Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) Read online

  Deeper Than Red: A Novel

  © 2014 by Sue Duffy

  Published by Kregel Publications, a division of Kregel, Inc., 2450 Oak Industrial Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49505.

  The persons and events portrayed in this work are the creations of the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

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  To my grandchildren, the storytellers to come

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the following for their enormous help in crafting the Red Returning trilogy …

  To concert pianist Marina Lomazov—on whom the character of Liesl Bower was loosely based—for the exquisiteness of her music and her willingness to guide me in selections featured in this trilogy.

  To my son, BM1 Brian M. Duffy of the U.S. Coast Guard, for his hands-on knowledge of weaponry, boarding procedures, and Homeland Security protocol.

  To my husband, Mike Duffy, for his expertise in boats and navigation.

  To my brother, Scott Railey, a former charter captain, for his knowledge of fishing the Florida Keys.

  To the works of authors Josh McDowell, Don Stewart, and Texe Marrs for their coverage of cults and the occult in such books as The Deceivers and New Age Cults & Religions. Other research materials included books and brochures gathered on-site at the medium colony on which Anhinga Bay Spiritualist Camp was based. Yes, I went inside their bookstore where Mr. Fremont would have worked. Yes, I dared to wear a cross around my neck. And yes, what happened to Tally in this story happened to me.

  To the global intelligence gatherers and analysts at Stratfor, to which I subscribe because they know things the rest of us don’t.

  To my family who allowed me such long stretches of isolation to complete this and all my novels. I love you more.

  Chapter 1

  Moments after the Russian president’s motorcade pulled away from the Kremlin, one of the phones in Evgeny Kozlov’s bag vibrated. He turned from the window overlooking a dingy Moscow street and glared at the canvas appendage to a life on the run, always ready for the grab and escape.

  With one last visual sweep of the street, he crossed to the unmade bed and retrieved the phone. Noting the familiar code that flashed onto the screen, he answered with only a clipped “Yes.”

  “Something is not right,” Viktor Petrov alerted. “President Gorev just left for his village near the Volga to meet his wife and children for the weekend. He left with his usual security detail in three cars, except for the drivers. At the last minute, they were all replaced.”

  Evgeny went still. “Replaced with whom?”

  “New recruits. I don’t know their names. Part of their training, I was told.” Viktor had worked for the Federal Security Service, a Russian intelligence network, since its former days as the Soviet KGB.

  Evgeny could hear his old friend begin to wheeze and the discord of traffic in the background. “Where are you?”

  “Near the office.” That would be Lubyanka Square across town, now pulsing with rush hour traffic that Thursday afternoon.

  Evgeny grimaced. Surely Viktor was out of range of his agency’s hawk-eyed surveillance systems, always monitoring their own. Surely time hadn’t dulled the old agent’s serrated wits. “Are you safe?” Evgeny asked, hearing a horn bleat somewhere on the square.

  “More than you. Are you in the same place?”

  Evgeny glanced around the decomposing room in what the Americans would have called a flophouse. But no one searched for him there. Not this moment. “I will leave immediately.”

  “Evgeny, Gorev is a good man. Ineffective, but honest.”

  “Honest always loses.” With his free hand, Evgeny shoved clothes and toiletries into another bag on the bed. “I will signal you from the road. Hurry back to your office.”

  He dropped the phone into his jacket pocket before closing the door behind him and picking his way down a stair littered with refuse and one drunken human form crumpled into a corner of the landing. Evgeny had known far better than this in his life, at least in material matters, though the old days of ready cash and heady power had also carried the stench of betrayal to everything he’d once known to be good and just. The penniless orphan who’d escaped his lot and landed solidly within the fraternal clutch of the Cold War KGB wouldn’t have dared question its integrity or authority. His survival had depended on blind devotion and unwavering obedience … until his great unraveling in the realm of Liesl Bower.

  He paid his bill to the woman at the front desk and hesitated at the door before entering the street. Through the glass, it seemed a normal summer afternoon in the sluggish bowels of the city. He looked back at the cashier. Her black-lined eyes were still fixed on the lurid magazine photos she’d barely turned from to take Evgeny’s money. He was glad to see they weren’t the frightened, darting eyes of one who’d just been instructed to act normal until the man in room 14 had exited the door, then duck.

  He stepped confidently from the hotel and hurried to the faded-blue Fiat parked around the corner, knowing he was already fifteen minutes behind the motorcade. He was glad for the sight of the boxy little car wedged between two sanitation trucks. The money he’d deposited in various banks while still a well-compensated KGB agent was dwindling rapidly. Viktor had supplied the little car and new plates.

  Evgeny wound his way toward one of the ring roads skirting the Kremlin. Between buildings he glimpsed the towers in the great wall and the golden domes of cathedrals enclosed by it. He sensed the heartbeat of his motherland, feeling its erratic pulse. But he feared the things underfoot in the back rooms of power, things that threatened the country he loved, though it had never loved him back.

  Leaving the ring artery, Evgeny turned onto a freeway leading northwest out of the city, his accelerator foot slammed to the floor.

  President Dimitri Gorev had long preferred retreating to his modest family farm rather than the stately dachas provided him and Russian presidents before him. He’d always been a man of the soil whose deepest regret had been his inability to deliver a better life to those who’d toiled the earth through Soviet oppression and into the hope of a new day, which never seemed to dawn for them.

  He was a man of the common people, despite the luxurious, and heavily armored, Mercedes sedan in which he now rode. His usual complement of security agents was with him on this routine weekend transport—except his customary driver, who’d been pulled that morning. So, too, had the drivers in the other two cars. Gorev chose not to concern h
imself with the abrupt switch after his security chief assured him it was a necessary training exercise for the young men.

  He’d survived one assassination plot, thanks to a young American pianist. Liesl Bower had discovered the code that exposed the coup conspiracy of Gorev’s countrymen Vadim Fedorovsky and Pavel Andreyev. Both had been executed.

  That had left one—Ivan Volynski, the mastermind of the conspiracy, who would have launched a wave of terrorist strikes against the United States … if he hadn’t been incinerated over the East River in New York six months ago. That had created something of an implosion in the shadow world of the Kremlin, where Gorev knew Ivan’s people still bred. The man’s death had not ended those back-corridor murmurings of subversion that still threatened the present administration. After the foiled assassination plot, Gorev had purged the ranks as best he could. He’d held exhaustive interrogations and surveillances that had employed old Soviet KGB tactics. In the end, he’d rooted out only a handful of insurgents, and the taunts to him persisted, one coming that very morning in his own village, which was normally a stronghold for him. Someone had displayed a public notice referring to “the late Dimitri Gorev.”

  Was he reading too much into the threats? Imagining others? Was it not true that his own prime minister had averted his eyes from Gorev too many times? That Arkady Glinka had gradually withdrawn from all but required interaction with his president?

  There was no doubt that something was still festering in the underground of his government. It was time to draw a sword and attack. But first, this brief respite in the village of his birth. He leaned back against the seat and watched regiments of birch trees parade by. Just a few more miles and his gentle wife would wrap him in her arms. His children would run barefoot through the yards to greet him, and the Kremlin would fade away, for a while.

  He watched the lay of the land begin its descent to the river ahead, a lethargic tributary of the Volga where Gorev had fished as a child. He turned to the guard seated beside him. He was a middle-aged man employed by the Federal Security Service and recently assigned to the president’s personal detail.

  “Yuri, where did you grow up?” Gorev asked.

  “In Moscow, sir.” The man glanced past Gorev at the view through the window. “I am afraid I have never known the country life, though I intend to when I retire in a few years. Then I can fish every day.”

  Gorev waved a hand toward the river. “I will show you where I caught my first fish. Just ahead, the road will bend sharply to the south to follow the riverbank. Then it will wind through the woods, a remote stretch of road with fish pools along the way.”

  Now past the turn, Gorev leaned forward in his seat to catch the first spark of sunlight off the water. Just then, the driver suddenly stomped on the brake and sent the unbelted Gorev lurching forward, impacting the back of the seat before him. Its occupant, one of Gorev’s most trusted aides, emitted a painful cry as his head slammed into the dash. Instantly righting from his own fall, Yuri grabbed his gun from the holster beneath his coat.

  Gorev turned on the driver. “What are you doing?” he demanded angrily. But the young man didn’t answer. Instead, he flung open his door while simultaneously lowering the bulletproof windows. Gorev spun in his seat toward the tail car and saw its driver also leap from the vehicle.

  Feeling the rush of air from the now-open windows, Gorev turned back to see his driver running hard toward the tree line. From those same trees emerged a swarm of gunmen bearing down on the motorcade, their weapons raised.

  “No!” Gorev shrieked as more gunmen advanced from the opposite side of the road. Before Yuri could open fire, the president grabbed the gun from the man’s hand and squeezed off only one round. It hit the fleeing driver in the back and dropped him just short of the trees. It was judgment, a death sentence carried out by a man just seconds from his own execution.

  Chapter 2

  Evgeny ran the Fiat wide open, risking interference from a highway law enforcer with no right to know the things Evgeny did. And there was certainly no time to explain them. He would have to close the fifteen-minute gap between him and the motorcade in a car that threatened to blow some critical part if he didn’t slow down, which he refused to do.

  Evgeny knew what a last-minute switch of drivers meant. He’d long been programmed to know such things. It was part of the core curriculum for assassins. To interpret the signs, plot, infiltrate, anticipate, kill, and to trust those who said it was all for Mother Russia and the ultimate good of her people. He’d gladly swallowed every bit of it through all the years he’d served the Communist juggernaut, until it burned and sank in 1991. He’d jumped clear just in time, though for a while he’d floundered in a sea of disillusioned fellow agents. Most of them had climbed aboard the next ship to stop and pick them up—the new Russian Federation with its tastes-like-KGB intelligence machine, the Federal Security Service, known as FSB.

  But Evgeny and a few others chose not to follow. They longed to return Russia to its former position of world power. Two of the KGB’s most powerful and inspired leaders, Pavel Andreyev and Vadim Fedorovsky, promised to do that for them. So Evgeny leapt into the fold, pledging allegiance to their renegade order. What he didn’t know was that someone unseen had long been working Andreyev and Fedorovsky like puppets. Evgeny had likened it to discovering an unknown planet in the solar system. How had he missed it? But once the phantom fist of Ivan Volynski materialized, Evgeny realized that the man’s feverish quest for power, wealth, and brutish dominance over the United States would eventually destroy Russia.

  Ivan Volynski, a self-exiled Kremlin power broker, ruled over a secret brotherhood strategically embedded throughout the new government and military, waiting for the moment to snuff out the Federation, seize control, and return Russia to its former might. Ivan Volynski was to rule as a modern-day czar. Until one pleasant afternoon six months ago when Evgeny fingered a small remote and blew Volynski out of the New York sky.

  The Fiat screamed northwest along the busy highway until the turnoff to Gorev’s hometown. There, Evgeny left the highway and slid along a tranquil road leading to a tributary of the Volga River. He checked his watch. Almost four. He’d made remarkable time and hoped to catch up with the motorcade before it reached the small village where the president’s family had farmed for six generations.

  From a bag on the passenger seat, he pulled out a personal-size arsenal with enough firepower to counter whatever he might face ahead. Three handguns, an Uzi, grenades, and tear gas. What did he think he was doing? He’d once been party to a conspiracy to kill President Gorev. Now, Evgeny was risking everything to save the man. But from whom? Ivan Volynski was dead. But his power-lusting compatriots, the ones who hadn’t already been executed for treason, surely had climbed back to their camouflaged hiding places along the rungs of national power. They were still there, Evgeny was sure, looking for a new leader to deliver them. But it was too soon for one to have risen in Volynski’s wake, in time to stage the thing Evgeny feared lay ahead. Who’s pulling the puppet strings now?

  The road curled through forests so deep and dark that their boundaries seemed like the edge of night. The innocent beauty of the trees, their graceful bowing, the wind now chiming symphonically through his open window all conjured the image of Liesl Bower. He glanced at the cold weaponry on the seat beside him. How had she landed in such a world as his? Or he in hers? She’d once been his prey, now his conscience. He willed her image to flee from this peril, back to the fine old home on Tidewater Lane, under the sultry Charleston skies.

  He inhaled the wild scent of the Volga and wished himself to flee as well, yet knowing he would never be free of the thing that had drawn him back to Russia, the primal need to cleanse himself of the blood on his hands.

  He cocked his head toward the open window, hoping for the sound of clean, rushing waters, but what he heard triggered a spasm through his body. Gunfire. A distant fury of automatic weapons. He was too late.

  And then
it stopped. There was only the shriek of the Fiat’s now-futile race down the winding road to the river. Downshifting around one more curve, Evgeny suddenly braked into a sideways skid and came to rest before the riddled remains of the president’s three-car entourage.

  Almost bumper to bumper, they lay like a single butchered serpent, its last breath just released. No after-death twitching from nerves still firing. Not this time.

  Evgeny grabbed the Uzi and dashed from the car to an outcrop of boulders just off the road and listened. He knew the sound of an escaping hit team, and he heard it now. The garbled signals to each other, the swift and careful footfalls over raw ground. The blinding quiet left behind.

  The assailants were gone. No need to follow. Evgeny knew the escape tactics that had been his. He glanced down the road in both directions. He didn’t have long. Though the ill-kept road was remote, some unsuspecting motorist was sure to come along soon.

  Evgeny turned back to the ruin. He hurried to the middle car, knowing that’s where he’d find the president. As he passed the last car in the line, he looked inside. The condition of the two bodies there triggered the taste of bile in even this veteran killer. He hurried to the big Mercedes and stopped at the backseat window. As in the car behind, the bulletproof shield had been fully lowered.

  The president stared at him with unseeing eyes. Evgeny stared back at them. It was too hard to look at the rest of him.

  Careful not to leave a print, he reached through the open window and checked for a pulse in the president’s neck. Then he slid the back of his finger along the man’s bloodied hand. “I am as guilty of this as they are,” he told the corpse, its blood still warm against Evgeny’s skin. “But I will find them and make them pay, just as I too must be brought to justice one day.” The eyes held Evgeny fast, though their clear sheen was fading quickly. “So go, and be at peace. I envy you.”

  Evgeny stepped away from the Mercedes and went quickly to the lead car, finding its occupants as shattered as the others. There was no one at the wheel of any car. He believed the order to substitute drivers had come from too far up the chain of command to trace, certainly not by him. Surely an intricate cover-up was already in place.