[Story] Secret War

High tech intrigue and Cold War
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Siege
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[Story] Secret War

Post by Siege »

Advance warning: this is going to take forever to finish, even by my usual standards.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Off naked Chatham show,
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And this the Dutchmen know!
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Siege
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Re: [Story] Secret War

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SECRET WAR


War is the statesman's game, the spy's delight, the soldier's jest, the assassin's trade.


Act I: Portents


“We are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude, but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favor.” - Samuel Johnson


East Coast mob don Nicola Auger dies

New York Globe | January 13, 2015

One of the east coast's most powerful mob bosses passed away yesterday at age 51. Nicola Auger, who it is believed ruled the east coast underworld with an iron fist for two decades, died at 5:00 a.m. yesterday at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Jersey City, a hospital spokesperson confirmed.

Auger suffered from acute leukemia and was hospitalized earlier this month while also fighting a losing battle with kidney failure.

Federal investigators called him “the most powerful and significant crime boss since the seventies”, and believed Mr. Auger to be responsible for the transformation of organized crime on the eastern seaboard. After uniting disparate gangs behind his central leadership in 1994 Mr. Auger ran his criminal empire like a multinational, with security consultants and encrypted satellite phones, off-shore Caymans accounts, Twin Towers accountants, and a million-dollar Ivy League legal team.

He was arrested by the FBI in 2001 and indicted of an avalanche of illegal activities, including murder, gambling, racketeering, tax evasion and extortion but the case resulted in an acquittal when critical evidence went missing. In 2005 Mr. Auger was tried for obstruction of justice but again the charges failed to ‘stick’, a pattern that held everytime state or federal authorities attempted to mount a case against him.

Defenders of Mr. Auger credit the crime boss with enforcing peace on the mean streets police were unable or unwilling to patrol-


Mafia boss found dead by river

Philadelphia Gazette | January 26, 2015

The body of the former mob boss Samuel Jericho, who U.S. authorities said was the trusted right hand of recently deceased crimelord Nicola Auger, was fished out from the frigid Delaware River on the outskirts of Philadelphia yesterday.

The body of the 47-year-old crimelord was found after a witness said she heard gunshots and saw a man jump in the water. Police believe Jericho leaped into the river in a desperate attempt to elude his attackers, the Philadelphia Gazette has learned. The cause of death has not been disclosed, as police await the results of an autopsy.

Police sources speculate that the execution of one of the east coast's most powerful crime figures, so soon after the death of Auger, heralds a struggle for power in the criminal underworld-


Bloody gang war engulfs New Jersey

Jersey City Herald | February 25, 2015

A murderous gang turf war has erupted on the mean streets of Jersey City, spilling over into Bayonne and Newark, the Herald has learned.

One innocent youth has been murdered and a dozen others injured in more than half a dozen skirmishes linked to a feud between the Prophets of Armageddon outlaw motorcycle gang and Los Tiburones, a Latin American gangland militia linked to the La Estacado Cartel, law-enforcement sources said.

"Both of these gangs have stepped up recruiting at schools all over New York and in New Jersey," one gang investigator said.

“Los Tiburones are considered the fastest-growing gang in New Jersey and renowned for using automatic weapons and violence to make a statement.”

In the past three months, the New Jersey police has investigated confrontations between the two groups in and around Mercer County Park, West Third Street, the Bayonne Bridge area and Kellog Park-


In the Middle of New England's Crime Wave

New York Globe | April 9, 2015

THE WARM SUMMER sun has scarcely set on Good Friday when the shooting begins. A dark sedan glides through the dusk on West 168th Street, in the heart of the urban war zone that is northern Harlem.

Suddenly automatic assault rifles and shotguns appear from the car's windows and a burst of gunfire sprays a cluster of young people hanging out near the corner. One round instantly kills Terence D'Amato, ending his life at age 20. A shotgun blast leaves a 4-year-old boy, certainly too young to know anything about the imperatives of the east coast gang war, critically wounded. Ten more fall wounded onto sidewalks and lawns-


Gang Conflict Paralyzes Brooklyn

Brooklyn Daily News | June 1, 2015

The back streets of the port of New York are the scene of a violent conflict between the Fulda Syndicate and Russian mafia from Brighton Beach, two immigrant cultures with almost nothing in common except their attempts to establish control over the same neighborhoods.

“It's just like in a war zone,” said Detective Joni Eire of the NYPD. “They are blasting each other, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.”

The police and community leaders describe a clear starting point for the gang war: February 28, when a carload of German-Americans shot and killed a member of the Sokolinaya Bratva gang-


Killing of 5 in Little Italy Raises Fears of Gang War Expansion

Daily New Yorker | June 21, 2015

The killing of five high-level Italian-American mobsters in a Little Italy restaurant on Saturday has renewed fears of new and violent gangs struggling for control in New York and underscores how a recent wave of immigrants from Europe and South America has transformed the city's criminal underworld, the police and community leaders say.

The five men, who were playing cards when they were killed, were shot numerous times, each at least once in the head, NYPD spokesman Jackson McKellum said. A sixth victim was critically wounded and is kept under police protection at a hospital the name of which police have refused to disclose for his protection.

The killings came after the car bomb death last Tuesday of Johnny Sindacco, a boss for the DiLucca crime family. According to Mr. McKellum the slayings are most likely a reprisal by European organized crime groups for the attack by masked gunmen on an upscale Manhattan cocktail lounge believed to be a front for West German crime syndicates-


Crime wave to influence upcoming senate elections?

Boston Chronicle | June 20, 2015

As embattled police struggle to regain control of east coast streets the ongoing gang warfare is poised to become a central theme of the upcoming senate elections. With seats on the line in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, three states heavily affected by the crime wave, incumbents and challengers alike are commenting on the unrest, ostensibly in the hope of capturing the public’s anger and resentment over the authorities’ failure to quell the violence.

In New York especially, fiery rhetoric by Democrat hopeful Jackie Aiken has allowed her to maintain a lead over incumbent Republican senator Elliott Gould. Aiken has been making headlines across the country by stating that “This government is failing us. President Skye, her administration and her senate, use US troops to patrol the streets in Colombia, Cambodia, Iraq and the Congo. Whilst at the same time American citizens are dying on American city streets because the American government cannot be bothered to keep them safe. Bring those troops home. We can use them here."

The White House chastised Aiken for “politicizing law enforcement and failing to recognize the importance of American commitments overseas”, but the comments increased her poll lead over Elliott Gould to seven points. Gould, a four-term senate veteran for the Republican party whose position on the defense appropriations committee and hardline anti-communist stance earned him the nickname ‘Big Guns’ Gould, downplayed his opponent’s edge, claiming Aiken’s lead was “a temporary insanity”-


Despite police efforts, east coast mafia war shows no sign of slowing

New York Globe | June 28, 2015

Since tensions escalated into war five months ago, the police say, more than 82 shootings and bombings have claimed victims in New York City alone, in an alternating series of revenge attacks.

Says an NYPD spokesperson: “We still have some attacks now that haven't been paid back for yet, and you can be sure that they will be.”

The New York County District Attorney's Office Organized Crime Unit, which concentrates on gang activity in New York, has identified more than a dozen gangs believed to be implicated in the bulk of the slayings.

The combatants belong to a welter of gangs with names like the Cosa Nostra, Black Cell, Sokolinaya Bratva, Los Tiburones, and the Fulda Syndicate. They share interlocking rivalries previously kept arbitrated by the underworld itself, but this precarious balance exploded into violence following the death of east coast 'capo di tutti capi' Nicola Auger in January of this year.

The brutal territorial gang battles are believed to be responsible for as many as 161 slayings in New York City in the last six months, according to law-enforcement authorities-


Wake up call

Fedir & Larysa | Brooklyn

The first thing Fedir noticed upon waking up was that he wasn't alone in his apartment. He tried to sit up, then realized he was already sitting, in a very hunched and awkward position. With an effort he raised his head a few inches, noticing whilst he did there was a sheet of something very much like paper stuck to the side of his face. He opened his eyes, winced as bright light stabbed at his eyeballs, closed them again, blinked rapidly. Slowly his vision resolved into a view of his apartment. A very bright apartment. Daylight streamed in through windows that really ought to be cleaned some day, dust motes glinting in beams of morning light that fell unopposed past dark blue curtains that had been drawn back in their entirety. Fedir wondered who’d visit such a vile torment on him.

He craned his head at the person standing next to him. She stood just over six feet, a scrawny twenty four year old in ripped jeans and an oversized army surplus jacket, her shoulders set back in perpetual challenge. A mob of unruly brown curls framed an angular face that could’ve been pretty if her jaws weren’t clenched so much, and if there wasn’t a razor thin scar that ran across her right cheek up toward her hairline, only narrowly missing her eye. Larysa Stetchkov looked down on him in silence, one eyebrow raised.

“Oh,” he muttered. “Oh, hell.” Or at least that’s what he tried to say: what came out sounded more like ‘mmhmm’.

“And top of the morning to you too, Fedir.” Larysa shot him a smile as sharp as a tack. “Big night yesterday?”

Fedir Roscha slowly shook his head, tearing himself loose from the pages of the book his face had come to lie on top of when he’d fallen asleep, something his protesting body told him couldn’t have been more than five minutes ago. He blinked again and craned his head to the clock on the wall of his dingy apartment. A quarter to nine in the morning. He should’ve been up an hour ago. “Oh hell,” he repeated for good measure. He tried to sit up and succeeded on the second try, but pushed a glass bottle off the desk as he did. Larysa deftly caught it, looked at the label and raised it to her lips. Fedir swiped it from her hands before she could and placed it back on the desk, screwing the cap back on. She eyed him. He shrugged and winced as locked shoulder muscles screamed in protest. “Bourbon is no good for you.”

Larysa snorted. “And it is for you?”

He rose from the seat in which he’d fallen asleep, nearly seven feet of rumpled shirt and tussled trousers, steadying himself lightly against the desk when his head went briefly woozy. “Evidently not.” He squinted at her, eyes half-shut against the onslaught of light and tried to ignore the little demons hammering nails into his forebrain. “Give me a minute to clean up?”

“Sure.”

Fedir nodded and stumbled to the bathroom. He didn’t have to go far. The tiny Brooklyn apartment didn’t measure more than eighty feet all told, divided into a living room, a bedroom barely large enough for a single bed and a tiny bathroom that could only just hold a sink, a toilet and a shower. He ignored the shower and turned open the tabs on the sink, pushing the creaky door shut as far as it would go, which was not very. The stumbling sounds of a very large large man in a very small room trying to fold his head under a water faucet followed soon after.

Larysa smiled a little and shook her head. She looked around the place. Fedir’s living room didn’t amount to much, though she had to admit it was impeccably clean and well-organized. That was somehow unexpected, although she supposed that it made sense, what with him being a big guy and everything. An old brown sofa was pushed against one wall. Before it a small and simple wooden table stood on a rug that looked Russian but could just as well be Arabic or, hell, for all she knew it could have been made in Jersey somewhere. The opposite wall was taken up in its entirety by shelves. Larysa didn’t see a computer, but there was a TV - a small, old-fashioned LCD, not one of the newer LEDs. Still, most of the space on the shelves was taken up by reams and reams of books. Paperbacks and hardcovers on an eclectic variety of subjects, from cheap thrillers with creased spines to leather-bound treatises by names she didn’t recognize but had lots of titles in front of them, were organized in a system she couldn’t fathom out but that no doubt made sense to Fedir.

She picked up the book Fedir had been reading before he’d fallen asleep, made a point to place a bookmark into it, then studied its cover. “A Colder War: NATO and the Soviet World in the 21st Century,” she read out loud. “By Aldon Mackinly. You reading this?” she called.

“Have to,” Fedir replied, his voice a little strained and occasionally muffled by running water. “It’s required course material.”

“It’s thicker than the Bible. Bet you could kill someone with this.”

“Hey, be careful with that, okay? It cost a hundred and eighty bucks.”

“Jesus.” She put the book back on the desk, gingerly as if it were a live grenade. “What’s in it that’s worth that much money? An almanack to the future or something?”

“Nah.” In the bathroom the water cut out. “Political stuff. Mackinly was Secretary of State under O’Hara and during Barclay’s first term.”

“That supposed to mean anything to me?”

The rickety wooden door opened and Fedir came back out. He’d shaved and washed his bald head, and he’d lost the bedraggled shirt, exposing the slabs of muscle that passed for his chest. He was completely free of tattoos, which was unusual for a member of the Russian outfit. A pair of dog tags dangled around his neck, and a white towel was draped around his shoulders. It looked tiny on him. “They were Presidents.”

Larysa shrugged and eyed him appraisingly. “I didn’t vote for them.”

“‘Cause this was back in the nineties and early zeroes. You were a kid so-” The big man hesitated as he stumbled upon a painful subject. He looked at her, his expression apologetic. “Well. You know.”

Larysa looked at her shoes for a moment, her posture gone very still. She shivered and drew her coat about her. Then she closed her eyes and shrugged, but the gesture looked forced. “You can say it.” Her voice was harsh. “I was on my back all the time.”

Fedir actually cringed. The big man looked very awkward with the tiny towel around his shoulders. “I was never going to say that, Lara.” He sounded genuinely apologetic. “I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

She sighed and shook her head. “Yeah, I know. I just get- Never mind, I guess.”

He relaxed a little as they eased past a thorny moment. Fedir disappeared into the bedroom. “What are you doing here anyway?” he called.

“When you didn’t show, boss told me to go fetch you. Like, he told me personally.”

The bedroom was silent for a few seconds. Then came a muffled “crap.”

“Yeah. Said he had a job for us.” For you, that meant, but by and large the outfit knew and accepted - kind of - that Fedir and Larysa were a package deal. “I kinda got the impression it was a big deal.”

“Double crap.” Fedir re-emerged, dressed in a fresh white shirt that was only a little wrinkled. He grabbed his coat, a black knee-long feature, from where he’d tossed it on the sofa. “When was this?”

Larysa looked at the cheap but sturdy digital watch on her wrist. “About an hour ago.”

He gave her a look. “Took you an hour to get here?”

“Took me ten minutes to get through your front door.” She waggled a pair of hairpins in front of him, then used them to push back her curls a little. “Your locks are way hoary.”

“Nothing in here is worth stealing.” He glowered at her. “And you could’ve just called.”

“I did. I bet the boss did too.” Larysa pointedly looked at the mobile phone that lay on the desk, next to Mackinly’s thick and expensive tome. Fedir picked it up. The phone was dark, switched off, and wouldn’t boot up. No charge left in the battery. Triple crap.

“Well... Fedir resumed glowering at her. “You could’ve knocked.”

She beamed a genuine, if razor-sharp, smile back at him. “Now where’s the fun in that?”

The sun hit Fedir like a sledgehammer the moment they stepped out of the cheap brownstone he rented an apartment in. It was still relatively early in the morning but already it was promising to be yet another blisteringly hot New York summer day. Fedir grunted and pulled a pair of Aviators from his coat. Beside him, Larysa mirrored the gesture with a pair of cheap knockoffs. He scanned the street, the act of doing so instinctual after five months of gangland warfare. Town houses, parked cars, occasional trees and apartment buildings four or five stories high lined the street. Occasional automobiles passed by only a handful of pedestrians. In the morning this part of Brighton Beach was very quiet. Fedir took a glance along the street, thought for a moment, then grunted. “We’ll take the car.”

Larysa made a disapproving noise. “Do we have to? Driving your car makes me feel like I’m drowning. In wallpaper paste.”

“Boss wants us for a job. We’ll need wheels. We take the car.” He purposefully strode over to a big battleship of a 1970s Oldsmobile, its red paint old and flaking, its once-white roof now more of a dubious gray color and fixed up with silver duct-tape. The car was parked only loosely inside the yellow lines delineating parking spaces, but the owners of the vehicles around it were all clearly more afraid of scratched paint and dented fenders than Fedir had been so they had left plenty space around the elderly Cutlass. Fedir produced a key that harkened back to a time when the term ‘electric lock’ still belonged firmly in the realm of science fiction. He man-handled the passenger door open and gestured grandiosely. “Ladies first.”

Larysa rolled her eyes and snatched the keys from his hand. “You’re hungover. I’m driving.”

Fedir stared at her and, for a moment, looked as if he was about to object. Larysa gave him a stern look over the rim of her sunglasses as if daring him to. He snorted and carefully folded all nearly seven feet of himself into the front passenger seat. Larysa nodded primly, skidded over the hood and slid behind into driver’s seat, very nearly disappearing behind the wheel of the giant car. She slowly heaved the seat up into a position that allowed her to actually reach the pedals and turned the key in the ignition. The Cutlass’ engine came alive with a low, arthritic growl. Fedir leaned back, a small smile on his face. “Let’s roll.”


Loose ends

Red | Socol-13

The twhop-twhop-thwop of helicopter rotors rang through the steep, craggy gorges of Severin province in western Romania, bounding and reflecting off the living rock until Doppler shift smeared the sound out into a single ominous hum. The helicopters came in fast and low, racing over the stream that criss-crossed along the valley floor, missing the tops of occasional evergreens with mere feet to spare. A big Hind-2 gunship was at the heart of the formation, a bulging twin-rotored ladybug with a belly full of veteran KGB spetsnaz. In loose escort around it roared the lean black crocodile shapes of heavily armed Hokum attack helicopters.

"Two minutes!" called the gunship pilot.

Red acknowledged tensely. The first time she'd made a hot drop the opponents had been Afghans and she had been a wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant riding a transport into the Khyber Pass. The next time they had been Nicaraguans and she had been a decorated major. Now she was detached from the army, the enemy wore uniforms just like her own, and she was just as anxious as she had been that first time. The world, it seemed, wasn’t getting any simpler.

“One minute!”

She methodically checked her vest, her featureless gray uniform, the compact Arsenal handgun secured in its black holster. It was an easy way to take her mind off the impending ideological confusion. She’d made those checks at least a dozen times setting off from Bucharest. In the crimson-lit dimness of the shaking troop compartment she could see commandos doing the same thing, going through the routine equipment checks as a way of distracting the mind and suppressing inevitable nerves. Damn Sechalin. Damn all power-mad men. Damn them to hell.

“Thirty seconds!”

She straightened her back and pulled the optic link, a smooth black device somewhere between an eyepatch and an insect’s compound eye, down over her left eye. Lasers leapt into action, etching patterns of light and information into her optic nerve. The AI came in a rush that took her breath away.

The world beyond the bucking steel walls resolved itself with startling clarity. Red couldn’t help shiver a little as SICKLE opened her virtual third eye, its augmented reality dense with information. It took half of her sight into the red-lit compartment and replaced it with a tactical overview of the gunship’s surroundings, compiled in real-time by the AIs immensely powerful heuristic processors. Her target was a few hundred meters across all told, a complex of squat concrete bunkers protected by fences and concentric webs of sensors backed up by hidden defenses. Feeds from the ground teams were overlaid onto it. Down below the raid was already underway, and the AI battle-manager showed her webs of complex yet intuitive color-coded lines representing strike teams rushing through the bunker network toward their primary and secondary objectives. Points of resistance blossomed in red across the v-space, lethal close-quarters gun battles abstracted away into blobs of photons that faded almost as quick as they’d come. November Group moved hard, fast and with perfect timing.

“Fifteen seconds!”

The gunship shuddered as the pilot flared its rotors, draining off momentum and settling the Hind in a surface glide that felt like a stone drop. Red tried to ignore her heart thumping somewhere high in her throat and gave her last-minute orders, the subvocalized commands picked up over the din of the engines through the microphone strapped to her throat. Her troopers drew back the compartment doors and hot summer wind rushed in as the heavy gunship slammed into the ground. Its landing gear absorbed most of the shock, but still the force of it felt like someone drove a car into the back of Red’s spine.

“We’re down!”

Ten soldiers were out of the compartment in under three seconds. Red followed them by jumping down, her side-arm a solid and useless but psychologically reassuring weight in her hand. The gunship had come down on a concrete field in the middle of the compound. Or more accurately, Red knew, on its roof. The tapered concrete bunkers visible all around them were the tips of an iceberg; most of the facility was buried underground. On paper Socol-13 was a compartmentalized information survival facility, one of many digital knowledge repositories and switching centers located in remote and robust facilities meant to prevent the collapse of Soviet civilization in case of a global nuclear war. It was that, but its deep shelter warehouse also stored very different things.

The AI showed her the way in arrows of green laserlight. Troopers fell into formation around her as the Hind rose back into the sky. The bunker entrance was protected by sets of separately locking heavy blast doors, each rated to withstand a nuclear air burst. There was no way lightly equipped KGB spec-ops would be able to breach it, so it was a good thing they didn’t have to. November Group had infiltrated the complex days before under the guise of a standard guard shift, and beyond the wide open steel gates a handful of troops in green field uniforms stood guard over a number of zip-tied KGB guards lying down beside the smoking ruins of a jeep. The troops standing straightened a little as she went by. The ones on the ground just looked on in utter confusion.

The concrete innards of Socol-13 were silent as a tomb, and Red allowed herself to breathe a little easier. On the way the most dreadful of contingencies had played themselves out in her mind. But there had been no missiles streaking up, no platoons of fanatical ultramilitant zealots willing to die for their cause -- hell, the alarm hadn’t even been tripped. The surprise was so complete it was almost anticlimactic. Almost. The memory of the civil war was fresh enough, and Red’s memories of it painful enough, for her to offer a silent prayer as thanks for one straightforward success.

At first glance the insides of the KGB’s secret laboratory looked like a cross between a nuclear bunker and an office tower, carpets and cubicles mated to concrete and steel beams. There were some signs of battle, smashed office furniture and computers ripped apart by high-velocity rounds, joined here and there with spatters of still-wet blood and the bodies of guards dumped on unceremonious heaps. She sped her pace up a little and tried not to look at the corpses. Four of her bodyguards kept pace with her, anonymous behind their masks.

The administrative core of the base was an old missile silo, decommissioned under an arms reduction treaty in the nineties and then repurposed for the KGB’s own uses. Steel staircases wrapped around the wall of the erstwhile silo, winding down toward a series of progressively lower steel platforms. Bundles of fiber-optic cables thick as Red’s wrist dropped down through a central shaft, and on every level computer screens sprouted from them like flower buds off a central stalk.

Red descended the outer staircase and bleakly surveyed the messy results of her operation. Spetsnaz kept rifles trained on men and women in drab gray working uniforms. The base’s surviving staff looked frightened and uncertain. Maybe they didn’t know that they were about to be implicated in high treason. Or maybe they did: battle damage was more significant down here. Bullet holes pockmarked the reinforced concrete walls, and the air was full of the sharp smell of cordite and death. The mangled bodies of guards and staff still sprawled where they had been shot. Blood seeped through the steel grating and drizzled in onto the levels below, ran in runnels onto destroyed equipment and pattered down onto scattered confidential papers. Specops troops stood watch amidst the blood rain, relaxed like only men and women intimately accustomed to the nearness of violent death could be.

The bottom of the concrete cylinder was different from the levels suspended above it. Rail tracks were set into a concrete floor originally designed to withstand the blast of an ICBM’s booster rocket. Two large steel doors set at opposite ends inside the circular wall lead to concrete tombs that had once cradled the silo’s intercontinental missiles, but were now home to respectively the base’s augmetics labs and its deep cryo storage facilities. The doors were open, and more spetsnaz stood beside them. Half a dozen bodies were laid in a neat row on the bare floor, all dead except for the last one, a man who was thrashing wildly. Two soldiers tried to hold him down but were only partially successful. Another soldier, a stocky fellow with a black beard, lean Chechnyan features and Major’s stars on his epaulettes turned away from the convulsing man and saluted her cheerily. “Comrade commissar, glad to see you could make it. You missed all the fun.”

“Major Fomin,” Red nodded and ignored his jibe. “Your report?”

“The facility is ours. Unfortunately I regret having to tell you there’s no sign of Colonel Korzha.”

“Dammit.” The sole goal of the raid on Socol-13 was to amputate Colonel Irys Korzha from the KGB. Similar operations were taking place all over the Union, aimed at taking down another round of traitors and turncoats accused of backing Marshal Sechalin during his coup d’etat and the violent civil war. Korzha hadn’t been with Sechalin, not exactly, but she was still the KGB’s black sheep in chief. It's Central Committee had decided this was as good a time as any to clean up the mess, and the Red Room did not disagree. Or at least that was the idea. Evidently the Colonel had different ideas entirely. “Perhaps she’s hiding?”

“Yes, perhaps we should look under the beds again.” Kir Fomin made no effort at all to hide the disapproval in his voice. “Whilst you were sitting in your helicopter we went through this base with a fine-toothed comb, comrade. And we found the tracking chip that was supposed to be in her thigh in a jar of formaldehyde on her desk. If I say she is not here, then she is not here.”

“Alright, alright,” Red raised her hand in a gesture of appeasement. “I mean no disrespect to the Group, Major. You did a good job.” She looked at the bodies and the still twitching and shaking man. “What happened here?”

“Meet what’s left of base command, Korzha’s inner circle. We found them holed up in the augmetics lab. The one still alive is,” the Major’s eyes briefly unfocused and his voice went flat as he accessed information stored on his implants. “Junior Lieutenant Gregory Sidorov, assistant adjutant to the Colonel. My guess is he wasn’t a true believer, because he only swallowed his suicide pill when we stormed the room. Rest of them were long gone by then.”

Red walked over to inspect the bodies. Fluids oozed from their ears, noses and eyes. Some of it had come off when the soldiers moved the bodies, but rivulets of blood and liquefied brains still ran across the corpses’ cheeks and foreheads. A smell like overcooked pork lingered over the bodies. She shivered. “Grey goo? To prevent post-mortem data extraction?”

“Got it in one. Medics pumped Sidorov with full-spectrum antinano but I don’t know if we got to him in time. That shit he swallowed is trying real hard to fry his brain stem. Could be he’s gone already.”

So much for one straightforward success. Red massaged her brow. “So Korzha saw us coming after all. She’s in the wind and the people who might know where she’s gone have pressure-cooked their own skulls. This isn’t the news I was hoping for, Major.”

“It gets worse, comrade. Colonel Korzha is not the only thing missing from this base.”

Red raised a tired eyebrow. “Why do I think I’m not going to like what I’m about to be told?”

“Because you are possessed of finely honed feminine intuition, commissar,” Fomin said with a complete deadpan. “Once we established control over the base computer I had SICKLE do an inventory check and... Well.” He produced a ruggedized tablet computer and handed it to her. “See for yourself.”

She looked at it, and almost immediately looked back up at the Major. “I need to talk to the Kremlin.”


In the ghetto

Fedir & Larysa | Brooklyn

Brighton Beach was never the best part of New York City, but the first two decades of the twenty-first century hadn’t been kind to the old neighborhood. The southernmost tips of Brooklyn might not be as bad as the decrepit Projects of the South Bronx, but it was still amongst the poorest areas of the city. Coney Island and the rest of the coast were still relatively well off, but as the Cutlass wound its way deeper into Little Odessa squalor and dilapidation increasingly dominated the street view. Abandoned buildings and boarded-up storefronts popped up first in ones and twos but increasingly more often with three or four on a block. Some of the old, once-stately brownstones and red brick apartment buildings were strewn with bricks, garbage and graffiti. Others had their windows covered over in concrete blocks.

Fedir and Larysa drove in silence punctuated only by the car’s ancient radio, which warbled a static- and soundbite-laden pundit discussion about the upcoming elections for the US Senate. There was little traffic on the roads, and the few people walking down the street did so hurriedly, glancing furtively and with barely concealed suspicion at other passers-by. Far from every house was a ruin, but driving down the ill-maintained streets it was amply clear that this neighborhood was a long way from the glass towers of midtown. Uniforms and patrol cruisers were conspicuous in their absence. This was gang territory, a neighborhood under siege in the deadliest mob war New York had seen in decades.

When the car finally turned onto Kherson Drive the sparse traffic disappeared entirely. The Drive was a back street barely worth a name, literally overshadowed by the solid concrete mass of
the Parkway, the six-lane freeway overpass that scythed through Brighton Beach on its way to JFK International in the east. Down here the drone of motor traffic was a constant, and in the course of a handful of yards the buildings alongside the road went from rough-and-tumble innercity decay to burned out blight that wouldn’t look out of place in third world warzones. None of the three-story row houses retained their roofs, and all of them had their ground floors boarded up. Several showed signs of fire damage around windows.

The ruins were still occupied, but not by tenants. Even from the car Fedir caught glimpses of tattooed bruisers in leather jackets and the gleam of rifle scopes. Beside him Larysa shifted uncomfortably in the driver seat. He didn’t blame her. Sokolinaya Bratva could turn Kherson Drive into a killzone filled with enough lead to deter the hardiest of SWAT teams, and the gang didn’t even bother to hide that fact. Which, Fedir supposed, really summed up the state of affairs in this part of the city. What was telling wasn’t so much that the Russian mob could blatantly fortify its neighborhood, it was that they had to do so in the first place. Months of gang war hadn’t been kind to Sokolinaya Bratva. They’d lost three stash houses to the West German syndicates in the last two weeks alone, a loss bad enough to make even the hardiest of criminals antsy.

At the end of the Drive the street ran abruptly into a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. A fifteen foot high barrier was strung between the thick pillars of the overpass, cordoning off an area roughly half the size of a city block. Larysa let the car roll up to the gate and cut the engine, and made sure to leave her hands on top of the steering wheel. The only sounds were the thrum of cars passing on the overpass above, the ticking of the engine and the barking of dogs somewhere beyond the fence. Security cameras looked unblinkingly down from vantage points high atop the steel and concrete. Fedir opened the car door and stepped out. He too made sure his hands were visible and nowhere near his pockets at all times.

Half a minute passed. Fedir leaned against the door.

A bald and stocky man appeared in the doorway of one of the ruins. He had the build of a man who did plenty of working out in the gym, and maybe some steroids on the side. His arms bulged with muscle and his shoulders were nearly as wide as he was tall. He wore fatigue pants, a sleeveless black shirt and a bulletproof vest under a worn leather jacket. Tattoos crawled up his neck, patriarchal crosses and other religious symbols, and Cyrillic phrases in blue ink. A submachinegun nonchalantly hung from a strap around his shoulders, and a transceiver was clipped to his belt. A half-smoked cigarette hung listlessly from the corner of his mouth. “Fedir,” he rumbled. His voice was gravelly, and about as pleasant on the ears as an industrial accident. “You’re late.”

“Andriy,” Fedir nodded politely. “I had a long night.”

Sokolinaya Bratva’s lead enforcer craned his bull neck to look in the car. He leered at Larysa. “I bet.”

Fedir impassively scratched his chin. “Could we get this over with? I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to keep him waiting any longer.”

Andriy glowered at him, annoyed his taunt went unanswered. “I can’t figure what they want with you, Fedir,” he murmured. “But one day they’re gonna realize you’re an unreliable fuck, and that there’s no place for wormy bastards like you in this outfit. And then I’ll be there.” He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “And I’ll be there for her too.”

This time Fedir rolled his eyes, although he wasn’t sure the gesture was visible through the sunglasses. “But not today,” he stoically replied.

“Not today.” The gangster backed off and raised the transceiver to his mouth without taking his eyes off Fedir. “Let them in.”

Fedir got back in the car as the gate opened with a squeal of metal. Larysa gave him a look from the corner of her eye. “What did he say?” Her voice was smaller than usual.

He didn’t fault her. Andriy Dudik was intimidating and thoroughly unpleasant, a brute and a bully. Fedir rolled his shoulders. “Nothing worth repeating.”

“He hates me.” Her voice was heated. She’d knitted her brow and Fedir noticed her left hand had slipped down the steering wheel a little, toward the bulge he figured hid a gun tucked in her jacket.

“Yes, he does.” He looked at her and lightly put his hand on her shoulder. “But don’t take it personally. I think Andriy hates everybody.”

She looked at him, a little startled. He could feel her twitch at his touch, and then relax a little. “Well, I don’t get why he has to be such an asshole,” Larysa murmured.

He shot her a swift, brief smile. “Let it go, Lara. There’s more important things to worry about.”

Brief silence. Then she sighed and relaxed a little. “Right. You’re right.”

Fedir withdrew his hand. They sat for a moment and pretended nothing had happened. The gate screeched open with the sound of metal grinding against concrete, revealing what passed for the current headquarters of the Sokolinaya Bratva, the biggest Russian gang in New York City. It was an underwhelming sight. The lot had once been a seedy car dealership set up underneath the overpass and it still looked that way. Half of it was a scrapyard, carcasses of dead automobiles piled four or five high in haphazard ranks around a set of rusty cranes, warehouses and a big trash compactor. The front half of the lot looked neater: rows of second-hand Buicks, Chevvies and Lincolns lined up neatly with prices plastered behind their windows in glaring neon lettering. But the cars were all dirty with dust and soot. Nobody had bought a car here in months. And it wasn’t hard to see how those rows of vehicles created crisscrossing lines of obstacles that prevented easy vehicle access to the heart of the lot, a place that had once been a showroom for brand new all-American sedans.

Metal shutters now blocked off the big showroom windows, and sandbag firing positions were laid down on the terraced roof of the white two story building. More armed thugs protected its entrances, some of them escorted by black Doberman dogs on tight leather leashes. It looked like militarized overkill, but the graveyards of New York were littered with a dozen or more bosses and underbosses who thought they could make do with less. The wars for supremacy over the East Coast underworld were savage, perhaps uniquely so, and the Krylenko brothers were not taking any chances if they could at all help it.

Larysa pulled the car into an empty parking space near the showroom and the two of them were escorted inside. The office of Tikhon and Vitaly Krylenko was at the heart of the erstwhile dealership, a concrete box devoid of windows and protected by a heavy security door. The office was big, but not colossal. In better days it might have been home to a sales department. The furnishings were spartan but sleek. A row of identical filing cabinets was set against the back wall. Above them hung the only personalized object in the room, a signed photograph of Elvis during his '91 farewell tour. A pair of space-age metal desks dominated the center of the room. Only one of them was occupied. The goon who’d brought them in closed the door and left Fedir and Larysa alone with Vitaly Krylenko.

He didn’t look like a mob boss. Vitaly was a balding, round-faced, slightly puffy man in his fifties who hunched over when he sat and preferred conservative suits that made him look like an accountant. That made it easy to underestimate him, a mistake Fedir knew had cost many a rival dearly. The Krylenko’s parents had been mid-level bureaucrats in the USSR who’d picked the wrong side during the coup of '76, and when the dust settled they chose exile over whatever Alexa Zhadanova might have in store for them. Like many thousands of Brezhnevian loyalists they’d ended up - ironically - seeking asylum in the United States. The US government debriefed them, extracted whatever intelligence it could, and happily left the Soviet exiles to their own devices. With no money, often without even speaking English, and never fully trusted by an American populace wary after decades of Cold War propaganda, most of them had ended up living on the dole in rundown slum communities like Little Odessa.

The Krylenko twins were the products of that community. They hated the Soviets for what their parents had gone through. They hated the Americans even more for what they themselves had gone through. They were men who’d made their way with their fists and by being more vicious than everybody else, men you crossed at your peril.

All these things were going through Fedir’s head -- and also the fact that he’d kept Vitaly Krylenko waiting for an indeterminate number of hours. The boss didn’t look up, focused intently as he was on a laptop computer, but waved them down in the pair of modern office chairs in front of his desk. A minute passed. Vitaly typed slowly, with two fingers. Finally he closed the laptop down and looked up at the two of them. “Ah, Fedir. Did you have a good night’s sleep?”

“Afraid not, boss.” Fedir shook his head. “I was up all night.”

“But not all morning.” There was a hint of amusement in Vitaly’s accentless voice.

Fedir had the good sense to blush a little. “Sorry I'm late, boss.”

Vitaly waved his concern away with an indulgent smile. “That’s all right. That is the name of an Elvis song, you know. 'That's all right, anyway you do.'” He glanced at the picture on the wall. “His first single.” Krylenko gave Fedir a look. “You were studying, were you not? What was it again?”

“Political science, boss.”

“And you still intend to pursue a career in this field?”

Fedir shrugged laconically. “Eventually. Maybe.”

The boss nodded. He appeared to be in unusually good spirits. “It is important to know a man’s ambitions, Fedir. And it is good to know your ambition isn’t to sit in my chair.” Vitaly flashed quick smile. His pale blue eyes bored into Fedir’s. “It means you’re dependable. And that makes you valuable to me. Do you understand?”

Fedir frowned. It wasn’t usual for him to meet directly with one of the bosses of the outfit. He wasn’t high enough up on the totem pole for that. “You need something done – by someone dependable?”

Vitaly smiled again, more broadly this time. “Exactly. And you I can trust, can I not? A man with a reputation that is solid. A man of learning! So. The job I need done, it is very sensitive. I want the two of you to drive up to Red Hook Container Terminal. There is a foreman there called Hornby who has agreed to do a job for us. He will hand you a shipping manifest. You will take it, and bring it to me.”

Fedir raised an eyebrow. “That’s all?”

The boss regarded him with a quizzical expression. “Is it not enough?”

“No, it's just, I mean...” Fedir shook his head. “Can’t he e-mail the manifest?”

'Suspicion torments my heart’” Vitaly hummed by way of reply. “’Suspicion keeps us apart’”. The ageing mob boss rolled his shoulders in a way that was unnervingly Elvis, and Fedir caught a glimpse of the slick and charismatic sociopath who’d conquered Brighton Beach twenty-five years ago. Vitaly smiled and steepled his fingers. “This is a very delicate matter, Fedir, best not trusted to electronics. After all, these days one never knows who might be listening. No. It has to be paper. So someone has to go and get it. I have decided you are the man for the job.”

Fedir thought it over a bit. “Red Hook... That’s on the East River. West Brooklyn. That’s Black Cell territory.”

The boss’ smile thinned almost imperceptibly. “I am aware of this.”

Fedir’s eyes narrowed. “So the real reason you’re sending us and not, say, Andriy...” He didn’t finish the thought, but then he didn’t have to. It was perfectly obvious that driving through rival gang territory in the middle of the most brutal gang war in decades wasn’t precisely a healthy prospect. Instantly the job seemed less a case of trustworthiness and more one of expendability. Fedir wasn’t in any hurry to be expendable, but he realized expressing that sentiment might be a level of candidness the Krylenko’s didn’t appreciate.

But Vitaly lazily shook his head. “No, no. It is not about disposability.” He stopped to look at Fedir, and for a moment the threadlike smile touched his eyes. “Well. It is not only that. Andriy, I also trust him. But everyone knows Andriy -- he also has a reputation. He is very good at violence...” The boss leaned forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “But only at violence.” He fell back in his chair and idly gestured at his neck and chest. “And he is not, shall we say, inconspicuous? But Hawks and his Black Cell, they do not know you. And I believe they are focused elsewhere. You can, what is the phrase... Fly under the radar?”

Fedir glanced at Larysa, who seemed very much to be trying to blend into the background, a difficult proposition considering how much her army-green jacket stood out against the gray office carpets. “I suppose so.”

“Excellent.” Vitaly beamed. “You do the job. You bring me the manifest. We win the war. Easy peasy.”

Fedir’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Just like that?”

“Just like that.” The boss drummed his fingers against the table, his expression excited. “Things are going to change around here, Fedir. I think you will find we have new friends now.”


The consultant

Salem | Manhattan

The cucumber-tuna sandwich had been very much enjoyable, and when Salem Lynde exited the tiny Lower East Side deli nobody tried to shoot him. This improved his day immensely.

Tyres screeched. Cars and coaches honked on their ascent toward Williamsburg Bridge. The smells of rubber, exhaust fumes and hot tarmac mixed with that of food from street vendor stalls and the deodorants of the passers-by. It was the smell of summer in Manhattan. Lynde was in his mid-forties, a man of average height with a figure that trended toward portly more than he liked to admit. His burnt orange hair was graying at the temples, prematurely but in a fashion that could at least aspire toward stately, and the heat that lay like a blanket over the city caused him to perspire at even the smallest physical exertion. And the sunburn was even worse.

People of all walks of life crowded the streets and the cacophony of city sounds was disorienting. As often Salem Lynde found himself a bit unnerved by the chaos of it all. For a moment he wondered why he’d settled here in the first place, and the logic chain that instantly sprung from his memory did a lot to reassure him. He forced his feet not to skip over the cracks in the pavement and reminded himself not to count his steps as he navigated hectic Manhattan traffic, sparing an occasional moment every so often to glance over his shoulder to ascertain he wasn’t being followed.

He knew, of course, that it would be much harder for anyone to follow him around if he didn’t have his lunch every day at the same time in the same deli. Repetitive behavior was bad behavior, but making a living in Manhattan was challenging enough for an OCD ex-spy at the best of times, so Salem figured he could be forgiven a few sloppy habits. Besides, he’d reasoned with himself, even if he did mix up his lunchtime customs he couldn’t very well randomize the location of his office, could he? So he soldiered on best he could, and savored not-being-shot every time he stepped out the deli as a confirmation of not just his continued existence, but the definitivity of his career change.

He’d ponder the irony of that thought later.

Right now though he was mostly occupied tracing his steps back from the deli to the six-story building that contained his tiny rented office. Even that brief walk was enough to make him sweat noticeably, enough to make him actually consider undoing the top button on his striped polo. He decided against it, and instead enjoyed the cool air inside. Someone had done a not very good job converting the old tenement building into office space. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and only kept cool through brute-force air conditioning. When the five AC units mounted to the back of the building worked at full power they rattled the glasses off his coffee table, but at least it was cool in return.

The hallway wasn’t particularly inviting. In fact it looked distinctly shabby for a Manhattan office building. The paint on the walls was faded and flaking. The black and white tiles on the floor looked like they hadn’t been properly cleaned in a few weeks. One of the white industrial lights on the ceiling had given out and not been replaced. Wide and worn wooden stairs wound along an old cage elevator toward the upper floors. The various companies and offices located in the building were printed in black capitals on simple strips of white plastic that could easily be inserted into - and pulled out of - the simple wall-mounted directory. That said something about the transient nature of the building’s occupants: most businesses were here for only a short while. They either moved on to greener pastures, or they went bust. Salem had been in town for just over a year, and already his office had been here longer than most. The only one in the building Salem actually knew to any degree was the lawyer on the third floor. They occasionally did business, and sometimes drank coffee together. She did a lot of pro bono work for women, minorities and the destitute, organizing divorces and restraining orders. Salem had a pension. He usually ended up paying for lunch.

Salem’s office was located at the end of the hallway on the sixth floor. Charitably, that meant you could say it was a corner office. Less charitably, that none of the windows showed anything other than the walls and blank windows of the building across the narrow alley.

A black haired woman with olive skin leaned against the wall in front of his office door. She wore a white shirt and blue pantsuit, and eyed him expectantly. “You Salem Lynde?” she asked as he approached.

He gave her a look, produced a key and opened the office door that said, in frosted lettering:

Salem Lynde
Information Consultant


By way of reply he ushered her into the office. The furnishing was spartan: there was a cupboard with an old coffee machine and some mugs, a water cooler, and a plant. The plant had been a gift. One wall was lined with wire shelves full of books, mostly reference works and legal treatises as well as texts on management theory, sociology and information science. There was a small air conditioning unit, blowing at full tilt, and a paper shredder -- not a simple ticker tape office model, but an expensive secure type that could reduce even cardboard to millimetric confetti in the blink of an eye. “So,” he started and looked over his shoulder at the mystery woman. “What can I do for you, detective.”

The woman raised a surprised eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m with the police?”

He flicked the switch on the coffee machine. It started to gurgle pleasingly. Reassured, he gingerly folded himself into one of four faded brown leather chairs grouped around a glass coffee table with a laptop computer, a stack of newspapers and an empty notepad on it. “You’re wearing a pantsuit,” he started, using his fingers to keep count of what he said. “Pant suit, Manhattan? Middle class. But no heels.” He pointed at her sturdy rubber-heeled shoes. “Those are comfortable loafers. Well worn, though. So no office job and you’re not a city girl -- nobody in banking or insurance wears shoes like that.” His speaking pace accelerated a little. “Then there’s the suit itself. Masculine cut, a little aggressive. And you’re not wearing make-up. So, a male-dominated work environment: you’re trying not to remind your colleagues you’re a woman. And your jacket is tailored to conceal the shoulder rig underneath it. Does a decent job of it too, but not good enough to be federal. It’s also just long enough to fall over your belt, probably so you can do the badge reveal move.” He paused and looked her in the eye. “So, you’re a plain clothes cop. I guessed detective, and that look on your face just now confirms I'm right.”

The woman nodded slowly as she took in what he’d said. “Very observant of you, Mr. Lynde.” She slowly pulled aside the front of her jacket, revealing the golden badge strapped to her belt. “Sierra Call, NYPD Organized Crime Unit.” She sat down opposite her and crossed her knees, her expression neutral. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“I do not. Although, am I to understand though that this visit is off the record? Because we’d both look silly if I ended up charging you for an off-the-books thing.”

Call frowned a little. “You work for the NYPD?”

A small nod. “Very occasionally. I wouldn’t fault you for not knowing, I try to keep a low profile. But I do have a little laminated card that you guys gave me.” He looked at her with sudden interest. “You said your name was Call?”

“Yes.”

“I think I read about you in the papers. Wasn’t there some unfortunate business with your partner?”

Her expression darkened only slightly. “He isn’t my partner anymore. And I’m not here to talk about me, Mr. Lynde. I'm a little fuzzy on your profession. Could you tell me what it is you do for a living?"

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the frosting on the door. "I am a consultant."

"Okay, I got that far. But what do you consult on?"

Salem smiled guardedly. “I provide various services, but my primary expertise is in information security.”

“Meaning... What, exactly?”

He spread his palms. “Meaning that all information is worthless outside of its proper context. To understand the present, you need to know the past. As a detective you must know how easy it is to have the right facts, but draw the wrong conclusions. Or how dangerous it can be if the wrong facts come out at the wrong time. Come to think of it, even the right facts at the wrong time can do more harm than good. To be sure what the right time and the right facts are, you need context. I provide context to my clients. Or deny it, if that’s what they want.”

“I... see? That’s a nice pitch.” Call rubbed her chin. “You practice it?”

“Every once in awhile.”

“Then you know you’re using a lot of words to not tell me anything.”

His smile widened a little. “And you haven’t told me what it is you wanted from me either.” He stood up. “Coffee?”

“Two sugars, no milk.”

Salem filled two ceramic mugs with steaming hot coffee and dropped two cubes of sugar and a spoon in one. He handed that one to the detective, then sat back down and gave her an expectant look. “So.”

“So. Let’s get to the point.” Call reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and produced a photograph that she put on the table. A push sent it sliding across the glass toward Salem. “Do you know who this is?”

Salem bent forward to look at the photo but didn’t pick it up. It showed a middle-aged black man, captured on film from some distance, probably with a telephoto lens. His hair was cropped close to his head in military fashion, but he was dressed in a sharp suit and designer sunglasses. A confident smirk hung around his lips. He was surrounded by at least three broad-shouldered men who looked like bodyguards or hired muscle. He could be a mercenary or a CEO or a drug dealer. He wasn’t either of those things. “That is Mr. Cecil Hawks.”

The detective nodded in agreement. “You know him then?”

“He is a client.”

“You work for him.” It wasn’t a question.

But Salem shook his head. “I do not.”

Call raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“My position does not fit that description.” He took a sip of his coffee. It was hot and strong and richly flavoured. “He is not my boss. He is a client. I’m a consultant; I work with him, not for him.”

The detective leaned ever so slightly forward, a measuring look in her eyes. She held her mug cupped in two hands. “And yet you said you worked for the police.”

“Ah, but Mr. Hawks didn’t give me a little laminated card.” Salem smiled again, this time more broadly. He enjoyed the back-and-forth.

Call snorted, clearly unimpressed. “Are you aware that Mr. Hawks is a major figure in organized crime?”

“I am aware that there are accusations to that effect.” Salem kept his voice carefully neutral. He had a good idea now of where this was going. “I am also aware that none of those accusations have been proven.”

“You are of course correct.” The detective’s voice took on a sharp and accusatory tone now. “Because Mr. Hawks has proven himself to be a very difficult man to keep tabs on. He switches cars. He doesn’t use text messages. He encrypts his e-mail. He never has a conversation in a public venue -- in fact, he barely even shows his face on the street-”

“Considering the sorry state of New York's streets that's hardly incriminatory,” Salem injected. “No offense.”

The detective ignored him. “So I can’t help thinking you might have something to do with how difficult our investigation into Mr. Hawks has become. One those ‘various services’ you offer wouldn’t happen to be counter-surveillance, would it?”

“In point of fact,” Salem replied and serenely folded his hands in his lap. “It would.”

“I see.” Sierra Call’s voice left no doubt that this wasn’t a surprise to her. “So you protect Mr. Hawks from police surveillance?”

“Detective, my clients pay a premium for their privacy, because it's worth a premium in today's world. Business rivals, the police, wives or husbands, the Soviets, the neighbors... It doesn't matter who's trying to listen in. Counter-surveillance tends to cover all bases.”

“But has Mr. Hawks asked you to protect him from police surveillance?” Call insisted.

“I cannot comment on the nature of my work for any specific client. That information falls within the purview of professional confidentiality.” A slight frown creased Salem’s brow. “I’m not sure, detective... What is it that you want from me?”

“Peace on earth,” Call replied instantly and let out a humorless chuckle. “But that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. So right now, I’ll settle for any information you can give me about your ‘client’.”

Salem took a swig from his mug, scalding his mouth in the process. He made a face and put the mug down. “So what you’re saying is, you’re on a fishing expedition.”

“Not quite. Information is your ‘jam’, right? Well then,” Call shifted in her seat. “Right now, I’m informing you that your client is the subject of an NYPD investigation and will probably end up on the wrong end of a RICO charge sooner or later. I’m giving you a chance to make my job easier, so maybe you won’t end up in jail with him.”

Salem creased his brow. “Much as I sympathize with your desire to do your job, detective, especially in these difficult times, my job is to guarantee the privacy of my clients. It’s not to make your life easier. Much as you might dislike that, it’s not illegal.”

“It will be when I charge you as an accessory.” Call took another sip from her coffee and looked him in the eyes with a stone certain expression. “We have strong circumstantial evidence that Mr. Hawks was a ranking member of Nicola Auger’s inner circle. You know who Auger was, right? Well, his empire fell apart the day he died. All his lieutenants tried to grab a slice of the pie. They’re the ones fighting and killing in the streets, and Hawks is one of them.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Not yet.” She pointed to the photo. “But that picture? It was taken at Auger’s cremation in Oyster Bay. Every kingpin and don on the east coast was there. So was your ‘client’. It doesn’t matter how clever he is, Mr. Lynde. If his enemies don’t get him then the NYPD will. And when we do, I will come after you too. If Hawks goes down, you're on the hook for obstruction of justice. And then I will get you. Consultant or no, you are not a lawyer. You are not covered by legal confidentiality.”

“I’m not sure you quite understand my position, detective. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t help you.”

“Yes you could. You just choose not to.”

“No. No, it’s not that. My hands are tied. Are you familiar with the Gould-Maccoby Provision? The RAMPART Laws?”

Call frowned. “I’ve heard of it. Relief of American Patriots Against... Something or other. Some Washington backronym law to do with... Contractors overseas, I think. What’s that got to do with the price of coffee?”

Salem made a sweeping gesture to indicate his office. “Much as this may look like the office of your stereotypical run-down private eye, detective, that's not what I am. I am a security contractor licensed by the State Department. As a client Mr. Hawks is protected by federal rule of evidence laws. If I break those laws I will lose my license and my national security clearance. Even assuming I knew of any wrongdoing and did not care about my livelihood... Well, whatever I told you would be fruit of the poisoned tree. You couldn’t use it as evidence of anything in a trial.”

The detective’s frown deepened. “I’m pretty sure that law was meant to protect military contractors working for foreign governments from domestic lawsuits. In other words, legitimate businesses. Not common criminals.”

Salem shrugged. “Criminals, businesses... These are the United States, detective. In my experience they are often the same thing. And the Gould-Maccoby Provision is part of the RAMPART national security package. My services are contracted by Ambit Unlimited, a company of which Mr. Hawks is the owner, and the law applies to me just as it does to my colleagues working for the DoD. I’d have to see a subpoena before I could divulge any of the specifics of my work for Mr. Hawks and his company to you.”

“You’ve thought this through then.”

“It's my business to.” Another shrug. “I'm sorry. But if the law is overbroad that’s hardly my fault, detective. If you do not approve of blanket military security legislation then I suggest you let Senator Gould know by voting with your ballot. He is up for re-election in a few days.”

Detective Call nodded slowly as she took that in. Then she put the mug down and stood up. “I guess that’s all there really is to talk about, then.”

“Apparently.”

“You’re not going to help.”

“I didn’t say that. I do sympathize with the NYPD.” Salem shook his head. “But my hands are tied with regards to Mr. Hawks.”

Call hooked a stray strand of black hair behind her ear in an effort to hide a flash of irritation. She didn't quite succeed. “Tomahto, Tomayto.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not done though, Mr. Lynde. I suspect we’ll run into each other again.”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“As long as you know it.” The detective moved to the doorway, then turned around and leaned against the doorpost. “Oh. One more thing. I checked you out before I came here. That is to say, I ran your name through every database I could. Not much luck, not even in our own records - you weren’t kidding when you said you kept a low profile. I got a single hit on an obscure government directory, but the result was classified. I put in a request for release. Less than an hour later the hit disappears. And shortly after that I get a call from some woman who told me to back off and mind my own damn business. Didn't even say her name or what agency she was with. But our techs traced that call to Langley. Isn't that where the CIA is?”

Salem’s expression went very still and pensive. “It was when last I checked.”

“So what is it that you do for the Agency, Mr. Lynde?” She held up a hand. “No, wait. I bet you can’t talk about that, either.”

“I’m not-” Salem caught himself as something occurred to him. “Hold on for just a second. They wouldn’t be calling you. They would be calling your superior. Or maybe the Chief of Detectives. And it'd be them telling you to back off... But here you are anyway.” A genuine smile split his face. “You’re off the chain, detective! Very gutsy. I’m impressed – that confirms what the papers said about you!”

Call made an ugly face. “If I’m supposed to be afraid you’ll carry the tale to your friends in the Department...”

Salem raised his hands. “Oh no, nothing of the sort detective. I think you’ll find that one way or the other I’m not prone to spilling the beans. My lips are sealed. Hope to... Well, cross my heart.” And he actually drew a little X over his chest.

“Yeah. Well.” Call crossed her arms, not sure what to make of that. “Thanks, I guess. But that doesn’t get you off the hook. I’m still gonna go after Hawks.” Fire returned to her eyes. “And I still wanna know what you are up to, and if I get anything on you no amount of unspilt beans will save your hide from me.”

“Believe me, detective; I wouldn’t have it any other way.”


Sphinxes

Red | Cairo

Cairo. Jewel of the Nile. The city of a thousand minarets, the largest city in Africa and the Arab world. Hot, polluted and choked with traffic; home to 7 million people, ancient monuments and the headquarters of the multinational corporations. Center of Nasserism, the leftist Arab nationalist political ideology, and just as equally that of Shehadism, the authoritarian pan-Arabist ideology that challenged it. Hotspot for tourism, NGOs and high-tech nanocarbon industries that competed directly with Istanbul and LA. And for international intrigue, because as Cairo straddled the river that was Egypt’s lifeblood, so did Egypt itself straddle the ancient geopolitical fault lines dividing Africa and the Middle East.

Red navigated the small lanes of the Old City with the intuitive ease of half-remembered familiarity. The oldest neighborhoods near the city’s eastern bank had grown haphazardly over the centuries, and were dominated by crowded tenements, medieval mansions and palaces, and Islamic architecture. Weird, homophonic music echoed from shadowy dens and bazaars along crooked cobblestone alleys. Veiled women and men with grooved, leathery faces watched her pass. She felt the old jittery butterflies in her stomach. Red hurried past and tried not to hurry.

“This is truly unfortunate,” Ihor Glinka had said when she called into Moscow Center with the news of the double disappearance. “Truly unfortunate indeed.” His voice had been as infuriatingly balmy as it ever was. Glinka didn't seem possessed of emotion, or indeed much of any human quality. The bony, pensive man didn’t have an official title, because he didn’t need one. Everyone knew he was Kiralova’s captain of witch-hunters, the commissar-in-chief. “I’m afraid we’ll really have to find another way to get hold off the wayward colonel.”

And for ‘get hold off’, in Glinka’s dictionary read ‘bring back by any means necessary’.

The midday sun had reached its highest point, and the alleyways and thoroughfares of Old Town were almost deserted, Cairo's inhabitants wisely yielding the streets to the scorching heat. From their minarets the muezzin recited the call to prayer. Hayya 'ala s-salah; Hayya 'ala 'l-falah; Allāhu akbar. Come to prayer. Come to success. God is greater. Alien words in an alien language. Despite the torturous heat Red drew the high-collared trench coat a little tighter around her. The damned thing was uncomfortably hot and she felt deeply uneasy in the expensive Western couture, but there were only so many ways to conceal a weapon. The pistol, smuggled into Egypt in a diplomatic carrier bag, was a cold steel presence inside her left pocket, the only thing cool in this sunlit hell. The other pocket contained only an electronic 'panic button'. Damn the Middle East. She knew she'd never feel comfortable here.

Red turned a corner and risked a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't followed. Somewhere in the maze ahead she knew the banks of the Nile were waiting.

“Fortunately for us, young lieutenant Sidorov stabilized long enough to give us an inkling of how our delinquent colonel managed to disappear so completely,” Glinka reported in his usual unworried style. The wan chief inquisitor glossed over the horror of the cortical yoke, or maybe it simply didn’t bother him. “He has been telling us many interesting things, chief amongst which that the colonel conducted regular black flights out of Montenegro.”

Red raised a quizzical eyebrow. Relations between Warsaw Pact and the self-contained Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were strained at the best of times. The KGB wasn't officially allowed in the country, let alone to fly black ops out of Montenegro. “The Yugoslavians knew about this?”

“Not officially of course. I, or rather, the External Ministry has requested clarification from Belgrade, but so far one hasn't been forthcoming.” They both knew what that implied. Khorza had made some kind of deal with a big name, and now that the cat was out of the bag the SFRY was in ass-covering mode. “What convinces me this is pertinent however is that less than an hour after we notified the Yugoslavian president the Romanian government informed the Red Room that their 91st Airlift Flotilla is missing an Ilyushin airlifter.”

Red was left momentarily speechless. “... a military transport?”

“It was supposed to fly from Bucharest to Berlin,” Glinka mused serenely. “Suffice it to say it never made it to its destination, and someone kept the Romanians from reporting this fact until it no longer mattered. This is no coincidence.”

“Christ in his heaven, Khorza is running circles around us.” A terrible realization dawned on her. “Unless...”

Glinka leaned almost imperceptibly toward the camera, his eyes suddenly piercing. “Yes?”

Foreign governments? The air force? This was too complex a scheme for a single KGB colonel to pull off with any hope of success. “Unless she's not acting alone.”

The old witch-hunter nodded the way an old professor might at a particularly bright student. “I have come to suspect the same thing. It may turn out the Warsaw Pact is not yet as clean as we thought. Our enemies are still out there, and they are working against us.”

The sounds of the Nile were drawing closer. The cries of gulls and the murmur of onrushing water lured her onward. Red turned left, cutting through a dark alley and underneath an ancient medieval archway. Her footsteps quickened against the cracked flagstone passage. Suddenly the alleyway widened, the ancient limestone architecture giving way as the Old City labyrinth opened up. A dilapidated teahouse and its tiny terrace clung to a sudden hillside slope, offering a breathtaking view of the Nile, still a few kilometers off in the distance. On the other bank, Mokattam Hill and the Citadel of Saladin rose high above the city, bathed in blistering sunlight. Red took a moment to get her bearings. This was the place. She pushed the door open and went inside.

It wasn't a guess, Glinka explained: it was mathematics, a process of elimination. Regions of heavily monitored airspace Khorza's aircraft had to have avoided; the amount of fuel the Ilyushin could carry before it ran out; patrol routes of military flights that had reported nothing unusual; the lack of foreign chatter indicating the colonel had not defected to the West. Each piece of data was a constraint, and the path of the Khorza's ghost flight had to obey every one of them, so the set of possibilities was paired down with every new source of data. The positions of NATO warships and their exclusion zones, all to be avoided. A cruiser, the Nikolaev, that had briefly picked up electrostatic discharge in a patch of sky over the Ionian Sea that should have been empty.

“Plasma stealth?”

“Rudimentary, but functional.”

Finally, a frontal aviation station in Benghazi that had reported tracking sensor ghosts on a broadly similar heading.

Egypt.

The blinds were closed, and the interior of the tea house was dark. It was still early; customers would come later, when the worst of the heat died down. Old chairs were grouped around a handful of ramshackle wooden tables. A water feature murmured in its alcove. Red washed her hands in the traditional manner and closed the door, sending door chimes tingling. The owner looked up from the ancient wooden bar. Behind him an impressive filigreed water boiler stood against the bare bricked wall. He was a wiry man in his fifties with tanned skin so dark he could easily pass for an Arab even though he wasn't. “As-Salāmu Alaykum,” he greeted her with a nod. He was polishing a glass with a white towel. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Tea please,” she murmured in rudimentary Arabic, and sat down in a place where she could see both the door and the staircase winding up toward the upper floor behind the bar.

The barman nodded, deftly manipulated the massive water boiler and poured a cup of hot water. He added mint leaves, sugar and a tiny silver spoon and brought it to her table. “Tourist?” he asked her in accented English.

“Something along those lines,” Red replied in sudden French. “How's Paris, Jerome?”

The barman went absolutely still, and his dark eyes glittered in their sockets as he looked at her. Then he silently moved to the door and locked it. He checked the blinds and curtains, poured himself a cup of tea, and finally sat down opposite her. Then he shook his head. “I thought it might be you, but I wasn’t certain. You look a lot different, Jasha.”

“It’s been a long time since Dubai, Jerome. Six years?”

He sighed. “Seven.”

She gave him a lopsided smile. “Back when the world was a lot simpler.”

He smiled back tiredly but genuinely. “Your world perhaps.”

Ihor Glinka rubbed his chin. It was the most human gesture Red had ever seen him make. “Alexei was kind enough to shine his light onto our problem.” He meant Alexei Silayev, the feared Director of the KGB. “He swears blind he has no idea what Khorza is up to. I am inclined to trust him.” Red decided she didn't want to know what Ihor Glinka had done to be convinced of that loyalty. “The colonel did not land at any significant airports in the Middle East, and the plane didn't have fuel to make it any farther. It seems eminently reasonable that she touched down somewhere in Egypt.”

“That is rather a large area to search. I don't suppose our satellites have seen anything interesting?”

“Nothing so far. But with MIR gone... General Ligachev has retasked most orbital surveillance to patch critical holes. Satellite coverage of Africa is spotty at best.”

“We could lean on the Egyptians,” Red argued, but she already knew the old Polish ghost wouldn’t go for it.

“I'm afraid that would be rather more public than is acceptable right now, my dear. We'll have to do this the old-fashioned way. He fixed her with a careful stare. “You have contacts in Egypt, do you not?”

Red smirked. For just this once she'd seen the commissar coming from a mile away. “I'll talk to him.”

Jerome Lefèvre was not as old as he appeared at first glance. His tanned face was grooved, his back and legs were bent like he was standing against a storm and his olive complexion had darkened through decades spent in Sahara sunshine, but now that he sat his back straightened and his expression was intelligent and full of wry humor. He could be fifty years old, but just as easily sixty – or forty.

Jerome wasn’t a friend, not exactly, but he also wasn’t an enemy. That put him well ahead of most people in Red's world. The wiry, white-haired Frenchman excelled at the little social games of international intelligence. He traded favors and information back and forth between the people in his network, making sure he came out ahead every time. Over the course of his career he had made more than a few deals with the Soviets, and seven years ago he'd done a young GRU officer a big favor in Dubai. In fact, without the Frenchman's help it was more than likely Captain Jaslenika Krasnya would've ended up in the hands of either the CIA or a Kurdish warlord called Zengo Loran. Less than a week later she'd returned the favor by tipping him about the Mukhabarat snatch team poised to raid his DGSE safehouse.

They'd both survived Dubai by the skin of their teeth, and come away with a newfound appreciation for what the Frenchman liked to call 'ideological flexibility'. It wasn’t that he was incognizant of the political realities of the Cold War so much as that he chose to substitute those realities with his own brand of practicality – much to the outrage of his superiors. “Paris shoved me off to this dead-end post. And Moscow made you a commissar!” Jerome chuckled in his tea. “Looks like I got the better deal after all.”

“I think you did. This place doesn't look so bad.” She looked around the ancient interior of the Islamic teahouse “Although it could do with a little bit of paint.”

“Ah, I have asked for the funds many times, but the Deuxième Bureau are penny-pinchers and nobody cares for poor Jerome now. I am an outcast among lepers,” he grinned and spread his hands in fake humbleness. “A problem I think you do not have. You get to convict on suspicion and take justice into your own hands!”

“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” she sighed. “Not after the first round of executions, anyway.”

“We know very little about the Commissariat, you know. Little that's not rumor or speculation, anyway. Brussels says you have carte blanche from the Kremlin- from Kiralova herself. That you can do anything, go anywhere. And indeed, here you are.” He gave her an intrigued look. “So, tell me. Is that true? How far down does the rabbit hole go?”

“I’ve been informed,” Red responded a little tightly, “that if the hatchet comes down I have release authority for tactical nukes up to 15 kilotons.”

Merde.” Jerome stared at her, his expression a mixture of awe and alarm. “That must have been fun to find out.”

“I threw up when they told me.” She knew he was fishing and that she might be telling him things that might not strictly be sanctioned, but then again she did want his help, and frankly it didn't really bother her if French intelligence knew she could nuke them off the face of the Earth. She also doubted any of this information would ever reach Paris unless Jerome was given a reason to supply it. She didn't intend to give him that reason.

It was almost as if the Frenchman could read her thoughts. “Power,” he said with a smile and a theatrical swirl of his tea, “is the most overrated piece of shit thing on planet Earth.”

Red snorted and raised her tea. “I'll toast to that.”

They clinked their glasses together and drank the powerfully flavored tea in silence. When they finished Jerome got up for a refill. “So tell me,” he called from the water boiler. “Why is a Commissar of Militsiya 1st Rank of the great and bountiful Soviet Empire visiting a humble servant of the Fifth Republic in a hole like this?”

She sighed. “Information.”

He laughed and presented her a new cup of tea. “What else, hey?”

What else indeed. “We are missing an aircraft.”

Jerome's expression grew serious. “Truly? What kind of aircraft? I heard of no defections.”

“This wasn't a defection. It wasn't a jet fighter either. The Romanians are missing an Ilyushin 107 from the 91st Flotilla. We have reason to believe it must have landed in Egypt somewhere.” She let out a breath. Time to put the cards on the table. “It should have passed through Egyptian airspace sometime between 96 and 88 hours ago. We were hoping that your... government connections might lead us to our lost property.”

“No, no.” His eyes twinkled. “This is not about a plane.” He pointed a finger at her. “You are too important now to bother with cargo planes. If it was just a plane, you Soviets would simply have your robots build another one. No. Someone important must be aboard. Or something.”

Red sighed. “Both, actually.” She should have known it would be impossible to pull anything past Jerome. He presented a humble facade, but even the East Germans in Dubai had called him the French Devil. The STASI station chief had joked that whenever one of their safe houses was rolled up, if you listened closely you could hear La Marseillaise play. In this occupation you didn't get to be as old as Jerome without a finely honed set of skills. “Aboard the plane is some stolen property we would very much like to be returned.”

“Stolen property,” Jerome nodded. That was apparently something the Frenchman could accept. “Hot?”

“Very.”

“Nuke? Because I remember when the British lost several a few years back. What a headache that was.”

Red shook her head. “Not a nuke.”

“Worse?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh la la,” Jerome tut-tutted. “And I assume I would not be acting against the wellbeing of our liberal and magnanimous Union by assisting you in this matter?”

“I wouldn't be here if I thought you were in on this, Jerome.” Which wasn't strictly true, but if he was this was the quickest way to find out. “As far as we know this is a strictly internal matter. No-one needs to hear of this.”

“Hmm,” the old Frenchman nodded slowly. “Nobody in Paris cares about poor Jerome, so poor Jerome cares little for them. But you know how it is with us capitalist pigdogs...” He pursed his lips. “I am close to retirement, and I would like it to be somewhere nice and warm. Not a hole in a les banlieues. What would this information be worth?”

She impassively reached into her waistcoat and put a bog-standard USB drive on the polished wooden table. “A hundred thousand rubles in an untraceable Caymans account. And my contact details.” She smiled softly. “I'll owe you a favor.”

He let out a brief bark of laughter. “A favor of the commissariat, that'll be the day.” Jerome nodded and took the drive. “Very well. I have a friend who does traffic control for Cairo Suborbital. He owes me for all the drink I bought him. If there are any black flights, he knows about them. I will-” He stopped mid-sentence, frowned and reached in his pocket. Then he withdrew a buzzing phone and looked at it. His frown deepened. “Uh-oh.”

Red raised a worried eyebrow. “Uh-oh? I don’t like uh-oh. Uh-oh’s no good.”

He turned the screen around. From an aerial perspective it showed white-skinned men in sand-colored outfits. They moved in a military fashion through the shadows down suddenly deserted alleyways. They wore reflective sunglasses and plastic earpieces, and clutched tiny Austrian submachineguns. “We appear to have visitors.”

Something knotted in her stomach. “Who are those guys?”

“I recognize some of them,” Jerome murmured. “They work security at the big ConEurope tower downtown – but they never walk the grounds.”

A cold chill crept down Red's spine. “WEU hitters?”

“Perhaps. I thought they might be corporate counterintel. Now, I'm not so sure.” He stood up and checked the locks on the door. “I don't think they are here for tea.”

Red stared at the footage but in her mind she was already measuring the distance between the table and the back windows. She also realized it was a long way down from those windows to the streets below the precipice. The teahouse suddenly felt like a trap. “How are you getting this feed?” It didn't look orbital. It was high up, but not that high up.

“Surveillance heli-drone. Tiny. Solar-powered. It analyzes crowd behavior – something to do with fluid dynamics. Gives me a heads-up if something looks odd.” As if on cue the tiny screen abruptly went blank with static. “Jammers. These people are serious.” Jerome looked at her, a frown on his face. “They are most likely not here for me.”

Red flashed back to poor lieutenant Sidorov, twitching and flailing as the suicide pill tried to cook his frontal lobes. She wondered what Glinka had done to his mind after that. That's not going to be me. She resisted the urge to reach for the hidden gun and rose from the table. “I had better go. What way out?”

Jerome beckoned her to follow him behind the counter and her mind was racing. She'd come into Egypt under deep cover, and nobody had followed her through the Old City. She was positive about that. If these guys were after her... How had they found her?

Had Jerome perhaps tipped them off?

Could she actually trust him?

She used to, but that was six – no, seven – years ago. A lot had changed in the meantime, in Russia and abroad, and not much of that change was positive. She'd seen plenty of it first hand. Paranoia roared through her head like emergency sirens. Jerome could be in on this. Ideological flexibility went both ways. It could be a set up, he could be leading her straight into a trap. How much could you trust anyone in this business? 'Trust no one', Glinka always said. 'Jesus Christ only had twelve friends and one of them was a double.'

God only knew what the WEU might want, no, could get out of a commissar. She'd just told him she had access to launch codes, dammit.

Jerome lifted the thick Arabian carpets behind the counter and opened the trap door hidden underneath. Darkness beckoned below. He gestured at the ladder for her to go first. Don't do it! her mind screamed at her. He's obviously setting you up! Someone rapped on the front door. Too late. There was no way her tiny pistol would hold off a half dozen men. And the only other way out was the forty-foot sheer drop through the windows.

Four steps down into the dark basement of the old teahouse. She held her breath and waited for a bullet to hit her, old Jerome the superspy to jump on her back, the sharp sting and sudden dizziness of a tranquilizer dart piercing her skin, but it didn't happen.

The basement was dusty, boxes of supplies stacked neatly in rows. Red let out a breath. The trap door closed behind them. “It won't be long before they find this place,” Jerome murmured. “We must move quickly.” He went ahead and beckoned her to follow.

She still didn't trust him.

At the end of the basement the wiry Frenchman pushed against a rack of dirty wine bottles that swiveled away to reveal a narrow and dark passage, its ancient roof arched and crumbling. The passage was much older than the teahouse on top, and buried into the bedrock of the ancient city. A string of old-fashioned light bulbs hung from the ceiling, etching a line of fuzzy orange lights in the darkness. “These are very old tunnels,” Jerome voice sounded muffled in the corridor. “According to legend they used to reach all the way to the Citadel, and the Sultan used them to dispatch his assassins across the city. Now though this one only connects to an old warehouse a few streets away. But that's good enough for now.”

Red could hear him smile, but she didn't feel much like smiling herself. By the time they'd scuffled through the length of the twisting tunnel Red could hear stifled noises coming from behind them. The thought of armed men hurrying down the claustrophobic passage with automatic weapons made her back itch. It took only a few minutes to make it sixty-odd yards of tunnel but it felt like hours. By the time Jerome pushed the door at the end open she was sweating openly and her hands were shaking.

The warehouse was deserted, like Jerome had said. He twisted a lever and a clever pulley mechanism made a solid wooden door rumble down over the opening. He grinned when he turned around. “That should keep them-” The grin faded and he held out two hands. “Careful with that, Yasha.”

Red didn't follow him at first, but then she realized that without thinking about it the gun had ended up in her hand and she was pointing it at the Frenchman. “How did they know where I was, Jerome?” She hated how jittery her voice sounded.

“I'm frankly not sure,” Jerome's voice was thoughtful. “But if I wanted you out of the way I wouldn't have given you a heads-up first. I would have poisoned your tea.”

“Maybe you did.”

“I would have picked a quick poison. So you wouldn't be able to point a gun at me. Besides,” he squinted. “How do I know they don't work for you?”

“You said they were ConEurope. They don't work for my side.”

“I said I thought they were. But nobody tells Jerome what's what. They might be after me. And we're on different sides now?”

“You know what I mean.” But she lowered the gun. “And you might be right. We had better go.”

As if to underscore her words something banged dully against the inside of the wooden barrier. Jerome nodded wordlessly and hurried through aisles of dusty crates. Sunlight spilled in when he unlocked the door and peered out at the street. “No gunmen here – yet,” he said. “Let's go. I'll go left and you...” He glanced back. “On second thought, you choose which way you want to go.”

Red couldn't help smile a little. “I'll go right then.” She hesitated. “Will you be alright?”

“Don't worry about Jerome.” He patted his pocket. “I will contact you when I find out where your plane has gone.” Then he laughed. “And if anybody comes for me, I will tell them you pulled a gun on me and forced you to tell you my escape route.” He draped his kheffiyeh over his head, gave her a mock salute and slipped out into the street and was gone. There was another noise from the back of the warehouse and Red hurried into the street. Sweat caked her shirt to her back, none of it from the heat. She wondered how to keep a cover when nerves are making your hands shake. It was still blazing hot on Cairo's streets even though it felt like more time should have passed. She tried to remember the lessons that had taught her to move fast without attracting attention. Lengthen your stride. Keep your hands in your pockets. Don't look over your shoulder. Keep track of your peripheral vision and try to use windows to see if there's anybody following you. But all windows in the Old Town were covered up, and the winding alleyways and crooked archways made Red feel like she was trapped in a maze. She wondered if ConEurope had those little drones too. Don’t reach for the gun. Stop looking at that merchant. Think of Khorza, think of anything but the trained killers chasing you.

But that was hard to do when hurried footsteps pattered down the cobblestone lane behind her. Red looked around just in time to see a pair of men in desert camo come around the corner. She felt the weight of hostile attention as they pointed at her. Red broke into a run and tried desperately to remember where the extraction point was. Someone behind yelled in German. She took a right at a junction and then went left at another one, but the footsteps were coming closer. Red was running like a madwoman, old stone houses and closed bazaars flashed by, but she knew she wasn't going to make it. There were no stores to slip into, no crowds to get lost in, and the Europeans had a dragnet going.

A shadow appeared in a darkened doorway, she panicked but he already had his hand on her shoulder and pulled her in. Red tried to draw her gun but the bearded man blocked her arm with his body as he wrenched her off the street and only then did she recognize him. Kir Fomin pushed her into the house and simultaneously threw a grenade into the alley. Panicked warnings were cut off by the ear-shattering thud and brilliant flare of the flashbang grenade. Fomin said something to her but her ears were ringing and specks of brilliant white fire danced across her vision. The commando grabbed her arm and dragged her quickly through the darkened house, and it was only after he'd already stuffed her in the back of his getaway car and they were racing to the safehouse on the edge of Cairo that her scrambled brain deciphered what he'd said.

“Leave guns to professionals, comrade commissar.”


Bargain of the century

Ferhad Hewrami | Morocco

The black jet swooped in for landing like a hawk diving for its prey, the sound of its passing strangely muted. Tires shrieked briefly as the angular transport touched down, and then it rolled to a halt on the grit-swept airstrip of El Ouata, squat turbojet engines whipping up a storm of sand as they spooled down inside their matte black stealth casings. Ferhad Hewrami didn’t recognize the plane’s design, but even an amateur would realize it was a blisteringly modern thing, etched in the swooping curves and angular lines of the supersonic stealth age. In comparison his own twin-engined Tupolev looked a relic. Not for the first time Ferhad Hewrami wondered where on Earth his counterpart got her gear, and if perhaps he was better off not knowing.

A bead of sweat ran down his brow. Ferhad Hewrami was nervous. The portly Algerian arms dealer knew he was a man of importance, someone to be reckoned with. He was a merchant of death, a seller of arms to presidents, warlords and princes from Liberia to Puntland and from Libya to the Cape. His wares could make or break revolutions and regimes alike. He’d made deals with men who killed without blinking and massacred without thinking twice. None of them frightened him.

But there were always bigger fish, as the appearance of the stealth jet reminded him. And as he watched the slowly setting sun cast long shadows that very nearly edited the black plane out of his vision entirely, he was eerily reminded that some of those big fish had little bioluminescent angler lamps to lure smaller prey right into their jaws. Flashlights flicked on at the nose of the black plane, flooding the runway in burning magnesium light. Suddenly blind, Hewrani raised a hand to protect his eyes from the brightness. He could hear the whirring sound of a loading ramp clanking down onto the concrete and cringed a little. He felt horribly exposed and vulnerable and wondered not for the first time what he was getting into. For all his wealth Ferhad Hewrani was not a courageous man. It was probably why he’d lasted as long as he had.

“Ferhad!” came a young and female voice. The voice was cheery and her Arabic was heavily accented, though much less so than the last time he’d heard it. Hewrami slowly lifted his hand and blinked quickly, forcing his eyes to adjust to the light. “It’s so great to see you!”

In front of him stood a, well, a girl. She couldn’t be more than a year over thirty. Lazily curling blond hair hung down onto a black leather jacket. Underneath it she wore a One Direction t-shirt that, Hewrani observed, stretched quite tightly across her breasts. He forced his eyes away from her. She was a looker. She was also the most notorious weapons trafficker on the face of the planet. “If you are, Miss Drake, then why do you have men with guns with you?”

Mary-Louise Drake beamed a perfectly innocuous smile at him. “These boys?” she waved at the dozen or so heavily armed men who’d descended the ramp after her and were now fanning out across the deserted landing strip. They wore black body armor and tactical vests strapped with a variety of modern high-powered weaponry, and moved like they meant business. Mercenaries, Ferhad figured. Brazilians or even South Africans, ex-special forces maybe. Men trained to employ spectacular violence by some of the most dangerous agencies in the world. Way above his usual pay scale. “Don’t mind them. They’re just insurance. You know how it is.”

“You mistrust me.” Ferhad put a hand on his chest. “My dear, you break my heart.”

She gave him a sunny smile. “If you don't have my things it'll be something else that's breaking.”

Hewrami shook his head. Risking the wrath of a superpower with enough weapons to vaporize the world several times over made Hewrani cringe and sweat. But he knew that if Drake asked you to do something for her it was unwise to refuse. She was unpredictable. Connected. Scary dangerous. “Believe me, nothing will please me more than to be rid of your things.” He made a quick hand gesture and the Tupolev began to split open, the nose assembly door slowly raising upward to reveal its mechanical innards. “If I'd known what it was you wanted me to move...”

“Well that would have defeated the point of having you move it, right?” Drake looked past him at the people who were exiting Hewrami's Tupolev. “Colonel! Nice to finally meet you in person.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Colonel Irys Khorza said disapprovingly. She still wore her KGB uniform but it had been divested of all signs of rank or significance. Khorza was an imposing woman with the line-straight posture of trained military. Her brown hair was streaked with premature gray. She looked at the black jet. “I see you have one of our aircraft.”

“Don’t I just?” beamed Drake. “Picked it up for cheap in Cambodia. Amazing what a million and a Durban apartment can buy these days. It’s like a yard sale out there!”

Khorza's expression soured even further. “I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm. Can we get this over with please?” Behind her Hewrami's men were already unloading the standard-size freight container from the Tupolev. “There's my end of the bargain, now where's yours?”

Drake waved and one of her bodyguards produced a black briefcase. “We'll unload your Mercedes in a bit. This has keys, credit cards, tickets, a South-African ID, a satellite phone, half a million Swiss francs and another hundred thousand in Krugerrands, as agreed. You can count it if you like.”

“I don't think that's necessary. You have a reputation.” Khorza took the case and looked at the cargo container as it rolled slowly toward Drake's jet. “Aren't you going to check?”

“Me?” Drake shrugged. “No way. I think we both know roughly where she's going. I don't intend to be anywhere near when they take possession, and if you screwed up I'm not going to be on the hook.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Khorza said sourly.

“The please's all mine,” smiled Drake. “Bye Ferhad, bye colonel.” She turned with a flourish and walked a few paces back to her jet, then stopped and called over her shoulder. “Oh, Khorza?”

The colonel looked at her with a wary expression. “Yes?”

“I threw in a thumb drive with the best of the Backstreet Boys as a bonus. Consider it required listening now that you're part of the decadent West!”


Sphinxes

Red | Cairo

“Yes?”

“Yasha?”

“Speaking.”

“Excellent. You managed to get out then.”

“Barely. But yes. How about you?”

“I told you, don't worry about Jerome. Is this line secure?”

“As secure as we can make it. Do you have the info?”

“The plane you're looking for landed at a small airstrip two hundred kilometers west of Aswan, near the Toskha Lakes. It's a tiny place, little more than paved dirt. Weapon dealers, human traffickers and people even less savory use it.”

“I imagine it's the less savory people I'm looking for. How do you know this is the place?”

“Because your plane is still there. The Egyptian military is at the site now. They don't know what they're looking at.”

“Anything aboard?”

“Not according to my source. It's been deserted.”

“Shit.”

“I know it's not what you were hoping to hear, Yasha.”

“Not your fault Jerome. Thanks anyway.”

“My pleasure. Now I must go. They might still be looking for me. I should lay low for a while and not talk to commissars.”

“Probably best. Hey Jerome? I'm sorry I pointed a gun at you.”

“Don't worry about it. Happens to the best of us. Good luck, Yasha.”

“Godspeed, Jerome.”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Booted Vulture »

Interesting stuff. Given the title though, the question remains, is this 'Gang War' actually happening? Or is it just the cover the new world order is putting out for their shennanigians.

And when do the giant robot arrive? ;)
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Siege »

Updated with chapter 2: intro of another main character, and Soviet commando action.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Booted Vulture »

Ha. Everyone loves soviet commandos. Even if they can't seem to do anything right. Nice setting up of atmosphere, Siege. Now I'm wondering whats on the tablet.

eta: The mention of dual rotors on the Hind II rmade me remmeber the random ideas thread. Is this a pic of the hind II?
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Ford Prefect »

So much for 'slow updates' lol

Though it's early days I have no doubt that the two threads shown here are connected somehow, possibly making this gang war potentially completely spectacular.
FEEL THESE GUNS ARCHWIND THESE ARE THE GUNS OF THE FLESHY MESSIAH THE TOOLS OF CREATION AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL ENACT THE LAW OF MAN ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
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Re: [Story] Secret War

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Ain't no stinkin' just first installments 'round here. There's second installments and everythin'.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Arty »

Oh, I'm so okay with this. Very cool to get a glimpse of what the street-level part of CSW is like.
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Booted Vulture »

Siege wrote:Ain't no stinkin' just first installments 'round here. There's second installments and everythin'.
i can't remember the last installment well enough to tell. Did you just update this? Or was that just a jab at my post in the Old Familiars thread?
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Re: [Story] Secret War

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It was just updated :).
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

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Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Booted Vulture »

Just re-read this start to finish and it is very enjoyable. I admire you abillity to create character that feel quite real, or at least no archetypes. Just the names, physical descriptions, the people you choose as protoganonist are very interesting.

And for the new part, the plot as she says thickens.
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Re: [Story] Secret War

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The consultant

Salem | Manhattan

The cucumber-tuna sandwich had been very much enjoyable, and when Salem Lynde exited the tiny Lower East Side deli nobody tried to shoot him. This improved his day immensely.

Tyres screeched. Cars and coaches honked on their ascent toward Williamsburg Bridge. The smells of rubber, exhaust fumes and hot tarmac mixed with that of food from street vendor stalls and the deodorants of the passers-by. It was the smell of summer in Manhattan. Lynde was in his mid-forties, a man of average height with a figure that trended toward portly more than he liked to admit. His burnt orange hair was graying at the temples, prematurely but in a fashion that could at least aspire toward stately, and the heat that lay like a blanket over the city caused him to perspire at even the smallest physical exertion. And the sunburn was even worse.

People of all walks of life crowded the streets and the cacophony of city sounds was disorienting. As often Salem Lynde found himself a bit unnerved by the chaos of it all. For a moment he wondered why he’d settled here in the first place, and the logic chain that instantly sprung from his memory did a lot to reassure him. He forced his feet not to skip over the cracks in the pavement and reminded himself not to count his steps as he navigated hectic Manhattan traffic, sparing an occasional moment every so often to glance over his shoulder to ascertain he wasn’t being followed.

He knew, of course, that it would be much harder for anyone to follow him around if he didn’t have his lunch every day at the same time in the same deli. Repetitive behavior was bad behavior, but making a living in Manhattan was challenging enough for an OCD ex-spy at the best of times, so Salem figured he could be forgiven a few sloppy habits. Besides, he’d reasoned with himself, even if he did mix up his lunchtime customs he couldn’t very well randomize the location of his office, could he? So he soldiered on best he could, and savored not-being-shot every time he stepped out the deli as a confirmation of not just his continued existence, but the definitivity of his career change.

He’d ponder the irony of that thought later.

Right now though he was mostly occupied tracing his steps back from the deli to the six-story building that contained his tiny rented office. Even that brief walk was enough to make him sweat noticeably, enough to make him actually consider undoing the top button on his striped polo. He decided against it, and instead enjoyed the cool air inside. Someone had done a not very good job converting the old tenement building into office space. It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and only kept cool through brute-force air conditioning. When the five AC units mounted to the back of the building worked at full power they rattled the glasses off his coffee table, but at least it was cool in return.

The hallway wasn’t particularly inviting. In fact it looked distinctly shabby for a Manhattan office building. The paint on the walls was faded and flaking. The black and white tiles on the floor looked like they hadn’t been properly cleaned in a few weeks. One of the white industrial lights on the ceiling had given out and not been replaced. Wide and worn wooden stairs wound along an old cage elevator toward the upper floors. The various companies and offices located in the building were printed in black capitals on simple strips of white plastic that could easily be inserted into - and pulled out of - the simple wall-mounted directory. That said something about the transient nature of the building’s occupants: most businesses were here for only a short while. They either moved on to greener pastures, or they went bust. Salem had been in town for just over a year, and already his office had been here longer than most. The only one in the building Salem actually knew to any degree was the lawyer on the third floor. They occasionally did business, and sometimes drank coffee together. She did a lot of pro bono work for women, minorities and the destitute, organizing divorces and restraining orders. Salem had a pension. He usually ended up paying for lunch.

Salem’s office was located at the end of the hallway on the sixth floor. Charitably, that meant you could say it was a corner office. Less charitably, that none of the windows showed anything other than the walls and blank windows of the building across the narrow alley.

A black haired woman with olive skin leaned against the wall in front of his office door. She wore a white shirt and blue pantsuit, and eyed him expectantly. “You Salem Lynde?” she asked as he approached.

He gave her a look, produced a key and opened the office door that said, in frosted lettering:

Salem Lynde
Information Consultant


By way of reply he ushered her into the office. The furnishing was spartan: there was a cupboard with an old coffee machine and some mugs, a water cooler, and a plant. The plant had been a gift. One wall was lined with wire shelves full of books, mostly reference works and legal treatises as well as texts on management theory, sociology and information science. There was a small air conditioning unit, blowing at full tilt, and a paper shredder -- not a simple ticker tape office model, but an expensive secure type that could reduce even cardboard to millimetric confetti in the blink of an eye. “So,” he started and looked over his shoulder at the mystery woman. “What can I do for you, detective.”

The woman raised a surprised eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m with the police?”

He flicked the switch on the coffee machine. It started to gurgle pleasingly. Reassured, he gingerly folded himself into one of four faded brown leather chairs grouped around a glass coffee table with a laptop computer, a stack of newspapers and an empty notepad on it. “You’re wearing a pantsuit,” he started, using his fingers to keep count of what he said. “Pant suit, Manhattan? Middle class. But no heels.” He pointed at her sturdy rubber-heeled shoes. “Those are comfortable loafers. Well worn, though. So no office job and you’re not a city girl -- nobody in banking or insurance wears shoes like that.” His speaking pace accelerated a little. “Then there’s the suit itself. Masculine cut, a little aggressive. And you’re not wearing make-up. So, a male-dominated work environment: you’re trying not to remind your colleagues you’re a woman. And your jacket is tailored to conceal the shoulder rig underneath it. Does a decent job of it too, but not good enough to be federal. It’s also just long enough to fall over your belt, probably so you can do the badge reveal move.” He paused and looked her in the eye. “So, you’re a plain clothes cop. I guessed detective, and that look on your face just now confirms I'm right.”

The woman nodded slowly as she took in what he’d said. “Very observant of you, Mr. Lynde.” She slowly pulled aside the front of her jacket, revealing the golden badge strapped to her belt. “Sierra Call, NYPD Organized Crime Unit.” She sat down opposite her and crossed her knees, her expression neutral. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.”

“I do not. Although, am I to understand though that this visit is off the record? Because we’d both look silly if I ended up charging you for an off-the-books thing.”

Call frowned a little. “You work for the NYPD?”

A small nod. “Very occasionally. I wouldn’t fault you for not knowing, I try to keep a low profile. But I do have a little laminated card that you guys gave me.” He looked at her with sudden interest. “You said your name was Call?”

“Yes.”

“I think I read about you in the papers. Wasn’t there some unfortunate business with your partner?”

Her expression darkened only slightly. “He isn’t my partner anymore. And I’m not here to talk about me, Mr. Lynde. I'm a little fuzzy on your profession. Could you tell me what it is you do for a living?"

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the frosting on the door. "I am a consultant."

"Okay, I got that far. But what do you consult on?"

Salem smiled guardedly. “I provide various services, but my primary expertise is in information security.”

“Meaning... What, exactly?”

He spread his palms. “Meaning that all information is worthless outside of its proper context. To understand the present, you need to know the past. As a detective you must know how easy it is to have the right facts, but draw the wrong conclusions. Or how dangerous it can be if the wrong facts come out at the wrong time. Come to think of it, even the right facts at the wrong time can do more harm than good. To be sure what the right time and the right facts are, you need context. I provide context to my clients. Or deny it, if that’s what they want.”

“I... see? That’s a nice pitch.” Call rubbed her chin. “You practice it?”

“Every once in awhile.”

“Then you know you’re using a lot of words to not tell me anything.”

His smile widened a little. “And you haven’t told me what it is you wanted from me either.” He stood up. “Coffee?”

“Two sugars, no milk.”

Salem filled two ceramic mugs with steaming hot coffee and dropped two cubes of sugar and a spoon in one. He handed that one to the detective, then sat back down and gave her an expectant look. “So.”

“So. Let’s get to the point.” Call reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and produced a photograph that she put on the table. A push sent it sliding across the glass toward Salem. “Do you know who this is?”

Salem bent forward to look at the photo but didn’t pick it up. It showed a middle-aged black man, captured on film from some distance, probably with a telephoto lens. His hair was cropped close to his head in military fashion, but he was dressed in a sharp suit and designer sunglasses. A confident smirk hung around his lips. He was surrounded by at least three broad-shouldered men who looked like bodyguards or hired muscle. He could be a mercenary or a CEO or a drug dealer. He wasn’t either of those things. “That is Mr. Cecil Hawks.”

The detective nodded in agreement. “You know him then?”

“He is a client.”

“You work for him.” It wasn’t a question.

But Salem shook his head. “I do not.”

Call raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“My position does not fit that description.” He took a sip of his coffee. It was hot and strong and richly flavoured. “He is not my boss. He is a client. I’m a consultant; I work with him, not for him.”

The detective leaned ever so slightly forward, a measuring look in her eyes. She held her mug cupped in two hands. “And yet you said you worked for the police.”

“Ah, but Mr. Hawks didn’t give me a little laminated card.” Salem smiled again, this time more broadly. He enjoyed the back-and-forth.

Call snorted, clearly unimpressed. “Are you aware that Mr. Hawks is a major figure in organized crime?”

“I am aware that there are accusations to that effect.” Salem kept his voice carefully neutral. He had a good idea now of where this was going. “I am also aware that none of those accusations have been proven.”

“You are of course correct.” The detective’s voice took on a sharp and accusatory tone now. “Because Mr. Hawks has proven himself to be a very difficult man to keep tabs on. He switches cars. He doesn’t use text messages. He encrypts his e-mail. He never has a conversation in a public venue -- in fact, he barely even shows his face on the street-”

“Considering the sorry state of New York's streets that's hardly incriminatory,” Salem injected. “No offense.”

The detective ignored him. “So I can’t help thinking you might have something to do with how difficult our investigation into Mr. Hawks has become. One those ‘various services’ you offer wouldn’t happen to be counter-surveillance, would it?”

“In point of fact,” Salem replied and serenely folded his hands in his lap. “It would.”

“I see.” Sierra Call’s voice left no doubt that this wasn’t a surprise to her. “So you protect Mr. Hawks from police surveillance?”

“Detective, my clients pay a premium for their privacy, because it's worth a premium in today's world. Business rivals, the police, wives or husbands, the Soviets, the neighbors... It doesn't matter who's trying to listen in. Counter-surveillance tends to cover all bases.”

“But has Mr. Hawks asked you to protect him from police surveillance?” Call insisted.

“I cannot comment on the nature of my work for any specific client. That information falls within the purview of professional confidentiality.” A slight frown creased Salem’s brow. “I’m not sure, detective... What is it that you want from me?”

“Peace on earth,” Call replied instantly and let out a humorless chuckle. “But that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. So right now, I’ll settle for any information you can give me about your ‘client’.”

Salem took a swig from his mug, scalding his mouth in the process. He made a face and put the mug down. “So what you’re saying is, you’re on a fishing expedition.”

“Not quite. Information is your ‘jam’, right? Well then,” Call shifted in her seat. “Right now, I’m informing you that your client is the subject of an NYPD investigation and will probably end up on the wrong end of a RICO charge sooner or later. I’m giving you a chance to make my job easier, so maybe you won’t end up in jail with him.”

Salem creased his brow. “Much as I sympathize with your desire to do your job, detective, especially in these difficult times, my job is to guarantee the privacy of my clients. It’s not to make your life easier. Much as you might dislike that, it’s not illegal.”

“It will be when I charge you as an accessory.” Call took another sip from her coffee and looked him in the eyes with a stone certain expression. “We have strong circumstantial evidence that Mr. Hawks was a ranking member of Nicola Auger’s inner circle. You know who Auger was, right? Well, his empire fell apart the day he died. All his lieutenants tried to grab a slice of the pie. They’re the ones fighting and killing in the streets, and Hawks is one of them.”

“You can’t prove that.”

“Not yet.” She pointed to the photo. “But that picture? It was taken at Auger’s cremation in Oyster Bay. Every kingpin and don on the east coast was there. So was your ‘client’. It doesn’t matter how clever he is, Mr. Lynde. If his enemies don’t get him then the NYPD will. And when we do, I will come after you too. If Hawks goes down, you're on the hook for obstruction of justice. And then I will get you. Consultant or no, you are not a lawyer. You are not covered by legal confidentiality.”

“I’m not sure you quite understand my position, detective. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t help you.”

“Yes you could. You just choose not to.”

“No. No, it’s not that. My hands are tied. Are you familiar with the Gould-Maccoby Provision? The RAMPART Laws?”

Call frowned. “I’ve heard of it. Relief of American Patriots Against... Something or other. Some Washington backronym law to do with... Contractors overseas, I think. What’s that got to do with the price of coffee?”

Salem made a sweeping gesture to indicate his office. “Much as this may look like the office of your stereotypical run-down private eye, detective, that's not what I am. I am a security contractor licensed by the State Department. As a client Mr. Hawks is protected by federal rule of evidence laws. If I break those laws I will lose my license and my national security clearance. Even assuming I knew of any wrongdoing and did not care about my livelihood... Well, whatever I told you would be fruit of the poisoned tree. You couldn’t use it as evidence of anything in a trial.”

The detective’s frown deepened. “I’m pretty sure that law was meant to protect military contractors working for foreign governments from domestic lawsuits. In other words, legitimate businesses. Not common criminals.”

Salem shrugged. “Criminals, businesses... These are the United States, detective. In my experience they are often the same thing. And the Gould-Maccoby Provision is part of the RAMPART national security package. My services are contracted by Ambit Unlimited, a company of which Mr. Hawks is the owner, and the law applies to me just as it does to my colleagues working for the DoD. I’d have to see a subpoena before I could divulge any of the specifics of my work for Mr. Hawks and his company to you.”

“You’ve thought this through then.”

“It's my business to.” Another shrug. “I'm sorry. But if the law is overbroad that’s hardly my fault, detective. If you do not approve of blanket military security legislation then I suggest you let Senator Gould know by voting with your ballot. He is up for re-election in a few days.”

Detective Call nodded slowly as she took that in. Then she put the mug down and stood up. “I guess that’s all there really is to talk about, then.”

“Apparently.”

“You’re not going to help.”

“I didn’t say that. I do sympathize with the NYPD.” Salem shook his head. “But my hands are tied with regards to Mr. Hawks.”

Call hooked a stray strand of black hair behind her ear in an effort to hide a flash of irritation. She didn't quite succeed. “Tomahto, Tomayto.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not done though, Mr. Lynde. I suspect we’ll run into each other again.”

“It’s entirely possible.”

“As long as you know it.” The detective moved to the doorway, then turned around and leaned against the doorpost. “Oh. One more thing. I checked you out before I came here. That is to say, I ran your name through every database I could. Not much luck, not even in our own records - you weren’t kidding when you said you kept a low profile. I got a single hit on an obscure government directory, but the result was classified. I put in a request for release. Less than an hour later the hit disappears. And shortly after that I get a call from some woman who told me to back off and mind my own damn business. Didn't even say her name or what agency she was with. But our techs traced that call to Langley. Isn't that where the CIA is?”

Salem’s expression went very still and pensive. “It was when last I checked.”

“So what is it that you do for the Agency, Mr. Lynde?” She held up a hand. “No, wait. I bet you can’t talk about that, either.”

“I’m not-” Salem caught himself as something occurred to him. “Hold on for just a second. They wouldn’t be calling you. They would be calling your superior. Or maybe the Chief of Detectives. And it'd be them telling you to back off... But here you are anyway.” A genuine smile split his face. “You’re off the chain, detective! Very gutsy. I’m impressed – that confirms what the papers said about you!”

Call made an ugly face. “If I’m supposed to be afraid you’ll carry the tale to your friends in the Department...”

Salem raised his hands. “Oh no, nothing of the sort detective. I think you’ll find that one way or the other I’m not prone to spilling the beans. My lips are sealed. Hope to... Well, cross my heart.” And he actually drew a little X over his chest.

“Yeah. Well.” Call crossed her arms, not sure what to make of that. “Thanks, I guess. But that doesn’t get you off the hook. I’m still gonna go after Hawks.” Fire returned to her eyes. “And I still wanna know what you are up to, and if I get anything on you no amount of unspilt beans will save your hide from me.”

“Believe me, detective; I wouldn’t have it any other way.”


Sphinxes

Red | Cairo

Cairo. Jewel of the Nile. The city of a thousand minarets, the largest city in Africa and the Arab world. Hot, polluted and choked with traffic; home to 7 million people, ancient monuments and the headquarters of the multinational corporations. Center of Nasserism, the leftist Arab nationalist political ideology, and just as equally that of Shehadism, the authoritarian pan-Arabist ideology that challenged it. Hotspot for tourism, NGOs and high-tech nanocarbon industries that competed directly with Istanbul and LA. And for international intrigue, because as Cairo straddled the river that was Egypt’s lifeblood, so did Egypt itself straddle the ancient geopolitical fault lines dividing Africa and the Middle East.

Red navigated the small lanes of the Old City with the intuitive ease of half-remembered familiarity. The oldest neighborhoods near the city’s eastern bank had grown haphazardly over the centuries, and were dominated by crowded tenements, medieval mansions and palaces, and Islamic architecture. Weird, homophonic music echoed from shadowy dens and bazaars along crooked cobblestone alleys. Veiled women and men with grooved, leathery faces watched her pass. She felt the old jittery butterflies in her stomach. Red hurried past and tried not to hurry.

“This is truly unfortunate,” Ihor Glinka had said when she called into Moscow Center with the news of the double disappearance. “Truly unfortunate indeed.” His voice had been as infuriatingly balmy as it ever was. Glinka didn't seem possessed of emotion, or indeed much of any human quality. The bony, pensive man didn’t have an official title, because he didn’t need one. Everyone knew he was Kiralova’s captain of witch-hunters, the commissar-in-chief. “I’m afraid we’ll really have to find another way to get hold off the wayward colonel.”

And for ‘get hold off’, in Glinka’s dictionary read ‘bring back by any means necessary’.

The midday sun had reached its highest point, and the alleyways and thoroughfares of Old Town were almost deserted, Cairo's inhabitants wisely yielding the streets to the scorching heat. From their minarets the muezzin recited the call to prayer. Hayya 'ala s-salah; Hayya 'ala 'l-falah; Allāhu akbar. Come to prayer. Come to success. God is greater. Alien words in an alien language. Despite the torturous heat Red drew the high-collared trench coat a little tighter around her. The damned thing was uncomfortably hot and she felt deeply uneasy in the expensive Western couture, but there were only so many ways to conceal a weapon. The pistol, smuggled into Egypt in a diplomatic carrier bag, was a cold steel presence inside her left pocket, the only thing cool in this sunlit hell. The other pocket contained only an electronic 'panic button'. Damn the Middle East. She knew she'd never feel comfortable here.

Red turned a corner and risked a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure she wasn't followed. Somewhere in the maze ahead she knew the banks of the Nile were waiting.

“Fortunately for us, young lieutenant Sidorov stabilized long enough to give us an inkling of how our delinquent colonel managed to disappear so completely,” Glinka reported in his usual unworried style. The wan chief inquisitor glossed over the horror of the cortical yoke, or maybe it simply didn’t bother him. “He has been telling us many interesting things, chief amongst which that the colonel conducted regular black flights out of Montenegro.”

Red raised a quizzical eyebrow. Relations between Warsaw Pact and the self-contained Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were strained at the best of times. The KGB wasn't officially allowed in the country, let alone to fly black ops out of Montenegro. “The Yugoslavians knew about this?”

“Not officially of course. I, or rather, the External Ministry has requested clarification from Belgrade, but so far one hasn't been forthcoming.” They both knew what that implied. Khorza had made some kind of deal with a big name, and now that the cat was out of the bag the SFRY was in ass-covering mode. “What convinces me this is pertinent however is that less than an hour after we notified the Yugoslavian president the Romanian government informed the Red Room that their 91st Airlift Flotilla is missing an Ilyushin airlifter.”

Red was left momentarily speechless. “... a military transport?”

“It was supposed to fly from Bucharest to Berlin,” Glinka mused serenely. “Suffice it to say it never made it to its destination, and someone kept the Romanians from reporting this fact until it no longer mattered. This is no coincidence.”

“Christ in his heaven, Khorza is running circles around us.” A terrible realization dawned on her. “Unless...”

Glinka leaned almost imperceptibly toward the camera, his eyes suddenly piercing. “Yes?”

Foreign governments? The air force? This was too complex a scheme for a single KGB colonel to pull off with any hope of success. “Unless she's not acting alone.”

The old witch-hunter nodded the way an old professor might at a particularly bright student. “I have come to suspect the same thing. It may turn out the Warsaw Pact is not yet as clean as we thought. Our enemies are still out there, and they are working against us.”

The sounds of the Nile were drawing closer. The cries of gulls and the murmur of onrushing water lured her onward. Red turned left, cutting through a dark alley and underneath an ancient medieval archway. Her footsteps quickened against the cracked flagstone passage. Suddenly the alleyway widened, the ancient limestone architecture giving way as the Old City labyrinth opened up. A dilapidated teahouse and its tiny terrace clung to a sudden hillside slope, offering a breathtaking view of the Nile, still a few kilometers off in the distance. On the other bank, Mokattam Hill and the Citadel of Saladin rose high above the city, bathed in blistering sunlight. Red took a moment to get her bearings. This was the place. She pushed the door open and went inside.

It wasn't a guess, Glinka explained: it was mathematics, a process of elimination. Regions of heavily monitored airspace Khorza's aircraft had to have avoided; the amount of fuel the Ilyushin could carry before it ran out; patrol routes of military flights that had reported nothing unusual; the lack of foreign chatter indicating the colonel had not defected to the West. Each piece of data was a constraint, and the path of the Khorza's ghost flight had to obey every one of them, so the set of possibilities was paired down with every new source of data. The positions of NATO warships and their exclusion zones, all to be avoided. A cruiser, the Nikolaev, that had briefly picked up electrostatic discharge in a patch of sky over the Ionian Sea that should have been empty.

“Plasma stealth?”

“Rudimentary, but functional.”

Finally, a frontal aviation station in Benghazi that had reported tracking sensor ghosts on a broadly similar heading.

Egypt.

The blinds were closed, and the interior of the tea house was dark. It was still early; customers would come later, when the worst of the heat died down. Old chairs were grouped around a handful of ramshackle wooden tables. A water feature murmured in its alcove. Red washed her hands in the traditional manner and closed the door, sending door chimes tingling. The owner looked up from the ancient wooden bar. Behind him an impressive filigreed water boiler stood against the bare bricked wall. He was a wiry man in his fifties with tanned skin so dark he could easily pass for an Arab even though he wasn't. “As-Salāmu Alaykum,” he greeted her with a nod. He was polishing a glass with a white towel. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Tea please,” she murmured in rudimentary Arabic, and sat down in a place where she could see both the door and the staircase winding up toward the upper floor behind the bar.

The barman nodded, deftly manipulated the massive water boiler and poured a cup of hot water. He added mint leaves, sugar and a tiny silver spoon and brought it to her table. “Tourist?” he asked her in accented English.

“Something along those lines,” Red replied in sudden French. “How's Paris, Jerome?”

The barman went absolutely still, and his dark eyes glittered in their sockets as he looked at her. Then he silently moved to the door and locked it. He checked the blinds and curtains, poured himself a cup of tea, and finally sat down opposite her. Then he shook his head. “I thought it might be you, but I wasn’t certain. You look a lot different, Jasha.”

“It’s been a long time since Dubai, Jerome. Six years?”

He sighed. “Seven.”

She gave him a lopsided smile. “Back when the world was a lot simpler.”

He smiled back tiredly but genuinely. “Your world perhaps.”

Ihor Glinka rubbed his chin. It was the most human gesture Red had ever seen him make. “Alexei was kind enough to shine his light onto our problem.” He meant Alexei Silayev, the feared Director of the KGB. “He swears blind he has no idea what Khorza is up to. I am inclined to trust him.” Red decided she didn't want to know what Ihor Glinka had done to be convinced of that loyalty. “The colonel did not land at any significant airports in the Middle East, and the plane didn't have fuel to make it any farther. It seems eminently reasonable that she touched down somewhere in Egypt.”

“That is rather a large area to search. I don't suppose our satellites have seen anything interesting?”

“Nothing so far. But with MIR gone... General Ligachev has retasked most orbital surveillance to patch critical holes. Satellite coverage of Africa is spotty at best.”

“We could lean on the Egyptians,” Red argued, but she already knew the old Polish ghost wouldn’t go for it.

“I'm afraid that would be rather more public than is acceptable right now, my dear. We'll have to do this the old-fashioned way. He fixed her with a careful stare. “You have contacts in Egypt, do you not?”

Red smirked. For just this once she'd seen the commissar coming from a mile away. “I'll talk to him.”

Jerome Lefèvre was not as old as he appeared at first glance. His tanned face was grooved, his back and legs were bent like he was standing against a storm and his olive complexion had darkened through decades spent in Sahara sunshine, but now that he sat his back straightened and his expression was intelligent and full of wry humor. He could be fifty years old, but just as easily sixty – or forty.

Jerome wasn’t a friend, not exactly, but he also wasn’t an enemy. That put him well ahead of most people in Red's world. The wiry, white-haired Frenchman excelled at the little social games of international intelligence. He traded favors and information back and forth between the people in his network, making sure he came out ahead every time. Over the course of his career he had made more than a few deals with the Soviets, and seven years ago he'd done a young GRU officer a big favor in Dubai. In fact, without the Frenchman's help it was more than likely Captain Jaslenika Krasnya would've ended up in the hands of either the CIA or a Kurdish warlord called Zengo Loran. Less than a week later she'd returned the favor by tipping him about the Mukhabarat snatch team poised to raid his DGSE safehouse.

They'd both survived Dubai by the skin of their teeth, and come away with a newfound appreciation for what the Frenchman liked to call 'ideological flexibility'. It wasn’t that he was incognizant of the political realities of the Cold War so much as that he chose to substitute those realities with his own brand of practicality – much to the outrage of his superiors. “Paris shoved me off to this dead-end post. And Moscow made you a commissar!” Jerome chuckled in his tea. “Looks like I got the better deal after all.”

“I think you did. This place doesn't look so bad.” She looked around the ancient interior of the Islamic teahouse “Although it could do with a little bit of paint.”

“Ah, I have asked for the funds many times, but the Deuxième Bureau are penny-pinchers and nobody cares for poor Jerome now. I am an outcast among lepers,” he grinned and spread his hands in fake humbleness. “A problem I think you do not have. You get to convict on suspicion and take justice into your own hands!”

“It's not all it's cracked up to be,” she sighed. “Not after the first round of executions, anyway.”

“We know very little about the Commissariat, you know. Little that's not rumor or speculation, anyway. Brussels says you have carte blanche from the Kremlin- from Kiralova herself. That you can do anything, go anywhere. And indeed, here you are.” He gave her an intrigued look. “So, tell me. Is that true? How far down does the rabbit hole go?”

“I’ve been informed,” Red responded a little tightly, “that if the hatchet comes down I have release authority for tactical nukes up to 15 kilotons.”

Merde.” Jerome stared at her, his expression a mixture of awe and alarm. “That must have been fun to find out.”

“I threw up when they told me.” She knew he was fishing and that she might be telling him things that might not strictly be sanctioned, but then again she did want his help, and frankly it didn't really bother her if French intelligence knew she could nuke them off the face of the Earth. She also doubted any of this information would ever reach Paris unless Jerome was given a reason to supply it. She didn't intend to give him that reason.

It was almost as if the Frenchman could read her thoughts. “Power,” he said with a smile and a theatrical swirl of his tea, “is the most overrated piece of shit thing on planet Earth.”

Red snorted and raised her tea. “I'll toast to that.”

They clinked their glasses together and drank the powerfully flavored tea in silence. When they finished Jerome got up for a refill. “So tell me,” he called from the water boiler. “Why is a Commissar of Militsiya 1st Rank of the great and bountiful Soviet Empire visiting a humble servant of the Fifth Republic in a hole like this?”

She sighed. “Information.”

He laughed and presented her a new cup of tea. “What else, hey?”

What else indeed. “We are missing an aircraft.”

Jerome's expression grew serious. “Truly? What kind of aircraft? I heard of no defections.”

“This wasn't a defection. It wasn't a jet fighter either. The Romanians are missing an Ilyushin 107 from the 91st Flotilla. We have reason to believe it must have landed in Egypt somewhere.” She let out a breath. Time to put the cards on the table. “It should have passed through Egyptian airspace sometime between 96 and 88 hours ago. We were hoping that your... government connections might lead us to our lost property.”

“No, no.” His eyes twinkled. “This is not about a plane.” He pointed a finger at her. “You are too important now to bother with cargo planes. If it was just a plane, you Soviets would simply have your robots build another one. No. Someone important must be aboard. Or something.”

Red sighed. “Both, actually.” She should have known it would be impossible to pull anything past Jerome. He presented a humble facade, but even the East Germans in Dubai had called him the French Devil. The STASI station chief had joked that whenever one of their safe houses was rolled up, if you listened closely you could hear La Marseillaise play. In this occupation you didn't get to be as old as Jerome without a finely honed set of skills. “Aboard the plane is some stolen property we would very much like to be returned.”

“Stolen property,” Jerome nodded. That was apparently something the Frenchman could accept. “Hot?”

“Very.”

“Nuke? Because I remember when the British lost several a few years back. What a headache that was.”

Red shook her head. “Not a nuke.”

“Worse?”

“Maybe.”

“Oh la la,” Jerome tut-tutted. “And I assume I would not be acting against the wellbeing of our liberal and magnanimous Union by assisting you in this matter?”

“I wouldn't be here if I thought you were in on this, Jerome.” Which wasn't strictly true, but if he was this was the quickest way to find out. “As far as we know this is a strictly internal matter. No-one needs to hear of this.”

“Hmm,” the old Frenchman nodded slowly. “Nobody in Paris cares about poor Jerome, so poor Jerome cares little for them. But you know how it is with us capitalist pigdogs...” He pursed his lips. “I am close to retirement, and I would like it to be somewhere nice and warm. Not a hole in a les banlieues. What would this information be worth?”

She impassively reached into her waistcoat and put a bog-standard USB drive on the polished wooden table. “A hundred thousand rubles in an untraceable Caymans account. And my contact details.” She smiled softly. “I'll owe you a favor.”

He let out a brief bark of laughter. “A favor of the commissariat, that'll be the day.” Jerome nodded and took the drive. “Very well. I have a friend who does traffic control for Cairo Suborbital. He owes me for all the drink I bought him. If there are any black flights, he knows about them. I will-” He stopped mid-sentence, frowned and reached in his pocket. Then he withdrew a buzzing phone and looked at it. His frown deepened. “Uh-oh.”

Red raised a worried eyebrow. “Uh-oh? I don’t like uh-oh. Uh-oh’s no good.”

He turned the screen around. From an aerial perspective it showed white-skinned men in sand-colored outfits. They moved in a military fashion through the shadows down suddenly deserted alleyways. They wore reflective sunglasses and plastic earpieces, and clutched tiny Austrian submachineguns. “We appear to have visitors.”

Something knotted in her stomach. “Who are those guys?”

“I recognize some of them,” Jerome murmured. “They work security at the big ConEurope tower downtown – but they never walk the grounds.”

A cold chill crept down Red's spine. “WEU hitters?”

“Perhaps. I thought they might be corporate counterintel. Now, I'm not so sure.” He stood up and checked the locks on the door. “I don't think they are here for tea.”

Red stared at the footage but in her mind she was already measuring the distance between the table and the back windows. She also realized it was a long way down from those windows to the streets below the precipice. The teahouse suddenly felt like a trap. “How are you getting this feed?” It didn't look orbital. It was high up, but not that high up.

“Surveillance heli-drone. Tiny. Solar-powered. It analyzes crowd behavior – something to do with fluid dynamics. Gives me a heads-up if something looks odd.” As if on cue the tiny screen abruptly went blank with static. “Jammers. These people are serious.” Jerome looked at her, a frown on his face. “They are most likely not here for me.”

Red flashed back to poor lieutenant Sidorov, twitching and flailing as the suicide pill tried to cook his frontal lobes. She wondered what Glinka had done to his mind after that. That's not going to be me. She resisted the urge to reach for the hidden gun and rose from the table. “I had better go. What way out?”

Jerome beckoned her to follow him behind the counter and her mind was racing. She'd come into Egypt under deep cover, and nobody had followed her through the Old City. She was positive about that. If these guys were after her... How had they found her?

Had Jerome perhaps tipped them off?

Could she actually trust him?

She used to, but that was six – no, seven – years ago. A lot had changed in the meantime, in Russia and abroad, and not much of that change was positive. She'd seen plenty of it first hand. Paranoia roared through her head like emergency sirens. Jerome could be in on this. Ideological flexibility went both ways. It could be a set up, he could be leading her straight into a trap. How much could you trust anyone in this business? 'Trust no one', Glinka always said. 'Jesus Christ only had twelve friends and one of them was a double.'

God only knew what the WEU might want, no, could get out of a commissar. She'd just told him she had access to launch codes, dammit.

Jerome lifted the thick Arabian carpets behind the counter and opened the trap door hidden underneath. Darkness beckoned below. He gestured at the ladder for her to go first. Don't do it! her mind screamed at her. He's obviously setting you up! Someone rapped on the front door. Too late. There was no way her tiny pistol would hold off a half dozen men. And the only other way out was the forty-foot sheer drop through the windows.

Four steps down into the dark basement of the old teahouse. She held her breath and waited for a bullet to hit her, old Jerome the superspy to jump on her back, the sharp sting and sudden dizziness of a tranquilizer dart piercing her skin, but it didn't happen.

The basement was dusty, boxes of supplies stacked neatly in rows. Red let out a breath. The trap door closed behind them. “It won't be long before they find this place,” Jerome murmured. “We must move quickly.” He went ahead and beckoned her to follow.

She still didn't trust him.

At the end of the basement the wiry Frenchman pushed against a rack of dirty wine bottles that swiveled away to reveal a narrow and dark passage, its ancient roof arched and crumbling. The passage was much older than the teahouse on top, and buried into the bedrock of the ancient city. A string of old-fashioned light bulbs hung from the ceiling, etching a line of fuzzy orange lights in the darkness. “These are very old tunnels,” Jerome voice sounded muffled in the corridor. “According to legend they used to reach all the way to the Citadel, and the Sultan used them to dispatch his assassins across the city. Now though this one only connects to an old warehouse a few streets away. But that's good enough for now.”

Red could hear him smile, but she didn't feel much like smiling herself. By the time they'd scuffled through the length of the twisting tunnel Red could hear stifled noises coming from behind them. The thought of armed men hurrying down the claustrophobic passage with automatic weapons made her back itch. It took only a few minutes to make it sixty-odd yards of tunnel but it felt like hours. By the time Jerome pushed the door at the end open she was sweating openly and her hands were shaking.

The warehouse was deserted, like Jerome had said. He twisted a lever and a clever pulley mechanism made a solid wooden door rumble down over the opening. He grinned when he turned around. “That should keep them-” The grin faded and he held out two hands. “Careful with that, Yasha.”

Red didn't follow him at first, but then she realized that without thinking about it the gun had ended up in her hand and she was pointing it at the Frenchman. “How did they know where I was, Jerome?” She hated how jittery her voice sounded.

“I'm frankly not sure,” Jerome's voice was thoughtful. “But if I wanted you out of the way I wouldn't have given you a heads-up first. I would have poisoned your tea.”

“Maybe you did.”

“I would have picked a quick poison. So you wouldn't be able to point a gun at me. Besides,” he squinted. “How do I know they don't work for you?”

“You said they were ConEurope. They don't work for my side.”

“I said I thought they were. But nobody tells Jerome what's what. They might be after me. And we're on different sides now?”

“You know what I mean.” But she lowered the gun. “And you might be right. We had better go.”

As if to underscore her words something banged dully against the inside of the wooden barrier. Jerome nodded wordlessly and hurried through aisles of dusty crates. Sunlight spilled in when he unlocked the door and peered out at the street. “No gunmen here – yet,” he said. “Let's go. I'll go left and you...” He glanced back. “On second thought, you choose which way you want to go.”

Red couldn't help smile a little. “I'll go right then.” She hesitated. “Will you be alright?”

“Don't worry about Jerome.” He patted his pocket. “I will contact you when I find out where your plane has gone.” Then he laughed. “And if anybody comes for me, I will tell them you pulled a gun on me and forced you to tell you my escape route.” He draped his kheffiyeh over his head, gave her a mock salute and slipped out into the street and was gone. There was another noise from the back of the warehouse and Red hurried into the street. Sweat caked her shirt to her back, none of it from the heat. She wondered how to keep a cover when nerves are making your hands shake. It was still blazing hot on Cairo's streets even though it felt like more time should have passed. She tried to remember the lessons that had taught her to move fast without attracting attention. Lengthen your stride. Keep your hands in your pockets. Don't look over your shoulder. Keep track of your peripheral vision and try to use windows to see if there's anybody following you. But all windows in the Old Town were covered up, and the winding alleyways and crooked archways made Red feel like she was trapped in a maze. She wondered if ConEurope had those little drones too. Don’t reach for the gun. Stop looking at that merchant. Think of Khorza, think of anything but the trained killers chasing you.

But that was hard to do when hurried footsteps pattered down the cobblestone lane behind her. Red looked around just in time to see a pair of men in desert camo come around the corner. She felt the weight of hostile attention as they pointed at her. Red broke into a run and tried desperately to remember where the extraction point was. Someone behind yelled in German. She took a right at a junction and then went left at another one, but the footsteps were coming closer. Red was running like a madwoman, old stone houses and closed bazaars flashed by, but she knew she wasn't going to make it. There were no stores to slip into, no crowds to get lost in, and the Europeans had a dragnet going.

A shadow appeared in a darkened doorway, she panicked but he already had his hand on her shoulder and pulled her in. Red tried to draw her gun but the bearded man blocked her arm with his body as he wrenched her off the street and only then did she recognize him. Kir Fomin pushed her into the house and simultaneously threw a grenade into the alley. Panicked warnings were cut off by the ear-shattering thud and brilliant flare of the flashbang grenade. Fomin said something to her but her ears were ringing and specks of brilliant white fire danced across her vision. The commando grabbed her arm and dragged her quickly through the darkened house, and it was only after he'd already stuffed her in the back of his getaway car and they were racing to the safehouse on the edge of Cairo that her scrambled brain deciphered what he'd said.

“Leave guns to professionals, comrade commissar.”


Bargain of the century

Ferhad Hewrami | Morocco

The black jet swooped in for landing like a hawk diving for its prey, the sound of its passing strangely muted. Tires shrieked briefly as the angular transport touched down, and then it rolled to a halt on the grit-swept airstrip of El Ouata, squat turbojet engines whipping up a storm of sand as they spooled down inside their matte black stealth casings. Ferhad Hewrami didn’t recognize the plane’s design, but even an amateur would realize it was a blisteringly modern thing, etched in the swooping curves and angular lines of the supersonic stealth age. In comparison his own twin-engined Tupolev looked a relic. Not for the first time Ferhad Hewrami wondered where on Earth his counterpart got her gear, and if perhaps he was better off not knowing.

A bead of sweat ran down his brow. Ferhad Hewrami was nervous. The portly Algerian arms dealer knew he was a man of importance, someone to be reckoned with. He was a merchant of death, a seller of arms to presidents, warlords and princes from Liberia to Puntland and from Libya to the Cape. His wares could make or break revolutions and regimes alike. He’d made deals with men who killed without blinking and massacred without thinking twice. None of them frightened him.

But there were always bigger fish, as the appearance of the stealth jet reminded him. And as he watched the slowly setting sun cast long shadows that very nearly edited the black plane out of his vision entirely, he was eerily reminded that some of those big fish had little bioluminescent angler lamps to lure smaller prey right into their jaws. Flashlights flicked on at the nose of the black plane, flooding the runway in burning magnesium light. Suddenly blind, Hewrani raised a hand to protect his eyes from the brightness. He could hear the whirring sound of a loading ramp clanking down onto the concrete and cringed a little. He felt horribly exposed and vulnerable and wondered not for the first time what he was getting into. For all his wealth Ferhad Hewrani was not a courageous man. It was probably why he’d lasted as long as he had.

“Ferhad!” came a young and female voice. The voice was cheery and her Arabic was heavily accented, though much less so than the last time he’d heard it. Hewrami slowly lifted his hand and blinked quickly, forcing his eyes to adjust to the light. “It’s so great to see you!”

In front of him stood a, well, a girl. She couldn’t be more than a year over thirty. Lazily curling blond hair hung down onto a black leather jacket. Underneath it she wore a One Direction t-shirt that, Hewrani observed, stretched quite tightly across her breasts. He forced his eyes away from her. She was a looker. She was also the most notorious weapons trafficker on the face of the planet. “If you are, Miss Drake, then why do you have men with guns with you?”

Mary-Louise Drake beamed a perfectly innocuous smile at him. “These boys?” she waved at the dozen or so heavily armed men who’d descended the ramp after her and were now fanning out across the deserted landing strip. They wore black body armor and tactical vests strapped with a variety of modern high-powered weaponry, and moved like they meant business. Mercenaries, Ferhad figured. Brazilians or even South Africans, ex-special forces maybe. Men trained to employ spectacular violence by some of the most dangerous agencies in the world. Way above his usual pay scale. “Don’t mind them. They’re just insurance. You know how it is.”

“You mistrust me.” Ferhad put a hand on his chest. “My dear, you break my heart.”

She gave him a sunny smile. “If you don't have my things it'll be something else that's breaking.”

Hewrami shook his head. Risking the wrath of a superpower with enough weapons to vaporize the world several times over made Hewrani cringe and sweat. But he knew that if Drake asked you to do something for her it was unwise to refuse. She was unpredictable. Connected. Scary dangerous. “Believe me, nothing will please me more than to be rid of your things.” He made a quick hand gesture and the Tupolev began to split open, the nose assembly door slowly raising upward to reveal its mechanical innards. “If I'd known what it was you wanted me to move...”

“Well that would have defeated the point of having you move it, right?” Drake looked past him at the people who were exiting Hewrami's Tupolev. “Colonel! Nice to finally meet you in person.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Colonel Irys Khorza said disapprovingly. She still wore her KGB uniform but it had been divested of all signs of rank or significance. Khorza was an imposing woman with the line-straight posture of trained military. Her brown hair was streaked with premature gray. She looked at the black jet. “I see you have one of our aircraft.”

“Don’t I just?” beamed Drake. “Picked it up for cheap in Cambodia. Amazing what a million and a Durban apartment can buy these days. It’s like a yard sale out there!”

Khorza's expression soured even further. “I'm afraid I don't share your enthusiasm. Can we get this over with please?” Behind her Hewrami's men were already unloading the standard-size freight container from the Tupolev. “There's my end of the bargain, now where's yours?”

Drake waved and one of her bodyguards produced a black briefcase. “We'll unload your Mercedes in a bit. This has keys, credit cards, tickets, a South-African ID, a satellite phone, half a million Swiss francs and another hundred thousand in Krugerrands, as agreed. You can count it if you like.”

“I don't think that's necessary. You have a reputation.” Khorza took the case and looked at the cargo container as it rolled slowly toward Drake's jet. “Aren't you going to check?”

“Me?” Drake shrugged. “No way. I think we both know roughly where she's going. I don't intend to be anywhere near when they take possession, and if you screwed up I'm not going to be on the hook.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” Khorza said sourly.

“The please's all mine,” smiled Drake. “Bye Ferhad, bye colonel.” She turned with a flourish and walked a few paces back to her jet, then stopped and called over her shoulder. “Oh, Khorza?”

The colonel looked at her with a wary expression. “Yes?”

“I threw in a thumb drive with the best of the Backstreet Boys as a bonus. Consider it required listening now that you're part of the decadent West!”


Sphinxes

Red | Cairo

“Yes?”

“Yasha?”

“Speaking.”

“Excellent. You managed to get out then.”

“Barely. But yes. How about you?”

“I told you, don't worry about Jerome. Is this line secure?”

“As secure as we can make it. Do you have the info?”

“The plane you're looking for landed at a small airstrip two hundred kilometers west of Aswan, near the Toskha Lakes. It's a tiny place, little more than paved dirt. Weapon dealers, human traffickers and people even less savory use it.”

“I imagine it's the less savory people I'm looking for. How do you know this is the place?”

“Because your plane is still there. The Egyptian military is at the site now. They don't know what they're looking at.”

“Anything aboard?”

“Not according to my source. It's been deserted.”

“Shit.”

“I know it's not what you were hoping to hear, Yasha.”

“Not your fault Jerome. Thanks anyway.”

“My pleasure. Now I must go. They might still be looking for me. I should lay low for a while and not talk to commissars.”

“Probably best. Hey Jerome? I'm sorry I pointed a gun at you.”

“Don't worry about it. Happens to the best of us. Good luck, Yasha.”

“Godspeed, Jerome.”
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
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Booted Vulture
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Booted Vulture »

wow. that was a meaty update. Was I getting a Dresden/Murphy vibe off the first section.

As for the others, some good stuff here and Drake is a hoot as always. Wondering what's coming next. I read it in installments so I have missed a few details. Is the impact of the finale scene that Jerome is lying to Red? And the plane used in the pen-ultimate scene is the missing on? Or has the missing one genuinely been ditched?
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Siege
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Re: [Story] Secret War

Post by Siege »

I find the main issue with writing longer stories is that I have set-pieces dreamt up for later chapters but there's a lot of setting things up first that requires a ton of work. Hence why it takes a long-ass time to get updates out.

And yeah, I suppose a bit of early days Dresden/Murphy went into the first bit. The dynamic is certainly similar.
Booted Vulture wrote:Is the impact of the finale scene that Jerome is lying to Red? And the plane used in the pen-ultimate scene is the missing on? Or has the missing one genuinely been ditched?
I was worried it might give impression; Jerome wasn't lying, the Soviet plane was indeed ditched in Egypt. Drake paid Hewrami to ferry the goods to Morocco. He's the middleman she can cut out in case things go south.
"Nick Fury. Old-school cold warrior. The original black ops hardcase. Long before I stepped off a C-130 at Da Nang, Fury and his team had set fire to half of Asia." - Frank Castle

For, now De Ruyter's topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet -
And this the Dutchmen know!
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