Noble Sanction

by William Miller

  He checked his cellphone and found it was dead. The dunk in the river had killed it. He wanted to contact Langley and find out what they knew about the United Front. That would have to wait. He pocketed the useless device and said, “Alright, I’ll help, but we’re going to do this my way.”

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” Eliška said without slowing down.

  “You don’t have a choice,” Noble told her. “It’s my way or the highway.”

  She stopped and turned to him. “What does this mean? ‘My way or highway’?”

  “It’s something my mother says,” Noble explained. “It means we can do this my way or not at all.”

  She sized him up and nodded. “Okay, Jakob. What is your plan?”

  “We’re going to need hardware,” Noble said and clarified, “Guns.”

  “You are in luck,” Eliška told him. “Czechia makes the world’s best guns.”

  “Agree to disagree,” Noble said.

  She led the way through the crowded streets of Old Town to a crumbling building tucked away on a side street off Malá Štepánská. The brick façade looked like it was ready to come down any second. Noble imagined the front of the building calving like the side of a glacier into the street. A simple placard had the name in Czech and a picture of barbell underneath.

  Noble said, “Is this a gym?”

  “Praha CrossFit.” Eliška pulled open the door and motioned him inside.

  He stepped into a spartan gymnasium of bare concrete floors covered in dusty mats. The equipment consisted mostly of Olympic bars and kettlebells. A few pull-up stations were bolted to the walls. The place smelled like armpit and chalk. A powerfully built woman in spandex clean-and-jerked a 150-pound barbell to her chest. Her face turned beet red. Veins stood out on her neck. She pressed the weight overhead, then let the bar slam to the ground—it impacted with a heavy clang. The woman transitioned directly to a pull-up bar and cranked out a dozen reps while Noble watched.

  “Impressive, yes?” Eliška asked.

  Noble nodded.

  There was a young man thumbing through his phone behind the front desk. He looked up when they entered and asked if they were members, first in Czech, then English.

  “I’m need to speak with the manager,” Eliška told him.

  He motioned to a door marked, “private.”

  Eliška motioned for Noble to follow. They crossed the gym, passed the locker rooms, to the manager’s office. Eliška opened the door without knocking. The room was small and lit by green-tinged fluorescents. A very fit man in a red tracksuit sat with his feet stacked on the desk and a magazine open on his lap. A glass of red wine stood on the desk, along with the remains of his dinner. He sat up when the door opened, recognized Eliška and spoke in Czech.

  Her response was short. It didn’t sound pleasant to Noble, but then Czech wasn’t a pleasant language. It had none of the beauty of the romance languages and all the gruffness of the eastern Slavic tongue.

  The manager stood up and left without a word. Noble waited until he was gone and closed the door, shutting out the grunts and clanging barbells. “How do you happen to know the owner of a CrossFit gym?”

  “He’s just the manager,” Eliška explained. “I’m the owner. He works for me.”

  “Does he know what you do for a living?”

  “He knows better than to ask questions.”

  “You use this place to launder your earnings,” Noble said. It was more statement than question.

  “I suppose I’ll have to sell now,” she said.

  There was an electrical panel on one wall. Eliška pulled it open to reveal a hollowed-out space filled with a large olive-green duffle bag. She extricated it with some effort, blew off the dust, and pulled the zipper. Inside was half a dozen pistols, two submachine guns, loaded magazines, flashlights, knives, cleaning supplies, bandages, several passports, and stacks of Euros.

  Noble hooked the bag with his toe and dragged it away from her. “I’ll take over from here,” he told her. “You watch the door.”

  Her lips pressed together in a tight line.

  Noble said, “You didn’t think I was actually going to trust you with a gun?”

  Her nostrils flared. “Grab what we need and make it quick.”

  He checked the action on a CZ pistol, gathered three spare magazines, along with a few stacks of Euros and a SpyderCo knife, while Eliška kept watch at the door. She had enough hardware in the duffle to wage a small war. Noble wondered how many more stashes she had hidden around the globe. A Qual-A-Tec sound suppressor on a .22 pistol caught his eye.

  “You know how this works?” Eliška asked. She circled around behind the desk and dropped into the office chair. “The suppressor locks up the action. It’s single-shot. You have to cycle the pistol every round.”

  “I’ve used one before,” Noble assured her.

  “The .22 is a small round,” she said. “Hardly any knockdown power.”

  “It’s not the size of the boat,” Noble told her as he removed the can. He put the suppressor in one pocket and the small .22 caliber in the other. “It’s the motion of the ocean.”

  Her face pinched in confusion. “This is another of your mother’s sayings?”

  Noble chuckled. “No, it’s an innuendo.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Never mind.” He stuffed a collection of bandages, gauze, and medical tape into his pockets.

  Eliška said, “Do you think we’ll need it?”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “This expression, I know,” Eliška said.

  Noble stuffed the bag back into the hiding place. He shut the fake electrical panel and gave it a tug to be sure it was closed, then crooked a finger at Eliška. She stood like a schoolgirl summoned by the headmaster. Noble took her by the elbow and steered her out of the CrossFit gym.

  Stars winked in the night sky and a cold wind cut right through Noble’s wet clothes. Eliška pointed him toward the nearest subway entrance. They took the stairs to the underground and Eliška walked right past the electronic ticket reader without slowing down. There were no turnstiles, just a machine with a slot for validating stubs.

  Noble said, “Don’t we need tickets?”

  She shook her head.

  The underground in Prague works on the honor system. Passengers are supposed to validate tickets as they enter the station, but meeting transit authorities is rare and the penalty for riding without a validated stub is a few hundred Czech crowns. More often than not, the fine can be paid directly to the corrupt transit cops. Noble followed Eliška onto the platform as a shuttle hissed to a stop and they joined the crowd of people pushing onto the train. Eliška said, “So what is your plan?”

  “First, we get to your father’s apartment and scope out the situation,” Noble told her. “Then we’ll come up with a plan.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Piotr Cermákova sat in his threadbare recliner. His ruined hands lay in his lap and his eyelids drooped. The sound from the television washed over him, lulling him into a fitful doze. He rarely slept in his bed anymore. Shuffling to the bedroom seemed like too much work. Instead, Piotr simply cranked back his recliner and let the television put him to sleep. It was more like lucid dreaming. He laid in his chair, eyes closed and lips slightly parted, reliving the dark days of Socialist rule.

  Piotr Cermákova had been a Colonel working at uncovering dissidents in the Czechoslovakian military during the Cold War. A decorated soldier and a respected member of the Communist Party, he had served Moscow faithfully the first few years. In the beginning, he had been an energetic supporter of Socialism. The philosophy had appealed to the idealistic young officer. No more bourgeois aristocracy wielding their land and titles over penniless workers. Socialism was going be the great equalizer. Young Piotr had envisioned a classless society where no one went hungry. The reality, however, had turned out very different. Instead of an age of plenty, Socialism had ushered in unparalleled pove
rty and starvation.

  At first, Colonel Cermákova had performed his duties with religious zeal. He arrested hundreds of traitors, sentencing them to death and sending their families to forced labor camps. But as the arrests and executions tallied up, Piotr’s belief in the ideology eventually collapsed under the weight of all those dead bodies. When he could no longer deny the horror of what was happening under Socialist rule, Piotr had started feeding information to dissident groups—the very groups he was tasked to uncover. By the end, Piotr Cermákova was actively working for the resistance as a double agent. It was only a matter of time before the Soviets discovered his betrayal.

  He remembered the night they came for him. October 28, 1989. He remembered the knock at the door and the cold hand of dread that had gripped him. A pair of Soviet KGB officers had dragged Piotr from his home while little Eliška wept. Piotr spent the next month in a cold concrete cell. They tortured him for information. He held out as long as he could and was saved from death by the Velvet Revolution in November of that year.

  These memories were playing through Piotr’s head when he heard a stealthy tread on the creaking floorboards outside his front door. His eyes snapped open. His heart thundered beneath his sunken chest. He could feel the blood pounding in his ears. For a moment, he was convinced it was still 1989 and the KGB had come for him. He shook off the sleep. He wasn’t sure if the sound was a dream that had spilled over into wakefulness, or if there was someone outside his door. The old soldier’s instincts took over and his crippled hand went to his hip, but there was no gun there, not anymore.

  Lucas Randall winced at the creak of rotting wood beneath his feet. Shoddy Soviet architecture made stealth all but impossible. He didn’t let it worry him too much. Their target was an ageing pensioner, probably had bad eyes and poor hearing. Lucas put his shoulder to the jamb and checked the action on his Sig P229.

  Gregor, Muller, and Stanz stacked up on the other side of the door, pistols held tight to their sides. Lucas counted down on his fingers and then gave the signal. Stanz stepped up and kicked the door just below the knob. The flimsy wood crashed open, taking a large part of the frame with it. One of the hinges tore away from the wall with a shriek of wood and twisting metal.

  Gregor went first. He stepped inside with his gun up, looking for targets, and saw the old man coming at him with an oxygen tank. He couldn’t fire or risk rupturing the tank and killing them all. Instead he threw an arm up to block and tried to backtrack. He ran into Muller coming through the door behind him and they bottlenecked in the doorframe.

  The old man swung the tank with a grunt of effort. The metal tube crashed down on Gregor’s forearm. Pain lanced up his arm and into his brain. It felt like the bones in his arm had turned into bits of broken glass. He choked out a scream but managed to hang on to his weapon. The old man tried for another swing, but his spindly arms gave out. His strength was gone. He lost his grip and the oxygen tank clattered to the floor.

  Gregor recovered and cracked the old man with the butt of his pistol. He caught Piotr in the mouth. There was a sickening crunch. The pensioner stumbled back, spitting blood and teeth. Stanz hit the old man twice more. The first blow rocked Piotr’s head back on his scrawny neck. The second put him on the floor in a senseless heap.

  The Germans would have killed the old-timer if Lucas hadn’t intervened. “Don’t kill him,” he ordered. “We need him.”

  He produced a yellow plastic zip tie, knelt down, and secured Piotr’s hands. He gave the zip a sharp yank. The plastic bit into paper-thin flesh.

  Gregor cradled his injured arm in one hand. “I think he broke it.”

  “Soldier through,” Lucas told him. “When this is over, we’ll get you to a hospital.”

  Gregor nodded but stared daggers at the prostrate figure.

  Lucas gave the old man a few light taps on the face to bring him around. Piotr’s eyelids fluttered open. Lucas said, “Where’s your daughter?”

  When he didn’t answer, Lucas tried German.

  “I speak English,” Piotr said. He turned his head to the side and spat a mouthful of blood on the dusty floor. “KGB thugs tried and failed to break me. I’m certainly not going to talk to the likes of you.”

  Lucas smiled. Even maimed and crimpled, the tough old goat had proven dangerous. “That’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to talk. She’ll be along soon enough, and we’ll be waiting for her.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Noble watched the front of the Soviet-era pillbox. He and Eliška were sheltered in a narrow alleyway across the street. The Škoda was still parked right where Noble had left it. That seemed like ages ago. The sky was a black dome littered with pinpricks of light. A cold wind worked under Noble’s wet clothes and into his bones.

  Cermákova, teeth chattering, said, “I’m freezing.”

  “We need to get out of these wet clothes,” Noble said by way of agreement. It’s possible to die in temperatures as low as forty degrees Fahrenheit. It had to be ten degrees colder than that now. Noble’s breath steamed up in silver clouds that broke apart on the wind. He wasn’t terribly worried about freezing, but the cold would slow him down, cause him to shake. If things got loud, he didn’t want to waste bullets because his hands were shaking too badly to hit a target. He cupped his paws together in front of his face and blew into his palms. It wasn’t much but it brought a little life back into his fingers.

  He spent ten minutes looking for any sign of movement on the fourth floor. The lights were out and the windows were dark. There was nothing more to be gained by waiting. It was likely a trap, but one they had to walk into if they were going to save Eliška’s father. Noble was just about to suggest they make their move when he heard a noise behind him. The small hairs on his arms stood up. His heart leapt. His scrotum tried to crawl up inside his pelvis. He wheeled around and clawed the .22 from his pocket.

  A stray cat streaked from an overturned trash can and went speeding off down the alley.

  Eliška let out a shaking breath.

  They looked at each other and shared a quiet laugh. The situation had them both on edge. Noble shook his head and threaded the suppressor onto the barrel while he waited for his heart to settle back into his chest. “Let’s go see if anybody’s home.”

  He held the gun down against his thigh and crossed the street. Eliška was close behind him. They mounted the steps and Noble murmured, “Get the door.”

  She reached for the knob.

  Noble entered with the gun up. The small entryway was silent and deserted. A row of mailboxes were built into one wall. A flight of sagging steps led to the upper floors. Noble went first. Eliška followed. Every riser groaned under their combined weight. They made it to the fourth floor and Eliška motioned silently to her father’s door.

  Noble already knew which apartment, but didn’t bother to tell her. He had been here once before. Shortly after landing in Prague, he had parked the Škoda and climbed the stairs to the old man’s apartement. Piotr Cermákova had answered the door. Noble pretended to have the wrong address, figuring the old-timer would forget all about it. He did it to get a look at Piotr Cermákova and, more importantly, a peek inside the apartment. What he had seen told him Piotr and Eliška were estranged and that the elder Cermákova probably wasn’t hiding his daughter.

  Now the door was open. Someone had kicked it in and left it swinging on twisted hinges. The living room—what Noble could see from the hall—was empty. He nudged the door with his toe and slipped inside. The place smelled like an old man who sits in front of the television day after day without bathing. A timid yellow light from the street filtered through moth-eaten curtains and a tattered armchair was parked in front of an aging television set. Noble made a quick sweep of the apartment and came back to the living room. Cermákova was staring down at a mobile phone on the recliner cushion.

  She reached for it and Noble caught her hand.

  “Could be a trap.” He dropped down on his belly and searched und
erneath the recliner for wires or explosives and then gently probed the seat. When he was relatively certain there were no bombs, he carefully lifted the phone. He had barely picked up the device when it started to ring. A video call was coming through. The ringtone was Dirty Deeds by AC/DC. Noble wondered if the song was meant for Cermákova or him. In the end, he decided it didn’t really matter. He thumbed the green button and Lucas Randall’s face filled the screen.

  Lucas said, “Hello, Jake.”

  Noble’s brows pinched. “Lucas?”

  “Been a long time,” Lucas said.

  Eliška gave Noble a withering look. “Friend of yours?”

  He held up a hand for her to wait. “What the hell is going on, Lucas?”

  “You’re screwing up a mission I spent the last year and a half planning,” Lucas said. “That’s what’s going on.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Noble felt his reality grinding to a halt, like the planet would stop spinning and break apart. Lucas was supposed to be one of the good guys, a Navy SEAL—a Tier One operator. They had fought together, shed blood together. Lucas had been there on Noble’s last mission for the CIA when a Qatar politician walked into their op and got himself killed. Noble shook his head, unwilling or unable to believe his own eyes. He said, “Tell me you aren’t part of this? The dead Secret Service agent? The counterfeits?”

  “You know about the counterfeits, huh?”

  Noble only nodded.

  “I wish I could take the credit,” Lucas said. “Somebody much smarter than me is driving the bus.”