The Perfect Instinct Read online

  He pronounced the Chinese word for manual as he drove away. He had a lot of work to do on the phonetics.

  Chapter 3

  Gregor Smelinski battled the urge to color his hair. He fought it daily.

  Age changed his once solid black thick mane to salt and pepper; mostly salt. He saw the 68 years of Russian life looking back at him in the mirror. Turning his head side to side, he looked at the wrinkles and spots and grey and wondered about it all. All the years.

  And he smiled. He was still alive. He'd outlived most who challenged him.

  The KGB legend turned from the old man in the mirror and walked from the bathroom into the bedroom where his third wife lay sleeping. He continued down the hall to his home office. Fully dressed for his day in a charcoal grey suit, white shirt and burgundy tie, he sat down at his desk and brought his computer back to life. Most in the KGB, now FSB, would be amazed to learn the Soviet Lion of the Cold War was quite adept at working his computer. He was actually a bit torqued the IT guys wouldn't get him a Mac.

  He opened the coded email program and entered the required three successive passwords. While the program loaded, he took a sip from the teacup he'd left at the computer 20 minutes earlier. It was cold. But still good. He liked his tea strong, nearly as black as coffee.

  When the software completed loading, Smelinski clicked on the top encrypted email. It was a coded overnight report. The bulleted list of items was kept short, no more than two lines for each listing. These reports were designed to provide the briefest of overviews of happenings around the world. They contained references to activity from Russia, Europe, America, Asia and outposts in-between.

  There it was. The ninth item from the top. It was merely a sentence.

  Trieste - a lone male, bearded, long hair, pulled gun, shot and interrogated the Ukrainian and others about the location of a female.

  He re-read it again and then again. It was nothing. Nothing in the grand scheme. Most Europeans consider Trieste a backwater. It serves a useful black market role in transporting drugs and guns and humans into the former Yugoslavia region. But the port city hadn't played a major role on the world scene in nearly 50 years since the tumultuous period just after the end of WW II.

  Smelinski would know. He was there as a young man in the 50s, after Trieste's heyday as the world's Cold War hotspot.

  It wasn't just the location that caught his eye. It was the words. And of course, the timing.

  A lone male, bearded, long hair. It was the fact this individual shot and interrogated Maksym Voloshyn, the Ukrainian, in an open setting about an unnamed female. Others wouldn't know what those words meant. Smelinski did. He knew this individual was looking for information about the elusive and extremely secretive Elena Stefanko.

  Only he and a very select few knew that Elena was placed in her leadership role of a shadowy Trieste smuggling organization nearly five years ago by an equally mysterious woman. Marta. It was the last network she destroyed and re-launched before abandoning Smelinski.

  Gregor leaned back from the computer screen and turned to the window. He looked out at the gathering dawn, the silhouettes of barren trees and deep snow covering Moscow this March morning. It was nearly a year ago he last heard from Marta. In his head, he heard her definitive and succinct words over the phone line. She was very direct in her orders to him - do not look for me.

  She disappeared into the ether along with another - Lance Priest.

  Smelinski met him. He was mere feet, inches away from this explosive CIA killing machine in a KGB holding cell in Moscow just hours after Priest slaughtered four of his agents in a filthy dilapidated hotel room.

  If only he'd known whom Priest was at the time.

  "Black Angel," Smelinski whispered the words. He was right there within his grasp. And then he was gone, off to kill others.

  The two of them, Marta and Lance, were perhaps... no scratch that.

  They were definitely the two most lethal people to ever join forces. The fact that he and Siebel, his longtime CIA nemesis, created these two wonderful resources and unleashed them on the world was nothing less than astonishing. Smelinski smiled at the accomplishment.

  Astonishing.

  Gregor the Terrible turned back to the computer screen and read the cryptic sentence one more time. He took a last sip of cold tea to finish the cup and closed his eyes for a few seconds to try to see the whole thing, the big picture. Gregor knew he could never have the same vision of the world as Seibel. That was a truly unique and demented worldview. But he did see most of it, most of the pieces on this worldwide tabletop puzzle.

  He shut down the computer, stood and walked the teacup to the kitchen where he set it on the counter next to the sink. The blooming daylight outside brought more detail to a darkened world. He flipped on the light above the sink. As he rinsed out his cup, he looked again at the old man staring back at him in the window's reflection.

  But his mind was not on aging and hair. No, his distant thoughts were only of Marta. His greatest creation, who turned out to be yet another brilliant Siebel deep-cover operation. But still, she did so much for him, for Russia, in only a few years. The framework she built during her reign of destruction and renewal throughout collapsing KGB operations across Europe was still in place in the locales she worked on his behalf.

  Elena had proven to be a brilliant choice for Trieste. She was smart, ruthless, vicious. Elena was so independent she had proven nearly impossible to control. Very challenging.

  Now this. A lone male shows up in Trieste looking for Elena in a very public fashion. Smelinski shook his head and looked through his reflection at the morning ahead.

  "Marta, what are you and your soul mate up to?"

  Chapter 4

  The sheer volume of Geoffrey Seibel's Special Activities Division (SAD) operations around the globe was downright shocking when a comprehensive list was finally compiled months after "the legend" unceremoniously departed the agency. Immediately following the Braden/Chinese Mole fiasco, Frank Wyrick was called in from the wilderness to do the compiling.

  Though Wyrick was never officially on the CIA payroll, he knew more than any other human resource about the vast array of intricate and pervasive Seibel projects. Wyrick worked many of them as the primary intel gathering arm. In three decades, Seibel amassed an incredible amount of clandestine wealth. He spent this wealth on a worldwide board game of black operations from Singapore to Stockholm to Santiago.

  Sting operations, deep-cover moles, massive electronics surveillance undertakings, blackmail, gang and mafia murders, wholesale government coups, they were all in there. An incredible body of nasty work. Seibel had seen and overseen it all. And it was all done to serve his country. It was ugly and messy and violent and brilliant and some of it downright evil. Seibel's operations were a direct reflection of the world and the constant struggle for global power among the humans with diverse interests populating this planet.

  Good and evil are merely semantics. Just words. Power is the only word that truly matters. And Seibel knew how to get and use and sometimes abuse power better than most.

  Wyrick spent months meticulously gathering documents and computer files into a top-secret ultra-limited access room at Langley. He didn't much like coming to CIA HQ, but felt it his duty after playing an active and vital role in so many of Seibel's adventures over the years. And of course, during the process Wyrick purposely left some things out of this information-gathering project. He allowed facts and names and operations to slip between the cracks and find their way into shredders to protect those involved and those who might get killed by sticking their nose under the covers.

  He was pleased that during the deep-dive hunt for any and everything Seibel, he did not come across a single reference to Lance Priest, codename Preacher. Wyrick's deletion work from several years before was even more meticulous than his current project. Preacher was nowhere to be found in any files or microfiche or recordings or testimonies. Dude didn't exist.

&nb
sp; As an outside, unofficial intel contractor working with Seibel for more than three decades, Wyrick was granted the freedom, the anonymity, to work without the constant hassle of the government bureaucratic yoke. Seibel told him what he needed and Wyrick delivered. Always. Went like that for decades.

  Wyrick was there at the nascent beginning of the Marta project and then six years later for the launch of the Lance Priest world tour of violence and mayhem. Brilliant stuff. They were Seibel's unparalleled masterworks. And Wyrick was again crucial to the success of these two long-term investments. His info reconnaissance of the lives and activities of a teenage girl and later a 21-year-old college student were the foundation of Seibel's stunning achievement.

  The unparalleled surveillance professional looked up from the laptop computer screen on the table in front of him and thought probably for the ten thousandth time about the other major player in Seibel's operations over the past two decades. Stuart Braden. Wyrick shook his head at the memory.

  Seibel handpicked the young psychologist and nurtured him from his college days. He was brought in, welcomed into Seibel's inner circle, granted access to tightly held secrets. Turned out, Braden was the one doing the schooling. He was the deepest of deep cover moles. Truth be told, and it isn't often told by anyone associated with Seibel, Braden was really the brains behind the creation of Marta and Lance. They were his ideas. The brilliant mole influenced Seibel and guided Project Marta and Project Preacher from behind his studious glasses.

  The fact that Braden was a Chinese spy all along was almost unbelievable. Wyrick worked side-by-side with the team's brilliant psychologist for 21 years. Considered him a brother. A friend.

  He played them all. Played them and beat them in a game of life and death and cat and mouse and house of mirrors. Friggin' brilliant.

  Wyrick shook his head to get Braden's image out and returned to the coded message on the laptop screen. In the months since he came in from the cold after being asked to do so by a very assertive deputy CIA director, Wyrick assumed direct control over a number of Seibel's operations considered too valuable to scrap. And turns out, he was quite good at it. The surveillance sleuth possessed an innate ability to see the truly necessary details in communications, like the one he was reading now.

  It was an intercept of an FSB message relayed to Moscow early this morning. Looked like it was for Smelinski's eyes only. The CIA, by way of the NSA, was able to capture upwards of 50 percent of FSB communications on any given day. The mountains of code-breaking software translation applied to these intercepts meant most encrypted codes were broken within minutes of being captured. This particular message was pilfered four hours ago. It was routed to Wyrick because of its provenance, its source. The coded message originated from Trieste. A Seibel operation was in place in the Adriatic port city for more than a decade now.

  As Wyrick read the brief message a second, third and fourth time, his eyes widened and then narrowed. He focused on the words - a lone male, bearded, long hair. The interrogation of the Ukrainian about an unknown female portion of the short text obviously referred to a KGB, now FSB, operative.

  A lone male.

  Could be anyone. Anyone in the whole world.

  But it could be...

  The elder snoop knew the details on Trieste. He, like most, thought Elena was a strange choice to run the smuggling operations Marta put in place. And he knew every detail about the other CIA operative working in the port city.

  Wyrick turned away from the laptop on the 6-foot folding table he used as a desk and looked out the window. Beyond the parking lot, the oak and maple trees in northern Virginia were bare. The blanket of snow from three days ago was mostly melted away, but patches of white persisted. When he changed his focus from the distant tree line to his reflection in the window, he could see in the years, the passage of time. He could also see remorse.

  No going back. No putting the genie back in the bottle. He was part of it all. Helped create them.

  Turning back to the computer screen, a whisper slipped out, "That better not be you over there Preacher."

  Chapter 6

  When Bojan Petrovic closes his eyes, he sees those lost, those gone forever. He sees the faces of the beloved dead.

  So many dead since the beginning of this war.

  The tiny village in Bosnia his family had called home for centuries was empty. A ghost town. A small but proud Serb community surrounded by Bosniaks and Croats was now a graveyard. All gone. Most dead.

  Blame was easy to assign on both sides. Atrocities had been committed by all involved. Mostly by his side. But blame did not bring back the dead. Blame would not resurrect his wife, his son and young daughter. They were only memories now. Only faces in photos carried in pockets and wallet. Faces haunting a tortured mind when eyes are closed. For Bojan, his dead wife and children are the muscle in his heart. They are the linings of his lungs, the aching soles of his feet.

  He opened his eyes and looked around the dark room in the derelict house. He was in the same position he collapsed into four hours earlier. Their small troupe had been on the move for three sleepless days, covering many miles and mountains. The other men in the room mirrored the same looks on their faces, in their eyes. They each suffered terrible loss and inflicted terrible pain during this useless war. Each and every one had killed for vengeance and anger and reciprocity. Each soldier bone tired from this desperate struggle for homeland. They fought side-by-side against a tide that ebbed and flowed and often seemed hopeless, as it did now.

  Their war, their call to arms was slipping away. The world labeled them murderers, war criminals.

  The world could go to hell. They had no idea the hell they witnessed and lived through. Belgrade would not support the Bosnian Serb cause much longer. The tides of war were shifting towards a negotiated settlement, a forced peace. Bosnia and Herzegovina would get their country. Serb villages surrounded by Bosniaks inside these borders would never know peace or freedom. Hope and home for centuries would finally be stolen from them inside an artificial border.

  Unless.

  Unless someone did something about it. A committed warrior willing to sustain the true cause of this struggle and take the fight to his enemy could do just that.

  Bojan was willing and more than able. It was in his blood, this ability. For centuries, his family smuggled goods into and through their homeland to Balkans neighbors. This family import/export business made them rich. But wealth is a temporary state. It can be taken away in mere moments, like the lives of those you love.

  He knew the routes, the hiding places, the corrupt officials with open palms. He knew the ports to bring goods in from the sea.

  And for most of his adult life, when he wasn't killing Bosniaks and Croats, Bojan smuggled the majority of his illicit goods onto dry land through the port of Trieste, Italy. It was out of the way and required a longer negotiation of a land route back to the Balkans, but he knew it well. Better than any other.

  His latest shipment was nearing port now. Tomorrow he would be in Trieste receiving his treasure. And from the port city, he would travel a trusty route east and south to where he would deliver the product. He would change the tide of this war.

  Bojan made a deal with the devil to secure the goods in this shipment. He promised his services and those of his men in return. Sometimes, the devil is the only one willing to give you a chance.

  He looked around the dark room at darkened eyes meeting his. He nodded. Unshaven chins nodded back. No reticence in these eyes. No hesitation. The men in this room would forever change and win this war for their Serb brethren. And they all looked to Bojan Petrovic to lead them. He wouldn't fail. He would not fail his lost family, his lost home.

  Chapter 7

  Sailing produces a sense of peace like no other. The gentle nudging or violent crashing of waves upon the vessel's hull is rhythmic language all its own. The ocean speaks to the sailor in a tongue only those who live upon the water can comprehend.

  Th
e sea moves people, relocates them across the water's surface where they eventually land in places and ports and new lives. The sea's unknown depths wash away history, drowns the past's skeletons.

  Juan Rodrigo Triana is one of these souls. Cleansed of the past and its burdens, Triana arrived in Trieste's port 15 years ago as a 26-year-old vagabond. He left behind in Spain a turbulent youth as an orphan and violent young adulthood. His unstable upbringing was colored by run-ins with the law in and around Barcelona.

  He worked his way to Trieste as a deck hand aboard a container ship. After arriving in the port city, he found his true love on the water. Sailing.

  He took a low-paying job on a privately owned vessel and worked his way up to captaining a boat and eventually purchasing his own sailboat. Now, 15 years later, he runs a lucrative sailing rental business catering to the highest of high end. He counts three vessels in his tidy little fleet; each worth nearly a million dollars. Captain Rodrigo has done well, very well.

  He still finds his greatest pleasure on the water captaining one of his boats, harnessing the wind as it fills sails with that ultimate potential and drives the gliding vessel effortlessly across the open and welcoming sea. The captain looked the part. Chiseled face and body, sun-bleached long hair, deep Adriatic tan. He was a man truly in control of his business, his boats, his life.

  Quite a success story.

  If any of it were true, that is.

  Rodrigo did arrive in Trieste aboard a container ship nearly a decade and a half ago. But almost nothing before that was factual. His tales of troubled youth and wild rebellion as a young man told to other sailors and anyone who listened were just that, tales. Details, backstory, layer upon layer of background drilled in, studied and rehearsed.