Kandes had been placed in a state school at the age of five, and he’d only ever come face-to-face with his brother a half dozen times in ten years, but it had been enough for the bond to be made. His brother was blood.
Most of the traffic flowed into the city, and driving away from Moscow, he tried to wrap his mind around exactly why his brother had been so in love with Russia that he’d been willing to give his life for it. The Rodina — motherland. It was one of the questions he meant to ask the general this morning, because it was a mystery, and before he evened the score, he had to know the answer to something he was incapable of feeling.
Petushki, a town of about fifteen thousand, was a one-hour drive on the highway that followed the Nizhny-Novgorod Railway. About ten kilometers east of the small industrial city, he came to a narrow dirt road that led to the north through a sparse forest where at the top of a low rise he pulled over and got out of the car.
Below in a narrow valley cut by a small stream was a series of buildings, including a cow barn,and an ornate dacha with minarets, onion domes, a half dozen chimneys, and intricate wooden scrollwork beneath the eaves. From what he’d learned, the place had been owned by a Czarist general before World War I. A lot of blood had been spilled here and at other similar spots around Russia. Nearly every owner since then had been sent to Siberia to count the birches for one reason or another and had never come back. This general had been the one exception — he returned from Siberia.
A Mercedes SUV was parked across a footbridge from the house, but no one was around, and there was no other sign that anyone was in residence.
Kandes drove down the hill, where he parked next to the Mercedes. He waited for a minute or so, the window down, listening to the sounds of the stream and some birds in the distance. The air here was fresh and smelled of grass and perhaps the earth. To the right, across the stream, a few acres of sod had been plowed under, exposing the black, rich soil.
A large man in coveralls and knee-high boots suddenly appeared at the window. He held a SIG SAUER pistol at Kandes’s face. “Get out of the car,” he said in Russian.
“Sure,” Kandes said. He got out of the car, snatched the pistol out of the man’s hand, and with lightning speed removed the magazine and fieldstripped the weapon, tossing the parts aside.
The bodyguard started forward, his face dark, angry.
“Nyet,” an old man on the porch of the dacha across the creek called out, and the guard stopped.
“General Didenko,” Kandes said. “I’d like to have a word with you.”
“Arkasha’s brother, finally,” Didenko said.
The inside of the house smelled musty. Paper covered some of the windows, and drop cloths draped much of the furniture. Only the kitchen in the rear seemed fully functional as did a sitting room in a porch overlooking the stream looping around to the west. A copse of trees stood in stark contrast at the base of the low hill. All in all, it was a pleasant if lonely place.
Didenko poured them a dark Russian beer, and they sat in wicker chairs facing the creek. He was a shrunken man who’d once been a bear, over six feet with thick shoulders, a broad face, and thick torso. Now he looked ill.
“I understand that you’re with the Spetsnaz special group in London,” Didenko said. “One of Karl’s rising young stars.”
The Spetsnaz had been positioned in just about every country around the world since the end of the Cold War. If hostilities were to break out, they would go to work as saboteurs, striking not only infrastructures like water and electrical supplies but also military installations. The program was highly classified and for the last years under the ironfisted control of Major General Karl Nikandrov, the head of the SVR that was the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for all clandestine activities outside of Russia.
Kandes was not especially surprised that the general knew who he was; the old-boy network was stronger than ever these days. But the breach of security was disturbing. The names of the Spetsnaz operators and the units they belonged to were highly classified and just now very high on Putin’s list of important programs.
“The question isn’t why you came to see me — you want to know how your brother died — but it’s how you managed to get here without a shit storm falling down around you. I assume you’re traveling under a false cover.”
“Nicholas Kandes.”
“For Nikolai Kurshin. Will anyone suspect that you’re here?”
“I asked for a fifteen-day leave, and they gave it to me,” Nikolai said. Didenko was legendary among Soviet spymasters, but he didn’t seem like anyone out of the ordinary. Just an old man living in the middle of nowhere.
“Really extraordinary that they gave it to you,” Didenko said. He looked away for a moment. “Your brother was killed in a flooded tunnel beneath a castle museum northeast of Lisbon, ten, maybe twelve years ago. He might have drowned, but he didn’t. When his body was recovered, it was found that the back of his skull was caved in, as if somebody smashed it with a cricket bat, or more likely knocked it against a stone wall or floor.”
“Who did it?” Nikolai asked, keeping his violent temper in check.
“Kirk McGarvey. I thought that you would know the name.”
“I wanted to make sure. But why, just spy to spy?”
“It was much more than that. There was a cache of gold the Nazis had taken from Jews they’d killed and had hidden in Portugal for after the war. We wanted it, and the CIA didn’t want us to have it. But your brother worked for Valentin Baranov, my boss in Number One in the old days, and there was an incident involving a nuclear missile in Germany.
“We’d found out that the Israelis had stockpiled nuclear weapons at a site near Ein Gedi. Your brother managed to steal one of the Americans’ Pershing missiles and reprogram it to fly to Israel and destroy the depot.”
“McGarvey stopped him?”
“Yes, but your brother didn’t give up. He put together a strike force that somehow managed to steal a Los Angeles — class nuclear submarine, kill the crew, and scuttle the boat after they’d stolen another missile. Then he programmed it to strike Ein Gedi. But McGarvey stopped him, and in fact, your brother was presumed dead, his body lost somewhere in the sea off Cyprus.”
Nikolai knew most of that, and he’d managed to dig up a fair amount of information about the CIA operator who’d not only been a shooter but had even briefly directed the agency. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what had driven his brother to give his life for the Komitet. Or for Baranov or Didenko.
“Was there money in the end?” he asked. “Was he planning to retire?”
Didenko laughed. “Your brother would never have quit. Just after the Ein Gedi incident, McGarvey assassinated Baranov — and that was another long-standing blood feud. I was promoted to head our Illegals Directorate—mokrie dela—wet affairs, and your brother called me out of the blue. We were convinced that he was dead, so when he called me on an unsecured line from Damascus, I almost had a heart attack. I told him that he should come in. Give me a couple of days, and I could arrange something.
“‘I’ve become a floater,’ he told me. ‘When I want blood, I’ll call you. This time, you bastards, I won’t let you fuck me up.’”