Abakov said nothing. He tested the lock from both sides of the newly installed door with a shiny brass key tied with sturdy twine to a piece of wood with the number 312 burned into it like a brand. Satisfied that it worked properly, he stood with arms folded across his chest and sniffed, perhaps picking up the faint scent of mistaken assumptions.
“Someone kicked the door in and shot them,” Scott said. “Then they told Nikita to make up a story, to get the door fixed, and to keep his mouth shut. Everyone in Murmansk knows to keep their mouths shut. As you heard Alex say, Colonel, old habits from the Soviet era die slowly.”
Abakov looked shaken, as if his investigative skills had suddenly been proven worthless. The vein in his neck started throbbing impatiently. “Are you trying to make a fool of me, Captain? What do you know that you’re not telling me? Who is this person you think killed Admiral Drummond?”
“Alikhan Zakayev.”
Abakov stared at Scott in icy silence.
Before Abakov could speak, Scott said, “Drummond was sent to Russia to find Zakayev. That’s all I can tell you. Zakayev probably knew Drummond was looking for him and he probably knew Drummond was going to meet Radchenko—not to buy sex but something else. Information. That’s why he killed him or had him killed.”
“What kind of information?” Abakov said with a hint of skepticism.
“There’s only one kind of information Radchenko could possibly have had that would interest Frank.
Information that someone, probably Zakayev, was planning to steal fissile materials from Olenya Bay.”
“How would Radchenko, a seaman, have that information?” Abakov said.
“I don’t know, Colonel. Perhaps he overheard something.”
“Are you telling me that if Zakayev had fissile material, he could build a nuclear bomb?” He rounded on Alex. “Is that possible, Dr. Thorne?”
“Theoretically,” she said, “but it would be very difficult to build a bomb. He’d need U-235 or Pu-239.
But recycled naval reactor plutonium is not easily made critical; plus, he’d need a trigger and a pusher of, say, lithium deuteride and—”
“Are any fissile materials missing from Olenya Bay?” Abakov demanded.
“Not so far as I know. But one can never be one hundred-percent sure. There’s a lot of garbage laying around up there and it wouldn’t be hard to steal.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Scott said. “Alex, did Frank ever talk to you about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on fissile material and building a nuclear device?”
“Only in the abstract. Sure, we discussed what it would take, the techinical means and all, but we concluded it would be almost impossible to do without resources that terrorists are not likely to have, like metallurgy labs, that sort of thing. Actually, the weapon that it might be possible for them to build is a radiation bomb: a device that would spread radioactive material over a wide area and contaminate people and cities.”
Abakov, stripped of skepticism, said, “How many people would die if radiation was spread over a population center by one of these bombs?”
“Depends how much radiation was released, the prevailing winds, et cetera. Under the right conditions, perhaps thousands.”
“And if he were to target Moscow…?” Abakov said.
“Colonel, the whole idea is pretty much impossible.”
“Dr. Thorne, please believe me when I say that I know Zakayev, and for him nothing is impossible. He has contacts all over the world with men who would not hesitate to kill millions of people.” Abakov’s brusque manner had given way to solicitation. He was clearly shaken by what Alex had said.
Scott pictured Zakayev the terrorist assembling the raw materials needed to make a radiation bomb. He pictured a grubby clandestine workshop in some back alley in Chechnya and a group of terrorists busy putting the parts together: explosive, wiring, timers, outer explosive shell. The only thing missing might be the fission product, a highly dangerous radioactive nuclide such as strontium, cesium, or cobalt. But there was another way for them to attack their enemies that didn’t require the making of a crude radiation bomb. What it required was stealing a nuclear bomb already built, but he didn’t say what he was thinking.
Scott’s rumination was interrupted by Abakov’s chirping cell phone. An excited voice leaked past Abakov’s ear planted on the phone. He went to the window blind, opened the slats with two fingers, and peered out at the red glow in the sky. “I’m looking at it now,” he said to his caller. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Abakov hung up and said, “There’s been a shoot-out and car bombing in the harbor area. Several men were killed and the Murmansk police think that one of them may be Ivan Serov.”
“The Russian mafiya chieftain?” Scott said.
“Yes,” Abakov said.
“What was it you said in Moscow, Colonel? ‘Where you find Serov, you often find Zakayev.’ ”
The car was a smoking hulk. A sickening smell hung in the air. Two corpses covered with plastic sheeting had been burned beyond recognition, their arms and legs charred stumps reaching skyward, the bodies twisted into grotesque shapes. A third corpse had been burned only below the waist, the internal organs trailing away to a black, unrecognizable mass.
Abakov pointed his foot at the corpse. “This one is a Serov lieutenant.”
“How do you know?” Alex said, a hand over her nose and mouth.
The dead face was jowly and a gray tongue protruded from a wide-open mouth from which, it seemed, a scream had escaped before the man’s brain died.
“There’s this….” Abakov squatted and pointed with a ballpoint pen to a pair of crossed daggers dripping blood tattooed on the man’s biceps. The tattoo had been exposed when the man’s jacket and sweater had been ripped off by the blast that destroyed the car. “We know that Serov’s men wear this tattoo as proof of their blood loyalty. It means they will render their blood for him.”
“Yuck.”
“I’m willing to bet a week’s pay that one of these other two beauties is Ivan Serov himself. It’s not like him to get involved in something as crude as a shoot-out. But now I am thinking he was also involved in the shoot-out in St. Petersburg. Whatever the reason, he must have felt it had to be finished on his terms, here.”
“Was it a feud with Zakayev?” Scott said.
Abakov grunted. “Anything is possible.”
In his element now, Abakov shouldered between firemen rolling up hoses and stowing gear. He greeted Murmansk police officers and spoke to them in rough, clipped argot while they sifted through burnt rubble looking for evidence. Scott and Alex followed in his wake, stepping carefully over burnt wreckage from the car.
“Used to be a BMW,” Abakov said over his shoulder.
He stopped to confer with an officer who then led them to the concrete steps outside the charred warehouse. Inside, a powerful beam from a flashlight played over walls and support beams as the owner of the warehouse assessed damage.
The officer showed Abakov three small, scorched automatic weapons lying on a tarp spread out on the top step of the cement staircase.
“Micro Uzis.” Abakov said, poking one with the ball point pen. “Perfect for hosing down a room or an alley, and easily concealed.” The little 9mm submachine guns had twenty-round box magazines and folding wire stocks. “They’re a favorite weapon of the Russian mafiya,” Abakov revealed. He held up two metal objects. “Do you know what these are, Captain?”
“A safety pin and spoon from a grenade.”
“A Czech grenade,” Abakov said. “Rare.”
“Is that what blew up the car?” Alex said.
“More than likely,” Abakov said.
The police officer said something to Abakov that Scott didn’t catch.
“He says,” Abakov explained, “that they found spent cartridge cases around these steps in two sizes, nine-millimeter and twenty-five-caliber. The twenty-fives are probably from a Czech CZ92. Somebody put up a pretty good fight against Serov and his men. The grenade won it for them. We’ll check these spent nine-millimeter cases against the ones we found in St. Petersburg. They’re probably from the same weapon.”
“Then you think Zakayev killed Serov,” Scott said. “And got away.”
Abakov shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll find Zakayev’s corpse here.”
“Can we talk?” said Scott.
“Um, sure,” Alex said over the phone from her office at the embassy in Moscow. “But can you make it quick.”
“Not on the phone,” Scott said, sensing she was not alone in her office. “At Frank’s apartment. Half an hour?”
“I’m pretty busy…. I told you, that’s why I had to getback to Moscow.”
“So you did. If it’s David Hoffman you’re worried about, tell him I’ll explain things to him later.”
“Scott, please don’t—”
“Just do it.”
Alex found Scott engrossed in Drummond’s papers, which he was preparing for shipment to the States.
He had them laid out in piles on the countertops in the kitchenette. “What’s so damned important that it can’t wait till after work?” she said. “You know I want to help you, but I’ve barely had a chance to decompress from our trip to Murmansk, David’s breathing down my neck, and I’ve got a ton of things to do for him.”
Scott brushed her objections aside with the wave of a hand. “Tell me what Frank said on the voice mail he sent you when he was in Murmansk.”
“Jake, for God’s sake.”
“What did he say?”
Alex frowned. “I told you, nothing. Nothing I could understand. It was garbled, like cell phone calls often are.”
“You must have heard him say something.”
She exhaled heavily. “If you don’t believe me, then listen to it yourself.”
Scott brightened. “You mean that you still have it on your voice mail system?”
“I don’t have it on my system, but all calls to the embassy are stored in the central security archive.”
“Can Jack Slaughter find it?”
“I guess so. Ask him.”
“I will.”
“And I’m going back to my office.”
“Wait. If Slaughter can find the message, I want you to listen to it with me.”
“You don’t seem to understand: I work for David Hoffman, not Jake Scott. I can’t get involved in your”—she searched for a word—“scheme.”
“Scheme? You think this is a scheme? Two men are dead—murdered. Three more were killed in a shoot-out in Murmansk. Some one may have stolen fissile materials to make a crude bomb. And you think this is some scheme that I dreamed up?”
She came to him, put a hand on his arm. “Jake, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. It was a poor choice of words.”
His eyes roamed her lovely face as if committing it to memory. He heard her breathing, smelled the musky aroma of her perfume. She kept her eyes down as if immersed in a private reverie. He wondered if she had ever allowed a man into her inner life, and if she had, what kind of man he was.
“Jake, you don’t understand….”
“Tell me.” He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her lightly against him.
“Don’t.” Her breath fluttered across his cheek.
“Don’t what?”
She tried to move away, but he held her. “Don’t complicate things any more than they already are.”
Scott turned her chin up to him so he could look into her eyes. “Alex, it doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“But it will be and I don’t want that now.”
His kiss ended further protest. Her arms linked around his neck and she arched into him. When she pushed away, she allowed his hands to linger around her waist. Moisture glistened on her lips. “Jake, this is no good. That was nice, but wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Perhaps sensing that her comment lacked conviction, she stepped away from Scott and went to the window to look out.
“Is it David Hoffman?” Scott said.
“Not the way you mean it. I’m not in love with him.”
“But he’s in love with you.”
At first she didn’t answer. She turned from the window and, in a low voice, said, “I love this country and the people. I know this will sound melodramatic, but I believe I’m contributing something important by doing what I do to make Russia and the world safer. When Frank arrived in Moscow, I believed that he would help put an end to the nightmare we were facing on the Kola Peninsula. But then he was killed.
“I’m not a crusader nor a politician and I want to help you find Frank’s killer, but I have other responsibilities too. To the people I work for and my colleagues here at the embassy. We’re not always one big happy family, but it’s a tight-knit group.” She turned from the window to face Scott. “Does that make sense?”
“Sure,” Scott said. “Look, I don’t want to cause problems for you. As you said, you have to live with David after I’m gone from Moscow. But I need your help. You were the last person to hear from Frank
—I know, I know, the message was garbled—but there may be something on it that will jog your memory.”
Scott teetered on the brink between fantasy and reality. His experience in intelligence had taught him never to discard a scrap of information no matter how innocuous it seemed. He’d dug through Drummond’s graveyard of old documents and found a link between Frank and Zakayev. Abakov saw a link between Zakayev and Serov. And there was another link between Radchenko, Drummond, and the K-363—which, to Scott, meant there had to be a link to her skipper, Georgi Litvanov.
He remembered something else. First rule of intelligence work: Don’t jump to conclusions. Second rule of intelligence work: Construct a premise. Third rule…something about logic and reason, but they had gone out the window.
“All right,” Alex was saying, “let’s try jogging my memory.”
“Dive the boat!” rasped over the SC1 announcing system.
Georgi Litvanov, in the CCP—Central Command Post—with stopwatch in hand, closely monitored a series of well-orchestrated moves to get the eight thousand-ton-displacement Akula-class nuclear attack submarine underwater as fast as possible. The singsong of orders came in full cry.
“Full dive on planes fore and aft! Make your depth one hundred meters! Both engines half speed ahead!”
Litvanov thumbed the stopwatch, noted the elapsed time, then glanced at the compass repeater. The K-363 was on a northerly course out of Olenya Bay.
Litvanov’s eyes drifted to Starshi Leitenant Karpenko, the young, wide-eyed officer of the deck, who returned Litvanov’s frosty look with a hopeful gaze.