The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  “Something very bad is about to happen,” Lance said.

  Roth nodded. “And we’re in disarray.”

  “We’ve got to get Laurel back.”

  “I’m tracking every source I’ve got,” Roth said.

  “The guy in New Jersey said he put her on a jet at Teterboro.”

  “Where was the plane headed?”

  “He assumed Moscow.”

  Roth nodded.

  “They’re going to skin her alive, Levi.”

  “I know what they’re going to do to her.”

  “I’m going to Moscow. I’ve got to get her back. It’s my fault she was captured. If I’d come when she asked, this never would have happened.”

  “Slow down, cowboy. I’ll fly the other assets to Moscow too. We’re going to have all hands on deck.”

  “I can’t let Davidov get ahead of me a second time,” Lance said.

  “And he won’t. I’ll get the other assets to fly in immediately. To get to Davidov, you’ll need all the help you can get.”

  “Agreed,” Lance said.

  “And don’t let your personal history with Davidov cloud your judgment,” Roth said.

  Lance looked at him. “This isn’t about personal history, Roth. Davidov is the one man I can think of who might actually release an uncontrollable virus. He wouldn’t think twice about it if he thought it would increase his power. No matter how many people it killed.”

  Roth nodded. “Trouble is coming, Lance. I can feel it. Every bone in my body says he’s going to make a move. Something devastating.”

  “What could he be thinking? A bioweapon is going to cause outrage. It will lead to war. How will that help them?”

  “They’ve got an election coming up. The president’s reached his constitutional term limits. They’ve got protests in the streets. Students fighting the police.”

  Lance shook his head. “They’d risk war to win an election?”

  Roth looked at him. “They’d do anything to stay in power.”

  He pulled out a tablet and opened some video footage. It was satellite surveillance of a Russian city.

  “This is Yekaterinburg,” Roth said.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “That’s the former Biopreparat Biological Weapon’s compound. Compound 19 they call it now.”

  The compound looked like any other utilitarian, Russian science facility. Steam billowed from a chimney stack. Some cars made their way from the front gate toward one of the buildings. The camera panned across the city.

  “What’s this?”

  “One of the city’s main hospitals.”

  It was a big facility. Multiple buildings. It looked like a group had gathered in the parking lot and they were protesting something.

  “What’s going on?”

  “The hospital was on lock down. From what we’ve been able to tell, there was a leak at a bioweapons production facility in the city. People were getting sick.”

  “Are those corpses?” Lance said, pointing to some tarps in the parking lot.

  Roth was about to answer when, bang, a flash of light disrupted the footage.

  “What was that?”

  “An airstrike.”

  “Their own?”

  Roth nodded.

  “They hit their own facility?”

  “Yes.”

  “With an airstrike?”

  Roth nodded gravely.

  Lance said nothing. Roth didn’t have to tell him that anything that could cause the Russians to bomb one of their own hospitals in broad daylight was serious.

  “What are you proposing?”

  “Flying you to Yekaterinburg.”

  “So that compound is where the bioweapon was produced?”

  Roth pulled up satellite images. “The compound is quite large. They’ve got a lot of low-security buildings in there. Army administration. A factory producing kevlar vests. Another working on drone technology.”

  “So a lot of workers?”

  “A lot of workers. A lot of traffic.”

  “Not a lot of security?”

  “You won’t have any trouble getting into the compound itself. This building here is the Permafrost Pathogen Institute. From what we’ve been able to gather, that’s where the bioweapons research is being conducted.”

  “Do we have schematics for the building?”

  “Yes. They’re incomplete, but we were able to get the original drawings from when the building was constructed in the seventies. It was originally intended to be a civilian research center. It’s been retrofitted but the layout should be mostly the same.”

  “All right.”

  “Your biggest risk won’t be getting in. It will be accidentally releasing a pathogen.”

  Roth pulled up some more photos.

  “This is another facility in the south of the city,” he said. “This is where the leak seems to have occurred.”

  “This is where the sick people are coming from?” Lance said.

  “This building here is a textile factory. The first cases came from there. Then they spread in this direction. This is a school. These are apartments. That’s a shopping mall.”

  “The area is very contained,” Lance said.

  Roth nodded.

  “And we’re not seeing cases spread exponentially?”

  “No,” Roth said. “Not as far as we can tell. They seem to have contained this initial outbreak to this one area.”

  “How is that possible? From what you and Laurel showed me of the virus.”

  Roth shook his head. “That’s the thing. We don’t think this outbreak is the virus.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s got to be something else. Something that isn’t transmissible. Given the history of the facility, our best guess is that it’s some sort of anthrax strain.”

  “So they’re working on more than one bioweapon?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Lance looked at Roth.

  “I know,” Roth said. “That’s why I want to get you over there as quickly as possible. Destroy this facility. Grind this thing to a halt.”

  “All right,” Lance said. “So they’ve got a lab and a production facility?”

  “Yes. The lab’s the real target. The production facility seems to be using pretty ordinary pharmaceutical equipment. These tanks here are the main production vats. There are four of them. This building, we think, is for drying and milling ingredients.”

  “It doesn’t look very high tech.”

  “Like I said, it’s low-value equipment. Given the fact there was a leak, it doesn’t even seem like they’ve customized it for military use. It’s just ordinary industrial-grade stuff. Nowhere near up to the task.”

  “Why would they develop deadly new pathogens, and then cook them up in old vats like these?” Lance said.

  “Same reason we shipped sixty M224 mortars to Basra with no four pound shells.”

  Lance nodded.

  “The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing,” Roth said.

  “If this is how they produce anthrax, we better pray they don’t start production of the virus.”

  Roth nodded. “That’s why the main priority has to be the institute. That’s where the research is coming from. Destroy the lab, and you destroy the new weapons at their source.”

  “So just walk in and start blowing shit up?”

  “That would be a recipe for disaster,” Roth said.

  “No kidding,” Lance said.

  “You’re going to need help. The institute is led by this woman,” Roth said, pulling up a photo. “A scientist named Sofia Ivanovna. If you could somehow capture her and get her to guide you, it would make your job a lot easier.”

  “That’s a pretty lady.”

  “Yes it is,” Roth said impatiently.

  “And why do you think she’ll help?”

  “Because we ran analysis on every scientist in the institute. If they have a weak link ideologically, it’s h
er.”

  “But she’s head of the institute.”

  “It looks like they hired her because of what she could achieve in the lab, not because of her party loyalty.”

  “Beautiful, and smart.”

  “She’ll help you, Lance.”

  Lance swiped through the other scientists. “What about this guy? You scored him highly.”

  “Vasily Ustinov. Second in command there.”

  “Dagestan.”

  “Yeah, but go for the woman first.”

  “Good fighters in Dagestan.”

  “The woman’s our best bet.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Someone got that vial to Tatyana. My bet is it was her.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “It beats walking in and blowing shit up, as you put it.”

  “All right,” Lance said. “And you got the schematics there?”

  “As much as we could find.”

  Lance looked at Roth. The old man looked like he was struggling with the situation. As far as Lance knew, there had never been a breach of Roth’s system before. Not in all the years the group had been in operation. There would be repercussions.

  “Hey,” Lance said. “They can’t be thinking of shutting you down. Not with this going on?”

  “I don’t know what they’re thinking,” Roth said. “The president spends all his time with Mansfield now, and Mansfield has been trying to eat up our operation for years.”

  “Yeah, but Mansfield’s a blowhard. If he gets the job, the Russians will walk all over us. The president knows that,” Lance said.

  “Times have changed, Lance. Mansfield’s the top dog now. And if he gets his way, the CIA will be relegated to a second tier agency. And my group will be the first thing he cuts.”

  “They can’t replace you that easily,” Lance said.

  Roth nodded. “We’ll see,” he said.

  Lance finished his coffee. “I’ll go to Yekaterinburg. But you find Laurel. I’m not coming home without her.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean it. I could give a shit about the rest of it. I want her out. She deserves that much from us.”

  “I’ll find her, Lance,” Roth said. “You have my word. By the time you’re done in Yekaterinburg, I’ll have a location for you.”

  Lance nodded. “And get the other assets there too. We’re going to need all the firepower we can get.”

  48

  Tatyana had a fever. She had to clean her wound every few hours. She woke frequently during the night, and didn’t always know where she was.

  Twice, she heard footsteps outside her door and reached for her gun. Both times it was just hookers plying their trade.

  In the backpack she had antibiotics, weapons, cash, and clean ID.

  When morning finally came, she went into the bathroom and examined the wound carefully. Thankfully, it looked like it was going to heal.

  But she still needed rest.

  There was a kettle in the room and she made herself some tea. Then she sat on the bed, sipping it, and thinking.

  This was it, she thought. The time had come. She’d always known, somewhere deep down, that eventually she’d be on the outside. The things she did at the GRU, the people she’d killed, the men she’d pleasured. She’d been in survival mode her entire life.

  And this was her act of defiance.

  It might cost her her life, but at least she’d die fighting the forces that had killed her mother.

  She finished her tea, packed her things, and went down to the lobby. No one was at the desk. She’d paid for the room in advance so she walked outside and hailed a cab.

  There was no one she could trust now. She knew that. She was alone, and would be for the rest of her life.

  If Igor had turned on her, all the resources she’d put in place were compromised.

  And if they’d found out she was trying to reach Lance, then maybe there was a breach on the American side too.

  “Where to?” the cab driver said.

  She needed to create some distance. The search for her would begin in Manhattan.

  She needed to get away from the city, buy herself some time to think, and figure out her next move.

  The driver looked at her in the rearview. He looked out the window at the seedy hotel she’d come out of. He looked at her bare feet and ripped dress.

  “I’m not working, Romeo.”

  He raised his hands in protest. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I need to get out of here,” she said.

  “How far do you want to go?”

  “Not far. Queens. And I need to go to a Walmart.”

  “There’s a Target in Flushing.”

  “That will do. Take me there.”

  She ignored the driver’s ramblings as they drove. On their way to the Queensboro Bridge, they passed the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel.

  It seemed like a lifetime had passed since she’d checked into the hotel. She would have liked nothing more than to go back up to her room and sleep for three days.

  But she couldn’t.

  Even driving by it felt reckless.

  In Flushing, the driver dropped her off at the Target. She went inside and bought ordinary clothes and sneakers, some snacks, a cheap phone and laptop, and some more medical supplies. She changed her clothes in the store’s fitting room.

  From there she caught a cab to Flushing’s Chinatown, where dozens of seedy hotels were ready to rent her a room without ID. She had clean ID now, clean credit cards, but the less she used them, the better. Cash was always safer.

  She found a place called Lucky Lodgings and went inside.

  “What’s the price?” she said to the Chinese woman at the counter.

  “Hundred a night.”

  “Do the rooms have their own bathrooms?”

  “Some of them, but they’re taken.”

  “I’ll give you two-hundred if you can find me one of those.”

  The girl went into the office and came back with some keys. ”Room 404,” she said. “Take the stairs.”

  Tatyana climbed the stairs and then collapsed onto the bed. She fell asleep for a few hours and when she woke up, the streets outside had come to life. Market stalls, hawkers, hookers, dealers of every type. It was a good place to lie low.

  She had work to do but she was exhausted. She went into the bathroom and had a shower. Then she dressed her wound and changed into some fresh Target clothes. It felt good to be clean. She went down to the ground floor and asked the girl at the desk to order her some Chinese food.

  Then she went back to the room and turned on the television. She sank into the bed and watched some people bid on the contents of a storage locker in California. It was surprisingly engaging.

  When the knock on the door came, she took the gun from her backpack and slipped it into the back of her jeans. It was the girl from the lobby with her food. Tatyana tipped her well.

  Then she sat on the bed and ate three times her normal meal, the food sprawled out on the bed like a picnic. She watched to see if the guy who’d won the auction made a profit on the storage locker’s contents. It had contained some valuable baseball cards that saved him.

  All the time, she mulled over a single question.

  Who’d found out she was leaking to the Americans?

  And how?

  She pulled out the laptop she’d bought and tethered it to the cell phone. Then she downloaded the Tor browser and began setting up a VPN.

  49

  Igor stood by his office window, his forehead resting against the cold glass, and wondered what to do.

  He reached into his pocket and felt the crumpled, blood smeared piece of paper. It was still there. Wishing it away did no good. He pulled it out and looked at it. On it, in Agniya’s handwriting, was the name of a high-level database, and her access password.

  He thought back to her final moments.

  He’d been so blinded by rage. By betrayal. He’d never full
y trusted her, but he’d wanted to. There’d been moments when he’d thought maybe she was the one person on earth that he’d be able to let his guard down for.

  He could still feel the structure of her throat as it collapsed under the pressure from his thumbs. The memory of it made his stomach turn.

  She’d told him that this database was the only reason she’d ever been assigned to his desk. She was a spy, a mole, and she’d been planted so that the top floor could have complete access to all Tatyana’s movements and operational communications.

  They’d been watching Tatyana all along.

  There was some relief in that. They hadn’t been watching him. Whatever Tatyana had gotten herself involved with, it wasn’t something that implicated him. The top floor knew about it. They’d kept it from him on purpose. That was the only reason he was still alive.

  He’d held himself back from accessing the files out of fear.

  He had no desire to draw himself into something that could be avoided.

  But he knew he was running out of options. He’d stumbled into this and he wasn’t going to be able to stumble back out. His best chance of coming through it alive was to arm himself with as much information as possible.

  He left the window and went to the door, half expecting to see Agniya when he opened it, sitting at her desk the way she’d always been, facing him, her computer positioned so he wouldn’t ever see the screen.

  He’d surprised the two guards and they shuffled themselves to attention.

  “Leave,” he said to them.

  He waited for them to shut the door behind them, then sat at Agniya’s desk and powered up the computer.

  He pulled up the SQL terminal. This was it. There’d be no turning back from this.

  He took a deep breath and entered the username and password she’d given him. The database was encrypted and he had to wait some time before anything happened. After a few minutes, a black screen appeared with a search box in the center, a cursor blinking inside it.

  He hesitated another second, took a deep breath, then entered Tatyana’s name.