Dangerous Secrets

Three

Surveillance van

A mile from Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion

November 18

John Di Stefano held up a bottle of Coke and wished with all his heart that it was a beer. But this was a job, and alcohol and work didn’t mix, to his regret. A beer sounded great right now, to wash the taste of frustration out of his mouth.

To an impossible job. He held the Coke bottle up long enough to make the silent toast, then chugged its contents down.

He’d been holed up with Nick Ireland, aka Iceman, and Alexei Nestrenko in a surveillance van for the past week now and the inside of the van looked it and smelled it. Stale pizza lay in boxes piled on top of takeout cartons and ramen noodle containers, and the stench of unwashed male permeated the closed space. It was goddamned cold, too, since turning on the engine for heat too often would leave a telltale plume of exhaust.

The surveillance van was painted a mottled green that blended well with the pine trees surrounding them. They were a mile from Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion, high up in the hills, with a direct line of sight that allowed the laser-microwave beam to pick up vibrations off the French windows of Worontzoff’s study and digitally transform them into sound.

There were taps on the phones, but Worontzoff used the landline sparingly. Iceman had wanted ten dishes in an array around the mansion. He’d pounded desks, which usually worked—a Delta operator was like a lion in the geeky Tech section of the Unit—but this time the brass stood firm. One listening device. One. Larry down in Tech said it was the best way to keep surveillance from a distance.

Anything Worontzoff said in his study could be heard. They heard all conversations Worontzoff had in his study and landline conversations. Nothing specific had been said yet, but according to Alexei, something was brewing.

There had been chatter, a lot of chatter in the past months. The NSA had intercepted a message between two tangos in Islamabad about “the Russian in Vermont.” A mole in a Mafiya network in Bulgaria operated by Worontzoff’s organization had said that something big was in the pipeline. But it was all bits and pieces with no smoking gun.

Alexei was their smartest analyst and could speak Russian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian. He’d been sitting with heavy earphones on for over a week, listening to Worontzoff and his staff basically pick the lint out of their bellybuttons. And listening to music.

There were probably three thousand people of Russian extraction in Vermont, but only one Russian. The big man himself. Vassily Worontzoff wasn’t the grand old man of literature everyone thought he was, but rather the head of the Russian Mafiya in America, come to straighten out the assorted and disorganized scumbags in Brighton Beach, making mere millions off gas tax fraud and girls when there were billions to be made off counterfeit medicines and organ transplants and arms, the bigger the better.

Di Stefano almost choked on the mouthful of stale nachos as sounds came from his partner’s headset. Something going down! At last!

“What? What did he say?” Di Stefano rounded on Alexei and fought the urge to grab the smaller man’s grubby sweatshirt and shake the words out of him.

Slowly, deliberately, Alexei lifted one earphone away from his ear. The other he kept covered with the foam rubber earpiece. Alexei had been offered earbuds and even a sleek, pricey Bang & Olufsen headset that conducted sound through the ear bone, but he’d refused them all. He wanted to hear everything, he said, and for that he needed the big old-fashioned foam rubber pads that covered his ears.

They couldn’t operate the laser beam at night. The light beam became visible in the dark. But from first light to last, Alexei was on duty, eating and drinking and pissing and crapping with at least one ear covered at all times, listening.

This was what the Unit was all about—a secret government agency tasked with studying the growing contacts between terrorism and international organized crime, bringing together military operatives and law enforcement officers to combat this unholy alliance.

Alexei blinked as if coming out of a trance. “Not much. He picked up the phone and said hello, listened, then said excellent, then listened some more, then said have a safe journey, my friend. That’s all I heard him say.”

John’s mind raced. “Okay, okay. He’s happy about something. He’s happy about something that’s moving. Or rather someone that’s moving.” Di Stefano closed his eyes at the thought of all the bad people who could be moving around. “So now all we have to do is find out what it is that he’s so happy about, if it’s coming here and when.”

Alexei, who was a 36-level Doom player, grinned and lifted his can of diet Coke. “Piece a cake.”