Black Flagged Vektor (4) Read online

  The door closed behind him.

  “Alexei. Have a seat, please,” Greshnev said, indicating the cushioned, straight-back chair in front of his desk.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He wondered if he would have the opportunity to say more than “thank you” to Greshnev. Actually, if that was all he was required to say, the meeting would be a success.

  “I just spoke with Internal Affairs,” Greshnev began.

  “So did I. Less than five minutes ago, coincidentally,” Kaparov replied.

  Greshnev showed the faintest hint of a smile, which faded as quickly as it arrived. “Monchegorsk is a closed issue.”

  “I couldn’t agree more. I haven’t asked any questions or made any suggestions in nearly two weeks.”

  “Let’s keep it that way. This comes from above. Far above me,” Greshnev added.

  “I never look any higher than your office, comrade. If it comes from you, that’s all I need to hear,” Kaparov said.

  “All right then. Do you need anything from me?”

  Here was the moment of truth. He didn’t want to piss off Greshnev, but it was necessary to keep him off the suspects list, should the missing CIA officer from Stockholm end up in a dank, SVR-sponsored torture chamber.

  “How should I proceed with Anatoly Reznikov? I forwarded my assessment of the information captured in Dagestan, but never heard back. If he’s working with Chechen separatists, this could represent a major bioweapons threat to the Russian Federation.”

  “I have it on good authority that Reznikov is no longer a threat. SVR wouldn’t release any details, which leads me to believe that he met an untimely death.”

  “The only thing untimely is that it didn’t happen years ago. I’ll close Reznikov’s file,” Kaparov said.

  “Good work making that connection. Russia is much safer because of your diligence in that matter,” Greshnev said, standing up. He held out his hand, signifying the end of the meeting.

  “Thank you, sir. That’s all I’ve ever persevered to do on behalf of our government.”

  Chapter 7

  10:45 AM

  Warehouse 42, North Dock

  Oxelösund, Sweden

  Mihail Osin walked toward the door at the back of the dimly lit room. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder at the sagging, bloodied CIA officer zip-tied by his hands and feet to a high-backed wooden chair in the center of the room before continuing to the door. He heard the door’s external deadbolts slide, followed by a sudden bright light. Mihail stepped into the well-lit hallway and shut the door behind him, shaking his head at Stepka, one of the operatives assigned to his team. Stepka uttered an expletive and relocked the deadbolts. None of them wanted to spend any more time in this building.

  Acquired over a decade ago by a shell company associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the warehouse served as a Directorate “S” way station for northern European operations, and provided the perfect location for a discreet interrogation. Located on Oxelösund’s working waterfront, the warehouse was one of few serviceable buildings left on the sparse north dock. Most of Oxelösund’s ironworks exports passed through structures on the more accessible and modernized southern dock, leaving the north dock largely ignored.

  Warehouse 42 was maintained in decent enough shape to keep Swedish public safety authorities from demanding a detailed inspection of the grounds, but not well enough to attract the attention of local criminals. Most of the money allocated to the warehouse by Directorate S went into an internal expansion of the “corporate offices.” The internal structure consisted of several soundproofed interrogation rooms, stocked with every tool or device needed to extract information from its unfortunate guests. Mercifully, Warehouse 42 represented the last stop for most guests. The unluckiest among them were transferred by boat to a coastal site near St. Petersburg, where they could be sent anywhere within Russia for a more thorough interrogation.

  Additional rooms beyond the interrogation cells served as temporary lodging for transiting teams of “illegals” or Spetsnaz; complete with showers, locally sourced clothing and a stocked kitchen.

  The last room, known as the “bath house,” served the most nefarious purpose, and few within Directorate S knew what was kept inside. Once a guest expired in Warehouse 42, they were taken to the “bath house,” where the team that “sponsored” the guest would dispose of the body. One look inside the room would test the personal resolve of the hardest operative.

  Unlike the rest of the “office suite,” the interior walls of the “bath house” were lined with floor to ceiling cinderblock, matching the ugly gray concrete floor. An industrial-grade stainless-steel ventilation hood reached down from the center of the tall ceiling. A 55-gallon stainless-steel barrel mounted to a wheeled frame sat next to a Teflon-coated 20-gallon rectangular bin along the wall opposite the door. A small sewer drain sat in the furthest corner of the room, flanked by a water spigot on one side and a neatly coiled, wall-mounted garden hose on the other. A sturdy plastic shelving unit next to the door held several one-gallon jugs of hydrofluoric acid. Larger, five-gallon, military-style plastic jugs labeled “sodium hydroxide,” lye, were stacked side by side on the lowest shelf next to three neatly arranged propane tanks.

  The most gruesome spectacle was the “work bench,” a thick, wooden four-foot-by-three-foot tabletop set upon solid, stubby square legs. The table was pushed up against the wall next to the plastic shelving unit. A blue industrial pegboard covered the wall above the table, suspending two small chainsaws and an electric skill saw.

  The process for disposing of Warehouse 42’s guests was relatively simple. The bodies were cut into smaller pieces and placed in the stainless-steel drum, which was wheeled into the center of the room under the ventilation hood. The drum was filled with enough sodium hydroxide and water to cover the body parts, and a sizable propane burner was placed under the drum. The burner slowly brought the drum’s contents to a boil, accelerating the alkaline hydrolysis process and completely dissolving the body within seven to eight hours.

  The resulting alkaline soup was poured down the drain in the corner and washed down with the hose. Hydrofluoric acid was used in the Teflon-coated bin to dissolve metal remnants like knee pins or any stubborn bone material that failed to completely dissolve in the heated lye. The guest’s clothing and shoes were often burned in a metal barrel outside of the warehouse or taken along by the “sponsors” to be deposited in a city dumpster.

  Upon completion of the process, nothing remained of the guest in question. Sixty-seven guests had disappeared at Warehouse 42 during its twelve-year operational period, designating the cement-lined room in Oxelösund, Sweden, as the most active “bath house” operated on foreign soil by Directorate S. Within Russia, several notorious “bath houses” far exceeded Warehouse 42’s productivity level, forming the backbone of an expansive network of clandestine torture chambers commissioned after the dissolution of the KGB in 1991. Nearly all of the KGB’s secret locations had been exposed when the organization was split into the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the Federal Security Service (FSB). The SVR’s Directorate S, which operated under considerably less oversight than any of the other branches, took the lead in reestablishing the KGB’s legendary interrogation apparatus.

  Mihail turned left and walked down the concrete hallway, past a door leading to another windowless interrogation room. He leaned against the cold wall and dialed his control station on a small, encrypted satellite phone kept in his coat pocket. After negotiating a few layers of SVR security, he was connected with Dmitry Ardankin, Director of Operations for Directorate S. Ardankin’s voice sounded like a whisper.

  “What do we know?”

  “The CIA station at the embassy provided ground surveillance for the operation. Several officers were staged throughout the city to put eyes on the target when the location was passed.”

  “When did they put these officers in the field?”

  “The night befo
re the raid. The station chief turned over control of the agents to NCS operations. The assault team arrived separately, but he doesn’t think the assault team was CIA.”

  “What does that mean?” Ardankin asked.

  “He maintains that the station didn’t know anything about the target or the team. CIA headquarters was in direct communication with the agents on the street, effectively compartmentalizing the operation. At this point, I don’t think he’s hiding anything from us. We’ve worked on him all night.”

  “Did he shed any light on the mission source?”

  “Karl Berg was the only end user identified.”

  “Yes. That would make sense. What about the missing female CIA officer? Erin Foley?”

  “According to Reese, Foley never returned to the embassy. She must have been situated the closest to Reznikov’s apartment in Södermalm.”

  “And the CIA station chief?” Ardankin demanded.

  “Reese was sitting with the station chief at the embassy, waiting for word. They received a call from headquarters around 7:30 AM, notifying them that the operation had succeeded.”

  “Did he take the call?”

  “No. It was the station chief.”

  “Did he know the location of the safe house?”

  “No. He was not aware of any secure facilities within Sweden. Should we prepare for a return trip to Stockholm? It sounds like we should have grabbed the station chief,” Mihail said.

  “We don’t grab station chiefs, or any CIA employees, for that matter. This was a one-time exception. We’ll have to approach this from a different angle,” Ardankin said.

  “What should we do with Mr. Reese?”

  “Pack him up for shipment. There’s no sense in wasting the resource. What’s done is done. It’s not every day we grab a station officer. I’ll pass the pickup information shortly. Once the pickup is complete, head to Munich and stand by for further orders. We may have located one of the shooters in Stockholm.”

  “Understood,” Mihail said, and the connection ended

  He looked down the hallway toward Stepka and saw that the operative had been joined by the rest of the team.

  “We prep him for transport,” Mihail said.

  “That’s a first,” one of the operatives remarked.

  “Beats the alternative. I hate that fucking room,” Stepka replied.

  “The situation is unique. Events like this cause ripples that tend to come back as tidal waves,” Mihail said.

  “As long as I don’t have to pour him down a drain, I don’t care what they do with him,” Stepka added.

  Mihail regarded his comment with feigned disinterest. The young operative had no idea what this meant. Grabbing an “illegal” off the street was one thing, nabbing a station officer was another. There would be repercussions.

  Chapter 8

  12:50 PM

  Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Headquarters

  Yasanevo Suburb, Moscow, Russian Federation

  Dmitry Ardankin stood up from the small desk in his private communications room and took a few steps to the sealed door leading out of the chamber. He paused for a moment before sitting back down in front of the secure telephone set. He had another call to make that would require the use of this space. The closet-sized room was located at the front of his office, taking up most of the right corner. Resembling a walk-in closet, the standalone chamber had been designed to thwart any possible efforts to electronically eavesdrop on his conversations from the outside, despite the elaborate amount of effort put into the building itself. Laser detection and jamming technology had been mounted to every building in the SVR campus in order to augment the countermeasures integrated directly into the buildings.

  The exterior windows had been designed to passively defeat attempts to use laser technology. Each window held two panes of glass separated by a spacer frame. The area between the frames was filled with a gas mixture denser than air, effectively damping sound waves travelling from one pane to the next. An integrated sound generator was applied directly to the outer pane, creating thermal noise over a wide frequency range, which superimposed vibrations equivalent to a forty-decibel level of sound. This created the unusual humming effect heard throughout the campus. Unless Ardankin yelled during a conversation at his desk, a laser-based listening device targeting his office window would register white noise. Finally, a coating on the outer pane prevented the laser from reaching the inner pane, where the glass vibrated with his voice. All of this, and they had still insisted on a soundproof room within a soundproof building.

  He rarely used the chamber, but this morning’s call from Mihail Osin had been different. The room also provided him an extra layer of security against internal eavesdropping, which was highly unlikely. Still, the ongoing operation in Sweden required the strictest compartmentalization. Beyond Osin’s team, only the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service knew about the kidnapping. Unfortunately, the risky gamble didn’t shed much light on the situation, beyond confirming that either the SVR or FSB had been compromised. The only other way to explain the security breach involved a more frightening possibility.

  The Americans may have developed a new generation of surveillance technology without their knowledge. He hoped it wasn’t the latter. His people could uncover a leak, but a significant shift in electronic espionage technology represented a devastating challenge to Russian’s intelligence community. He didn’t look forward to the next call. The director would report these findings directly to Putin, and nobody could predict how he would react.

  Dmitry Ardankin suddenly didn’t relish the privilege of sharing Russia’s darkest secrets anymore. Putin had an ironfisted reputation for keeping these secrets from ever reaching daylight, regardless of rank or position. Putin and his cronies continued to take a bizarre and unhealthy interest in Reznikov. Unhealthy for anyone but Putin. Ardankin decided he would watch his back on this one. He hadn’t made it this far to be poured down a drain on the outskirts of Moscow.

  Chapter 9

  2:15 PM

  Federal Security Service (FSB) Headquarters

  Lubyanka Square, Moscow

  Maxim Greshnev continued to examine a recent report on Monchegorsk when the door opened. He heard Inga go through her solemn routine of making anyone who stood outside of his door feel uncomfortable.

  “The director will see you now,” she said.

  He looked up when the door closed and frowned, motioning for Arkady Baranov to take a seat. He waited until the Center of Special Operations (CSN) director was seated before placing the report on his desk. He regarded Baranov for a moment, knowing that his usual gruff scare tactics would have little effect on the man. Baranov still looked like an active Spetsnaz operative, athletic and grizzled, his muscular frame evident under his navy blue suit. The only telltale sign that Baranov had reached his fifties was graying hair, which he kept in a smart buzz cut. He’d known Baranov for nearly twenty years, having helped the ambitious Spetsnaz colonel transition from the KGB to the Federal Security Service.

  Colonel Baranov’s distinguished career started in Afghanistan as a young “Alpha Group” lieutenant. He led a squad of KGB Spetsnaz during Operation Storm-333, an ambitious raid launched against Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, at Tajbeg Palace in 1979. The operation killed the anti-Soviet leader, along with his entire two-hundred-guard contingent, successfully opening the door for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Baranov successfully negotiated a transfer to the newly formed “Vympel Group” in 1981 and returned to Afghanistan, where he led sabotage groups against the Mujahideen until the bitter end of the Soviet occupation in 1989.

  After Afghanistan, the newly minted full colonel took command of the Vympel Group, which was gutted and tossed around from agency to agency upon the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. Colonel Baranov’s group eventually landed in the hands of the Interior Ministry (MVD), with only sixty of its original three hundred operatives. In 1993, Maxim Greshnev plucked Baranov out o
f the MVD on his meteoric rise up the FSB hierarchy ladder, placing him as the assistant deputy director of Greshnev’s newly formed Center of Special Operations. By 1995, Baranov had consolidated control of CSN, showing little motivation or ambition to rise any further, which suited Greshnev fine. He had little doubt that Baranov could easily outmaneuver him on the way to the top. Fortunately for him, Baranov was Spetsnaz to the core and couldn’t step away from the action to be bothered with politics.

  “We have a problem,” Greshnev grumbled.

  Baranov cocked his head slightly and waited for Greshnev to continue.

  “I just got off the phone with the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and he’s not happy—”

  “He’s never happy,” Baranov interrupted, drawing a critical stare from Greshnev.

  “Apparently, they have confirmed that Reznikov’s address in Stockholm was leaked to the CIA.”

  Baranov shook his head. “Let me guess. They think it came from my division.”

  “This was the first joint operation with SVR in years, and it ended in disaster. It’s only natural for them to react this way.”

  “Joint operation? We had a grand total of four people in the Ops Room for that fiasco. Myself, two others that I trust explicitly, and one of the senior techs,” Baranov said.

  “Then our investigation shouldn’t take too long,” Greshnev said.

  “That won’t satisfy our friends in the SVR,” Baranov said.

  “No. It probably won’t. We can expect them to start surveillance on your entire department,” Greshnev said.

  “Maybe we should put Directorate S under surveillance. How many fucking people did they have involved in the operation?”

  “Given the unit involved, not as many as you might think. Ardankin won’t ignore the possibility that the leak came from his side, and neither will his boss,” Greshnev said.

  “It’s the Security Service’s job to investigate issues like this,” Baranov said.