“Does Salko know about this?” he asked.
The man to his right, a towering figure twice as wide as the average person, glanced back at the man with the torch.
They said nothing, but kept pulling him on.
Where? Where were they taking him?
Much more time in the open, and he would die.
He peered into the darkness ahead and tried to pick out shapes. He saw black silhouettes against a gunpowder sky, and followed the edges to discern the outlines of some buildings. The curved roof of a warehouse, the flat roof of an office... wait... no... it couldn’t be.
But part of him knew it was. He hadn’t seen this place for years, but it was branded in his memory like an owner’s mark. Boltino Army Base. He’d never be free of its legacy. Not unless... He stopped himself. Now was not the time for dreams. Even if he could escape whatever dark fate this night held, true freedom was an impossibility.
His captors dragged him into the main administration block. They hauled him through the building and, as the flashlight beam fell here and there, Yenen’s memory brought the decayed place to life. Colonel Arman Zhuk, the camp commander, a man long since dead, had his office along this corridor. Yevgeny Salko, the young intelligence agent whose zealous mind dreamed up everything they’d done here, had been two doors down. Everywhere he looked, Yenen saw bursts of the past, and he wondered whether the cold had got to him. Was he beginning to hallucinate?
The men dragged him into what had once been a classroom. Now it contained nothing but snow and a broken desk, a relic of what had once been.
His captors tossed him into the snow, and the leader shone the flashlight in his eyes as the group encircled him. There were more than nine. Including the two who’d carried him, there were fifteen people in total. Men and women, all masked, all in dark clothes.
“Please,” Yenen pleaded with the leader. “I’ll die in this cold.”
“It’s good you know that.” It wasn’t the leader who spoke, but the huge man who’d dragged Yenen to this place. “It means you won’t delay in giving us the information we need.”
Yenen rubbed his hands against his frozen torso, and a wave of painful needles tracked the course of his fingertips. His teeth chattered and he felt as though death already had hold of him.
“What happened here?” the big man asked.
The question cut through the numbing cold, and woke Yenen’s deteriorating mind.
Who are these people? How much do they know already?
“You’re dying,” the big man said. “What happened here?”
“Things designed to change the balance of power,” he replied.
“What things?” the big man asked.
Yenen’s jaw snapped shut intermittently as automatic functions overrode his conscious mind. His body was rigid with cold, and was doing everything it could to keep him alive. “There was a program called Bright Star. It was designed to give Russia the advantage in the twenty-first century.”
The man with the flashlight, the leader of the group, shone the beam in Yenen’s eyes.
“I need to know what he’s saying,” the man remarked in English.
Yenen recognized the voice, but from where? Yenen fought to focus his panicked mind.
Then he realized who his captor was.
Chapter 83
Power is nothing but an illusion. We come into the world helpless and we leave the same way. In between, we might be able to convince ourselves and sometimes others that we are masters of our own destiny, but fate always conspires to give us a stark demonstration of the truth. Maxim Yenen was learning that lesson. We’d taken the billionaire from his life of power, and in a few simple steps had transformed him into a pitiful creature. He crouched in the snow, his skin red in the torch-light, his lips blue, his hands desperately rubbing his torso, trying to generate warmth. I wondered whether he was aware of the injuries he’d sustained in the crash, or if the cold had dulled his senses.
A mottled purple bruise covered his left ribs, he bled from a wound on his forehead and his right ankle was black and swollen; it looked as though it was broken. He needed medical attention, but if he didn’t get out of the cold very soon, none of his injuries would trouble him. He would die of exposure.
I didn’t like what we had done, but I liked losing a colleague even less. Maxim Yenen was clearly linked to Veles in some way — the trap he walked us into after firing us from the investigation into Yana Petrova’s murder had confirmed that — so he had Leonid’s blood on his hands.
“Please,” he begged. “Please, Mr. Morgan, give me some clothes. Something to protect me. Anything. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. I’ll tell you all about Bright Star.”
I nodded at Feo, who’d been leading the interrogation, and he signaled one of his men, who tossed him a blanket. Feo handed it to Yenen, and the semi-naked man fumbled as he wrapped it around his shoulders.
“Start talking, or it goes,” I said.
The blanket must have given him courage as well as warmth, because he looked at me defiantly. “You’re not a killer, Mr. Morgan.”
“Don’t test me, Mr. Yenen,” I replied. “All I have to do is walk away.”
His gaze faltered and he looked beyond me at the squad of former police officers Feo had assembled. Our operation had been oversubscribed with almost every resident volunteering to play a part, so Feo had been forced to choose the thirteen men and women who stood behind me.
“Alone,” Yenen said. “I’ll talk with you alone.” His teeth chattered.
“You worried what they’ll do to you?” I asked.
“I’m not scared for me,” he snapped. “I’m scared for them. What I know brings death. If you want to know it too, that’s your concern, but don’t inflict this knowledge on others.”
I glanced at Feo. Like mine, his face was concealed beneath a ski mask, but his eyes expressed understanding. He said something in Russian to the squad, and they filed out of the room. He followed them out, and, within moments, it was just me, Maxim Yenen and one other masked figure.
“I said alone,” Yenen complained.
The figure removed her mask.
“I watched my friend die,” Dinara said. “So you will talk to me too.”
Yenen nodded. “OK.”
He shivered. “I’ve been leaking Russian intelligence secrets. I was using Yana Petrova to spread this information. I discovered she was Otkrov and made contact. She was more than happy to be the conduit. Someone in the Kremlin, I don’t know who, must have discovered her identity and they had her killed, as noisily as possible, probably to serve as a warning to her co-conspirators.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why betray your country?”
“The closer I get to the heart of the Kremlin, the more ugliness I see. The world works best when there is balance, Mr. Morgan,” Yenen replied. “America checks Russian power. Russia checks American ambition. Neither has free rein.” He hesitated. “But that is about to change. The Bright Star program will give Russia geopolitical dominance. It will change the balance of power for a hundred years. What we’ve done with the Bright Star program will reshape the world.”
Chapter 84
“We?” I asked.
“I was part of it,” Yenen admitted. “I sat in this very classroom as a child. There were dozens of us. Children from all over Russia, some from other countries. Orphans mainly. All taught to be Americans. Your democracies think short term. A four-year presidency? Ha! What can you achieve in four years? In Russia, a president can enact a plan to train children to infiltrate the highest echelons of American power, and he can still be in office when his plan comes to fruition.”