Watchlist (26 page)

Clearly still blinded by the blow to her nose, Gun Bitch swiveled her weapon in the direction of the noise and issued a command in a language that Felicia did not understand, yet whose meaning was universal: “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Felicia punched the woman’s wrist, connecting squarely with the tendons on the soft underside and sending the pistol spiraling into the lap of her co-captive, who grunted reflexively on impact.

The vehicle slowed even more as the driver pivoted to see what was going on, but when Gun Bitch barked another order, he whipped back around to face front and acceleration forces kicked in again.

Felicia dove for the racing pavement.

Middleton knew that the urgency in Tesla’s tone had been driven by the presence of a corpse in the middle of his flat. His wrecked flat.

The body was a concern, of course, but Middleton had seen way too many of them over the years to get overly spun-up about one more. With a dead body, you got analytical. You could take your time. Someone dead today would still be dead a week from now, so the urgency was gone. The spattered blood and brains were literally and figuratively custodial matters—troubling annoyances to be cleaned up later with a little time, patience and detergent.

Far more troubling to him was the shattered violin on the floor. Resting as it was, scattered among the flotsam of overturned furniture and broken trinkets, Middleton knew in an instant why the concert had been postponed. It wasn’t a missing pianist or a technical problem. It was the missing star of the show.

“Who took Felicia?” Tesla wondered.

Middleton muttered, “Whoever left a dead man in my foyer.”

“They didn’t just leave him here. They shot him here,” Tesla said. “We need to notify the locals. Now that there’s a murder, we need to get them involved.”

“Fine.” Middleton couldn’t have cared less. Where the hell was Felicia? Why would anyone attack her like this?

“You say that so easily,” Tesla said, trying to draw him into the present. “But they’re going to ask some damn difficult questions.”

Middleton scowled at her and cocked his head, as if he’d just heard a foreign language being spoken. “What?” Then it fell into place. “Oh, OK. Fine. Whatever. Let them ask their questions. Nora, we need to find her.”

She shook her head. “No, we need to find
them
. They come as a package deal.”

But where to begin? With so many moving parts, how the hell were they supposed to—

His cell phone chimed in his pocket. “Jesus,” he spat, and as he looked at the caller I.D. display and didn’t recognize the number or even the exchange, he almost hit the ignore button. But then he thought better of it. When this much was going so wrong so quickly, you never knew where the next turn was going to lead. He brought the phone to his ear. “Middleton.”

“Carson.”

He recognized the difference in her voice and his gut tightened. “Are you all right?”

“Lespasse is dead,” she said. The simplicity of the delivery could have seemed harsh, but in this case, he sensed that by saying the words aloud, she’d freed herself of a burden.

“Dead! How?” At the exclamation from her colleague, Tesla’s head whipped around.

“Tampa was a trap. Place looked like it’d been empty for weeks. They had a bomb planted for us.”

His landline rang. He ignored it. “For
you
? How could they plant a bomb for you? They couldn’t know that you were coming.”

“If not for us, for someone. Jesus, Harry, cut me a break on the grammar, OK? I’m on my way into surgery.”

So Carson was hurt too. He hadn’t thought of that. “What happened to you?” The landline cycled through its third ring and Middleton nodded for Tesla to answer it for him.

“Some burns and broken bones. Not too bad, I don’t think.”

Despite her words, he could hear the pain and fear in her voice. “Is that what you say or does that come from the doctor?”

Carson said, “I didn’t call for sympathy, Harold. I have important news that I need to share before I go under the knife.”

Across the room, Tesla covered the mouthpiece with her hand and waved at Middleton.

Still stunned by the news of the death of his comrade and friend, Middleton stared at her blankly as he tried to focus on his own call. “Hold on, Connie.”

Tesla said, “It’s about Felicia.”

“Is she OK?”

“This is the police on the line. They say that she wandered into the station bruised and bloodied and saying something about diving out of a moving car. They’ve sent her to the hospital.”

“Who snatched her?”

“A woman. Youngish. Pretty. Tough . . . Middle Eastern maybe. Indian, Pakistani. Sri Lankan. Harold, what should I tell the police?”

“That you’ll call them back.”

He returned his attention to Carson. “OK, Connie, go ahead.”

The Texan was explaining her own urgent matter. One phrase jumped out and refocused him entirely on his cell phone.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Did you say thermobaric explosive?”

“I did,” Carson said. Even through the phone, he could hear her pleasure that he’d connected his own set of dots. “Just like all those we dealt with in Kosovo. Just like the ones the Afghanis have been disarming for a decade.”

Thermobarics were perfected by the only nation he knew of whose troops regularly deployed them. “So you think there’s a Russian connection?”

“Sure could be. I found a note about calling Moscow. No number. And a shipping label in the trash. Blank, but they may have records.” She gave him the name, her voice quivering in pain.

He thanked her. “Connie, I’m sorry.”

Toughening her drawl, she said, “Later, Harry. I’ve got to see a man about a knife.”

The phone sagged in Middleton’s hand. He turned to Tesla and inhaled deeply. Then he shared the terrible news about Lespasse.

“No! My God, no!”

“And Connie’s been hurt.” But then he controlled the emotion and continued, telling her what Carson had explained about the thermobarics.”

“Russia?”

“Possibly.” Then he nodded at Tesla’s phone. “What about Felicia?”

“She told the police that her kidnapper was angry that they’d taken the wrong person. She thinks they were actually after Charley.”

Middleton felt the color drain from his cheeks. “Sure, Felicia’s young and was in my apartment. They thought she was my daughter. Then they realized she was Polish, not American. They were probably going to kill her. Thank God she got away.”

“She’s still in the emergency room—they won’t let her call. But she sent a message. You should read your email.”

He lifted his cell phone, furious at himself for not opening Felicia’s message immediately. “Jesus,” he said as he read, “Sikari patented technology for a new heavy-water system for making nuclear material.”

“What she was telling us about heavy water . . . ”

“Right.”

Middleton pulled out his encrypted cell phone and placed a call to the Volunteers’ office outside D.C. He took a deep breath and when a man answered, he said, “Wiki . . . ”

“Boss? What’s wrong?”

“I have something to tell you.” After a moment’s hesitation, he delivered the news about Lespasse.

“No, Harry . . . Oh no.”

“I’m afraid so. Connie was with him. She’s in surgery in Florida right now. I need you to stay on top of what’s happening down there.”

“You bet. Of course . . . Boss, I’m sorry.”

Then Middleton shoved aside the memories about his dead colleague and consulted his notes. He said, “I need you to crack into the shipping records of Continental-Europe Transport Ltd. Find all the deliveries to and from Sindhu Power in Tampa. Connie found their shipping label.”

“And that’s the outfit in Florida where Connie and JM were?”

“Yeah. The address on Balan’s computer.”

Middleton clicked his phone shut and turned to Tesla. “OK, Nora, if they snatched Felicia thinking she was Charley—”

“It means Charley’s in trouble. You want to go to Paris, Harold?”

“No, I want you to. The email on Balan’s computer said whatever was going to happen in the ‘village’ was going to happen soon. Our Florida operation’s been derailed. Given that Connie found a note about calling Moscow, Russia’s our only lead—that’s the only country selling thermobarics on the black market. I’ve got to get there as fast as I can.”

Stepping over the body, he snagged his suitcase, which he hadn’t had a chance to unpack.

Tesla looked at the body. “The police. I have to call them back. What should I tell them?”

Middleton paused for a moment to think. “Tell them anything,” he said. “Everything, if you’d like.” He started walking toward the front door. “We won’t be around when they get here anyway.” A nod at the body. “He’s their problem now.”

6

JOSEPH FINDER

A
t just after three o’clock on a gloomy afternoon, the Boeing 727 touched down on runway number 3 at Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport.

The reverse thrusters kicked in with a loud whine and before long the roar of the engines subsided as the plane was powered down.

For several minutes, the pilot and his three-man crew just sat there, waiting patiently for the tedious rituals to begin—border control and customs, clearing first the crew and then the cargo. Hours of forms and questions but most of all
waiting.
The Soviet Union was no more, but its bureaucracy lived on. Rain thrummed against the Plexiglas cockpit window, which slowly began to fog up.

And they waited.

Since this was a cargo plane, there were no passengers to deplane. The main cabin was a cavernous cargo bay packed with eleven containers of cargo—igloos, they were called in the business—which were in turn jammed with boxes. Everything from flat-screen TVs to iPhones, from Armani suits to Armagnac.

Seated along the bulkhead in the small compartment aft of the cockpit, the second officer spoke quietly to the new man, who had been added to the crew at the last minute, just before takeoff in Frankfurt.

“You don’t talk much,” the second officer said. He hadn’t stopped talking since they departed Frankfurt.

“Yeah, well,” said the other man.

“Ever been to Moscow before?”

“Once or twice. Long time ago.”

“You won’t recognize the place.”

“So I hear.”

“Well, you got one whole night to see Moscow before we turn around and fly out of here in the morning. I know a couple of awesome night-clubs.
Smokin’
hot Russian babes.”

“Thanks anyway,” the new man said. “I thought I might just do a little sightseeing.”

“Come
on
, man. What’re you gonna do, go see
Lenin’s tomb
or something? This place I’m going to, it’ll totally blow your mind when you see the way these Russian babes—”

“I’m good,” said the new man. “I’m wiped. I’ll probably just walk around, see what Moscow’s like these days.”

“Well, be careful, buddy,” the second officer said. “They got street crime now, you know. Some parts of the city you don’t want to walk around at night, being a foreigner and all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” said the new crew member.

The second officer stood up and said, “I gotta use the john.”

When he emerged from the lavatory, he heard a sharp rap on the plane’s exterior. A beefy uniformed agent from FSB Frontier Control came aboard.

“Passport,” the Russian barked.

The second officer handed his passport over and watched as the agent scanned it with a handheld device.

Then the second officer turned to look at his colleague, but the other pull-down seat was empty.

No one was there.

As the Russian entered the cockpit to check the passports of the pilot and co-pilot, the second officer looked around, bewildered. He got up, glanced into the cockpit, but the new guy wasn’t there either. He yanked open the door to the cargo compartment, but there was barely enough room for someone to squeeze in between the rows of igloos.

The guy wasn’t there.

Very strange.

Colonel Harry Middleton strolled along the Old Arbat, a cobblestone street that had been converted into a pedestrian mall crowded with shoppers and peddlers, bearded minstrels playing strange-looking guitars and teenagers just hanging out. There were souvenir shops selling ornate lacquer
palekh
boxes and Russian nesting dolls painted with the faces of foreign leaders and pop stars.

He’d visited Moscow once before during the height of the Cold War. Everything looked and felt different now: colorful instead of gray; boisterous and teeming instead of quiet and ominous. The rusty old Volgas and Zhigulis had been replaced by Ferraris and Bentleys. But the immense Stalinist tower that housed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was still there, at the end of the Arbat, just as it was half a century earlier. Maybe the changes didn’t really run all that deep after all.

The last twenty-four hours had been tense and exhausting, but he suspected the next twenty-four hours would be even worse.

Just getting into Moscow had involved calling in a stack of chits. Like an old friend from his time in Kosovo, an Apache helicopter pilot with the U.S. army’s 82nd Airborne Division who’d taken his retirement from the army and risen up the ranks of an international air-freight company—and was willing to add a fourth crew member to a Moscow flight. And another old friend, a wily KGB careerist named Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin, who’d been in Kosovo at the same time and became one of Middleton’s most-valued sources inside Russian intelligence.

They’d gotten him into Moscow, but Middleton knew that if anything went wrong, they wouldn’t be able to get him out.

Now Middleton found himself staring at the display window of an antiquities shop across the street from the old Praga Restaurant. The shop window was a jumble of dusty curios—brass kaleidoscopes and bad copies of icons and Russian-made Victrolas and shabby oil paintings.

He wasn’t inspecting the antiques, of course. He was watching the reflection in the plate glass. But so far he hadn’t detected any followers. It was only a matter of time before Russian intelligence took notice of a foreigner walking the streets of Moscow. A foreigner who’d somehow managed to slip into Russia without leaving any fingerprints in the databases. If he were brought in for questioning . . .

Well, it was better not to think about that possibility.

Middleton pulled opened the heavy front door. A shopkeeper’s bell tinkled pleasantly. No electronic entry alert here. The place looked, even smelled, a century old, musty and mildewed. Middleton half expected to see Aleksandr Pushkin, who once lived on this very street, browsing the wares.

Behind a crowded dusty glass counter was an elderly man with a pinched, severe face and oversized round black-framed glasses.

“
Dobryi dyen’
,” the clerk said.

“Good afternoon,” Middleton replied. “I’m interested in icons.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows, and his big round glasses rose along with them. “Ah? Anything in particular, sir?”

“I’m particularly interested in the Novgorod school.”

The flash of recognition on the old man’s face disappeared quickly. “Yes, of course, sir,” he said. “They are some of our finest. But there are very few and they’re quite costly.”

“I understand,” Middleton said.

“Please,” the clerk said, gesturing toward a maroon velvet curtain that divided the front of the shop from his back office. “Please to follow me.”

It was dark in there, and even mustier, and dust motes swam in an oblique shaft of light that came in from between the curtains.

The Russian took out a battered leather briefcase from a file drawer and popped open the clasp. Inside, the case was lined with black egg-carton shell foam. Set snugly in a cutout at its center was a brand-new SIG Sauer P229, a compact semiautomatic pistol, with a matte black finish.

Middleton checked it quickly, pulled back the slide and was satisfied. “Chambered for 9mm,” he said.

The old clerk nodded, pursed his lips.

Middleton peeled five hundred-dollar bills from the roll of cash in his front pocket and set them on the counter. The Russian scowled and shook his head. He held up two fingers. “Two thousand,” he said.

“That was not the deal,” Middleton protested.

“Then I am so sorry that we cannot do business today,” said the Russian.

Middleton sighed, then put down another fifteen bills. He hated being held up this way, but it wasn’t as if he had a choice. “I assume you’ll throw in a box of ammo,” he said.

The Russian produced an ancient-looking, dog-eared box of Winchester cartridges from another drawer. About twenty or thirty bucks back home. “Today we make special deal,” the clerk said. “Only five hundred dollars.”

Ruslan Maksimovich Korovin was a Russian bear of a man, short and rotund, with a neatly trimmed goatee that adorned a fleshy, ruddy face. He extended his short arms and gave Middleton a hug.

“Garrold!” Korovin exclaimed. This was as close to “Harold” as Korovin was able to say. He escorted Middleton into a large, comfortable room that looked like an English gentleman’s club. Oriental carpets covered the floor; here and there were leather chairs in which doddering old men snoozed behind tented copies of
Pravda
. Except for the choice of newspaper, it could have been Boodle’s in London.

Actually, it was a men’s club of sorts, only the men were old KGB officers. In this nineteenth-century townhouse on a narrow street off Pyatnitskaya Street, former and retired Russian intelligence officers gathered over vodka and sturgeon and cabbage soup to reminiscence about the bad old days.

“Ruslan Maksimovich,” Middleton said, stumbling slightly over the unwieldy patronymic. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

In a lower voice, Korovin said, “I trust my friends at the airport treated you with the proper deference.”

Korovin, who’d spent more than three decades in the KGB, was a legendary operative who knew how to pull strings that most people didn’t even know existed. His web of contacts extended even into the facilities maintenance operations at Domodedovo Airport, where a refueling crew had smuggled Middleton off the cargo plane and into central Moscow. A risky infiltration, to be sure, but Middleton knew he could trust Korovin to make the plan go off flawlessly.

The old KGB man’s directions had been precise. And they’d been relayed to Middleton using the simplest, yet most modern, of all spy trade-craft techniques: Korovin had written an email, but instead of sending it, he’d saved it as a draft, on a Gmail account for which both men had the password. The email account was one of many set up by Wiki Chang, back at the Volunteers’ small office headquarters in Virginia. Intelligence agents no longer needed things like microdots and burst transmitters, not when they could use the good old Internet.

“It went far more easily than I expected, to be honest,” Middleton said.

“From me you should expect only the best,” Korovin said. “And I hear you made a purchase at Volodya’s shop on the Arbat, yes? He has the finest selection of icons in all of Moscow.”

“Pricy, though,” Middleton said.

“Well, after all, it
is
a sellers’ market, my friend,” Korovin said.

“I didn’t dicker,” said Middleton.

Korovin led him to the dining room, dark and dismal and mostly empty. They sat at a small table, which was already set with
mineralnaya voda
and dusty-looking tumblers and shot glasses.

A waitress shambled over with a tray. An old crone with thinning white hair and pale gray eyes who looked to be in her eighties, she wore a long black shirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Probably, Middleton thought, a pensioner from some back office at the Lubyanka. With fumbling hands, she set down an assortment of
zakuski
, Russian appetizers like beet salad and mushroom “caviar,” smoked fish and pickled onions. Then she unsteadily filled their shot glasses with a domestic brand of vodka.

Korovin slid a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, lit it with an old Red Army lighter and then offered a toast to their work in Kosovo. The two intelligence operatives had played a behind-the-scenes role in that ugly conflict a decade earlier, a role the world would never know about.

Ten years ago, they’d seen how close the Kosovo conflict had brought the two superpowers to war. The Russians backed the Serb guerrillas, and NATO and the Americans defended the ethnic Albanians, even though there was plenty of “ethnic cleansing”—that grotesque euphemism—on both sides. When Russia finally agreed to abandon the Serbs in exchange for a separate role in the peacekeeping process, NATO reneged on the deal. The Russian forces found themselves taking orders from a U.S. general. They felt humiliated and double-crossed. The tensions could well have boiled over into a war between two nuclear powers were it not for the quiet, back-channel efforts of a few intelligence officers like Korovin and Middleton.

Now, the two men drank and then Korovin poured again. But before he could offer another flowery toast, he gave Middleton a sideways glance. “I thought you were retired, Garrold.”

“I thought I was too,” Middleton said.

“Yet you needed to enter my country off the books. Which tells me that you have gone active again.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He gave his Russian friend a quick, sanitized version of the work that the Volunteers had been doing and then told him about the bizarre incident on the Côte d’Azur that had activated the Volunteers once again. “I need some information.”

“Ah.” Which might have meant yes, absolutely. Or the opposite.

“Information about thermobarics.”

“It’s easier to get you the explosives than it is to get you information about the explosives. Safer, anyway.”

“Well, let me ask, in any case,” Middleton said. “I had my associate look into the records of a shipping company that delivered some merchandise to an outfit in Florida. I think it was explosives. He contacted me on the flight and told me that a number of shipments labeled ‘construction items’ were sent from Albania to Moscow to Mogadishu to Algiers and finally to the U.S. The company realized he was into their system and blocked him out, but not before he got me the names of all the freight forwarders involved.”

“You’re looking at me rather knowingly, friend. I believe I am nervous now.”

Though Korovin didn’t look nervous. He looked amused in that indulgently conspiratorial way former Soviet army officers and KGB operatives slip on their faces like bank robbers do a ski mask.

“And you want to hear a funny coincidence?” Middleton asked.

“No, I do not.”

“All the shipping companies were incorporated by a single law firm in Moscow. And guess who they also represent? Your boss, Arkady Chernayev.”