Konstantin Malkovic sat calmly at the breakfast table in his luxury apartment, which occupied the top floor of a building overlooking the Kitay Gorod financial district. He sipped the last of his morning tea while reading through summaries of the overnight trades made by his commodities brokers in the United States and Asia. For the first time in the past several days, the billionaire felt able to concentrate on the routine operations of his far-flung business empire. Brandt had the two Americans?Smith and Devin?safely in his grip, and last night’s late news reports from Berlin were also extremely satisfying.
HYDRA was once again completely secure.
Quietly, one of his servants appeared, holding a phone. “Mr. Titov is on the line, sir.”
Malkovic looked up in some annoyance. Titov was responsible for manag-ing the Moscow offices in his absence. What was so important that it couldn’t wait until he arrived at Pashkov House a bit later in the morning? He took the phone. “Well, Kirill?” he demanded. “What’s the problem?”
“We have received an e-mail addressed to you personally,” Titov told him.
“It is marked urgent. I thought you should know about it.”
With an effort, Malkovic suppressed his irritation. Like many Russians who had grown up under the old Soviet system, Titov had difficulty acting on his own initiative, without explicit orders from his superior. “Very well,” he sighed. “Read this e-mail back to me.”
“Unfortunately, I cannot,” Titov said carefully. “It appears to be coded using the SOVEREIGN encryption program.”
Malkovic frowned. The SOVEREIGN cipher system was one reserved for the most sensitive communications, those involving his most secret and illegal enterprises. Only Malkovic and a few of his most trusted subordinates possessed the ability to decode these messages. “I see,” he said, after a pause.
“You were quite right to bring this to my attention. I will handle the matter myself.1!
After breaking the connection with Titov, he rose from the breakfast table and went back into his study. With a few quick keystrokes on his computer, he brought up the e-mail and ran it through his decryption program. It was a frantic report sent by one of his top operatives in German}-, a man who controlled the various puppets and spies Malkovic had planted in several of that country’s most important government ministries.
Malkovic read through the message in increasing alarm. The hunter-killer team sent by Brandt to Berlin had been wiped out. Worse, this man Lange and his men had failed in their primary mission. The Americans were still hot on Renke’s trail. The HYDRA secret was in greater jeopardy than ever.
Coldly, the billionaire contemplated the likely reaction to this news by the Russian president. He grimaced. Dudarev’s threats had been explicit. Could the details be kept from him? The Russian leader had his own sources of information, and one way or another, he would soon learn of this disaster. When he did, it would be unwise in the extreme for Malkovic to rely on his forbear-ance. With his armies already on the march toward their unsuspecting enemies, too much was at stake for Dudarev to easily forgive failure.
Still scowling, Malkovic deleted the damning message and shut down the computer. For a short time longer, he sat moodily staring at the blank screen, mulling over possible courses of action. HYDRA could still be salvaged, he knew, but the work would be best done personally?and from well beyond Dudarev’s reach.
Abruptly, with his decision made, he pushed away from his desk and stalked over to a wall safe concealed behind a centuries-old icon of St.
Michael the Archangel. Keyed by his fingerprints, the heavy metal door swung open, revealing an assortment of CD-ROMs, folders of photographs, and a small box full of audiotapes of surreptitiously recorded conversations.
Together, this material documented his secret transactions with the Kremlin.
It also included a detailed summary of everything he had learned about Russia’s military plans.
Quickly, the billionaire began transferring the contents of the safe to one of his briefcases. Once he was safely outside Russia, he would be able to use this information to renegotiate his agreements with Dudarev, securing iron-clad guarantees of his personal safety in return for bringing HYDRA to completion. Malkovic smiled thinly, imagining the Russian president’s outrage at being blackmailed by his confederate. Then he shrugged. Fortunately, like him, Dudarev was fundamentally a cold-eyed realist. Their alliance had never rested entirely on the basis of mutual trust.
Jon Smith was drowning, sinking down and down through the waters of a bot-tomless black pool. His lungs were on fire, straining against the increasing pressure as he tumbled deeper and deeper into the crushing depths. He writhed in a desperate attempt to claw his way back up to the surface. Then, to his horror, he realized that his hands and his feet were frozen, completely im-mobile. He was pinioned and helpless, falling ever faster headfirst into nothingness. There was no escape.
“Wake up, Colonel!” a harsh voice demanded suddenly.
Smith shuddered and gasped, retching as another bucketful of ice-cold water hit him right in the face. He coughed violently and then doubled up in pain. Every nerve ending felt raw. Warily, he forced his eyes open.
He was lying on his side in a puddle of freezing water. His hands, bound behind his back, were numb. So were his feet, tied together tightly at the ankles. A rough, worn stone floor stretched away into darkness. For a long moment, nothing he could see made any sense. Where was he? What the hell ?lad happened to him? He could hear what sounded like a woman moaning softly nearby. Slowly, wincing involuntarily at the agony it cost him to make even the slightest movement, Jon turned his head to look upward.
A tall, blond-haired man stood there, staring down at him with an appraising look in his winter-gray eyes. The tall man studied him for a bit longer in silence. Then he nodded in cruel satisfaction. “Now that you are conscious, Colonel, we can begin ?all over again.”
Unwelcome memories rushed back, flooding into Smith’s pain-clouded mind like a rising river bursting through a weakened dam. The gray-eyed man was Erich Brandt. And he and Fiona Devin were Brandt’s prisoners. They had been dragged into this dank cellar not long after the ambush that had killed Oleg Kirov.
The cellar itself lay below the ruins of a church, part of a Russian Orthodox monastery that had been closed by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Revolution. Jon remembered seeing hundreds of bullet holes pockmarking the walls and hearing the tall German explain, with grim amusement, that this chamber had been used by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, as a place of execution for political prisoners during one of the dictator’s brutal purges. Now the monastery’s grounds and its buildings, what was left of them, were wholly abandoned, slowly being swallowed up by the surrounding forest.
The terrible hours since they were brought here had passed in an endless procession of torment as Brandt and two of his grim-faced henchmen took turns interrogating them. Every question they asked was punctuated by pain, either by a short, sharp punch to the ribs or the head, or an open-handed slap to the face, or by the application of electric shocks. In the brief intervals between these sessions, Jon and Fiona had been drenched with freezing water, and bombarded by a dizzying succession of shrill, earsplitting sounds and blinding strobe lights?all as part of an effort to disorient them and weaken their resistance.
Brandt had been watching him closely. The blond man smiled coldly. He nodded to the other men standing unseen behind Jon. “Our American friend here is ready. Help him back into his seat.”
Two pairs of rough, callused hands grabbed Smith under the arms as Brandt’s underlings hauled him bodily upright out of the icy puddle of water.
They shoved him back into a chair and then again looped a leather strap around his chest, binding him to the sharp-edged wood frame. The strap tightened unmercifully.
Jon gritted his teeth. He glanced to his left.
Fiona Devin was strapped into a chair next to him. Her hands and feet were also bound. Her head lolled. Blood trickled out of the corner of her mouth.
“Like you, Ms. Devin has been … uncooperative,” Brandt said easily. A humorless smile appeared on his face and then vanished swiftly without leaving a trace on his lips or in his eyes. “But I am a forgiving man, so I will grant you both another chance to save yourselves more of this unnecessary pain.”
He snapped an order over his shoulder to one of his men. “She looks fhirstv, Yuri. Give her another drink!”
His subordinate, a brawny, shaven-headed man, obeved, tossing a bucket full of cold water into Fiona’s face.
