"Come in," he barked, and Yuri Prerovsky opened the door, stepping in tentatively.
"Shut the door. We have a problem," he said.
Agent Yuri Prerovsky, second in command of the Bioweapons/Chemical Threat Assessment Division, shut the door and walked over to a crude folding chair opened next to his boss's desk. "What's all the commotion?"
He threw the report down on the end of the desk closest to Yuri. "Have you seen this report?"
Yuri studied the first page and thumbed through it. "I haven't read it. I catalogued it and placed it on your desk two days ago. I think we received it by mistake. It should have been routed to the Caucasus Threat Division if anything…hold on," he said, studying the document, "actually, it was routed to them as well."
"Read page three and you'll see why it was routed to us," he said and waited for Yuri's response.
"Fuck…how did Central Processing miss this?"
"They didn't. They got it to the right desk, but didn't bother to highlight Reznikov's name or put an alert in the computer! Anything to bring this to our attention. He's at the top of our list for fuck's sake!" he yelled, instantly calming back down and holding his hand out for the report.
"Two days you say? Shit." Kaparov lit a cigarette from the pack of Troikas in his desk. "The raid occurred five days ago, and this is the speed at which we receive crucial information?" he said, deeply inhaling tobacco smoke.
"There isn't much here, and we’re not likely to dig the rest out of Alpha Branch. I'll try though," Yuri said.
Kaparov exhaled the smoke toward the ceiling and regarded Yuri. He was young and smart, part of the new generation of law enforcement agents that hadn't been trained under the KGB. He wasn't part of the paranoid, compartmentalized thinking that had served mother Russia so miserably for nearly fifty years. The fact that he had no hesitation to walk upstairs to the infamous branch that handled FSB Spetsnaz Operations was a testament to the new days.
Agents like Prerovksy gave him hope that the change was real. Two decades ago, walking up to the KGB Special Operations Branch without an invitation could easily end your career, and if you were on your way up there to ask the wrong kinds of questions, you could wake up the next morning in a Siberian detention camp. Times had fortunately changed, but old fears were hard to shake.
"It's worth a try, but the report entry doesn't indicate much more than a few scattered ledger entries regarding Reznikov's visit to the camp and a reference to recent activity in Kazakhstan. That's Reznikov's old stomping grounds. He was fired from the VECTOR bio-research facility in Novosibirsk, just a few hundred miles away from the Kazakhstan border. He supposedly disappeared en route to an interview at its sister institute, barely three hundred miles away in Stepnagorsk, Kazakhstan.
"Yuri, I have a bad feeling about this. Reznikov's been nosing around Al Qaeda for three years, with what I can only assume is one purpose: to strike some kind of funding deal to complete his research into weaponized encephalitis. Even during the heyday of the Soviet bioweapons program, that research was banned."
"But they still did it," Yuri said.
"Unfortunately, considerable research continued, and VECTOR was one of the primary sites that violated the Kremlin's decree. Of course, it stopped for good in 1978."
Yuri cocked his head and cast a curious look.
"Ah, the benefits of being a remnant of the old guard. Lots of loose lips back then, without any glue to keep them shut. Rumor has it that the entire scientific team associated with the project was executed by firing squad on the front lawn of the facility. Reznikov's father was supposedly among the group executed. Nobody really knows. There was no official record of the executions, as you can imagine. What we do know is that Reznikov's mother fatally shot herself on the same day, and Anatoly Reznikov went to live with the mother's sister somewhere south of Murmansk. The father just disappeared from record."
"No wonder Reznikov is a little off."
"A little? He was a vocal proponent of continuing his father's research. Can you imagine how well that was received at VECTOR? Within a month of being hired there in 2003, he suddenly started talking nonsense about how modifying encephalitis genomes could save the world. That fucker went under surveillance within the hour, and emails from certain research staff hit my desk quicker than you can imagine. Whether the rumors about 1978 were true or not, nobody wanted to be summoned to attend an impromptu picnic on the front lawn. Know what I mean?"
"So, where do we go with this?" Yuri said.
"I'll walk this up to the Investigative Division. They'll need to start sending agents out to Kazakhstan and all potential laboratory sites in the area. Only God knows what's in this for Reznikov, but if he's aligned with Muslim extremists, we have a big problem. Al Qaeda won't be funding his research to improve their image on the scientific scene. This can only lead to one thing. Bioterrorism attacks on European and U.S. soil. Hell, if Chechen separatists are involved, which is a fair assumption given the Dagestan connection, then we're looking at possible attacks right here in Russia. We need to assume the worst. Let's get our team looking in the right places for any more information. I'll stop by Alpha Group on my way back from Investigative, unless you have a contact there."
"Well, I do have special access to a lady friend up there," he said, grinning.
"I don't even want to think about your concept of ‘special access,’ Yuri. If I don't have any luck with them this morning, I'll pay for you to take her out on the town tonight. And they said we were out of the spy business," Kaparov said, shaking his head.
Chapter 5
Srecko Hadzic sat impassively at a thick stone table, contemplating the warm, salty air that wafted through the enclosed courtyard. The "Hague Hilton," as some critics liked to call it, was located in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen, less than a mile from the North Sea, but Hadzic had never seen any of it. His room didn't come with a view. None of the cells did. To Srecko, this was far from any Hilton Hotel he had visited and an ungodly affront to his nature.
His tenth cigarette of the morning smoldering between his stubby, yellow-stained fingers, he glanced up at the clear Dutch sky and swallowed his pride for the hundredth time since he was rudely awoken by the guards this morning. A surge of rage always followed, but by midday, he would start to feel slightly level as the strong emotions abated. This would last until something seemingly innocuous would vomit all of the rage and indignity right back up in his lap, and he'd have to start over trying to come to terms with his situation.
He'd been slowly rotting in the United Nations Detention Center for seven years, watching one former Serbian colleague after another leave for various reasons. Some were indicted and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences. He didn't envy their fate. They were rumored to have been transferred to Germany for imprisonment. Others had been released pending further trial proceedings, a feat not even Srecko's lawyers could accomplish, which only served to fuel his daily rage.
Above all, nothing stoked his anger like the luckiest of his former Serbian "friends," who were suddenly freed from custody when the chief prosecutor for the war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, simply excluded them from the draft indictments of "criminal enterprise" leveled against Milosevic's regime. Her indictment focused on Slobodan Milosevic, essentially ignoring several other key members of the regime, who Srecko knew had ordered many of the crimes that held him firmly entrenched in his own cell.