The Red Man reverted to his Russian accent. “Start eating more. Then you grow up big and strong like me.”
He stood tall, revealing that he was naked. I was glad when he leant against the windowsill again.
“You’re not here for bread, little American liar. You were sent to collect a vehicle,” he remarked. “I received a message.”
West nodded and the Red Man tossed him a set of keys.
“The small key is for the door. The other is for the Volkswagen Transporter. There are three in there. Take the blue one. It has what you need in the back. There is an inventory in the glove box. Make sure you close the door when you leave.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No need,” he replied. “Now be ready because I’m going to swear at you in Russian.”
And he did. Loudly and violently, obviously for the benefit of his neighbors. Nothing like hiding in plain sight.
West yelled something back and the Red Man smiled.
“Not bad, American,” he said quietly. “You can swear like a Russian even if you can’t talk like one.”
West flashed him a grin and we headed for the bakery. He opened the double doors to reveal three Volkswagen Transporters in the large storeroom.
He got in the blue one, started the engine, and rolled into the yard.
I shut and locked the double doors then jumped in the passenger seat.
“Check the glove box,” West suggested.
I opened it to find the laminated inventory list.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“Everything,” I replied. “There’s enough artillery in this thing to launch an assault on the Kremlin.”
“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”
“Don’t go getting soft just because this is meant to be your vacation,” I suggested, and we both smiled.
He put the Transporter in gear, drove us out of the yard, and headed north.
Chapter 91
The last time I made this journey there was thick snow everywhere and the bitter winter had covered everything in frost. This time the countryside north of Moscow was rich with color: the green of trees and grass, the white, pink, and yellow of wildflowers, and the blue of a cloudless July sky. But it might as well have been monochrome. I was impervious to it, lost in contemplation of the task that lay ahead.
My people had been taken by Valery Alekseyev, a man convinced I’d wronged him and his country. His position suggested he was powerful and his actions told me he was vindictive, which meant he was unlikely to surrender Dinara and the others without a fight. His power gave him resources that would stack the odds against us, which made our prospects grim.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked West when we were about an hour north of Moscow. He was closer to home than to danger, and I wanted him to have the chance to turn around.
“No, I’m not sure,” he replied. “Is anyone ever sure? But I’m staying the course.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because if I don’t, it’s more likely the bad guys will win. Call me sentimental, but I was raised on apple pie, Sesame Street, and the belief good triumphs over evil. You and I both know that’s a lie, but good can triumph over evil sometimes, and for that to happen, men and women like us need to stand up.”
I nodded. He glanced in my direction.
“Why are you here? You could sit stateside counting your money and pretend you’d done your part by calling the Moscow Police.”
“I was raised on Sesame Street too,” I replied. “And these particular bad guys have my team, which makes it personal.”
“I could tell you were a Sesame Street fan,” West joked, but his smile didn’t last, and neither did mine, and we continued our journey lost in our own thoughts.
We took turns behind the wheel, switching every couple hours. I was driving when we passed the wreckage of the two vehicles which I’d seen all those months ago. This time they weren’t buried in snow, so their rusting twisted chassis were completely exposed. They made me think of the rotten, corrupt network we had exposed, linking Russia and China, and how it too was a blight on the world, polluting everything it touched.
The sun had dropped beneath the horizon and we were traveling through the glow of the last embers of the day by the time we reached Volkovo, almost ten hours after we’d set out from Moscow.
I was driving and slowed as we went through the town, past the simple houses and the bakery where Leonid Boykov, a good and kind man who had worked for Private until his untimely death, had once bought pastries for Dinara and me. I pictured him smiling, trying to push sweets on us. His loss still weighed heavily on me, but all I could do was remember and mourn him as I did so many of the departed.
I took us north and found a trail two hundred yards south of the dirt track that led to Boltino army base. I drove along this and parked behind some trees that would shield the vehicle from view.
“The base is about two miles north-east of here,” I said. “Not long now.”
Chapter 92
The back of the Transporter contained four flight cases full of gear and there was a secret compartment beneath the flatbed that held a cache of weapons.
We used a micro surveillance drone to survey the base. The drone was silent and dark, nothing more than a tiny shadow against the night sky. West used a remote control with an infrared display to pilot the device up through the trees that concealed us and over the forest that ringed the base.
The buildings were much as I remembered them. A collection of bunkers, hangars, silos, and barracks, all crumbling and rusting, the legacy of a military might long gone. In the center of the base was the command block where I’d questioned Maxim Yenen and forced him to admit his involvement in the Bright Star program — a deacades-long initiative designed to subvert America’s political system and power structure.
Apart from the lack of snow, the only other difference was the collection of vehicles parked between the command block and the largest hangar. There was a large forward-operations truck. It didn’t have any military markings but was decked out in grey-and-black camouflage. Next to it were two troop carriers and a dozen SUVs and ten vans.
There were four men patrolling the vehicles, each armed with a machine gun, each sporting night-vision goggles. There were another three stationed outside the large hangar, who were similarly equipped. Two more men stood outside the command block.
West piloted the drone around the large building. We couldn’t be sure how many people were inside, but the artificial lights coming from within meant he was able to switch from infrared to optical camera, and through holes in the walls, we counted a minimum of three guards patrolling the interior. West flew the tiny aircraft through one of the holes and found a makeshift operations center in what looked like an old communications room. Six men and two women stood in front of computers that had been placed on old concrete plinths that were designed to be blast-proof. Some of the men and women were talking on their phones.
“They are hunting us,” West translated the audio picked up by the drone. “They’re coordinating a massive search of the blocks around the embassy where we disappeared.”
And overseeing it all was Valery Alekseyev, operations director of the SVR. He wore a black pullover and pants, looking every inch as cruel and ruthless as he had in his photograph. This was the man responsible for the deaths of the three Private agents in Beijing, for killing Lewis Williams and putting Jessie Fleming in hospital, destroying Private Beijing, abducting Alison Lucas, making a traitor of Rafael, and trying to kill yet more of my friends and colleagues in New York and Moscow. I understood the depth of the anger Alekseyev felt toward me for causing his brother’s ruin because now I returned it many times over.