The Solomon Effect by C. S. Graham Page B

tapped at his computer for a few minutes, then looked up. “The representative from Langley checked in for his flight to Kaliningrad twenty minutes ago.”
    “Fuck.” Rodriguez glanced across the kitchen to where the other men were clustered around a big oak table and eating breakfast out of takeout containers from a local inn. “Dixon, you and Salinger come with me. We’ll get the son of a bitch when he lands.”

17
    Burrowing deep into her jacket, Tobie stepped off the flight from Copenhagen into an icy Baltic wind and found herself staring into the muzzle of a machine gun.
    A stony-faced circle of guards herded the flight’s passengers across the nearly deserted tarmac to an ugly Soviet-era terminal. A row of battered booths controlled the passage from the immigration hall to customs, but only one booth was manned. Waiting in the endless line with her bag clutched to her side, Tobie had plenty of time to watch the way the tall, thin guard was subjecting each passenger to a ruthless scrutiny.
    Something was wrong.
    Despite the frigid atmosphere of the room, she suddenly felt hot. CIA personnel were typically assigned to embassies, a position that conveniently provided them with diplomatic immunity. Intelligence personnel without diplomatic passports were said to be under “unofficial cover.” In this case, “unofficial” basically meant exposed.
    Without the immunity afforded by a diplomatic passport, Tobie was just an ordinary foreign national. And while the Cold War might be over, some things hadn’t really changedin Russia. If the Russians knew or even suspected her connection to the CIA, she could disappear into a system that would treat her like—well, like the U.S. treated the guys they sent to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib and a couple dozen other secret prisons scattered from Afghanistan to Rumania to Morocco. When the guard finally raised his head and called out, “Next,” Tobie jumped.
    “Sdrasvytye,” she said with a smile as she stepped up to the booth.
    The guard stared at her passport, his dark bushy eyebrows drawing together in a frown. She expected him to say, “And what is the purpose of your visit?” But he didn’t say anything. His frown deepening, he swung away to peck at his computer’s keyboard.
    “You will wait to one side,” he said, jerking his chin toward the cinderblock wall behind him.
    Tobie stopped breathing. “Is there a problem?”
    “You wait,” he told her, already motioning to the next person in line.
    A stirring at the edge of the room drew her around. A barrel-chested man with short-cropped dark hair, full lips, and a crooked nose strode across the chipped linoleum floor, his face set in harsh lines as he walked up to her. He was casually dressed in a black turtleneck and jeans, but there was no doubt from the way everyone deferred to him that this was one seriously scary individual.
    “Ensign October Guinness?” he snapped.
    Ensign? Holy shit. How did he know that? Tobie’s voice shook. “Da.”
    He said in Russian, “Come with me, please.”
     
    Andrei Gorchakove had graduated from the Academy and joined the KGB in the dying days of the once-mighty Soviet empire.
    Like most Russians, he remembered those chaotic years with bitterness and shame. Ironically, both the Americans and Osama bin Laden liked to take credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Andrei himself thought the fault lay with the slow bleed of the Afghan War and the environmental disaster at Chernobyl. But whoever or whatever the cause, there was no denying that the breakup of the Soviet Union had brought terrible hardship to them all—or at least, to most of them.
    Bereft of the ideology that had guided them for nearly a century, the Russian people had stumbled through a dark and terrible period as the millennium drew to a close. The state collapsed. Hordes of ruthless oligarchs calling themselves capitalists gobbled up the wealth of the country and brought a once-proud nation to her