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  Rubens could not imagine a better move for the woman.

  The new ANSA was a retired Marine four-star general, John L. James. The President’s appointment of James had been a real shock to Beltway insiders; the current POTUS was not seen as a friend of the military. Speculation and outright gossip held that James was nonconfrontational, had no personal agenda or strong ideological leanings, and could evaluate ideas dispassionately whether they came from the left or the right. Historically, the NSC had often been blocked or sidelined in the rough-and-tumble politics required to gain and hold the President’s ear.

  James was well respected by nearly everyone in town and was known as a team player. With the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the director of central intelligence, and the President’s chief of staff all battling with the NSC for presidential access, it would take a no-nonsense combat veteran as well as a diplomat to thread the labyrinth of Washington’s halls of power. Hell, the guy was a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. If anyone could handle the job, he could.

  Rubens knew a number of U.S. Marines, both active duty and retired. Charlie Dean was one. He wondered if the President knew just what he’d signed on for by appointing one as his advisor on national security.

  “All rise,” Wehrum called from behind the podium. A moment later, General James strode into the room, followed by several aides and accompanied by Rodney C. Mullins, a congressman from New York and a prominent member of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Rubens had not been aware that Mullins was going to be present today.

  “Sit down, sit down,” James growled at the room. He was known to dislike ceremony and protocol. “Sorry I’m late. The Honorable Mr. Mullins and I were held up in an Intelligence Oversight Committee meeting. Mr. Wehrum? What’s up first on the dog-and-pony show?”

  “Sir … the Palestinian crisis. We have a report from the deputy DNI—”

  “Let’s get on with it, then. What do you have for us, Mr. Scribens?”

  Wehrum sounded annoyed by James’ bluntness — or perhaps it was by his dismissal of the briefing session as a dog-and-pony show, Pentagon slang for formal prepared briefings designed to please, rather than inform, high-ranking officers or civilians.

  Rubens smiled inwardly. It was well known that Wehrum had expected to step into Bing’s shoes; she’d been grooming him as the next ANSA throughout most of her tenure, and James’ appointment must have been a bitter surprise. He took his seat, however, as Paul C. Scribens, one of four deputy directors of national intelligence, stood and walked to the podium.

  It would be, as Wehrum had promised, a long session.

  Ruebens wondered if Dean and Akulinin were clear yet, and back in contact with the Art Room.

  CHARLIE DEAN

  SAFE HOUSE

  DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  WEDNESDAY, 2040 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  “Net li oo vahs luchshi comatih?” Dean asked.

  The white-haired woman peering through the cracked-open door looked him up and down, then stared past him at Akulinin and Masha. The crack closed, Dean heard the rattle of the chain lock, and then the door opened again. “Did anyone see you?” she asked in accented English. She was an older woman with gray hair and eyes that might have seen too much. Dean guessed that she might be in her sixties. “Did anyone follow you?”

  “Not that we could see,” Dean told her. “All the excitement is over in the center of the city.”

  “Excitement is right. You three have kicked over hornets’ nest. Get in, get inside.”

  They’d parked the Hunter inside a shed behind the Adkhamov safe house. The woman running the house, Tatyana Konovalova, was a transplanted Russian who’d been recruited by the CIA in Moscow back in the bad old days of the Cold War. When her husband had moved to Dushanbe in the 1980s, she’d come along — and continued sending in reports about Russian troops in the area during the disastrous Soviet war in Afghanistan. Her husband, Viktor, had been a civilian, an engineer working on a pipeline project in Kabul, at least until the Mujahideen had caught him and slowly skinned him alive. She still kept a small altar to the man, with candles flanking his photograph on a table in her small foyer.

  She remained on the CIA’s payroll, the money brought by a messenger from the U.S. Embassy in town each month. In CIA parlance, she was an agent, meaning a local recruited by a CIA officer. There would be at least one Agency officer stationed at the embassy, Dean knew, but he would be unwilling to get embroiled in an NSA op gone sour. Except for the offer of a place to stay for the night, Dean, Akulinin, and their unexpected tagalong would be on their own.

  “Mrs. Konovalova doesn’t have access to another vehicle,” Dean said. He was sitting alone now, in one of three tiny bedrooms carved out of an attic. Beneath a steeply sloping ceiling, a small bed on rope springs was squeezed in between a wooden box that served as dresser, night table, and lamp stand and the stacks of dusty boxes and piles of paper common to any other attic in the world. It was just past nine. “We’re going to have to take the Hunter, and the MVD will have a description and a plate number.”

  “The Firm has new plates for your car,” Jeff Rockman told him. “They’ll send them over by special messenger in a few hours. We’re also looking at how we can compromise the local LE net.”

  The Firm — another insider’s term for the CIA. Maybe the three of them weren’t as alone as he’d thought. “LE net” meant the local law enforcement radio frequencies. The NSA possessed technologies that would allow them to infiltrate the Dushanbe police and MVD radio nets, not only to eavesdrop but also to plant misleading messages or information.

  “Any data yet on Maria Alekseyevna?”

  “There’s not a lot available, but from what we’ve been able to learn, her story checks out. There was an Alekseyevna family living in Brighton Beach until 2002. Moved to Moscow, where the mother died a year later. No information on the father or the daughter since.”

  “How about a Dr. Shmatko?”

  “A pathologist trained in Moscow. He received a posting to Dushanbe two years ago. It’s possible he was a family friend.”

  “What are we going to do with her?” Dean asked. “We can’t throw her to the wolves.”

  “If you can get her to the Afghanistan border, we’ll fly her out when we extract you. What happens to her after that …” Dean could almost hear Rockman’s shrug over the channel. “Mr. Rubens will have to be brought in. Special provisions might be arranged, but the boss will have to take that up with State.”

  “She’s a good person,” Dean said. “She helped Ilya, didn’t turn him in when doing so might have earned her some brownie points.”

  “We’ll just have to see how it plays out. First step is to get you the hell out of Tajikistan. I recommend you get some sleep now. You’ll be up early.”

  “We’re all over that. Any word on getting quality satellite time?”

  “Not yet. We’re on the NRO’s queue. The boss said he’s going to be talking to people later this morning.”

  “It’s taking too long. By now, those suitcase nukes could be anywhere.”

  “I hear you. Oh … but you’ll want to hear this. The photos Ilya got of those three stiffs in the morgue. We have positive IDs on all of them.”

  “One of them is Zhernov.”

  “He was styling himself Zhern at last report, as any good patriotic and anti-Russian Tajik would do. The guy with the mustache was Amirzai Shams, a Pashtun with connections to extremist Muslim factions in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Both of them have long records with the Russian mafiya. Both had sizable traces of radiation on their hands.”

  “And the Asian?”

  “He’s the real puzzle in this mess. Major Kwok Chung On. PLA military intelligence. He was with a Chinese trade delegation in Dushanbe until four days ago, when he disappeared.”

  “So what is he doing in Central Asia?”

  “We’ve done some checking through our ba
nking connections. Two weeks ago, the State Bank of Beijing transferred one point three billion dollars to a private account in Dushanbe. The size of the transaction raised flags at the Financial Desk.”

  “I would imagine so.” The Financial Desk was the department within the NSA specifically tasked with tracking the flow of large amounts of money throughout the corporate world and across the international community. Identifying accounts used by various terrorist organizations, and freezing their assets, was quite possibly the most important weapon available in the long-term fight against groups like al-Qaeda. Follow the money, and you knew who was behind a group or an attack. Freeze or seize the money, and you paralyzed the group, making it harder for them to buy weapons, carry out operations, or provide for the families of suicide bombers.

  To that end, the code monkeys working at the NSA had developed a number of CIPs, covert intrusion programs, software designed to infiltrate international banking networks, record transactions, and trace large-scale movements of currency and other assets.

  “Who owned the Dushanbe account?” Dean asked.

  “We don’t know, but the account was emptied four days ago.”

  “When Major Kwok disappeared.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So,” Dean said, piecing it together, “Zhern and Shams, either one working with the Russian mafiya, transport twelve suitcase nukes from Stepnogorsk to Dushanbe. Kwok withdraws over a billion dollars … You know, that’s one big, unwieldy package.”

  “Bearer bonds.”

  “Okay. Kwok takes out over a billion in bearer bonds and uses them to pay Zhern and Shams, and probably another party as well, who takes over the nukes for the next leg in the journey. Kwok stays with Zhern and Shams—”

  “We suspect they were driving him toward the Chinese border.”

  “And Vympel, in the form of Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev, intercepts them.”

  “In the mountains about seventy miles east of Dushanbe.”

  “So … who has the nukes now? And where?”

  “We don’t know the who. Our best guess about where … they left Ayni Airfield yesterday, maybe the day before, and are at or beyond the border with Afghanistan by now.”

  “Why Ayni? They could have flown them out from Dushanbe Airport instead.”

  “Probably because Dushanbe Airport is solidly under Russian control, with the 201st’s headquarters right next door. Political control out at Ayni is divvied up between Tajikistan, Russia, and India. They might actually have felt they had a better chance of smuggling the shipment in and out again at a smaller airfield with divided jurisdiction.”

  “So … what now?” Dean asked. “We still need to find out what happened to the shipment, how they got it out of Ayni.”

  “Our first requirement is to get you and Ilya out of Tajikistan,” Rockman told him. “We were looking at sending in a helicopter, picking you up at Ayni, or maybe someplace in the countryside, but things are too unsettled right now. The Indians have closed down Ayni — rumors of Pakistani terrorist-saboteurs in the area.”

  “Hm. I wonder how that happened?”

  “Once you have new plates and registration documents for your car, you can drive out. We’ll pick you up at Shir Khan, as originally planned. In the meantime, you need to catch up on your sleep.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Dean said, in the tone of a sulky ten-year-old. Rockman was right, though. He was exhausted — and they would have to hit the road as soon as the plates and other gear arrived from the embassy.

  He pulled off the rest of his Indian Air Force uniform and collapsed into the bed.

  ILYA AKULININ

  SAFE HOUSE

  DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  WEDNESDAY, 2110 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Akulinin was nearly asleep when the chirp of a floorboard brought him to full awareness. His hand found the pistol beneath his ancient mattress, and he sat up, peering into the darkness. Someone on the stairs?

  The safe house’s attic was divided into three side-by-side bedrooms. Akulinin was in the middle room, the one with the stairs going down to the building’s second floor. If someone was coming up …

  He heard a faint tap on the door to the right-side bedroom, then the click of a latch being dropped, the creak of a door opening a few inches in the darkness.

  “Ilya?” The voice was a whisper, barely heard.

  “Masha?” He kept his voice to a whisper as well.

  “I … I can’t sleep. Can I come in … can I stay with you?”

  “Of course! Come in!”

  He tucked the pistol back into its hiding place. He felt rather than saw her standing next to the bed. He heard a rustle of clothing, and then she was slipping in beside him under the quilt.

  He gathered her into his arms. She wasn’t wearing anything, and she was crying.

  “What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “Will you … will you take me back to America? Back home?”

  “I can’t promise anything,” he told her, “but I’ll do my very best. At least we can get you away from here.”

  “Away from here would be very, very good.”

  “You probably shouldn’t stay here,” he told her after a long, close embrace. “Mrs. Konovalova strikes me as the conservative type. I don’t think she would approve …”

  “Mrs. Konovalova is a fussy old babushka,” Masha whispered in his ear. “She won’t ever know.”

  “For a little while, then …”

  CHARLIE DEAN

  SAFE HOUSE

  DUSHANBE, TAJIKISTAN

  WEDNESDAY, 2135 HOURS LOCAL TIME

  Charlie Dean was very nearly asleep when a sound brought him wideawake. His hand found his Makarov PM beneath his pillow. A careless foot on a loose floorboard?

  Squeak … squeak … squeak …

  It took him long minutes to identify the sound. It was too regular, too rhythmic to be footsteps on squeaky floorboards. As he shifted in the bed, however, and the bed frame gave a mournful squeak with the movement, he realized what it must be.

  Squeak … squeak … squeak …

  Hiding the pistol again, he rolled over, his back to the gentle sounds from the bedroom next door.

  Just so you get some sleep tonight, Ilya, he thought.

  Soon he was asleep himself.

  ART ROOM

  NSA HEADQUARTERS

  FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  WEDNESDAY, 1235 HOURS DST

  Squeak … squeak … squeak …

  Jeff Rockman looked up, startled. The sound was coming over Ilya’s line. He’d thought Akulinin had taken off his clothes — including his belt-antenna — and left them out of range of his communicator implants when he’d gone to bed earlier. Apparently, his trousers were just close enough to pick up the signal from his implant.

  “What is that noise?” he asked the technician sitting next to him at the console.

  “Interference on the tactical channel?” she asked.

  “Bozhe moy!” a voice said, a woman’s voice, speaking low but very clear, as though her mouth were close beside the microphone implanted in Akulinin’s skull.

  “Kakya tebya hochu!”

  Rockman exchanged a glance with the tech. He didn’t speak Russian, but it was the way the woman said it …

  “Ah! Bistraye! Bistraye!”

  Every word coming in over the communications channels of officers in the field was recorded, of course, for later analysis. Rockman had a feeling the analysts were going to enjoy this one.

  “Gospodi! Kak mne horosho!”

  The Old Man, however, was going to hit the roof.

  7

  NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL BRIEFING ROOM

  WHITE HOUSE BASEMENT, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  WEDNESDAY, 1246 HOURS EDT

  Rubens stood and walked to the podium. The briefing session had been going on now for over an hour without a break. The meeting was supposed to end at one o’clock, and Rubens was the last scheduled speaker. These things were always carefully
choreographed.

  Now it was Rubens’ turn.

  “We have a solid lead on twelve of the Lebed nukes,” he told the room, with no preamble.

  His announcement created a buzz of background conversation. Several of the attendees looked puzzled, but he was prepared for that.

  “I’ll keep this very brief,” he said. “On September 7, 1997, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with former Russian national security advisor Aleksandr Ivanovich Lebed. Here is a portion of that interview.”

  Rubens touched the audiovisual controls on the lectern, and the screen behind him lit up with Lebed’s bland Slavic face.

  “… I’m saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of two hundred and fifty are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia,” Lebed said. “I don’t know their location. I don’t know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they’ve been sold or stolen, I don’t know.”

  “Is it possible that the authorities know where all the weapons are, and simply don’t want to tell you?”

  “No,” Lebed said, his voice flat.

  He went on to describe the devices, which he claimed could fit inside large suitcases. The nuclear weapons inside measured sixty by forty by twenty centimeters — about two feet long — and could be detonated, he claimed, by one person with less than a half hour’s preparation. They had been distributed among special covert operations units belonging to the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Lebed claimed he’d learned of the weapons’ existence only a few years before, when Boris Yeltsin commissioned him to write a report on the whereabouts of the devices.

  Rubens let the 60 Minutes segment play itself out, then switched off the screen. The room was dead silent.