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“Look on the bright side—she’s got great vocabulary for a four-year-old.”
Before Quinn could go fullDadon me, the screen mounted on the wall came to life and Naz appeared.Another Russian who’d left his former job under a cloud, but he’d been intelligence rather than clean-up crew.Naz was a partner at Sirius Consulting alongside Alaric, one of my exes, and I valued his thoughts on the problem at hand.Blackwood had a small presence in Moscow, but we were far from experts on the region, so we needed all the help we could get.
I made the introductions.“Darya, this is Naz.Naz is former SVR”—Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii, also known as Russia’s foreign intelligence service—“but now he’s moved to the private sector.Naz, this is Darya, an old comrade of Ana’s.”
Officially, Naz no longer existed, and his current passport said he was Norwegian, as did his carefully cultivated accent.But he couldn’t change his past, and his sharp intake of breath told me when he’d put two and Seven together and made Nine.
“Sorry I’m not able to greet you in person, but I don’t like funerals, especially when they’re my own.”
“Coward,” I said.
“No, I just have a healthy sense of self-preservation.So, why am I involved here?Alaric mentioned embassy personnel?”
“Somebody’s high-school science project went missing, and the US government wants it back.There’s reason to believe that one of the culprits involved has a connection to the Russian Consulate Field Office in Huntington Beach.Our job is to work out who, and then relieve them of the goods.”I waved a hand towards the wall of whiteboards behind me.“Uncle Sam has kindly shared whatever information they have on the folks who came and went from the building today.We need to identify them and either rule them out of any involvement or dig into their lives further until we find what we’re looking for.Any assistance you can provide would be much appreciated.”
“Okay, I understand.We’re waiting for more people before we begin?”
Hallie and Vance had just walked in, and Vance had headed straight for the breadsticks.
“No, everyone’s here.”
“Then who is all the food for?”
“We’re going to freeze it and defrost it in batches for the rest of our lives.”
“Your arteries will hate you.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Like who these mystery men were.
We’d actually had one small stroke of luck—today was a Sunday, and the field office ran a skeleton staff at the weekends.That left us with seventeen faces on the boards, and twelve of them had already been identified by the watchers as diplomatic staff, security personnel, or regular visitors.Four were suspected of being spies, and they must have kissed serious ass to get this gig.Year-round sunshine, hobnobbing with the Hollywood set, and a political landscape that was virtually flat compared with DC.The logs backed up my initial thoughts that this was a cushy little job—few of these guys were early risers.Maxim Agapov rarely showed up before eleven thirty a.m., and the notes said he often looked worse for wear.Now that Darya had identified him, that left us with four unknowns.
I helped myself to a slice of pizza as our quartet of Russia experts took centre stage—Ana, Darya, Naz, and Quinn.Quinn wasn’t Russian himself, but he’d lived there for years, spying for the US, and although he mainly trained newbies at the CIA now, he still kept his finger on the pulse.
Naz and Ana both picked out a sour-faced chap as a career diplomat, a man who’d once been an aide to Pushkin, the former president.Quinn was eighty percent sure the sole woman on the list was Miroslava Novikova, a bottle blonde in her late twenties who’d worked under the former energy minister, quite literally if rumours were to be believed.That left two men who’d arrived together in the afternoon and stayed for less than half an hour.Both in their early thirties at a guess, one in a suit, no tie, and the other wearing slim-fitting khakis and a sweater with a quirky pattern of criss-crossing stripes in varying shades of blue.Darya stepped closer and studied the faces.The dude in the stripy sweater was looking down at the phone in his hand, so we didn’t have a great view of him.
“I don’t know the man on the right.And the other…” She traced Suit Guy’s features with a fingertip.“I haven’t seen him before either, but still, he’s familiar.The eyes, the set of his chin, the shape of his face… He reminds me of Arseny Timonenko.”
“Didn’t he have a son?”Naz asked.“There was talk of one.”
“Yes.”Quinn snapped his fingers.“The son was Marat, and Arseny divorced his wife and married Marat’s mother.”
Who was Arseny Timonenko?“Could somebody enlighten those of us who aren’t fluent in Kremlin?”
Ana did the honours.“He worked for Pushkin.Officially, he was a special advisor, but in reality, he was Mr.Fix It.”
“So it’s possible that this guy…” I pointed at maybe-Marat’s picture.“…is another connection to Markovich’s old opposition?How do we feel about Pushkin?Could he be involved?”
Darya held up both hands.“I’ve been out of the loop for four years.”
“You must have watched the news.”
Pushkin had come to power after his predecessor, Krupin, fell down the stairs in the Kremlin.Fell.Not many people thought it was an accident.Pushkin had started off as a proponent of Marxism-Leninism, but after years of sanctions first implemented under Krupin left the Russian economy crumbling, Pushkin had become more open to the idea of a social democracy.At least, that’s what he claimed.Nobody had believed him.He just wanted the sanctions removed, so he said what the West wanted to hear, culminating in the mistake of agreeing to democratic elections monitored by an international team.By that point, the Russian people had been sick of queueing for bread and potatoes, and when a right-wing nutjob named Lagunov had promised them better things, they’d fallen for his spiel.
Oh, Lagunov had spearheaded a clever campaign, which was to say, he’d manipulated people by playing on their fears.Plus he’d coerced a thirty-seven-year-old oligarch’s son, who also happened to be rather easy on the eye and the star of popular Russian cop showDetektivy, into running alongside him as prime minister.Gennady Nizhegorodov, known professionally as Gennady Markovich because nobody at the Screen Actors Guild could pronounce his actual surname, knew fuck all about governing, but that didn’t matter.His role was to woo the female voters, post nice things about Lagunov on social media, and make the occasional speech.
Then Lagunov’s plane had crashed two days after he was sworn in, and suddenly Markovich had a country to run.