Page 2 of Dangerous Secrets

November 18

At first light, as agreed, the pilot was waiting, alone, at the bottom of the rolling stairs. It was an undeclared flight with a plane that didn’t officially exist and no co-pilot would be welcome. The less people involved, the better.

They were on a runway on the far side of the military airport, which had been decommissioned when the Soviets lost power and had never been recommissioned. Passengers: the pilot and a nuclear engineer.

They had only been told first names, Lyosha and Edik. Both names were false, but it didn’t matter.

The nuclear engineer, whose real name was Arkady Sergeyevitch Andreyev, knew the only thing about the pilot that was necessary—that he was azek, a former guest of the Russian Gulag. It had been a long, long time ago, but it was an exclusive club—men who didn’t die in the Russian Bear’s cruel embrace.

The two men didn’t shake hands. But when the pilot stretched out his hand to help Arkady maneuver the hand truck to shift the heavy container from the van to a loading pallet, Arkady saw what he expected to see—a barbed wire tattoo around the pilot’s wrist.

I had faded, just like his own. They’d both been just kids when they’d been sent away to hell.

Former prisoners had their experience in hell etched into their skins, not just their souls. Arkady was covered in tattoos, from the stars on his knees that meant he bowed to no man, to the crosses that were a symbol of the years in the Gulag. He wore them proudly.

The only part of his skin that was clear was a large, shiny, scarred patch over his heart where once had been the tattoo of the distinctive, goateed Tatar features of Lenin. Soviet prison guards were a superstitious lot and would never shoot the holy image of Lenin.

The day the camp fell, he’d stolen a soldering iron from the deserted guards’ barracks and burned the head of Lenin off himself. He hadn’t even felt the pain, he had been so happy to rid his body of that monstrous image.

The two men, Arkady and the pilot, silently noted each other’s tattoos. Nothing more had to be said. They were members of theBratva,the Brotherhood. That was all they had to know.

The heavy lead container was lifted into the cargo bay of the Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft, where the pilot carefully strapped it to the bulkhead. Inside the lead container was a large, lead-lined canister filled with cesium 137, enough for a very powerful dirty bomb. Enough material to close down the city center of London, or New York, or Paris, or Rome, or Berlin or Washington DC. Wipe it off the face of the earth as a viable city, turn it intodeserted concrete canyons forbidden to humans or any other life form for ten thousand years.

The pilot closed the cargo bay door and entered the small cabin where Arkady had observed the stowage of the container.

“Is everything all right?” the pilot asked quietly.

Arkady knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t offended. This was a dangerous business.

Though he was a superbly well-trained and careful nuclear engineer, and had taken all the necessary precautions, the pilot couldn’t know that.

Instead of answering, Arkady opened his briefcase and extracted a small Geiger counter. He switched it on, walked to the cargo bay and waved it over the container. They both listened to the welcome sound of soft, gentle ticking. The Geiger counter was picking up on the ambient radiation, higher than normal in the area surrounding a nuclear power plant, but nothing more than that.

The pilot nodded, satisfied, and without a word made his way to the cockpit. Arkady walked down the steps onto the tarmac. There was one more thing to take care of before take-off.

Telling theVorthat the first stage was successful.

If this trip proved successful, there were many more such trips in the future. HisVor, an already powerful and rich man, would become one of the most powerful men in the history of the world.

Arkady opened the green cellphone. He had three of them, one for each stage of his long journey. Three brand-new cellphones, one-time use only. He dialed a long number, connecting to a remote mansion in the northern state of Vermont, in the United States.

The cellphone was unencrypted. If there was one thing guaranteed to catch the attention of America’s frighteningly powerful electronic surveillance agency, the NSA, it was anencrypted cell phone message to the United States. So there was no encryption and no nonsense about packages on their way or delivery times.

The NSA’s endless banks of supercomputers, trolling daily and tirelessly through terabytes of data spanning the globe, was trip-wired with a number of key words, ‘package’ and ‘delivery’ being two of them, and would have immediately picked up on those words.

The Vor’s money had bought the services of one of the junior NSA officers and they had the list of words. The Vor thought of everything.

No packages, no deliveries. Their code was the weather.

The cellphone at the other end was picked up immediately. It, too, was a one-off, to be destroyed after the message. Arkady had memorized each of the Vor’s one-off cellphone numbers, though they were 12 digits each.

A laughable exercise. Child’s play. In Kolyma, numbers had kept him sane. He’d memorized Pi to the 13thdecimal, prime numbers up to the first 500 and had perfected in his head a risk calculation method the Vor used to this day.

The Vor himself, a literary genius, had memorized every word of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades. Vassily Worontzoff, the greatest man in the world. The man who’d saved his life and, perhaps more important, his sanity in Kolyma. His Vor.

“Slushain.”I’m listening.The Vor’s deep voice, with its cultivated Muscovite accent, reassured Arkady at the deepest possible level that all was right in his world.

“Greetings,” he replied, looking up at the black clouds roiling in the sky. A fierce Siberian wind was blowing, and the temperature was well below freezing. He huddled more deeply into the sheepskin jacket the Vor had bought him. “I just thought you might like to know that the weather here is perfect. Sunny skies. Very warm weather.”

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