The Solomon Effect (8 page)

Burrowing deep into her jacket, Tobie stepped off the flight
from Copenhagen into an icy Baltic wind and found herself staring into the muzzle of a machine gun.

A stony-faced circle of guards herded the flight’s passengers across the nearly deserted tarmac to an ugly Soviet-era terminal. A row of battered booths controlled the passage from the immigration hall to customs, but only one booth was manned. Waiting in the endless line with her bag clutched to her side, Tobie had plenty of time to watch the way the tall, thin guard was subjecting each passenger to a ruthless scrutiny.

Something was wrong.

Despite the frigid atmosphere of the room, she suddenly felt hot. CIA personnel were typically assigned to embassies, a position that conveniently provided them with diplomatic immunity. Intelligence personnel without diplomatic passports were said to be under “unofficial cover.” In this case, “unofficial” basically meant
exposed.

Without the immunity afforded by a diplomatic passport, Tobie was just an ordinary foreign national. And while the Cold War might be over, some things hadn’t really changed
in Russia. If the Russians knew or even suspected her connection to the CIA, she could disappear into a system that would treat her like—well, like the U.S. treated the guys they sent to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and a couple dozen other secret prisons scattered from Afghanistan to Rumania to Morocco. When the guard finally raised his head and called out, “Next,” Tobie jumped.

“Sdrasvytye,”
she said with a smile as she stepped up to the booth.

The guard stared at her passport, his dark bushy eyebrows drawing together in a frown. She expected him to say, “And what is the purpose of your visit?” But he didn’t say anything. His frown deepening, he swung away to peck at his computer’s keyboard.

“You will wait to one side,” he said, jerking his chin toward the cinderblock wall behind him.

Tobie stopped breathing. “Is there a problem?”

“You wait,” he told her, already motioning to the next person in line.

A stirring at the edge of the room drew her around. A barrel-chested man with short-cropped dark hair, full lips, and a crooked nose strode across the chipped linoleum floor, his face set in harsh lines as he walked up to her. He was casually dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans, but there was no doubt from the way everyone deferred to him that this was one seriously scary individual.

“Ensign October Guinness?” he snapped.

Ensign?
Holy shit. How did he know that? Tobie’s voice shook.
“Da.”

He said in Russian, “Come with me, please.”

Andrei Gorchakove had graduated from the Academy and joined the KGB in the dying days of the once-mighty Soviet empire.

Like most Russians, he remembered those chaotic years with bitterness and shame. Ironically, both the Americans and Osama bin Laden liked to take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Andrei himself thought the fault lay with the slow bleed of the Afghan War and the environmental disaster at Chernobyl. But whoever or whatever the cause, there was no denying that the breakup of the Soviet Union had brought terrible hardship to them all—or at least, to most of them.

Bereft of the ideology that had guided them for nearly a century, the Russian people had stumbled through a dark and terrible period as the millennium drew to a close. The state collapsed. Hordes of ruthless oligarchs calling themselves capitalists gobbled up the wealth of the country and brought a once-proud nation to her knees. KGB men like Andrei were forced to take jobs as bodyguards and day laborers, just to stay alive.

But they had a saying in Russia:
There’s no such thing as an ex-KGB man.
In the end, the men of the KGB decided they’d had enough. The oligarchs were thrown into prison, or fled to places like England and Israel. A new war against the Chechens united the people and fired them with patriotism; the downward slide into poverty and despair was brought to an end. Once again, Mother Russia was beginning to stand tall.

Now, thanks to the Americans’ own misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was the United States that was feeling the strains of overreach, while the revenues from soaring oil prices gushed into Russia’s coffers. There had been a time, Andrei knew, when the Americans had made the mistake of thinking that Russia was finished—that they could treat their erstwhile rival like a conquered nation. In that, they had erred. Andrei had no idea why they had sent this young woman, this Naval ensign, to Kaliningrad, now. But by the time he was finished with her, he would find out.

He ushered her into a frigid, windowless room with a steel table and one metal chair. Her checked bag lay open on the table, the clothes strewn across the metal surface.
“Pa-zhalista,”
he told her. “Sit down.”

She sat, her face ashen and drawn with fear, her gaze following him as he went to stand on the far side of the table. She was young, no more than twenty-five, dressed like most Americans in jeans and sports shoes, with a navy V-necked sweater pulled over a button-down shirt.

He tossed a file on the table before her. “I see you’re a linguist. You speak Russian, Arabic…many languages.”

She swallowed hard, but said nothing.

He pressed his palms flat on the tabletop and leaned into them. “We have computers, too, you know. And according to our records, you were given a psychological discharge from the Navy a year ago. Yet, this past summer, you were recalled to active duty and given a promotion to ensign. This is correct?”

“Y-yes.”

“Why?”

“You mean, why was I recalled?”

He nodded.

“I—” Her voice cracked. She swallowed and tried again. “I don’t think it’s a secret that the United States military has a hard time making their recruitment quotas these days. They needed me back.”

“Despite the fact they’d decided you’re crazy?”

Her eyes narrowed, and he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d hit a raw nerve. “I’m not crazy,” she said in a tight voice.

Andrei allowed a hint of a smile to touch his lips. He pushed away from the table to wander the room. “I ask myself, Why is this attractive young American woman traveling alone to Kaliningrad Oblast?”

He was aware of her watching him closely. She said, “You don’t get a lot of tourists?”

“Some. Mainly Germans who come to see the lost homes of their parents or grandparents, or to visit the beaches and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit. Tell me, Miss Guinness; are you German?”

She shook her head. “Irish. Among other things.”

He nodded. “Your father was Patrick Guinness?”

He saw the confusion in her eyes. Confusion and fear, as she wondered how he knew about her father. A decorated Vietnam vet, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Guinness had died when his daughter was still in kindergarten. Andrei suspected he knew more about what had happened to her father than she did.

She swallowed again. “Yes.”

“You are to meet someone here?”

The sudden shift in topic obviously disconcerted her. She hesitated, uncertain how to answer. Despite the frigid temperature of the room, he saw a sheen of perspiration form near her hairline.

He said, “There is another American arriving this morning on a flight from Berlin. A man calling himself Jason Aldrich. You wouldn’t know him by any chance, would you?”

Her eyes widened, but she said nothing. As he watched, a bead of sweat rolled slowly down the side of her face. She had dark brown eyes and honey-colored hair. An unusual combination—especially for someone who claimed to be Irish.

Andrei leaned his shoulders against the wall, his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his black designer jeans. “You’re not very well trained, are you?”

“I’m a linguist.”

The sound of the door opening behind her jerked her head around. A man walked into the room, flanked by two armed
soldiers. Just above medium height and leanly built, he wore a pullover cashmere sweater and a black leather jacket that had the effect of making him look European rather than American. But then, that was one of the things they taught you in spy school—how to blend in with the natives.

He drew up just inside the doorway, his expression inscrutable as he gazed first at the woman, then at Andrei. “Jesus Christ,” said Jax, smoothing the cuffs of his jacket as the soldiers stepped back. “What the hell is going on here, Andrei? The Cold War is supposed to be over.”

Rodriguez was at the Kaliningrad airport when the call came through from Borz Zakaev.

“We may have something. Last night, at a village near Ayvazovskaya, a kid matching Stefan Baklanov’s description stole some clothes. A militiaman chased him, then lost him in the woods.”

Rodriguez shoved a stick of gum in his mouth and watched as a baldheaded Dane pushed open the battered doors from the Customs and Immigration hall. “Where is this Ayvazovskaya?”

“Southeast of Kaliningrad.”

“Could be him.” Rodriguez glanced at his watch. The passengers on the Aeroflot flight from Berlin would be coming out at any moment. He said, “We should be done here soon. Let me know when you have something positive. Once we get the little shit, all we need is the U-boat’s big boom, and we’re outta here.”

Borz gave one of his deep laughs. “You don’t like Kaliningrad?”

“I don’t like Russia.”

“Neither do I,” said Borz, and hung up.

Jax let his gaze travel from Andrei Gorchakove to October
Guinness’s white, strained features, and thought,
Sonofabitch.

When it came to delicate international situations, Jax didn’t like dealing with unknowns, and at the moment he was facing a shitload of them. Not just,
What did the Russians know?
But,
How much had they managed to wheedle out of October?
She wasn’t a field operative, and she’d never been trained to handle interrogations, and Washington should never, ever have sent her on an assignment like this.

“You took your time getting here, Jax,” said Andrei, pushing away from the wall. “We were expecting you last night.”

“Blame Aeroflot.”

Andrei made a sound deep in his chest that might have been a laugh. Dismissing the two soldiers with a nod and a snap of his fingers, he led them to a more comfortable room with a desk and a couple of upholstered chairs set before a window overlooking the bleak runway.

“Please, have a seat.” He glanced at his watch, said, “Excuse me a moment,” and left the room.

Jax watched October sink down on the edge of one of the upholstered chairs. From the looks of things, she was sweating and shivering at the same time—never a good sign. He frowned. “You all right?”

She glanced up at him, a lock of loose hair falling across her face. “Aside from being scared shitless, I’m great.”

He gave her a crooked smile. She might be untrained and way too far into woo-woo for his taste, but she wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t weak.

She jerked her head toward the door and lowered her voice. “Who is that guy?”

Jax went to lean against the window overlooking the tarmac, his arms crossed at his chest. “You do realize this room is bugged—and probably set up with a video camera, too?”

She blinked, and he knew from the expression on her face that no, that hadn’t occurred to her. God help him.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “But I think they already know who he is. And you know who he is. So the only person who doesn’t know who he is, is me.”

Jax said, “How much do you know about the KGB?”

“I thought it didn’t exist anymore.”

“Not technically. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB basically split into two organizations. There’s the FSB, or Federal Security Service, which is like a combination of our FBI, Secret Service, Customs Agency, and DEA, all rolled into one. And then there’s the SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service. They’re the Russian equivalent of the CIA.”

“Let me guess; this guy Andrei is with the SVR?”

“You got it.”

“So how do you know him?”

“The first time we met, we were in the jungles near Mandalay and I was right out of the Farm.” Jax glanced out
the window at the heavy gray clouds pressing down on the runway and surrounding fields. A few drops of rain had begun to fall, beading on the glass to run down in long rivulets. “Andrei saved my skin.”

“So you owe him.”

“At the moment, we’re even. I saved his ass last year in Niger.”

“So does that make you friends or something?”

“Hardly. Don’t let him fool you. Andrei Gorchakove is a dangerous sonofabitch. He’s fiercely loyal to Russia, and he can be utterly ruthless when he needs to be.”

“I’d figured that part out myself,” she said dryly.

“That’s reassuring. Now I need you to tell me exactly what you told them—and nothing more,” he warned her.

She sat for a moment, as if running the last hour or so through in her head. “They already knew I was a linguist with the Navy. They even knew about my psychological discharge.” Her forehead crinkled. “How could they know any of that stuff?”

“You think we’re the only ones with spies? Their intelligence network is a hell of a lot more effective than it used to be. Back in the days of Communism, the Soviets were so insular the only spies they could run in the West were assigned to their embassies or with Aeroflot, which made them really, really easy to watch. Now the West is overrun with millions of expat Russians. And a big chunk of them report to the SVB.”

“He even knew about my father.”

Jax frowned. “Anything else?”

“No.”

It was time, Jax decided, to end Andrei’s little listening game. He said, “How’s your cat?”

The question obviously disconcerted her. Her face went almost comically blank.
“My cat?”

“Your cat. What’s his name?”

“You mean, Beauregard?”

“That’s it. Beauregard.” Jax could practically hear Andrei sighing with frustration at the other end of the mike feed. A minute later, the door opened and the SVB man walked back into the room.

“Sorry about that,” he said in his precise English, shaking out a packet of British cigarettes. He held them out to October. “You smoke?”

“No, thank you,” she said with painful politeness.

The Russian went to perch on the edge of the desk, his attention all for the task of lighting his cigarette. It was a moment before he spoke. “You asked what’s going on, Jax.” He exhaled a stream of blue smoke. “I’ll tell you something:
I’d
like to know what’s going on.”

He pointed the tip of his cigarette at them. “A couple of days ago, the Kaliningrad militia reported a curious incident at a shipyard near the entrance to the Vistula Lagoon. When the manager stopped by to check on a shipment Saturday morning, he found his night watchman with a slit throat and a salvage ship called the
Yalena
floating in the cove. Everyone on board was dead.”

“A shipyard?”
said Jax incredulously. He looked at October to find her sitting forward, her lips parted. He didn’t want to believe she had “seen” U-114 simply by reaching out with her mind, but the evidence was starting to stack up. “Did you say a shipyard? And a salvage ship?”

Andrei flicked the ash from his cigarette and frowned. “That’s what I said, Jax. A shipyard, a salvage ship, and thirteen dead men—fourteen, counting the night watchman. That’s an unusually high body count, even for Russia. And then I hear that Jason Aldrich has booked a flight to Kaliningrad.” He paused to look at Jax. “Don’t you ever change your cover identity?”

“There wasn’t a lot of time.”

“Evidently.” Andrei inhaled deeply, his eyes narrowing against the smoke. “I ask myself, what has happened, is happening, or is about to happen in Kaliningrad Oblast that’s unusual? I think about that incident near the Vistula Lagoon, and I find my curiosity piqued.”

His gaze shifted to October. He said, “So I leave my nice, comfortable office in Moscow and travel down to this godforsaken place, expecting to meet my old friend Jax Alexander at the airport and show him a good time in Kaliningrad. And what happens? A beautiful young American Naval officer flies in that same morning.”

October squirmed uncomfortably, but said nothing.

Andrei spread his arms wide, then dropped them to his sides. “So, here I am. I have a salvage ship with thirteen dead bodies, a dead night watchman, a live CIA agent, and an American Naval officer with an interesting past, all showing up in Kaliningrad Oblast at roughly the same time. So now I ask you, Jax, what is going on here?”

Jax leaned back against the window, his gaze on his old adversary’s battle-scarred face. His options were severely limited, and he knew it. If he tried to stonewall Andrei, the Russian would have them both on the next flight out of Kaliningrad—or worse. There were times when the truth was the best option. “It’s about Nazi gold.”

October threw him a quick, incredulous glance, while Andrei—caught with a lungful of cigarette smoke—fell into a coughing fit.
“What?”
he said when he was able.

“The militia didn’t by any chance find an old German U-boat at this shipyard, did they?”

Andrei’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know about that? We haven’t even notified Berlin yet.”

“We saw it,” said Jax. He was aware of October giving him another look. But Jax knew what Andrei would
think—that the Americans had “seen” the sub on a satellite image.

Andrei cupped his hand around his cigarette to scratch behind his right ear. “What is your interest in the U-boat?”

Choosing his words carefully, Jax laid it all out for him—the missing sub, the Nazi gold, the link to a looming terrorist hit on the United States.

At the end of it all, Andrei blew out a long stream of smoke, his eyes twinkling with silent laughter. “And you expect me to believe this?”

Jax shrugged. “It’s what they told me.”

Andrei’s smile widened. “I take it you’re still in Division Thirteen?”

“What do you think?”

The Russian swung his head to fix October with a hard stare. He was no longer smiling. “And you?”

She froze, her eyes widening in a deer-in-the-headlights look.

Jax answered for her. “The CIA didn’t anticipate me receiving such a warm and personal reception from the SVR. Since my Russian’s no better than it used to be, they sent Ensign Guinness along as a translator.”

“Her command of the language is certainly better than yours ever was,” said Andrei, his gaze still on Tobie. “Tell me, Ensign, did you learn Russian before or after your psychiatric discharge from the Navy?”

“Before.”

She said it calmly enough, although Jax knew that psychiatric discharge was a sensitive subject with her. Which was, of course, why Andrei mentioned it. Andrei was very good at finding sore points and pressing on them.

“That’s the only reason you’re here?”

Jax said, “What other reason could there be?”

Rather than answer, Andrei said, “You do realize, of
course, that if there ever was any gold on that U-boat, it’s not there anymore?”

It was common knowledge among Russians that when the militia investigated a robbery, anything the thieves missed, the militia took. Jax said, “It’s not the gold I want. I want the guys who hired that salvage ship in the first place.”

“You mean, your terrorists?” Andrei blew out a lungful of smoke, his eyes narrowing with what looked like amusement. “I think there’s something on that U-boat you need to see.”

Jax pushed away from the window. “If you’ll just point us to the local rent-a-car people, we’ll be on our—”

“You forget; I know you, Jax.” Andrei took a final drag on his cigarette and ground it out on the ashtray beside him. “Which means you go to the shipyard in my car, or you don’t go. It’s that simple.”