“In other words,” Storm said, “if I get caught, you’ll deny you ever knew me and I’ll spend the rest of my life in a prison shackled next to a bunch of Tibetan dissidents.”
“Affirmative.” Jones smiled.
“Charming,” Storm said. “So what’s my next move?”
“The Chinese finance minister is set to give an important speech to the European Union in Paris,” Jones said.
“Yeah? So?”
“So one of our people tells us that the Chinese Ministry of State Security” — the Chinese equivalent of the CIA and the FBI, rolled into one — “has a joint covert operation of some kind going on with the Chinese Finance Ministry. A Ministry of State Security agent is now traveling undercover with the Finance Ministry. It makes sense that if this plot involving bankers has the kind of complexity we think it does, it would need to have Finance Ministry expertise — and State Security Ministry cunning. Our working theory — and, again, it’s just a theory at this point — is that this State Security Ministry agent is the one who hired Volkov.”
“What do we know about the guy?”
“Absolutely nothing. We’re getting this from one of our double agents, who is getting it from a source he is only starting to cultivate, so it’s all still a little shady at this point. The only thing we know for sure about this State Security agent is that she’s not a guy.”
“A female agent?” Storm said, his face involuntarily lifting.
“I knew you’d like that part,” Jones said, sharing conspiratorial glances with Bryan and Rodriguez. “Our person on the inside told us she made a trip to Switzerland a few days ago.”
“Switzerland. As in, where Wilhelm Sorenson was found murdered. Think that’s a coincidence?”
“That’s why you’re going to Paris,” Jones said. “Find her. Get close to her. Figure out what she’s up to.”
CHAPTER 6
JOWZJAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan
rom the outside, it looked like there was no inside. That’s what made it such a good hiding place.
Gregor Volkov had come across the cave complex during the early nineties, back when he was a young operative with the secret Soviet police force known as the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, back when there was still such a thing as the KGB.
This was only a few years after the USSR had publicly given up on the folly of trying to tame Afghanistan — and a decade or so before the United States took up the same fool’s errand. The Soviets still had secret operations in the country, even though it was clear they could not conquer it. In the vacuum created by the Soviet departure, many groups competed for power. It was a wild time in a wild place, which made it perfect for Volkov, the wolf. The Taliban were slowly taking hold in some of the cities, but out in the mountains, it was the same as it had always been. The notion that there even was such thing as a nation state called Afghanistan — or that the locals owed it some sense of fealty — was not commonly accepted. Political power was wielded behind the muzzle of a gun by whoever had the fortitude to assert it.
This kind of might-makes-right ruling structure appealed to Volkov. When he found the cave, he knew the USSR was not long for this planet. In some ways, he was ambivalent about its demise. Mother Russia had weakened herself by taking on so many dependent children. It was better for Russia to cut the apron strings and pursue an empire without them. In the meantime, Volkov was also envisioning his own independence, one that involved a future as a freelancer. As the USSR entered its final spasms of dissolution — and order began to break down in the KGB — Volkov returned to this small crevice in the side of a mountain and made it his base of operations.
Through the years, he had turned it into an effective launching pad and a comfortable home. The entrance was only a few meters wide and well covered with trees. But inside, nature had burrowed out a generous labyrinth that led deep into the mountainside. Volkov had hired local laborers to help broaden parts of it, smooth out other parts, generally civilize it. Then he killed the laborers one by one, to keep them from talking about it.
From there, he installed a makeshift plumbing system, with clean water piped in from a nearby spring. He brought in generators to give him power and heat and stashed enough barrels of diesel fuel — stolen from the Red Army as it crumbled — to keep the lights on for many years. He replaced the empties one by one. He installed a few strategically hidden satellite receivers that allowed him to communicate with the outside world or, if he chose, just kick back and surf the Internet.
Volkov could come and go as he pleased, crossing the border from Turkmenistan via any number of mountain passes. He didn’t have to worry about the authorities, because there were none. The only passport he needed was whatever automatic or semiautomatic weaponry he was carrying at the moment. The nearby villagers — who only knew he was somewhere in the mountains and only saw him when he came to town for supplies — lived in mortal terror of him. There was a warlord known to operate in the region. He did not bother with Volkov. There was plenty of room for everyone, what with hundreds of square miles of basically uninhabited mountain terrain. Besides, Gregor Volkov was not the kind of man anyone wanted to pick a fight with.
He only brought his crew here when he needed something done, and now he needed their help. And so, having successfully completed their latest job in Switzerland, Volkov and his crew had spent one wild night in Monaco, indulging their taste for girls, booze, drugs, and gambling. Then they stole a Monex 4000, broke it down into small enough pieces that it could be transported without detection, and then reassembled the pieces in the cave, so that Volkov could attempt to turn this already profitable job into something even more lucrative.
“Yuri, have you secured the link-up yet?” Volkov barked at a young man with a mane of fiery red hair tied back in a ponytail. Yuri’s fingers were flying across a keyboard that was connected to a computer that, in turn, remotely controlled the angle and direction of Volkov’s satellite dishes.
“Yes, General, I’m just getting them now,” Yuri answered. General. Volkov insisted all his men called him General. He believed that if the USSR had held together, he would have eventually risen to the top of the KGB, then switched to the military, where he would have ascended to that rank and exerted his influence on the Politburo. That none of that ever came to pass did not change Volkov’s opinion that he ought to be addressed in that manner.
“And you’ve got this terminal set up?” Volkov asked.
“Yes, General. I’ve been working on it, but I…”
“All right, let’s see it then,” Volkov interrupted, strolling across the branch of the cave that served as his communications center.
The MonEx 4000, protected by a casing of beige-painted steel, was the size of a footlocker and weighed several hundred pounds. It looked not unlike a large server. Not all digital electronics had yet shrunken down to handheld size, and this was one the complexity of which necessitated its ample dimensions. It fit on the top of a table one of the crewmen had brought into the communications center.
“General, with all due respect, I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” Yuri said.
“You don’t understand what?”
“Our employer is paying us generously for each MonEx code we supply, am I right?” Yuri asked. Volkov had not told his crew how generously. He was getting a million dollars per code, but he told his crew it was a hundred thousand. Each member of the five-man crew thought he was getting a decent deal — ten thousand each, with the other half going to Volkov. If any of them suspected the split was, in fact, much less fair than that, none of them dared let on.