by Saul Herzog
As the dust cleared, she could see out into the street where the soldier lay on the ground. He was facing her, and his cold, lifeless eyes stared at her as if looking into her soul.
She looked around for Lance but didn’t see him.
She just had time to register that the shooting in the street had stopped when more gunfire came from inside the apartment building.
She made an effort to focus.
The hotel.
That was where she was to meet him.
Walk away, he’d told her. Don’t run. Don’t look back. Wait at the bar.
But as her senses came slowly back to her, she became aware of something new. The sound of screaming. Someone in the bar was hurt.
Larissa got up and moved through the dust in the direction of the screams. The power had gone out, and it was difficult to see. Shards of glass crunched under her feet. She took a few steps toward the center of the bar and crouched down.
It was the waitress. She’d been hit in the neck, and blood coursed from the wound in time to her weakening pulse. The crimson blood spread across the ground in an expanding pool.
Larissa held the woman’s face in her hands and said, “Everything’s going to be all right.”
She knew it wasn’t. The woman was going to die. She knew it, and the woman knew it.
She looked up at Larissa and stopped screaming. A flash of recognition crossed her face, and she said, “Your man brought this.”
Larissa was taken aback.
The life in the woman’s eyes was fading by the second, but the way she was looking at Larissa made her blood shiver.
Larissa wanted to tell her that Lance wasn’t her man, that she didn’t think he was capable of belonging to anyone, and the woman, even as her breath grew weaker and weaker, forced herself to say more.
“There’s a darkness around him,” the woman said. “A cloud, the smell of blood, it’s the weight of the wolf who knows it has killed too much, and too freely.”
Larissa nodded. She knew what the woman was saying was true. There was a sadness to Lance’s actions, a detachment, as if he was no longer part of the world he fought for, like there was nothing at stake for him in the fight.
He lived his life like it was a sentence that had to be served.
Larissa had once heard that in order for the KGB interrogators to torture their victims, they first had to be subjected to the most brutal tortures themselves. For them to be able to inflict that kind of pain on others, it had to first be allowed to get inside them, to tear their souls apart, to stamp out the empathy and compassion that would otherwise stop them from doing their job to the degree necessary.
Larissa saw now that the same was true for assassins.
For killers.
Whether they were Russian or American, it made no difference. For them to take life so readily, they first had to die themselves.
Larissa also knew that was a group to which she now belonged. She’d taken a life.
She held the woman as she took her final breaths, and when her life finally left her, it seemed as if it floated away like a falling leaf from a tree.
Larissa’s eyes filled with tears.
The woman was gone.
And then a voice from behind her broke the spell.
“Get up,” a man said.
She turned to see a soldier, blood pouring from his forehead, pointing his gun at her.
71
Lance entered the building and scanned the hallway. When he was sure it was clear, he made his way to the stairs, carefully checking the landing above as he climbed the steps. The second floor was clear, but as he made his way to the next level, a bullet struck the staircase’s wooden handrail, missing him by inches.
Lance swung behind the banister and fired upward without seeing the shooter.
When a flash bang grenade came down the staircase, he crouched, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands.
He heard the bang and then fired in the direction of the stairs without being able to see through the smoke.
He heard a body sliding down the stairs.
He stepped toward it and put another bullet in the head, then crouched down and took a flash-bang from the man’s belt. He continued up to the next level.
This was the apartment’s level, and he could see the doorway, which had been smashed open. He approached cautiously. Three men were still unaccounted for, and they would have heard the fight downstairs.
They would be waiting just inside the apartment, ready to ambush him. He dropped to his knee, fired three shots at the wall next to the doorway, and a soldier slumped to the ground behind it. He shot the man again in the head and rolled to his right in time to dodge a spray of return fire.
The bullets kept coming, and he had to retreat as far as the staircase. He descended a few steps and threw the flash-bang he’d taken from the dead soldier through the door of the apartment.
He waited for it to go off, then ran for the doorway, diving into the apartment. While still in midair, he knew there was a man behind him, running for the door.
He turned and fired two shots, hitting the ground hard on his back as he landed.
The man who’d been running fell to the ground, and Lance got up and went to him. He was badly injured, one of the bullets in his shoulder, the other in his knee.
Lance restrained him and took his guns.
“Where’s the other guy?” Lance said, scanning the room.
Apart from the injured man’s breathing, the room was silent.
Lance dragged the man across the room to where a heating pipe ran along the floor and restrained him with his own cuffs. He searched him, taking from him anything he might use to escape, including the keys to the cuffs.
“Try to escape, and you die,” Lance said.
“You’re too late,” the man said.
“What does that mean?”
The man laughed. “You’ll see,” he said.
Lance put his gun against the man’s knee and said, “There should be one more of you. Where’s the other guy?”
The man laughed again, and Lance pulled the trigger, sending a bullet into his knee. He writhed in agony while Lance cleared the apartment. The last soldier wasn’t there.
His mind went immediately to Larissa.
He picked up the soldier’s assault rifle and ran to the window.
Outside, he could see the eighth soldier. He was standing in the bar, pointing his gun at someone.
Lance had no doubt it was Larissa the gun was pointed at.
He took a moment to aim, inhaled slowly, and just as he breathed out, let his finger depress the trigger. The gun fired, and a split second later, the soldier fell to the ground, dead.
Lance prayed Larissa was still safe and that she would make her way to the hotel, but he didn’t have time to watch.
According to the message from Laurel, four more men were still at the back of the building. The gunfire would have drawn them out of their positions, and they’d be making their way toward him.
He went to the bedroom, from where he could see the courtyard behind the building, but as he entered the room, he saw a soldier in the process of climbing in through the window.
Lance fired three shots and shoved him back out. There was another soldier on the fire escape, and Lance quickly pulled back inside as a bullet struck the window frame.
He drew his handgun, reached out the window, and fired blindly. Then he looked around and aimed with his second gun, hitting the man twice in the head.
Below in the courtyard, the final two soldiers were in retreat. They provided themselves with undirected cover fire, and Lance slung the rifle from his shoulder, aimed at the first and then the second, and took them both out.
He took a breath.
He could already hear sirens in the distance and knew more special forces operatives would be there within minutes. He didn’t have much time.
He went back to the living room where the soldier still lay cuffed to the pipe. He’d lost a
lot of blood and was beginning to slip out of consciousness.
Lance bent down and tapped him on the face to wake him up.
“Ambulances are on the way,” he said.
The man nodded.
“I don’t know if you have a family, but if you want to be alive when the ambulances get here, you have to talk right now.”
“Go to hell,” the man said.
“That’s fine,” Lance said. “You have thirteen dead comrades here. If you want to join them, you have thirty seconds to make up your mind. I’ll wait.”
Lance stepped back and sat on the sofa. He started a timer on his watch and looked at the man.
The man said nothing.
Lance shrugged. He got up and went to the window, making sure the street was still clear. He would leave through the back but would have to go soon if he didn’t want to encounter more trouble.
“All right,” he said when the timer went off. “Make peace with your God because you’re about to meet him.”
He raised his gun and pointed it at the man’s face.
“Wait,” the soldier said at the very last second.
“Who sent you?” Lance said. “That’s all I need to know.”
“The albino sent us,” the man said.
“Who is the albino?”
“I don’t know who he is. No one knows who he is. He’s a ghost. A chimera. He appears and disappears as he pleases, and answers only to the president.”
The sirens were getting closer.
“Everyone leaves some sort of trail.”
“This man stays out of sight. He stays out of the sun. It burns his skin. Even if you scoured the entire city with your drones and satellites, you’d never find him.”
“Then how would I find him?”
“You have to get close to him. You have to be where he is. You need someone on the inside.”
“Tell me how I do that,” Lance said.
“He works out of the Lubyanka,” the soldier said. “You can get to him there.”
“That’s a lie. We checked the FSB databases a thousand times. He doesn’t exist.”
“Of course he doesn’t exist. He doesn’t work for the FSB. The FSB works for him. He uses the Lubyanka building as cover because he can get in and out.”
“We’ve been watching the Lubyanka round the clock. If he came in or went out, we’d have seen him.”
“No you wouldn’t,” the man said. “He comes and goes by a private entrance underground. He has his own elevator. His office is on the top floor, and the floor is completely sealed off from the rest of the building.”
The sirens were so close now that Lance couldn’t delay any longer. He had to leave.
There’d been a triage kit among the man’s things, and Lance gave it to him.
Then he left.
72
It felt strange to be returning to Tatyana’s hotel. He remembered vividly the night she’d been attacked and knew it was a place already on the GRU’s radar.
When he arrived, there was no bouncer at the door. The place was quiet, almost deserted. Inside, a single dancer performed for a handful of men. Larissa was at the bar, her back to the stage, a drink in front of her.
Lance saw that she was drinking straight vodka as he sat next to her. He let her knock back her shot.
There was blood on her coat and hands.
“Did I ever tell you what I did before I met you?” she said.
Her hand was shaking.
He knew how she was feeling. No one ever forgot the first time they took a life. It would stay with her forever, a ghost in the shadows of the mind.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“That waitress is dead.”
“Waitress?”
“The lady at the bar who flirted with you. She got hit.”
“I’m sorry,” Lance said.
“She said you brought it,” Larissa said. “You brought the storm. You carried it with you like a curse.”
Lance nodded.
“Those soldiers,” Larissa said. “The one I…,” she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“You can’t think about them,” Lance said.
“They were ordinary men, with ordinary lives. Wives, maybe. Children, maybe.”
“They were soldiers,” Lance said. “That’s all we can let them be.”
“One of them was standing right in front of me,” Larissa said. “He wasn’t more than ten feet from me.”
Her voice cracked.
“I’m sorry,” Lance said again.
He got the bartender’s attention and ordered two more shots. They didn’t have time for it, but Larissa was in shock.
The bartender poured two shots, and Lance paid him. There was blood on both of their clothes and the sirens could be heard on every street for miles around. Lance counted out about a hundred dollars worth of notes and put the money on the bar.
They knocked back their shots, and Lance said, “We can’t stay here. Tatyana stayed here, and they came for her.”
“They sent an assassin.”
Lance nodded.
“Like you.”
He nodded again.
“But you stopped him.”
He got up, but she remained seated. She stared at the empty shot glass in front of her.
The first time wasn’t easy. He knew it. She’d have flashbacks for years. She’d have dreams, nightmares, so real she wouldn’t be able to tell them from reality.
“She said something to me,” Larissa said.
“Who did?”
“The waitress from the bar.”
“Oh?” Lance said.
Larissa hesitated, searching for the right words, then said, “She said that you’re a wolf who’s tasted too much blood.”
Lance nodded. He looked at the bartender. There was a phone on the bar. It wouldn’t be long before the doors burst open, and soldiers poured into the hotel.
“We need to go,” he said to Larissa, putting his hand awkwardly on her shoulder.
She pulled away from him.
“Call a cab,” Lance said to the bartender.
They went outside, and Larissa lit a cigarette. Lance put his arm around her and pulled her into him as some police cars sped by, sirens blazing.
When the cab arrived, he told the driver to take them to the closest metro station.
They got out at the metro station, and Lance immediately hailed another cab, getting the driver to take them to the next metro station.
“What are we doing?” Larissa said.
“Hiding our tracks,” Lance said.
He told her to take off her coat, which had blood on it, and they left it behind.
They paid each driver in cash, and when they got out at the next station, they got in a third cab, which he let take them all the way downtown.
The albino would be expecting that. He wouldn’t know what the soldier had told Lance, but the bullet in his knee would confirm that he’d been questioned, and the fact he was alive would indicate he’d talked.
Wherever he was, he’d have his guard up now. He’d just walked into a trap, and he knew it.
He knew he was being hunted.
They got out of the cab at a busy plaza on the Garden Ring, and Lance looked around for the cheapest looking hotel he could find. The cheaper the hotel, the less computerized their systems.
They were in the albino’s territory now, and he knew they were coming for him.
He chose a nondescript hotel down a side street with shutters on the windows and gas heaters outside so that people could sit on the patio in winter.
He brought Larissa into the lobby, and they got a room using false identification papers. Once upstairs, he told her to have a shower and wash off the blood.
When she came out, she dressed and sat on the side of the bed while he had a shower of his own.
Lance came out of the shower to find her asleep on the bed, two little bottles of vodka from the minibar empty on the side table next to her.
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He pulled out the burner phone he’d been using to make contact with Laurel and typed out a message.
Got a lead on the albino. Need satellite surveillance and schematics on the Lubyanka.
He clicked send and turned off the phone. Then he removed the SIM from the back of the phone and took a lighter from his pocket. He held the SIM over the flame until it began to melt, then threw it in the toilet and flushed it.
He let Larissa sleep for thirty minutes, then woke her.
They went back down to the lobby and left the hotel. They walked a few blocks, hailed another cab, and took it right to the district of the Lubyanka.
It was Larissa’s home territory, close to where she worked every day, and she knew it well.
“We need a hotel, small, not a chain. Someplace you’ve never stayed before.”
She knew of a place, not dissimilar from the first hotel, and they got a room.
When they got upstairs, Larissa collapsed on the bed and seemed to be asleep instantly.
There was a sofa by the window, and Lance moved it in front of the door. The room was on the fourth floor. It was as safe as they were going to get.
73
Roth hadn’t been back to the White House since the ambush in the Roosevelt Room, and he straightened his tie before entering the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” he said, “thank you for seeing me.”
“Of course, Levi.”
It was late, the president was in a gown and slippers, the fire was lit, and Roth was glad to see that a bottle of port was open on the table.
The president was on the sofa by the fire and rose to his feet.
“Please, sir,” Roth said, indicating for him to remain seated.
“Roth,” the president said, “my predecessors would be ashamed if they knew how I treated you.”
“Not at all, sir. You were doing what you thought was best.”
“I was a fool, Roth, and I apologize again for my misjudgment.”
They went over to the fire, and the president poured two glasses of the port. It was a Flagman’s Colheita, the name carefully stenciled on the bottle by hand.
“Delicious,” Roth said, taking a sip.