The morning sun reflecting off the Thames offered little comfort to the thousands of Londoners making their way across the walkway on Blackfriars Bridge. A snapping breeze had blown the stubborn mists out to sea, revealing a rare sunny vista of St. Paul’s Cathedral. But it also knifed right through the woolen layers of pink-faced commuters on their way to work.
Among them, Genevieve Lund, née Maria Borbova, aka Zoloto, strode with purpose, blond hair spilling over a black scarf. Like the rest of the Londoners pressed between the rails, she huddled through the raw air. It was a two-mile trip from her Bankside apartment in the south to her Farringdon office on the north side of the river.
While it was cold, she thoroughly enjoyed these morning commutes. A winter in London was nothing compared to a winter in Moscow. She did her best thinking while walking on this bridge, just as she was thinking now.
As the breeze turned her forehead numb, the Directorate S officer pondered her course, now that her formerly dependable CIA source, Ed Rance, had gone silent.
Pointedly so. On her last trip to DC, she’d followed through with the usual text flirtations. He had responded that he wasn’t available—hadn’t even bothered to invent an excuse. How cliché.
She’d consoled herself that she knew his lusting weaknesses. Knew them all too well. Knew it was probably just guilt, the wife, the sons, the usual banal melodramas. She’d been expecting to hear from him at any moment.
But now, three weeks on, her confidence ebbed. Could it be the blown op at John Dale’s property? Could American counterintelligence have mobilized, detecting her relationship with him, outing her? She’d run over her operational security practices. She’d been sure she was solid. But now . . .
Like a jilted schoolgirl, she was suddenly desperate to hear from this man that she so utterly disliked.
Her office at 4 Snow Hill Road took up the third floor of a nineteenth-century brick building that had once been a Victorian warehouse. The old red building, ornamented with white balustraded balconies and pedimented windows, stood like a soldier in ranks amid others of similar dominion.
She took the stairs to the third floor and entered suite three by punching a code on a cypher lock. Once inside, she unwrapped her scarf, removed her coat, and stood looking at a two-way mirror. Above it was a sign that read: RECEPTION, STOKE PARK INSURANCE, LONDON. PLEASE SIGN IN. A table held a telephone and a logbook. She dialed. A reinforced fire door buzzed and clicked open.
The other side revealed a floor that stretched all the way to windows overlooking the street. Shades had been drawn and the office was dim, save for lights hunched on the five desks spaced haphazardly across the carpet as though they’d just been dropped off by a moving crew.
Between them, strewn without any particular order, lay heavy black shipping cases, big as coffins, locked by thick silver buckles. Snaking between these were power cables duct-taped to the floor. A wide table ran along one wall with stacks of electronic equipment. A printer hummed, spitting out pages.
Two men sat at their desks, typing on laptops. One of them looked up at Maria and nodded as she made her way to her workstation.
“Dobre utra. You’re in early,” Oleg said.
He wore a gray suit with a white shirt open at the collar. He was the Spetsnaz Alpha operator who’d helped Maria interrogate Kuznetsov in Moscow. He’d been assigned to her as the paramilitary lead, her number two.
“Good morning.” She dropped her coat on the floor next to her desk and sat down. She turned back to him. “Pozhalsta, can I get a look at the message boards? Anything good from Yasenevo?”
“Da.”
He picked up the clipboard with its thick stack of dispatches. Most of them were administrative, having to do with the mundane details of managing SVR stations around the world.
But there was a certain gleam in his eye. He tapped the top of the stack as he set it on her desk. “Third or fourth down. A direct message from the Beirut embassy. Your friend Kuznetsov.”
Maria grunted and picked up the clipboard. On her walk across the bridge, she’d thought of Kuznetsov. She’d been rough on the PR man. At the time she’d thought him a snitch, blowing her Rance operation.
She’d nearly killed him in that hotel before Oleg pulled her back. Thank God he had, she thought now, looking at Kuznetsov’s message, her mouth curling. The little major might yet be worth something.
His report, filed from the Russian consulate in Beirut, noted that he’d established an international surveillance operation for John Dale and his ex-wife, Meredith Morris-Dale. After corroborating the intelligence taken from Rance, the recorded conversations at John Dale’s property, and the bioweapons dealer picked up in the Dubai operation some weeks back who’d since met his demise, the Russians were convinced the Dales were at the center of a plot to infiltrate the Iran–Russia nuclear collaboration.
According to Yuri’s message, steeped in SVR bureaucratese, they would now have a detection net in place ready to catch either of them entering the Middle Eastern area of operations.
She had to admire the nature of the trap. The major had attached images of the Dales to the records of real criminals wanted by the Russian government, along with a note that the suspects were likely to be using false credentials. He’d uploaded the doctored records with the Dales’ photos to the Interpol database in Lyon.
Following proper diplomatic channels, he’d tasked Interpol to issue a Red Notice for the criminals in the doctored records, effectively an arrest warrant with an allowance for extradition back to Russia. With Interpol’s one hundred member countries, it meant the Dales were screwed.
It wouldn’t matter if they traveled under an alias, which they almost certainly would. Nearly all border points around the world used cameras. Their images would instantly be compared to the Lyon data center’s facial recognition software.
Better still, she saw, Yuri’s Red Notice was silent. It asked that the Interpol member country only notify the Russian police force of the entry—not make an actual arrest. It would allow SVR to roll up whatever operation the Dales were running before it got started.
Maria flipped the page. More messages from Yasenevo—most of them repeats of tasking orders for intelligence on American informants in Iran.
Right. She rotated her head in a circular motion. If only Rance would call.
The intelligence tasking orders were coming more regularly now, more urgently. In another week, a high-level delegation led by the minister of energy would be traveling to Bushehr to celebrate renewed cooperation on the reactor and secretly to negotiate continued collaboration on yellowcake processing, maybe even cruise missiles as a delivery vehicle. It was a high-profile public meeting designed to build political pressure against the Israelis and the Americans, who’d begun making noise about it.
When Maria finished reading, she set the boards aside.
Oleg slid in a wheeled chair toward her. “You like?”
She nodded. “A good net. First step anyway.”
“Good thing we didn’t kill him, eh?” He grinned.
She looked at him coldly. “I only hope Leo and Vasily would agree.”
“We’ll get Dale,” he said. “As soon as he pops up, we’re ready to roll.”
She nodded. “I want a twenty-four-seven going on here.”
“We know. I’ve split the team into six-hour shifts. We’re actively monitoring the net, real time.”
“Who was on last night?”
“Ochenko. But, boss—remember what we talked about?”
She thought about their conversation from the night before. The Spetsnaz men were eager to get out of the office and get in some proficiency work. She’d had them cooped up here for over a week now.
“You mean the training?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Show me the watch bill. If I’m convinced we’re covered, then yes, we can go.”
“You’ll be convinced,” he said. “I’ll call Scotland Station.”
He was right. By lunchtime, she’d become comfortable that they’d established a competent watch profile and agreed to Oleg’s trip. She’d leave two men at the operations center and accompany the other three to the training grounds. Privately she knew she could use some small-arms refresh work.
By one in the afternoon they’d loaded their large heavy shipping crates into two vans and driven to Stapleford, a private airport just to the northeast of London, conveniently situated near the M25 freeway. There, they transferred their equipment and themselves into two Sikorsky S-76 helicopters, each chartered by the fictitious insurance company, crewed by on-call SVR pilots who were billeted permanently in London.
By three thirty the SVR team landed on a wide green lawn at Pickston, just to the northwest of Perth, site of a large Scottish hunting estate that was legally owned by the insurance company. All of them, the four SVR operatives and four aircrewmen, spent the night in the estate’s moldy stone house, eating the meager rations they’d brought with them.
The caretaker of the estate hadn’t been given notice and very little had been prepared. In the freezing Highlands, it seemed to take hours for the house to finally warm up to the point that they could get some sleep.
The next morning, her team completed a five-mile run through mossy woods. She was careful to keep her satellite phone close, just in case she should hear anything from the London watch station—or even better, Rance. But nothing came.
The real purpose of the trip opened up by midmorning, just as the sun was chasing away the freezing fog. In a fallow field less than a quarter mile from the house, Oleg had spread an array of weapons including four snub-nosed silent pistols for close-in covert work, four standard AK-12 assault rifles, and most exciting to the group, two of the new A-545 compact machine guns.
Oleg set up targets tacked to hay bales at various distances, the longest of which was over five hundred yards away. The sound of gunfire was nothing unusual in this remote, hunting-obsessed part of the country.
Around four forty-five, the sun turned orange and hid in the trees. Maria was chilled to her bones, and she hoped the old man who ran the estate had somehow succeeded in warming up the drafty old house.
The satphone on her hip buzzed. Oleg was lying prone, clattering off rounds from the extra-loud AK-12.
With one finger in her ear and the other to the phone, she stepped on the back of his thigh and yelled, “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
It was Dmitry, the Spetz operator on watch in London. “We have a message from Beirut Station,” he said. “A hit on the Red Notice. Ninety-eight percent probability. The man—John Dale.”
“Already? Where?”
“Mumbai.”
She ran her free hand through her hair, which was stringy from dried sweat. Oleg got up and stood beside her, listening.
“Mumbai? As in Bombay? India?” she said. “You sure?”
“Chhatrapati International. Mumbai’s main airport. Traveling under the name Reza Shariati. Canadian passport.”
“An Iranian name,” she said. She looked at Oleg, who shrugged. Into the phone, she said, “Canadian passport? You’re sure? Diplomatic or civilian?”
“Civilian. I have a digital copy of it right here. It’s him.”
She smiled for the first time in days. “We’ll be back in London in two hours.”
Overhearing this, the team around her started folding their rifle stocks.
“Oh and one more thing,” she said into the phone. “Patch me through to Beirut Station. I want to speak to Major Kuznetsov personally.”
“Da, da, da,” Yuri said to the beautiful blond Directorate S officer he still only knew as Zoloto.
She was as demanding on the phone as she was in person. She’d already asked fifty questions to ensure the facial recognition ping on John Dale was legit. It was getting old.
“The net will stay up,” he said for the tenth time. “I’ll have Mumbai Station conduct a diplomatic meeting with the Indian Police Service. As you say, I’ll call them now. Yes, of course now.”
He turned toward Putov and rolled his eyes. They were sitting on a white sofa, looking out at the lights of Beirut from a fifth-floor suite in the Olympic Hotel. Putov was smoking and smiling. It was a little after eight p.m.
“Da. Da. Da.” Yuri rolled his eyes again. He hung up and placed the phone on the coffee table, shaking his head. “Bitch hung up on me,” he grumbled. “Remind me to send a message to the Mumbai consulate in the morning.”
“Not now?” asked Putov.
“No. Fuck her. After what she did to me in Moscow, you think I’m going to let her spoil my only good night in Beirut?”
Putov shook his head, commiserating. Changing the subject, he said, “We need to go, boss. The show starts in a half hour. Car’s downstairs.” He tapped his watch.
Yuri stood and checked himself in the foyer’s mirror. Mostly bald at the top, he’d used some hair gel to move his side hair around. He retucked his shirt into his jeans and turned in profile, sucking in his gut. He thought he might have lost some weight on the torturous trip to Moscow.
“All right,” he said, smoothing his hand along his chest. He faced Putov. “How do I look?”
Putov stood, grinning. “I’d fuck you, boss.”
Yuri laughed. Good old Putov. The SVR major twisted into the shoulder holster carrying his small Udav nine mil. He threw a linen sport jacket over that and checked himself in the mirror one more time.
They took the elevator to the lobby and climbed into the back of a black Mercedes with an embassy driver. The car barreled through the hotel security gate and picked up speed as it merged onto Général de Gaulle Avenue, then east into city traffic, aiming for the Sodeco neighborhood.
They were on their way to Dalida Bar, one of Beirut’s belly-dancing clubs. In the back of the Mercedes, they smoked and sipped from minibar vodkas. Yuri told the story again about how the FSB had rounded him up and drugged him and how Niskorov hadn’t even given a shit. What a boss. This led to commiseration about life in the SVR that lasted through two more mini vodka bottles.
In the dark, neither they nor the embassy driver noticed the white minivan that followed them turn for turn as the city traffic thickened.
Thirty minutes later, Yuri was in heaven, having forgotten all about that bitch Zoloto and that bastard Colonel Niskorov. As Middle Eastern music vibrated the walls, three plump belly dancers writhed around his padded chair. Now and then he reached out to clumsily grope them, laughing with such force, he had a hard time catching his breath through his smoke-scarred lungs.
A half bottle of Jameson into the party, a particular dancer caught his eye. He couldn’t stop focusing on her. With a more serious nod to Putov, a word was put in to the club’s manager. The next thing he knew, the girl was pulling him by the arm up some rickety steps to a windowless second-floor room.
Once in the garish den, the raven-haired, henna-painted girl started kissing and undressing him, pressing her bare, overperfumed midriff against his stomach.
He wobbled drunkenly. She killed the ceiling lamp. A string of red Christmas lights hanging from one cracked plaster wall to the other provided just enough illumination to make things interesting. Their hands roamed over each other and Yuri unbuttoned his shirt.
Sensitive to the weapon around his shoulders, he pushed the girl off and unsheathed the pistol, sliding it under the mattress. She looked curiously at him, which made him feel interesting. He was, after all, a genuine Russian spy about to bed a beautiful woman in an exotic location. Overcome with whiskey-fueled confidence, he smiled as he unwound from his shoulder holster and dropped his shirt to the floor.
She kissed him as he lay on the bed, her hand wandering to his belt, which she began to unhitch, opening his pants. But just as he was beginning to enjoy things, she stopped. Placing her mouth over his ear to be heard over the pulsing music, she said in bad French that she’d be right back, that she needed to change.
The scent of her perfume, the warmth of her breath, the undulating depression of the mattress under her body weight, all made Yuri exceptionally agreeable. He nodded eagerly.
He placed his hands behind the stained pillow under his head and relaxed, crossing his legs, fantasizing about how the next hour would unfold. He closed his eyes, taking it all in. Propelled by alcohol, overstimulated senses, and a raging imagination, he reclined on the dirty mattress of the squalid, pulsating room like a man balanced perfectly at the top of the world.
But then the door opened and a bearded man walked in, a pistol at his side.
Yuri leaned up on an elbow, confused, thinking it must be Putov. But the man was on him quickly, flipping him over, trying to secure his wrists. He was young, tall, strong. Yuri screamed but couldn’t be heard over the music. He bucked wildly, panicking at the thought of again being bound at the mercy of an assailant. A second man appeared. Yuri vaguely heard them shouting to each other in guttural Arabic. The newcomer was grabbing Yuri’s ankles, trying to lasso him with a plastic cord.
In the melee to zip-tie his wrists and ankles, the SVR major flailed wildly, careening off the bed. One of the men punched him in the jaw and his head snapped sideways. But the momentum of the punch carried the attacker off-balance.
Prone, Yuri kicked the other man in the ankles, toppling him onto the Russian’s lap. As the fallen man lashed out, grappling for Yuri’s throat, the Russian slid his hand under the mattress and found the pistol he’d stashed when he was undressing. He managed to free it, aim it, and squeeze off a shot that flew directly into the bearded man’s jaw, blowing a portion of his whiskered chin to the far wall in a Rorschach blot of black blood.
The second man stared at the shattered head of his accomplice. Terrified, he raised a pistol of his own and fired, striking the shirtless Major Yuri Kuznetsov in the chest, knocking him hard against the bed. Yuri slumped to the floor, clutching his wound, gasping.
The music continued pumping, and the second bearded man met with a third at the doorway. This time they succeeded in zip-tying the Russian major, but it was to no purpose. He’d gone limp.