Day of Wrath

JUNE 7

_{MVD Holding Area, Sheremetevo-1 Airport, Outside Moscow}

The MVD holding area at Sheremetevo-1 showed signs of hard usage. Its black-and-white checkerboard linoleum floor was scarred, scuffed, and still showed mud and other stains tracked in during the last spring rainstorm. Several of the overhead fluorescent lamps were burned out, and some of those that were left flickered at irregular intervals.

Puke-ugly, lime-green plastic chairs bolted around the walls provided the room’s only seating.

Colonel Peter Thorn sat stiffly upright in one of those hard plastic seats, studiously ignoring the young MVD private standing nearby. The kid looked barely old enough to shave, and Thorn earnestly hoped he’d been given enough training to know how to work the safety on the AKSU submachine gun he held cradled in both hands. From the way the private twitched whenever Thorn so much as shifted in his chair, he seemed to think he was guarding Bonnie and Clyde.

Thorn looked across to where Helen Gray sat. Another soldier stood watching her, and a burly, hardfaced MVD captain occupied the chair right next to hers.

She looked pensive, sad, and utterly weary. There were shadows under her blue eyes — shadows that had darkened in the two days since Alexei Koniev had died.

He sighed inaudibly. Losing a partner was one of the toughest things that could ever happen to anyone in law enforcement or the Special Forces. It was something you never really got over.

He knew that only too well. One of his closest friends, his old sergeant major, had been killed in the Delta Force raid on Teheran. He still had occasional nightmares about that — nightmares that lingered on in a sadness that was hard to shake when he woke up.

Thorn shook his head somberly. This investigation had already exacted a bitter price from the woman he loved — and they still weren’t much closer to the truth they’d been seeking. He leaned toward her, hoping he could find the right words to tell her how sorry he was. “Helen, I—”

“Silence!” the MVD captain barked in heavily accented English.

“No talking! It is forbidden.”

Thorn bit down on a savage curse. Damn it. This was ridiculous.

He rubbed angrily at his wrists, fiercely massaging the abrasions left by handcuffs that had been locked down too tight for too long.

He hadn’t been very surprised when the first militia units arriving on the scene at the Star of the White Sea put them under arrest. That had been a reasonable precaution for any policeman faced with a shipload of corpses and two armed foreigners. But what followed next hadn’t been reasonable. Not by a long shot.

They’d been held under lock and key at the Pechenga militia headquarters for hours, denied any contact with the American embassy, and ignored whenever they demanded information on the state of the investigation down at the docks. When this MVD captain and his men showed up earlier today, Thorn had at first thought the wheels of Russia’s ponderous bureaucracy were finally starting to spin in the right direction.

Big mistake, boyo, he thought bitterly. If anything, their situation had gone from bad to worse. He and Helen had been hustled out of militia custody, handcuffed like common criminals, and plopped onto a military transport plane bound for Moscow.

And now they’d been left sitting in this dingy, godforsaken waiting room for more than two hours. He grimaced. What kind of game was the MVD playing here? Somebody, probably that smug son of a bitch Serov, had set the three of them up, and every minute that passed gave whoever it was more time to either cover his tracks or vanish.

Thorn swiveled slightly in his chair as the door to the holding area swung open.

A young man cautiously poked his head through the opening.

Wary brown eyes blinked owlishly behind his horn-rim glasses.

“Captain Dobuzhinsky?”

“Da.” The MVD captain lumbered to his feet. “You are from the American embassy?”

“Yes.” The young man nodded rapidly. He strode forward. “My name is Andrew Wyatt. I’m with the administrative affairs section.”’ It was about time the pinstriped cavalry rode over the ridge, Thorn thought sourly.

Wyatt turned toward them. “Special Agent Gray? Colonel Thorn? I’ve been sent to bring you back to the embassy.” He glanced at the MVD officer. “I assume that’s all right, Captain?”

Dobuzhinsky nodded dourly. “First, you must sign for them.”

The captain held out a clipboard and watched impassively while the young embassy staffer hurriedly read through the official form attached to it — moving his lips as he sounded out some of the Russian legal jargon.

Once Wyatt scrawled his signature across the bottom of the form, the MVD officer uncuffed them — first Helen and then Thorn. He scowled at them and then nodded abruptly toward the door. “Very well. You are free to leave. But only to go with this man from your embassy.

Nowhere else. You understand?”