by Trevor Scott
As Zukov entered Viktor’s office, two other men left and went out into the main entrance area.
“Have a seat,” Viktor said. He sat behind his large metal desk with two LCD screens. One had a constant feed of the cameras around the building. The other was hitched up to high speed internet access.
Zukov sat in a hard wood and leather chair, his eyes on his boss.
“Vladimir Volkov is dead.”
“Where was he found?” Zukov asked, not restraining his surprise. He had the hit notice out on this man for the past two weeks and nobody was able to find him.
“Baden-Baden.”
“Is it confirmed?”
Viktor turned his monitor for Zukov to see. There were photos of the crime scene from German Polizei, along with a report on the incident, which he quickly read.
“Two others dead?” Zukov asked, leaning back into his chair. “Do you guess that was collateral damage?”
“Collateral to someone. But we got a claim of responsibility.”
Zukov was confused. “Who are the others killed?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Viktor said. “This was an open assignment to the highest bidder. We might have had two teams get there at the same time. It’s more likely that Vladimir Volkov got off a few shots.”
Shaking his head, Zukov said, “The Polizei report says there was another shooter there.”
Viktor smiled. “Good catch. Watch this.” He clicked on a video link on the computer, which showed a man with a gun at the side of his leg walking out of a building. The video was crude and dark.
When the video was done Zukov said, “So that’s our shooter. He claimed responsibility?”
“Yes. Calls himself Remus?”
Zukov laughed. “Of Roman lore?”
“Apparently.”
“Something bothering you?”
“Yeah. You get a feeling about these things. I’m going to send Nikolai on this meeting.”
“Are you sure? Will his old BMW even make it there? He’s had engine problems. He needs to steal a newer one next time.”
“He’ll be fine. You go as backup. But only observe from a distance. Do not shoot him.”
This was out of character for Viktor. He’d always let him handle these claim meetings.
“You have a problem with this, Zuk?”
“It’s my job, Viktor.”
“Nikolai needs the experience.”
“He’s right out of the Army.”
“He’s twenty-five. He spent time in Chechnya. It’s my decision.”
“Is something wrong with my work?”
Viktor leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. “I thought we agreed to dump the bodies without identification,” he said directly. It wasn’t a question.
“Are you talking about the Turk? I made a mistake.”
“And the recent Polish man. Two mistakes? I could believe one but not two.”
They had gone over this earlier in the evening. Zukov was burning inside now. He didn’t like explaining his actions to anyone. Which is why this assignment in Berlin had been so good for him. He could maintain a certain level of autonomy.
“All right,” Zukov finally said. “As you know, I’ve been having a little fun with the local Polizei.”
Shaking his head side to side, Viktor said, “I thought that might be the case. This isn’t chess, Zuk. What if the Polizei actually catch you?”
“I’ll be expelled.”
“And what will Moscow do with you then?”
Perhaps Viktor had a good point. They could send him to far worse assignments. But it would have to be a place without diplomatic relations with Western nations, unless they gave him a complete change of identity.
“I understand,” Zukov said reticently.
“What do the Polizei know of these dead men?”
“Not much, I’m sure. None of the dead men have any ties to us. Have you found the American yet?”
Viktor grasped the arms on his chair. “Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time. He has the Austrian and German Polizei after him, an Interpol Red Notice on him, along with every hit man in Europe on his trail. His days are few.” A smile forced its way out the side of his mouth.
Zukov smiled with him, not knowing the real reason for the obsession his boss had with this man. Maybe some things were better that way. Secrets always made life more interesting.
“I’ll find this American,” Zukov said. “Anything else?”
Viktor’s eyes shifted to his computer and then back to Zukov. “Moscow wants us to accelerate.”
How much faster could they go? Any quicker and Russia and America would be in a real war together. “You mean General Tatyana Petrova.”
“Keep your mouth shut, Zuk,” Viktor spit out. “Only you and I know of her involvement.”
And they had no official orders for their current work. If they were caught, the good general would hang them all out to dry, like smoked fish on a Siberian line.
“I understand,” Zukov said. “But I would feel better with a fail-safe of some kind.”
Shaking his head, Viktor explained, “There are few guarantees in this business. Success is your only insurance.”
He knew that too. “Then I better find the American,” Zukov said.
Without another word, Anton Zukov left his boss alone and exited the office building. Sitting in his car for a moment, the rain coming down a little harder now, he considered the next meeting with this man who had killed Vladimir Volkov. The man had been a legend in the spy game. Part of him wished he could have found the man first and picked his brain. Found out all his secrets. That man had to have thousands of them. Maybe that’s why General Petrova had personally placed his name on the list. They were killing the past and building a future. He could live with that.
25
Waking the next morning in Bonn, Toni went to get Franz from his room to go down for breakfast. She was forced to knock a few times before a groggy Austrian Polizei man shuffled to the door. He looked like crap. There was no other way to say it. She went ahead of him to start on coffee, while Franz took a long shower to clear his lungs of infected sputum and blood. He was moving into a pneumonia, she could tell, and wasn’t sure what would kill the man first—that disease or cancer, which had sucked all vitality out of a man that had been brusque and burly just a few months ago.
Drinking coffee by herself at the hotel restaurant, Toni’s phone buzzed in her pocket and she picked up. She had just turned it on after going to wake Franz.
“Yeah.”
“Where the hell have you been?” It was her boss, Kurt Jenkins, the CIA director.
“Sleeping. What’s up?”
“Can you talk?”
“I’m at a hotel restaurant, but there’s only a few people here and they’re across the room. What you need?”
“A lot of activity last night,” Jenkins said. “A former KGB slash SVR officer was killed last night in Baden-Baden.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Vladimir Volkov.”
“Jesus. He practically ran the spy game in Germany during the Cold War. What was he doing in Baden-Baden.”
“Apparently retired.”
“How’d he die?”
“Don’t know. There were two others dead in the apartment.”
Toni’s mind immediately thought of Jake Adams. “Was Jake. . .”
“No. But he might have been there. The Polizei found about a dozen spent brass. Forty cal. Jake’s preferred round.”
“And you think Jake took out Vladimir Volkov.”
“No. He was killed by two shooters with nine millimeter silenced Yarygin PYa pistols.”
“Did the Polizei identified the shooters?”
“Not yet. Based on the guns they’re guessing Russian. Both were in their twenties. Could be GRU.”
“That makes no sense,” Toni said. She saw Franz enter the restaurant and go straight to a coffee machine. “Anything else?”
/> “Yeah. We searched Vladimir Volkov. He’s been retired in Germany for two years. We got a ping off the Russian’s computer in Frankfurt. Sergei. Volkov also had a one million Euro bounty on him.”
“Interesting.”
Franz sat down across from Toni, his cup spilling some coffee onto the table, which he wiped up after swearing.
“Someone there with you?” Jenkins asked.
“Yeah.”
“Franz Martini?”
“Yep.”
“You need to send him back to Austria.”
“Not yet. Anything else?”
“Maybe. Someone has asked to be paid for the hit of Volkov. I think you should intercept that. Maybe take credit for the hit yourself.” He went on to explain what he wanted her to do, giving her the details of the hit and the meet. When he was done, they both hung up.
“Sorry about that,” Toni said to Franz, stuffing her phone into her pocket.
“Work is work. Any good news from the Agency?”
She wasn’t sure how much she could tell Franz. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the man, but over the years she’d come to compartmentalize almost everything—much to the displeasure of her new husband, who had become increasingly frustrated with her job, even though he knew what he was getting into with her. Well, he knew she worked for the government, not the Agency.
Toni explained the hit in Baden-Baden. She left out the important details, though.
When she was done, Franz gave a little whistle. “Sounds like this goes much deeper,” Franz said. “So Jake isn’t alone.”
“Do we know what Anna was working on with Interpol?”
“As you know, I’m sure, she worked with The Public Safety and Terrorism Sub-Directorate.”
“That could cover a lot of things,” Toni assured him.
“I know. But I’m sure your friends at the Agency could find out more about her work.”
Toni raised a finger while she dug out her phone and called back the director, explaining what she needed. Jenkins said it could take some diplomacy and a few favors to get that information, but said he’d find out.
She hung up and said, “You better get down something solid. We’ve got a little drive this morning. I’ll go check out.” She got up to leave.
“Great. Crazy woman on the Autobahn again. I hope I can keep my food down.”
She laughed and left him there. It was good to see he still had a sense of humor.
●
Alexandra Schecht reluctantly drove into work, getting to the BND building outside of Munich by nine. As she passed through security, she was stopped and held for a moment until two of her colleagues showed up—Martin Mayer and a young officer, whose name kept escaping her, but who she knew as a smug suck-up.
“I thought you were off for the rest of the week,” Mayer said as they walked down the main corridor.
Where would they bring her? To one of the interrogation rooms? Settle down, Alexandra. She’d run every scenario through her brain, trying to assure herself, and was ready for every possibility.
“I need to report some contacts over the past couple of days,” she said, trying to get ahead of the conversation.
“Wait on that for a moment,” Mayer demanded.
Why was he being such a hard-ass? More so than normal. He would have made a great Gestapo officer, she thought.
The three of them went into a conference room, and Alexandra knew it was not only sound proof, but she would be recorded visually and audibly. Not only that. The chair had hidden plates inside that would check her pulse for lies. If they were trying to intimidate her, they were far from doing so. They were just pissing her off.
In their chairs now, Martin Mayer leaned back and smiled. “All right. Please explain your actions.”
She started from the beginning, like Jake had asked to do, from him showing up in town, to the men chasing her to the Autobahn, and through the Luxembourg incident. She also brought up the fact that Jake had to kill the two men in France. However, she left out the part about her and Jake making mad passionate love for a few days, or the fact that they’d gone to the Interpol officer’s house near Lyon. No need to get Andre involved. When she was done, she leaned back in the chair and let out a slight breath of air to observe Herr Mayer. She knew he had no field experience as a BND officer and had come from academia only a few years ago. Psychology professor from Berlin.
“An interesting story, Fraulein Schecht,” Mayer said, his elbows on the table and his hands clasped together with a steeple, the spire touching his lips. “Why did you come back through Geneva, Switzerland?”
Calmly, she warned herself, or they’d know she was lying. “I said I dropped Mister Adams at a train station in France. If you look at a map, it’s not really out of the way.” This was true from Lyon, but not from much farther north in France, closer to Luxembourg. In her story, she had only said she’d dropped Jake at a train station in France, and not which station. But now he would ask her that location.
“I assure you I understand European geography, Alexandra. Geneva is quite a distance from Luxembourg. Where did you drop off Mr. Adams?”
No harm in telling this, she thought. “Lyon.”
“Ah, then that makes sense.” Mayer spread his hands out onto the table, his eyes shifting to his young minion, who stood in the corner behind Alexandra, and then settled back on her.
Something was bothering her. How did they know she had gone through Switzerland. It had been a long time since there had been any requirement to stop at the borders.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Mayer said. “How did we track you through Switzerland?”
“Exactly. You are brilliant,” she said diffidently. “I didn’t think I had a GPS tracker on my car.”
Martin Mayer grinned broadly. He explained the new tracking system that had been adopted by Germany and Switzerland and would probably spread to all of Europe in the near future.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s going to piss off a lot of people when the word gets out.”
“It’s a closely-held secret,” Mayer explained. “Only a few people in the Polizei even know of the system.”
Someone will leak it to the press, she thought. And it will only take one passing over of a promotion, or some other snubbing to anger a bureaucrat into releasing the information. These things never remain a secret for long. And once it got to the press, they’d blab it to the world.
“Perhaps. But by then we will have a list of successes to lay out for the public. Explanations to describe how their government has kept them secure, with little loss of civil liberties to law-abiding citizens. We will assure them that we don’t have the time or inclination to observe the comings and goings of ordinary citizens—only those who we suspect have committed a crime. There are legal safeguards in place.”
Right. “Truthfully, it sounds like a great system.” The detectors would find no lie in that statement.
“Now, let’s get to work,” Mayer said. He clicked on the LCD screen on the far wall and the lights dimmed immediately. “If you’re ready to come in off vacation, we have an assignment for you.”
On the screen was a grid of photos of six men and two women. The slide show pulled up each briefing on the individuals, along with short bios. The last man was Vladimir Volkov.
Alexandra found a perfect opening. “That man was just killed in Baden-Baden,” she said, bringing a shocked look to Martin Mayer.
“How do you know that?” Mayer asked.
“I was on the internet last night,” she explained. “They mentioned three Russians had been killed in Baden-Baden, but hadn’t given the names. I checked on the address and found out it was Volkov. My uncle Gunter mentioned the man many times. How Vladimir was the spy master of Germany, running more agents than any other Russian during the Cold War. So last night I dug deeper and found a hit had been put out on the net for the man. One million Euros.”
“Just like Jake Adams,” Mayer said with a smile.
“You knew this?”
“Of course,” Mayer said. He pointed to the screen. “All of those on the panel have been killed in the past month. All had one million Euros on their head.”
“But what do they have in common?” she asked. “There were Russians, Czechs, a Pole and two Hungarians.”
“They are all former Cold War spies,” Mayer muttered.
She thought for a moment. Jake had been right. Someone was killing all kinds of former spies. “What do we do about it?”
Mayer clicked off the screen and the lights rose to a near-blinding sheen. “That’s where you come in, Alexandra. You are going to Berlin to take responsibility for the hit on Vladimir Volkov.”
Wunderbar. She didn’t even have to ask to be put on the case. “Why me?”
“You are one of our best field officers,” Mayer praised. “And not well known in Berlin. You will be fully briefed on the details of the shooting in Baden-Baden. Right down to the type of underwear the man was wearing.”
“What kind would that be?” she asked curiously.
Mayer smiled and said, “He wasn’t wearing any.” He got up to leave. “Wait here. An analyst will be here in a minute to brief you. Show you Polizei photos. The whole works. You must leave by this afternoon. We’ve already made contact online, having you claim responsibility. Your meeting is tomorrow in Berlin.”
He left her in the room alone, her thoughts going to Jake, who had been right. They would let her get into the case. But she didn’t have to convince them of anything. They had her in mind all along. That was more than a little interesting. Perhaps disturbing as well.
26
Jake woke that morning in Baden-Baden unsure how the local Polizei would react to what they thought was a triple homicide, but what Jake knew was a hit on a former Russian spy, with him getting in the way and ruining their hopes to collect on a one million Euro bounty.
When he got to the main train station, security hadn’t seemed any different from normal. Nobody checked his backpack or passport, and with a Eurail pass he simply walked on to the train to Frankfurt.