Cherkshan stared hard at the man. And now he is after my daughter.
“Send the colonel’s file to me. My eyes only. Lock it tightly. I do not want prying eyes looking at this.”
“Yes, sir.” A moment later, Emil told him that the file had been sent. A few moments after that, it showed up in Cherkshan’s e-mail.
The general stared at the hard planes of his daughter’s pursuer and tried to make himself believe that everything would be all right. Dreading what he would find, Cherkshan clicked on the file in his mail, saving it off to another folder on his hard drive. He buried it among plans for the Ukraine invasion, but he would know where it was. Then he opened it and watched the file spread across his monitor.
One of the files showed the bodies of Colonel Linko’s confirmed kills. Linko obviously most enjoyed those assignments where discretion was not enforced. Several of the kills had been of Islamic terrorists, CIA agents, and black marketers. Those had been done in public, and they had been very messy.
The man was a psychopath on a very loose leash. It was no surprise that he had been hidden away in the FSB.
Farther back in the files, Cherkshan found more pictures, these of Chechen women who had been tortured. According to the accompanying information, Linko had demanded information from them, but they had died and taken it to the grave with them.
Cherkshan felt certain that the women had had no information worth knowing. No one could have been that dedicated to keeping a secret. Linko was a sadist who enjoyed hurting and killing people, that was all.
He closed the images and read through Linko’s service record. Much of it had been redacted, but enough of it remained to fill in the blanks. People summoned Linko like a rusalka, a succubus that came out to mesmerize victims then deliver them into death’s embrace. The gender was wrong, but the end result was the same.
Now this thing was after Anna, and Cherkshan felt certain he knew who had put Linko on Lourds’s trail. After his audience with President Nevsky and the man’s mention of Alexander the Great, Cherkshan had read up on the Macedonian king. Nevsky hadn’t said what had interested him so much about Alexander, and Cherkshan couldn’t fathom the reason.
During the past few months, the general had read dozens of books and grown more frustrated with his independent research. He had a small library of the books at home but had found nothing that would warrant the Russian president’s focus.
Growling a curse, Cherkshan closed down the file, took a final look at the image of Colonel Sergay Linko, and hoped that the men protecting Anna and Lourds would kill the FSB agent, or that he could at least tell Anna about the danger she was in, but that would circumvent Nevsky’s actions to apprehend or kill the American linguist and take whatever he was truly after.
That, too, was another mystery.
Cherkshan drank the dregs of his tea, now tepid, then grabbed his greatcoat and put it on. He wanted to walk among the tanks. That was when he felt most in control of a coming battle.
Turning out the lights behind him, he departed the room.
30
Safe House
Kandahar
Kandahar Province
Afghanistan
February 15, 2013
Seated at the long dining room table, Lourds reached into a basket and took out a small, fresh-baked flatbread. Breaking it open, he inhaled the naan‘s sweet aroma. He glanced at Fitrat sitting across from him. “Did you make this?”
“I did.”
Lourds scooped up a large bite of qabili palau, a rice pilaf prepared in a seasoned broth. The taste exploded in his mouth, and he sighed contentedly. “You set a very good table, Captain. My compliments.”
“You are most welcome, Professor.”
As he ate, Lourds parceled out the story he had put together in his mind. “In order to understand Aristotle and why his presence as Alexander the Great’s mentor was such a great blessing, you must first understand Plato.”
“The Greek philosopher and founder of the Academy in Athens?”
Lourds shot Captain Fitrat a glance, then remembered what Layla had told him of the man, how he had been schooled in America and his parents had expected him to become a doctor. “That’s right. He founded it on a piece of land called the Grove of Hecademus, also called Academus, hence the name Academy.”
Layla sipped her water. “The Greeks did have a way