by Saul Herzog
“And who was the passenger?” Lance said.
“I don’t know,” the pilot said. “Please, I don’t know. I don’t ask. I never know.”
“Where’s the manifest?”
“On the desk,” the pilot said.
The two mechanics were pounding their fists on the window of the door. Lance looked up at them, and the pilot swung a fist at Lance’s face.
Lance blocked him as the door of the office burst open, and the two mechanics jumped onto Lance’s back.
Lance knocked them back.
The first threw a punch, and Lance deflected it, then brought his fist up in an uppercut to the man’s kneck. He fell to the ground, and the second was about to attack. Lance caught his eye.
He stopped.
“Get back,” Lance said, motioning to the door.
The man stepped back, and Lance rummaged through the files on the pilot’s desk until he found the manifest. Under the entry for passenger, someone had written in “Alex.” Beneath it, in a section marked for notes, was written, “Lousy lay and worse tipper.”
40
Christoph Prochnow sat on a park bench and chain-smoked Gauloises cigarettes. It was a cold night, but he was dressed for it, in a black cashmere turtleneck and camel duffel coat.
Inside his coat was a loaded Heckler & Koch VP9 pistol. The VP stood for Volkspistole, like Volkswagen, a pistol for the people. It was originally designed at the request of the Bavarian State Police and was now one of the most commonly found guns in the country. It was chambered for the 9x19 Parabellum, and Prochnow’s particular gun was a sound-suppressed variant.
Not that he was planning on being subtle.
He’d been waiting for Tatyana to arrive, and when she did, he felt an innate revulsion for everything she stood for.
How could a real Russian, an actual daughter of the Motherland, betray her country the way this woman had?
A faithless, disloyal bitch.
That was what she was in his eyes.
What could the Americans ever do for her that would make up for that?
This would be an easy kill.
He had no qualms about it.
As far as he was concerned, the bitch deserved to die.
He’d been warned about her training. This woman had been a high-level operator, one of the most highly-prized and effective honey-traps in Igor Aralov’s Widow Program.
She knew how to kill, and she knew how to spot a threat.
But she wouldn’t see him coming. How could she?
She had her back to the door.
She was expecting a friend.
The bar was packed full of young men. Prochnow himself was dressed exactly like the patrons. He’d fit right in.
He was surprised she’d allowed herself to be so vulnerable. Maybe she wasn’t as good as everyone gave her credit for.
Her true talents, he suspected, were probably more apparent when she was on her back.
And all he had to do was walk up behind her, pull out the gun, and put a bullet in the back of her skull.
There was no training in the world that allowed someone to dodge a bullet at point-blank range.
He watched her sitting at the bar for a few minutes. She ordered a drink, a glass of wine, but didn’t take a sip.
She didn’t look at her watch. She didn’t act impatiently. She didn’t look nervous or in a hurry.
She looked perfectly relaxed, fitting right in with the evening crowd. Prochnow had no doubt if he waited much longer, someone would start hitting on her.
He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out under his boot.
He crossed the street and pulled open the door of the bar.
A group of women stood by the entrance, and he had to excuse himself as he walked through them.
“Hey, stranger,” one of them said.
There was a man in an expensive suit, very drunk, stumbling toward the washroom, and Prochnow let him pass.
A cocktail waitress carrying a tray of empty glasses rushed by in the other direction.
He weaved through the crowd, his hand inside his coat, gripping his gun.
When he was a foot from Tatyana, he pulled the gun, pressed it against the back of her skull, and bang.
41
Tatyana was a young operative, fresh out of the academy, the first time she was sent to Berlin.
Her target was someone on their own side, a Pole who’d been sent to West Germany decades earlier to work as a spy for the Soviets. Despite being a Pole, he was one of the most unimpeachably loyal operatives the GRU ever had. For decades he’d been feeding information back to his handlers, information that proved so valuable that legends had grown up around him.
Most of the Soviet coups in Berlin during the Cold War were attributed directly to his intel.
Everyone in the GRU had heard of him.
Even the West Germans and the Americans knew he had to exist.
And yet, no one could figure out who he was.
To all, regardless of what side they were on, he was known only as the Clockmaker of Berlin.
Apart from his handlers, only two men knew his real name, the president and Jacob Kirov. And there were even rumors that the president’s precipitous rise to power had been facilitated by the Clockmaker.
Tatyana’s mission, something typical of the GRU at the time, was to test his loyalty. To someone so utterly corruptible as Vladimir Molotov, anyone that honest was immediately regarded as suspect.
And Tatyana’s job was to be the test.
She would attempt to bribe him in some small, insignificant way, and if he took the bait, then his integrity would be immediately regarded as compromised.
In Tatyana’s opinion, the entire operation was misguided. These men, who’d literally raped the entire nation, were going to test the integrity of a highly valuable operative with a cheap trinket and then judge decades of unquestionably valuable intel on that basis. But no one asked her opinion.
She was warned in advance that he’d been in the game for a very long time. It was all he knew, and he wouldn’t slip up easily. Her mission was small, but enormous subtlety and skill were required to carry it off.
He had a clock repair shop on the Kurfürstendamm, and she was to visit his shop and have him appraise a watch for her.
The watch was expensive, a forty-millimeter Rolex day-date in yellow gold. The Clockmaker would appreciate its precision self-winding chronometer with calendar and day display. He would appreciate the fine craftsmanship.
But it was not an extraordinary watch. It could be purchased at any Rolex boutique, or at any high-end airport duty-free, for about thirty-five thousand dollars.
In Russia, they were used almost as calling cards among oligarchs doing business with the party elite. In order to get anything done, it was advisable to show up with a forty-millimeter day-date, packed up nicely in its distinctive collector’s box.
It was known that the president owned so many that he had a jeweler in Moscow whose sole responsibility was inscribing almost microscopic serial numbers on the inside bracelet just so he could keep track of them.
They were like an informal, untrackable currency. A Russian Bitcoin, before Bitcoin was a thing. Officials even referred to the prices of certain transactions in terms of them. Bribing a federal judge cost two forties. Getting planning permission for a major project in Moscow could cost hundreds of them.
Tatyana was to show up at the Clockmaker’s shop, dressed in furs and bright lipstick, and try to unload one such watch, complete with one of the president’s serial numbers.
It would be obvious there was only one way a girl like her could get her hands on a watch like that.
It would look like she’d stolen it.
The Clockmaker had been in Berlin for sixty years. According to the president, even a dog’s loyalty didn’t last that long.
Everyone knew the rules. If you stole so much as a kopek from the president, it would cost you your life. He took it personally. I
t was a matter of honor.
So Tatyana would go in with the watch. An innocent girl, relatively speaking, as far as the Clockmaker was aware. A nice girl. A Russian girl who’d done no harm to him.
And she would present this dilemma.
Maybe the Clockmaker was getting soft in his old age.
Maybe his judgment was beginning to wane.
And if it was, all the more reason to have him removed.
Would he report the watch up the chain, essentially issuing the girl a death warrant, or would he keep mum?
There couldn’t be a simpler test of loyalty in the president’s eyes.
But when Tatyana came into the shop and saw him there, looking at her with eyes more kindly than any she’d seen in a long time, she couldn’t go through with it.
At enormous, almost reckless risk to herself and her own safety, she warned him. She tipped him off.
She did it out of nothing more than simple human affection. She didn’t know the old man. She knew nothing of the story of his life, the fact he was born the same day the Germans invaded Poland, or that his mother had died as a whore to Nazi officers in the General Government, or that his father had raped his mother before that, and that he was the result of that crime.
All she knew was that he had kind eyes.
And she couldn’t be the cause of his death.
As she handed over the watch, she whispered, “They sent me.”
It was as simple as that.
Later she’d regretted it. She thought, what if she’d been wrong about the old man? What if the test had been of her loyalty? She was the one with something to prove, after all. What if he told his handlers what she’d said?
But he never did.
Either one of them could have caused the other’s death. And neither did. It was the beginning of a profound relationship of trust.
Years later, Tatyana had been lying asleep in a hotel room in Berlin. She’d just finished a series of extremely high-level, high-risk operations and was waiting to be recalled to Moscow.
She was on the home stretch of what had been one of the most dangerous weeks of her life.
And the phone rang.
She wasn’t expecting any calls but picked up. It was the hotel concierge with a message.
“Madam, your clockmaker just called.”
“My clockmaker?”
“Yes, ma’am. Your alarm clock is ready.”
Tatyana hung up the phone. She hadn’t spoken to the Clockmaker in years and had rarely thought of him. But she got out of the room immediately.
It saved her life.
42
In the instant Prochnow pulled the trigger, Tatyana reached up over her shoulder and grabbed his wrist. The bullet flew into the enormous mirror behind the bar, shattering a wall of glass that rose twenty-feet to the ceiling. The fragments cascaded down the wall like a waterfall, and Prochnow realized, as his reflection shattered, that she’d chosen her position better than he’d given her credit for.
She spun around to face him, twisting his wrist painfully in the process, then kneed him in the groin.
He doubled over in pain, and she slammed his face against the bar, once, twice. There was a rocks glass on the bar, and she grabbed it and smashed it against the back of his head.
He reached up and grabbed her by the hair, pulling her head backward. She was fast, but he had strength on his side. With her head bent backward, he thrust out his fist and punched her in the rib cage.
The blow would have floored her, but she managed to deflect it with a manicured hand.
He punched her again, this time in the belly, and her lithe frame buckled under the pressure of the blow.
He yanked her back by the hair again and was about to fling her to the ground when her stilettoed foot flew around her and landed square in his groin.
He lost his grip on her for a split second, and that was all she needed. She knew exactly where she was going.
She moved like a cat, leaping across the bar to a fire exit at the far end of the room.
He ran after her, but it seemed suddenly like every drunken idiot in the place was in his way. He had to heave and push his way to the door, which led to a narrow alley lined with dumpsters and fire escapes.
She was already out of sight.
He drew his gun and stepped carefully into the alley. To his left was a high, brick wall.
He went right.
Thick clouds of steam came from vents in the sides of the buildings, making it hard to see. The ground was filthy, the melting snow almost black. Graffiti covered every inch of the walls.
There was some movement to his side, and he fired two bullets. It had been a cat, and the shots clanged off the steel bin harmlessly, drawing sparks.
About a hundred yards ahead, he heard the crash of a fire escape being released from its latches and hitting the ground.
He ran toward it and looked up. Three floors above, Tatyana was just reaching the roof.
He fired off two more shots and this time hit his mark.
He heard a yelp of pain as the bullet tore into her flesh.
He had her.
43
Tatyana leaped up the steps of the fire escape, desperately trying to make it to the roof before the assassin saw her, and just as she reached it, felt the searing pain of a bullet tearing through her right calf muscle.
She knew then that the game was up.
She’d made a mistake.
There was no way she’d a trained GRU assassin now.
She should have listened to her instincts.
She’d known, sitting in the bar, that something bad was going to happen. Agata wouldn’t have kept her waiting like that.
It was more than a premonition,
She’d been about to leave when she caught the reflection of the man behind her in the mirror and grabbed his wrist.
She stumbled across the roof, a flat open space punctuated by ducts and vents, a tried to keep moving. Sometimes a gunshot wasn’t as bad as it felt, and you could run a surprising distance before it stopped you. But this was not one of those times. Before she’d even crossed the roof, she could tell that her leg wasn’t going to hold up. She was losing too much blood, and every step she took was agony. She could feel the muscle tearing.
She reached the edge of the building and, without hesitating a second or taking the time to judge the distance and determine whether she could make it, leaped across the alley.
She was blatantly risking death, the concrete three stories below was dizzyingly real, but she knew she had no alternative. When hesitation meant certain death, there was no reason not to make the leap.
If she hadn’t been hurt, she might have made the jump, but as it was, she fell short, crashing into the side of the building and only barely managing to grab the ledge.
The assassin was sprinting toward her. She didn’t dare look back. She didn’t have to. She knew he was coming, rushing like a freight train, and if she didn’t find cover before he got to her, it would be her death.
As she pulled herself up onto the roof, she sensed, like a premonition, that she’d reached the end of the line.
A few feet in from the edge of the roof was a low cinderblock wall about two feet high. She took cover behind it just in time to dodge a bullet. It crashed into the brick, sending chips of rubble into the air.
She pulled the Browning from her coat and returned fire blindly as a dark shadow flew right above her. It was the assassin, leaping from the other building, right over her. She raised her gun and pulled the trigger, and in the same moment, the gun was kicked from her hand.
It was a fluke, a moment of pure luck for the assassin. His trailing foot struck Tatyana’s hand, and the Browning was knocked from her grip. She watched helplessly as it slid twenty feet across the roof.
She had two options, and in an instant, unarmed and injured, she decided.
The assassin landed with a thud and rolled, and Tatyana flung herself back over the cinderblock wa
ll and dropped over the edge of the building.
She hung by her fingernails to the side of the building, and from that desperate position, knew she was rapidly exhausting her options.
She looked around frantically and saw a window ledge about twelve feet below. If she could get herself onto it and through the window, it would buy her time. The assassin wouldn’t follow. That much was certain.
He’d have to find his way into the building another way, and that would take time.
She looked down and could only barely see the lighter colored stone of the window ledge.
It was a bad plan.
It wasn’t going to work.
“Give it up, bitch,” the assassin said from above.
His feet were inches from the tips of her fingers, which could only hold onto the ledge for a few seconds longer in any case.
He spoke Russian, but with a heavy German accent.
That was all she had time to learn of him because without giving herself another moment to change her mind, she let go of the ledge.
She fell like a weight of lead.
The brick wall of the building flew by her like a rocket. The stone ledge was gone in an instant. She never stood a chance of grabbing it. All that was left was the concrete ground below, flying up at her at terminal velocity.
And then there was nothing at all.
44
Laurel stood by the window of the suite, staring out at Lafayette Square and the broader vista of Central DC.
She felt numb.
Sick to her stomach.
Two hours earlier, soon after Tatyana left her hotel room for the bar in Kreuzberg, Laurel had lost all contact with her.
Something had happened. It was the only explanation for why she hadn’t checked in.
She rested her forehead against the glass pane of the window and sighed. From where she was, she could just about make out the form of the famous Rochambeau statue, its bronze glinting in the moonlight.
There was an exact replica of it in Paris, and both bore words written by George Washington extolling “the cause of liberty.”