SIXTY-ONE
Annika Dittenhofer pushed a hand out of the bedsheet and reached for the phone, both to answer the infernal ring and to see what the time was. In her line of work it was hardly out of the ordinary to get a late-night call, but since she’d told her technical team that she was taking a few days off, she really didn’t expect them to bother her on the first evening of her hiatus.
She answered. “Dittenhofer.”
“Miriam? Hi, it’s Moises.”
“What time is it?”
“It’s almost eleven. Were you asleep?”
Annika sat up. “Yeah. What’s going on?”
“I know you said you were taking leave, but I just wanted to ask your opinion.”
“On what?”
“We broke off coverage of Mirza yesterday, like we’d been instructed, but about an hour ago his phone started pinging its location.”
“The burner phone? The one he got rid of?”
“We only thought he got rid of it. It stopped pinging its location midafternoon yesterday. But it’s back on. Yanis thinks Mirza might have put it in a Faraday cage before the operation at the American embassy, and only just took it back out.”
“But he wasn’t at the embassy.”
“Operational security, I guess. Dunno.”
“Where is it pinging now?”
“It’s heading out of the city. In the direction of Fürstenberg.”
“That’s more than an hour and a half to the north. Right now? At eleven p.m.?”
“Yes. Yanis and I thought we’d take the van up there and have a look. Normally we’d get a physical surveillance request approved by the case officer assigned to us, but since you went on vacation, we’re kind of on our own.”
Miriam was already out of bed, racing to her closet for some dark clothing. “Approved. I will meet you there. Call me the second he stops.”
Moises was pleased. “We were hoping you’d say that.”
Court didn’t wince as Dr. Azra Kaya pulled the needle out of his arm, though the sticks into the veins sure were adding up. She put a Band-Aid on the tiny wound; he thought it was funny that it was just a couple inches away from the large dressing around his biceps, but he appreciated her care nonetheless.
“There you are. You look like you’re responding well to the treatment, but it’s imperative you keep it up.”
Court nodded, then stood slowly. Just then his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was the Signal app, he could tell by the pattern of the vibrations.
“Sorry. It’s work.”
Dr. Kaya nodded and led him to the door.
Court answered the call, realized it was Zack, and then rushed out into the hallway. “What’s up?”
“Yo, Six, the tracker you put on the Shrike van is indicating movement. Heading due north, out of the city.”
Court looked at his watch. “It’s eleven p.m.”
“No shit, it’s eleven. Wrap it up with your girlfriend and let’s go take a peek at what these shitheads are up to.”
Court first saw this as potentially a perfect opportunity to snatch Dittenhofer, but soon he had another idea. He felt certain this must have something to do with Mirza, that perhaps she was following him, and he wondered if he and Zack could take the Iranian terrorist and his cell down tonight, and derail al-Habsi’s entire plan.
For this he would need Chris Travers and his team, but Court wasn’t ready to spin them up just yet. He wanted to make certain he had a target for them to hit.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an Adderall, then said, “You load the Audi up with all the gear. I’ll meet you at the safe house in thirty. Be downstairs and ready to go.”
“Hell, yeah, brother.”
One minute later Court climbed onto his motorcycle, fired up the engine, and took off in the direction of Spandau.
When the darkened street was quiet again, a woman stepped out of an alcove a block to the south and pulled out her phone. “Inna? I saw him. Yes, tell Maksim.” Anya Bolichova added, “He’s gone now, but I put a tracker on his motorcycle. I’ll follow him at a safe distance, put trackers on any other vehicles he has, and report his location as soon as I know it.”
Moises and Yanis parked the surveillance van in a campground in the forest meters away from Röblinsee, a small lake to the north of Berlin. They were just outside the town of Fürstenberg, in the Mecklenburg Lake District, and both the lake and the forest were shrouded in a thick, almost impenetrable mist at this time of night.
The men had tracked Haz Mirza’s phone to an abandoned animal feed warehouse less than three hundred meters away, nestled between the Havel River, Röblinsee, and the train tracks. There it stopped moving, and it had remained stationary for the past forty minutes.
There was no light at all evident over the water from the warehouse itself, but the phone was definitely located there, so they determined they would park here to wait for Miriam, and to listen for any audio picked up by the phone.
In all their surveillance on the Quds men, they’d never been anywhere near here, and they didn’t have a clue what could be going on across the water in an abandoned complex.
Annika Dittenhofer arrived in her car just fifteen minutes later and immediately asked for an update from her team.
Yanis joked, “You don’t act like you’re on vacation.”
She smiled at this, then said, “Pay attention. What’s going on inside?”
Moises replied, “The phone is in there. Hasn’t moved.”
“When did you get here?”
“About fifteen minutes ago. We aren’t picking up any audio from it at all. If there is anyone in there, then they aren’t talking, and they aren’t moving around.”
Annika thought it over for a moment. “This might be some sort of a staging area. He dropped his burner off with some other things and left.” She looked out the smoked window here in the rear of the van. “There is nothing going on on this street. Let’s give it another thirty minutes.”
“Until what?” Moises asked.
“Until I go over there and take a peek.”
Upon hearing this, Yanis looked out the front windshield. “It’s black over there. Run-down. Abandoned.”
Moises echoed this. “Scary.”
Dittenhofer belted out a scoffing laugh. “If there is no noise and no movement, then that means there’s no Quds Force. We will wait awhile to be sure, but I’m not afraid to walk over there.” She waved at the audio gear in front of them. “Just pay attention to your headphones.”
Court and Zack had turned the Audi’s running lights off as soon as they got within a half mile of the now-stationary tracking device, and they rolled to a quiet stop in a small residential community just a couple blocks north of the lake. Parking in an elementary school parking lot, the two men were struck by the heavy mist hanging over the lot and the adjacent two-laned street.
They opened their car doors quietly; Zack had already disabled the interior light. They were stealthy here not because they were worried that Annika Dittenhofer or even Haz Mirza might hear or see them but rather because, even in the heavy mist, there were a lot of homes in sight, and they didn’t want some busybody coming out and confronting them or, worse, calling the local police.
At the rear of the vehicle, Zack said, “Do we gear up?”
The two men had Heckler & Koch UMP submachine guns and extra magazines in the trunk, and chest rigs with body armor inserts, in addition to the pistols they wore on their bodies.
Court thought it over. They had a few blocks to walk still, and they would have to pass numerous homes between here and their objective. He didn’t see any way they could kit up with big ceramic plates in their chest rigs, magazines strapped to their bodies, and subguns on their shoulders. Instead he said, “UMPs and extra mags in our backpacks. No armor. We’re doing a recon. If we have something to hit, we’ll call Travers.”
Zack said, “Roger that,” and both men got to work collapsing down the guns and loading the mags into the packs.
This done, they put in their earpieces and Court called Zack to open a phone line between them, and then they set out in the darkness towards their objective.
A half hour to the minute after Annika arrived, she pulled a flashlight out of a utility pack in the van and turned back to the two young men. “I’m going to take a look.”
“You sure about that? This guy is Quds Force, or used to be, anyway.”
Miriam said, “I’m not going to get too close. I’ll put my earpiece in, and you guys can call me if you hear anything.”
“Be careful,” Yanis said, and then Annika climbed out of the van. Looking up the dimly lit street through the nighttime mist, she felt the scene to be like something out of a Cold War spy novel.
Soon she began walking slowly through the vapor.