Death Wave (9 page)

What the Crips and the Bloods would have done with weapons like
that
was something to ponder.

More recently, the NSA had tracked a COSCO freighter from Shanghai to Karachi, in Pakistan, with a cargo of weapons-related goods. The cargo included specialty metals and electronics used in the production of Chinese-designed Baktar Shikan antitank missiles.

There were plenty of other cases, too.

The NSA had been watching Mr. Feng for almost two years now, turning up a great deal of rather scandalous information about his private life but only hints and whispers about his professional connections. The CIA thought he was clean, though he
was
closely connected with Wang Jun—a senior executive in China’s Poly Technologies still wanted for his role in the
Empress Phoenix
affair. Rubens disagreed. Considering Feng’s former position in Chinese military intelligence, his reported dealings with people believed to be associated with several Islamic terror groups, including Pakistan’s Harkatul-Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammad, the Palestinian Hamas, and al-Qaeda itself, the man couldn’t
possibly
be clean. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck …

Contacts within Israel’s Mossad were concerned about a Palestinian operation known as Nar-min-Sama, variously translated as Fire of Heaven or, possibly, as Fire
from
Heaven. There was a code name associated with this operation—al-Wawi, the Jackal. Not even the Mossad yet knew who the Jackal was, but believed that he was orchestrating some sort of strike against both Israel and unnamed targets in the West.

There was also the matter of Lebed’s suitcase nukes to consider, as well as concerns about nuclear weapons from Iran or North Korea reaching any of a number of Islamic extremist groups.

Feng had recently traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, an unlikely, landlocked destination for a high-ranking executive of a maritime shipping company. From there he’d flown to Cairo, where he’d met with several men believed to be associated with Hamas, before going on to Berlin. The NSA had monitored numerous cell phone calls to all of those places, as well as Karachi, Kabul, and Dushanbe.

Connect the dots, Rubens thought, and a rather disturbing picture appeared, one involving transporting something from the heart of Central Asia south to Pakistan’s major port, then by ship to the Middle East—Cairo, perhaps, or Israel, or just possibly northern Europe.

That’s why Rubens wanted an operator inside Feng’s organization, someone who could get a lead on some of these mysterious business contacts of Feng’s, and someone who might have the opportunity to bug Feng’s computer and phone.

If anyone within the NSA’s Deep Black service could handle the job, it was Lia, but that didn’t make it any easier for Rubens to walk out of the Art Room at a critical moment in her op.

No, the dots didn’t make a pretty picture at all—and Lia and her team might be right at ground zero.

ADLON HOTEL
PARISER PLATZ
CENTRAL BERLIN, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY, 1625 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Lia was sitting on her bed in her hotel room when the knock sounded at her door.

“Sounds like opportunity knocking, Lia,” CJ told her.

Lia was alone in her room. CJ was still watching from down on the street, while Castelano and Daimler were in their room up on the seventh floor, but all three—as well as the Art Room crew—were linked in through her communications implant. She was careful of what she said while in the room. Though a sweep earlier had failed to turn up any electronic listening devices, Feng’s people might have still managed to bug it.

“Coming,” she called out. She’d changed out of her heels, skirt, and low-cut blouse in favor of more comfortable—and practical—clothing: blue jeans, a black pullover, and tennis shoes. Her hat, however, rested on the hotel room desk, its hidden camera set to provide Desk Three with a clear view of the entire room. Swiftly, she pulled her weapon from her open suitcase—a 9 mm SIG SAUER P226 Blackwater Tactical—and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back, tugging the pullover down to conceal it.

She unlocked the door. “Yes?”

It was one of the maroon-jacketed hotel bellhops. “Fräulein Lau?”

“Yes.”

“I have two packages for you,” he said in passable English. He handed her a manila envelope—that would be the promised COSCO contract—and a small white box tied with red ribbon.

“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the box.

“I don’t know, fräulein. I was told to give you both of these. And I’m to wait for you to sign something and return it.”

“Wait a moment.”

Closing the door, she took the envelope back to the desk and opened it. As expected, it was from Feng, three copies of two close-spaced printed pages—more of a letter of agreement than a full-blown contract. She scanned through it quickly, murmuring aloud the pertinent paragraphs for the benefit of the Art Room.

“Looks good and as promised,” she said, completing the document. She picked up a pen and signed all three copies. Two went back into the envelope for return to Feng. She looked at the white box for a moment, then decided to wait until she’d given the envelope back to the bellhop.

She opened the door and handed him the envelope and a generous five-euro tip. “Here you go. Thank you.”

“
Danke
, Fräulein Lau!”

Lia returned to the desk and picked up the box. “So, is Mr. Feng making a play for me already?” she asked. “Too big for a diamond ring.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the sort to propose marriage,” CJ said. “Are you going to open it?”

“It’s also too small to be a bomb,” she added.

“But not too small to be a listening device of some sort,” Tom Blake said. “Be careful what you say, Lia.”

She didn’t reply, but she set the package in front of her hat, directly beneath the camera, and began opening it.

A moment later, she pulled the contents out and dangled them for Desk Three’s inspection. “Oh, my.”

There was a handwritten note inside the package.
For the beach tomorrow
, it read, and it was signed
Jiu Zhu
.

“Are you actually going to wear that?” Marie Telach asked.

“What is it?” CJ said. “I’m blind out here, you know.”

“A bikini,” Lia said. “A very
small
bikini.” She frankly had her doubts that she would fit into that top. It was electric blue, what there was of it, three triangles of rather sheer blue cloth with black borders and some spaghetti-thin black string.

“It’s too small to hide a listening device, at least,” she said. “Too small to hide much of
anything
.”

“Another fine item of female apparel from Testosterone Fantasies Are Us,” Marie put in. “You’re not actually going to wear those postage stamps in public, are you?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Lia said. “I’ll have to see if this sort of thing is in my new job description.”

In fact, she knew, in a sense it was, since keeping Feng happy—being “eye candy,” as Rubens had described it—was as precise a description of the job as was possible.

She knew one other thing, too. If this was supposed to be her working outfit, she was going to have a hell of a time hiding any SIGINT devices inside—to say nothing of her P226.

5

ILYA AKULININ
MORGUE, RUSSIAN MILITARY HOSPITAL
DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN
WEDNESDAY, 1925 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Oh, God, no,” Masha said, taking several halting steps backward.

“What’s the matter?” Akulinin passed the radiation counter over the Chinese man’s body. There was no response—or very little. A few clicks that might represent normal background radiation, but nothing like the hiss of static that the other two had shown, even on his hands.

So … this one had stayed back while the other two had gotten their hands dirty. Had he been the one in charge? Or had he just not been involved with the actual transfer of radioactive materials?

“The radiation on those two …”

“Don’t worry,” Akulinin told her. “It’s not enough to make you sick or anything.”
I just hope the Art Room knows its stuff
, he added to himself.

“You don’t understand,” she said. She looked desperate, and scared. “Those men who were here a few minutes ago, Vasilyev …”

“What about them?”

“They’re FSB! That means they’re part of an antiterror unit, or maybe nuclear security, and they were after these three.”

“Yeah … so …”

“So I’m not
stupid
, Ilya! Those two people were handling nuclear material of some sort, and they’re
mafiya
!
That
one”—she pointed at the Chinese man—“if
he’s
involved, this must be big. International. Big enough, even, to bring in the American CIA?”

She was quick on the uptake.

He indicated the gray-eyed corpse, “This guy was a
mafiya
middleman,” Akulinin told her. “We think he was selling stolen mini nukes to an Islamic extremist group, maybe al-Qaeda, maybe someone else, a Pakistani terror organization. I don’t know why the Chinese guy is here.”

“Don’t you understand? Vasilyev will be back soon with a technician to check the bodies for radiation. They’re not going want to let word of this get out. Stolen nuclear weapons? That makes the Moscow government look
very
bad. If they think I know too much, they … they’re not going to let me go!”

“It’s okay, Masha,” Akulinin said. He was thinking fast. It was a breach of operational security, but in for a penny—

“It is
not
okay!”

“Look, you said you were trying to get back to the States, right? Maybe I can help.”

Her eyes widened. “What? Really? That would be—”

“I’m going to need to clear some stuff with my superiors, but at the very least we can get you out of
here
.”

The immediate problem was how. Dean and Akulinin were supposed to exfiltrate across the border into Afghanistan when their part of the op was over. Bringing along a civilian woman they’d just happened to pick up along the way was definitely
not
a part of the plan.

“People who get on the bad side of the FSB,” she said, “they … they disappear.”

Akulinin nodded. The
Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti
had a bad rep both for being thoroughly corrupt and for being unnecessarily brutal in the prosecution of their duties. Most Russian civilians were terrified of them, and with good reason. There were reports of
mafiya
extortionists within the FSB shaking down small business owners, of ex-military and ex-KGB thugs kidnapping people and holding them for ransom.

“I know,” he said. “That’s not going to happen to you. I promise you.” He stooped over and reattached the radiation counter to his ankle. “Listen, have you tried the American Embassy here in Dushanbe? I’d think they could help you.”

“No. My parents surrendered their American citizenship when they came here … and mine, too. And I would need money,
lots
of money, for a plane ticket, and proof I had relatives or a job in America.” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t help me.”

“It depends on who you talk to, Masha. I have … friends. They should be able to swing something.” He saw a pad of notepaper on a desk nearby, and a pen. He walked to the desk and wrote out an address in clear block Cyrillic letters. “Do you know where this is?”

“Adkhamov Street? It’s in the eastern part of the city. About, oh, five kilometers from here.”

A long way for her to walk. “Do you have a car?”

“No … but there’s good bus service.”

“Where do you live?”

“Prospekt Apartments, on Karamova. Perhaps a kilometer and a half.”

“I want you to go home, pack whatever you need to bring with you—a small suitcase, no more. Then get to this address.”

“What is it?”

“A safe house. You’ll buzz the intercom at the front door, and when a voice answers, you’ll ask them
Net li oo vahs luchshi comatih?
”

She looked puzzled. “Do you have a better room?”

“Right. It’s a code phrase. They’ll let you stay there, no questions asked. I’ll come by later.”

“Wait! Where are you going?”

“I have to see about rescuing my friend.”

“Who? Oh! The Indian Air Force officer?”

“The same. He’s in a lot of trouble right now.”

“You … you know they probably have men watching the hospital outside. If they see you leave … or me …”