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The Shadowmen
By David Hagberg Tom Doherty Associates
Copyright © 2016 David Hagberg
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8626-7
CHAPTER 1
Present Day
Moscow had changed since the last time the man traveling on a British passport in the name of Nicholas Kandes was here. More traffic, more people, the frantic pace of cities in the West, such as Berlin, Paris, London, even New York. He emerged from the posh Ritz-Carlton Hotel just off Red Square and went to where a valet stood with the driver's-side door of the rental BMW M6 Coupé open.
Kandes, not his real name, was a slightly built man, well under six feet. His features were unremarkable, even bland, except for his eyes, which were sometimes intense and other times hooded like those of a cobra ready to strike. He was dressed in crisply starched jeans, Gucci loafers, a white silk shirt, and a light sweater, the sleeves looped around his neck. He was twenty-six last month.
"Good morning, sir," the valet said. "Would you like help with directions?"
"No, thank you," Kandes said, handing the man a hundred-euro note. His Russian was nearly perfect with just a hint of a British accent.
At eight, rush-hour traffic was in full swing, but Kandes knew his way around the city, and in no time, he was past the Kursk Railway Station outside the second ring and onto the M7, which led almost directly east out of the city. Even out here, change was evident. Much of the old-growth birch forest had been plowed under to make way for housing developments. Western-styled malls, miniestates with outdoor swimming pools that could only be used a few months out of the year but were prestigious.
Hate had ridden on his shoulders ever since he was a teenager when he learned that his brother had been murdered by an American CIA agent. He was enough of a realist to understand the risk that soldiers took when they raised their hands and gave the oath to defend their country against all enemies foreign and domestic, but his brother had been his entire world — his only world. Their parents were dead, and they had no aunts, uncles, cousins, no one except the two of them.
Kandes had been placed in a state school at the age of five, and he'd only ever come face-to-face with his brother a half dozen times in ten years, but it had been enough for the bond to be made. His brother was blood.
Most of the traffic flowed into the city, and driving away from Moscow, he tried to wrap his mind around exactly why his brother had been so in love with Russia that he'd been willing to give his life for it. The Rodina — motherland. It was one of the questions he meant to ask the general this morning, because it was a mystery, and before he evened the score, he had to know the answer to something he was incapable of feeling.
Petushki, a town of about fifteen thousand, was a one-hour drive on the highway that followed the Nizhny-Novgorod Railway. About ten kilometers east of the small industrial city, he came to a narrow dirt road that led to the north through a sparse forest where at the top of a low rise he pulled over and got out of the car.
Below in a narrow valley cut by a small stream was a series of buildings, including a cow barn,and an ornate dacha with minarets, onion domes, a half dozen chimneys, and intricate wooden scrollwork beneath the eaves. From what he'd learned, the place had been owned by a Czarist general before World War I. A lot of blood had been spilled here and at other similar spots around Russia. Nearly every owner since then had been sent to Siberia to count the birches for one reason or another and had never come back. This general had been the one exception — he returned from Siberia.
A Mercedes SUV was parked across a footbridge from the house, but no one was around, and there was no other sign that anyone was in residence.
Kandes drove down the hill, where he parked next to the Mercedes. He waited for a minute or so, the window down, listening to the sounds of the stream and some birds in the distance. The air here was fresh and smelled of grass and perhaps the earth. To the right, across the stream, a few acres of sod had been plowed under, exposing the black, rich soil.
A large man in coveralls and knee-high boots suddenly appeared at the window. He held a SIG SAUER pistol at Kandes's face. "Get out of the car," he said in Russian.
"Sure," Kandes said. He got out of the car, snatched the pistol out of the man's hand, and with lightning speed removed the magazine and fieldstripped the weapon, tossing the parts aside.
The bodyguard started forward, his face dark, angry.
"Nyet," an old man on the porch of the dacha across the creek called out, and the guard stopped.
"General Didenko," Kandes said. "I'd like to have a word with you."
"Arkasha's brother, finally," Didenko said.
* * *
The inside of the house smelled musty. Paper covered some of the windows, and drop cloths draped much of the furniture. Only the kitchen in the rear seemed fully functional as did a sitting room in a porch overlooking the stream looping around to the west. A copse of trees stood in stark contrast at the base of the low hill. All in all, it was a pleasant if lonely place.
Didenko poured them a dark Russian beer, and they sat in wicker chairs facing the creek. He was a shrunken man who'd once been a bear, over six feet with thick shoulders, a broad face, and thick torso. Now he looked ill.
"I understand that you're with the Spetsnaz special group in London," Didenko said. "One of Karl's rising young stars."
The Spetsnaz had been positioned in just about every country around the world since the end of the Cold War. If hostilities were to break out, they would go to work as saboteurs, striking not only infrastructures like water and electrical supplies but also military installations. The program was highly classified and for the last years under the ironfisted control of Major General Karl Nikandrov, the head of the SVR that was the successor to the KGB's First Chief Directorate, responsible for all clandestine activities outside of Russia.
Kandes was not especially surprised that the general knew who he was; the old-boy network was stronger than ever these days. But the breach of security was disturbing. The names of the Spetsnaz operators and the units they belonged to were highly classified and just now very high on Putin's list of important programs.
"The question isn't why you came to see me — you want to know how your brother died — but it's how you managed to get here without a shit storm falling down around you. I assume you're traveling under a false cover."
"Nicholas Kandes."
"For Nikolai Kurshin. Will anyone suspect that you're here?"
"I asked for a fifteen-day leave, and they gave it to me," Nikolai said. Didenko was legendary among Soviet spymasters, but he didn't seem like anyone out of the ordinary. Just an old man living in the middle of nowhere.
"Really extraordinary that they gave it to you," Didenko said. He looked away for a moment. "Your brother was killed in a flooded tunnel beneath a castle museum northeast of Lisbon, ten, maybe twelve years ago. He might have drowned, but he didn't. When his body was recovered, it was found that the back of his skull was caved in, as if somebody smashed it with a cricket bat, or more likely knocked it against a stone wall or floor."
"Who did it?" Nikolai asked, keeping his violent temper in check.
"Kirk McGarvey. I thought that you would know the name."
"I wanted to make sure. But why, just spy to spy?"
"It was much more than that. There was a cache of gold the Nazis had taken from Jews they'd killed and had hidden in Portugal for after the war. We wanted it, and the CIA didn't want us to have it. But your brother worked for Valentin Baranov, my boss in Number One in the old days, and there was an incident involving a nuclear missile in Germany.
"We'd found out that the Israelis had stockpiled nuclear weapons at a site near Ein Gedi. Your brother managed to steal one of the Americans' Pershing missiles and reprogram it to fly to Israel and destroy the depot."
"McGarvey stopped him?"
"Yes, but your brother didn't give up. He put together a strike force that somehow managed to steal a Los Angeles–class nuclear submarine, kill the crew, and scuttle the boat after they'd stolen another missile. Then he programmed it to strike Ein Gedi. But McGarvey stopped him, and in fact, your brother was presumed dead, his body lost somewhere in the sea off Cyprus."
Nikolai knew most of that, and he'd managed to dig up a fair amount of information about the CIA operator who'd not only been a shooter but had even briefly directed the agency. But he didn't know why. He didn't know what had driven his brother to give his life for the Komitet. Or for Baranov or Didenko.
"Was there money in the end?" he asked. "Was he planning to retire?"
Didenko laughed. "Your brother would never have quit. Just after the Ein Gedi incident, McGarvey assassinated Baranov — and that was another long-standing blood feud. I was promoted to head our Illegals Directorate — mokrie dela — wet affairs, and your brother called me out of the blue. We were convinced that he was dead, so when he called me on an unsecured line from Damascus, I almost had a heart attack. I told him that he should come in. Give me a couple of days, and I could arrange something.
"'I've become a floater,' he told me. 'When I want blood, I'll call you. This time, you bastards, I won't let you fuck me up.'"
"You were involved with the Nazi gold operation?"
Didenko nodded. "And we damned near pulled it off, your brother and I."
"Except for McGarvey."
"He was better than Arkasha. Had been all along."
"Or luckier." Nikolai sat back with his beer. He'd looked up to his brother, but he'd never really known him. Aloof, a sometimes rough sense of humor, though Nikolai could never remember his brother laughing out loud, and he could never remember any physical contact; a hug, kiss after a vodka. It was the Russian way, or had been in the old days.
But he clearly remembered the strength and confidence that fairly exuded from his brother's pores. He was a man extremely capable in whatever he did. You just knew that everything would turn out for the best if Arkasha were involved.
He was everything that Nikolai held sacred and pure and real in a world that had gone all to shit after the empire had disintegrated. Except for Putin, finally, Russia had gone through a horrible period of not knowing what it was or even what its existence meant.
That, however, had never been a problem for Nikolai. He knew exactly who he was, and he knew exactly what his existence meant.
"I'm going to kill him," he said, looking up.
Didenko laughed. "Don't be so sure."
"He's an old man now."
"Fifty."
"An old man — his reactions are slower, his strength less, maybe he loves his life a little more than he should. Maybe he has people he cares for."
"You won't be sanctioned."
It was Nikolai's turn to laugh. "That doesn't matter. But I'm going to play with him. I'm going to make him feel pain, like my brother must have in the sea off Cyprus and in the tunnel in Portugal. I'm going to become his shadow. Wherever he goes, I will be right there, and in the end, he will die."
"We called your brother the Chameleon, but his real work name was the Shadowman. He was always there right out in the open, right next to his prey — but no one recognized the danger, because a shadow is as natural as the light of the sun or the moon."
"Then I'll become Kirk McGarvey's shadowman," Nikolai said.
"Why?"
"Because I can. Because I want to. Because it amuses me to take on an old man."
Didenko stared at him for a long time. "Think before you start this; you'd better be a lot more sure of your reasons than that."
CHAPTER 2
"If nothing but the truth and only the truth were written down, all our university libraries would be housed in tiny little buildings. The thing is, however, we would know a lot more than we ever did, and we would understand it better," Voltaire had written.
Kirk Cullough McGarvey looked up from the screen of his laptop and shivered. A cold wind had suddenly passed through him, leaving behind a vague sense of foreboding. Someone or something was coming his way again. On top of that, he didn't know if he believed Voltaire any longer. Too much had passed — too may lies, too much deceit to believe or even understand much of anything.
He was a solidly built man around fifty, with broad shoulders but narrow in the waist because of a strict regimen of exercises that included swimming or running every day. He had pleasant features and eyes that were green on some days and gray on others, often depending on his mood. Today, they were gray.
The view out the third-floor window of his converted lighthouse on the Greek island of Serifos was stunning, especially this morning because of the early spring weather that was perfect — low humidity, pleasant shirtsleeve temperatures, only a few puffy clouds in a brilliantly blue sky, and almost no tourists.
After the last business with Pakistan, which had very nearly ended up badly, he'd come back here to his retreat — his safe haven — to finish his second book on the philosophy of Voltaire, especially as it pertained to government. After the CIA, and between freelance assignments for the Company, he taught philosophy at New College in Sarasota, part of the State University System of Florida. It was a liberal arts school and one of the best small schools in the country.
"You like teaching, I think," his friend and sometimes lover Pete Boylan said.
That had been a couple of years ago, after they'd gotten back from Paris and he was getting set to return to school. At thirty-seven, Pete was a lot younger than he, but she admitted more than once that she was madly in love with him, and no matter what he did or didn't do or say, her feelings wouldn't change. The point is she was a lot closer politically to the kids than he was.
"Teaching makes you think," he'd told her.
Sometimes he'd take his class outside to the water's edge on Sarasota Bay, and they would continue their discussion of some point in minute detail, often at the tops of their lungs, everyone talking at once. It was fantastic.
Voltaire had taught, among other things, that common sense wasn't so common, after all. That the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman. That men used thought only to justify their wrongdoings and speech only to conceal their thoughts. And one of Mac's favorites:
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
It was getting close to lunchtime. Mac saved the page and went downstairs to the tiny kitchen, where he poured a glass of ice-cold Retsina wine and went out to the stone patio.
Writing about someone else's life — someone he admired — often made him reflective of his own past. A lot of water under the bridge, his old friend Otto Rencke would say. More people killed in the line of duty, often for some presidential directive or national objective, or sometimes for something as minor as greed or even ego. The CIA's old acronym for why people became defectors was MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Eego. In actuality, the reasons people became traitors to their own countries were a lot more complicated than that.
But what was even more complicated, even for McGarvey, was why people stood with their toes to the line, ready and even willing to give their lives for their countries. For some cause, sometimes for words, sometimes for leaders, sometimes for ideals.
He'd never had his own answers, at least none that were satisfactory, beyond the facts that by chance he'd been born in the U.S. and that ever since he was a kid, he'd hated bullies.
But those sentiments had cost him dearly. Just about every woman he'd ever been involved with had been assassinated because of who he was and what he'd been doing at the moment, including his wife, Katy, and their grown daughter, Elizabeth.
Liz's husband, who had been a CIA operative, had been shot to death in the line of duty. Mac, Katy, and their daughter, all of them devastated, had gone to the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, the girls had ridden in a separate limo, Mac in the Lincoln just behind them.
Staring down across the rocky valley and the path that led up and over the next hill and down to the ferry dock in town, the day at Arlington stood out in vivid detail in his mind. The afternoon was too bright, too clear, the weather too mild for a funeral.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Shadowmen by David Hagberg. Copyright © 2016 David Hagberg. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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