The Asset (21 page)

“Do you have something for me?”

Trudeau looked at Laika, who nodded impatiently.

“Yes.”

“Don't be shy.”

Trudeau opened his jacket slowly and unbuttoned his shirt. He was wearing a vest that resembled body armor. The men in the room perked up and fondled their holstered weapons. Trudeau released the front of the vest from four side clips and handed it to Laika, who examined the pouches stuffed with stacks of hundreds. Trudeau removed the back of the vest and two long packets taped to his legs, also full of cash. After a few minutes of counting, Laika nodded and the boss smiled.

“Party time.” Laika laughed heartily. “I'm so glad I don't have to cut you up into little pieces and feed you to the wolves.”

“Me too,” Trudeau said, forcing a chuckle.

Drinks were already flowing, but Trudeau insisted, before imbibing, on seeing the goods he had just purchased. Laika and his men drove him to one of the warehouses on the compound. Trudeau was photographing everything with minuscule cameras mounted on his eyeglasses, watch, and pinky ring. The photos were being automatically uploaded to a satellite, which was completely reconstructing the compound from the photo data and beaming it back to Langley. They arrived at an even larger warehouse, filled with an arsenal of modern military weapons, and Laika showed him the Buk missile launchers he had supposedly just purchased.

“Good quality,” Trudeau commented, impressed.

“These are the same ones we use in the field. We don't sell surplus here.”

“When will they ship?”

“They go on the truck tomorrow and tanker in two days,” Laika said. “We can have them to your deployment zone within the week.”

“Excellent. Now how about that drink?”

By the time they sat down to dinner, Langley had a satellite scanning infrared heat signatures of the entire compound. Trudeau politely dined on the excellent fare the chef was offering but drank moderately. Laika and the rest of the men guzzled staggering amounts of vodka. When they were all passed out or mumbling incoherently to themselves, the boss wandered off with three twenty-something escorts, one of whom was the Russian field agent assigned to support Trudeau. That was Trudeau's cue to retire to his own sleeping quarters.

An hour or so later, as the boss was enjoying the company of the escorts, plus a mountain of cocaine, the Russian agent rendered the other two hookers unconscious with sedative-laced champagne and dosed the boss with a fentanyl buccal tablet disguised as Viagra. The fentanyl immediately incapacitated him but didn't knock him out. He was in a state of anesthetic paralysis, his muscles unable to communicate with his nervous system. He tried to speak but only drooled on his pillow and rolled his eyes in panic. That was when Trudeau walked in carrying a black case.

“I thought I'd drop in for a nightcap,” Trudeau said.

He sat on the bed next to the boss while the Russian agent opened the black case, revealing some nasty-looking torture implements.

“What she's given you is a surgical anesthetic,” Trudeau said. “That's why you can't move or speak. However, I assure you that you can still feel pain.”

He took a sharp steel awl and jabbed it under the boss's toenail, all the way to the cuticle. The boss's eyes rolled violently and his tongue flicked like a snake's as he tried in vain to scream.

“You see what I mean? Now, imagine what it would be like for me to cut your balls off with this.”

Trudeau held a pair of rusty wire cutters in front of the boss's face.

“It would be very time-consuming, scissoring into your tender scrotum with this blunt pruning tool—which I would have to superheat in your fireplace in order to cauterize the wound while I cut. All the while you
would be completely powerless to do anything. You wouldn't even be able to scream. So, tell me, are we going to be friends?”

The boss tried desperately to nod his head but only ended up rolling his eyes wildly, like a mental patient.

“I'll take that as a yes. Friends share secrets and I know you have a big one you need to get off your chest. In thirty seconds or so, you'll be able to speak. It will only be a whisper, but I'll get very close to you, like a friend, to listen. And you're going to tell me everything I want to know, yes?”

“Y-yes,” the boss whispered.

“Good,” Trudeau said.

The Russian CIA asset brought over the boss's laptop.

“I know you don't keep transactions on your laptop. So, I'd like you to share with us the log-in information for your Dark Net accounts. No doubt what we need is there.”

The boss shook his head as much as he could. Clearly, there was a lot more at stake in giving Trudeau that kind of access.

“Are you saying no?”

“Can't do that,” the boss whispered.

“Too bad. And I thought we were friends.”

Trudeau clipped off the end of the boss's pinky finger. Blood spurted out. The Russian agent wrapped the wound tightly with the boss's satin robe sash to slow the bleeding. The boss looked like he was going to have an aneurism. He was trying to scream, but only a breathy whisper sound was coming out. His eyes were twitching and his tongue rolling. Trudeau threw champagne in his face to snap him out of it.

“You seem like a man who refuses to believe in the inevitability of a foregone conclusion.”

Trudeau held up the bloody wire cutters.

“Is this conclusive enough for you?”

The boss nodded and gave over his Dark Net password. Trudeau logged in and simultaneously sent the access information to Langley. Things were far worse than he had ever imagined. The Russians had recently sold twenty-­five Cold War–era Russian RA-115s—miniaturized tactical nuclear weapons called “suitcase nukes” because they weighed fifty to sixty pounds and could easily be transported in a suitcase or backpack. Each of them had the firepower of roughly ten kilotons of TNT. The
“Little Boy” atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a fifteen-kiloton blast yield.

There was an old CIA bedtime story about how the Soviets developed the Little Boys to be deployed by a network of KGB sleeper spies embedded in different cities in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s. Based on the transaction dates and the number of weapons, it appeared Lentz might be about to make that nightmare come true.

A
lia had anticipated that Trudeau might discover nukes, and that kind of intel came with strict protocols. She had reminded him that whatever he found was for her eyes only—she'd then be required to report it to the director, who would have to brief the president. After that, Alia would be given her marching orders and the fate of Red Carpet would be decided. Trudeau figured the Department of Defense would take over at that point, and the whole thing would be handed over to military intelligence.

The problem was, Trudeau didn't trust people like Alia and he certainly wasn't going to allow the fate of the world to rest in her hands. He had been a part of the team of weapons experts who helped to debunk the WMD claims by the Bush administration that had been the impetus for the Iraq war. He learned from that, and from many other painful experiences like it, that the suits who made the decisions at Langley might as well be lobbyists, for all the politicking they did. They were beholden to committees run by elected officials who only cared about getting reelected. And those men and women hated how difficult it was to manipulate the complex information gathered by the CIA and distill it into a message that could sound-byte the American people into agreeing to catastrophic global actions.

So Trudeau sent the intel to Juarez and Kennedy as well, letting them know he'd broken protocol to do so. If Alia was going to start tap-dancing around the truth, Juarez was the one person with the balls and authority to do what needed to be done. And if something happened to him and Juarez, which was a strong possibility, considering the danger they were going to be in after pulling the Norilsk job, at least Kennedy would have the intel. Trudeau thought that making Kennedy an asset and team leader was idiotic, but he could tell the man was an idealist, someone who cared more for the safety of total strangers than he did for himself. If everything went sideways, he felt sure that Kennedy would put his neck on the block to stop Lentz.

After all of the Dark Net files were uploaded to Langley, the Russian agent gave the boss a lethal dose of fentanyl. Next, the two of them assembled an explosive device consisting of several “romantic aids” she'd brought to the party and easily slipped past the lascivious guards. The sex toys were made of enough Semtex plastic explosive to annihilate a city block and had built-in detonators the agent controlled with her wireless phone. She activated the connection between the phone and bombs and the two of them slipped out of the compound unnoticed.

As they sped away in a mining truck the Russian agent had stolen for a cover vehicle, she detonated the charges in the boss's boudoir. The blast set off a chain reaction and the heavy ordnance at the compound exploded as well, shaking the city like a small earthquake. The subsequent fire burned the entire compound to the ground.

The Russian agent dropped Trudeau back at Alykel Airport at dawn with a duffel bag and drove the stolen truck to a vacant lot, where she torched it. In the airport terminal, Trudeau locked himself in a bathroom stall and pulled fresh clothes, a new passport, credit cards, cash, a white plastic jug, and a large, rough sponge from the duffel bag. Trudeau stripped, soaked the sponge in the liquid from the jug, and scrubbed himself with it for half an hour. It was a solvent that neutralized any of the Semtex molecules that might still be on his body. The last thing he needed, after one of the biggest “chemical explosions” in the history of Norilsk, was to fail a random test for explosive materials at the screening checkpoint.

When his skin was raw and burning, he put on his new clothes and headed back into the terminal to check in for his flight, but the woman working the ticket counter told him it was canceled due to weather. Trudeau's heart sank. In most places, a winter storm is no big deal. You get a few inches of snow; flights are held up for a few hours, one day max. In Norilsk, a winter storm pummels the city with several feet of snow, hurricane-­force winds, and temperatures plunging south of negative fifty, making it possible for flights to be canceled for several days.

Trudeau was in a very dangerous position. The longer he stayed there, the more likely the Russian military would connect him to the massacred arms dealers. Even though Trudeau's travel cover as a Norwegian oil and gas exec had flawlessly gotten him through Russian customs, it wouldn't be that difficult for them to analyze recent passenger manifests from the handful of flights that had come in and treat him as a person of interest. Additionally, the Russian mob would be looking for someone to skin for destroying millions of dollars' worth of black market military stock. The airport was not safe. Going to a hotel was out of the question, as hotels meant passports, credit cards, and security cameras, all of which created a trail of digital bread crumbs. Trudeau checked to see if he could catch any of the last flights heading anywhere before the airport shut down, but there was nothing.

He had no choice but to contact Juarez for an extraction. This was also a dangerous option due to the conspicuous nature of private aircraft, but at least he would have Juarez and a support team if they had to shoot their way out. Trudeau found a quiet place and dialed Juarez on his satellite phone. It didn't even ring. Then he heard the worst thing imaginable: “Satellite signal temporarily interrupted.”

Ach, putain de merde
.

He kept his cool—until he saw two Russian soldiers with a dog patrolling the airport, randomly checking passports. He had to get out of there, so he went outside into the mind-numbing cold. He broke protocol and texted his support agent, hoping against hope that she could come back and get him the fuck out of there. The weather was going from bad to worse. Buses were nonexistent, but he could see the lights of a few taxicabs clustered in a parking lot on the outskirts of the airport. His only choice was to hoof it out there and hope one of them would take him to
a cash-only flophouse in town to hole up until his sat service came back. Even then it could take as long as eighteen hours for Juarez to get to him once he made contact. The subzero wind reminded him he'd better find something soon or Juarez would be extracting what was left of him in the spring thaw.