FORTY-TWO
The news from Baghdad filled Sultan al-Habsi with beaming pride. As he sat at a desk in the residential quarters at the UAE embassy on Hiroshimastrasse in the center of Berlin, his thoughts were on his plans—those already realized, and those still to come.
He considered calling his father right now but he decided to let the old man sleep a couple more hours. He would be told by his aides at the hospital upon wakening, and he would know for certain that his son had prognosticated this just days earlier.
Sultan, even as operational director of the Signals Intelligence Agency, had made tonight happen; he had personally orchestrated the killing of the man responsible for the deaths of both of his brothers.
His plan had involved using the Americans as proxies. He had no way to kill the most well-protected Iranian himself. His own intelligence outfit was struggling in Yemen; they were hardly capable of finding, fixing, and finishing a target as elusive as the commander of Quds Force in Iran.
But Sultan did have a weapon at his disposal. He was a key and respected informant for American intelligence; they relied on him for his knowledge of the region and its actors, and he could begin tailoring his intelligence product in a way that would, over time, place a large red X on the head of General Rajavi.
And this is exactly what he did.
It took five months, but a Quds Force operative in Baghdad spoke a cryptic code over his phone, a code the SIA had deciphered. The man told a compatriot in Tehran that everything was ready for “the visit,” and then it was simply a matter of tracking the aircraft Rajavi always used to make his international flights on the night mentioned in the code.
Killing Rajavi had always been a possibility for the Americans, but in the past they had been leery of fomenting Shia anger to new heights. But when the Europeans relaxed sanctions, the Iranians killed American soldiers in Syria, and there seemed to be no way to stem the tide of a new Iranian ascendancy. The Americans, after listening to the good counsel of al-Habsi, the CIA’s number one ally in the Middle East, decided a blow needed to be struck at the heart of Iranian military intelligence leadership.
And this they did.
It was all going to plan for Sultan, except for the American, Gentry, who had somehow appeared in Venezuela, and then again today here in Berlin. Al-Habsi had no idea what his knowledge was about all this, nor what his relationship was to all this.
Hades had lost another member of his team today attempting to take the former paramilitary operations officer down, and this noise and attention on the periphery of al-Habsi’s operation was now a clear and present danger to the entire scheme.
Al-Habsi had PowerSlave operating, searching for the American, and he hoped like hell he could both (a) get another hit on the man’s whereabouts, and (b) get Hades and his remaining operators there in time to eliminate him.
Otherwise, there was no telling how much trouble the Gray Man might cause.
He successfully pushed this one wrinkle out of his mind, and he thought about his ultimate objective.
He wanted war between the great superpower of America and the evil Shia regime in Iran.
And this would happen only after the next stage of his plan was initiated.
Al-Habsi felt betrayed by the Americans and the Europeans. The Americans talked a good game, diplomatically they pressured Iran to some degree, and they spent a lot of money spying on Iran’s nuclear program, but getting the president to green-light this necessary targeted assassination had been like pulling teeth, and he knew Washington had no plans to escalate pressure on the Shias.
And the Europeans made no pretense but that they were all but allied with Iran.
Sultan al-Habsi realized that America and Europe were not his allies. They were, instead, impediments to his goal.
So he felt no qualms about them suffering collateral damage.
He was pleased his father had lived to see Rajavi’s death, and he prayed the old man would stay around for the finale of the show.
Court slept on a pile of towels and clothing arrayed on the bathroom floor of his Spandau apartment, aided by the pain medication taking the brunt of the sting out of his shoulder and the spot above his right eyebrow that he had used to break the nose of a German intel officer.
He woke to the clock radio on the floor just outside his bathroom turning on. It was six a.m., which meant he’d slept almost four hours, and he felt . . . not good, but not too bad.
There was a bustle outside as people headed out on the street. Then he heard footsteps on the stairs right outside his thin walls.
He slid his hand up to his Glock pistol lying on the cheap vinyl floor next to his head and wrapped his fingers around the grip.
But the footsteps continued on past his floor.
The radio was turned to Deutsche Welle, a news station, and a breaking story began a few seconds later. It was in German, but Court picked up the majority of the correspondent’s words.
General Vahid Rajavi, the Quds Force chief shithead, had been killed in a missile strike in Iraq. The German media speculated that the attack was carried out by either America or Israel, but as Court sat up, rubbed his eyes, and then massaged his shoulder distal of where he’d been stabbed, he had no doubt what had happened.
Matt Hanley had warned that something big was about to go down, something that would not necessarily make the world a safer place.
America had blown the Iranian general straight to hell, Court had no doubt.
Rajavi was a prick, this Court knew without question, so it was debatable as to whether this would have a net positive effect on planet Earth. It all depended on what Iran and its proxies did in retaliation.
There was speculation about this on the German news, as well. Protests were a given, violence was expected, and some sort of military response from Iran was all but assumed.
The second story was less surprising to Court, though it would be a shock to most anyone else in Berlin. A German government intelligence official had been murdered in the center of the city the evening before, the victim of a gunshot wound.
There was little information about the victim, and no description of the killer was given. He wondered if that would change, and he wondered if someone fitting his description might eventually be implicated.
Court pulled himself to his feet with the help of the sink next to him. He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror; the bruise above his eye was just a faint dull gray, and he credited Dr. Kaya’s care for that.
He’d thought through his next course of action while lying on the bathroom floor the evening before. He knew he was supposed to begin his hunt for Annika Dittenhofer; that was what Brewer and Hanley wanted out of him, but he’d come here to help Zoya. If Brewer was telling the truth, then Zoya would be holed up in her hotel suite all day.
A suite made safe enough with cameras and security, but a suite Court had no doubt at all he could get into.
He fished twenty milligrams of Adderall out of a bottle and popped it into his mouth along with an antibiotic and several anti-inflammatories. He’d stay off the narcotics throughout the day, despite the pain, because he needed to be extra sharp for what was about to come.
After a shower, he shaved off his beard for the first time in months, then took a razor to his head, buzzing the whole thing. He wasn’t bald, his dark hair remained, but he looked completely different now.
If he’d been picked up on cameras around the Adlon the night before, he wouldn’t be recognized there today.
Unless PowerSlave got him, he told himself with no small amount of concern.
He left the apartment at seven a.m., a man reborn via certain artificial enhancements, but a man reborn nonetheless.
Zoya Zakharova had slept on a row of bed pillows she’d lined up in the large walk-in closet in her large two-room suite. She woke at seven a.m., then reached up and fingered the small SIG Sauer P365 pistol she kept inches from her face.
All the thoughts from last night came back to her in a flood. The walk through the memorial garden, the confrontation with Sorokina, the gunshot and the shattering glass.
It was more than a minute before she started thinking again about the operation Hanley had sent her to Europe to undertake, and she wondered if she would ever get the intel on Shrike Group the Agency needed, especially now that she’d been so utterly compromised by the Russians.
Who had exposed her? She’d lain in her faux bed in the closet for over an hour before sleep last night trying to answer this very question. It had to have been Ennis, or this Miriam character, real name Dittenhofer, although she’d never met the woman. She didn’t think it would have been Moises or Yanis, but she couldn’t rule them out, either.
She checked her phone and found that a text had come in over the night from Suzanne Brewer. It was a link to a news article on UPI.
Iranian general killed in drone strike.
Zoya assumed this had happened in Yemen, but she clicked on the story. In seconds she saw why Brewer had sent her the piece.
Shit. So the U.S. fragged the commander of Quds Force. When Zoya spoke with Brewer last night, just after her encounter with Inna Sorokina, Brewer had promised her that Berlin station would put men on her, at a safe distance, to keep any Russian hit team at bay. It hadn’t really calmed the Russian woman to learn this; she expected that Maksim Akulov and his team would run robust countersurveillance of their own operation and adapt accordingly. But even last night, Zoya had known her work was important.
Someone was killing enemies of Quds Force in Berlin, and now she’d learned that this had been going on directly in advance of an American assassination of the Quds Force commander.
This was no coincidence.
She sat up slowly, the stress firing burning acid throughout her stomach.
She told herself she was safe for now, at least in the hotel, and that exercise would help her calm down. She climbed out of the closet and headed to the bathroom, with plans to go downstairs to the gym.
At the far end of the hallway, inside suite 401, there was a flurry of activity. Semyon Pervak stood shirtless in the bathroom, using his big, brawny arms to hold the much smaller and utterly naked Maksim Akulov under an icy shower to revive him from the lingering effects of the night before. In the suite, Inna Sorokina and Anya Bolichova had dressed and armed themselves, and they had packed all their luggage save for what they needed for the assassination, placing all the Gucci bags by the door.
They then returned to the three laptop workstations on the kitchen table to monitor the various camera feeds split onto two of the computers as well as the real-time room service log on another.
Zoya had slept in her closet; this, both women assumed, was due to Inna’s encounter with her the night before causing her enough terror to upset her normal routine. They’d only sat down and confirmed through the room service screen that Zakharova had yet to order her daily breakfast when they saw their target’s closet door open on the bedroom camera. Zakharova stepped into the bathroom near the door, then exited it a few minutes later.
Her two watchers fully expected her to go to the room phone to place her breakfast order, but instead she got dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt that read Universität Heidelberg.
Bolichova said, “She’s adopting some kind of college student disguise, maybe?”
Inna did not reply, she only watched the feed.
Both Russian women next saw their target slip a holstered pistol into a backpack, along with a one-piece swimsuit, a room key, and a few other items.
Then she headed for the living room of the suite.
Both Inna and Anya rose to their feet; Bolichova ran to the door’s peephole to look out and Sorokina hurried back through the bedroom, into the bathroom, where she encountered a very naked but surprisingly sober-acting Maksim. Semyon was no longer holding him; the assassin stood on his own two feet next to the shower, his impossibly lean and sinewy body covered with both scars and tattoos.
He raised an eyebrow at his intelligence officer, Pervak tossed him a towel, and Maksim nonchalantly secured it around his waist while she talked.
“Zakharova is in the hall. She’s leaving.”
“What’s she wearing?”
“Looks like workout gear. Swimsuit in her bag.”
“Then she’s going to the gym.” Maksim said it with confidence, then reached for his pack of cigarettes on the sink.
“Hurry up,” Sorokina demanded, then looked at Pervak. “Put your shirt on. We can do this right now.”
She rushed back through the bedroom and into the living room, then leaned over the other woman on the team, who was again seated at the computers watching the screen.
Bolichova said, “She got off on the second floor. Looks like she’s heading to the spa.”
“What would it take to shut off all cameras to the spa?”
“A press of a few buttons, but I don’t advise it.”
“Why not?”
“You’d also want to control the cameras for Maksim’s movement into the location. Doing the job here on the fourth floor would be a lot easier. I’ve prerecorded the empty hall to play back during the hit. Hotel security won’t see a thing. If you want Maksim to go down to the second floor, kill her in the health club, and then get out of the building, I’ll have to bring the entire system down. Easy to do, but hard to fool anyone as to what is happening. Police will be here in minutes, and it definitely won’t seem like natural causes when they find that the hotel cameras have been tampered with.”
Maksim had followed Inna out of the bedroom, still wearing only the towel. “We go with the original plan. She’ll be hungry after her workout, and she’ll order food and coffee when she gets back to her room.”
Inna looked again at Anya. “What about making entry on her room now? Lie in wait for her. I can open the lock.”
“No,” Pervak said. “This scenario benefits us. We use the time we have now while she’s in the gym to get all the luggage out of the building except for two laptops and our weapons. When she comes back, we go in.”
Inna turned to Maksim. “When she calls for breakfast, they’ll tell her twenty minutes, but you go in fifteen. We cut the cameras seconds before we open this door, and you take the cart. This needs to look like suicide. The best way to ensure that is to overpower her at gunpoint, put her in the tub, then slit her wrists. When she bleeds out, you leave, then put the Do Not Disturb sign on her door. No one from the hotel will enter all day.” She smiled. “We’ll be in Moscow by then.”
“What about the real room service?” Semyon asked.
Anya Bolichova answered this. “Just like D.C. I’ll call and cancel it before it comes up. Spoof the phone in Zakharova’s suite so they think it’s her.”
This made sense to everyone, Inna included. She turned to Maksim. “Put your room service attendant’s uniform on, and be ready.”
He saluted the woman sarcastically, then turned on his heel, leaving a cloud of cigarette smoke behind in the room as he left.
Zoya opted for a swim in the large indoor pool. She put her backpack in a locker, leaving the door open while she put on the one-piece suit she’d bought upon arrival here at the Adlon once she saw the great pool. She pulled her little SIG Sauer from the pack and slid it up through a leg hole in her suit, eventually pushing it up around her midsection. She wouldn’t be able to draw it especially quickly, but, she reasoned, if she met any threats while she was in the pool, having a gun on her, though inconvenient to access, would be better than the alternative.
But she didn’t really think it likely that she was in great danger now. Zoya knew a thing or two about Russian government-ordered extrajudicial killings, and all she knew on the subject told her there was no way Maksim Akulov would come into the center of a five-star hotel, full of cameras, for such a brazen hit.
No, if the Russians got her, she decided it would be by them running her down with an SUV as she stepped off a streetcar.
Still, the pistol gave her the peace of mind she needed to dive into the pool.
She swam laps, executed racing turns at each end, measured her breathing, felt the endorphins pumping into her brain.
Exercise always helped her relax, but this morning it was difficult to think of anything more than the fact that the fabled Maksim Akulov, an insane hit man of incredible skill, was here targeting her.
And the only reason he would know to come here, to be able to find her, was that her masters at Shrike Group had somehow slipped Moscow the intel. Wittingly or unwittingly, she had no idea, but for a woman who trusted no one, her mistrust had now reached a crescendo.
She swam faster and faster, anxious to get her workout in and return to her room.
Her plan to obtain intel for the CIA was thin today, this she knew, because her focus was fixed firmly on her other plan, her plan to dodge Russian assassins.