Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) (2 page)

Feeling the rush of air from the now-open windows, Gorev turned back to see his driver running hard toward the tree line. From those same trees emerged a swarm of gunmen bearing down on the motorcade, their weapons raised.

“No!” Gorev shrieked as more gunmen advanced from the opposite side of the road. Before Yuri could open fire, the president grabbed the gun from the man’s hand and squeezed off only one round. It hit the fleeing driver in the back and dropped him just short of the trees. It was judgment, a death sentence carried out by a man just seconds from his own execution.

E
vgeny ran the Fiat wide open, risking interference from a highway law enforcer with no right to know the things Evgeny did. And there was certainly no time to explain them. He would have to close the fifteen-minute gap between him and the motorcade in a car that threatened to blow some critical part if he didn’t slow down, which he refused to do.

Evgeny knew what a last-minute switch of drivers meant. He’d long been programmed to know such things. It was part of the core curriculum for assassins. To interpret the signs, plot, infiltrate, anticipate, kill, and to trust those who said it was all for Mother Russia and the ultimate good of her people. He’d gladly swallowed every bit of it through all the years he’d served the Communist juggernaut, until it burned and sank in 1991. He’d jumped clear just in time, though for a while he’d floundered in a sea of disillusioned fellow agents. Most of them had climbed aboard the next ship to stop and pick them up—the new Russian Federation with its tastes-like-KGB intelligence machine, the Federal Security Service, known as FSB.

But Evgeny and a few others chose not to follow. They longed to return Russia to its former position of world power. Two of the KGB’s most powerful and inspired leaders, Pavel Andreyev and Vadim Fedorovsky, promised to do that for them. So Evgeny leapt into the fold, pledging allegiance to their renegade order. What he didn’t know was that someone unseen had long been working Andreyev and Fedorovsky like puppets. Evgeny had likened it to discovering an unknown planet in the solar system. How had he missed it? But once the phantom fist of Ivan Volynski materialized, Evgeny realized that the man’s feverish quest for power, wealth, and brutish dominance over the United States would eventually destroy Russia.

Ivan Volynski, a self-exiled Kremlin power broker, ruled over a secret brotherhood strategically embedded throughout the new government and military, waiting for the moment to snuff out the Federation, seize control, and return Russia to its former might. Ivan Volynski was to rule as a modern-day czar. Until one pleasant afternoon six months ago when Evgeny fingered a small remote and blew Volynski out of the New York sky.

The Fiat screamed northwest along the busy highway until the turnoff to Gorev’s hometown. There, Evgeny left the highway and slid along a tranquil road leading to a tributary of the Volga River. He checked his watch. Almost four. He’d made remarkable time and hoped to catch up with the motorcade before it reached the small village where the president’s family had farmed for six generations.

From a bag on the passenger seat, he pulled out a personal-size arsenal with enough firepower to counter whatever he might face ahead. Three handguns, an Uzi, grenades, and tear gas. What did he think he was doing? He’d once been party to a conspiracy to kill President Gorev. Now, Evgeny was risking everything to save the man. But from whom? Ivan Volynski was dead. But his power-lusting compatriots, the ones who hadn’t already been executed for treason, surely had climbed back to their camouflaged hiding places along the rungs of national power. They were still there, Evgeny was sure, looking for a new leader to deliver them. But it was too soon for one to have risen in Volynski’s wake, in time to stage the thing Evgeny feared lay ahead.
Who’s pulling the puppet strings now?

The road curled through forests so deep and dark that their boundaries seemed like the edge of night. The innocent beauty of the trees, their graceful bowing, the wind now chiming symphonically through his open window all conjured the image of Liesl Bower. He glanced at the cold weaponry on the seat beside him. How had she landed in such a world as his? Or he in hers? She’d once been his prey, now his conscience. He willed her image to flee from this peril, back to the fine old home on Tidewater Lane, under the sultry Charleston skies.

He inhaled the wild scent of the Volga and wished himself to flee as well, yet knowing he would never be free of the thing that had drawn him back to Russia, the primal need to cleanse himself of the blood on his hands.

He cocked his head toward the open window, hoping for the sound of clean, rushing waters, but what he heard triggered a spasm through his body. Gunfire. A distant fury of automatic weapons. He was too late.

And then it stopped. There was only the shriek of the Fiat’s now-futile race down the winding road to the river. Downshifting around one more curve, Evgeny suddenly braked into a sideways skid and came to rest before the riddled remains of the president’s three-car entourage.

Almost bumper to bumper, they lay like a single butchered serpent, its last breath just released. No after-death twitching from nerves still firing. Not this time.

Evgeny grabbed the Uzi and dashed from the car to an outcrop of boulders just off the road and listened. He knew the sound of an escaping hit team, and he heard it now. The garbled signals to each other, the swift and careful footfalls over raw ground. The blinding quiet left behind.

The assailants were gone. No need to follow. Evgeny knew the escape tactics that had been his. He glanced down the road in both directions. He didn’t have long. Though the ill-kept road was remote, some unsuspecting motorist was sure to come along soon.

Evgeny turned back to the ruin. He hurried to the middle car, knowing that’s where he’d find the president. As he passed the last car in the line, he looked inside. The condition of the two bodies there triggered the taste of bile in even this veteran killer. He hurried to the big Mercedes and stopped at the backseat window. As in the car behind, the bulletproof shield had been fully lowered.

The president stared at him with unseeing eyes. Evgeny stared back at them. It was too hard to look at the rest of him.

Careful not to leave a print, he reached through the open window and checked for a pulse in the president’s neck. Then he slid the back of his finger along the man’s bloodied hand. “I am as guilty of this as they are,” he told the corpse, its blood still warm against Evgeny’s skin. “But I will find them and make them pay, just as I too must be brought to justice one day.” The eyes held Evgeny fast, though their clear sheen was fading quickly. “So go, and be at peace. I envy you.”

Evgeny stepped away from the Mercedes and went quickly to the lead car, finding its occupants as shattered as the others. There was no one at the wheel of any car. He believed the order to substitute drivers had come from too far up the chain of command to trace, certainly not by him. Surely an intricate cover-up was already in place.

He’d just started back for his own car when he heard the faint whine of an approaching vehicle. Seconds later, the Fiat hurtled away from the scene, though Evgeny would revisit it many times. It would be captured by the first photographer to arrive at the grisly discovery, then blitzed throughout the world. But its images, like Gorev’s blood, were already indelible inside the broken vessel that was Evgeny Kozlov.

Who did this?
Evgeny’s mind zoomed as fast as the Fiat’s climb from the river valley. Coming just months after Volynski’s murder, was it his people’s revenge? Did they believe their own president had ordered the hit, and not the Americans, on whose lands Volynski would have mounted a campaign of terror? Why would Volynski’s people not suspect the American president had conveniently rid himself of the ruthless half brother who hated him? Everyone knew of that kinship now. Travis Noland himself had announced it to the world. In doing so, had he sealed his own fate? Was Noland next? If the avengers couldn’t be sure who’d killed their hero, maybe they were just brash enough to cast judgment and sentence on all the candidates.

Volynski’s followers couldn’t know that Evgeny was the executioner. He didn’t exist anymore, not even to the hunters inside Russia’s voracious intelligence community. They had their warrens and he had his, the two never intersecting. And now, he was driving hard to reach the nearest drop-hole into his netherworld. From there he would pick up the scent of those who’d just fled through the woods.

I
n the unopened hours before sunrise that Thursday morning, Travis Noland had stood before his bathroom mirror, the only sound the scraping of a blade against the gray stubble on his face.

Confronting him in the mirror was a conflicted man whose struggle for equilibrium had begun to emit something like the hot-wire hum of a transformer. Intrusive and incessant. Wiping the remaining foam from his face, he’d once again observed the influence of both maternal and paternal genes. From his mother, a high forehead, and now, at age sixty-one, slight jowls settling on either side of his chin. What dominated, though, was the short, broad nose that rose to a high bridge and wide-set, blue eyes. His father’s nose and eyes, most everyone had noted when Travis was growing up.

F. Reginald Noland III had been a force to contend with, both in the Noland household and at the U.S. State Department. The brilliant negotiator who’d helped steer the country through the world’s diplomatic minefields for more than three decades had succumbed to his own arrogance and lust. He’d much preferred the heady challenge of his far-flung assignments and the power they afforded him to his home turf. He particularly craved his choice of female companionship. In time, coming home to his wife and only child in Joplin, Missouri, was barely tolerable, until the day the
New York Times
ran a front-page story exposing the distinguished elder statesman’s covey of mistresses lodged in diplomatic ports from Istanbul to Moscow. Particularly incriminating were the photographs of him with two women the CIA had identified as foreign intelligence agents assigned to lure classified information from him. Though an investigation found insufficient evidence to indict him, Travis’s father resigned and came home to Joplin, where he lived alone until he died. His wife had received all the evidence she needed to secure a divorce and flee the scandal with her teenage son, Travis.

The president had looked hard at his image in the mirror. At the Noland nose and eyes. How had he not recognized them on the face of Ivan Volynski? How preposterous if he had. Why would he have thought such a thing on first meeting the Soviet Army officer nine years his senior, an adversary of the first class, a hostile man whose own blue eyes shot fiery darts from some secret reserve.

But once the president confronted the truth of their kinship, the Noland resemblance sprang at him from the face of the man who would have blown a hole in the United States, if someone hadn’t executed him.

Noland had mourned the loss of his tortured half brother. How different it might have been if they’d discovered each other as children. Or would it? Would one have remained privileged and the other impoverished? One snug in the security of his mother’s protection, the other left to fend for himself while his chambermaid mother scrubbed away her youth and lay down her self-respect. One sent to ivy league schools, the other cast off to fight for scraps of knowledge that would free him. But he was never free of his hatred for Travis Noland, the pedigree son.

It was now almost ten that June morning, and the West Wing was at full stride, despite the encumbering heat outside. The president knew the day’s docket was too full to suit his secretary, Rona Arant. But he’d insisted on plugging the only gap in the schedule with a goodwill visit from a couple of legislators from his home state of Missouri.

While he awaited their arrival, he downed a couple of decongestant tablets, having detected the signs of a summer cold. Setting the glass down on his desk, he focused on a photograph of his wife and two sons beaming at him from a tortoise-shell frame on his desk. He’d visited the DNA of a murdering revolutionist upon his sons’ bloodline and they’d treated the news as if Ivan Volynski were just a kooky uncle to contend with—until they, and the whole nation, saw the footage of the man’s private helicopter splinter into flaming wreckage. For the last six months, they’d had to deflect the barbs of their father’s political adversaries who’d taken a near fiendish delight in exploiting the “Noland family shame,” as one senator had called it. Still, others had rallied around the president and admonished those who’d slung their scorn at him, daring them to peel back the layers of their own families and look hard at what lurked beneath.

The arrival of his guests broke into Noland’s reverie. He was just showing them to their seats when Rona reappeared at the door.

“Sir.” She summoned him with a slight lift of the hand. Theirs had been a long and comfortable partnership, begun during his tenure at the State Department. She’d made the move with him to his congressional office, then on to the White House. At nearly seventy, she had no intention of retiring, for which he was grateful.

“Excuse me,” he told the legislators and moved quickly to the door. “What is it, Rona?”

“The CIA director is here, sir. He says it’s urgent that he see you immediately.”

Noland tried to read her face, though he was certain Don Bragg wouldn’t have confided anything to her. “Okay, Rona. Take these gentlemen to one of the conference rooms and get them something to eat, please.”

The president apologized to his guests for dismissing them so abruptly, but expressed hope that the interruption wouldn’t last long. He was wrong.

Moments later, Director Bragg rushed into the Oval Office. Noland was standing behind his desk.

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“Have a seat, Don.”

“I’d rather stand, sir.”

Noland nodded and remained on his feet.