Dale Brown - Puppet Master

The bearded man pushed his hand across the desk, removing the ashes that had fallen.

“One of my men will drive you to the city. Wait outside.”

Tolevi started to leave.

“I would not stay in Donetsk for very much longer,” added the bearded man. “It is not a safe place. Too many recidivists and anti-democrats marching around. You never know what may happen.”

Massina regained consciousness in a grungy room with a view of the Charles River. His hands were tied behind his back, and his feet were chained to the leg of the couch he’d been deposited on. He knew it had to be past midnight, though his watch had been taken, along with his wallet and phone.

While he was well off, Massina had never considered himself a prime target for kidnapping or even robbery. The company’s security forces were focused on the plant and IP, not his own person. So he looked at the situation the way he looked at everything unexpected: with great intellectual curiosity. What did these thugs think they were going to get, and why? How were they going about it? What were their assumptions and their motivations?

Money would be a good guess as to the latter.

Standing, he found he could move a few feet from the couch before being held back by the chain. He stretched as best he could, then tried to figure out where exactly he was by staring out the window at the darkened river.

Lights were scattered along the far shore. He thought he could see the outline of the bridge to his right, but the window wasn’t clean enough for him to get a good view of what was outside.

West maybe of Arsenal Street or Route 20.

He strained to see if there was traffic on the bridge — a lot of traffic would make it the highway, but he couldn’t tell from where he was standing.

“Awake, good!”

Massina jerked around. A man leaned up against the corner of the room. Massina hadn’t even realized he was there.

“You’re pretty rich, huh?” said the man.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Just to make sure you were OK. I apologize for the rough handling. It was a mistake. The people responsible have been punished.”

His face was obscured by the shadows, but Massina guessed that he was in his thirties. He spoke English with a heavy accent, Russian or German.

“Is this a kidnapping?”

“A kidnapping, no? Not even a robbery. Your wallet and phone are in the outside room.” The man stepped forward. His face was covered by a ski mask. Massina tried to guess his size — over six feet, but by how much?

“Here’s the key,” said the man, turning as he reached the door. He threw a small ball of tape at Massina, hitting him in the chest. The ball dropped to the floor near the couch. “You may go when you free yourself.”

“Who are you?”

“Friends. You may do well to take on investors,” added the man. “As insurance in the future.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Massina, but the man left the room without answering.

Two burly men in civilian clothes drove Tolevi back to the city. They were quiet the whole way, but it didn’t take much to guess that they were Russians. The fact that they weren’t hiding their faces was a good sign, he thought: it meant they felt he had been sufficiently cowed not to be of further trouble.

It might also mean that they were going to kill him. He tried not to think about that possibility.

Whatever they were thinking, the less they knew about him, the better. The hotel key card was generic enough that it might not have been recognized; even if it had, a little misdirection might be useful. So he told the men to take him to the Ramada, which was on Shevchenka Boulevard near the reservoir. They dropped him there and took off quickly, not even bothering to wait until he entered the building.

Aside from the fact that the hotel was in eastern Ukraine — or the Donetsk People’s Republic — it was similar to every other Ramada on the planet. Tolevi went inside, nodded at the sleepy desk clerk, then walked over to the large coffeepot set up at the far end of the lobby. He filled a cup, then went out to the patio near the pool to sit, as if he were waiting for someone. He was surprised to find that his jaw, although painful as hell, was working. Maybe it wasn’t broken after all.

What he was really doing was sorting himself out. He’d lost his prepaid phone; he’d need a new one. Using either the sat phone or his regular cell, which were both back at the hotel, was now out of the question while he was in the city. The Russians used scanning technology just like the Americans; they might not be quite as sophisticated, but even they could figure out how to snag his number, location, and even conversations.

Without the documents permitting him to bring the drugs in, there was no sense contacting the men he’d planned to deal with. He’d only be putting them in danger, and at best he’d be cutting off the possibility of future deals. So that part of his trip was over.

SVR would not be happy. But they could take that up with the bearded Spetsnaz general.

More likely a colonel. Tolevi decided he would think of him as a colonel, though the man had not made his rank clear.

Were the Russians following him? The two men who’d dropped him off seemed not to care very much about him, but that could easily be a ruse.

Maybe they knew everything.

It was easy to get too paranoid, to let fear freeze you.

On the other hand, he had narrowly escaped death. The Russian operation against the loyalists had saved him.

But was that an accident? Or was that even part of a plan?

Too much thinking. Stop.

The coffee was terrible. Tolevi rose and dumped it on the concrete. He walked through the lobby and back out to the street, where he checked his watch.

Five past five.

Too early to see Fodor.

He decided he would get something to eat, then collect his luggage and ask the old man for a ride to the border. Surely he knew a way across.

Get home and regroup. He’d come up with something else for Medved.

It was a decent walk to the Donbass Hotel, a bit over twenty minutes. The air was still damp, but the predawn sky showed the clouds were breaking up; Tolevi guessed it would be a decent spring day once the sun came up. He imagined himself showing Borya Ukraine — not this Ukraine but the Ukraine of his youth.

An improbable dream now, but these idiots couldn’t stay at war forever; remove Putin and the conflict would likely evaporate. And Putin wasn’t as secure as the West believed.

Yes, but he would die before giving up power willingly? What Russian would?

Tolevi was lost in his thoughts as he neared the hotel. It was the fatigue and the calmness that came with having a plan. In a place like Donetsk — in any place really, given his profession — it was very dangerous, and he realized it as soon as he entered the lobby and saw Dan rising from a couch to confront him.

“You’re up,” said Tolevi in Russian, as matter-of-factly as he could muster. “I thought we weren’t meeting for another hour and a half.”

“Where have you been?”

“Just a walk,” said Tolevi. “Have you had breakfast?”

The other man glared at him. He had the look of someone who thought he’d been cheated, or about to be cheated.

“Come on,” added Tolevi. “Let’s get coffee and food.”

“Where?” demanded Dan.

“There’s a good place across the street,” said Tolevi. “Come.”

The café where he’d stopped the afternoon before was not yet open, but another shop farther along the block was. The owner was clearly a morning person; he greeted the two men warmly and struck up a conversation with Tolevi about how difficult it was to find good coffee anymore.