Death Wave

Rubens came awake with a start.

He’d driven back out to Fort Meade as soon as the NSC meeting was over, grabbing a fast-food burger on the way for lunch. He’d spoken with Marie by cell phone, gotten an update on the op in Dushanbe, and learned that Dean and Akulinin were at the safe house — with a stray.

He approved transport for the stray — if Charlie and Ilya were vouching for Alekseyevna, he would do his best to help her — then rattled off a string of orders. He didn’t want the boys immediately leaving Dushanbe but wanted them to pull a quick black bag job first, and Marie should expect a large download over the secure line from the CIA.

Once back at Fort Meade, he decided he had to get some sleep. He’d been on his feet now for more hours than he cared to think about, and he’d caught himself nodding at the wheel as he drove up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway out of the city.

Not good.

So when he’d finally reached his office at a bit past two thirty, he’d pulled off his shoes and collapsed into the cot in the back room off his office, facedown in the pillow.

Thirty minutes later, Ann Sawyer, his secretary, was shaking him awake. “Sir? Sir!”

“What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you, Mr. Rubens, but they say there’s something you should see on C-SPAN.”

“If this is not the end of the world, Ann …”

“Sir, I—”

“Never mind, never mind. I’m coming.”

He rolled out of the cot and made his way to the office. Ann had already switched on the monitor mounted within one wall.

He recognized the face of Rodney C. Mullins, giving an address.

“… that it is critically important that we provide timely funding for our surveillance satellite system. As I said before, we have people on the ground in places like Astana, Dushanbe, and Karachi, and they cannot do their jobs defending this great nation from the threat of rogue states or terrorists quite possibly armed with nuclear weapons if they do not have adequate technical support!

“And so I move, Mr. Speaker, that my amendment to the military appropriations bill be voted on without delay …”

Rubens stared at the screen in disbelief. “Jesus fucking H. Christ!”

AYNI AIRFIELD

SOUTHWEST OF DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

THURSDAY, 0415 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Charlie Dean took another look around the dark compound, then lay down on the ground.

“Tell me again why this is a good idea, coming back in here like this?” Akulinin asked.

“Because it’s the one place in Tajikistan they’re not looking for us,” Dean told him.

“And because Mr. Rubens suggested that you might want to try it,” Vic Klein added in their implanted speakers. Vic had taken over the Art Room’s part of the mission for Dean and Akulinin at the end of Jeff Rockman’s shift some hours ago.

“Right. You ready, Charlie?”

Dean closed his eyes and nodded. “Let’s do it.” His right hand closed a little tighter around the pen he was holding cupped there, out of sight. He heard the faint crunch of gravel as Akulinin hurried away.

The nap at the safe house had been all too brief. He’d been able to sleep for perhaps two hours before the promised messenger had shown up with new plates for the car and new ID cards and papers, both for the two Desk Three operators and for Maria Alekseyevna. Now, her blond hair tucked up inside a black wig, she was Ruqiya Nazarova, and she was listed as Sergei Nazarov’s Tajik wife.

Dean wondered if the Art Room wizards had been aware of Ilya’s tryst with Masha a few hours ago when they created their new legends.

Probably not … but with them and their high-tech magic at listening in, you never knew. The two had been back in their separate rooms by the time Mrs. Konovalova had come up the stairs to wake them, and that at least had worked out well. Dean had the feeling that the old woman would not have approved.

Or … perhaps she would. Her eyes had been sparkling a bit when she’d wished them all safe travels, and it seemed to Dean that she’d been smiling in a knowing and somewhat condescending way at Ilya and Masha as they said good-bye.

Maybe the squeaks had penetrated the floor to her bedroom below.

And maybe the woman didn’t mind if two young people found a few moments of escape from a dark and pain-grim world.

Their initial goal had been to drive south as quickly as possible, using back roads to avoid the dragnet thrown up around the city by Vasilyev’s forces and by the local police. Besides the new license plates, the Dushanbe CIA resident had sent along a new drivers-side mirror to replace the one that had been shot out earlier, plus a spray can of a tacky adhesive with which to coat the car’s body. There was no time to repaint the vehicle’s green exterior, but handfuls of dirt scooped up from outside the shed and hurled against the body quickly transformed the dark green Hunter from new-looking to something that had been bouncing around on the arid dirt roads of Tajikistan’s mountains for weeks. They couldn’t do anything about replacing the car’s rear window, but they did brush some dark matte gray paint into the bright white star where the bullet had glanced off glass and metal. It wouldn’t get past a close examination, but at night, from a distance of a few yards, the scar was now invisible.

While they’d been detailing the car to give it its new look, Rubens had explained the new plan.

According to various surveillance sources, Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev had his office in the Ayni Airfield tower building. Analysts going over the footage Dean had transmitted of Vasilyev jumping out of the helicopter had shown him carrying a briefcase — not the sort of fashion accessory normally taken by FSB officers on board helicopters. The NSA analysts were not sure what happened to that briefcase. Dean and Akulinin had not seen it in the hospital morgue. It might have been in Vasilyev’s car, or it could have been passed to a subordinate and taken to Vasilyev’s office in the Ayni control tower building.

Either way, the chances were good that the briefcase was in his Ayni office now, and Rubens wanted the Desk Three operatives to slip inside and have a look.

They’d returned in the middle of the night to Ayni, a few kilometers southwest of Dushanbe. Getting back onto the base had been simple enough. The Deep Black electronic support unit back at Fort Meade had for the past several hours been busily infiltrating the radio and cell phone calls crisscrossing the airwaves over Tajikistan, adding reports, sightings, and orders designed to confuse the manhunt now under way. In several cases, they’d even used the Internet to modify local police and military records and files. Numerous new reports now had the fugitive vehicle fleeing north on the M34 toward the border with Uzbekistan, while other reports suggested that the fugitives were not two men and a woman, as originally reported, but one man and one woman, the female described as blond, the male as being Pakistani, with black hair and beard.

And so a dusty, travel-worn car with different license plates than were on the fugitive vehicle had entered the Ayni front gate. The bored Indian guards there had looked at their IDs and waved them through. Dean had parked the vehicle in the main parking lot, and Masha had stayed in the back, huddled underneath a blanket, while Dean and Akulinin had approached the control tower.

The building — indeed, the entire base — appeared to have shut down for the night. There were two guards in front of the control tower entrance, however, both of them Russians. Dean and Akulinin had watched them for a moment from behind the corner of a large tool shed a hundred yards from the tower. The windows were probably covered by an alarm system; the only way in, then, was through the front door, directly between the guards.

Now Dean lay on his back behind the tool shed, listening as Akulinin’s footsteps receded into the distance. A moment later, he heard shouting — Akulinin barking orders.

He heard multiple footsteps returning, crunching over gravel, running this time. “He’s over here, around this corner!” Dean heard Akulinin say in out-of-breath Russian. “I think he’s still alive.”

“I’m not supposed to leave my post, sir,” another voice said.