Michael Shayne. Writer of political, murder, and conspiracy thrillers
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Friday, April 5, 1996
12:15 A.M.
"Hey! Wake up!”
The man heard the words echoing as if underwater. Each syllable pounded inside his beaten brain like a sledgehammer.
When he felt the icy, salty brine of the Aegean Sea splash his face, he stirred, groaned, then opened his one unswollen eye to more darkness.
After spitting bloody mucus onto the fiberglass bow of the rising and falling dinghy, he managed to ask, “Where are we?”
Across the bow, the blurry figure said, “About a thousand feet above your grave. Give or take.”
The voice was familiar, and it cemented the reality of his situation as it all came back to him. Where he was—and why.
Even in the darkness, he could see and feel the flex-cuffs binding his wrists. He couldn’t see his feet, but knew they were cuffed too. He could make out a chain tied to a length of rope that snaked its way to where the figure sat balancing an anchor on the edge of the gunwale.
His situation was clear now. The end no longer a mystery. And he laughed through a bloody grin.
“What’s the joke?” the figure asked.
The man spat blood again and said, “You were always so melodramatic. And so fucking predictable.”
“Well, then, this won’t come as a surprise either.” The figure lifted his arm and let the anchor fall into the sea, taking the coil of rope with it.
Monday, March 11, 1996
25 Days Earlier
8:33 A.M.
Sleet pelted the faces of the four men following the narrow stone paths of the Novodevichy Cemetery on Moscow’s south side, their gloved and frozen hands curled around the wooden handles of their tools. The area was crowded and too historic to allow heavy equipment, so the caretaker had demanded the dig be done by hand.
The only man without a tool was wearing slacks, a tie, leather gloves, a wool overcoat, and a ushanka fur hat and fought with a flapping map of the cemetery.
On the way to their destination, he paid little notice to the graves of Anton Chekhov and Nikita Khrushchev. March was too cold to loiter for long, even for seasoned Muscovite gravediggers.
The man in the suit stopped and pointed at a stone marking the plot. Hand-chiseled in large block letters was the name BERGER. And inches from there, embedded in the earth, lay three rectangular granite markers, one for each of the deceased: Karl, Sophya, and Liam. Their birth dates were missing, but the death dates were the same.
November 11, 1982.
Several minutes into their task, the men had picked their way six inches into the frozen ground when they heard, then saw, the screaming woman running toward them, her arms waiving wildly in the air. “Oстановка! Остановка!” she cried. (Stop! Stop!)
The man in the suit ordered the diggers to halt while he met the crazy woman on the path. “Why do you stop us? We have permission from the highest—”
Bent over and out of breath, she struggled to speak. “You—won’t—find—them.”
Tuesday, March 12, 1996
General Grigori Urmanov, Russia’s minister of defense, finished the call with his informant, then returned the phone’s receiver to its cradle with a shaky, liver-spotted hand. After a long drag from his cigarette, he used it to light a new one while he leaned back in his chair and stared at the yellow-stained ceiling above his desk.
How long had the ceiling been like that? he wondered.
He had expected the call years ago. What he had done, what they had done, could never disappear into the dust of an evidence shelf. Not if Jurg Ivanovich, the head of the SVR (Russia’s intelligence agency), had his way. And apparently, he had.
Checking his watch, Urmanov knew he had two, maybe three, minutes. His heart palpitated as he shuffled to the window, split the drapes, then opened the French doors leading to the narrow balcony. Leaning against the railing, he stared across the Moskva River one last time—a view he had come to cherish since taking over as Defense Minister.
Eleven floors below, three black SUVs belonging to the SVR skidded to a stop, blocking the Znamenka Ulitsa and the sidewalk as maybe ten agents poured out and disappeared into the building’s ground floor, leaving one agent to take up a position on the sidewalk. With a submachine gun in his grip, the lone agent looked up, spotted Urmanov, and pointed.
The call Urmanov had received from his informant had been timely. And accurate. The SVR had been to the cemetery. And they had dug.
Stepping back inside, Urmanov went to the wall behind his desk and opened the hinged portrait of Boris Yeltsin to reveal a wall safe.
After the third shaky battle with the dial, he removed the pre-stamped, pre-addressed envelope, closed the safe, then dropped the envelope down the mail chute.
As his office door rattled with angry fists, he strolled easily back to the window, waved at the SVR agent below…
… then threw himself over the railing.
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