by Ross Sidor
He hadn’t needed to piss, didn’t care about the latest headlines, and certainly hadn’t been craving a drink. It was simply cover for action. If any Belarusian KGB were observing him or airport security watching from the surveillance cameras, they would have not realized that Avery had just conducted a mini-dry clean run. But they likely were not observing, because the SDR came up dry.
Avery stepped outside through the sliding glass doors. The air was cool and smelled of fresh rain. Night had already descended over Minsk and there was the sound of car horns blaring, traffic whizzing past on the highway, and mostly Russian-speaking voices.
He stood near a concrete post and set his suitcase down on the sidewalk, produced a cigarette, and lit it. He wasn’t a smoker, but looking like an uneasy flyer enjoying the opportunity to finally light up would buy him a few more minutes to stand in place, scope out his surroundings, and scan faces. He kept his posture relaxed and comfortable, but his eyes never rested. They observed and took in everything around him, keeping track of people and vehicles and noting their placement. People walked busily past him without even glancing his way.
Twenty-five feet away, he watched the lines of stopped taxis and cars waiting to pick up newly arrived passengers or make drop-offs. Irritated policemen yelled at drivers to move their illegally stopped vehicles, horns blared, and steady streams of traffic flowed in both directions on the double lanes of the M2.
He was looking out for a blue 1998 Fiat Siena. And a minute later, he spotted it, off to his left, pulled over on the shoulder, lights blinking, eight car lengths away, behind the taxi pick-up lane, facing him. The Siena’s windows were lightly tinted, so he was unable to see inside, but he could distinctly make out the silhouette of a single occupant in the driver’s seat.
Avery waited two more minutes before taking one last drag on the cigarette. Then he dropped it and ground it out beneath the sole of his boot. He glanced right once, then left, and started toward the Siena.
Within five feet, the passenger side window rolled halfway down.
The driver was a woman. Early thirties, Avery assessed, fit looking, East European, with shoulder-length auburn hair, high cheekbones, and no cosmetics. She wore a light blue North Face fleece with jeans. Both her hands were planted on the wheel. She gripped it tight, because her knuckles went white. She appeared alert and defensive, but not intimidated, and Avery supposed that being a reporter she was likely accustomed to meeting with unsavory strangers under unusual circumstances and taking risks to run down a story.
Avery’s eyes swept over the rear seats, checking that were was no one else in the car.
“Usun, et meie ühine sõber korraldas sa mulle küüti,” he said in Estonian. His enunciation of the memorized statement left much to be desired. He’d just told her that he believed their mutual friend had arranged for her to pick him up.
If it was a trap, that meant they’d been reading her e-mails and would know the recognition phrase. That may have occurred to her, too, because she didn’t appear too relieved. “I am always happy to help a friend,” she responded in good English. “My name is Aleksa. You should get in before someone notices us.”
Avery realized he’d been standing out here too long, and a cop, some twenty feet away, was watching them now, getting ready to blow his whistle and yell at them. Avery opened the passenger door and slipped in. He moved the seat back and set his suitcase on the floor.
The woman put the Siena into gear, accelerated, and merged smoothly into the oncoming traffic on the M2. Over the next ten minutes, she made numerous lane changes and exited the highway, doubled back, and re-entered the highway, heading once more in the original direction. Avery didn’t know where they were going or the route she intended to take, but he recognized a dry cleaning run when he saw one.
“We are being followed,” she soon announced, glancing into the rearview mirror. Then she looked back over at Avery, looking for a reaction, but he didn’t give her one. She was testing him. An amateur would have panicked and turned around excitedly in his seat to get a look, asking a dozen questions.
“They’re not here for me.” Avery was confident no one had tracked him here.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. “I told no one where I was going, and I know I wasn’t followed here. The car has government plates; KGB or police. It’s likely routine. Maybe you caught someone’s attention at the airport. Or perhaps they checked the registration number on this car.”
“Is this your car?” Avery asked.
“No, it belongs to a friend, but he is someone the authorities like to monitor.”
Avery was ready to ditch this woman and go it alone, but he’d garner KGB scrutiny now anyway just by association with her.
She took the M2 into Minsk.
It was 8:30PM.
The city was well lit. With shiny glass and steel buildings, plenty of green grass and trees, including temperate forests preserved as parks, and recently refurbished streets, Minsk’s modern, clean look was a sharp contrast to Dushanbe’s drab, dusty squalor. Founded in 1067, Minsk is one of Europe’s oldest cities, although it never flourished until annexed by Russia, and there were plenty of examples of its pre-Soviet and medieval architecture on display. Nearly all of the cars on the streets were of East European manufacture, and the newest models were probably from the mid-to-late ’90s. Advertisements for the hockey championship adorned billboards, buses, and trains everywhere.
“I still haven’t gotten your name,” Aleksa said, “or should I keep calling you Mockingbird?”
Avery didn’t recognize her accent, but it wasn’t difficult to surmise that it was Estonian. Her English was good, and he thought she’d likely spent time in the West. She was still tense and had her guard up. He didn’t hold that against her. He would too, in her position. Plus he knew he wasn’t the best at making strangers feel comfortable or relaxed around him, so he didn’t try.
“Call me Nick.”
He wondered if Aleksa was her real name and decided it probably was.
A reporter could be just as bad as a spy. They were just as nosey, but not as subtle about it. She likely saw him as a source and would probe and pry for information. Why else would she meet him?
“So what’s the plan?”
“The plan, Nick, is that I will drop you off at Sputnik Hotel. That is where the KGB men behind us will lose interest in you since the staff at the front desk report to them and will notify them of any visitors you receive or when you leave the building, should the KGB instruct them to do so. I’ll give you my cell number in case you need to reach me, but it would be best not to use the hotel phones or make any calls inside your room. Wait thirty minutes, then take the stairwell to the ground floor and leave through the service exit. I’ll meet you there, after the KGB has lost interest in me, and we’ll go someplace safe to talk.”
“Are you sure you’re only a journalist?”
“Well, I suppose we have to do things differently in this part of the world than in America. You are an American, are you not?”
“Canadian, actually.” Avery knew she didn’t believe it. “Oh, I almost forgot.”
He rummaged through his pockets and produced an extra set of hockey tickets. He handed them to her. She glanced down at the tickets and frowned. “Hockey?” she said. “You know, most tourists come to Minsk for the ballet or opera, something a little more cultured. Anyway, I thought it was another interest of yours that brought you to Minsk.”
“Oh, you mean watching airplanes? Nah, that’s strictly for business.”
He explained that if the authorities did question her about what she was doing with a Canadian who’d come to see the championship, she’d tell them that she’d met Nick Ambrose on Facebook and planned to show him around and go to a game with him. He didn’t know a thing about Facebook or making friends, but he thought it sounded plausible.
“And what is your business exactly?” she asked.
“I’m self-employed.”
&nbs
p; She pulled up near the Sputnik, a wide, five story building located outside of the city’s downtown area and known for being one of the older and more economical hotels in Minsk. It was run by the government agency Minotrel, which reported to the KGB. But the targets of interest to the KGB tended not to stay in a place like this. The spies, diplomats, and businessmen were all at the Crowne Plaza or Minsk Hotel.
Avery left Aleksa behind and checked in at the front desk. The clerk stamped his migration card and asked about his visit to Minsk. When Avery mentioned hockey, the man’s face lit up and he started going off about the championship. Fortunately, his English was poor, so Avery wasn’t forced to fake his way through a conversation trying not to let on that he didn’t know a thing about hockey other than the quick Wikipedia research he’d done on teams and players. He wasn’t the only hockey fan in the building. A group of loud, drunk German hooligans clad in jerseys stumbled past on their way outside.
The clerk gave Avery his key, and Avery proceeded to his fourth floor business-class room. It was small, drab, and stuffy, with a tatty door that looked like it’d blow over any minute, an uncomfortable bed, tiny chairs, ugly green carpeting and wallpaper, a foul smelling fridge, and a huge boxy TV with a small screen. The room looked like it was stuck somewhere in the eighties. But Avery didn’t care about the decor, and he’d told the clerk that he’d be away most of the time for the games and sightseeing.
Avery turned on the TV. The reception was poor. It offered mostly local or German stations.
He went to a local channel with coverage of the championship games. It would be a good idea to know what teams were doing what. Plus it was for the benefit of anyone who might be listening by audio surveillance or anyone that would visit his room while he was away.
As he waited, he fired up his notebook computer, connected to the Internet, and started searching. Several minutes later, he determined that his contact was Aleksa Denisova.
She was a national correspondent for an independent Russian newspaper. Her areas of expertise included government corruption, business, organized crime, and weapons proliferation. While covering a story about FSB torturing militants’ families in Chechnya, she’d been detained and interrogated by the Russian military. Later, she’d been only a half block away from a car bomb in Grozny and nearly killed. Conspiracy theorists pinned the blame on the FSB, but most likely she’d simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what happened when you spent time in warzones.
But it wasn’t just Putin and his friends she called out. She was equally critical of the West, too, especially American intervention and the games NATO played in places Ukraine and Georgia.
Avery thought she was trouble. Both the Russian and Belarusian agencies would know she was here. He also was uncertain of her motives for being here and taking the risks that she did. He’d seen plenty of reporters make mistakes and stupid decisions that got them into trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he knew she didn’t make much money doing what she did. But despite his judgment telling him to ditch the reporter, he was curious as to what she might know.
Thirty minutes passed.
Avery slipped into his windbreaker and headed out. He left his Glock in the room, concealed in the suitcase. If the police stopped him on the streets, there’d be no explaining the gun, and he’d immediately be looking at jail time.
When he emerged from the service exit in the rear of the building, the blue Siena was already there. He climbed in. Aleksa drove around the building and turned right onto Leninsky Avenue, taking them deeper into the city. Avery once more closely watched the scenery and kept track of what direction they were going, trying to orientate himself to the layout of the city, in case he would need to get around on his own. He didn’t like being a passenger in an unfamiliar city.
She took him to Gorky Park, near Victory Square, on the Svislach River. Avery quietly followed her out of the car and onto a wide path into the park, passing a miniature train that rumbled slowly by, packed full of delighted children while their parents watched. Avery thought that he was definitely out of his element here.
The park was colorfully lit-up, and the cold, rainy weather wasn’t keeping anyone away. Sightseers, families, and couples filled the park grounds and gathered around attractions. Over two hundred years old, with a Ferris wheel, planetarium, and indoor ice rink, Gorky Park was a popular tourist attraction and a favorite spot of Belarusians. Even Lukashenko came here to ice skate. At this hour and with such a high volume of people, there was also a heavy uniformed police presence.
As they walked, neither Avery nor Aleksa attempted small talk, but the silence wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable. She seemed a bit more at ease now. He thought she was a bit like him, alone but content with her own company, a self-contained personality. Watching all the parents with kids having fun and young couples holding hands, Avery experienced the familiar feelings of detachment and wondered if Aleksa felt the same. He knew he definitely wouldn’t be doing this shit if he had other choices, but instead of going to medical school he’d joined the army.
A young boy, maybe five years old, laughed and cut across the path in front of them, paying no attention to where he was going. He stopped short of nearly running right into Aleksa. She quickly stopped, too, so as not to knock him over. She smiled down at him, putting him at ease, and waited until the boy’s mother caught up with him before continuing walking.
There was something pleasant and peaceful about being here, Avery thought. He was accustomed to the more fucked up parts of the world. It’d been a long time since he’d seen little kids simply having fun instead of starving. For a minute, he wasn’t thinking about Cramer, weapons, and looking out for surveillance, and he wondered if this was what it was like to be a normal person. He glanced over at Aleksa, watched her, and then something clicked in his mind, and he pushed the thought away, a fleeting glimpse of a life not meant for him, a pointless distraction.
“So maybe we can talk business,” Avery said.
Aleksa glanced over at him, and he thought he saw disappointment, but it lasted only for a second. “Maybe,” she said. “I still haven’t decided if I should trust you.”
“Yeah, well, the feeling’s mutual, if it makes you feel any better. It’s nothing personal. I just have a sort professional adversity to reporters.”
She thought that over, realizing they were both in a similar predicament as far as trust went. “You know, that does make me feel better. It puts us on an even level. But I still don’t know anything about you, other than you’ve travelled very far to watch hockey.”
“Look, does it really make any difference? You’re smart. You have a fair idea of what I am. You don’t need me to spell it out.” And he wasn’t going to question her intelligence and insult her by feeding her a line of bullshit. He knew her only doubt was as to whether or not she really wanted to take her chances with someone like him.
“Are you military?”
“No.”
“You look like a soldier.”
Avery recalled Dagar’s words at Port Said and wondered if he was really that easy to read. “I used to be in the army.”
“But you are no longer? You said you are self-employed.”
“That’s right. Look, if you don’t want to talk to me, okay, but tell me, so we don’t waste each other’s time.”
“You’re very impatient, aren’t you?”
They continued walking in silence. A young man with his wife or girlfriend eyed Aleksa lasciviously up and down as they passed.
Aleksa lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it. “I am already in danger, so I suppose I may as well take my chances with you.”
“Why’s that? Is taking pictures of airplanes a serious crime in Belarus?”
“It is when the airplanes belong to a close friend of the Kremlin and who is also fanatical about the privacy of his business. Litvin’s security saw me and chased me across the airport. I barely got away from them. I wouldn’t be the first Russian j
ournalist to disappear.”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty dangerous career choice these days.”
“Do you know what was onboard that plane?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“According to the documentation I obtained, the cargo manifest consists of furniture that originated from Russia and is destined for a chain of shops in Dushanbe. The plane’s destination was a Russian-leased military airfield and not Dushanbe International, which is odd for a commercial transaction. Belarusian customs didn’t even inspect the cargo.”
Before continuing, Aleksa paused to take another drag. She studied Avery’s face closely, and he averted his glare.
“I’ve written about Litvin and GlobeEx before. I’ve done a lot of research into his business. This is the third flight that plane has made from Minsk to the Russian airfield in Tajikistan in the last nine weeks. I’ve heard rumors about the Kremlin arming the Taliban through proxy agents. I also confirmed that Russia commissioned the sale of a hundred-fifty Igla-S missiles and other hardware to Belarus. Last month, my contact here discovered that Litvin has been meeting with Belarus’s chief military acquisitions officer. Litvin paid cash for the missiles and other weapons, while the hardware remains listed in Belarusian inventories.”
“Why would Russia want to arm the Taliban? They’re fighting their own war against Islamic terrorists in the Caucasus.”
“True,” Aleksa said, “but it’s still in the Kremlin’s interests to see the West fail and militarily defeated in Afghanistan. Over the last decade, Russia has become increasingly threatened by American involvement in Central Asia. Imagine how the US would react if Russia started deploying troops in South America. Plus if NATO is bogged down in Afghanistan, they’ll be less inclined to take action in Ukraine or Moldova or Georgia when Russia decides to re-take Soviet territory. It’s also an opportunity to field test how their newest weapons will perform in combat against American equipment, and a resurgent Taliban will frighten the other former republics into cozying up to Russia.”