The Last Option: The Project, #17

CHAPTER 1

One more hour, and he'd be safe.

Yuri Kolkov looked out at the sea of clouds passing below the plane and pushed down on his knee to damp the nervous tapping of his foot. He knew he was under suspicion. He'd wondered if he was going to be arrested before he got on the plane, but he'd boarded the Aeroflot flight at Sheremetyevo with no problems. Now here he was, almost in the West.

There was no reason to worry. He'd been telling himself that since he'd left his Moscow apartment that morning.

Yuri squirmed in the narrow window seat, trying to get comfortable. Seventeen inches wide. Why didn't they build these things for humans? But only another hour to endure, then he would leave the airplane and Federation territory behind forever.

A brief smile flickered across Yuri's forgettable features. Someone would have to pay for his defection. He hoped it would be his overbearing boss. Yuri imagined the look on Brezhinski's face when the FSB came to interrogate him. With a little luck, the fat pig would lose his cushy position.

He thought about Irina and wished the years had been better. It had been a long time since there'd been anything but unhappiness between them. They'd question her, of course. They'd put the fear of God into her, but in the end they'd let her go. She knew nothing. Irina was a survivor.

She'll be all right, he thought.

He'd promised to bring her something nice from Paris when he came home. In spite of himself, he'd felt a pang of guilt when he said it.

He wasn't going to return.

He was going to miss Moscow. He loved the city, for all its infuriating problems. He loved Russia. It was because he loved his country that he was going to betray her.

The note of the engines changed. The plane began to descend as it entered the landing pattern. He looked at his watch.

Twenty minutes. Maybe a bit more.

They dropped through the layer of clouds and the runways of Orly airport appeared below. The plane banked and he caught a glimpse of Paris in the distance. Minutes later, the plane touched down. The roar of the engines as the pilot reversed thrust was a comforting sound, almost loud enough to drown out the doubts about what he was doing.

The lines at customs and passport control were long and slow. When it was his turn, the agent compared the picture on the official ministry passport with the man standing in front of him.

Your business, Monsieur?

Yuri's French was good, as was his English. It was one of the reasons he had advanced as far as he had within the Ministry.

I'm here for the air show.

How long do you plan to stay?

Five days.

The official stamped the passport and handed it back.

Welcome to France.

Merci.

Yuri pulled his carry-on behind him and followed signs to the taxi rank. He stepped outside into the humid air of a Paris summer.

Safe, he thought. I've done it.

Someone bumped into him. He felt a brief sting, like a mosquito bite. Suddenly an enormous fist wrapped around his chest and squeezed. He stumbled and gasped for air and fell facedown onto the pavement.

No.

Someone was bending over him, saying something. The last thing Yuri was aware of was the man's cheesy, rotten breath.

No...

Then, nothing.

CHAPTER 2

Nick Carter and Selena Connor sat at the kitchen table in their Washington loft. Stretched out in the middle of the table was an enormous orange tomcat named Burps. He was asleep, paws twitching in the air. Soft snores bubbled from his open mouth.

Selena pushed a wisp of blond hair away from her face and shifted position in her chair. She was seven month's pregnant with twins. It wasn't easy to get comfortable.

Elizabeth Harker and her deputy Stephanie Willits sat across from Nick and Selena. Stephanie had her laptop open. The image on the screen showed a man lying in a French morgue. There was nothing in the image to tell you what kind of man he had been.

Who was he? Nick asked.

Yuri Kolkov, Elizabeth said, an analyst who worked in the Russian Ministry of Defense. He was one of Langley's deep cover assets. He was defecting and bringing information out with him, something important. We don't know what it was.

He won't be telling us about it now.

No, he won't.

Elizabeth looked like a child, sitting at the large table. She was a small woman, barely five feet tall. An emerald and gold salamander was pinned on her black suit jacket, the emeralds a touch darker than the green of her cat-like eyes.

What killed him? Selena asked.

Poison. They found a puncture mark on his back during the autopsy. A tox scan turned up one of those nasty little compounds the Russians give to people they don't like.

So he was killed to keep him from telling anybody what he knew?

Looks like it.

Why are we involved? Nick asked. He was Langley's agent. They've got people on the ground in France.

The president handed it to us. I think we're meant to fail, so he can get his excuse to close us down.

President Corrigan had wanted to shut down the unit after Harker discovered the embarrassing presence of a Russian spy in the White House. She had powerful friends in Washington. Corrigan had been persuaded to reverse his decision, but Elizabeth knew the unit was on borrowed time.

What does he have against us, anyway?

I'm not sure, Elizabeth said. We're not exactly a political asset. He strikes me as someone who's concerned with appearances rather than substance, another politician who thinks more about his poll numbers than the country. I'll never understand why he was elected.

Selena said, President Rice never seemed to worry much about political fallout.

Rice was a Marine, Nick said. He knew getting the job done isn't always pretty or by the rules. This guy Corrigan is a political animal, a creature of party politics. An empty suit. We're probably lucky he doesn't have us arrested.

How do you want to proceed, Elizabeth? Stephanie asked.

Let's get Freddie on it. How's he doing in his temporary home?

Freddie wasn't a person. He was an artificial intelligence program with full, independent abilities. Freddie thought for himself. The computer where he normally lived had been damaged beyond repair during an attack on Project headquarters by a shadowy group that called itself Phoenix. Currently Freddie's program was housed in one of Langley's Crays, an emergency backup Stephanie had arranged as a safety precaution. She could access him through her laptop.

I know it sounds strange, but I think he's lonely. Back at HQ, we were always around. I was always around. He could watch me while I was working and carry on conversations with me. Where he is now, that's not the case.

How can a computer be lonely?

Stephanie shrugged. That's my impression.

He's still functioning as he should?

Oh, yes, he's fine that way. But the sooner we get the new computers installed so I can transfer him back, the better off he'll be. Me too, as far as that goes.

Everything will be ready for us to move back next week, Elizabeth said. In the meantime, there's our dead Russian. Steph, get Freddie on it. Pull the CCTV recordings from France. See if you can spot anything. With a little luck, we'll get a shot of the assassin.

What about French security? Nick asked. Have they come up with anything?

No. Even if they had, they might not tell us about it.

Stephanie closed her laptop. If the assassin is on those tapes, Freddie and I will find him.

CHAPTER 3

At the headquarters of Russia's foreign intelligence service, the view from Colonel General Alexei Vysotsky's fourth floor windows looked out over an urban forest of pine trees. Beyond the trees, the red battlements of the Kremlin rose in the hazy distance.

Scorching July heat baked the city. The building's central air-conditioning system had broken down again and Vysotsky had ordered the office windows opened. A fan on his desk blew warm air through the room. For all the good it did, looking at pictures of Siberia in winter would have been just as effective.

Vysotsky reached down into the bottom drawer on the left side of his desk and lifted out a bottle of vodka with a green label and a water glass. He filled the glass halfway and drank.

A faint breeze came into the room, bringing with it a hot, dusty scent of the green pines outside. Vysotsky rose, glass in hand, and walked to the window.

A sudden, electric pain slashed through his gut. He gasped and doubled over, clutching the glass. Then the pain was gone, as quickly as it had come. He straightened and rubbed his belly and looked out over the trees.

Damned indigestion. Those pills I've been taking aren't worth a shit. I'll have to make another appointment with that quack.

Thinking about the doctor made him think about his mistress and the other  pills, the blue ones. It was getting harder to satisfy her and gifts weren't enough. He was tired of dealing with her constant demands, her unsubtle hints that he should divorce his wife. It was time to cut her loose. She would go quietly, or she'd find herself in an unpleasant situation.

The sound of a distant explosion drove thoughts of the woman from his mind. The windows rattled.

What was that? Big. Somewhere in the city.

One of the phones on his desk began ringing. He picked it up.

Vysotsky.

General, there has been an explosion outside the Tsvetnoy central market. There are many casualties.

A bomb?

Yes, sir. A car bomb.

All right. Send a team. And have my car brought round.

At once, General.

He set the phone down. So, a car bomb. There had been an increasing number of terrorist incidents in the past few months. The Tsvetnoy market was an upscale department store noted for its food floor and an array of expensive European outlets. It was a popular tourist destination, often crowded. Vysotsky had a feeling this one was going to be bad.

If it's bad enough, it could be the opportunity I've been waiting for, he thought.

SVR's mandate was the world outside the borders of the Federation. The Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the FSB, was responsible for domestic security and counterterrorism. Lately the FSB had been screwing up. They'd arrested a few low-level operatives, but gotten nowhere in finding out who was behind the terrorist attacks.

Their incompetence meant President Orlov was displeased. It was an election year and Orlov wanted a happy electorate. Even though the results of the election were foreordained, it was important to him that the country appear prosperous and secure.

The Tsvetnoy market was a symbol of prosperity, of how far the country had come since the days of the Soviet Union. An attack on the upscale stores of the market was exactly what Orlov didn't need.

Maintaining power required a strong security apparatus. It had always been so in Russia, and Vysotsky had no doubt it always would be. His burning ambition was to revive the KGB, a single organization to deal with all security and intelligence, domestic and foreign. Perhaps he could use this incident to convince Orlov it was time to bring back the Sword and Shield, with himself at the head of a renewed and feared security empire.

There were obvious advantages to having all domestic and foreign security and intelligence concerns under one roof. The main disadvantage was a classic Russian problem. A revitalized KGB was a potential threat to whoever ruled Russia. That was the real reason the old security apparatus had been fragmented into two separate organizations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. No one knew that better than President Orlov, a former KGB Colonel.

If Vysotsky could find the people behind the bombing and eliminate them, it would go a long way toward convincing Orlov it was time for a change.

I need someone to hunt down the terrorist leaders, someone efficient. Someone experienced. Someone they wouldn't suspect.

He picked up his phone.

CHAPTER 4

Six days after Elizabeth asked Stephanie to look into Yuri Kolkov, the team had moved back into their newly renovated headquarters. Nick stood with Selena outside the building, looking at the entrance, destroyed during the assault.

It looks like it always did, she said.

Amazing. If you look hard, you can see where they repaired it. But if you didn't know what happened...

Nick left the sentence unfinished. Inside, the smell of fresh paint and carpeting was a reminder of how much damage had been done. The bullet holes in the walls were gone. A new leather couch in Elizabeth's office had replaced the one destroyed during the firefight.

Hey, Nick, you gotta check out this new couch. Man, this is comfort.

Lamont Cameron lounged on the couch with Ronnie Peete. Elizabeth sat behind her desk. Stephanie sat off to the side with her laptop. It was the first time they'd all been together in weeks.

Lamont had been down in the Florida Keys, fishing and taking it easy. He'd gotten a lot of sun. It made the pink scar on his brown face stand out even more than usual.

Ronnie had been badly wounded during the attack. When the doctors let him out of Walter Reed, he'd gone home to Arizona. He'd spent the past month working with his uncle, a Navajo singer, undergoing traditional healing ceremonies.

He doesn't look good, Nick thought.

Ronnie's reddish skin was pale. There were deep shadows under his eyes. He lifted his hand in greeting.

Take a seat, Elizabeth said. We have a lot to cover. Stephanie identified the assassin who took out Kolkov.

I looked at CCTV recordings from the airport, Stephanie said. Kolkov was killed in the middle of a crowd of people heading for the taxis. Let me show you what I found.

Before the attack on headquarters there had been one large monitor mounted on the wall behind Elizabeth's desk. That one had been destroyed during the firefight and replaced. Now there was an additional monitor, mounted across from the desk under a row of clocks displaying the time zones across the world. Stephanie tapped a key on her laptop and both monitors lit. They displayed a still picture of the crowded taxi rank in Paris where Kolkov had collapsed.

You can see Kolkov here, coming out of the main terminal.

Stephanie moved her mouse until the arrow came to rest on a nondescript man coming through the doors and pulling a carry-on behind him.

I'm going to run it forward in slow-motion.

The image on the monitor came to life. They watched Kolkov move through the crowd toward the taxis. There were people all around him. Suddenly he went down onto the sidewalk. Stephanie stopped the recording.

That's the moment of the hit, she said. The poison was a fast acting nerve agent.

I still don't see who did it, Selena said.

Watch again.

The recording backed up and then started forward once again, this time in super slow motion.

Watch the woman on Kolkov's right, the one in the hat.

The recording crept forward. Several people jostled around the Russian, one of them a woman in a big hat. They watched her bump against Kolkov and walk past him. Seconds later he pitched forward onto the pavement.

Now here's the recording from a different camera, facing toward Kolkov.

Once again they watched the Russian leave the main terminal, pushing through the crowd toward the taxis. The woman in the hat appeared behind him, just another person in the crowd. She had her head down. The hat covered most of her face.

She knew about the cameras, Nick said.

Figures, Lamont said. The Russians don't use amateurs.

They watched her bump against Kolkov and move away. As she did, they caught a fleeting glimpse of her face.

Selena gasped. Valentina.

Selena's half-sister.

Selena's father had been an agent for the CIA, stationed in West Germany during the Cold War. A KGB agent had been ordered to seduce him, but something more than tradecraft had happened between the two spies. Valentina Antipova was the result of the forbidden liaison.

Her father had been sent back home to the states with a reprimand. Her mother had returned to Soviet Russia. She'd managed to keep the child and stay in the KGB. Valentina had been brought up by a succession of KGB minders and trained to become one of the their most accomplished assassins. With the fall of the Soviet Union she'd continued her training under the guidance of her mentor, General Vysotsky.

She wasn't on the plane, Steph said. She was waiting for him inside the terminal.

The image on the monitors switched to a recording of passengers milling about inside the terminal, near the exit to the taxis. Stephanie froze the recording on the woman in the hat, walking toward the exit doors a few steps behind Kolkov. There was no doubt that it was Valentina.

Damn it, Selena said.

It's what she does, Nick said.

That doesn't help, does it? She's still my sister.

I kind of like her, Lamont said. She saved our ass in Egypt. Hell, she's hot.

Nick looked at him and shook his head.

Lamont shrugged. What?

Your sister is a complicated individual, Elizabeth said. Selena, you need to set aside your feelings for her. Can you do that?

I've done it before. I can do it again.

All right. Now, Kolkov had a carry-on. French security has it. We need to examine what was in it. Elizabeth looked at Selena's swollen belly. Can you handle a flight to Paris?

Yes.

Good. I want you and Nick to go over there and talk to a contact I have in the DGSE. I'd just send Nick but he doesn't speak French and you do. I want the two of you to examine that carry-on and find out if anything is hidden in it.

Won't the French have taken it apart? Nick asked.

I'm sure they've looked through it. But they don't know Kolkov was working with Langley and they don't know he was planning to defect. At this point his murder is a mystery to them.

When do we leave? Selena asked.

CHAPTER 5

Valentina Antipova entered General Vysotsky's office and came to attention in front of his desk.

As always, Alexei was struck by Valentina's feral beauty.