C. Graham - The Solomon Effect

The militia driver braked beside the waiting chopper. Andrei drew the smoke from his cigarette deep into his lungs and said, “Not necessarily.”

Jax paused with his door half open. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Andrei dropped the half-smoked cigarette in the snow and ground it beneath his heel. “It means there’s someone I think Ensign Guinness might like to meet.”

Carlos Rodriguez rode the Ural to within two hundred meters of the Polish border. Abandoning the motorbike in a ditch, he cut through a nearby stand of birch until he came out on a Polish road. He thumbed down a trucker, then caught a series of rides that brought him to Gdansh-which had once been the German city of Danzig but was now very, very Polish.

He booked a flight to Washington, D.C., then found a quiet coffee shop and put in a call to Boyd.

“The Russians have the kid,” he told Boyd without preamble.

There was a moment’s tense silence. Boyd said, “Tell me what happened.”

Rodriguez stared across the concourse to where a woman in a short skirt and high black boots was helping a toddler take off his coat. “They had his house staked out. It was a trap.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, but it was close enough. “They got my entire team.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.” It was important that every man be dead; dead men don’t tell tales. “No one captured. And they were all sterile.”

Boyd’s voice was a gravelly rasp. “You must be losing your edge, to fall into a trap like that.”

Rodriguez tightened his jaw. “It was an FSB operation. They had their first team in there.”

Again, a fierce silence. Boyd said, “When can you get back here?”

“My flight leaves in an hour.”

“We’ll talk when you get here,” said Boyd, and hung up.

Rodriguez glanced again at the woman. As if conscious of showing too much leg, she’d crouched down. He turned away.

The failure to kill the boy was a concern, but not too much of a problem at this point. If the boy had found someone to listen to his tale earlier in the week, he would have done some real damage. But now? No one would have time to put the pieces of the puzzle together before Saturday night.

It was the loss of Salinger and Kirkpatrick that really stung. Rodriguez didn’t like to lose men. He didn’t like to lose, period. He still wasn’t exactly sure what had gone down in the stables of Yasnaya Polyana. But he knew who to blame for it. And once Boyd’s little operation was over, Rodriguez would see that they paid for it.

Both of them.

Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October

3:10 P.M. local time

Her name was Dr. Svetlana Bukovsky. A small, slim woman with gray-streaked brown hair and fiercely intelligent gray eyes, she might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Dressed in a brown tweed skirt, brown sweater, wool tights, and sensible shoes, she met them at the doorway of her office at Immanuel Kant State University in Kaliningrad.

“What a pleasure it is to actually meet you, Ensign. I’ve been following your career with interest for months.”

Tobie found her hand seized in an unexpectedly firm grip. “You have?”

Andrei said, “Dr. Bukovsky teaches here at the University, now. But before that, she spent more than twenty years working with the KGB. Her specialty is remote viewing.”

“How did you-” Tobie broke off, her gaze flying to meet Jax’s.

“How did I know you’re a remote viewer?” Andrei gave an enigmatic smile and turned to Jax. “Come. Let us leave them to their work.”

Tobie said, “I don’t really need a tasker.”

They sat across from each other at a table made of golden oak. Tobie’s chair was comfortably padded, the room dimly lit and soundproofed.

A perfect RV room.

Dr. Bukovsky said, “I know. But it is always easier for others to accept one’s results, don’t you agree, when one has the mechanics of a more controlled viewing in place?”

“Somehow, I can’t see the United States government giving much credence to a viewing I did with a KGB scientist in Kaliningrad.”

A soft smile touched the older woman’s eyes. “Is that so important at this point?”

Tobie hesitated, aware of the clock ticking relentlessly toward Halloween. She blew out a long sigh. “All right.”

She closed her eyes, let her breathing slow and deepen as she relaxed down into her Zone. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.

The Russian rested the palm of one hand on a plain envelope that lay on the table before her. “The target is written here. Tell me what you see.”

Tobie closed her eyes again. After her experience in Bremen, she knew a moment of uncertainty, a worry that her gift had somehow deserted her. But this time, the images came. Faint at first. Blurred flashes that slowly solidified. She said, “I’m getting the sense of something rectangular. It’s like a box, or a case. A metal case. It’s…shiny. Like an aluminum case.”

“What’s in the case? Can you see?”

“Something cylindrical. Yellow.” She began to sketch the images on the pad that lay before her. “It’s a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. The cylinder is also metal. But I get the sense…” She hesitated. “It’s as if it’s not real. It’s an illusion.”

It made no sense, but now was not the time for analysis. The Russian said, “Can you back away from it?”

“Yes.”

“Now tell me what you see.”

“The aluminum case is lying on a desk. A wooden desk. Well polished. The room is rather small, paneled in the same wood as the desk. I get the impression of comfort. Luxury.”

“Move above the room, then look down and tell me what you see.”

“A railing. White. White walls. It’s like a house, but it’s not a house. There’s water. Sunlight.” She started a new sketch, the outlines of a sleek bow and decks slowly taking shape. She said, “It’s a boat.”

“Can you move around it?”

Tobie shifted her perspective again. Coming around the stern, she could see the name of the boat written in a flowing script. “There’s an ‘h.’” She frowned. “No. Maybe it’s an ‘l,’ or an ‘f’.” She shook her head. She always had a hard time with script. “I can’t read it.”

“That’s all right, October. Back away from the boat now and tell me what you see.”

Tobie took a deep breath and smelled the briny bite of the sea. “Water. Calm water. Reflections of lights. City lights. There’s a stretch of silvery wood. A dock.”

“Keep moving back.”

“I’m getting a sense of a wide-open area. Grass. Beyond that are trees. No. Not trees. Columns. A row of columns. Pavement. It’s a building, or a house. A large house.” She sketched it quickly. An Italianate villa with a terrace overlooking the water. She went back over her drawing, adding arched windows, wide French doors, the feathery fronds of palm trees.

Dr. Bukovsky said, “Can you move back more?”

Tobie tried to focus on the surrounding houses, the street. But the farther she moved away from the boat, the more indistinct and disjointed the images became. She managed to draw a rough sketch of a bridge. But in the end, she shook her head in frustration and leaned back in her seat.

“The target,” she said, pushing her hair off her forehead with one splayed hand. “What was it?”

Wordlessly, Dr. Bukovsky held out the plain envelope.

Tobie ripped it open. On a single sheet of white paper, someone-Andrei?-had written, “The current position of the pathogen from U-114.”

“I guess that explains why the viewing I tried in Bremen didn’t work,” said Tobie, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the university building. The snow had stopped, but a bitter wind had kicked up, stinging her cheeks and making her eyes water. She turned up the collar of her jacket. “I was trying to RV an atom bomb that didn’t exist.”