The effect of sundown was almost supernatural, thought Fields-Hutton. For nearly two hours he had been sitting beneath a tree on the banks of the Neva, reading manuscripts stored in his Toshiba laptop. At the same time he was listening to his Walkman that was actually a radio receiver tuned to the frequency of the peso behind the door. Now, as he watched the sun drop lower in the sky and the streets begin to empty and the riverside promenade become virtually deserted, he felt as though people had to be indoors before the vampires and ghosts came out to prey.
Either that, he reflected, or I’ve been editing horror and science-fiction comic books for far too long.
He was getting cold. He felt colder than even his London-hardened flesh was accustomed to. What was worse, he was beginning to think that the afternoon had been wasted. All he had heard since he tuned in to the bug was trivial chatter about sports, women, hipcracking bosses, crowbars ripping up crates, and the comings and goings of people working on the TV facility. Not exactly the kind of surveillance that made the pulses race back at D16.
He looked out across the river, then gazed back toward the Hermitage. The museum was striking, its dozens of white columns now ruddy with sunset and the ribbed dome gleaming. The tour buses were beginning to carry their groups away. The day shift started to leave. The night shift was just arriving. The local citizens who had spent their Sunday at the museum were filing out to meet trolleybuses or to take the fifteen-minute walk to the nearest Metro stop, the Nevsky Prospekt Station. Soon, like the streets themselves, even the great museum would be deserted.
Fields-Hutton hoped that Leon had been able to get him a hotel room: he was going to have to come back in the morning and continue his surveillance. He was convinced that if anything untoward was going on here, the TV studio was the place.
The Englishman decided to go back inside and stake out the room for a few minutes, to watch and see if someone other than the work crew used the room near closing time. Someone he might be able to describe to the photo division at D16-a military person in civvies, a government official, a foreign agent. What’s more, there was always confusion and pressure in the days before and immediately after the start of any new operation. Moreover, a worker leaving the place might say or do something that would tell him what was really happening here.
Closing up his computer and rising on bones that an American agent once described as belonging to Arthur Fiedler-he stood with a symphony of pops-Fields-Hutton brushed off his pants and left the Walkinan on as he walked briskly toward the museum.
To the right, he saw a couple that had just left the museum strolling hand in hand along the river. He thought of Peggy, not of the first fateful walk they took, the one where she brought him into the spy business, but of the walk just five days before along the banks of the Thames. They had talked about marriage for the first time, and Peggy admitted that she was leaning toward it. Of course, Peggy had the constitution of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it might take her an eternity to fallbut he was willing to run the risk. She wasn’t quite the demure creature he had always envisioned himself ending up with, but he enjoyed her pluck. She had the face of an angel. And, most important, she was well worth waiting for.
He smiled as a young woman jogged toward the river with her Jack Russell terrier. He didn’t think they had the English breed in Russia, though the black market was smuggling anything and everything these days, including dogs that were fashionable in the West.
The woman was dressed in sweat clothes and a baseball cap and carried a small plastic water bottle. As she approached, he noticed she wasn’t perspiring. That seemed strange, since the nearest apartments were at least a half mile away and a runner should have worked up a sweat by now. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Suddenly, the dog broke free of its leash. it darted toward him and took a bite from the inside of his shin before the jogger was able to pull it away.
“I’m so sorry!” she said as she thrust the yipping dog under her arm.
“It’s all right,” he said, wincing as he dropped down on his right knee and examined the painful wound. He set his computer aside, took out his handkerchief, and wiped away the blood from the two semicircular rows of teeth marks.
The woman knelt beside him, her face a mask of concern. With her right arm clasped tightly around the frenzied terrier she held out her left arm, offering him the water bottle.
“This will help,” she said.
“Thank you, no,” Fields-Hutton said as the teeth marks filled anew with blood. Something wasn’t right about this. She was too concerned, too attentive. Russians weren’t like that. He had to get out of here.
Before Fields-Hutton could stop her, the woman poured water on his wound. Rivulets of blood streamed down his leg into his sock as Fields-Hutton reached out to stop her.
“What are you doing?” he demanded as she emptied the bottle on his wound. “Miss, please-”
He rose. Then she did, backing away as she stood. Her expression was no longer concerned but devoid of emotion. Even the dog was silent. Fields-Hutton’s suspicions turned horribly real as the stinging in his leg began to fade-along with sensation in his feet.
“Who are you?” he demanded as numbness spread up his leg and he began to feel dizzy. “What did you do to me?”
The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. FieldsHutton suspected he’d been poisoned with a fast-acting chemical agent. As the world began to spin, he thought about Leon and bent to retrieve his computer. He fell, grabbed the handle, and dragged the laptop along as he crawled toward the river. When his legs became completely numb he tried to claw ahead, to remain conscious. He wanted to stay alive long enough to throw the computer into the Neva. But then his shoulders began to lose all sensation. His upper arms became dead weight and he fell forward.
The last thing Keith Fields-Hutton saw was the golden river flowing just a few meters away. The last thing he heard was the woman behind him say, “Goodbye.” And the last thing he thought was how Peggy would cry when Commander Hubbard informed her that her lover had been killed on a mission in St. Petersburg.
His head rolled slowly to the side as the VX nerve agent stopped Fields-Hutton’s heart.
NINE
Sunday, 9:00 P.M., Belgorod, the Russia/Ukraine border
The Kamov Ka-26 radial-engined helicopter landed on the floodlit patch of earth, its twin rotors kicking up dirt and swirling it into inverted sea horse patterns. While soldiers ran over and began unloading crates of communications equipment from the bay aft of the pilot’s cabin, Interior Minister Dogin stepped out. Holding his fedora with one hand and the front of his greatcoat with another, he ducked low and walked briskly from the landing area.
Dogin had always loved temporary bases like this one-empty fields transformed overnight into pulsing centers of power, bootprints on the windswept soil, the dusty air ripe with the smell of diesel fuel.
The base was set up for mountain warfare, using a configuration designed in the closing days of the war in Afghanistan. To his right, one hundred yards away, was row after row of large tents, each housing a dozen soldiers. There were twenty tents in a row, and they reached far beyond the glare of the floodlights, nearly to the distant foothills. Beyond them, at the north and south corners of the camp, were firing pits for riflemen and dugouts with overhead covers. In the event of a war, these positions would be used to protect the base from guerrilla attacks. To the left, where there were no hills, were rows of tanks, armored vehicles, and helicopters, the mess area and canvas shower stalls, garbage pit, medical tents, and supply depots. Even at night, there was life here-mechanized, electric, and invigorating.
Off in the distance, straight ahead, Dogin saw the immaculate, vintage PS-89 twin-engine monoplane that belonged to Dmitri Shovich. Two men stood guard, each carrying Avtomat assault rifles; the pilot sat in his seat, ready to depart at a moment’s notice.
Looking at the plane, the Interior Minister felt a chill. What had only been talk until now was about to become a reality. The men and materiel here, and the equipment en route, would take them only so far. To get the money he needed to help undo the disastrous results of the election, he was about to make a pact with the devil. He only hoped that Kosigan was right, that the escape clause would work when the time came.