The Asset

by Saul Herzog

  And how much power did they have?

  Igor closed the file and ran a search for RA_999, the code for the Russian Agency that had ordered the surveillance of the Europa, and had put Tatyana under surveillance after her encounter with the American.

  The hit came back.

  Identifier: RA_999

  Agency: Dead Hand

  Lead Agent: Evgraf Davidov

  Restricted Database

  Igor’s blood went cold.

  50

  Lance was passing through the Watergate plaza on his way to the apartment when he sensed something wasn’t right. As he approached the elevators, he saw the reflection of two men behind him. Both wore black suits, like a pair of FBI agents in a kid’s movie, and he could hear their shoes on the tiled floor behind him.

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened. Lance stepped inside and turned in time to see their faces. One of them hurried forward to grab the door before it closed, and then held it for his friend.

  “Going up?” Lance said.

  The men nodded and all three of them stood like sentries as the doors closed.

  The second it shut, Lance ducked. The man to his right swung for him and missed. Lance grabbed him by the waist and drove him back against the wall.

  The other man pulled a knife and stabbed downward at Lance’s back. Lance kicked back, hitting him in the groin. The knife fell from his hand to the floor.

  Lance rose up, smacking the man above him on the chin with the back of his head, then immediately pushed his head forward, butting the man in the face and smashing his nose.

  The man behind drew a gun but the added length of the silencer made it unwieldy. The extra second gave Lance time to swing the other man around as cover. He took three bullets in the back.

  Lance then pushed him forward, crushing the other man against the wall.

  Letting the dead man fall to the ground, Lance gripped the other man’s wrist and yanked it backwards, forcing him to drop the gun. Then he kneed him in the groin.

  The man doubled over and Lance finished him with a knee to the face.

  The elevator dinged and the doors opened on Lance’s floor. Lance pulled the man who was still alive into the corridor and dragged him to his apartment.

  Once inside, he filled a glass with water and poured it on the man’s face.

  The man came to and Lance said, “If you want to live, tell me who sent you.”

  The man shook his head. “I can’t talk,” he said.

  Lance pointed the gun at him. “Talk or I shoot.”

  “I’m already dead,” the man said.

  “Then what difference does it make?”

  “You don’t understand,” the man said. “I don’t even know who I work for.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I take anonymous contracts.”

  “Cut the crap, buddy,” Lance said. “No one takes anonymous contracts. I want to know who sent you and I want to know why.”

  The man shook his head and Lance pressed the gun against his knee. He put his finger on the trigger and was about to shoot when the man started to blab.

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I’ll talk.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “A Russian.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  “How does he contact you?”

  “Someone calls my phone. I don’t know who they are. I tried tracing the call and couldn’t do it. They give me a target, some details, and I make a hit. That’s it. After the job is done, I get the number of an offshore account. My pay is already in the account.”

  “You’ve never met anyone? Never spoken face to face with anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Someone got you started.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman.”

  “A Russian woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “You gotta watch out for those,” Lance said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Describe her.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember her.”

  Lance pressed the gun against the man’s inner thigh, dangerously close to his balls.

  “All right. All right,” the man said.

  “Who was she?”

  “She was attractive. Very attractive.”

  “What else?”

  “She came up to me in a bar. Dressed like a hooker. Got me to go to a hotel room with her.”

  “Poor you.”

  “It wasn’t like that. She played me."

  “What happened?”

  “She said they had shit on me.”

  “What shit?”

  “I was a cop back then. They knew some shit I was mixed up in.”

  “What was it?”

  The guy looked around.

  “Eyes on me,” Lance said. “What was it?”

  “Drug dealer shit. I was on the take. They knew more about it than I did.”

  “So they had dirt on you?”

  “Yeah. Dirt. They told me I’d go to jail if I didn’t do what they wanted.”

  “So you agreed to kill for them?”

  “I never agreed to anything. They started out giving me small jobs. But over the years they got bigger.”

  Lance shook his head. “Tell me how a man goes from being a dirty cop to an assassin for the Russians.”

  “It’s easier than you’d think.”

  “All right,” Lance said. “So they told you to kill me?”

  “Yes. I got a call.”

  “When?”

  “A few hours ago.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said you were CIA. That you were trained. Dangerous. Probably armed.”

  “And you came anyway?”

  “I brought that other guy.”

  “What else did they tell you about me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think.”

  “They said you were right handed.”

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “You want me to kill you now?” Lance said.

  “What? No.”

  “Make it easier for you. I thought you were a goner anyway.”

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  Lance shook his head. “What’s this country coming to?”

  The man didn’t know. Lance looked at him. He was about Lance’s age. Similar height and weight. Similar features.

  “This woman who recruited you,” he said.

  “Who blackmailed me,” the man said.

  “Did she have any defining features?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She had dark hair, dark eyes.”

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean, what else?”

  “You know, in bed.”

  The man thought for a second and said, “She had a birthmark.”

  “Where?”

  “Inner thigh.”

  “Which thigh.”

  “I don’t remember, I swear.”

  “How big was it?”

  “About the size of a bottle cap. Looked a little bit like a heart. I thought it was attractive.”

  Lance’s phone started ringing. He picked it up and the man made a move. He leapt to his feet like a panther and dove into Lance’s torso. Lance brought an elbow down onto his head as he fell backwards onto the bed. The man was on top of him and they struggled for position until the man managed to get his hands on Lance’s throat.

  Lance swung his body around the man and got him in a choke hold between his thighs. He held him, deadly tight, and felt the man get weaker and weaker. After about five minutes the man wasn’t struggling anymore.

  Lance checked his pulse. He was alive but unconscious.

  Lance checked his phone and saw the call had been from Roth. He called him back.

  “Someone just tried to kill me,” Lance
said.

  “What?”

  “Two guys. My apartment. They attacked in the elevator.”

  “How did they find you?”

  “I don’t know, Roth. I was going to ask you that.”

  “Listen,” Roth said, his voice frail with stress. “We’re in free fall. You’re on your own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do what we discussed. Go to Russia. Take out these bastards. The group’s been compromised. Don’t contact anyone at Langley.”

  “What do you want me to do with this guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “This guy they sent. He’s still alive.”

  51

  Igor felt as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room. He looked at the screen.

  The Dead Hand.

  Evgraf Davidov.

  He’d suddenly entered very dangerous territory. The Dead Hand was something people in Igor’s position knew about, but no one ever talked about it. It was a part of the Russian intelligence community that even senior GRU officers were afraid to mention. Its existence had never been officially acknowledged.

  And the reason was simple. Talking about the Dead Hand, or showing any kind of interest in its activities, was a death sentence.

  In normal military parlance, a dead hand was an autonomous defense system, something that activated automatically, even if the people responsible for it had all been killed.

  The most famous was a Soviet-era system known as Perimeter. The Soviets had always been afraid of an American first strike. They knew they had enough nuclear weapons to destroy every man, woman, and child in the United States a thousand times over, but under certain scenarios, if the Americans launched first, the Russian early warning system gave the Kremlin just four minutes to issue a retaliatory strike. If they failed to respond in that time, Moscow would be obliterated while all its nuclear missiles were still in their silos.

  To protect against this, they built a system that guaranteed that if Moscow was ever hit, a retaliatory strike would always be launched against the United States, even if everyone in the Kremlin was dead.

  To achieve this, seismic sensors were installed deep under the Russian capital. In the event of a nuclear attack, the sensors would detect the strike, and automatically launch a number of satellites across the Soviet Union. The satellites were preprogrammed with top-level General Staff launch codes, and thirty minutes after reaching orbit, would transmit those codes to every Soviet nuclear bunker capable of responding.

  Unless the satellites were recalled by the Kremlin during those thirty minutes, which would not happen if the Kremlin had been destroyed, there was no way to stop the launch codes being transmitted.

  In effect, it meant that if Moscow was ever destroyed, the rest of the world would go down with it.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, perimeter remained operational, continuing to guarantee mutually assured destruction right up to the present day.

  Inside the GRU, this led to the term Dead Hand being used to describe the special group that was authorized to do anything necessary to protect the nation’s political leadership. This included a list of people inside Russia, hundreds long, who would automatically be assassinated if anyone ever struck at the president internally.

  It was the reason there’d never been an uprising in Moscow against the ruling regime. Everyone in the Kremlin knew about the group, and how ruthlessly it would protect the president and his cabal of billionaire oligarchs who controlled the country.

  The group was extremely brutal, operating more like a South American drug cartel than an intelligence service. It ruled by fear, hunting and killing anyone who threatened the group or the president politically. Opposition politicians, members of the Russian parliament, even judges of the highest courts in the land, had been brutally murdered in their homes, along with their families.

  The group didn’t play by the rules.

  It made examples of its victims.

  And no one dared question its methods or challenge its objectives.

  To challenge the Dead Hand, was to guarantee an assassin was on his way.

  The president of Russia had been in power for over twenty years, and likely would be for twenty more, despite constitutional restraints limiting his tenure to two consecutive six year terms.

  And no one would challenge that in a serious way.

  No one in Moscow talked about it.

  But everyone knew about it.

  Igor was used to living his life according to certain rules of conduct. He dealt in death every day, but the rules gave the game a modicum of order. They made it possible for him to live a relatively normal life, to have a family, to sleep at night without fearing for his life, to eat in restaurants, to walk in parks.

  The Dead Hand didn’t play by those rules, and the people involved enjoyed no protection under them. To them, nothing was sacred. Like the Perimeter system, if the criteria were met, they pulled the trigger.

  Igor was beginning to sweat.

  He logged out of the database and shut off the computer.

  This was the kiss of death.

  52

  Roth later called it the night of the long knives, a reference to the night the Nazis purged almost a thousand of their own most loyal members in a single night in 1934.

  It was a devastating attack.

  A purge.

  The four most skilled assassins in the nation, all of them with flawless records, all attacked simultaneously in four separate operations.

  Three of them were successful.

  Between them, the assets had completed dozens of the most complex and dangerous covert actions ever conceived. They’d assassinated heads of state, infiltrated the most secure of secure locations, rooted out moles and traitors deep within the military-industrial complex.

  And all without leaving a trace.

  Roth had known there’d been a breach of his network since the night of the glitch. What he hadn’t realized is how pervasive it was.

  The audit revealed a specific type of cyber attack technology that could only have originated from one place. A group so deep within the Russian intelligence apparatus that even hardened Kremlin officials didn’t dare speak of it. A group so ruthless they killed Russian politicians, Russian military commanders, even Russian judges. They had one objective, and that was to protect the Russian president and ensure his continued rule.

  They were bound by no laws, and did things other parts of the Russian military would never dare consider.

  When your objective was to protect the nation, you acted in a certain way. You were predictable. You were logical. You didn’t pick fights you couldn’t win, or that would lead to massive casualties without any tactical gains.

  When your objective was to protect the interests of a single man, even if that man was president of the federation, all those calculations were drastically altered. Fruitless conflicts could suddenly become highly valuable. Ruinous wars could have massive benefits. If losing a thousand soldiers was unthinkable to an ordinary commander, it could be very thinkable to a president who saw it as an election advantage.

  Roth could see what was coming and he needed desperately to speak to the president. Someone was about to wage all out war. But the president hadn’t been returning his calls.

  The assets were men so accustomed to watching their own backs there were rumors they literally slept with their eyes open. Getting close to them would be like trying to pull the tail of a cobra. They struck fast, and their fangs were razor sharp.

  And in a single strike, three were gone.

  It was the single deadliest loss in group history.

  And it happened on Roth’s watch.

  He let out a long sigh and stood up from his desk. He walked over to the window. The rush hour traffic was thinning out. It was almost nine. He paced across the room and opened the office door.

  His team was working furiously, banging away on their computer keyboards or debating in the confer
ence room, pointing at maps and images and graphs.

  Thirty-two people worked at group headquarters. Himself, four handlers, and twenty-seven specialists.

  And they’d just had their asses handed to them.

  And to make everything worse, one of them was a rat. It was the only way the Dead Hand’s cyber attack could have been pulled off. It required someone on the inside to plant the malware. It required a physical transmitting device to work.

  A specialist looked up at him from her desk.

  “Get you anything, boss?”

  “Get my car,” he said.

  He shut the door and his eye went straight to the bar cart. He had a bottle of forty year old Islay single malt. It had been a gift from the president. He hadn’t opened it, it was a two thousand dollar bottle, but he was tempted now.

  He shook his head and poured himself yet another cup of coffee. He had a long night ahead of him. A lot of explaining to do. Everyone would be looking at him. No one would say it, but he was fighting for his professional life now.

  Four briefs had been prepared by his staff, one for each asset.

  Rebel, Camaro, Hornet, Mustang.

  There wasn’t much to them, a few flimsy pages, but they captured the salient details. He flicked through them. They were his last hope. Because one of them had been falsified.

  Rebel: KIA

  Hotel Imperial

  Ringstraße 16

  Vienna, Austria

  Assassin rappelled from roof of hotel and entered room through window. Eight shots fired from a suppressed .22 caliber pistol. Asset died from multiple gunshot wounds. Satellite surveillance shows indistinct figure on roof of building prior to attack.

  Suspects acquired: None

  Special Operations Group Database

  The crime scene was in the hands of Austrian police and they could be trusted to acquire forensic evidence reliably. The Vienna field office was already in touch with them. But it would lead nowhere. At best, and this was a long shot, they’d find the assassin. But the assassins acted on orders from an unknown source. They received payment anonymously. They knew nothing of what they were doing or why.

  He opened the second file.

  Camaro: KIA