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  A gunshot cracked from behind them … followed by a second shot, and fragments of pavement stung Akulinin’s leg. So much for the traffic making the soldiers cautious. At least they hadn’t opened up with automatic weapons. Those shots had sounded like a 9 mm pistol, probably Vasilyev’s. The range was a good thirty yards, against moving targets and uncertain lighting. They had a chance …

  Akulinin dragged Masha past the halted car, weaving left to put its headlights between them and the gunmen. The car accelerated — he heard the driver screaming obscenities at them — and he swerved right once more, twisting between the lines of oncoming traffic.

  Almost across the last lane, headlights flared to the right, and another horn sounded. This time, screeching brakes were followed by a heavy thud as the driver swerved into a tree beside the road. Another car piled into the rear of the first. More horns sounded — the beginnings of a traffic jam.

  But they’d made it! They ran onto the grass beyond the curb, a strip thickly planted with large, old trees. Another shot banged out from the hospital steps, this one a deeper, flatter crack that sounded like an assault rifle being fired single-shot. Akulinin heard the snap as the bullet passed somewhere overhead and behind; another shot, and this time the round punched into the trunk of a nearby tree, close enough to fling splinters at them. Turning behind the tree, they ran flat out, racing south now, on the east side of Rudaki.

  “Charlie is almost at the car,” Jeff Rockman said in his ear. “Just a few more minutes.”

  “Copy!” Akulinin was panting, out of breath. Dean would be teasing him about spending more time on the obstacle course back home.

  “Ilya!” Masha said. She sounded like she was in better shape than he was. “Don’t you have a gun?”

  “Not with me,” he told her. A Russian officer would not have checked out a sidearm from his armory unless he was engaged in some duty that required one, and if he’d had to submit to a search, he would have had trouble explaining why he was carrying a concealed weapon.

  Besides, Hollywood notwithstanding, field agents only rarely went armed in the real world. Spies were looking for information, not firefights, and depended on getting in and getting out without being noticed. If you got into a gunfight, your mission had failed.

  Another rifle shot from behind, from beyond the blaring horns in the street, and Akulinin bit off a curse. He wouldn’t say this op had failed, exactly, but the getaway was proving to be a little noisier than planned. Horns began blaring somewhere behind them. The bad guys were crossing Rudaki.

  “Charlie’s at the car,” Rockman told him. “Two minutes!”

  “Tell him to get his ass in gear!” Akulinin replied. “We’ve got a small army chasing after us, and we’re under fire.”

  “We’ve picked up radio calls in your area,” Marie Telach said. “Colonel Vasilyev is calling for backup, and he’s calling in the local police and the VV.”

  Dushanbe had its own police force, of course, but there were MVD internal troops in the region as well; Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs still maintained a presence in most of the countries that had arisen from the now-defunct Soviet Union. The Vnutrenniye Voiska Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del, usually abbreviated VV, was a paramilitary force similar to the U.S. National Guard.

  “Copy.”

  “He’s also calling in a GNR,” Telach said. “The guy sounds pissed.”

  “Well, it’s nice to be popular …”

  GNR was Gruppa Nemedlennogo Reagirovaniya, a police rapid-response group assigned to the local region. They were calling out the equivalent of a SWAT team.

  “Okay, Ilya.” It was Rockman again. “We have a little problem.”

  “Just what I wanted to hear.”

  “Dean can’t reach you. Major traffic jam. We have a satellite map up of your part of the city, though, and we’re tracking you. We’re going to reroute Charlie onto another southbound road. I want you to look for a street or an alley going off to your right.”

  “I see one just ahead, yeah. Doesn’t look like a good part of town.”

  “Duck down that alley, going east.”

  “Copy that.”

  Akulinin and Alekseyevna turned and jogged down the alley. He was tired, fighting to get his second wind. On the street behind them, he could hear the two-toned ululations of police sirens converging on the area.

  The tree-lined boulevard of Rudaki Avenue was clean, bright, and almost parklike. Less than a block to the east, however, the cityscape turned dark, with a dilapidated and abandoned factory, piles of rubble, and a distinct lack of streetlights. When the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991, Tajikistan had almost immediately fallen into a nasty civil war. Non-Muslim minorities had fled the country, rival gangs and militias had carried out widespread ethnic cleansing, and most of the cities had been devastated. Deaths in the war were estimated at fifty thousand, and over a million people had fled the country as refugees.

  Six years later, Emomali Rahmonov — or Rahmon, as he styled himself nowadays — had engineered a cease-fire with his rivals, and the country had begun to rebuild. Even so, large stretches of Dushanbe, off of the main thoroughfares and business districts, still showed the ravages of brutal civil war.

  They slowed down as the darkness deepened. There was light enough, however, to see gang signs scrawled on deteriorating walls, and piles of garbage in the alley ahead.

  “Where are we going?” Masha asked. “It’s not safe.”

  “Safer than behind us,” he told her. “My friend is going to meet us somewhere ahead.”

  Several shadows stepped out into the alley ahead.

  “Behist!” someone shouted. By the uncertain light, Akulinin could make out a scarred, bearded face and the gleam of a knife.

  “Ya neepanimayu,” Akulinin said in Russian. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s Tajiki,” Telach whispered in his ear. “A form of Persian. He just told you to stop.”

  “Well, well,” the scarred man said in thickly accented Russian, holding up the knife. “We have a fucking Russian Army officer! And what is this?” He leered, exposing a prominent gap in his front teeth. “A pretty little girl!”

  Two other men had emerged into the alley behind the first. Akulinin heard one say something to the other in Tajiki, and then they both laughed. One was holding a length of pipe, the other another knife.

  Maybe he should have brought a weapon.

  “Back off,” Akulinin told him. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

  “Sometimes you find it anyway, neh? Or it finds you!” Gap-tooth gestured with the knife. “I want your money, pretty boy. Your cards and papers.

  And that uniform! Military stuff fetches well on the black market!” He grinned at Masha. “As for you … I think we’ll take you as well. We can show you a good time, yes?”

  “Please—” Masha said.

  “How long ’till Dean gets here?” Akulinin muttered. He was still holding Masha’s hand, and he gave it two quick squeezes, hoping to communicate get ready.

  “Coming down the street in front of you, right to left. Thirty seconds!”

  The smallest of their three assailants was on the left, the one with the pipe. He looked young, probably a teenager. Hell, they all looked young, even bearded Gap-tooth. Akulinin took two steps closer, snapped out his free hand, and slammed it open-palmed against the pipe-wielder’s shoulder. The blow caught the kid by surprise and knocked him off balance, sending him stumbling back against the thug beside him.

  Akulinin turned, shoving Masha ahead and through the sudden opening in their assailants’ line. “Run!” He shouted in English, then added,

  “Skaray!” Quickly!

  Akulinin’s training with the NSA had included long hours of martial arts at the Farm, as the CIA’s Camp Peary training center near Williamsburg, Virginia, was popularly called. He knew both Tae Soo Do and the U.S. Army Combative System, a streamlined synthesis of several martial arts forms. Pivoting, he brought his right foot u
p and snapped it around in a roundhouse kick hard to the falling kid’s kneecap.

  Gap-tooth screamed and lunged forward, jabbing with the knife. Akulinin countered with a wrist-breaker lock, kicked his right ankle, and slammed him to the pavement.

  Then Ilya ran after Masha. He’d only disabled one of the thugs — the kid was on his back shrieking, cradling a broken kneecap — but the idea was to get away, not to let himself get bogged down in a street brawl. Besides, more shouts and whistles were sounding from the west end of the alley. The police were closing in.

  The two fugitives ran as hard and as fast as they could, their footsteps echoing off bare brick walls. The alley opened onto a larger north-south street, and Akulinin led Masha diagonally across, then turned south. Seconds later, headlights flashed, and the boxy Ulyanov Hunter squealed to a stop beside them. Akulinin clambered into the backseat, Masha into the front.

  Then Dean squealed the tires as he accelerated down the street.

  Behind them, Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev burst out of the alley, pistol in hand, breathing hard.

  He was just in time to glimpse the number on the vehicle’s license plate.

  6

  DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  WEDNESDAY, 2014 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  So, are you going to introduce me?” Dean asked as he drove the Hunter south.

  “Masha, this is my friend Charlie Dean,” Akulinin said in English. “Charlie? Maria Alekseyevna. She works in the morgue.”

  “There’s a conversation stopper,” Dean said. “I remember you, Ms. Alekseyevna. You were telling Vasilyev where to get off.”

  “Call me Masha,” she said.

  “You speak excellent English.”

  “She’s from Brighton Beach, Charlie! Tell him, Masha!”

  “It’s true. I grew up in Ilya’s old neighborhood!”

  “Remember the Royal Pizzeria, right there under the Brighton Avenue tracks?”

  “I do.”

  “Sounds like old home week,” Dean said dryly. “Ilya? Better break out the weapons.”

  “Got ’em right here.” A foam-filled aluminum case hidden under one of the seats held two Makarov PM semiautomatic pistols and several full magazines. The weapons were the Russian equivalent of the Walther PP series but would not shout “foreign spy” if they were found in a search. Dean heard the snap-click of a magazine being inserted and a round being chambered.

  Akulinin handed him one, butt first. “Round chambered, safety on,” he said.

  Dean pocketed the small weapon. It wouldn’t be much in a firefight, but anything was better than nothing. “So, Masha,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  Masha filled Dean in as they drove, telling him about her family’s move back to Russia, her father sending her to Dushanbe, and how she’d worked for Dr. Shmatko now for two years.

  Dean caught Akulinin’s glance in the rearview mirror. “Sharkie, this is so against regs.”

  “I know — but we can’t leave her for Vasilyev, can we?”

  “No. No, we can’t now.”

  “Sharkie?” Masha asked.

  “It’s the name,” Akulinin told her, rolling his eyes.

  “Ah! Akula. Shark.”

  “You’re quick,” Dean said.

  “Charlie,” Jeff Rockman said, interrupting. “They’re throwing out a cordon. Roadblocks on Rudaki at the Medical Institute in the north, at the university in the south. They’ve already blocked off the bridges over the Varzob, west of you, and they’re putting units out on Mirzo Tursunzade to the east.”

  “Talk me through it,” Dean said. “I’ve got a major drag crossing just up ahead.”

  “That’s in front of Dushanbe University. Turn left.”

  “That’ll take us back to Rudaki.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “They have that roadblock in place yet?”

  “We’re working off a satellite map here, Charlie. We heard them calling for a roadblock in front of the university. Don’t know if it’s in place yet.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out.”

  Traffic was heavy at the intersection with Rudaki, which seemed to be the main north-south thoroughfare through the city. Cars and trucks honked continuously, and a harried-looking policeman stood in the intersection, trying to direct traffic away from Rudaki, which was completely clogged toward the north. The cars in Dean’s lane inched ahead.

  “Masha,” Akulinin said, leaning forward from the backseat, “we’re not going to be able to go back to your apartment for your things. Vasilyev will have your records checked to learn where you live. Guaranteed he’ll soon have some interior troops on the way there in case you show up.”

  “That’s okay, Ilya. There’s nothing there I need.”

  “Good.”

  The line of cars moved ahead a few more yards toward the intersection, then halted again as several police cars worked their way through the congestion, blue lights flashing. Dean described the scene ahead.

  “Turn right if they’ll let you,” Rockman told him. “That’ll put you south on Rudaki, past the university.”

  “Okay … here we go. I’m signaling … he’s waving me through …”

  They made the turn. Ahead, in front of the main entrance to the university, more policemen were moving cars to block traffic, and Dean could see one man in an army camouflage uniform holding an AK assault rifle.

  “Shit. They’ve got us blocked. Okay … wait a second …”

  The street was utter chaos, with halted vehicles and shouting drivers. To the right, however, was a broad walkway, crowded with pedestrians, flanked by trees. Dean hauled the steering wheel over and accelerated, bumping up onto the sidewalk. Pedestrians scattered, some shaking fists or gesticulating as Dean nudged ahead through the crowd. The soldier shouted something unheard in the din as he unslung his rifle. More pedestrians scattered, and Dean put his foot down on the gas, sending the right-side wheels jouncing up onto the broad concrete steps in front of the main university building. A crowd of students spilling out of nearby dormitories appeared to be cheering.

  The soldier let loose with a burst of full-auto gunfire, but it was aimed high, up into the air. Dean swerved past a clump of huge trees and bumped back onto the street, which, south of the roadblock, was nearly deserted.

  He floored it as another burst of gunfire snapped after them. A white star appeared high on the rear windshield as a round struck the metal frame above it and ricocheted. Another round smashed Dean’s drivers-side mirror. On the right, he spotted the Dushanbe Fire Station, painted a startlingly bright shade of pink but with more traditionally red trucks parked inside the open bays.

  “Passing the firehouse on my left!” Dean called. “Turning left!” He swerved the Hunter across oncoming traffic and ducked into a side street.

  “That’s going to take you into a residential district, Charlie. A maze of narrow streets, lots of twists and turns. We’ll guide you …”

  Dean decided that just maybe there actually were times when having your boss looking over your shoulder and micromanaging the situation was a good thing. With Rockman following his progress on the map back at the Art Room and guiding him through the warren of narrow streets and alleys, he could pay attention to the driving. The Art Room was also able to keep him up-to-date on police calls and radio reports, the signals picked up by one of the NSA’s SIGINT satellites and transmitted back to Fort Meade for translation and analysis.

  They might, just possibly, get away with this …

  NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL BRIEFING ROOM

  WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  WEDNESDAY, 1131 HOURS EDT

  Rubens walked into a room dark with mahogany paneling and plush carpeting, dominated by a long, massive conference table, and found one of the last remaining openings. He noticed Debra Collins’ glance from across the table as he took his seat. He nodded at her, but she ignored him, turning instead to watch George Francis Wehrum taking the podium at the front.


  Some of the people there were NSC staffers. The rest were a mixed lot of military officers from the Joint Chiefs and personnel from the NRO, the Department of Intelligence, the CIA’s Operations Directorate — that was Collins and the aide seated beside her — and the Department of Energy. The session this morning was a planned briefing by several U.S. government intelligence agencies for the NSC’s Presidential Advisory Staff.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for coming.” Wehrum was chief aide to ANSA, the advisor on national security affairs. His boss hadn’t arrived yet but was expected momentarily. “We have several important briefs on the agenda this morning. It’s going to be a long session. I will remind those present that information discussed in this room should be restricted to Top Secret and below.”

  The National Security Council was comprised of about one hundred staff members working in one of the basement levels of the White House, a labyrinthine fortress with security almost as vigilant and as uncompromising as it was for the Puzzle Palace — with ID checks, a retinal scan, and a stroll through a brand-new backscatter X-ray scanner that could electronically peer through both clothing and hair.

  Technically, the NSC was chaired by POTUS, the President of the United States, and its statutory attendees included the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. The senior military advisor was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the intelligence advisor was the director of national intelligence.

  The meeting this morning, though, didn’t rate attendance by such high-ranking luminaries. Its purpose was strictly to serve as a session for presentations by various intelligence groups, briefing ANSA on several key situations or operational deployments.

  Most of the people at the table were well known to Rubens, but at least there was now a new ANSA. The previous advisor on national security affairs had been Debra Bing, an unpleasant woman with political and personal power agendas that had often conflicted with a clear understanding of the information provided by the intelligence community. She hadn’t been fired so much as promoted sideways; she was over at Foggy Bottom now, working for the secretary of state.