The commandant’s office was a two-story building with an enclosed red-brick entrance that jutted out from the front. The front steps were half as wide as the entire house, with low brick walls framing the sides. Rusted outlets for lights sat out above the front door, the bulbs long since smashed out. Iron rails topped the entry on three sides, forming a small veranda where the commandant might well have spent his evenings, smoking Cuban cigars and swilling the local beer or something harder shipped in from Moscow. The plaster siding had peeled away from much of the facade, exposing the brown brick underneath. The front door, weathered and split wood, hung open on corroded hinges and Kyra could see through the building all the way to the back. A large dormitory that had housed soldiers of the armored corps stationed at Vogelsang sat off behind some smaller trees a few hundred feet to the right of the house.
“Tire tracks, a few different sets… not sure how many,” Kyra said, searching the ground. “Pretty recent, I think. The ground is still a little muddy from the rain.” She climbed the low steps, stopped, and listened. She heard nothing, not even birds in the nearby evergreens.
“This was probably the nicest home on base, back in the day,” Jon observed. “Creeped out yet?”
“It’s just an old building,” Kyra said with a shrug. Central Virginia, home, had more than its share of abandoned old buildings, some as old as the Revolution itself. She extracted a flashlight from her pack and moved quietly inside.
The walls inside had faired little better than those without. The wallpaper was shredded and large chunks of broken drywall exposed the frames and wiring underneath. Fallen plaster crunched under her boots, and she kicked one of the larger pieces through a hole in the timbers of the floor. It rattled as it fell down a few feet. Kyra looked down.
“Footprints,” she said. “Boots by the look of them, but somebody had a pair of dress shoes.” The dust had been disturbed, mostly by shoes with fat treads, but also a pair with a flat sole.
They searched the ground floor and found nothing besides the signs of recent movement across the floor. Kyra used her smartphone to document them with digital pictures before the analysts moved up the stairs to the second floor.
The first two rooms were no different from the ones they’d seen on the ground floor, more entropy at work on the wood and wallpaper, but the third was what they’d come to see. A chair sat in the corner, a wooden stool in the center of the room. Both had only the smallest bits of dust on their seats. A length of cord sat on the floor next to a black hood.
“Bet you ten dollars this is where they arrested Strelnikov,” Kyra offered.
“Sucker’s bet. I’ll keep my money. The ante is too low to be interesting.”
“You think we should bag that stuff,” Kyra asked, nodding at the hood and the rope.
Jon shook his head. “Just photograph the room. If this is where Strelnikov checked out, then it’s a crime scene, technically speaking. I don’t think the Germans would be very happy with you tampering with evidence.”
Kyra shrugged, and photographed the room and its contents. She stared around, looking for any missed details. “There’s nothing else here. I don’t see anything that could tell us what Lavrov is working on.”
Jon’s gaze had become unfocused and Kyra recognized the thousand-yard stare that he fell into when he was thinking. “That Syrian officer wouldn’t have come all the way out here just to talk with Lavrov,” he said, working the puzzle as he spoke. “They could’ve done that at the embassy, or just over a secure phone. He must’ve come to Berlin so Lavrov could show him something… or give him something.”
“Maybe Lavrov wanted to show him that he’d caught Strelnikov?” Kyra suggested. “Show him that his operation was secure?”
Jon shook his head. “A photograph would have done that just as well. No need for him to see that in person, or at least not to see only that in person. He must’ve come here for something that Lavrov couldn’t just share remotely,” he suggested. “And Lavrov is a technology dealer.”
Kyra saw where his line of logic was going. “You think Lavrov brought him here to demonstrate something, or deliver something? A weapon?”
“Or some other piece of technology.”
“Why not do that in Russia?” Kyra asked.
“Good question. I don’t know,” he admitted. “But if the Syrian did come here for a weapons test or a technology demonstration, where would Lavrov set it up?”
Kyra pulled out the base diagram again. “Assuming he wanted to keep the demonstration secure, he wouldn’t want to do it around here. The base is enormous. Anyone could stumble in from a dozen different directions. There’s no way he could secure the place without bringing in a regiment, and that would be hard to hide from the locals.”
Jon stared at the diagram and put his finger down on a spot to the southwest. “The actual missile base? It would be easier to lock down a smaller group of buildings than this main complex… and it had its own living quarters, workshops, and hard storage bunkers where everything could be secured. If Lavrov wanted a self-contained space where he could mount up some actual security, that would be the place, because it probably was the most secure place on the base when this place was actually operational. But that’s just me doing some mirror imaging. I’m not a Russian intelligence officer.”
“It sounds logical. Let’s hope that Lavrov is a logical man,” Kyra offered in support.
“You think I’m wrong?”
“No, I’m worried that you’re right,” Kyra replied. “And I’m really worried that his people will still be there.”
“Then we call the Germans and let them clean the place out,” Jon advised. “Maybe everything gets wrapped up nice and neat.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“When have I ever been an optimist?” he asked.
They needed almost another hour to walk down to the missile base. The complex was far smaller than the main base they’d just left, but still large enough to be daunting. They reached the tree line, and Kyra stopped short. “Jon,” she said, quiet. “Up there.”
He looked up. Two wooden poles six meters tall rose from the ground with a heavy metal cable strung between them over a concrete slab on the ground, then fastened to the earth on either side like the guidelines of a tent. A steel girder, rust apparent on its surface even from a distance, hung suspended from the wire over the slab, five meters square underneath. More dark wires on each side ran down to enormous metal cylinders topped with gold ports, and several other wires ran into a concrete bunker buried in a hillside beyond.
“Are those power lines?” Kyra asked.
Jon nodded. “Good bet. Look where they run.” He pointed and Kyra followed the invisible line drawn by his hand to the large silver cylinders topped with gold stubs. “Those look like industrial capacitors.”
“No corrosion on them. Those are new,” she said. “Big ones too. They look like the ones you’d see in a power substation.”
Jon twisted his head, listening. “No buzz,” he said.
“Line’s dead?”
“Probably, but I’m not going to test it,” he replied.
“If this is where Lavrov was set up, he could’ve just pulled some generator trucks up and jacked in right there.”
“I don’t think so,” Jon countered. “Those wires run over to those buildings. Makes more sense that they’d put up a generator inside. It would be quieter than running it out in the open.”
Kyra scanned the close horizon, looking for movement or other signs of life. She saw nothing. “I don’t see anyone.”
Jon nodded, and they walked toward the odd setup. “It’s a test rig of some kind, I think.”