THIRTY-SEVEN
Court moved a few feet closer to the two men watching Zoya across the street from the Adlon. He stopped just in the periphery of a cluster of young people both sitting at tables and standing around talking to one another on the sidewalk. He would be invisible to the men now, just another faceless body in the crowd. Court couldn’t see Zoya as well now, but he was able to lock onto the pair of men without them noticing him doing so.
Finally, after five more minutes, Court noticed that the two men in the alcove finally stopped their chatting. The one against the wall pushed off and stood upright, while the man facing him stiffened somewhat.
Court read the signs. These weren’t two guys about to say good night. These were two guys with a job to do, and they’d just decided it was time to get started.
The man who had been leaning against the wall reached into a pocket, pulled out something small, and pressed it into his right ear.
The other man did the same, then turned away, towards the Adlon, and began heading for the crosswalk that would help him navigate the evening Unter den Linden traffic.
Court’s illness and lethargy seemed to slip away—momentarily, at least—as fresh adrenaline pumped into him. He dropped his empty cup into the trash and opened his backpack. He left the suit pants inside, put his dark jacket on over his black T-shirt, then slipped on the dress shoes. He shouldered the bag as he moved east on the sidewalk, in the opposite direction, to cross the street there.
Semyon Pervak received a text from Inna Sorokina telling him to halt coverage of the target for the evening, but he’d just ordered a second scotch, and Anya Bolichova had ordered a second cosmopolitan. Pervak acknowledged Sorokina’s message, but he kept his seat and continued nursing his drink, although he did stop looking into the reflection in the mirror at the distant image of Zakharova and her colleague eating out on the sidewalk.
He and Bolichova had little to talk about that wasn’t work related, and there were too many people around for that, so instead they just sat there until they finished. They looked like father and daughter, and they played that role well, both keeping their faces in their phones and all but ignoring each other.
When they were finished, Pervak paid the tab and the pair began walking back to the elevator. Neither was staying here at the hotel, but they wanted to speak with Inna about the operation the next morning and to figure out what to do about Maksim Akulov.
They were halfway across the lobby, moving together but not closely, when Pervak eyed a man coming into the hotel from a door on the eastern side. He had been sizing up people as potential threats for thirty-five years, and something about the man piqued his senses. His age, his fitness, his bearing. He was dressed in less expensive-looking clothing than most other people here in the lobby, and it all came together to ring alarm bells in the fifty-three-year-old Russian’s brain.
Semyon didn’t know who he was or what he was doing here, but he tracked the man with his eyes as he headed over to the bar, near the seat Pervak himself had taken to give him an angle on Zakharova. Once settled, the stranger looked up into the mirror, back in the direction of Pervak’s own target.
Sorokina had insisted Zakharova knew better than to take this job with Shrike Group under thin cover. She felt certain their target had some sort of backup, or was part of a larger operation.
Semyon had discounted it at the time. He wasn’t half as impressed with the target’s dossier as was Sorokina, but now he did wonder if this lone man was here in some capacity to benefit her.
He couldn’t think of any other reason she would have a tail. There was nothing in her file that suggested German or U.S. intelligence knew about her presence here, and there was no way in hell SVR or GRU would send two teams after the same target at the same time.
This odd man out was interesting to him, so he sent Bolichova into the elevator alone, telling her he was going to check something out before heading upstairs.
Pervak crossed the lobby and took a seat where he could see both Zakharova out the window on his left, and the mystery man alone at the bar.
Zoya was disappointed she had not learned more from Ennis during their nearly two-hour dinner. She did get the scoop on Mirza and Iravani, but once she’d brought up Miriam, the American had clammed up. She couldn’t tell for certain if he stopped spilling the beans simply because he was worried about Shrike Group’s veil of secrecy, or if it had to do instead with the fact that he’d shifted into brazenly making passes, and he treated all talk of work with complete disinterest.
As the evening wore on, he had seemed less inclined to pass out more intel, and more inclined to talk about his football days at San Diego State, and his travel and intrigue with the CIA. He talked about his divorce, about the loneliness of a bachelor on a long-term work assignment, and, after a second bottle of wine had been consumed, after they were halfway through their after-dinner drinks, he asked her to think of him not as a boss but as a close friend, a confidant, and whatever else she needed him to be.
Zoya thought him to be a self-absorbed prick, and never more so than when he spoke again.
“Your secrets, Zoya, all your secrets, I want you to know they are safe with me.”
Ennis had the power to have Zoya killed by Moscow. He knew it, she knew it, and he knew that she knew it. Alluding to the danger while aggressively showing his interest in her was, as far as she was concerned, reprehensible.
The thought of grabbing her knife and plunging it into Ennis’s carotid appealed to her, but she simply thanked him, and then she did her best again to steer him back to important matters. She couldn’t be overt about it, she had to keep him comfortable talking around her, even if she didn’t learn all she needed to know tonight.
But she pressed one last time. “You said we were tracking Haz Mirza.”
He nodded.
“Are you the one on him?”
“Why do you ask?”
She shrugged, portraying nonchalance. “His name came up in my investigation today. Even if we have a horizontal structure at Shrike, it seems like I should be coordinating with whoever it is who has him under surveillance.”
Ennis pounded his old-fashioned, sucked on the orange peel for a moment, then spit it back into the glass. “Forget about the way you used to work. We’re different.” She thought he was about to clam up for good, but instead he said, “Miriam is running the Mirza surveillance operation. Just telephonic conversations. She’s not physically on his ass. If she learns anything relevant to your work with Sasani, I’m sure she’ll communicate that to you.” He smiled. “Through me.”
“Good,” Zoya said. “That’s all I ask.”
Finally, Ennis put the bill on his corporate card, and they stood and headed back into the lobby of the hotel.
Ennis had told her that his apartment was in Potsdam, but he had taken a room at the nearby Hilton for the last couple weeks of the Iran contract to avoid the daily commute into Berlin. It was just a few blocks’ walk away, but he was following her back into the Adlon lobby, and not in the direction of his own hotel.
Zoya knew what his plan was.
On cue he said, “How about a nightcap upstairs?”
It was after ten p.m.; Zoya didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, except for the fact that Ennis said Moises and Yanis would meet her in her room at ten a.m. for a breakfast meeting.
But it didn’t matter what came tomorrow; even if she knew she had the entire day off, she didn’t want to spend any more of tonight on Ric Ennis.
She shook her head politely. “I’ve got an early morning, sorry. Good night.”
She turned for the elevator but made it just a couple of steps before Ennis took her by her upper arm. She spun back and looked at him, ready to tell him to take his fucking hand off her, but instantly something behind him drew her attention away from her creepy supervisor. A man strolling across the lobby fifty feet away stopped abruptly when she’d turned. Now the man walked over to some sofas, making a forty-five-degree adjustment to his earlier direction. Zoya had been trained to pick up on the movements and patterns of those around her, and in her heightened state now, this tell had not been difficult to detect. She had no idea if this was a Russian hit man sent after her, something else that posed a danger to her or her operation, or nothing more than a man who changed his mind about going to the elevators at the same time she turned around.
Ennis was unaware of all these thoughts going through Zoya’s mind. “One drink,” he pleaded. “Upstairs. Then I’ll go.” The man was clearly somewhat inebriated from the alcohol, but more than this, Zoya determined, he was drunk on his own confidence, certain he could cajole the vulnerable Russian woman into sleeping with him.
She looked back down at his hand. It lingered on her arm. “Ric. No.” Her voice was strong, emphatic, but not angry.
Ennis released his grip slowly. When she looked up to his face, he held her gaze for several seconds, then gave a little smile. “Next time, maybe.”
She wasn’t thinking about next time. She wasn’t thinking about Ennis at all.
She was thinking about the man on the sofa. His back was to her, but he would be able to see her in the window’s reflection.
To Ennis she said, “Thank you for a pleasant evening.” And then she turned toward the elevator.
This time Ennis let her go, and he spun away, began walking back to the restaurant and the exit to Unter den Linden there.
Court stood in the dark shadow of the grandfather clock in the lobby, some sixty feet from Zoya, as he watched her press the button for the elevator. He’d seen the slight altercation between her and Ennis, but as he was on the far side of the clock, he’d not seen what Zoya had seen, a potential follower caught in the open.
Court leaned back a couple of inches as Zoya scanned the room while waiting for her elevator, shielding him from her, but a moment later he heard the car arrive and the doors open. He waited an instant, leaned forward again, and saw the door as it closed.
Zoya was gone. This pleased him. He had no doubt but that she would be in for the night, and a five-star hotel like this would have decent security and an excellent camera system.
The Russians wouldn’t stage a hit here in the hotel, of this he was reasonably certain. She was operating in the field, after all; there were too many opportunities for a successful hit and a quick getaway on the street, in the U-Bahn, on a streetcar, or in a café. To Court, the hotel would be the worst possible location for any assassin to act.
She was safe for now, as far as Court was concerned.
He stepped out from his spot near the grandfather clock, then turned his head to see Ennis leaving the hotel through the restaurant.
And then he saw something else. Ennis had a tail.
One of the men Court had recognized from the Starbucks across the street slid off a bar stool and headed after Zoya’s dining companion as he left the restaurant.
Interesting, Court thought. It occurred to him he might not be tracking Russian hit men tonight, after all, unless the Russians also happened to have a tail on Ennis for some reason.
Doubtful, but possible. Perhaps their target was Zoya, but they wanted to understand Ennis’s role before acting.
Court wanted to know where the other man in the duo had gone when the two split up, and since Zoya would likely lock herself in her suite for the rest of the night, he decided to terminate his coverage of her and shadow this unknown subject.
Court exited through the main door of the Adlon and then made a right, heading off in the direction Ennis and his follower had gone.
Zoya Zakharova exited the lobby of the Adlon via the western side door, moving along casually, but well aware there were likely eyes boring into the back of her neck even now.
She’d not climbed into the elevator, had not gone up to her room, but instead she’d shot across the lobby and headed back out into the night.
Zoya hadn’t had much time to think through the best course of action, and she’d only come to this decision reluctantly. She told herself she needed to know if she did, in fact, have a shadow on her, and decided she’d run an SDR through nighttime Berlin to find out. It was an incredibly risky move; if this was, in fact, a hit man, her strolling through the darkness would give him an open target.
At the very least she would be giving him an opportunity to act.
But Zoya didn’t like the idea of having this watcher in pocket right now and not exploiting the opportunity to learn something about the opposition. Who knew if she’d be able to find this guy, or one of his colleagues, in a crowd tomorrow before they shot her with a poison dart? He was on her now, and she needed to know his intentions now.
She carried a 9-millimeter SIG Sauer pistol in her purse, and this gave her the confidence she needed to take this dangerous stroll. She told herself she’d move through the neighborhood on foot for a half hour to an hour, to monitor the disposition of anyone following her, to look for handoffs of the surveillance to other shadows so she could identify them, to ID vehicles involved in the tail, and then she would adjust her own operational security accordingly.
If this was just one asshole sent to keep tabs on her movements, she’d continue with her assignment here in Berlin for CIA; if it was a well-trained team of Russian hitters, she’d call Brewer from a boarding gate at Tegel Airport before jumping on the next plane out of the capital.
Zoya was a professional; her mission was important to her, but she also knew how to look out for number one.
She walked under the Brandenburg Gate, passing people strolling along on a calm August evening, and then she turned to the left. As a bus rolled by she scanned its windows for a reflection showing any hint of someone tailing her.
She saw one person, too distant to know if it was the man she’d seen in the hotel after her spin back around caused him to fumble his surveillance of her. But it was definitely a lone figure in the dark, walking from the direction of the hotel, and Zoya had been doing this long enough to know she most likely had a tail.
She quickened her pace, nonchalantly tugging open the zipper of her purse as she did so.
Semyon Pervak followed the man who followed Zakharova, right in front of the U.S. embassy on Pariser Platz and in the direction of the Brandenburg Gate. He didn’t know what the man had in store, nor did he know where the hell Zakharova was going, but he did know that he needed to call this in.
As he walked through the night he held his phone to his ear, waiting for his team’s intel officer to pick up.
A second later he heard Inna say, “Anya says you were checking something out. I’m in the stairwell heading down now to back you up. You do not operate alone.”
Sorokina sounded annoyed that he hadn’t followed her instructions to return to the hotel room. He wanted to show her he knew his job better than she knew hers.
Pervak said, “Target is on foot, leaving hotel.”
Sorokina was surprised by this. “What? Where is she going?”
“I don’t know.” Then Pervak tossed in, “She has a shadow.”
Sorokina answered quickly. “A shadow? Who is this shadow?”
“Want me to go ask him?”
Sorokina snapped back. “I want you to follow him.” She was clearly intrigued, though. “What are the chances they are together? That he’s watching out for her?”
“Unknown,” Pervak said, and then, “It looks like a standard foot-follow. I don’t think he’s working with her.”
“I’ve been telling you for days that she is the best. She’s ID’d her follower and she’s running an SDR to see how many are on the team and to try to judge their skill. If they aren’t with her, then they could be German or American intelligence, or . . . anybody else she’s pissed off. Trust me, Sirena has enemies other than us.”
This Pervak had worked out on his own, so he just kept walking, keeping himself at least fifty meters back from the man who was fifty meters behind Zoya.
Sorokina said, “Listen carefully, Semyon. Direct me to her, and I’ll fulfill my obligation to give her a chance to surrender herself tonight.”
“But the follower?”
“We need her to lose the tail before I get there. You can help with that.”
Pervak nodded into the phone. “Kill him?”
“No. A mugging, something like that. Just take him off the chessboard. He might be armed, so watch yourself.” She sounded to Semyon as if she were running down the stairs now. “Stay on the line and direct me.”
“Passing under the Brandenburg Gate, making a left on Ebertstrasse. Come out the south side of the hotel and you can get in front of her.”
“Copy,” she said before hanging up.
Pervak adjusted his ill-fitting sport coat as he walked on, passing men and women here and there, but keeping his eyes on the man who had his eyes on Russia’s public enemy number one.