Charlie gave him a jack-o’-lantern grin with three teeth missing as Walsh approached. The older man said, “I haven’t seen you in a few days, Captain. Everything all right?”
Walsh smiled back and nodded. “Been busy at work.”
“Good for you. I like to see any former military man succeed. Even if he was a marine.”
As Charlie walked along with him, Walsh stopped at a bakery with a window onto the sidewalk and bought the man two doughnuts and coffee. He knew how Charlie took his coffee and didn’t say anything, just handed him the food.
The older man accepted it with a smile. After a minute of walking and throwing down the doughnuts like pieces of candy, Charlie said, “The cops find out anything more about the two thugs that tried to rob you?”
“They told me it was just a robbery and that I should feel lucky I wasn’t hurt.”
“Typical cops, just explain things away without trying to solve anything.”
Walsh normally would have defended the police, but in this case Charlie was right. It just didn’t feel like a robbery to him. It was more calculated. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he had been much more alert in the past week.
As he reached the courtyard that led to the entrance to his building, Walsh stopped and stared at the animated crowd of Stand Up to Wall Street people. Two dozen cops were trying to keep them from destroying a cruiser they’d flipped onto its side and move them off the property.
Walsh looked at Charlie and said, “I haven’t seen these guys this active since they started protesting.”
Charlie said, “It’s not just them, there’s problems all over the city. I don’t catch much news, but someone said there had been more terror attacks and people are getting scared.”
Just then Walsh’s phone let off an alert tone he had set for breaking news on the financial markets. He fished the phone out of his pocket and swiped the screen. The markets had been open less than thirty minutes and were already down hundreds of points. Computer trading had been stopped, and the London Stock Exchange had halted trading altogether.
What the hell was going on?
Joseph Katazin sat in the home office of his comfortable Brooklyn residence. The converted bedroom held three TVs mounted in different corners, a pressboard computer desk, and two black leather rolling chairs. On a separate oak desk, paperwork related to his business was piled in a seemingly random order.
The room had little natural light because files and invoices sat on the windowsill and took up more than half the window space. Even though it was fall, the sun was shining. That was good: It would give these Americans a false sense of security. Nothing bad ever happened in sunshine.
Katazin was still amazed he was allowed to take such a big part in an extensive operation from outside Moscow. On the other hand, if something went wrong, he had no illusions. He would be the scapegoat, and no one in the Russian government would acknowledge that he ever had anything to do with them. And if he somehow escaped American custody, his own government would stop at nothing to eliminate him. There was nothing more terrifying to a government than a loose cannon who knew too much. This was not Hollywood. There were no tales of forgiveness and redemption. Only success or failure.
He’d really done very little so far. A few financial transactions, that was it. The only thing that really made him uneasy was the alliance his government had made, however temporary, with extremists who cared little about Russia’s interests. Katazin wondered if they even realized these Islamic extremists would turn on them in a heartbeat. But he worked with the resources that had been provided, and so far they had done everything they said they would.
Yesterday, Katazin had been able to leak the story of Thomas Brothers Financial sending money to an account accessed by terrorists. In addition, if anyone cared to look into it, Thomas Brothers would be missing hundreds of millions of dollars. The story hadn’t broken to the general public, but there were already rumors burning across the Internet.
He had a lot to keep track of. Some would say too much, but after years of relative inactivity, enjoying the good life as an American, he was ready for some excitement. His meeting in Battery Park in forty minutes would give him a better idea of how things were really going and whether his superiors were happy with him.
There was a barely audible knock on his closed office door. He turned and rolled across the hard wooden floor in his black leather chair to unlock the door, letting it open a few inches. He saw the pale face of his twelve-year-old daughter, home from school with strep throat.
She croaked, “Papa, can I watch TV?”
He motioned the girl into his office, and she automatically climbed up on his lap. He rocked her gently and said, “Yes, but don’t tell your mother. She doesn’t approve of TV when you’re home from school.”
She gave him a weak smile as he felt her forehead. She was still warm but getting better. She scurried out of the office, and he heard her pounding down the stairs. Her mother wouldn’t be home for another few hours, so he was safe from her murderous stare for overruling one of her strictest edicts. But his daughter’s smile made the risk worth taking.
Someone once told him they would rather have the flu in America than be healthy in most Eastern European countries. That was probably accurate. Most Americans never appreciated how good they had it. They would scoff at the thought of waiting in line for groceries or a new pair of jeans.
Now they were about to get an idea of how the rest of the world lived.
Major Anton Severov sat in the billowing tent hidden by tall trees on the border with Estonia and stared at his commander. The temperature had dropped in the last two days, and he felt a chill, but at the moment he wasn’t sure what the cause was. He took a step back and absently plopped onto a wooden bench. It was just after sunset. He wondered why this assignment couldn’t wait until tomorrow. All Severov could do was stare at the plump colonel with jowls that wiggled as he turned his head. The man was a stereotype of a Russian held by Westerners. He had a bottle of Dovgan vodka sitting on his camp desk, and he continued eating pork chops as if they were cookies on a stick, smacking his lips as he tore the meat from the bone.
Severov said, “Sir, I don’t understand. I’m a tanker, not Spetsnaz. I have a company to administer. I have been lining up my tanks for days and making sure they have plenty to eat and are well covered from satellite surveillance.”
The jolly colonel said, “Listen, Anton, you need to see this for what it is. You being asked to do this is an honor. It actually makes sense for a change. There’s little enough of that in the army.”
“But a scout? In civilian clothes? Isn’t that something intelligence should do? What good is the GRU?”
The colonel’s eyes shifted in both directions, and he lowered his voice. “Don’t talk like that, Anton. The fact is you were told to do this and you’re going to do a good job.”
“If I’m not in uniform, I could be shot as a spy.”
“That’s the beauty of the European Union. No one knows where you came from or where you’re supposed to be. A German will think you’re a Pole, a Pole will think you’re Ukrainian. And besides, you’re going to have someone with you that’s supposed to speak several languages.”
Severov still wasn’t convinced and stared off into space as he tried to find a new angle on this assignment. All he had ever done was arrange tanks in attack formation and fire the main gun. His dream was to meet NATO soldiers on an open battlefield, not creep around towns and villages dressed like a tourist.