The Cold Edge (26 page)

“I hope your man knows where he's going,” Jake yelled into Petrova's ear.

Petrova smiled. “He not only know this lake. He has the best GPS navigation available.”

“Where are we going?”

The Russian raised his brows in delight. “I see you noticed your backpack. My men found it and search it completely. They found this.” Petrova removed a gem from his pocket and delicately opened his fingers, making sure the wind did not send the Alexandrite flying. “You should have looked more carefully.” He laughed and put the gem back in his pocket.

“They are beautiful,” Jake said.

“We found the bullet hole in your backpack. You must have been carrying the metal box inside.”

Jake wasn't sure of his point, so he said nothing.

Petrova continued. “You asked me where we're going. To get what's mine.”

“You don't know where we're going,” Jake said, “but we're making damn good progress.”

“Right. That, and we're getting away from your friends.”

“What do you mean?”

The boat slowed somewhat, as if the pilot was preparing to maneuver around something.

Petrova studied Jake's eyes, obviously trying to read him. “You probably don't know. Your friends just raided my estate. Although I don't know why. Perhaps they think I'm trying to acquire a deadly Soviet-era flu virus to unleash on the world. I have no idea where they get their intel. They're often wrong these days.”

Now Jake smiled. “You're the master of deception, Victor. While still playing KGB, you orchestrate this elaborate plan within a plan. You pretend as though a cabal in the Soviet government is trying to turn back the clock, away from the Gorbachav reforms, by an assassination attempt during the Reykjavik Summit. In the process you implicate a bunch of your political enemies, who end up magically disappearing. Then you feed the Americans a bullshit story about a MiG pilot trying to defect and who subsequently crashes in the remote Norwegian islands. You send your hand-picked team to find the crash site to extricate the metal box from the MiG. You probably told your men that it was a deadly biological weapon, since you had stamped the box with biohazard. Let me know when I get something wrong.”

Petrova simply stared ahead, not looking at Jake.

He continued. “You didn't have a great fix on the location of the MiG crash site, though. Your men did find it, but they could not relay the location back to you. That had to drive you crazy. Horseshit communications of the late 80s. Let me back up. You also leaked the crash to the Americans, hoping they would send a crew to Svalbard also, which we did. You wanted the Americans to eventually find the site so they could independently verify the plot. You expected your men to get there first and take the bogus biohazard box back to you. But I checked on your whereabouts during that timeframe. You weren't even in Russia. Your diplomatic passport had you in Oslo at the time. You were waiting for your men to show up in Oslo with the box, which you would have taken from them and started fencing. I'm guessing you would have also killed these men to keep them quiet. But you had a problem.” Jake stopped to look for a reaction. Nothing. The guy was a rock.

“Yes,” Petrova said. “What was my problem?”

“You didn't expect the Americans to shoot it out with your men. You didn't expect all of them to die on Spitsbergen. You didn't calculate the climate. Snow cover was at a low point in history. Immediately following the crash, though, and the area got more and more snow and ice, completely covering the MiG, your dead men, and your precious gems. You redirected satellites at that time to try to find the crash. No luck. You even sent other teams looking for the crash site in nineteen ninety-two and again just before you left the KGB. Nothing. The Soviets abandoned their settlement in Pyramiden on Svalbard, but the Russians recently re-established the mining operation there. Which was fortuitous, considering the more recent summer they've had in Svalbard. The glacial range has melted this year even lower than it had been in the late eighties. When one of the Russian miners found the crash site, you got wind of it and set your plan in motion.”

The boat picked up speed again. The fog was not as thick in this area, so Jake could see the shore on both sides of them. Headlights from cars slowly crept along a highway on the right side—the road he had traveled from Hamar.

“Where are we going?” Jake asked again.

“To get my gems,” Petrova answered.

“How do you know I didn't leave them at my hotel in Lillehammer?”

Petrova shook his head. “My men already checked. They also checked the car you stole in Sweden.”

Great. They had found that. Not completely unexpected, though.

“You going to finish your little yarn?” Petrova asked.

“Just about through. This brings me to me. I kept on asking myself why you would send me to Svalbard to find this box. Of course you first picked Colonel Reed, knowing the two of us had a personal relationship that wouldn't allow me to say no to him. You used the colonel to get me. You already knew that I knew the man who had died on Svalbard, because your men in Volgograd tortured me for two weeks, and one of the questions that kept coming up dealt with my relationship with Captain Steve Olson. That made no sense to me at the time, since Steve had taken a job in Oslo and died in a car crash. I should have known, but didn't, that the car crash story was a cover. So you could have beaten me to death I would have told you nothing else.”

“You can't blame a guy for trying,” Petrova said.

“Right. But, still. You could have sent your men to Svalbard.”

“Trust is a delicate balance to maintain. And I knew that I was under scrutiny from not only the Russian SVR, but the American Agency and the Swedish SAPO. Not to mention your girlfriend's Interpol and local police. I can't fart without someone testing the air quality. Besides, life gets quite boring if you can't fuck with people. You came to me one night in Stockholm while I sipped single malt and listened to
Don't Be Crue
l.”

Jake thought about that. Petrova had played on Jake's sense of duty. “You knew I'd find the biohazard box and would turn it over to the Agency. But then why send the helicopter to shoot us out of the sky.”

Petrova shook his head vehemently. “Those weren't my men. They were with Russian SVR.”

Christ. He had shot and killed agents with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. “Did the SVR think we had the flu virus or the Alexandrite.” He already knew the answer to this, but he had to ask anyway.

Petrova laughed. “The SVR couldn't find its own ass with both hands and two mirrors. They thought it was the virus, of course.”

“And the men on the train?”

Shrugging, Petrova said, “They were mine. We knew you had the gems by then. It just took us a while to track you down.”

Which is also why he knew where he was going, Jake guessed. “You still haven't told me where we're going.”

“Yes, I did. To get my Alexandrites. You dumped them somewhere between Falun, Sweden and Hamar, Norway. Now you will bring me to them.”

Okay, the guy wasn't an idiot. “That's a large area, Victor.”

One of the little men stood up for a better look, and Jake made his move. With one fluid motion, he rushed the man, grasped him by the collar and pants, and threw him overboard. The other men, dumbfounded, suddenly realized what had happened and pointed their guns at Jake.

“No,” Petrova yelled.

The boat slowed and turned to the left.

Jake looked back and saw the man bobbing up and down behind them, his tiny arms waving and his voice barely audible in the wind.

“What was the point of that?” Petrova asked Jake.

Moving back to the bench, Jake took a seat again. “It just looked like fun.” Really, he had gotten rid of one MP5 automatic submachine gun. He was sure the guy would have dropped the rifle to the bottom of the lake as soon as he hit the water.

“That was just cruel.”

“That means a lot coming from you, Victor.”

They picked up the wet little guard, without a rifle, and continued down the lake toward Hamar.

Toni Contardo had heard over the radio that Jake was probably with Victor Petrova and his men in the boat, somewhere in the fog ahead of them. But by then Petrova had gotten a good lead on them. They could have been miles ahead by now. Toni had made sure to tell Anna to redirect some assets along the road between Lillehammer and Hamar. That had angered the Interpol agent. She had already done that.

Now, with the fog lifting somewhat, the police officer driving the boat was able to pick up the pace. Yet they still had not even caught a glimpse of Petrova's boat. Sitting solemnly next to Toni, Colonel Reed shifted his head away from the wind and caught Toni staring at him.

“Jake will be fine,” the colonel said, barely above the sound of the motor and the swift breeze.

“Why did you get him involved in the first place?” Toni asked him. She thought she had already asked him this before, but her thoughts were clouded now by the task at hand—finding the little madman.

The colonel lowered his jaw and said, “Petrova suggested it. When he mentioned that our mutual friend Captain Olson had died there, I should have been suspicious. After all, how would he know that?”

That was easy to know. “The KGB had a file on all of our military attaches at each of our embassies—just like we have on them. When Captain Olson and CIA officer John Korkala suddenly no longer worked there, no cover story would have slipped past Victor Petrova. He knew our men had something to do with his own men not coming back from the Arctic.”

“Makes sense. Now that you spell it out for me. How we going to find Petrova now?”

They both heard the helicopter approaching from the north at a high rate of speed, and looked up as it buzzed past them fifty feet above the lake.

“That'll help,” Toni said.

●

They were cruising at maximum speed for the Bell 407 at that elevation, over a hundred forty miles per hour. Kjersti looked determined behind the stick. Anna, in the second front seat, turned to the cargo area and saw the two MI6 officers, Jimmy McLean and Velda Crane, strapped into benches, the tall Scotsman calm and cool and the little English woman, white knuckles, holding on for her life.

They had hurried back down the road to Lillehammer, the area still foggy, but Kjersti saying she could take off, clear the low ceiling, and pull back down once they got down the lake a ways. After all, the weather report had Hamar nearly clear and the fog thinning out the farther they got from Lillehammer. They could have taken more people on the flight, but Kjersti wanted her chopper as light as possible for maximum speed and maneuverability.

Anna had asked for the main highway between Hamar and Lillehammer to be closed, but the local police said that would take a while. It was almost forty miles between the two cities by road—longer by the lake—so it would take some time to clear the cars from that highway. She had also asked the police to set up on the main bridge crossing the lake, but the police had not been able to reach the bridge in time.

Through the headset, Anna said, “Would it be better to vector over the mountains and come at them from the other side?”

Kjersti thought for a moment, no certainty in her expression. “I don't know.”

“Victor Petrova could feel cornered, nothing to lose, and decide to kill Jake.”

“I don't think so. He wants those gems more than he wants Jake dead.”

Anna hoped so, but she still thought she was right. Why not come around and catch them off-guard? “Move to the east,” Anna ordered.

Instantly after Anna spoke, Kjersti banked hard left, the helicopter responding to her actions. As they approached the hills around the lake, she pulled back on the stick and they rose over the trees and hills. Once over the top, she banked to the right and continued south. From that position they could only catch periodic glimpses of the lake as they passed river valleys or lower humps in the hills.

The quick maneuvers put a lump in Anna's throat and she thought she might lose her lunch. But she was convinced they had done the right thing.

●

Jake checked his watch. They had traveled by boat for an hour now. Perhaps thirty miles at their rate. Moments ago, the driver slowed and pulled over to the east bank of the lake. A couple miles back they had passed under the main highway that ran from Hamar to Lillehammer, with Jake guessing they would have had at least a modest police presence on the bridge. But he had only seen a couple cars cruising along the highway as they passed under the bridge, none of them police types.

The boat slowed now and pulled into a small sheltered inlet. Ahead on the shore, Jake saw movement. Victor Petrova had men waiting there. They nudged the shore and two Swedish men, the remaining two that Jake had followed from Falun, including the man he had encountered on the train, held the boat as all but the driver and one of Petrova's men remained on the boat. The man Jake had thrown overboard. Seconds later, the boat was shoved off and it quickly made its way back out to the center of the lake at their original speed.

All of them trudged through the thick woods—no trail at all—until they came to a small dirt road where two identical Volvo sedans sat. They piled in, Jake ending up with the driver who would no longer drink Coke, he and Petrova in the back, and another little man with an MP5 in the front. The one with the blond spiked flat-top.

As they pulled away, Jake said to the driver, “I'm getting kind of thirsty. You wouldn't happen to have a Coke hanging around up there would you?”

The driver scowled at Jake in the rearview mirror. They all ignored Jake. Fine. They can't take a joke. But Jake guessed the Swede hadn't mentioned the incident on the train to anyone.

“You all seem to know where you're going,” Jake said. “Glad someone knows. I get all turned around on these back roads in foreign countries.”