Page 70 of Spymaster

Lying on the backseat, he focused on catching his breath as Chase punched the accelerator and got them the hell out of town.

CHAPTER 42

KALININGRAD

The Rome bombing, despite his concern about moving it up, had gone off perfectly. It was exactly what his superiors back in Moscow had needed to see. It had also garnered wall-to-wall media attention.

The fuse had been lit. Tretyakov could stop right now and everything would probably take care of itself. But that would be leaving too much to chance. He didn’t believe in trusting things to chance—especially for something this important. There were still many more things to be done.

Chief among them was getting to the bottom of what NATO knew, and what their level of preparedness was. Because the haystack fell partially within his jurisdiction, he was one of several people charged with finding those needles.

Any intelligence operatives who delivered intel to Moscow that proved helpful for its Baltic invasion would be able to write their own ticket. They would not only receive rank advancement and state acknowledgement, but they would also be positioned to reap incredible financial benefits. Just as the punishment for failure could be extreme, so could the rewards for success. Sometimes, as much as he hated to admit it, the underpinnings of capitalism made sense.

What didn’t make sense, though, was who the American on the CCTV footage from Visby Hospital was. That was needle number one.

Ivan Kuznetsov had received the footage from one of his assets on Gotland, a police officer named Johansson. The American had identified himself as “Stephen Hall” and had NATO credentials. But based on all of its NATO sources, Russia couldn’t find anything on him. For all intents and purposes, Stephen Hall didn’t exist. Tretyakov was certain the man was an intelligence operative, likely CIA or possibly DIA.

He forwarded the footage to Moscow, where they ran it through all sorts of analysis and facial recognition programs. They thought they had a partial match with a piece of Al Jazeera footage from a few years back. An American soldier had been caught on tape beating a local man in a Middle Eastern market, but the comparison was inconclusive.

Other than that, they had come up empty. The guy was a ghost. That only further served to convince Tretyakov that he was dealing with an intelligence professional—probably one who was very highly skilled.

Flying a team into Gotland on a private jet was a big deal. NATO had money to burn, but not for run-of-the-mill personnel conducting site surveys for alleged training exercises. The local police might have bought a cover story like that, but not Tretyakov.

The fact that the people on the plane were there to meet a Swedish intelligence operative, the same man who had Staffan Sparrman under surveillance, concerned Tretyakov—and rightly so.

Even though the man’s death had looked like an accident, Tretyakov was now worried that they had been too rash. The Gotland cell was too valuable to lose—especially right now.

Kuznetsov, though, had told Tretyakov not to worry. According to Johansson, the local Chief Inspector hadn’t suspected anything.

The worst thing that they could do at this point was to change their routines or to start acting suspiciously. The beauty of the Gotland cell was that it wasn’t trying to hide. It was operating right in the open for everyone to see.

Tretyakov supposed he was right, but he didn’t like it. What bothered him was not knowing what his opponents knew. If they had anything of substance, they would have rolled the entire cell up by now. Putting it under surveillance seemed to suggest that they were still gathering information.

Tretyakov was willing to go along with Kuznetsov and let it ride, for the time being. He didn’t want to be the one to tell Moscow that they needed to shut the Gotland cell down. There was too much riding on them.

The second needle he had to deal with was the alleged Gryphon missile upgrade kits. He used the term “alleged” because like “Stephen Hall,” none of his NATO sources knew anything about the missiles, other than the fact that they were supposed to have been destroyed. By all accounts, there were no Gryphons in NATO’s inventory. But did that mean they didn’t exist?

Tretyakov didn’t trust the Americans, not one bit. Therefore, he was willing to entertain the idea that they secretly, and in violation of the treaty, had either left in place or removed, and later smuggled back in, land-based cruise missiles in Europe. His issue, though, was that the level of secrecy that would be required for something like this was almost outside NATO’s capability.

America and its allies had always been obsessed with following the rule of law and the terms of their treaties. To take such a gamble was so far outside their comfort zone that the missing upgrade kits had started to feel like disinformation to him. Yet Russia’s GRU and FSB had both received solid, separately sourced reporting on it.

That’s what really had made it difficult. If the corroborative reporting hadn’t been there, it would have been much easier to brush the entire idea aside. But they couldn’t ignore what had come in—including the report from the United Nations in New York City. The behavior of the American and Baltic Ambassadors had all but verified the theft of the missile kits.

Based on his sources, the search had moved from Poland into Belarus—Minsk to be exact. The presence, or lack thereof, of the Gryphon missiles in the Baltics was a top-level concern for Moscow. They wanted proof, either way, and they wanted it ASAP.

Tretyakov had activated a team in Minsk to observe the progress there, and had also been shaking down every contact he had in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The road mobile launchers used for the missiles were not vehicles that were easy to hide, nor were rumors of their existence. Somebody, somewhere, had to know something.

In the meantime, Moscow continued to tighten the screws on him. They not only wanted answers, but they were also anxious to finish prepping the battlefield so that they could launch their invasion.

They wanted him to capitalize on the success of Rome. More than that, they wanted him to improve upon it. They were focused on civilian casualties. Civilian deaths captured the media’s attention. Once you had the media’s attention, the public’s followed, like a dog on a leash.

The question was how he would follow up on the Rome bombing. That attack had been perfect. It had also been unique, on many levels. Replicating it wouldn’t be easy.

But if easy was what had been needed, there were many untold numbers Moscow could have called. He occupied the position he did because he delivered what others couldn’t. He delivered the impossible.

And, as he cleared his mind and decided which attack would come next, he realized there was no better word for it thanimpossible.

CHAPTER 43

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