Evgeny Semyonovich Gorokhov was a rarity in Russia, almost a freak. He was seventy-eight-years old in a country where the average life expectancy for men had been, until recently, less than fifty-six. Unbowed by age, he was tall, his shoulders broad, his chest still massive, as if he had already been cast in bronze as a memorial statue in a hall of heroes, all features aggrandized to proportions larger than life. In the rarefied circles of his nation’s spymasters and scientific elite, Gorokhov was exactly that: a legend.
He dressed the part, as well. His suits—always dark, somber, perfectly fitted—were Savile Row. The British tailors came to him, as they should. The heavy, gleaming watch he wore today, one of dozens in his collection, was by A. Lange & Söhne, a thrillingly exact instrument of platinum, gold, and sapphire. Gorokhov appreciated precision, and predictability. The timepiece’s price was astronomical, though like most things he possessed, Gorokhov had not had to purchase it. Instead, it was a personal gift from the president of Russia, in recognition of a lifetime of service to the ideals the president was at last bringing back to their troubled nation.
The one characteristic that marked Gorokhov as a mere mortal was the ridged and mottled skin that rose along his neck, forming fingers of pale flesh that clawed across his face, the ravages of the third-degree burns that had kept him, as a teenager, socially isolated from his peers, an unsightly outsider. His father had paid the price for the drunken outburst that had set fire to his home, ruined his son’s features, taken his wife’s life. Gorokhov had seen to that punishment personally, and no one in his village had spoken against him when the authorities investigated his father’s savagely beaten body, half buried in bloodstained snow. The people who knew him then understood his need for justice, and their need to fear the boy whose heart was as scarred as his skin.
But the isolation those scars had brought, and the seething resentment they had fueled, had helped forge his will, his ability to continue to do whatever must be done, without remorse, to ensure Mother Russia would not only survive, but prosper. It also accounted for the manner in which he was so revered and honored throughout his career. These days, those who did not consider him a legend tended to have their careers sidelined. In earlier days, those people had had their reputations ruined, or had simply disappeared.
Today, though, Evgeny Gorokhov was among those to whom his every word was a holy pronouncement. He was chief administrator of the Byuro Spetsial’nykh Issledovaniy. By itself, the name meant nothing. As a line item on the Kremlin’s public spending reports, Gorokhov’s Bureau of Special Studies amounted to nothing more than what the Americans would call “budget dust”—thirty million rubles, not even a million dollars.
But the five additional men and women in this cramped, hot, and electromagnetically shielded monitoring room knew that the other, classified name for the BSI was VEKTOR. They also knew that its true funding was measured in the billions of dollars, as befitting an organization that, more than any other, ensured the nation’s security from all attempts to weaken it, without and within.
For now, the chief administrator sat motionless in his chair, staring ahead at the dark glass wall, well aware that the others in the room, all standing, were terrified to speak to him. For now, the computer monitors were blank, and with nothing to do but wait, he glanced at his watch, just to observe and appreciate the orderly, measured sweep of its second hand, the unruly universe tamed.
But one of the technicians, Irina Roslyakova, a nervous young woman in a crisp white lab worker’s coat, apparently misunderstood his action.
She blurted, “Three more minutes, Chief Administrator.”
He gave her a slow, sidelong glance, gestured with a massive hand to the digital time display above the blank screens on the far wall. “As I can read for myself.”
He saw Roslyakova flinch, bow her head, step back out of his sight line. She was twenty-eight, and two weeks earlier had been promoted three levels to become head of VEKTOR’s mapping division, because the three technicians above her in rank had been arrested. Two had already been shot.
Point made, Gorokhov turned his attention back to the dark glass wall. The glass itself was ordinary, fully transparent. It was the coarse metal mesh embedded in it that cut the transmission of light. But it wasn’t so dark as to completely block the view of the projection room on the other side. In it, three perceivers waited as well, impatient in their reclining encounter beds.
The perceivers were three of VEKTOR’s best. Number One, a tall man, soft and pasty in appearance, was renowned for capturing the coordinates of an American drone so precisely that the Iranians had been able to intercept and bring it down with minimal damage. Though, of course, the insufferable Iranians explained their feat as a triumph of their technological skills.
Number Two and Number Three, both women, were equally unimpressive in appearance, one young, the other older. But in addition to the innate talent to perceive, both women had impressive visual memory. Most importantly, none of the three operatives had any connection to what had happened three weeks ago.
Number One nervously scratched at his nose, taking care not to disturb the web of interconnected EEG electrodes attached to his forehead, temples, and shaved scalp. On the far wall of the monitoring room, the blank screen waiting to display his output flickered briefly as nerve cells fired randomly in response to the stimulus.
Behind Gorokhov, a senior technician, Igor Byko, also recently promoted, barked into his headset’s microphone, “Number One, refrain from motion. Acquiring location in twenty seconds.”
Gorokhov kept his full attention on the three perceivers. They were all motionless now, lying back, eyes closed, breathing slowly as they entered their sensitive, meditative state. Their shaved scalps glistened with sweat in the gaps between the electrodes.
“Ten,” Byko intoned, and continued counting down until he reached “Three.” Two seconds later, above the time display, the small panel displaying the installation’s security status switched from all green to all amber. The electromagnetic shielding protecting the projection room had been disabled.
Though it was late afternoon at VEKTOR’s underground facility, it was now midnight in New Mexico. There the sun’s electromagnetic interference with the perceivers’ efforts would be at its least disruptive. At the same time, while the monitoring room Gorokhov and his technicians were in remained shielded, the projection room in which the perceivers prepared to become operational was now unprotected, allowing each perceiver’s consciousness to be sent forth. Studies, and exceptional espionage, had led VEKTOR to conclude it would take at least eleven minutes for America’s NSA satellites to alert CROSSWIND personnel to the change of status in VEKTOR’s shielding. They would then try to exploit the opportunity by having their own perceivers attempt to see what was happening here. Therefore, VEKTOR’s perceivers now had just under eleven minutes to accomplish their mission.
The time display began to count down.
“One, Two, and Three in theta,” the senior technician said.
Gorokhov checked the EEG displays himself, saw that the brainwave tracings of all three perceivers had fallen into the distinctive pattern of lessening frequency and greater amplitude than the alpha and beta waves of consciousness. At theta stage, each perceiver was now in what appeared to be light sleep. But Gorokhov knew they were searching.
Two minutes passed. The room grew hotter, filled with the clinical scent of warm plastic and electronics. Then one of the output screens flickered again with what appeared to be another random display of dark and light shadows.
“Number One now in gamma,” Byko reported.
Gorokhov leaned forward. His chair creaked. Gamma waves indicated that though the subject was asleep, there was a form of conscious effort arising most significantly from the visual cortex. It was a brainwave pattern observed most strongly in Buddhist monks with extensive experience in meditation techniques, as well as being a hallmark of the most talented perceivers.
Whatever Number One perceived, this change in his brainwave pattern indicated his resting mind was attempting to find order in the sensations he was experiencing. The chief administrator had long since given up trying to comprehend how a projected mind could be aware of anything without sense organs. It was enough that it could.
“I think it’s a road,” Dr. Jelavich said. He was an older man, trained in the army, short white hair, a constant look of amusement.
The shadow patchwork on Number One’s screen began to coalesce. From an engineering perspective, Gorokhov knew he was looking at a computer-generated image constructed from the neurons now firing in the man’s visual cortex. All of VEKTOR’s perceivers had spent thousands of hours in MRI scanners capable of resolving individual neurons. While the perceivers viewed carefully calibrated collections of films and photographs, the firing patterns of those neurons were precisely recorded. Now each individual perceiver had a database of millions of different readings from which a VEKTOR algorithm could match a particular pattern of signals from the perceiver’s visual cortex to an approximation of the visual scene that could account for it. The technology had arisen from the increasingly successful attempts to provide artificial sight for the blind.
Although the images created by this technique, for now, were low resolution and rarely included color, they did allow specialists who lacked the talent to project their own minds to, in effect, see through the perceivers’ disembodied eyes. This exponentially increased VEKTOR’s ability to identify key mission targets.
Engineering aside, from a purely observational perspective, Gorokhov likened the experience to that of watching an old-fashioned photograph come to clarity in the red light of a darkroom, the image slowly emerging from a blank sheet of paper within a chemical bath.
By 00:06:00, as the output screens for Number Two and Number Three also began to resolve into visual images, Number One’s output was now clearly that of a road, two-lane, lit by headlights of a moving vehicle and observed from within the vehicle’s cabin. From time to time, at a frame rate of about one new image every four seconds, a bright smear indicated other vehicles passing in the opposite direction. The mission’s targets were traveling.
With six minutes left in the safe window, all three perceivers had linked with the targets and were now traveling with them. Knowing the approximate location of the targets accounted for the swift success of tonight’s attempt. In previous attempts over the past three weeks, targets had to be searched for almost randomly across multiple time zones, and there had been only two successful contacts. Since the night the chase teams had been slaughtered outside the Mexican city of Tampico, there had been no contact at all.
But now the details came quickly. Number Two concentrated on the immediate surroundings. Her output captured images of the vehicle’s dashboard. The instrument configuration would allow VEKTOR experts to determine the most likely make and model of whatever was being driven.
Number Three now tried to capture nearby landmarks, difficult at night and in motion. Her efforts yielded only a series of road signs, most of whose lettering in the reconstructed images was too indistinct to be read, though Gorokhov knew she would retain the visual information with enough clarity to later transcribe what she was seeing.
With one minute left in the window, Gorokhov growled, angered that insufficient information had been collected to determine the current location of the vehicle. It would be twenty-four hours until another attempt could be safely made. Someone in this room would have to pay for that, be made an example—and from the tension he felt rising around him, they all knew it.
Then the unruly universe delivered an unexpected prize.
On Number One’s screen, the road changed. The vehicle had turned, and come to a stop. Within seconds, on all three perceivers’ screens, from three slightly different perspectives, a brightly lit building came into view, detail growing with each passing moment.
“Thirty seconds,” Byko said.
Gorokhov raised a hand. “I want more detail. What kind of building is that?”
“A warehouse, I believe,” Dr. Jelavich said.
Gorokhov gave a grunt of agreement. He could see the resemblance. There was a large sign as well, unreadable for now, but possibly captured in the three perceivers’ memories.
“Twenty seconds.” There was the metallic snap of safety covers being opened over the rocker switchers that would reestablish the projection room’s shielding. “Standing by to recall.”
“No.” Gorokhov stood, knowing the risk he was taking. “Wait for the details to fill in. We need to know what that sign says.”
Byko blurted out his apprehension. “Chief Administrator, by now the Americans will know that the facility’s exposed. If CROSSWIND has perceivers already deployed, they—”
“You’re excused.” Gorokhov didn’t bother looking at the nervous man. He kept his attention on the output screens, heard the door to the corridor click open, hiss shut as Byko left. No one dared argue with the chief administrator.
“There’s a new light source,” Jelavich said.
On Number Two’s screen, a dramatic change in contrast. Now the woman was perceiving the interior of the vehicle in bright light. At once, Gorokhov understood that the vehicle’s door had been opened; its dome light had come on. As the details filled in, there in the rearview mirror was a pattern he recognized. It was a face so familiar to Number Two’s visual cortex that VEKTOR’s algorithm was instantly able to match it. The final prize.
The driver of the vehicle was General Stasik Sergeyevich Borodin. Betrayer of the Motherland.
* * *
For five years, Borodin had served as VEKTOR’s chief military liaison. He had personally developed the training and tactics employed by the pinnacle of VEKTOR’s achievements: tenevyye voiny, the shadow warriors.
He also had been instrumental in crafting the overall strategy and operational tactics of Operatsiya Kosa—Operation Scythe—the masterstroke that would one day unleash the shadow warriors and in hours eliminate America’s influence over Europe. In the days that would follow, the NATO Alliance would collapse as its nations at last understood that true strength and security could only be achieved by coming to terms with Russia, and not some powerless and degenerate upstart across the Atlantic. The younger leaders had embraced the general’s plan as one that would lead their country to the greatness that was its destiny. But Gorokhov and the others of his generation, who had come of age under Stalin and seen their country rise to become a superpower under Khrushchev, understood Scythe for what it truly was: the final battle of the Cold War, the conflict that in their hearts had never ended, and now, at last, would be won.
Then, three weeks ago, the colonel who was to have led Scythe was found dead in his quarters. A heart attack. Unsuspected, but in Russia, not unusual.
With a year still to go until all preparations for Scythe were complete, General Borodin had valiantly stepped forward to take command of the operation himself, until a permanent replacement for the colonel could be found.
Forty-eight hours after Borodin had been given the command codes for accessing and deploying the prototype shadow warriors, he had disappeared with them. Two days after that, the colonel’s autopsy results indicated the heart attack wasn’t from natural causes. It had been induced by a skorpion, a radio-frequency device created by the KGB, no larger than a packet of cigarettes. When placed in contact with the victim’s chest, even through clothes it was capable of sending the healthiest heart into uncontrolled arrhythmia from a single high-frequency electromagnetic pulse, leaving not a mark.
One of the devices was missing from the quartermaster’s armory. The technicians responsible for stealing it were identified, interrogated, and the final truth was revealed.
The colonel’s killer was Borodin.
Operation Scythe had been completely disrupted, the carefully constructed timetable in ruins, and whatever Borodin planned to do with the shadow warriors, it was unknown.
* * *
“We have him,” the psychologist said.
“Recall and reestablish shields,” Gorokhov ordered. In less than ten seconds, the three perceivers were stirring and the entire facility was shielded once again.
VEKTOR’s chief administrator allowed himself a rare smile, and let the others see it to know they had done well. He turned to the young head of the mapping division. “The instant you’ve confirmed coordinates, inform the major.”
And with that simple order, Gorokhov knew that Borodin was already dead, and the nightmare finally over.