Red Warning by Matthew Quirk

Author:Matthew Quirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

37

Lange trailed a young man, pale and sharp-eyed, up Twenty-Fourth Street through Foggy Bottom, hanging two blocks back on the brick sidewalks. Andrei Pasternak was a second secretary at the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue and an officer in the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. Lange always learned everything about his targets. Pasternak was a Saint Petersburg native with a Jewish grandmother, which was rare inside the services, and he liked to read history late into the night after his wife and daughter had gone to bed.

Pasternak had left the rezidentura an hour ago and executed a perfectly competent, if a little obvious, dry-cleaning run on his way here. He was operational.

This neighborhood, between the White House and Georgetown and home to the State Department, boasted expensive corporate apartments that catered to the international NGO set and wasn’t totally out of character for a young Russian diplomat.

It was prime terrain for a secret meeting, though, quieter and with fewer VIPs than Georgetown. There were a handful of luxury hotels with overpriced brasseries and steak houses off their lobbies. That made it very easy for a young, ambitious second secretary to meet up with an American diplomat or someone from the White House or State. They could take separate entrances in and a back hall straight to the private room of one of those hotel restaurants.

It always felt off to be hunting someone from your own service, but Lange had no choice. There were enemies within. Ever since Peter the Great, Russia had lusted to be part of the West, kneeling before Europe and then America, only to be humiliated again and again.

Lange had watched that desire take hold once more as a young officer in the last days of the USSR. The breaking apart of the Soviet empire was not some flowering of freedom but Western subversion, the infiltration and destruction of his homeland. There were those within the secret services who resisted. They put their lives on the line, and in the 1991 coup they sent tanks and paratroopers to surround the Russian Parliament. But they lacked the discipline and the will to go all the way, and in the end, they couldn’t hold their nation together against the American spies who backed the reformers and the politicians desperate to enrich themselves and make deals with the United States. They plundered Russia, starved its people, and plunged it into chaos.

That war between the reformers and the hard-liners had never ended, and Lange had proudly walked the hard line for forty years. The fight was about to break out into the open. Russia had only days until chaos swallowed it again. It was the best-kept secret in the world.

Reformers and liberals like Pasternak were on the other side, ready to make a separate peace with the West, to sell out their country and its leaders in exchange for help in seizing power. They claimed they wanted peace, but they would bring Russia’s downfall. Lange had to stop them, and if that ultimately meant shedding the blood of his fellow countrymen, so be it.

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