Mission critical, p.32
Mission Critical, page 32
part #8 of A Gray Man Novel Series
“Couldn’t he just be running the Bratvas here?”
Fitzroy shook his head. “This Black Wolf, if he exists at all, is not part of the Russian mob himself, that much is assumed. The Solntsevskaya Bratva owns swaths of this town, and swaths of politicians and cops, as well. They own banks here, more property than you can imagine, and they are growing all the time. But they don’t have the sophistication that we are seeing in the UK these days that involve Russian interests. Topflight political killings, targeted poisoning, kidnapping, financial and hacking schemes to support the Kremlin.
“Our mastermind has a very careful hand, and an extremely deft touch.” Fitzroy added, “That doesn’t sound like the Russian mob, now does it? And then the loads of contract killings against Kremlin outsiders that have taken place here. Too many to believe that SVR assassins are causing all the damage. The SVR has its own problems with moles and compromises. They wouldn’t be getting away as cleanly as they are.” Fitzroy sipped his drink. “Chernny Volk, he’s the mastermind, if you believe the rumors.”
Court said, “What do you suggest I do, Don?”
“Forget all this bollocks and go home.” Court said nothing. “But since that is out of the question, you could do this.” Fitzroy thought a moment. “Cassidy is at the club every afternoon, usually by four. He takes over one of the small parlors to do business, meets with people there.”
“Business with other club members?”
“Yes, you don’t get into the Red Lion Club without being a member.”
This surprised Court. “You have Russian oligarchs and crime bosses in your club?”
“Heavens, no. We don’t let that ilk in. Terry does his deals there with proper Englishmen.”
Court didn’t suspect that people working with Terry Cassidy were proper anything, Englishmen or not, but he did not say this. Instead he said, “There are just a few people with Western names on his client list.”
“Perhaps this list isn’t all his clients, just the ones he wants to keep a paper trail on. The corrupt, the criminals, the dangerous ones.”
Court asked, “Do you recognize the names of the Westerners? Are they OC?”
Fitzroy looked down again. “Yes, now that you mention it. Most of these blokes are known gangsters of varying degrees. David Mars is a name I don’t recognize, although that doesn’t mean he’s not someone. As I said, I’m out to pasture.” He looked up. “What are you planning on doing, lad?”
Court shrugged. “You know, same old thing. Find the bad guy. Kill him.”
Fitzroy smiled. “You are a nutter.”
“No argument there. Could you get me into your club this afternoon?”
Fitzroy drank the rest of his scotch and then laughed. “You want to beat Cassidy into a confession?”
“Of course not. I could plant some bugs. Do they sweep there?”
“Cassidy does it himself before he starts his meetings.” Fitzroy added, “But his detection equipment isn’t state-of-the-art. I’ve seen it. Any device that has a remote shut-off could be deactivated during the sweep and then reactivated to transmit a signal once Cassidy begins his meetings.”
“Good,” Court said.
“Not so good, actually,” Fitz said, and he adopted a pained expression now. “It’s just that . . . the Red Lion Club has been there for one hundred fifty years, and I’d much like to know it will be around for another one-fifty.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning . . . when Courtland Gentry walks into a building with an operational intent, often that building and its inhabitants do not fare well. Perhaps you should give the equipment to me, and I’ll get it placed in the club.”
Court grinned now. “Ho-ly shit. I’m running Sir Donald Fitzroy as a technical asset? I love it.”
Fitzroy drained the last of his scotch. “Don’t get bloody used to it, lad.”
CHAPTER 41
Zoya ran her fingers over the arms of the comfortable wingback chair and picked at a loose thread, but her eyes remained locked on the door in front of her. She fought with her emotions, but this was getting harder and harder the longer she waited.
She sat in the library of Vladi Belyakov’s twenty-thousand-square-foot palace just outside Aylesbury, to the west of London, and with each passing minute her trepidation only increased.
Zoya had arrived at Belyakov’s Belgravia house three hours earlier and was let in, frisked, and taken to the oligarch in his study. Zoya insisted that Uncle Vladi call her father, and despite the fact that the night before last he’d told her he didn’t have a clue regarding what she was talking about, now he just nodded and reached into his pocket for his phone.
He left the room for ten minutes.
After the call, Belyakov put Zoya in a car and drove with her and some security to Barclays London Heliport. They took off and headed west; he told her they were going to his country house.
Zoya assumed everything Belyakov did now was the marching orders her father had given him over the phone. It seemed to her that Belyakov continued to respond to the general like a complete subordinate.
Belyakov told her Feo Zakharov himself would fly out via his Airbus jet helicopter, but for over an hour she was kept here waiting in the library, her heart thundering in her chest the entire time, sweat on the back of her neck and her faint stress hives kept hidden only by the simple black top she wore over black jeans.
She sipped tea but wished she had something stronger, and just when she was about to call across the room to a silent Belyakov and ask for a drink, she heard a helicopter fly over the mansion.
She said nothing about the alcohol now; it was too late for it to make any difference.
* * *
• • •
David Mars unfastened his seat belt and climbed out of his helicopter. He marched towards a rear entrance of the private palace, one hundred meters away. Fox was behind him, Hines behind Fox, and three more men, well-trained elite mercenary contractors working for Mars, walked alongside the group, their short-barreled rifles with collapsible stocks hidden under their denim or leather jackets.
As he neared the house, Mars steeled himself to become the person he needed to be in order to face his daughter after fourteen years. This reunion would not be a happy one, he knew, either from her side or from his. He hoped he would find her at least somewhat open to a reconciliation, and he would love nothing more in the world than to have her by his side while he worked on his greatest operation, but he harbored no illusions of this. She was CIA, or helping them at least, and this made her his enemy, unless she could convince him otherwise.
She was half American, this he knew, and this had always bothered him.
And how could it not?
David Mars had been born Feodor Ivanovich Zakharov in Minsk, then part of the Soviet Union. His parents were from Moscow, both military officers, and they returned to the capital when he was still young.
He was a smart and physically fit child, enjoyed mountain climbing, chess, and foreign languages. It was a foregone conclusion that he would follow his taciturn father, by now a colonel, into the Army. He graduated from Frunze Military Academy and entered the officers’ corps of the Soviet Army. Picked for his able brain and strong body to join the GRU, Russian military intelligence, he went to Afghanistan shortly after the war began. He interrogated prisoners and supported troops with his intelligence product, paid off goat herders for information about enemy supply lines from Pakistan, and, even though he was not a frontline infantryman, survived over a dozen attacks by Mujahidin fighters during his time there.
By the mideighties he was back in Moscow, learning deep-cover tradecraft, including but not limited to improving his English and his ability to blend into foreign environs.
He met Irene Carson, a young and beautiful language teacher from Los Angeles, and the two married after approval from GRU leadership. They had two children: Feodor and then, two years later, Zoya. After the fall of the Union his entire family was sent to embassies in London and Washington. He was, ostensibly, a military attaché, but with his skills he was able to slip out of opposition coverage of his house, almost at will, and run agents throughout whatever capital he’d been assigned to.
This he and his family did for nearly a decade.
Irene had long since changed her name to Irina, and she and their kids bolstered his cover as a mild-mannered family man, but Irina wasn’t an intelligence operative herself.
No, that was Feodor Zakharov’s role. Over the years, in fact, he became the GRU’s best spy.
Until his next promotion sent him back to Moscow, that is. He was assigned to the Aquarium, GRU’s headquarters. He made general, became a deputy to the GRU chief, and when the man retired after a year, the president of Russia himself handpicked Zakharov from a list of candidates to take the reins of Russian military intelligence.
He was young for the job, in his early forties, and he remained ensconced in this position for several years.
And then his wife Irina was run down by a truck that had been stolen from the Red October Chocolate Factory and dumped in the Moskva River after the incident. Inconsolable, he began to look for the culprit.
Evidence came out that the entire sleeper deep-penetration program that she was a trainer for had been compromised to MI6 by a leak at the Kremlin, and while the SVR could never positively conclude that Irina Zakharova had been murdered by British agents, Zakharov’s own personal digging into the situation uncovered clues that the compromise at SVR was, in fact, due to a British intelligence operation. These clues sent him on a self-financed private trip to London to slip back into one of his characters using false papers.
To obtain his own private security and foot soldiers in the UK, he reached out to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the largest of the Russian mafia groups, and he was put in touch with a brigade commander there in London. He built networks of other criminal organizations, local British groups, and transnational satellites operating in London, and soon enough he had men working for him in the Metropolitan Police Force.
He was months into his own investigation of his wife’s death at the hands of the British, still living in London, when he had his target. A high-level MI6 operations officer named Wellstone. Zakharov decided to assassinate the man, on the streets of London, in the most dramatic fashion he could imagine.
The operation was under way, but Zakharov shut it down when he learned Feo Feodorovich, his twenty-one-year-old son, was in a hospital in Moscow suffering from advanced-stage leukemia.
Zakharov raced home, but Feo died that very night.
The elder Zakharov blamed the British for his son’s death, although no one else knew of any evidence to support this.
Still, his lust for revenge only grew.
After the death of Feo, Feodor Zakharov went to the Kremlin and demanded the opportunity to operate against Britain personally for both the murder of his wife and their involvement in the death of his older child. He himself adopted the plan that was ultimately approved by the president. He was pleasantly surprised that the president agreed to it so easily, but the Kremlin had been looking to send a dedicated intelligence leader into the UK to organize the Bratvas there into a proxy force, to acquire intelligence on the powerful anti-Kremlin dissidents who lived there, to oversee the offshoring of Russian money through and to UK banks, and to conduct targeted killings at the behest of Moscow.
And they recognized that Zakharov was their man. They could always get another GRU chief, but there was no one else with the skill, training, and motivation to do what needed to be done on the ground in the most important foreign location for Russian interests.
Zakharov flew to Dagestan, where war raged against Shariat Jamaat; was declared dead on the battlefield after photographs were taken purporting to show his body; and spent the next two months undergoing cosmetic surgery. He grew the first beard he’d worn since fighting through the Afghan winter of 1983–84, and he darkened his hair several shades, making it almost black.
General Feodor Zakharov turned into David James Mars, a wealthy real estate mogul who’d lived most of his life in the Caribbean, which accounted for the fact that few around town knew much about him. By becoming David Mars, Feodor Zakharov himself became a sleeper, an operative who has not come to the attention of police or security forces.
He slipped into London’s elite circles with few questions asked, bolstered by contacts made through front companies run by the SVR around the world, and connections in the UK purchased with Russia’s billions funneled into UK banks.
He resumed working with the Solntsevskaya Bratva, whose leadership assigned him to an English-educated Vor named Artyom Primakov. Primakov had been an SVR agent and graduate of the school where Irina Zakharov taught, and he blended into London just as well as Mars.
Zakharov and Primakov, now David Mars and Roger Fox, spent the next several years working for Russian interests across the United Kingdom.
No one in the mafia other than senior leadership and Artyom Primakov knew David Mars was Russian, and neither did any but a very few at the Kremlin. Instead he went by a code name: Chernny Volk, Black Wolf.
The money for Mars’s operations came from Vladimir Belyakov, the billionaire Russian oligarch who, despite a very public falling-out with the government in Moscow, was in truth a dedicated foot soldier for the Kremlin, a member of the Siloviki, the politically influential elite. The Kremlin eased off the Solntsevskaya Bratva while simultaneously increasing their menace of other mafia groups to further bolster the operation.
David Mars had spent the past several years operating here in London against UK interests and in furtherance of Russian interests, but he had no ties to the Kremlin at all. He was the Russian president’s “fire and forget” weapon, sent to cause mayhem, set up with virtually unlimited men and money, and left to his own devices.
He was careful at first, building contacts in intelligence circles, not just in the United Kingdom but with all the Five Eyes nations, paying for dirt on IC personalities, socking it all away so he could initiate his schemes when the moment was right.
This was a time of great Russian expansion into the United Kingdom; secretive banking and property ownership laws saw to this, and London became, quite simply, the oligarch’s haven of choice.
And then Zakharov’s operational tempo increased when Britain began threatening to strip assets from the Russian kleptocrats who had taken up residence in and around London. The Kremlin let it be known to Mars, through a half dozen cutouts, that it was time the gloves came off.
A month later Mars had an MP killed in West Bromwich. He conducted many other assassinations, often with nerve agents, sometimes with polonium. He killed Russian dissidents on UK soil, he blackmailed bankers and lawyers to ease restrictions on and inquiries into questionable accounts full of Kremlin members’ money, and he did it all with no one knowing who he was, or even that he was Russian.
His work had been fulfilling, though he felt he would never do enough damage to the English for what they’d done to his family.
He’d already been planning some sort of intelligence operation against the British at the upcoming Five Eyes conference in Scotland when he learned the news that changed everything. Four months earlier, he learned that his beloved daughter, an SVR operative who was wholly unaware he was alive for operational security purposes, had been killed by American intelligence officers during a mission in Thailand.
Mars was once again inconsolable. But as before, he channeled his rage into action. He had a new foe, a second enemy who had caused him great personal pain.
And soon he knew what he was going to do about it.
The Five Eyes conference would have the elite of all the English-speaking spy agencies in one place at one time, here in the United Kingdom, the nation where Mars and his Bratva minions had operated with impunity for the past dozen years.
He would find a way to kill them all.
He first thought of polonium, but there was no way this would not lead all investigators directly to Moscow’s door. A biological attack, on the other hand, could be effectively pulled off, he decided, but only if he used deceptive measures to turn this into a false-flag operation.
He went to an old colleague from the Afghan war who now worked in biological warfare research. He told him he wanted the name of a foreigner who might be persuaded to attack the West, and the man understood exactly what Zakharov wanted.
Zakharov was at first surprised when the name he was given turned out to be that of a female North Korean doctor in Stockholm, but he was also handed access to her FSB file, which detailed both her capabilities and her stated wish to use her knowledge against the West. He learned that she was a North Korean intelligence agent, as well, and she possessed both the knowledge and the temperament to conduct the attack.
He realized by the time he closed the file that this had the potential to be a perfect symbiotic relationship. Zakharov, a warrior consumed with the desire to destroy his target, and Won, a weapon in human form, consumed with the desire to detonate.
He sent Fox to collect her, and he told her enough of his plan to move her to Scotland, where Mars convinced her that North Korea would never take the fall for what was to come.
And at the same time Mars created a paper trail, orders from North Korea, and photographic evidence of Won’s movements, and this was all kept safely hidden for the day when he needed to prove to the world that this was not a Russian operation but a North Korean one.
He was just days away from commencing his attack, and all was in place, when Vladi Belyakov met with him at St. James’s Park and told him Zoya was alive.
He never wavered a moment after getting this news. She was not dead, but she’d clearly switched sides, working for America, which meant working for the Five Eyes.
