She kissed the side of his head and walked from his office.
* * *
That evening, a young man rang the doorbell at her apartment. When she answered, he handed her a bag of carryout food. Inside a wad of paper money, Svetlana passed him the USB drive. Within an hour, the contents of the drive were being exploited by a trusted team of technicians from Directorate I of the SVR, the office of Russian intelligence that specialized in digital forensics and cyber exploitation.
CHAPTER 35
SVR Headquarters, Moscow
BY THE TIME ALEKSANDR Zharkov reached his desk at 8:00 a.m., the report from Saint Petersburg was already in his inbox. His attention was diverted by a mild crisis in Damascus that morning, so he didn’t get a chance to open the document until the afternoon. The cover sheet summarized the raw intelligence and made reference to both the source of the information as well as some of the more relevant documents recovered from the subject’s hard drive.
Svetlana had performed beautifully, just as he’d known she would. The Russian intelligence services were the best in the world when it came to manipulating subjects using sex, and the psychological analysis of Oliver Grey had been spot-on. Aleksandr had pulled in all information on Grey going back to the original paper files, when he was first spotted, assessed, and developed by the Soviet-era GRU before his recruitment by the late Vasili Andrenov. It was always amusing to Aleksandr when he saw state documents marked with stars, hammers, and scythes, the pseudo-religious emblems of communism.
Upon their reexamination of Grey’s records, the SVR’s psychoanalytical team had come up with a secondary diagnosis, one that went deeper than the obvious father issues. As a result of his father’s absence and eventual abandonment, his mother had overcompensated and inadvertently created an unhealthy relationship with her son. He was unable to connect with women his own age or younger because, deep down, he still hungered for a mother. Svetlana had been successful in earning Grey’s trust and bringing his repressed gerontophilia to the surface.
Aleksandr had placed Svetlana, one of his most experienced assets, into his father’s business more than a decade ago and she had consistently provided him with accurate, timely, and relevant updates on the activities of his father and brothers ever since. He double-clicked on a PowerPoint file titled “Montana OPORD” and began scanning the pages. He quickly realized that the operation in question had already been put into motion.
He scrolled to the profile on the targets. He recognized the name of Lieutenant Commander James Reece, U.S.N. (Ret.), immediately, thanks to the widespread media coverage of his attack on a ring of conspirators responsible for the deaths of his family and SEALs under his command. The SVR had actually tried to locate Reece after his disappearance in an attempt to recruit him and offer him the chance to defect but had been unsuccessful in tracking him down. Aleksandr also knew that Reece was suspected in the death of former Russian intelligence official Vasili Andrenov, though nothing had been proven. It was obvious from the intelligence package that his father’s new asset had organized a bratva hit team to kill James Reece either in retaliation for the Andrenov assassination or before Reece could mount an offensive of his own against Grey.
The second target was more of a mystery. Raife Hastings, also a retired SEAL officer, was a resident of western Montana. The African-born Hastings owned an outfitting business and had made a name for himself as a builder of fine custom hunting rifles. Hastings was apparently married to the daughter of a billionaire oil and gas man who’d previously served in the U.S. Congress.
Could it be him?
Aleksandr, ever the hunter, was an avid reader of outdoor magazines published around the globe. He had become mildly obsessed with a columnist who wrote occasionally under the pseudonym of “S. Rainsford,” a nod to the protagonist of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” The columns were the author’s firsthand accounts of his solo Montana backcountry hunts, told in brilliant detail. Unlike most of the glorified advertising that passed as outdoor journalism these days, whoever “Rainsford” was, he was a hunter.
Aleksandr pulled up the background check via Russian intelligence channels he’d requested a few months back. They had failed to identify an “S. Rainsford” but had compiled a list of twenty-four possibles. Rifle maker and hunting outfitter Raife Hastings was on that list.