by Saul Herzog
By the time he reached the hotel, it was almost three. He pulled up outside and saw that a strip club on the ground floor was still open. It was later than local bylaws permitted, but it didn’t look like the kind of place that cared.
He had the two fully loaded silenced pistols in holsters beneath his jacket and he slid the Glock into the waist of his pants. The larger guns remained in the canvas bag on the backseat of the car.
He walked up to the club.
“Still open?” he said to the bouncer.
“Not really,” the bouncer said.
“I just need a drink.”
The bouncer shrugged, and Genadi walked past him. Inside, the place was deserted. No dancers, no customers, no bartender.
He walked through the club, through some doors, to the hotel lobby. A half-asleep man sat slumped in a chair at the reception. Genadi walked past him to the stairs.
He went to the second floor, turned on the corridor lights, found the room he was looking for, and listened. There were twelve rooms on the floor, not a sound from any of them. It looked like a straightforward job.
He drew one of the silenced pistols and stepped closer to the door.
Listened again.
Nothing.
He looked at the door and made sure it would open on the first attempt.
Then he rose his leg and brought it down hard. The wood at the latch split, and the door flew open.
He stepped inside the room, where the light from the corridor was enough to make out the bed. He extended the pistol and fired six shots. Even in the dim light, he saw the dark stain of blood seep through the covers.
3
Lance Spector sat in the corner of the bar by the window and watched the snow. It came down the street, gusting off the river in flurries, whipping around the vehicles as they made their way slowly in the evening traffic. The few pedestrians, buffeted by the wind, held tightly to their coats.
“What can I get you tonight?” the waitress said in Russian.
Lance looked at her. She was a solid woman, accustomed to labor. He pegged her at about fifty. “Same as last night,” he said.
“You don’t want something a little stronger?”
He shook his head.
She nodded and left. When she came back, she had a pot of coffee and a white mug. She left the pot on the table and went back to the bar.
She and Lance were the only two people in there. He’d been coming every night, and every night was the same. He sat by the window sipping the coffee, she sat on a stool at the bar and watched soap operas on a small TV with the sound off and subtitles on.
The place was quiet, which suited him, and the woman didn’t bother him.
“You can turn the sound on,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The sound. You can turn it up.”
“The boss doesn’t like that,” she said.
“He’s not here,” Lance said.
She lit a cigarette. Lance did the same. The microwave dinged, and she brought over the bowl of borscht soup that was inside.
“Thank you,” he said.
Her skin was pale, freckled, and her hair was somewhere between brown and red.
“You sure you don’t want some vodka?” she said when she put down the bowl. “It’s freezing outside.”
“Do you have any bread?”
She left and brought back two thick slices of rye and a full bottle of vodka.
“You come every night,” she said to him.
He nodded, stubbing out his cigarette.
She picked up his pack and helped herself. He offered her a light.
“You’re American,” she said.
Lance nodded. There was no use denying it.
He dipped some bread in the soup and put it in his mouth.
“No sour cream tonight,” he said.
“We ran out.”
He nodded.
“We don’t get many,” she said.
“Many what?”
“Americans.”
He looked at her. He’d looked at her a thousand times. He’d been trained to notice things and saw nothing now he hadn’t seen before. She arrived at the bar at four every afternoon and worked until it closed ten hours later. The work wasn’t difficult, but she moved like she was tired. He thought she might have another job during the day. She chain-smoked. She wore knee-length skirts, practical shoes, and in the gap between her socks and skirt, he could see thick, blue veins on her calves. Her accent was a little west of Moscow, Obninsk maybe, home of the world’s first nuclear power plant.
They were in the working-class neighborhood of Kapotnya, an industrial sprawl just off Moscow’s main ring road with a large oil refinery, power plant, and colossal state factories that had all shut down in the years since the Soviet collapse. The streets were narrow and dingy with old-style streetlamps that cast an orange glow on the cobbled sidewalks.
“I don’t think there are many foreigners in this area,” he said.
She nodded. “We don’t offer what they want.”
“And what’s that?”
She tapped her cigarette on the side of his ashtray.
“You know,” she said.
He looked away, glancing out the window. The traffic was light. A bus went by, laboring against the wind, its headlights revealing two fierce blizzards in front of them.
The woman went to the bar and returned with two shot glasses.
“My cousin married an American,” she said, taking the seat across the table from him. It was the first time she’d said more than a few words to him, the first time she’d joined him, and he didn’t mind the company. She poured them each a few ounces of the vodka.
“Nice guy?” Lance said.
She made a face. “He was old.”
Lance looked out the window again. His building was across the street, a nineteenth-century tenement with a door that opened onto the sidewalk and a staircase leading to eight units on four floors. His was on the third floor. The back overlooked a brick courtyard with a fire escape.
He’d seen the apartment advertised on a handwritten notice, posted on a bus stop not far from where they were. He called the landlord, arranged to meet in person, and paid in cash for three months.
He needed a place to lay low for a few weeks. He wanted to let the dust settle before leaving Moscow. It always paid to tie up loose ends. Often after a job, something would crawl out of the woodwork that you didn’t want to let fester.
Lance had always been thorough, and even now, when he no longer considered himself an employee of the US government, he couldn’t let that old discipline lapse.
But there was another reason he hadn’t left the city.
Tatyana.
She’d refused to leave with him. She said she had a contact, an informant she couldn’t leave behind, at least not without seeing her one last time.
Lance understood that. When an agent defected, it was a death sentence for those left behind. Warning them was the right thing. But only if you could do it safely.
“You’re risking your life,” he’d said.
Tatyana shook her head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“I have to warn her. I can’t abandon her.”
“Her?” Lance said.
Tatyana shook her head. “Just a few days,” she said. “Then we’ll leave. I promise.”
“The entire GRU is after you, Tatyana.”
“I know that, but I can’t hang this girl out to dry. I won’t. She’s …”.
“She’s what?”
“She’s … special.”
Lance dropped it. He needed the time anyway. His leg was healing, and a few more days would help.
He’d rented the apartment with the idea he and Tatyana would stay together, but she refused.
“They’re after me,” she said. “You’ll be safer if I’m not around.”
“My leg’s fine,” Lance said.
“It’s not fine
,” she said.
He eventually agreed to her renting a room at a nearby hotel. She’d been there three nights, and unknown to her, he made a habit of checking on her.
He looked at the bartender across the table. She was leaning forward like she was ready to pounce.
“You don’t like older guys?” he said.
She held his eye and knocked back her shot. Her cigarette dangled precariously from her fingers, and she brought it to her mouth like Lauren Bacall trying to seduce Humphrey Bogart.
“I prefer younger,” she said.
4
Lance left the bar and walked the two blocks to Tatyana’s hotel. It was a seedy place with a strip club on the ground floor, the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, and a few middle-aged, down-on-their-luck dancers shaking their tits around.
Tatyana knew Lance’s apartment was close by, she’d chosen the hotel for that reason, but she had no idea he came by at night to check on her.
Lance was uncomfortable with the risks she was taking. She should have fled the city as soon as she killed Aralov. Moscow was no place for traitors. The entire GRU was hunting her.
But she insisted on getting word to one of her informants and refused to leave until it was done. She wasn’t the type to let a contact go down without a fight.
It kept Lance up at night. He was sure she was accessing the GRU database. In her position, he’d do the same thing. There were records to delete, sources to protect. You didn’t just walk away without cleaning house, without burning your files.
Not if you wanted your closest contacts to go on breathing.
Not if you wanted a chance at surviving life on the outside.
You had to lay the groundwork for your escape. You had to keep your network intact. You had to be able to continue the fight.
What Tatyana was doing was saving lives all over the globe.
But she was also putting herself at incredible risk.
Every time she accessed the system, she opened a window that an agency hacker, if he was lucky, if he was in the right place at the right time, could use to track her right back to her hotel room. No amount of IP masking could protect you if they found an access socket that was still open.
There was no doubt about it, whatever she was up to was dangerous enough that she refused to stay in the apartment with him.
If she kept it up, they would find her.
And when they found her, they’d send an assassin.
As he walked down the street, he kept an eye on the cars parked by the sidewalk. His first night out, he memorized every license plate on the block. Every night since, he kept note of which cars were new. There were usually a few he didn’t recognize, and tonight was no different.
He’d seen enough GRU assassinations to know what to watch for.
They would come at night. Usually, they would send a lone gunman, but in Tatyana’s case, because of her training, they might send more. The operation would be crude. They were inside Russia, which meant there was no risk of a diplomatic incident.
There would be no attempt to disguise what had happened.
Tatyana was a traitor, and the Russian government was very clear about what happened to people like her. They wouldn’t be subtle. The police, and the local press, would find a body riddled with bullets and a hotel room splattered in blood.
He walked briskly, hurrying his pace.
It was a little after midnight when he reached the hotel. He tipped the night watchman, which he always did, and went up to the second floor. He walked quietly to Tatyana’s door and listened.
What he heard was the unmistakable sound of two people having sex. The headboard thudded rhythmically against the wall, and a man grunted and groaned like a glutton on the first bite. He prayed she hadn’t been reckless enough to call someone she knew. That would be suicide, she knew better than that, but love made people do strange things.
No.
She wasn’t like that.
She was a smooth operator, all business.
There was no man in her life.
He’d have known if there was.
This was someone new. Someone she’d only just met. One of the creeps from downstairs. A guy with a beer gut, bad breath, and a wife and kids.
He shook his head and kept walking. He’d already spent more time thinking about it than it deserved. He told himself it was the recklessness of it that bothered him, but he knew better.
He went back to the bar and lit a cigarette. A topless bartender asked him what he wanted. He ordered a beer. He didn’t drink it, just held it in front of him and watched the dancers do their thing. One or two girls came to speak to him, but he wasn’t feeling chatty.
No one stuck to the rules all the time. It wasn’t possible. There really did come a point when slipping out for a drink, or ordering room service, or letting a stranger into your bed, was worth the risk. He knew of operatives, highly-trained, ruthless, killing machines, who were dead because they’d given in to the temptation of a Dominos pizza, or a pack of cigarettes, or in one case, the crossword section of the New York Times.
Every mark slipped up eventually.
Every person on the run went to a convenience store, or a restaurant, or a movie theater.
That was why the GRU, the CIA, and every other spy agency spent so much time teaching their assassins one lesson.
Patience.
Nine times out of ten, it wasn’t a question of who could move faster, or who could hit harder, or whose aim was sharper. It was a question of who could wait longer.
This indiscretion didn’t make Tatyana a bad agent. It made her human.
She was on the run, still in Moscow while defecting to the American side, risking her life to protect an asset, and she still couldn’t sit tight for three nights without going down to the hotel bar to pick up.
Lance was self-aware enough to know he was human himself. What he felt now wasn’t a cold, calculated, professional risk-assessment. It was plain old jealousy.
Nothing crazy. He and Tatyana weren’t lovers.
But he wondered what kind of man she’d brought up with her. Who made the cut? Who got to see the inside of her room?
She’d said staying in the apartment with him was too risky, but then she did this. Maybe if she’d stayed with him, he’d be the one in bed with her right now. Maybe that was the real reason she was at the hotel.
One thing was clear. It didn’t say much about his powers of seduction.
After thirty minutes, he went back upstairs and listened by the door again. He could hear them talking, their voices muffled, Tatyana and her man, her lover. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tone told him it was relaxed, idle, meaningless.
He felt like a voyeur at the door, and went down the corridor to the small alcove that served as a common area. It had an ice machine, a coffee machine, a vending machine with a few snacks. He put some money in the coffee machine and watched it spit out a cappuccino in a small plastic cup.
He took a sip and grimaced.
There was a chair, and he sat on it, leaning back against the ice machine at an angle that gave him an oblique view down the corridor. He wanted to watch the man leave, but after an hour it still hadn’t happened, and Lance began nodding off.
He was tired. Sleeping had been difficult the first few nights in the apartment because of his leg.
He woke with a start to see someone kicking in Tatyana’s door. His vision focused just in time to see a single man in black extend a gun in front of him and step into the room.
5
Tatyana stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror, examining the fine lines around her eyes, telling herself they weren’t a sign of aging.
Life was cruel. She wasn’t even thirty.
She’d been lying asleep next to some guy she’d picked up in the club downstairs. It was a seedy place, and he wasn’t her type, but she’d needed the release.
She felt a chill and threw on a t-shirt that was hanging on the towel rack. She
’d have liked to get rid of the man in her bed, she was done with him, but she supposed that would be unladylike.
He also warmed the bed, which in this hotel was something not to be thrown out lightly. She was about to go back to him when she heard movement in the corridor outside the room. She listened at the bathroom door, motionless, holding her breath. The bedroom door crashed open. The sound was followed by the six heavy thuds of suppressed bullets hitting flesh.
They’d found her.
She was unarmed, her gun was in the room beneath her bed, and she had no idea who was out there. She heard the floorboards creak as someone entered the room, and her instincts took over.
She silently wrapped a towel around her fist, ran to the window, punched out the thin pane of glass, and leaped through it.
She already knew there was a deep snowbank beneath her window, and she hit it hard. She rolled and was on the ground in an instant, the snow searing her feet.
She was halfway across the parking lot when the gunfire started. A man at the bathroom window was shooting at her. He’d discarded the silenced PSS, and the cracks rang out loudly in the still night.
Tatyana was a trained professional, and she’d scouted her escape route in advance, but she’d been caught, quite literally, with her pants down.
The gunfire stopped, and she didn’t have to look back to know she was being chased.
From the lack of cover fire, she guessed the assassin was alone.
Across the parking lot was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. She knew where it was loose against the support posts and could be pulled aside. She grabbed the fence and slid through it, disappearing into the brush on the other side.
She didn’t know how close behind her pursuer was. She couldn’t hear him. She was unarmed, almost naked, and couldn’t afford the luxury of looking over her shoulder to check.
The ground sloped downward toward a railway track, and she slid down the hill, getting cut and scratched by the brush.
She ran along the track and leaped down the slope on the other side toward a six-foot cinder block wall covered in graffiti. She pulled herself to the top, and as she lowered herself on the other side, turned and looked back up the slope. A well-built man was emerging from the brush back up the track. He stopped and pointed his gun at her.