he’d been sitting in had been pretty badly pummeled by debris. They drove back to Kaliningrad in one of the blue-and-white militia vans with the siren wailing and Andrei shouting into his cell phone for so long that, by the time they thumped over one of the bridges crossing the Pregel River and onto the island of Kneiphof, the Russian was hoarse.

“I’m supposed to be at a meeting that started ten minutes ago,” he said as the van swooped in next to the curb. “You get out now.”

“Here?” said Jax, looking around. Once, Kneiphof had been the island heart of old Königsberg, a jewel of medieval and renaissance architecture and learning. But the graceful, ancient university buildings were long gone, bombed to dust
by the Allies, while the Russians had dynamited the city’s famous castle back in the 1960s and replaced it with a concrete governmental monstrosity frequently described as the ugliest example of Soviet architecture in existence—which was really saying something. Even the cobbles from the surrounding lanes had been taken up and relaid in Moscow’s Red Square. Only the cathedral had survived, as a hollowed-out shell that was now being restored.

“The car will be back for you by seven. You’re both booked on tonight’s flight to Berlin.”

“Berlin?” October froze in the act of scooting across the seat. “But my ticket is through Copenhagen.”

Andrei lit a new cigarette from the embers of his old one, his cheeks hollowing as he inhaled. “I want you out of here tonight, and the next flight to Copenhagen isn’t until later this week. You’re going to Berlin. And Jax—”

Jax paused with his hand on the edge of the door. “Yes, Andrei?”

“Be here. If I have to make other arrangements to get you out of the country, you really aren’t going to like them.”

“Got it,” said Jax, and closed the door.

“I guess he doesn’t want to play nice anymore,” said October, her brows drawing together as she watched the militia van speed away.

“No. But that doesn’t mean he’s not still playing.”

She glanced over at him. “What does that mean?”

Jax put his hand under her elbow, drawing her across the square toward the looming red brick nave of the cathedral. “Don’t look, but there’s a guy in a black leather jacket and a visored helmet who just parked his Kawasaki down the street. He was following us when we left the airport this morning.”

Jax watched, amused, as she struggled really, really hard to keep from staring down the street. “You think he’s one of Andrei’s men?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

She dug her fists into her pockets and kept her head down as they walked rapidly across the park. “Is he still following us?” she asked as they skirted the newly roofed sidewalls of the old German cathedral.

“Yes.”

They cut around behind the towering red brick nave, to where the still waters of the river reflected an autumn riot of golds and rusts.

The guy from the Kawasaki stayed behind them, one hand creeping to the small of his back as a tall rose-colored portico closed off by a wrought-iron fence loomed before them.

“What’s that?” said October, her head tilting back as she stared up at the soaring columns.

Jax turned so that he could keep one eye on the guy from the Kawasaki. “It’s the tomb of Immanuel Kant. He was an atheist, so they buried him out here. Which is kind of ironic, when you consider that his tomb is the only reason the Russians didn’t tear down the cathedral—Marx being a big fan of Kant, you see.”

She glanced over at him. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“I majored in history at Yale.”

She started to laugh.

“That’s funny? Why is that funny? Because I majored in history, or because I went to—” Out of the corner of his eye, Jax saw the Kawasaki rider’s hand come up.
“Look out!”
he shouted, shoving October to one side.

He heard a whine, and a corner of the worn old sarcophagus disappeared into dust.

“Shit,” said Jax, gravel rolling beneath his loafers as he dragged her behind one of the slender columns.

October lost her footing and almost went down. “He’s shooting at us? Why is he shooting at us?”

“Because he’s not Andrei’s guy.” Jax yanked her up.
“Come on!”

As they sprinted around the side of the cathedral, October stumbled and almost went down again. “Ah,
shit,
” she cried, one hand on her knee.

He knew she had an old knee injury dating back to the same incident in Iraq that earned her a psycho discharge. “Here,” he said, wrapping an arm around her waist. “Lean on me. Can you make it?”

She straightened, her jaw set hard. “I can make it.”

Up ahead, a side door opened to disgorge two middle-aged women wearing heavy handknit sweaters and plastic rain caps over their coiffed gray heads. Jax yanked the door open wider and pushed October inside.

“Ey! Prikratitye!”
bellowed a red-faced guard with a sagging belly and a walrus mustache. “This is an exit. You are not allowed to enter this way!”

“Sorry,” October shouted back at him.

October limping badly, they pelted down the soaring nave of the cathedral, the guard blowing hard on his whistle. She glanced sideways at Jax. “What’s the penalty for crashing a museum in Russia?”

“I don’t know,” said Jax. “But it can’t be worse than getting shot.”

They heard the door bang open behind them again, streaming natural light into the dim nave. The guard let out another bellow.

She threw a quick look over her shoulder and said, “Shit. It’s him. What do we do now?”

Up ahead, a clutch of tourists choked the main door from the porch. “We mingle.”

They slowed to a walk, shoving their way through the tight-knit group, eliciting stern frowns, disapproving hisses. Jax could hear the tour guide’s stentorian voice saying in
heavily accented English, “Over one hundred children sought refuge here, beneath the tower, on the second night the Allies bombed the city. The cathedral took a direct hit. All were killed.”

As Jax pushed toward the tall arched entrance, the tourists—a bunch of British pensioners, from the looks of them—turned mulish, refusing to budge. He was aware of the Kawasaki rider skirting the edge of the group, positioning himself to close on Jax as he neared the top of the main entrance steps.

“Excuse me,” said October, seizing a furled black umbrella from the hands of the pudgy, balding man beside her. “Can I borrow this?”

“I say,” sputtered the tourist.

As the Kawasaki rider lunged forward, the muzzle of his suppressed pistol coming up toward Jax, October reached out to thrust the handle of the borrowed brollie between his legs. Hooking one ankle, she gave it a sharp yank.

The man staggered, hunching forward as he fought to regain his balance. But by then, October was close enough to aim a downward chop at his extended right wrist, followed by a snap kick that spun the man around and sent him stumbling backward to pitch down the short flight of steps to the pavement below.

Wheels clanging, a tram trundled up the cobbled street before the cathedral, its windows filled with curious faces pressing forward. A chorus of gasps and
tut-tuts
arose from the tour group as a flock of helping hands descended on the man sprawled at the base of the steps.

“Thank you,” said October, restoring the umbrella to its rightful owner.

“Nice job,” said Jax. He grabbed her hand. “We have a streetcar to catch.”

Dashing down the steps, they leaped onto the back plat
form of the streetcar as it clattered past. On the pavement behind them, the Kawasaki rider struggled to his feet, still surrounded by a clucking, smothering horde of concerned British tourists, all talking at once.

“You okay?” Jax said, glancing at her.

She nodded, her breath coming hard and fast. The tram picked up speed, rattling over the bridge just as the cathedral clock began to chime the first notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, the somber tones ringing out to drift across the river and down the mist-filled valley.

Rodriguez watched Clay Dixon swing his leg over the Kawasaki’s seat, his hands clenching around the motorcycle’s handlebars, his body rigid with rage and frustration as he stared at a rusty barge floating past on the river below.

Rodriguez walked over to stand beside him, his gaze on the pigeons swirling around the clock tower of the cathedral.

“You okay?”

Dixon hawked up a mouthful of bloody spittle and shot it at the gutter. “Fucking bitch. We should have hit them on the road when they were with the Russians.”

“That would not have been wise.” Rodriguez kept his gaze on the cathedral’s red brick façade. “We can deal with this. There are two places our targets will logically go next: Baklanov’s house in Rybachy, and the salvage company’s office in Zelenogradsk. I’ll send Lysenko and Saidov to Rybachy. You go to Zelenogradsk.”

Dixon gunned the Kawasaki to life. “Fucking assholes. I want her. I want them both.”

“I don’t care who gets them, as long as we get them.”

They rented a beat-up old Lada from a shady outfit in a grimy
lane just off a wide avenue the Soviets had renamed Moskovsky. The white-haired, wizened Russian behind the counter insisted they pay cash in advance, but magnanimously threw in a free Cyrillic map of the province.

“It’s a little out of date and not particularly accurate, but—” He broke off to toss a quick glance over his shoulder, then leaned in closer to add in a whisper, “Accurate maps are considered military secrets, so you might be in for a few surprises. Still, it’s better than nothing.” He hesitated. “Usually.”

“This doesn’t sound promising,” said October, spreading the map open across the dashboard.

“Can you find Zelenogradsk and Rybachy, or are they still military secrets?”

“Here’s Rybachy. It’s on the Curonian Spit.” She drew her finger along the thin bar of sand dunes that stretched from the Oblast to Lithuania and divided the Baltic Sea from the Curonian Lagoon. “I don’t see Zelenogradsk.”

“It must be around there somewhere.” He turned the key, and on the third try managed to get the Lada to turn over.
He wrestled it into gear, and the car lurched forward. “We’ll try Rybachy first.”

Keeping one eye on the rearview mirror, he spent about ten minutes weaving in and out of city traffic, driving randomly around first one block, then the next.

“See anyone?” she asked, craning around to look back.

“No.”

“Maybe there’s no one else.”

“Maybe,” said Jax, unconvinced.

They drove through dark fallow fields and sodden bogs, the road a narrow tunnel between avenues of elms that met overhead and stretched on for miles and miles across the countryside. In another week or two the tree limbs would be bare, but now they were clothed in brilliant shades of yellow and rust that drifted softly down around them. Occasionally they’d see the broken spire of an abandoned church in the distance, or pass through villages of three to five houses huddled around the inevitable statue of Lenin. More often they found place-name signs whose villages were slowly disappearing.

“Why hasn’t anyone ever heard about what happened here?” said October, staring at the crumbling ruins of a medieval church marooned in a plowed field.

“It didn’t just happen in East Prussia, you know. The Allies massacred huge German-speaking populations in the provinces taken over by Poland and Czechoslovakia, too.”

She turned to look at him. “How many people are we talking about?”

Jax shifted down to swing out around a lumbering farm wagon that nearly blocked the road ahead. “No one ever bothered to do an accurate, detailed reckoning, but the most unbiased estimates put the number of German-speaking civilians expelled from Eastern Europe at around sixteen million.”

“Sixteen million people?”

“Give or take a few million.” He swung back into the right lane. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he could see the plodding wagon, then the narrow road stretching out straight and empty behind them. “The lucky ones managed to make it across the new German borders. But a lot of the women and children were just herded into concentration camps and left to die of starvation and disease, or killed outright. And then there are the tens of thousands of Germans that the Russians sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Only a handful of those survived to make it back to the West.”

“How many?” she said softly. “How many died?”

He glanced over at her white, tightly held face. “No one knows for sure. A U.S. government study in the late forties put the number of dead at between two and three million—most of them women and children. And the very old, of course.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

Jax blew out his breath in a long sigh. There had been some revisionist attempts to drastically lower the death figures. But most historians without a political agenda tended to agree that the original estimates were probably conservative. He said, “We all think we know what’s true and what isn’t. You think the U.S. could never have been complicit in something like this, while I think it’s impossible for someone to sit in a room on a Naval base in New Orleans and somehow ‘see’ a Russian shipyard in her mind.”

She was silent for a moment, watching a stork rise from its nest on the rafters of a ruined barn. “That’s different.”

“Is it?”

By the time they reached the coast, a brisk wind had blown away all but a few wisps of the low-hanging clouds that had made the morning so bleak. The sky that arched above them
now was a vast, pastel blue reflected by the waters of the Curonian Lagoon to their right and the Baltic Sea to the north.

They followed a narrow road that cut through vast dunes ranging from thirty to sixty feet high. Most had been planted with pine forests in an effort to overcome the dunes’ habit of swallowing entire villages. But some were still wind-sculpted, shifting mounds of bare golden sand.

They found the village of Rybachy just a few kilometers short of the Lithuanian border. Seagulls wheeled, screeching, above rows of wooden fishing boats rocking beside a pier that stretched far out into the waters of the lagoon. Nearby, the ruins of an old Teutonic Knights’ castle stood guard over a few hundred houses, many of them still showing the carved wooden fronts of a different age and different inhabitants.

“There,” said October, pointing to a white stucco house with a red tiled roof about halfway down a leafy street. “That’s where Captain Baklanov’s widow lives.”

Jax pulled into the shelter of a spreading elm and killed the engine. The curtains at the house’s windows were all tightly drawn, the neatly tended yard deserted.

“I wonder if she speaks English,” said October, thrusting open her car door.

“Probably not. Why?”

A soft smile touched her features. “I was just trying to figure out how I’m supposed to let you do the talking if she only speaks Russian.”

“Oh? Like you let me do the talking with Andrei?”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

They walked up a brick path to the house’s shallow front steps. Jax noticed her limp was getting better. She said, “What if she doesn’t want to talk to us?”

“We tell her we’re from her husband’s insurance company. She’ll talk to us.”

October stopped in the middle of the walk. “But that’s mean. What if Baklanov didn’t have any insurance? We’d get her hopes up for nothing.”

He groaned. “You have way too many scruples to work for the CIA. Tell her we’re journalists from the AP doing a story.”

“On what?”

“Crime? Modern pirates?” He rang the bell. “Make something up. It’s what spies do, you know. We lie.”

Heavy footsteps sounded on the other side of the door. “But—”

The door swung inward to reveal a stout woman with graying hair and a full, puffy face, her features blurred by grief. “Yes?” she said, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

“Dobrih dyen,”
said October, giving the woman a wide smile. “Uhhh…” For a moment, she froze. Then she cleared her throat and said in her flawless Russian, “We’re journalists with the Associated Press.”

She chose the modern Baltic pirates angle. Jax’s Russian was just good enough to enable him to follow most of what was being said. When Anna Baklanov turned her watery gray stare from Tobie to Jax, he slipped out his wallet and presented her with his press card.

While October stared at him in wide-eyed wonder, the captain’s widow took the card between two fingers and scowled. He had no way of knowing if she could read it or not, but her jaw hardened and she started to close the door. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

Jax stuck his foot in the rapidly closing gap and said to Tobie, “Tell her we’ll pay.”

October translated.

The widow sniffed. “I’ve no time for this. I’m on my way to stay with my mother-in-law.”

“A thousand rubles,” said Jax. In a province where over half the population made less than four thousand rubles a month, a thousand rubles was a lot of money. In the States, it would buy you a tank of gas.

Anna Baklanov sniffed again and opened the door.

She led them into a bizarrely furnished sitting room that looked more like Arabian Nights than Russian Revolution. Massive
mansaf
trays a meter wide, made of copper coated with tin, hung above olive wood chests inlaid with mother of pearl. There were scimitars from Turkey and Syria, daggers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, colorful thick carpets from the land of the Hindu Kush. This was a side of Jasha Baklanov they hadn’t been expecting. At the far end of the room, dominating it all, stood an easel proudly displaying a framed black-and-white photograph of a little girl with wild hair presenting President Brezhnev with a bouquet of white roses. If Jax squinted, he could see the ravaged remnants of that little girl in Anna Baklanov.

“I had the militia here two days ago,” she said, fumbling with a pack of cigarettes. “Wanting to know who hired Jasha to raise that old U-boat. As if I knew.”

October nodded sympathetically. “Jasha didn’t talk about his business much, did he?”

“What man does talk about business when he comes home? Hmmm? That’s why he comes home, to get away from business. Eat his dinner, drink his vodka.” She paused to light her cigarette and drew hard. “You’d like some vodka?”

“No, thank you,” said October.

Jax smiled, “One glass.”

Anna Baklanov heaved to her feet and disappeared through a door.

October whispered, “I hate vodka.”

“Russia runs on vodka. You’ll never get her to talk if you don’t drink with her.”

The widow was back in a moment bearing a tray with three glasses, a bottle of vodka, and slices of dark bread. She filled their glasses to the brim.

“It must be tricky raising an old submarine,” said October, taking her glass with care.

“Jasha was the best.” Vodka in hand, Anna Baklanov leaned forward and lowered her voice. “He’d done it before, you know. Sold the sub itself for the steel, and auctioned everything from Kraut helmets to belt buckles and gas masks on eBay.”

October took a sip of her vodka and choked. “Someone hired him for that?” she asked, her voice a raw rasp. “Or was it his own plan?”

“Of course it was his plan.” Anna Baklanov upended her own glass and let the vodka slide down her throat in an easy motion that made Tobie’s eyes widen. “He got the idea from something he read on the Internet, about the British salvaging the old German U-boats they sank off the coast of Ireland.”

“Smart man,” said October.

Jasha’s widow nodded and fumbled for a handkerchief to blow her nose.

October said, “So he had experience raising World War II submarines. I suppose that’s why these men came to him.”

Anna Baklanov tucked her handkerchief out of sight, lit another cigarette, and nodded. “They’d heard about him.”

“They were Russians?”

She shook her head. “Two of them spoke Russian, but they weren’t Russian.”

“Ah. Foreigners.”

The widow filled their glasses again. “There’s no point asking me where they were from because I don’t know. Jasha was always secretive. Why, just last month he left on a trip for four days without telling me a thing. If I hadn’t found
the receipt from that Beirut restaurant in his pocket when I was washing his trousers, I’d never have known where he’d been.”

October’s hand jerked, nearly spilling her vodka. “He went to Lebanon?”

“He goes there a couple of times a year.” The widow paused, then corrected herself. “Used to go.”

“Do you still have the receipt?”

“For the restaurant? No. Why?”

“Do you remember the name?”

“No.” She polished off another vodka and sniffed. “Poor Jasha. The militia keeps refusing to release his body to me. Can you imagine? They haven’t let any of the families see the bodies.”

Jax thought about the condition of the bodies he’d seen in those big glossy militia photographs, and figured that was probably a good thing.

Anna Baklanov dabbed the pad of one finger at the corner of each eye. “It’s so hard on Jasha’s poor old mother, losing the two of them.”

“The two of them?”

She nodded. “Jasha’s nephew was on the
Yalena
with him, you know. Jasha’d been like a father to the boy, ever since his brother died. And now Stefan’s dead, too.”

“I’m so sorry,” said October. “I had no idea.”

Lurching to her feet, the widow reached for a snapshot in a cheap brass frame that rested with a collection of others atop a nearby piano. “This was taken last year,” she said, holding it out.

“But he’s so young,” said October, holding the picture in both hands.

Peering over her shoulder, Jax found himself staring at a skinny, dark-haired boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen. The picture was taken on a rocky beach on a cold, overcast day,
the sea a sullen gray in the background. But the boy was rosy-cheeked and laughing, with one arm thrown affectionately around the shoulders of the big shaggy mutt panting happily beside him.

“Nice dog,” said Jax.

Anna Baklanov sniffed. “Stefan’s father got him for Stefan when the boy was just a little thing. Broke the poor boy’s heart when the dog died, not more’n a month after this picture was taken.”

She took the photograph back and stared at it soulfully before carefully returning it to its place on the piano. “He could sing like an angel, you know. Sang in the church choir from the time he was small. Jasha used to say it made him weak, like his father. But then, Jasha had no use for the church. Russia might not be Communist anymore, but Jasha was a member of the Party until the day he died.”

Jax lifted his vodka in a silent toast. To Jasha Baklanov. Smuggler. Thief. Proud Party member. He had the glass halfway to his lips when a thought occurred to him. “How old was the boy?” he asked in his fractured Russian.

He obviously got it wrong because Anna Baklanov’s bleary eyes squinted into a frown. “Excuse me?”

October repeated the question for him.

Anna Baklanov blew a stream of blue smoke out her nostrils. “Just sixteen.”

They wavered back to the car in a haze of vodka fumes.

“What are you doing with a press card?” said October.