The Shadowmen Read online

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  For Lorrel, as always

  The Shadowman lives between two worlds,

  The real world and the world of the deep-cover spy.

  Earlier

  McGarvey, his Walther PPK in hand, groped his way silently in the absolute darkness of the tunnel beneath the Castelo de Oro northeast of Lisbon. He hesitated at the doorway, his left hand brushing the wet stone wall as he listened for a sound, any sound ahead. He could hear water dripping somewhere, and in the background, he heard an extremely faint hissing noise.

  “Maria?” he called softly.

  Kurshin laughed, but it was almost impossible to tell how far away he was or even his direction. Sounds were distorted in the narrow tunnel.

  Mac had to fight down the urge to get out immediately. He was caught deep underground in a crypt. The realm of the dead, not the living.

  “Is she with you?” he called.

  “She’s here, McGarvey,” Kurshin said. His voice sounded odd, somehow disjointed.

  “Let her go, Arkasha. This is between you and me now.”

  “She’ll die here with you,” Kurshin said, and he laughed again. It sounded as if he were unhinged.

  “What’s the point? Baranov is dead; Didenko has been arrested. There’s nowhere for you to go.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No one is looking for you” McGarvey said. He moved into a position around the steel gate from where he could extend his gun into the tunnel.

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Even if you manage to kill us and get out of here, then what?” McGarvey said.

  “Once you’re dead, nothing will matter.”

  “How long before you crack? How long before you can’t stand the lack of purpose? How long before you put the muzzle of your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger?”

  Kurshin fired three times, the bullets ricocheting off the stone walls and ceiling in long, ragged sparks.

  Mac fired twice, adjusting his pattern right to left against the possibility the man had moved the instant he had fired.

  Kurshin fired back, and this time the bullet smacked into the stone wall an inch from Mac’s face, stone chips nicking his cheek.

  The Russian was shooting a Makarov or possibly a TK. Nine shots if he had started with a full magazine.

  “You won’t get out of here alive,” McGarvey called softly. He dropped down and crawled into the tunnel, flattening himself against the far wall a few feet past the gate.

  Kurshin fired twice more, both shots high and to the left.

  McGarvey jumped up, fired once to the left of the muzzle flashes, once to the right, and once directly at them, and he dropped down again.

  Kurshin cried out and fired three more times. A moment later, something metallic clattered to the floor just ahead. The empty magazine. Kurshin was reloading.

  McGarvey fired once from where he was crouched and a second time as he got to his feet. He charged blindly down the tunnel, slamming into the Russian in less than ten feet.

  Both of them crashed backward off the rock wall and down onto the wet floor, blood spurting over Mac’s face. His right shoulder smashed into the stone, his hand went numb, and his pistol slipped out of his grip.

  He held Kurshin’s gun hand off with his left and with his right dug into the Russian’s neck, trying with everything in his power to rip out the man’s throat.

  The beam of a flashlight suddenly illuminated the tunnel. “Kirk!” Maria screamed from behind.

  McGarvey lifted Kurshin’s head from the floor and smashed it back down. He pulled it up again and again, and all the while Maria screamed something.

  As the life faded from Kurshin’s eye, the man’s trigger finger jerked reflexively. His pistol fired, sending a long, jagged spark down the tunnel.

  From the darkness beyond Maria, the spark blossomed into a huge fireball that raced below a punctured gas line directly toward them.

  McGarvey reached Maria, pulling her onto the floor and shielding her with his body as the fireball reached them. The heat was so intense for a moment that it began to melt the back of his jacket and scorch the hair on his head.

  A huge explosion from somewhere far above them shattered everything, and the ceiling began to come down, pieces of the concrete slamming into Mac’s head. Water fell in cascades.

  Not like this. The single thought crystallized in Mac’s head. After everything, all the close calls, all the near misses, he wasn’t going to die like this, buried in a tunnel.

  He rolled off Maria and stumbled to his feet. Water was flowing from a dozen different breaches along the walls and ceiling, but there was still light from as many gas flames.

  “We need to get out of here!” he shouted, hauling Maria to her feet.

  She collapsed against him. “I can’t!” she cried. “My leg!”

  McGarvey lifted her off her feet and slung her over his shoulder, the effort after all he’d been through nearly causing him to black out.

  Water rose over his knees by the time he had slogged just ten feet. The flames were dying out now, and it would only be a matter of seconds before they were in total darkness.

  For the first time in his life, McGarvey tasted panic at the back of his throat. Maria was crying something, but he couldn’t make out her words. There was nothing left for him but to continue. If he was going to die here, he would die, but he would be moving when the end came.

  The last of the light faded as the water came up to his chest. The tunnel ceiling was higher here, so he could stand up a little taller. But it was too late.

  He stumbled on something and fell forward. For just a moment, he thought that he was seeing lights. But that had to be impossible.

  Maria was gone, and hands were on his arms, dragging him upward, his feet and legs bumping up the stairs.

  “McGarvey!” someone shouted. “McGarvey!”

  Then nothing.

  First Strike

  1

  Present Day

  Moscow had changed since the last time the man traveling on a British passport in the name of Nicholas Kandes was here. More traffic, more people, the frantic pace of cities in the West, such as Berlin, Paris, London, even New York. He emerged from the posh Ritz-Carlton Hotel just off Red Square and went to where a valet stood with the driver’s-side door of the rental BMW M6 Coupé open.

  Kandes, not his real name, was a slightly built man, well under six feet. His features were unremarkable, even bland, except for his eyes, which were sometimes intense and other times hooded like those of a cobra ready to strike. He was dressed in crisply starched jeans, Gucci loafers, a white silk shirt, and a light sweater, the sleeves looped around his neck. He was twenty-s
ix last month.

  “Good morning, sir,” the valet said. “Would you like help with directions?”

  “No, thank you,” Kandes said, handing the man a hundred-euro note. His Russian was nearly perfect with just a hint of a British accent.

  At eight, rush-hour traffic was in full swing, but Kandes knew his way around the city, and in no time, he was past the Kursk Railway Station outside the second ring and onto the M7, which led almost directly east out of the city. Even out here, change was evident. Much of the old-growth birch forest had been plowed under to make way for housing developments. Western-styled malls, miniestates with outdoor swimming pools that could only be used a few months out of the year but were prestigious.

  Hate had ridden on his shoulders ever since he was a teenager when he learned that his brother had been murdered by an American CIA agent. He was enough of a realist to understand the risk that soldiers took when they raised their hands and gave the oath to defend their country against all enemies foreign and domestic, but his brother had been his entire world—his only world. Their parents were dead, and they had no aunts, uncles, cousins, no one except the two of them.

  Kandes had been placed in a state school at the age of five, and he’d only ever come face-to-face with his brother a half dozen times in ten years, but it had been enough for the bond to be made. His brother was blood.

  Most of the traffic flowed into the city, and driving away from Moscow, he tried to wrap his mind around exactly why his brother had been so in love with Russia that he’d been willing to give his life for it. The Rodina—motherland. It was one of the questions he meant to ask the general this morning, because it was a mystery, and before he evened the score, he had to know the answer to something he was incapable of feeling.

  Petushki, a town of about fifteen thousand, was a one-hour drive on the highway that followed the Nizhny-Novgorod Railway. About ten kilometers east of the small industrial city, he came to a narrow dirt road that led to the north through a sparse forest where at the top of a low rise he pulled over and got out of the car.

  Below in a narrow valley cut by a small stream was a series of buildings, including a cow barn,and an ornate dacha with minarets, onion domes, a half dozen chimneys, and intricate wooden scrollwork beneath the eaves. From what he’d learned, the place had been owned by a Czarist general before World War I. A lot of blood had been spilled here and at other similar spots around Russia. Nearly every owner since then had been sent to Siberia to count the birches for one reason or another and had never come back. This general had been the one exception—he returned from Siberia.

  A Mercedes SUV was parked across a footbridge from the house, but no one was around, and there was no other sign that anyone was in residence.

  Kandes drove down the hill, where he parked next to the Mercedes. He waited for a minute or so, the window down, listening to the sounds of the stream and some birds in the distance. The air here was fresh and smelled of grass and perhaps the earth. To the right, across the stream, a few acres of sod had been plowed under, exposing the black, rich soil.

  A large man in coveralls and knee-high boots suddenly appeared at the window. He held a SIG SAUER pistol at Kandes’s face. “Get out of the car,” he said in Russian.

  “Sure,” Kandes said. He got out of the car, snatched the pistol out of the man’s hand, and with lightning speed removed the magazine and fieldstripped the weapon, tossing the parts aside.

  The bodyguard started forward, his face dark, angry.

  “Nyet,” an old man on the porch of the dacha across the creek called out, and the guard stopped.

  “General Didenko,” Kandes said. “I’d like to have a word with you.”

  “Arkasha’s brother, finally,” Didenko said.

  * * *

  The inside of the house smelled musty. Paper covered some of the windows, and drop cloths draped much of the furniture. Only the kitchen in the rear seemed fully functional as did a sitting room in a porch overlooking the stream looping around to the west. A copse of trees stood in stark contrast at the base of the low hill. All in all, it was a pleasant if lonely place.

  Didenko poured them a dark Russian beer, and they sat in wicker chairs facing the creek. He was a shrunken man who’d once been a bear, over six feet with thick shoulders, a broad face, and thick torso. Now he looked ill.

  “I understand that you’re with the Spetsnaz special group in London,” Didenko said. “One of Karl’s rising young stars.”

  The Spetsnaz had been positioned in just about every country around the world since the end of the Cold War. If hostilities were to break out, they would go to work as saboteurs, striking not only infrastructures like water and electrical supplies but also military installations. The program was highly classified and for the last years under the ironfisted control of Major General Karl Nikandrov, the head of the SVR that was the successor to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, responsible for all clandestine activities outside of Russia.

  Kandes was not especially surprised that the general knew who he was; the old-boy network was stronger than ever these days. But the breach of security was disturbing. The names of the Spetsnaz operators and the units they belonged to were highly classified and just now very high on Putin’s list of important programs.

  “The question isn’t why you came to see me—you want to know how your brother died—but it’s how you managed to get here without a shit storm falling down around you. I assume you’re traveling under a false cover.”

  “Nicholas Kandes.”

  “For Nikolai Kurshin. Will anyone suspect that you’re here?”

  “I asked for a fifteen-day leave, and they gave it to me,” Nikolai said. Didenko was legendary among Soviet spymasters, but he didn’t seem like anyone out of the ordinary. Just an old man living in the middle of nowhere.

  “Really extraordinary that they gave it to you,” Didenko said. He looked away for a moment. “Your brother was killed in a flooded tunnel beneath a castle museum northeast of Lisbon, ten, maybe twelve years ago. He might have drowned, but he didn’t. When his body was recovered, it was found that the back of his skull was caved in, as if somebody smashed it with a cricket bat, or more likely knocked it against a stone wall or floor.”

  “Who did it?” Nikolai asked, keeping his violent temper in check.

  “Kirk McGarvey. I thought that you would know the name.”

  “I wanted to make sure. But why, just spy to spy?”

  “It was much more than that. There was a cache of gold the Nazis had taken from Jews they’d killed and had hidden in Portugal for after the war. We wanted it, and the CIA didn’t want us to have it. But your brother worked for Valentin Baranov, my boss in Number One in the old days, and there was an incident involving a nuclear missile in Germany.

  “We’d found out that the Israelis had stockpiled nuclear weapons at a site near Ein Gedi. Your brother managed to steal one of the Americans’ Pershing missiles and reprogram it to fly to Israel and destroy the depot.”

  “McGarvey stopped him?”

  “Yes, but your brother didn’t give up. He put together a strike force that somehow managed to steal a Los Angeles–class nuclear submarine, kill the crew, and scuttle the boat after they’d stolen another missile. Then he programmed it to strike Ein Gedi. But McGarvey stopped him, and in fact, your brother was presumed dead, his body lost somewhere in the sea off Cyprus.”

  Nikolai knew most of that, and he’d managed to dig up a fair amount of information about the CIA operator who’d not only been a shooter but had even briefly directed the agency. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t know what had driven his brother to give his life for the Komitet. Or for Baranov or Didenko.

  “Was there money in the end?” he asked. “Was he planning to retire?”

  Didenko laughed. “Your brother would never have quit. Just after the Ein Gedi incident, McGarvey assassinated Baranov—and that was another long-standing blood feud. I was promoted to head our Illegals Directora
te—mokrie dela—wet affairs, and your brother called me out of the blue. We were convinced that he was dead, so when he called me on an unsecured line from Damascus, I almost had a heart attack. I told him that he should come in. Give me a couple of days, and I could arrange something.

  “‘I’ve become a floater,’ he told me. ‘When I want blood, I’ll call you. This time, you bastards, I won’t let you fuck me up.’”

  “You were involved with the Nazi gold operation?”

  Didenko nodded. “And we damned near pulled it off, your brother and I.”

  “Except for McGarvey.”

  “He was better than Arkasha. Had been all along.”

  “Or luckier.” Nikolai sat back with his beer. He’d looked up to his brother, but he’d never really known him. Aloof, a sometimes rough sense of humor, though Nikolai could never remember his brother laughing out loud, and he could never remember any physical contact; a hug, kiss after a vodka. It was the Russian way, or had been in the old days.

  But he clearly remembered the strength and confidence that fairly exuded from his brother’s pores. He was a man extremely capable in whatever he did. You just knew that everything would turn out for the best if Arkasha were involved.

  He was everything that Nikolai held sacred and pure and real in a world that had gone all to shit after the empire had disintegrated. Except for Putin, finally, Russia had gone through a horrible period of not knowing what it was or even what its existence meant.

  That, however, had never been a problem for Nikolai. He knew exactly who he was, and he knew exactly what his existence meant.

  “I’m going to kill him,” he said, looking up.

  Didenko laughed. “Don’t be so sure.”

  “He’s an old man now.”

  “Fifty.”

  “An old man—his reactions are slower, his strength less, maybe he loves his life a little more than he should. Maybe he has people he cares for.”