Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy), page 2
He’d just started back for his own car when he heard the faint whine of an approaching vehicle. Seconds later, the Fiat hurtled away from the scene, though Evgeny would revisit it many times. It would be captured by the first photographer to arrive at the grisly discovery, then blitzed throughout the world. But its images, like Gorev’s blood, were already indelible inside the broken vessel that was Evgeny Kozlov.
Who did this? Evgeny’s mind zoomed as fast as the Fiat’s climb from the river valley. Coming just months after Volynski’s murder, was it his people’s revenge? Did they believe their own president had ordered the hit, and not the Americans, on whose lands Volynski would have mounted a campaign of terror? Why would Volynski’s people not suspect the American president had conveniently rid himself of the ruthless half brother who hated him? Everyone knew of that kinship now. Travis Noland himself had announced it to the world. In doing so, had he sealed his own fate? Was Noland next? If the avengers couldn’t be sure who’d killed their hero, maybe they were just brash enough to cast judgment and sentence on all the candidates.
Volynski’s followers couldn’t know that Evgeny was the executioner. He didn’t exist anymore, not even to the hunters inside Russia’s voracious intelligence community. They had their warrens and he had his, the two never intersecting. And now, he was driving hard to reach the nearest drop-hole into his netherworld. From there he would pick up the scent of those who’d just fled through the woods.
Chapter 3
In the unopened hours before sunrise that Thursday morning, Travis Noland had stood before his bathroom mirror, the only sound the scraping of a blade against the gray stubble on his face.
Confronting him in the mirror was a conflicted man whose struggle for equilibrium had begun to emit something like the hot-wire hum of a transformer. Intrusive and incessant. Wiping the remaining foam from his face, he’d once again observed the influence of both maternal and paternal genes. From his mother, a high forehead, and now, at age sixty-one, slight jowls settling on either side of his chin. What dominated, though, was the short, broad nose that rose to a high bridge and wide-set, blue eyes. His father’s nose and eyes, most everyone had noted when Travis was growing up.
F. Reginald Noland III had been a force to contend with, both in the Noland household and at the U.S. State Department. The brilliant negotiator who’d helped steer the country through the world’s diplomatic minefields for more than three decades had succumbed to his own arrogance and lust. He’d much preferred the heady challenge of his far-flung assignments and the power they afforded him to his home turf. He particularly craved his choice of female companionship. In time, coming home to his wife and only child in Joplin, Missouri, was barely tolerable, until the day the New York Times ran a front-page story exposing the distinguished elder statesman’s covey of mistresses lodged in diplomatic ports from Istanbul to Moscow. Particularly incriminating were the photographs of him with two women the CIA had identified as foreign intelligence agents assigned to lure classified information from him. Though an investigation found insufficient evidence to indict him, Travis’s father resigned and came home to Joplin, where he lived alone until he died. His wife had received all the evidence she needed to secure a divorce and flee the scandal with her teenage son, Travis.
The president had looked hard at his image in the mirror. At the Noland nose and eyes. How had he not recognized them on the face of Ivan Volynski? How preposterous if he had. Why would he have thought such a thing on first meeting the Soviet Army officer nine years his senior, an adversary of the first class, a hostile man whose own blue eyes shot fiery darts from some secret reserve.
But once the president confronted the truth of their kinship, the Noland resemblance sprang at him from the face of the man who would have blown a hole in the United States, if someone hadn’t executed him.
Noland had mourned the loss of his tortured half brother. How different it might have been if they’d discovered each other as children. Or would it? Would one have remained privileged and the other impoverished? One snug in the security of his mother’s protection, the other left to fend for himself while his chambermaid mother scrubbed away her youth and lay down her self-respect. One sent to ivy league schools, the other cast off to fight for scraps of knowledge that would free him. But he was never free of his hatred for Travis Noland, the pedigree son.
It was now almost ten that June morning, and the West Wing was at full stride, despite the encumbering heat outside. The president knew the day’s docket was too full to suit his secretary, Rona Arant. But he’d insisted on plugging the only gap in the schedule with a goodwill visit from a couple of legislators from his home state of Missouri.
While he awaited their arrival, he downed a couple of decongestant tablets, having detected the signs of a summer cold. Setting the glass down on his desk, he focused on a photograph of his wife and two sons beaming at him from a tortoise-shell frame on his desk. He’d visited the DNA of a murdering revolutionist upon his sons’ bloodline and they’d treated the news as if Ivan Volynski were just a kooky uncle to contend with—until they, and the whole nation, saw the footage of the man’s private helicopter splinter into flaming wreckage. For the last six months, they’d had to deflect the barbs of their father’s political adversaries who’d taken a near fiendish delight in exploiting the “Noland family shame,” as one senator had called it. Still, others had rallied around the president and admonished those who’d slung their scorn at him, daring them to peel back the layers of their own families and look hard at what lurked beneath.
The arrival of his guests broke into Noland’s reverie. He was just showing them to their seats when Rona reappeared at the door.
“Sir.” She summoned him with a slight lift of the hand. Theirs had been a long and comfortable partnership, begun during his tenure at the State Department. She’d made the move with him to his congressional office, then on to the White House. At nearly seventy, she had no intention of retiring, for which he was grateful.
“Excuse me,” he told the legislators and moved quickly to the door. “What is it, Rona?”
“The CIA director is here, sir. He says it’s urgent that he see you immediately.”
Noland tried to read her face, though he was certain Don Bragg wouldn’t have confided anything to her. “Okay, Rona. Take these gentlemen to one of the conference rooms and get them something to eat, please.”
The president apologized to his guests for dismissing them so abruptly, but expressed hope that the interruption wouldn’t last long. He was wrong.
Moments later, Director Bragg rushed into the Oval Office. Noland was standing behind his desk.
“Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Have a seat, Don.”
“I’d rather stand, sir.”
Noland nodded and remained on his feet.
“We just received an alert from one of our field agents that President Dimitri Gorev has been assassinated.”
Travis Noland felt as if the floor beneath him had just shifted. He leaned hard against his desk and placed both hands flat on top of it. “Go on,” he said tightly, his eyes riveted on the director.
“It’s unconfirmed, though my team is working to pin it down. There’s been no official announcement.”
“This source is reliable?”
“Yes, sir. Our agent has a contact inside FSB.”
“When did this happen?”
“About an hour and a half ago, sir. About five PM Moscow time, on a country road near his family farm. He was going home for the weekend.”
“Do we have specifics?”
“Gunmen were waiting for him in the woods. They surrounded the motorcade and opened fire. We’re not sure of much else.”
“And your best guess who these gunmen were?”
Bragg drew a long sigh. “Indulge me, sir.” Noland nodded a go-ahead. The director brought a hand to his chin and started to pace in front of the desk. “Six months ago, Volynski and his closest aides vaporize over the East River. Only a handful of us know that Evgeny Kozlov planted the bomb. He’d seen Volynski for the madman he was. So Kozlov decides to save Russia from the guy and, acting completely on his own, plans and carries out the hit.
“The media goes ape, digs up everything they can on Volynski and the terrorist on the tug who tried to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time the chopper exploded. They can’t find too much on Volynski and we, of course, aren’t talking. But then the TV-network contributors—the retired crew-cut generals and other Beltway pundits who are paid to wax authoritative with insider knowledge they don’t always have—suggest Gorev might have ordered the hit, though we know he didn’t.”
“Keep going, Don.”
“What our people are sure of, though, is that Volynski had a sophisticated network of followers in Russia, dug in along the halls of power from government to the military. And in the youth population, where a growing number of subversive coalitions were beginning to clamor for Volynski to come back from self-exile and make Russia the powerhouse it used to be.”
Noland eyed him with certainty at what was coming. “Draw your conclusion, though I see it already.”
Bragg nodded. “In my opinion, sir, Volynski’s loyals didn’t need our press to suggest that Gorev ordered the assassination. They were sure of it. So they killed him. Though the death isn’t confirmed yet.”
Noland stared down at his desk. “God help us,” he said aloud, then walked to a window. He stared into the garden beyond, at the faces of roses tilted up in innocence. But hidden beneath their fine costumes were the thorns that would mercilessly pierce a man’s flesh. He returned to the desk. “I’ll get your confirmation.” He pushed a button on his phone and summoned his secretary.
“Yes, sir,” she answered instantly.
“Rona, get Arkady Glinka on the phone for me, please.”
“The Russian prime minister, sir,” she clarified, a note of surprise in her voice.
“As quickly as possible. Thank you.” He looked up at Bragg and saw the apprehension on the veteran spy’s face.
“Sir, I’m not sure that’s what you want to do,” Bragg said tactfully.
“I assure you it is. I have my reasons.”
“Forgive my asking, but would you mind sharing them with me?”
“At this moment, I would. Now, please, make yourself comfortable.” He motioned to one of the chairs opposite his desk, and Bragg complied.
Noland settled into his chair and carefully regarded the venerable CIA director. “I know what you’re thinking, Don, and yes, I ignored your warning not to announce to the nation that Ivan Volynski was my half brother. Here I go again. Right?” Bragg started to respond, but Noland raised a polite hand and continued. “But there are things I know that you don’t. You couldn’t.” Noland gauged the man’s bearing, his guarded expression, yet his transparent devotion to his role as keeper of the nation’s darkest secrets. Such a trust could gut a man in time. The president hoped his old colleague would retreat before that happened. He liked Don Bragg for the wounds he already bore from his own tours as an undercover field agent, but mostly from the weapons fired at him by senate subcommittees aghast at the things he sometimes allowed his agency to do to protect the country. Sometimes they were the right things, sometimes not, Noland knew. But always, Bragg was a patriot.
Noland cleared his throat and leaned back in his chair, choosing now to bring the director closer to the truth. “Arkady Glinka is more than just second in line to the Russian presidency and a long-time figurehead in Russian politics.” Noland caught a glint of anticipation in Bragg’s eyes. “You seem sure of what I’m about to tell you.”
“Pretty sure,” Bragg replied. “That Glinka was once Volynski’s childhood friend and later, KGB boss. That Glinka mysteriously disappeared from Russia about ten years ago, then resurfaced as a converted conservative. A believer in and passionate supporter of all things Gorev, at least on the outside. In fact, Glinka so enamored himself with Gorev, the rising president tapped him as his prime minister. We know everything about his career, his family, and his appetite for fast Italian cars and even faster women.”
A half smile creased Noland’s weary face. “Go on. There’s more.”
Bragg’s confidence stumbled. “I’m not sure what you’re referring to, sir.”
Noland straightened in his chair. He hadn’t meant to parlay his privileged information into a one-up game with Bragg. “I’m sorry. Your team would have uncovered this soon enough. So I’ll tell you what I know.” He shifted again in his seat, hastily assembling in his mind what he would and would not reveal. “A few months ago, a young Israeli intelligence agent started tracking the rise of Arkady Glinka to prime minister. You might call it an excavation. The agent was particularly interested in Glinka’s possible connection to Volynski’s earlier scheme to assassinate Gorev and the Syrian president, and he produced forged documents to prove that Israel had pulled the trigger on both. A plot laid bare by the code Liesl Bower found in her music, as you well recall.” Noland smiled. “I wonder if Volynski ever faced a more comely and threatening adversary than Liesl, who surfaced yet again to help dismantle his terror campaign inside the U.S.”
Bragg nodded acknowledgment of the pianist’s unlikely role in that, but kept pressing for more information. “And did this young Israeli discover a connection between Glinka and Volynski’s ongoing conspiracy?” Bragg didn’t seem to mind not knowing.
“More like an umbilical cord, but one that was invisible to Gorev and most of the Kremlin.”
“But not enough evidence to arrest Glinka?”
“Not yet. Maybe never.”
“Who is this Israeli agent, sir?”
Noland eyed the man cautiously. Something told him it wasn’t the time to identify the one whose exhaustive work now promised a straighter shot to the matrix of Russian power. The one whose own DNA was as inextricably linked to a murdering anarchist as Noland’s was. When Maxum Morozov fled Israel after Liesl Bower’s code exposed him as a Russian mole inside the Israeli Defense Department, he left behind a son reeling from that discovery. Now, the son hunted the father. Young Max had temporarily laid down his violin and picked up his father’s trail. Along the way, operating as an unofficial agent of Israel’s legendary Mossad, Max had uncovered the secret life of Arkady Glinka.
“What’s more important is what he discovered,” Noland said with the conviction that protecting young Max Morozov’s deep-cover quest was more crucial to American security than sending the CIA alongside. At least for now. “By the time Mr. Glinka dropped from Russian radar a decade ago, he had plunged headlong into the occult.”
Bragg was clearly stunned.
“It started out as a mere dalliance,” the president continued. “A séance here and there, psychic readings by practitioners, from a young blind woman in the Ural Mountains to a set of male twins in Istanbul. Our young Israeli even tracked Glinka to a hut in Bali where he’d once lived on the beach for almost a year, floundering around in some cosmic haze possibly induced by a bit of substance sampling.”
“How long did Glinka’s, uh, spiritual quest last?”
“Four or five years. But only a couple of those were spent hopping from blacked-out parlor to parlor, crystal ball to who knows what. Then something changed. He fell under the spell, so to speak, of a colony of mediums in Germany, who later moved en mass to a remote mountain range in Montana.” Bragg arched one eyebrow. “You know something about that?” Noland asked.
“About four years ago, the FBI backtracked a shipment of meth leaving Montana for points unknown. It came from a mountain commune that had a strict code against substance abuse among its so-called family. They’d just turned the meth-maker in to the nearest sheriff’s office when the feds busted into their camp.”
“Glinka wouldn’t have been there. He returned to Russia six years ago.”
“From Montana?” Bragg asked.
“No. He left Montana a few months after he arrived. And that’s where the trail goes cold, except for one little blip on the screen. Two years ago, a sheriff’s deputy stopped a speeder in the Florida Keys. The violator’s name was Arkady Durov, who produced a legitimate Ukraine passport and claimed to be a tourist.”
Bragg listened expectantly as the president added, “Durov was Glinka’s mother’s maiden name.”
“No other documents were produced?” Bragg asked.
“It was a one-light-town officer with no apparent inclination to do more than issue a warning and send the man on his way. End of trail. We don’t know where he’d been or was going, or how long he was there. But we do know that when Glinka—if that was him—was stopped, there was a man in the car with him.”
“How do you know that?”
“Our Israeli friend hunted down the officer, who is now retired and still living in the area. He happens to remember that particular traffic stop because the two men spoke Russian to each other. The officer knew this because his grandmother was Russian. So he engaged them in conversation about the motherland and the one summer he’d spent there as a boy. Evidently, the exchange made a lasting impression on the officer, who described the driver as dark complected, not so handsome, and heavyset, which certainly fits Glinka. He remembers the passenger as nice looking, slim, and less interested in conversation.”
“Could he identify either man from a photograph?”
“Photos of Glinka are being sent now,” Noland said. “But even if he is positively identified, it tells us nothing at this point.”
“And the other man?”
“The agent is sending a photo of Volynski as well.”
Bragg cocked his head. “An excellent move. But what makes this agent suspect Volynski was the other man?”
Noland smiled. “Just a hunch, I’m told.”
