Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (44 page)

It also included a detailed summary of everything he had learned about Russia’s military plans.

Quickly, the billionaire began transferring the contents of the safe to one of his briefcases. Once he was safely outside Russia, he would be able to use this information to renegotiate his agreements with Dudarev, securing iron-clad guarantees of his personal safety in return for bringing HYDRA to completion. Malkovic smiled thinly, imagining the Russian president’s outrage at being blackmailed by his confederate. Then he shrugged. Fortunately, like him, Dudarev was fundamentally a cold-eyed realist. Their alliance had never rested entirely on the basis of mutual trust.

Outside Moscow

Jon Smith was drowning, sinking down and down through the waters of a bot-tomless black pool. His lungs were on fire, straining against the increasing pressure as he tumbled deeper and deeper into the crushing depths. He writhed in a desperate attempt to claw his way back up to the surface. Then, to his horror, he realized that his hands and his feet were frozen, completely im-mobile. He was pinioned and helpless, falling ever faster headfirst into nothingness. There was no escape.

“Wake up, Colonel!” a harsh voice demanded suddenly.

Smith shuddered and gasped, retching as another bucketful of ice-cold water hit him right in the face. He coughed violently and then doubled up in pain. Every nerve ending felt raw. Warily, he forced his eyes open.

He was lying on his side in a puddle of freezing water. His hands, bound behind his back, were numb. So were his feet, tied together tightly at the ankles. A rough, worn stone floor stretched away into darkness. For a long moment, nothing he could see made any sense. Where was he? What the hell •lad happened to him? He could hear what sounded like a woman moaning softly nearby. Slowly, wincing involuntarily at the agony it cost him to make even the slightest movement, Jon turned his head to look upward.

A tall, blond-haired man stood there, staring down at him with an appraising look in his winter-gray eyes. The tall man studied him for a bit longer in silence. Then he nodded in cruel satisfaction. “Now that you are conscious, Colonel, we can begin —all over again.”

Unwelcome memories rushed back, flooding into Smith’s pain-clouded mind like a rising river bursting through a weakened dam. The gray-eyed man was Erich Brandt. And he and Fiona Devin were Brandt’s prisoners. They had been dragged into this dank cellar not long after the ambush that had killed Oleg Kirov.

The cellar itself lay below the ruins of a church, part of a Russian Orthodox monastery that had been closed by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. Jon remembered seeing hundreds of bullet holes pockmarking the walls and hearing the tall German explain, with grim amusement, that this chamber had been used by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, as a place of execution for political prisoners during one of the dictator’s brutal purges. Now the monastery’s grounds and its buildings, what was left of them, were wholly abandoned, slowly being swallowed up by the surrounding forest.

The terrible hours since they were brought here had passed in an endless procession of torment as Brandt and two of his grim-faced henchmen took turns interrogating them. Every question they asked was punctuated by pain, either by a short, sharp punch to the ribs or the head, or an open-handed slap to the face, or by the application of electric shocks. In the brief intervals between these sessions, Jon and Fiona had been drenched with freezing water, and bombarded by a dizzying succession of shrill, earsplitting sounds and blinding strobe lights—all as part of an effort to disorient them and weaken their resistance.

Brandt had been watching him closely. The blond man smiled coldly. He nodded to the other men standing unseen behind Jon. “Our American friend here is ready. Help him back into his seat.”

Two pairs of rough, callused hands grabbed Smith under the arms as Brandt’s underlings hauled him bodily upright out of the icy puddle of water.

They shoved him back into a chair and then again looped a leather strap around his chest, binding him to the sharp-edged wood frame. The strap tightened unmercifully.

Jon gritted his teeth. He glanced to his left.

Fiona Devin was strapped into a chair next to him. Her hands and feet were also bound. Her head lolled. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth.

“Like you, Ms. Devin has been … uncooperative,” Brandt said easily. A humorless smile appeared on his face and then vanished swiftly without leaving a trace on his lips or in his eyes. “But I am a forgiving man, so I will grant

you both another chance to save yourselves more of this unnecessary pain.”

He snapped an order over his shoulder to one of his men. “She looks fhirstv, Yuri. Give her another drink!”

His subordinate, a brawny, shaven-headed man, obeved, tossing a bucket full of cold water into Fiona’s face. She choked and spluttered, leaning back against the chair in a vain effort to avoid the deluge of freezing water. After a

few seconds, she slowly opened her eyes. Noticing Smith looking at her with evident concern, she forced a wry, painful grin. “The service here is really rather awful. Next time, I’ll choose different accommodations.”

Brandt snorted. “Very amusing, Ms. Devin.” He turned back to Smith.

“Now, Colonel, let me try being reasonable one last time.” His voice hardened. “Who do you work for? The CIA? The Defense Intelligence Agency?

Some other organization?”

Jon braced himself for the blow he knew was coming. He raised his head, staring the former Stasi officer straight in the eyes. “I’ve told you before,”

he

said tiredly, surprised at how shirred his voice sounded. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith, M.D. I work for the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute — “

But instead of hitting him, Brandt spun around and slapped Fiona hard across the face. Her head rocked back. Blood from a new cut inside her mouth spattered off into the darkness. The sound of the blow echoed like a gunshot in the damp silence of the cellar.

“You’re a dead man,” Smith growled through his clenched teeth, shocked by what he had just seen. He strained uselessly against the wide leather strap holding him in place.

Brandt swung back with a sly, satisfied grin on his face. “Oh, didn’t I tell you, Colonel? The rules have changed. From this moment on, Ms. Devin will suffer for each of your lies, not you.” He shrugged. “The pain she endures ‘n the process will be on your conscience, not on mine.”

Christ, Smith thought bleakly, feeling light-headed. The big, gray-eyed bastard had read him perfectly. He had been tortured before, and he knew the limits of his own endurance. But how long could he sit helpless and watch another person being brutalized to satisfy his own stubborn pride?

“Pay me no mind, Jon,” Fiona Devin said quietly, spitting out a mouthful of blood. “This murdering bastard will kill us both no matter what we tell him, or don’t tell him — “

Yet another open-handed blow from Brandt’s hard hand rocked her head to the side.

“You will be silent, Ms. Devin!” he said coldly. “My conversation is with the colonel here, not with you. You had your chance to tell me what I wished to know. Now it is his turn.”

Smith raged inwardly, maddened by his inability to stop this devilish game. If he could just get free, even for a second, he thought desperately…

but realistically he knew there was no chance of that. He also knew that Fiona was right. They were both going to die here in this dark, dank cellar, this place

already haunted by the ghosts of hundreds of others murdered by men like Brandt and his thugs. The only real question remaining was whether or not they could win at least one small last victory by denying the Stasi officer the information he demanded.

He closed his eyes briefly, steeling himself to endure the long, pain-filled, and bloody hours to come. Then he opened them and looked up again at Brandt in front of him. “My name is Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith, M.D.,”

he repeated steadily, in a stronger voice than he would have thought possible.

“And I work for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases…”

Brandt stared down at the lean, dark-haired American in frustration. He had been sure that Smith was on the edge of breaking. He had sensed it. But now he could see the man’s resolve stiffening. Meanwhile, time was moving on. Sooner or later, a militia patrol would discover the carnage inside the Zakarov dacha. And sooner or later, they would find the wreckage of that bullet-torn GAZ jeep lying in a ravine by the side of the road. Once either of those things happened, Alexei Ivanov would start asking some very awkward questions.

He rubbed his jaw. At least Fadayev had finally called into the Group’s headquarters, reporting that the driver was definitely dead and that he had retrieved the dead man’s identity papers. If nothing else, Brandt thought, that would make it slightly more difficult for Ivanov to connect the two incidents.

But only slightly.

His phone rang suddenly.

Scowling, Brandt yanked the device out of his pocket. “Yes?” he snapped irritablv, walking back toward the stairs out of the cellar, moving out of earshot of the two prisoners. “What is it?”

“Your man Lange has bungled his assignment,” Malkovie told him bitterly.

“And by now the CIA must have penetrated very deeply into our communications network.”

Brandt listened in stunned disbelief while his employer ran through what he had learned about the disaster in Berlin. Lange dead? Along with all of his handpicked team? It scarcely seemed possible.

“We have no choice now,” Malkovie said flatlv. “We must transfer the key elements of the HYDRA lab to a new location—without further delay. I intend to oversee the work myself, and I want you there, too. Both for security purposes and to make sure that Professor Renke appreciates the need for immediate action.”

Brandt nodded, understanding what the other man really wanted. He wanted personal protection against any danger. The billionaire was frightened to death of what the Russians might do once thev learned that all of his fine promises to them about HYDRA’s operational security were worthless.

His jaw tightened. Malkovie was right to be afraid. “When do we leave?”

be asked harshly.

“My personal jet is scheduled to take off in just under three hours,”

Malkovie said. “But first I want you to shut down all of your operations in Moscow. Make arrangements for your key people to rendezvous somewhere °utside Russia. Dump the communications system. And wipe your files, all of tnem. Understand?”

Yes.” Brandt considered the work necessary to implement those orders.

“e nodded again. “It can be done.”

“Make sure of it,” the other man told him coolly. “I will not tolerate any Mlore mistakes.” The phone went dead.

Brandt spun on his heel. “Yuri!” he growled. “Over here!”

Openly curious, the brawny, shaven-headed man ambled over. “Yes?”

“We’ve got new orders,” Brandt told him brusquely. “I’m heading back to Moscow straight away. Close up shop here, sanitize the area, and follow me when you can.”

“What about the Americans?”

Brandt shrugged. “They’re useless to us now. Finish them.”

With their hands still tied behind them, Jon Smith and Fiona Devin were hustled up the stairs and out of the cellar at gunpoint. They came up into the ruins

of the church, a square stone building topped by the broken remains of a central onion-shaped dome. Gray light from an overcast sky streamed in through empty windows and gaps in the dome. Small patches of weathered, fading paint on the moss-covered walls were all that was left of the bright frescoes of saints

and scenes from the Old and New Testaments that had once decorated the church interior. Everything else of value—the marble altar, the golden taberna-cle, chandeliers and candelabras—had long since been carted away.

Brandt wheeled at the main door to the church and sketched an ironic salute. “And here I will say farewell to you, Colonel. And to you, too, Ms.

Devin.” His teeth flashed white in the gloom. “I will not see either of you again.”

Jon said nothing, staring back at him with an impassive face. Show no fear, he told himself. Don’t give the bastard any satisfaction. He noticed that Fiona had the same faintly bored look on her bruised face. She glanced at Brandt with no more interest than she might have shown if he were a common house-

“y buzzing against a window.

Visibly irked by their lack of reaction, the gray-eyed man turned on his heel and left. Not long afterward, they heard the engine of his Ford Explorer roar into life and listened to its thick tires go crunching away across the snow and ice.

“Go on!” one of the two gunmen still guarding them growled. He gestured with his pistol, a 9mm Makarov, pointing toward a smaller, arched doorway at the side of the church. “Out through there!”

Smith glanced at him, not hothering to hide the contempt he felt. “And if we refuse?”

The gunman, the shaven-headed man Brandt had called Yuri, shrugged carelessly. “Then I will shoot you here. It makes no real difference to me.”

“Do as the man asks,” Fiona murmured. “If nothing else, we buy a little more time. And at least we get the chance to breathe a bit of clean air.”

]on nodded slowly. In the end, resisting here would make no real difference to their fate, and perhaps it would be better to die outside —under the open sky—than here in this musty pile of stone.

Of course, not dying would be even better, he thought wryly. Cautiously, he tried again to loosen his bonds, straining his wrists hard against the length of heavy-duty plastic cable binding him and then relaxing, trying to stretch them out slightly. Over time, the constant expansion and contraction might create a point of weakness that would let him break free. He sighed. It was a technique that might succeed, but only if he were given an uninterrupted ten or twelve hours to spend working awav at the cable. Unfortunately, his remaining life span was probably measured in minutes at best.