“Attack target.”
This was Wordlow’s first time witnessing an actual strike and it seemed all too much like a video game. The Strike Fighters were represented by moving triangles. The target was boxed. The missiles, small circles, separated from the planes. As they converged on the box, he shifted his eyes to another screen. There he saw what the missiles saw: live video of the terrorist camp looming closer and closer.
“Seconds now.” Morris pointed to the satellite feed. Barely two seconds later, the circle met the box, the missile-view cameras went black, and the satellite showed massive explosions. The base was obliterated.
“They’ll go in for another run, but it’s over,” Morris stated.
Wordlow leaned back and let out the breath he’d been holding. As many as 100 men, maybe some women, were incinerated in a thousandth of a second. They had no warning, no chance to look to Allah for deliverance. It was the price they paid, he thought without remorse, for planning to blow up the Ville St. George Hotel and the President of the United States.
Jack Evans thought the same thing, watching the attack from his command center in the Pentagon.
Chapter 42
“Hey, I got this odd e-mail. It’s short and kinda weird.” Michael O’Connell handed it to his editor at The New York Times. “What do you make of it?”
Andrea Weaver read it and quickly dismissed the content. “These unsolicited e-mails are useless.”
O’Connell would normally agree. Internet tips hardly ever amount to much. The correspondence is usually comprised of verbose, argumentative complaints from disgruntled, anonymous readers. This, too, was anonymous, but there was something that piqued O’Connell’s interest.
“No phone number. No contact. No information,” Weaver complained. “Pass.” She returned it to O’Connell.
“That was my first reaction,” he explained. “But check it out again.” He gave it back to her.
She nodded affirmatively. “Bad English.”
“Maybe intentionally bad.”
She re-read the e-mail.
Andrea Weaver had been transferred to the news desk from Moscow only two months earlier. She had limited contact with O’Connell, but she’d been told to give the reporter, who was likely to earn a Pulitzer for his inside reporting of the Lodge investigation, room to work.
“You think this is about Lodge?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing that directly indicates that, Michael.”
“There’s nothing that precludes it.”
She read the correspondence a fourth time, then handed it back. “You probably don’t even need my approval on a travel voucher,” she said, acknowledging his star status at the paper.
“I know, but I do need to pick your brain. You’ve been there. I haven’t. Where should I go?”
He could see Andrea Weaver’s whole manner change. He’d worked her and she just realized it. “You are good.”
“Why, thank you,” he said through a laugh.
“Okay, sit down. Let me grab a map and we’ll see what looks most promising.”
Deep down, Aleksandr Dubroff hoped that nobody cared about him. He hoped that the State had forgotten him. But the very fact that he received pension payments reminded Dubroff that at least one department knew where he was, whether or not they knew who he was. Furthermore, he wasn’t naive. The FSB wouldn’t welcome him speaking to the West. Not with what he knew.
Dubroff’s career was built on secrets, deceptions, outright lies, and murder. He’d trained countless good young men to become merciless killers. He’d transformed medical students — who may have once dreamed of healing people — into torturers who inflicted unimaginable pain. He turned innocent girls into mistresses who would get their bedfellows to admit crimes against the State. And he taught everyone the lesson he believed the most: Trust no one.
While the Western press reported that Russia was transformed under democratization, Dubroff knew otherwise. Nations with no concept of democracy cannot suddenly be democratized. It was the way of Russia. For hundreds of years. He thought it was amazing that the Americans failed to realize that, even after Iraq. People need to be told. People need the State to make their decisions.
And now he was selling out the State — at least, the old regime. He feared the new leadership would not make the distinction.
Dubroff had already taken the first dangerous step. He sent an e-mail to the reporter O’Connell. But would the American be smart enough to act on the invitation? He hoped so.
Your reports fine.
Why do you write about things you not know?
You need information good.
Bearly a friend.
Michael O’Connell analyzed the printout at his desk. There were only four sentences to the e-mail, in obviously poor English. A trick, or a clue to the sender’s identity? He considered each word important and possibly meaningful on multiple levels.
Your reports fine. For more than a year, O’Connell’s beat had been Teddy Lodge. He’d covered the origins of the sleeper spy plot that won Lodge the election and almost put him in the White House. President Taylor had given him complete access to the military mission that garnered the proof. Other news sources quoted him. The author of the note had to be referring to the coverage.
Based on information recovered in the American raid on Libya, O’Connell knew that the plot had been handed off from one Arab country to another, but it originated in Russia. The e-mail is from Russia.
Why do you write about things you not know? This was more puzzling. Is this criticism? An observation from someone who does know? This is what he immediately concluded. Even working with the White House and his ex-CIA sources, O’Connell knew very little, and understood even less. But the person who sent this to me does know.
You need information good. O’Connell got excited every time he read the line. The awkward English syntax aside, he felt this could be an invitation. You need… It sounded like an offer more than a criticism. And …information good. He believed that good meant correct. He believed the writer was indicating he or she had intelligence on the matter, and was interested in offering it up.
The letter was intentionally vague. The reporter reasoned it was written in such a way as to also pass as a complaint if intercepted. It might read that way to someone else, but in Michael O’Connell’s hands, it told another story.
Bearly a friend.
O’Connell saw the connection immediately. The root of the word — bear. This wasn’t about an animal. From his knowledge of the Cold War, “bear” meant only one thing. He was getting an invitation to come to Russia.
Dubroff moved cautiously. He smiled to neighbors when he left the house. They see my suitcase. It was a terribly weathered two-suiter. The leather was dry and flakey. “I’m going to visit my wife’s ailing sister,” he told the old woman who sold him eggs and milk.
“Where?” she asked. “You never mentioned…”
See? Everyone is suspicious. The Soviet way.
“In St. Petersburg. She has been failing for a long time,” he added.
Dubroff waved to his butcher, and when the vegetable seller asked when he’d be back with more mushrooms, Dubroff said in a week-and-a-half.
In truth, something he had little experience with, he didn’t know when or if he’d return to Staritsa. He wondered whether the FSB would detain him the moment he tried to board the bus at Tver, or later. Would he feel a cold hand yank him on the shoulder, steps away from his Moscow-bound, not St. Petersburg, train? That’s how he often did it, theatrical and forceful. He simply slipped out of the shadows when his subjects were most focused on blending in, when they were convinced they had succeeded in tricking Mother Russia. That’s when he loved making his arrests. In public, with no equivocation. No sympathy. Everyone would talk about what happened. Few would dare it.