Page 20 of Denied Access

As medical diagnoses went, this one wasn’t exactly ironclad. Still, Joe wasn’t in a position to argue. The throbbing in his head had begun to recede, but he sure as hell didn’t feel up to weaving between traffic at 130 kilometers per hour on A13, a sleepy two-lane road probably rated for less than half that pace. Excessive speed aside, his teammate wasn’t doing a half-bad job driving.

If only Joe knew what they were chasing.

David redlined the engine, and a boxy silhouette resolved into a knockoff Volkswagen minivan.

“Got you!” David said.

“Back off the gas,” Joe said. “If you get too close, the driver will be able to see us in his rearview mirror.”

David dutifully reduced his speed, and the minivan pulled ahead.

“There,” Joe said once the minivan was about fifty yards in front of them. “That’s the perfect distance. Now, walk me through how a drunk flashing you the middle finger makes him and his crew Russian operatives.”

“Right,” David said, nodding. “So when I came around the corner to get you, the agitators from the bar were standing by the van, but they weren’t just watching. I had the windows down so I could hear them.”

“Hear them?”

“Yeah. They were catcalling. Mocking the survivors and yelling insults. It was as if they wanted to be noticed.”

Joe frowned.

While the men’s behavior was callous, trying to read the purpose behind a belligerent drunk’s actions was a fool’s errand. Small slights often led to exaggerated outcomes when mixed with alcohol. There was a reason rowdy bars employed bouncers. “I’m still not following.”

“The men wanted to be heard and seen,” David said, enunciating the words as if he were speaking to a child. “They could have gotten away before anyone saw them, but didn’t. The agitators wanted to be remembered.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It makes no sense if the men were what they seemed to be—Latvian nationalists picking a fight with their ethnic Russian countrymen. I’ve got a hunch they’re something else. That second explosion was a doozy. It seemed to surprise the agitators as much as it did you. The shock wave knocked one of them into the van, and he let loose a string of curses.”

Joe thought he was beginning to see. “In a different language?”

David shook his head. “Same language. Different accent.”

“Russian?”

“Exactly.”

Joe massaged his temples. It was thin, but he could see where David was heading with his theory. “You think the bombing was a false-flag operation?”

The minivan picked up speed as it exited Daugavpils proper for the more sparsely populated outskirts.

David kept pace.

“Daugavpils is unique among Latvian cities in that there are more ethnic Russians here than Latvians, right?” David said.

“Yep.”

“And the ethnic Russians and Latvians don’t always get along, right? Especially after the coup in Riga a couple of years back?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Mostly low-level stuff, but there’s definitely been an uptick in race-related crimes in Daugavpils. Latvian nationalists are naturally suspicious of their fellow citizens. Especially since some provinces openly supported the Soviet-instigated coup.”

“Exactly,” David said. “The coup failed for a number of reasons, not the least of them being world opinion. Images of unarmed Latvian citizens gunned down by Soviet paramilitary forces didn’t play well on the nightly news. I’m not saying this is the only reason the Soviets backed down, but the narrative that innocents were being killed was a powerful one.”

“Powerful enough for the Russians to give it a try?”

David nodded. “Think about it—Latvians of Russian descent get blown up by their own countrymen. If the Latvian government can’t protect its citizens who are of Russian descent—”

“Then the Russian government might just have to do it for them,” Joe said, waving away the argument. “I get the theory, and I agree that what you’ve laid out is certainly possible. What I don’t understand is why we’re chasing a van full of potential Russian operatives.”