It was Ivan’s lust for information that persuaded him to send an emissary to Argentina, where a CIA officer was offering him valuable intelligence. That job fell to Dimitry Mashkov, a trusted bratok who had interrogated enough Chechens during his days as a paratrooper in the 104th Guards Airborne Regiment to know when a man was lying. If he could break a fanatical Muslim, stay alive in Kresty Prison, and take out members of the rival Solntsevskaya Gang, he was confident he could discern if some American desk officer was the genuine article.
Dimitry spent three days interrogating the American in a Cordoba farmhouse and was convinced he was being truthful. Such an asset would be invaluable to Zharkov’s operations. The trick was getting him from Argentina to Russia, which meant airports and customs officials. Via his son, Aleksandr, the elder Zharkov had the appropriate influence to provide the man with a clean passport, but he would still have to traverse a series of international airports. These days, ever-present surveillance cameras using facial recognition technology made clandestine travel problematic.
Luckily, Zharkov’s friends in the South American drug trade were the best in the world when it came to moving contraband; they ultimately provided the solution. The former spy was moved overland from his Argentine hideout to Caracas, where the failing government was ripe with corruption. For a staggeringly low sum, he was shepherded through the airport’s already lax security and loaded onto a Havana flight without incident. From José Martí in Cuba, it was a direct flight to Moscow on an Aeroflot SU-151, an unremarkable event for a man carrying a legitimate passport of the Russian Federation. Aleksandr was able to smooth things over at Sheremetyevo, one of Moscow’s four international airports, and the man had been delivered to Ivan just a few hours and a quick domestic flight later.
The CIA man was now parked in a hotel suite, waiting impatiently for what was, effectively, a job interview.
* * *
Oliver Grey looked at his watch, the iconic dive instrument that had influenced a thousand knockoffs. The stainless steel case and bracelet were worn and scored by a hard lifetime’s worth of use, though they had accrued before Grey took possession. The acrylic crystal was burnished by time and the bezel and face were faded from months in the sun, a standing testament to the original owner’s vocation. Behind the battered exterior, though, the hands of the precision Swiss instrument swept on unscathed.
He knew that the watch was a Rolex Submariner, and that its former owner was the late Thomas Reece. What he did not know was that Tom Reece purchased it on R&R in Saigon during his first tour in Vietnam with SEAL Team Two. He’d worn it on hundreds of ops both as a frogman and an intelligence officer, and had planned on passing it to his son, James, when the time was right.
He never got the chance. Grey had planned his demise, outwitting the legendary CIA case officer who was far past his prime, sticking his nose where it didn’t belong when he should have been fishing or playing golf or whatever it is that retired spooks do with their free time. Grey had used the watch’s absence to make the murder appear to be the result of a simple mugging in a South American city well acquainted with that brand of violence. Grey hadn’t killed him with his own hands. He’d instead used his Cajun pit bull Jules Landry, who had brought him the watch as a trophy, eager to please his new boss. That was fifteen years ago. Now Landry was dead, castrated and left to bleed out on a dirty floor in northern Iraq. Grey had no illusions as to where his future was headed. He knew he was firmly in James Reece’s sights and, if he hoped to survive, he was going to have to strike soon, before the frogman had a chance to track him down.
He will come for me and that Syrian sniper, Nizar, who put a round through his SEAL friend.
Grey had read all about it in the papers, how two Americans had thwarted the assassination of the U.S. president in Ukraine and saved Odessa from a chemical weapon attack at the last moment. The coup orchestrated by the late Vasili Andrenov, Grey’s Russian handler, had ended in failure. Reece had been unsuccessful in saving the Russian president, and Senior Chief Freddy Strain had been killed in the attempt.