The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  “You’re in room 309,” the girl at check-in said and Laurel thought she would physically strangle someone if anything else went wrong that day.

  “Room?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We booked two rooms.”

  “We only have one,” the girl said, like that ended the conversation.

  “But we booked two. I have the thing right here. The confirmation.”

  “Well, with the snowstorm and all, we had to make a few accommodations.”

  “Accommodations?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We were flooded with last minute requests.”

  “And you decided not to hold our booking?”

  “Well, technically we only hold bookings until 10 pm. It’s after midnight.”

  “Our flight was diverted.”

  “If you’d called ahead.”

  “Called ahead? We’ve been in the middle of nowhere for six hours. We’re lucky we made it at all.”

  The girl looked to Roth for help.

  “Come on, Laurel. It will be all right.”

  Laurel gave up. “Fine,” she said, picking up her bag. “Are there two beds at least?”

  The girl typed on her computer and Laurel already knew by how long it was taking that the answer was no.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “I’ll take a cot,” Roth said.

  “We’re out of cots,” the girl said.

  “The couch then?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “Come on, Laurel. I’ll be a true gentleman.”

  “Don’t touch me,” Laurel said, leading the way to the elevator.

  Apart from only having one bed, the room wasn’t that bad. It was basic, but had a coffee machine, a TV, a clean bathroom with hot water.

  “There’s no couch,” Roth said.

  Laurel threw her bag down. “Surprise, surprise.”

  “I’ll keep to my side of the bed.”

  Laurel shrugged. “Fine,” she said.

  She slumped onto the bed and picked up the TV remote. She liked home improvement shows, people flipping houses, redecorating kitchens. She found something familiar and turned down the sound.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “This Lance Spector better be worth the trip.”

  Roth shrugged. He had his suitcase open and was taking a leather toiletry pouch from it. It looked like something her grandfather would have packed. The sight of it, the domesticity, made her stomach turn.

  “I guess that depends,” Roth said.

  Roth hadn’t told her much in the briefing. That wasn’t unusual, but in this case it didn’t seem there was much more he could have told her.

  A low-level embassy staffer in Istanbul had been handed an envelope at a local coffee shop. The owner of the coffee shop said a woman with dark hair had left it. Whoever the woman was, she was no novice. She’d known exactly where the embassy’s security cameras were, as well as local police CCTV cameras, and managed to avoid being picked up by any of them. She’d arrived by cab, and had asked the owner to call her another cab when she left. The driver she’d arrived with couldn’t be tracked down. The one that picked her up only brought her a few blocks, letting her out at a nearby bus stop, again unmonitored by CCTV. After that she’d disappeared.

  The café owner said she’d never removed her sunglasses or scarf, and apart from her hair color, the only identifying information he’d been able to provide was that she was slim, average height, and ordered in English. He got the impression she was Russian, there were always a lot of Russians in Istanbul, but that wasn’t based on anything more than a hunch.

  The woman had apparently known that an envelope left in that café would find its way into the embassy.

  As it happened, the staffer handed it in at the front gate, where it was scanned and opened by security as per protocol.

  The envelope contained a printed note.

  I will only speak to Lance Spector.

  There was a return address on the back for a mailbox in Manhattan. Roth had it checked out. Against regulations, no ID had been required for the box rental and payment had been accepted in cash. The name used on the rental form was Reggie White.

  “Did we track him down?” Laurel said.

  “Who?”

  “Reggie White?”

  Roth chuckled. “I think it’s a fake name, sweetie. Reggie White was a big player for the Eagles.”

  The envelope also contained a small titanium case, something clinical with a biohazard label on it.

  The envelope and its contents were flagged by security and the titanium case was put in a secure locker.

  A bulletin went out to Delta Force at Fort Bragg informing them of the note, and they forwarded that to Langley.

  Within hours it was on Roth’s desk. He had the CIA field office in Istanbul pick up the titanium case and it was immediately sent to a lab in Germany for analysis.

  He’d briefed Laurel on everything to do with the envelope while failing to give her anything new on Spector.

  She pulled his file to see if it had been updated. It was as sparse as the day she’d first read it. The suppressed civilian record. The sanitized army record. His group file with the Delta Force recruitment code and training record. Roth hadn’t been kidding when he said Spector was good. He had the best training scores she’d ever seen. But that was where the file ended. It was as if Spector disappeared after training.

  Whatever he’d done for the group, and whatever had led to his leaving, had been wiped.

  From his birth certificate she knew he was thirty-eight. His birth name had been erased but he was born in Montana, which was where he’d been since Roth froze his status two years ago. He had no living family, no kids, never married.

  The thing that stuck out about it all was Roth’s treatment of him. The old man had stuck his neck out. That was weird. He wasn’t one for sentimentalism. Spector should have been terminated when his status was frozen. The rules were black and white. And ruthless.

  No one simply got to check out.

  She could see from the file Roth had taken pains not to make a final ruling on Spector’s status. It was simply frozen. In limbo.

  “So,” Laurel said, “when are you going to tell me why you’ve got such a hard on for this guy?”

  “Hard on?”

  “Yeah,” she said, holding her fist in front of her groin. “Hard on.”

  Roth made to say something, then stopped himself.

  She raised an eyebrow. He really had no explanation.

  “His name pops up and we fly halfway across the country in a snow storm?”

  “He’s a good soldier, Laurel.”

  “They’re all good soldiers.”

  “He’s different.”

  “No one’s different.”

  Roth looked at her. “You don’t really think that.”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t that cynical. Not yet.

  But the assets were all as near flawless as soldiers could be. Laurel couldn’t imagine what made Spector different enough to warrant special treatment.

  He had a good training record, but so what? There had to be more to it.

  “You’ll meet him tomorrow,” Roth said.

  “And then I’ll see for myself?”

  “I don’t know that you will.”

  “It’s all instinct, right?”

  Roth shrugged.

  “Let me ask you this,” she said. “If he’s so good, why did you cut him loose?”

  She couldn’t help being curious. She’d waited two years for him and was finally about to meet him.

  “I mean, on paper he’s perfect,” she said.

  “There was more.”

  “What more?”

  “I had the file altered.”

  “That much is obvious. You’re hiding something.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But there was a red fla
g.”

  Roth shrugged.

  “He’s a nut?” Laurel said.

  “No.”

  “He went off the deep end?”

  “No.”

  “You altered the file. Something wasn’t good.”

  “He’s not a nut.”

  “You stuck your neck out for this guy, and now you’re assigning him to me.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Why else would you bring me all this way?”

  Roth raised his hands. “Fine,” he said.

  “I’m just saying, if my life’s about to be tied to this guy, if we’re going to depend on each other completely, and there’s a red flag, something big enough to get you to put him on ice for two years, I think I should know what it is.”

  Roth was no idiot. Maybe he spent too much on clothes, and had a weakness for women of a certain type, women young enough to be his granddaughter, but he also had his finger on the pulse of the nation’s security in ways other people could never imagine.

  He was the man behind the secret assassinations, the targeted strikes. He was the puppetmaster pulling the strings. He was the one who kept terrorists awake at night.

  Sometimes, when Laurel looked at him she saw everything that was wrong with the world. The privileged, white, Anglo-Saxon, relic of a bygone era, a man so used to taking what he wanted he no longer bothered to check it was his. He had never struggled to make rent. He wasn’t judged every time he walked into a room. He certainly didn’t have the hand of someone forty years his senior squeezing his ass.

  But every once in a while, she saw something in him. A man didn’t get where Roth was by accident. He knew what he was doing. And he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Other men would have buckled under the pressure.

  Roth cleared his throat. “All right,” he said. “Spector is a trained assassin. He’s received more training than anyone on earth. Certainly more than anyone the government is aware of.”

  “Right,” Laurel said.

  “And he’s killed a lot of people for this country. Before I even found him the body count was piling up. After I recruited him it only got higher.”

  Laurel nodded.

  “There’s a lot of blood on his hands,” Roth said.

  “I know.”

  “I mean, you could fill a graveyard.”

  “I get it,” Laurel said, impatient to hear where this was going. “He likes it too much,” she said. “Got too much of a taste for it.”

  “No,” Roth said.

  “What then?”

  “A man like him. You know what makes him different?”

  Laurel wanted to shake it out of him. “Tell me,” she said.

  “The perfect killer. You know what makes him stand out?”

  “Come on,” Laurel said, exasperated.

  “It’s knowing when not to pull the trigger.”

  Laurel leaned back, surprised. That wasn’t what she’d expected.

  “I see,” she said.

  Roth had taken some dental floss from his leather pouch and was in the process of wrapping it around his fingers.

  “That doesn’t sound like what we do,” she said.

  “It’s not,” Roth said.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “When you’re in my line of work,” he said, “someone not pulling the trigger is the scariest thing in the world.”

  “Even when they’re right?”

  Roth shook his head. “They’re never right.”

  Laurel wasn’t sure what to make of that. All she knew was that she was not going to stay there and watch Roth floss his teeth, getting bits of food all over the bed they were supposed to be sharing.

  “I think I’m going to go out for a bit,” she said.

  “Out? Where?”

  “A drink.”

  She’d seen a bar on the drive in that looked like it would suit her purpose.

  “A nightcap,” Roth said. “Maybe I’ll join you.”

  Laurel shook her head. “No.”

  “No?”

  “No offense, boss, but charming as your company is, I think I could use a little break.”

  11

  The Yaroslavsky Train Terminal in Central Moscow had the distinction of being mile zero of the longest railway line on the planet. The fact was commemorated by a small, concrete marker just outside the station with moss on its north side and a barely legible 0 carved into its west face. The marker was placed in 1916 by a young engineer from Petrograd named Myasnikov who personally oversaw the placement of every single marker along the ten thousand kilometer route. Myasnikov died in 1937 in a Siberian gulag, within sight of marker 3,434. His crime had been to suggest ‘improvements’ to a later route drawn on a map by Stalin himself with ruler and pencil.

  A passenger on the Trans-Siberian could get on a train in Moscow and pass Myasnikov’s markers at a rate of one per minute for seven days, finally disembarking on the Pacific coast in Vladivostok, or Beijing, or even Pyongyang if they had the paperwork.

  Marker 1,816, the only one located on a bridge, marked the spot where the train left Europe for Asia. The bridge spanned the Iset. The peaks of the Urals were visible in the distance. Across the river rose the Soviet-era buildings of the city of Yekaterinburg.

  It was there, in 1723, that Peter the Great ordered the construction of a massive iron-making plant that would later become one of the largest metallurgical facilities on the planet.

  It was there also, in July 1918, that Tsar Nicholas II, with his wife and children, was executed by the Bolsheviks. The site of the execution, or massacre depending on one’s viewpoint, was the famous Ipatiev House. In 1977, at the order of the Politburo and to prevent its becoming a symbol of revolution to future generations, local party chiefs oversaw the complete demolition of the house. Even the foundations were dug out of the ground.

  The streets of the city were laid out on a sprawling grid exhibiting some of the Soviet Union’s most historically significant, if unattractive, constructivist architecture.

  The mile upon mile of uniform, concrete buildings appeared soulless even to the men who built them. One of the more distinctive neighborhoods, known as the Chekist town, was built in the 1930’s to house the hundreds of members of the NKVD based in the city.

  Rumors still circulated of underground interrogation rooms and torture chambers that the secret police used to terrorize the population.

  It was in this neighborhood, in the city’s Infectious Disease Center a few blocks from the train station, that doctor Olga Abramova ran from her ward to make an urgent phone call.

  The number she dialed was in the secretive government research institute located inside the military compound south of the city center.

  Sofia Ivanovna was in her lab when the orderly came to get her.

  “Doctor, you have a call. Very urgent.”

  She followed him to the main office and picked up the phone. It was rare she got a call through the switchboard. It usually signaled something official, a dreaded Moscow call.

  “This is Doctor Ivanovna,” she said.

  “My patients are dying,” Olga said in her distinctive Irkutsk accent.

  Olga grew up in a small village south of Lake Baikal close to the Mongolian border. She had a way of speaking that some people called unsophisticated.

  Sofia had always thought it charming.

  “Excuse me?” Sofia said.

  Sofia was the daughter of a prestigious doctor in Moscow and had gone to all the best schools. Her youth had been about as different from Olga’s as was possible. She spoke English, German, and French fluently and had a way of making her Russian sound so soft and elegant that people in industrial Yekaterinburg sometimes mistook her for a foreigner.

  She and Olga had studied together. They’d worked together before Sofia was plucked into military service and given the directorship of the institute. They’d been friends, and remained so.

  “Pneumonia,” Olga said. She was agitated. “Somethin
g like that. We’ve had nine now.”

  “Olga,” Sofia said. “Slow down. What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Something’s not right,” Olga said. “Nine dead on this shift.”

  “What?” Sofia said.

  Sofia had never told Olga what exactly she did at the institute, only that it was classified government work, but of course Olga had her suspicions.

  “Nine,” Olga said again, and Sofia felt a wave of panic flood over her. She leaned on the counter to steady herself.

  She glanced around the office. It was the nerve center of the institute, the place where all the calls came in and the researchers did their paperwork. Everything looked perfectly normal. One of the administrators had had a birthday and there were balloons by her chair. There was an open box on her desk with a half-eaten medovik cake in it.

  Sofia told the orderly to grab her a pen and paper.

  “Nine fatalities?” she said.

  “In two hours,” Olga said.

  “Symptoms?”

  “Fever,” Olga said. “Headache, cough, chest pain.” She was speaking very quickly.

  “When did the symptoms start?”

  “All nine women woke up perfectly normal this morning,” Olga said.

  Sofia scribbled down the notes.

  “Women?”

  “All of them.”

  It was in the air, Sofia thought.

  “What did they have in common, Olga?”

  “Oh my god,” Olga said. There was something going on in the background, some commotion. “They’re bringing more now.”

  There was a click, like the receiver had been dropped, and Sofia heard Olga talking to someone. Then she was gone. The line wasn’t dead, she could still hear sounds in the background, but Olga had left the phone.

  “I’ve got to go to Infectious Diseases,” Sofia said to the orderly, grabbing her briefcase and coat.

  She hurried to the elevator and threw on her coat before it reached the ground floor. Outside, the snow swarmed around her. It seemed early in the year for the temperature to be so low. She got to her car and fifteen minutes later was at the east entrance to Olga’s building.

  She double parked in an ambulance bay and before she was even out of the car, saw a woman coming out of the hospital. The woman was wearing the light pink uniform of the Empress Catherine textile factory. Sofia knew the uniform well. She passed the workers every day. The factory was located in Chkalovskaya, just south of Yevchenko’s proposed production facility.