FIFTY
Inna Sorokina’s phone rang while she sat in the passenger seat of the Russian hit squad’s rented Mercedes coupe. She looked down at the number and saw it was Maksim’s burner.
Again.
It was almost ten p.m. now; they’d spent the entire day sitting in the car in an underground garage a couple of blocks from the Kempinski, worried about vehicle checks on the road in the wake of the chaos in the hotel at Pariser Platz. Now they were tired and stressed and they hadn’t been able to get a signal on their sat phone to send in a distress call to Moscow.
Inna knew she had to make that call, but she told herself she first needed to remain vigilant while Anya drove, to make certain they hadn’t been tailed.
The call could wait. Maksim and Sem weren’t going to get any more dead in the interim.
A steady rain fell, and as they headed south out of the city, the sky grew darker and darker.
A minute later the phone rang again.
Anya said, “Why don’t you just answer it?”
Sorokina turned it off now. “Someone found it with his body and has been calling the last number dialed, probably the only number dialed, trying to find a relative or a friend of the idiot who put on a room service uniform, murdered one or two foreigners in a hotel suite, depending on whether they think Semyon was a victim and not an aggressor, and then died trying to escape out the window.”
“If that’s what the authorities think, does that mean we’re in the clear?”
Inna shook her head. “Not at all. They will work out quickly that the man dead on Unter den Linden had confederates, and they’ll be hunting for them. Pulling the fire alarm bought us some time; they’ll have a lot of people to look over on the camera footage, but you can bet we’re burned.”
Anya turned right off Potsdamer Strasse and up the little driveway of a lake house on lake Templiner, south of the city of Potsdam. It was a wooded area with more houses dotting the shore, not as remote as Sorokina would have liked, but, she had to admit, Anya had found a safe house with a good balance between accessibility to central Berlin and an out-of-the-way location with multiple avenues of escape, if necessary.
They entered the four-bedroom home at ten thirty and immediately set up their computers.
Anya said, “You have to call this in.”
Inna nodded and sniffed. “What do I tell them?”
“What happened, I guess.”
“Right.” Inna pocketed her phone, then stepped over to the little bar by the glass windows to the back deck with the view of the lake. “I’ll send a distress call to Moscow. But first we can have a drink in honor of Maksim. The fool got himself killed, he got Sem killed, and he failed to eliminate his target, but at least he didn’t get us killed.” Anya gave a stressed laugh, then went over and drank a shot of tepid vodka with her team’s intelligence officer.
“That man today,” Anya said. “Whoever he was, he was extraordinary. Maksim in his glory days wouldn’t have had a problem with him, but Maksim’s glory days are long past.”
“All his days are past,” Inna said solemnly, then poured herself another drink.
Just as she brought the little shot glass back to her mouth, she and Bolichova simultaneously heard a noise near the front door. They produced their pistols in an instant and trained them towards the sound just as the door opened.
Both women had their fingers on their triggers, and when a figure stepped into the room, out of the darkness and the rain, both women let out a gasp.
Inna blinked hard, as if the image in her eyes would just reset, turn into something else, something that made sense.
But when she opened them back up, the image remained.
Maksim Akulov stood before them in a black raincoat, dark slacks, and soaking-wet dress shoes. He stepped into the room, under his own power, and in his left hand he held a bottle of cheap bourbon.
It was clear from the bottle and from the man holding it that a few shots had been downed already.
The two women just stared uncomprehendingly, until both slowly lowered their weapons. They looked at each other, as if to say, Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Akulov stepped into the house fully, shutting and locking the door behind him.
And then he said, “I bet you two are just full of questions.”
Neither woman spoke, so Maksim asked Bolichova a question of his own. “Who was he?”
She was still in shock, but she said, “We . . . can only . . . assume he was the guest in the next suite.” She looked at her screen. “Darrin Patch, from Canada. I’m sure it’s a pseudonym, despite his backstopped legend.”
“He just appeared in the room. How did he get into her suite without you seeing it on the hotel camera?”
Inna said, “There’s only one explanation. He went out his window, climbed over to hers.”
Anya was still incredulous about this. “That’s . . . a long way down.”
“Tell me about it,” Maksim said.
“No, Maksim,” Inna said. “You tell me about it. How are you alive?”
Maksim moved slowly to a chair near the laptops. Anya pulled it out for him and helped him sit down.
Finally, he said, “It all went to shit. The woman was a fighter, just as you said, but we had her. It was going to be messier than I wanted, but with Ennis there, I wasn’t worried about all the evidence of a fight.
“Then he appeared. Out of fucking nowhere. We fought a moment, I injured him, but he was slippery. He . . . that man . . . he was . . . he was like nothing I’ve come up against. Economy of movement, unreal speed, an efficiency in his decision making.” He looked at the women. “He dove away from one of my knives, thrown from only five or six meters’ distance. He almost avoided the second one completely, too. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
Both Anya and Inna were impatient, but it was Inna who said, “Tell us how you survived the fall.”
“I dove out the window. I didn’t mind dying, I just refused to die at the hands of another. I remember flying through the air, the falling, the wind rushing past my ears. I thought I would be at peace, but I felt no peace, because I didn’t understand who this man was and how he made me fail my final mission. I finally felt it.”
“Felt what?”
“The will to live. If only to kill Zoya Zakharova.”
He paused again. Inna was about to walk over and slap him across the face, just as she’d done late the previous night, so he could snap out of his inebriation long enough to tell them what the fuck was going on.
But before she could, he shrugged. “And then I hit it.”
“Hit . . . what?” Anya asked.
“I hit a flagpole. Don’t know how far down it was, but it hurt. It snapped under my weight, but I got hold of the flag, and it tore immediately. Then I was falling again. Spinning.” He looked off into the distance; he was reliving a recent memory through the haze of drink.
“I crashed into the canopy in front of the main entrance. A big, red, soft fabric, which tore in two, of course, with the force of my weight and my fall.”
Anya cocked her head. “You crashed through the awning and hit . . . what?”
“A bellman was pushing a luggage cart into the hotel. I landed on it. The flagpole and the flag slowed me, the canopy absorbed much of my momentum, and a stack of Louis Vuittons took care of the rest.”
Inna remained utterly incredulous. “That must have been eighteen, maybe twenty meters.”
Maksim replied, “I’m no expert, but it felt like twenty-five.”
“You weren’t hurt?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course I was hurt.” He took off his wet raincoat with difficulty, opened his shirt, and took it off in front of the two women. Though he was covered in body art, when he lifted his right arm to them, it was easy to see it was horribly scraped and bruised. Vicious red and purple splotches covered the right side of his rib cage, as well. “But nothing broken, I don’t think. If I sober up I might find out differently. I was helped up, someone ran to get me a doctor, but I just staggered off. Bought this coat, went to a bar, fell asleep in a park, went to a liquor store, came here.” He sighed. “What a day.”
He unscrewed the top of the bottle of bourbon, started to bring it to his lips, then looked at Inna. “With your permission.”
She sniffed and looked away. “Doesn’t matter now, does it?” She was still fixated on his story. “You are the luckiest maniac to ever live.”
“Me? Lucky?” He snorted out a little laugh and took a long pull from the bottle.
“I’ll get you some ice,” Anya said, and she headed to the kitchen.
“Just a couple of cubes. I don’t want to water it down.”
Inna snapped at him. “She’s talking about for your injuries, not for your Jack Daniel’s!”
Maksim didn’t acknowledge her, he just looked out the window towards the lake. “It’s a shame about Semyon, but Zakharova would have shot me, instead, if he hadn’t been there to take her attention while I fought the other guy. Poor Sem saved my life.”
What a wasted pursuit that was, Inna thought but did not say.
Maksim drank while the two women tried to wrap their heads around the fact that their leader sat here before them, alive.
Inna shook the insanity of it all away, then pulled out her phone to call in to Moscow. Before she dialed, Maksim spoke, though it seemed as if he were talking to himself.
“The stranger. Whoever he was, he had one flaw, though. One easily exploitable weakness.”
“Which was?” Sorokina asked.
“Virtue.” He lit a cigarette from a pack he took out of his raincoat. “He went through all that to save Zakharova. And then, when he had me in his sights, he put himself between her and me.” He took a puff and blew out smoke. “I don’t know where he came from, I don’t know who he is, but I am certain that he cares for her more than he does for his own life.”
“You can identify love from actions in a gunfight?” Anya asked as she handed him a plastic bag of ice. He placed it between his ribs and his right arm, and used the arm to press it against his torso.
Maksim winced with the cold as he thought about the question posed to him. “Da, I suppose I can. He loves her. That’s it. I felt it.”
Inna had heard enough. “I’m calling Moscow so we can be exfiltrated.”
Maksim took another drink from the bottle. “Nyet, I’ll do it.”
“Are you sure—”
“I’ll do it!” He stood, turned, and pointed at Bolichova. “You got images of the man when he was in the suite, correct?”
“Yes. They automatically saved on my laptop.”
“Send the images to Moscow; they can run them against the SVR, FSB, and GRU databases. Do everything you can to identify him.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, as she spun to her computer.
But Inna said, “Why? Sem is dead. We failed. All we need to worry about is getting out of here before we are captured or killed.”
Maksim headed for the back deck, limping slightly as he walked. He pulled out his phone at the back door, then turned to the two women. “Indulge me. Put a name to that face. Put a biography to that name.” He left through the door.
Anya Bolichova was already working on it. Inna just sat down on the sofa, still dumbstruck that Akulov had somehow survived.
Haz Mirza had spent the day as angry and as resolute as he had ever been in his life, but now, seconds after ending the call on his burner phone, he was even angrier.
Stand down.
That had been the message from his superiors. Yes, they were as angry as Mirza, they swore unto Allah, but there could be no violent retaliation, whatsoever, in Europe. Not now. The relaxation of sanctions was, Mirza had been told, simply too important to give up.
The twenty-four-year-old Iranian seethed. He wanted to act. He needed to act. The entirety of his time here in Germany, the entirety of his time fighting for the Shia realm in Yemen and Libya and Syria, it would all be just a big joke, a waste of life, if the West could simply be allowed to decapitate Iranian military intelligence without Haz Mirza doing anything more than going to his job at the trucking company like it was just another regular day.
He’d spoken to all nine of his men around the city today, before the stand-down order had been relayed. To a man they’d been furious at America because of the murder of General Rajavi, and they all agreed they would do whatever it was that Tehran wanted. But Mirza could tell that for some of them, their hearts weren’t in it. Two of the group mentioned the easing of sanctions themselves, saying if this cell had had Allah’s fortune to be stationed in D.C., and not Berlin, then they would have certainly acted in the first few hours to deliver Iran’s crippling counterstrike.
“But Berlin, brother,” one said, and the second echoed his sentiment. “This is not where the fight will be. Let’s keep our heads down, wait for our chance to serve our nation.”
Mirza had wanted to pull his Beretta pistol on the men who talked like this. Weak lambs.
He went to bed at one in the morning, but he couldn’t sleep. His body communicated his need to him as strongly as his heart did. His hands were balled into fists, his jaw clenched, his blood pumping madly through him.
The thought of defying his masters came to him, and he discounted it the first time. The second time, he did the same. But the third time, he allowed his brain to linger a moment at the possibility. He had drawn up a plan himself for a brazen attack on the U.S. embassy. He had light weapons, he had nine mujahedin to fight with, though some of them were probably better truck loaders and forklift drivers than they were combatants.
If he went forward despite his orders to stand down, he and his men would be sentenced to death by Tehran for their actions, but Haz Mirza did not find this to be any great deterrent. He was no fool. He knew that ten men couldn’t take over the U.S. embassy, not for any real length of time. No, they would all die in the lobby in a hail of gunfire.
But not before they had struck a blow against America, a blow that would send it reeling.
A blow that, in Mirza’s racing brain, would lead to other Shiites around the world taking up arms in retribution for the death of General Vahid Rajavi.
He made no decision that night, but only by telling himself that his jihad was coming, one way or another, did he allow himself to finally close his eyes, to fall asleep, and to dream of glory.