The 14th Colony: A Novel by Steve Berry

meant Zorin was not a man to be taken lightly. He would be highly trained, far more accustomed to offense than defense.
    “And what does Zorin want revenge for?”
    “He longs for communism.”
    “Move to China.”
    “I doubt he has much love for the Chinese. He’s more a Lenin-traditionalist, and a dangerous one. He was also part of the special destinations group.”
    Those she also knew. The Soviets trained them to penetrate an enemy either before or just after a war started. Their job would be to disrupt power stations, communications grids, dams, highways, and any other strategic target. They were experts in weapons, explosives, mines, and killing. They were also all pilots, required to be fluent in at least two other languages, English nearly always one of those.
    “He served in Afghanistan during our war there,” Osin said. “Quite effectively, too.”
    “Nikolai, please tell me what’s really happening here.”
    She hoped her conciliatory tone would loosen this spy’s tongue. All of this had started for her with a call from Osin. The initial inquiry had come days earlier from the Kremlin to the White House, the matter then referred her way by President Danny Daniels.
    The facts, as originally told, were relatively simple. A former KGB archivist, an old man named Vadim Belchenko, had gone missing. Russian internal security kept tabs on Belchenko, since they’d learned long ago that archivists could be their biggest security problem. Archivists once enjoyed unfettered access to both the highest intelligence and the most sensitive policy papers. They knew everything, so to ignore them could be fatal. That lesson was taught by one named Mitrokhin, who smuggled out 25,000 pages of sensitive documents, which in 1992 made their way westward, offering the clearest picture ever of Soviet espionage and proving that the KGB had evolved into the largest foreign intelligence service in the world.
    Sharp of sword, tough of shield.
    That was its motto.
    And the main way the West knew anything about how dangerous it became was from archivists. So she understood why Belchenko may have been on a watch list. What remained unclear was why this man was so important right now, and how Zorin fit in.
    “He is a profoundly troubled man,” Osin said. “He fled east after the Soviet collapse, along with a hundred or so other expatriates. They’ve lived by Lake Baikal without incident for a long time. Lately, though, this calm has changed. Zorin knows Belchenko. They have communicated many times through the years. But never has Belchenko himself gone east.”
    That had been Cotton’s mission. To recon the dacha and the village and see if he could locate Belchenko.
    “Why not send your own people,” she said. “Why call me?”
    “There are several reasons for that. But the most relevant is that this has nothing to do with Russia. It’s an external problem.”
    “Care to explain that one?”
    “If your agent finds Belchenko, I will gladly. For now, let’s just say that I like to think that we are not enemies, though sometimes it’s hard to know for sure. I was told to involve you as a show of our good faith.”
    And, she realized, to also give Moscow some deniability if things went terribly wrong. At least we brought you in from the start would be their line. And he was right about the enemies part. No longer were Russia and the United States open adversaries. But while the Cold War had been over a long time, a more frozen version had slowly come into existence. She sensed, though, that this mess was something more akin to the old days.
    “For now,” he said, “let me say that this is a fight that may involve only Zorin and the United States. Or at least that’s our hope. So I thought it prudent to now make you aware of it. We don’t want to see you lose.”
    A strange comment, which she added to the growing list of anomalies.
    He stared at her through eyes that were surprisingly congenial. “Do you know of Stanislav