He opened his eyes. Wrapped in blankets, he was strapped loosely to a stretcher. An IV tube was attached to his arm. A uniformed medic with a Red Cross armband finished checking his pulse, gave him a quick thumbs-up sign, and then sat back.
Truznyev lifted his head slightly, studying his surroundings. From the noise and vibration, he judged that he was in the troop compartment of some kind of military aircraft. Grim-faced men and women in snow camouflage uniforms sat in fold-down seats that ran down the length of the cabin. Both their uniforms and their weapons were unfamiliar.
His eyes widened when he saw the large, spindly-limbed combat machine squatting near the aircraft’s sealed rear ramp door. Memories of the slaughter he’d witnessed suddenly crowded his mind. He started to shiver. He was in the hands of the Poles and their Iron Wolf mercenaries.
With a jolt, the aircraft touched down, bounced slightly, and then settled firmly. The roar of its engines diminished fast, spooling down into silence. At the same time, the ramp door whined open, revealing a barren stretch of tarmac and snow-dusted trees in the distance.
With that same startling grace he’d witnessed earlier, the tall robot unfolded itself and strode away with amazing speed. The snow-camouflaged troops followed it out, assembling in squads on the tarmac and then marching away at the double.
Once the ramp was clear, a medical team darted inside, lifted up his stretcher, and carried him outside. As they left, Truznyev got a better look at the aircraft, a large tilt-rotor emblazoned with a metal gray, red-eyed robotic wolf’s head.
The medics set his stretcher down on the tarmac.
A well-dressed man with long gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard sauntered over and looked down at him. “Welcome to Poland, President Truznyev,” the man said smoothly.
Truznyev recognized Kevin Martindale at once. Intelligence reports, rumors, and pure speculation about the former American president and his private military corporation occupied substantial space in official Russian intelligence databases and in those belonging to his own private consulting group.
He swallowed hard. “You—” he said hesitantly, not sure quite how to proceed.
“Extracted you from a rather nasty situation of your own making?” Martindale finished for him.
Wordlessly, Truznyev nodded, feeling humiliated. First, Gryzlov and now this American. How many others had uncovered the secrets he thought so carefully buried?
“Yes, we did,” Martindale said flatly. “And at considerable risk and expense to ourselves.” Coldly, he stared down at the Russian. “You know who I am, Igor,” he said. “So you know that I am not a particularly charitable or forgiving man.”
Again, Truznyev nodded.
“Good. Because you put yourself into this mess. And now you’re going to have to buy your way out of it,” Martindale told him. His expression hardened. “And if you can’t, my people will dump you back across the border so that Gryzlov’s killers can finish the work we so rudely interrupted. Is that clear?” Truznyev winced. He felt the color drain from his face. “Good,” Martindale said, sounding satisfied, not waiting for a verbal response. He signaled the waiting medic. They lifted Truznyev’s stretcher again and moved toward a waiting ambulance.
Martindale kept pace. “You’re going to a pleasant, comfortable, and extremely well-guarded military hospital, Igor,” he said with a slight smile. “And on the way, you and I are going to have a really thorough and very detailed chat about the cyberwar complex you folks call Perun’s Aerie.”
TWENTY-NINE
Sergei Tarzarov maintained a small office just down the hall from Gennadiy Gryzlov’s more extensive suite. Unlike the president’s elaborately furnished chambers, the chief of staff’s working space was plain, almost Spartan in its simplicity. He made do with a metal desk, a single chair, an old-fashioned desktop computer, and a secure phone with direct links to the president and other major key players in the government. There were no decorations, no knickknacks, mementos, or personal photographs — nothing that might suggest he had any hobbies or interests beyond work or any weaknesses that potential rivals could exploit.
Now he sat alone at his desk, with the door firmly closed, moodily contemplating the mystery of Igor Truznyev’s sudden disappearance. When the first police report of the bomb attack on the former president’s limousine came in, he’d assumed Truznyev was dead, killed with his bodyguards. That had prompted him to order an immediate high-priority investigation by the FSB’s counterterrorism section. He’d also embargoed all news accounts of the incident. Until it was clearer why someone had murdered Truznyev, there was no point in feeding a speculative frenzy by domestic and foreign journalists.
But now it was clear that Igor Truznyev had not been inside his S-Class Mercedes when it was blown to hell. Surveillance camera footage retrieved from his office-tower garage showed him being accosted by a woman in uniform. After a brief conversation, he’d left the building in her car, followed moments later by his own bodyguards in the Mercedes.
Unfortunately, the security cameras weren’t equipped to record audio — apparently the result of a deliberate specification by Truznyev himself, as part of his own anti-eavesdropping precautions. Nor had the FSB’s lip-reading experts been able to piece together anything useful from the footage. The angles were wrong, they said. The intelligence service’s photo-interpretation experts were more certain they could extract information from the one grainy screen capture they’d made of an ID card shown to Truznyev by the mysterious woman. They were methodically working on the project, digitally enhancing the image over and over until it was clean enough to make out details.
Privately, Tarzarov doubted that would help much, if at all.
Preliminary searches through every Russian military- and intelligence-service database had failed to turn up a match. Whoever she really was, she was not on the books for any government agency. And the license plates on her sedan were faked. While the sequence of numbers and letters on them matched those reserved for official cars, that particular number had never been issued. Effectively, barring some lucky break, the FSB’s investigative team had reached a dead end.
In the meantime, Truznyev himself had vanished completely. Checks at every airport, train station, and border crossing point were still in progress, but so far no sign of him had turned up. It was as though he’d been snatched off the surface of the earth by aliens.
Damn the man, Tarzarov thought. Was this disappearing act part of one of Truznyev’s private spy games? The murder of his bodyguards made that seem unlikely.
Was it possible that he’d finally pushed one of his shadier rivals or even a onetime business partner too far? His Zatmeniye consulting firm certainly had its fingers in any number of different enterprises — many of which were not even remotely legal. And Russia’s organized-crime syndicates were even more violent and unforgiving than their Sicilian or North American counterparts. If so, it was unlikely anyone would ever see Truznyev again, alive or dead. Permanently disposing of an inconvenient corpse was no great challenge for the Russian Mafiya, with its ready access to factory blast furnaces, cement mixers and construction sites, and vast stretches of empty wilderness.
Sergei Tarzarov’s high forehead furrowed in sudden worry as he contemplated a far less appealing prospect. Truznyev dead was no great loss. Yes, the former president’s services, political and diplomatic advice, and occasional tidbits of intelligence had been useful, but they were not vital. But what if he were still alive? And not only alive, but somewhere outside Russia — either as a prisoner or, more probably, a defector?