Day Of Wrath (22 page)

He claimed he was a friend of Helen’s. Well, let him prove it. He shook his head. “Not true. We know one of the people who set us up.

Have somebody put the squeeze on Colonel General Feodor Serov. That son of a bitch knows a hell of a lot more than he told us.”

Spiegel sighed. “That’s one of the new developments I mentioned.

Somebody took out both Serov and his wife yesterday-probably very early in the A.M. Whoever did it was a pro. The wife took one bullet to the brain. Serov went a little harder.

Somebody pumped him so full of heroin that the stuff was practically pouring out his eye sockets.”

Thorn felt his jaw muscles tighten. Every time he thought they were close to the inner core of this mystery, somebody got there first and cleared out all the evidence and witnesses. He looked hard at Spiegel.

“I suppose Serov’s murder is all over the evening papers, too?”

The
CIA
officer shook his head. “Not a peep. Nada. The
MVD
and the Russian Air Force have clamped down a complete security blackout around Kandalaksha. Nothing’s getting in or out. They’re damned serious about it, too. Finding out one of their highest-ranking officers was involved in drug trafficking has them rattled.”

“Oh?” Helen looked skeptical. “Then how did you find out about it?”

“Well …” Spiegel smiled slyly. “Let’s just say that Russian counterintelligence isn’t as good as they’d like to think.”

“All right, so Serov’s dead,” Helen said slowly, thinking aloud.

“That still leaves one more trail you could follow.”

“Oh?” Spiegel said. “Fill me in. I’ve never claimed omniscience.”

“Arrus Export,” Helen said. “Both Serov and the customs agent at Pechenga claimed they were dealing with a man named Peterhof.”

“Yeah,” Spiegel said. “I read your report.” Then he shook his head again. “That’s another dead-end, I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

The
CIA
man shrugged. “We checked with the Arrus office here in Moscow. They’ve never had anyone named Peterhof working for them. And they claim they’ve never run an Su24 engine acquisition program like the one you described.”

“What makes you think they’d admit something like that so easily?”

Thorn challenged. “Christ, we’re talking about blackmarket arms sales here!”

“I understand that, Colonel,” Spiegel said. He checked to make sure the door was completely closed, then lowered his voice slightly.

“Look, Arrus is a clean operation, okay? It’s on the side of the angels.”

Helen stared at him. “Are you telling us that Arrus Export is a Company asset? That it’s a front organization for the CIA?”

“Not exactly,” Spiegel said hastily. “But Arrus has done some significant favors for us in the past. And it’s very well connected back in the States. The owners are fair-haired boys in Langley’s books.”

Helen looked forward, her eyes glittering. “I’m going to ask you one more question, Charlie.” Her lips thinned. “And I expect a straight answer.”

“If I can,” Spiegel temporized.

“No ifs, Charlie,” Helen said coldly. “And no screwing around with maybes. or other covert op double-talk. You owe me.

Remember?”

The
CIA
officer flushed. “Ask your question.”

“Is this engine smuggling operation tied into the Agency somehow?” Helen said carefully. “Or to some other U.S. government outfit?”

“You’re sure?” Thorn asked skeptically. Spiegel’s denial meant nothing if he was out of the loop. All covert operations were run on strict need-to-know principles.

“I’m sure, Colonel,” the
CIA
man said. He looked Thorn squarely in the eye. “I went straight to the top of the Operations Directorate when I saw Helen’s preliminary report from Kandalaksha.

I even asked about the drug angle. Hell, I know this wouldn’t be the first time someone’s tripped over one of our ops, but I’m telling you this was not one of them.”

Spiegel shook his head yet again. “Look, I don’t know who the hell was buying Su-24 engines on the sly, or running heroin, or whatever the real story is. But I do know the
CIA
is clean. We’re not involved here.”

He glanced at Helen and frowned. “Christ, Helen, I know what you’re going through. Hell, I liked Alexei Koniev, too! But face facts: You’ve pushed this thing as far as you can. You’ve already put your whole career on the line, and you were damned lucky to get out of Pechenga in one piece. So let the Russians sort out their own messes!”

Thorn knew Spiegel was offering them good advice, but he didn’t need to see the stubborn set of Helen’s shoulders to know that she wasn’t prepared to let the matter drop so easily. Unfortunately, he didn’t see what choice either of them really had. Once they were out of Russia their ability to pin down the truth of what had happened at Kandalaksha would drop to precisely zero.

JUNE
8

U.S. Embassy Residential Compound, Moscow

Helen Gray surrendered any hope that she could persuade herself to sleep. Her body was tired—beyond tired, in fact. Every muscle ached. And whenever she moved, she could feel every separate scrape, cut, and bruise she’d collected during the desperate firefight aboard the Star of the White Sea. She could have ignored the pain. Training and sheer exhaustion would have allowed her to do that.

But now her mind and memory betrayed her.

The image of Alexei Koniev lying dead rose before her, and then fled back into the darker recesses of her mindchased away by old ghosts and new fears. All her life she’d pushed herself hard—striving always and everywhere to be the best, to win every game and every contest. Now it looked as though she’d finally met a puzzle she couldn’t solve and an unknown enemy she couldn’t beat.

Helen opened her eyes in the darkness and lay staring up at the ceiling of her small bedroom.

When she was just thirteen, she’d set her heart on becoming an
FBI
agent. Her parents, her brother and her sisters, and even some of her teachers had tried to convince her that she was on a wild-goose chase.

But she’d persisted. She’d weighed every class, every hobby, and every interest by how far it moved her toward her goal—the
FBI
Academy at Quantico.

Once in the
FBI
itself, she’d clawed her way up and into the elite Hostage Rescue Team by sheer ability and hard work-disdaining the various affirmative-action shortcuts that had been dangled in front of her. To Helen, the way to smash the sexist bias of the Bureau’s old boy network was to prove it flatout wrong—not to give them a chance to fall back on the tired, old cop-out that women couldn’t make the grade without special help.

Her jaw tightened. There would be celebrating in some corridors of the Hoover Building once the news that she’d been yanked out of Moscow filtered through the rumor mill. And there were plenty of others like Mcdowell scattered throughout the
FBI
.

Of course, Helen knew that she had friends and mentors in the Bureau’s hierarchy, too. Men who trusted her. Men who would stand by her. But what could they do for her now? Incurring the wrath of the Russian government while solving an important case might have been acceptable.

Pissing off the Kremlin just to come up with a jumble of unintelligible clues—all leading nowhere—was another story.

On the surface, Charlie Spiegel was right. Their investigation had reached a dead-end. Every witness and every potential suspect they’d turned up had been murdered—first Grushtin, then the entire crew of that Russian tramp freighter, and now Serov.

And, with Alexei Koniev dead, she and Peter had not only lost a partner and friend, they’d also lost their access to anybody they could trust in Russian law enforcement. So what else could they do but slink home to America with their tails between their legs?

Helen sat bolt upright in bed and thumped her fist onto the mattress with a muttered, “No way!”

“Thought you were awake,” Peter Thorn said softly, pushing himself up to sit beside her.

Peter had visited the broom-closet-sized room offered him as temporary accommodations by the embassy staff just long enough to drop off his travel kit. Then he’d come straight to her own cramped quarters to help her pack. Several hours of steady work had left her life in Moscow jumbled up in cardboard boxes all over the floor. At her invitation, he’d stayed for the night.

Both of them were too drained and exhausted to make love, but neither wanted to leave the other’s side. And neither of them gave a damn anymore about the gossip that might race through the chancery building.

Helen turned her head toward him, seeing his eyes gleaming in the dark.

“You can’t sleep, either?”

“Nope.” Peter sighed. “I just keep running things over and over in my mind—trying to see where we screwed up.” Then he shrugged ruefully.

“And trying to avoid thinking about what happens next. Once we’re home, I mean.”

Helen sat silent, struck by a sudden sense of shame. She’d been thinking too much about herself. No matter where they stuck hen-whether in Mudville or the Hoover Building’s basement records office—she would still carry a badge. She would still be an
FBI
special agent. But Peter … Peter had lost everything.

The United States Army had been his home—his real family, in fact for all of Peter Thorn’s life. His father had been a career soldier, a highly decorated senior sergeant in the Special Forces.

Peter’s boyhood had been spent on military bases around the country and around the world. And, after his wayward mother abandoned them when he was eleven years old, he and his father had grown still closer—closer to each other and closer to the Army they both loved.

Now he was forty and faced with the prospect of … what?

Helen wondered. Retirement? Shuffling papers as a manager in some corporate hive? Living hand-to-mouth as a freelance counterterrorism consultant in a world crowded with other ex-soldiers chasing the same degrading contracts?

She felt tears well up in her eyes and turned toward him. “Oh, Peter …” she whispered brokenly.

His arms tightened around her. One strong hand softly stroked her hair. He kissed her forehead gently, brushing his lips across her skin. “It’ll be all right, Helen,” he promised. “We’ll see this thing through together. No matter what happens.”

“Side by side?” she asked.

“Come hell, high water, earthquake, or congressional committee,” Peter said flatly.

Helen felt her fatigue, her pain, all her doubts, and all her fears fly away—vanishing in a single, convulsive instant. Her lips met his fiercely and parted. Her body molded to his in a flowing, moving, pulsing rhythm that swept time and trouble aside.

Sometime later, exactly how long she wasn’t sure and didn’t really care, she lay still in the comforting circle of his arms. She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, feeling her eyelids growing heavier by the second. “Wow.”

“Wow, yourself,” Peter agreed gladly. But then he shifted slightly beneath her. “Who knows? Maybe retirement won’t be so bad, after all.”

Helen heard the worried undertone in his voice and felt sleep fade out of her reach again. She raised herself up on one elbow and tapped him on the ribs. “You don’t mean that, Peter, do you?”

He sighed. “No, not really.” His eyes looked over her head—off toward a horizon she couldn’t see. “I know what I am, Helen.

I can’t dodge it. I was born to follow the
LIFE
and the drum—not the lute and the tambourine. If I can’t be a soldier …” He fell silent.

“Then we have to find a way to beat these guys. To win our honor back.

To prove we were right to chase after Grushtin and Serov, and whoever murdered them,” Helen said angrily, feeling her mind starting to come fully alive for the first time since she’d left Randolph Clifford’s ornate office.

“Nice sentiment in theory. But probably impossible to carry out in fact,” he said reluctantly. “I think we’re licked, Helen.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“No,” Peter said finally. Then he shrugged. “But I really don’t know where the hell we go from here.”

“Back to the basics,” Helen suggested.

“Okay,” he said. He sat up in bed again. “The basics being: What’s worth sabotaging a passenger plane, murdering a high-ranking Air Force officer, and slaughtering an entire ship’s crew to keep secret?”

“Heroin?” she speculated. “Bulk quantities of heroin? Stashed inside one or more of those Su-24 engines Serov and his officers sold?”

“Maybe. It fits most of what we know,” Peter said slowly. “And the Russians and our own people have sure bought that as the motive behind all this.”

She heard the doubt in his voice. “But you haven’t?”

He shook his head. “Christ, Helen, I don’t know. Not for sure.” He grimaced. “All I do know is that I’m really tired of having heroin smuggling shoved in my face as a motive at every possible opportunity.”

She nodded. The same thing had been bothering her. The ambush aboard the Star of the White Sea made it clear that the bad guys had been one step ahead of them all the way. If that were so, and they were smuggling drugs, why hadn’t they tried harder to clear away the evidence ?

When she asked that question aloud, Peter nodded himself.

“Good point. God knows those guys had plenty of time to themselves aboard that freighter-once they murdered the crew.” He leaned back against the pillow. “No, the more I think about it, the less I believe this whole thing is really about heroin smuggling.”’ “But what about the stuff we found in Gasparov’s suitcase?” Helen asked.

“Coincidence?” Peter suggested. “It could be a coincidence that the bad guys have been running with ever since—leading us down a bunch of blind alleys.”

Helen thought that over. “Maybe. The only real link we had between Captain Grushtin and Colonel Gasparov was that suicide note …”

“Which they forced Grushtin to write under torture,” Peter finished for her.

Helen grimaced. “Well, then, if we’re not chasing smuggled heroin—what the hell are we looking for?”

“Something else kept at Kandalaksha. Something valuable.”