Rasputin's Shadow (29 page)

The festive year celebrating the Romanov dynasty’s three hundred years on the throne came and went peacefully. And then the calamities starting raining down on us again.

I had just discovered a frightening potential for spreading the effect of my device using a piezoelectric transducer and a dynamo. The potential was truly terrifying—and it was then that two separate catastrophic events occurred on consecutive days, two assassinations that would affect the lives of countless millions and redraw the map of the continent.

In Sarajevo, on a Sunday in June of 1914, a young Serb murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A monstrous war now seemed inevitable. As before, the tsar, the military, the old aristocracy, and the young bourgeoisie were all aching for battle. And as before, the tsarina didn’t want it. Rasputin intervened once again and sent the tsar several urgent missives, only this time, the dire prophesies of God’s emissary were rebuffed by the tsar. Even worse, Tsar Nicholas, now firmly on a war path, refused to see Rasputin and instructed him to go back to his village, “for the sake of social calm,” as he put it.

And it was there, on the very next day, in Pokrovskoye, that the mad woman knifed him.

I wasn’t with him, of course. I had to remain in St. Petersburg, in case the tsarevich fell ill again and needed our help.

“I was walking back from church when this disfigured beggar approached me, asking for help,” he told me. “I reached into my pocket to give her a coin, and the devil woman just pulled out a dagger through a slit in her shirt and stabbed me in the stomach while shouting, ‘Die, Antichrist, die!’ I pushed her away and ran, my mind not registering what she had done to me. She followed me, still brandishing her knife and yelling at me like a Cossack warrior. I felt my legs weaken and decided to turn and face her. I spotted a thick wooden stick by my feet and used it to beat her back until fellow villagers arrived and took her away.”

The woman was an ex-prostitute whose face had been ravaged by syphilis. She had no regrets and likened her attack to a holy duty, saying she had decided to kill him because he was a false prophet and an agent of the devil. Rasputin suspected she had been sent by one of his biggest enemies, the monk Iliodor, and I must say I agree with him on this. Regardless, her act would have consequences as dramatic and far-reaching as that of the assassin in Sarajevo. Her blade would incapacitate the one man in all of Russia who could have kept our great nation out of this savage war.

The nearest doctor was a six-hour ride away. Rasputin hovered between life and death for days. And when he finally recovered, after weeks of care, he was not the same.

The tsar ignored the telegrams Rasputin sent from his hospital bed, in which he implored him to avert the war. In his last plea, my master warned the emperor of “an immeasurable sea of tears” before concluding that “everything will drown in great bloodshed.” The tsar didn’t listen. Russia went to war, a war that would engulf the entire continent and beyond.

Rasputin was now a changed man. In constant pain from the attack, he took to heavy drinking—not just Madeira and Champagne, but vodka, and lots of it—and his character turned foul. He was now shamelessly taking vast amounts of money from all kinds of unsavory supplicants on whose behalf he intervened with the government. The chronicles of the police agents charged with his surveillance now referred to him as “The Dark One.” As his strength returned, the wanton debauchery resumed with a vengeance, now combined with drunken revelry and violence. And as the empire sank further and further into war, he sank with it.

He couldn’t speak out against the war when everyone seemed fervently delighted by the bloodletting. The tsar was away running the campaign, while, back at the palace, the tsarina needed constant uplifting prophesies to keep her spirits up. The public outcries against Rasputin across all of Petrograd—for that is what the capital is now called, St. Petersburg having been deemed too German—resumed with a new ferocity. He feared for his life, and he was plagued by doubt and disillusionment.

And that was when I made my biggest mistake.

I told him about the developments in my work. About how I had refined my device’s powers and greatly extended its range.

“Show me what it can do,” he said, a feral animus radiating out of his deep-set eyes.

I could not refuse.

***

A
S
I
WRITE THIS
, after our return from those most horrific of days in the Urals, I am lost as to what I should do.

The words of Rasputin, the ones that shook me to my very soul as we stood outside the doomed mine and contemplated the result of our cursed deed—they still haunt my every waking moment.

“How?” I remember asking him. “How does this monstrous crime that we’ve just committed ensure the salvation of our people?”

“They won’t listen to me anymore,” he said, his tone guttural but unusually coherent. “They want war. They want bloodletting. They think that is the righteous path that God wills. Well . . . if they want war, I’ll give them war. I’ll show them the true glory of savagery. We will ride to the front, you and I. And we’ll ride right up to the enemy’s lines and stand back and watch as they slaughter each other at my command. And when these fools see this, when they see the extent of my power . . . the enemy will beg for mercy, and the tsar will grant me anything to curry my favor.” He smiled and directed his mesmeric gaze into me. “He will even grant me the throne.”

I am lost in a maelstrom of torturous thoughts.

“Everything drowns in great bloodshed,” he had told the tsar in his warnings against the war. Now we are the ones doing the drowning.

I fear my old master has lost his way. He has fallen into a state of grave spiritual temptation. The purity of soul needed to prophesy and heal has turned into a dangerous gift now that he has succumbed to the Antichrist.

I have to do something to stop him. To save Russia.

I have to do something to save his soul.

I
wa
s like a caged animal all afternoon, with competing feral instincts battling inside me.

I felt we were really on to something with the van and my theory and wanted to keep pressing ahead with it. At the same time, I felt Kurt had given me a real opportunity to get closer to Corrigan than I’d managed after months of trying, and it was an opportunity I might not get again.

I had to juggle both, if only for a few hours.

We checked on and debriefed Ae-Cha at the hospital, then got back to Federal Plaza and went straight into a video conference call with, of all people, an analyst at the CIA.

They’d gotten a hit on the voice print of Ivan that we’d sent across to them and to the NSA. No ID, sadly. Not a name, or a photograph. But it did tell us a couple of things. One was that they’d heard his voice before, on a couple of occasions. Once in a wiretapped conversation in Dubai, shortly before the disappearance of a Ukrainian businessman who was a growing force in the opposition movement to his country’s Kremlin-backed regime. And in Marbella, a few days before the drowning of a senior Russian banker.

Ivan got around.

The other was that while they didn’t have a name for him, they had a code name. “Koschey.” From a character in a Russian folktale. Also known as “Koschey the Deathless.”

Terrific.

They wanted him, of course. So did several governments around the globe. Beyond that, there wasn’t much they could tell us, nor was there much we could add to their wafer-thin profile. It wasn’t like we needed any confirmation about the guy’s competence or his ruthlessness.

I also got the info Kurt sent me via a dead-drop Yahoo mail account he’d set up. The hotel’s address and a picture of Kirby, just as I’d asked. There was nothing in the photograph to suggest that he was anything other than a middle-aged, middle-rung professional with a middle-American life. Albeit in a slightly more sensitive line of work than your average salary man. He did, however, have few wrinkles and a full head of hair, which, considering he was in his early fifties, was no lean achievement. Maybe his illicit trysts were keeping him young.

I checked my watch, then went online and looked at airline schedules. There was a flight leaving JFK at 5:15 that landed at Washington National Airport at 6:40. Assuming it left on time, it would give me enough time to grab a cab to Georgetown and be there when Kirby and his playmate arrived at their secret assignation on M Street. I wondered how the hell he managed to pay for four nights a month at a fancy boutique hotel like that and not feel the pinch. Maybe I’d ask him about that, too.

By four thirty, it was time for me to make a decision. I’d be taking a huge risk. A potentially irresponsible one. Koschey was still out there, with Sokolov and the van. We had an APB out on the latter two. But we didn’t have anything else to go on, and I didn’t think we’d be having any more Kevlar moments with him. Larisa had suggested we lean on Mirminsky together, but the Sledgehammer was no longer with us, and I couldn’t think of any other avenue we could still pursue, anything we could do besides wait and stay sharp and hope something broke. And I wouldn’t be gone for more than five or six hours.

A tough call, but I decided to do it.

Which meant I had to tell my partner.

“I need you to cover for me,” I told him as I closed the door to the empty conference room. “I need to be somewhere for a few hours.”

He stared at me curiously. “Where and to do what?”

“I can’t tell you.”

He snorted. “You can’t tell
me
?”

“Yep.”

He studied me curiously for a moment, then his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You got something going on with our Russian hottie?”

“Of course not.”

He grimaced with faux-annoyance. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He turned serious. “What’s going on, Sean?”

“I really can’t tell you.”

Aparo got angry. “Hey, this is me you’re fucking talking to.”

“I can’t. Not now.”

“Not now? When then?”

I had to go. “Soon. Look, it’s better this way. For your sake.”

That really pissed him off. “You’re giving me deniability now? Seriously? Since when did I care about that bullshit?”

“It’s just for tonight,” I insisted. “Let me do this. If something comes out of it, you’ll be the first to know.”

As I reached the door, he asked, “This about Alex?”

I stopped. We hadn’t been partners for ten years for nothing. “I gotta go, man. Anything breaks, call me.”

“At least tell me where the hell you’re going?”

I kept my hand on the door handle, then I said, “DC.”

I heard him mutter, “Shit,” then I left the room.

***

I
T WAS TIME FOR A BREAK
. More important, it was the agreed-upon time for Koschey’s follow-up phone call.

He escorted Sokolov back to his familiar holding spot on the floor by the radiator and tied him to it. They’d made good progress in dismantling the gear from the inside of the van, but there was still a lot of work to be done.

Throughout, Koschey had gotten Sokolov to give him a running commentary about what he was doing, what each component was, how it all worked. Working alongside him, he gained a firm grasp of Sokolov’s ingenious invention. He’d also told Sokolov to divide it into two separate stacks instead of just one. Moving it to yet another vehicle, or packing it into crates, would be easier that way. It wouldn’t all need to be dismantled again.

He left Sokolov in the small office and stepped outside by the vehicles to make the call.

His Saudi contact took the call promptly, as he’d expected.

“Do you have an answer for me?” Koschey asked in Arabic.

“The answer is yes,” the man said, “provided you can guarantee that none of this will come back to our doorstep. You can guarantee it, yes?”

“Nothing will come out from my end because no one else is involved but me. But I can’t guarantee what slips out from your end.”

“Our end is secure.”

“Then there’s no problem. What about my package?”

“It should be with you within the hour. The other half will be paid on completion, as you proposed.”

Koschey smiled. The promise of a hundred million dollars tended to have that effect on most men. “Make sure it’s not delayed.”

“It’ll be there,” the man said. “Good luck.”

Koschey clicked off. Luck—he scoffed at the notion. He made his own luck.

He’d known the Saudi’s people would go for it. Not the government, of course. In his experience, governments were a waste of time. They made terrible partners. The decision-making process was slow and convoluted. Discussions and consultations had to be undertaken. Foreign pressures had to be taken into account. And decisions by committee were rarely unanimous, which meant there would be dissenters, and dissenters were prone to creating problems. To say nothing of leaks. Which, given how subservient the Saudis were to the Americans, would be immediate.

Fortunately, there were now people on the planet who made far better partners when it came to decisive action. Billionaires who were as wealthy, and as politically motivated, as any government. Oligarchs, oil sheikhs, media tycoons, and a varied collection of massively successful businessmen who held highly strung views about the world they lived in. Megalomaniacs with staggering riches had the means to fund their own initiatives and shape the world in their vision, whether by initiating advertising and PR campaigns to alter the course of elections, channeling weapons to opposition movements, or funding private armies of mercenaries to overthrow regimes. Bin Laden had been the most notorious of them all, but there were many others and they came in many guises. And Koschey had direct connections with several such players, in all corners of the globe, players whose agendas were as yet unfulfilled, players who could be tempted with the right offer. The kind of offer Koschey had made to his Saudi contact.

An offer that would cause huge problems for the Saudis’ archenemies—Iran—while giving Koschey the immense satisfaction of delivering a crushing blow to the Americans he loathed.

It was now time to make another phone call.

With another such offer.

This one would be to a Lebanese car dealer, in Beirut. A man who had a direct and secure pipeline into the upper echelons of Hezbollah, who in turn had a direct and secure pipeline to Tehran.

This man could take Koschey’s offer to the most radical elements among those in power there.

Koschey was about to make the biggest play of his life. But to do so, this call needed to be handled differently.

For this call, Koschey had to adjust some of the settings on his phone.

This was a call he needed certain people to hear.

He switched off the highest-level encryption, making it possible for his conversations with the car dealer to be picked up and deciphered by the NSA’s Echelon eavesdropping software. Not too easily, but possible. And highly likely, given the key words he was going to use in order to snare the attention of the server banks at Fort Meade. Then he added a layer of distortion to the outgoing segments of the call, giving his voice a new frequency range and ensuring it didn’t match any voice prints the Americans or anyone else had on record for him.

He also made sure his phone was set to record their conversation. Just in case the trail of evidence he was planting to implicate Hezbollah and their Iranian patrons wasn’t enough. Sometimes, more was more. Especially if you were trying to frame a foreign government for a major terrorist attack.

He made sure the settings were all in place. Then he made the call.

***

S
HIN HADN’T MOVED FOR HOURS
.

He was still there, curled up on a bench in Astoria Park, hungry, thirsty, scared, muttering to himself and eyeing everyone suspiciously. The schoolkids and the health freaks running around the track, the carefree dilettantes on the tennis courts, the chess players and the bums. They were all threats.

After last night, everyone was a threat.

After last night, his whole world had changed.

He still couldn’t make sense of what he’d witnessed out in Brighton Beach. Even with his extensive knowledge, even with his perceptive and analytical mind, he still couldn’t process it. Even worse was the shoot-out. Watching his friends die. And knowing that all the sinister forces of the world had to want this thing and would do anything to get their hands on it.

How he’d made it this far, he didn’t know. He couldn’t justify or rationalize it. Jonny and Bon hadn’t made it, and they were the pros. They had the street chops he never possessed, they were the cool cats, the survivors. And yet they were gone and he was still here.

What to do from here on, though, was another matter.

He hadn’t dared go home to Nikki. Sure, she had to be worried sick about him. But she was probably more angry than worried. She was already royally pissed off at him for going out to meet Jonny like that in the middle of the night. Nothing good could possibly come out of that kind of meeting, she’d told him. Jonny was nothing but trouble, they both agreed, and Shin had made her a promise, after all. A promise to drop a life that he knew wasn’t made for him.

She was right, of course. And he couldn’t face her. Not now. Not like this. Not when he didn’t know who might be waiting for him there, watching their place, ready to pounce.

All the sinister forces of the world had to want this thing, he reminded himself.

He didn’t dare go to the chop shop either. He couldn’t confront the others. By now, they had to know that Jonny and Bon were dead, and given the contempt they felt for him, something they’d never been shy about, there was no point in him going there. Hell, they might even suspect him of having sold their buddies out. No, the chop shop was out of bounds. Besides, it was the obvious place for any agents to be lying in wait for him.

He had to keep his head down until things settled—if they ever did. Wait and watch from the sidelines, and hope that at some point he’d be able to resume his less-than-charmed life and act like last night had never happened.

One thing kept preying on his mind, though. The bad guy. The
gaejasik
who’d shot Jonny and Ae-Cha.

Shin knew where he was. Where he was last night, at any rate. But it seemed to be his hideout, his safe house. His lair. And Shin knew he might be the only one to possess that information.

Information that could lead to the man’s capture.

He’d been debating it all day, and had yet to reach a conclusion. He wanted to call it in, but at the same time, he didn’t want to get involved any more than he already was. An anonymous tip—surely, there was no harm in that. But with all the sophisticated tracking technology, nothing could be taken for granted anymore, and the last thing he needed was for them to figure out who he was and find him.

Better to keep your mouth shut, he told himself.

Then Ae-Cha’s smiling face assailed his mind’s eye, Ae-Cha whom he’d had a crush on from the moment he’d first met her when he was twelve, Ae-Cha who’d never taken notice of him but whom he still fancied nevertheless, and he wasn’t so sure of keeping silent anymore.