“I don’t like what’s happening here,” Martina said, her voice hostile and suspicious. “I’m leaving.”
In a single smooth movement, Ya’ara pulled the pistol out from behind her back, cocked it, and fired a round into Martina’s left foot. Martina screamed and collapsed. Ya’ara aimed the pistol at her head. “The next one will kill you,” she said. “Lift yourself up, with the help of the table, and take a seat.” Martina whimpered, a look of shock and hatred on her face. She grabbed the table with both hands and managed with a supreme effort to pull herself up, before standing there, shaking, on her good right leg. Her left foot was shattered and bleeding, with its Timberland boot horribly torn, revealing a mixture of flesh and bone. “Good, now sit, slowly, slowly.”
Ya’ara walked around the table, stood behind Martina, pulled the chair closer to her, and pressed the tip of the Glock’s barrel against the back of Martina’s neck. Using a large roll of duct tape, she proceeded to wind a wide strip around Martina’s torso and the back of the chair. Martina couldn’t move. Ya’ara poured out a large measure of vodka for her and said, “Drink it, in one shot. It’ll ease your pain.”
“Who are you? Who are you?”
“We don’t have much time. I’m an officer from the Security Division of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service. You and your friends have fallen victim to a plot hatched by subversive and reactionary elements in our intelligence services. The operations you’ve planned are liable to set all of Europe on fire. No responsible state can allow itself to play a part in such a thing. We are aware of your insane plans to murder three of the most senior bankers in Germany in their homes. We can’t allow that to happen.”
“But Alexander spoke to us about the need to shake the foundations of Europe again, a Europe that’s become smug and cruel. That’s alienating the oppressed who are trying to flee there as refugees. That’s turning its Muslim populations into rejected and impoverished people and then wonders why they rise up against it.” Martina’s face was pale and drawn, her pain and rage ablaze in her eyes. “Our previous campaign ended in defeat, the authorities imprisoned my grandmother and murdered the defenseless Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in their prison cells. But in Europe today there are young and powerful forces that aren’t willing to play a part in this bourgeois puppet show. More and more people know that they’ve seen the truth and have paid the price for doing so. And now you’re telling me that you, too, are cooperating with them. Have they bought you, too?”
“Quiet!” Ya’ara hushed her, seemingly offended by Martina’s words. She dragged back the chair to which Martina was bound. The motion caused Martina to feel the pain in her leg shoot to her head like a bolt of lightning. She moaned in agony. Ya’ara walked around to face her, leaning against the table.
“Listen to me good and proper, Martina,” she said. “I’ll blow your other foot to pieces, too, and then your left knee, and afterward the right, and you’ll pray to the God you don’t believe in and beg to die. I want you to tell me all you know about Matthias Geller, how you met him, and what Alexander instructed you to do with him.” She picked up the Glock and aimed it at her legs. A look of terror flashed through Martina’s eyes. She spat at Ya’ara, to the accompaniment of a poisonous hissing sound. Ya’ara put a bullet in her right foot. Martina yelled and screamed in pain and rage and helplessness. Ya’ara stared at her, her face blank.
“Alexander instructed me to get close to Matthias.” Tears were streaming down her cheeks and long strands of snot dribbled from her nose. “He pointed him out to me at one of the bars near the port. He told me he was a real son of a bitch who worked for the German intelligence service. After we met, Matthias told me he was a customs official. He fell in love with me like a young boy. Did he really think someone thirty years his junior was going to fall in love with him like that? Alexander told me not to tell the others. It was my private assignment. I was supposed to go to him after the operation in Frankfurt. To hide out at his place. I had a whole story to tell him—why I had disappeared like that and why I was back. Like any infatuated teenager, he would have believed me. I was then supposed to kill him and leave enough clues and evidence behind to tie him to the assassination of the bankers. It would have made for an interesting twist in the plot, don’t you think? Just imagine the suspicion and paranoia it would have stirred in the BND.” She sighed, and briefly pursed her lips in pain. “You’re a filthy fucking bitch,” she said with the last of her strength, the pain from her shattered feet pounding and pounding in her chest and head. “A crazy fucking bitch.”
Ya’ara fired two rounds into her head. She stepped out of the cold warehouse and into the freezing black night, adjusting the collar of her coat. She had one thing left to do.
• • •
When she reached the center of the city in the Golf, Ya’ara called the police. She spoke in English, with a pronounced Russian accent, from the same cellphone she had used to call Martina.
“Listen up,” she said to the dispatcher. “If you don’t deal with this call quickly and in earnest, your career with the police will be over and done with. Write down every word I say, and then report immediately afterward to the duty officer and make sure, too, that the Bremen police chief is wakened and informed. He, personally, will fire you if you spare his sleep. Understand?”
“I hear you, ma’am.” The dispatcher sounded attentive and alert. Ya’ara knew that their conversation was being recorded, like all calls that come in to the police dispatcher.
“A gang of murderous anarchists, four men and two women, all Germans, are residing currently on a farm east of Bremen.” She provided the exact coordinates of the farm. “They are planning the simultaneous assassination of the CEOs of Commerzbank and DZ Bank and the deputy CEO of Deutsche Bank. Schlein, Haas, and Mannesman. The killings are due to take place between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. You’ll find weapons and ammunition hidden in gasoline drums in the farmhouse barn. Kalashnikovs and pistols. One of the computers at the farmhouse contains folders with detailed intelligence about the three objects, their vehicles, and their residences. I know all of this because backing the gang of anarchists is a department of Russian military intelligence that has gone insane. I serve in the GRU and I am not willing to lend a hand to madness that will leave us all wallowing in blood.”
She spoke slowly, trying to create an impression of determination and despair and helplessness.
“Did you write down everything I said?” she asked. “Do you realize just how important and urgent a matter this is?”
“I understand, ma’am. Can you give me your name and a number on which to contact you?”
Ya’ara hung up. She had dumped the pistol she used to kill Martina on the drive from the port area to the city center. She had stopped by the river and thrown it with all her strength into the fast-flowing black current. She knew she hadn’t left any fingerprints in the warehouse. The gloves had made sure of that. Now, she got out of the Golf, leaving the keys inside. She took off her gloves and removed the SIM card from the phone she had used, breaking it into little pieces and scattering them on the ground as she continued on foot. As for the phone itself, she slammed it down onto the sidewalk and crushed it with her foot. She then picked up the pieces and threw them into a drain at the side of the road. She and Aslan had worked together on the text for the call to the police. But the entire episode with Martina had taken place without the knowledge of anyone else at all. It was her initiative, her mission alone. She was painfully aware that Martina had joined the ranks of the people whose lives she had taken—her private Order of the Dead. All were justified, she thought, and immediately pushed the image of Martina’s corpse from her thoughts. Ya’ara knew that the wound this killing would leave in her soul was hers alone. She felt as if she were cloaked in something black and heavy. But she was familiar with that cloak, and knew that at some point, ultimately, she would find solace. She would wrap Martina in it, too.
33
As had happened many times before, the forces went into action in the small hours of the morning. A sleeping enemy is a defenseless enemy. At that time of the day, even the toughest of the tough allow themselves to drop their guard and sail away fast asleep into moments of childhood and innocence. The night is a friend of those who can see despite the darkness, of those with adrenaline rushing through their blood, of those primed for battle from head to toe.
Ya’ara’s call did the trick. The decisions that followed in its wake were swift and decisive. No one suspected a hoax. The details were precise and corresponded with snippets of intelligence already in the hands of the German police and German security service—snippets that until that very moment had yet to come together to form a solid picture. With the consent of the Bremen police chief, responsibility for the matter was transferred to the BKA, the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, and three hours before a pale dawn began painting orange streaks across the morning sky, members of the Police Tactical Unit, the elite counterterrorism squad, deployed around the farm, setting up surveillance positions and security perimeters. There was no movement on the farm itself. A four-by-four Land Rover was parked in the yard, and a weak glow was coming from inside the farmhouse, perhaps from a light above the staircase. The four helicopters flew in very low, almost noiselessly, and the commandos they were carrying alighted quickly and in precise order, before crouching and advancing slowly on the house. With perfect timing, they burst in through the front door and two second-floor windows, climbing up one after the other on aluminum ladders. The dull sounds of stun grenades could be heard from within the house, followed by a short burst of gunfire. A second team surrounded the barn, weapons at the ready. Two sappers dressed in cumbersome protective gear were sent inside, accompanied by a German shepherd trained to sniff out explosives.
The commandos removed five stunned individuals from the living quarters—four men and one young woman. All of them barefoot. The faces of two, apparently injured in the raid, were bleeding slightly. Their hair was disheveled and unruly. All five were aggressively shoved into a van that sped into the farmyard and then roared out again. Within twenty minutes they’d be at the detention facility. A brief medical examination and then the start of a very prolonged interrogation.
34
The following day, the last day before Christmas Eve, three powerful explosive devices were detonated in three pubs in three cities in England—London, Manchester, and Birmingham. The attacks left twenty-three people dead and more than a hundred wounded. No one took responsibility for the blasts.
In Rome, the governor of the central bank was wounded in an assassination attempt just outside his home. He was struck in the stomach by two bullets fired from a pistol. According to eyewitnesses, a woman wearing a motorcycle helmet shot at him four or five times. After the governor slumped bleeding to the sidewalk, they reported, the woman ran to a waiting motorcycle on the other side of the street, its motor running, hopped on behind the rider, wrapped her arms around his waist, and the two raced off down the street and disappeared.
35
HAMBURG, DECEMBER 30, 2014
Matthias appeared thinner, Ya’ara thought, when they sat down together at the small restaurant in Hamburg. Thin and pallid and elderly, as if his years had finally caught up with him. It didn’t matter to her in the least.
“They found Martina’s body in an abandoned warehouse near the port in Bremen,” he said to her, his painful gaze closely scrutinizing her.
“I’m sorry,” she replied.
“She was tortured before they killed her. She was tied up, and someone shot her in both feet. She bled out for a few minutes at least before she was shot in the head. The person who did it used a Glock. We know from the ballistics results. Two more of the same pistols were found at the farm.”
“Her Russian handler may have killed her. He may have thought she was endangering the others, and the operation. It’s best not to think about it.”
“Maybe.” Her words clearly hadn’t put his mind at rest. He wasn’t simply a grieving lover, he was also a proficient intelligence official. Ya’ara wondered if he wanted to know the real answers.
She touched Matthias’s hand, caressing it absentmindedly, tracing its contours with her fingertips. She had always thought his hands were beautiful and masculine, and now she wanted him to hold hers. But his hands remained limp. She was wearing a necklace of large pearls that shone like pale moonlight. Her fair hair was tied up. Her beauty took his breath away. But at the same time, and for the first time, he also noticed a sharp stab of iciness that pained him.
“They arrested the remaining five members of the group,” Matthias continued. “And they found the computers with the field dossiers and the weapons, Kalashnikov assault rifles and Glock pistols. Based on what the investigators have learned thus far, the group was supposed to operate in pairs, simultaneously. The police received an anonymous call from a woman, a GRU officer, but you know that, of course. The conversation was very detailed and focused. Very convincing at least. Attested to by the fact that they acted that same night.”
“Did Tomas, your friend at the security service, ask you anything?”
“Nothing. A good friend knows when not to ask, too.”
“Matthias,” Ya’ara softly said, “let’s go away somewhere, for a week or two, just the two of us, you and me. We’ll rent some cabin in the forest or, if you want somewhere warmer, we’ll go to southern Italy. Sicily, perhaps?”
The look in his eyes that her blue-gray orbs encountered was primarily one of weariness. “I can’t right now, Ya’ara,” he said. “More than once I’ve thought to myself that I’d like nothing more than to be with you, just to be with you, no matter where, just to be there with you. But now I need to be here. With myself. Maybe they’ll get to me during the course of their investigation into the entire affair, and I don’t want them to think I’ve fled. And I also don’t want them to draw a connection between us, certainly not in this context. And there’s also Martina. Or who she was, in other words. We need some time, Ya’ara.”
He saw the shadow of pain flash through her eyes, but he knew things had to be the way he said.
“You took some crazy risks for me. I know. You went to the ends of the earth for me. I appreciate it a lot more than I’m able to express. You know I’m not a man of words. I know you saved me. And you certainly saved the lives of three of the most senior bankers in Germany.”
“We weren’t able to save those who were killed in England. And it was nothing but luck that left the governor of Italy’s central bank wounded and not dead.”
“Are you positive that all the incidents are related?”
“They must be. Everything happened, or was supposed to happen, simultaneously. On the same day. Retro attacks in three locations. The IRA, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Someone has a very creative and demonic imagination. Someone who’s saying: Look what we can do. Look at the murder and mayhem we can spark at any given moment. Someone’s saying: Look at me. You can’t ignore me. I have the potential to cause enormous damage. And we all know about the ties to Russian intelligence.”
“It’s hard for me to believe that the Russians, as a state, are tied to the affair. That’s simply madness on their part, if it’s them. And they’re very calculated and rational, after all.”
“We identified Kovanyov.”
“Maybe he’s operating on his own account. Maybe he’s a rogue agent who’s out of control and out of his mind.”
“Maybe. Anything’s possible. But I don’t think so. The Russians have taken several extreme measures over the past year. They truly are calculated, you’re right, but they believe they can raise the risk threshold significantly. How would you describe what’s happening in Ukraine if not as a calculated but daring move on the very edge?”
They sipped their wine in silence. When it was poured into the glasses, the red beverage looked
almost black.
“Tell me, Matthias,” Ya’ara asked in a soft but clear voice, “could the Russians have exposed you? Could they have identified you as an intelligence official? Perhaps they wanted to use Martina to implicate you, and the BND in turn, in this whole affair?”
“I have no idea. But having a source at any governmental entity in Hamburg would be enough for them to learn who I am. I’m well known to certain customs officials and the Interior Ministry and the police and the authorities at the port and in the free-trade zone and the Chamber of Commerce . . . The list is endless. When you’re someone of my rank, you have no choice but to reveal your true position to your peers and affiliated organizations. So yes, I may very well have been made by Russian intelligence.”
“I’m worried that you’re in danger. Maybe you should ask for a transfer to a different role, somewhere else, to make a fresh start?”
“I can’t run away. And if they take the ships and the port and the seamen away from me, I’ll no longer be myself.”
“There’s always a moment when one has to move on, isn’t there?”
“Right now, Ya’ara, I feel like I’m at my peak. I’m in the right place; the only way on from here is down. I can’t sentence myself to a slow death because of an imaginary threat.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. It doesn’t suit you.”
“I feel very clear-headed actually. And besides, I can think of worse ways to die than by a bullet from a Russian-made Makarov pistol. Wasn’t it Hemingway who said he wanted to die at the hands of a jealous husband armed with a shotgun?”
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