Bogdanov flipped open the file to a report of Faith meeting with the well-connected antique collector Dr. Svetlana Nikolaevna Gorkovo. The files were stitched together at the top. She took a razor blade from her desk and excised the report, careful not to leave any marks on the page beneath it. She removed everything mentioning the doctor. When she finished, she folded the sheets and stuck them inside her inner jacket pocket. She didn’t want any shredded documents in her office.
A phone rang. Stukoi demanded her immediate presence in his office. She returned the edited files to the documents repository and braced herself for his fury. The general screamed at her before she could close his office door. She stood at attention in front of his desk and waited for the tirade to extinguish itself.
“I’m sorry, sir; what caught on fire?” Bogdanov said.
“The fucking facility where you were keeping the Americans, you idiot.”
“Did FedEx and Otter survive?”
“Not confirmed. Most of the guards abandoned their posts and ran out of the building. One guard stayed behind to get them out, but he hasn’t been accounted for. The fire department is on the scene.” Stukoi smashed his cigar into an ashtray. “How could you let this happen? They were in your charge, you fuckup.”
“They weren’t in my custody. Kosyk had already relieved me.” Bogdanov held out a paper to Stukoi. “I even had him be a good German and sign for them. He might really be a Slav, but you can always count on him to act Deutsch.”
“So the great Kosyk fucked up. That makes my day.”
“Any known loss of lives?” Bogdanov said.
“Does it matter?”
Bogdanov tapped on a pack of Aeroflot cigarettes until one came out. “Even if the Americans died, we can put on a show of searching for them. We have enough surveillance photos to put together anything we want. A nationwide manhunt might work better for us than catching them immediately. We can always corner them in some building they set on fire with their remaining explosives. We produce their charred remains as evidence. Trotting them in front of a camera would’ve been nice, but they wouldn’t have given us what we wanted, anyway.”
“You cover your ass well, Bogdanov. Going by the time on that receipt, you had just handed them over to Kosyk right around the time of the fire.”
“They were in his custody.”
“How could he be so stupid as to sign a receipt for prisoners we don’t want a paper trail on?”
Bogdanov nodded to Stukoi, indicating she wanted to use his lighter. He tossed it to her. “It’s standard MfS procedure. He even stood there like he was waiting for me to pull out a stamp to make it official.”
“What I don’t understand is why the hell you would do it if you didn’t already know they’d escaped.”
“Maybe I wanted to make him feel at home. He’s lost her before. I wanted to cover my ass, just in case.”
“You fucked him and the prick deserves it. Good work. Always did say you have balls. I still don’t like the fact that we lost them, but, hell, I like a good hunt as well as the next guy. We do have enough to pin it on them when we find them. And we will find them.”
Bogdanov lit the cigarette. “They started the fire?”
“We don’t know yet. There’s a hole in the wall of the room where they were held. Something exploded there. It’s a mess, but we found one body.”
“There were chemicals inside. I don’t know how volatile.”
“We have one report from a babushka who was sweeping the street. She claims a man and a woman climbed out of the hole after an explosion and ran. We can’t get a good description-bad eyesight.”
“Any chance Gorbachev’s people got word of the event, started the fire and helped them escape?” Bogdanov said.
“If his people knew, we wouldn’t be here right now. Because of the old lady, I want to work on the assumption they’re alive and on the run. We’ll have to find them.”
“As I see it, our hands are tied until tomorrow morning. We can’t start a full search for them until after the deed. If we look for them now, it’ll put Gorbachev’s bodyguards on a higher state of alert, and we’ll seem incompetent if police all over the union know we had foreknowledge but couldn’t stop two American assassins,” Bogdanov said.
“Agreed, but I’m going to have Popov’s investigative unit see if they can quietly pick up their trail from the building. They can search known associates.”
“Sir, I feel partially responsible for their loss, even if they were in Kosyk’s hands. I’d like to personally direct the investigation into known contacts.”
“You’re an excellent field operative abroad, but you’ve just proven you’re worthless on home soil. You’re perceived as too central to the operation to remove you at this point without too many questions, or I would. I don’t want you touching it or anything else right now. You’re expected at our final planning meeting tonight, so you’d better show up. Go home until then. Visit your father. I don’t want to see your face around here. Dismissed.” A phone rang and Stukoi lowered his ear to each one along the row.
Colonel Bogdanov walked from the office to see Stukoi’s secretary, Pyatiletka, disappear out the main door. A note on her desk informed the general she had gone home early for her granddaughter’s birthday. Thanks to her usual negligence, her computer terminal was still on. The colonel looked around the empty room and sat at the terminal. At the prompt she typed in KUSNV, then the password LATA33, and she was logged into the SOUD system on the mainframe. She quickly navigated through the hierarchy of menus and searched for records with both Faith Whitney and Svetlana Gorkovo. Fourteen hits. She pressed the delete button and an error message popped onto the amber screen. Only a high-level systems administrator could delete a file.
She logged off and raced to Faith.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
MOSCOW
4:46 P.M.
Two hours after escaping from the brain trust, Faith knocked on Svetlana’s door as hard as she dared. A loud bark came from the flat.
“Reagan, good dog,” Faith said.
Svetlana’s many eccentricities included talking to her dog in English, but Faith spoke in Russian so as not to give any hint of her nationality to any eavesdropping neighbors. The dog ignored her and barked louder. The more Faith pleaded in Russian, the more Reagan barked. He pawed at the door.
“Quiet!” Summer said. The dog fell silent. “She’s not home or the dog would’ve had her here. Wait and I’ll be back in a second.” Summer went down the stairs, taking several steps at a time. In less than a minute he returned with a thin metal strip with a rivet lodged in one end. He fed the metal into the slit between the door and the frame just as a loud creak came from across the hall.
A shriveled face peeked through the crack. “What’s happening? Who’re you?”
“Zdravstvuite,” Faith greeted her. “I’m here with my husband to feed Reagan for Sveta, but forgot the key. Did she perhaps leave you a spare?”
“She said nothing to me about a trip. What’s that smell?” The woman’s accusing eyes darted between Faith and Summer.
“My apologies. I came from work and we had eleven bodies to embalm today. I don’t understand why people always die in clusters. Cousin Ludmilla went into early labor and Sveta doesn’t want to leave her alone.” Faith turned toward Summer and gestured to the door. Her voice became harsh and she shouted at him in Russian. “Haven’t you got that open yet? You forgot the key, so you go home and get it. And no drinking. Don’t you dare come back here with alcohol on your breath.”
Summer shrugged his broad shoulders and turned back to the door. The dog let out a deep bark. Faith hoped Reagan remembered her. Summer coaxed the metal strip into the lock and the door sprang open.