THIRTY-EIGHT
Court moved east on Behrenstrasse, a block and a half southeast of the Kempinski hotel, tailing a man who was tailing a man who had just finished dinner with the woman he loved. His only plan was to try to get a fix on who this follower was, to make certain he wasn’t part of a Russian kill team, and if he was, to somehow neutralize the threat.
The pain meds and the infection were going to make that already daunting task even more so, but he pushed himself forward, every step a chore, every block covered a sap to his already minimal energy and focus.
Far ahead, Ennis made a right on Mohrenstrasse, and his shadow, who had been walking on the opposite side of the street and behind him, crossed quickly and remained in pursuit, probably forty yards back.
Ennis turned suddenly, crossed Mohrenstrasse again, and stepped into the lobby of the Hilton Berlin. His shadow entered through a door on the west side.
Court stopped his advance now and stood alone in the darkened street, his legs more unsteady than ever. Ennis was going back to his hotel room, this seemed obvious enough. The tail would be heading in to surreptitiously get a look at what elevator floor he stopped on.
Could this be a hit? There had been opportunities to close on the target on the street if the man had wanted to do that. Walking into a four-star hotel to frag Ennis in front of cameras and witnesses would have been the wrong play. No, Court decided, this was just one of the two shadows he had detected earlier watching Zoya, and this one had branched off to follow her companion to learn more about him.
Just as Court himself now had done with Ennis’s shadow.
Even through the fog threatening to overtake his brain, he’d been careful along the short stroll to keep one eye open for the other man he’d first seen outside the Starbucks. Now he was less worried about seeing two men, because if they had been working in a duo on the Ennis tail, then it would have been the other follower who actually went inside the building, and not the man who’d been directly on the target’s ass for the entire walk.
Court knew this job, he understood the intricacies of the tradecraft better than almost anyone, and he was confident the show was over for tonight.
Unless, he realized, he could wait out here until the man learned what he needed to learn about Ennis and then went and met back up with his partner.
All Court wanted to do was to go see Dr. Kaya and get some pills that would make him feel like he wasn’t trudging through chest-high molasses. He felt his body weakening by the minute, sleep fighting its way from his eyes, to his temples, and up into his frontal cortex.
And it was only ten thirty p.m.
But the mission came first, especially when the mission meant keeping Zoya alive.
He squatted down slowly on his haunches next to the revolving-door entrance to a bank that was long closed for the day. He sat back roughly against the window of the darkened space, then scooted his body deeper into the shadow of the corner of the doorway. If Ennis’s tail came out the same door of the Hilton that he’d entered, Court would see him easily, but if he exited another door and headed back in the direction of the Adlon, Court would also have a view of him as he crossed Charlottenstrasse.
He closed his eyes a moment, thought of sleep again, then shook his head as he reopened them. An hour, no more, he told himself, and he’d be back at the Turkish doctor’s flat, being pumped full of antibiotics and energy.
He also told himself he could tolerate the discomfort as long as he needed to in the interim. Tolerating discomfort, both physically and psychologically, was, in essence, his life.
But this time, he was wrong.
After less than ninety seconds his eyes closed and they did not reopen, and soon after his head lolled to the side.
Zoya’s heart felt like a clenched fist, and her mouth was dry. She’d been in combat before, more times than she’d like to remember, and she’d faced death with regularity, both when she was SVR and then, in the past few months, as an operative in the CIA’s ultra-black Poison Apple program.
But now she felt naked, unsure of the threats, unsure of what actions she should take to minimize them.
She just kept walking, all her senses roaring fires as she tried to discern the motivations of everyone in sight, tried to see into each dark window, divine the objective of the occupants of all the vehicles that passed her by.
She came to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a city-block maze of thousands of individual stone columns, lined by trees on the western side but otherwise open. During the day it would normally be covered in tourists, but tonight it looked like that which it was meant to represent, a graveyard. Many of the columns were no more than a meter high, some less, but as one traveled deeper into the maze, the stone monuments rose to several meters.
Zoya had originally intended to stay on the street, to make a left at the intersection ahead, perhaps to find her way back to the Unter den Linden U-Bahn or to climb aboard a streetcar, all part of her surveillance detection route to see if her tail would either follow or pass her off to others.
There was artificial lighting all around the monuments, but each of the 2,711 columns casts a shadow, so she knew that moving through them, as opposed to just remaining on the street, would be a labyrinthine haunted house for a woman nearly certain she was being followed by a man who aimed to do her harm. Still, she felt so exposed walking down the sidewalk, this actually seemed like the safer alternative.
She decided to use this danger as an opportunity. She turned suddenly and began heading into the columns, passing the low ones slowly, making sure she could be seen by whomever was on her tail.
Anyone who came in here after her, she decided, was a threat.
“Let’s get on with it,” she muttered to herself as she disappeared into the labyrinth.
Semyon Pervak walked on the far side of the street on the west side of Ebertstrasse, pangs of uncertainty creeping into his normally calm and confident tactical brain. He’d seen Zoya turn into the big, dark, and deserted memorial on the east side of the street, but in following her through the maze with his eyes from a distance, he’d managed to lose the man he was really tracking tonight, who had been walking well in front of him on the same side of Ebertstrasse.
Zoya’s shadow, as far as Pervak could conclude, had ducked into the trees here lining the west side of the street, perhaps because he was worried his target was trying to lead him into a trap in the warren of monuments. The big Russian stepped into the trees now himself, began walking slowly and carefully, expecting to come up behind some crouching man peering across towards the east, weighing the danger of continuing the foot-follow against the desire of his superiors, whomever they were, for him to get the intel they wanted.
Semyon himself had lived through many moments like this while working surveillance.
The big Russian did not draw his pistol from its shoulder holster; he wasn’t going to get into a gunfight tonight, but he did have a hooked-blade knife in a sheath behind his belt buckle, and his left hand hovered close to it while he spoke softly into his phone.
“Target has turned in to that monument thing.”
“What monument thing?” Inna asked, her voice still breathless as she rushed to move into a position to intersect Zakharova.
“For the dead Jews.”
Inna answered back quickly. “I’m passing it on the south side now. I’ll go in and cut her off. Have you taken care of the shadow yet?”
As she asked the question, Pervak saw the man he’d been tailing. He was dead ahead, standing still and staring towards the memorial across the street through the trees. It was almost completely dark here, and the Russian knew that with the man’s attention focused elsewhere, he would be able to close on him easily.
“Consider it done.” He tapped his earpiece to end the call, and he slowed his advance, hunting Zakharova’s shadow by moving slowly through the shadows himself.
Zoya Zakharova ventured deeper into the intricate memorial; her hand was shoved inside her purse, her fingers folded loosely on the grip and trigger guard of the little SIG Sauer P365 that she had already drawn from its pocket holster.
If this was, in fact, a Russian assassin behind her, the only thing that would stop him from acting right now was the very real possibility that he would suspect he was being led into a trap. Even so, a hitter sent after her would not be sent alone, so she knew to be on the lookout for others moving in from the street on her right, or hiding somewhere ahead.
That seemed unlikely to her, because no one would have been able to predict she would pass through the center of this thick maze of columns, so no one would know to lie in wait here in the middle of the all-but-abandoned memorial.
Not long after she considered this possibility, she walked by monuments one, two, even three meters over her head. It was nearly dark here, and she felt she was coming to the end of the block. She turned to the right, hoping to make her way out onto Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, just to the south.
But as soon as she turned, she saw a silhouette of a woman standing just meters ahead of her in front of a tall column, her arms raised.
A feminine voice spoke Russian. “Ne strelyay.” Don’t shoot.
Zoya pulled the pistol out of her purse, aimed at the woman’s chest, then spun a quick glance over her shoulder to make certain the man she’d seen wasn’t slipping up behind her. After a moment, fighting a jaw that wanted to clench from terror, she said, “Who are you?”
The woman slowly began lowering her hands, and Zoya pushed her arms out straighter, aiming the pistol between the woman’s eyes now.
The woman’s hands went back up as she spoke.
In Russian she said, “I’m an old friend, Sirena.”
And just like that, Zoya knew without any lingering shred of doubt that the Kremlin had tracked her down.