Frank stood. “You’re obviously not serious, Comrade Beria. I’ll be in touch. Think about it.”
You should join him. Maggie did.
A single voice in his head — Frank couldn’t tell which one — was quickly followed by a chorus of others. Join him. Think of what you could do. The world is crap. Join him. He may have a point. You trust Maggie; look at her now.
JOIN HIM.
Frank stopped and looked around, wide-eyed. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw movement — that shadow Variant of Beria’s maybe? But there was nothing, except for the clamor in his mind.
Beria just smiled a little wider. “Things are different lately, aren’t they?”
“Wh — what?”
“Your abilities. ‘Enhancements.’ It is a phenomenon we have seen over the past several weeks. Our abilities have begun to change. They are more insistent, angrier if you will. We both know there is something behind the phenomena that gave us these abilities — ours in Leningrad, yours in, oh, what is that place called where you moved it? Idaho?”
Frank shook his head to clear it. “You have good sources.”
“Of course we do. And if your teams had been as diligent in their study of the phenomena as ours, you would’ve noticed some changes. Perhaps they have and you’re not being told. But there is something coming, Lodge. It feels… like a storm. I intend to act before it strikes.”
JOIN HIM.
“I… I really don’t know what you’re talking about, pal,” Frank said. “Do you want to trade or not?”
The doors to the office opened again, and Frank’s jaw nearly hit the floor.
“I don’t think we’re doing a trade, Frank,” Maggie said in her passable Russian as she walked in, wearing the uniform of an MGB officer, then switched to English. “Heya, buddy.”
You really should’ve brought the null generator, Boris said.
14
Danny really wanted to tell Sorensen to floor it, drive faster, dodge traffic — anything to get to the Lubyanka — but getting pulled over by the local cops would delay them further, if not blow their covers entirely. But now that they were closer to the city center, Danny could feel Frank’s presence in the general direction of MGB headquarters — and he could sense someone else as well.
“Are you sure it’s Maggie?” Sorensen said as he cruised through a traffic circle. “I thought she was in Leningrad.”
“I’d know her presence anywhere,” Danny said. “She’s there with Frank, and another Variant, too. I’m betting Beria. It’s his office, after all.”
“Any others?”
Danny closed his eyes and concentrated. “I think… yeah, there’s a couple others heading toward the Lubyanka, like us. But I only get those three in the actual building right now.”
Sorensen sped up. “So it’s a race. Great.”
Danny ran through the contingencies in his head. He’d left Katie and Mrs. Stevens behind, to prepare to bug out if everything went sideways. Their worst-case scenario — and this was looking more and more like it might very well become that — was to gather what they could carry, burn the entire safe house to the ground, and make for the U.S. embassy with all due haste. They all had code words that would get them past the Marine guards and safely onto U.S. territory.
The Soviet Variants were another story. Danny’s orders were to try to get them to the embassy as well and, barring that, deny them to Beria — permanently. He honestly wasn’t sure if he could do that.
“So is Frank really off the reservation here?” Sorensen asked. “I mean, do we have to take him down? Is he flipping to Beria? Or is this some kind of super-secret wrinkle in the plan?”
Danny shrugged and gave Sorensen a tired smile. “We’ll find out in a few minutes, I guess. I really don’t know. They don’t always tell me everything.”
Sorensen frowned, but said nothing and kept driving. Even with all of his experience in the field — four-plus years — the former mechanic from Minnesota still had problems adapting to changes in operational plans.
Granted, this was a doozy.
Sorensen sped past the Bolshoi Theatre and, within a few blocks, tore into Lubyanka Square, the MGB headquarters hulking over the place. “Now what?” he asked.
Danny pointed toward the left. “There — Ulitsa Bol’shaya Lubyanka. Pull over there and — oh, shit. Stop the car!”
Sorensen veered toward the curb and hit the brakes while Danny watched a glass window explode and shards fall from the corner of the building’s third floor. A second later, he saw someone jump out, seemingly trying to rappel off the side of the building without a rope, almost bouncing off the wall and grabbing onto the building’s ornamentation to momentarily arrest his fall. To his surprise, the man landed on his feet and began to run, off in the direction of the Bolshoi.
“Wrong way, Frank,” Danny muttered, then turned to Sorensen. “Go dark and head back to the house. Prepare to bug out. Stay by the radio.”
Sorensen vanished.
The driver’s side door opened and the driver’s seat relaxed outward as Sorensen invisibly left the car. Danny scooted over to the driver’s seat and gunned the engine, taking off while keeping Frank’s location firmly in his mind’s eye. Teatral’nyy Proyezd was one way, so Danny swerved past the Lubyanka building in the opposite direction, then took a hard left onto Pushechnaya Ulitsa and took off back in Frank’s general direction.
There were flashing lights in the rearview mirror now, and the sound of sirens. Beria apparently wanted Frank back. Badly. As he drove, Danny concentrated a moment on Maggie, but she was no longer in his mind’s eye. He hadn’t traveled out of his usual range, so that meant one thing — she was back in a null field of some kind.
And likely still in Beria’s grasp.
Danny focused back on Frank, only to find that he’d stopped moving, roughly four blocks north of the Bolshoi. Danny immediately recognized the location as one of the dozen or so caches that had been hidden around Moscow in the first few days since the team arrived. In abandoned alleys, damaged buildings, disused basements, and other forgotten places, the MAJESTIC-12 agents had stored spare clothes — nearly all were proletarian outfits designed to blend in — and forged papers. To Frank’s credit, he intuitively understood the need to get out of his MGB uniform. He also likely knew to sit tight and let the dragnet spread out well beyond the Lubyanka building.
Danny pulled over on a side street, killed the engine… and waited. That was the worst part, sometimes. Just waiting. But it was necessary — patience was an unheralded but critical part of espionage. So he sat and leaned back in his chair, pretending to doze off while keeping an eye on his mirrors. The police activity continued for a while, but then died down. After about a half hour, Danny keyed on his radio, cannily hidden inside his wallet, an innovation only Mrs. Stevens could make possible. “Misha, this is Alexi, did you make your delivery? Over,” he said in Russian, should there be other ears listening. Sorensen, are you back at the safe house?
A moment later, the radio crackled to life. “Misha here, Alexi. Yes, delivery made. Receipt is signed. Over.” I’m back, and all is well here. No signs we’ve been made.
“Thank you. I think that’s it for tonight, but keep your radio at hand. Over and out.” Put the bug-out on hold. Stay sharp and await further orders.
So that was one positive sign. Whatever Frank had done at MGB headquarters, the Soviets hadn’t made a move on the safe house. Sorensen was trained to do a thorough, invisible surveillance of the immediate neighborhood to ensure the house wasn’t being watched, and by now he was getting pretty good at identifying which “casual bystanders” were actually carrying concealed weapons and radios. Danny figured that they had at least tonight to figure out whether or not the op was truly busted. He wasn’t worried about whether Maggie would flip on them — she didn’t know the location of the safe house, wouldn’t have been told until she made contact in Moscow.