Running With The Big Dogs: Sybil Norcroft Book Six (9 page)

Chapter Eleven

CIA Safe House, Central Moscow, Russia, Undisclosed Location, January 25, 2020, 0600 hrs

T
he most important weapon Sybil brought with her was money. She did not carry the money herself. It was just numbers. However, Sybil could activate those numbers anytime, and a person she designated could pick up almost any amount of cash imaginable. She came prepared to seduce confidential informants and Mafiosi and to subvert the much-vaunted, and highly over-rated, code of honor and silence of the
russkaya mafiya
.

Two days of nervous pacing on Sybil’s part and a small army of trusted operatives—both American and Russian—produced a Mafioso willing to put aside his scruples for enough filthy lucre to take him away to a beach in Mexico where he could live in luxury for the rest of his life. Mac and the absolutely daunting leader of the special-ops hostage rescue group convinced the man that he did not have to fear reprisal from the
Solntsevskaya Bratva
anywhere near as much as he needed to fear Mac and his friend, and even more, the dragon lady, who never spoke. Sybil sat in an old imperial Russian chair like an all-wise Sphinx and held the Mafioso with an unblinking gaze. He acknowledged both the carrot and the stick and swore that he could lead them to the kidnapped girls without them risking capture by Leonid Aleksandrovich Zaslavsky and his minions.

Now that the team was in Moscow, Sybil was able to pick up the signal from Cerisse’s GPS implant. The signal was stable and in a fixed place—central Moscow. Without the Mafioso, the team would be able to track the girl to 100 yard diameter circle, but the GPS device did not live up to its promise of precision of location within 10 feet. They had to be able to be more precise than that. The team’s and the girls’ lives depended on it.

The CIA ring leaders held a quick and intense conference and decided to trust the Mafioso enough to have him lead them to the girls and their captors. As soon as the man left the safe house, Mac, Steffan—not his real name—and Sybil quickly dismantled the safe house and moved on to a different location which their Mafioso “partner” did not know about. They arranged to meet in the forested area of Sokolniki Park at 0200 the next morning.

The cold was beyond numbing; it was frightening—25°F below zero. The plus side of that problem was that almost no one was out on the streets, and not a soul was in the park other than the CIA team and their “partner”. Moscow is one of the greenest cities in the world; and, at that hour, on that day, it was one of the whitest. There are 96 parks, 18 gardens—of which four are botanical—in Moscow. 170 square miles of forest have been preserved in the city, most of which is in the central part of Moscow. It was easy to remain anonymous to the point of near invisibility among the birch, maple, and elm tree labyrinths contained in the two-and-a-half square mile area of the park.

The team was in place at 1:30 to be able to guard against betrayal by their Mafioso “partner”. The members of the team who were to participate in the actual attack on the
Solntsevskaya Bratva
stronghold numbered twelve, and the rest of the team—ten men—was held in reserve and to provide back-up and communications. From their vantage point, Mac, Steffan, and Sybil could see out of their dense cover of trees to the large fountain situated just beyond the frozen ponds.

The Mafioso arrived exactly on time, and was alone—both pluses. The CIA team waited patiently for five minutes; and when no one else appeared, Steffan left the cover of the trees and walked in a circuitous path towards the man who was about to betray his
Solntsevskaya Bratva
masters. At this point, his life and that of the CIA agents were inextricably intertwined, and trust became an empirical imperative. Steffan was dressed all in white and was almost invisible. The night was clear, and there was nothing but starlight to offset the mine-shaft blackness of the very early morning.

Steffan gave the pre-arranged signal—two long and three short flashlight exposures followed by a pause, then repeated. The Mafioso returned the signal.

“Everything still a go?” Steffan asked in fluent Russian.

“Yeah,” the Mafioso said. “You have the money and the transportation out?”

“I do,” Steffan assured the man. “I’m freezing. Let’s get this show on the road.”

“What means, ‘show on the road’?”

“Just an expression. It means, we need to begin moving.”

“I will ride with you and show the way.”

The ‘way’ was surprisingly close.

The three vehicle convoy drove lights out and very close together to an affluent and very popular residential area called
Patriarshiye
Ponds [Patriarch’s Ponds] although there was only one pond—a small, beautiful oval which was now solid ice.

“We are here; this is
Patriki
,” their Mafioso told the team.

They were in a fairly densely populated residential area in downtown Presnensky District of Moscow with easy access to many of Moscow’s most famous sites—the Kremlin, Tverskaya street with all its stores and restaurants, the Bolshoi Theater, and the Moscow Conservatory. Beautiful apartment buildings and a few large mansions were situated around the pond. The team cautiously approached their destination—house No. 6, Maly Patriarshy Pereulok, on the south-west side of
Patriarshiye
Ponds, home of Leonid Aleksandrovich Zaslavsky, the
vory v zakone
[syndicate boss and chief of the thieves-in-law] of the
Solntsevskaya Bratva, russkaya mafiya
. It was now three in the morning, a frigid January 26, 2020.

There was no activity in or near the house, verified by more than half a dozen passes by the team before they were satisfied. Mac, Steffan, and Sybil asked the Mafioso two more times if he was certain that the American girls were inside that house; and he swore on his mother’s life that they were. Before the assault team made the final commitment to attack the mansion, they quietly circled through the adjacent streets—Spiridonovka, Bolshava, and Malaya Bronnaya Streets and Trekhprudny, Kozikhinsky, and Granatny Lanes. Cars lined the streets, but the team never saw one of them move. They moved slowly along the streets looking carefully into each vehicle and saw no one inside.

As the Mafioso predicted, there was no police presence.
Patriarshiye
Ponds was one of the safest places in all of Moscow—no criminal with any brain at all would even think of committing a burglary or a crime of violence in that
russkaya mafiya
stronghold—and the police had an understanding with the
mafiya
. Moscow is home to more billionaires than any other city in the world, and a fair share of them were in Paradise Ponds. House No. 6, Maly Patriarshy Pereulok was home to one of them.

The house was an old and beautifully preserved late nineteenth century Gothic/Neo-Gothic mansion located facing the pond in an island of calm in the heart of Moscow, which has more than its share of street crime. All low-rise buildings which once surrounded the pond had given way after the 1950s to mansions filled with people who did not fraternize with one another and who made it a ruling dogma of their lives not to know that No. 6 was home to the chief-of-chiefs of the
mafiya
. They went to great lengths to keep their neighborhood looking respectable.

By 3:30, the team had decided on their escape route and had found a lot adjacent to No. 6 where they could park their two SUVs and their van in relative obscurity. Christian Hanks was the electronics advance man. He crept through the snow up to the house and used the wizardry of his electronic devices to map out the security system. It helped that he was in possession of the blue prints of the place drawn when No. 6 was refurbished in 2014. With the help of a little
c. взяточничество
[bribery money] everything they needed was obtained from the hall of records.

Christian decided on the most vulnerable entrance points.

“It is amazing, but they have next to nothing in the way of security on the second and third floors. We can climb the rear fire escape then move along the narrow balcony to the second floor portico. We should be able to cut out a segment of the glass doors and get in without making a sound.”

“Too noisy,” Steffan said, “we’ll have to climb the walls.”

“How about human and K-9 guards?” Sybil asked.

“Probably there—both of them—but I didn’t get detected by either in my little reconnoitering adventure. We have some ground steak packed with doggy sedatives to feed them if—or more realistically, when—they greet us.”

He was right. As soon as the group of CIA agents got close to the house, three silent and very menacing Doberman Pincers rounded the corner of the house from the hedge area in the back. As predicted, they were more interested in the mounds of ground meat than in the intruders; and they succumbed quickly to the long-acting sedatives.

Mac and Steffan unfolded and threw their four talon steel grappling hooks and lines up to the second floor balustrade and climbed swiftly up the braided nylon ropes. They opened their backpacks and each withdrew a thin but sturdy rope ladder. Sybil and the six additional men—who had been selected to make the actual entry into the house—quickly ascended the ladders and joined Mac and Steffan on the narrow stone balcony walkway with its marvelous niches and frescos. They were all wearing the best military night-vision goggles available in the world. The nine intruders made their way to the glass doors which opened onto a small second floor patio. The other four members of the team remained out in the cold to patrol the grounds to protect against sentries.

The first death occurred less than a minute after the entry team cut an opening through the glass doors and into the house. A sentry, shivering in the cold and clutching a steaming mug of tea, walked into a trap set by two of the CIA perimeter guards. The sentry never knew what hit him. No one standing more than five feet away would have heard a thing.

Inside the house, Sybil’s team reconnoitered and spent a few minutes getting their bearings. They communicated by pre-arranged hand signals and separated—combat knives in hands—to eliminate any security guards and to find where the girls were kept. Sybil drew first blood. She rounded a corner and saw a sentry standing in front of one of the second floor bedrooms. He had ear buds in his ears and was swaying to music coming from an iPod. Sybil’s svelte figure covered in black slipped along hugging the wall. The hallway was pitch-black except for a small night light mounted over the bedroom door. She moved with glacial celerity and in perfect silence until she was standing next to the sentry who was absorbed in his music. He was little more than a teenager. Sybil dispatched him with a sudden swipe of her razor sharp K-bar knife. She caught his body as he crumpled to the floor before he could make a noise. She entered the bedroom, presuming it was the room of someone important because of the guard.

From photographs of the family prepared before the mission unit left the U.S., Sybil recognized that she was looking at the adored daughter of the most violent man in Russia. Renata Leonidovna Zaslavsky was the only child of the
vory v zakone
[chief of chiefs] of the
Solntsevskaya Bratva
and was an accomplished cyber hacker and criminal in her own right. Renata was easily the most protected adolescent in all of Russia. Given that she was the daughter of the
vory v zakone
, she was an untouchable. No criminal in his right mind would risk a six week slow death by disturbing a hair on the beautiful blond girl’s head. She was a genius; her specialty was the placement of network viruses which could be used to corrupt information transfer or to disrupt the function of an entire network, something she had done to the NYSE computer network a few weeks previously.

Improvising, Sybil took out her bottle of chloroform, dabbed some on a black handkerchief and quickly and forcefully applied the cloth to Renata’s nose and mouth. There was a very brief and violent—but quiet—struggle before the pretty young woman was anesthetized. Sybil bound her hands and ankles with plastic cuffs and taped her mouth and eyes with duct tape. By the time she was back out in the hallway, the other agents had shot and killed three other sentries with silencer equipped pistols. The guards had been posted in front of third floor bedrooms. All nine CIA agents gathered in front of the largest and most elaborate door, presuming that it led into the
vory v zakone
, Leonid Aleksandrovich Zaslavsky and his wife Christiane’s bedroom.

That presumption was correct. The corpulent chief-of-chiefs was snoring vigorously. His wife—in a separate bed—had ear plugs in her ears and a soft black face mask over her eyes. On each of their bedside tables sat a half-finished goblet of red wine and a bottle of the powerful sleep agent, Zolpidem. Sybil chloroformed and bound Christiane. The rest of the agents surrounded the bed of Leonid Aleksandrovich and pounced on him. He was trussed up like a Christmas goose before he could mount an effective or noisy defense. At Mac and Steffans’ insistence, he remained conscious; so, he could communicate.

In Russian, Steffan spoke softly and with menace to the terrified mafia boss, “Don’t make a sound, or I will blind you,” where Steffan’s first words.

He punctuated his communication with the point of a knife hovering less than a quarter of an inch above Zavlavsky’s left eye.

“Good thinking,” Steffan said.

He removed the duct tape from Zavlavsky’s mouth.

“No noise,” he said.

“You are dead men,” Zavlavsky said, having regained something of his courage and panache.

“We are not, and you are in no position to make threats. We have no intention to kill you, Leonid Aleksandrovich. On the contrary, we want you to remain very much alive. However, if you put up resistance, I will blind you and make you deaf—a condition that will persist for as long as you live in a prison in a faraway land where you will be a despised supplier of information. Your choice.”

Zavlavsky nodded his understanding but still glared malevolently.

“Where are the girls?” Steffan asked softly with all the menace of which he was capable.