Death Wave (8 page)

“Um … no, actually. Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev has it.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“Of course.” Akulinin glanced up at a large clock hanging on one concrete block wall. It was just past 7:10. “You’re here awfully late. Are you the night shift?”

“I’m working late, actually,” she said. “Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev phoned me from Ayni and said he was on the way.”

He gave her his most radiant smile. “Really? So what time do you get off?”

“You can turn off the charm, Major,” she told him. “It won’t work. You still haven’t told me who you are or given me your authorization to be here.”

He cocked his head to one side. “That is an interesting accent there.”

“What about it?”

“It sounds American, actually.”

She sighed, took a step back, and began peeling off her gloves. “That’s because I
am
an American. Russian American. My parents moved to a place called Brighton Beach in Brooklyn when I was three.”

Akulinin started. “Really?” He hesitated. He could get into serious trouble dropping his cover, but he couldn’t simply ignore what the woman had just said. “Then you and I might be neighbors,” he said, shifting to Brooklyn-accented English.

It was the woman’s turn to look startled. “Brighton Beach?
You?
”

“My parents emigrated to the United States in ’82. I was born two years later.”

“My God!” She shook her head. “What are you doing
here
?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“How can I believe you? This is impossible!”

“Unlikely, yes,” he said, grinning. “Not impossible. Brighton Beach is probably the largest colony of transplanted Russians in the U.S. You know the intersection of Brighton and Coney Island Avenue?”

Her eyes opened wider. She nodded.

“Remember the subway/el tracks? They come down in a big curve overhead, right above the intersection … right? Q train for local service, the B train for weekday express. And when the train comes through, it sounds like thunder!”

“I used to walk under that overpass on my way to school!”

“Public School 253.”

“
Yes!
How did you know?”

“I went to the same school …”

For several more minutes, Akulinin dredged up memories of his own childhood in Brighton Beach, enough to convince the woman that they had indeed grown up in the same neighborhood. He wondered if he’d ever seen her; she looked to be a couple of years younger, but they might well have attended the same school during the same years, just a few classes apart.

What were the chances of running into her
here
?

He asked her what had brought her back to Russia—and Tajikistan.

“My … my parents moved back to Russia when I was thirteen,” she told him. There obviously was some pain associated with the memory. “A business opportunity for my father. There was … some trouble. Financial trouble. My mother was sick. He got into debt with some very bad people.”

“Mafiya?”

She nodded. “After my mother died, my father sent me to work with a man he knew, a friend, Dr. Shmatko. He is a pathologist with the Science Academy here in Dushanbe.”

“Why?”

“Those men, the ones he owed money? They offered to settle some of his debt if I would go to work for them. Photographs … movies … to be posted on the Internet, you know?”

Akulinin nodded. He
did
know. The Russian
Organizatsaya
was heavily involved in the sex trade, both prostitution and pornography. White slavery in the twenty-first century, vicious and sick.

“So I came here and trained as a
diener
with Dr. Shmatko.”

“
Diener
. A
morgue
attendant?”

She nodded.

“That’s horrible!”

“It’s not so bad.” She shrugged. “My … clients don’t talk back, and never give me trouble. The pay is … not too bad, and Dr. Shmatko is teaching me a lot, so that I can go to school and be a doctor myself one day. But first I hope to save enough to get back to the United States someday. It’s … life is hard, here.”

“What about your father? Where is he?”

She shrugged. The expression on her face, behind her eyes, was heart-wrenching. “I don’t know. It’s been two years now. I stopped getting letters, oh, two or three months after he sent me away. I think … I think …”

She was trembling, on the verge of tears.

“It’s okay. What’s your name?”

“Maria. Maria Alekseyevna. My friends … my friends call me Masha.”

It was, Akulinin knew, a common Russian nickname for Maria. “I’m Ilya,” he told her. “I might be able to help you.”

“You still haven’t told me what
you’re
doing here. You’re
not
army, are you?”

“Not exactly.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re a spy! Who do you work for?”

“I really can’t—”

“You’re with the American CIA! Right?”

“Something like that.” He looked at the corpses on the nearby tables. “I
am
here to photograph these bodies. So … are you going to turn me in?”

“Of course not! It isn’t every day a girl gets to meet a real-life James Bond! Especially one who grew up in her old neighborhood!”

He pulled out his mini camera and walked over to one of the stainless steel tables. He’d managed to get a shot of one of the bodies earlier, while Charlie was sparring with the Russian officer, but not the others. One of them, in fact, was still anonymously wrapped up in an olive green body bag. He took several more photos of the first two from different angles. The two bodies already removed from the body bags were male Caucasians, still dressed in civilian clothing. Both were heavily tattooed on their arms. One sported a bushy Stalinesque mustache; the other was clean-shaven, his wide-open eyes pale gray against a bright red mask. There was a
lot
of blood, with deep gashes in their faces and arms.

“This one had a bullet wound,” Masha pointed out, touching the skull of the mustached man and turning it so he could see. “Left temple. Definitely fatal.”

“I … see.” Akulinin wasn’t particularly bothered by death, but the young woman’s casual attitude was a bit disturbing.

“Did Vasilyev tell you anything about these guys?”

“No. Just that he wanted complete path workups, and for them to be checked for radiation. I don’t know why.”

“Well, I can help with that much.” Pocketing the camera, he reached down and pulled up the cuff of his uniform trousers, revealing the small radiation counter strapped to his ankle. Unfastening the chrome-colored device, he held it up, peered closely at a switch on the side, and flicked it.

“It was set to transmit data … somewhere else. Now it will play what it picks up for us, and record it for transmission later.”

Holding the counter like a wand, he passed it over the body in front of him. There was little reaction over the man’s face and shoulders, but his hands, both of them, elicited a sharp clattering static from the device.

“Interesting,” Akulinin said. He stepped over to the other table, passed the counter over the body, and got the same response.

“What does it mean?” Masha asked.

“That these two guys were handling a leaking crate not too long ago.”

“A crate of what?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“These two are Organizasiya, you know.
Mafiya
.”

He looked at her, surprised.

She touched one blood-smeared arm. “The tattoos.” Reaching across, she swiftly unbuttoned the man’s shirt and tugged it open. His chest, as well as his upper arms, was a solid mass of intricate tattoos. He could see a rose on the body’s chest, a skull, a dagger or sword, delicately interwoven floral designs …

“They often start off as prison tats,” she told him, “but they also get them to mark advancement within the gang, special achievements, punishments, anything like that. It’s a part of the whole culture of the
Vory v Zakone
, the Russian underworld. Someone who knows the language can actually read a man’s history with the
mafiya
.”

The second body had tattoos as well.

He frowned. “I’d like to check the third body, too.”

“Give me a hand here,” Masha said. She was already unzipping the body bag.

Awkwardly, Akulinin helped her, peeling the body bag open and sliding it down. He looked at the man’s head and blinked in surprise. “Shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“What the hell is a Chinese doing
here
?”

NSA HEAD QUARTERS
FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
WEDNESDAY, 1010 HOURS EDT

Rubens glanced at his wristwatch, confirming what he already knew. “Damn,” he said. “I have to go.
Now
.”

“Give our love to the NSC,” Marie told him. “I’ll call you when we regain signal.”

“Do that. I’ll be out of touch while I’m in the meeting, but leave me messages and keep trying.”

“Of course, sir.”

He didn’t like leaving now. He was strongly tempted to delegate the NSC meeting to Gene Lenard, his operations director.

Gene was a good man, well able to be Rubens’ representative—but the position of deputy director of the NSA was, unfortunately, as much political as it was practical. If Rubens
personally
failed to attend this meeting, the other people present would assume the issues on the agenda were not of high importance to Desk Three or the NSA. Those people included the chairman of the National Security Council, his senior aide, and his longtime political enemy Debra Collins, deputy director of operations at the CIA. If Rubens wasn’t there this morning, he could wake up tomorrow and find that the CIA was in charge of Haystack—and he had eight operators on the ground over there right now, two of them out of touch.

If he left
right now
, he should be able to make the meeting in time, allowing for traffic on 295 into town and for the security check at the White House.

“While I’m gone, I want a full workup on Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev. I want to know where his office is, including architectural plans, blueprints, whatever you can find. Does he have a safe in his office? A computer? Find out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I should be back around two, two thirty,” he told her.

Rubens checked out through several security desks, picked up his car in the VIP parking area, and threaded his way out of the maze of lots and gates surrounding the towering central buildings of the NSA’s Fort Meade complex, long known to insiders as the Puzzle Palace. Canine Road swung him right onto 32 West, and he took the almost immediate cloverleaf onto 295 South, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Traffic was light and he hit the pedal, accelerating swiftly past the slower vehicles. Any touch by police radar would trigger a transponder in the car, one that flagged him as having special clearance.

Charlie Dean and Ilya Akulinin would be okay Ruebens mused. Dean was a longtime veteran of the agency, a former Marine sniper who simply never got flustered, who was always in the game. Rubens ranked him as Desk Three’s best operator. Akulinin was younger and less experienced. He’d come on board with Desk Three just a year and a half ago, during that Russian
mafiya
affair up in the Arctic, but he was quick, he spoke fluent Russian—it
was
his first language, after all—and he knew the culture. Both men were smart and resourceful, and they got results.

He was more concerned about Lia DeFrancesca. She, too, was a damned good, experienced operator, and her team in Berlin, her on-site backup, was first rate. But the China Ocean Shipping Company was big and it was dirty, an immense commercial giant that was an arm of the Chinese Navy and the Beijing government. Lia wasn’t simply up against Feng Jiu Zhu in Berlin. She was squaring off against the government of the People’s Republic of China.

COSCO had been involved in illegal gunrunning before.

On March 18, 1996, undercover agents with the U.S. Customs Department and the BATF had accepted delivery of a trial shipment of two thousand fully automatic AK-47 assault rifles from Chinese representatives as a part of a sting operation tagged Operation Dragon Fire. Those weapons had been smuggled into Oakland, California, on board the COSCO container vessel
Empress Phoenix
.

In the history of U.S. law enforcement, there had never been a bigger seizure of fully automatic weapons. The Chinese said that the weapons were for the California street gang market, and that other military-grade weapons were readily available as well, from grenade launchers to Red Parakeet shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems.