FIFTEEN

The man in apartment 3C jolted upright in his bed, looked around the small room, and then lowered back down slowly. He listened to the rain beat against the window next to him for a moment, and then, like most mornings, he wondered where the fuck he was.

Is this still Minsk? No . . . it’s Warsaw. I’ve been in Warsaw for weeks.

He asked himself if the fog in his brain was from the early hour or from the pain raging between his temples.

He looked to the clock on the wall. It was almost nine a.m.

So . . . it wasn’t the hour.

He’d drunk too much last night, again, and the bite in his stomach from all the vodka competed for supremacy against the pounding in his head. He had an ulcer; this he’d been told, and he’d also been told drinking himself to sleep each and every night would do nothing to improve his condition.

But Maksim Akulov didn’t give a shit about his body anymore.

He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, then reached for a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke straight into the air above his bed.

It had been a rough night. The rough nights were lining up one after another these days.

It wasn’t just the drink, and it wasn’t just his health. Well, not just his physical health, anyway.

It was the dreams. The dreams had haunted him again.

The fucking dreams.

They stopped with the morning; he’d grown so accustomed to them he only needed to open his eyes to send the nightmares packing for another day. But they’d be back tonight, he knew, and he also knew there was no sense in worrying about things he could not control.

Maksim Akulov was a survivor. He had survived an abusive father. He had survived special forces training. He had survived Chechnya. He had survived Georgia. He had survived Dagestan. He had survived Syria. He had survived Ukraine. He had survived wounds, sickness, every dangerous place, and every dangerous mission his nation had thrown his way.

But these days, the only danger he felt was from the demons in his mind.

And with each passing day they grew in strength and in number.

The forty-three-year-old Russian knew what he needed to do to make the nightmares stop. He needed new challenges, a new purpose, in the real world. The problem, as he saw it, was not that he had the nightmares. The problem was that he had nothing else to devote his time to but the nightmares, so they owned his soul.

He didn’t have to wonder about the origins of his dark subconscious. Akulov was an assassin, after all; he’d seen things, done things, that he would never be able to erase from his memory banks.

But walking a razor’s edge between life and death was the only existence he had known for many years.

He’d been in the Russian army, a member of an exclusive Spetsnaz unit, and then he had been hired into domestic intelligence, the FSB. There he worked in Vega Group, the most elite covert fighting force in the nation. After a few years kicking doors and bashing heads on behalf of the white, blue, and red flag that he wore on his shoulder, however, he was asked to resign his federal position and to go to work as a civilian.

For the Russian mafia.

He became a hit man for the Solntsevskaya Bratva, working Moscow and St. Petersburg at first, then taking foreign jobs in Central and Western Europe. It didn’t take him long to recognize that most of his targets were political in nature, so he put together without anyone telling him officially that he still worked for the Kremlin, no matter who put the money in his bank account.

He didn’t care. He was doing what he was good at, all he was good at, and he found value in that. He justified his life by saying he followed orders, and the morality of the orders didn’t weigh on his shoulders but on the shoulders of those who gave them.

He didn’t believe any of that bullshit anymore, but it had sure sounded good at the time.

He climbed out of bed and walked over towards the spartan kitchen on the far wall of the studio apartment, and along the way he grabbed the TV remote and flicked on the news; it was in Polish, reminding him again he wasn’t in Minsk any longer. The job he’d done in Belarus ended six weeks earlier, so for six weeks he’d been here, lying low, thinking, drinking, and, unfortunately, dreaming.

He put the teakettle on, fished through the dirty dishes for a not-too-dirty cup, and readied it with a tea bag and a spoon.

His motivations had changed since his early years, when he cared only about executing his orders. Now his only motivation was the desire to work for the sake of work itself, to focus and distract, to take his mind off anything that was not the job.

Akulov saw himself as an akula, a shark. Sharks must keep swimming or they die, he’d been told once, and he felt the same. As long as he was killing, as long as he was pursuing his next victim, then he would be free of the screaming in the night.

But the thrill was gone. Now it was just the momentum.

Swim or die.

He’d become introspective, especially after the past six weeks of near hibernation, alone with his thoughts. He knew how this would all end now. He’d die in the field, and when it happened, it would be beautiful.

Death in the field was preferable to life in the loony bin. This he told himself every day.

Akulov had spent two years, against his will, at Mental Hospital Number 14, Branch 2, in Moscow. He didn’t learn much there, but he did learn that he was unusual in that he welcomed death, and the only reason he was still alive was that he enjoyed the prospect of killing just slightly more than the prospect of dying.

Before the teakettle whistled, his mobile phone buzzed in his pocket, surprising him. He looked down at the number and his heart began to pound along with the throb in his temples.

In Russian he said, “Da?”

The reply came in Russian, as well. “Maksim, how are you?”

He rubbed his eyes, straightened his back, and brought some power into his voice. “I am fine.” It was Ruslan, and Ruslan never called unless there was a job.

“I have a job.”

Maksim threw his cigarette into the sink and began pacing his little flat. And just like that, the wounded, beaten man had come fully back to life. “Khorosho.” Good, he said.

“I can send the details to the drop box, I just need to know you and the team are ready for this one. It’s big, comrade.”

Maksim had never been readier. His team? Well, his three colleagues were also here in Warsaw, also lying low and growing moss, and whether or not they wanted to get back to work, Maksim knew that was exactly what they needed.

“We are all ready, sir.”

“Very well, then. You have never let me down before. I expect your best performance. The target is . . . deserving of the full measure of your talents.”

“He will get the full measure of my talents,” Maksim assured, then said, “Where is he?”

“The target is a she, and she is in Berlin.”

Maksim Akulov hung up the phone and rushed to his computer in the kitchen, ignoring the teakettle as it began to wail. All the remnants of last night’s horror show in his brain had drifted away, the headache seemed to subside with the rush of adrenaline, and he concentrated fully on his job.

Akulov opened his encrypted drop box and looked over the dossier. “Perfect,” he said with a smile so faint it was nearly imperceptible, though it was the widest smile he’d worn in months.