Later, they would look back on that day as the beginning.
CHAPTER 12
On the top floor of the SVR headquarters building in Moscow, General Alexei Vysotsky put down the report from Washington. He took a deep breath to calm his rising blood pressure. Three FSB agents, dead in the home of two of Harker's operatives. Volkov had poked a stick into a hornet's nest.
That meddling bastard has done it now. What the hell was he thinking?
It was late in the afternoon. Outside Vysotsky's window, a sea of leafy green treetops stretched all the way to the Moscow river flowing past the walls of the Kremlin. It was the best time of year in the city, when the arctic cold of winter was gone and the brutal heat of summer had not yet arrived. Most of the time in Russia it was too hot or too cold.
Vysotsky set the report down and opened the left-hand bottom drawer in his desk. He took out a bottle of vodka and a tumbler, filled the eight ounce glass and drank half of it down. Vysotsky considered vodka a good replacement for water. He couldn't drink as much as when he was young but he could still hold his own with the best of them. As long as he didn't overdo it, vodka helped him think when he was confronted with an annoying problem.
Like Volkov.
Volkov was doing everything he could to curry favor with Vladimir Orlov. He wanted the Federation president to think Alexei was unfit to run Russia's powerful foreign intelligence service and never missed a chance to undermine Vysotsky and SVR. Alexei suspected him of sabotaging two operations that had gone bad but couldn't prove it. Volkov wanted to establish a new KGB, with himself as Director. It wasn't hard for Alexei to imagine Volkov's motivation. It was exactly what he wanted for himself.
Vysotsky was certain Orlov saw through Volkov's manipulations, using them to keep the two intelligence agencies at odds. The oldest trick in the Russian political book was to divide and control.
Now Volkov had stepped over the line. He'd sent people to break into the home of an active American intelligence operative. Worse, he'd involved Elizabeth Harker's Project.
Besides, Alexei thought, if anyone is going to do any breaking and entering in America it's going to be on my orders, not his.
Why had Volkov done it? It was the last straw. It was time to do something about him but it wasn't going to be easy. He needed to pry Volkov out of Orlov's favor.
Alexei set the half empty glass of vodka down and closed his eyes, letting himself slip into a light meditative state where thoughts and bits of information mixed without interference. Vysotsky's mind was highly visual. He'd learned to trust the random association of images and ideas that surfaced during these sessions with himself.
The tension in his muscles eased as he relaxed. Images and thoughts began to flow.
The report from Washington… The face of Selena Connor… Elizabeth Harker's green eyes… Volkov, unsmiling… A report from an informant… FSB activity in Holland… A Russian archaeologist murdered in Amsterdam...
Alexei's eyes snapped open. He had spies planted throughout the ranks of the FSB. A week before, one of them had reported that Volkov was sending agents to Amsterdam. The informant hadn't known why.
A few days later a routine report from the SVR residency in Holland noted the death of Yuri Sokolov, an academic researcher from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He'd been identified as a man found beaten to death three days earlier in his hotel room. There was no indication in the report of who had done it or why, or what Sokolov was doing in Amsterdam in the first place.
Until this moment, Alexei hadn't put the two pieces of information together.
It can't be coincidence. Volkov's men killed him. Why?
Vysotsky decided to find out.
CHAPTER 13
Selena rubbed her tired eyes. The pictures she'd taken of the tablet were displayed on her computer monitor, where she could zoom in on parts of the inscription with ease. She'd been at it for hours.
Some words had been easy, similar to the version of Linear A she was used to. Not that anything about Linear A was easy, even with the translation key she and Nick had discovered in Tibet. Selena had concluded that the stone was inscribed with a script predating Linear A. She'd decided to call it Linear D. There was already a Linear A, B and C. Linear C had been supplanted by early Greek.
Linear D taxed all of her considerable linguistic skills. Without the hieroglyphics inscribed on the Egyptian column, she wouldn't have gotten far. She could read and understand most of those. The hieroglyphics had helped her make sense of the Linear D on the pillar, but the pillar was only a warm-up for the French tablet.
Translation required much more than understanding symbols and words. The structure of the language was still confusing to her. It didn't help to know what a word meant if she couldn't put it in context with what went before or came after. Trying to understand the meaning of words without understanding how they related to each other was like listening to random radio signals from the universe, hoping to hear a message from another galaxy. The message might be there, but without comprehensible structure and context it was just static.
It was after two in the morning. She knew she'd get no more done tonight. The last time she'd seen Nick had been an hour ago when he'd looked in on her and told her he was going to bed. Selena yawned and decided he'd had the right idea. She turned out the light in the study and went into the master bedroom.
Nick lay naked on his back, the covers thrown onto the floor. He was making quick, erratic movements, muttering in his sleep. His body glistened with sweat.
He's having one of his nightmares, she thought. They've come back since Germany.
She was about to wake him when he shouted and sat up, sending a pillow flying.
"Nick. Wake up. It's all right, you're home."
She was careful to keep her distance. Sometimes he swung out wildly when he was having one of his dreams. Before they'd gotten married the nightmares had come close to driving them apart.
"Nick," she said again.
"What?" He opened his eyes, saw Selena standing nearby. "Oh."
"Afghanistan again?" she asked.
In Afghanistan Nick had almost been killed by a grenade thrown by a child. He'd shot the boy as the grenade was in the air. The boy's face haunted his worst dreams.
Nick rubbed his eyes. "Yeah. Only it was in Germany at the same time. In that café."
The café was where Ronnie and Lamont had been wounded. It had been a close call all around.
"Maybe you should make an appointment with Milton."
She meant the therapist Nick had seen a while back. Milton had served in Afghanistan and lost an arm to an IED. Nick respected him. He'd helped Nick work with the PTSD that sometimes froze him in place.
"Yeah. Maybe." He got out of bed. "I'm going to take a shower."
She watched him walk to the bathroom.
No point in going to bed now.
Selena was wide awake and Nick wouldn't go back to sleep tonight. She headed to the kitchen and turned on the lights, got out cups and started coffee. Nick would want some and she needed a jolt of energy.
It was while she waited for the coffee that the key to understanding the inscription on the tablet came to her. The coffee forgotten, she went back into her study, rebooted the computer and looked again at the pictures.
Yes! That's what I was missing.
Three hours later she'd finished the translation.