John Dale stood in the lobby of Mumbai’s Taj Lands End hotel, sweating in a suit at one in the morning, trying to check in. With dark skin, a thick beard, and shoulder-length hair slicked by pomade, he looked about the same as any number of other traveling businessmen in the area at that time of night—rumpled, tired, and grumpy.
The hotel clerk looked at his passport, thumbing through it carefully in search of Dale’s entry stamp. It was the kind of unwanted scrutiny from a minor figure that drove him crazy when on mission. He took a deep breath to still himself and readjusted the open collar of his shirt, just to give his hands something to do.
“It’s a bit smudged,” said the twenty-five-year-old Indian clerk. “I can’t see the date.”
The handsome young Indian boy pulled the passport close to his eyes, studying the page with the precision of a gemologist. His shirt was two sizes too large and his necktie hung loosely.
“Let me check with someone. Just a moment, sir,” he said.
Before Dale could react, the kid darted through a door behind the desk. Dale balled his fists, counting to ten. He’d now lost sight of the crucial passport, a rookie mistake if ever there was one. India’s immigration systems were notoriously confused. The ability to fall through the cracks was one of the reasons he’d readily picked this country as an egress point for his agents. How ironic that it might be the thing that would turn around and screw him.
He looked around the lobby. For one in the morning, it was surprisingly busy. There were dozens of people checking in. A handful of them looked like foreign business travelers, but there were a number of breezy, well-heeled Indians who appeared to be on vacation wandering around the lobby, looking in the windows of the closed shops or parking themselves at the lobby bar.
That all seemed a bit weird to Dale, but whatever. Stuck out here on the peninsula by the sea, the Taj Lands End had a reputation for catering to the Bollywood film industry and all the groupies just such a place would attract. The clerk had mentioned that the Australian national cricket team was in town. He’d also said with a sly little wink that if Dale kept his eye out, he might catch a glimpse of an Indian film starlet. Whoever the girl was, her seven-syllable name went right by Dale. He’d pretended to understand just to stay unremarkable.
In truth, he cared not a whit about any of this. As he saw it, Mumbai was disorganized, choked with traffic, stuffed with people, and hopelessly inept at basic infrastructure. These were the aspects that made it an ideal country for a rendezvous with an agent looking to come in.
At least that was how it had been five years ago, thought Dale, the last time he’d been there. As he stood there waiting for the boy, studying the wealthy clientele, he wondered if he’d made a grave error. Along with the acceleration of the global tech industry, India had been booming. Most of the world’s software developers seemed to come from here. With all that talent, maybe they were a little more organized now. Maybe they’d gotten their act together.
He quietly surveyed the revolving front door, thinking about what he’d do if he had to make a run for it. He knew reasonably well how to disappear here, which wasn’t that hard; but admittedly, it had been a while.
He cared only about holing up in this hotel for as long as it took to establish the rendezvous with Cerberus. As soon as he got the word, he’d deliver the prized agent to the CIA station at the American consulate just upriver. With that done, he’d board his Air India flight to Delhi, then Air France to Paris, then Delta home to Seattle as a free man. Then he’d really be done with the Agency. They would no longer have a hold on him. That was the deal he’d worked out with Dorsey in order to execute this thing.
Just how long he’d be staying here at the Taj, he couldn’t say. Cerberus had told Dale only to come to India, stay at the Taj, and wait for further word. Dale had been about to call bullshit on the whole thing, but Cerberus wasn’t giving him much of a choice. Their sparse communications continued through the intermediary of a reconfigured digital drop box on Baramar support servers. The last time Cerberus had checked in was a week ago to leave this message to come to this very spot.
It wasn’t a total surprise. Dale had known from the start he’d be headed to India for Cerberus. It was all part of the egress plan they’d worked out years ago. India was Iran’s largest oil market and home to the world’s second-largest concentration of Shia Muslims. Better still, the majority of those Muslims were Ithna Asharis, black-turbaned believers in the messianic Twelfth Imam, just like the most devout Iranian Shias. It was, in short, a good country to pull something like this off because the Iranians were generally not suspicious of travel there.
Dale’s original egress ruse was that Cerberus would pose as a visiting lecturer and somehow wangle himself a trip. But it was supposed to be Delhi, not Mumbai. The meet was supposed to be in the grand old city at a hotel close to the American embassy. That way Dale could bundle him up under American protection quickly, the way it was supposed to be done. This Mumbai angle was a curveball.
The kid with the loose collar returned. He had a manager with him who wore a mustache and a badly tailored blazer. He looked like the first kid’s slightly older brother.
“Sir, did you come in directly from the airport?” asked the older brother.
“Yes,” said Dale.
“Taxicab?”
Dale shifted on his feet. It had been a steamy ninety degrees and the cab lacked air-conditioning. He could feel sweat running down his lower back, the sensation he most associated with this country.
“Yes, taxi,” he said tersely. “Does it matter?”
The big brother shook his head, studying the passport hard. He muttered an incoherent apology. Dale started thinking about ripping the booklet out of his hand and bailing. Why the hell had Cerberus asked him to come to such a meticulous high-end place? Terrible idea.
The two kids looked up at Dale with wide, dewy eyes. It suddenly struck the American what was going on. He reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a wad of pink rupees. He said, “Here, let me show you the stamp myself.” He took the passport, folded a half inch of bills into it, and handed it back.
“Ah, I see,” said the manager, his face lighting up. “I think we have it now.” He smiled. “Enjoy your stay, sir.”
Rusty, Dale thought to himself. Fucking rusty.
Once in his room, he drew the curtains, bolted the door, and began to unpack his large roller bag. Traveling commercially, he had no weapon, but he did have a cache of implements for other exigencies: a coil of climbing rope, a red-lensed flashlight, binoculars, a trauma kit. He hadn’t been exactly sure what might be in store, so he’d planned as he would have done years ago on any other extract mission.
Dead tired after the long flights, he changed out of his suit and into a pair of cargo pants. Over these he draped an Indian dhoti shirt that draped halfway down his thighs, covering the bulky pockets. He changed socks and slipped into a pair of hot-weather hiking boots. He ran some water through his dyed black hair and mussed it up. Diluting the pomade made his hair greasy. It hung in strands.
Inspecting himself in the full-length mirror, he felt he could pass as a local, if not exactly a native. Good enough. There were foreigners everywhere in this town of twenty-odd million and a good many of them spoke English, the official unifying language of India.
He sat on the bed and fired up his iPad. He considered whether to leave a message for Meth, but then thought better of it. He’d need her help to get Cerberus into the consulate. But the way Dale saw it, communicating with her now would just expose him to risk. Though he trusted her to keep quiet, she’d still need help from the Agency to get things ready. Someone else would eventually know what was up.
Yawning, he checked the Baramar servers to see if there was a message from Cerberus. With a sense of dread, he saw an empty in-box. Bullshit, he thought, angry with himself. There he was, old, rusty, making stupid rookie mistakes—and waiting like a witless imbecile on the asset he was supposed to be handling.
He shut the iPad down. The room had two queens. Enough of the lazy mistakes, he chided himself. He mussed up one of the beds, propping up some pillows under the covers to make a reasonable semblance of a sleeping body. He took the blankets and pillows from the other bed and carved out a niche for himself in the closet with his backpack as a pillow. He killed the lights, slid into the closet, and shifted to his side, fully clothed. If anyone came through the door, he’d have at least a few seconds of surprise on his side.
He started thinking about a weapon. Maybe it would be worth the risk to ping Meth, he thought. She could at least set him up with a pistol.
Uncomfortable, he flipped onto his back and checked his watch. This sucks, he thought. He wanted to go home.
A bright shaft of light pierced the crack between the curtains. Jet lag and the darkness of the room had Dale waking late. As soon as he’d shaken off the kinks of a rough night on the floor, he checked his messages again. Same result. Another demand from Meth, nothing from Cerberus. Fuck.
To make the most of his time, he spent the day on a recon of the city, ensuring he’d be familiar with at least the various twisting alleyways that led to the US consulate, just five miles up the River Mithi. He raided the room’s expensive snack bar for a lame breakfast, checked his appearance in the mirror again, and set out for the streets.
Carrying nothing more than his Canadian passport and a thick clutch of rupees, he performed an SDR through the city streets before eventually finding his way to a local bus line. In the city’s infamous choking traffic, it took close to an hour to cover the easy distance to the US consulate. No good. As soon as he had word from Cerberus, he’d invest in a motorcycle for a faster option. The little two-wheelers were everywhere, sometimes teetering through the roiling streets with a whole family on board. They seemed like the easiest way to snake through traffic and blend in.
Then he rethought it. Cerberus would almost certainly have his wife with him. He wasn’t sure about the daughter. Dale looked out the dirty bus window at the crowded street. The bus was stuck, as usual, idling amid the chaos of an intersection. There was zero order to any of it—a wonder anyone got anywhere around there. Cars, motorcycles, scooters, pedestrians, street vendors, all of them wandered around like there were no rules at all. It looked like a depressing version of Carnival.
He studied the traffic, looking for multipassenger alternatives. Maybe one of these crappy little three-wheeler delivery vans, he thought to himself. That would probably do it. He figured he could wheedle one away from its owner easily enough by throwing down the equivalent of about two hundred bucks.
Toward late afternoon, exasperated by the heat, snarled logistics, and the general discomfort of waiting, he retreated to the Taj. As he entered the lobby smeared with the dust of the city, the uniformed bellman shot him a condescending look. Dale was happy to see that, reasoning that his disguise must have been at least somewhat effective.
Later, holed up in his room, he snacked on some energy bars and sucked down water. He went through the routine of checking his covert communications setup through his iPad. There were two more messages from Meth, pissed off, as usual, that he hadn’t checked in.
They were really heating up now. He was a pretty good judge of her limits, and he sensed she was nearing the redline. Woe betide the poor schlub within the blast radius of Meth when she went off. The twelve thousand miles of planet between Dale and his ex-wife wouldn’t be enough.
Occupational hazard, Dale thought.
For all Meth’s brilliance as an intelligence officer, she had a blind spot when it came to the rhythm of fieldwork. Her idea for handling a deployed nonofficial-cover, NOC, officer had always been to check in regularly, at standard intervals, ensuring safety. Leveraging HQS resources, she’d called it, employing the corporate speak currently in vogue. Dale saw that kind of micromanagement as a nuisance at best, downright suicidal at worst.
He checked the Baramar site. Nothing from Cerberus.
Screw this, he said to himself.
Tactically speaking, this entire thing was whacked. He’d made enough mistakes. He needed to get sharp. The last thing he was going to do was sit here in a fancy hotel at the behest of an asset who, for all he knew, was already compromised. He loaded up his backpack with tactical gear, more energy bars, and a couple of bottles of water. He stepped out of the room and headed to the elevators.
Six miles away in the humid Mumbai dusk, a beefy Russian Mi-8 twin-engine helicopter of the Indian Air Force (IAF) settled onto its landing struts on the lawn of the Russian embassy. As the whining turbines slowed, four men with thick arms in short sleeves exited, ducking the spinning blades, carrying long ballistic nylon cases. Behind them walked a blonde, wearing black hiking pants and a black T-shirt and carrying a heavy green rucksack. A moment or two after the group departed, the helo spun up and lumbered aloft into the gathering dark, leaving nothing but the fading drumbeat of its rotors behind.
The five passengers made their way through a double-wide door and down a set of stairs to a concrete hallway that led to a concrete room. It was the basement of the Russian consulate, part armory, part troop garrison. Here they unloaded most of their gear and took turns using the lavatories to wash up.
One by one they made their way back upstairs, where they gathered in an anteroom. A plainclothesman in his early thirties greeted them with subservient courtesy. Wearing a golf shirt tucked into khaki pants, he was Captain Akirov, a Directorate PR SVR officer working under diplomatic cover in Mumbai. Maria and the team of Alpha operators merely nodded at his intro, staying mute.
“You will sleep here?” asked Akirov to fill the silence.
Mumbai was a backwater SVR post. He’d been shocked when the Foreign Ministry had called earlier in the day. They’d asked a favor of Indian Defense and would be landing a Russian cargo jet at an IAF base just north in Gandhi National Park. The crew was then to hitch a ride via IAF helo there to the consulate to pick up “technical updates.” If asked, the cover was that they were here to help service IAF MiG-29s.
Akirov knew they were anything but a maintenance crew. He’d heard stories of S Directorate Alpha teams and he was pretty sure he was looking at one now.
It was after the consulate’s regular business hours. Other than a few uniformed FSB officers standing guard out front, Akirov was the only one there. He leaned into a mini fridge and pulled out bottles of water for each of them.
“Can I prepare the cots in the armory?” he asked.
Settling into rolling desk chairs scattered around the main office, the Spetsnaz commandos looked at Maria to do the talking while they accepted the water.
“Spasibo,” Maria said, slugging some water down. “We’ll repack and stay in the city somewhere. But for now I need to see the message boards.”
Akirov nodded and left. While she waited, she checked her Android tablet’s encrypted in-box. The other men started looking through their phones.
Maria sighed over her tablet. Nothing from Rance. Still hard to believe. She ran a hand over her hair. It could do with a wash. They’d been traveling for more than twenty hours.
The boards consisted of a thick three-ring binder of diplomatic traffic. Maria scanned through the book hastily, fagged out by jet lag and annoyed with Rance. She gulped more water and felt the impatient eyes of the team on her as she flipped through the stack of paper. She knew they were tired, but she wasn’t about to let anyone turn in until she had an update on Dale.
There was no formal message from Beirut or Damascus Station. Kuznetsov had let her down. She wasn’t surprised. She thought all PR Directorate people were lazy bureaucrats who would eventually fall short on a mission.
A half inch farther into the stack, she came across something interesting. Reading along with her finger to make sure she had it right, she suddenly sat up in her chair. It was a redirected message from her own watch station in London, two hours old. Scanning through the lengthy communications headers that preceded the actual text, she saw that it was a second hit on the Reza Shariati passport that had come in from Interpol. Dale.
“Govno!” she exclaimed. She turned to her team, eyes wide. “He’s over at a hotel called Taj Lands End.”
Oleg nodded. He put down his water, picked up his phone. He thumbed at the screen. “It’s over by the ocean, ten clicks. Still as Reza?”
“Yes. Same Canadian passport. It came in through their nightly immigration batch traffic. Hotels report passports here.” She stood, flipping the binder closed. Hearing the commotion, Akirov returned. She turned toward the SVR captain. “I need a six-passenger van and some city maps. Good ones.”
Akirov nodded, glad to have something to do. “Yes, gospozha. I’ll have something waiting for you in the morning.”
Maria shook her head. “Nyet. Now, Captain.”
Dale put a handful of rupees down on the counter at the Basti Backpackers Hotel, a ten-dollar-a-night hostel in the center of the sprawling city. It was a run-down three-story building sandwiched between two apartment buildings that were even worse. Whatever the building codes for this part of India were, no one was bothering to follow them.
A mangy brown dog brushed insistently at Dale’s leg as he waited for the clerk to count up his money.
“Okay, sir,” said the withered old man. If he weighed a pound over one ten, Dale would have been shocked. With a wizened little arm, the old man extended the key. “Second floor, room eight.”
Dale hefted his backpack over his shoulders and nudged the dog with his foot. It groaned and shuffled off, pausing to urinate on the sidewalk just outside the door. Dale stepped over the puddle and started up the outdoor stairs, sweating.
Two Western girls in flip-flops passed as they descended the stairs. They were tatted and braided, dressed like hippies. Dale thought he heard some German, maybe Dutch. Though he looked away, the girls seemed to stare at him—and not in a pleasant male-female way.
Oh, I get it, he thought. They saw him as a creepy older guy preying on a youth hostel. Whatever.
Room 8 was a far cry from the Taj. Dale shut the dented metal door and barricaded the jiggling knob with a grimy chair. He sat on the creaking twin bed, listening, looking at the walls, taking in his surroundings. The sun had gone down but he’d deliberately left the lights off. He didn’t need them; yellow street light permeated the room.
The walls were covered in stained flowery paper and travel posters of more bucolic Indian scenes. There was a vintage seventies portable TV with rabbit ears. Above that was a window with a view that went directly into the dilapidated building next door. There was bamboo scaffolding between the buildings, common throughout this area. Dale wondered if that was a matter of renovation or a sad attempt at structural support. On the positive side, he thought he could dive out the window and climb down if need be.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, he told himself, checking his watch. He could hear televisions through the thin walls, at least five of them. They seemed to come from above, below, and next door. Game shows, apparently, screams and exclamations. What a shithole.
He scrunched up on the bed, feeling each individual spring under the thin mattress. He checked his messages on the iPad again.
Good news.
Cerberus had checked in. Meet tomorrow, four o’clock, exact location to be delivered one hour before the meeting. No word about the wife or daughter.
Well, thought Dale, at least this mess is almost over with.
He acknowledged the message to Cerberus and said he’d be there. He also noted to himself that he might punch the guy in the mouth when they finally met face-to-face.
Almost over, he thought, spirits lifting.
Perhaps now he could answer Meth’s desperate pleas for a check-in. Using the Agency covert communications app, he let her know he was in Mumbai. He asked that someone deliver a pistol to the back side of the toilet in the southeastern men’s room of the Mumbai Central Railway. She could text him with the final location.
That ought to make her happy, he thought, not an easy instinct for Meth. But this, by God, ought to do it.
He told her to be ready to accept “the package” for delivery at the consulate tomorrow night around six p.m. local.
She’d better be fucking happy, he said to himself, trying to ignore the idiotic TV noise.
He shut down the iPad and checked his watch. He looked up at the ceiling and watched a cockroach take a stroll from one corner to a small hole near the ceiling, where it disappeared. The TV in the next room blared incomprehensibly. He heard a toilet flush somewhere down the hall.
Almost done. As they used to say in the Navy, he’d be home in “one day and a wake up.”