was carefully controlled and measured. Like a jungle predator, Gates was calm and patient in stalking his prey.
On Kilkenny’s order, the remaining SEALs took up defensive positions around the clearing. Should Gates and Darvas find themselves outgunned, they would have a place to fall back. Kilkenny waited quietly with the rest of his squad as Gates neared the clearing.
From the jungle’s edge, Gates studied the figure but detected no sound, no motion coming from the man. Not even the sound of breathing. The figure was upright, but unnaturally so, with arms extended outward to each side. Crucified.
Gates moved up close and discovered that, whoever it was, he had been there awhile. The remains were in an advanced state of decay, with the clothing rotted and little flesh remaining on the bones. A garland of feathers and beads was hung around the corpse’s neck, along with several other items that Gates couldn’t readily identify.
‘I’m coming up behind you, Max,’ a muffled voice crackled in Gates’s ear. After years of working together, he knew Kilkenny’s voice even through the distortion of a throat mike.
‘What do you think?’ Gates asked, his gaze still fixed on the grisly figure.
‘Voodoo. Practically everyone on this island believes in the voodoo religion, and Masson is considered a powerful high priest. This is a warning.’ Kilkenny looked at the tattered remnants of the man’s uniform and noticed the shoulder boards hanging loosely. ‘Looks like he was Haitian military. We must be getting close to Masson’s camp.’
Kilkenny raised his hand, then pointed the way. Slowly, they re-formed and melted back into the jungle, leaving the grisly sentry to his silent watch.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIAL
December 13
Cole’s flight arrived in Washington on schedule and the bleary-eyed systems analyst entered Frank Villano’s office casually dressed and slightly rumpled. He dropped his suitcase and coat by the door and poured a cup of coffee from the pot that his boss brewed for his personal use. Villano liked his coffee strong, which is just what Cole needed this morning.
Villano took one look at Cole’s faded jeans and dayold stubble and groaned. ‘A little casual for the office, aren’t we?’
Cole just glowered at the thin, bespectacled man behind the desk. ‘If you haven’t checked your calendar, it’s Sunday, the sacred day of football as the play-offs draw near. Anyway, I answered your summons and caught the first flight in. I even came directly here from the airport without stopping off at home.’
‘Ah, Saint Michael.’ Villano raised his hands in benediction. ‘You are a dedicated man, and, for that, I will forgive your transgression against the office dress code.’
‘Thanks.’ Cole sat down and took a sip of the steaming brew from his mug. ‘Now tell me, what’s so important that you have to call me in from Chicago to deal with it?’
‘We’ve been given an interesting challenge, one that requires a person of your unique technical skills and high security clearance.’
Cole was all too familiar with the look on Villano’s face. Someone on the seventh floor wanted another miracle from the computer department. ‘Something hot that they want yesterday, I assume?’
‘You are correct.What do you know about the former KGB’s First Chief Directorate?’
Cole thought for a second, but he recalled only a few generic facts about the KGB from his CIA indoctrination classes. ‘Didn’t they handle Soviet foreign intelligence operations?’
‘Right.We recently acquired some files that are alleged to be the property of Andrei Yakushev, one of the top men in the FCD. Yakushev ran their Special Operations group for twenty years, right up to the failed coup in 1991.’ Villano could see that the name meant little to Cole, and he needed him to understand just how important any information on Yakushev was. ‘Did you ever hear about the CIA’s witch-hunts for moles during the sixties?’
‘Yeah, I heard some stories from the old-timers.’
Villano bristled for a second, but let the ‘old-timers’ crack slide. Cole knew that Villano was part of that longtenured group of CIA staff.
‘Well, if there were any moles in the CIA, Yakushev was running them. He was their best. Yakushev was also a political rival of KGB chairman Nikitenko, the guy who tried to oust Gorbachev. Now that you know the basics, I’ll explain our situation.’
With his arms behind his head, Villano tilted back in his chair, his feet propped up on top of his desk. ‘We have a new defector, a junior KGB officer who went AWOL back in ‘91 and has been hiding in Latvia ever since. He claims that Chairman Nikitenko personally ordered him to secure Yakushev’s dacha, which had accidentally burned, and to retrieve the late comrade’s files. Our boy followed his orders and went to the dacha, only the fire didn’t look so accidental once he got there. All the bullet holes in the bodies kind of looked suspicious to him. He found the fire safe that Nikitenko wanted and headed back for Moscow. On the way back to Lubyanka, he had a revelation.’
‘He found God?’ Cole asked lightly.
‘No, but he decided that if he went back to Moscow, he had a very good chance of meeting him. Yakushev’s place was a long way out in the country, so this guy was listening to the radio on the way back. That’s when he heard about Gorby catching the Kremlin flu—you know the bug that all the general secretaries get before they croak. Our defector used his head and decided that there was a good chance the accidental house fire might be connected with Nikitenko’s attempted takeover of the government.’
‘The bullet holes ruled out the possibility of a coincidence for him, I take it?’
‘They have a tendency to do that, especially over there,’ Villano said with a nod.’Our defector saw the storm clouds rising and ran for cover. He was born up in the Baltics, so he hightailed it back home until the whole mess blew over, taking Yakushev’s safe with him.’
‘Why is this guy defecting now? The Soviet Union broke up years ago, and the Baltics are independent. I don’t see the value.’
‘He’d been living quietly and never intended to defect, until last week, when his cover was blown. The locals in that part of the world are touchy about Russian nationals and KGB collaborators. Somehow, word got out that he worked for the KGB, and things went bad real quick. For his own safety, the local police spirited him to Riga,where he appeared at the front door of our consulate with a dusty old fire safe and a wild story about the coup.’
‘Okay, so what did we find inside the fire safe?’
‘That’s for you to find out, Michael.We got it open—no big trick there—but all we found was a stack of computer diskettes. We don’t know yet what’s on them, but we have a theory. Like us, the FCD didn’t keep operational information inside their agents’personnel records. For deep-cover agents, like the ones Yakushev ran, the personnel files at Lubyanka might even be falsified to protect agents in the field. The true operational histories and aliases of deep-cover agents might be known only to a handful of high-ranking officers, and our sources tell us that Yakushev was very
