“Raife, as you know, we’ve cited national security concerns up to this point to keep a lid on this, but that won’t hold up for long. I need to talk to Reece, and I need to talk to him now.”
Raife looked the shorter man in the eye and nodded.
“Reece told me you were one of the good ones. He wants to talk to you, too.”
Raife reached across the desk and handed Vic a phone number on scratch paper.
“Dial it from the landline here. It’s to a sat phone.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s not far, but he needs a little time. He’ll explain.”
Vic took the paper.
“Are all members of your family accounted for?”
“Everyone but my sister Hanna. She’s in Romania. If you could have someone from the embassy check in on her and bring her in, my family would be grateful.”
“That will be my first call,” Vic said, standing to switch places with Raife so he could use the phone. “You and your family did good work today.”
“We’ve had some practice.”
True to his word, Vic called Langley. The desk officer immediately contacted the chief of station in Romania. Within the hour, two embassy vehicles were on their way to the town of Moldavia.
He then dialed the number Raife had given him.
“Vic?”
“Well, Reece, looks like your days of peace and quiet have come to a screeching halt.”
“Someone had other plans. Your phone call saved our lives.”
“I can’t lose you before I even officially bring you on board.”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll have a harder time saying no next time you ask me to do something.”
“I’m going to do that now. Where are you?”
“Close. There was something I had to do before law enforcement arrived.”
“Please tell me you don’t have a live suspect in custody.”
“If I did have someone, they wouldn’t be a suspect, they’d be an enemy combatant. I’ll share what I can, when I can. In the meantime, I need you to hold off the FBI until I figure this out.”
“A dead Russian hit team on one of the most respected ranching outfits in the state won’t stay secret for long.”
“What have you found out on your end?”
“I can only share that with cleared Ground Branch staff.”
“If I don’t get thrown in prison for what I’m about to do, I might be just that. What do you know?” Reece pressed.
“This morning I received a call from a retired spook from the old days. He was Moscow station chief near the end of the Cold War. Knew your dad. He told me he got a personal call from a Russian intelligence officer named Aleksandr Zharkov, who warned him of an attack in Montana targeting James Reece and Raife Hastings.”
“What? Why would an SVR official want to save my life?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, Reece. I don’t know. Zharkov’s father is Ivan Zharkov, a Russian mob boss. He runs the Tambov Gang out of St. Petersburg.”
“That fits. The EKIA look like Russian mafia. They’re covered in prison ink.”
“FBI made the same assessment. So, my first instinct is that this is directly related to the intelligence package I gave you last year on Colonel Andrenov.”
Reece remembered firing the RPG-32 that turned Vasili Andrenov, a man responsible for manipulating markets with terrorist attacks across Europe and an attempted Russian coup that almost killed the president of the United States, into mulch.
“Vic, I’m going to have to get back to you. I have work to do.”
CHAPTER 48
SVR Headquarters, Moscow
THE FULL INTELLIGENCE REPORT on the Hastings family was on Aleksandr’s desk when he arrived that morning. It was more robust than even he would have imagined, with information going back to the 1970s. Soviet intelligence assets had aided insurgencies throughout the world and the Rhodesian Bush War was no exception. Detailed records of these operations were kept, and many duplicate reports from satellite nations were provided to the Soviets. The result was a treasure trove of information in the SVR’s records that spanned nearly a century.
The GRU had identified two brothers, Jonathan and Richard Hastings, as members of the elite Selous Scouts and further identified the family’s ranch in the nation’s lowveld as a possible target in years and wars gone by. Jonathan Hastings’s name came up again in Angola before he emigrated to the states and fell off the communist intelligence radar. Richard, it appeared, had never left the continent of his birth.
The remainder of the information had been gathered from open-source information and by hackers, including biographical, educational, and financial records on the entire family. They had significant