Threat Vector

decision were put to rest the instant he saw the relief in Sandy’s eyes.

Sandy deserved this. Patsy deserved this, too. And his grandchild deserved a grandfather who would be around for a while. Long enough to cheer him on at baseball games, long enough to stand proudly at his graduation, long enough, just maybe, to watch him walk down the aisle.

John knew that, considering the line of work he’d been in since Vietnam, he’d lived most of his life on borrowed time.

That was over now. He was out.

Clark was surprised to find himself at peace with his decision to retire, though he imagined he would harbor one regret — that he never got a chance to wrap his hand around the throat of Valentin Kovalenko.

Oh, well, he thought as he gave a gentle hug to his daughter and headed into the kitchen to help with dinner. Wherever Kovalenko was right now, John was near certain he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself.

SIX

Matrosskaya Tishina is a street in northern Moscow, but it also serves as shorthand for a facility with a much longer name. Federal Budget Institution IZ-77/1 of the Office of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in the City of Moscow does not roll so trippingly off the tongue, so those referring to the massive detention facility on Matrosskaya Tishina normally just refer to the street itself.

It is one of Russia’s largest and oldest pretrial lockups, built in the eighteenth century, and it shows its age. Though the seven-story facade that faces the street is well maintained and almost regal in appearance, the cells inside are small and decrepit, the beds and bedding are infested with lice, and the plumbing is unable to keep up with the building’s current population, which is more than three times the capacity for which it was built.

Just before four in the morning, a narrow gurney with squeaky wheels rolled down a green-and-white painted hallway inside the old main building of Matrosskaya Tishina. Four guards pushed and pulled it along while the prisoner on the bed fought against his bindings.

His shouts echoed off the poured concrete floors and the cinder-block walls, a sound just louder and no less shrill than the squeaky wheels.

“Answer me, damn you! What’s going on? I am not ill! Who ordered me transported?”

The guards did not answer; obeying the profane commands of prisoners in their charge was precisely the opposite of their job description. They just kept rolling the gurney down the hall. They stopped at a partition of iron grating and waited for the gate in the center to be unlocked. With a loud click the gate opened, and they pushed their prisoner through and rolled him on.

The man on the gurney had not told the truth. He was ill. Everyone who had spent any time behind bars in this hellhole was ill, and this man suffered from bronchitis as well as ringworm.

Though his physical condition would be appalling to a citizen on the outside, the prisoner was no worse than most of his cellmates, and he was correct in his fear that he had not been hauled from his cell in the middle of the night in order to receive treatment for maladies shared by virtually every other prisoner in the building.

He yelled again at the four men, and again they took no notice of him.

After more than eight months here at Matrosskaya Tishina, thirty-six-year-old Valentin Kovalenko still had not gotten used to being ignored. As a former assistant rezident of Russia’s foreign intelligence arm, the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, he had grown accustomed to having his questions answered and his orders obeyed. He’d been a rising star in the SVR from his early twenties until his mid-thirties, achieving the plum assignment of number-two man in their London Station. Then, some months ago, a personal and professional gamble had failed, and he’d gone from meteoric rise to freefall drop.

Since his arrest by internal security officers in a warehouse in Moscow’s Mitino district in January he’d been held at the pretrial facility under an executive order of the office of the president, and he’d been told by those few prison officials that he’d met that his case would be delayed and delayed again, and he should mentally prepare himself to spend years in his cell. Then, if he was lucky, all would be forgotten and he’d be sent home. On the other hand, they warned, he could be shipped east and ordered to serve time in Russia’s gulag system.

This, Kovalenko knew, would be a virtual death sentence.

For now he spent his days fighting for a corner of a cell shared by one hundred prisoners and his nights sleeping in shifts on a bug-ridden cot. Disease and disputes and despair encompassed every hour of every day.

From other inmates he learned that the average wait to see a judge for someone whose case had not been sped up by bribes or political corruption was between two and four years. Valentin Kovalenko knew he did not have two to four years. When the other inmates in his cell learned who he was, a former high-ranking member of Russian intelligence, he would likely be beaten to death within two to four minutes.

Most residents of Matrosskaya Tishina were no great fans of the government.

This threat of exposure and then reprisal had been used effectively by Kovalenko’s enemies outside the prison, mostly at the Federal’naya Sluzhba Besopasnosti, Russian internal security, because it ensured that their inconvenient prisoner would keep his mouth shut while on the inside.

In the first month or two of incarceration Kovalenko had had sporadic contact with his frantic and confused wife, and in their brief phone conversations he’d only assured her that everything would be straightened out and that she had nothing to worry about.

But his wife stopped coming to the prison, and then she stopped calling. And then, he had been told by the assistant warden, his wife had filed for dissolution of the marriage and full custody of his children.

But this was not the worst news. Rumors began filtering down to Kovalenko that no one was working on his case. It was frustrating no one was on his defense, but the fact no one was working on his prosecution was even more ominous. He was just sitting here, in a cage, rotting away.

He worried he would be dead of disease inside of six months.

As the gurney turned to the right and rolled under a recessed light in the ceiling, Kovalenko looked at the guards. He did not recognize any of them, but to him they appeared to be just as robotic as the rest of the staff here. He knew he would get no useful information from them, but out of growing panic he shouted again as they took him through another gate that led out of his cell block and into an administrative portion of the facility.

In another moment he was wheeled into the prison infirmary.

Valentin Kovalenko knew what was happening. He’d imagined this. He expected this. He could have penned the script for this event himself. The late-night rousing. The leather bindings on the gurney with the squeaky wheels. The silent guards and the trip into the bowels of the prison.

He was about to be executed. In secret and in defiance of the law, his enemies were going to remove him from their list of worries.

The massive infirmary was empty of doctors, nurses, or any prison employees except for the men who rolled his gurney, and this reconfirmed Kovalenko’s fears. He’d been taken here once before, when a guard’s rubber club had opened a wound on his face that needed stitches, and even though that had happened late at night, the medical facility had been well staffed.

Tonight, however, it appeared as though someone had cleared out any witnesses.

Valentin fought against his wrist and ankle straps in vain.

The four guards rolled him into an exam room that appeared to be empty, and then they backed out of the doorway, shutting the door behind them and leaving him in the dark, bound and helpless. Kovalenko shouted as they left, but when the door closed, he looked around in the low light. To his right was a rolling curtain partition, and behind this he could hear movement.

He was not alone.

Kovalenko asked, “Who’s there?”

“Who are you? What is this place?” replied a gruff male voice. The man sounded like he was just on the other side of the partition, also on a gurney, perhaps.

“Look around, fool! This is the infirmary. I asked who you are?”

Before the man behind the curtain answered, the door opened again, and two men entered. Both wore lab