Watchlist

“From me you should expect only the best,” Korovin said. “And I hear you made a purchase at Volodya’s shop on the Arbat, yes? He has the finest selection of icons in all of Moscow.”

“Pricy, though,” Middleton said.

“Well, after all, it is a sellers’ market, my friend,” Korovin said.

“I didn’t dicker,” said Middleton.

Korovin led him to the dining room, dark and dismal and mostly empty. They sat at a small table, which was already set with mineralnaya voda and dusty-looking tumblers and shot glasses.

A waitress shambled over with a tray. An old crone with thinning white hair and pale gray eyes who looked to be in her eighties, she wore a long black shirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Probably, Middleton thought, a pensioner from some back office at the Lubyanka. With fumbling hands, she set down an assortment of zakuski, Russian appetizers like beet salad and mushroom “caviar,” smoked fish and pickled onions. Then she unsteadily filled their shot glasses with a domestic brand of vodka.

Korovin slid a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros, lit it with an old Red Army lighter and then offered a toast to their work in Kosovo. The two intelligence operatives had played a behind-the-scenes role in that ugly conflict a decade earlier, a role the world would never know about.

Ten years ago, they’d seen how close the Kosovo conflict had brought the two superpowers to war. The Russians backed the Serb guerrillas, and NATO and the Americans defended the ethnic Albanians, even though there was plenty of “ethnic cleansing”-that grotesque euphemism-on both sides. When Russia finally agreed to abandon the Serbs in exchange for a separate role in the peacekeeping process, NATO reneged on the deal. The Russian forces found themselves taking orders from a U.S. general. They felt humiliated and double-crossed. The tensions could well have boiled over into a war between two nuclear powers were it not for the quiet, back- channel efforts of a few intelligence officers like Korovin and Middleton.

Now, the two men drank and then Korovin poured again. But before he could offer another flowery toast, he gave Middleton a sideways glance. “I thought you were retired, Garrold.”

“I thought I was too,” Middleton said.

“Yet you needed to enter my country off the books. Which tells me that you have gone active again.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He gave his Russian friend a quick, sanitized version of the work that the Volunteers had been doing and then told him about the bizarre incident on the Cote d’Azur that had activated the Volunteers once again. “I need some information.”

“Ah.” Which might have meant yes, absolutely. Or the opposite.

“Information about thermobarics.”

“It’s easier to get you the explosives than it is to get you information about the explosives. Safer, anyway.”

“Well, let me ask, in any case,” Middleton said. “I had my associate look into the records of a shipping company that delivered some merchandise to an outfit in Florida. I think it was explosives. He contacted me on the flight and told me that a number of shipments labeled ‘construction items’ were sent from Albania to Moscow to Mogadishu to Algiers and finally to the U.S. The company realized he was into their system and blocked him out, but not before he got me the names of all the freight forwarders involved.”

“You’re looking at me rather knowingly, friend. I believe I am nervous now.”

Though Korovin didn’t look nervous. He looked amused in that indulgently conspiratorial way former Soviet army officers and KGB operatives slip on their faces like bank robbers do a ski mask.

“And you want to hear a funny coincidence?” Middleton asked.

“No, I do not.”

“All the shipping companies were incorporated by a single law firm in Moscow. And guess who they also represent? Your boss, Arkady Chernayev.”

Arkady Chernayev was the richest man in Russia, perhaps in the world. He divided his time between his estate in Knightsbridge, London, and a mansion on the outskirts of Moscow. Not to mention a dozen other properties around the world, several private planes and three obscenely large yachts. Chernayev had gotten rich in the oil business during the free-for-all in the last days of the Soviet Union.

“No, not boss.” A scowl.

“Ruslan, you’ve done private security work for him. Don’t even bother trying to deny it. My sources on this are impeccable.”

Korovin looked away, then busied himself by sectioning a herring with the delicacy of a cardiac surgeon performing a coronary bypass. He placed each slice of herring atop squares of black bread, then looked up. “That was long ago,” he said finally, his expression hardened. “Why is this so important to you?”

“Because if Chernayev is behind this, which I’m beginning to believe, I think he’s channeling money or explosives or both to a dangerous fanatic named Devras Sikari. The point of contact for their interests was Tampa, Florida.”

“Then let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you are correct. This is why you wanted a weapon? Because you think you will shoot your way in to Chernayev’s dacha? Do you know how many bodyguards this man has surrounding him at all times? And just one of you?”

Middleton shrugged, said nothing.

“And for what? You plan to kill Chernayev and hope to survive?”

“Kill him? No, of course not. I need to talk to him. Can you tell me anything about him?”

“He’s grown reclusive. He had some financial problems.”

“The richest man in the country?”

“Not any more. Wealth comes and goes like the tide, my friend… but he’s on the rebound now, we hear. No one knows what his good fortune is. I can’t give you first-hand knowledge… Tell me, what is this about?”

Middleton had a thought-Sindhu Power. Lowering his voice, he went fishing. “Because of the copper bracelet.”

A nervous smile flitted across Korovin’s face, then disappeared. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“I think you do.”

Korovin snubbed out his cigarette, then slid another one from the pack and lighted it. When he next spoke, it was through a mouthful of smoke, his voice muzzy. “The copper bracelet,” he said. “This is nothing more than what we call skazki. Folk tales. What you call old wives’ tales. Stories told by frightened old men to inflate their own importance.”

“Try me,” Middleton said.

“No. The copper bracelet is no more. That snake was killed long ago. Decades ago.”

“Amuse me.”

“It originally described some old scientific process. But then the name came to refer to a cult. A cult of madmen-fanatics, as you say-that rose from the ashes of the Second World War. You know of the Norsk Hydro plant?”

Middleton shook his head.

“This was a factory in Norway jointly owned by Norsk Hydro and I. G. Farben.”

“The giant Nazi corporation.”

“Yes. It was destroyed by the Allied forces and the Norwegian resistance movement. One of the most remarkable sabotage acts of the war.”

“What did the factory make-weapons?”

“In a way, yes. The copper-bracelet system produced heavy water. It was a revolutionary way to produce nuclear material.”

Middleton thought immediately of Felicia’s insights and her encrypted message to him. Heavy water. Sikari’s patents.

“The Nazis needed it to make an atomic weapon. But once the factory was destroyed, the Nazi atomic bomb program was ended. The story, Garrold-the skazka-is that the plant may have been destroyed, but some of the records of the technology survived. A group of Russians and Germans-successors to the Nazis, you could say-have been hoping for someone to reconstruct the science behind it.”

“Connection to Chernayev?”