The Backup Asset (3 page)

“Yes, he is. But if you can’t take any of our advice for it, take Sam’s. We’re all corporate investigators, I agree, but Sam’s ex-CIA. He knows the spy-and-terrorist business better than we’ll ever know it, and he said the same thing. Keep your eyes open, but move on with your life. We might never get to him; he might never resurface again. He might be busy doing time in Siberia for failing his mission, for all we know. Who the hell knows?”

“We’re definitely never gonna find him if we stop looking, that’s how I feel. Someone’s gotta keep on looking. No one knows we’ve worked this case. Sam’s retired CIA. He’s not active anymore, so he’s not looking either. So, who is? Or who should be?”

She knew she had a point, and he didn’t argue.

“All right,” he said, “what if you continue to search for him, but with a time limit?
Say . . . two hours per week, not more?”

“I tend to not trust you when it’s about me. You’ve always been overprotective. Will two hours per week keep me sane?”

“Yes, it will teach you to control this urge you have to obsess about the puzzle piece you’re missing.”

“Can I do four?”

“Huh?”

“Hours. Since you tend to be overprotective and all that,” she said, tilting her head to the side in a flirting gesture.

“No. Not more than two hours per week. Please promise me. Go back to doing what you loved to do, put your heart in each client you’re working. If your mind is elsewhere, your work will suffer.”

“This client’s fine, it’s Brian’s client anyway, not mine. I can afford to do it. I’m just support, not that important or essential anyway.”

“Would you be comfortable repeating that statement to Brian?”

She blushed and pursed her lips.
Damn.

“Umm . . . No.”

“Why do you let yourself think that? We’re all risking our lives when we go undercover. Our support is critical, and you know that. You should know that better than anyone. We’re all counting on one another, and we’re all counting on you. When you’re primary on a case, we don’t cut corners on your support, or allow ourselves to become preoccupied by something else.”

“All right,” she admitted. “I’ll give you that. But if I limit this to only two hours, the only question is what would I do for fun?”

He let out a long, pained sigh.

“That’s your choice too. I could be here with you every day, if you’d only let me. We could spend our lives together.”

“No. We’ve discussed this. As long as we work together, we can’t have that type of relationship. Weekends and vacations, and only if we go out of town. That’s it, and I’m not budging.”

His blue eyes didn’t hide his sadness very well.

“You know we talked about it,” she continued in a softer voice, “you know why I can’t. It would be risky for us both, for the entire team. We can’t, and you know that. Even if Tom doesn’t mind, I do.”

“Then let’s get going,” he said, trying to put some cheer in his voice and mostly failing.

She took a quick shower, changed, and got ready for their weekend trip at his cabin up in the mountains near Alpine. He grabbed her bag, opened the door for her, and loaded the bag in the trunk of his black Mercedes G-Class.

Alex turned on her heels and headed back into the house.

“Be right there, I forgot something,” she said, as she closed the door behind her.

She went straight for the blue bedroom. She pulled the window curtains shut, turned on the powerful track lights, and took several pictures of her crazy wall with her phone. Satisfied, she turned off the lights, pulled the curtain that concealed the corkboard shut, and locked the main door on her way out.
Two hours, four hours, whatever, but who’s counting?

“I’m ready,” she said, smiling, and hopped in the car. “Let’s go.”

President Piotr Abramovich, the most powerful man in Russia, felt nothing, if not powerless, that morning, irritated by his prime minister’s continued inability to name a new defense minister.

Arkady Dolinski, the chair of his government, just couldn’t get it right. He had suggested a few names, but none of those generals had what it took to drive Abramovich’s military vision. They were weak, comfortable with their set ways and their overflowing vodka guts. None of them was the crusader Abramovich was looking for.

He missed Dimitrov, his former minister of defense, his old friend Mishka. Abramovich paced his Kremlin office slowly, remembering the last time he’d seen him. Hearing that a critical intelligence operation had failed, Dimitrov had collapsed of a heart attack right there, on that rug, breaking the Bohemian crystal coffee table on his way down. He didn’t die that day, though. He recovered, but Abramovich had no other choice but to announce his retirement to the entire world.

Almost five months later, the defense minister seat on Russia’s government was still empty. Dimitrov’s shoes were hard to fill. Abramovich still remembered the days when they had worked together in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, in Foreign Operations. It was the two of them and Myatlev, all three united by their ambition, their willingness to pay all costs only to win, advance, and lead, and their pledge to have one another’s backs, regardless of circumstances.

Unlike Myatlev, Abramovich’s early life hadn’t benefitted from having a father as a high-ranking KGB officer. His parents had been blue-collar workers in a system that squeezed them dry and spat them out, sick and forgotten. After a life-long struggle, working twelve-hour days in noisy, toxic manufacturing plants, followed by standing in long lines to buy the bare necessities of food and supplies, his parents didn’t even live long enough to make it to retirement. His mother had died of bone cancer, her screams of pain waking up their entire neighborhood for weeks. His father had a stroke before he reached age fifty, leaving young Piotr to figure out how to survive on his own.

He had sworn to himself he’d never follow in their footsteps. Not him. Let the rest of the Russians sweat their lives away in god-forsaken factories. That life was not good enough for him. He was going to be different. He was going to have it all.

He had to claw his way into the system and hadn’t hesitated in doing so. He’d started at the ground level, at eighteen, fresh out of high school with no other place to go that would have been in alignment with his ambitions. He joined the KGB’s Seventh Directorate as an entry-level surveillance agent, locked in windowless rooms and listening all day to the conversations that key party leaders had in their secretly bugged homes.

Most Russians knew there was no such thing as a private conversation in the apparent privacy of one’s home. The KGB bugged private residences without hesitation, especially those belonging to men and women holding ranks of power in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even though they suspected their homes could be under surveillance, the occasional slipup still happened, and Abramovich was there to hear it, record it, and use it. A political joke told by a visiting relative, a snide or bitter comment, or just the stating of a simple fact, such as the absence of heating on a cold winter day, could be easily taken out of context, manipulated, and turned into a life-ending report.

Abramovich figured out that once he filed his reports, most of the people in question were never heard from again. Inspired by the newly gained awareness of his secret power, he started building a strategy.

His boss was easy to manipulate and quite indifferent, but his boss’s boss, a man named Konev, was a hardheaded, old-school idiot who disliked him and was never going to let him advance. Abramovich spread the seeds of doubt regarding Konev’s allegiances, and then offered to the right people to bug Konev’s home and spend a couple of weeks recording his conversations.

A few days later, carefully edited tapes played back, in front of a shocked audience, the voice of unsuspecting Konev responding to his wife’s comment about the scarcity of meat in their meals with a phrase expressing angrily that the situation had gone on long enough, was intolerable, and he was going to do something about that. Only Abramovich knew that Konev had said that phrase in the context of his ten year old getting bad marks in school. Abramovich had learned how to cut tape, edit, adjust the sound levels to make it smooth, and recopy the edited pieces onto a brand new tape. He had also learned how to dispose of the fragments, how to destroy magnetic tape without leaving a trace of evidence behind.

Last he had heard, Konev was being shipped to Perm-36, a forced labor camp administered by the GULAG. The GULAG, just as dreaded as it was notorious, was an acronym for the Russian Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Labor Settlements; in short, the forced labor camps management.

Konev never resurfaced; few people who entered the GULAG’s camps ever did. But Konev was not the only one Abramovich had sent to Perm-36; he was just the first.

In recognition for his exemplary work in the identification and capture of an enemy of the people, Abramovich was offered the chance to enter the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB. He took the opportunity enthusiastically and started on the path to become a career KGB officer. He was only twenty-two.

At Dzerzhinsky he met both Myatlev and Dimitrov, just as young and ambitious as he was, and their early friendship evolved into a mutually benefitting long-term alliance, forged to help one another propel their careers. They grew to rely on one another, even trust one another to some extent. People like them knew better than to fully trust anyone.

Then Abramovich started ascending to power. His reputation for ruthlessness and his deep knowledge about how to destroy lives parted the crowds in front of him; nothing and no one stopped him on his way up. No one who wanted to stay alive or see his or her family again dared oppose unrelenting Abramovich.

After graduation, he had the choice of service, and he chose to lead a small division within the Fifth Chief Directorate reporting to Lavrentiy Beria, later known to have been responsible for the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR. Fascinated by the incredible power he’d have in that role, he didn’t go for the coveted Foreign Intelligence unit in the First Chief Directorate. Although foreign intelligence was his next goal, he wanted to learn new ways to control opponents, to extract information, and to incarcerate indefinitely without anyone questioning the validity of his decisions. What better place to do all that than the psychiatric unit?

Anyone who was a dissident, who said anything or did anything that contradicted the communist dogma, could happen to have a nervous breakdown. Sluggish schizophrenia was a popular diagnosis at that time. Any such diagnosis required admission for treatment in a special psychiatric ward, bitterly yet unofficially known as
psikhushka
, a Russian term for what would freely translate as the loony cage. These psychiatric wards were nothing more than psychiatric detention centers, where unwanted dissidents were chemically brainwashed into long-term, quiet obedience, and forgotten there until they drew their last breaths.

Of course, any dissident could have a public nervous breakdown if the right drugs were administered, with or without their knowledge. Abramovich learned a lot about drugs, manipulation with drugs, and information extraction under the influence of drugs. Thus, he became an even more successful, feared, and unstoppable career KGB officer.

He gave punitive psychiatry almost two years of his life. Then he moved on to Foreign Intelligence, where his newly acquired pharmacology knowledge enabled him to get above average results in the extraction of information from both willing and unwilling participants. Seven successful years later, he left Foreign Intelligence, having yet again a choice of careers in front of him. He chose the Second Chief Directorate, dedicating himself to learning the ropes of internal political control. He was thirty-five and a major general, the youngest ever to hold that rank, multiple decorations adorning the uniform he wore with immense pride.

The path opened for Abramovich’s political ascension. He was a general during Gorbachev’s tenure at the Kremlin, and watched in horror how that reckless traitor was dismantling the USSR and selling the parts. Right when he was so close to holding supreme power in his country, the USSR was disappearing right in front of his powerless eyes.

There was no way he could fight Gorbachev and stop his damned glasnost. He tried and failed on multiple occasions. Gorbachev was fiercely pro-West; he strongly believed in all that transparency and reform bullshit that was going to ruin Russia and bring it to its knees. They were all at the mercy of Western puppeteers who had made fools out of Gorbachev and all his followers.

When the KGB dismantled, he was forty years old and more decided than ever to take the Kremlin one day and restore his country’s lost greatness. It took some effort. He had to adapt to a changing political landscape, new entrants in the game, and new political structures emerging all around him. Ultimately, people feared the same things, whether in communism or democracy, and he knew how to master those fears.

The Kremlin was his now and had been for a few years. He was almost midway through his third term as president, proving again that he could achieve the impossible. He had started his path to reconstruct Russia’s fallen greatness. The urgency of his vision kept him up at night, counting the years he had left before he’d win the supreme game of his career.

Few people embraced or even understood his vision, and his tolerance for them was wearing thin. He hadn’t grown any more patient with the passing of years; he often felt he was running a desperate race against time, the world, against everyone.

Abramovich slowed his pacing enough to grab a quick shot of vodka from the readily available bottle of Stolichnaya waiting on ice near his new coffee table. Grabbing ice cubes with his fingers he let them drop in a glass, and covered them with the clear liquid. He took a large gulp, letting out air in a satisfied, audible expression of satisfaction, typical for Russian career drinkers. Then he went to his desk and pressed a button.

“Da, gospodin prezident?”

“Get Dolinski in here.”

Minutes later, after a quick knock on the door, his prime minister entered.

“Dolinski, tell me you have a defense minister.”

Dolinski kept his head lowered, eyes fixated on the floor.

“Gospodin prezident, I have a couple of names you might want to consider.”

“Like whom?”

“General Sokol would be a good fit. He’s old guard, a hardliner, combative.”

“He’s a hundred years old, for fuck’s sake, Dolinski, what the hell? I need someone who’s going to
live
long enough to make things happen. Someone who can still think of war, want a war, start a war.”

“Then General Chaplinski would be great. He’s only sixty years old, very determined, a great leader.”

“Do you think Chaplinski shares my vision? In his heart? Or just does it lip service? Is he a communist or United Russia?”

United Russia had become the leading political party after the fall of communism. It was non-ideological in nature, a party uniting all the politically disoriented survivors of almost a century of communism. But as a member and former leader of United Russia, Abramovich knew that anyone could function under the colors of United Russia and have their own hidden agendas.

“He’s United Russia. Did you want a communist for defense minister? How would the world see that?”

“Fuck the world, Dolinski, I don’t care about what they see and don’t see. This is about making Russia great again, not about impressing the fucking West. The West can go to hell, and if I can help make that happen, I will. Stop trying to kiss the West ass, Dolinski. Do you still have the balls to do your job? Or has it castrated you already, left you impotent?”

Abramovich’s voice had reached thunderous levels, his anger taking over. He gulped the remaining vodka and slammed the empty glass on his desk.

“N–no, sir,” an intimidated Dolinski managed to utter.

“I’m surrounded by impotents.” Abramovich continued to pontificate from the bottom of his lungs. “No one has the guts to help me get back what’s ours, what has always been ours. Where are the great men of Russia? Where are the fearless leaders of tomorrow, our brave generals? Doesn’t anyone have what it takes to get me results? To think and plan great things? Who’s been handling defense since Dimitrov retired, and what have they accomplished?”

“Umm . . . I worked with Generals Chaplinski and Sokol to keep things in motion until we name a new defense minister.”

“Is that what you think this country needs? Keeping things in motion?”

“We continued to execute the plan set by Minister Dimitrov before he retired. The readiness for engagement, the incursions outside the national territories, even Division Seven.”

“How’s our readiness?” Abramovich’s tone dropped to almost normal levels.

“It’s going according to plan. We’ve restored to 100 percent readiness all our missile sites, nuclear submarines, and military jets. We’ve conducted exercises and assessed the readiness levels of our ground forces. We’ve taken an updated inventory of our arsenals and started research and production on every item we still need. We estimate that by midsummer we will have all our arsenals replenished as per the former minister’s plan.”