Then he shook his head sharply. “So be it. We can’t undo the recent past.
Which means we’ll just have to find the proof we need to convince our allies to act with us, if necessary.” He sat up straighter. “That first disease outbreak in
Moscow seems likely to be the key.”
“Agreed,” Klein said. His eyes were cold. “Someone is certainly determined to eliminate anyone who tries to tell us about it.”
“One more thing is clear,” Castilla continued. “I can’t rely on the CIA to take the lead on this. They’re not prepared to operate effectively in Moscow? at least not clandestinely.” He snorted. “We’ve been so focused on trying to play nice with the Russians these days, trying to keep them as our allies in the war on terror. Langley has spent its time and energy building working relationships with their security services, instead of recruiting networks of deep-cover agents inside the Kremlin. If I ask the Agency’s Moscow Station to reverse gears now, at such short notice, the odds are that they’ll only muff it.
And then we’ll end up with so much diplomatic egg dripping down our faces that no one will believe a word we say.”
His exes gleamed for an instant. “That leaves you and your outfit, Fred.
Front and center. I want a priority investigation by Covert-One. But it’s got to be quick, and it’s got to be quiet.”
Klein nodded his understanding. “I have a small but excellent team already in place in Moscow,” he agreed. Thinking hard, he drew a handkerchief out of his coat pocket, took off his glasses, and polished them. Then he slipped the wire-rims back over his ears and looked up. “Plus, I have another top-notch field operative on stand-by. He’s tough, resourceful, and he’s worked in Russia before. Best of all, he has the medical training and scientific expertise to make some sense out of whatever information they uncover.”
“Who have you got in mind?” Castilla asked curiously.
“Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Smith,” Klein said softly.
Halfway between the industrial city of Kharkiv and the capital of Kiev, Poltava occupied three hills in the middle of the vast and otherwise almost featureless Ukrainian steppe. Its central streets and avenues radiated outward from a circular plaza. And set in the very center of this open expanse lay the Iron Column of Glory, ringed by small cannons and topped by a golden imperial eagle. Erected in 1809, this towering monument commemorated Czar Peter the Great’s decisive victory over the invading Swedes and their Cossack allies a century before, a victory that had ensured Russia’s lasting domination over the region.
Large neoclassical government buildings constructed during the nineteenth century ringed this round park. Their upper-floor windows looked out toward the Iron Column.
Leonid Akhmetov, chairman of Poltava’s regional group of parliamentary deputies, stood staring out the window of his office. The burly, white-haired politician and business oligarch glowered out at the golden eagle and then swung awav. I le shul the blinds with a muttered curse.
“You do not approve of the view?” his visitor, a slender, thin-faced man in a drab suit, asked sardonically. He was sitting in a chair on the other side of Akhmetov s ornate desk.
Akhmetov frowned. “Once I rejoiced in it,” he grunted dourly. “But now that column is only a reminder of our shame, of our abandonment to the ef-fete West.”
Both men were speaking in Russian ?the first language of nearly half of Ukraine’s people, most of them concentrated in the country’s eastern industrial regions. Two recent presidential elections, the first of them overturned by allegations of fraud, had split the country into rival factions, one heavily authoritarian and favoring renewed ties to Moscow, the other more democratic and more oriented toward Europe and the West. Akhmetov and his cronies were among the local leaders of the pro-Russian faction. They controlled most of Poltava’s industries and businesses.
“Mother Russia never truly abandons her loyal sons,” the thin-faced man said quietly. His eyes hardened. “Just as she never forgives those who betray her.”
The taller, heavier oligarch flushed red. “I am no traitor,” he growled. “My people and I were ready to move against Kiev months ago, right up to the moment that your President Dudarev reached his ‘accommodation’ with the new government. When the Kremlin pulled the rug out from under us so suddenly, what real choice did we have but to make our own peace with the new order?”
The other man shrugged. “The accommodation you condemn was only a minor tactical retreat. We decided the time was not yet right for an open confrontation with the Americans and the Europeans.”
Akhmetov’s eyes narrowed. “And now it is?”
“Soon,” the other man told him quietly. “Very soon. And you must do your part.”
“What must I do?”
“First? We want you to organize a public demonstration, one coinciding with Defenders of the Motherland Day, February 23,” the thin-faced man said. “This must be a mass rally demanding full autonomy from Kiev and closer ties to Mother Russia ?
The oligarch listened closely and with mounting excitement while the visitor from Moscow outlined his orders from the Kremlin.
An hour later, the man from Moscow left the Poltava Region Administrative building and strolled calmly toward the Iron Column of Glory. Another man, taller, with a broad, friendly face and a camera slung around his neck, detached himself from a small group of schoolchildren studying the monument and joined his shorter colleague from the Russian FSB’s Thirteenth Directorate.
“So?” he asked.
“Our friend Akhmetov has agreed. In six days, he and his supporters will gather here in this plaza, at the base of the column,” the thin-faced man reported.
“How many?”
“At least twenty thousand. Perhaps twice that number, depending on how many of his workers and their families obey their orders.”
“Very good,” the broad-faced man said, smiling openly. “Then we can assure them a warm reception?and a demonstration to a horrified world of just how far Kiev will go to suppress peaceful unrest among its troublesome ethnic Russians.”
“And you have all the information you require?”
The bigger man nodded coolly. He tapped his digital camera. “The images I need for detailed planning are stored in here. The rest is a mere matter of mathematics.”
“You’re sure?” the thin-faced man asked. “Ivanov will insist on absolute certainty and precision. He wants a cold-blooded massacre, not a pathetic fizzle.”
The other man grinned back. “Relax, Gennady Arkad’yevich. Relax. Our masters will have the excuse they need. Give me enough explosive? especially RDX?and I could send that so-called Iron Column flying to the moon.”
Chapter Ten
The ancient and beautiful Umbrian town of Orvieto perched high on a volcanic plateau above the broad Paglia valley, roughly halfway between Rome and Florence. The sheer cliffs ringing the town had acted as a natural fortifi-cation for millennia.
Below those cliffs, a side road broke away from the main highway, the cam tostrada, and wound west up the flanks of a low ridge facing Orvieto. Several ultramodern steel-and-glass buildings sprawled across the ridge, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with tight rolls of razor wire.
Signs at the main gate identified the complex as the headquarters of the European Center for Population Research. The Center’s stated purpose was the study of historical European population movements and genetic
