The Target

by Saul Herzog

  Laurel wondered what the founding fathers would make of the work she did. And she wondered what hellish trap she’d just sent Tatyana into. If the GRU captured her alive, her fate didn’t bear thinking about.

  Roth had entrusted her with rebuilding the Special Operations Group from the ground up. The most prized intelligence group in the history of the nation. The most elite killing machine ever created.

  And within hours of her taking control, she’d potentially just sent her first ward to a brutal, grueling, hideous death.

  She shook her head. She’d been so determined to avoid the mistakes of the past.

  She’d wanted to create a perfect tool.

  A perfect weapon.

  Where the military was a sledge hammer.

  And the CIA was a dagger.

  She was going to give the president a scalpel, a weapon he could use with such precision that it could cut away threats to the nation without leaving even a trace of a scar.

  Complete disavowal.

  Zero blowback.

  Zero collateral damage.

  There would be no technical staff, no specialists, no analysts.

  Just her and Tatyana, pulling the strings, calling in hits, striking foes, and all from a hotel suite two blocks from the White House.

  No one would ever suspect it.

  And there would be no leaks.

  Of that, she could be certain.

  Tatyana was the one person guaranteed never to make contact with the Kremlin. They wanted her head. They were after her sister too. She could never go back to them.

  And then there was Lance.

  Laurel didn’t know if he’d ever come back. After hearing of what he’d done, she wasn’t sure she even wanted him back.

  How could you trust a man like that?

  A man who’d killed his own unborn child, and the woman carrying it.

  Orders be damned, that was just unnatural.

  And yet, there was a bond there, not just between her and Lance, but between all four of them, Roth and Tatyana too. As if their trials and traumas had forged them together.

  If something had happened to Tatyana, she wasn’t sure the dynamic between the remaining three worked.

  The hotel phone rang, and she picked it up. It was the concierge at the front desk.

  “I have a Mr. Roth for you, ma’am.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  She took the elevator down to the lobby. Roth was waiting in his car, and the usher barely managed to open the door for her as she hurried past.

  Another usher opened the door of the Cadillac, and she climbed in.

  “You’re in a hurry.”

  He looked so untroubled, sitting on his leather seat with a paper cup of coffee on the console next to him and a copy of the early edition of the Washington Post on his lap.

  “I’m sorry to have called.”

  “Call me any time, Laurel. Now, what’s this about?”

  “I’m afraid it’s going to put a damper on your spirits.”

  “We’re going to the Capitol, Harry,” Roth said to the driver, and then to Laurel, “meeting with the House Intelligence Committee.”

  “Sir,” she said, and then her voice trailed away.

  He put his hand on her knee and said, “Something’s happened in Berlin.”

  She nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I figured from the way you’re acting.”

  “I lost contact two hours ago.”

  “Did you have eyes in the bar?”

  “Comms were a mess. I didn’t dare tell the station chief in Berlin that Tatyana was in the city for fear of a leak.”

  “So you relied on satellite.”

  She nodded.

  “And the Keyhole feed was unreliable.”

  She nodded again. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re looking into it, believe me, but the long and short of it is that the Russians are fucking with us.”

  “With Keyhole?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Laurel let out a long sigh. “Keyhole’s, it’s…”.

  “I know.”

  “I thought it was immune from interference.”

  “We all did,” Roth said.

  Laurel gave him a look that said things were beginning to go south.

  “There are reports of gunfire in Kreuzberg,” she said.

  “Well, maybe she’ll check in with her friend, the Clockmaker.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Laurel,” Roth said, “this isn’t your fault. She chose to do this.”

  “I made the call to send her in without backup.”

  “To avoid a leak.”

  “And I lost visual.”

  “That wasn’t your fault either.”

  “She could be dead, Roth,” Laurel said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “She’ll check-in. You’ll see.”

  Laurel looked away. Wiped her face. She was embarrassed by her show of emotion.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ve got an entire field office in Berlin. I’ll send word to the station chief to start searching for her.”

  “We can’t do that. We promised her.”

  Tatyana had made them both swear that they would do nothing to endanger the Clockmaker. She said he’d maintained his cover in Berlin for sixty years, and she wasn’t going to be responsible for blowing it.

  “We have no choice.”

  “I can be on a plane in an hour.”

  “I already said that’s not going to happen, Laurel.”

  “That was before Tatyana fell off the grid.”

  “You’re the head of the Special Operations Group now. That means keeping under the radar. Staying out of harm’s way. Delegating this type of thing to other agents.”

  “I don’t have any other agents.”

  45

  Prochnow never saw anything like it in his life. And he’d seen a lot. The target let go of the building and tried to catch the ledge below.

  Impossible.

  She fell three floors to her death.

  Which, he supposed, was good for her. If she’d been taken alive, the interrogators in Moscow would have had a field day with her. They took a special interest in defectors.

  He stood at the edge of the building and looked down at the body.

  There was a poetic justice to it.

  She was traitor trash, and she’d fallen into an open dumpster.

  Already, the rats were moving in on her, sniffing at the blood, nibbling her fingertips. She’d look like a pile of chicken bones by the time they were finished with her.

  Prochnow spat over the edge and watched the phlegm land on the corpse.

  In the night air, he could already hear the police sirens.

  It was time to leave.

  He entered the building through the roof access and made his way to the ground floor. It was an apartment building with an ethnic restaurant on the ground floor selling takeout. Lebanese, it looked like.

  He exited through a side door into the alley, where he went to the dumpster to confirm the kill. As he approached, a putrid, sickly-sweet stench of rotting food hit him. He reached up to the top of the dumpster and pulled himself up to look over the side.

  He was ruining his expensive kid leather gloves.

  Rats scattered.

  The smell made him want to gag.

  He rested his weight on his chest and reached into the dumpster. The target lay face-down on the garbage, and he checked her wrist for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  He checked her neck to make sure, and was about to drop back to the ground when he felt the faint, scarcely detectible trace of a pulse.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  She wasn’t dead.

  That was a problem.

  Kirov wanted her interrogated. If Prochnow managed to bring her in alive, it would only enhance his standing with him.

  But bringing her in would be a lot of work.

  It w
ould have been a lot easier simply to put a bullet in her skull.

  Prochnow looked at the dumpster and sighed. He lit a cigarette.

  “Fuck it,” he said and pulled himself back up the side of the dumpster. He put his gun against the target’s head and was about to pull the trigger.

  But he didn’t.

  How would it look when Kirov found out she’d been executed at point-blank range?

  He dropped back to the ground and took out his phone, dialing the number of his handler.

  “Why are you calling this number?” a woman’s voice said in heavily accented German.

  “Why don’t you just speak Russian,” Prochnow said. “It will be easier on both of us.”

  Prochnow didn’t know who she was. He didn’t know her name. They’d never met in person. She sounded older, maybe in her fifties, but it was difficult to tell.

  She switched to Russian, saying, “What do you want?”

  “I need some help.”

  “Did you get the target?”

  “She fell from a rooftop not far from the bar.”

  “So she’s dead?”

  “No. She’s breathing. I can bring her in, but the streets are calling with cops.”

  “Gunshots were fired?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you exactly?”

  “I’m sending my location now,” he said, sending her the data.

  “I’m sending a team now. There’s a black site in Kreuzberg. We’ll bring her there.”

  Prochnow hung up.

  He waited by the dumpster for twenty minutes, smoking cigarettes, and when someone came down the alley, he expected it to be the GRU extraction team.

  But it wasn’t.

  It was a cook from the Lebanese restaurant with a black plastic bag filled with trash.

  “Give it to me,” Prochnow said to him, stepping forward and reaching out for the bag of garbage.

  The cook eyed him suspiciously but gave him the bag.

  “Now fuck off,” Prochnow said to him.

  The cook looked at him more closely. Prochnow knew if he was forced to show his gun, he would have to kill him too. Otherwise, he might call the police.

  “What are you doing out here?” the cook said.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Prochnow said.

  He was ready to pull the gun, he was ready to put a bullet in the cook’s forehead, it was nothing to him, but it would be simpler not to. He didn’t know how long the team would take, and if he killed him, someone might come looking, and then he’d have to kill him too, and so on, and it would just be simpler if the guy did what Prochnow told him to do in the first place, and just fucked off.

  The cook hesitated just a second, then turned away.

  46

  Laurel got back to the hotel suite and immediately began packing. She threw items into a bag, more or less at random, while simultaneously sitting on hold for the Lufthansa ticket office.

  She had a number of identities she could travel under, and not all of them were flagged for Roth’s attention.

  She couldn’t just sit there while Tatyana was possibly fighting for her life. She was the one who’d sent Tatyana to Berlin, she’d sent her straight into a trap, and she would be the one to bring her back.

  An agent answered the phone, and Tatyana said, “What’s your next flight to Berlin out of Dulles?”

  The agent did some typing and said, “There’s a flight leaving in three hours.”

  “Direct?”

  “Yes, it’s direct.”

  “I’ll take it,” Laurel said.

  Twenty minutes later, she was in the back of a cab on her way to the airport. She’d slipped out of a side entrance at the hotel and would be halfway across the Atlantic before Roth realized she was gone.

  She watched the dreary city through the window. It had rained, and the air was thick with mist.

  Her phone began vibrating, and she looked at it, expecting Roth.

  It was Lance.

  That was a surprise. She hadn’t expected to be hearing from him in a while.

  “Lance?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

  Lance said nothing for a moment, then said, “I’m in New York.”

  “Oh,” Laurel said, unsure what he was saying.

  “I was just…” he said, and she noticed he was slurring his words heavily.

  “Lance, are you drunk?”

  “Drunk?”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “She’s dead, Laurel.”

  Laurel immediately felt a knot in her stomach. It was the thought she’d been unwilling to admit to herself for the past three hours. Tatyana was gone.

  “Lance, how do you know that?”

  “They killed her, Laurel.”

  Laurel didn’t know what to say. Why was she going to Berlin if Tatyana was definitely dead? Her head spun.

  Lance was ordering a drink from a bartender. He was definitely very drunk. She wouldn’t have minded joining him.

  “Lance,” she said into the phone. “Lance. Can you hear me?”

  The line wasn’t dead, but Lance was no longer listening to her. She listened to the sounds of the bar for a minute before hanging up. She tried calling him back, but he didn’t pick up.

  The cab arrived at the airport, and she forced herself to put Lance’s call from her mind. He was drunk. He didn’t know what he was talking about. There was no way for him to know if Tatyana was dead or alive.

  Laurel knew it was possible the two were in touch, she knew there was more between them than what she’d been let in on, but even that wouldn’t explain how he’d know before she did if Tatyana had been killed.

  She passed through check-in and airport security in a haze of her own thoughts. She didn’t even care if she was flagged by Roth. She passed through the final security line, half expecting the agent to tell her to step aside.

  But he didn’t, and she was allowed to board the plane.

  She was flying business class, and as soon as she got to her seat, she had a martini and two sleeping pills.

  She didn’t wake up until the plane was an hour from landing. She ate a few bites of breakfast, and as soon as the plane landed at the enormous new terminal at Berlin Brandenburg, she called Lance.

  He didn’t pick up, and she tried him again from the back of her taxi.

  It was early, and traffic along the Karl-Marx-Allee was slow. Ahead, she could see the spire of the Fernsehturm, the two-hundred-meter-high television tower that had been built by the Communists in the sixties as a symbol of Soviet power. By design, there was no part of West Berlin from which its spire could not be seen.

  Laurel felt a wave of melancholy as the taxi inched along the wide avenue. The weather was as gray as it had been in DC, and as they entered the Friedrichshain district, they passed a long section of the Berlin Wall, perfectly preserved, covered in political graffiti from a different time.

  Berlin was a strange city. The Communists, Stalin, the Cold War, the Second World War, the Nazis, Hitler, the First World War, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second. All that history lived on, like strata in an excavation, each taking its shape from the one below and imparting its own to the one above.

  Everything connected.

  Everything reached back.

  If someone knew that history, even if they’d been kept in a cave for the past thirty years, they’d have known what was at stake for Laurel and the CIA.

  “Why do they oppose us?” she’d once asked Roth. “There’s nothing in this war for them. There’s nothing they could possibly hope to gain from this.”

  It was during a mission in Afghanistan in which she’d discovered that the GRU was paying locals to take potshots at American troops.

  “Why do they oppose us?” Roth had said. “You’d be as well to ask why wolves hunt. It’s what they are. They have no choice. They do only what nature made them to do.”

  She hadn’t understood, and he said, “There’s no understanding today
without understanding yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. It all is what it is, and it can’t be changed. It can’t be rewritten.”

  “But why do they oppose us on absolutely every front? Year after year. When there’s nothing in it for them.”

  “They oppose us now because of the Cold War. And they fought us then because we beat them to the bomb.”

  “The atomic bomb?”

  “The atomic bomb,” Roth said. “The single most destructive weapon in the long and sordid history of human weapons.”

  “But they have the bomb too.”

  “For self-defense,” Roth said. “To them, their nuclear capability is a shield, completely defensive in nature. They say it doesn’t threaten anyone.”

  “They can’t possibly believe that.”

  “They believe it, Laurel, and their fathers believed it. And their grandfathers. Their nukes are less powerful than ours. Less capable. Their delivery methods are less reliable. Their technology is aging. Their infrastructure is rotten. They don’t even know themselves which stockpiles, which systems, would still work in case of war.”

  “That’s hardly our fault,” Laurel said.

  “Their arsenal came second, Laurel. It wasn’t built as a challenge to the West. It was built as a response. It’s not a question. It’s an answer.”

  “Come on. They’d have built nukes first if their scientists had been able to deliver them first.”

  Roth shrugged. “Sure. It’s hard to imagine Stalin holding back on a new weapon as powerful as the atom bomb.”

  “But he didn’t get it first,” Laurel said quietly.

  “No,” Roth said. “We did.”

  “But we were their ally.”

  Roth smiled. “We were their ally,” he repeated. “In a war that cost them twenty-seven million souls.”

  “Everyone suffered losses during the war.”

  “Not on the same scale,” Laurel. “You take all other belligerents, Britain, the US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Commonwealth, dozens of countries, and not even their total loss combined comes close to twenty-seven million.”

  “What about the Holocaust?”

  “Yes, the Holocaust. An unthinkable atrocity. Death on an industrial scale, the likes of which had never been witnessed before or since. You picture those factories, those furnaces, running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with the sole mission of wiping out one entire branch of the race of men.”