EIGHTEEN

Russian assassin Maksim Akulov stepped out of central Warsaw’s rainy noontime bustle and entered through the door of Alkohole Nonstop, a state-run liquor store on Widok Street. He was alone, but as he nodded to the old woman behind the counter, she gave him a sideways glance and a slight nod, indicating that those he’d come to meet had already arrived.

He let water drip from his black raincoat onto the floor as he headed towards the back in the direction of the woman’s glance, then took a narrow staircase down into the basement and began moving past stacks of boxes of Irish whiskey, Polish vodka, and Hungarian wine. He made a left at a stored display advertising a popular local honey liqueur, then continued down a dark and narrow aisle. Passing a shelf of loose 1.5-liter bottles of various alcohols, he didn’t break stride as he yanked a room-temperature bottle of Chopin vodka, then continued on into a back room, the booze now tucked under an arm.

Here, two women and a man sat at a small table, each with a paper cup of coffee from nearby Café Nero. A fourth cup sat on the table in front of the one empty chair.

Maksim took the remaining seat with his wet coat still on. He put the bottle down on the table and opened the lid of the coffee cup.

The man on his left was older, with gray hair and a thick midsection. One of the women was a little younger than Maksim at thirty-nine. She was dressed in a business suit and wore eyeglasses; her long blond hair was braided and a tablet computer rested in front of her. The other woman, still in her twenties, had dyed platinum blond hair, cut short, and she wore jeans and a tank top. At first glance, Maksim thought she was the most attentive of the bunch today, and he was proven right as soon as he sat down.

She spoke up brightly. “Dobroye utro.” Good morning.

“Is it though?”

She motioned to the cup now in his hand. “Brought you some coffee, sir.”

Maksim replied with a disinterested “Spasibo,” then took the coffee and poured it unceremoniously onto the concrete floor next to him while the younger woman looked on.

He unscrewed the lid off the Chopin now, poured himself a long shot into the still-hot cup, and then downed warm coffee-infused vodka in a single gulp.

Both women winced.

The other man at the table chuckled a little. “Polish vodka? Are you just keeping up your cover or do you really like it better than good Russian vodka?”

Akulov flinched a little with the bite of the drink going down, then recovered and poured himself another shot. While doing so he said, “Nyet, Semyon, it’s not better than good Russian vodka, but it’s better than shit Russian vodka, which is the only kind these idiots import into their country.”

“They are used to shit,” declared Semyon Pervak, making the statement as if it were common knowledge.

Inna Sorokina, the older of the two women, kept her eyes on Maksim as she took a careful sip of her hot brew, and then her eyes flashed over to the younger woman on her right.

Maksim caught the glance between Inna Sorokina and Anya Bolichova, knew he was being judged by his female subordinates for hitting the bottle before noon, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, his constitution could handle anything he could throw its way, at least until the next morning. Still, he told himself the sooner he started drinking each day, the sharper and smarter it made him and, more importantly, the sooner the day would be over.

He knew that Semyon Pervak, Anya Bolichova, and Inna Sorokina all looked down on his life choices, but they hadn’t walked in his shoes. Despite their judgment, however, Maksim Akulov knew they would shut their mouths and do their jobs, just as soon as he gave them a job to do.

To that end, he ignored any further pleasantries, reached inside his coat, and pulled out a sheaf of papers in a manila folder. “Back to work, finally. A target in Berlin. We leave today.”

“Berlin is boring,” Bolichova declared.

“And Warsaw isn’t?” Pervak asked.

Maksim downed the second shot before saying, “I’d love an assignment in Tahiti as much as the rest of you, but we go where they send us, don’t we?”

It was a rhetorical question, and his team regarded it as such.

He put the folder down in the middle of the table and kept his hand on top of it. When Semyon reached for it, Maksim held it firm. He looked up at Sorokina instead. “Inna will see the assignment first.”

The thirty-nine-year-old woman cocked her head in surprise. Semyon Pervak was second-in-command on this team, not her.

She pulled the folder to her and asked, “Why me?”

Maksim smiled; he was already reaching for the big bottle of Chopin again. “You’ll see.”

Inna opened the folder, and almost immediately she let out a little gasp. She then looked quietly through the five-page dossier, until finally she closed it.

Her gray eyes darted back up to Maksim. With a tone of wonderment, she uttered one word. “Sirena.”

“Who the fuck is Sirena?” asked Semyon.

Maksim answered. “The target is Zakharova, Zoya F., former SVR officer. Her code name was Sirena Vozdushnoy Trevogi. Banshee, in English.” His eyes were still on Sorokina’s. “Inna, you knew her when you were with foreign intelligence, I presume.”

The blonde took a slow, measured breath. “I knew her well. Trained with her. Worked with her in the field several times over the years.”

Even through the haze of drink, Maksim had a sharp mind that he was able to focus like a laser, ready to pick up every microexpression on his female colleague’s face when he asked the next question. “And”—his tone was slow and measured now—“how do you feel about targeting your old friend?”

But there was no mistaking how Inna felt because there were no microexpressions. Only macroexpressions, obvious to all. She scowled at Akulov. “I did not say she was a friend. In fact, she killed a friend of mine in Bangkok a few months ago.” She took another sip of her coffee as she pushed the dossier back across the table. “I will very much enjoy watching her die.”

Semyon Pervak felt ignored. He’d been at this a long time; he was usually the one who knew the target, not fucking Sorokina, the officious and buttoned-up ex-government spy. Pervak, in contrast, had been a street thug, a mob enforcer since the heyday of the Russian mafia in the nineties, and though he was well over a decade older than Maksim, he was still proud to be the former Spetsnaz soldier’s number two.

But he wasn’t about to take a backseat to a woman. “Who gives a shit if one of us knows the target? She’ll go down like all the rest.”

“No,” Maksim corrected. “Not like all the rest. This one is different. Moscow wants us to give her a chance.”

Anya Bolichova didn’t understand. “A chance for . . . what?”

“A chance to come home. A chance to tell Yasenevo what she’s been doing, who she’s been doing it with, and who she’s talked to.”

Sorokina wasn’t having it. “She’s too smart for that. She’ll know that no matter what she says, she’ll end up with a bullet in the base of her skull and an unmarked grave.”

Akulov smiled a little. “I’m banking on that. I’m banking on the fact that she’ll know that her only chance is to run from us.” He nodded, almost to himself. “That would be good. I need a hunt.”

“Rules of engagement?” Pervak asked.

Akulov sighed at this. “Assuming she runs, they don’t want attention on this one. We need her quietly dispatched if we are going to do it in the German capital. We’ll have to make it look like an accident, or natural causes, or a suicide.” He shrugged. “I’ll slit her wrists, toss her in a bathtub, and the locals will forget about her in days. No comebacks on the Rodina.”

Anya Bolichova spoke next. “How current is the intel?”

“Nearly real time,” Maksim responded.

“What does that mean?”

“We have someone at her organization, apparently, who can notify us of her location. The intel goes through Moscow before it comes to us, but we should have excellent intelligence on our target’s disposition.” He readied the Chopin to pour himself a third shot. “Almost too easy.”

Inna Sorokina surprised everyone when she all but lurched across the table, yanked the bottle away from her superior, and lobbed it into a plastic garbage can in the corner. “Listen to me, Maksim. Nothing with Sirena is easy. The SVR’s most elite went after her in Asia. And now, some of them are dead. You get it? I’ve seen her in action. She was always a formidable ally. She will be a formidable foe. She is the best.”

“I thought you were the best,” Maksim chided.

“If I were the best, I wouldn’t be working for you, you’d be working for me.”

Pervak snorted out a little laugh. “You sound scared, Inna. I don’t work with cowards.”

“I’m not scared. I’m careful, and I’m knowledgeable about this target.” She turned back to Akulov. “Trust me, Maksim, if you want to kill her, you can’t just stagger off a train in Berlin, go to her flat, and slide a knife across her wrists. Not with Sirena. If you aren’t at your best, then she’ll either disappear from us completely or we’ll lose her until she shows up behind you and slides a knife into your spine.”

Bolichova’s eyes were wide, but Maksim and Semyon were wholly unimpressed.

Sorokina ignored their annoyance as she looked slowly around the table at all three. “We might get her, but she’ll get one of us, at least. I promise you that. Which one of you wants to die?”

Maksim raised his hand, and Anya took it as a joke and laughed.

Semyon shook his head. “You’re being ridiculous, Inna. I’ve been doing this for a long time and—”

Now Sorokina yelled at the mafia enforcer. “You’ve been killing hapless fools who never saw you coming! Zoya knows there are teams like us out here, hunting her! She has her defenses up, and she is a hair trigger away from going on the offense at any time!”

Maksim rubbed his eyes like it was five a.m., then ran his fingers through his thick and unkempt reddish-brown hair. He took in Sorokina’s words, then shrugged in acquiescence. “I don’t need to be told that every good plan can go to shit. We hear you, Inna. We’ll be extra diligent.

“Let’s get back to the information we have. We build this operation like any other. Zakharova is in Berlin, posing as an American, using the name Stephanie Arthur. She’s working in cover for a private intelligence firm; the Kremlin thinks it has Israeli ties, but she’s essentially on her own. There will be no one watching her back.”

“Bullshit,” said Inna.

Maksim sighed now. “Are you suggesting our intel is wrong?”

“I’m suggesting we don’t start complimenting ourselves on a job well done before we do the damn job. She knows Moscow is after her; if she is showing up on our radar like this, then there is a bigger game at play. Whatever she’s doing, she will be ready for us.”

Semyon Pervak leaned back in the metal chair, his cheap blue blazer open and his girthy midsection on display, covered by an off-white shirt that needed a wash and a press. “Dammit, Sorokina, this Zoya isn’t the fucking Gray Man.”

Bolichova laughed aloud. She knew the legend of the unkillable uber assassin the Gray Man, and she also knew it was nothing but a fantasy.

Akulov said, “No . . . she’s not the Gray Man.” He sighed wistfully. “But I wish she were.”

---

•   •   •

The meeting adjourned after another half hour, with a game plan of moving the team and their equipment into a safe house in central Berlin having been established. Bolichova handled the team’s logistics, so she left first to begin preparations. Pervak was “the Cleaner”; his task was to reconnoiter in advance of the hit, and then to come along behind the hit, before the first responders arrived, and make sure there was no evidence left behind that might incriminate the team.

Inna Sorokina served as the intelligence officer in the small unit. She orchestrated target acquisition, and she, along with Maksim, decided on the time and the place for the actual assassination.

Maksim Akulov was the trigger man, save for one time on the island of Crete where he had been too drunk to get out of the car to shoot a man in an outdoor café, so Pervak was forced to both do the deed and clean up any evidence from the scene.

No one in the unit talked about that night in the island town of Chania, and Maksim Akulov had made amends somewhat on the two jobs since, for which he had stayed off the bottle, at least for a few hours before conducting his kills.

After Semyon left the liquor store, Inna sat with Maksim, who gazed at the garbage can where his bottle of vodka had been tossed.

Inna saw the distant look in his eyes. “Pazhalusta, Maksim.” Please. “Respect this woman as a competent foe.”

“You think I won’t?”

“I think that, if you want to survive, then this job has to be run like Minsk, like Ankara, like Long Island. It can’t be another Crete.”

Akulov pushed himself up from the table, slid the dossier into the small of his back. “Fine. You run the pre-workup to the target, and when the time comes to act, I’ll be on my best behavior.”

Inna was pleased. “Good. We go in with full stealth, she never sees or hears—”

Maksim raised a hand. “You read the brief. She has to get a chance to walk in.”

“She won’t do it. That’s insanity.”

“Yes, that’s insanity. Do you know what else it is? It’s an order. When we have her found and fixed, you, her old colleague, will contact her and tell her there is no escape except to face the music back in Moscow. I admit, it’s a strange way to go about things, but there is someone very, very high up at SVR or in the Kremlin who is mandating this. They want to know where she’s been and who she’s been talking to.”

“Why don’t we not do this, and then just tell headquarters we did do this, and she said no?”

Maksim laughed at this. “Lie to HQ?”

“Why not? We lie to HQ every time we tell them you are operationally fit.”

Maksim stopped laughing, but he kept a little smile. “A low blow, Inna. Ever since I got out of the asylum, I’ve kept my shit together, more or less.”

Sorokina didn’t miss a beat. “More or less? Yes, that’s fair. More in Long Island. Less in Crete.” Akulov didn’t respond, so she added, “You are headed one of two places, Maksim. Either back to the loony bin or to the morgue. I can’t stop you, but I don’t want you taking me with you to either of these places.”

The man with the reddish-brown hair laughed again; it was clear to Sorokina that Akulov didn’t give a shit what she thought. Then his head seemed to clear a bit, and he said, “You will make contact with Zakharova just before we move on her. When she refuses to surrender, we kill her. That is final.”

Sorokina didn’t like this complication, but she wasn’t going to fight Akulov. “Ladno.” All right. “You take care of your part, I’ll take care of mine. We’ll wait for Anya to get the safe house arranged, then we get on a train. We can be in Berlin by tonight. Pervak can do his recon, I can conduct surveillance, and after a couple of days learning her pattern, we can act.”

“Which means,” Maksim said as he turned and headed for the door, “Zoya Zakharova has about seventy-two hours left on this miserable Earth.” He drew a cigarette from a pack and lit it. “Lucky girl.”

Inna did not respond. Her leader had a death wish, he was about to target an incredibly challenging opponent, and, the Russian intelligence specialist was certain, there was more to whatever Zoya was up to in Berlin that she needed to figure out before they went after her. She told herself she’d concentrate on the target profile, and she’d just hope like hell Maksim could keep his shit together long enough to make the kill.

She followed her trigger man out the door of Alkohole Nonstop and back into Warsaw’s warm rain.