Mission Critical
She sat in the library of Vladi Belyakov’s twenty-thousand-square-foot palace just outside Aylesbury, to the west of London, and with each passing minute her trepidation only increased.
Zoya had arrived at Belyakov’s Belgravia house three hours earlier and was let in, frisked, and taken to the oligarch in his study. Zoya insisted that Uncle Vladi call her father, and despite the fact that the night before last he’d told her he didn’t have a clue regarding what she was talking about, now he just nodded and reached into his pocket for his phone.
He left the room for ten minutes.
After the call, Belyakov put Zoya in a car and drove with her and some security to Barclays London Heliport. They took off and headed west; he told her they were going to his country house.
Zoya assumed everything Belyakov did now was the marching orders her father had given him over the phone. It seemed to her that Belyakov continued to respond to the general like a complete subordinate.
Belyakov told her Feo Zakharov himself would fly out via his Airbus jet helicopter, but for over an hour she was kept here waiting in the library, her heart thundering in her chest the entire time, sweat on the back of her neck and her faint stress hives kept hidden only by the simple black top she wore over black jeans.
She sipped tea but wished she had something stronger, and just when she was about to call across the room to a silent Belyakov and ask for a drink, she heard a helicopter fly over the mansion.
She said nothing about the alcohol now; it was too late for it to make any difference.
* * *
• • •
David Mars unfastened his seat belt and climbed out of his helicopter. He marched towards a rear entrance of the private palace, one hundred meters away. Fox was behind him, Hines behind Fox, and three more men, well-trained elite mercenary contractors working for Mars, walked alongside the group, their short-barreled rifles with collapsible stocks hidden under their denim or leather jackets.
As he neared the house, Mars steeled himself to become the person he needed to be in order to face his daughter after fourteen years. This reunion would not be a happy one, he knew, either from her side or from his. He hoped he would find her at least somewhat open to a reconciliation, and he would love nothing more in the world than to have her by his side while he worked on his greatest operation, but he harbored no illusions of this. She was CIA, or helping them at least, and this made her his enemy, unless she could convince him otherwise.
She was half American, this he knew, and this had always bothered him.
And how could it not?
David Mars had been born Feodor Ivanovich Zakharov in Minsk, then part of the Soviet Union. His parents were from Moscow, both military officers, and they returned to the capital when he was still young.
He was a smart and physically fit child, enjoyed mountain climbing, chess, and foreign languages. It was a foregone conclusion that he would follow his taciturn father, by now a colonel, into the Army. He graduated from Frunze Military Academy and entered the officers’ corps of the Soviet Army. Picked for his able brain and strong body to join the GRU, Russian military intelligence, he went to Afghanistan shortly after the war began. He interrogated prisoners and supported troops with his intelligence product, paid off goat herders for information about enemy supply lines from Pakistan, and, even though he was not a frontline infantryman, survived over a dozen attacks by Mujahidin fighters during his time there.
By the mideighties he was back in Moscow, learning deep-cover tradecraft, including but not limited to improving his English and his ability to blend into foreign environs.
He met Irene Carson, a young and beautiful language teacher from Los Angeles, and the two married after approval from GRU leadership. They had two children: Feodor and then, two years later, Zoya. After the fall of the Union his entire family was sent to embassies in London and Washington. He was, ostensibly, a military attaché, but with his skills he was able to slip out of opposition coverage of his house, almost at will, and run agents throughout whatever capital he’d been assigned to.
This he and his family did for nearly a decade.
Irene had long since changed her name to Irina, and she and their kids bolstered his cover as a mild-mannered family man, but Irina wasn’t an intelligence operative herself.
No, that was Feodor Zakharov’s role. Over the years, in fact, he became the GRU’s best spy.
Until his next promotion sent him back to Moscow, that is. He was assigned to the Aquarium, GRU’s headquarters. He made general, became a deputy to the GRU chief, and when the man retired after a year, the president of Russia himself handpicked Zakharov from a list of candidates to take the reins of Russian military intelligence.
He was young for the job, in his early forties, and he remained ensconced in this position for several years.
And then his wife Irina was run down by a truck that had been stolen from the Red October Chocolate Factory and dumped in the Moskva River after the incident. Inconsolable, he began to look for the culprit.
Evidence came out that the entire sleeper deep-penetration program that she was a trainer for had been compromised to MI6 by a leak at the Kremlin, and while the SVR could never positively conclude that Irina Zakharova had been murdered by British agents, Zakharov’s own personal digging into the situation uncovered clues that the compromise at SVR was, in fact, due to a British intelligence operation. These clues sent him on a self-financed private trip to London to slip back into one of his characters using false papers.
To obtain his own private security and foot soldiers in the UK, he reached out to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the largest of the Russian mafia groups, and he was put in touch with a brigade commander there in London. He built networks of other criminal organizations, local British groups, and transnational satellites operating in London, and soon enough he had men working for him in the Metropolitan Police Force.
He was months into his own investigation of his wife’s death at the hands of the British, still living in London, when he had his target. A high-level MI6 operations officer named Wellstone. Zakharov decided to assassinate the man, on the streets of London, in the most dramatic fashion he could imagine.
The operation was under way, but Zakharov shut it down when he learned Feo Feodorovich, his twenty-one-year-old son, was in a hospital in Moscow suffering from advanced-stage leukemia.
Zakharov raced home, but Feo died that very night.
The elder Zakharov blamed the British for his son’s death, although no one else knew of any evidence to support this.
Still, his lust for revenge only grew.
After the death of Feo, Feodor Zakharov went to the Kremlin and demanded the opportunity to operate against Britain personally for both the murder of his wife and their involvement in the death of his older child. He himself adopted the plan that was ultimately approved by the president. He was pleasantly surprised that the president agreed to it so easily, but the Kremlin had been looking to send a dedicated intelligence leader into the UK to organize the Bratvas there into a proxy force, to acquire intelligence on the powerful anti-Kremlin dissidents who lived there, to oversee the offshoring of Russian money through and to UK banks, and to conduct targeted killings at the behest of Moscow.