Collusion Read online

  Dedication

  We dedicate this book to the poison victims and others

  who have been murdered by Russian president Vladimir

  Vladimirovich Putin’s regime.

  Epigraph

  Russia never lost the Cold War because it never ended.

  —Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Part I: The Bear Shows Its Claws

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part II: Escape from Moscow

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Part III: A Killer Cometh

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Part IV: The Devil’s Breath

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  A Partial Listing of Murders and Other Mysterious Deaths During the Putin Era

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Also by Newt Gingrich

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cast of Characters

  Marcus Austin Moscow chief of station for the CIA

  Elsa Eriksson NGO worker, Nigeria

  Randle Fitzgerald U.S. president

  Brett Garrett Former U.S. Navy SEAL

  General Andre Borsovich Gromyko Russian president’s top advisor

  Harold Harris CIA director

  Makayla Jones Antifa leader

  Vyachesian Leninovich Kalugin Russian president

  Thomas Jefferson Kim Cybersecurity expert

  Valerie Mayberry FBI Counterintelligence agent

  Yakov Prokofyevich Pavel Deputy Russian foreign minister

  Aysan Rivera Antifa member

  Cormac Stone California U.S. senator

  Part I

  The Bear Shows Its Claws

  Those who “abjure” violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

  —George Orwell

  One

  Two Years Earlier

  The jihadist seemed to rise from the underworld. Crawling across the Cameroon terrain when he’d reached them before dawn. Navy SEAL Brett Garrett could see the color of his black eyes. Boko Haram. The missing twentieth fighter whom everyone except for Garrett had believed dead. He’d followed them from the bloodbath in his camp. Patiently waiting, watching them board the helicopter, waiting until liftoff, knowing it was his best chance to maximize deaths.

  He shouldered his weapon at the same moment Garrett raised his rifle from his seat inside the open cargo door. Garrett fired and in that same instant saw the rocket-propelled grenade flying at the cockpit.

  A bright yellow burst. Instant loss of hearing. Instant concussion. Instant confusion. The machine fell. Its shell smacking into the earth, throwing Garrett free but on fire.

  Still conscious enough to roll over, over, and over again. What of the others? He didn’t know. He’d disobeyed a direct order. He was responsible for what was now happening. But he’d done it for the right reasons.

  Hadn’t he? Surely, they would understand. He’d wanted to save the children.

  Two

  Current Day

  A shrill alarm pierced the darkness. A hulking figure stepped outside the building into the minus-twelve-degree temperature cradling an unconscious woman in his arms. Roof floodlights illuminated the snow-covered grounds. Svetogorsk, Russia. A facility hidden outside the town in a dense forest.

  The man trudged through a foot of snow toward a 1980s-era, rusty Lada parked alongside a half-dozen other tired Soviet-era vehicles. It was a twenty-yard trek to the car. The man almost made it halfway before a thin line of blood trickled down from under the protective mask covering his nose and mouth. His breathing became gasps. Two steps more before he fell to his knees still holding the listless woman. His wife.

  He struggled to remain upright; he gazed forward at the parked Lada as if he were picturing himself reaching it. So close. His heart stopped. He fell, covering his wife’s corpse.

  The alarm ended but the spotlights continued to shine, causing the snow to glisten. Twinkles of bright and faint ice diamonds.

  Two figures. A man and a woman in hazmat suits. Like space travelers, they emerged from the building, following the man’s footsteps to where he and his wife were motionless. Disfigured snow angels.

  With thick-gloved hands, the man leaned down. Inspecting the bodies.

  “We must incinerate the corpses before we contact Moscow,” he said through a microphone to the woman with him.

  “General Gromyko will be angry,” she replied.

  “We cannot to be blamed!” the man snapped. “Accidents happen.”

  “Accidents? This was no accident.”

  “Don’t be a fool. Immediate cremation. For everyone’s protection.”

  “They have a child,” she said. “Peter. A mute.”

  “The boy is of no consequence to us. General Gromyko will deal with him.”

  The woman stared down at the dead couple. “Her father holds a high position in the Foreign Ministry,” the woman said.

  “Which is why we must burn these bodies quickly and report their deaths as an accident.”

  The man stood, turned his back to her and the dead couple, and began making his way through the snow to the building. The woman hesitated, glanced over her shoulder to be sure he was not watching, and made the sign of the cross.

  Her lips moved. A prayer for the dead.

  Three

  Two years earlier

  Elsa Eriksson couldn’t sweat.

  Dehydration. The body loses 10 percent of the water it takes in every day through sweat. That’s what the nursing instructors in Sweden had taught her.

  Lying in the fetal position on the hard ground, she guessed it was at least a hundred degrees. She’d asked her kidnappers for water, but they wanted her weak, compliant—not dead. She was worthless to them dead. One bottle of water per day—sixteen fluid ounces—handed to her bound wrists for her to lift underneath the loosened black hood slipped over her head.

  With her bare feet—they’d taken her shoes—she’d felt the bare ground beneath. Extending them out, she touched the mud walls of what she assumed was an African mud hut. She decided to stand and was met with a sucker punch to her abdomen. She fell back to the floor. Someone was guarding her.

  She had no one to blame but herself.

  The Nigerian army commander had told her not to leave the compound. Thirteen-foot-tall pieces of corrugated metal—each four feet wide—protected “New Banki City” in this northern province—although it was hardly a city by any definition. Cities had municipal services, order, normality. New Banki was a refugee camp.

  Eriksson had been warned before leaving Sweden. Still, she was shocked
when she’d first arrived three months ago. Trash-strewn dirt paths, bombed-out concrete buildings, flimsy tents. Inside the camp were children, women, and old men. No males of fighting age. They’d been herded sheeplike into trucks for transport to Nigerian army detention centers. Outside the enclosed compound, Boko Haram was in control. Islamic extremists. Kidnappers. Murderers. Rapists. Suicide bombers in training eager to claim their celestial virgins. She’d entered a human toilet bowl edged by IEDs—a cesspool of disease and death unlike anything she’d witnessed.

  The Nigerian commander had confiscated all the medical supplies that she’d brought from her employer, a Swedish humanitarian NGO, and only after her repeated threats to report him to the Swiss and Americans had he returned less than a third of them, selling the rest on a thriving black market. Having a Swedish father and American mother gave her twice the diplomatic clout.

  She had stuck out. A too-thin, unmarried, thirty-year-old Christian woman in an ocean of uprooted Muslims. The army soldiers took bets about how long she would stay.

  The explosion had come at dusk. An IED tripped by one of two women who’d left the compound at dusk to gather firewood. One had returned staggering. Cuts, bruises, and totally confused. The Nigerian soldiers had smirked. They showed no interest in searching for the other woman.

  Eriksson had gone out with a medical bag. A recent Christian convert, Abidemi, which translated to “girl born when father was away,” had accompanied her.

  Eriksson, Abidemi, and Jesus wandered in the darkness. Outside the camp, they’d proven easy prey.

  Now captive in a Boko Haram hut, Eriksson could hear Abidemi screaming nearby. Fourteen. Unlike the foreign NGO worker, Abidemi was not worth a ransom.

  “Please, God, save us,” Eriksson whispered. “Please, send someone, Jesus, someone to save Abidemi and me.”

  Four

  Current Day

  Yakov Prokofyevich Pavel glanced pensively from his upper-floor window at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, one of Moscow’s seven landmark Stalinist skyscrapers. It was Nikita Khrushchev who’d recalled Stalin’s words: “We won the war . . . foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and there are no skyscrapers. If they compare Moscow to capitalist cities, it’s a moral blow to us.” Stalin had demanded his architects build them. Posturing for the world. Necessary after World War II, even more so now. Stalin had asked for forty stories, but twenty-seven was as high as they could reach in 1953. His builders’ limited skills were a national secret—like so many others. Heavy steel frames with concrete ceilings necessitated a slab foundation that was more than twenty-two feet thick. Even with it, twenty-seven floors was the max. Pavel was on the twenty-sixth with its premium views.

  Pavel had been told earlier this morning that General Andre Gromyko was coming. He spotted the general’s jet-black Mercedes-Benz S600 Pullman limousine—a gift from the Russian president—as it turned into the ministry’s circular driveway. When Pavel was a party member, no high-ranking Communist would have risked driving a foreign luxury car. But that was before.

  The seventy-two-year-old Pavel remembered the past, unlike the junior diplomats scampering around him. Before the end of the Soviet empire, President Vyachesian Leninovich Kalugin had been considered a mediocre KGB agent at best, not considered particularly bright and with little potential for advancement. How then had such a man seized control?

  Like so many of his fellow Russians, Pavel had welcomed the end of the old Soviet Union but had been unprepared for what had followed. A drunk Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin had been swept into power only because of a single courageous act—standing on a Soviet tank defying the KGB’s 1991 aborted August coup. It had been Yeltsin who had first opened the corruption floodgates, permitting the looting of the country’s vast resources, giving birth to both the Russian mafia and money-grubbing oligarchs.

  The Americans were not blameless. They had emasculated Russia, stripped it of its pride—declaring themselves the world’s only superpower—creating resentment. Looting Moscow became the new rule for the powerful.

  Vyachesian Kalugin had seized the moment, tapped into the centuries of distrust. Fueling the bitterness, he’d taken advantage of a nationalistic wave, a need for restored pride. The old guard had badly underestimated him. The ambition. The ruthlessness behind the grin. His insatiable greed. A Russian Gordon Gekko with a gun. Not a literary symbolic wolf of Wall Street but a genuine wolf trained by the KGB. A bribe or a bullet. What man would refuse to kneel?

  The Kremlin was now a kleptocracy. Western intelligence estimated Kalugin’s personal wealth at $80 billion, magically accumulated while being paid less than $200,000 per year on his government salary. Where were the cries of corruption? Where was the demand for an accounting? Critics were jailed or murdered. Others were fellow pigs feasting at the trough. Or, like Pavel, they remained silent.

  President Kalugin had chosen a brutal lackey of limited intellect as his closest advisor. General Andre Gromyko’s military rank and chest filled with colorful medals were as fraudulent as his toothy smile and too-firm handshake.

  A hurried knock on his office door snapped Pavel to attention. His secretary stepped in.

  “The general and his aides have entered the lobby. Should I serve vodka or water with gas?”

  “Vodka.” The one constant in Russia.

  “Cookies?”

  “You decide.”

  A look of trepidation fled across her face. She was older and from a generation that remembered the dangers of the simplest, most innocent error. Pavel’s mother had once told him a story about when she had worked for Lavrently Pavlovich Beria, the brutal secret police chief and overseer of gulag labor camps. After the war, she’d been assigned to Beria’s secretarial typing pool. One day he’d entered and asked in his charming voice, “Girls, who typed a letter for me yesterday addressed to our party leader in St. Petersburg?” No one had raised a hand. Silence. “Come, girls,” Beria repeated softly, “I’ve lost my copy of the letter, and there is a small detail I need to recall.” A young typist stood and, when he asked, provided the missing detail.

  Pavel’s mother had never forgotten what had happened next. Two men dragged the girl away. Beria’s mood had changed from pleasant to cruel. “You girls are to type letters. You must never read them.”

  Brutality. Yet another constant. Another carryover from the past.

  “Bring cookies,” Pavel said, moving from the window to his desk. He would not be standing to greet General Gromyko. A Beria still in diapers.

  His secretary announced them. Gromyko paraded inside like a peacock with an attractive, much younger woman following him. Pavel glanced up from his desk. Neither offered a welcoming hand. Gromyko sat in a chair facing Pavel. The woman on a stool behind him.

  “Yakov Prokofyevich, I’m sorry to report bad news,” the general announced, although his voice and facial expression registered no signs of sorrow. “Your daughter and son-in-law.”

  Pavel’s jaw tightened.

  “An unfortunate accident. Both are dead.”

  Gromyko spoke with the empathy of a babushka dropping a hatchet across a chicken’s neck.

  Pavel’s secretary entered with a silver tray that she placed on Pavel’s desk before excusing herself.

  “When and where?” Pavel asked.

  “They died serving our motherland. There is little else I can tell you. Both were chemists, were they not?”

  His question was insulting.

  “Honor graduates from MIPT, and both were working for you.”

  “Ah yes, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,” Gromyko responded. He glanced at the unopened vodka and sugar cookies. Leaning forward from his chair, he helped himself to a cookie. “A decent school, I’ve heard. If I recall, you graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, our Russian Harvard.”

  Pavel didn’t reply.

  “And yet here I sit,” Gromyko continued, glancing around Pavel’s office. “Your supe
rior—a simple former KGB officer who attended the St. Petersburg Mining University, but for only a brief period. I found school rather unchallenging.”

  Again, Pavel remained stone-faced.

  Dismissively tossing half the cookie back onto the silver serving tray, Gromyko licked crumbs from his fingers and said, “Shall I assume you had no communication with your daughter and your son-in-law?”

  “I was told their work required secrecy,” Pavel said.

  “Always the clever diplomat. Your reply does not answer my question. When was the last time you spoke to your daughter?”

  “I have not been in communication with her since she and her husband began working for you.”

  “Come now, you’re a widower. Your only family is your daughter, her husband, and your grandson—Peter, isn’t that correct?—and not a word from any of them in two years?”

  “It is a price we willingly pay for the benefit of all, is it not?” Pavel said.

  Gromyko let out a short sigh. “Again, the answer of a diplomat. Yakov Prokofyevich, both of us know rules can be bent, especially for someone such as you, a high-ranking, senior diplomat.”

  Momentary mutual stares.

  “General Gromyko,” Pavel said, “I assume you have made arrangements for my grandson to be brought to Moscow to live with me. When should I expect him?”

  “Tomorrow. I will have a car bring him to your office.”

  “And the remains?”

  “Cremated. If you like, your grandson can bring them with him.”

  Awkward silence.

  “General Gromyko,” Pavel said, “is there more we need to discuss? I have a meeting, a matter of great urgency to the ministry, and I am late.”

  “A meeting, but my dear Yakov Prokofyevich, you should be in mourning. Do you not wish to take a day off?”

  His voice was taunting.

  “The work of the state continues,” Pavel said.

  “I will not think about leaving until after we have a toast in memory to your daughter and her husband. It is the only decent thing to do.”

  He motioned to his female aide, who summoned Pavel’s much older secretary. The elderly woman opened the vodka with shaky fingers, pouring two shot glasses.