A Raging Storm Read online

  It was Barkovsky’s goal, and that of his New Russia Party, known simply as the NRP, to turn Russia backwards and, in doing so, restore it as a world superpower, capable of protecting its people from the threat of the U.S. and its newer rivals: China and India. Suspect everyone. Destroy all enemies. Use any means at your disposal.

  Wooden chairs and tables had been placed on the station’s boarding platform and train service had been suspended for tonight’s rally. Blood-red and bright yellow banners—the very colors of the flag of the old Soviet empire—dangled from the ceiling. The entire station had the feel of an old time Communist rally. It was all well planned. Most of the crowd of four hundred had been members of the apparatchiki—the Communist Party apparatus. They had reaped the spoils of the nomenklatura—the party system of rewarding people who were in political favor. As a child, Barkovsky had grown up envying these privileged party members, wanting desperately to be one of them. But his parents had not been invited to join. They had been poor factory workers south of Leningrad. Because they were not party members, they had been doomed to lives of obscurity and poverty. Their only son should have suffered their same dreary fate, but Barkovsky had found a way to pull himself up from the squalor. Through sheer determination, a total lack of conscience, and an unquenchable lust for power, he had risen to become the most powerful leader in Russia since Joseph Stalin. Now he used his humble origins to his advantage. He had become a hero to the masses by pretending to be one of them. They loved him even as he was picking their pockets and constructing a palace for himself along the banks of the Black Sea, at a cost of a billion dollars. Some nights, when he was alone, Barkovsky wondered if he could be the living reincarnation of Stalin. There were moments when he imagined that he could feel Stalin’s blood pulsating through his veins.

  Standing before the crowd, soaking in the hoopla, Barkovsky felt a hand gently touch his shoulder, followed by the familiar voice of his chief aide whispering.

  “Senator Windslow is dead.”

  Without showing the slightest glimmer of a reaction, Barkovsky cocked his head slightly to his right and asked. “Where is Petrov?”

  “London.”

  “Why is he still alive?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Duke of Madison’s estate

  Somerset County, England

  The startled ring-necked pheasant burst from its hiding place in the knee-high grasses. The blood red circling its eyes gave the bird a terrified look as it flapped its wings to gain speed. A brown-and-white spotted cocker spaniel had flushed it. Like many game birds in England, the pheasant had been bred and reared by a professional gamekeeper and then released to roam the rolling hills of the Duke of Madison’s vast estate until its master came hunting.

  The pheasant had flown about twenty feet above the ground when the boom of a 12-gauge shotgun broke the early morning silence. Dozens of blackbirds in nearby trees took wing, scattering in different directions.

  The buckshot broke the pheasant’s right wing, causing it to careen to the ground, where it flapped desperately as the dog raced toward it. The spaniel expertly snatched the wounded bird in his mouth and shook it violently, snapping its neck and ending its misery.

  “Good boy, Rasputin,” cried the dog’s owner, Ivan Sergeyevich Petrov. The spaniel dropped the pheasant at Petrov’s feet and was rewarded with both a treat and pat on its head. One of Petrov’s two bodyguards took the bird and deposited it in a satchel. It was the first kill of the morning.

  “Nice shooting, Ivan Sergeyevich,” Georgi Ivanovich Lebedev said. He was Petrov’s best friend and morning hunting companion.

  Petrov opened the breech of his 12-gauge shotgun and inserted a new shell. He considered it unsportsmanlike to hunt with anything other than a single-shot rifle. If he couldn’t kill a bird with one round, the creature deserved to escape.

  “The next bird we see will be yours,” Petrov promised.

  Lebedev was smart enough to always allow Petrov the first kill. It was one reason why the two men had stayed close friends for so many years. Lebedev was content being second fiddle. It had been this way from the time when they were boys growing up in the northwest Moscow neighborhood of Solntsevo, one of city’s toughest areas. When the teenage Petrov took a sudden interest in a girl named Yelena, Lebedev stepped aside even though he had a crush on her. When Petrov became best friends with Russian president Barkovsky, Lebedev gladly turned into the third wheel. When Petrov and Barkovsky became sworn enemies, Lebedev supported Petrov, eventually following him to London.

  While Lebedev played the role of a supplicant well, Petrov played it not at all. It was fair to say that he never put his own wants or needs aside for anyone. It was a luxury he could afford, given his net worth of a reported six billion dollars. The fact that his fortune had come not because of hard work or brilliance but because of good timing and connections did nothing to deflate his grandiose ego.

  It was his bloated self-esteem that had ultimately led to him clashing with President Barkovsky. To escape being arrested and thrown into prison, Petrov had been forced to flee Moscow at night, concealed behind a false panel inside a Russian SUV. British foreign intelligence had arranged his escape and in return had demanded that he snitch on his Kremlin friends. Petrov had done so with relish. He had known where lots of bodies were buried.

  In truth, only his money made him attractive to the young women who frequently accompanied him to London’s most posh clubs. A big man, standing six feet, two inches tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Petrov’s had a puffy, white, and round face. At age forty-two, he was balding, although his personal stylist did her best to disguise it by combing long strains of hair from the side of his head across his naked scalp. He favored loose-fitting, hand-tailored clothes and only wore black and white because he was colorblind. This morning, a pair of handmade platinum rimmed sunglasses copied from a photograph of a bespectacled Johnny Depp sat on his nose.

  His hunting partner was shorter, standing five feet, six inches, and considerably thinner. Lebedev had a full head of bushy black hair, as well as two caterpillar like eyebrows. He was both a lawyer and an accountant, two trades which served him well as Petrov’s most trusted lackey and advisor.

  Shortly before daybreak, they had left the forty-thousand-square-foot manor house that Petrov had purchased from the cash-poor heirs of the Duke of Madison. Walking side by side, they had crossed the lush fields and rolling hills of the Cotswolds.

  With Rasputin racing a few feet in front of them, they had entered a tall grass area near a brook and trees. It was here that Petrov had killed the first bird. Afterward, he celebrated by opening a thermos bottle filled with black coffee mixed with vodka, Kahlúa, and amaretto. Lebedev had brought coffee, too, but it contained no alcohol. As the two men drank, Petrov’s bodyguards walked in a circle around them, safely out of hearing distance as they scanned the landscape for possible flashes of sunlight—reflections from a camouflaged shooter’s telescopic gun sight.

  “The Americans will be sending people to question you about Senator Windslow,” Lebedev said solemnly.

  “Should I see them?” Petrov asked. “Or go to the Daria?” He was referring to his 439-foot-long yacht that had cost one billion dollars to build and was named after his mother. He kept it anchored in the Mediterranean Sea off the French Riviera. “It will be more difficult for them to interrogate me there.”

  “I think you should meet with them. Otherwise, it will look as if you have something to hide.”

  Petrov chuckled. “I do.”

  “I should be present as your lawyer.”

  “Perhaps, it was a mistake telling the CIA about the gold, instead of my British friends,” Petrov said.

  “I disagree,” Lebedev replied. “The Americans have longer arms and are not as timid as MI-6. It was right to tell them. The Americans also have more to gain by helping us.”

  Rasputin, who was waiting patiently at Petrov’s feet, began to pant loudly and whine.
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br />   “You have a scent, don’t you, boy?” Petrov said to his dog. He finished his drink. “Are you ready?” he asked Lebedev.

  Tossing away the remains of his coffee, Lebedev put his stainless steel cup into his knapsack and said, “I’m ready.”

  Leaning down, Petrov gave his dog the command: “BIRD.”

  The spaniel bolted along a hedgerow, his snout floating inches above the ground. The sound of rustlings feathers and a cry of alarm caused both men to shoulder their shotguns. Another pheasant exploded into the sky, this one much smaller and faster than the first.

  Petrov fired. His shot stopped the bird in midair. Bits of feathers blew away from its breast. It fell dead.

  Cracking open his shotgun, Petrov said, “I promised you the second kill, my friend, but my instincts overruled my obligation.”

  Lebedev shrugged. “There will be other birds for me.”

  Rasputin arrived with the dead bird clutched in his mouth. Petrov petted the dog.

  “You have someone watching the Americans,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. One of our best.”

  Lebedev reloaded and snapped the shotgun shut.

  “Do you think Jedidiah Jones has told the FBI what he knows?”

  Lebedev replied, “We can’t be certain. This is why you must meet with the Americans.”

  Petrov grinned. “They think they are coming to interrogate me but I will be interrogating them.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CIA headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  How many layers does an onion have? What had brought Storm to this moment?

  Jedidiah Jones had called Storm back to Washington, D.C., two weeks earlier to help solve a “simple” kidnapping. But that crime had proven to be more than a kidnapping and not simple at all.

  Matthew Dull, the stepson of Senator Windslow, had been abducted while he and his fiancée, Samantha Toppers, were walking near the Georgetown University campus. Four hooded men overpowered him, forced him into a van, and sped away, leaving a hysterical Toppers on the sidewalk.

  When the FBI failed to find Dull, Windslow had asked Jones to bring in a “fixer”—someone who knew how to track missing persons and didn’t mind coloring outside the lines. Jones had reached out to Storm and had cashed in a favor. A big favor.

  Storm had been fly-fishing in Montana when the helicopter arrived. He was a man seemingly without any cares. This was because he was dead—at least to the world. He had successfully faked his own death four years earlier and gone off the grid. He’d done it to escape from Jones and a clandestine world that had tried to kill him, not once, but several times.

  There had been a time in his life—before he’d met Jones—when Storm had been just another down-on-his-luck private detective with too many bills and not enough clients. He’d spent his days and nights peeping through windows at no-tell motels photographing cheating spouses and spying on able-bodied men who’d filed false workman’s compensation claims citing “bad backs.” Storm had scraped by. Barely.

  But then Clara Strike had entered his world and turned it upside down. The CIA field officer had enlisted Storm’s help in a covert operation being run on American soil. Technically, the CIA was forbidden to operate inside the U.S., so she’d needed Storm as a front man. She’d taken advantage of his expert tracking skills, his patriotic spirit, and his then-trusting nature. She’d introduced him to Jones, and it had been Jones who’d drawn him further and further into the CIA’s web. One of his assignments had gone terribly wrong. Tangiers! It had ended with Storm lying severely wounded on a cold floor in his own blood.

  Jones had rescued him. Storm had survived, but Tangiers had changed him. After that, he’d decided that he wanted out. And the only way for him to quit was for Derrick Storm—the roguish private eye and conscripted CIA operative—to die. In poetic fashion, he’d gone out in much the same way that he’d come into Jones’s world. Storm had perished in the arms of Clara Strike. She’d watched in stunned disbelief as the light in his eyes dimmed. He’d reached out for her, and she had taken his hand, squeezing it for the very last time. His death had seemed legitimate because it had been as close to a real death as possible—thanks to the wizards inside the CIA’s Chief Directorate of Science and Technology. The CIA scientists had used their magic to stop his heart and show no discernible brain waves. Storm didn’t know how they’d done this. He hadn’t cared. Death had freed him.

  Or so he’d thought.

  Jones had brought him back by cashing in Tangiers. Storm owed his life to Jones, and so he’d returned, supposedly for one final mission.

  He had now come full circle. He was sitting across from Jones in his Langley office the day after Senator Windslow’s assassination.

  “I warned you this might get complicated,” Jones said.

  “Yes, but you somehow forgot to mention the Russian element when we first talked,” Storm said.

  Jones smiled slyly. “Must have slipped my mind.”

  Storm knew better. Nothing slipped Jones’s mind.

  “Since you seem to have overlooked that part,” Storm said, “why don’t you tell me about the Russians now?”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Jones said. “You tell me what you’ve learned about the kidnapping and the Russians.”

  This is how Jones played the game. Ask him a question and he answered with two questions of his own. Ask him two questions and he responded with a dozen more.

  “There were actually two groups of kidnappers,” Storm said. “The kidnappers who really abducted Matthew Dull were ex–KBG officers.”

  “And the second ones?”

  “They turned out to be Samantha Toppers and her brother.”

  “She’s the short blonde with the big—” Jones started to say.

  Storm interrupted. “Yes, Toppers is rather well endowed. She and her brother tried to profit from the kidnapping by sending Senator Windslow and his wife ransom notes even though they didn’t have Dull. It was a pretty clever scam.”

  “That you figured out,” Jones said.

  It was as close to a compliment as Jones ever gave.

  Continuing, Jones said, “Sadly, you weren’t able to save Dull. The real kidnappers killed him and now someone has assassinated a U.S. senator.”

  “Hey, I didn’t pull those triggers,” Storm protested.

  “True, but you also don’t know why they were pulled.”

  “The men who did the actual murders were professionals. My guess is they are hired guns. The real question is who paid them? There are two likely candidates: Ivan Petrov and Oleg Barkovsky.”

  Storm suspected that Jones already knew about both men. Jones always knew more than he shared with Storm. He never revealed more than what was necessary. He listened and expected his operatives to do their own digging, to develop their own clues, to reach their own conclusions. He expected Storm to dig up his own answers. It was Jones’s way of insuring that no rock went unturned.

  Continuing, Storm said, “FBI Special Agent April Showers believes Petrov paid Windslow a six-million-dollar bribe. But at some point, Windslow changed his mind and didn’t follow through. That’s when Petrov had him killed.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “I’m sure Windslow took a bribe, but I’m not sure it was Petrov who gave the order to have him and Dull killed. It could have just as likely been Barkovsky.”

  “Why?”

  “To stop Senator Windslow from helping Petrov. The problem is that I don’t know what either man wanted from Senator Windslow. There’s always a motive for murder. Until I figure out that motive, I can’t identify the killer.”

  Jones leaned back in his office chair, which squeaked. It had needed oil for as long as Storm had known Jones. The CIA spymaster swept his right hand across his face as if he were trying to wipe away a problem. Built like a bulldog and in excellent physical shape, especially for a man in his early sixties, Jones was both Storm’s mentor and tormentor. He was the only man capable
of bringing Storm back into the CIA’s world of smoke and mirrors.

  “The sniper left his rifle on the roof of the Capitol Police headquarters building,” Jones said. He leaned forward, causing another squeak, and removed a photo from a desk drawer. He passed it to Storm.

  Storm inspected it and said, “It’s a photograph of a Dragunov sniper rifle. Military issue, not one of the cheaper, knockoff versions manufactured in China and Iran for sale outside Russia.”

  Jones smiled. “Go on.”

  “Does the media know a Russian rifle was the murder weapon?” Storm asked.

  “No, but it’s only a matter of time. You know how Washington is about leaks and secrets.”

  Storm did. When it came to the nation’s capital, Benjamin Franklin had said it best more than two hundred years earlier: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

  “Matthew Dull was shot with Russian-made bullets,” Storm continued. “Now a sniper shoots Windslow with a Russian military sniper rifle. The killers clearly aren’t worried about covering their tracks.”