Peter Kirsanow - Second Strike

Bor placed the dish and silverware in the sink and thanked Allie for her hospitality.

“Where’s George?” Bor asked.

“He went into the den. He’s going to sand and putty the floor where he dropped the door to the cellar last night. It left a little dent. I think he should just put a rug over it and be done with it. But he likes to fix things.”

Bor picked up the grocery bag from the counter and proceeded toward the door.

“Thank George for me.”

“Good luck,” Allie replied perfunctorily.

Bor stopped for a moment next to the door, turned, and nodded. Then he walked briskly onto the porch and saw that the volunteers had retaken their respective seats in the two vehicles. He looked at his watch, then scanned the countryside. Not another house, vehicle, or person in sight. They would make good progress today.

He rode in the passenger seat of the van again as it led the LaCrosse down the long driveway and onto the two-lane country road, heading north. They drove for a minute or so before they heard something that sounded like a rumble of thunder, but the skies were clear. Bor heard murmuring coming from the rear seats, followed by excited whispers. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the volunteers looking wide-eyed out the right window and slightly to the rear.

Rising above the tree line was a plume of thick black smoke in the general vicinity of the Nichols farmhouse. With no wind to disturb it, it billowed gently into a mushroom before the outer edges dissipated into a formless, ash-colored cloud.

The magnesium incendiaries had worked a bit faster than he’d expected, but not by much. From the time he flipped the thirty-second timer switch next to the front door to the time of the explosion, approximately two and a half minutes had elapsed. As expected, the extreme heat from the incendiaries was sufficient not only to incinerate the cellar, but to set the house ablaze also. In hindsight, tampering with the gas line behind the stove was probably superfluous and a bit of a risk. The couple might have smelled the odor of the tagging agent in the natural gas and attempted to escape. Besides, with some of the windows open on this warm morning, the volume of gas might not have built to a combustible critical mass. Regardless, the natural gas would lead any local fire investigators down a rabbit hole, causing them to conclude it was at least a contributing factor.

But Bor knew something the elderly couple and any local fire officials did not. Regardless of the natural gas or the open windows, the house was doomed the moment Bor initiated the thirty-second timer.

Inside the container with the stenciled markings were several kilograms of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, enough to level the entire farmhouse and leave a sizable crater. The searing heat from the magnesium incendiaries was more than seven times hotter than the ignition temperature of the white crystalline substance inside that stenciled container. The container would protect its contents against the heat of the incendiaries for a brief interval, but combustion was inevitable.

Bor knew this because the stenciled markings were the letters and numbers signifying the chemical formula for the explosive, an explosive with which the assassin was well familiar. His innocent farmhouse hosts were not. The container had likely been delivered for an operation that never received a green light, never transpired. No agents had come to collect it. Consequently, it sat unused and forgotten along with all of the other relics in the cellar.

So whatever remained of the pulverized and cremated bodies of Oleg Nikolin of Leningrad and Aleksandra Ivanova of Moscow was likely part of the ash-gray cloud hovering over the well-tended farm in a land that had become their home. It was a land upon which their assassin would soon visit execrable horror.

WASHINGTON, D.C.,

AUGUST 15, 7:55 A.M. EDT

The buzzing in Olivia’s ears had returned.

It was the visit to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the satellite images Laura Casini had put up on the screen in her office. The buzzing was an insistent reminder to tend to an unsolved puzzle, a signal that something was amiss. It harried her to acquire more information and to examine the information she did have from another angle.

The last time the buzzing had irritated her was approximately a month ago. Then it had been even more aggravating than now, perhaps because at the time the informational vacuum had been greater and the threat more palpable. It had stopped when Michael Garin had acquired the last pieces of the puzzle, establishing that the curious anomalies at Russian industrial sites were in preparation for a massive EMP strike against the United States. Once Garin had provided the pieces, the puzzle was complete and the buzzing stopped. The threat had been eliminated.

But had it? The Allied bombing campaign had devastated Iran’s nuclear and ICBM programs. The threat of an EMP attack from Iran had been eliminated. The standard electrical equipment warehoused in such abundance in anticipation of the EMP was now superfluous. There was no market for it.

So why did it seem as if suspicious activity at the Russian warehouses and industrial sites had resumed?

Sure, the satellite images weren’t unequivocal. The activity at the warehouses wasn’t nearly as frenzied as it had been in the weeks prior to the planned EMP strike. In fact, it was arguable that the activity level was lower, far lower than that of ordinary warehouses and plants.

But the activity level had been zero in the weeks immediately following the onset of the bombing campaign and the warning to Russia to stand down. And since the equipment was standard and unremarkable—in some cases generations old—Olivia believed the activity level should have remained near zero.

She needed to advise Brandt, her famously unflappable boss. He would soberly consider the information, factor it into other strategic developments around the world, and determine whether it should be brought to the president’s attention.

Olivia logged out and turned off the desktop before leaving her office in the Old Executive Office Building for the White House. The buzzing persisted as the clack of her heels echoed down the hall. It continued as she exited the massive structure. It persisted as she maneuvered between the camps of reporters and their broadcast crews, fixtures on the west lawn of the White House.

By the time she was in the White House and just outside Brandt’s office, she was convinced that the increase in activity revealed in the satellite images was deserving of further inquiry, maybe even worthy of mention to the president.

The buzzing in her ears was supplanted by groaning, groaning so exaggerated as to be comical. Groaning she recognized in an instant.

As she turned into Brandt’s office she saw the source of the groaning lying on his back, Brandt’s foot rubbing his chest. Arlo, Brandt’s longtime German shepherd service dog, enjoying a massage, leapt up upon seeing Olivia and offered his muzzle for stroking. Olivia and Arlo went back several years to when Brandt was Olivia’s mentor at Stanford. Brandt had already gained the sobriquet “the Oracle” because of his prescience regarding global affairs. For nearly a quarter of a century he had been predicting the unpredictable: the collapse of the Soviet Union; the rapid economic emergence of China; the rise of radical Islam to supplant communism as the chief threat to the West. He often was years ahead of the other analysts in assessing and knitting together the implications of isolated geopolitical developments.

The nickname had almost as much to do with his regal appearance as his intellect. Sightless from birth, his blue eyes were framed by thick white eyebrows that matched the shade of the hair atop his head, brushed in the style favored by nineteenth-century British aristocracy. The perpetual upward tilt of his chin suggested confidence, sagacity. No one could recall ever seeing him rattled, regardless of the circumstances.