Brad Thor - State Of The Union

“You don’t know very much, do you?”

“Why don’t you fill me in?”

“There’s no time,” replied Ivanova, as she nervously scanned the room.

Harvath could hear what sounded like several men in heavy boots making their way toward them.Probably the club’s bouncers coming to investigate. “We need to get out of here.”

“We can’t. Not yet,” replied Ivanova, turning back to the booth. “I need to check his pockets. He was supposed to have something for me.”

“Like this?” said Harvath, holding up the folded piece of paper Nesterov had given him.

Alexandra couldn’t believe her eyes.

“It looks like we’re going to be working together after all,” said Harvath as he grabbed her arm. “Now let’s move.”

After leaving the oxygen bar and retrieving Harvath’s backpack, Scot and Alexandra looked for a place to rest and decide what their next move would be. The Hotel Oktyabrskaya was situated in a busy neighborhood just across from St. Petersburg’s Moskovsky railway station and was a perfect place for them to hole up while they waited for morning.

Harvath grabbed a pen and a small pad of paper from next to the telephone in the bedroom and began to reexamine Nesterov’s note. After several minutes replacing the Cyrillic letters with corresponding characters from the English alphabet and rearranging bits and pieces in the lines of text, Harvath could finally read it. “Universal Transverse Mercator.”

“Mercator?As in latitude and longitude?”

“Exactly. Hours, minutes and seconds both north and east. What we’re looking at is a Geo coordinate.”

“A Geo coordinate for where? What does it point to?”

“According to his note,” replied Harvath, “somebody named Albert.”

“Ring any bells?”

“None at all,” said Alexandra.

Harvath set the note aside. “Then the first thing we need to do is to pinpoint those coordinates.”

“There’s a twenty-four-hour internet café in St. Petersburg calledQuo Vadis. All we’d have to do is get on line with one of their computers and find a web site where we can enter in the coordinates.”

“I don’t like it. With those networked systems it’s too hard to erase your tracks. We’d be leaving a trail of electronic breadcrumbs. Isn’t there a bookshop on the Nevsky Prospekt across from the Kazan Cathedral?”

“Yes, it’s called the Dom Knigi.”

“Good,” said Harvath. “We’ll wait until a half hour after they’ve opened and then go in separately. I’m going to buy a couple of books, one of which will be an atlas and you are going to go to their stationary section and buy some pencils, a notebook and most importantly, a ruler.”

Alexandra now understood what Harvath was up to. “We’re going to plot the coordinates the old-fashioned way.”

“Exactly. I just wish we had a way to get around. There’s too much potential downside in renting a car right now.”

“We don’t have to,” replied Alexandra. “I already have a car. I parked it in one of the long-term lots near the airport. It’s easier to move around St. Petersburg without it.”

“We can’t do it. It’s too dangerous. If they’re on to you, they’ll be looking for your car too.”

“Technically, it’s not my car. It’s a nice Grand Cherokee that belonged to someone who tried to kill me a couple of days ago. It’s a long story.”

“Well, we’ve got several hours until the store opens,” said Harvath, who grabbed a nearby chair and sat down. He put his feet up on the bed and then reached over and opened the mini-bar where he grabbed an ice-cold beer for himself and a minivodka for Alexandra, which he threw to her and said, “Feel free to blow on yours before you start.”

Whether or not it was her belief that she would be able to dump Harvath as soon as she got what she needed she didn’t know, but for some reason she felt it was okay to talk to him. After all, with no idea of who she could trust in the SVR, Harvath’s willingness to listen to what she had been through was more of a relief than she would have expected.

Alexandra told Scot about her father’s dossier and how he had kept it a secret from her until his death. She explained the meeting at the hunting lodge outside of Moscow where she had seen Stavropol dragging three bodies outside along with the help of another man whose face she couldn’t see very well, but thought might have been Draegar. She told how she had helped save General Karganov’s life only to have Milesch Popov came along with his gaudy Pit Bull pistol and its armor-piercing rounds and end it. As she withdrew the gun from inside her coat and showed it to him, she detailed how she had salvaged the SIM card from Popov’s cell phone and that her would-be killer had been dumb enough to store Stavropol’s number under the general’s real name. By scanning the call log, it was easy to ascertain to whom Popov had been talking when she had captured him. He had been negotiating the price for her murder, as well as Karganov’s, and the man on the other end of the line was none other than Sergei Oleg Stavropol.

Though she was sure that Stavropol originally had no idea of her involvement when he had sent Popov hunting for General Karganov, there was no question that he knew about it now.

Alexandra quietly reflected on the fact that not only was being seen with Nesterov enough to cement her guilt, but if Draegar recognized Harvath, which Alexandra was fairly confident he had, then Stavropol would automatically assume she was working with the Americans. It was only a matter of time before he had every law enforcement officer and military person in the country looking for her. In the blink of an eye, she had lost the anonymity she had worked so hard to preserve and had become Russia’s equivalent of public enemy number one.

Things could never go back to the way they were. There was no middle ground, not now that they knew she was on to them. They wouldn’t rest until she was dead and she had to be just as tireless in her efforts to stop them. Like it or not, it was beginning to look not only like she might have to work with Agent Scot Harvath, but that she actually might need him. Either she succeeded in her undertaking or she died.

“Tell me about the scientist, Nesterov,” said Harvath, filling the void as Alexandra had stopped talking and her mind seemed to have traveled elsewhere.

“Nesterov?” she repeated, bringing her focus back to the present. “I thought he might be helpful.”

“So you tracked him down and he agreed to meet with you, just like that?” asked Harvath. “You must have said something to him to make him risk so much.”

Alexandra was quiet and for several moments and once again seemed very far away. “Nesterov was one of two scientists working on this project whom my father had thought might be cooperative with his investigation; scientists who viewed their duty as being to their country and countrymen first and not necessarily their government.”

“Well, whoever this Albert is,” said Harvath, as he laid his H amp;K across his chest and closed his eyes, “let’s hope he feels the same way when we track him down tomorrow.”

SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE PETROZAVODSK, RUSSIA

STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS-3 DAYS

Leaving St. Petersburg’s Dom Knigi bookstore with two fly-fishing books and a thick Russian atlas, Harvath stopped at a local sporting goods shop and then met up with Alexandra at the Moskavskya metro station, where they caught the shuttle for Pulkovo Airport.

Popov’s forest-green Jeep Grand Cherokee wasn’t as bad as Harvath had thought it was going to be. In fact, the vehicle was relatively unremarkable in a country where conspicuous consumption ran rampant.