96%.

  Then a male’s voice came over her earbud. “ETA less than one minute.”

  “Copy that,” she said. “At the ready.”

  Her finger held steady over the ‘ENTER’ button while her eyes focused on the screen.

  98%.

  As soon as the squadrons reached a certain point of the lab’s adjoining corridors, she hit the ‘ENTER’ button with stabbing authority. Within a second of transmitting the commands, well-placed Semtex charges had gone off in quick succession, the explosions thereby taking the forces out as corridors collapsed beneath the Kremlin.

  99%.

  But there were other tunnels and more soldiers, all who were pressing down on their position from different locations.

  All Natasha did was buy them more time.

  100%.

  After removing the flash drive and pocketing it, she stated into her earbud mic, “I’ve got the download. Now heading to the extraction site. The Conquistador will land in five. I repeat, the Conquistador will land in five”

  “The Conquistador will land in five. Copy that.”

  Natasha stood up, removed her lab coat, and tossed it over the PC monitor. Then she grabbed her suppressed weapon from her side holster, a Glock, and moved to the rear of the lab where there was a submarine hatch door with a wheel handle. After appropriating the blueprints from Kremlin-based databanks regarding hidden tunnel systems, Natasha’s team had prepared well for their escape.

  Entering the tunnel, which was tube-shaped, she and her two-man team ran down the corridor which led them to a train platform. A cylindrical-shaped car that looked like a Pringles container lying on its side was actually a highspeed train that operated by the maglev principles of ‘magnetic levitation,’ and a system that was popular in Japan.

  Knowing full well that they were being captured on the CCTV scanners, Natasha, along with her team, took out the cameras with their weapons.

  * * *

  The Kremlin’s video team had watched Natasha’s every move all the way to the tram station. And then the camera feeds went dead, the CCTV monitors taken out by strafing shots as they were about to board the train.

  Sergei Ostrovsky watched closely as he stood before the monitors and watched with a keen eye. Natasha Kaminski was betraying her oath, he considered. And when captured, she would die a traitor’s death with her torture slow and agonizingly painful. The other two were just pawns who would suffer by the means of slow dismemberment, starting with a finger and then the hand. Then Ostrovsky would take bits and pieces all the way up to their shoulders. Extracting information, at least in Sergei Ostrovsky’s mind, was the best part of his job. It was also something he was quite good at since mining information was his forte. Especially when he did so behind closed doors where his victim’s cries were often heard, and then abruptly stopped. As a statement of his success, he would exit his exclusive chamber with his leather apron coated with the blood of others when his slaughter was complete.

  To play this game, however, he first had to catch his quarry.

  Issuing commands into his lip mic with measured calm, he watched his advancing teams removed from the equation by the predetermined placements of explosives. That may have been a well-played moment on the part Natasha Kaminski, he thought, but a battle win, especially inside the Kremlin, was far from winning the war.

  The Kremlin leader issued more commands, this time to intercept the train, which was, according to the monitors, heading west at a significant speed. He wanted the conspirators taken alive, if possible, and brought to him, especially the woman. There was no doubt in Ostrovsky’s mind that the appropriation of the missile designs was by a backing of either the Mossad or the CIA.

  Nevertheless, he would gleefully practice his skillset to find out.

  * * *

  As soon as the operative who stood before the control system of the train enabled the panel, the structure lifted off the floor as the forces of magnet against magnet worked against each other and started the tram along the course, the train eventually picking up speed.

  Sweat beaded on the man’s brow, which he wiped away with the sleeve of his ‘Cossack’ uniform, something he felt dirty wearing.

  Then bullets started to punch through the walls of the tram, the holes suddenly showing up like magic, the driver ducking instinctively. Sparks flew from the damaged panel, but the train kept moving along at a good clip.

  More shots.

  More holes.

  More ducking.

  The driver slid aside the conductor’s door on his left, knowing that a train on the adjacent track was keeping pace, which was something he and Natasha had expected and were fully prepared for.

  As rounds continued to punch holes through the hull of the cylinder-shaped car, the operative raised his weapon, now in grenade-launch mode, and set off a grenade that corkscrewed through the space between them, and struck the conductor’s cabin of the opposing train. The driver’s compartment exploded with a fireball. And then the car, after the concussive forces knocked the vehicle off the magnetic pad and at a speed of more than one hundred miles per hour, rolled a dozen times in blinding revolutions before coming to a full stop, the train nothing but twisted wreckage with all onboard dead.

  Natasha’s driver continued forward though the vehicle was beginning to slow, the damage done. The digital speedometer was clocking downward: 90, 85, 80, 75 . . .

  He had hoped that the train would make it to the extraction site to the west.

  . . . 55 . . . 50 . . . 45 . . .

  From bordering magnetic tram pads, he could see two more trains converging to intercept. According to his wrist monitor, he had another two kilometers to go, just over a mile.

  Smiling somewhat grimly, he thought: You almost made it . . . Almost.

  . . . 25 . . . 20 . . . 15 . . .

  The other two trains caught up, slowed, and when the operative’s train came to a final stop, the doors to the flanking trams opened with fully armed soldiers from the Kremlin’s Regiment spilling out with their weapons raised.

  The operative, still bearing his grim smile, held his arms up in surrender and went to his knees, but only after he hit the ‘hazard’ button on his watch to send a signal to his handler.

  Upon inspection of the train, neither Natasha nor the other soldier could be found.

  The train had been used as a distraction.

  * * *

  Sergei Ostrovsky was seething inwardly, the man a bubbling cauldron of anger as the muscles in the back of his jaw worked. He had been bested by Natasha, someone he had come to trust over the past few months, someone who had obviously worked and manipulated him like a puppet. And now he stood before the monitor as the Regiment surrounded and cuffed the operator.

  Then into his lip mic and with less restraint, Ostrovsky said, “Find her.” But he knew it was too late. He had been duped to believing that the team was moving west and to a point of escape, when, in fact, they were moving elsewhere.

  Whether Natasha worked for the Mossad or the CIA, it mattered little since they were one and the same because they had shared secrets. The confidentiality of Russia’s most coveted weapon system was now in the hands of their opponents. And Putin, he knew, would not be happy.

  Nevertheless, he would take his anger out on the captured operative.

  Without emotion, Ostrovsky stated evenly to a guard, “Find my leather apron.”

  The soldier complied.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Natasha and her personal guard, a man by the name of David Simmons, maneuvered through the eastbound tunnel and ran through security doors that had to be decoded and unlocked, until they reached an exit tube that was several yards east of the Kremlin.

  Into her lip mic, Natasha said, “The Conquistador has landed. I repeat, the Conquistador has landed.”

  Above them, a manhole cover was lifted and slid aside, which gave Natasha and her teammate a view into a van’s interior that was stocked with high-end surveillance equipment.

  As they climbed the rungs of the ladder, a hand extended down to her from a man wearing a headset. In the background, wails of sirens closed in. “We’ve got to move,” he stated with urgency. “When you breached the defense doors to maneuver through the tunnel system, you triggered security warnings.”

  “You were supposed to disable them,” Natasha reminded him.

  “We did. They apparently have a backup system that was disassociated from the primary one. We thought we were golden.” After Natasha grabbed his hand, he lifted her into the cab. Then he reached for Simmons’ hand and, as he did with Natasha, lifted him into the van’s bay. Once they were both inside, the van operator moved the manhole back into place, then closed the hatch to the van’s floor. Then he called out to the driver: “Go!”

  While the van was speeding away in an easterly direction, the headset-wearing operator reached an open hand to Natasha. “Flash drive.”

  After she handed it to him, the tech immediately inserted it into a port and started to upload the data. Since he was operating from a BGAN Ismarsat terminal, which was a mobile workstation that as long as it had a line-of-sight to one of the three geostationary satellites to receive a feed from, then he would have global coverage on a secured line. Right now, a satellite feed was receiving and sending data to Langley.

  Natasha leaned against the cab’s wall knowing that this was far from over. Russia had its protocols of containment, whereas the CIA had its methods to beat those protocols. Mission designs always looked great on paper, she understood, but rarely worked out as planned.

  After removing her tied-up bun so that her hair could flow freely, and then tucking her glasses into the pocket of her lab coat as a means of shedding her second skin of Natasha Kaminski, Shari Cohen breathed a heavy sigh. She could feel her insides shaking with a gelatinous quiver, her nerves on edge. Months ago, she had negotiated her way into the Kremlin through operative channels—with those channels being long-placed assets by the Mossad and MI6 who had widened the cracks within the Russian system to allow a mole through the tear. She happened to be that mole who worked Sergei Ostrovsky like a tool, by installing measures of security never considered by Russian principals, which they eventually employed, but were also measures she knew how to breach. Ostrovsky bought it all—hook, line, and sinker—after she had groomed him and others on his staff until they regarded her with unbridled trust. It was not an easy mission. But it was an undertaking that was filled with compromises on her part. She had to expose American secrets, albeit false ones that the United States had planted for the commandeering by the Russians, which endeared them to her. It had taken years of planning but months to implement. Now, they had the plans to Russia’s Golden Shield ICBM system.

  “What about Manning?” she asked the van operator. Beside her, her other guard, Simmons, rested his head against the van’s wall and closed his eyes.

  The van operator made a cutting motion across his throat. The signal was clear: Manning had sent information through his digital watch, something they all had, that he had been compromised. He had become the sacrifice of the one for the good of the many.

  Nodding, Shari, like Simmons, leaned her head against the van and closed her eyes.

  In the distance, though closing, were the sounds of multiple sirens.

  As Shari tried to decelerate her anxiety through meditation, her mind continued to work furiously. She had been on the front lines of espionage and, on many occasions, a bullet away from termination. She had applied her skillset, her intelligence, and her experience as a professor who excelled at counterterrorism. So when her opponent made a move, it was her job to counter these moves by examining every plausible strategy. And in doing so, she had breached the Kremlin, downloaded pertinent data, and absconded with the blueprints of an elite missile system. The cost, however, was Trevor Manning, a seasoned operative who shored up U.S. defenses through the front line of espionage.

  Opening her eyes because the meditation wasn’t working, she knew that the assignment was far from over. Even though they were in the process of bouncing the ICBM information from satellite to satellite until it reached Langley, they were still in Russia with the authorities closing. Bridges, train and bus stations, airports, all shipping ports of exit, would be heavily manned and guarded. Helicopters, she knew, would be leaving their pads to conduct an aerial investigation with Moscow going into lockdown. But these efforts took time.

  Glancing at her watch, Shari knew that they had eight minutes to reach their rendezvous point. “Eight minutes,” she said to the console operator.

  The operative, who wore his headset in an odd way with one audio earmuff on and the other off, stated, “Not a problem. We’ve plenty of time.”

  The sirens were getting louder in the background, the vehicles drawing close.

  A minute later, the van’s driver drove off the thoroughfare and onto an access road that led to a tree line. As soon as they reached the copse of pines, the van moved beneath the boughs and out of sight. Parked close by was a black Lada Granta, a small vehicle with traceable Russian plates that belonged to a dignitary, and a decoy for not getting stopped for inquiry.

  Getting out of the van, the console operator completely removed his headset and tossed it inside the van. The transfer of the data was complete, the screen registering a 100% download of completion.

  The driver, a tall and lanky individual who appeared almost Lincolnesque, opened the trunk of the Lada Granta. Inside were six neoprene outfits, the type of wear that was worn to fight the cold and frigid weather. These outfits, however, were manufactured to be aquatic wear.

  Nothing was said amongst the team as they unclothed and put on the neoprene suits, which clung to them as tightly as a membrane. The suit that was meant for Manning was left inside the trunk, a sad reminder that all the planning in the world was foolproof.

  Through the tree line, sirens and flashing lights passed by, the entourage of vehicles now chasing a phantom van. But as soon as the choppers took to the air to become their eyes in the sky, the caravan of cars would be informed of this and double back.

  They now had three minutes to reach the rendezvous point.

  Getting inside the vehicle, the console operator programmed an incendiary device inside the van to go off in three minutes. It was a thermite unit that would completely sanitize the van by destroying all trace evidence.

  As the Lada Granta started, the driver, who had yet to say a word, moved the vehicle away from the trees and onto the road. Making his way across the main thoroughfare that ran parallel to the Moscow River, the team eventually found themselves standing along the bank of the river.

  At the exact time of pickup, bubbles rose to the water’s surface, and then a submersible began to emerge, the six-man sub rising. When the hatch was lifted, the pilot did a headcount. A man was missing: Manning.

  After the pilot was informed that ‘they were it,’ the team entered the frigid waters of the Moscow River and entered the sub. The quarters were cramped and cold with the temperature not much different than the freezing weather outside. Their journey west, the pilot explained, would take them to Kiev in the Ukraine, where they would meet their contacts who would see them to the United States. But the ride to Kiev would be a long one.

  Just as the submersible was about to go under, there was an explosion, a muffled whump as the van caught fire and exploded. As expected, the helicopters had rerouted the security vehicles to the point of the fire within the trees beyond the access road.

  Now with the submersible moving west in cramped confines, Shari Cohen closed her eyes and tried to meditate, only for her thoughts to drift to Kimball Hayden, with this segueing bringing on a marginal smile. In her mind’s eye she could see the wide breadth of his shoulders and his smoldering smile with ruler-straight teeth, and those stark cerulean blue eyes that were always as clear as Jamaican waters. But that was the ying to the yang of his body scars, she thought, the beautiful against the ugliness that left him ravished with the traumas of his life. The healed over slashes, the discoloring burns and the melted flesh that had cooled and healed like the tallow of wax, and the pocks of his gunshot wounds, all vestiges of a man who had suffered greatly. The pain of life, she hoped, would not carry over with him in death. He had paid his dues a thousand-fold for the sins of his past. The man had paid his penance.

  Now let him be in peace.

  And let him be with me.

  For hours, the sub continued its course with the neoprene suits doing what they were intended to do by keeping them warm. And though she would think of Kimball often, she also wondered about Manning. Was he dead? Alive? Was he under the authority of the Russian FSB? She would never get her answer, but she would surmise that he would suffer either death or a lifetime inside a gulag, with death perhaps the better option.

  As the minutes turned into hours, the submersible slowly made its way down the river towards Kiev.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Archdiocese

  Beijing, China

  Cardinal Giuseppe Angullo was a murderer.

  Once a member of the preferiti, meaning a preferred follower in line to receive the papal throne, the cardinal’s ambition was so great to lead the church that he had forced a vote for a new pontiff after he had cast Pope Gregory XVII—after he had poisoned the man—from the papal balcony and to the cobblestone pavement below.

  On that night, he was hiding in the shadows of the pontiff’s chambers as the pope—who became progressively ill as the poison wore on—had become so feverish that he took to the cool sanctuary of the balcony that overlooked St. Peter’s Square.

  With his hands gripping the railings while teetering drunkenly on legs that were threatening to become boneless beneath him, the man called out, claiming he knew that the cardinal was hiding within the shadows as a monster in waiting. Although Cardinal Angulo considered this to nothing more than the declaration of a man who was caught within the hold of a fever dream, he quickly crossed the floor with his arm extended and facilitated the pontiff’s death by shoving him over the banister.

 

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