by Seeley James
“Killing is so twentieth century, Petr.” Yuri straightened up. “The twenty-first century belongs to those who can manipulate people without touching them. And that is what we do best. Who is smarter, the man who pulls the trigger or the man who convinces the killer it’s the right thing to do? This is the first step. We will create confusion and animosity. We will make them loathe each other. Then, when they are at each other’s throats, we will unleash a remote-controlled weapon that cannot be traced back to us.”
The men turned to each other asking what he was talking about. He waited until their curiosity peaked.
“Brothers, friends, I swear to you—I did not kill Strangelove.”
CHAPTER 57
Big, juicy snowflakes, the kind that melts on your skin, fluttered down to Pia’s shoulders as she got out of the cab and checked her surroundings. Helsinki’s Christmas Market filled Senate Square with laughing families, festive music, and bundled shoppers. Brightly lit, Helsingin Tuomiokirkko—Helsinki Cathedral—huddled over the scene. She watched the merry-go-round filled with children and winced as Stefan’s words came back to her: Love can conquer everything, Pia.
Love didn’t conquer Viktor Popov before he killed Bridgette Jallet. Love didn’t save the people on Flight 1028. Love didn’t stop Watson from turning her over to Strangelove. Love didn’t save Dad. Her fists tightened until her fingernails dug into her skin. She took a deep breath.
In her peripheral vision, two men stepped off Tram 2.
She stared at the Restaurant Savotta for a second before heading in. With Tania two steps behind her, they joined two Sabel agents from the Helsinki office at a table by the back wall where they could see the window. Two more agents, a woman and a man, came from the kitchen and took a table near the door.
“The owner is onboard.” Agent Kaspar nodded at the waitress to give them a minute. “So is the guard at City Hall. It would help if we understood the objectives better.”
“I need to get from point A—” Pia tapped her finger on the table “—to point B without satellites or people tracking me.”
Kaspar started to ask another question, but Tania cut him off. “That’s all you need to know.”
He put his hands up in surrender. “OK, since you can’t talk, I’ll talk. Thank you, Ms. Sabel, for letting me open Sabel K-9 Security. We have already selected several good dogs to start the program. Fifty people from around the world have applied to become handlers—and you haven’t even made the official announcement yet.”
“Your love of animals is infectious, Kaspar. I’m counting on you to make it a success.”
“I have to. My children want to keep the dogs we have in training. I’ll need to bring in hundreds before they’ll let go of any.”
The waitress approached and took their orders.
Pia asked the local agents about business in the Helsinki office while they ate. Halfway through, the couple seated next to them gave her a nod. Then they got up and made a show of putting on their coats in front of the window. Another window was blocked by the café staff.
“You sure you want us to stay behind?” Kaspar asked.
“Make it look like we’re still here.” She and Tania exited through the kitchen into a small, snow-covered courtyard.
This was it. Their last stop before boarding. They had to shake the tail to keep their destination secret. Time was running out, and their shadows were still following them.
They crossed through an alley to the back door of Helsinki City Hall, where a guard let them in. They padded through the marble halls and through a side door to Katariinankatu, Catherine Street.
Parked cars lined one side of the narrow cobblestone lane. Halfway down the block, a shadowy figure in a long coat approached them. On the other end, a motor scooter rounded the corner and accelerated.
“There’s more of them than we thought,” Pia said.
“Good thing we left our agents inside.” Tania tensed and faced the lone man.
Pia stepped to the middle of the lane and reached for her Glock. She slipped it from the holster and held it to her side. The scooter revved up. A family with a stroller rounded the corner behind him. Taking a shot could produce casualties. The man on the scooter raised an arm holding something. Not a gun. As he got closer, she realized it was a Taser. She raised her pistol and aimed at him hoping to cause a flinch. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he adjusted his aim.
Pia jumped to her left, into his path, as his Taser darts flew toward her. They missed by an inch but hit Tania’s back. Pia twisted off her left foot. The bike sped by. She raised her arm, catching the rider under his helmet, knocking to the ground. She pumped a dart into him.
He writhed in pain and rolled away. The dart was stuck in his body armor. He reached for a pistol as his bike hit a parked car. At the top of the street, the Finnish mother screamed, and the father yelled something. Pia jumped on his outstretched arm and fired a dart in his lower leg. He exhaled and went limp.
Pia turned quickly to Tania to find the Taser’s electrodes stuck in her friend’s jacket. Tania held the man in the long coat pinned against the wall with her pistol.
“Who are you?” Tania asked.
Sirens wailed two blocks away. The Finnish family yelled at them again.
“No time.” Pia raised her gun and darted the man. She spun around and rifled the biker’s jacket for ID, grabbed it, and looked around for the best escape route.
The City Hall guard opened the side door and waved them in.
He pointed up a narrow staircase along the open meeting room. Shouting voices reached them from the back of City Hall. They ran up and found a closet at the end of a narrow balcony. Inside was a rack the size of a refrigerator filled with blinking electronic gear. They squeezed in behind it and listened.
From downstairs and outside, the sounds of police issuing orders floated up to them. A systematic search of the surrounding area was underway.
Bianca texted that she’s sent Pia an email report on the Pozdeeva files. Pia pulled it up in the dark.
“We cracked Pozdeeva’s code. The Latin documents make up a catalog of the companies involved in the rest of the files. There are ten thousand records of transactions between shell companies. This might be a paper trail proving Roche’s involvement in money laundering. However, Emily says tracking down all the companies and tying them together could take years. We’ve copied the FBI on them. Among the decoded Latin documents, we found a personal letter from Pozdeeva to you. He calls it a confession. I’ve attached it here.”
Pia took a moment to collect her thoughts and catch her breath before she opened the attachment:
In profound humility, I weep for all my sins. While my role in events was small, I am complicit in the murder of innocents. This has weighed on my soul since I met you. You probably will not remember, but my daughter was a fan of yours. She insisted on getting your autograph in a Leipzig café. You made a profound impression on me. You were gracious to strangers. You were accomplished despite your tragic childhood. And you had no idea who I was or what I had done. That night, I resolved to atone for my sins knowing it would take years.
Outside their small, warm closet, many voices echoed. Pia listened. They appeared to be conducting a search of the building. She went back to the email:
To accomplish this, I collected all the kompromat that Strangelove and Popov held against your adopted father, Alan Sabel. I destroyed all copies, electronic and paper. He is now free to seek justice on behalf of the families murdered and destroyed by these men. They have nothing to hold against him. The evidence he needs to convict them in the World Court is hidden in Popov’s dacha in Jurmala, Latvia. In his library, one book stands out among the others. In it are all the documents Alan needs to convict these animals in the World Court.
No doubt you wonder why I do this. It is to unburden my heart. Hear my confession.
Pia’s heart collapsed like a supernova. If only she’d been smart enough to decipher the code earlier, her fat
her might have lived. All the trips Dad took to unearth outdated kompromat on Chuck Roche were unnecessary. Everything she had done for the last several months had been futile.
Outside their cramped space, voices approached. Boots ran up the stairs. Tania positioned herself behind the racks of computer equipment and peered between the servers. Pia squeezed in behind her. The door to their closet opened. Pia couldn’t see past Tania, but she could sense someone peering into their dark space.
Tania held her Glock at the ready. They both held their breath.
Pia imagined her whole mission blown up by this lone incident. Just being called in for questioning by the local authorities would give her adversaries enough information to know what she was planning. The biker’s identification burned a hole in her pocket. She longed to discover who came this close to her. But she couldn’t move. The door remained open.
Their friendly guard spoke to the officer in Finnish, his tone explaining the closet’s limited space.
Pia bent her knees and lowered herself to look through a gap. The officer was staring directly at her without seeing her in the dark.
The door closed. The voices trailed off into the distance.
They started breathing again.
Pia returned to Pozdeeva’s confession:
In the early 1990s, Boris Yeltsin threw open the doors to a part of the KGB archives. He intended to discredit the Soviet regime and solidify his grip on power. It worked. But, a few years later, KGB officers closed those doors and wanted to assess how much of their operation had been compromised. Under the pretense of opening more archives to the CIA, I was dispatched to Washington as a personal liaison to then-CIA Director, Veronica Lodge Hunter.
The closet door opened again. The guard told them the police were gone and he’d sent for her agents. It was time to leave before anyone discovered them.
They wasted no time. Kaspar and the other agents waited at a door on the far side of the main hall. They held umbrellas to confuse satellite observation. The group exited the building together, each person immediately taking a different direction.
Pia and Tania strolled to the docks just a block away. They stood at the end of the pier and waited. Pia returned to reading:
Director Hunter never trusted the KGB or the FSB, much less my cover story, so she kept me at arm’s length. She knew my real mission. I was a spy handler, developing and discovering new information for the Russian Federation. My tasks were difficult, but I executed them well. My successes brought me to the attention of Viktor Popov. He sent me on many clandestine missions. He only called me on the phone once. He told me to have a face-to-face meeting with Chuck Roche, the oil refining billionaire. He said that once I delivered the information, Roche would know what to do.
A Kilo-class submarine—rented for training exercises from a cash-strapped Baltic navy—rose silently from the ocean depths into the dark night. A crew member extended a gangplank. They walked onboard and climbed down a ladder to the cramped interior. Inside, a crew showed them to the galley. They sat on benches to wait out the long cruise.
Pia and Tania pulled the identity papers they’d taken from their pursuers in Helsinki. They’d snapped pictures and sent them to Bianca moments before the submarine dove. The sub was faster below the surface than above. The entire cruise would take place beneath the waves.
She went back to Pozdeeva’s confession:
When I arranged the meeting with Chuck Roche, he insisted Hunter must join us. I was uneasy about including Hunter, it would expose my clandestine aims, but I could not risk contacting Popov again for instructions. Popov trusted Roche, so I assumed it was fine. It took a few days to align everyone’s calendar. We met at a park south of Washington along the Potomac. I wasted no time when I arrived and got straight to the point. After I told them, neither Roche nor Hunter asked any questions. A week later, I read the news about your parents. I knew they had arranged the murders. The message I delivered was this: Lloyd Aston developed a metacapacitor technology that would destroy the oil business.
Pia didn’t read the rest. Veronica Hunter. The woman had pretended to be a friend and mentor. All the while, complicit in the murders of her parents. No wonder Hunter was so quick to join Roche’s conspiracy. Hunter had provided the killers, Leroy Johnson and his accomplice. Roche must’ve supplied the blood money. Pia’s heart raced, her anger rose. How could she get revenge on a sitting president?
Her mind turned the revelations over. She recalled David Watson’s claim when he applied for the job, that he could tell President Hunter had not told her the whole story about her parents’ murders by “who was left alive.” The implications were murky, layered, and deep.
Had anyone ever told her the truth? Alan Sabel? Veronica Hunter? Chuck Roche?
Her father’s metacapacitor was an unproven technology that promised to store electricity a thousand times more efficiently than a battery in a fraction of the space. It could’ve saved the world from pollution. By killing her father and destroying his work, Popov, Hunter, and Roche had doomed the future of the planet.
She seethed with rising rage. The President and the President-Elect should die along with Popov, the man who gave the orders. Pia considered the downside: killing a president—past, present, or future—was bad for the nation. It would be a betrayal of democracy. She had to let the process work on them.
But Popov was wrecking American democracy. She had no qualms about killing him. After all, she’d made a promise to Olesya.
Then Stefan’s words came to her. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King changed the world without hurting people.
The faces of everyone who had died from Cyprus to France to Washington, and the untold numbers who might yet die, also came to her. Lives sacrificed at the whim of narcissistic sociopaths far away. She chewed the inside of her cheek until a crewman came for them.
The ship surfaced. They went topside and climbed aboard the electric-powered Zodiacs. Pia sat in the prow. Knives of sea salt stabbed at her cheeks as they sped toward a dark shore.
CHAPTER 58
Sylvia and her team ignored me by speaking to each other in French. Not just on the jet from Monaco, but on the drive from Vilnius, Lithuania to Riga, Latvia. Her cameraman was all over her, which she made sure I noticed. He wore tight Euro-clothes and shaved everywhere, including his eyebrows. Her sound girl, the last goth in black, chatted with the director, who had five-day stubble and a man bun. Supposedly they were a famous documentary crew from Paris or Milan or someplace.
The four of them sat across the aisle from me in facing seats. I had four chairs to myself as the train rolled off into the pre-dawn darkness.
Across the aisle, Mercury stood over Sylvia’s shoulder and pointed at her. See what I’m talking about, bro? This is how the woman treats you? That’s disrespectful, that’s what that is. I’m telling you, toss her off the train right now.
I looked up. And tell Ms. Sabel—what?
He stepped into the aisle, working out kinks in his neck. Yeah. I feel ya. Sure. You can toss her off the train on your way back. That’s better. Just get her out of your life—soon as.
I put my feet up and tried catching up on things, like Pozdeeva’s confession. Ms. Sabel sent it to me just before she dove for the bottom of the Baltic. It blew me away. Everyone involved in her parents’ murders were powerful people. And so far, they’ve gotten away with it.
The immediate question remained: who killed Kasey Earl? If it was one of Roche’s people, they would’ve destroyed the box of records. If it wasn’t Roche’s people, who was it? Was Kasey dumb enough to brag to someone else about the documents? Knowing him, he was trying to sell it to the highest bidder.
Mercury sat next to me. Yo, homie, you’ve seen Roche Security people. They’re Sabel-rejects like Kasey. Most of them knew Kasey. You think they’d go after one of their own? C’mon, bro, keep thinking.
I said, Maybe Roche did it himself.
Mercury put his feet up, his too-shor
t toga barely covering him. Dude, do you ever wonder what kind of ammo the killers used?
I took out my phone and texted the NYPD cop about the ballistics. He texted back “5.45mm” and something about me owing him for waking him up in the middle of the night. My reply was, “Sleep is for the weak. Here’s another tip for your troubles: the 5.45 is almost exclusively used in the AK-105. That rifle was built for the FSB’s special forces. Which is run by a man named Viktor Popov.”
Mercury nodded his approval. That better be one damned big temple, you know what I’m saying, dawg?
I said, Why would Popov want dirt on Roche? Weren’t they pals?
Sylvia pushed my feet. I looked up and pulled them off the seat opposite me. She took the now-vacant chair.
“Are you going to tell us about the mission?” she asked.
I gave her my soldier stare. Not to be mean, but to make her understand we were not messing around here.
She flinched.
“How much help would you be if you accidentally—or under duress—told her adversaries the plan?” I waited for her to register the gravity of the situation.
She looked at her fingernails then glanced out the window, unable to figure out where she wanted to take the rest of the conversation.
“Put yourself in the bad guys’ shoes.” I leaned forward. “Picture yourself at a bank of monitors. You see two moms pushing strollers on the sidewalk and two dark figures sneaking through the bushes. Which group do you send your agents after?”
“We’re the moms pushing strollers?” She almost smiled. “And you hide in the stroller. We’re Plan B?”
“You and your team are naturals.” I rubbed my palms together. “Don’t worry. I’ve got the rest of this.”