09.Deep Black: Death Wave Read online

  “There … may have been an oversight,” Collins admitted. “Or a delay putting your request through. But we were not ‘hogging’ those satellites, as you put it.”

  “Of course you weren’t.”

  Rubens knew all too well how it worked. There would be no policy, no actual directive put out to exclude the NSA from the intelligence loop—but requests to expedite key requests, clearances, director approvals, and the like might accidentally be left in an electronic in-basket, or conveniently ignored for a few hours while other and more pressing matters were addressed.

  Such a delay might give the Agency’s analysis teams an extra few hours to develop important intelligence before the NSA had a chance to look for the same hidden gems. And if Agency teams turned up the goodies, it would be the Agency that got the credit—and the funding at the next round of budgetary meetings.

  “Don’t patronize me, Bill,” Collins told him.

  “I’m not. Don’t you play cute political games with me.”

  “At the director’s level, politics is a part of the job description. You know that as well as I do. And the only one playing games here this morning was you, sabotaging me in front of the ANSA to build up your own position.”

  “Debra, it was not my intent to make you look bad this morning—no more than it was your intent to sequester that data. We need access to that imagery, though, and we need it now. I have people on the ground over there. Their lives, and the success of this operation, both depend on what we can turn up from those satellites, especially Crystal Fire. It is my intent to talk to ANSA personally if I have to—I have his attention now, don’t you think? I’ll take it to the Oval Office if I have to.”

  She stared into his face for a long moment, as though testing his resolve. Rubens didn’t have direct access to the President, but the President’s advisor on national security did.

  Then she looked away. “I’ll authorize transmittal as soon as we get out of here,” she told him.

  “Thank you, Debra. Together I think we can crack this.”

  She was already walking away.

  FORT LEE INN

  FORT LEE, NEW JERSEY

  WEDNESDAY, 1319 HOURS EDT

  The two men used the stolen keycard to let themselves into room 225. One held an automatic pistol at the ready as the door swung open, but the room’s occupant was still in the shower. They could hear the rush of water, taste the steam in the air. Quietly, they walked into the room and moved the desk chair to an open space near the foot of the king-sized bed.

  Both wore thin disposable gloves. The one with the keycard wiped it carefully with his handkerchief and placed it on the bureau; then the two of them sat down in the remaining chairs over by the closed curtains to wait.

  Soon the sound of the water cut off, and a few minutes later Jack Pender walked out of the bathroom, rubbing himself with a hotel towel. In the darkened room, he didn’t see his visitors, not until they grabbed him from either side.

  “What the fuck—” he yelled, and then one of the men jammed a rolled-up sock into his mouth. Pinning his arms, they slammed him into the desk chair.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Pender,” one of the intruders said. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife. Pender’s eyes opened wide, fixed on the blade, which flashed once in a gleam of light from the curtains at his back. He started to struggle, but the man holding him was strong, too strong, his grip on his wrists like steel. Pender tried to kick the guy with the knife, but the man sidestepped the attempt, reached down, and pulled Pender’s left arm from behind his back.

  “I really do dislike doing this,” the man with the knife said. He dragged Pender’s arm forward and down until it was pinned against the chair, palm up. “I actually am one of your big … what is the American word? Fans. Yes. I am a big fan. It is really too bad you decide to suicide.”

  The intruder slipped the point of the knife into Pender’s wrist and sliced deep, dragging the blade up the struggling man’s arm, rather than across. Blood welled up from the sudden wound, dark and slick. Pender screamed through the sock, thrashing violently now, but the big man behind him kept him pinned as the other made a second deep slice up his wrist … a third …

  On the fourth cut, the knife hit the artery, and blood splattered across the unmade bed, across a wall, across white ceiling tiles.

  After a time, the intruder began cutting the other wrist; by then, Pender was so weak he could barely struggle.

  Ten minutes more, and Pender was no longer moving. The man with the knife felt for a pulse at his throat with a gloved finger, peeled back an eyelid, then nodded. “Taiyib!” he said.

  They released Pender, letting him slump back in the chair, naked, his arms, legs, and torso sheathed in blood. The killer pulled the sock from the man’s mouth, then carefully wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the handle of the knife. When the man let go, the knife dropped from limp, blood-gloved fingers and fell beside the chair. The sock went back on the floor by the bed, next to Pender’s shoes. Very carefully, then, the intruders stepped past the body, watching where they put their feet, careful not to step in the blood now soaking into the cheap hotel room carpet. There was a lot of blood …

  They were as careful about footprints as they’d been with fingerprints. Bloody gloves were peeled from their hands and went into their pockets, and they wiped the doorknob clean behind them as they let themselves out.

  8

  NSA HEADQUARTERS

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  WEDNESDAY, 1510 HOURS EDT

  Rubens came awake with a start.

  He’d driven back out to Fort Meade as soon as the NSC meeting was over, grabbing a fast-food burger on the way for lunch. He’d spoken with Marie by cell phone, gotten an update on the op in Dushanbe, and learned that Dean and Akulinin were at the safe house—with a stray.

  He approved transport for the stray—if Charlie and Ilya were vouching for Alekseyevna, he would do his best to help her—then rattled off a string of orders. He didn’t want the boys immediately leaving Dushanbe but wanted them to pull a quick black bag job first, and Marie should expect a large download over the secure line from the CIA.

  Once back at Fort Meade, he decided he had to get some sleep. He’d been on his feet now for more hours than he cared to think about, and he’d caught himself nodding at the wheel as he drove up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway out of the city. Not good.

  So when he’d finally reached his office at a bit past two thirty, he’d pulled off his shoes and collapsed into the cot in the back room off his office, facedown in the pillow.

  Thirty minutes later, Ann Sawyer, his secretary, was shaking him awake. “Sir? Sir!”

  “What is it?”

  “Sorry to wake you, Mr. Rubens, but they say there’s something you should see on C-SPAN.”

  “If this is not the end of the world, Ann …”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Never mind, never mind. I’m coming.”

  He rolled out of the cot and made his way to the office. Ann had already switched on the monitor mounted within one wall.

  He recognized the face of Rodney C. Mullins, giving an address.

  “… that it is critically important that we provide timely funding for our surveillance satellite system. As I said before, we have people on the ground in places like Astana, Dushanbe, and Karachi, and they cannot do their jobs defending this great nation from the threat of rogue states or terrorists quite possibly armed with nuclear weapons if they do not have adequate technical support!

  “And so I move, Mr. Speaker, that my amendment to the military appropriations bill be voted on without delay …”

  Rubens stared at the screen in disbelief. “Jesus fucking H. Christ!”

  AYNI AIRFIELD

  SOUTHWEST OF DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  THURSDAY, 0415 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Charlie Dean took another look around the dark compound, then lay down on the ground.

  “Tell me again why th
is is a good idea, coming back in here like this?” Akulinin asked.

  “Because it’s the one place in Tajikistan they’re not looking for us,” Dean told him.

  “And because Mr. Rubens suggested that you might want to try it,” Vic Klein added in their implanted speakers. Vic had taken over the Art Room’s part of the mission for Dean and Akulinin at the end of Jeff Rockman’s shift some hours ago.

  “Right. You ready, Charlie?”

  Dean closed his eyes and nodded. “Let’s do it.” His right hand closed a little tighter around the pen he was holding cupped there, out of sight. He heard the faint crunch of gravel as Akulinin hurried away.

  The nap at the safe house had been all too brief. He’d been able to sleep for perhaps two hours before the promised messenger had shown up with new plates for the car and new ID cards and papers, both for the two Desk Three operators and for Maria Alekseyevna. Now, her blond hair tucked up inside a black wig, she was Ruqiya Nazarova, and she was listed as Sergei Nazarov’s Tajik wife.

  Dean wondered if the Art Room wizards had been aware of Ilya’s tryst with Masha a few hours ago when they created their new legends. Probably not … but with them and their high-tech magic at listening in, you never knew. The two had been back in their separate rooms by the time Mrs. Konovalova had come up the stairs to wake them, and that at least had worked out well. Dean had the feeling that the old woman would not have approved.

  Or … perhaps she would. Her eyes had been sparkling a bit when she’d wished them all safe travels, and it seemed to Dean that she’d been smiling in a knowing and somewhat condescending way at Ilya and Masha as they said good-bye.

  Maybe the squeaks had penetrated the floor to her bedroom below.

  And maybe the woman didn’t mind if two young people found a few moments of escape from a dark and pain-grim world.

  Their initial goal had been to drive south as quickly as possible, using back roads to avoid the dragnet thrown up around the city by Vasilyev’s forces and by the local police. Besides the new license plates, the Dushanbe CIA resident had sent along a new drivers-side mirror to replace the one that had been shot out earlier, plus a spray can of a tacky adhesive with which to coat the car’s body. There was no time to repaint the vehicle’s green exterior, but handfuls of dirt scooped up from outside the shed and hurled against the body quickly transformed the dark green Hunter from new-looking to something that had been bouncing around on the arid dirt roads of Tajikistan’s mountains for weeks. They couldn’t do anything about replacing the car’s rear window, but they did brush some dark matte gray paint into the bright white star where the bullet had glanced off glass and metal. It wouldn’t get past a close examination, but at night, from a distance of a few yards, the scar was now invisible.

  While they’d been detailing the car to give it its new look, Rubens had explained the new plan.

  According to various surveillance sources, Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev had his office in the Ayni Airfield tower building. Analysts going over the footage Dean had transmitted of Vasilyev jumping out of the helicopter had shown him carrying a briefcase—not the sort of fashion accessory normally taken by FSB officers on board helicopters. The NSA analysts were not sure what happened to that briefcase. Dean and Akulinin had not seen it in the hospital morgue. It might have been in Vasilyev’s car, or it could have been passed to a subordinate and taken to Vasilyev’s office in the Ayni control tower building.

  Either way, the chances were good that the briefcase was in his Ayni office now, and Rubens wanted the Desk Three operatives to slip inside and have a look.

  They’d returned in the middle of the night to Ayni, a few kilometers southwest of Dushanbe. Getting back onto the base had been simple enough. The Deep Black electronic support unit back at Fort Meade had for the past several hours been busily infiltrating the radio and cell phone calls crisscrossing the airwaves over Tajikistan, adding reports, sightings, and orders designed to confuse the manhunt now under way. In several cases, they’d even used the Internet to modify local police and military records and files. Numerous new reports now had the fugitive vehicle fleeing north on the M34 toward the border with Uzbekistan, while other reports suggested that the fugitives were not two men and a woman, as originally reported, but one man and one woman, the female described as blond, the male as being Pakistani, with black hair and beard.

  And so a dusty, travel-worn car with different license plates than were on the fugitive vehicle had entered the Ayni front gate. The bored Indian guards there had looked at their IDs and waved them through. Dean had parked the vehicle in the main parking lot, and Masha had stayed in the back, huddled underneath a blanket, while Dean and Akulinin had approached the control tower.

  The building—indeed, the entire base—appeared to have shut down for the night. There were two guards in front of the control tower entrance, however, both of them Russians. Dean and Akulinin had watched them for a moment from behind the corner of a large tool shed a hundred yards from the tower. The windows were probably covered by an alarm system; the only way in, then, was through the front door, directly between the guards.

  Now Dean lay on his back behind the tool shed, listening as Akulinin’s footsteps receded into the distance. A moment later, he heard shouting—Akulinin barking orders.

  He heard multiple footsteps returning, crunching over gravel, running this time. “He’s over here, around this corner!” Dean heard Akulinin say in out-of-breath Russian. “I think he’s still alive.”

  “I’m not supposed to leave my post, sir,” another voice said.

  “Don’t worry. We just need to get him to the infirmary.”

  Dean felt someone standing beside him, leaning over him, felt a cold hand touch the side of his face, then probe for a pulse at his throat. He opened his eyes, looking up into the startled face of a Russian soldier, then snapped his arm straight up, shoving the tip of the pen directly into the man’s solar plexus.

  The applicator was based on emergency medical injector units—the kind used to autoinject massive jolts of atropine in case of an attack by nerve gas. When the tip hit the man’s shirt, the needle fired, sending a dose of a powerful relaxant into his central torso. He opened his mouth to yell … but no sound came out, and his knees were already buckling. Dean rolled out from beneath him as Akulinin grabbed him from behind, clamping his mouth shut and lowering the sagging body to the ground.

  The neurosuppressive cocktail in that pen would keep the man unconscious for at least six hours. As soon as he was down, Akulinin stepped around the corner and waved at the other guard. “It’s okay! The son of a bitch is just drunk! Come give us a hand, will you?”

  A moment later, the second guard rounded the corner of the shed, his weapon slung. He barely had time to register the fact that the body on the ground was that of the other guard before Akulinin’s arm swept around from the side and slammed the tip of another auto-injector into his chest. The second guard collapsed as swiftly and as silently as the first.

  Dean used a small lockpick set to open the simple padlock on its hasp securing the tool shed door. They dragged the Russian soldiers inside, relieved them of weapons, ammunition pouches, and IDs, and left them with their hands and feet bound in plastic zip-strips. Somebody would find them when they finally woke up and started yelling, if not before.

  The front door to the control tower facility was unlocked—a somewhat worrisome fact. It suggested that there might be an officer of the watch who made periodic rounds inside the building as well as outside. Since they didn’t know his schedule, they would have to work fast.

  They’d brought a small leather satchel with them, another present from the embassy. Dean pulled out a small device the size of a paperback book and scanned the door carefully, searching for live wires and circuits hidden in the wood or bricks—an indication that there might be silent alarms or hidden cameras. “Nothing,” he whispered.

  Akulinin pulled a small black cylinder from the bag and planted it in the
dirt next to the door. “Okay,” Vic Klein’s voice told them through their implant communicators. “Good picture. Go ahead.”

  Inside, the building was completely dark. They didn’t have IR or starlight gear, but the two operators used tiny lights to find their way down a long hall and left, to a suite of back offices, the lights red-hued to preserve their night vision. A search through airport staffing records indicated that Vasilyev’s office was number 12; a search of architectural records in Dushanbe had pinpointed number 12 at the end of the dogleg to the left. The door was locked. Another electronic scan showed an absence of hidden alarms. Dean pulled out a slender rectangle of steel the size of a credit card and slid it between the door and the jamb, popping the bolt.

  The office had two rooms, an outer room for a secretary and reception, an inner sanctum for the boss. They performed yet another electronic sweep with negative results. Akulinin left a micro camera positioned where it could watch the door, then checked with the Art Room to make sure the device was transmitting. Next the two operatives picked the lock to the inner door and entered Vasilyev’s private office.

  They left the lights off, unwilling to let them show through the closed blinds at the back of the room and make someone suspicious. Using their red minilights, though, they found Vasilyev’s desk, then swept the entire room for electronic signatures. Against the wall in one corner was a four-foot steel safe. Akulinin sat down at the computer and powered it up. Dean moved to the safe.

  The safe had been imported from the United States—with a Sargent and Greenleaf Model R6730 locking mechanism—and had been identified as such already in the architectural plans uncovered by Desk Three’s long-distance computer snooping.

  The lock mechanisms for safes rated for holding classified DoD documents back in the United States were now required to be electronic, using a keypad to punch in the combination. Though more secure against safecrackers employing traditional methods—listening to tumblers fall through stethoscopes or manipulating the lock—electronic locks were actually easier to penetrate using modern computer technology.