creeping slowly through the snow and tall grass.
Quickly, Smith twisted around onto his back, lying with his legs drawn up to his chest, coiled and ready to strike. With luck, he might get one chance, he knew. But only one. If he muffed it, he was a dead man.
Off to his right, he heard a sharp thud, then another, and another, and finally what sounded like someone weeping in sheer terror and frustration.
Fiona was playing her part well, he realized, mimicking the noises that might be made by a frightened woman desperately crawling away through the cemetery in a panic.
Jon held his breath, waiting.
Flat on his belly, Brandt’s man wriggled out from around the weathered edge of the tall stone slab, moving faster now that he thought he had pijJ pointed the position of the two Americans, with the 9mm Makarov pistol held ready in his right hand. His head swung sharply toward where Smith lav watching him.
Jon saw the other man’s eyes widen in utter dismay. In that instant, he kicked out with both feet, smashing them as hard as he could straight into the gunman’s face. He felt a sickening crunch and saw the man’s head snap backward under the force of the blow. Droplets of blood spattered across his boots.
Smith kicked out again.
The shaven-headed man writhed backward, away from the American’s second attack. Below his glaring eyes, his face was a gruesome mask of fractured bone and shattered teeth. Enraged and in agony, he rolled up onto his feet, taking careful aim at Smith’s head.
And a third rifle shot rang out, echoing sharply across the little hollow.
Hit in the back, the man screamed once, clawed desperately at the huge hole torn through his stomach, and then folded over, hanging limp across the tall stone slab. His head and hands trailed in the weeds. More blood slid down the marker and pooled on the ground, staining the white, ice-crusted snow a sickly pink.
Slowly, painfully, Jon sat up. He inched away from the dead man and leaned his head back gratefully against the ice-cold stone of another grave marker, waiting for his nerves to stop twitching.
“Colonel?” a soft voice called out. It was Fiona Devin. “Are you still in one piece?”
“I seem to be,” he called back, not bothering to conceal the relief in his own voice. He caught a flicker of movement among the trees on the slope rising above them and sat up straighter. The movement resolved itself into the figure of a tall, silver-haired man, striding down the little hill toward them with a Dragunov SVD rifle cradled casually in his arms and a wide grin wreathed across his broad, large-nosed face.
Jon stared in total disbelief. He was looking at a man who should be dead.
He was looking at Oleg Kirov.
“How in hell …?” he asked, when the other man drew nearer.
For an answer, the Russian pulled open the torn winter coat he was wearing. Underneath, he wore a bulk} black vest. It was pockmarked and stained with what appeared to be smears of once-molten copper. He patted it affec-Honatelv. “British-made body armor, Jon,” Kirov said with satisfaction. “Some of the best in the world.”
“Which you just happened to decide to wear last night?”
Kirov shrugged. “Before I became a spy, I was a soldier. And what soldier in his right mind would go out on sentry duty without the proper equipment?”
He grinned again. “Old habits die hard, my friend, and old soldiers die even harder.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Ten minutes after turning off the Beltway that ringed Washington, D.C., Nikolai Nimerovsky glanced down at the odometer of his rental ear, a plain white Ford Taurus, checking how far he had come. Five miles. He was getting close to his destination. He looked hack up at the little country road stretching ahead of him. On either side, thick stands of trees choked by underbrush were lit by the car’s headlights and then disappeared in the predawn darkness.
A small signpost loomed up out of the blackness on the right, marking a turnoff that his map indicated meandered deeper into this state park until it came out a few miles away in a new housing subdivision.
He pulled off onto the shoulder and got out, holding the briefcase he had been given in Zurich. Following the instructions given to him in Moscow, he found the dead drop easily enough. It was a hollow tree just a few yards from the signpost. Acting quickly, he slid the briefcase into the tree trunk, made sure it was not visible from the road, and then walked unhurriedly back to his car.
Along the wax, he punched in a local phone number on his cell phone. It rang three times before someone answered.
“Yes?” a voice snapped, sounding irritated at being woken up so early in the morning.
“Is this the Miller residence at 555-8705?” Nimerovsky asked carefully.
“No,” the person on the other end said tartly. “You’ve dialed the wrong number.”
“I’m very sorry,” Nimerovsky said. “My apologies.”
There was a sudden click as the person he had called hung up.
Smiling now, the Thirteenth Directorate agent climbed back into his rental car and drove away. His mission was complete. The HYDRA variant had been delivered.
Curt Bennett swore suddenly and violently, He bent forward, peering even more closely at the computer screen in front of him, while his fingers raced across the keyboard sitting in his lap.
Randi looked up from her end of the long conference table. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. The CIA technical analyst was not ordinarily a profane man.
“Trouble?’ she asked.
“Big trouble,” Bennett confirmed tightly. “The network we’ve been probing is going dead.”
Randi hurried to his side. “Dead in what way?”
“In every way,” Bennett told her. He nodded at the screen. Most of the cell phone numbers whose ownership he had been tracing were now showing up in red, indicating they no longer belonged to active accounts. While she watched, the others shifted to red, too.
“Professor Renke and his friends are pulling the plug,” Randi realized.
“Not only that,” Bennett said. He tapped a key, switching to a new screen.
This one showed long columns of information?date and time stamps and locations?all broken down by separate telephone numbers. One by one they were disappearing, vanishing into the ether. “They’re also purging the database records of every call made or received by those numbers.”
Randi whistled softly. “I thought that was supposed to be basically impossible.”
The CIA analyst nodded. “Yeah, it is.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and frowned. “Unless, of course, you happen to have access to the proprietary software and top-level security codes used by all of the different telecom companies involved in completing those calls.”
“So who would have that kind of high-level access?”
Bennett shook his head. “Before now, I would have said nobody.” He watched the rest of the screen fade to black and then turned away in disgust.
“Most of those companies are fierce competitors. They don’t share that kind of data.”
“A third party, then,” Randi suggested. “Someone from the outside who can hack in past their safeguards.”
“Maybe,” the analyst admitted. He looked troubled. “But anyone able to break into those phone company computer systems so quickly and easily could do just about anything else he wanted to them.”
“Such as?
“Loot their corporate bank accounts. Steal the private account information for tens of millions of customers. Crash whole switching subroutines so badly that it might take weeks before anyone in the affected areas could make a phone call.” The analyst shrugged. “You name it.”
Randi nodded slowly, thinking very fast. “And yet,” she pointed out, “even with all of that incredible power at their fingertips, the only thing that these guys seem to have done with it is piggyback their own secure
