Red Eagle Page 4

  “What was she doing meeting with him? And why the hell would they do it in Finland and not Stateside?”

  “She had critical intel that was time-sensitive and had to be discussed in person. She didn’t want to risk any type of intercept or leak, so the Chief went to meet with her in person.”

  “What was the intel?”

  “We just found out a few minutes ago. It has something to do with a double agent codenamed Red Eagle from the Cold War. A Soviet double agent.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “No, the moment we entered it into the system, the whole ops center went into lockdown and I was escorted under armed guard to meet with the Director.”

  “The Director?”

  “The Director.”

  “Oh. And what did she have to say?”

  “She told me the limited amount she knew about Red Eagle, but even she wasn’t aware of what intel Thorn had. We just got a file that was in the Chief’s pocket on a flash drive, and we’re reviewing it now. It looks like Red Eagle has worked himself up within the new regime and has access to all of Russia’s finances, including the personal finances of their so-called president.”

  Kane whistled. “Just what kind of access?”

  “Somehow, he’s managed to get all of the account numbers and passwords for what appears to be over two-hundred-billion dollars that the big man himself has siphoned off from the government coffers. With this information, within minutes, whoever has it would be able to financially destroy the man, and reveal publicly what he’s been doing since he’s been in power. It could bring him down.”

  “Whoever has that intel could do a lot worse than that if they acted on it. Their president has total control. We could be looking at war if he decides he wants his money back.”

  Leroux’s chest tightened at the thought. He was so busy attempting to absorb the intel, he hadn’t had time to process its implications. “You’re right, which means it’s essential we find Red Eagle and get this information secured before it falls into the wrong hands.”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “She was your handler, so I figured you’d want in on the op.”

  “You figured that right. What did the Director say?”

  “She gave me carte blanche. She wants a minimal team, but I’ve been authorized to bring in anyone I feel is necessary, including you and Bravo Team.”

  “What’s the latest intel on where she is?”

  “Considering this happened less than half an hour ago, we’re assuming she’s still in Helsinki, but won’t be for long. This op was professionally executed by a well-armed, well-trained unit. I’m guessing Spetsnaz or a mercenary group made up of former Spetsnaz. They’ll have her out of there any minute now.”

  “Okay, arrange the fastest flight to get me to Finland. You can let me know in the air if I need to redirect.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Oh, and since you’ve been given carte blanche, I need one tiny little thing.”

  Leroux frowned. “Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to like this?”

  “Because you know me so well.”

  8 |

  Unknown Location Helsinki, Finland

  The moment they had shoved Beverly Thorn into the back of the SUV, she had resigned herself to her fate. It was over, any hope of rescue now gone. She fully expected the next time she saw the light of day, she would be in Mother Russia. There was no way Washington would authorize a rescue mission. It would risk war. Though, if she knew the agents she was responsible for, some of them, one in particular, would stop at nothing to get her back. The question was whether she wanted him to.

  Dylan Kane was the best agent she had ever worked with, and the most loyal. He wouldn’t stop until he found her, dead or alive. She could choose to try to hold out, to give him a chance to find her and save her, but he might die in the process. Or she could try to get herself killed, ending this now. They would dump her body some place where her people could find it, signaling to her country not to bother continuing with their investigation.

  But there was too much at stake. Her life was unimportant, as was Kane’s. It was the intel that was critical. They couldn’t allow the money to fall into the wrong hands. It provided too much leverage over the Russian dictator, a man who couldn’t care less if some other country were harmed by the weapons he might pay in ransom to get what was stolen from him back. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of lives depended upon gaining control of that intel, and at the moment, the only way she saw that happening was if she stayed alive and held out for as long as she could without giving them what they wanted.

  She had to meet Red Eagle tomorrow, so she had one day to survive whatever they would do to her, and one day for Kane and the others to rescue her. And while this morning, one day seemed like nothing, now it felt like an eternity.

  An eternity she had to suffer through in the faint hope the agents she thought of as her children, could save her.

  Yet the likelihood of them succeeding was slim to none. She had little doubt she was going to die, but she had no doubt she wouldn’t be dying as quickly as she would hope. Torture would come first. The only question was for how long.

  She had shouted her asset’s codename to Morrison, which was all she could do under the circumstances. Unfortunately, she feared he wouldn’t survive long enough to share that intel. All she could hope was that Langley would piece together what was going on based upon the contents of the flash drive she had given Morrison at the beginning of the meeting, but that meant they needed to find it on his person. If Langley had found that flash drive, they just might get enough information together to follow through on the mission.

  And she wasn’t the mission.

  Her life was inconsequential. They needed to find Red Eagle, and they needed to secure the intel he had. If it fell into the wrong hands, they could use the money merely for profit. But they could also use it for blackmail purposes, to force the Russian leader to do something he normally wouldn’t do to recover his ill-gotten gains. That could involve the selling of weapons of mass destruction. It could mean bombing a country out of existence. It could mean any number of things, all of which were horrific to imagine. If America could get its hands on that information, it could potentially use it as leverage in backroom dealings should the need present itself. All that mattered was that the information was delivered into the hands of people who could be trusted with it, and at the moment, there were only two possibilities.

  Her side, or their side.

  It was the people in between that couldn’t be trusted. She could tell these people what they wanted to know, and if they did indeed work for the Russian President, then they could return the information to its proper owner, eliminating the risk. However, she had no way of knowing if these people worked for him, nor did she have the information they wanted.

  Red Eagle had it.

  The only information she had was where and when they were supposed to meet tomorrow in St. Petersburg, Russia. There was no way she’d be making the rendezvous now, leaving a critical question unanswered: what would Red Eagle do?

  What were his motivations?

  He had requested new identities for him and his wife, and $10 million, a sum she had no doubt Morrison would have approved. He could have requested $50 million, even $100 million, and it was likely the CIA would pay, simply to make sure the information didn’t fall into the wrong hands. The fact he had asked for so little suggested he either didn’t know the value of what he possessed, or wasn’t motivated by greed. $10 million was more than enough for him to lose himself somewhere on the planet and enjoy a comfortable retirement. He could have simply taken the $10 million from one of the accounts, but it would eventually have been discovered, and they would have tracked him down. He wanted clean money, and a new identity, something she could provide.

  In her communications with him, it was clear he wanted out of his current life, and if she didn’t show up with
his expected payday, the information could end up on the black market. The very notion terrified her. The accounts and codes, according to Red Eagle, provided direct access to over $200 billion. With today’s technology, they could drain those accounts within minutes and transfer the money a hundred times before the Russians would even receive the ransom demand.

  But it wouldn’t be a ransom demand, because whoever ended up with it, would already have more than anyone could ever dream of needing. It would be a ransom demand for some thing, and that would likely be chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. The horrific scenarios were too numerous and too terrifying to even think about. She needed to know who she was dealing with, for she had no doubt her torture would begin the moment they felt they were secure, and though she had been trained, there was no way she’d hold out. Her only options were to either tell them the truth and avoid the beating, take the beating and then tell them the truth, take the beating and tell them a lie convincing enough they would believe her, or find some way to kill herself or cause them to kill her.

  She had no doubt Langley was doing everything they could to find her, and the longer she gave them, the more likely it was she could come out of this alive, but more importantly, could secure the intel. If she missed the meeting, she was the only one who knew how to re-establish contact, and if she were rescued, she might still reach out to Red Eagle in time before he sold the data to someone else.

  Though there was another option.

  If her captors were Russians acting on behalf of their leader, and she provided them with the information they needed, it would at least be secure from third parties, but it would also mean betraying Red Eagle, something she didn’t want to do, though the life of one person could never outweigh the lives of potentially millions of victims.

  The vehicle came to a halt and she could hear the doors open. She caught a whiff of jet fuel and the roar of engines. It was clear they were at an airport and, from the sounds of it, a fairly significant one. Someone tapped on the container they had placed her in after her abduction. The lid opened and a man stared down at her as he held up a syringe.

  “Time for your flight, Miss Thorn,” he sneered. “This will help you pass the time.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, and he held up a finger.

  “Make a sound, and I’ll kill a dozen children while you watch.”

  She bit her tongue, instead processing his words. On most people, the threat of harming children would work, and of course it would on her as well. The question was, were they serious? Russians were brutal, and their government clearly had no qualms about eliminating anyone who wasn’t of Russian ancestry. What they had done in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and countless other locations had proven that. But would they massacre a dozen innocent children over her? The sad reality was that she couldn’t rule it out, especially with what was at stake, and she had no doubt the Russian leader would slaughter thousands to get his money back.

  And as the needle jabbed into her arm, and she began to pass out, a thought occurred to her, bringing in a thunderous new possibility. If these were indeed Russians working on behalf of their leader, then they must already know about Red Eagle and the information he had. But if they knew, why didn’t they simply change the passwords? Her eyes shot wide as they placed the lid back on the container, her heart momentarily racing with the realization there could be only one explanation.

  Red Eagle had already stolen the money.

  9 |

  Embassy of the United States of America Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics May 31, 1988

  Thorn stared across the table at the young agent that had helped thwart the assassination attempt that could have led to an indefinite extension of the Cold War. She stared into his eyes, gauging whether what he had just told her was the truth. She could sense no deception, and his earnestness certainly suggested he was being honest.

  My God, was I ever that young?

  She suppressed a smile at the sight of a pimple coming in on the poor man’s nose. According to his file, he was 24. He had completed college and had applied for a position in operations. They had accepted him, put him through the training, and he passed with flying colors. Yet she had a sense his future wouldn’t be in the field. What he had managed to puzzle out himself with no help, had her thinking he should be doing what she now did. When she had started her career, she was in the field constantly, putting her life at risk, taking out targets, whatever Langley asked of her. She loved the job and she missed it sometimes. What she did now was still risky, extremely risky. But she wasn’t out actively killing people, nor running around Moscow, expecting someone to shoot her at any moment.

  Yes, she could be arrested and never seen again if they found out what she was really doing, but that never bothered her. For her, it was the thrill of the hunt, of overcoming someone else’s security, triumphing over all the tricks and traps laid out in anticipation of your arrival by teams of experts attempting to anticipate your every move. And if you could figure out what they had done, and then circumvent their precautions and still achieve your goals, there was no feeling like it. She’d take that adrenalin rush any day over the best lay she had ever had, or even a box of Belgian chocolates.

  As a spy, it was often necessary to have sex with men she would normally find revolting, to get them to loosen their tongues. The honeypot was one of the oldest tricks of the trade, and while demeaning, though voluntary, it was highly effective, and the end result sometimes worth the degradation. She simply compartmentalized the emotions. It was a job, nothing more. She was playing a part, taking advantage of a man’s weakness, and gaining valuable information for her country in its fight against communism and the Soviet menace.

  While she was no Mata Hari, and had convinced herself she wasn’t the slut some might think she was when reading her file, she still found herself sometimes showering a little extra longer in an attempt to wash the memories away.

  Unfortunately, they would be with her until the day she died.

  As she stared at the young man across from her, fidgeting nervously, she envied him. She was only ten years his senior, but the lifetime she had lived already made her feel as if she were his mother. She suppressed a sigh. Some days she felt so old.

  She shifted in her chair, her hip aching from a beatdown delivered by the KGB several years ago. They had picked her up and accused her of being a spy, and laid into her for days. Yet she had held out, revealing nothing, merely claiming repeatedly that she was a translator for the embassy. She spoke fluent Russian, her mother born here, Russian the only language spoken in her house when she was a child. It gave her an advantage over everyone else at Langley. She spoke Russian with a dialect, something difficult to teach. She winced as a jolt of pain shot through her side.

  The young man leaned forward, concerned. “Are you okay, ma’am?”

  She waved her hand, dismissing his concern. “I’m fine. Just an old war wound. And if you ever call me ma’am again, I’ll tear your throat out.”

  The young man flushed. “Sorry, ma’..., sorry, umm, sir?”

  She chuckled. “Ma’am is fine. I was just joking.”

  He smiled weakly. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She closed the file in front of her. “I think we’re done here. If you remember anything else that might be pertinent, let your supervisor know. He’ll reach out to me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She rose and he leaped to his feet. She extended her hand and he clasped it, giving her hand a proper shake. And those few moments told her a lot about this young agent. His handshake was firm and dry. It was the handshake of a man with confidence. She released her grip, smiling.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Agent Morrison.”

  10 |

  Operations Center 3, CIA Headquarters Langley, Virginia Present Day

  Leroux sat at his station, having finished reading all the materials on the flash drive. It was a fascinating glimpse into the Cold War and one of the most
important double agents America had ever turned. It provided insight into who the man once was, but other than that, was of little use in helping find him today. The executive summary had indicated what the intel he now possessed was, however, there was no information beyond that reference. There was no proof he actually had the accounts and passwords, and there was no indication of how they were supposed to acquire them from the man. He assumed that once the Chief had approved Thorn’s plan, she would have met with Red Eagle and exchanged funds or some other favor for the intel. However, the files contained none of that information, and with Thorn now either dead or held hostage, there was no way to contact Red Eagle to perform the exchange.

  Tong turned in her chair and faced Leroux. “Something doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “What?”

  “It can’t be the Russians.”

  He gave her his full attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, it can’t be the Russians who abducted her, because that would mean they know about the security breach.”

  Leroux stared at her, chewing his cheek. “So, if they already know, why not just change the passwords?”

  “Exactly. It would render the intel worthless.”

  “Maybe they don’t know what the intel is. All they know is there’s some sort of breach, and Thorn is involved, so they abducted her to find out what intel was stolen,” suggested Child.

  Leroux’s head bobbed. “That’s definitely a possibility, though this was a fairly brutal response to a breach. For all they know, it could have been Stalin’s grandmother’s recipe for borscht. You don’t kill six people, especially six Americans, and critically wound three and abduct another, when you don’t know what the intel is.”

  Child frowned. “Yeah, I guess not.”

  Tong folded her arms. “Then doesn’t that mean they do know?”