Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (2 page)

Viktor paused long enough for Evgeny to respond, “Do
you
know this man?”

“No.”

“Where is he?” Already, Evgeny’s mind calculated the inevitable mission of stopping him.

“It is believed he operates from the sea, headquartered on one vessel or another within his fleet. He could be anywhere in the world.”

“Fleet?”

“This is a man of uncommon means. He—” Viktor quickly raised a quieting hand and looked toward the open door to the room. “Listen,” he whispered.

Evgeny leaned far enough to peer through the doorway, but he saw and heard nothing. Then a beam of light pierced the front window and arced through the store. He jerked back out of sight and glanced at the flashlight above him. Dousing it would only signal that someone was in the room.

Already hidden, Viktor remained still, but Evgeny could hear him wheeze. When the light retreated and didn’t return, Evgeny leaned forward in his chair and whispered, “A policeman making rounds.” It was both a statement and a hope. Surely his skills hadn’t failed him so miserably that he’d led others of his own trade to this place and to his trusted compatriot.

A cautious interval passed before either spoke again. Then, “There is something else,” Viktor said, his shoulders sagging. “Your uncle and cousins.”

Evgeny stopped breathing. But he already knew, in the way that assassins such as he knew death and those who forced it on others.

“They are all dead,” Viktor announced bitterly.

“When?” Evgeny struggled to ask.

“Last night, as they slept.”

Through the years, others had met the same fate at Evgeny’s own hand. How dare he mourn now. But how could he not? These innocent peasants had died for no other reason than their tenuous kinship with him. A solitary spy, Evgeny had long since severed the distant and fragile ties to family, to spare himself and them any harmful entanglements.

Fedorovsky had ordered their execution even from prison, Evgeny was certain. His late mother’s brother and his two sons, the last of his family, had scraped a bare living from the soil with no hope of improving their lot. Evgeny was certain they had never heard of Fedorovsky, never knew
of
the man’s raging quest to overtake their country. They wouldn’t have cared anyway. Their country could fail them no worse under his reign than at the hands of all the despots past.

“I am very sorry,” Viktor offered.

But Evgeny had already shifted from the hateful news to something within his control. Vengeance. “I must go,” he told Viktor as he rose from the chair.

“Where?”

“Someplace where Fedorovsky’s people will not look for me.” Evgeny hoisted his backpack to his shoulders. “His house.”

Chapter 2

T
he next night, Evgeny’s SUV slowed at the entrance to Vadim Fedorovsky’s country home, about eighty miles from Moscow. He was grateful to find no fresh blanket of snow as in the city, no untouched canvas for him to imprint with telltale proof of his visit. With headlights extinguished and guided by a waning moon, he shifted to four-wheel drive and turned into the rutted slush of the lane, certain his tracks would be largely indistinguishable from those already laid, some recently, judging from the clear tread marks. The patrols, no doubt.

He bounced along the lane toward the handsome old dacha, its rock walls and dark timbers visible through a skeletal troop of aspens. Its owner had been confined to a prison cell for just over a year. Evgeny feared prison wouldn’t hold Fedorovsky for long, though.

Evgeny had been here once before, when he was still a loyal soldier of the anarchy spawned along the back corridors of the Kremlin under the breeding hand of veteran intelligence officers Vadim Fedorovsky and Pavel Andreyev. The home had been the movement’s outpost, a safe house whose secrets were kept in files Evgeny had only glimpsed during that one prior visit to these woods. Surely they had been removed by those who’d arrested Fedorovsky for the attempted assassination of the president and other crimes against the state. But Evgeny would conduct his own search.

Despite the fine sleet plinking against his windshield, he stopped the vehicle and lowered his window to listen. The night was still. He raised the window and moved on toward the house.

Because Fedorovsky’s loyals believed Viktor Petrov was still one of them, Evgeny’s old friend had gained limited access to a bank of communications between operatives within the secret movement, enough to determine their watch on the incarcerated leader’s Moscow apartment and his dacha.

Evgeny hoped the information Viktor had gathered was correct. Patrols checked the house twice a week but according to no discernible schedule. He knew the risk of being here, but there had to be something inside to lead Evgeny to this phantom Architect, the one who killed, not championed, the people—Evgeny’s people, his pitiable fringe of family and all the others who’d toiled under oppression.

When he finally rolled to a stop behind the house, Evgeny pulled the gun from his pocket and pat-checked the bulk of ammunition still inside. Then he strapped on the critical backpack with its tools, falsified passports and identification, currencies, backup weapons, and trace-secure phones. When he got out, he didn’t close the door, didn’t move, only listened and watched. Then making his way slowly through the trees, he reached the back door of the house.

He stopped abruptly. Where was his plan of escape? Viktor was right. His wits had dulled during the last year of dormancy. He turned toward the distant logging trail Fedorovsky had once pointed out to him, then headed back to his vehicle.

Fifteen minutes later, he had moved the SUV a short way down the trail and into an overhang of wild brush, camouflaging it further with branches stripped from young trees. He doubted such a move was necessary, especially on such a brutally cold night when even Fedorovsky’s most devoted security guards would surely prefer to turn over beneath their down comforters and go back to sleep.

He returned through the ice-crusted field and glanced up at the slope rising behind the house. About fifteen yards up a rocky path was a storm shelter Fedorovsky had built into the bank. He sneered.
Imagine, the executioner of innocent peasants afraid of the weather
.

It took little time for the veteran spy to disengage the security and locking systems on the house. When he slipped inside, he was glad to see the drapes drawn and to feel even a minimal discharge of musty heat. He switched to a flashlight capped with red tape to filter the light. The crimson glow was enough to lead him through the house, though he knew already where he would begin his search.

For what, he didn’t know.

On his way through the opulently furnished dining and living rooms, he allowed only passing notice of the late Mrs. Fedorovsky’s penchant for ruby glassware, embroidered table scarves, and expensive samovars ringed by porcelain tea cups fit for royalty. But the grand piano beside one window made him pause and remember.

Fedorovsky had been a music professor at the Moscow Conservatory, beloved by students and faculty alike, none of whom knew of his simultaneous, subterranean career as a KGB spy and Kremlin power broker. For many years, Fedorovsky had worked in tandem with his American counterpart, Harvard music professor Schell Devoe.

Evgeny flashed back to the afternoon when, at Fedorovsky’s orders, he pumped three bullets into Devoe after the CIA had turned him to work for them—an execution witnessed by Liesl Bower. He closed his eyes and saw her face, heard her scream. He would never forget. Now, he gazed at the graceful lines of the instrument that sounded with such beauty and purity. How had Fedorovsky compromised such a thing with the instruments of death?

Quickly dismissing the troubling muse, he shifted toward the study off the living room and moved to a heavily carved walnut desk. He found its two file drawers empty, as he’d feared, then looked around the room. Only a couple of lounge chairs and a bookcase crammed with little more than pulp fiction filled the cozy room. Just then, Evgeny remembered the bedroom at the end of the upstairs hall. Fedorovsky had converted it to a workshop for his and his wife’s jigsaw puzzles, a favorite winter pastime. But it also held two more file cabinets, one with a collection of photographs. In that room, Fedorovsky had given Evgeny photos of Liesl Bower, after ordering him to capture and later dispose of her—an
assignment
Evgeny was grateful he had failed. It was the code Liesl had found hidden in her music, left there by her professor, Schell Devoe, that led to Fedorovsky’s and Andreyev’s arrests.

Taking the steps two at a time, Evgeny entered the workroom and headed straight for the cabinets. Empty. He closed the drawers and wandered back down the hall, pausing at the top of the stairs. His gaze fell on the piano below, and something sent him bounding down the steps. When he reached the fine ebony instrument, he laid the flashlight down, lifted the heavy curved lid, and affixed the support. Retrieving the light, he searched the stringed cavity beneath. Nothing. He squatted before the low music cabinet alongside. Nothing on top or inside it. The arresting officers had swept the house clean of evidence.

Evgeny slumped to a sitting position. He looked up at the window holding back the night and pondered his next move. Would he have to wait for whatever shreds of information Viktor might stumble upon next? Waiting didn’t come naturally to Evgeny, but neither did charging blindly down dead ends. The need to charge somewhere, though, was overwhelming. They had killed his family. They had lied to those like him who’d sacrificed themselves for the good of the cause, the redemption of Mother Russia. They had promised to raise her up from ashes and restore her honor, her reach, her benevolence toward her people. But they had disguised their one true motive—power and riches for themselves. And now Evgeny knew it had all come down from one man.
Who is he?

Evgeny rolled back his head and sighed, his eyes resting on the nearest leg of the piano. He ran a hand along its rise to the underside of the instrument. And there it was.

He grabbed the flashlight and rolled beneath the piano. Taped into an upward crevice between two wooden supports was a white, legal-sized envelope. Evgeny stared at it. What peculiar prompting had led him to such a hiding place?

But as he reached for the envelope, he heard sounds. First the whine of an engine, then the slogging of tires along the ice-packed lane. Not a second to waste.

He grabbed the envelope and scrambled to his feet, taking one instant
to
peer around the drape. A truck was bearing down on the house. Evgeny flew to the back door, knowing there was no time to reinstate the alarm and locks. He had only moments to close the door and race for the tree line behind the house. To the storm shelter. How ironic that Fedorovsky’s fears might save his enemy.

Not daring to turn on even the red-filtered flashlight, Evgeny searched through only a dappling of moonlight for the entrance to the shelter, which surely was overgrown by now. He slipped on ice and fell hard against a rock, but righted himself instantly and kept hunting until something glinted through a drape of vines just ahead. A metal door. And again, the sense that something had prompted him to hide his vehicle, to look beneath the piano, to find a covered door in the dark.

He parted the lattice of vines and branches and felt for the latch, which gave instantly in his hand. With no thought of what might lurk inside, he threw open the door, stepped onto the uneven floor boards of the tiny space, pulled as much of the leafy screen back over the door as he could, and closed himself in.

Two truck doors opened and closed. Evgeny guessed the guards would scan the grounds before going inside. Five minutes tops, he estimated, before they discovered the break-in.

But it was only three.

One man yelled. Another answered, and running footsteps ensued. The unsecured back door slammed, and Evgeny imagined their tense search inside. But they would find nothing left behind by an intruder, and nothing obvious removed. They would alert a superior, then begin their search of the nearby woods. If they were good, they would find his tracks through the open field, but maybe not up the rocky hillside.

How long could he remain in the shelter meant only for passing storms? No storm in Evgeny’s life had ever passed quickly.

Moments later, he heard two voices trail from the house into the field leading to the logging trail and his SUV. The loss of one escape route now led to a new one.

He eased open the door of the shelter and looked down the hill. The guards’ truck stood in a beacon of moonlight, as if it were a summons for
Evgeny
to run, and run now! Looking toward the field, now washed in the same lunar light, he saw the men disappear into the trees along the trail. Evgeny mostly slid down the hill and raced to the truck, flinging open its door and finding, against the odds, the keys still in the ignition. The sweat of his scalp tingled beneath his hood.
Such good fortune doesn’t come to me. Why now?

The truck roared to life and spun furiously away from the house, lights blazing the way. It didn’t matter that they saw him now. In moments, they would no longer, as if he’d never been there. He slipped a hand inside his coat and felt the envelope safe in an inside pocket. No time to explore its contents now. They’d be looking for this vehicle. He had to make a switch soon.

A half hour later, he sped along the highway back to Moscow at the wheel of a small car he’d acquired in his usual way, this one parked behind a village tavern not far from the dacha. Soon, he pulled into a small town and behind a cluster of shops that wouldn’t open for a few hours. When he cut the engine, he finally pulled the envelope from his coat. Inside were a single sheet of folded paper and one unredeemed airline ticket to New York. Evgeny set the ticket aside and examined the short letter, written in a feminine hand. It was dated September 2011, just a few weeks before Fedorovsky’s arrest.