Midnight Promises (5 page)

He and Jacko weren’t clueless. In fact, they were fucking good. Good luck to anyone trying to attack them in their homes. So yeah, Lauren was going to stay with Jacko for a while.

And Felicity was going to stay with him.

Because his home was secure and he was one farther step away from Lauren.

Because he was a trained medic and could take care of her medically.

Because…because.

Metal bent over Felicity so all she’d see was his face.

“Felicity?” She licked her lips and nodded. Her beautiful eyes shifted left to right as she watched his eyes. She opened her mouth and closed it. Talking took too much energy. That was okay. She didn’t have to talk. She just needed to be informed. “I’m taking you home with me. If the guy after you somehow knew where you were headed, he won’t find anyone at Lauren’s. But we’ll have cameras running so if he stops by we’ll catch him on film. Lauren will be staying with Jacko and you’ll be staying with me. My home is secure and I can look after you. You’ll be just fine. I’ll be there if infection sets in or you need anything. Nod if you understand me.”

She nodded, eyes huge.

“Nod again if this is okay with you.”

She hesitated a second and his heart sank. Because the hard truth was she was coming home with him whether she liked it or not. Someone was after her and was not going to get a second crack at it. After a second or two she nodded her head.

“Good girl. I’m going to carry you to my vehicle. Is that okay?”

That earned him a small smile and a nod and something in his chest gave a hard thump.

She was staying with him.

Yeah.

Chapter Three

Manhattan

Borodin sipped his after-dinner Armagnac and thought of lost worlds and worlds to come.

A generation ago, he and a group of other young KGB officers had seen the handwriting on the wall, though none of them in that long-ago summer and fall of 1989 could ever have imagined how great the loss would actually be. No one imagined that the Soviet Union could actually fall.

At the time, all their hopes had been pinned on the great closed city of Chelyabinsk, one of an archipelago of
naukograd
, science cities. The rest of the Soviet Union was going to hell, the situation even worse than the idiots of the Politburo realized, but in the
naukograd
, things held. Orderly and wealthy and elite, great things were coming if only the country could hold out.

The greatest invention, what was going to change the world forever, was being slowly pieced together by a genius-level nuclear physicist named Nikolai Darin in Chelyabinsk, a
naukograd
specializing in nuclear weaponry. Darin was working on man-portable nuclear weapons, called Deti, Little Ones, and they were going to change Russian history. World history.

Borodin had seen the specs of the nuclear weapons. They could fit into a backpack. He had no idea how Darin could do it, but the end result would be nuclear bombs that were shielded and could be carried in on foot and manually set with a timer. The backpacks were light enough to be easily carried and would pass unnoticed.

As a KGB officer, Borodin had trained with backpacks heavier than the bombs.

The KGB plan had been to deploy six man-portable nuclear weapons in America, one for each of the great cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami. All the great military deterrents America could deploy would be useless. They were bombs that had no trajectory, could not be destroyed in midair. The bombs would suddenly, without any warning and with no known source, explode. The President of the United States couldn’t counter attack because no one would claim the bombs.

Six cities destroyed, radioactive deserts until the end of time. America plunged into another Great Depression or worse. The Soviet Union finally ready to soar after having lost Afghanistan.

When pressed, Darin could give no deadline for completion of the bombs.

The KGB was putting enormous pressure on Darin’s team. The Deti were necessary.

The Soviet Union pulled back from Afghanistan in February, 1989. The Berlin Wall fell in November. In December, Darin was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. The evening of the ceremony, he and his wife were killed in a car accident.

Hearing the news, Borodin and three other KGB officers rushed to Chelyabinsk only to find…nothing. The Deti were not there. Darin’s colleagues swore that the Deti were years from reality.

Two years after that, the Soviet Union was no more, and the country plunged into chaos. Tanks, weapons, RPGs—gone. Entire missile silos were lost. No one ever mentioned man-portable nukes ever again.

Borodin and his coconspirators, now that there was no Soviet Union to save, scattered to the winds. Like everyone else, Borodin plundered the state that was falling apart before his very eyes, grabbing rights to natural gas fields in Siberia.

He made his peace with being on the losing side of history by becoming a very rich man.

Yet history has a way of bouncing back into the present. Borodin’s world turned upside down.

The American government had been peppered with spies and moles put there by the KGB for decades. An entire machine had been built for this—children in remote locations trained from a young age to be infiltrated into America. They attended special English-only schools and grew up watching videotaped American TV programs specially airlifted into the Soviet Union. Access to the finest dentists was provided because the one thing the
Amerikanski
did well was dentistry. The program had been a wild success and spies had been seeded everywhere, a battalion of them. The program was code named Operation Yankee.

But then the Soviet Union fell. Nobody could have predicted that the country they had sworn allegiance to, the country that had given them a lifetime journey to fulfill, would disappear, almost overnight.

The KGB office running the moles melted away. The KGB itself disappeared and reappeared as the FSB with an entirely different staff.

The moles aged, rose up through the ranks, and most of them had forgotten the motherland. After all they’d been trained to be Americans from the age of ten onward.

Borodin had forgotten all about the program, busy building Intergaz into one of the largest corporations in the world.

And then a report crossed his desk.

A Russian double agent recruited in 1987 into the FBI under the auspices of Operation Yankee. Career FBI, now retired with a very nice pension. In the early years he’d faithfully filed reports but in the end, with no one to read them or even accept them, he’d simply gone native. Had a great career in three major metropolitan areas, won several commendations and had forgotten a lot of his Russian. Yuri Grigori had permanently become Roy Gregory.

During the run-up to his retirement Gregory came across some reports from the Domestic Terrorism desk, Russian subsection, which after 9/11 had become a dusty backwater. Gregory had spent his last years at the FBI overseeing the transferral of paper documents to hard disk.

He’d found what he considered something of minor interest and, as a last volley of his truncated career as a Russian mole, had sent it on to his masters at the FSB.

Knowing that Borodin had always been interested in the object of the report, someone faithful to him in the FSB forwarded it to him.

This changed absolutely everything. Everything he thought he knew had been wrong.

Nikolai Darin was
alive.

Or rather, he was dead but he’d died in 2009 not 1989.

He hadn’t died after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, he’d
defected
.

A sharp encrypted email to Roy Gregory to gather more intel had spooked the man and only the promise of a substantial payment ensured his cooperation.

The FBI files were classified, of course. But a lot of time had gone by and Russia wasn’t a priority. They were hard to get but not impossible. Certainly not for someone who had a hundred thousand incentives like Gregory did.

Nikolai Darin and his pregnant wife, Irina, defected to the CIA in Sweden right after the Nobel Prize ceremony on December 10, 1989. The CIA faked their death, debriefed them and then passed them on to the FBI, who debriefed them again and then they were finally settled by the U.S. Marshals Service in their new identity.

The files made interesting reading. Borodin could almost feel the frustration the Americans felt with Darin. Because it was clear he was supposed to deliver…something. Something he never did deliver.

Borodin knew exactly what that something was.

Six somethings. Six tiny but powerful nuclear bombs that could destroy a country with no payback.

Darin hid the six bombs and the codes. The Deti were somewhere in America, Borodin was sure of it. Darin and his wife were dead, but there was a daughter.

It took another fucking hundred thousand dollars to get Gregory to dig farther into the files but he finally came up with the current identity of the daughter, who’d changed her name. Her birth certificate said Katrin Valk but she changed her name when she turned eighteen. She was now Felicity Ward.

Felicity Ward, mid-twenties and a graduate of MIT, lived in Burlingham, Vermont.

There was a photo taken of her upon graduating the technical university and Borodin, who had eyes to see, could see Mother Russia in every line of her very pretty face. She looked like her mother, who had been a famous beauty.

It was as if the world had been slumbering, just waiting for Borodin to push the levers of the world and move it in a new direction. Suddenly, the pace of events picked up.

Via a roundabout route, Borodin contacted a
vor
, head of one of the great Mafiya clans, who in turn had strategic alliances with the Chechens, who in turn had connections to their terrorist brethren. Borodin was delighted not to have contact himself because he could never hide his distaste for the kind of men who’d delivered the first nearly fatal blow to the Soviet Union. But via the
vor
he was able to send a clear message.

What was the going price for a ‘small’ nuclear weapon, that did not require a missile launch?

Ten million dollars was the price. Each.

Borodin was very rich but sixty million dollars was sixty million dollars. And someone else was willing to set them off. The goatherds hadn’t even asked if it would be possible to detonate them remotely which had been a big problem in Borodin’s day. How to deliver without sacrificing the deliverer.

Luckily, the Islamists didn’t have that problem. They had plenty of
kretin
lining up to sacrifice themselves for the cause, stepping instantly into paradise after blowing themselves up.

Perfect. Absolutely perfect. A whole worldwide movement willing to bring America down. They’d happily take the blame should a devastated America still have some resources left for retaliation. Russia would watch America implode, take revenge on the wrong people with what resources they had left and happily scoop up Europe and bring its traitorous breakaway provinces back into the fold. Russia would become the indispensable country.

And Borodin himself would be sixty million dollars richer.

Doing well by doing good.

Of course, he needed the girl. Darinova.

He checked his Patek Philippe and frowned. Anatoli should have reported in by now. He’d sent one of his ambitious young managers to intercept the girl. Anatoli Lagoshin. He’d volunteered, hoping it would further his career.

So where was he?

In that very instant Borodin’s cell phone rang and he smiled. Yes. Yes, perfect. He was moving with the very tides of history. He could feel it in his bones.

He was still smiling as he checked the caller and accepted the call. He wasn’t smiling ten seconds later.

“I’ve lost her,” Anatoli said.

*

“
Pizdets!
”
Fuck!

Anatoli Lagoshin winced as he heard his boss swear in a low vicious tone. Borodin usually had himself on a tight rein. His cold-bloodedness was famous inside Intergaz. In the five years Anatoli had worked for Borodin as part of Borodin’s personal staff, he’d never even heard the oligarch raise his voice.

It was moments like this that Anatoli remembered that Vladimir Borodin had not always been an oligarch. He’d once been a colonel in the KGB.

And he, Anatoli Lagoshin, had failed
that
man. The man who had sent thousands of men and women to their deaths or to the gulag, which was the same thing. The man who had fought in Afghanistan and become famous for his ferocity, earning the nickname of the Butcher of Kabul.

Borodin’s voice was glacial. “How did that happen? You knew the plane she was on, you had a photograph. How the fuck could you lose her?”

“She got away and pulled a bomb alert at the airport.” Anatoli tried to keep the sullenness out of his voice. Damn it, this is not what he had studied so long and so hard to do. He wasn’t a thug. He was a modern businessman with two majors in business administration and accounting, who spoke excellent English, pretty good French and German, and passable Chinese. He wanted with all his heart to be a leader in the
new
Russia, built on business not bones.

“
How
did she pull a bomb alert?” Borodin sounded enraged but also bewildered. In many ways, though a canny businessman, Borodin was a dinosaur. Anatoli was sure he was imagining this Felicity Ward going up to a wall, breaking a glass pane and pulling down a handle.

The man was a dinosaur but a big dangerous one, with claws and teeth. Dinosaurs had ruled the earth for millions of years and it took an asteroid to kill them off.

“She hacked into the airport security system and initiated a bomb alert. Not before I wounded her, though. She got away but she was bleeding.”

Silence. Anatoli knew Borodin was scrolling through reactions.

Anatoli had been given strict instructions to capture the woman but also not to harm her in any way. Contradictory instructions, of course. And he’d managed to hurt her and let her get away.

Borodin let the hacking issue go. Anatoli knew he didn’t really understand that. But he understood the other part of his comment just fine. “Wounded her?” he asked.

“I used a knife, easier to hide.” The instant they discovered that the woman they were after had booked a flight to Portland, Oregon, Borodin had directed his pilot to fly directly across the continental United States. Anatoli had landed two hours before Ward’s flight, since she’d had two connecting flights.

He’d waited in Borodin’s luxurious A318 Elite jet until they checked the flight status of her flight and saw that it had landed. The pilot, who looked like he ate steel for breakfast and shat nails, and who was undoubtedly ex-military, had showed him a secret compartment with enough firepower to start a small war. Anatoli knew how to shoot but wasn’t comfortable with firearms. The pilot looked on with contempt as Anatoli chose a ceramic knife, capable of passing a metal detector. Going into an airport, that seemed like a good idea.

The plan had been for Anatoli to grab Ward when she exited and make their way to the private sector of the airport. The airplane was in an isolated position with very few people around. The pilot would fuel up in the meantime and the moment Anatoli got back with Ward in tow, they’d take off.

That had gone to hell. Now, the pilot would wait in the plane in a private hangar for as long as it took for Anatoli to find the woman.

“She was wounded, you moron,” Borodin said coldly. “She would seek medical attention.”

Anatoli ground his teeth. “Yes. I rented a car with my alternate ID and made the rounds of the hospitals. There are four hospitals in the greater metropolitan area and I did not find her anywhere. Nothing in her record showed that she’d ever even been to Portland, but if she has a private doctor friend, then there is no way I can track her down.”