back. “You can safely reach me through that secure number, day or night.”
He slipped the card into his shirt pocket.
“In the meantime, I’ll keep the pressure on the Russian medical bureaucracy from my end,” she promised. “I have an interview set up tomorrow morning largely for that very purpose. With Konstantin Malkovic.”
Smith whistled softly. “The financier? The guy who made billions in commodities and currency speculation?”
Fiona nodded. “The very one.”
“He’s an American, isn’t he?”
“A naturalized American,” she agreed. “Much as I am myself, for that matter. But Malkovic is Serbian by birth, and he’s invested heavily in Russian industries over the last several years. He also donates large sums to the charities trying to rebuild this country’s antiquated health care systems. And all of that investing and donating has bought him close ties to these new lads in the Kremlin. No matter how much Dudarev and the other ‘men of power’ long to bring back the old ways, they’re not utter fools. They walk softly around a man with so much money to throw around.”
“And you hope to persuade Malkovic to start asking a few awkward questions of his own about this disease?” Smith guessed.
“Indeed, I do,” Fiona agreed. “He’s said to have quite a temper, and he’s used to getting his own way.” A look of devilish delight danced in her bright blue-green eyes. “So I would very much hate to be the first Russian official forced to refuse his requests.”
Chapter Fourteen
Four requisitioned passenger buses crammed full of Russian soldiers crawled along a narrow, deeply rutted track, an old logging road, slowly winding their way deeper into the pitch-black forest. Overhanging branches scraped loudly along the sides and windows of the darkened vehicles.
Up at the front, Captain Andrei Yudenich crouched beside the driver, holding on to the back of the man’s seat to keep his balance. He peered out through the cracked and dirty windshield, again trying vainly to get a better idea of just where he and the crews of his tank company were being sent. He grimaced, deeply disquieted by recent events.
So far, this twenty-four-hour-long journey from their barracks outside Moscow had been a nightmare of misdirection. Their original orders had sent them south by rail toward Voronezh, ostensibly as the first stage of a battalion-sized deployment to Chechnya. But once there, they had been switched onto another train, this one heading back west to Bryansk. From there, Yudenich and his tank crews had been bundled onto these old buses and sent lumbering off into the woods, following a confusing succession of newly plowed country roads.
A soldier in a white camouflage smock suddenly loomed up ahead, illuminated by the wavering beams of the headlights. He was standing on a mound of snow piled up by the side of the logging road. A bright red armband and glowing baton identified him as a member of the Commandant’s Service?a special Army-level unit that served as field security and traffic control troops.
The white-smocked soldier waved his baton abruptly, pointing imperiously to the right. Obeying his signaled order, the buses turned off the logging track one after the other and rumbled up an even narrower path, one newly hacked out of the forest, judging by the fresh-cut stumps visible on either side.
Frowning openly now, Yudenich clung tighter to the back of the driver’s seat, swaying up and down as the heavy vehicle bounced through deep ruts.
Several minutes later, they pulled into a clearing and stopped.
More field security troops in red armbands, with assault rifles held ready, swarmed around the buses, shouting, “All out! Everyone out! Move! Move!”
Yudenich was the first one through the open doors. He dropped lightly onto the rock-hard, frozen earth of the clearing and then saluted the nearest officer?a captain like himself. His tank crews tumbled out of the buses behind him, hurriedly forming up in ranks under the chivying of their sergeants and his lieutenants.
‘Tour orders?” the other man snapped.
Wordlessly, Yudenich dug the thick sheaf of papers out of the breast pocket of his field jacket.
The other captain flipped them open and studied them in the light of a small shielded flashlight held by an orderly. “I see that you’re part of the Fourth Guards Tank Division,” he commented. He handed the orders back and then studied a list on his clipboard. “Right. You and your company are posted to Cantonment Fifteen, Barracks Tents Four through Eight.”
“Cantonment Fifteen?” Yudenich asked, not bothering to hide his surprise.
“Off through the trees over there, Captain,” the other man said tiredly, nodding toward the forest beyond the clearing. “You’ll be guided.”
Obediently, Yudenich looked in that direction. His mouth fell open. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the darkness, he could see that they were standing on the outskirts of an enormous military encampment, one built right in among the trees. Huge panels of infrared-and radar-absorbent camouflage netting were strung overhead, and coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see, apparently encircling the whole camp. Teams of heavily armed guards ?Interior Ministry troops by their uniforms ?and growling dogs nervously prowled the perimeter.
“What the devil is going on here?” he asked quietly.
“You’ll be briefed when you need to know,” the captain told him. He shrugged. “Until then, you communicate only through your own chain-of-command. Clear?”
Yudenich nodded.
“Good,” the other man said grimly. “And make sure your boys don’t go wandering off. Anyone who crosses the perimeter without authorization gets a bullet in the neck and a shallow grave hacked out of the snow and frozen mud. No formal court-martial. No appeals. No mercy. Understand?”
Yudenich nodded again, shivering suddenly under his heavy camouflage jacket.
Erich Brandt stepped off the steep escalator and walked into the vast, echoing underground hall of the Novokuznetskaya Metro station. Throngs of tired-looking shift workers heading home surged around him. Even this late at night, subway trains rumbled loudly through the tunnels, arriving and departing in warm gusts of oil-scented air every two or three minutes. Moscow’s underground railway system was the best in the world, carrying nearly nine million passengers a day?more than the London Underground and New York’s subways put together. And in contrast to the dreary utilitarian hubs of the West, many of the Metro stations were gems of art and architecture. As a means of demonstrating the growing power and culture of the now-dead Soviet Union, each had been built in marble and decorated with sculptures, carved reliefs, mosaics, and enormous hanging chandeliers.
For an instant, Brandt stood still, eyeing the khaki-colored bas-reliefs lining the walls. They depicted soldiers and military leaders, ranging from stout Mar-shal Kutusov, who had fought Napoleon at Austerlitz and Borodino, to panels caned to show heroic Second World War Soviet Naval Infantrymen leaping ashore from assault boats to join the climactic battle at Stalingrad. On the high curved ceiling overhead, occasional mosaics showed smiling factory workers and farmers reveling in their happy, idyllic lives as servants of the Communist State.
The big, blond-haired man snorted wryly. The Novokuznetskaya station had been constructed in 1943, at the height of the brutal Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany. Its art celebrated certain victory over Hitler and his fascist minions. Trust Alexei Ivanov to choose this as a place to meet his unwelcome East German colleague. For all his reputed subtlety as a spymaster, the head of the Thirteenth Directorate had a blunt, heavy-handed sense of humor.
After a moment, Brandt spotted the gray-haired Russian intelligence chief sitting calmly on a marble bench and went straight over to sit beside him.
Both men were much the same height.
“Herr Brandt,” Ivanov said quietly.
“I have the special HYDRA variant you requested,” Brandt told him.
