Page 58 of Jacob

“Hi,” he said. “You okay?”

To her credit, Alex didn’t sound exasperated. “Yes, thanks. I’m going over some info The Queens have sent. Quite interesting. The ultimate owner seems to be?—”

“One Colonel Ilya Topolev,” Jacob said. “Of the FSB.”

“Uh-huh. You had a chance to read it.” She sighed. “I didn’t even know what that was until they told me. Sorry. Scientists lead a sheltered life.”

“No reason for you to know. So, honey, I’m going to show you the labs. Can you tell me if you see something out of place? If they seem like normal research labs to you? We’re not turning on the regular lights, my phone is filtering LED stealth light. Let me know if there is something unclear or out of place or just wrong. I’ll start from the perimeter and work in.”

“All right.”

Jacob started from the west wall, slowly recording everything there was to see, lingering over equipment. He was prepared to do this for all the labs, if necessary, but was hoping one lab would be indicative of all of them. It took twenty minutes, but finally he finished with the final countertop in the center of the room. There were stainless steel doors below the countertop, but when he opened them, they were empty. Nonetheless, he showed them, too, to Alex. Sometimes absence was as important as presence.

“Okay.” Jacob brought the phone closer. He was looking at Alex’s beautiful face. It anchored him, made him feel better. “Thoughts?”

Alex was frowning in concentration. “Well, it’s hard to think of what you have shown me as a working lab. It has primitive and old-fashioned equipment. Almost all the equipment is at least ten years old. I didn’t see any obvious holes, as it were, otherwise I might have suspected that they emptied the lab of the modern equipment, but it doesn’t look like that. It looks like a lab that hasn’t kept up with the times. Wait a minute. There’s something I couldn’t tell in that weird light. Can you run your finger along a surface?”

Jacob scowled. “What?”

“Run your finger along that countertop, for example. And along all the surfaces.”

Well, she was the expert. Jacob ran his finger over every surface he could and understood when his fingers left a streak.

“Dusty. That doesn’t show up under stealth light.”

“Dusty,” she agreed. “Jacob, that is most definitely not a working lab. Labs are kept meticulously clean. Sterile, in fact. Dust on surfaces would interfere with results. This lab hasn’t been used in a while. It’s abandoned. I’d say some time ago. I don’t think you’re going to learn too much from it, unless they left behind paperwork. I’d advise you to look for paperwork and records and then leave.”

Jacob nodded at Nick. “Okay. We’ll look for docs then we’ll come back to the hotel and make a plan to approach the hidden lab at Zalny. How are you doing?”

“Fine.” Her face softened. “I’m on my second coffee. This is a comfortable suite, and in an hour, I’ll order lunch. Looking at the weather, I am much more comfortable than you. Please don’t worry about me. By the time you guys arrive I think I’ll have some info for you.”

“Make sure you order lunch. You need to eat lunch.”

“Yes, mom.” Alex rolled her eyes. “You want me to order something for you guys?”

Jacob looked over at Nick, who nodded. “Yeah. Don’t know when we’ll get there so in about an hour, order a couple of club sandwiches and a couple of?—”

He looked over at Nick again, who said, “Cokes.”

“Couple of Cokes. See you later.”

Alex smiled at him on the screen and he thumbed it closed.

“There now,” Nick said soothingly. “Feel better?”

“Actually,” Jacob said, feeling sheepish, “I do. We don’t know what we’re facing and I feel better that I know where she is and that she’s safe.”

“Let’s finish up in here and we can get back to the hotel. You’ll feel even better when you see her.”

ChapterTwelve

Topolev followed everything via his men’s bodycams. It went down smoothly. They rappelled down onto the rooftop of the hotel from a specially built baffled helo that made a fraction of the noise a normal helo did. His men were in body armor and well armed but they also carried a gas mask with well over an hour’s autonomy. Topolev was sure the entire thing would be over in five minutes, but to be well prepared was to be well armed.

It was the Dubrovka Theater crisis in miniature. He’d been right there, in Moscow, during the whole thing. On the 23rdof October, 2002, he’d been training recruits in psy-ops, a weeklong course in the fine art of fucking with the enemy’s head. The FSB had subtly started training recruits in electronic surveillance, economic sabotage, false flag interventions. He remembered thinking that his own kind of training—poison pills and grenades and rifles—was starting to be old fashioned.

He was preparing a new generation of recruits in the subtleties of modern warfare when word came that a handful of Chechen terrorists had taken an entire theater hostage. Almost nine hundred theater-goers imprisoned under the watchful eyes and guns of the most backward, ferocious soldiers he’d ever encountered. They were positively primitive, savages.

He’d rushed to the Dubrovka theater, where officers of the FSB, including the Alpha Group and Vympel Special Forces, had taken the lead in responding to the terrorists, troops from the Ministry of the Interior, emergency services, and local Moscow police officers. It was an utter stalemate with a thousand elements of law and order milling around, helpless because the terrorists held assault rifles on almost a thousand hostages.

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