Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (4 page)

Dempsey spoke into his handheld radio. “Co ahead, Sarge.”

“Dispatch reports an emergency call from an office inside the DIA’s JCS

Support Directorate. Somebody in there just punched in 911, and then left the phone off the hook. The operator thinks she can hear someone breathing, but she can’t get anyone to respond. I want you to go check it out.”

Dempsey frowned. The Defense Intelligence Agency’s several Pentagon office suites were incredibly sensitive areas—ordinarily completely off-limits to anyone without at least a Top Secret clearance. He was authorized to override those restrictions if necessary, but doing so was going to raise one hell of

a hornet’s nest. Even if this was just a false alarm, he’d be spending the next several hours filling out non-disclosure forms and being interrogated.

He sighed and trotted off down the corridor. “On my way.”

Dempsey paused outside the locked outer doors of the DIA section’s office complex. A light on the electronic security station there shone bright red.

Anyone trying to force their way through would automatically trigger alarms throughout the massive building. With another frown, he dug the shift-issued special police ID card out of his uniform pocket and ran it through the machine. The light shifted to yellow, indicating that he had been granted emergency permission to enter.

He pushed through the security doors and found himself in another hallway, this one leading deeper into the building. Several soundproofed glass doors opened onto this corridor. Silently now, the policeman moved faster toward the office his sergeant had identified as the source of the abortive 911

call, trying very hard not to look too closely at anything in the rooms he passed.

A painted sign on the door he was looking for read DIRECTORATE FOR CURRENT INTELLIGENCE—RUSSIA DIVISION. Dempsey knew enough about the different intelligence outfits to realize that the men and women who worked here were directly responsible for briefing the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs on all significant military and political developments. They were the top analysts charged with pulling together the bits and pieces of information gathered by human agents, from satellite photographs, and from intercepted radio, phone, and computer transmissions.

“Police!” he called out as he went inside. “Is anyone here? Hello?”

The corporal looked around carefully. The room was a tangle of desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and computers. The faint voice of the 91I operator still

trying to get a response guided him toward a desk in the far corner.

Dozens of file folders and prints of satellite photographs lay strewn across the desk and the carpeted floor around it. Despite his best efforts, the corporal

could not help reading the tags on some of them: 4TH GUARDS TANK

DIVISION — NARO-FOMINSK CANTONMENT, SIGNAL INTERCEPTS —45TH SPET-SNAZ BRIGADE, R\IL TRAFFIC ANALYSIS —MOSCOW MILITARY DISTRICT. Red warning stamps marked them all as being classified TOP SECRET or beyond.

Dempsey winced. Now he was in for it.

The computer on the desk hummed quietly to itself. A screen saver hid the contents of whatever document its owner had been working on and the police corporal was very careful not to touch anything around the machine. He looked down.

There, curled up next to an overturned chair, lay an older man. The skin on his face and neck was strangely mottled. He groaned once. His eyes flick-red partly open and then closed as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

e was still clutching the phone receiver in one hand. Clumps of his thick gray hair were falling out, revealing grotesque bald spots covered in a bright red rash.

Dempsey dropped to one knee, taking a closer look at the sick man. He felt for a pulse. It fluttered rapidly and irregularly under his fingertips. He swore once and grabbed his radio. “Sergeant, this is Dempsey! I need a medical team up here, pronto!”

February 16

Moscow

The ornate pinnacles and towers of the Kotelnicheskaya apartment block soared high above the city, offering an unsurpassed view west across the Moscow River toward the red brick walls and golden domes and spires of the Kremlin. Dozens of satellite dishes and radio and microwave antennae sprouted from every relatively open space on its elaborate facade. Kotelnicheskaya was one of Stalin’s massive “Seven Sisters”—seven enormous high-rises built around Moscow during the 1950s to close what the increasingly power-mad dictator believed was a humiliating “skyscraper gap” with the United States.

Once home to Communist Party officials and heavy-industry bosses, the enormous high-rise now mostly housed wealthy foreigners and members of the new Russian governing and business elite—those able to afford the rents on luxury flats that ran several thousand American dollars a month. The very highest floors, those immediately below a towering central needle topped by a giant gleaming gold star, commanded prices beyond the reach of all but the richest and most powerful men. To bring in even more money, several apartments at the very top had been converted into high-prestige corporate offices.

A tall, powerfully built man stood at a window in one of those renovated penthouse office suites. There were strands of gray in his pale blond hair, a color matched by his ice-gray eyes. He frowned, staring out across the darkened city. The long winter night still held Moscow in its freezing grip, but the sky overhead was turning faintly paler.

A secure phone chirped suddenly on the desk next to him. A digital read-out attached to the phone blinked to life, identifying the caller. He swung round and picked it up. “This is Moscow One. Go ahead.”

“This is Prague One,” a muffled, nasal-sounding voice said. “Petrenko is dead.”

The blond-haired man smiled. “Good. And the materials he stole from the hospital? The case files and biological samples?”

“Gone,” Prague One reported grimly. “They were in a briefcase that went into the river along with Petrenko.”

“Then the matter is closed.”

“Not quite,” the caller said slowly. “Before we caught up with him, Petrenko had arranged a rendezvous with another doctor, an American attending the same conference. They were talking together when we jumped them.”

“And?”

“The American broke free of our ambush,” Prague One admitted reluctant]}. “The Czech police have him in protective custody.”

The blond-haired man’s eyes narrowed. “How much does he know?”

The man known as Prague One swallowed hard. “I’m not sure. We think Petrenko managed to tell him something about the deaths before we arrived.

We’re also fairly sure that the Russian was planning to hand over the medical files and samples to him.”

Moscow One tightened his grip on the phone. “And just who is this interfering American?” he snapped.

“His name is Jonathan Smith,” the other man said. “According to the conference records, he’s a military doctor—a lieutenant colonel—assigned to one of their medical research institutes as a disease specialist.”

Smith? The blond-haired man frowned. He had the fleeting impression that he had heard that name before, but where? Somehow it seemed to ring a faint warning bell far back in his mind. He shook his head impatiently. He had more immediate concerns. “What are the Czech police doing now?”

“Dragging the river.”

“For the briefcase?”

“No,” Prague One replied. “We have an informant inside the police headquarters. They’re only looking for Petrenko’s corpse right now. For some reason the American is keeping his mouth shut about what he was told.”

The blond-haired man stared back out the window. “Will they find either one?”

“The body will turn up sooner or later,” the other man admitted. “But I am confident that the briefcase is gone forever. The Vltava is wide and its current is swift.”

“For your sake, I sincerely hope you are right,” the blond man said quietly.

“What about this man Smith?” Prague One asked after a moment’s uncomfortable silence. “He could become a serious problem.”

The blond-haired man frowned again. That was true enough. The American doctor might not yet have told the Czech authorities what he had learned, but eventually he would report Petrenko’s claims and the news of his murder to his nation’s intelligence services. If so, the CIA and others were likely to begin paying entirely too much attention to new reports of other mysterious illnesses. And that was something he and his employers could not risk.

Not yet anyway.

The man code-named Moscow One nodded to himself. So be it. Acting openly against this man Smith would be dangerous. If he disappeared or died, the Prague police would certainly begin asking even more awkward questions about the Petrenko murder, and passing those questions on to Washington.

But letting him live was potentially more dangerous. “Eliminate the American if at all possible,” he ordered coldly. “But do it carefully—and leave no one alive this time.”

Prague

The tiny interrogation room near the back of the main Prague police station at Konviktska 14 was sparsely furnished. There were just two bartered plastic chairs and an old wood table covered with dents, gouges, and the scorch marks left by countless cigarettes carelessly ground out on its surface. Jon Smith sat stiffly in one of the chairs wearing borrowed slacks and a sweatshirt.

Even the slightest movement made him uncomfortably aware of his own aching cuts and bruises.

He frowned. How much longer were the Czech authorities going to hold him here? There was no clock in this little room, and his wristwatch had been ruined by its immersion in the icy waters of the Vltava. He glanced up. The faint light leaking in through a tiny window high on one wall showed that it was already past dawn.

Smith fought down a yawn. After they rescued him from the riverbank, the Czech police had taken down his account of the vicious attack that had killed Valentin Petrenko and brought in a medic to patch up the bullet crease across his shoulder. In the process, his belongings, including his wallet, passport, and hotel room key, had been hustled away for “safekeeping.” By that time, it had been very nearly midnight and, after bringing him a late supper of soup, they had “suggested” that he use a cot in one of their empty holding cells. He smiled wryly, remembering the long, cold, and mostly sleepless night. At least they had left the door unlocked, making it clear that he was not exactly under arrest, only “helping the authorities with necessary inquiries.”

Bells tolled somewhere close by, probably those of the Church of St. Ur-sula, calling the devout to early morning mass and voung children to classes at the adjoining convent school. As if on cue, the door opened and a lean, pale-eyed police officer, immaculate in a neatly pressed uniform, came in. His light gray slacks, blue shirt, carefully knotted black tie, and darker gray jacket

marked him as a member of the Prague Municipal Police —the more powerful of the two rival law enforcement agencies operating in the Czech capital.

The ID badge clipped to his jacket identified him as Inspector Tomas Karasek. He dropped easily into the chair directly across from Smith.

“Good morning, Colonel,” the police officer said casually in clear, comprehensible English. He slid a pair of police artist sketches across the table.

“Please tell me what you think of these drawings. The) are based on the statement you gave my colleagues last night. Do they match what you remember of the man who you claim killed Dr. Petrenko?”

Smith took the drawings and examined them closelv. The first showed the face of a man with long, tangled hair, dark, brooding eyes, and a small skull earring. The second was identical, except that the artist had added a bandage over what appeared to be a badly broken nose and sketched in bruising all around it. He nodded. “That’s him. No question about it.”

“Then he is one of the Romany,” Karasek said coolly. He tapped the pictures with one forefinger. “I believe you would call him a Gypsy in your country.”

Smith looked up in surprise. “You’ve already identified this guy7”

“By name, no,” the Czech police officer admitted. “No one matching his precise description appears in our files. But the earring, the hair, the clothing … these are all signs which tell me that he is one of their people.”

He grimaced. “By their very nature, the Romany are criminals. Even their youngest children are raised to be petty thieves, pickpockets, and beggars.

They are nothing but troublemakers, scum, and vermin.”

With an effort. Smith concealed his distaste for this expression of unthinking bigotry. For all their very real faults, the Romany, a poverty-stricken and rootless people, were commonly used as scapegoats by the richer, more settled societies in which they roamed. It was an old game and all too often a deadly one.

“Dr. Petrenko’s death was not exactly an act of petty theft,” he said care-fv, reining in his temper. “More like cold-blooded murder. These guys knew his name, remember? That’s prettv goddamned personal for a simple bunch of muggers.”

Karasek shrugged. “They may have followed him to the Charles Bridge from his hotel. These Romany street gangs often prey on tourists, especially if they scent rich pickings.”

Something in the way he said it sounded false to Smith. He shook his head. “You don’t really believe any of that crap, do you?”

“I don’t? Then what should I believe?” the other man asked quietly. The pale-eyed Czech policeman looked narrowly across the tabic. “Do you have some theory of your own. Colonel? One that you would like to share with me, perhaps?”

Smith stayed quiet. This was dangerous ground. There were limits to what he could safely tell this man. He was sure that Petrenko had been killed to stop him from handing over the medical files and samples he had smuggled out of Moscow, but there was no real evidence left to back that up. Both the briefcase and the Russian had vanished in the Vltava. In the meantime, pushing the idea that this was a political murder was too likely to entangle him in an investigation that could drag on for weeks, and risk revealing skills and connections he had sworn to keep secret forever.