Day of Wrath

FBI Legal Attache Office, U.S. Embassy, Moscow Spring was slowly giving way to summer all across Moscow — heralded by blue, cloudless skies and longer, hotter days. Red-tinged sunlight streamed through the window in Helen Gray’s fifth-floor office, dancing on dust motes swirling in the warm air.

Colonel Peter Thorn sat in a chair with his back to the window, letting the late afternoon sun relax shoulders that were still stiff from a long day spent in cramped airplane seats and uncomfortable airfield waiting rooms. Covering the thousand miles between Kandalaksha and the Russian capital had required first hopping a military cargo flight to Arkhangelsk, and then waiting for the once-a-day commercial flight south. For now he was content to wait for Helen to finish the phone call she’d received within minutes of their return to the embassy.

He stretched his legs out and accidentally bumped into Alexei Koniev’s feet. “Sorry, Major.”

Koniev chuckled. “Don’t worry about it, Colonel. Rabbits do not complain about their teeming warrens. Why should we be any different?”

Thorn nodded. The MVD officer’s imagery was apt. One person could work comfortably in Helen’s narrow office. Two people might squeeze in for a short time without driving each other crazy. But three was very definitely a crowd. When added to her desk, computer, bookshelves, and filing cabinets bulging with case files, two extra chairs left barely enough room to breathe.

His gaze drifted to the framed pictures on Helen’s walls and desk. One showed her parents, brother, and two sisters. Two familiar faces smiled back at him from another photo — an older man in U.S. Army dress blues and the stars of a major general and a silver-haired woman wearing an elegant evening dress.

Sam and Louisa Farrell.

They were two of the most important people in his own life.

Major General Sam Farrell had been his mentor and commanding officer for most of his years with Delta Force. Thorn knew his old friend had called in every favor he was owed to keep him in the Army after the Teheran raid. Farrell had retired the year before, but he still carried a lot of weight in the special warfare and intelligence communities. And Louisa Farrell had first introduced him to Helen.

Which brought him to the last picture — the one Helen kept prominently displayed on her desk. It was a picture of them together — a picture taken in those heady, happier days when she’d taken her first steps unaided after being wounded. Back in the days when marriage, a life together, had seemed the logical and inevitable next step to both of them.

Thorn shied away from that thought, uncomfortably aware that he didn’t have any pictures of Helen displayed in his own barren office at O.S.I.A or even in his empty town house in the Virginia suburbs. They were all packed away somewhere in envelopes.

He had lived his whole life as a uniformed nomad — always ready to move on to the next post, to the next duty station.

Permanence had never been part of the package. By the time he’d begun to accept the possibility, she was gone — to Moscow and this legal attach assignment.

“Khorosho. Da. Spasibo.” Helen hung up her phone and looked up at her two colleagues.

“So what’s the word?” Thorn asked.

She shrugged. “You want the good news first, or the bad news?”

“The good news.”

Helen nodded toward the phone. “That was Titenko — the deputy head of the organized crime directorate. He finally ran a militia patrol past Grushtin’s dacha earlier this afternoon.”

“And?” Koniev leaned forward.

“He’s there,” she said. “They spotted a brandnew BMW outside.

It’s registered in Grushtin’s name.”

Thorn smiled wryly. “Nice can-especially for a guy whose salary is just a couple of hundred dollars a month.” He straightened up. “So when do we pay Captain Grushtin a visit?”

Helen frowned. “That’s the bad news. Titenko won’t let us move without backup from an SOBR team.”

Thorn mentally paged through the briefing papers he’d read.

SOBR was the Russian-language acronym for the Special Detachments of Rapid Deployment — the MVD’S organized crime SWAT unit.

“The SOBR?” Koniev said impatiently. “For God’s sake, why?

We’re talking about bringing one man in for questioning — not assaulting a drug lord’s mansion!”

Helen shook her head. “General Titenko and the rest of your superiors aren’t so sure about that, Alexei. After reading the report we filed from Kandalaksha, they’ve seized on the heroin angle to explain why Grushtin sabotaged that plane. If he is working for a smuggling syndicate, there’s no telling what kind of firepower he could have hidden in that dacha.”

In theory, Thorn agreed with this Titenko’s caution. Rushing an operation without adequate recon or backup was a good way to get yourself killed. And he could understand why the Russians were so eager to believe the An-32 crash was drug-related. Since returning from Kandalaksha, he’d seen some of the reports crossing Helen’s desk.