Western Europe, either. But tonight . . . first at Ternhill and now in Virginia . . . both in the same night?”
“We are days away from our objective, Fox. You can expect an increase in all activity over the next week.”
With a pause the man said, “Yes. I understand.”
Mars looked back out onto Portobello Road, his eyes narrowed with determination. “We must protect our retributive strike from all threats, no matter what.”
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova read through each page of the file on her father’s death slowly while Suzanne Brewer sipped her tea and looked on.
After five minutes of this, the American interrupted the quiet. “I have to ask. Are there some suspicions you have about what happened that you haven’t revealed to us?”
Zoya shook her head as she read. “No. But I owe it to him to look. Someone from the family should know of his . . . his sacrifice.” Now Zoya looked up. “It’s my final duty to my father.”
Suzanne Brewer looked at Zoya with suspicion, but said, “I understand.”
The Russian woman with the American accent flipped a page and came to the first color photograph. It was of two men, both lying on their backs, face up, twisted among the rubble of what appeared to be some sort of automobile repair shop. Engine parts, tires, shop rags, and car parts lay on the ground near the bodies.
The man on the right Zoya didn’t recognize, but he wore body armor and the combat uniform of a Russian artillery officer. His left hand and forearm were missing, his eyes were open but rolled back in his head, and blood covered his throat and the dusty concrete floor beneath him.
And the other man was her father. He wore a heavy coat that was half pulled off, and a tunic that was blood-soaked and ripped open, exposing his neck and right shoulder, as if someone had tried to render aid, but found the wounds to be unsurvivable. A fur cap lay next to his head, and his eyes were closed.
A jagged hole in his right temple had spilled blood down over his ear, onto a pile of shop rags lying under his head. His arms and legs were askew.
She leaned forward, absorbing every detail of the photo, running a fingertip slowly over her father’s face and neck. All the while Brewer looked on, sipping her tea.
Finally Zoya turned to the next photo. A shot from across the same room showing the bodies on the floor in the rubble under a hole in the ceiling; Zoya had the expertise to recognize the impact of a high-explosive mortar round, fired with a delay fuse to penetrate the roof of the building before detonating.
In this picture she also saw three men standing around, looking over the bodies. They were all GRU officers; she did not recognize the first two, but the third she knew well. “Uncle Vladi,” she said in Russian under her breath, but Brewer did not hear her.
There were more photos of the scene: a close-up of Zoya’s father’s clean-shaven face, placid in death. He looked younger than his forty-eight years, but he looked the same as Zoya remembered him.
After ten minutes more reading the notes, and several more returns to the photos of her father’s body, she slid the papers back to the American CIA officer across from her. “Thank you.”
Brewer had not taken her eyes from Zoya’s face for the past twenty minutes. “Did you see anything worthy of note?”
The Russian shook her head. “It’s just as had been described to me by my father’s colleagues. A million-to-one strike by a mortar that killed the head of Russian military intelligence.”
“Your father.”
“My father. Yes.”
“CIA never found out what a GRU general was doing there on the front lines in the middle of a pitched battle.”
Zoya shrugged. “Neither did his daughter.”
After a sympathetic look Zoya didn’t buy as authentic, Brewer closed the file and slid it into a leather bag on the floor by her feet. “Very well. Shall we move on to tonight’s debriefing?”
The brunette in the George Washington sweatshirt kept looking off through the window, but she answered. “It’s not like I have someplace else to be.”
“Me, either. Let’s begin.”
CHAPTER 2
Just before three thirty in the morning the CIA Gulfstream landed at RAF Ternhill, a nearly shuttered air base in the West Midlands of England owned by the Ministry of Defense but maintained primarily by civilian personnel.