“Seems kind of familiar, doesn’t it?” Castilla said quietly. “Too many hostiles and not enough help.”
“Maybe so, Sam,” the head of Covert-One replied. He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Then again, nobody rational ever claimed that being the world’s only superpower was going to be easy. Or particularly popular.”
The president grimaced. “True enough. And it beats the alternative. I guess I’d rather we were the decent, but unloved, five-hundred-pound gorilla than the pitied and hapless ninety-eight-pound weakling.” He nodded his head toward a nearby black leather couch. “Go ahead and sit down, Fred.
We’re facing one hell of a situation, and I need your input.”
Castilla waited while Klein sat and then lowered himself stiffly into an upholstered armchair on the other side of a low coffee table. “Have you seen the list of sick intelligence and policy analysts?” he asked.
Klein nodded grimly. Over the past two weeks, more than a dozen of the government’s top experts on Russian and former Soviet bloc military, political, and economic affairs had collapsed, falling deathly ill either at home or at work.
“Well, I’ve been getting updates all through the day,” the president said somberly. “Three of our people have already died. The rest are in intensive care and fading fast. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that nobody?not at the hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control, or USAMRIID?has been able to identify this disease they’ve got, much less how to treat it successfully. So far the doctors have been trying every combination of treatments they can think of?antibiotics, anti-viral agents, anti-toxins, and chemo-and radiation therapy?without any positive results. Whatever is killing our people is completely outside our medical experience.”
“Nasty,” Klein murmured. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his eyes were troubled. “But this isn’t the first time this mystery illness has popped up, Sam.”
Castilla raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“Over the past forty-eight hours or so, we’ve picked up reports of several other people who died of a previously unknown disease, one with identical symptoms,” Klein told him quietly. “In Moscow. More than two months ago.
No details leaked out to the West because the Kremlin clamped a tight security lid on any news of the outbreak.”
The president’s square jaw tightened. “Go on.”
“Two of my best Covert-One field operatives, Fiona Devin and Jon Smith, were separately approached by Russian doctors who had been involved in treating the victims. Unfortunately, both men were silenced before they could provide us with copies of the relevant medical records and other evidence. The first died on a Moscow street two nights ago, supposedly of a heart attack. The second was murdered in Prague yesterday.”
“By the Russians?”
Klein frowned. “Perhaps.” He snapped open his briefcase and handed Castilla a black-and-white print of the ID card photo transmitted earlier by Smith. It showed the image of a narrow-faced man with cold, dead eyes. “This fellow commanded the hit team in Prague. When I ran this picture through our computers, he turned up in half a dozen intelligence and law enforcement databases, usually with a ‘Most Wanted/Apprehend with Utmost Caution’ tag attached.”
The president read the name printed at the bottom of the photo. “Georg Dietrich Liss? A German?” he asked in surprise.
“An East German,” the head of Covert-One corrected. “When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, his father was a high-ranking officer in the communist government’s Ministry for State Security, the Stasi. The elder Liss is currently serving a long prison sentence for various crimes against the German people.”
Castilla nodded. He tapped the photo in his hand. “What about the son?”
“Also a member of the secret police,” Klein answered. “He served as a junior officer in the Stasi’s ‘Filiks Dzierzynski’ regiment, a sort of elite Praetorian
Guard force for the East German government. And there are rumors that he was part of a ‘black ops’ death squad used by the regime to murder political dissidents and even foreign journalists whose reporting proved too embarrassing.”
“Charming,” the president said in disgust.
Klein nodded. “Liss was a very nasty piece of work. By all accounts, he was a cold-blooded sociopath of the first order. Berlin issued a warrant for his arrest not long after reunification, but he fled Germany before the local police could take him into custody.”
“So who’s been paying his keep for the past fifteen years?” Castilla asked.
“Most recently, we think he was employed by an organization called the Brandt Group,” Klein said. “They’re a very shadowy, freelance intelligence and security outfit based in Moscow.”
“Moscow again.” The president tossed the photo down onto the coffee table. “And just who pulls the strings on this Brandt Group?”
“Our data is very sketchy,” Klein admitted. “We don’t know much about the organization or its real sources of funding, though they appear to have considerable resources. But there is a lot of back channel chatter claiming that Brandt Group agents sometimes work for the Russian government on a contract basis, conducting deniable surveillance and even assassination operations against Chechen exiles and other troublemakers living outside the Kremlin’s immediate reach.”
“I Icll,” Castilla growled.
“And there’s more,” Klein said. He leaned forward in his chair. The expression on his face was grave. “I’ve been making discreet inquiries. What looks verv much like this same illness is apparently affecting the top Russian specialists in every major Western intelligence agency?the UK’s MI6, Germain’s BND, the French DGSE, and others.”
“We’re being blinded,” Castilla realized suddenly. “This disease is being used as a weapon. by killing our best intelligence analysts, someone is hoping we’ll find it more and more difficult to understand exactly what’s happening inside Russia.”
“It’s possible, even probable,” Klein agreed. He opened his briefcase again and held a single sheet of paper filled with names and locations. “We also started scanning news sen ices and medical databases around the world, looking for other reported cases showing similar symptoms. It’s taken some digging, but this is what we’ve found so far.”
The president took the new list and studied it in silence. He whistled softly.
“The Ukraine. Georgia. Armenia. Azerbaijan. Kazakhstan. All former Soviet republics bordering Russia.”
Klein nodded again. “And in each and every case, the men and women getting sick are among the key military and political leaders in those countries. From what I can see, most of those replacing them are significantly less competent ?or more closely aligned with Russian interests.”
“Son of a bitch,” Castilla swore out loud. He scowled. “That sly son of a bitch Viktor Dudarev. The Russians already tried to screw around with the last Ukrainian presidential election ?and failed. Having to back down so publicly must have rankled something fierce. Well, maybe the Kremlin is playing the same game again, but this time on a much bigger scale.”
“The pattern is certainly suggestive,” Klein said slowly.
The president glanced at his old friend. The ghost of a crooked smile crossed his broad face. “Meaning, don’t go off half-cocked, because we don’t have any real evidence yet, right?”
“That is ultimately your call,” Klein pointed out. He cleared his throat softly. “But I submit that we are very long on theory and very short on hard facts at the moment. In the present world circumstances, I’m not sure how an unsupported American suggestion of Russian dirty work would be received.”
“No kidding,” Castilla said. His broad shoulders slumped, as though they were being weighed down by an immense burden. “Fairly or unfairly, we’re perceived as having cried ‘wolf too often over the past few years. As a result, our old friends and NATO allies are readv to believe we’re prone to exaggerat-ing dangers ?and equally ready to cut and run from us at the first whiff of controversy. We managed to rebuild some of our credibility in the aftermath of the Lazarus crisis, but it’s still an uphill fight.”
The president frowned. “One thing’s certain. Nobody in London, Paris, Berlin, or Warsaw is going to thank us for risking a new round of the Cold War.” His eyes fell on an antique globe in the corner of the room. “And with our troops, ships, and aircraft tied down all around the damned planet, we’re sure as hell not in good shape for any open conflict with the Russians. Not on our own, anyway.”
Castilla sat silently for a few moments more, contemplating the situation.
