A Raging Storm (2 page)

“Let’s see your ID.”

Dealing with this dolt was a waste of time. A men’s room. That’s where the shooter would go to ditch his disguise. Emerge as someone else. Someone who wouldn’t stick out. A tourist. A businessman. A janitor. A construction worker. Anyone but a Capitol Hill cop
.

There was a large “RESTROOM” sign to his left. Storm ran past it into the room. A long string of startled men peeing at urinals glanced up. When Storm drew his handgun, they panicked and scrambled past him out the exit, some not bothering to zip their pants. There were seven stalls across from the urinals. Storm could see beneath the doors that three were occupied.

He pounded on the first stall’s door, and when the occupant let loose with a profanity, Storm stepped back and kicked it open.

“What the—” the startled man sitting on the commode exclaimed, his sentence cut short when he saw Storm’s Glock.

“Sorry,” Storm said. “You can go back to your business.”

He moved to the next stall, but when he knocked on the door, its occupant opened it and immediately raised his hands. It was a teenage boy. The last occupant was an old man. None of them had been changing out of a Capitol Hill uniform. None of them had looked suspicious.

“Drop it!” a voice behind Storm yelled. It was the D.C. cop from the lobby.

Raising his Glock above his head, Storm slowly turned to face him.

“Are you crazy, man?” the cop asked him. “What the hell you doing, busting in here, waving around a gun? You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you just now.”

“I’m looking for a sniper,” Storm said. “Like I told you, he’s dressed as a Capitol Hill cop. We need to close off the exits before he escapes.”

“Then you
are
crazy,” he replied. “Even if I wanted, there’s no way to shut down this building in time. We got entrances out onto the street, downstairs to the subway lines, and out back to the trains.”

A second D.C. cop came running inside with his gun drawn.

“What’s happening?” he asked his partner.

“He says he’s a private eye looking for an assassin.”

The newly arrived officer asked Storm, “You high on something?”

“Get his weapon,” the first cop declared.

Holstering his sidearm, the second officer stepped forward, took Storm’s Glock, and ordered him to “assume the position.”

Storm placed both hands flat against the wall and spread his legs. Resigned, he said, “Don’t tickle.”

Agent Showers came flying into the men’s room. “FBI!” she said, waving her badge. “You’ve got the wrong guy. He’s with me.”

“Then you can have him,” the first officer said, lowering his gun. The second officer stopped frisking Storm, who turned and said, “My gun please.”

The officer handed it back.

Storm walked over to a nearby trash container and flipped open its lid. But there was nothing inside it except crumpled paper towels and trash. He checked a second one. There was no Capitol Hill policeman’s uniform inside it either.

“We’ll check the lobby,” the first officer announced.

“Great,” replied Storm, knowing the killer was probably long gone.

“What exactly are we looking for?” the second officer asked.

“At this point?” Storm replied. “A ghost.”

Storm and Showers stepped from the men’s room together. A third trash container was a few feet away, located between the entrances to the men’s and women’s restrooms. Storm checked it. A blue Capitol Hill Police officer’s shirt was stuffed inside, complete with a badge and pair of black slacks.

Pulling the shirt from the bin, Storm said, “It’s a small. We’re looking for a man probably under six feet, about a hundred and fifty pounds.”

Together they scanned the waves of people scurrying by them in the cavernous station’s lobby. Dozens of men fit that description. The shooter could have been anyone, anywhere.

“How’d you know I was in the men’s room?” Storm asked.

“Do you think you’re the only one who can think like a fleeing criminal?” she replied.

Storm smiled. “It could have been embarrassing for you if I hadn’t been in there.”

“Not really,” Showers said.

“Oh, you’ve been in a lot of men’s rooms, have you?”

She simply smiled and said, “Let’s go. We got a killer to catch.”

Moscow, Russia

Mayakovskaya Metro Station

“We are the new Russia!” President Oleg Barkovsky declared, ending his three-hour-long speech. The crowd leaped to its feet. They stomped on the floor. They hollered. They whistled. No one grumbled about the late hour. No one complained that it had been five hours since the evening’s meal had been cleared from the tables. The vodka had flowed freely all night. Barkovsky’s aide, Mikhail Sokolov, had made sure of it. The many toasts and earlier speeches had been painstakingly choreographed to build momentum for this moment.

Barkovsky’s ovation was the evening’s grand finale.

The Russian president made no effort to calm the frenzied crowd. He stretched out his arms—Christ-like—behind the podium and drunk in their revelry. In his mind, he deserved it.

Barkovsky was transforming Russia. The reforms of the past—
glasnost
and
perestroika
—were dead. Gone were the leaders who had betrayed Mother Russia by destroying the great Communist Party. Gone were the oligarchs who had raped the nation, stealing billions and billions. Like a mythical Phoenix, Barkovsky had arisen from the chaos of the imploded former superpower. He’d kicked out the money-grubbing foreign capitalists who had arrived promising reforms but had only lined their own pockets. Brilliant and ruthless, he had maneuvered himself into the presidency and reasserted the Kremlin’s authority over all aspects of Russian life. Reporters who dared question him were attacked by thugs who left them bleeding and dying on sidewalks. Political enemies were arrested, imprisoned; some had disappeared. Elections were bought. After years of instability, ordinary Russians had silently fallen into line. There had been no complaints when Barkovsky started stripping away the civil liberties that the revolt against the old regime had brought them. Barkovsky’s iron fist established order. For the first time in decades, it was safe to walk the streets of Moscow at night; shops were well stocked, homes were heated, people had bread, and Russia was once again demanding international respect.

"Barkovsky!” a dark-haired beauty near the podium screamed. Her cry sparked a chorus. “Barkovsky! Barkovsky! Barkovsky!” It swept through the chamber like a wave. Glancing down from the stage at the woman, Barkovsky brought his fingers to his lips and blew her a kiss.

She fainted. He was a political rock star.

The late night rally was being held not in the ballroom of one of the new, dazzling Western-style hotels that now dotted the Moscow skyline, but in Mayakovskaya Metro Station on the Zamoskvoretskaya rail line. To the unaware, it may have seemed an odd choice. But to this crowd, it was a brilliant selection.

Joseph Stalin promised in 1932, when construction of the Moscow underground began, that the city’s railway stops would be artistic showplaces—daily reminders to the masses of the superiority of the Communist system. The Mayakovskaya station was a jewel in the Metro crown. It was such an engineering feat when it opened in 1938 that it was awarded a Grand Prize at the New York World’s Fair. It was designed to calm even the most claustrophobic traveler. Buried more than one hundred feet underneath the city, the station’s ceiling contained thirty-five individual, round niches with filament lights hidden behind them. The lights burned so brilliantly that it looked as if the summer sunshine were streaming through the panes. The station’s steel support beams were covered with pink rhodonite. Its walls were decorated with four different shades of granite and marble. Artists had created thirty-four mosaics in the ceiling, each glorifying the Soviet Empire. During World War II, the station had served as an air raid shelter and had escaped unscathed. But it was another historic event that had caused Barkovsky to select the station for this evening’s banquet. When Moscow was under siege in 1941 by the Nazis, Stalin had addressed a crowd of party leaders and ordinary Muscovites inside this very station, giving what would become known as his “Brothers and Sisters” speech. In it, Stalin predicted that although the Nazis seemed invincible, they would be defeated. Barkovsky’s speech tonight had mimicked Stalin’s famous remarks. He had attacked “outside invaders” who were threatening the new Russia—just as the Nazis had once done. He’d made thinly disguised attacks on the United States and NATO. Stalin had promised that the Motherland would rise triumphant, but only if it held “true to the moral principles” that had first guided the Communist revolution. Barkovsky repeated that same cold line.

It was Barkovsky’s goal, and that of his New Russia Party, known simply as the NRP, to turn Russia backwards and, in doing so, restore it as a world superpower, capable of protecting its people from the threat of the U.S. and its newer rivals: China and India. Suspect everyone. Destroy all enemies. Use any means at your disposal.

Wooden chairs and tables had been placed on the station’s boarding platform and train service had been suspended for tonight’s rally. Blood-red and bright yellow banners—the very colors of the flag of the old Soviet empire—dangled from the ceiling. The entire station had the feel of an old time Communist rally. It was all well planned. Most of the crowd of four hundred had been members of the
apparatchiki
—the Communist Party apparatus. They had reaped the spoils of the
nomenklatura
—the party system of rewarding people who were in political favor. As a child, Barkovsky had grown up envying these privileged party members, wanting desperately to be one of them. But his parents had not been invited to join. They had been poor factory workers south of Leningrad. Because they were not party members, they had been doomed to lives of obscurity and poverty. Their only son should have suffered their same dreary fate, but Barkovsky had found a way to pull himself up from the squalor. Through sheer determination, a total lack of conscience, and an unquenchable lust for power, he had risen to become the most powerful leader in Russia since Joseph Stalin. Now he used his humble origins to his advantage. He had become a hero to the masses by pretending to be one of them. They loved him even as he was picking their pockets and constructing a palace for himself along the banks of the Black Sea, at a cost of a billion dollars. Some nights, when he was alone, Barkovsky wondered if he could be the living reincarnation of Stalin. There were moments when he imagined that he could feel Stalin’s blood pulsating through his veins.

Standing before the crowd, soaking in the hoopla, Barkovsky felt a hand gently touch his shoulder, followed by the familiar voice of his chief aide whispering.

“Senator Windslow is dead.”

Without showing the slightest glimmer of a reaction, Barkovsky cocked his head slightly to his right and asked. “Where is Petrov?”

“London.”

“Why is he still alive?”

Duke of Madison’s estate

Somerset County, England

The startled ring-necked pheasant burst from its hiding place in the knee-high grasses. The blood red circling its eyes gave the bird a terrified look as it flapped its wings to gain speed. A brown-and-white spotted cocker spaniel had flushed it. Like many game birds in England, the pheasant had been bred and reared by a professional gamekeeper and then released to roam the rolling hills of the Duke of Madison’s vast estate until its master came hunting.

The pheasant had flown about twenty feet above the ground when the boom of a 12-gauge shotgun broke the early morning silence. Dozens of blackbirds in nearby trees took wing, scattering in different directions.

The buckshot broke the pheasant’s right wing, causing it to careen to the ground, where it flapped desperately as the dog raced toward it. The spaniel expertly snatched the wounded bird in his mouth and shook it violently, snapping its neck and ending its misery.

“Good boy, Rasputin,” cried the dog’s owner, Ivan Sergeyevich Petrov. The spaniel dropped the pheasant at Petrov’s feet and was rewarded with both a treat and pat on its head. One of Petrov’s two bodyguards took the bird and deposited it in a satchel. It was the first kill of the morning.

“Nice shooting, Ivan Sergeyevich,” Georgi Ivanovich Lebedev said. He was Petrov’s best friend and morning hunting companion.

Petrov opened the breech of his 12-gauge shotgun and inserted a new shell. He considered it unsportsmanlike to hunt with anything other than a single-shot rifle. If he couldn’t kill a bird with one round, the creature deserved to escape.

“The next bird we see will be yours,” Petrov promised.

Lebedev was smart enough to always allow Petrov the first kill. It was one reason why the two men had stayed close friends for so many years. Lebedev was content being second fiddle. It had been this way from the time when they were boys growing up in the northwest Moscow neighborhood of Solntsevo, one of city’s toughest areas. When the teenage Petrov took a sudden interest in a girl named Yelena, Lebedev stepped aside even though he had a crush on her. When Petrov became best friends with Russian president Barkovsky, Lebedev gladly turned into the third wheel. When Petrov and Barkovsky became sworn enemies, Lebedev supported Petrov, eventually following him to London.