“Show me.”
The blond-haired man opened his briefcase, revealing a small, soda-can-sized thermos. With his thick leather gloves still on, he unsealed the metal cylinder in a puff of vapor, pulled out a small vial full of clear frozen liquid, and then handed it over.
Ivanov held the vial up to the light. “A lingering death with so innocent an appearance. Remarkable,” he murmured. Then he glanced at his companion.
“But how can I be sure that this tube contains anything more lethal than ordinary tap water?”
“In all candor, you cannot. Not without using it against the intended target. You will have to trust me.”
The head of the Thirteenth Directorate smiled grimly. “Trust is not something I grant easily to anyone, Herr Brandt. Especially not with more than a million euros’ worth of state funds involved.”
The ex-Stasis officer returned the same thin, cold smile. “That is understandable, but unavoidable. You asked for a means of ensuring the continued cooperation of my employer?or for taking vengeance on him should that prove necessary. Renke and I have met your request. Whether you believe us or not is up to you. Under the circumstances, our price is entirely reasonable.”
Ivanov grunted. “Very well, you’ll have your money. I’ll authorize the second wire transfer to Switzerland tonight.” He held the vial up to the light again
and then looked narrowly at Brandt. “What if our scientists instead used the material this contains to reverse-engineer the HYDRA technology? Then we would no longer need you, Professor Renke, or your master.”
“You could try that, I suppose.” The blond-haired man shrugged his massive shoulders. “But Renke assures me that such an attempt would inevitably fail. Your researchers would only recover a few broken fragments of unusable genetic material drifting in a sea of dying bacteria.”
The head of the Thirteenth Directorate nodded slowly. “A pity.” He slid the vial back into the thermos. The thermos itself went into his own coat pocket.
Brandt said nothing.
“One thing more, Herr Brandt,” Ivanov said abruptly. “I want your personal assurance that your security for HYDRA is still intact. Now that we are entering the final phases of our own military preparations, absolute secrecy is vital.
The Americans and their allies must not discover what is about to happen.”
“Both Kiryanov and Petrenko are dead,” Brandt said flatly, hiding his concerns about the missing Colonel Jon Smith. “There are no other outstanding threats to HYDRA,” he lied.
“Good.” Ivanov smiled again, but his dark brown eyes were completely de-void of any warmth or amusement. “And you understand that we will hold you personally responsible for any failure?”
Brandt nodded tightly, feeling droplets of sweat beginning to form on his forehead. “Yes.”
“Then I bid you good night, my friend.” The gray-haired chief of the Thirteenth Directorate rose heavily to his feet. “For now we have nothing more to discuss.”
Chapter Fifteen
Warm in her full-length, fur-lined coat, Fiona Devin came out of the Borovit-skaya Metro station and turned south. She walked carefully along the icy pavement, moving gracefully around the other pedestrians on their way to work in the lingering darkness. Though it was morning by the clock, the long winter night still gripped the city. Not far ahead, a large mansion rose above the street, set on a massive stone base. Pillars and ornate carvings decorated the building’s white facade and a perfectly proportioned rotunda topped its roof. To the east, Moscow’s streets and other buildings fell away, sloping downhill toward the red walls and towers of the Kremlin.
She smiled narrowly to herself. She was not surprised that Konstantin Malkovic had set up shop in one of the Russian capital’s most beautiful and conspicuous locations. The Serbian-born billionaire was famous for both his self-aggrandizement and his lavish spending. This mansion, Pashkov House, had been built in the late eighteenth century for a fantastically wealthy Russian officer, Captain Pyotr Pashkov, a man determined to own the grandest private home in all of Moscow, one perched on a hillside overlooking the Kremlin itself. After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the building had become an annex of the adjoining Russian State Library, the repository of roughly forty million precious books, periodicals, and photographs.
Shortly after deciding to make Moscow one of the centers of his global business empire, Malkovic had donated more than twenty million dollars to help restore the sagging fortunes of the aging and antiquated Russian archives. One of the strings attached to his grant had been permission to set up a suite of offices on the top floor of the Pashkov House. Protests by a few architectural purists had fallen on newly rich and newly deaf official ears.
Bells from the nearby Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, recently rebuilt after its destruction by Stalin, began pealing, echoing across the surrounding neighborhoods. It was just after nine. Her interview with the billionaire was scheduled to begin in ten minutes.
Moving faster now, Fiona strode up the broad stone steps and into the main hallway. There a bored-looking functionary checked her name against the register and directed her up the main interior staircase. Two unsmiling security guards waiting at the top carefully examined her identification, closely studied her camera and tape recorder, and then motioned her through a set of detectors, checking her for weapons and traces of explosives.
A second pair of employees, both pretty young women, took her in tow.
Speaking politely in hushed tones, they briskly ushered her through the busy semi-chaos of a large outer office full of desks, computers, and people entering data or issuing buy and sell orders for stock markets across Europe. One of the women took her coat and vanished. The other escorted her into a slightly smaller, immaculately decorated room ?Konstantin Malkovic’s private office.
Along one wall, three tall windows offered a spectacular view of the Kremlin’s floodlit walls, turrets, and golden domes. Centuries-old Russian Orthodox religious icons, priceless originals, stood in niches built around the rest of the room, carefully lit by recessed lights shining down from the high, intricately painted ceiling. A thick Persian rug covered the floor in muted splen-dor. Malkovic’s elegant eighteenth-century desk faced away from the windows. A flat-screen computer and a set of slim, ultramodern phones seemed to be the room’s only concession to the twenty-first century.
The billionaire himself rose to his feet from behind his desk and came around it to greet her with an outstretched hand. “Welcome, Ms. Devin! Welcome!” he said, smiling broadly, revealing a full set of perfect white teeth.
“I’m a great admirer of your work. That last article in The Economist?the one on the competitive advantages of Russia’s flat tax system?was particularly good.”
“You’re far too kind, Mr. Malkovic,” she said calmly, taking the offered hand and smiling back. She recognized this effusiveness as one of the routine tactics he employed on those whom he hoped to influence. “After all, I only wrote a few thousand words of analysis about its likely effects. But I’ve been told that you had a hand in crafting the new tax code itself?”
He shrugged. “A hand? Nothing so direct.” His eyes twinkled. “Oh, perhaps I spoke a word here. And perhaps another small word there. Nothing excessive, though. As a mere man of business, I never interfere too deeply in any nation’s domestic politics.”
Fiona let the polite fiction pass unchallenged. According to her sources, this man could no more resist meddling in political affairs than could a starv-ing lion lie down quietly beside a nice fat lamb.
Malkovic was taller than she had expected, with a mane of thick white hair left long on top but cropped short at the sides and neck. High cheekbones and pale blue eyes marked his Slavic ancestry. The clipped tones and slightly flattened vowels of his English reflected the years he had spent in Britain and America, first as a student at Oxford and Harvard and later as a wildly successful businessman, investor, and commodities speculator.
“Please, do sit down,” he told her, indicating one of the two embroidered armchairs set at angles in front of his desk.
