by Saul Herzog
“The YouTube guy?” the man spat. “I’m the biggest independent media outlet in the nation.”
Roth nodded.
The man was a political commentator. He broadcast online and on the radio from a high-powered transmitter he’d set up on a ranch somewhere in West Texas. Strongly anti-government, he propounded several conspiracy theories that had steadily been gaining traction among certain segments of the population.
“I guess an election year’s a bad time to be in your line of work,” Roth said.
“Free speech in this country is a hoax,” the man said. “A thing of the past. We live in a fascist state now.”
The man’s arms were covered in tattoos.
“You served?” Roth said.
“You bet your ass I served,” the man said, pulling back his sleeve.
It was a tattoo Roth had seen countless times before. An eagle holding a Semper Fidelis banner.
“I guess you’re what passes for a domestic terrorist these days,” Roth said.
“It’s a crock of horse shit,” the man said.
Roth nodded. He agreed with him. He knew that man was there because of his ability to sway voters, nothing more.
“You pissed off the wrong pencil-pusher,” Roth said.
“How’s this even legal?”
Roth sighed. “Legal’s what they say is legal,” he said.
Gone were the days when the CIA kept clear of domestic affairs. These days, whether you were in Basra, or Boise, once they set their sights on you, there was nothing you could do.
Roth knew better than anyone why it happened and how, but that didn’t mean he liked it.
They heard more footsteps approaching.
“This bench is going to get cozy,” Roth said.
But when the guards appeared, they weren’t escorting another prisoner. They were escorting an attractive blonde in a black blazer, black skirt, and black heels.
In one hand, she carried a black leather briefcase, and in the other, a large, plastic Starbucks cup with some kind of frappé in it.
“Sandra Shrader,” Roth said. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see you.”
67
Laurel pored over the drone feeds. The street in front of Lance’s apartment was quiet. It was late. There was no traffic to speak of. The weather was abysmal, but the snow on the ground made it very easy for the sensors to pick up heat signatures. A cat in the alley next to the building showed up clear as day.
Her phone beeped, and she picked it up.
It was Roth.
“You’re out.”
“Sandra came to get me.”
“There’s a long story there,” Laurel said.
“She’s been catching me up,” Roth said. “Who else knows about the situation with her daughter?”
“Apart from me and Tatyana, no one.”
“Perfect,” Roth said.
Laurel could practically hear the gears in his mind at work, figuring out how he would use this situation to his best advantage. It wasn’t every day that leverage over the director of the NSA fell into his lap. He’d be using it for years to come.
“I’ve already spoken to the president,” he said. “The warrants against you and Tatyana have been dropped.”
“That’s a relief. Tatyana could use a doctor.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Another long story,” Laurel said.
“All right,” Roth said, “well, I got the president to agree to an extension of your mandate.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can go over the details later,” Roth said, “but it looks like he’s going to sign off on the Special Operations Group acting completely outside CIA authority.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means more power,” Roth said, “and if you check your satellite feeds, you’ll see that you’ve already been given full access to all NSA, DoD, and even NASA resources.”
“Holy cow,” Laurel said, typing the coordinates of the apartment in Kapotnya into NASA’s high definition network.
“Nice, ey?” Roth said.
“Very.”
“You also have the ability to grant your own top-level clearances,” Roth said. “Tatyana, her sister, whoever you want, you can bring in without going through the CIA’s red tape.”
“The president said yes to that.”
“I learned a long time ago,” Roth said, “that the best time to ask someone for something was right after they learned they’d just fucked you.”
“It sounds like he gave you everything you wanted.”
“Everything we wanted, Laurel.”
She nodded. If the Group had been granted full access to everything on Roth’s wishlist, it was going to be the most formidable, battle-ready, and well-resourced intelligence asset in the history of espionage.
“All we need now is Lance to come back into the fold,” Laurel said.
She heard the hesitance in Roth’s voice. “We’ll have to see about that,” he said. “In the meantime, I want visuals on that apartment of his from every angle. If he so much as opens a curtain, I want to be able to see his hand move.”
“I’m requesting the additional satellites now,” she said.
“Good,” Roth said, “and I just sent emails to the Pentagon and the White House bunker linking them to your control view.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I put my neck out, trying to convince everyone Lance was the most valuable asset this country ever produced. If he’s about to give us the people behind the bombing, I want everyone to have a front-row seat.”
Laurel’s new satellite feeds were coming online, and she zoomed in on a small park two blocks away from the apartment.
Three Russian military tactical vehicles, each capable of carrying its own discrete team, had gathered in the park.
“Looks like we’ve got contact,” Laurel said.
Three four-man teams got out of the vehicles and began making their way in tactical formation toward the apartment. Two teams headed for the front of the building, while the third approached the back, taking up overwatch positions.
“Do we have contact with Lance?” Roth said.
“I already notified him,” Laurel said. “Eight men from the front. Four at the back.”
“Good,” Roth said. “Make sure this footage is patched through to the Pentagon and White House. I want those pencil-pushers to see why I stand by this guy.”
68
Lance sat with Larissa by the window of the bar. It was the seat he’d been in the first time he saw her. She’d pulled up in her beat-up Volkswagen, and nothing had been the same since.
Outside, the infrequent traffic plowed through yet another snowstorm.
Lance looked at her. The first time he saw her, he thought she was a prostitute. He couldn’t understand now how he’d ever imagined that. She was constitutionally incapable of giving up that much of herself.
She glanced up at him.
“Can I get you anything?” he said.
She looked at the empty coffee cup in front of her. “To be honest, I wouldn’t mind something a little stronger.”
He smiled. “The first rule of being an operative,” he said, “is no drinking on the job.”
“I’m not an operative,” she said. “And besides, I’ve seen James Bond. He has enough vodka in his martini to feed an army battalion.”
“One-hundred-twenty milliseconds,” Lance said. “That’s how much time you lose after a single drink.”
“That doesn’t sound like very much.”
Lance shrugged. “It’s enough.”
“You think it will come down to that tonight?”
“To milliseconds?”
She nodded.
“I think it might.”
Larissa looked uneasy.
Lance got the waitress’s attention. “Two more coffees,” he said, holding up two fingers.
“One,” Larissa said to the waitress. “I’
ll have a glass of wine.”
“White or red?”
“Red,” Larissa said, then looking at Lance, “You don’t know Russian women. We have more tolerance than you think.”
Lance nodded. “I won’t argue with that.”
Larissa leaned toward the window and looked up at the building across the street. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said. “The third window.”
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
“What do you mean, I don’t need to worry?”
“I promised your sister I’d keep you safe.”
“Armed men are coming to kill you,” she said.
Lance sighed.
“What did you think?” she said. “That I’d just sit this out?”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to put you in harm’s way.”
“At least let me do something.”
He took a sip of his coffee.
“Lance,” she said, “I didn’t come this far to watch you get killed.”
The waitress came over with the wine. Larissa took a big sip.
Lance looked out the window.
“Under the table,” he said.
She looked at him blankly. “Excuse me?”
He touched her knee, and she realized he was passing her a pistol.
“That’s a loaded Yarygin pistol,” he said. “Standard Russian military issue. Seventeen rounds.”
“Seventeen bullets?”
“You ever used one?”
“Once or twice,” she said.
“Make sure the safety is off.”
“I know.”
“Hold it firmly.”
“I remember how to use it.”
“Watch the apartment window from here. I’ll signal you when I need you to create a distraction.”
“What’s the signal?”
“I’ll turn the lights on and off three times.”
“What sort of distraction?”
“Come out onto the sidewalk, aim at the window, and fire until you hit it.”
“That’s it?”
“It will buy me some time,” Lance said, “but you’ll need to get the hell out of here after you do it. Make some noise, then walk away.”
“Walk away?”
“Hold the pistol close to your leg. Don’t draw attention. Don’t run. Don’t look back. Just walk.”
“Where?”
“You know the hotel we passed on the way in?”
“The one with the strip club?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you at the bar there after the gunfight.”
“All right.”
“Just sit there and wait.”
“I’ll wait.”
“If I don’t show…”.
“You’ll show,” she said.
He reached into his coat and pulled out an envelope. It contained cash in US dollars and Russian rubles.
She shook her head.
“Take it,” he said. “You’ll need it.”
Reluctantly she took it and put it inside her coat.
“Okay,” Lance said.
Larissa looked down at her wine gravely.
“Not so thirsty now?” he said, sipping his coffee.
She shook her head.
Lance reached out and took her hand. “Listen to me,” he said. “If anyone follows you when you leave here, you have to shoot them. Do you understand?”
She looked at him for a moment before nodding.
“They’ll look like security forces. They might tell you they’re going to arrest you or something. You can’t let them do that.”
“I know,” she said.
“You have to look innocent. Look sweet. And when they get close, draw your weapon and shoot.”
She nodded.
“No warnings, just shoot.”
“I’ll do it.”
“They won’t be expecting it. That gives you an advantage.”
She nodded, but her eyes were wide with fear.
He squeezed her hand.
Using her to create a distraction might make the difference, but he was putting her at risk. If anything happened to him, they’d scour the neighborhood for her.
“Anyone comes at you,” he said, “use the pistol.”
He finished his coffee and was about to order another when a beep came from the burner phone.
“Go time,” he said.
69
Lance read the message on his way up the stairs.
Eight men from the front. Four at the back.
He entered the apartment and went straight to the back window. There was a courtyard behind the building. It was empty, and the only way to access it was through the building on the other side. He scanned the windows and balconies of those buildings and knew the team at the back would occupy positions to block off escape.
There were ways he could draw them out, but he didn’t have time.
It was the eight men approaching from the front he was worried about. They would come from both ends of the street and enter through the front door.
They were also the ones who were a threat to Larissa. He had no intention of getting her to create a diversion, that was just his way of getting her to stay in the bar, but that didn’t mean she was completely safe. Anything could happen down there, and after the diversion she’d created at the embassy, he had little doubt the Russians were onto her.
He went to the living room and looked down at the street. Larissa’s silhouette was in the bar window. She was sitting, watching. At intervals, her hand brought her glass to her mouth.
He made a last-minute decision.
She was too vulnerable. He was too far away.
He needed to be on the ground floor.
He had planned to take the men in the apartment, the layout was good for an ambush, but he hadn’t counted on there being eight of them on the street.
Eight was too many. Some would come up the stairs, but they’d leave at least two outside watching the front of the building.
Once the fighting started, there was no telling how it would go down. If Larissa came out of that bar with her gun, for whatever reason, they would kill her.
It would be safer to kill the men outside first, then follow the rest of the men up to the apartment.
He grabbed two silenced Beretta M9 pistols. They were chambered in the 9x19 Parabellum, and each carried fifteen rounds. He then went back down to the ground floor and hid in a corner of the hallway behind the stairs.
He placed a small mirror on the ground, positioned to see what was happening at the door, and waited.
It was another five minutes before anyone came to the door. They used an electronic lock pick to get in quietly, and in the mirror, he counted six men enter the narrow hallway.
They were from the president’s own Special Operations Force, an elite unit Lance had encountered before around Raqqa and Palmyra in Syria. They were among the best-trained units he’d ever come across. They carried PYa handguns like the one he’d given Larissa, and Vityaz submachine guns. Two of them had AK-105s, which were essentially carbine versions of the AK-47.
He knew their hand signals. Four would go straight for the stairs. Two would clear the lower levels behind them.
That meant there were two men still out on the street, and they were the ones he worried about.
He knew just how easily a life could be ended. The lightest touch of a trigger. The release of a spring. The strike of hammer on primer.
Firing a bullet was about as complicated as striking a match.
But once it left the barrel, all the prayers under God’s blue sky couldn’t pull it back into the chamber.
The two men on the ground floor were coming his way.
He waited. He could hear the other four on the landing above him.
At the very last second, staying as low to the ground as he could, he peered out from behind the stairs and shot both approaching soldiers in the knees. Before their heads hit the ground, they each contained anoth
er bullet between the eyes.
Above him, the other four continued up the stairs. There was a brief pause and then the explosion of a flash-bang grenade. In a matter of seconds, they would realize he wasn’t in the apartment.
He ran to the front door, kicked it open, and rolled to a position behind the nearest parked car. Two soldiers were out there, one on the sidewalk by the open door of the building, the other in the middle of the street looking up at the apartment window.
Lance had a pistol in each hand and pointed them at the man by the door. He pulled both triggers while the man was swinging in his direction.
The man hit the ground at the same moment the second opened fire. Sustained fire from a submachine gun ripped through the row of cars along the sidewalk, shattering glass and popping tires in a ten-yard arc in front of the soldier.
Lance only had seconds to do something, the soldiers upstairs would have a clear line of sight on him, but he was pinned in place. The seconds passed like eons, and then the distinctive pop of a pistol shot brought the fire to an abrupt halt.
Lance rose from behind the car. The soldier lay dead on the ground, a halo of blood in the snow by his head.
Across the street, by the door of the bar, Larissa stood with her gun extended in front of her, frozen in shock.
Lance didn’t understand. She was supposed to be inside. Even before it happened, he saw in his mind what happened next.
A hail of bullets came from the window of the apartment. The glass at the front of the bar shattered into a thousand pieces. In the chaos, the only thing he was aware of was Larissa’s slight frame, falling to the ground with the excruciating drama of a slow-motion movie sequence.
70
Larissa fell to the ground as the world around her shattered. Glass fell like the sudden downpour of a storm. Chips of wood and concrete flew through the air. By the time the gunfire ceased, the bar was so thick with dust and smoke that she could barely see. The palms of her hands were cut from glass. Her ears rang as if a fire alarm was going off inside her head.
And she’d killed a man.
In all the chaos and confusion, that one fact stood out in her mind like a beacon.