The 14th Colony (Cotton Malone 11)

“Not in the least. He was not a man who cared about credit, only results. He wanted to leave the world a safer place than he found it, and that’s exactly what he did. I saw him for the last time in 1992, at his presidential library. We met alone, and he thanked me again for all that I did. He was an extraordinary man, and history will record that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.”

“You did good,” Danny said to her. “Real good. You have to be proud as hell at what you accomplished.”

It meant a lot to hear his praise. He was not a man who doled out compliments lightly. The essence of the intelligence business dictated that recognition almost never came. Getting the job done had to suffice, though sometimes it could be a poor substitute. She was proud. More than she could ever say. She’d been there when Eastern Europe barred the one-party system, tossed aside a planned economy, and chose freedom and the rule of law. She’d helped the two most powerful men in the world bring about the total destruction of an evil empire.

Much had happened since, but nothing like that.

“It was a remarkable time,” she said. “But like now, the incoming Bush administration decided they had no further need for me. That’s when I moved to Justice.”

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere.”

She was impressed. “Churchill’s speech. Delivered in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, after he lost his own reelection bid for prime minister. I never realized you were a Cold War student.”

He pointed a finger at her. “What you meant was you never realized I could remember things. You’re going to discover a lot about me you didn’t know.”

Of that she was sure.

“Truman was there in the audience when Churchill spoke,” he said. “He said afterward that he agreed with every word, especially the phrase coined that day. Iron Curtain. Churchill was right about Stalin and the Russians.”

“And it took us another forty-five years to win that Cold War.”

“But win it we did. Total and complete victory.”

“How’d you find out?” she asked. “Only a handful of people knew about Forward Pass.”

“Osin told me yesterday.”

“And you never said a word?”

“I can keep a secret.”

She smiled. He could be quite adorable, when he wanted to be.

“Zorin, like you, is a Cold Warrior,” he said. “But unlike you, he hasn’t moved on. He’s one of our problems, but the split inside the Kremlin is a whole different matter. Osin, to his credit, is trying to do the right thing. But there are more nuts inside the Russian government than Osins. Not the zealot, Lenin, Karl Marx kind. No, these are pure criminals, out for nothing more than themselves. The good thing is that they’re not the world-dominating type. But five nuclear weapons hidden here? That’s something that might come in handy to them. A good hammer to keep us under control.”

He pointed to the other folder on the nearly empty desk. “That one I had Edwin assimilate.”

She started to reach for it, but he gently clasped her hand, stopping her. An unfamiliar chill swept through her.

The phone on the desk buzzed, breaking the moment.

He pushed the lit button and activated the speaker.

“There’s been a problem in Canada,” Edwin said.

They both listened to what the police on Prince Edward Island had found. Four bodies at a man named Jamie Kelly’s residence, just outside Charlottetown. No identification on any of them.

“Any word from Cotton?” she asked.

“Nothing. But at least we know he’s been busy.”

That they did.

“He’ll call when he needs to,” she said to Edwin. “Can you tell the Canadians to stay out of the way?”

“Already done.”

“Keep me posted,” Danny said, ending the call.

She saw the concern in his eyes.

“What were you going to show me?” she asked.

“Cotton reported that the archivist, Belchenko, mentioned two things before he died. Fool’s Mate and zero amendment. The first term Osin has promised to work on. The second, though, we can handle.” He pointed at the other folder. “It’s all in there.”

She stared down at the folder.

“In there are copies of documents Edwin found in an old classified CIA file. The words zero amendment led us straight there. Seems we have things digitally indexed at Langley now, which is a good thing. People over there tell me they haven’t heard those two words associated with the Soviet Union since the 1980s. Take the folder upstairs and read. Then get some sleep. Pick any bedroom you want.”

“Including yours?”

He grinned. “Like you say, not until I’m a free man.”

She reached for the file. Some sleep would be great. But she was damn curious as to what was going on.

“Let’s talk about this more at breakfast,” he said.

She headed for the door.

“The Soviets called it the zero amendment,” he said to her. “We call it the 20th Amendment to the Constitution.”

* * *

Cassiopeia kept the binoculars to her eyes, the grayish images of the road ahead easy to see. Night-vision technology had come a long way from the everything-is-green scenario. In fact, the view through the eyepieces was clear as dusk on a summer’s day. She’d been tracking their route on her smartphone, noting that they were running out of Canadian real estate, the border with Maine less than eighty kilometers away.

“Is he going to cross over into the United States?” she asked.

“Kelly could easily. Edwin told me that he’s a U.S. citizen with a passport. But Zorin? No way. He dropped in on a parachute. Unless he brought some fake ID, he’d need a visa to come in legally on a Russian passport. I doubt he even has a passport. But that’s not going to stop him.”

They’d stayed way back, sometimes too far, but luckily the car ahead had not made any turns.

“There’s a town, Digdeguash, coming up,” she said, checking the map on her phone.

Cotton had done a solid job of using the few cars they’d encountered as cover. She checked her watch. Nearly 3:00 A.M.

“He’s not going to drive across the border,” Cotton said.

She agreed, so she used her finger to shift the map on her phone, moving the image north and south, then east and west. “We’re due north of Maine, just across the Passamaquoddy Bay, maybe thirty kilometers between us.”

“That’s how he’s going to do it,” Cotton said. “On the water.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Zorin had not pressed Kelly on what the man had discovered. Any detonation spot was meaningless unless the weapons themselves had survived.

So first things first.

They’d ridden in silence for a while, passing the city of St. John and keeping south on the four-laned highway until it shrank to two lanes, paralleling the coastline. His driver seemed to know exactly where he was headed.

They entered a quiet community down for the night. Kelly stopped at an intersection, then turned south on another black highway.

“There’s a lovely little village just ahead called St. Andrews by the Sea,” Kelly said. “I’ve visited many times. Only a couple thousand people live there, and Maine is just across the St. Croix River. I like sailing and they have boats for rent. We can steal one at this hour and be long gone before anyone realizes. We’ll avoid the river and head across the bay to Eastport, in Maine. It’s not far, fifty kilometers or so. There we can easily slip into the United States.”