The Kremlin Phoenix (12 page)

* * * *

Present Day

“The American intelligence agencies
have always known about it,” Valentina said. “Before the collapse, the Soviet
Union kidnapped dozens of senior Allied pilots – mostly American –  shot down
in every war since Korea, to learn about allied air power. Your father was the
only pilot post-Soviet Russia kidnapped, because he was unique. He was a
stealth pilot, the most valuable pilot ever captured.”

“How could they do it, without us
hearing about it?” Craig said, scarcely able to believe her farfetched story.

“No government would risk nuclear
war for a handful of pilots.” She shrugged. “They were expendable.”

“How do you know this?”

“We were investigating your
employer, Goldstein, McCormack and Powell. We did extensive background checks
on everyone who worked for them, looking for a way to recruit someone on the
inside . . . it was an accident we found your name in an Interior Ministry database.”

“My name?” Craig said surprised.

“You were listed as the son of an
occupant of an Interior Ministry facility. Upon admission, bureaucrats
routinely recorded the names of the occupants’ wives and their children, their
dates and places of birth. They’d been doing it for decades for Russian
detainees. They simply followed the same procedure for your father. Yegor Demidoff
was our lead investigator. He found your father’s case had been closed for
years. The dossier was stored in an old archive, inactive and forgotten. He bribed
a certain individual to see the file one night. No written notes, no copies
were allowed, however, Yegor was able to steal just one photo of your father.
It’s the only proof we have.”

“I want to see that dossier.”

She smiled incredulously. “That’s
impossible!”

“Make it possible. You have enough
money now to bribe a thousand informants. Get me a copy.”

“Some things are better left in
the shadows,” Valentina said. “It would not be in the interests of either of
our countries for that dossier ever to be released. Besides, I don’t know who
the informant is.”

“Someone must know.”

“Only Yegor knew who the
informant was, to protect him.” She hesitated, then added. “There have been
leaks. Either my organization is being watched, or there is a spy among us.”

“A double agent?”

She shrugged fatalistically. “It
is Russia. It is our way. It is why I cannot help you.”

Craig fell silent for a moment,
then asked, “Is my father still alive?”

“All I know is, he was taken to
Russia for interrogation because of his knowledge of American stealth
technology. If Yegor were still alive, he could tell you more.” Valentina
reached out and touched Craig’s hand sympathetically. “After all this time, he
must be dead. All of them must be.”

“Demidoff said my father was a
traitor. What did he mean?”

“He said that to control you.”

“But is it true?”

Valentina withdrew her hand. “No
one can resist torture forever, and you must understand, Russia and China are
desperate to catch up with America’s stealth technology. Your father and his aircraft
were a gift from the sky. They were never going to let him go. He would have
told them everything he knew – eventually.”

“I want proof he’s dead,” Craig
said, suppressing his anger.

“There is none.”

“We made a deal. Until you prove
he’s dead, you haven’t lived up to your part of the bargain.”

“I’ve done all I can,” she said
simply.

“Your country has a history of locking
political prisoners away for decades. Why not a prisoner of war? My old man was
a survivor. Unless they murdered him, he’s still alive.”

“Your father is dead,” she said,
then nodded to Fenenko. Again, the other men held Craig down while Fenenko searched
his clothes, finding the photo of Colonel Balard in Craig’s wallet.

“What are you doing?” Craig
demanded. “That’s mine.”

“No it isn’t” Valentina said. “It
doesn’t exist. You can’t tell this story to anyone, and if you do, you have no
proof.” She stood up, indicating their business was concluded.

“This is not over!” Craig yelled,
starting to rise, then Fenenko cracked the butt of his gun over Craig’s head, knocking
him out.

“You didn’t need to do that!”
Valentina said angrily.

“It’s better this way!” Fenenko
said, pulling the hood over Craig’s head.

Several of the men helped Fenenko
carry Craig to the car, then they drove him back to London. Almost two hours
later, Fenenko stopped the car on Edgeware Road and removed Craig’s hood. “Cricklewood
station is that way,” he said pointing, then pushed Craig out of the car and
drove off.

Craig started toward the station,
but soon waved down a cab.

“Where to chum?” The cabby asked
as Craig climbed in.

“You know any good Swiss banks?”
No American bank would do, not for what he had in mind. He now had a purpose,
driven by a simmering anger that would not easily be quenched.

The cabbie shrugged. “Sure, but
they won’t be open this time of day.” Craig glanced out the window, seeing the
first signs of dawn beginning to appear in the sky.

“Take me to the biggest Swiss
bank. I’ll wait until it opens.”

The cabbie raised his eyebrows,
then turned back to the wheel. “Right you are, Guv’ner.”

* * * *

“It was close,” Detective Woods said
as Nikki regained consciousness, “but you’re going to be all right.”

Pain drummed relentlessly through her
head, easily the worst hangover of her life. She was in a private hospital room
and her face was covered in fresh bandages. Outside, two armed police officers
guarded her twenty four hours a day.

“My . . . face?” she stammered,
too weak to raise her hand.

“You’ve got a few broken bones and
a couple of beautiful black eyes, but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed,” Woods
assured her. “The doctor said in a couple of months you’ll be as good as new.”

Tears formed in her eyes. “Craig?”
Her voice was barely audible.

“Did you tell the man who did
this, where Craig went?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got him under
surveillance in London. We know he’s innocent.”

“You do?”

“It’s a long story. Are you OK to
talk?”

She nodded weakly.

“Can you tell me why he’s gone to
London?”

“He’s . . . looking . . . for his
father,” she said, surprised at the effort needed to speak.

“His father?”

A white coated doctor appeared
beside Nikki’s bed. “Detective! I told you, she needs rest!”

Nikki closed her eyes and drifted
back to sleep, only vaguely aware of Detective Woods’ voice speaking to her from
a great distance.

“Why is he looking for his
father?”

* * * *

Sergeivich Moroshkin parked his white
Fiat in front of the country house shortly before sunset. A financial expert,
he was a member of Valentina’s SK unit who was working undercover at the
Russian embassy as part of an economic delegation, although it had already been
noticed that he was more interested in embassy affairs than economic relations
with Great Britain.

“Welcome Sergeivich,” Valentina
greeted him as he entered the house, “We were beginning to worry.”

“They’re watching me. I couldn’t
get away from the Embassy last night without arousing suspicion.”

“Why would they suspect you?”

“Someone inside SK must have told
them what I’m really doing.”

Valentina fell silent, wondering
who would betray them. Their unit was a relatively small, tight knit group. “I can’t
believe we have a traitor.”

“I’m finding it difficult to
believe we don’t have one,” Moroshkin said meaningfully.

She showed him into the sitting room.
A new personal computer sat on the table beside a shrink wrapped box full of
computer software. Moroshkin quickly loaded and configured the software.

When he was finished, he said, “I’m
ready. Where are the codes?”

Valentina handed him the MLI
master list she’d taken from Craig.

“This is
a great day for our people!” Moroshkin exclaimed enthusiastically. As soon as
he tried to access the first London account, a message suddenly flashed across
the screen.

ACCESS
DENIED!

“What
happened?” Valentina asked surprised.

“I must
have made a mistake,” Moroshkin said uncertainly.

He carefully
re-entered the account number and security code, with Valentina double checking
every keystroke over his shoulder. When he tried to execute a transaction, he
was greeted by the same message.

ACCESS
DENIED!

Moroshkin
scowled. He tried another account and password combination. The computer
connected to another bank’s central computer.

ACCESS
DENIED!

With
growing unease, he tried several more accounts.

ACCESS
DENIED! . . . ACCESS DENIED! . . . ACCESS DENIED!

“These
are the wrong codes!” Moroshkin declared angrily, waving the sheet of paper at
Valentina. “You’ve been tricked!”

* * * *

In the
basement of the Russian Federation Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens,
computers from the Special Communications and Information Service – the
Spetssvyaz – had been scanning police radio signals for a day and a half, ever
since they’d received a high priority order from Moscow to search for the key
word – Balard. Late that afternoon, receivers on the Embassy roof, and at the
Ambassador’s residence, intercepted a routine radio transmission from
Metropolitan Police detectives answering a query from New Scotland Yard’s
headquarters at the Broadway: they reported there’d been no sign of Balard
since he’d checked in to the hotel the day before.

The
Spetssvyaz computers automatically triangulated the source of the broadcast to
a quiet street in Norfolk Garden. A few minutes later, signals intelligence
analysts in Moscow determined there was only one hotel within visual range of
the radio transmission point, and forwarded the intercept, the hotel name and the
address to a secret group in GRU headquarters at Khodinka, Moscow.

Minutes
later, a text message appeared on Nogorev’s phone advising him of the address
of what was now his primary target. Nogorev knew it would be a simple matter to
use the hotel register to determine which room Craig Balard occupied.

January 14, 2278

“I don’t understand what went
wrong!” Mariena said. “We know Craig Balard got our last message, because he wasn’t
killed in New York.”

“And our sensors detected the
timeline reset!” Zikky added.

“Maybe he kept the money and ran?”
Wilkins suggested.

“But he went to London to meet
Valentina Petrovna,” Mariena said, nodding to several wall panels. One displayed
Craig’s English death notice, the other a passage from Prime Minister
Gundarovsky’s autobiography detailing Valentina’s failed mission in London, a
passage that had not existed before the last timeline reset.

“Whether he was killed in New
York or London, we’re screwed either way!” Zikky said disconsolately.

“Someone got to him, before he could
give the master list to Valentina Petrovna,” Dr Mariena Del Rey said thoughtfully
as she gazed through the floor to ceiling pressure window at the dead Earth one
and a half million kilometers away. The planet was shrouded in swirling black
clouds and perfectly haloed by the sun, one hundred and fifty million
kilometers further on. The light sensors in the window filtered out the
blinding harshness of the sun’s light encircling the Earth, while the bright
solar halo emphasized what a freezing, radioactive cinder Earth had become, now
enveloped by a choking, ash filled atmosphere incapable of supporting even single
cell organisms.

“But you don’t know how he died,
or why,” Wilkins said, “so we’re flying blind.”

“That’s true,” Mariena conceded
as she turned back towards them. “That’s why we have to find a way to let him
speak to us.”

“That’s impossible!” Zikky said.
“The tachyon array can only send signals into the past, and even if it could
send signals forward in time, there’s no way 21
^st
century technology
could build one.”

Mariena shook her head. “That’s
not what I mean. It’s much easier to send a signal forward in time, than
backwards. We’re already doing the hard part.” As Chief Science Officer of the
Solar
Explorer III
, she understood the tachyon based communications technology
better than any of them.