Midnight Promises by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

Gregory.
    During the run-up to his retirement Gregory came across some reports from the Domestic Terrorism desk, Russian subsection, which after 9/11 had become a dusty backwater. Gregory had spent his last years at the FBI overseeing the transferral of paper documents to hard disk.
    He’d found what he considered something of minor interest and, as a last volley of his truncated career as a Russian mole, had sent it on to his masters at the FSB.
    Knowing that Borodin had always been interested in the object of the report, someone faithful to him in the FSB forwarded it to him.
    This changed absolutely everything. Everything he thought he knew had been wrong.
    Nikolai Darin was
alive.
    Or rather, he was dead but he’d died in 2009 not 1989.
    He hadn’t died after receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics, he’d
defected
.
    A sharp encrypted email to Roy Gregory to gather more intel had spooked the man and only the promise of a substantial payment ensured his cooperation.
    The FBI files were classified, of course. But a lot of time had gone by and Russia wasn’t a priority. They were hard to get but not impossible. Certainly not for someone who had a hundred thousand incentives like Gregory did.
    Nikolai Darin and his pregnant wife, Irina, defected to the CIA in Sweden right after the Nobel Prize ceremony on December 10, 1989. The CIA faked their death, debriefed them and then passed them on to the FBI, who debriefed them again and then they were finally settled by the U.S. Marshals Service in their new identity.
    The files made interesting reading. Borodin could almost feel the frustration the Americans felt with Darin. Because it was clear he was supposed to deliver…something. Something he never did deliver.
    Borodin knew exactly what that something was.
    Six somethings. Six tiny but powerful nuclear bombs that could destroy a country with no payback.
    Darin hid the six bombs and the codes. The Deti were somewhere in America, Borodin was sure of it. Darin and his wife were dead, but there was a daughter.
    It took another fucking hundred thousand dollars to get Gregory to dig farther into the files but he finally came up with the current identity of the daughter, who’d changed her name. Her birth certificate said Katrin Valk but she changed her name when she turned eighteen. She was now Felicity Ward.
    Felicity Ward, mid-twenties and a graduate of MIT, lived in Burlingham, Vermont.
    There was a photo taken of her upon graduating the technical university and Borodin, who had eyes to see, could see Mother Russia in every line of her very pretty face. She looked like her mother, who had been a famous beauty.
    It was as if the world had been slumbering, just waiting for Borodin to push the levers of the world and move it in a new direction. Suddenly, the pace of events picked up.
    Via a roundabout route, Borodin contacted a
vor
, head of one of the great Mafiya clans, who in turn had strategic alliances with the Chechens, who in turn had connections to their terrorist brethren. Borodin was delighted not to have contact himself because he could never hide his distaste for the kind of men who’d delivered the first nearly fatal blow to the Soviet Union. But via the
vor
he was able to send a clear message.
    What was the going price for a ‘small’ nuclear weapon, that did not require a missile launch?
    Ten million dollars was the price. Each.
    Borodin was very rich but sixty million dollars was sixty million dollars. And someone else was willing to set them off. The goatherds hadn’t even asked if it would be possible to detonate them remotely which had been a big problem in Borodin’s day. How to deliver without sacrificing the deliverer.
    Luckily, the Islamists didn’t have that problem. They had plenty of
kretin
lining up to sacrifice themselves for the cause, stepping instantly into paradise after blowing themselves up.
    Perfect. Absolutely perfect. A whole worldwide movement willing to bring America down. They’d