Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (23 page)

Fiona climbed into the narrow back seat, while Smith and Kirov settled themselves in front, with the older man in the driver’s seat. The Russian slammed the gearshift into reverse and backed up fast, cranking the steering wheel hard over. The Moskvitsh swung round through an arc and ended up facing away from the direction it had been going.

Kirov drove east at an easy clip, deliberately staying below the posted speed limit.

“Oleg,” Fiona warned suddenly, leaning forward over the Russian’s big shoulder. She pointed ahead through the dirty windshield. Flashing blue lights were coming into view, rushing up the road toward them at high speed.

“We have company.”

The first militia squad cars were converging on the scene of the reported accident and gun battle.

Kirov nodded coolly. “I see them.” He spun the steering wheel again, turning right onto a narrower side street. He drove on a bit farther and then pulled over to the curb, parking right next to the Mongolian embassy. The elegant nineteenth-century building now housing Lithuania’s embassy was just across the street. The ex-FSB officer reached down and flicked the little car’s headlights off. He left the engine running.

Smith shifted around in the cramped seat, craning his neck to peer out through the Moskvitsh’s small rear window.

In seconds, the first militia squad car flashed past their side street without slowing, still racing west up Povorskaya Street. Others followed in its wake, one after another, tearing along with their sirens wailing.

They all breathed out in relief. Slowly, Kirov reached down and put the Moskvitsh in gear again. Then he pulled out and drove away, heading south, deeper into the Arbat district.

“What’s our next move?” Smith asked quietly.

The older man shrugged. “First, we look for a place to ditch this stolen car, discreetly if possible. And then we find a safe house for you and Ms. Devin.”

“And after that?”

“I try to think of some way to smuggle the two of you out of Russia as soon as possible,” Kirov said flatly. “After what happened tonight, the Kremlin will mobilize every element of the state security apparatus to hunt you down.”

“We’re not leaving, Oleg,” Fiona Devin said firmly. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Fiona!” Kirov protested. “Don’t be a fool! What can you possibly hope to accomplish by staying in Moscow?”

“I don’t know yet,” she said stubbornly. “But I do know that we still have a job to do here. And so long as that is true, I have no intention of tucking my tail between my legs and running.”

Fiona held up the bloodstained binder. “Those bastards back there murdered Elena Vedenskava to prevent her from passing these medical records to us. Right?”

Both men nodded slowly.

“Well, then,” the dark-haired woman told them grimly. “As I see it, that means that Colonel Smith and I had better do our best to uncover the secrets thev contain.”

PART THREE

Berlin

The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA)—the Federal Criminal Police—served as the German equivalent of the American FBI. Like the FBI, its several thousand law enforcement officers and forensic experts provided assistance and coordination for the separate police forces of the sixteen individual German states.

And like the FBI, the BKA was also responsible for investigating a wide range of high-level crimes, among them, international arms and narcotics traffick-ing, money laundering, and terrorism.

The agency was in the middle of a large-scale reorganization. The bulk of its personnel and facilities were being gradually relocated to Berlin, with the predictable result being a certain amount of chaos and confusion as BKA units settled into unfamiliar locations around the city.

The State Security Division—charged with investigating high-level political crimes that threatened the Federal Republic—was no exception. Its Berlin-based officers and clerical staff now occupied a five-story building in the Nikolaiviertel, St. Nicholas’ Quarter, a labyrinth of crowded streets, alleys,

restaurants, and small museums along the brick-lined banks of the River Spree. The building itself was a modern reconstruction of a centuries-old structure that had once housed medieval merchants and artisans.

Inside the foyer. Otto Fromm sat behind a long counter, manning the front desk at the beginning of the long, dull night shift. He yawned, already bored with the tabloid newspaper he’d brought to keep himself occupied. As a young man straight out of technical school, he had joined the BKA as a lowly uniformed security guard, imagining himself one day promoted to chief detective on the basis of sheer merit. Twenty years later, he was still trapped in the same dead-end position, though at least with substantially higher pay and six weeks of vacation time.

The door from the outside opened in a quick gust of clean, cold air.

He looked up from his paper. A tall, long-legged young woman with fashionably short, almost spiky, auburn hair, a straight nose, firm chin, and very bright, deep blue eyes crossed the foyer, coming straight toward his desk. She was already unbuttoning her long winter coat, revealing a slender figure with small but firm breasts that set his pulse racing.

Fromm’s eyes brightened at the sight of such an attractive woman, especially one without a wedding band on her left hand. His last live-in girlfriend had kicked him out of her apartment just six months ago and now his drinking pals were all urging him to “get back in the hunt.” Unconsciously, he sat up straighter and smoothed back his unruly, thinning hair. “Yes, Fraulein?” he asked politely. “Can I help you?”

She handed him her Bundeskriminalamt identity card with a dazzling smile. “I’m sure you can. My name’s Vogel. Petra Vogel. I’m with the Information Technology Division in Wiesbaden.” Then she swung her leather attache case lightly onto the top of the counter and unsnapped its flap, revealing an array of CD-ROMs nestled in separate compartments. “I’m here to install new software upgrades for your local-area network.”

Fromm looked up at her, unable to conceal his bew ilderment. “Now? But almost everyone here has already gone home for the night.”

“That’s precisely the point,” the young woman said pleasantly, still smiling.

“You see, to run the upgrades, it’s possible that I’ll have to shut down parts of

your system for an hour or two. This way nobody is seriously inconvenienced or loses too much valuable computer time.”

“But you still need an official authorization for that,” Fromm muttered, fumbling quickly through the papers piled on his desk. He looked up at her in confusion. “And I don’t see any approval for this software upgrade. There’s nothing listed here. Plus, Herr Zentner, our IT specialist, is away on vacation for the next three weeks. Somewhere on the beach in Thailand, I think.”

“Lucky for him,” the auburn-haired woman said enviously. “I wish I could get away to the sun and sand, too.” She sighed. “Look, I don’t know why you don’t have the right paperwork. Someone, somewhere, must have fouled things up. Wiesbaden was supposed to have faxed all that here yesterday.”

She rummaged through one of the inner compartments of her attache case and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Here’s my copy. See?”

Chewing his lower lip nervously, the security guard got up from his chair.

He read quickly through the copy that she handed him. Written on official letterhead and signed by the director of the Information Technology Division, it ordered Computer Specialist Petra Vogel to conduct a systems software upgrade at the Bundeskriminalamt’s Nikolaiviertel office.

Fromm’s eyes brightened as he saw a discrepancy. “Here’s the problem!”

he said, pointing to a telephone number appearing at the top of the document. “This was sent to the wrong place. Our fax number here ends in 46 46.

But your office in Wiesbaden sent this to 46 47 instead. That’s probably the number of a local bakery or a flower shop or something.”

The young woman leaned forw ard to take a look herself, bringing her face very close to his. He swallowed hard, suddenly feeling as though his shirt collar and tie were choking him. The fresh, clean floral scent of her perfume wafted into his flared nostrils.

“Unbelievable,” she murmured. “They muffed it. And now the office in Wiesbaden is closed until tomorrow morning.” She sighed. “So now what am I supposed to do? Go back to my hotel and kick up my heels while waiting for my director’s slow-witted secretary to untangle the mess he’s made?”

Fromm shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t see what else you can do.”

The auburn-haired woman sighed in regret. “That’s a shame.” With a slight pout, she began closing her attache case. “You see, I really wanted to finish this project tonight, so that I could take a day’s leave tomorrow, to explore

more of Berlin.”

Fromm caught what he thought might be a subtle nuance in her words. He cleared his throat. “You have friends here to visit? Or family, perhaps?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” She looked meaningfully up at him from under her long, half-lowered eyelashes. “I had hoped to find a new friend. Someone who knows all the ins and outs here in Berlin. Someone who could show me around … maybe even take me to the most exciting new clubs.” Then she sighed. “But I guess I’ll be tied up here instead, just trying to finish the job before my train leaves—”

“No, no, Fraulein,” Fromm said in a strangled voice. “That won’t be necessary.” He held up her authorization letter. “Look, it’s simple enough. What I’ll do is make another copy of this for our records. Then we’ll just pretend it arrived by fax, as it should have. And then you can go ahead and finish your work this evening, as planned.”

“You could do that? Bend the rules that way for me, I mean?” the young woman asked.

“Oh, yes,” Fromm said expansively, puffing out his chest. “Absolutely. I’m the senior security officer on duty. So it’s not a problem. Not a problem at all.”

“That would be wonderful,” she said delightedly, smiling directly at him in a way that made his mouth go dry.

Twenty minutes later, at a landing on the building’s deserted fifth floor, the woman who called herself Petra Vogel stood watching Fromm clomp heavily back down the central staircase running all the way to the ground level. Once he was well out of sight, CIA officer Randi Russell wrinkled her nose in disgust. “What an idiot,” she murmured. “Luckily for me.”

Then she took a deep breath, mentally preparing herself for the risky work ahead. Now that she had vamped her way in through the castle gates, it was time to storm the inner keep. She dipped her hand into her coat and came out with a pair of skintight surgical gloves.

She slipped the gloves on, then turned and entered the room unlocked for her by the ever-helpful Otto Fromm. She carried a set of lockpicks that would have done the job, but it was nice not to have needed them. Even the most sophisticated picks left small scratches inside locks that would show up under close investigation. This operation depended on her getting in and out of the Nikolaiviertel building without leaving hard evidence behind that could tie the CIA to the strange and unexplained actions of the phony Petra Vogel.

Randi closed the door firmly behind her and then carefully examined the layout of the room. Humming and clicking softly, various pieces of compact electronic equipment—sophisticated servers, a modular hub, and routers-lined the walls, connected by a maze of cabling. This was the heart of the State Security Division’s local-area network. Every workstation, printer, and personal computer in the building was tied together by the hardware contained in this one room. Also from here, high-speed, high-security connections linked each office to the main computer systems, databases, and archives inside the BKA’s Wiesbaden headquarters.

She nodded in satisfaction. Phis was exactly where she needed to be. With Karl Zentner, the division’s IT specialist, still off on his long holiday in Thailand, it was unlikely that anyone else here in Berlin would waste much time poking around inside the computer network that he was responsible for maintaining. In the meantime, thanks to her forged ID card, fake paperwork, and Fromm’s over-inflated sexual ego, she had a free pass to try some in-depth digging of her own.

Randi checked her watch. At best, she would only have an hour or so before the balding BKA security guard took his next coffee break and came tramping up the stairs to pester her. It was time to get busy. She moved quickly to a workstation set up in one corner. Rows of well-thumbed software and hardware tech manuals stuffed full of yellow Post-It notes indicated that this must be where Zentner spent most of his time. She pulled up the nearest swivel chair, sat down at the machine, and opened her attache case.

Three of the six CD-ROMs it contained stored legitimate variations of the same information management, access, and retrieval programs used by the Bundeskriminalamt. Two were blanks. The sixth disc held something very different indeed, a piece of highly specialized and extremely advanced software prepared by the CIA’s Office of Research and Development.

Humming quietly to herself, she tapped the keyboard space bar, kicking Zentner’s flat-screen display out of sleep mode. A page topped by the BKA’s logo—a stylized German heraldic eagle with outstretched wings—appeared, welcoming her to the State Security Division’s local-area network. She slid the special CD-ROM into the appropriate drive. The computer whined softly, rapidly transferring information from the disc to its main hard drive. The default screen vanished.

For nearly a minute, Randi held her breath, waiting. Suddenly a small text box flashed onto the blank screen in front of her: DOWNLOAD COMPLETE. SYSTEM READY.

Her shoulder muscles tightened. Her eyes narrowed. Now to find out whether the Agency programmers who had written this code were worth more than their very modest government salaries and pensions. If not, what she was about to do would set off top-level computer security alarms from here to Wiesbaden and back again.

Frowning now as she concentrated, Randi leaned forward and carefully typed in a command of her own: ACTIVATE JANUS.