The Target

by Saul Herzog

“The Russian in 404,” Aggy said to Lance.

  “Is he still in there?” Lance said.

  She hung up the phone and typed on her computer keyboard.

  “He hasn’t checked out.”

  Lance walked past her to the corridor and found the stairs.

  “You can’t just go up there,” she called out behind him.

  He went to the fourth floor and found room 404, stood in front of it, and in a single motion, brought the heel of his foot down against the base of the door. It flew open with a crash.

  Before he even had the lights on, he knew the room was empty. There was nothing in it, not a person, not a person’s belongings, nothing.

  He did a sweep of the room to see if anything had been left behind. He checked the sheets, the wardrobe, the side tables, the safe. Nothing.

  He went back down to the lobby and said, “What was the guest’s name?”

  The woman looked uncomfortable. “I called the police,” she said.

  “What was his name?” Lance said.

  “I don’t have a name,” she said.

  “Do you have an address?”

  She typed into her computer and shook her head. “It was a client account. I’d have to call corporate to find out the name on the booking.”

  “What did he look like?”

  The woman shook her head. “I wasn’t here.”

  Lance turned to leave, then stopped. He looked back at her one last time.

  The fear on her face was palpable.

  “One more thing,” Lance said. “Why wasn’t his room made up for three days?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The bed. It was ruffled.”

  She glanced at her computer. “He indicated no turndown service.”

  Lance was about to leave, then turned back again.

  “Please leave,” she begged.

  “Call Edelweiss again,” Lance said.

  “His name’s Edelberg.”

  “Call him.”

  Reluctantly, she picked up the phone and made the call.

  “Ask him to describe the guest.”

  She asked Edelberg and then said, “He was overweight. Forty or fifty. Dark hair.”

  “What about his accent?”

  “What about it?”

  “Where was he from?”

  “New York, maybe.”

  “He didn’t sound like a foreigner?”

  She asked Edelberg and shook her head.

  “How did he arrive?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Edelweiss rented him a car, then how did he get here?”

  She asked Edelberg and shook her head again. “Please,” she said. “He doesn’t remember.”

  “A cab?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Do you have security cameras?”

  “Please, sir.”

  “Show me to the security cameras,” Lance said.

  “The police are coming.”

  “I don’t care.”

  38

  Tatyana’s plane landed at the US Air Force facility near Berlin Tempelhof.

  She’d tried to sleep on the plane but couldn’t.

  Something was bothering her.

  Why hadn’t Agata been recorded at the embassy? Roth had a team go over every camera, every angle, and they hadn’t found a single trace of her.

  It was impossible to enter the US embassy in Berlin without having your face recorded. Not only did all visitors have to show ID, but the entire building was heavily monitored by multiple high-resolution cameras. The system had, in fact, been installed by a defense contractor who usually installed targetting systems in fighter jets.

  The cameras were capable of tracking the heat signatures of aircraft traveling faster than the speed of sound. Running the Pentagon’s facial tracking and recognition algorithms was child’s play in comparison.

  And yet, the message had been delivered completely anonymously.

  It was found on the night watchman’s desk at the end of his shift, and despite all those cameras and the most advanced monitoring equipment in the world, no one had an answer for how it got there.

  One thing was clear, however. Whoever had put that message on the desk had taken serious steps to remain concealed.

  It made sense that Agata would be cautious. If Kremlin assassins were on her tail, there was no end to the steps she might take to remain hidden.

  Roth was also looking into a local police report of another shooting close to her apartment in Riga the night before she fled the city.

  He’d contacted her commanding officer to find out what she was working on immediately before she fled the city but hadn’t heard back.

  But it was beginning to look like she’d been tailed from Riga to Warsaw and that an attempt had been made on her life in both cities. If that were the case, then it only made sense that she would be taking every precaution possible to remain concealed in Berlin.

  Still, it nagged at Tatyana. Some kind of visual confirmation from embassy security that the message had been delivered in person by Agata would have done a lot to put her mind at ease.

  Roth had also received local media accounts of a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate and within a stone’s throw of the embassy. Roth was looking into that too, but the German’s were notoriously protective of their police records. The sharing protocol between the CIA and the German intelligence service still required manual approval by a political appointee at the Chancellor’s office, as well as a federal judge in Berlin. It wasn’t unusual for a request to take twenty-four, or even forty-eight hours, to come back.

  Laurel had been right to be cautious.

  There was definitely more going on than met the eye.

  The only thing that made Tatyana willing to walk into it, was the certainty that Agata was in danger. Of that, there could be no doubt.

  And loyalty had to stand for something.

  She was the one who’d approached Agata.

  She’d told her she’d have her back.

  She said it paid to have friends.

  And now, Agata was being hunted across Europe and had asked for Tatyana by name.

  Things in Tatyana’s life hadn’t exactly gone to plan. She was being hunted by the GRU herself as a traitor to the Motherland. Before that, she’d used sex to entrap hundreds of men all over the world so that the GRU could blackmail them.

  In some ways, she’d betrayed everything and everyone she’d ever gotten close to.

  But this, she was not willing to turn her back on.

  This was a promise she intended to keep.

  She caught a cab from the airport to a hotel near the embassy. She had time for a quick shower and change of clothes before heading to the bar mentioned in Agata’s message.

  She wore a long Burberry trench coat, and in the inside pocket, she had the Browning handgun that Lance had given her when they first met.

  “It will save your life one day,” he’d said.

  That felt like a lifetime ago, but she still clung to those words. They hadn’t let her down so far.

  The bar was a hip, lively place in the trendy district of Kreuzberg, abuzz with hipsters and young professionals. Tatyana peered at it from the back of the cab, trying to get some bearings. She couldn’t see Agata inside, which made sense.

  Agata would be watching from somewhere else.

  Waiting.

  Tatyana looked around at the surrounding buildings and tried to determine where she might be watching from.

  “You going to sit here all night?” the cab driver said impatiently.

  Tatyana paid him and stepped out into the January air. It was cold in Berlin, colder even than it had been in DC, and she hadn’t had time to pack properly.

  She hurried across the sidewalk, went inside, and found a seat at the bar.

  It was a bar like a million others. Modern light fixtures over a bar of white quartz. Lots of glass and mirrors and
burnished brass accents. Behind the bar, strings of LED lights were intertwined with bottles of expensive liquor.

  Tatyana looked around, making note of the exits, trying to gauge the weight and fighting ability of every man she could see. She’d chosen her seat for the sightlines it afforded and instantly saw why Agata had selected the place. The front of the bar was completely taken up by a large, floor to ceiling window, and from the highrise offices across the street, you could see clearly to every corner of the bar.

  That’s where Agata would be.

  One of those offices.

  Peering in with a pair of binoculars.

  Tatyana turned toward the window, showing her face clearly.

  Agata would be cautious. She’d wait to see if Tatyana had come alone.

  She was doing a good job, Tatyana thought. She hadn’t been trained for something like this. She was a police officer, but that didn’t include training in how to stay off the grid, how to disappear, how to live off the grid while the most dangerous men on the planet hunted her.

  Tatyana felt for her.

  She was out in the cold.

  She’d probably come across something she wasn’t supposed to. And now, some very powerful men were not going to rest until she was dead.

  39

  Lance was still in the motel office, scrolling through security camera footage when McCaffrey arrived.

  “Come on, Spector,” he said. “You know you can’t be back here.”

  Lance was staring intently at the screen. He’d just found what he was looking for, or thought he had. A middle-aged, overweight man with dark hair stepping out of an orange and green taxicab.

  “McCaffrey, I knew your daddy. He was a good man, but I swear to God if you don’t let me finish what I’m doing, I’m going to send you up to join him.”

  McCaffrey was taken aback.

  “That’s it, Lance,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He strode toward Lance, and Lance raised his hand, two fingers, as if in beatification. McCaffrey stopped.

  Lance zoomed in as far as he could, but the resolution wasn’t good enough to get more than an impression.

  “This,” he said to McCaffrey, indicating the image on the screen, “is the man who killed Sam.”

  McCaffrey leaned over the desk to take a look, then turned to Lance.

  “Really?”

  Lance nodded.

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “I do not,” Lance said.

  “The hotel doesn’t have a record?”

  “Not here. He stayed on a corporate account.”

  “They’re required to check the ID of all guests.”

  “And the car rental company is required to check the driver’s license. Doesn’t mean they did it.”

  “I’ll get Darlene to call the cab company,” McCaffrey said.

  Lance nodded. McCaffrey called in the request, and the two of them went out to his cruiser and sat in the car.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” Lance said, opening his window a crack.

  “There’s no smoking in these vehicles, Lance.”

  Lance nodded. He hadn’t smoked cigarettes in a long time. That was, until three days ago when he’d returned to them with a vengeance.

  He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  He must have nodded off because thirty minutes had passed when McCaffrey tapped his shoulder and told him Darlene had come back.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said the cab company had a record of dropping one person to this motel that day.”

  “Where’d they pick him up?”

  “Glacier Park Airport.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  “I’m not a taxi service, Lance.”

  “You want me to drive myself?”

  “What are you going to do there?”

  “Find out who flew in.”

  “That will be hundreds of passengers, Lance. Thousands maybe.”

  “It’ll be one man,” Lance said. “And he’s a dead man walking.”

  McCaffrey pulled out of the parking lot and said, “If I drive you to this place, you’re not going to do something stupid, are you?”

  “If he was there,” Lance said, “I’d kill him, I swear to God.”

  “But he won’t be there.”

  “No, he won’t,” Lance said.

  “So you won’t kill anyone.”

  Lance said nothing.

  They drove at the speed limit the forty miles to the airport and parked right outside the terminal. Inside, they went to the information desk, where a blonde with a Starbucks in her hand sat behind a set of three computer screens.

  “I need a list of every arrival this week,” Lance said.

  She looked from Lance to the cop and then back to Lance.

  “It’s public record,” Lance said, smiling stiffly. He was so out of it, so disheveled that it only made her look away uncomfortably.

  “Yes, sir, it is,” she said, looking at her computer screen. She typed something and printed out a sheet for him.

  It wasn’t a long list, and Lance scanned it.

  “What’s this?” he said, pointing to the charter flight from Teterboro, an Embraer Phenom 300. “Who was on that?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “That information is going to require more than a wink and a smile.”

  “Can you access passenger information?” McCaffrey said.

  She shook her head. “Not even if I wanted to.”

  “Can you tell me if that plane’s ever landed here before?” Lance said.

  “That, I can do,” she said and did some more typing. “There’s no record of that plane ever having landed here, or any other airport in Montana for that matter.”

  “Where was it’s flight before here?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That I don’t have.”

  “Do you know where it’s been since?”

  “No, but I’m sure the FAA could help you with that sort of request.”

  Lance looked back at the sheet. “What about the N-number. Can you look that up for me?”

  She pulled up a new database and typed in the search, then printed the result and handed it to them.

  The plane was registered to a numbered corporation registered in Delaware.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but in my experience, you’re going to need a team of lawyers to find out the real owner. A Delaware corp will be owned by a Cayman Islands corp, and that will be owned by a numbered account in Luxembourg, and that will be administered by a law firm in Iceland, and on and on.”

  Lance nodded.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lance said. “How about you put me on the next flight you have to Teterboro?”

  It turned out there was no flight to Teterboro, and Lance had to settle for a commercial flight from Kalispell to Newark Liberty.

  McCaffrey drove him to the airport, and on the flight, he managed to snatch a few hours of sleep. At Newark, he got in a cab and told the driver to take him to Teterboro.

  The cab joined the afternoon traffic northbound on the I-95, and Lance stared out the window blankly.

  It was a dull, gray afternoon, about equal chances of rain or snow, and the cab trudged through the slush for twenty minutes before pulling up outside the terminal at Teterboro.

  The driver talked the entire way, but Lance didn’t hear a word.

  He had only one thought on his mind now.

  Revenge.

  He would find the man who’d done this thing, and he would kill him.

  But he wouldn’t stop there.

  Someone in Moscow had ordered this.

  Of that, there could be no doubt.

  What their motivation could have possibly been, what message they’d been trying to send, whether it had been intentional or some mistake, some rogue agent gone off the deep end, made no difference.

  Lance was going to make them pay.
>
  All of them.

  At Teterboro, he didn’t enter the terminal building. He walked straight onto the tarmac, where charter jets were fueling or taxiing, or sitting in rows like jets on the deck of a carrier.

  He walked along the planes and hangars until he found a Phenom 300. He checked it’s tail number and confirmed it was the plane he was looking for.

  Two men were fueling the aircraft, and Lance said, “Where’s the pilot?”

  “Right here,” a man said from the small office at the back of the hangar.

  Lance went over to him, grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket, and flung him into the office, kicking the door shut behind him.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the pilot protested.

  “Sit down,” Lance said.

  There were some plastic chairs in the office like the ones used in high schools, and the pilot sat down.

  “Did you fly that plane to Glacier Park Airport in Montana four days ago?”

  The pilot glanced around the room furtively. There was a desk, some coffee mugs with rings of old coffee caked onto them.

  “I don’t have time to dick around,” Lance said.

  “Listen,” the pilot said, “why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

  Lance looked out the office window. The two mechanics were approaching.

  Anyone who worked with the Russians, in any capacity, knew to keep their mouth shut. It was the one rule that would get you killed if you broke it. This pilot was going to need some encouragement to talk, and Lance flicked the lock on the office door before putting his foot on the pilot’s chest and pushing the chair backward. He fell back on the concrete floor, hit the back of his head against it.

  “Hey,” the mechanics yelled, breaking into a run.

  Lance bent down on the man’s chest and grabbed him by the hair.

  “Who chartered that flight?” he said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the pilot said, and Lance pulled his head forward, then slammed it back against the ground.

  “Please,” the man yelled.

  “I do that a few more times,” Lance said, “and you’re going to have some serious head injury. I doubt they’ll let you in the air any time soon.”

  He lifted the man’s head again, and the pilot blurted, “Please, it was the consulate in the city. The Russian consulate. They chartered it.”