The Solomon Effect (26 page)

The two Russians the militia shot down near the creek were
dead. So was the militia captain, and the village priest, and a blond, blue-eyed shooter wearing a camouflage jacket and a turtleneck sweater hiked up to show the U.S. Special Forces tattoo on his side.

“Somehow, I don’t think we’re dealing with al-Qa’ida,” said Andrei, studying the elaborate depiction of a snake swallowing a sword.

Jax shook his head and went to hunker down beside the body of the second shooter, a tall, thin man with brown hair and gray eyes and a pale, faintly freckled face. “Doesn’t look like it, does it?” He pushed to his feet. “Any chance I can get these guys’ fingerprints?”

“I’ll have them faxed to Division Thirteen.”

“Oh, Matt’ll love that.”

They found Stefan Baklanov huddled beside an old feed bin at the far end of the stable block, a half-grown black-and-tan pup cradled in his arms.

“He’s hurt,” said the boy.

Crouching beside him, October ran one hand over the
pup’s rear flank. Her fingers came away sticky with blood. “If you’ll carry him outside,” she said in her flawless Russian, “I’ll take a look at him and see what I can do.”

The boy hesitated, then swallowed hard and pushed to his feet.

Their attempts to get anything out of the boy were next to useless until some three hours later when, freshly showered and fed, and in clean clothes, Stefan Baklanov sat on a sofa in his mother’s home, the bandaged pup at his side.

“The men who hired your uncle to raise the U-boat,” said Andrei, “who were they?”

The boy hugged the dog tighter and threw a questioning glance at Jax.

“Don’t worry about him,” said Andrei. “Who shot your uncle?”

“Americans,” Stefan whispered.

“How do you know they were Americans?” said Jax in English.

Tobie started to translate for him, but Stefan answered easily, “I heard them talking.” He turned his head to meet Jax’s hard gaze. “They sounded like you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Jax.

Andrei snorted. “You mean, you don’t want it to make any sense.” To the boy, he said, “Do you know why these Americans wanted your uncle to salvage that particular U-boat?”

Stefan sank lower on the sofa, his gaze on the worn carpet at his feet.

“It’s all right,” said Tobie, ignoring Andrei’s frown. “No one is blaming you.”

Stefan fiddled with his dog’s ears. “They said the U-boat carried a weapon.”

Andrei’s voice sharpened. “What kind of a weapon?”

“A disease. I don’t know what kind.”

“Do you know why the Americans killed your uncle?”

Stefan nodded. “They found out he was planning to double-cross them. I don’t know how.”

Jax said, “The man in charge of the Americans—do you know his name?”

Stefan drew the pup up to him in a tight embrace and shook his head. “I only ever heard Uncle Jasha call him ‘Major.’”

“What will happen to the boy?” asked Tobie. They were in another militia van on their way back to the helipad.

Andrei took a new pack out of his pocket and shook out a cigarette. “I’ll leave a couple of militiamen at their farm for a few days, just in case. But I don’t think anyone will bother him. He’s told us what he knows.”

“They could be mercenaries,” said Jax, his thoughts obviously running along a different track entirely.

“They could be,” Andrei agreed.

A lot of Special Forces people left the service as soon as they could, taking their training and selling it for big bucks to private ‘security companies.’ Often they worked for the U.S. government. But sometimes they didn’t. Tobie said, “How do we find out who these guys were working for?”

“If they really were in the American military, their prints should lead us right to them.”

Tobie felt her stomach clench as the Ansat came into view, its main rotor slowly beating the air. “And if they weren’t? We’re at a dead end, aren’t we?”

The militia driver braked beside the waiting chopper. Andrei drew the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and said, “Not necessarily.”

Jax paused with his door half open. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Andrei dropped the half-smoked cigarette in the snow and
ground it beneath his heel. “It means there’s someone I think Ensign Guinness might like to meet.”

Carlos Rodriguez rode the Ural to within two hundred meters of the Polish border. Abandoning the motorbike in a ditch, he cut through a nearby stand of birch until he came out on a Polish road. He thumbed down a trucker, then caught a series of rides that brought him to Gdansh—which had once been the German city of Danzig but was now very, very Polish.

He booked a flight to Washington, D.C., then found a quiet coffee shop and put in a call to Boyd.

“The Russians have the kid,” he told Boyd without preamble.

There was a moment’s tense silence. Boyd said, “Tell me what happened.”

Rodriguez stared across the concourse to where a woman in a short skirt and high black boots was helping a toddler take off his coat. “They had his house staked out. It was a trap.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was close enough. “They got my entire team.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.” It was important that every man be dead; dead men don’t tell tales. “No one captured. And they were all sterile.”

Boyd’s voice was a gravelly rasp. “You must be losing your edge, to fall into a trap like that.”

Rodriguez tightened his jaw. “It was an FSB operation. They had their first team in there.”

Again, a fierce silence. Boyd said, “When can you get back here?”

“My flight leaves in an hour.”

“We’ll talk when you get here,” said Boyd, and hung up.

Rodriguez glanced again at the woman. As if conscious
of showing too much leg, she’d crouched down. He turned away.

The failure to kill the boy was a concern, but not too much of a problem at this point. If the boy had found someone to listen to his tale earlier in the week, he would have done some real damage. But now? No one would have time to put the pieces of the puzzle together before Saturday night.

It was the loss of Salinger and Kirkpatrick that really stung. Rodriguez didn’t like to lose men. He didn’t like to lose, period. He still wasn’t exactly sure what had gone down in the stables of Yasnaya Polyana. But he knew who to blame for it. And once Boyd’s little operation was over, Rodriguez would see that they paid for it.

Both of them.

Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October
3:10
P.M.
local time

Her name was Dr. Svetlana Bukovsky. A small, slim woman
with gray-streaked brown hair and fiercely intelligent gray eyes, she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Dressed in a brown tweed skirt, brown sweater, wool tights, and sensible shoes, she met them at the doorway of her office at Immanuel Kant State University in Kaliningrad.

“What a pleasure it is to actually meet you, Ensign. I’ve been following your career with interest for months.”

Tobie found her hand seized in an unexpectedly firm grip. “You have?”

Andrei said, “Dr. Bukovsky teaches here at the University, now. But before that, she spent more than twenty years working with the KGB. Her specialty is remote viewing.”

“How did you—” Tobie broke off, her gaze flying to meet Jax’s.

“How did I know you’re a remote viewer?” Andrei gave
an enigmatic smile and turned to Jax. “Come. Let us leave them to their work.”

Tobie said, “I don’t really need a tasker.”

They sat across from each other at a table made of golden oak. Tobie’s chair was comfortably padded, the room dimly lit and soundproofed.

A perfect
RV
room.

Dr. Bukovsky said, “I know. But it is always easier for others to accept one’s results, don’t you agree, when one has the mechanics of a more controlled viewing in place?”

“Somehow, I can’t see the United States government giving much credence to a viewing I did with a KGB scientist in Kaliningrad.”

A soft smile touched the older woman’s eyes. “Is that so important at this point?”

Tobie hesitated, aware of the clock ticking relentlessly toward Halloween. She blew out a long sigh. “All right.”

She closed her eyes, let her breathing slow and deepen as she relaxed down into her Zone. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.

The Russian rested the palm of one hand on a plain envelope that lay on the table before her. “The target is written here. Tell me what you see.”

Tobie closed her eyes again. After her experience in Bremen, she knew a moment of uncertainty, a worry that her gift had somehow deserted her. But this time, the images came. Faint at first. Blurred flashes that slowly solidified. She said, “I’m getting the sense of something rectangular. It’s like a box, or a case. A metal case. It’s…shiny. Like an aluminum case.”

“What’s in the case? Can you see?”

“Something cylindrical. Yellow.” She began to sketch the images on the pad that lay before her. “It’s a bright, almost
fluorescent yellow. The cylinder is also metal. But I get the sense…” She hesitated. “It’s as if it’s not real. It’s an illusion.”

It made no sense, but now was not the time for analysis. The Russian said, “Can you back away from it?”

“Yes.”

“Now tell me what you see.”

“The aluminum case is lying on a desk. A wooden desk. Well polished. The room is rather small, paneled in the same wood as the desk. I get the impression of comfort. Luxury.”

“Move above the room, then look down and tell me what you see.”

“A railing. White. White walls. It’s like a house, but it’s not a house. There’s water. Sunlight.” She started a new sketch, the outlines of a sleek bow and decks slowly taking shape. She said, “It’s a boat.”

“Can you move around it?”

Tobie shifted her perspective again. Coming around the stern, she could see the name of the boat written in a flowing script. “There’s an ‘h.’” She frowned. “No. Maybe it’s an ‘l,’ or an ‘f’.” She shook her head. She always had a hard time with script. “I can’t read it.”

“That’s all right, October. Back away from the boat now and tell me what you see.”

Tobie took a deep breath and smelled the briny bite of the sea. “Water. Calm water. Reflections of lights. City lights. There’s a stretch of silvery wood. A dock.”

“Keep moving back.”

“I’m getting a sense of a wide-open area. Grass. Beyond that are trees. No. Not trees. Columns. A row of columns. Pavement. It’s a building, or a house. A large house.” She sketched it quickly. An Italianate villa with a terrace overlooking the water. She went back over her drawing, adding arched windows, wide French doors, the feathery fronds of palm trees.

Dr. Bukovsky said, “Can you move back more?”

Tobie tried to focus on the surrounding houses, the street. But the farther she moved away from the boat, the more indistinct and disjointed the images became. She managed to draw a rough sketch of a bridge. But in the end, she shook her head in frustration and leaned back in her seat.

“The target,” she said, pushing her hair off her forehead with one splayed hand. “What was it?”

Wordlessly, Dr. Bukovsky held out the plain envelope.

Tobie ripped it open. On a single sheet of white paper, someone—Andrei?—had written, “The current position of the pathogen from U-114.”

“I guess that explains why the viewing I tried in Bremen didn’t work,” said Tobie, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the university building. The snow had stopped, but a bitter wind had kicked up, stinging her cheeks and making her eyes water. She turned up the collar of her jacket. “I was trying to
RV
an atom bomb that didn’t exist.”

Jax squinted over at the Tatar, who waited, unsmiling, next to a sleek silver Mercedes S-Class drawn up at the curb. They were booked on the next flight to Washington, D.C. “I suppose we can take this as some kind of proof that the pathogen does exist. Even if we don’t have a clue where it is.”

“You know it’s someplace that has palm trees and boats,” said Andrei, a smile tightening the skin beside his eyes. “That should narrow your search.”

Jax studied the Russian’s enigmatic face. “You’re being way too cooperative, Andrei. Why?”

“Can you think of a better way to find out if that pathogen has left Russia?”

“Are you telling me you believe in remote viewing?”

Andrei shook a cigarette from a nearly empty pack. “Why? Don’t you?”

When Jax didn’t answer, the Russian huffed a soft laugh. Resting the cigarette on his lower lip, he reached inside his
jacket for a sheaf of papers folded into thirds. “Here. Some light reading to pass the time on your flight.”

Jax took the papers. “What’s this?”

Andrei struck his lighter, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “You remember you asked about Martin Kline?”

“You found something on him?”

“Who told you he came to Russia?”

“Someone who was at Dachau.”

Andrei nodded to the papers in Jax’s hand. “Those are copies of some old World War II intel reports from the field, including a transcript from the debriefing of one of the Communists liberated from Dachau. According to his report, the Americans took Dr. Kline.”

“What makes you so sure your Dachau survivor was right, and mine was wrong?”

“Because this man wasn’t just repeating a rumor. He says he helped load Kline’s papers and medical samples on a truck. A U.S. Government truck.”

“He could have been mistaken,” said Tobie.

Andrei glanced over at her. “He might have been. Which is why I’ve also included a report from an agent we had at Fort Strong, where your government processed the high-value Germans it took to the States after the war.”

“Operation Paperclip,” said Jax, his fingers tightening around the papers.

Tobie looked from one man to the other, not understanding. “What’s Operation Paperclip?”

Miami, Florida: Friday 30 October 10:30
P.M.
local time

The 110-foot Hargrave yacht Walker’s ex-wife had christened the
Harlequin
rocked gently against the private dock at the base of Walker’s Miami garden.

Lifting the aluminum case onto the master stateroom’s
built-in desk, he eased it open. Nestled within the gray foam padding lay a fluorescent yellow steel tank, thirteen inches long, of the kind normally used as an emergency air supply by SCUBA divers. Within it waited six cubic feet of deadly air under 3,000 dpi.

Walker didn’t often smile, but he smiled now. There weren’t many men in history who could truly be said to have changed the world. But he was about to join their ranks.

He snapped the case shut and left it there, behind the locked door of the
Harlequin
’s stateroom.