Dangerous Secrets

Lisa Marie Rice

Prologue

Parker’s Ridge, Vermont

November 28

Iceman’s mission was over. So why was he still here, on a frozen hilltop, watching a burial in the valley below?

It was cold, even for November. The undertakers’ assistants found it hard to break the frozen ground for the large mahogany and brass coffin lying on the grass a few feet away. The sound of their shovels rang like steel and carried easily in the bright, cold air. A few people stamped their feet on the snowy ground, trying to warm up, then looked around uneasily. It wasn’t done to look uncomfortable at a burial, so they surreptitiously rubbed their arms and huddled miserably in their winter coats, hoping it would be over soon.

Iceman was in his hiding place two hundred feet up the wooded hillside, watching through the Steiner 8 x 30 tactical binoculars he’d kept from his Delta days.

He didn’t stamp his feet and he didn’t huddle. The cold didn’t bother him. Heat didn’t bother him. And he didn’t care about what the onlookers felt.

He was there for the widow.

She stood apart, pale and stiff, bareheaded, dressed in black. She didn’t seem to notice the cold. She didn’t fidget, she didn’t move. She just stood, small and straight, watching dry-eyed as the assistants laboriously dug. It seemed to take forever.

The undertakers’ breath rose in white plumes of vapor and their breathing grew harsh, like workhorses pulling a heavy load. Finally it was over, and there was a coffin-shaped hole in the ground.

As if by an unspoken signal, the onlookers gathered around the widow. An elderly gentleman dressed in a black cashmere overcoat briefly cupped her elbow and bent down to her. She shook her head and he stepped back.

The pastor, a young, pasty-faced man, opened his heavy Bible and read from a page that had been marked beforehand with a long white silk bookmark. He read slowly and solemnly while his nose turned bright red.

At last he came to the end of the passage, closed the Bible, and bowed his head. Everyone else bowed their head, too, except the widow, who continued to stare stiffly ahead. The elderly elegantly dressed lady with the elderly gentleman tried to walk toward the widow, but stopped when her companion laid a hand on her arm. He looked at her and shook his head. She looked confused, then stepped back.

The assistants had placed inch-thick ropes under the coffin which had been maneuvered over the gaping hole, and were slowly, laboriously easing it down. The coffin was huge, heavy. The assistants grunted with the strain, the sound carrying up the hillside. Finally, the coffin reached the bottom and the assistants stepped back respectfully.

The preacher spoke to the widow and she moved for the first time, bending gracefully to grab a handful of earth. She walked to the rim of the hole in the ground, threw a handful of earth onto the coffin, then looked blindly up.

Iceman stepped back sharply. It wasn’t that he was frightened of being seen. He was a master of camouflage and had chosen his lookout wisely and well. There wasn’t a chance in hell he’d be spotted. What hit him like a punch to the stomach was the raw, naked pain on the widow’s face.

A lovely face. A face he’d kissed more times than he could count.

Stop that, Iceman told himself. Think of the mission.

He lifted the powerful binoculars again and the graveside scene sprang back into focus.

The quiet ceremony was over. The onlookers were slowly moving away, grateful to get back to warmth and life and away from the cold hand of death hovering over the scene. The widow was the last to leave, on the arm of the elderly gentleman.

Suddenly the widow stiffened and stopped. She whirled around and ran back to the grave, where the grave diggers were already shoveling dirt over the coffin. The widow stopped just at the edge of the hole and the tears that were coming freely now streamed silver over her face. She knelt in the dirt and slipped her wedding ring off. She brought it to her lips, kissed it, and reached down to place it gently on the coffin lid, her hand lingering for a long moment, as if she couldn’t bear to break this last contact.

The elderly gentleman walked slowly back to her. When she showed no sign of standing, he cupped her shoulders, urging her to her feet. She stood and allowed herself to be led away, stopping just once to turn and gently blow a last kiss behind her.

It was a heartbreaking scene and Iceman felt his heart grow heavy with sorrow, then he shook himself.

Foolishness, he told himself impatiently as he started taking precautions to erase all traces of his presence from the underbrush.

He had to leave, right now. He had no business being here at all. The mission was over, for him at least.

Still, it wasn’t every day a man got to watch his own funeral.

One

Krasnoyarsk Nuclear Power Plant

Russia

Ten days earlier

November 18

At first light, as agreed, the pilot was waiting, alone, at the bottom of the rolling stairs. It was an undeclared flight with a plane that didn’t officially exist and no copilot would be welcome. The fewer people involved, the better.

They were on a runway on the far side of the military airport, which had been decommissioned when the Soviets lost power. A pilot and a nuclear engineer.

They had only been told first names, Lyosha and Edik. Both names were false, but it didn’t matter.

The nuclear engineer, whose real name was Arkady Sergeyevitch Andreyev, knew the only thing about the pilot that was necessary—that he was a zek, a former guest of the Russian Gulag. They were members of that very exclusive club—men who didn’t die in the Russian Bear’s cruel embrace.

The two men didn’t shake hands. But when the pilot stretched out his hand to help Arkady maneuver the hand truck to shift the heavy container from the van to a loading pallet, Arkady saw what he expected to see—a barbed-wire tattoo around the pilot’s wrist.

Former prisoners had their experience in hell etched into their skins, not just their souls. Arkady was covered in tattoos, from the stars on his knees that meant he bowed to no man, to the crosses that were a symbol of the years in the Gulag. He wore them proudly.

The only part of his skin that was clear was a large, shiny scarred patch over his heart where once had been the tattoo of the distinctive, goateed Tatar features of Lenin. Soviet prison guards were a superstitious lot and would never shoot the holy image of Lenin.

The day the camp fell, he’d stolen a soldering iron from the deserted guards’ barracks and burned the head of Lenin off himself. He hadn’t even felt the pain, he had been so happy to rid his body of that monstrous image.

The two men, Arkady and the pilot, silently noted each other’s tattoos. Nothing more had to be said. They were members of the Bratva, the Brotherhood. That was all they had to know.

The heavy lead container was lifted into the cargo bay of the Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft, where the pilot carefully strapped it to the bulkhead. Inside the lead container was a large lead-lined canister filled with cesium 137, enough for a very powerful dirty bomb. Enough material to close down the city center of London, or New York, or Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or Washington, D.C. Wipe it off the face of the earth as a viable city, turn it into deserted concrete canyons forbidden to humans or any other life-form for ten thousand years.