Love Is for Tomorrow

by Michael Karner

  The room was calm, which was good. It meant that everyone understood that World War Three was at stake.

  Antoine thought, Great. Another mission to save the world before I can get back to what I need to do.

  “Do you know anything about Tanya, or her connections?” Smith asked. “What terror group are we talking about?”

  Rose hesitated.

  “I am looking into that,” she said.

  “So she’s a ghost,” Antoine said looking at Jason.

  Rose nodded.

  “As you can imagine, it is easier telling other intelligence agencies that there is a bomb heading their way than informing them it’s in their country,” Rose said. “We need to find out what is going on and pass the intelligence onto an official body of authority, which will deal with the situation accordingly. Let them handle it. We stay in the dark, pulling the strings.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SINS OF THE FATHER

  “The apple does not fall far from the tree.”

  Vienna, Austria

  Rose tapped the side of her glasses. An internalized map display with different waypoints flickered in front of her left eye. She was in the war room with Priya. Rose fed what she saw to the big screen so that Priya could take a look herself.

  “That’s what I’m getting from my informant,” Rose said. “We’re tracking Olga’s location over the Gmail system Kate Jackson uses to get in touch with her.”

  The map showed the places Olga had visited after various time marks during the last couple weeks. To anyone else it would be just a jumble of information, but Rose knew how to make connections and extrapolate. Olga had flown through half of Europe, but there was a structure to it that was unrelated to the UN.

  “It’s amazing how the simplest things get overlooked. With this location tracker we get updates every half hour. We can follow her, anticipate her moves and stay close so we can find her when she meets Tanya. You see that?”

  Rose highlighted possible destinations, then linked it to Olga’s pattern. She cross-checked the outgoing flights for the next ninety minutes.

  “According to her tickets, it will be in Madrid,” Priya said.

  “You’re going after her, Priya,” Rose said. “There is no margin for error. I am sending a small support team with you in case things turn sour. Drone, sniper, spotter. Maximum surveillance. You need to be fast. I am sending Smith and Mini with you.”

  Priya asked somewhat surprised, “Mini? I thought she retired from the field after…”

  “She will just be a spotter. We need all hands on deck. She knows what’s at stake. Flight’s leaving in an hour.”

  ***

  Toledo, Spain

  Toledo was the home of master blacksmiths, producing the finest blades in Europe. However, Olga saw it as a medieval city that hadn’t lost its Renaissance charm. Sand colored cathedrals crowned the mountain top. She would be meeting Tanya in one of them. Edged weapons in every shop on every corner shimmered as she drove by through the narrow alleys. Red rocks surrounded the city in a surrounding valley, as the sun set, framing the city into red light. Olga parked her car close to the city gate Puerta del Sol. A narrow alley led her over cobblestones into a cube-shaped church. Her stiletto heels clacked over stone in the evening sun.

  Even now, danger loomed. It could be a trap. Olga was a valuable target who would fetch a top price. People said every person’s life was worth the same. If that was true, how come some had bigger ransoms than others? She pushed that thought out of her mind. Her father had gotten her to where she was. Now this was her chance to elevate herself to a whole new level: Stopping a terrorist attack against her motherland. This was an opportunity that she would not let slip by.

  She waited. Her eyes scanned the church.

  There was more to El Cristo de la Luz than what met the eye. A former mosque, it was now Tanya’s chosen rendezvous point. For the first time in years, she would see in the flesh a once close friend whom she had not seen for the greater part of a decade.

  A welcoming coolness and the smell of frankincense greeted her as she entered. The old wooden benches and crosses awoke painful childhood memories of her father forcibly dragging her to church. She dipped her fingers into the holy water font and made the sign of the Cross. She walked into the middle of the church. She genuflected at the figures of Jesus and Mary behind the altar and turned for the rightmost pulpit. A confessional box stood hidden in a dark corner.

  Olga went inside, closed the door behind her and took a seat. A small wooden grille was the only link between the two cells. Darkness stared back at her. She felt the presence of someone on the other side. A female voice spoke to her in Russian.

  “You have come here to atone for your sins?”

  That was enough for her to know she spoke with the right person. She gave enough for the other person to know she understood.

  “This time, I will listen to yours,” Olga said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CITY OF BLADES

  “Sleep is a shallow death we practice every night.” - Lydia Netzer, How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

  Toledo, Spain

  Olga couldn’t see but she felt that Tanya was grinning. She put her fingertips against the wall separating them.

  “Very well,” Tanya replied.

  Olga recognized her pattern of speech. It was the one that Olga’s father had taught Tanya and then Olga herself. She had still been a child, when Tanya left.

  “I don’t know how much your father told you about me, or how much you still remember,” Tanya began. “So I will tell you myself. I went to the States young. There I met a US born Russian who had already been vetted by the KGB. Of course the facts were kept blurred but he knew what I was doing. He agreed to it but wasn’t involved in spying. He helped me keep a good cover. We gave the illusion of a normal family.”

  Olga had seen their family pictures when she was young through postcards sent to her father. They went sailing and to the beach and did all these typically American things, with going to concerts and having barbecues.

  “Shortly after getting married, we moved to Washington. The huge increase in defense spending and hiring people with foreign language skills after 9/11 proved very beneficial.”

  Olga nodded. She had heard about this period, but didn’t know whether both of them got hired. Tanya surely did.

  “Then, agents in Russia and America both got captured, in the build-up to what would be the biggest spy-swap in history. Someone let it leak that we were involved. The US captured him in 2008 and then swapped him two years later. After his arrest, I pleaded to come back to Russia. You see, I loved my husband more than my country or mission”

  “Love conquers all,” Olga said.

  Tanya laughed.

  “Not in this job. One month after he returned to Russia, my husband was found dead in his cell. Apparently the FSB thought it would be better to kill him to make sure the Americans didn’t find out their mistake. It also eliminated any reason for me to come back. So I stayed, but for the last five years I have been making plans. I rose higher and gained more influence, power and money.”

  “I admire that you have no hatred against the FSB,” Olga replied.

  “The world is bigger than us and our feelings. What good would it do to harm my own country? It’s the last loyalty I have. Your father has it, you have it and I have it too. Without loyalty, we have nothing.” A long silence followed. “I have a car parked at Puerta del Sol. It is a wine-red Acura NSX. Follow me. I will lead you to a safe place where we can talk face to face.”

  “Why not here?” Olga said.

  “Hello?” Olga said after a long silence. The confessional compartment next to her was already empty. Steps moved over the stone tiles outside, leading to the exit.

  ***

  Priya lifted her head from the pew in which she was kneeling. Her hidden microphone aimed at the back of the chapel. Her eyes followed a woman in sunglasses who left the confessional box an
d made for the exit. Seconds later, Olga came out of it. She looked around and made the sign of the Cross before leaving.

  Priya rose from the pew, the old wood creaking. She walked into a side nave of the chapel.

  “Team,” she said into her micro-bead. “We’re about to get mobile. The angels are flying.”

  She slipped through the closing door and saw Olga scudding down the stone stairs.

  The plaza was drenched in evening heat. Only the shadows from the high tree tops made it bearable. A flock of pigeons rose up in the sky and fluttered away as Olga charged them.

  Priya hurried over the big cobblestones in the street to the parking lot. She saw Tanya leaving in the ruby Acura and Olga walk towards a black Mercedes AMG GT S.

  Priya paused behind a tree and pretended to take a picture of the city gate. Watching Olga in the background of her camera-feed, she took a picture of the license plate as the car drove away.

  “Sending you the number, take up pursuit,” Priya said, running to her Porsche. “Targets driving off. Olga is in the black Benz, her contact, probably Tanya, is in a red Acura.”

  Priya unlocked her car and got inside. Salim had done a good job giving her what she needed. She gripped the steering wheel and pressed the button to start the engine. The car lurched forward and propelled her onto the narrow street without making as much as a sound.

  She maneuvered through an upslope alley, being spit out onto the main square on top of the mountain. She closed distance with Olga’s Mercedes, as she sped the Porsche Boxter downhill. The city walls rushed past her. She banked right, taking the road over the bridge. The river rumbled a hundred meters below as the three cars reached the other side.

  Tanya led them in a wide circle around the city. The yellow blades of dry grass rushed past her. Cars and cyclists stopped in laybys to take in the sunset, oblivious to the chase.

  Olga slowed down in front of a restaurant with a wide view over the canyon and rolled her car into a free parking space.

  “They’re stopping,” Priya spoke into her mic. “Stopping at the Hierbabuena. I can’t go in there easily.”

  She looked around and scanned the environment.

  “Team, see that mansion to the south on the lone hill,” Priya said. “Go there and get access for an observation point.”

  “Understood,” Smith said.

  Priya hit the steering wheel and reversed. She was back up the road in mere seconds.

  The mansion was a private one-family estate, its driveway occupied by her team’s Dodge Grand Caravan. A wall of large windows faced the canyon with the Restaurante Hierbabuena. That was exactly why she chose it.

  Mini opened the door before Priya could ring the doorbell. The homeowners were still protesting as Smith carried equipment past her into the living room. Priya followed him. It was Mini’s job to deal with them--though it was clear in less than three seconds that she would get what she wanted.

  Priya joined Smith in the living room. He took position onto the floor of the balcony. Priya started her laptop in the living room and activated the drone. A moment later Mini arrived, closing all doors to leave them undisturbed.

  “I bought us twenty minutes,” she said. “Let’s hope it lasts.”

  “And that we aren’t too late,” Priya said, blowing a strand of hair away from her forehead.

  Priya had everything assembled. Her fingers were sweating. She didn’t want to miss a thing. Vital information could be passed between Tanya and Olga at this very moment. She had to get the drone up fast.

  Mini lay down next to Smith. She set up a tripod then balanced binoculars with a range finder on top.

  Smith began assembling his Nesika Tactical Rifle. In less than thirty seconds he had his scope in place, the barrel mounted and was aiming at the Restaurante Hierbabuena.

  “Range, five hundred meters,” Mini said. “Wind velocity…”

  Priya focused on her own task. She took the controls of the quadrocopter and started its engines. The rotors accelerated and lifted the UAV. She nudged it carefully out of the mansion.

  She went over to her laptop and followed the camera feed of her drone. The gorge opened up below her. If she lost contact with the drone, there would be nothing left to retrieve from a fall of that height. She bridged the canyon in under a minute. Beads of sweat formed on her forehead. It was still out of microphone range. “Come on, come on, move closer,” she whispered, while she felt her legs twitched involuntarily. She tried to calm herself and exhaled slowly. The drone was now in range but she still had no visual on the targets.

  “Using camera zoom,” she said and enlarged the view on her screen.

  “Got a sight on both targets,” Mini said in the same moment.

  “Positive,” Smith answered.

  A flash of metal tore through flesh. The wound was clean, with little blood squirting over the white plate. Priya watched it through the high-resolution video feed as if she was sitting at the same table. It was not something she wanted to see up close.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ENTER THE ENEMY

  “When in doubt, blame the Chechens.” - Russian saying

  Priya watched as Tanya’s knife cut into something sacred. Her fork speared the Argentinian steak. The only part of the meal that Priya could agree with was the Spanish red wine.

  Priya activated the hyper-microphone and aligned it to the other side of the valley, using the resonating sound waves on the huge glass windows to record their voices. Tanya’s sunglasses prevented the facial recognition software from positively identifying her. Running her voice through a database check for comparison later would have to do.

  Priya had to keep on them to find out as much as possible. The sniper-spotter team, Mini and Smith, was only there in case something went wrong.

  “Clear shot, clear shot,” Smith said.

  “Er..,” Priya said, not knowing how to respond.

  “Just saying.”

  The master marksman seemed edgy. But they didn’t come here to get blood. They came here to gather intel.

  The voices were unclear at first. Priya adjusted the equipment, so that it was set to the right wavelength and filtered out the ambient noise.

  “...deep in a terrorist organisation,” she heard Tanya say. “I can’t do much on my own to stop it without giving up my cover. That is why I’m turning to you. The motherland is in great danger from within. Hardliners in Chechnya are undertaking an attack on St. Petersburg. A dirty bomb from the Al nusra Khorasan group is on the way from Syria to Russia. It will arrive at the Georgian-Russian border on the night of the fourth at eleven thirty."

  “We need to stop it,” Olga said.

  “No, the bomb needs to get over the border safely. I’m in charge of the crossing. If the bomb gets stopped there, they will execute me, find another bomb and acquire a new target. The attack will still happen, only I will be dead and you won’t have any warning. Right now, I have all the intelligence we need: Names, dates, locations. I worked three years to get this deep. Trust me, it is our only chance.”

  “What’s your plan, then?”

  “You help me get the bomb into the country. I help you destroy the terror cell right before their attack. We root them out, every last one of them. We strike in St. Petersburg, at their end target. The President will be there before he returns to Moscow for Victory Day. Think about the effect of stopping the attack and dissolving a hidden terror cell in the motherland.”

  Olga let that sink in. It was not what she had bargained for. The stakes were much higher. So were the rewards. She wanted a moment to ponder it. If only she could talk to her father.

  Then Tanya handed Olga an envelope.

  “Tomorrow you go to Barcelona and meet a man named Khabib at the Opium Club. You give him this envelope, no more, no less. Payment instructions.” Olga started to open it, but Tanya’s hand stopped her. “And one more thing. Don’t trust him. Khabib is not on our side, don’t forget that. He is our deadly enemy, his weapon aimed at
our motherland’s heart. So we let him come closer, and when he’s close, we stab him in the back.”

  “Da.” Olga agreed and the decision was made for her. She was now part of Team Tanya.

  The recorded audio showed on Priya’s phone as graphs of overtones produced by the speaker’s vocal cords. It was unlikely that two individuals would develop the same pattern given all the different variables. Mobile phone and speech recognition apps providers had been recording and storing each user’s vocal fingerprint for years, which was the reason most agency operatives used hacked devices to keep each biometric identifier on the phone instead of sending it back to the provider.

  “Rose? Got the voice recordings?” Priya asked. She was already on the way to her Porsche.

  “We’ve been running them through our database,” Rose said. “No match.”

  Priya sighed and leaned back against the headrest.

  “Given their backgrounds, it’s no wonder,” Rose said. “They hid their tracks well, but there are other databases.”

  “Other than our own?”

  “Every secret service has one.”

  “Please don’t say you want me to hack into all of them,” Priya said.

  “No need. I have contacts. Let me deal with the identification,” Rose said. “You go to Barcelona and find out about Khabib.”

  Priya entered the new destination into her GPS. “It’s a seven hour drive.”

  “And I know with that car you can be there faster,” Rose said.

  Priya smiled.

  “Opium is a luxury night club,” Priya said, running a search through her phone. “I don’t suppose you can use one of your connections to get us in with a good spot.”

  “Sadly I don’t,” Rose said. “But I think there is someone who can get us what we need.”