When foreign missions selected residences for their diplomats, they did so with the cooperation of the host country. In addition to the quality of the dwelling and the safety of the neighborhood, one of the biggest considerations was the ability for local police, fire, and EMS to quickly respond to any calls. All diplomats and their addresses would be flagged in the emergency response database.
What Sølvi wanted to do was to pound on the door like an angry neighbor, demanding to know what all the noise was about. But that would have destroyed her element of surprise. Whoever was inside could go silent and just choose to ignore her, hoping she’d go away.
She could have called in a robbery, a fire, or a medical event, but if Vilnius first responders were like those in most major European cities, they were seven to ten minutes away. If she wanted to waste that kind of time, she would have already begun looking for the superintendent. Besides, there was no guarantee that if she sent the cops or fire department in, that she’d be able to peel her diplomat away.
She needed to stack the odds in her favor. Looking at the solid wooden door and its carved iron lock once more, that’s when it had hit her.
The building reminded her of the one in which she had lived in Paris as an au pair. From its façade, to the cage elevator, marble staircase, and hallways they were practically identical. She hoped the attic space was as well.
Measuring her paces back down the hall, she found a utility door, and was able to open it with a single kick. Behind it, was a set of wooden “servant’s stairs” that led up to the attic area under the roof.
It was dusty, scattered with boxes and other junk that must have belonged to the superintendent or the property owner, and ran the length of the building—just like the one she knew from Paris. From the north end of the building to the south, a plank walkway traversed the exposed, hand-hewn joists.
Retracing her steps, she picked up things along the way she thought might be helpful and kept moving until she was standing right above where the diplomat’s apartment should be.
There, careful not to cause anything to creak, she knelt down and listened. Lowering her head between two of the beams she was able to pick up the same muffled noises she had heard downstairs in the hallway. All she needed to do now was to zero in on her entry point.
Between two different sets of joists, spaced many meters apart, she located the mounting hardware for two separate chandeliers. Living room and dining room, she figured.
Straight back from the living room she found another. Entry hall. What she was looking for now was one additional set of hardware, just off that axis. Moments later, she found it. Master bedroom.
Unlike the French, who turned their attics into tiny living spaces for their maids, many Eastern European buildings had unfinished attics. Thankfully, this was one of them. That meant Sølvi didn’t have to deal with pulling up a subfloor. She could go right to work on the plaster and lath between the two joists she had selected.
Using the chandelier hardware as her “zero,” which she figured would be centered over the master bedroom, she had kept going until she assumed she was over the bed. Then, with the tools she had gathered, she went to work making a hole.
Had she been overly ambitious, she could have jumped straight through, hoping for the best, but she knew that posh, top-floor luxury apartments could have ceilings up to fifteen feet high. Even with all her experience jumping out of airplanes, if she didn’t nail the landing, she could be looking at a broken ankle, broken leg, or worse.
It was like a punching through spring ice on a shallow pond. She made a little hole at first so she could see where she was. To her credit, she was right above the bed. Widening the hole a bit further, and peeling out the chunks of plaster and stucco, she could see that the master door was shut.
A few more whacks and she had enough space to slide between the joists. Taking one final look to make sure the room was empty, she slid into the hole, feet first, and dropped athletically onto the bed below.
She landed hard, concerned that the bed frame might give way and crash onto the floor. It didn’t.
Even so, it had still created some noise. If not for the door being closed, she would have given herself away.
Raising her weapon, she hopped off the bed and hurried across the room. As best she could tell, the voices were coming from what she assumed to be the dining room area—out the door, at the end of the hall, and to the right.
Pressing herself against the wall, she reached for the door and slowly depressed the handle. When she felt the lock release, she drew the door back. It glided soundlessly on well-oiled hinges.
She peered into the hall, weapon up and at the ready—first right and then left. There were no targets in sight.
Moving toward the living room, she kept her pistol in tight, yet ready to engage. The closer she got, the better she could discern the different voices.
There was her guy—the diplomat, as well as two other men. They were all three arguing in what she assumed was their native language.
At the end of the hall, she pulled up short. She still had the element of surprise. As soon as she stepped into the living room, though, it would be gone and all bets would be off.
She didn’t want to go in blind, but she didn’t have any alternative. She couldn’t see anyone from where she had taken her position. Best-case scenario, the men—whom she assumed were armed—didn’t have their weapons drawn.
Applying pressure to her trigger, she took a deep breath, and button-hooked into the living room.
As soon as she did, she could see everything. In the dining room, her diplomat had been bound, hands behind his back, to the thick pull handle of the swinging door into the kitchen. He was being assaulted by two very large men. She had to stop herself from firing. All of it was being played out in the reflection of a large mirror at the boundary between the two rooms.
Without her even being conscious of it, Sølvi’s mind did the calculations, reversing everything she was seeing, in order to tell where the bad guys actually were. Adjusting her pistol, she aimed as best she could and began firing through the wall.
The closest of the two men dropped instantly. She had drilled two rounds through his head. The second man had only been grazed and a fraction of a second later returned fire.
He seemed to be using the mirror too because as Sølvi dove for cover, he was able to pinpoint her location and fire three times.
Two of his shots went wide, but one found its target. It went through her abdomen, near her right hip, and out through her lower back.
The pain was sharper than anything she had ever felt, but she had to push it down, ignore it as she had been trained. Which is exactly what she did.
She tried to use the mirror again, but she could only see a sliver of her opponent. The man had scrambled under the dining room table and was barely visible. Nevertheless, she aimed for what she could see and let the rounds fly as she rushed for a better position.
The man cried out as she shot him in his right foot, the round going through the sole of his boot and out the top.
She looked down at her own wound and saw that she was bleeding. She needed to put pressure on the wound, but first she had to finish this guy off.
Getting one more look at the mirror to see where he was, she fired at it, and shattered its glass, so that he couldn’t track her. Moving to a new position, she ejected her nearly spent magazine and slammed home a fresh one.
Whoever this guy was, she didn’t want to give him time to regroup, much less to crawl over to the diplomat, grab on to him like a shield, and place his gun to his head in order to use him as a bargaining chip. It was time to act.
Reversing course, she returned to where she had previously been, dropped to the floor, and began firing low, through the wall, toward the base of the dining room table.
The room was already thick with gun smoke, and grew thicker still. Chips of paint, pieces of drywall, and splinters of wood went flying everywhere.
She heard the man cry out in pain twice more. He fired three rounds in her general direction, but then he and his weapon fell silent.
“Help me!” the diplomat yelled.
“Are they dead?” she shouted back, her ears ringing from the booming cracks of her opponents’ weapons.
“Yes,” he shouted.
“Both of them?”
“The one nearest me is definitely dead,” the diplomat replied. “The other crawled out from under the table and has collapsed in the corner of the room. Near the window. He isn’t moving.”
Sølvi swapped out her current magazine with a new one, struggled to the far side of the living room, and then slowly moved behind the furniture toward the side with the windows.
Once she was confident that she’d be able to get a good line of sight into the dining room, she readied her pistol and risked a look.
The man was propped up in the corner, right where the diplomat had said he was. His shirt and his trousers were covered with blood. There was also a trickle dripping from his mouth. His hand, still wrapped around the butt of his gun, lay in his lap. His eyes were wide open and he was staring right at her—as if he knew exactly where she was going to reappear.
Pressing her trigger, she fired in two controlled pairs—two shots to his head, two shots to his chest.
Blood, skull fragments, and bits of brain splattered on the wall behind him. The gun fell from his hand. Slowly, his heavy body, slick with blood, tilted to the left and slid along the wallpaper until he landed on the floor with a thud.
Getting cautiously to her feet, Sølvi scanned for additional threats. As the ringing in her ears started to recede, she thought she could hear the wail of police klaxons.
“Is there anyone else here?” she asked.
The diplomat shook his head. “Only them. Untie me. Please.”
Motioning for him to be quiet as she slipped into the dining room, she checked the assailants and kicked their weapons away. They were both dead.
Cutting the diplomat loose, she gestured for him to stay put and stay quiet. Opening the kitchen door, she made sure no one else was hiding nearby. She then did the same thing with the bathrooms, the closets, and the children’s room.
Returning to the diplomat, she asked. “Are you injured?”
The man shook his head. “No.”
“Can you move?”
He nodded and Sølvi helped get him to his feet.
“You’ve been shot,” he said, eyeballing the dark spread of crimson across her midsection.
“I’ll be okay. Do you have any bandages?”
The man nodded again.
“Go grab them. And then we need to get the hell out of here.”
As the man went to do as she had instructed, Sølvi patted down the corpses. There was nothing on them—no passports, no wallets, no cell phones. Nothing.
When the diplomat came back into the dining room, Sølvi had trouble standing up and he had to assist her. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Let’s go.”
Buttoning her jacket to hide the blood, Sølvi checked the hallway first before signaling to the diplomat that it was safe to follow.
Taking the stairs down to the ground level in her condition was out of the question, so she, the diplomat, and the one suitcase she had told him he could bring when they had originally hatched their plan, all crammed into the little cage elevator and headed down.
She kept her weapon handy in case any more assailants might be waiting, but the lobby was empty. Plenty of neighbors had heard the gunfire and many could be seen peeking out of doorways and peering over the stairwell railing.
Outside on the street, she guided the diplomat to her vehicle and reluctantly agreed to let him drive. After getting her into the passenger seat, he threw his bag in back and they took off for the airport.
“Slow down,” she admonished, as she kept one eye on her side mirror while bandaging her wound. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Are you sure? It looks bad.”
“I’ve seen worse. Just get us to the airport in one piece and you’ll be back with your family before you know it.”
Once the bandage was in place, she took out her cell phone and sent Pedersen an encrypted message. She had been shot and had lost a lot of blood. She was now traveling with the diplomat and they were on the way to the private aviation side of the airport. She needed a doctor.
Pedersen had only one thing to say in response—I’ll take care of it.
And that’s exactly what he had done. It wasn’t until days later, recuperating in a private hospital in Oslo, that she learned how he had made it happen.
Carl had reached out to his number one contact in Lithuanian Intelligence—Filip Landsbergis of the VSD.
It was Landsbergis who had rushed a trauma physician to the jet Carl had chartered for her to fly home on. Without that doctor’s expert care, she wouldn’t have survived. She owed Landsbergis her life.
But based on what Holidae Hayes had told her, specifically that Harvath and Carl had been recently involved in an operation in Lithuania, that made Landsbergis a suspect in her book.
If he had compromised Carl, or had played any role whatsoever in his murder—she didn’t give a damn if the man had helped save her life. He was going to die. That’s why she had come back to Lithuania, all these years later.
According to Hayes, Carl had helped pave the way for two aircraft to secretly land at an air base in Lithuania. One was a private jet from Scot Harvath’s company, The Carlton Group. The other, which arrived shortly thereafter, belonged to the U.S. military. Whatever they had been up to, the entire mission had been highly classified.
Sølvi knew that there was only one person Carl would have trusted enough to put something like that together—Filip Landsbergis.
She needed to see him, to look him in the eye and put the question directly to him about Carl’s murder. Only then would she be satisfied. Only then could she know what her next move would be.