THIRTY-NINE
Zoya kept her weapon on the mysterious Russian woman in front of her, but again she spun her head left and right, still worried about the tracker from the street.
She moved closer to the woman, both to get a better look at her face in the horrible light and to put some distance between her and anyone who might show up behind her in the columns.
At only four paces away, the face in front of Zoya became distinct.
She knew who this was, and she also knew it meant nothing good.
The woman said, “Prevet, Zoya.” Hello, Zoya.
Zoya kept her gunsight on the woman’s throat. “Prevet, Inna. Kak zhizn?” How’s life?
Sorokina shrugged now, her hands still raised. “You know, the usual. Take a train to some town, eliminate a target, take a train out of town and on to the next.”
“That doesn’t sound much like the SVR I remember.”
“I’m not SVR any longer.”
Zoya nodded. She had suspected this the instant she recognized Sorokina. It would be strange to have a highly trained intelligence officer from the Russian security services involved in a direct hit in a European capital city. She said, “Solntsevskaya Bratva? Da? That does sound like them. Of course, you are doing the bidding of the Kremlin, just the same. You know that, right?”
“And who are you doing the bidding of, Sirena?”
“I’m just a woman trying to live her life in peace.”
“I want the same. May I lower my hands so we can talk about peace?”
“Do you have a weapon?”
“Grach. In my backpack.”
Zoya moved quickly to her, pushed her up against one of the taller concrete monuments, and frisked her quickly. She pulled out the Grach 9-millimeter, shoved it into her purse, then fished out a phone from Sorokina’s bag and tossed it onto the ground. There was nothing else. She spun Sorokina back around, then quickly aimed her weapon both to her left and right, still searching for more members of the hit team.
“You’re not here alone,” she said as she scanned.
“Of course, I’m not. You are a scary girl; I wouldn’t dare come by myself.” She smiled. “Relax. There was someone following you. He wasn’t one of mine, but I have one of mine taking him out of the picture.”
“Who was following me?”
Inna shrugged, then lowered her hands finally, although Zoya hadn’t told her she could. “I thought maybe you could help me figure that out. My guess is that someone is helping you, keeping tabs on you. Trying to keep you safe.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
“You tell me, girl. I don’t believe your story about working here for Shrike Group, unaffiliated with anyone else. Who is your master? Germany? America?” She said “America” as if the word repulsed her.
Zoya said, “Anyone who is on my tail is definitely not on my side.” But, deep inside, she caught herself thinking about Court.
Could he be here, protecting her?
With a jolt of emotion, Zoya said, “Your goon. What did he do to the man following me?”
With an unconcerned shrug she said, “I told him not to kill him.” She smiled a little. “We don’t want to make the news, do we?”
Zoya let it go. It wouldn’t be Court. It couldn’t be. She lowered her gun a little but kept all senses alert, either for threats from Inna or for threats from others. “Why are you talking to me? Shouldn’t you be slipping up beside me and poking me in the ass with a poisoned umbrella?”
Sorokina smiled more broadly now. Zoya saw it as a put-on. She wasn’t feeling any levity. Still, she answered with, “It wasn’t raining.”
Zoya remembered Sorokina from SVR. The blonde was several years older, much more serious, focused on her work to the point where Zoya found her difficult to interact with.
Inna continued, “I have been sent with a message. Yasenevo wants you back.”
“Really?” Zoya’s tone was, to say the least, dubious.
“Da. I will not tell you all is forgiven. That would be a lie, and you would see it as such. But I will say you have assurances from men higher up on the food chain than you will ever know that you will not be harmed, and you will not be held captive beyond the debriefing period.”
“That is so incredibly gracious of them,” Zoya said, unsure if straitlaced Inna would even pick up on her sarcasm.
But, to her credit, Sorokina knew she had some more selling to do. “Your late father was a legend. An institution. No one wants to kill the daughter of General Feodor Zakharov.” Zoya’s father had been head of the GRU, Russian military intelligence.
In response, she said, “And if I refuse?”
“Tonight, me coming to speak with you? This is our passive measure. If you refuse to return to Moscow with us, we will have no choice but to resort to active measures.”
Zoya said nothing.
“We will give you forty-eight hours to decide. And then we will find you, and we will kill you.”
“Why would you do that? You’ve already found me.”
“I expect you to run now. I would. But we will catch you in the open. Wherever you go.”
Zoya spun her head to the left and right again. The two of them remained all alone. Then she said, “Just don’t forget, finding me is the easy part. Killing me won’t be quite so simple.”
“Then it’s a good thing I won’t have to.”
Zoya waited quietly. Inna was about to tell her who else was on the team sent by Moscow.
“You know me,” the blonde continued. “Would they send me to pull the trigger? No. I was good, but I was no Zakharova. I am the brains. Not the brawn.”
“The man back there, then? Is he the brawn?” She motioned back in the direction of Ebertstrasse, where the man who had been following her had presumably been neutralized by one of Sorokina’s confederates.
But Sorokina shook her head. “He’s something, a mafia hit man, reputable, reliable. But not our chief weapon. No, Sirena, Yasenevo has sent the very best along with me, because if you won’t come peacefully, you will die violently.”
Zoya said, “I could shoot you right now, deplete your team by one.”
Inna smiled now. “But I’m not the one to fear, darling.”
Zoya saw something in the smile; it was real, it was confident. Satisfied.
“Who is it?” she asked, unsure whether Sorokina would give up this information.
But she answered with a single word. “Maksim.”
Zoya stared Inna down for several seconds before speaking again. Her response was delivered with calm. “You missed an opportunity to frighten me. I haven’t been gone from the service so long not to know that Maksim Akulov was sent to a mental institution, quite against his will, a couple of years ago. The Kremlin is farming out its wet operations to washed-up old soldiers pulled out of the nut house?”
But Inna didn’t smile back. She only said, “Da. They have done just that, exactly.”
Zoya could see it on the woman’s face, even in the low light. She wasn’t lying. Softly, and in English, Zoya said, “Oh my God.”
She knew the legend of the great Maksim Akulov, and her terror grew to unimaginable heights.
Court jolted upright, banging his head on the windowpane of the bank behind him. He realized quickly he’d been sleeping. He also realized, a little less quickly, that standing over him and looking down on him was the unknown subject he’d been tailing.
In English the man asked, “Who are you?”
Court couldn’t detect an accent; his brain was still coming out of the haze of sleep. He started to pull himself upright with the help of the window, and the man even helped lift him to his feet by taking an arm.
Court recognized what probably had happened. Ennis’s tail had come out the same door he’d entered, crossed the street here to head back towards his partner, no doubt somewhere back at the Adlon. And this put him close enough to see a man sleeping in the shadows. Any closer inspection of Court would make it obvious he was no vagrant. He’d been dressed to fit in inside a five-star hotel, after all; he couldn’t fool anyone for a second that he was a homeless person seeking shelter for the night.
Nope, Court had been compromised, and he’d been compromised simply because he couldn’t keep his infection-racked body functional.
And now his infection-racked body was going to have to deal with a much healthier man who had the drop on him.
Court spoke to him in Russian. He had no idea if the man was one of the hitters he assumed would be in the area hunting Zoya, but he was looking for a clue, a tell in the man’s eyes that he knew Court wasn’t who he claimed to be. Plus, if the man was German or American or any other nationality, Court’s Russian would give him pause, and help misidentify the mystery man when Court got away.
If Court got away.
“Sorry. I’m drunk. Fell asleep. You are police?”
The man cocked his head; it told Court nothing specific. Still in English, he said, “Let’s look in that rucksack of yours.”
Court leaned back against the window, and his eyelids drooped but didn’t drop fully. He kept his pack where it was on his back.
He wasn’t in the mood for this bullshit.
“Hey.” The man was louder now. “Your ruck. Hand it to me.” He then switched to German and spoke not to Court but apparently to someone on the other end of a call through his Bluetooth earpiece.
Court’s German wasn’t great, but he understood. “I think I had somebody following me. Be on the lookout. Over?”
Semyon Pervak was five steps from the man kneeling in the woods when the dark figure stood and spun around suddenly, reaching for a pistol on his hip as he did so. The Russian was surprised by the movement; Pervak was certain he’d made no sound, but he hadn’t survived the nineties on the mean streets of Moscow without knowing a thing or two about adapting to sudden threats. He wasn’t in knife range, so he yanked his CZ 75 pistol out of its holster and raised it in the man’s direction.
The shadow moved his hand away from his gun and raised his hands.
Softly, and in thickly accented English, Pervak said, “Give me your money.”
“My money?” came the reply, also in English. The man seemed confused, and it didn’t look like he was about to comply.
“Yes. Money.”
The man looked at the weapon with more fascination than fear, then shrugged, and slowly began reaching for his wallet in his pocket.
Pervak closed on him quickly, planning on pistol-whipping the man across the temple to knock him out, but as he neared, the man dropped his wallet on the ground and used the distraction to try again for his gun. The big Russian lunged forward even faster, knocked the man’s gun hand away, and crashed with him to the ground, jolting the man’s earpiece from his ear as they began to fight on the pathway in the trees.
Zoya Zakharova did not know Maksim Akulov, save for his reputation. He’d been a Spetsnaz operator for the GRU, then a behind-the-lines Vympel assassin for the Russian government in Chechnya, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. He’d done hits for the SVR, as well, killings in America and the UK and Lithuania and Hungary, and these were just the ones Zoya had heard about.
She’d never even seen a picture of him.
The word was the man was off his rocker, had been since his twenties, but a couple of years ago she’d heard through the grapevine he was finished. He’d seen too much, done too much, to function in normal society in any capacity. Hell, if he was too crazy to kill people for a living, then Zoya figured he should probably spend the rest of his days chained to a wall in a padded cell.
But now, if Sorokina was to be believed, he was here, in Berlin, and Zoya was his target.
With a voice remarkably weak for a woman who held another woman at gunpoint, she said, “Why would they put him back in the field?”
Inna said, “Maksim has run this team for the past year, after being pulled out of Mental Hospital Number Fourteen, quite covertly.” Inna kept talking. “You come with me now, Sirena, or Maksim appears by your side while you’re eating dinner one night. Slices your sweet throat as you swallow a sweet bite of strudel.”
Zoya went cold. She suddenly felt more alone and vulnerable than she’d ever felt in her life. She began moving to the right, towards the street to the south, but she kept the gun on Inna Sorokina.
“I am the last friendly face you will ever see,” Sorokina said.
Zoya didn’t find her face friendly at all. The gun quivered, and Inna saw this.
The older woman smiled a little. “You understand. There is only one chance for you. Come home, and talk to us.”
The man pressing his hand into Court’s chest, holding him upright against the window of the bank, had been trying to raise his partner over his earpiece, obviously without result. Court was hoping this guy would just take off to go check on his friend, who was probably just having regular comms trouble, the kind Court had dealt with countless times before.
Court spoke English now, with a fake Russian accent. “I go back to hotel. I no trouble, sir.”
The man wasn’t listening to him. He held his free hand to his earpiece, said, “Noah? Noah?”
Court saw an opportunity to sweep the man’s hand off him, to spin him away forty-five degrees with the movement, and then to slam a left jab into his jaw, hopefully dropping him outright or at least stunning him enough for Court to get away. This he could all do easily if he were healthy, but at the moment it would take more speed, strength, and dexterity than he’d exhibited in many weeks.
So he stood there, pressed back against the window, and hoped that whatever glitch was preventing this asshole from communicating with his teammate would take precedence over the drunk Russian, and this man holding him would just run off into the night.
But Court’s slim hope evaporated in an instant as a gunshot cracked, the sound rolling across the empty street from the west. It came from several blocks away, but the sound was unmistakable to a trained ear. It was clearly pistol fire.
Court had been as surprised at the sound as the man holding him obviously was, but Court didn’t wait around to see how this man responded to the gunfire. He swept his right arm up, broke the man’s grip on his shirt, then threw a punch at the side of the man’s head that did nothing more than knock out his earpiece. The man bent forward and charged him, slamming Court into and then through the bank window, and both men flew inside, Court landing on his back and his opponent crashing down upon him amid a shower of glass.
Zoya spun to the sound of the gunshot behind her, then trained her weapon back on Inna. Even in the darkness Zoya could see that her former colleague at SVR had been as surprised at the sound as she had been.
Just as she turned away to move off into the dark, Zoya heard the woman call out to her in Russian. “Last chance, Sirena. The faster you run, the quicker we’ll finish you.”
Both women then heard the sound of a large pane of glass breaking in the distance, from the opposite direction as the gunshot. Sorokina turned to look that way, and Zoya used the opportunity to lower her pistol and take off through the monuments.
Every one of the simple polished concrete statues around her—and there were thousands—felt like a threat, a watcher in the night, an assassin breathing down her neck. She felt claustrophobic, near panic as she fled, desperate to get back to the relative safety of her hotel room and to call in to Brewer, because at this point she didn’t know what else to do.
Court shook broken glass off his face before it dropped into his eyes and created even more problems. The man above him had his arms pinned, and though Court practiced judo and Krav Maga, he was too weak to get the man off him through any of the standard moves he would normally use in this situation.
Sirens clanged all over the small bank, echoed into the night, and Court knew that in seconds this now-empty street would be full of onlookers and police.
He stopped trying to pull away, and he went limp. The man above him sensed the unstated surrender, and then he looked around for his weapon, which had fallen free when they’d slammed into the tile flooring of the bank. He saw it a half meter beyond Court’s head where he lay back on the floor, and the man started to reach forward for it.
And with this Court found an opportunity, though he groaned inwardly with the realization of what was about to happen.
As the man straddling Court leaned forward to scoop up his pistol, Court launched his head upward with all his might. With a sickening crack his forehead met the bridge of the man’s nose, breaking it, stunning him, and causing him to slump over onto his side and off Court.
The American pulled himself to his feet with the last of his strength, rubbed the already swollen goose egg on his forehead, and climbed back out through the window as men and women began streaming out of the hotel across the street.
He staggered off in a daze, unsure about anything that had just happened, but keenly aware that his only objective right now was escape.
Semyon Pervak pulled the wallet off the ground next to the dead man, and then he climbed off him, his ears ringing from the gunshot he’d fired moments earlier. He put his hand on the trunk of a tree to steady himself, reholstered his weapon under his shoulder, and then turned to the west.
He was on the eastern edge of the massive Berlin Tiergarten, a 520-acre wooded park in the center of Berlin, through the middle of which ran the wide boulevard Strasse des 17. Juni.
Pervak knew the Adlon was to the east, as was the closest U-Bahn station that would take him out of the area, but the darkened tree-lined pathway to the west afforded him his best chance of escape. Were it not for the thin line of maple and oak between himself and the street, he would be in full view of the rear of the U.S. embassy right now, and he had no doubt that there would be cameras there that would have caught this entire event.
He jogged through the darkness and thought about what had just happened. He hadn’t intended to kill the man; he’d been certain that he could have remained stealthy all the way up to when he would have clocked him with his pistol and temporarily taken him out of the equation, as Sorokina had requested.
But the man had turned suddenly in Pervak’s direction, almost as if he’d received warning that someone was creeping up behind him. The man was fast and strong, and the instant he saw the man try to draw his gun, the big Russian realized he’d have to stop him from doing so, by either nonlethal or lethal means.
And when the man in the dark got his hand on the weapon, Pervak went lethal.
One shot into the upper chest, from a range of less than two inches, and the shadow dropped his weapon and went still.
Semyon trained his CZ on his victim’s forehead, and he stood and kicked the man’s HK pistol out of reach. He quickly knelt down, fished through the man’s clothing, and finally pulled his wallet off the ground where he’d dropped it.
As he raced through the park now he thought of the wallet, still in his left hand. He’d just slowed and begun looking through it when his phone began to ring.
“Yeah?”
“What happened?”
“I killed him.”
“I told you to—”
“Yeah, well, he went for his gun. He was in comms with someone else, I think. Maybe Zakharova? She warned him.”
Sorokina was clearly hoofing it, as well; her voice was breathless as she spoke. “I was with Zakharova. She didn’t communicate with anyone.” Then she asked, “Did you hear the glass smashing to the east?”
“I can barely hear you. Did you forget I just fired a pistol?”
“Are you clear?” she asked, and Pervak had had enough of Inna Sorokina.
“You take care of you, I’ll take care of me. I’ll be back at the Adlon in the morning. Have Maksim ready. Zakharova won’t be sticking around long after tonight.” And then he hung up, focusing his attention on the wallet in his hands, hoping to get some idea who he had just killed.
He pulled the German license from the closed billfold and saw that the man’s name was Noah Fischer. Then he opened the billfold fully, and saw credentials identifying Noah Fischer as an officer in the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. The BfV. German domestic intelligence.
Shit, Pervak thought.
The Krauts are after Zakharova, as well.