The other two bodyguards had barely spoken to him at all, except to map out the plans for changing trains and to check him for bugs or GPS trackers. They made those devices so small these days, a person could hang one on you just by casually brushing past you in the street—or in a train station, or even while you were sitting in your seat on the train—and you’d be none the wiser.
Dormov knew all the tricks—the Americans had given him a thorough education in surveillance, though not always intentionally. From time to time, someone who was absolutely, positively not in any way a spy had tried to bug his laboratory, or even his home. He always knew because they came from vaguely named government departments he’d never heard of. When that happened, he would refuse to work until his lab was swept clean—the whole lab, including the bathrooms. Anyone curious about what he and his assistants were up to could watch the feeds from the bugs that were already in place.
Surveillance wasn’t the reason Dormov had decided to go home. He knew damned well he would be monitored even more closely in Moscow—the Soviet state was no more, but old habits died hard. Even so, the Russian government had never been as coy about surveillance as the Americans. In Russia, you had to assume somebody, somewhere, was watching. In the US, they made a lot of noise about privacy, how everyone was entitled to it and the government had no right to violate it, so they made the bugs smaller and hid them better.
Then 9/11 had happened and even the average US citizen was conflicted about the choice between personal privacy vs. public safety. Not that the American government hadn’t already been wiretapping and bugging and just generally poking its nose into the private affairs of people they considered threats to national security. ‘National security’ was one of those vague terms intelligence agencies found so very useful as a way to avoid having to explain their actions, or even admitting to them.
Still, government surveillance was one thing; this latest thing they had asked of him was something else, completely unacceptable. Dormov had never been a fan of Soviet-style communism but letting capitalism run riot was just as bad, maybe even worse. He had always suspected that someday he would reach his limit and then he would have to leave the West altogether. Finally he had understood that the Americans would never even allow him to retire, not with all that knowledge in his head—he was a risk to national security. He’d known then that he had to get the hell out and go home.
Russia was no utopia of enlightenment and he had no illusions about why they were so happy to take him back—getting all the knowledge in his head would be a real coup. Plus, it would upset the Americans. It was nothing personal, but at least he’d be able to get a decent bowl of solyanka. Which he could enjoy with a pint of kvass—the real thing, not the bottled sugar-water sold in US gourmet shops.
Dormov looked out the window at the swooping curved lines of the canopy roof. The Liège station was breathtaking. When he had first seen it, he’d thought it looked like an enormous white wave that had somehow been captured and frozen in transit, an enormous white wave with grooves. It was all steel, glass, and white cement, sans facade, or grand front door, just that swooping roof. The grooves were actually white concrete beams that threw geometric shadow patterns in the sunlight.
According to his helpful bodyguard, this was a trademark of the architect, Santiago Calatrava Valls. Dormov admired the design—he thought he would enjoy meeting a man who could see something like this in his head. At the same time, however, the station looked so utterly strange, like something from another planet. Except it wasn’t; the train station was right where it was supposed to be. He was out of place.
But that was just his homesickness, Dormov thought. As his journey eastward had progressed, he had come to realize he had been homesick for over thirty years, and the closer he got to the bosom of Mother Russia, the more intense the feeling became.
It would be a relief when they reached Budapest and made contact with Yuri. Hungary wasn’t home, but it wasn’t the West, either. If he couldn’t get solyanka and kvass yet, he’d happily settle for kettle-made goulash and vodka.
Several miles southeast of the city, on a desolate hilltop overlooking a valley untouched by development, a man named Henry Brogan sat in an SUV. One dark brown, well-muscled arm was stretched out, his hand resting on the steering wheel as he gazed into the distance. A casual observer might have thought he had come to that deserted place for some solitary introspection, maybe to take stock of his life and consider the circumstances that had led up to this moment, with an eye to deciding what he might do next.
A more careful observer, however, would have noticed how straight he sat in the driver’s seat and attributed his posture to military service. Henry had been a Marine but those days were long behind him. The only thing he’d taken with him from that time besides a skill set he had since enhanced and improved to an incredible degree was a small tattoo on his right wrist, a green spade. He might have jettisoned that along with his uniforms and the rest of the military trappings except it meant more to him than all the commendations and medals he’d received put together. It was an icon; when he looked at it he saw the deepest and most significant part of himself, what other people might call the soul, a concept he had never felt comfortable talking about. Fortunately, he didn’t have to; it was all contained in that little green spade, nice and neat, the way he liked things to be in his life.
Right now, his attention was focused on a set of tracks 800 yards away waiting for the train from Liège on the first leg of its long journey to Budapest. Occasionally, he glanced at the photo taped to the rearview mirror; it was slightly fuzzy, copied from a passport or a driver’s license or maybe an employee ID badge, but clear enough to be recognizable. The name Valery Dormov was printed across the bottom in clear block letters.
Monroe Reed enjoyed taking the train anywhere on the Continent. The Europeans really knew how to travel at ground level. This was something he had learned to appreciate as travel by plane had become more complicated and less comfortable. It was bad enough that you had to wait in line for a godawful amount of time to walk through a metal detector and then maybe get felt up by some bored worker bee in a uniform. But to add insult to injury, airlines now had two or even three levels of coach and they all sucked.
Usually he didn’t have to suffer commercial air travel when he was working with Henry. But on occasion the DIA would give him an extra assignment or they would tell him to stay behind and do some clean-up. The agency didn’t send out jets for anyone as low as he was on the totem pole. Then he would be stuck listening to the screaming baby chorus while the kid in the row behind him kicked his seat for six hours—a kid he thought was probably very much like the one who kept running up and down the aisle right now, mouth going a mile a minute. Monroe wasn’t sure how old she was—six, maybe seven? Too young to travel alone but he was damned if he could tell which of the other adults in the car she belonged to. None of them seemed inclined to rein her in. His own parents hadn’t been big on corporal punishment but if he’d behaved like this at the same age, he wouldn’t have been able to sit down for a week.