Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“Dave,” O’Brien shouted. “If you spell Venona backwards you get a-n-o-n-e-v. Anonev.com is the website where we saw the hostiles holding a knife to Jason’s throat.”

It was almost ten when O’Brien returned to the marina. Nick Cronus, bottle of beer in one hand and a long fork in the other, was turning a steak over on his small grill perched in the cockpit. O’Brien could see him chatting with Max like she could understand every word.

Nick looked up though the thick smoke and poured some beer on the coals to douse flames. “Sean, where the hell you been? Man, you look like shit. When’s the last time you slept?”

Max barked and ran to where Sean was stepping from the dock into the cockpit. She danced around O’Brien’s legs, tail blurring. He bent down and lifted Max. She ran her tongue over his unshaven face. “Is Dave on his boat?”

“Saw him about an hour ago. He looks like somebody told him his ex-wife is in town. What’s gonna happen? We got no idea if Jason’s still on God’s earth.”

O’Brien scratched Max behind the ears as she watched the steak cooking.

“Why are you cooking so late?”

“Couldn’t eat earlier with all this stuff goin’ on … worried ‘bout Jason.”

“Me, too. Thanks for keeping an eye on Max.”

“No problem. Women love her, especially the outdoors types, you know?”

“I have to talk with Dave.”

“How ‘bout a steak?”

“Don’t have time.”

O’Brien stepped on Gibraltar’s cockpit and heard jazz coming from the open sliding-glass door.

“Come on in, Sean,” Dave said. “Hello, Max.”

O’Brien stepped into the salon, eyes taking a second to adjust to the reduced light. Dave was hunkered over his laptop, staring at text on the screen. He leaned back and looked above the top of his reading glasses. “I’ve been digging in a few Agency drawers and discovered some Yuri Volkow socks mated with Boris Borshnik socks amongst the soiled underwear.”

“What’d you find?”

“After listening to Miller’s confession, I started scratching at old files. By the way, here’s a flash drive copy of your conversation with him. Your cell had amazing clarity inside that condo.” Dave lifted a flash drive off his desk and handed it to O’Brien. “Ivan Borshnik, father of the man holding Jason, spent seven years undercover in the states. He, like the German would-be saboteurs caught in ‘42 after they disembarked from the two U-boats, got justice in front of a military tribunal. The only witness in Borshnik’s case was none other than Robert Miller, whose testimony nailed the coffin for Borshnik. Verdict was delivered in less than fifteen minutes. He was executed three days later.”

“Does it say anywhere in your CIA sock drawer how much money Borshnik paid Miller, ostensibly the FBI, for the HEU?”

“No. Here’s how a guy like Robert Miller could manipulate the system. The system was all about finding communists, the witch-hunt fire that Joseph McCarthy brought to a boil. Miller was acting as a double agent in the early saber rattling rounds of the Cold War. Now we know he indeed was a real double agent. Stalin, one never to trust Americans, had spies coming out of the woodwork over here. The Venona Project, that Miller alluded to, was a secret program, a precursor of the NSA, where our best cryptographers deciphered Soviet cables trying to attach real identities to fake names. They used the cover name of Kapian for President Roosevelt. The Manhattan Project was labeled Eormoz. We managed to catch a few covert operatives. They included people like Alger Hiss and Klaus Fusch.”

“Class acts.”

“Indeed. Young Congressman Richard Nixon, acting on information from the FBI, pushed for indictments, especially in the Hiss case. But it was the husband and wife spy team of Jules and Ethel Rosenberg who got the death sentence. They were the only Americans executed as Soviet spies during the Cold War. Both were strapped to the electric chair, as was Ivan Borshnik. He’d been in the states, undercover, as a record producer, working with some of the Big Band and jazz artists.”

“Robert Miller had a Tommy Dorsey tune playing in his condo.”

“Yes. From what we know, the Venona Project indicated that a lot of the big fish got away. Names we couldn’t decipher. We do know considerable damage was done to our security, especially in the atomic arena.”

“And much of that courtesy of one Robert Miller.”

Dave nodded. “One of the ones that got away.”

“Not completely. So, in his final years in the FBI, a rooky agent, Mike Gates receives training from Miller.”

Dave nodded. “Miller taught Gates fieldwork operations because Gates was being assigned to our embassy in Moscow.”

“Where he was recruited by Boris Borshnik, the single child of the only Russian ever tried by a U.S. military tribunal and executed. Wonder if Miller has spoken to Gates?”

“You mean since he retired?” Dave removed his glasses and rubbed his temples with the palms of his hands.

“I mean today, after I left him.”

“I don’t know how we’d find out.”

“I do.”

“How?” Dave asked.

“You’re supposed to bring me to the command center at eight in the morning. That’s when we’ll know.”

With Max half asleep in his arms, it was five minutes after midnight when O’Brien unlocked the salon doors on Jupiter. He ate a banana and called Lauren Miles. “We got Miller, and more importantly, we’ve got Mike Gates. He’s your double agent. In the pockets of the Russian Volkow, a.k.a. Borshnik, and Mohammed Sharif.”

“My God … are you sure, Sean?” she said.

O’Brien told her the story. “I’ve got the flash drive with his confession. I’m coming in tomorrow morning to hang Gates. I’ll try to get from him the location where Borshnik is hiding.”

“What can I do?”

“If I can’t get him to admit it, do what you have to do.”

Lauren was quiet a beat. “I hope you can get a few hours sleep.”

O’Brien pulled his last Corona from the refrigerator and took it in the bathroom with him. He set the Glock on the back of the toilet seat, turned on the shower, climbed in and closed his eyes as the hot water pelted his shoulders and the back of his neck. Exhaustion pooled around him like dark clouds. He braced his hands against the walls of the stall, his thoughts focused on Robert Miller’s face.

He stepped quietly into the master stateroom. Max was sleeping in the center of the bed. She barely opened her eyes as O’Brien slipped from the room into the salon. He saw a blur, a quick flash of muted color through the starboard porthole. A large cat jumped from a fish cleaning station, its mouth clamped on a discarded fish head.

Lying on his back, he could see clouds through the skylight. He watched them ride the wind like ghosts performing a nocturnal ballet against an inky backdrop.

Then O’Brien dreamed he heard a noise.

Max uttered a low growl. “Shhh,” whispered O’Brien. He sat up, reaching for the Glock on his nightstand. He stood, the glow from the moon falling softly through the Plexiglas skylight. Max growled again. “Don’t bark,” O’Brien whispered.

O’Brien held the Glock up and stepped into the short passageway from the stateroom to the salon. He could see a silhouette on the other side of the blinds in front of the salon door. He walked back in the stateroom, closed the door, stood on his bed, and slowly opened the skylight. Max whined. “Shhh … I’ll be right back.”

He quietly pulled himself straight up and through the open skylight. He could hear the breakers across the road and the rumble of a storm somewhere over the Atlantic. O’Brien held the Glock and stepped in his bare feet down the center of the bow, and inched his way around the catwalk beam until he was almost to the cockpit. He heard the man picking the lock. Just as O’Brien cleared the exterior of the salon, the man opened the lock and entered.