“Oh?” the old man smoking the cigarette said. It sounded like he had marbles in his throat. His teeth were dark yellow. Receding gums made them long. They seemed to click together when he spoke. The effect was horrifying. “Do tell.”

They were deep inside the bowels of headquarters. Most places inside the building, smoking was now off limits. But here in the inner sanctum? Anything was allowed.

“I’m sure you’ve already heard,” Special Agent Wallace Speck said.

He sat across a wide steel desk from the old man. There was almost nothing on the desk. No phone, no computer, not a piece of paper or a pencil. There was only a white ceramic ashtray, filled to overflowing with used cigarette butts.

The old man nodded. “Refresh my memory.”

“Yesterday he suggested that the crew of the Nereus be left to rot in Russian hands. He said this in front of twenty or thirty people.”

“Skip the easy stuff,” the old man said. They were in a room without windows. He took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it, and then let loose a plume of blue smoke. The ceiling was at least fifteen feet above their heads, and the smoke drifted upward toward it.

“Well, he walked that sentiment back. But he’s cut us and our friends out of the rescue operation, in favor of our new little brother at FBI.”

“Skip,” the old man said.

Wallace Speck shook his head. The old man looked like hell. How was he even still alive? He’d been chain smoking cigarettes since before Speck was born. His face was like ancient newsprint, turning almost as yellow as his teeth. His wrinkles had wrinkles. His body had no muscle tone at all. His flesh seemed to hang on bone.

The thought gave Speck a brief flashback to eating at a fancy restaurant one time. “How’s the chicken tonight?” he said to the waiter. “Beautiful,” the waiter said. “It falls right off the bone.”

The old man’s meat was anything but beautiful. But his eyes were still as sharp as razors, as focused as lasers. They were the only things left.

Those eyes regarded Speck. They wanted the dirt. They wanted the parts that people like Wallace Speck worried about sometimes. He could dig up the dirt, and he did. That was his job. But sometimes he wondered if the Special Activities Center of the CIA wasn’t overstepping its mandate. Sometimes he wondered if the special activities didn’t amount to treason.

“The man has trouble sleeping,” Speck said. “It seems he hasn’t gotten over the kidnapping of his daughter. He relies on Ambien to sleep, and he often washes his pill down with a glass of wine, or two. It’s a dangerous habit, for obvious reasons.”

Speck paused. He could give the old man paperwork, but the man didn’t want to look at paper. He just wanted to listen. Speck knew that. “We have audiotape and transcripts of a dozen telephone calls to his family ranch in Texas over the past ten days. The conversations are with his wife. In each call, he expresses his desire to leave the presidency, move back to the ranch, and spend time with his family. During three of those calls, he breaks down crying.”

The old man smiled and took another deep drag on the smoke. His eyes became slits. His tongue darted out. There was a piece of tobacco there at the tip of it. He looked like a lizard. “Good. More.”

“He has a sort of hero worship obsession with Don Morris, our little upstart rival at the FBI Special Response Team.”

The old man made a hand motion like a wheel spinning.

“More.”

Speck shrugged. “The president has a little dog, as you know. He has taken to walking it on the White House grounds late at night. He becomes angry if he runs across any Secret Service agents while he’s out there. A few nights ago, he came across two inside of ten minutes, and threw a temper tantrum. He called the night supervisory office and told them to stand their men down. He no longer seems to grasp that the men are there to protect him. He thinks they’re there to annoy him.”

“Hmmm,” the old man said. “Would he try to run away?”

“I would say it seems implausible,” Speck said. “But with this president, you never can tell what he’s going to do.”

“What else?”

“The political action group has begun to look at options for removal,” Speck said. “Impeachment is out because of the split in Congress. Also, the speaker of the House is a close ally of David Barrett’s and on the same page with him about most issues. He is very unlikely to pursue impeachment, or allow it to happen on his watch. Removal by the Twenty-fifth Amendment appears to be out as well. Barrett probably isn’t going to admit his inability to discharge his duties, and if the vice president attempts to…”

The old man held up his hand. “I get it. Skip. Tell me this: do we have Secret Service agents in nighttime operations on the White House grounds? Men who are loyal to us?”

“We do,” Speck said. “Yes.”

“Good. Now tell me about the Russia rescue operation.”

Speck shook his head. “We have no details. Don Morris is notoriously tight-fisted with information. But the bench isn’t deep over there, at least not yet. We can assume he’s given it to his two best agents, Luke Stone and Ed Newsam, young guys, both former Delta Force operators with extensive combat experience.”

“The ones who rescued the president’s unfortunate daughter?”

Speck nodded. “Yes.”

The old man smiled. His teeth were like yellow fangs. He could pass for the oldest of vampires, one who hadn’t tasted blood in a long, long time. “Cowboys, aren’t they?”

“Uh… I think they tend to shoot first, and then…”

“Are we planning to interdict? Derail their operation in some way?”

“Ah…” Wallace Speck said. “It’s certainly been on the table as an option. I mean, at the moment we don’t have that much…”

“Don’t do it,” the old man said. “Get out of their way and let it rip. Maybe they’ll get themselves killed. Maybe they’ll start a world war. Either way, it’s good for us. And if David Barrett does anything crazy, I mean really crazy, be ready to swoop in and take control of the situation.”

Wallace Speck stood to leave.

“Yes sir. Anything else?”

The old man looked at him with the ancient eyes of a demon. “Yes. Try to smile a little more, Speck. You’re not dead yet, so make an effort to enjoy your time here. This is supposed to be fun.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

11:20 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (3:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

Port of Adler, Sochi District

Krasnodar Krai

Russia

“Are they sure they want us to play this concert?” Luke said into the blue plastic satellite phone in his hand. “I think it’s going to be pretty loud.”

He leaned against an old black Lada sedan, made in Hungary. The boxy little car reminded him of an old Fiat or Yugo, just not as fancy as those. It seemed to be made of welded sheets of scrap metal. It gave off a faint smell of burning oil. The faster it went, the more it seemed to vibrate, like it was coming apart at the seams. Luckily, it was not the getaway car.

Nearby, his driver, a heavyset Chechen named Aslan, was smoking a cigarette and urinating through a chain-link fence. Aslan preferred it if you called him Frenchy. This was because when Chechnya collapsed, he had escaped the Russians by disappearing to Paris for a few years. His three brothers and his father had all died in the war. Now Frenchy was back, and Frenchy hated Russians.

They were in an empty parking lot near the mouth of the Mzymta River. A moist, pungent odor of untreated sewage wafted up from the water. From here, a bleak boulevard of warehouses ran along the waterfront to a small cargo port, guarded by a gatehouse and razor-topped fencing. In the glow of weak yellow sodium arc lamps, he could see men moving around by the gate.

The grand old Communist Party dachas, the new hotels and restaurants, and the glimmering Black Sea beaches of Sochi were just five miles up the road. But Adler was as desultory and depressing as a Russian port should be.

There was a delay as Mark Swann’s reedy voice bounced all over the world, from encrypted networks to black satellites, and finally to Luke’s phone. Swann’s voice trembled with nervous excitement.

Luke shook his head and smiled. Swann was in a penthouse suite with beautiful Trudy Wellington, in a five-star hotel in Trabzon, Turkey. They were supposedly a rich young newlywed couple from California. If bullets started to fly, Swann would be watching it on a computer screen, nearly but not quite live, via satellite. That’s why his voice was shaking.

“We are green light,” Swann said. “They understand we might get some complaints from the neighbors.”

“And the disco ball?”

“Right where we said it would be.”

Luke gazed across at a rusty old mid-sized cargo ship, the Yuri Andropov II, resting at dock. He mused that an old KGB torture specialist like Andropov must be spinning in his grave that this thing was named after him. It must be somebody’s idea of a joke.

The disco ball, of course, was the missing submersible, Nereus. Its GPS chip was still pinging from inside one of the holds on that ship.

“And the instruments?” The instruments were the crew of the Nereus.

“Upstairs in the closet, as far as we know.”

“Aretha? What does she have to say?”

Trudy Wellington’s voice came on, just for a second.

“Your friends are already partying on the beach.”

Luke nodded. Just south of here was the border with the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. The Georgians and the Russians were currently at each other’s throats. Trudy suspected they were going to have a little shooting war one of these days, but hopefully it wouldn’t start tonight.

The Georgian beach resort town of Kheivani was right across that border. It was a quiet, sleepy place compared to Sochi. There was a retrieval crew on a dark beach there, waiting to receive the rescued prisoners, if any of this even got that far.

From the beach, the prisoners would be moved away from the border, deeper into Georgia, and then out of the country. Eventually, when they reached a safe place, they would be debriefed about this whole mess.

None of that was Luke’s department. By design, he knew nothing about how it would go. Don and Big Daddy Cronin had cooked up that part. Luke didn’t even know who was involved. You could cut his fingers off and gouge his eyes out, and he couldn’t tell you a thing about it.

“Has the big man joined the band?” Luke said.

Ed Newsam’s voice came on. A howl of wind and the roar of heavy engines nearly drowned him out. “He’s in the dressing room and ready to get on stage. The sooner the better, as far as he’s concerned.”

Luke sighed. “All right,” he said, and the weight of the decision settled onto his shoulders like a boulder. People were probably about to die. You knew that going in. You just didn’t know which ones.

“Let’s do it.”

“See you in Vegas,” Swann said.

“Be sure to catch the fireworks show,” Ed shouted. “I hear it’s gonna be good.”

The call went dead. Luke dropped the satellite telephone to the broken blacktop of the parking lot. He raised his boot and brought it down hard on the phone, cracking the plastic casing apart. He did it again. And again. And again. Then he kicked the shattered remnants through an open runoff drain and into the water.

He still had one more.

He looked up.

Frenchy was there. His face was broad and his skin seemed thick, almost like a rubber mask. His hair was jet black and swooped backward. He was clean-shaven to blend in better with Russian society. Normally, his people had thick beards for Allah.

Frenchy wore a dark, loose-fitting windbreaker jacket over his big body. The night was a little warm for that. His hard eyes stared at Luke.

“Yes?” Frenchy said.

Luke nodded. “Yes.”

Frenchy took a deep drag of his cigarette. He slowly exhaled the smoke. Then he smiled and nodded.

“I am happy.”