Page 51 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

Though she understood English quite well, Irene stared at the phone as if she were trying to decipher a foreign language. After an embarrassingly long pause, Irene responded with the most coherent retort she could muster. “Sir?”

“Come on, Irene. Don’t make me spell this out.

As we speak, the wife of a CIA officer is languishing in a Russian prison, civil unrest is gripping Latvia, and a cabal of idiots in Congress is trying to muster support to defund the agency and derail my nomination.

And did I forget to mention that our British allies think one of our assassins is engaging in gunfights in downtown London?

This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. One of the fringe benefits of my new role is that I don’t have to care about seniority or any other such nonsense.

Until this crisis blows over, I need someone I can trust leading Moscow Station.

You, Irene, are that someone. Questions? ”

Irene did not have questions so much as objections.

Many objections. She’d never been the assistant chief of station or even the chief of base for the types of backwater postings that normally served as training grounds for the more critical stations like this one.

Perhaps most important, Irene was not a Russia hand.

She didn’t speak the language and had never worked the threat.

Asking her to assume the role of chief of station was the equivalent of tapping Stan Hurley to lead the Peace Corps.

But she didn’t say any of that.

The CIA was not a military organization, but it did embody some paramilitary attributes, chief among those being a fanatical focus on mission. Her boss had just given her a mission. One did not decline a tasking from Thomas Stansfield.

“No questions, sir,” Irene said. “I’ll check in with the ambassador on Miss Henrik’s status just as soon as I get an update from the Latvian intelligence fusion cell I convened.”

“Good. Moscow Station has been afraid of its own shadow for far too long and our intelligence-gathering efforts are the worse for it. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, Irene. I can feel it. Whether the CIA officers under your command need an attaboy or a kick in the pants, I’ll leave for you to decide.

Either way, I want those men and women hitting the bricks, meeting with assets, and stealing secrets. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Then I’ll leave you to it.”

“Wait, sir, there is something else I need to tell you. Lieutenant General Grigoriy Petrov decided to personally welcome me to Moscow. Do you know him?”

Stansfield sighed. “I do. He’s former KGB. Now FSK. We have a rather long history.”

“He gave me a message for you. Made me repeat it back to him word for word.”

“What did he say?”

It was sometimes difficult to decipher tone on a secure call, as the multitude of encryption devices that rendered the communication secure also made a person’s voice sound more sterile. Even so, Irene thought she detected a hint of wariness in Stansfield’s reply.

“He said, ‘Oranienburg 1945.’ Does that ring a bell?”

The answering silence stretched long enough that Irene would have thought that the call had been disconnected were it not for the flashing green light. She cleared her throat and was preparing to speak when her boss’s voice returned.

“It does. Are you familiar with Operation Paperclip?”

“The Allied effort to find Nazi rocket scientists and repatriate them to America?”

“Exactly. As you might imagine, there was a Soviet counterpart to our operation. It was called Alsos and its objectives were a bit different. Instead of only focusing on rocket technology, Alsos targeted another area of game-changing research.”

Kennedy instantly made the connection. “The atomic bomb.”

“Right again. The Nazis were frantically trying to develop a nuclear weapon up until the closing days of the war. Allied strategic bombing, along with the heroic efforts of Norwegian saboteurs, prevented Germany from obtaining the heavy water required to control a nuclear reaction, but their scientists had produced something else the Russians desperately needed. Uranium oxide. In the war’s closing days, the Nazis hid a large stash of the material in a suburb of Berlin called Oranienburg.

The Russians discovered the uranium oxide’s location and sent a convoy of vehicles to secure it. ”

“The Allies didn’t stop them?”

Stansfield cleared his throat. “The stash was clearly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The debate about whether stealing the uranium oxide was worth enraging our Russian partners embroiled leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. While they were trying to reach a consensus, the Russian convoy edged ever closer to Oranienburg. I decided to act.”

“You?”

“That’s right. By the war’s end, I was a young but highly experienced OSS officer.

It was obvious to me, as it should have been to anyone with half a brain, that the Soviets would soon be our adversaries, and that the world would be a much more dangerous place if they succeeded in building a nuclear arsenal.

I hoped that if I bought our leaders more time they would come to the correct decision, so I blew up a bridge as the Russian convoy was crossing it.

It sounds barbaric, I know, but it was war.

In order for my subterfuge to succeed, I had to ensure that there were no Soviet survivors. ”

As Stansfield spoke, Irene pictured the scene in her mind’s eye. That’s when the remaining pieces tumbled into place. “But there was a survivor. Grigoriy Petrov.”

“His scout car had broken down several miles west of where I’d set up the ambush.

He arrived in time to see me shoot the lone survivor as the man tried to swim for shore, but he was too far away to do anything.

I later learned that the man I’d killed was a brilliant Russian physicist. His name was Nikolai. Nikolai Petrov.”

For the first time since the conversation had begun, Irene was grateful that it wasn’t occurring in person. She managed to stifle her gasp, but there was no hiding the look of horror she knew was etched across her face. “You killed Grigoriy’s brother?”

“Yes. As you know from personal experience, the statement ‘War is hell’ isn’t just a colorful expression.

After the operation, I led my partisan band back into Allied territory without incident, but the team’s good fortune didn’t last. My aide-de-camp was a sixteen-year-old French boy named Andre.

He spoke German like a native and continued to poke around in the Soviet sector on behalf of Allied intelligence even though I admonished him not to do so.

Petrov eventually caught and killed him, but not before torturing Andre long enough to learn about my role in Nikolai’s death. ”

“War is hell,” Irene said.

“Indeed. Even the so-called cold ones. Perhaps now you better understand Petrov’s animosity.”

As always, Stansfield had a gift for understatement.

Irene knew the hatred she felt for the Islamic terrorists who’d murdered her father along with sixty-two-odd people in April 1983 when a suicide bomber detonated a van full of explosives outside the U.S.

embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, and she hadn’t watched him die.

“I can see why Petrov might hate you, but I still don’t understand his timing. If he is settling a vendetta, why now?”

“That is an excellent question for which I don’t have an answer,” Stansfield said. “Fortunately, there’s a new chief of Moscow Station, and I’ve heard she’s extremely capable. Now, unless you have anything else, I’m going to catch a few hours of sleep. Tomorrow has the makings of another long day.”

“Nothing else, sir. I’m on it.”

“I know you are, Irene.”

Stansfield ended the call.

Irene leaned back in her chair, alone with her thoughts at last.

What had seemed manageable moments before her call with Stansfield now felt different.

Moscow Station was in crisis, Europe might be on the brink of war, a lieutenant general in the Russian counterintelligence service was hell-bent on settling a forty-year-old vendetta, and once again blood was flowing down a European ally’s streets.

Blood that implicated her assassin. Irene eyed the yellow submarine’s unassuming, foam-covered walls imagining some of the conversations that must have occurred in this sacred space.

Here was where agency officers had tried to determine whether Nikita Khrushchev was bluffing about Cuba or ready to lead the world into nuclear war.

Here was where her predecessors had simultaneously missed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and brainstormed how to aid a brave Polish cardinal who’d been elevated to pontiff.

This room had been the scene of gratifying victories and stinging defeats, but that was the way of the intelligence business.

Irene wasn’t so much cowed by the enormity of her task as distressed by what little she could bring to the battlefield.

She didn’t have her usual allies like Dr. Thomas Lewis, Stan Hurley, or even Mitch Rapp.

No doubt word of her predecessor’s unceremonious recall back to Langley had already spread through the station’s personnel.

Some might welcome his departure, but on the balance, human beings prized stability, and of that Moscow Station had seen precious little.

Were she a betting woman, Irene would place odds on her welcome as the new acting chief being a bit muted, to say the least.

She was alone.

“Miss Kennedy?”

Irene turned to see the woman Duane had so rudely dismissed standing hesitantly in the door. What was her name? Something unusual and perhaps a bit whimsical. Elise? Eloise? Elysia—that was it.

“It’s just Irene, Elysia. Please, come in.”

The young woman’s answering smile warmed the room.

Perhaps Irene wasn’t without allies after all. Maybe she would be able to take a beat to figure things out before embarking on a one-woman crusade to right the listing ship that was Moscow Station.

“Sorry to interrupt, Irene, but I thought you should see this.”

Elysia extended a folded piece of stationery that Irene reflexively took. Unfolding the paper, she found a message typed in English.

I am a ranking staff officer in the Russian intelligence service.

I have vital information for Moscow’s chief of station that could help avert a war in Latvia.

I will only provide this information face-to-face.

Acknowledge receipt and intention to proceed by leaving the light in the chief of station’s office on your embassy’s fifth floor illuminated all night.

If you signal your intention to proceed, I will leave further instructions and proof of my bona fides on the following day in the same manner I provided the note.

Beneath the paragraph were two handwritten words.

Please hurry.

So much for taking a beat.