C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

Opening the file, he flipped through the militia photographs of the Yalena’s dead crew. Tobie cast one glance at the eight-by-ten shots of blood-soaked, bullet-torn bodies, and turned away to stare out over the smoke-swirled waters of the cove.

He pushed to his feet. “Come on. I want to check the captain’s quarters.”

The captain’s cabin lay at the top of the ship, just beyond the blood-splattered bridge with its bullet-shattered gauges and splintered woodwork. At the hatch leading to the small cabin beyond it, Jax paused and let out a low whistle.

Tobie drew up beside him. The bunk’s mattress had been pulled askew, the drawers yanked from the desk and dumped, clothes strewn across the floor. “Did the militia do this?”

“Some of it, maybe.” He reached over to pick up a wastebasket filled with ashes. “But not this. Looks like whoever killed Baklanov and his crew burned every piece of paper they could get their hands on.”

“But…why?”

“Because if you’ve just committed mass murder, you don’t want to take the time to sort through everything just to find what you’re looking for.”

“Which was…what?”

“Presumably, anything that might lead back to our terrorists.” He handed her Andrei’s file. “Here. Your Russian is a hell of a lot better than mine. Take a look.”

Perching on the edge of the bunk frame, she flipped through page after page of forms, all filled out in a tiny, nearly illegible Cyrillic scrawl. “Jeez. You’d think they’d have typed up the report before sending it to Moscow.”

“This is Kaliningrad, remember? They still store their potatoes in earthen burrows and haul hay to market in horse-drawn carts.”

“Listen to this,” she said, pointing to a cramped paragraph on the next page. “According to the shipyard manager, this isn’t the first German U-boat the Yalena salvaged.”

Jax crouched down to look at a smashed strongbox. “I wonder if the shipyard was planning to buy it.”

“The U-boat?” She glanced up from the report. “But…why?”

“For the steel. Our terrorists might have hired Balkanov to raise the sub for its cargo; as a salvage operator, Baklanov would know that U-boats are valuable in and of themselves, for their pre-1945 steel.”

She ran through the rest of the report, then shook her head. “I get the impression this Captain Baklanov was just planning to unload and store the sub here for a while.”

“Until when?”

“It doesn’t say.”

Andrei’s gruff shout drifted up from below. “Alexander! Get the hell off that ship.”

Jax threw a quick glance through the porthole. “Does the report list the address of this Captain Baklanov?”

Tobie flipped back through the pages.

Andrei shouted again. “Alexander. I told you to stay put!”

“Here it is. The salvage company’s offices are in some place called Zelenogradsk. But Baklanov himself lived in Rybachy. Looks like he had a wife. Anna.”

“That’s good. She might-”

“Alexander!”

“Come on,” said Jax, pulling her to her feet.

“So how are we going to get rid of your buddy Andrei so we can talk to this widow?”

“First of all,” said Jax, heading for the companionway, “Andrei is not my buddy. Secondly, you don’t get rid of an SVR officer. Thirdly, Andrei just lost I don’t know how many militiamen and a stolen Nazi U-boat that Moscow hadn’t gotten around to telling Berlin about, which means he’s going to want to get rid of us.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not.”

Washington, D.C.: Monday 26 October 7:00 A.M. local time

General Gerald T. Boyd was halfway through his morning workout routine in one of the Pentagon’s weight rooms when a slim, half-Asian colonel in his early forties sat down on the bench beside him.

Boyd braced his forearm on his thigh and curled the dumbbell up in a slow, controlled motion, his attention all for his breathing and the careful execution of form. Only then did he glance over at Colonel Sam Lee, noting the officer’s bloodshot eyes, the slack jaw of a man roused urgently and too early from his sleep.

“You have something for me?” said Boyd.

A computer geek, the Colonel had been assigned to the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency for the past two years. It was a plum position for a man close to putting in his twenty years; from here, he’d be able to walk into any one of a number of high paying jobs with the private sector when he retired. And he owed it all to Gerald T. Boyd.

“Not as much as I’d hoped,” said Colonel Lee. He was a small man, with short-cropped dark hair and the gentle features of his parents, who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.

Boyd watched his own bicep flex and relax, flex and relax. “There’s a problem?”

Lee reached for a fifteen-pound dumbbell. “This Guinness woman is the problem. I started by looking at her passport file.”

“And?” Boyd didn’t really care how Lee got the necessary information on October Guinness, as long as he got it-and was careful to cover his tracks.

“Turns out she’s in the Navy.”

Boyd frowned. “The Navy?”

“An ensign. I thought it would be a piece of cake, accessing her files.”

Boyd waited.

Lee cast a quick glance around and leaned in closer. “Instead, that’s when everything went to shit. The Navy doesn’t have her file.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s been detailed to the CIA.”

“That’s a problem?”

“I don’t know what she’s doing, but whatever it is, it’s a deep dark secret. Special Access shit.”

“So why is she in Russia?”

“I don’t know.”

Boyd switched the dumbbell to his left hand. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like it one damned bit. But all he said was, “I need for you to stay on this. I want to know exactly who she is, and why she’s involved.”

A muscle twitched beside the other man’s small mouth. “I’m afraid I may have already stumbled across a trip wire.”

Boyd pushed to his feet and dropped the dumbbell on the rack. “I’ll take care of the Agency. Just get me the information I need.”

Sam Lee glanced down at the dumbbell in his hand, then up again, his shoulders drooping with fatigue and a touch of fear. “Yes, sir.”

Kaliningrad Oblast: Monday 26 October 2:30 P.M. local time

The Tatar kept a heavy foot on the gas all the way back to the city of Kaliningrad, his shoulders hunched, his hands clutching the wheel. Sheltered by the row of warehouses, he’d survived the explosion with only a few scrapes and bruises. But the Mercedes he’d been sitting in had been pretty badly pummeled by debris. They drove back to Kaliningrad in one of the blue-and-white militia vans with the siren wailing and Andrei shouting into his cell phone for so long that, by the time they thumped over one of the bridges crossing the Pregel River and onto the island of Kneiphof, the Russian was hoarse.

“I’m supposed to be at a meeting that started ten minutes ago,” he said as the van swooped in next to the curb. “You get out now.”

“Here?” said Jax, looking around. Once, Kneiphof had been the island heart of old Königsberg, a jewel of medieval and renaissance architecture and learning. But the graceful, ancient university buildings were long gone, bombed to dust by the Allies, while the Russians had dynamited the city’s famous castle back in the 1960s and replaced it with a concrete governmental monstrosity frequently described as the ugliest example of Soviet architecture in existence-which was really saying something. Even the cobbles from the surrounding lanes had been taken up and relaid in Moscow’s Red Square. Only the cathedral had survived, as a hollowed-out shell that was now being restored.