“So why’s he with our CIA guy?”
“Because life is never easy.” Rodriguez unwrapped a new piece of gum and shoved it in his mouth.
They followed Dixon out of the airport and onto the hopeless excuse for a road that passed as a highway in Kaliningrad.
“Shit,” he said as the Mercedes turned away from the city, toward the northwest. “The sonofabitch is taking them to the shipyard.”
Beside him, Salinger grunted. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll trip the booby trap on the U-boat and blow themselves to hell.”
“What part of ‘life is never easy’ did you miss?”
“You never know; we might get lucky.”
Rodriguez laughed. “We might.” He checked his watch, figured out the time difference in Washington, then put in a call to Boyd anyway.
“What is it?” said the General. His voice was low and icy, but he sounded instantly awake.
“Things are not going as well as we’d expected. The representative from Washington arrived in Kaliningrad this morning.”
“I thought someone was dealing with this guy in Berlin.”
“We haven’t been able to contact our man in Berlin to ascertain exactly what went wrong. It’s not a problem; we’ll deal with him here. There’s just one detail that requires clarification.”
“Yes?”
“The representative from Washington has joined up with another individual who flew in from Copenhagen. A woman. You didn’t tell us about her.”
“I didn’t know about her.”
“Her name is October Guinness,” said Rodriguez. The information had been easily obtained from the sulky, green-eyed woman with spiked hair and well-developed capitalistic instincts who worked behind the Scandinavian Airlines counter. In the New Russia, anything and everything was for sale.
“I’ll see what I can find out about her,” said Boyd. “Where are these individuals now?”
“They were picked up by a Russian escort. An official Russian escort. We’re following them.”
“I want this guy taken care of by nightfall. Even if you have to take out a few Russians to do it.”
“Understood,” said Rodriguez, closing his phone with a snap.
Salinger threw him a quick glance. “We really going to kill the Russians?”
“Those guys? Not if I can help it. But if we have to…” Rodriquez clipped his phone onto his belt and shrugged. “People don’t disappoint Boyd and live.”
Washington, D.C.
General Boyd pushed up from the edge of his bed at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel and went to pour himself a drink. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the dark and quiet streets of the city spread out below. Then he reached for his phone and punched in a number.
It rang four times before a colonel named Sam Lee picked it up, his voice slurred by sleep and confusion. “Hello?”
“Lee? Boyd here. I need you to do something for me.”
20
Jax noticed the Kawasaki behind them as they were pulling out of the airport. It might not mean anything-after all, there weren’t that many roads in Kaliningrad, and the rider wasn’t exactly being careful about keeping close to them. Then again, he could be part of Andrei’s escort. Chase riders were no longer as necessary in Russia as they had been in the wild, lawless days after the breakup of the Soviet Union, but they were still common. Jax noticed Andrei casting one or two glances behind, before looking away.
They drove through thick, desolate pine forests interspersed with flat empty fields that lay dark and sodden beneath the leaden sky. Turning sideways in the passenger seat, Andrei shook a cigarette out of his pack and said, “So where exactly did you learn your Russian, Ensign?”
Jax was aware of October casting him a questioning glance, but he only raised his eyebrows. She cleared her throat and said, “I spent a semester in Moscow, when I was nineteen.”
“A semester only? And you learned our language so well? No wonder the CIA finds you useful.”
She wisely let that slide, saying only, “I’ve never been to Kaliningrad Oblast, though.”
Andrei stuck a cigarette between his lips and fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. “Until recently, no one was allowed in Kaliningrad Oblast. It was a closed military area. Kaliningrad is the only ice-free port in Russia, you know.”
“Not to mention the fact that it’s within such easy striking distance of so many European capitals,” said Jax.
Andrei laughed, his eyes narrowing against the smoke as he drew on his cigarette. “That, too. I’m afraid the breakup of the Soviet Union has been hard on Kaliningrad Oblast. Military expenditure used to be the mainstay of the economy, but no longer. And when you add to that the fact that Poland and Lithuania have both closed their borders to us, making the Oblast an exclave…” He shrugged his shoulders again. “Many of the people here have been forced to turn to smuggling, just to survive.”
“And to salvaging U-boats?” said Jax.
“So it would seem.”
He gazed out the window at the ruins of an old brick farmhouse. Beyond it he could see the skeleton of a barn, its rafters etched stark against the white sky and bare except for a couple of giant storks’ nests. They had passed many such abandoned homes-entire villages even-their walls crumbling, a tangle of trees growing up from within the ruins of houses, castles, ancient churches.
“Look, there’s another one,” said Tobie. “Why do I keep seeing all these empty villages and farms?”
Andrei took a deep drag on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. “They are old,” he said. “From before the war.”
“What you’re seeing,” said Jax, “is one of the twentieth century’s dirty little secrets. Until the end of the Second World War, this used to be part of Germany. Then Churchill and Roosevelt gave it to Russia, and Stalin ‘cleansed’ it of its original Prussian inhabitants. The ones who were lucky managed to flee west, ahead of the Red Army. The rest were either shot or sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Stalin brought in Russians to replace them, but the population today is still under a million-which is less than a third of what it once was. And they’re all Russians.”
He was aware of October staring solemnly as they swept past another overgrown field with a jumble of collapsed walls beyond it. It was one thing to read about “border adjustments,” and something else entirely to look at the ruins of what was once someone’s home.
“I can see you’re shocked, Ensign,” said Andrei, his voice rough. “You think we are butchers. Inhuman. Yet you Americans did it to your Native Indians, just as the Israelis are doing it today to the Moslems and Christians of Palestine. If history teaches us one thing, it is this: ethnic cleansing works.”
They topped a ridge, and the flat, silver waters of the Baltic Sea opened up suddenly before them. In the lee of the slight rise lay a sheltered cove lined with the weathered docks of an old shipyard, its vast wharves stretching out eerily empty beneath the cloud-filled sky. A shabby metal office building stood just below the crest of the hill, fronting a narrow, rutted road that wound down to the row of warehouses lining the docks. Jax could see three blue and white militia vans parked next to a dusty white pickup behind the office.
He felt a disconcerting chill run up his spine. Everything was much as October had drawn it, except that the office and rocky point were on the left, when she’d drawn them to the right.
“It’s backwards,” he whispered, leaning in close to her.
She sat forward, her gaze riveted on the scene below. And he found himself wondering what it must be like, actually seeing in person what she’d previously reached out and touched with her mind. “That happens sometimes,” she said softly. “The brain gets so used to reversing the images we get from our eyes that it sometimes reverses what you ‘see’ in a viewing.”