“I’m beginning to suspect the raid is a bust,” said a vaguely familiar voice to his right.
Kaparov turned to face Maxim Greshnev, Chief Counter-Terrorism Director for the FSB, one of the last people he would have expected to find watching the operation with the rest of the riffraff.
“Good morning, Director,” said Kaparov, instantly disappointed with himself for the robotic underling response.
“Nothing good about it,” said Greshnev. “They’ve been through every building except for the one they managed to blow up and they still haven’t located Reznikov. Take a guess what building went sky high?”
“The laboratory?”
“Of course,” said Greshnev. “Because why the fuck would we be interested in a full inventory of Reznikov’s work?”
“Look on the bright side, maybe they blew him up with the lab,” said Kaparov.
Greshnev chuckled, a rare show of visible emotion from the man. “We could only be so lucky,” he said, shaking his head.
Kaparov decided to ask a question he suspected would not be met with a straight answer. It wasn’t every day that you had the ear of one of the most powerful men in the FSB.
“How reliable was the source?”
“We received a onetime anonymous tip,” Greshnev replied.
“You get what you pay for,” Kaparov commented.
Greshnev stifled a laugh. “Apparently the laboratory is located in western Goa.”
“India?”
“The warm beaches of Goa attract Russian tourists year-round,” said Greshnev. “Hundreds of thousands of tourists and a few thousand permanent residents. They call the area between Arambol and Morjim beaches ‘Little Russia.’”
“No doubt the Solntsevskaya Bratva is well represented,” said Kaparov, understanding the connection.
“It’s a small outpost for the Bratva, completely off our radar until now.”
“And we’re sure he was there?”
“It was impossible to get anyone too close to the compound without tipping our hand, but relatively easy to ascertain that a sophisticated, medical-grade laboratory had been built in the middle of the jungle. It fit the profile, so here we are.”
He considered Greshnev’s revelation. Unless the director had lied about the anonymous nature of the tip, the information couldn’t possibly have originated from a source inside the jungle compound. A guard assigned to the laboratory would have attached a significant price tag to their sudden shift in loyalties. Nobody took a risk like this without a sizable financial incentive, and the Russian government wasn’t exactly known for handing out generous bounties to informants. Something didn’t make sense.
“How detailed was the information provided?” asked Kaparov.
“Detailed enough,” answered Greshnev, signaling that Kaparov’s line of questioning about the source had come to an end.
“Americans?”
“Definitely not,” answered Greshnev.
“You don’t expect they’ll find him, do you?”
“I had my doubts from the beginning,” said Greshnev. “I’ll make sure you receive a copy of the after-action report for this operation. I need a pair of cynical eyes sifting through the results.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“Your cynicism is what I like about you, not to mention your experience. Take a hard look at the report and get back to me with your observations. I’ll make sure Inga knows.”
Inga Soyev, Greshnev’s personal secretary, had earned the reputation as one of the most pitiless gatekeepers in Lubyanka’s history. Nobody saw Greshnev without her approval.
“I’ll see what I can dig up,” said Kaparov, still not sure what to make of this bizarre meeting.
“Looks like they finally discovered my absence,” said Greshnev. “Surprised it took the jackals so long.”
A pack of agents craned their necks from side to side to find him, some abandoning their prime locations in front of the screen to reposition themselves closer to the director.
Jackals indeed.
Instead of stepping forward into the inner circle, Kaparov took a few steps backward and made room for the swarm. A few eyed him skeptically, or jealously — he couldn’t tell in the soft blue glow of the tactical operations center. He truly didn’t care one way or the other. Getting out of there was his number one priority. If he managed to sneak away within the next few minutes, he could be home in bed within the hour. Any longer and he might as well lie down on the floor in his office.
One of the support agents seated among several smaller monitors arranged at a spacious workstation next to the main screen made an announcement over the loudspeaker.
“Alpha team leader reports negative contact with primary objective. The team managed a quick pass through the undamaged part of the laboratory structure, finding no human remains. Secondary objective destroyed in the fire.”
He assumed the secondary objective meant live virus samples. Greshnev shook his head, mumbling something to one of the men standing next to him as the report continued.
“The team needs to be airborne in two minutes. ELINT support has detected increased sensor activity and radio transmissions from the Indian Naval Air Station at Hansa. The team has shifted its focus to intelligence collection for the little time they have left.”
“Has there been any indication of a local law enforcement response?” Greshnev responded immediately.
A few seconds passed before he received an answer.
“No response detected,” said the agent.
“Pass along an urgent request to Director Baranov at CSN (Center of Special Operations). I strongly suggest they leave a discreet team behind, as discussed during the planning phase. There’s one shitty little road leading to and from the facility, and we’ve had it under continuous surveillance. If the primary objective was indeed on-site at any time in the past forty-eight hours and somehow narrowly escaped this attack, he can’t be far away.”
“Understood, Director Greshnev,” replied the agent.
The director glanced back at Kaparov, his look betraying the same skepticism that Kaparov himself felt. Something didn’t add up here.
Chapter 4
Frederick Shelby studied the faces of the men and women seated around the conference room table. He was far more interested in their reactions to the unsuccessful raid than the news itself. Shelby was still an outsider within this tight circle of power, a fact he couldn’t afford to forget or ignore. He’d secured a seat at the highest stakes table in town because of a single instrumental act of loyalty to the True America party, but knew all too well that the chair could be yanked out from under him at any moment, regardless of the cards he held. Reading poker faces could be as critical to success inside the Beltway as competence, especially tonight.
The failure to capture or kill Anatoly Reznikov in tonight’s raid would fall squarely in the CIA’s lap, and as the director of National Intelligence’s representative tonight, it would hit Shelby’s lap first. He noted a baleful flash from General Frank Gordon, commander of United States Special Operations Command, but he’d expected as much. SOCCOM had lives directly on the line tonight, and the intelligence shared with them by Shelby turned out to be a bust. He expected them to be hot. No. His focus centered on the immediate members of the president’s inner circle, the people that really mattered. The wrong word whispered in the right ear could be disastrous for Shelby.
He briefly turned his attention to the massive projection screen mounted to the front wall of the room. Live video feed from Operation RAINFOREST occupied the left half; a digital map displaying military symbols filled the right side. Four blue symbols clustered a hundred miles off the central western coast of India, each corresponding to one of the friendly units still in play. Within minutes, barring any unforeseen circumstances, only two blue circles would remain, their speed and direction data indicating a high-speed run due southwest, away from the coast.