Hawke motored slowly through the town. Smoke curled from a few chimneys, rising through spindly black tree limbs sharply etched against the rose-gold afternoon sky. But these few wispy smoke trails were the sole signs of human life. On the outskirts of town, he had seen three magnificent reindeer staring at him from the safety of the woods, frozen in place, nostrils quivering, their huge black eyes glistening.
Hawke was shivering behind the wheel of an ancient Saab in which both the heater and the windscreen wipers were woefully inadequate. Despite this deliberately inconspicuous vehicle, he’d somehow picked up a tail leaving the airport, a blacked-out late-model Audi. After a bit of cat and mouse in the narrow cobbled lanes of the Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s Old Town, he’d finally managed to lose them, whoever they were. Russian secret police, he supposed, the Tsar’s men. Korsakov would no doubt have his Third Department operatives watching the airports and rail stations.
Having made it safely out of Stockholm and driving south through the Swedish countryside to Kungsholm, he was now looking for any road signs not completely frosted over with snow. He was struggling a bit with the map unfolded on his knee. He wasn’t fluent in Swedish, and the damn thing was no help at all.
He was not yet prepared to admit that he was lost, but he was considering getting out his mobile and calling Stefan Halter, his contact, when he finally saw the snow-filled lane he was probably meant to take. He put the wheel hard over and skidded into it, careening harmlessly off the snowbanks on either side. The trees above him intersected to form a long dark tunnel snaking through the wood.
Stefan would be waiting for him at the end of this lane. An Interpol safe house here in Kungsholm had been chosen for Hawke’s rendezvous with the Russian double agent Halter had identified for the White House. All he knew was that the agent, whose name Hawke had not been told, was a man President McAtee had dealt with in the past and that Hawke’s meeting with him had apparently been specifically ordered by the president.
Hawke’s brief on this new mission had been straightforward enough:
Get to Kungsholm, Sweden, as fast as he possibly could without attracting undue attention. Find Halter.
The simple two-story farmhouse appeared through his frosted windscreen. It was built of roughhewn stone and had a sharply pitched roof of slate and two large chimneys at either end made of brick. It had a storybook quality, Hawke thought, which seemed to be the norm in this neck of the woods.
He parked the Saab next to a battered Mercedes sedan in a small yard just outside the entryway, climbed out, and rapped thrice, then twice, on the heavy wooden door, just as he’d been instructed.
The Russian mole, Dr. Stefanovich Halter, just as tweedy and natty as Hawke remembered him from Bermuda, pulled the door open. The smell of wood smoke inside was pleasant, and the weary British spy was pleased to come in from the cold.
“Alex,” Halter said, wasting no time on amenities, “prepare yourself.”
“Tell me, Stefan.”
“The man you’re about to meet is General Kuragin, the head of the Third Department, the Tsar’s private secret police. He’s waiting at a table in the kitchen. He’s a bit tight, I’m afraid.”
“Nikolai Kuragin?” Hawke said.
“Indeed. Know him?”
“I met him briefly at the winter palace. He’s the Tsar’s oldest and closest friend, is he not?”
“Well, let’s just say the general’s loyalty has never been above reproach and leave it at that.”
“Drunk, is he?”
“Not yet, but he’s working on it.”
“Take the bottle away.”
“Good cop, bad cop, as you Yanks say. I’m the good one. Listen, he’s got the Beta detonator with him. It’s one of only two in existence. It’s manacled permanently to his left wrist. He bloody sleeps with the damn thing.”
“Beta detonator? What the hell does it detonate?”
“Everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“The whole bloody world, basically.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m deadly serious, Alex. Look, there’s no time to explain now, but Korsakov has basically hardwired the whole world with explosives inside computers. Zeta machines.”
“The Wizards? I own one.”
“Yes. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but it’s not. It’s bloody reality. Witness the demise of Salina, Kansas.”
“You said two detonators. Where is the other one?”
“Always with the Tsar. Kuragin’s is the fail-safe backup in case something untoward should happen to Korsakov.”
“Is our general feeling cooperative?”
“He will be when he learns how much we’re prepared to pay for the Beta detonator.”
“Am I doing the negotiating?” Hawke asked.
“We’ll double-team him. He wouldn’t have agreed to come here if he weren’t for sale, that I can promise you.”
“What’s our ceiling?”
“Fifty million U.S. dollars. But we’ll start the bidding at twenty. I’ve already transferred that amount to his account in Geneva.”
“I knew I’d gone into the wrong business,” Hawke said with a wry smile. “The kitchen is back this way, I assume?”
“LORD HAWKE, WELCOME,” General Kuragin said, getting somewhat shakily to his feet and extending his hand. “We met briefly under slightly grander circumstances a week ago in the country. The Tsar’s winter palace.”
“Indeed we did, general,” Hawke said, shaking the Russian’s skeletal hand and taking a seat at the old butcher-block table. The man’s splendid black uniform, heavy, deep-set dark eyes, and pale yellow skin gave him an uncanny resemblance to Himmler, if Hawke’s mental picture of the old Nazi was accurate. Halter joined them at the table, and Kuragin ceremoniously filled the glasses at each man’s seat from a half-empty carafe of vodka. Kuragin spoke first, and what he said brought Hawke upright in his chair.
“I understand you spent some time sharing a cell with my old friend at Energetika, Lord Hawke.”
“Putin is your friend? But you helped overthrow him.”
“Things in Russia are not always what they seem. There are wheels within wheels, Lord Hawke, believe me.”
“Oh, I believe you, general. Absolutely Byzantine.”
The general nodded, a fleeting smile on his lips. He’d actually taken the word as a compliment. Then he covered Hawke’s hand with his own, patting it as one would a child’s. The bony fingers were trembling, cold as ice.
“Putin was most impressed in his appraisal of you. In fact, it was Putin himself who insisted I meet with you today.”
“Really? Why?”
“Why do you think? Surely he brought you into his confidence. Made his future plans known to you that night in his wretched cell.”
“He did, indeed,” Hawke said, replaying bits of the long conversation in his mind.
“And?”
“Eliminate the Tsar and return to power,” Hawke said slowly, sitting back in his chair. This entire Russian affair was suddenly clicking into place like the encryption rotors inside an Enigma machine.
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Churchill had said of Russia, and truer words were never spoken. Hawke sat back, sipped his vodka, and studied the man.
General Kuragin was the one secretly protecting Putin inside the prison. And it was Kuragin who would orchestrate Putin’s return to power once the Tsar was safely out of the way. And it was Kuragin who would emerge from this latest coup even more powerful than from the last two or three.
Yes, it was all quite clear now. He’d finally found him. The man MI-6 had long ago dubbed the Third Man, the unseen power behind the Kremlin throne.