Day Of Wrath (10 page)

Newly renovated and supervised by consultants from Forte Hotels, the Hotel National believed in serving its guests the very best of everything. Originally built in 1903, the National’s gilt chandeliers and frescoed ceilings had survived the Revolution intact. And, over the decades, its luxuries had prompted any number of the famous and infamous to stay there — H. G. Wells, Anatole France, and John Reed, to name a few. Even Lenin.

Still amused at the thought of sharing quarters once enjoyed by the founding father of the Soviet state, Mcdowell dropped ice into a glass and poured two fingers’ worth of Scotch over the cubes. Then, savoring his drink, he ambled back to the large windows and stared out across the Kremlin’s red-brick walls, gold-domed cathedrals, and palaces. No doubt about it. The Hotel National had the best accommodations and view in Moscow. Well worth the $450 a night price tag. Especially since his bill was being covered by the U.S. taxpayer.

Mcdowell raised his glass in a mock toast to his absent fellow citizens and took another sip of the smooth, smoky Glenfiddich.

Thank God for his expense account and that ever-useful phrase “necessary official expenditures.” He’d been offered a room in the U.S. Embassy’s guest quarters—an offer he’d hastily declined.

Why suffer through government-issue State Department hospitality when you could live like a czar? His stay here might even make up for the exhausting, whirlwind trip he’d been forced to make to that godforsaken air crash site.

Well, he thought smugly, at least the trip hadn’t been a complete waste. He’d been able to take Helen Gray and her soldier boy down a notch or two. His comments on that relationship in her personnel file should make damning reading at her next promotion review.

The phone rang, abruptly ending that pleasurable train of thought.

Mcdowell scooped it up, expecting it to be the concierge confirming his dinner reservation for the evening. One of the National’s four restaurants was the Moscow offshoot of Maxim’s of Paris.

He was wrong.

“Is this Mr. Mcdowell? Mr. Lawrence Mcdowell?” It was a middleaged man’s voice, smooth, assured, educated, and with just the trace of an accent.

“This is Mcdowell.”

“Mr. Mcdowell, my name is Wolf, Heinrich Wolf. I represent Secure Investments, Limited. I’m calling about your local commodities account.”

The
FBI
official flushed angrily. Jesus, he’d heard that Moscow was turning into a center for wild and woolly capitalism, but he’d never expected a salesman to get through the Hotel National’s switchboard.

This guy probably had a standing bribe out to the operators for info on any high rollers who checked in.

Still scowling, he growled, “Look, Mr. Wolf, or whatever your name is, I don’t have an account with your company. And I don’t want an account. So you can just save your sales pitch.”

The man on the other end simply chuckled. “Of course you’ve done business with us, Mr. Mcdowell. We worked together years ago. In fact, we invested quite heavily in you—and in your career.

Don’t you remember your
PEREGRINE
account?”

PEREGRINE? Mcdowell paled. It couldn’t be. Not now. Not after all these years. He was safe. He should have been safe. He clutched the phone tighter. “What did you say?”

“You heard me very clearly:
PEREGRINE
,” the voice said calmly. “So you do remember us, then?”

Suddenly cold and dizzy, Mcdowell sat down in a chair. He licked his lips that felt as dry as bone. “But you don’t exist anymore!

You’re all gone. Dead. Finished. Kaput.”

“Come now, Mr. Mcdowell,” the other man chided. “Old firms may go under or change hands. but you know that debts and obligations never disappear. They must always be paid—sooner or later.”

Lawrence Mcdowell sat silent in his chair, still holding the phone with numb fingers—listening in mounting fear while the man who called himself Heinrich Wolf calmly outlined just what he would have to do to meet his old obligations.

MAY
29

Crash Investigation Base Camp, Northern Russia
FBI
Special Agent Helen Gray stared down at the jumble of scorched tubing and pieces of crumpled metal spread out across a folding table.

The NTSB’s chief investigator Robert Nielsen, Alexei Koniev, and Peter Thorn stood close by, studying the same pile of debris.

Even without looking directly at him, she could sense Peter’s rigid self-control and utterly expressionless face. Ever since that bastard Mcdowell had walked in on them yesterday, he had avoided anything but strictly professional behavior toward her. Whenever they met, it was “Special Agent Gray” this and “ma’am” that.

It didn’t take
ESP
or a degree in psychology to read his mind. Angry at himself for having caused her trouble, Peter was busy beating himself up—all in the name of some chivalrous, selfdenying impulse to spare her further humiliation. It was all very old-fashioned, and also absolutely unnecessary in her opinion.

Helen sighed silently in frustration. One of the things about Peter Thorn that had first attracted her to him was his readiness to admit her competence and to acknowledge her skills. Very few of the men she’d ever worked with—let alone dated—would do that. Even when she’d showed them she could beat them at their own games, most just patted her on the head and drifted off—probably wondering why this strange woman worked so hard to master “masculine” abilities.

Peter had been different. Even after she’d been wounded, he’d pushed her hard to get back on her feet and onto active
FBI
duty—just as hard as she had ever pushed herself. He’d also known that she had to fight her own battles. She’d loved him more than ever for that.

But he’d changed over these past few months. He seemed more hesitant—less sure of himself and of his place in her heart.

Part of that was her fault, Helen knew. She’d allowed herself to be swept up in the excitement of her new assignment. Tracking illegal drugs, money laundering, arms smuggling, and the other booming ventures of Russia’s organized crime syndicates was often a twenty-four-hour-a-day job—one that made maintaining a relationship across eight time zones and thousands of miles immensely difficult.

Of course, the time they’d spent together here hadn’t been very conducive to romance, Helen thought ruefully. She and Peter were two birds of a feather. Neither of them found it particularly easy to open their hearts to another person—even under the best of circumstances.

Being dead-tired most of the time made that more difficult still. And the lack of privacy only compounded their woes. It was tough to rekindle physical and emotional intimacy when you were liable to be walked in on at any moment. So far, they were exactly .000 for two on that score, Helen realized, blushing as she remembered the knowing leer on Mcdowell’s face.

“Have you seen enough, Miss Gray?” Robert Nielsen’s dry, precise voice broke in on her thoughts, tugging her back to the case at hand.

Helen refocused he, r attention on the wreckage heaped in front of her.

She turned to the head of the
NTSB
investigative team. “So what exactly am I looking at here, Mr. Nielsen?”

“Part of the An-3”-s port engine.” The tall, gaunt man nodded toward the table. “One of the recovery crews found it at the bottom of a pond last night.”

“And the starboard engine?” she asked.

Nielsen shook his head. “They haven’t recovered it yet.”

“But you’ve learned something about what caused this engine to seize up?” Helen prodded.

“Yes.” Nielsen pulled a length of gnarled, threaded sleeve off the table. “This is the housing for the engine fuel filter. Now take a look at what we found inside it.”

Straining slightly, the
NTSB
man unscrewed the sleeve—exposing another, smaller sleeve inside. Then he reached inside and extracted a blackened cylinder.

“That’s the filter itself?” Peter asked quietly.

Nielsen nodded. He held it up for closer inspection. “See that?”

“See what?” Helen peered intently at the filter. It looked pitchblack against the light. “I can’t see anything.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Nielsen replied. “You should be able to see the light shining through the mesh screens on this filter.”’

He tapped the cylinder with one gloved finger. “But this filter is clogged, Miss Gray. It’s choked with so many contaminants that I’m not surprised this engine seized up.”

Alexei Koniev raised an eyebrow. “Contaminants? What kind of contaminants?”

“Dirt. Metal shavings. Rust particles.” The
NTSB
man ticked them off on his fingers. “It’s all the kind of crap you expect to find in most aviation fuel—just multiplied about a thousand times over the normal levels.”

Helen framed her next question carefully, conscious that she was treading on touchy ground. Like most people in his profession, Nielsen hated being asked to arrive at hard-and-fast conclusions ahead of the evidence. “This fuel contamination. do you think it could have happened accidentally? Or does it look deliberate?”

“Was it sabotage, you mean?” Nielsen pursed his lips, looking down at the dirty filter he still held in his hand. Then he shook his head.

“I don’t know, Miss Gray. Not with any degree of certainty.”’

“So speculate, then,” Helen said sharply, momentarily losing patience.

With effort, she reined her irritation in and tried a winning smile instead. “Please.”

“Damn it, it’s not that simple,” Nielsen grumbled. “We’ve had bad fuel bring down planes in the U.S. And it’s an endemic problem here in Russia. What’s more, both engines would draw from the same fuel source. So when one engine died of fuel starvation, the second would follow in short order.”

“All of which is consistent with the last radio transmissions from the aircraft,” Helen reflected.

“Right.” Nielsen held the filter up again. “What we’re seeing here could just be sloppy maintenance. Contaminants like these always settle out over time. So we may have a case where somebody really screwed up. Maybe they didn’t replace an old, used filter when they should have. Or maybe they fueled the plane using aviation gas from the bottom of a tank …”

“Or maybe somebody did the same things—on purpose,” Peter finished for him.

“That is possible, Colonel,” Nielsen confirmed reluctantly.

“The mechanics are the same either way. And the equation’s the same, too: The more contaminants flow through the filter, the more clogged it gets. Eventually, there’s not enough fuel getting through to feed the engine.”

Koniev frowned. “Is there any way you will ever know the truth?” ‘ The
NTSB
investigator sighed. “Maybe. At least I hope so.”

He nodded at the tangled pile of engine components. “We’re shipping all this off to Moscow this evening for more detailed forensic analysis.”

Then Nielsen shrugged. “But there’s a limit to what we’ll learn about this accident through an electron microscope.” He turned his gaze on the three of them. “You might have more luck on your end.”

“Meaning that whatever went wrong at Kandalaksha had a human component?” Helen said calmly.

“That’s exactly what I mean, Miss Gray,” Nielsen agreed.

“Very well.” Major Alexei Koniev straightened up. He turned to Helen.

“So we go to Kandalaksha?”

Helen nodded firmly. “Yes, Alexei. I think that’s exactly what we’ll do.” Her eyes narrowed. “And then we’ll take a good, hard look at the maintenance operation there—and at the people who readied this plane for takeoff.”

“Good.” The Russian
MVD
officer turned toward Peter Thorn . “Will you accompany us, Colonel?”

Helen held her breath. Peter was already pushing the envelope of his watching brief as a liaison to the crash investigation. Especially since his superiors at O.S.I.A had been reluctant to let him come to Russia at all. And none of the paper pushers in Washington would be happy if they found out that their least favorite ex-Delta Force officer had actively joined the hunt for whatever, or whoever, had brought the An-32 down. That might even give them the ammunition they needed to force him out of the Army entirely. How could she blame him if he opted for the safer course and stayed behind?

but she also knew that would probably spell the end of any future they might have as a couple. If she headed for Kandalaksha without him, they wouldn’t see each other again before he had to leave for the States. And if he chose the safer career course, his own wounded pride would always stand between them.

“Well, Colonel?” Koniev asked again.

Peter hesitated, visibly restraining himself from turning toward her, and then nodded decisively. “I’m in, Major.”

“You’re sure, Peter?” Helen heard herself ask.

“I’m sure.” He smiled tightly at her, a fleeting grin that flashed across his tanned, taut face and than vanished. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

MAY
30

Headquarters, 125th Air Division, Kandalaksha (D
MINUS
22)

Colonel General Feodor Serov reached for the phone on his desk and then stopped. Instead he glanced again at the fax he’d just received from the Ministry of Defense—as though hoping he could find the inspiration for some alternative course of action in its terse directives.

No, he thought somberly, scanning the flimsy sheet of paper for the tenth time, there were no other options left. Much as he hated it, he would have to seek assistance—and quickly.

Without hesitating further, Serov turned back to the phone and punched in the emergency contact number he’d been given.

Then, while waiting for the call to go through, he flipped the 80 switch on the hightech scrambler his “business associates” had assured him would thwart electronic eavesdropping.

“Yes.” The voice on the other end was impersonal, emotionless.

Serov grimaced. “This is Colonel General Serov. I ned to speak to Reichardt. The matter is urgent.”

“Wait.”

The line went silent for several seconds while Reichardt’s subordinate patched the call through to his superior.