The Hidden Vector: A Spy Thriller

by Mathew Snyder

  After Georgia, the numbers Kay Linh had tracked went quiet. Maria disappeared. They knew almost nothing about Scorpio. He approached the customs office on a hunch that the hijackers had used a boat to shuttle across the Black Sea from Batumi unnoticed. He had nothing else to go on.

  Asking around the customs offices for a friend of his named Andrei earned him some strange looks. One official had shouted at him in Romanian and pulled on his sleeve to leave the harbor office. The word American was clear enough. The others spouting from the man’s mouth were less polite, he assumed. The following day he had tried again with Nicu and explained that this Andrei owed him money. He offered to share payment—500 lei and promised 2,000 more if Nicu could provide any customs reports on the days after the hijacking.

  The desperation of it all nagged him, yet here he sat awaiting delivery of the list. He folded the cash discreetly into a city map and tucked them into his belt. Nicu was past late, even for a cautious official seeking a bribe. He sipped the last of his coffee and left a few lei for the inattentive waiter. He preferred the man’s lack of intrusions.

  He walked along the promenade among the packs of couples and their children eager to visit the nearby aquarium. Past the facade of swirling fish he spied a woman several yards ahead. Her blonde ponytail swayed as she walked. He glanced again and his blood pumped. It couldn’t be Maria. He felt foolish, even more so when he realized he had no idea how he’d react if he saw her again.

  “Mr. Pierce,” said a mild voice behind him.

  He turned, but the mellow voice continued.

  “Keep walking. I’m a friend,” it said.

  The voice was a monotone murmur, clearly American and meant for his ears only. He kept walking while focused on the swish of his own shoes and those of his new companion’s tapping on the pavement. The man walked behind him to his left, perhaps fives steps away.

  “Ahead there is long pier. Walk out on it, and I’ll meet you there.”

  He heard the steps veer left up a broad stair and disappear onto the street above. He walked on, taking his time to feign admiration for a small monument flanked by white columns. He didn’t recognize the man’s voice, but it had to be someone from the Agency. It wasn’t anyone he had met earlier. Who was he?

  By the time he walked out on the pier, he felt perspiration rolling down the small of his back. The black shirt warmed in the afternoon sun, but his anxiety and intrigue about his interlocutor was reason enough to sweat. Atop the pier’s entrance was an ostentatious restaurant encased in glass. He walked beneath it and out on to the long pier. Pleasure craft lined the sides, and farther down a larger ferry clung to the pier by thick ropes. An old man dangled fishing line from a long rod into the water. Ahead, two more tourists wandered toward him on the concrete walkway.

  At the end, he saw a man leaning on the railing overlooking the small harbor and the sprawling beach beyond. The man wore a striped shirt with short sleeves and dull gray pants. He was thin and his long gray hair bristled over his ears and down to his neck. Ethan leaned at the rail a few feet away and surveyed the beach himself.

  “I’m Russell,” the man said.

  Ethan recognized at once the same smooth voice that had approached him earlier. He made a disinterested frown. The name meant nothing to him.

  “The SVR is following you,” Russell said. He turned about and placed his elbows on the railing, staring back down the pier. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. “Did you know that?”

  Ethan winced. He kept looking out at the beach. “No.”

  “A few days now. I’d say four, maybe five. On the one hand, I can’t say I blame you. They’ve very good.” He exhaled a lazy plume of gray smoke. “Very good. On the other, I have to wonder just what you think you are doing.”

  Russell’s voice flowed without judgment, it seemed to Ethan. It neither rose nor fell in its hypnotic sound. Only the cigarette bounced as he spoke.

  “Who are you again?”

  “Russell. I’m in the Counter Intelligence Center. Paul Corso thought I should check in on you.”

  “You know Corso?”

  Russell nodded. “We go back a long ways, Corso and me. Ask me for a cigarette.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Humor me,” Russell said. His broad mouth smiled and revealed a row of large and nicotine stained teeth.

  Ethan took the cigarette and Russell lit it for him. He puffed once and exhaled. It burned his throat. He suppressed a cough while he examined the thing with disdain.

  “You get used to it,” Russell said.

  Ethan doubted that he would, but he played along with the smoldering cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He tried to blow the smoke trails away from his nose. The blowback made things worse, and he coughed again.

  “Now that you’ve established my bona fides, you were saying about your efforts?” Russell said.

  “Customs. I’m working a harbor customs officer to give me records for a boat that I think came in after the … incident.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  Ethan shook his head. It wasn’t working. Nicu was a bust. If Russell was right about the Russians, Nicu might be even worse than that. He did seem a little too eager to help. Then again, so did Russell. Ethan bit down in frustration for being so desperate.

  “You got someone’s attention. That’s not the end of the world.”

  “If you say so,” Ethan said.

  Russell smiled, baring his teeth once again. His skin was tanned leather with taut lines around his face and eyes. Ethan couldn’t guess the man’s age. He didn’t seem as old as Corso. Then again, maybe he was older.

  “When I was just getting started out, I was in Bucharest,” Russell said. “No idea what I was doing. Who does? One day I recognized a man. He seemed familiar to me. I spent a week watching out for him. Not every day, but he was there. I wanted to think it was coincidence. That I wasn’t blown. My gut said otherwise.”

  Ethan leaned out over the water again, squinting from behind his dark shades. “So, I take it they didn’t send you home?”

  “It was FSK then. Not that it matters. The Russians are still the same. There’s always another familiar face. A replacement for all of us. They found me, then I found them. And I’m still here,” Russell said, his voice as flat as a lullaby. He raised an eyebrow at Ethan and blew a steady wave of smoke that curled in the breeze.

  “Now that I know they’re on to me, I can use that against them. Find out why they’re here. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying I don’t believe in coincidences anymore. I think opportunity is a much better description. They’re interested in you for a reason, just like they’re here for a reason.”

  “I’m going to need help. I could use some local expertise,” he said.

  “You’ll get it. Just ask for me with the chief,” Russell said. “I’ve got a couple good people who can work quick.”

  “I will.”

  Ethan tossed the half-burned cigarette into the harbor and walked back down the long pier. His eyes danced around looking for familiar faces.

  ◆◆◆

  Three days later Ethan paced in the narrow space between his hotel bed and the desk and dressers along one wall. He had doubled his offer to Nicu Prodan and now awaited his call from the lobby.

  The room phone bleated. He answered.

  “This is Sawyer,”

  Nicu knew him as Ryan Sawyer, a black-market purveyor of cell phones and electronics. Ethan didn’t care anymore if he believed it. The meeting wasn’t about Nicu. The Russians would probably abandon him as an asset after this anyway.

  Nicu’s accented English came thick and distorted through the phone’s earpiece. “You have my money?”

  “Change of plans, Nicu.”

  “No change. We meet now.” Nicu sounded panicked.

  “Yes, change of plans if you want to get paid. I don’t like my hotel. The room service here sucks. Meet me in the lobby, an
d we’ll go find a new one.”

  He hung up and left the empty room. He and Wade had moved everything out earlier in the morning.

  He left the elevator, and Nicu spotted him immediately. The man perked his head above the few fellow Romanians in the lobby. Nicu chewed at his thumbnail, then glanced out the window as Ethan eased his way to him with a gratuitous smile. Ethan patted his pocket and pointed to the door. Nicu nodded and followed, his black shined shoes scooting on the tile floor.

  Ethan turned left and walked across the intersection. The hotel occupied a narrow street lined with cars packed front to rear like little soldiers. Nicu shuffled along to keep pace, and together they rounded another corner where Ethan ducked into the other hotel, a much older place. A plain looking woman with dark hair fussed in a mirror applying her lip balm. Ethan waved at the clerk and held up his small metal key and fob. Nicu nodded as well, and they rode up to the fourth floor together as Nicu tapped his fingers on the elevator rail waiting for the numbers above the door panels to change.

  They entered room 42, a room much like his former place with a bed and narrow floor space to the window that overlooked the street. In a derelict office hallway across the street Wade observed the room and hotel entrance below. Nicu remained near the door and fidgeted with his right hand.

  “You have the info I’m looking for?” Ethan said.

  Nicu produced a small flash drive from his pants pocket and held it close to himself.

  “My money?” he asked. “Please.”

  They needed time for this to work. Ethan imagined in his head the Russians chattering to themselves, running down stairways and between cars to trail them. He had to stall.

  “So polite. What’s your rush, Nicu? You seem very nervous here. I’m not a cop. You know, poliție? I’m not poliție.”

  “No, I know this. Is no problem. Change of plans no good. Very, how you say? Uncomfortable. You have my money?”

  Ethan pulled a roll of cash from under his shirt and began counting. He watched for Nicu’s reaction.

  “You know, you’re in customs. You and I could probably keep working together for a little while. What do you think? If this friend of mine needed some items to sell here, maybe some in Bucharest?”

  Nicu focused on the cash and began nodding. “What kind of items?”

  “Nothing illegal, no. Electronics, you know. Cell phones, computers, iPads. That kind of thing. Top of the line. Here, we agreed on 2,500 lei? Consider that a down payment on your cooperation with my friend, okay?”

  Nicu reached out for the cash and stuffed the tiny flash drive into Ethan’s hands. He bit his lip and nodded again

  “I’ll be in touch,” Ethan said.

  Nicu nodded once more as he checked the cash.

  “Okay, good,” Nicu answered. He left the room and let the heavy old door slam shut behind him.

  That should do it. Ethan waited for over an hour watching the incomprehensible programming on the room’s old tube television until Wade sent him a message that all was clear. He wandered down to the lobby and into a back-room office where Russell waited at a desk observing two video monitors. The dark-haired woman from the lobby—her name was Tereza—leaned against the wall looking bored. She stood when she saw him and gave him a half-hearted smile.

  They reviewed footage from the lobby over Russell’s shoulder. Ethan watched himself enter the hotel with Nicu at his heels. The images flickered, their faces washed out to bland whiteness. Russell sped the footage forward. A man in dark pants and black zippered jacket waddled into the frame like an old slapstick figure. Russell slowed the video to a standstill as the man scanned the room to find the camera. His face froze as he looked into the lens.

  “That’s our man,” Russell said. “Right on time.”

  He moved the video forward as a timer in the left corner lapsed on. He watched Tereza approach the man and say something to him in Romanian. He shrugged her off with a wave, but she persisted and wagged a brochure at him. He snapped at her, and she backed away, distracting his gaze from her left hand that slipped a tiny transponder wrapped in a crumpled receipt into his jacket pocket. She was good, Ethan had to admit. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he didn’t know the plan.

  Soon after, Nicu emerged from the elevator. The men exchanged looks, and Nicu gave him a quick nod and raised his thumb and three fingers before exiting the hotel. The man took a seat in the lobby, then approached the clerk. Russell stopped the video.

  “He rented a room on the fourth floor,” Tereza said.

  No coincidences. The device she put in the man’s pocket had limited range, but another of Russell’s team waited in a Renault outside to follow the man and his SVR comrades to wherever they holed up in the city.

  “That was nicely done,” he told Tereza.

  She shrugged, clearly unimpressed with him. Of late, he had to agree with her.

  ◆◆◆

  Days wasted while he worked with Wade and Russell’s team to monitor the Russians. He spent most of his time wandering around the city searching for any sign of the boat or its owners. He reached out to Nicu twice more, but he got no response. It would lead nowhere, but it kept the Russians occupied. They operated from a small house in Coiciu, near the city center. Russell and his team took turns with Wade watching the place from the Renault and a small service van Russell provided.

  His frustration grew as the routine wore on. He wandered the docks looking at boats, then would sit for hours watching tourists and checking his phone. He was a decoy, and he felt helpless. He fought the urge to check his voice mail. Under this kind of surveillance, it was too risky. If Corso only knew. He’d had longer assignments than this, but none harder. He wondered if Sarah had called or even left a message. She last called months ago. She’d moved on, but admitting that made him feel even more helpless. He had to let it go for the sake of the mission, and for his own state of mind.

  He awoke from a deep sleep to the ghost light of his phone that illuminated the old hotel room like a flickering candle. For a moment he wondered where he was, then he reached for the phone and mumbled a response.

  Russell’s voice whispered back.

  “They moved out of the city. Followed them to a villa north of the DN3. Something’s happening here. We may need some help if they split up.”

  “Where are you? Wade and I will come to you.”

  “It’s a vineyard. Some kind of villa a few kilometers west of the city. It’s not just the three of them. They’re with several more in two vehicles. I think they’re …”

  The phone went silent. Ethan called back, but the connection failed. In his head, he replayed the muted monotone of Russell’s voice and the hiss of nothingness.

  In three minutes he was dressed and in the hallway. He thumbed a quick message to Wade as the elevator descended. He walked out into street between a jumble of parked cars. Quiet seeped into the alleyways. Light from a distant streetlamp illuminated the crass graffiti on the building facade ahead of him. Somewhere in the decrepit office building above Wade slept on an old office couch. Ethan leaned against the building’s front and called to rouse him.

  “Yeah?” Wade said in an exhausted exhale.

  “Time to move. Bring what you need.”

  “About damn time,” Wade answered.

  Wade emerged from a stairway door with a long duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He nodded to Ethan and pointed down the lane to the van parked alongside a brick walkway. Wade strode down the street, his sway unaffected by the bag that Ethan guessed weighed eighty pounds. He was alert and watchful, his black skin glistening and wet from a quick rinse in the office bathroom.

  Wade had spent more than two weeks in that comfortless space at the top of the stairs or cramped into the Dacia van observing the Russians for hours as they smoked and drank on their patio. He performed this tedious routine without complaint, a remarkable act of willpower for his normally glib friend. Now, his body moved on command, and Ethan became the follower.

>   Wade sped through the empty streets, careful to note the nose of a police cruiser peeking from behind a blind corner. Ethan navigated on his phone. He found the highway Russell mentioned and scanned around for likely locations.

  “What do we got?” Wade asked.

  “Russell says the Russians moved in with a bigger group to a vineyard. Some place west of town,” he said.

  “How many?”

  “He didn’t say. He mentioned two vehicles, then his phone cut out. I still can’t reach him.”

  The city thinned to petrol stations and auto dealers. The Old-World charm faded as Wade sped on. They passed flat cornfields and scrub. The fields and decaying fences reminded Ethan of his younger days in Missouri—meager spaces and hard earth. It was a road not too different from this one where he learned his first hard lesson in life. A summer night like this, too, with a pair of headlights coming at them fast. He crushed his knee against the dash, but that was nothing. Eric Belcher never drove again. Never did anything again. He was gone, just like Marcus Eldridge. Like Seda. That night and that bad knee had steered him down a different road.

  “Ethan, man, you good? You ready for this?” Wade said. His eyes shifted between Ethan and the road as he drove. His hands tightened on the wheel.

  Ethan nodded. He still stared out the passenger window. He needed to focus.

  “I’m okay. I’m good.”

  “Look, man. I haven’t said one word about what happened in Georgia. That shit wasn’t your fault. You can’t carry that with you now. You have to be ready for this.”

  “I know it,” he said.

  The words rang hollow in his head. What was it Maria said? They make good liars out of us.

  “I’m ready.”

  Chapter 11: Needed Intelligence

  Podgoria Traian, Romania

  2:44 a.m., Friday, June 14

  Ethan scanned the inland countryside looking for a road that would take them north. Like the whole operation, they had become lost in darkness. Russell had only told him a direction before his phone went dead. They had to find a way to change direction. Ethan tapped his knee anxiously and squinted out the windshield.