THIRTY
Rudolf Spangler sat in his office in the unassuming Potsdam headquarters of Shrike International, drinking coffee and scrolling up and down his offshore accounts on his computer. His organization was flush with money for operational expenses, flush with profits even after paying all their people, both on the white side and on the black, and for a brief moment, the man was without worry.
Worry came seconds later, however, with the ringing of the phone.
“Spangler,” he said.
“Rudy, it’s Miriam,” she said in English, using her code name as a matter of personal security. “Kamran Iravani was murdered this morning at Humboldt.”
Spangler’s eyes narrowed as he took this in. “Iravani. He was a target of yours, correct?”
Miriam said, “Up until three weeks ago. Now he’s dead.”
Spangler said, “Well . . . it doesn’t involve us.”
But Annika Dittenhofer wasn’t listening. “Iravani was MeK. And he was spying for the Germans against Iran here in the city.”
“If he was actively spying against Tehran, obviously Iranian assassins killed him.”
“Nein, Rudy. We’ve seen no action at all from the Quds Force personnel we’re monitoring, no chatter from the Iranian spooks in town we know of. Someone else killed this kid. Someone who is protecting the Iranian regime for some reason.”
Spangler breathed heavily into the phone as her information began to weigh on him.
“Say something, Rudy!” Annika shouted.
“I . . . We didn’t do it! That’s all I know.”
“But our client? Did he do it? We obtained the intel on Kamran Iravani, we sent it off to our mystery client, and now the kid is dead.” Spangler did not respond to this, so Annika said, “Rudy, did you tell our client about Drummond, about Hutchens, and about Brust, too?”
Again, Spangler said nothing, but this told Annika everything.
“Well, then.” Her voice was lower and graver than Spangler had ever heard it. “Now we know. Don’t we?”
Spangler said, “I will bring up your concerns when I speak with the client.”
Annika replied, “Concerns? Do I sound concerned to you, or do I sound fucking horrified?”
“Very much the latter.”
“Iravani was an informant for the BfV. German intelligence is going to look very hard into what happened to him. If our client was involved, Rudy, then we are going to be in the bull’s-eye.”
“I don’t know if the client was involved or not. I’ll speak with him. What else can I do?”
Annika paused before saying, “Be careful, Rudy. You know what happens to people who ask too many questions these days.”
“That’s ridiculous. I run Shrike Group. I am not afraid of—”
“Do you, Rudy? Do you run Shrike Group? Or is our one client, the man keeping us afloat, is he actually the one in charge?”
Annika Dittenhofer ended the call, and Spangler put down the phone and rubbed the back of his thick neck.
Keith Hulett and his team were enjoying their afternoon, celebrating their successful antiterror operation.
Thor said, “That shit was almost too easy. We walked out of there totally invisible. Nobody looked at us twice.”
Hulett remembered Tarik telling him that as white Westerners, he and his team would be exceptionally suited to this type of work. He wondered if the previous team of hit men Tarik had mentioned had come to some misfortune, either from the Quds Force members they were targeting or from the local police.
Either way, he endeavored to make certain he and his men didn’t run into any similar trouble. They’d take the time to execute all of their hits just as cleanly and quietly as they had this morning.
Hulett’s phone sat on the coffee table around which he and his men sat. It began ringing, so he snatched it up and looked at the number. Instantly he was on his feet, heading down a back hallway to his bunk for some privacy.
“Go for Hades,” he said, because he knew who was calling.
“Hades, this is Omar.” Omar was one of Tarik’s top lieutenants.
“Yes, sir. The operation was successful. Scratch off one bad guy.” Hulett was still basking in the afterglow of his success, as he assumed the call from the UAE was simply to praise him and his men.
But Omar wasn’t praising anyone. He held tension in his voice. “I don’t care about that. We need you back out. There is a man who arrived in Berlin who is threatening our operation.”
Cool, Hulett thought. More work. “Who is he?”
“We think he is the man you encountered in Caracas the other night. I’m texting you his picture.”
And now the American mercenary stood straighter, began walking back up the hall to his men in the great room.
“Roger that. Where is he?”
“He was picked up on a camera near an operation our European partners are running, just thirty minutes ago. And then, two minutes ago, he was seen again, renting a motorcycle. He then went back in the direction of the operation.”
“Copy all. Tell me where the op is, and give me the description of the man and his bike.”
Omar directed him to Sasani’s neighborhood, Dahlem-Dorf, and gave the make and model of the bike. He then sent a secure text with two pictures of a man in his thirties with shoulder-length hair and a short beard wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans.
“This fucker? This nothing joker is the one who killed my man the other night?”
“Affirmative. We have information that this man is operating alone, but he has extraordinary skill. Use caution.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve got some skill myself, and I’m not operating alone. I’ll take care of this little bitch.”
As soon as he hung up his phone, he rushed back into the living room of the safe house. “Everybody saddle up! We’re about to go get us some payback for Ronnie!”
The thirty-nine-year-old blonde checked into the Adlon Kempinski just after three p.m. A corner suite on the fourth floor had been reserved for Xristina Dolyna by her company, a Danish housewares manufacturer, and her Ukrainian passport was in order, so she was quickly handed room keys and escorted to the elevator, while her Gucci bags were loaded onto a luggage cart.
She entered her suite and opened the double windows in the living room. The view of the Brandenburg Gate was spectacular, and she imagined it would only be more majestic at night. In front of the gate, still to her right, the Pariser Platz was an open city block with both concrete and grassy spaces, with the U.S. embassy on her side of the square and the French embassy across the wide concrete plaza.
She looked down on Unter den Linden, lined with taxis in front of the hotel, tables sitting at outside cafés, and restaurants and bars in both directions.
The woman stepped back inside when the bellman knocked. He gently put her two suitcases on racks in the living room of the suite as directed by the Ukrainian guest.
Another knock came minutes after the bellman left. The blonde looked through the peephole, then opened the door.
Russian assassin Semyon Pervak stood in the hall. He wore a camel sport coat and white designer jeans, neither particularly flattering on his bulky frame.
He entered the foyer of the suite, giving barely a glance towards the woman as he passed by, though he did speak to her.
“I can’t find Maksim. He’s not answering his mobile.”
Ukrainian Xristina Dolyna was, in fact, Russian Inna Sorokina, the intelligence officer for the four-man hit squad sent to hunt down Zoya Zakharova.
Sorokina shut the door and followed Pervak inside. She displayed no surprise at Pervak’s inability to track down her team leader; this was par for the course.
Matter-of-factly, she said, “If he is not answering at three in the afternoon, then he is drunk in a bar.”
Pervak said, “I have Anya checking the pub near the safe house, but he could be anywhere.” He shrugged, then pulled off his coat. “Doesn’t matter, we won’t need him till tonight at the earliest.”
“Yes, but when we need him, we will need him sober.”
“Whatever. We will make do.”
Sorokina bit her lip for an instant, then said, “He might not be out drinking at all.”
The middle-aged man looked back at her. Soon he shook his head. “No, Inna. If Maksim is going to kill himself, he won’t do it while on mission. He likes this part of the life. It will be during the downtime when he puts his gun in his mouth. We go another six weeks without a job after this, and we’ll find him floating in a river, but as long as there is work, there will be Maksim.”
Pervak turned away from her, looked out at the view from the windows of the living room.
He wanted to drop the subject, it was clear, but Inna said, “You do know how this ends, don’t you? Maksim gets one of us, or all of us, killed.”
The big Russian mob hit man sniffed loudly. “As long as Moscow says Maksim is in charge, then that’s good enough for me.”
“In charge?” Sorokina snapped. “Has he been taking charge of late?”
Pervak turned from the view and squared his body off towards her. “I might have to tell our team leader that his third-in-command is attempting to undermine his authority.”
Inna laughed at this. “If you told him right now, while he’s slumped over a bar stool, I doubt he would hear you, and I am certain he wouldn’t care.”
Pervak shrugged again, but his attention was on the luggage in the living room now. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Gucci? Headquarters okayed that purchase?”
Sorokina unzipped the first bag. “Reproductions. Picked them up in New York when we were there. Seventy-five dollars, U.S.” From it she pulled a laptop and some cables, and she began setting it all up on the bar area in the kitchen, while Pervak opened the other bag and began removing cameras and listening devices.
There was another knock at the door a minute later; Semyon headed for it, but while doing so he reached into his jacket at the waistband and put his hand on the butt of his CZ P-01 Omega pistol. He looked through the peephole, just as Inna had done a minute before, and then he relaxed his gun arm and opened the door.
Anya Bolichova wore a yellow and red sundress, large-framed mirrored glasses on the top of her head, and wedge heels. She carried nothing other than a small handbag over her shoulder.
Her mood was not as sunny as her outfit, however.
“I couldn’t find Maksim. I guess he’s out on another bender.”
Pervak said, “I hope it’s German beer he’s drinking. Better that than the vodka.”
Bolichova looked past Pervak, at Sorokina. “Okay, Inna. We don’t need our shooter now, anyway. What can I do?”
Inna said, “Can you get into the hotel guest list?”
“Da. Of course. Don’t need to be in the building to do it.” She looked out the massive floor-to-ceiling window a moment, past the railing and down to Unter den Linden. “But it’s nice here, so I’m not complaining.”
“I want to look at all the names, all the companies who have reserved rooms here, run it all against known actors. I have a hard time believing Sirena is what she claims to be. Her cover is too thin; she should be hiding under a rock right now, not working for an intelligence firm in Western Europe. If we are lucky, we might find out she has confederates, and they might be staying here so they can watch out for her.”
Anya Bolichova got to work. She hacked into the hotel’s servers in a matter of minutes, which gave her access to all the cameras, the guest list, the employee schedules; she could even see reservations in the cafés and restaurants on the property.
As they had been told by their handlers in Moscow, a woman using Zakharova’s alias, Stephanie Arthur, was staying at the far end of the long hallway here in room 405.
Inna couldn’t help but wonder if she was only thirty meters from Sirena right now.
Bolichova did more digging into the other guests, running names against known intelligence officers kept in a database, she assumed, at Russian Foreign Intelligence, but processed through her handler in Moscow.
When she had all the data, she summarized to Inna and Semyon. “Over two dozen people from the intelligence services, representing nine different nations, are staying here at the hotel. But that’s to be expected. We are near many embassies and consulates, after all. And the Reichstag is only a couple kilometers away.”
Sorokina looked over the list. Evaluated what was known about each of these players her colleague had identified. Finally, she said, “This name at the bottom.”
“That’s Ric Ennis. American. He used to be a case officer with CIA, but now he works for Shrike Group, Zakharova’s firm, here in Berlin.”
“And he is staying in the hotel?”
“No, but he has a dinner reservation for two tonight at eight thirty. Downstairs in Lorenz.”
This wasn’t what Sorokina was looking for, but it was something. She said, “Semyon, you go to the bar at Lorenz at eight fifteen. Be in position. Let’s see if darling Zoya makes an appearance with Mr. Ennis.”
Semyon didn’t like Sorokina telling him what to do. He was technically over her. But she was the intelligence officer, and ultimately these were her calls to make. He looked down at his watch. “That gives us five hours to find Maksim.”
Sorokina said, “When it comes time, you might have to do this yourself. There is no way she will come back with us to Moscow.”
This was, Semyon knew, not her call to make. “I agree that she will not surrender. The only way she’s leaving here is in a body bag. But Maksim is in charge. If he tells me he needs me to stand in, I will stand in. Otherwise, we will wait and watch the target.”
Pervak was right. The restaurant wasn’t the right time or location for this. Inna had another idea. She looked over Anya’s shoulder at the data for a moment. “Can we see room service orders?”
“Of course.”
“Has she ordered anything so far?”
Anya pulled it up. “Yes. She’s been here two weeks, and she’s ordered breakfast every single morning, lunch once, and dinner twice. She’s not just sleeping here; apparently she’s spending most of her time working from her suite. Some of these breakfast orders make it look like she’s meeting with others here. Multiple pots of coffee, lots of food for one woman.”
Sorokina nodded. “Okay. We can do this just like D.C.”
“What happened in D.C.?” Anya asked. It was before her time with the unit.
Pervak said, “The Dupont Circle Hotel. A year and a half ago we eliminated a Russian-born reporter who had been filing some embarrassing and completely untrue stories about our dear president. Maksim wore a room service attendant’s uniform, made entry on the man’s hotel room, and I came in behind him. He was drunk, we got him drunker, bashed his face in with a bedpost. We got away, the death was listed as natural causes, a drunk who fell and hit his head, and no one ever knew we were there.”
Inna said, “I want a camera in her room. We need her to be alone, and we need to be absolutely assured of this.”
Bolichova said, “I can open her lock, but I have to physically go down to her door with a computer and plug in to the battery port on the bottom of the latch.”
“Is that a problem?”
She smiled. “No. I’ll play a recorded loop of the hallway cameras, won’t take me a minute once I’m there.”
Semyon looked around Inna’s suite, assessing the ceiling, the fixtures, the layout. “I’ll take two cams, put them high on the walls in the living room and bedroom.” He turned to Inna. “Bathroom, too? Just to be sure?”
Sorokina replied with, “Grow up.” And then, “Watch out for telltales, look for other cams or recording devices. This isn’t like any other operation you’ve ever been on.”
Semyon loomed over Sorokina, brought a finger up to her face. “It’s exactly like every operation I’ve ever been on. I’m a fucking professional, too.”
Inna let it go. She knew Semyon was good at his job, and she had done all she could to plant the seed that his best efforts would be required for this mission.
If he fucked this up . . . well, she told herself, then that was on him.