Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Winter

“Nyet, glupyi chelovek,” she said in Russian. No, you silly man.

“Go into a store with multiple exits. Duck behind something so they lose sight of you. Go out one of the exits. I’ll wait,” he said, pretending to inspect tennis racquets while he activated and programmed the new cell phones.

A few minutes later she walked into the tennis store. He pretended not to know her and checked the mall to make sure she hadn’t been followed. It looked like she’d lost them. Motioning her to follow, they went out of that store and into a ski store.

“What are we doing?” she whispered, checking ski jumpers in a rack.

“We’ve got to get you a new ID,” he said.

He told her to go into a dressing room, and a moment later followed. Once inside, he took her photo with his cell phone camera, first with the blond wig on, then in her new pixie cut. They took the escalator down to the Metro station under Tolstoho Square and switched subway trains twice to make sure they weren’t followed.

“Who were they?” she asked, watching the doors as they pulled into a station.

“SBU, militsiyu, politsii, Syndikat blatnoi, the Chorni Povyazky, take your pick. The only one not after us is the Salvation Army.”

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“If we’re lucky.”

“Gospadi,” she said, half to herself. “What next?”

“I need an Internet cafe. Also a place to stay. Someplace where they won’t ask questions.”

“I can do that,” she said.

He nodded. “If they think we’re in Kyiv, they’ll probably be looking on the Right Bank, so make it someplace on the Left Bank. Here.” He handed her one of the new cell phones. “Use this. We’ll dump the ones we’re using.”

“Get off at the next stop, Vokzalna,” she said.

“Why?”

“There’s a twenty-four-hour Internet cafe on Chokolovsky Avenue.”

The cafe was full despite the cold weather and dangerous streets. Many were young people tweeting about demonstrations and what was happening. Scorpion paid a young man who looked like a student a hundred hryvnia for his seat at a desktop computer facing the wall. A few minutes later Iryna got a computer too.

Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, he inserted the flash drive and loaded the NSA software onto the computer. He logged onto the NSA server and began reading the translated transcripts of the calls made by Oleg Gabrilov since he had last checked. Thanks to his bugs, the NSA had all of Gabrilov’s calls, from the embassy, from his apartment, and from his cell phone. There was a single phone number that Gabrilov had called once a day; the first time, after he’d made his call to Alyona’s cell phone following Scorpion’s visit. A transcript of another call caught his attention. Gabrilov had said: “They’ve taken the bait.”

The SVR was running something, probably the frame for the Cherkesov killing, Scorpion thought. But why would the SVR want to assassinate Cherkesov, Russia’s biggest ally in Ukraine? And how would Gabrilov know that he and Iryna had taken the bait about Pyatov? What was happening at the time? Scorpion checked the date and time of the call. And then it hit him.

Gabrilov had made the call yesterday, before the assassination, right after he told Gorobets about Pyatov. That meant Gabrilov knew Michael Kilbane was in Dnipropetrovsk, and the only reason for him to be there was because he knew about Pyatov. Scorpion checked the phone number on the NSA database. When he read it, it made no sense. The number was registered to a Chinese trading company, Lianhuay China Trading, Ltd., on Vorovskogo Street in western Kyiv. The SVR and the Chinese intelligence service, the Guoanbu, were deadly enemies. Why would Gabrilov be contacting the Chinese?

Things were spiraling out of control. And what the hell did the Chinese have to do with it? He needed to get to Shaefer. He plugged earphones and a minimicrophone into the computer and Skype’d Shaefer’s BlackBerry. It was a private BlackBerry, not in Shaefer’s name, and that the Company didn’t know about. On the third ring, someone picked up.

“Cine este?” Shaefer said in Romanian over sounds of a conversation in the background.

“It’s FOBE. Can you talk?” Scorpion said in English.

“Un moment,” Shaefer said, and Scorpion heard him say something to someone in Romanian. When he came back on the line, the background sounds were quiet. “Are you out of your mind!? I shouldn’t talk to you! I shouldn’t know you!”

“We were set up,” Scorpion whispered.

“Who gives a crap? Have you any idea how hot you are? You are so PNG you don’t exist!” CIA-speak for persona non grata.

“I need a drop.”

“Don’t you get it? If I wanted to-which I don’t-I can’t come near you with a ten-foot pole.”

“What about FOBE?” Scorpion said. What he and Shaefer had been through together in Forward Operating Base Echo had to trump anything coming down the Company’s chain of command. They were foxhole buddies. Shaefer was one of the good guys.

“You’re out past Pluto, amigo. This is a bridge too far.”

“I just need-” Scorpion started.

“I’m burning this number. Don’t call again,” Shaefer said, and hung up.

Scorpion sat there for a moment, stunned, staring blankly at the computer screen. Not Shaefer, he thought. It couldn’t be. In Chaprai in Pakistan, bad intel had turned FOBE into a death trap. Their Delta Team had come under an intense Taliban attack that lasted three days and nights, at the end of which he and Shaefer were the only ones left alive. When they finally got evac’d out, they’d decided to join the CIA so no other American grunt would get killed because of lousy intel.

Only now, even Shaefer had cut ties with him. It meant this was so hot the CIA didn’t want to be associated with this thing. It also meant the Company-and the NSC-had concluded that unless the U.S. walked away now, they were headed for war. It was too big. He had to get to Rabinowich.

He checked his watch. It was almost 11:00 A.M., four in the morning in Virginia. He Skype’d Rabinowich’s home number. The phone rang three times, then clicked over. A recorded telephone company voice came on the line. It said the number he was calling was no longer in service and there was no new number. Christ, they’d gotten to Rabinowich too. The CIA’s best brain and ultimate in-house rebel! Apart from Shaefer, the only person he had always counted on.

The only connection he had left was the teenage chat room where Rabinowich, posing as a teenage girl from Omaha named Madison, chatted with him as her online boyfriend, Josh. Scorpion unplugged the earphones and mike and went to the online chat room. When he tried to log in, however, he was blocked. Instead of a login, he got a message telling him he had been permanently removed. Only the chat operator using a kill command for him specifically could’ve done that, he thought, feeling like he’d been kicked in the stomach. Even Rabinowich wanted no part of him. He was alone; completely cut off.

“Everything all right?” Iryna asked him.

“Fine,” Scorpion said, entering the Alt key sequence that would cause the NSA software to completely scrub any trace of his activity or that he had ever been on the computer, even resetting the computer’s clock and clearing his transactions from its local Internet server. When it finished, the software would delete itself. He tried to think of what to do next.

“I found a flat,” Iryna whispered. “In Desnianskyi raion. It’s on the Left Bank, near Volhogradska Square.”

Scorpion looked toward the door as a pair of Black Armbands walked in and began shoving people out of the way. They grabbed one young man at a computer-he looked like a student-and threw him to the floor. They started kicking him. No one interfered.