The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  He was into the third chapter when the knock on the door came.

  He went to answer it.

  Roth brushed in past him. He was wearing a ball cap and sunglasses.

  “You’re really spooked,” Lance said.

  Roth looked at him. “Something’s not right,” he said. “Some fucking thing.”

  He took off the hat and glasses and Lance saw he was tired. It was in his eyes. He’d had a rough night.

  “Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Lance poured him a cup and they sat at the counter.

  “Sorry for your loss,” Lance said.

  “She wasn’t my loss.”

  “You liked her.”

  “I cared about her.”

  Lance nodded. Roth had a reputation for being something of a ladies man, but Lance wasn’t implying that.

  “There was a pile of food delivery brochures under the door,” Lance said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You look like you could eat.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Roth said. “Really.”

  Lance nodded and they sipped their coffee. Neither spoke for a few minutes, until Roth broke the silence.

  “So, if I’m going to read you in on this thing, I need to know you’re back,” he said.

  “All right,” Lance said.

  “You don’t need to think about it?”

  “I thought already.”

  “Because you sure had your doubts back in Montana.”

  “You want me back or not?”

  Roth sighed. He looked old. Losing Laurel had really been a blow.

  Lance looked at him. “You want me to sign something?”

  “Would you?”

  “You serious?”

  “Yes, I’m serious.”

  “A piece of paper?”

  “If I had one, would you sign it?”

  “If it made you feel better.”

  “All right,” Roth said. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a tablet computer.

  “You really going to make me sign something?”

  “Of course not,” Roth said, opening the files.

  A picture of Tatyana Aleksandrova came on the screen. She was in a designer dress, expensive shoes, every bit as beautiful as Lance remembered.

  “You know this woman, right?”

  “Know is a strong word.”

  “What word would you use?”

  Lance shrugged. “She was a widow, an operative sent in to seduce targets. Get dirt on them.”

  “I know what a widow is.”

  Lance smiled. “Of course you do.”

  Roth remained stern. “Keep going,” he said.

  “We ran into each other in Syria.”

  “Was she targeting you?”

  “No. She thought I was Delta Force.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “She wasn’t targeting me, Levi.”

  “You wouldn’t know it if she was.”

  Lance shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then what was it like, Lance?”

  “It was something … off the books.”

  “Off the books?”

  “She wasn’t part of my operation. I wasn’t part of hers. Everyone was in this tiny part of the city. Us, the Russians, NATO people, news reporters. All in the same neighborhood. The same handful of hotels.”

  “So you just happened to be in the same place at the same time?”

  “You’ve been to Damascus. You know how it is.”

  “A coincidence?” Roth said skeptically.

  Lance shrugged.

  “Well ain’t that a regular love story.”

  “Very funny.”

  “No really. They could shoot a movie.”

  “Roth,” Lance said. “This isn’t what got Laurel killed.”

  Roth sighed. He got up and poured himself more coffee.

  “You knew she was a widow and you didn’t think that was worth reporting up the chain?”

  “It wasn’t my job to make sure the generals kept their dicks in their pants.”

  “You could have come to me with it.”

  “Oh, come on, Levi. You had bigger problems than a Russian honeytrap. You’d have told me to quit wasting your time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Her mission had nothing to do with ours. We were like two different species in the same jungle. She had her prey. I had mine.”

  “All right,” Roth said.

  “We’re on the same page then?”

  Roth shrugged.

  Lance was conflicted. He’d had contact with this Russian agent, and Laurel might have just paid the price for it. “I get the feeling there’s more you want to say on the matter,” he said.

  Roth shook his head.

  “If there’s something you need to say, say it,” Lance said.

  “All right. I’ll say it. You’re an arrogant prick, Lance.”

  Lance nodded. He deserved that.

  “This Russian’s basically a prostitute, she gets on her back whenever some slob in Moscow tells her to, with whoever they tell her to. She asks no questions. Does what she’s told. And you’re sitting here telling me that in the middle of all that, she’s just so attracted to you that she falls right into your arms?”

  Lance said nothing.

  “And it doesn’t cross your mind for one second that maybe you’re being played? Maybe she’s with you for more than the sheer pleasure of your company?”

  “I wasn’t her target, Levi.”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  “She couldn’t have been playing me, Levi. There was nothing to play.”

  “Nothing to play? What if Clarice found out?”

  “This was before Clarice and I were together.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell her about it?”

  Lance made to speak, then stopped himself.

  “That’s right,” Roth said.

  “I don’t think you should be bringing up Clarice,” Lance said.

  “Or what? You’ll shoot me?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ve apologized for what happened,” Roth said. “Believe me, no one was more shocked about it than me. Lance, if I had any idea, you have to believe me, I never would have made that order.”

  “You should have spoken to me.”

  “I didn’t know if you were in on it.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I made a mistake, Lance. I made a mistake that I can never unmake. If that’s going to stop us working together, you might as well tell me right now.”

  Lance let out a long sigh. He looked at Roth and asked himself what he felt. It wasn’t hatred. It never had been. Only pain.

  “Can we just talk about what we’re going to do?” he said. “Laurel’s down. Tatyana’s down. The least we can do is make sure they didn’t die for nothing.”

  “Fine,” Roth said. “Let’s move on.”

  “Fine,” Lance said.

  “You sure you’re ready?”

  “Just get on with it.”

  Roth looked at him. “You had an unreported fling with a foreign agent, you basically let the Main Directorate into your bedroom, and then this vial shows up with your name on it.”

  Lance shook his head. “Look. If you want to nail me all day long about this, there’s nothing I can do to stop you. But the longer we spend talking about it, the more time we waste.”

  “So you have no clue why she sent this vial to you, personally, out of all the people she could have sent it to?”

  “She needed to get it to someone she trusted.”

  “And she trusted you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now she’s dead, and near as we can tell, so is Laurel.”

  “Near as you can tell?”

  “We’ll get to that.”

  “On the phone you made it sound like she was dead.”

  “I said we’d get to that.”

  “So what happened?”


  “Well, your Russian friend…”.

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “What should I call her?”

  “Come on, Levi.”

  “The Russian agent,” he said. “Is that better?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Russian agent gave us the location of a dropbox. Laurel went there to meet her. And something went wrong.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “A lot of things.”

  “What exactly?”

  “We haven’t recovered the bodies.”

  “Either of them?”

  “Laurel was shot in the upper torso. We have drone footage and local witnesses. A man followed the Russian to the meet.”

  “He’s the one who shot them?”

  “Laurel and the Russian opened fire on him. Laurel hit him, but he hit her too. Then he followed the Russian. Security footage in the Christopher Street subway station shows her being shot and falling into the path of an oncoming train.”

  “But you didn’t get her body either?”

  “We found her blood, but no body. We’re still trying to figure out what happened.”

  “And what about Laurel?”

  “She was bleeding out in the street. People came to her assistance. They say she was in critical condition. Blood was coming from her neck, from her mouth. An ambulance was called.”

  “But?”

  “But the man came back before the ambulance got there. He stole a car outside the subway station. He fired his gun in the air. The people dispersed. Laurel was unconscious. He picked her up and put her in the back of the car.”

  “What a mess,” Lance said.

  “Yes.”

  “Do we have any idea who this man was?”

  Roth pulled up another photo on the tablet. It was a man in his fifties.

  “Recognize him?” Roth said.

  Lance shook his head.

  “We’re running him through the system now. So far we’ve got nothing.”

  “Without the bodies, there’s a chance both of them are still alive.”

  “There’s a chance,” Roth said, but his tone wasn’t optimistic. “If Laurel’s alive, you know what they’ll do to her.”

  Lance nodded. He looked at Roth then down at his coffee.

  “This is my fault,” he said.

  Roth said, “There’s still something you’re not telling me.”

  “About what?”

  “About why this Russian put your name on the vial.”

  Lance shook his head.

  “Tell me, Lance. What are you holding back?”

  “Something happened in Damascus.”

  Roth leaned forward. “I’m all ears, Lance.”

  “The details don’t matter.”

  “What do you mean, the details don’t matter?”

  “The only thing that’s relevant is that she felt I was someone she could trust.”

  42

  After the meeting with Roth, Lance went to Laurel’s apartment on U Street. The ground floor of the building was a furniture store, and he made his way to the back. Next to the steel delivery doors was a set of concrete steps that led to a second door. It was also steel, not the kind of door you could kick in, but above it was a fire escape leading to a metal balcony.

  Lance leapt and grabbed the bottom of the fire escape and pulled himself up to the ladder. He climbed to the balcony and tried the window. It was shut but a window air conditioning unit meant it couldn’t lock. He pulled it open and climbed into the apartment.

  Inside was a spacious room with a kitchen at one end and a luxurious four-posted bed at the other. In the middle was a sofa and TV, a few bookshelves, and a coatrack by the door.

  He noticed a gold fish bowl next to a fancy espresso machine. There was no fish in the bowl.

  He’d only spent a few hours with Laurel and knew nothing about her. This was his starting point.

  From what he could see, she had the same workaholic personality as everyone else Roth hired. She lived for the job.

  Handlers were required to go through a similar onboarding process to the one assets went through, cutting their relationships with anyone who knew who they were and adopting a new legal identity. From what he could see, Laurel had made sure every clue of her prior life had been completely erased. There were no photos in the apartment, no personal documents, there wasn’t even any dirty laundry in the hamper in the closet.

  Laurel lived like a ghost. He opened the refrigerator and it was almost empty. There was an unopened stick of unsalted butter, a few bottles of sparkling water, and a pint of strawberries that was beginning to turn.

  The only thing in the freezer was a bottle of Grey Goose vodka, two thirds full.

  There were a few cans of vacuum packed Italian coffee next to the espresso machine and a box containing packets of sweetener.

  She wasn’t one for cooking, that was clear.

  He clicked the TV remote and the news came on. He clicked it back off.

  He sat at the counter and thought about the one thing he knew for certain. If the man who’d attacked had put Laurel in his car, that meant she was alive. He wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of taking someone who was about to die, and if he was the kind of man who could take out two trained agents, he was the kind of man who knew the difference.

  She was alive.

  And he was going to find her.

  He got up and went to the sofa. There were copies of a few major news magazines on the coffee table. There was a laptop charger, plugged in, but no laptop. Next to where the laptop would have been was a notepad.

  On the top page was written the address of the EconoLodge hotel in Deweyville and the words “Two Rooms” underlined.

  Looking at it made him feel guilty. She’d come, and he’d turned her away.

  There was a wastepaper basket next to the table but it was empty.

  He went to the bedroom. The bed was a solid oak antique. It looked expensive. The bedding was Egyptian cotton. The bed was placed halfway between two huge windows that looked out onto the street. Light came in through lace curtains and fell on the bed, making the white sheets glow.

  Apart from the espresso machine, the bed was the only sign of luxury in the apartment. That said something about her.

  Lance ran his hand over the sheets. He lifted a pillow and smelled it, freshly laundered with a hint of lavender.

  He felt like a voyeur. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

  There was a dress form at the end of the bed with a silk negligee draped over it. He touched the silk.

  He stood at the window and looked out at the traffic on the street below.

  His phone rang.

  “Where are you?” It was Roth’s voice.

  “At her apartment.”

  “Anything out of place?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Listen, we just got a match on the assailant.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A US citizen with known ties to the GRU. According to the intel, he’s a hitman for Direktor Fyodor Timokhin.”

  “I don’t know Timokhin.”

  “I do.”

  “Bad news?”

  “You could say that.”

  “So where can I find this guy?”

  “I’m sending over what we’ve got now. He lives in New Jersey but my bet is this will lead straight back to Moscow.”

  43

  Tatyana woke with a gasp. Everything was black. For a split second, she wondered if she was still alive.

  Then she saw the steam billowing from the ventilation shaft. She was soaking wet, and she was freezing cold, so cold she was in danger of hypothermia.

  A gust of steam came from the vent beneath her and warmed her for the briefest second. Then it was gone and the icy cold returned. The steam kept her just warm enough to stay alive, but it also made her wet. If she left the vent, she’d freeze in a matter of minutes.

  Memories of what had happened came rushing back to her in flashes.<
br />
  She remembered getting rid of her electronics. She remembered struggling along the tunnel as far as a steel ladder. She remembered crawling through a ventilation shaft for what felt like eternity.

  Every second had been agony, the bullet wound in her arm burning like fire.

  She didn’t remember stopping, but if it wasn’t for the steam she’d have frozen to death.

  She looked at her watch. It was analog, her grandmother’s. It said seven.

  The ID she had, the credit cards, all of it would lead the GRU right to her. She went through her purse and counted her cash, a couple hundred dollars. She got rid of anything that would have allowed Igor to track her. She didn’t have her gun. She’d thrown it away when she realized the bullets were duds. Goldin must have changed them in the hotel room.

  She thought about the gun for a moment. She remembered when she’d gotten it.

  She’d been careless.

  Distracted.

  She’d let her guard down, rushed to make the meeting with Spector, and that had caused her to make a mistake.

  This was the price.

  Her tights were tied around the bullet wound. She vaguely remembered doing that. It would need proper attention soon.

  She stood up and felt faint. She instantly felt the absence of the steam. She was shivering so badly she had to hold on to the wall to steady herself. She looked down at her clothing. They were black, which would conceal some of the dirt. Her feet were completely bare. There was a bullet hole in the Chanel dress. That hurt almost as much as the wound.

  There was a ladder leading to a manhole above her and she could tell from the ring of light around it that it led to the surface.

  She climbed the ladder. The cover at the top was locked but there was a safety mechanism that allowed it to be opened from the inside. She turned it and pushed. The door was heavy, it took all her strength to move it, but it opened. She climbed through and found herself in a small maintenance shed. She sat on the ground for a few seconds catching her breath, then tried the door. It opened, and outside she saw the banks of the Hudson river. Across the water she recognized the Hoboken and Jersey City skylines.

  The shed was in a small, waterfront park and she had to cross West Street to get back to the city. Walking barefoot in the snow hurt. When she reached the street, the morning traffic sped by. She waited for a break in the traffic and managed to get herself across.