He punched the appropriate keys and sent the message on its way, then secured his terminal and took a break.
Ivan Strakov spent his alone time in the CIA cells preparing for the next meeting. He had to waste a little more time. He scrubbed some dirt in his eyes to make them red and watery. Then he stuck his finger down his throat and vomited.
When the beefy guards came to collect him, they noticed the vile puddle on the floor and radioed the information ahead: the prisoner looked sick. With handcuffs in place, they marched him to a different room in the building. The new location was larger than the usual little conference room, and there were several other people around a long table. Normally, the space was used for meetings by groups of lawyers and diplomats, but this afternoon, the spooks had taken over, and they looked grim.
The Russian had anticipated that there would be an escalation in the questioning as time wore on after the defection. Kyle Swanson had been just his opening move, to show that he possessed information the allies wanted and needed. In fact, they had allowed Strakov to go much longer than he would have if the situation had been reversed. Defectors were supposed to talk and he was never above using force or blackmaiclass="underline" whatever worked.
Well-placed leaks had led the media to discover his existence, and requests for interviews had arrived at the CIA. All were denied. The burst of notoriety meant all of the men and women at the table were under stress, feeling public and private pressure to pull more sensitive intel from him. Again, he had expected that, just as he had anticipated a meeting with Tom Markey. Strakov had already turned over some interesting tidbits, and these people needed to get even more to make their superiors happy. He rubbed his wrists in a show of exasperation, restoring blood circulation, and thinking that he still held the upper hand, and had a lot of leverage in the negotiations.
“Decision time, Ivan,” said Colonel Markey, at the far end of the table. He noticed that the defector did not look well.
“Who are all of these people, Tom? Can we speak freely before them?”
Markey folded his hands on some papers. He was tired of playing mind chess with this guy. “Stop it, Ivan. Don’t even think of stalling any longer. What is your decision?”
“Change is the light at the end of the tunnel,” Ivan quoted from memory. “That’s from a Welsh poet named Jack Harris.” In contrast to the rigidity of everyone else, Strakov slouched a bit into his chair. “I have decided that Kyle Swanson is no longer necessary for further conversations. Does that mean that our earlier agreements remain in place?”
Markey shot a look at a pudgy woman in a gray suit halfway down the table. She looked over the top of her half-rim glasses and said, “We agree.”
Ivan thought to himself: lawyer. Everything stayed the same, including his freedom to go outside when accompanied by security. “So who will be my primary contact now, Tom. You?”
“I will be it for a while. After that, various others will be chosen according to their expertise, to tackle specific subjects. You know a lot about many things, Ivan. No one questioner could get it all.” Markey felt good about this. He wanted to turn this guy over to the CIA as soon as possible and go back home.
“So we have a deal. That’s good,” said Ivan. “For now, I ask to be excused for the rest of the day, Tom. I need to go back to my room and rest, and be examined by a doctor. My stomach is raging and this headache is pounding. I suggest that we pick this up again in the morning, when I promise to be ready to do some real work.”
A woman left her one child, a six-year-old boy, with her mother and took the purple metro train out to the Polezhaevskaya station at the Khodynka Airfield. She was running a little late for work, and looked up with weary eyes at a massive, ill-maintained building that contained so many windows that it was known as “the Aquarium.” She hurried to her desk and checked in with her supervisor, who scowled and reminded her that she was fifteen minutes overdue. She apologized, promised that it would not happen again, and settled in for her long evening shift as one of hundreds of cipher clerks in the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, which was better known by its acronym, the GRU.
One item waiting in her queue was from an agent in Belgium, who gave bare details that Fire Base 8531 in Kaliningrad had been targeted for an enemy military raid out of Poland. It disturbed her enough that she summoned her supervisor, who was still upset about her tardiness.
He read it carefully, and they agreed that the agent perhaps had filed erroneous information. Some unreliable field people on government expense accounts drank too much with their sources and produced cow dung. Any chance that Poland was poised to attack Russia seemed remote in the extreme.
“Kaliningrad is in the Western Military District,” said the supervisor, who was tempted to delete the message entirely, but the idea of taking on such responsibility frightened him. “Send it over to St. Petersburg for headquarters attention, low priority,” he told the clerk.
23
Anneli thought it odd that she was not frightened at all. She was wearing commando garb, was illegally inside of Russia and was about to be part of a deadly attack on a military base. A normal person should be scared to death, while she lay almost at ease in the sniper hide listening to the voices coming over her powerful electronic ears. The three men who would do the actual fighting had fallen silent except for an occasional swap of information about changing conditions. She trusted them all. Anneli had seen Kyle Swanson work before and was totally confident in him. Sergeant Baldwin was a very polite Englishman who carried the same dangerous aura as Swanson. And Gray Perry had slithered out of the other sniper hide some time ago with such stealth that she did not even know he was gone until he called in from his new position overlooking the guard shack on the trail.
She was picking up increased activity down at the base and noted the time on the thick olive-green wristwatch she had been given. It was fifteen minutes before six o’clock in the evening. She added twelve to that to figure the military equivalent. It was almost 1800, and the early spring sky had dimmed from bright blue to an overcast slate as the sun set beyond the huge trees in the west, below strings of low clouds. It had glared into their eyes late in the afternoon, then slowly fell out of sight and was replaced by the early shades of darkness. The camp lights had been on for an hour, for the general’s helicopter was due soon. Things were getting busy down there.
“Heads up, Bushman Two,” Swanson warned in a soft voice. “There’s a Goat heading your way.” It was the same dirty green UAZ-469 utility vehicle that had been used for the earlier shift change at the guard post. Looking very much like an old American Jeep, the rough-terrain four-wheel-drive car was called a Goat, the English word for the Russian kozlik.
“Driver plus one,” Kyle said, watching through his scope. “Seems to be in a hurry but it is staying on the road. “Maybe just another shift change.”
Gray Perry clicked his own mike twice in affirmative response and remained perfectly still in the underbrush on a slight rise some sixty meters from the shack. The single soldier was still inside. Perry heard the coming vehicle long before he saw it, then the Goat arrived chewing dirt and made a sliding halt. The guard was suddenly alert as another soldier vaulted from the vehicle and a sergeant stepped from behind the steering wheel. The SAS sniper could not make out what they were saying, but their actions were obvious enough.