Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (26 page)

He broke off suddenly, hearing a horse whinny behind them. The Spetsnaz lieutenant and his two men swung round in surprise —and saw a voung boy staring down at them in astonishment from the top of the hill.

The boy, no more than twelve or thirteen years old, wore the long wool coat, loose white shirt, and baggv brown trousers tied at the waist of a typical Kazakh herdsman. He held the reins of a shaggy steppe pony, which was busy nuzzling the withered grass. A bedroll, tent, and supplies were piled up behind the pony’s saddle.

Carefully, Timofeyev and his men rose to their feet. “What are you doing here?” the Russian snapped. His hand edged slowly, almost imperceptibly, toward the holster at his side. “Well?”

“My father and I are scouting the land, preparing for the spring,” the boy said quickly, still staring with wide eyes at the three camouflage-smocked soldiers. “When we move our herds out of their winter pens around Ural’sk, we need to know where the best forage and water will be found.”

‘Tour father is with you?” Timofeyev asked gently.

“Oh, no.” The bov shook his head proudlv. “He is riding the land to the west. This stretch of hill country is my responsibility.”

“You are a good son,” the Spetsnaz lieutenant agreed absentmindedly.

Smoothly, he drew his pistol —a silenced P6 Makarov — worked the slide to chamber a round, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

Hit high in the chest, the bov rocked back under the impact. His eyes widened even further, now in horror, as he stared down at the blood running down his torn white shirt. Then, slowly, he fell to his knees.

Timofeyev chambered another round and shot him again, this time in the head. The Kazakh boy crumpled and went down. He lay curled up among the tall stalks of dead grass.

His pony whinnied in alarm. Panicked by the hot, coppery smell of fresh blood, the small sturdy horse reared up on its hind legs and then broke free, galloping back over the hill and out of sight. Belukov, the Spetsnaz sergeant, snarled and sprinted toward the crest, followed a second later by his two comrades.

At the top, he tucked the AKSU-74 against his shoulder and sighted down the barrel, drawing a bead on the steppe pony racing away down the reverse slope. He flipped the firing selector to full automatic.

“No!” Timofeyev knocked the submachine gun down before the sergeant could open fire. “Shooting the beast now would make too much noise. Let it go. The farther that horse runs the better for us. This way, when the Kazakhs come looking for the boy, they won’t know where to start.”

Belukov nodded sullenly, accepting the reproof.

“You and Pausin dig a hole over there,” the lieutenant continued, jerking his thumb toward the closest stand of trees. “While you’re burying the body, I’ll signal headquarters that we’re moving to our alternate position.”

“Shouldn’t we head back across the border?” Belukov asked in surprise.

“Before the Kazakhs start their search for the kid?”

“We have our orders,” Timofeyev reminded him icily. He shrugged. “One regrettable death makes no difference to our mission. After all, when the balloon goes up, other innocents will die. That is the nature of war.”

Berlin

Ranch Russell took the steps up to the embassy’s third-floor two at a time. She paused briefly at the landing to clip her Central Intelligence Agency photo ID

card to the breast pocket of her navy blue jacket. Then she pushed open a fire door and turned left, marching fast down a wide corridor. Harried-looking embassy file clerks carrying armloads of visa applications and reams of other official correspondence from one busy office to another saw her coming and moved quickly out of her way.

The tall, square-jawed Marine corporal on duty outside the secure conference room stepped forward to meet her. With one hand on his bolstered sidearm, he peered closely at her ID and then nodded. “You can go right on in, Ms. Russell. Mr. Bennett is expecting you.”

Inside the conference room itself, Curt Bennett, the head of the technical team sent out from the CIA’s Langley headquarters, barely glanced up when she came in. Red-eyed with fatigue, unshaven, and thoroughly disheveled, he sat hunched over a pair of linked personal computers set up at one end of a long table. He and his team had spent all of last night and the morning so far dissecting the material she had copied from the Bundeskriminalamt archives.

Cups of cold coffee and half-f soda cans were scattered around the room, some on the table, some on the floor, and some perched precariously on chairs. Even the air smelled stale.

Randi pulled up a chair and sat down beside him. “I got your page, Curt,”

she told the senior analyst—a short, fidgety man with very little hair and a pair

of thick, wire-rimmed spectacles. “What can you tell me?”

“That your wild-eyed guess was on target,” he replied, with a quick, toothy grin. “Someone inside the BKA has been a bad, bad boy—at least where Herr Professor Wulf Renke is concerned.”

Randi breathed out, feeling verv much as though an enormous weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The more she had studied Renke’s past, the more she had become convinced that someone high up in German law enforcement was protecting him. How else had the biological weapons scientist so easily avoided capture after the Wall came down? And how else was he able to travel, seemingly at will, to so many of the world’s rogue states —Iraq, North

Korea, Syria, and Libya, among others?

Of course, being sure of her hunch was one thing. Risking her career and the Agency’s relationship with its German ally by breaking into the BKA’s archives was quite another. Hearing that her gamble had paid off was a huge relief. If this operation went sour, the CIA brass at Langley could still toss her

to the wolves, but at least they could no longer do it while claiming she was wrong on the facts.

Randi leaned forward. “Show me.”

“Most of the files JANUS picked up were innocuous,” Bennett said. His fingers flew over the keyboard of one of the linked computers while he talked, rapidly bringing documents onto its displav screen and then just as rapidly whisking them back into virtual electronic oblivion. “Standard stuff, really.

Pretty much the same kind of thing we have on Renke in our databases-reports of rumors heard by field agents, mentions of possible sightings that didn’t pan out, routine follow-up queries from senior officials … all that jazz.”

“So what’s different?” she asked.

“What’s different, Randi,” Bennett told her with another big grin, “is that the BKA computer system is full of ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Randi asked steadilv.

“Deleted files and e-mails,” the CIA computer expert explained. “See, most word processing and database management programs have a common flaw, at least from the vantage point of anyone trying to erase incriminating documents or records.”

“Which is?”

Bennett shrugged. “You can hit the delete key and see a file go ‘poof.’ But that doesn’t really mean that it’s gone forever, shredded into unreadable bits and bytes. It’s actually just been shuffled away, ready to be overwritten when the system needs the space. But since e-mails and most files don’t take up that much room —especially on huge, interconnected systems—they’re usually still there, waiting to be retrieved by the right recovery software.”

“Gee, Curt, let me guess,” Randi said drily. “That’s something you included in JANUS.”

“Yep. That we did.”

“But aren’t there programs designed to wipe deleted files permanently?”

she asked after a moment’s thought.

Bennett nodded. “Sure. And a lot of private companies and government agencies use them routinely these days. But almost no one ever bothers going back through their systems to scrub out all the old, supposedly deleted, material that’s been accumulating in various nooks and crannies.”

“Like these ghost files you discovered,” Randi realized.

“Exactly,” the CIA technical expert confirmed. “And that’s how we spotted the way someone inside the BKA has been shielding Wulf Renke. Check out some of his early handiwork.” With a few quick commands, he pulled up a file on one of the computers.

Randi studied the displayed document in silence for a few moments, watching as Bennett clicked from page to page. It was a digitized version of Renke’s official East German government personnel dossier, complete with a black-and-white photograph of the scientist’s face, his fingerprints, a detailed physical description, and brief records of his birth, education, and research.

The picture showed a jowly, round-faced man with wavy, dark hair and thick, bushy eyebrows.

“That’s the one the Bundeskriminalamt has in its current archives,” Bennett said flatly. “The data they send out whenever some other law-enforcement or intelligence agency—say us, or the FBI, or MI6 —gets interested in tracking down Renke and requests information from the German government.”

“But there’s another version of the dossier?” Randi guessed. “An earlier copy of the original that someone erased?”

Bennett nodded. “Watch this.” Again, his fingers danced across the keys.

Another set of digitized images from Renke’s East German personnel file appeared on the second computer screen.

Randi glanced from one to the other, comparing them. Her eyebrows rose in dismay. “Jesus,” she muttered.

The original version of the file showed a different photograph of a very different-looking man, this one much slimmer, with short white hair, and a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. The typed physical description matched this photograph, and it was clear, even on a quick inspection, that the fingerprints in this dossier were not the same ones appended to the newer file.

“No wonder no one ever lays a glove on Renke,” Randi said bitterly.

“Thanks to that forged dossier, we’ve been looking for the wrong guy, probably somebody who’s been dead since at least 1989. Meanwhile, the real Wulf Renke can waltz in and out of just about any country he chooses, confident that his fingerprints and face won’t set off any warning bells.”

“Yep,” Bennett agreed. He gently patted the side of one of the computers.

“And the more we dig into the material you swiped, the more we find evidence of a continuing pattern of protection for Herr Professor Renke. For pretty much the past fifteen years, any genuine sightings of Renke have been routinely altered by the same BKA source. And anyone trying to follow up on those forged reports must have found themselves tearing off on a series of really wild-goose chases.”

For a moment, Randi eyed the shorter man carefully. Then she grinned.

“Okay, Curt. I know you’re itching to dazzle me with your knowledge. So spill it. Who is the traitor inside the Bundeskriminalamt? Who’s been covering up for Renke all these years.”

“His name is Ulrich Kessler,” Bennett said matter-of-factly. “Basically, the guy’s electronic fingerprints—his network user ID and his passwords—are all over those deleted files. Plus, he was perfectly positioned to help Renke evade arrest when the Wall went down.”

“How so?”

“Kessler was the ranking BKA officer in charge of the original investigation,” Bennett told her bluntly. “The Renke case was almost entirely his show, right from its promising start all the way to its inglorious and frustrating

finish.”

“Swell. Just swell.” Randi stared at the “ghost” dossier for a few seconds more and then shook her head in disgust. “And where is this son of a bitch Kessler stationed now?”

“Right here in Berlin,” Bennett replied. “But he’s been promoted a long way up through the ranks.” He smiled cynically. “Probably as a reward for his first big failure, at least if the Germans work the same way we do.”

Randi snorted. “Go on. Give me the bad news.”

“Ulrich Kessler is one of the BKA’s most senior administrators,” Bennett said quietly. He shrugged. “In fact, he’s basically one of the right-hand men for Germany’s Minister of the Interior.”

Strike Force Lead, 164th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment The twin-tailed Su-34 fighter-bomber raced low over the gently rolling countryside, roaring southwest through the pitch-black night at nearly eight hundred kilometers an hour. The aircraft shuddered and bounced sporadically, buffeted by turbulent currents of warmer and colder air.

The Su-34’s two-man crew sat side-by-side in its large cockpit, with the pilot/commander on the left and the navigator/weapons officer on the right.

Both crewmen were sweating now in their G-suits, intensely focused on the mission at hand. Softly glowing multi-function displays allowed each man to monitor the critical systems under his control. But the pilot, a sturdy, middle-aged Russian Air Force major, spent almost every moment peering intently through his infrared heads-up display, or 11UD, carefully scanning the sky and ground ahead.

To help avoid detection by enemy radar, they were flying at an altitude of less than two hundred meters —and at this speed that left no room for pilot error or inattention. Small pools of white light, signs of isolated villages and lone

farm compounds, streaked toward them out of the green-tinted darkness and then vanished just as quickly astern.

“Twenty kilometers to primary target,” the navigator, a younger captain, announced quietly at last. He pushed a button on one of the displays set at his right knee. “Cue up.”

“Understood,” the major muttered, impatiently blinking away a small droplet of sweat that stung his right eye. A small box appeared on his HUD, above and just a few degrees to the left of the Su-34’s current flight path. The box was a navigation cue supplied by their onboard computer—a visual guide to their primary ground attack target. He pulled back on the stick, climbing steeply to two thousand meters or so and turning slightly until the target box was centered on his display.

The brighter glow of city lights appeared ahead, spreading across the horizon as they closed in. A web of roads and rail lines converged on the growing sea of lights, cutting straight across the darkened landscape. The darker ribbon of a wide river, the Dnipro, came into view to the east. Days and weeks of intensive map study paid off as he recognized the outer eastern suburbs of Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.