The Last Deception

by DV Berkom, D. V. Berkom

  “When have I not been gentle?”

  There was a long pause before he changed the subject. “Will this be a long trip?”

  “Shouldn’t take more than a week. I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back. Did you find anything on those photographs I sent you?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got people working on them, though, so it shouldn’t be long now. If there’s anything these guys’ll find it.”

  Leine thanked him for the information and ended the call. Then she booked a flight to Athens and reserved a small apartment near the harbor. Since it was close to the off season, she got a surprisingly good rate. Her arrival in Greece this time of year meant air and ferry service to the Cyclades would be virtually nonexistent. If the Black Swan left Athens before Leine touched down, she’d have to make some kind of arrangement with Lou’s friend to find Sakharov.

  If all went well she shouldn’t need the help.

  Chapter 6

  Athens, Greece

  Leine touched down in Athens that evening, rented a car, and drove to the apartment she’d rented.

  The sights and smells of the city rekindled memories from an earlier time, and she stared through the windshield at the familiar terrain, feeling like a prodigal daughter. She’d completed assignments in Greece, but it had been a while since she’d been back. Those jobs, assassinations ordered by Eric at a time when he’d been using agency assets for his own ends, still weighed heavily on her conscience. How could she be certain the targets she’d eliminated had been actual threats to national security and not just jobs that would help line her boss’s pockets?

  There’d been changes to the city most referred to as the Cradle of Western Civilization. Ever since the economic collapse and the resulting austerity measures, the difference between “tourist Greece” and “real Greece” had become much more pronounced. Walls covered in graffiti dotted the landscape where earlier there’d been none. Once-thriving shops were now either shuttered or operating illegally out of someone’s home, and protests against the government and transportation strikes had become more frequent. From what little she’d seen so far, the people of Athens still retained their friendly manner and zest for life, although an underlying strain appeared to dampen their enthusiasm.

  Leine picked up the key to her apartment from a woman who lived two doors down and dropped her bag in the front room. Before driving to the marina to find the Black Swan, she filled a daypack with several items she’d brought with her. She wore light-colored capris and a black camisole under a long-sleeved sweater in anticipation of the warm weather predicted for the next day. Her all-terrain sandals were comfortable and gave her sufficient coverage, and she’d stuffed a weatherproof jacket in the bottom of her daypack in case the forecast turned out to be wrong.

  Fifteen minutes later she turned onto a steep side street perpendicular to the Artemis Marina, found a space to park facing the water, and turned off the engine. Several vehicles parked along the street allowed her rental to blend in. Down the hill to her left, kitchen staff sat outside the back door of a busy restaurant having a smoke. To the right, a vacant lot overgrown with vegetation stretched into the darkness.

  Harbor lights arced across the Aegean as waves gently lapped the shore. The faint clank of lines against metal masts and the sound of boats thumping against the dock accompanied a light wind blowing through the quiet neighborhood. Air redolent with garlic and onions and fresh grilled fish from the restaurant mixed with the briny scent of the gulf.

  A quick glance through the windshield with the night vision goggles affirmed the location of the Black Swan. In addition to a pair of sunglasses and the NVGs, she’d packed high resolution infrared binoculars, a computer tablet, bottled water, a first aid kit, and a cell phone, which she used to call Lou.

  “Hey, Lou. Checking in.”

  “I figured you’d be calling. There’s been some activity on the Black Swan. Looks like they might be getting ready to move. The crew’s been offloading suitcases and boxes and taking them to a van parked nearby.” Lou had been keeping tabs on the super yacht via one of hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth. This one happened to be owned by a private European communications firm. Lou had searched for and found the CEO’s son, who’d been kidnapped and held for ransom by an extremist group, and the two of them had been close friends ever since.

  “Makes sense. The weather’s turning and the season’s winding down. Anyone matching Katarina Sakharov’s description?”

  “I’ve seen her twice. She’s usually flanked by two big guys in dark suits.”

  “Good to know.”

  “By the way,” he continued. “Those three photos you sent? Keira found a way in.” A brilliant software engineer, Keira freelanced for the agency for several years but had gone off grid after she quit. Lou tracked her down and convinced her to do occasional side work for SHEN.

  “And?”

  “Two of them were recruitment videos for Izz Al-Din. One showed a couple of Russian soldiers complaining about their mission.”

  “Can you send them to me?”

  “Comin’ atcha. Are you going to need any bait while you’re there?”

  Bait was one of their code words for weapons. “Couldn’t hurt. I hear the fishing’s amazing this time of year. Minnows and a box of night crawlers should do it.” Minnows stood for a semiautomatic, and night crawlers meant ammunition.

  “What size container?”

  “How about a number nine?” A nine millimeter should be all she’d need.

  “No problem. You know the address.”

  “Thanks, Lou. I’ll send pictures if I catch anything.”

  “Please don’t.”

  She ended the call and found the message from Lou containing the videos. She retrieved her tablet and downloaded them.

  Leine opened one of the files and immediately dimmed down the brightly lit outdoor scene. The video had the narrow screen and quality of a cell phone video. Three masked men wearing black headscarves and holding huge knives stood at attention behind the same number of unmasked prisoners. Wind ruffled the prisoners’ hair. A nondescript landscape of buff-colored sand and rocks stretched behind them.

  The prisoners, two men and one woman, knelt in front of the masked men, hands behind their backs. The man on the left appeared resigned, his features slack, while the one in the middle rocked back and forth and prayed aloud, his eyes squeezed shut. In contrast, the woman’s rigid posture and angry expression communicated defiance and white-hot hatred.

  One of the masked jihadists began to speak in Arabic, directing most of his diatribe toward the US and the allies fighting against Izz Al-Din. His chilling last words sealed the victims’ fates:

  “These traitorous dogs have aided the infidels in their fight against Allah. Their sentence is to die at our hands and burn in the fires of Hell. Allahu Akbar.”

  The other two parroted the speaker’s last words before each of the three masked men stepped forward, grabbed a prisoner by the hair, exposing their throats, and raised the knives to each of their necks. Leine stopped the video before the beheading. She’d seen enough.

  The next video opened with a shot panning a barren landscape. Bright sun and unbroken, flat terrain hosted the occasional dust devil eddying across the ground like a whirling dervish, disintegrating as quickly as it formed. Gusts of wind buffeted the microphone, punctuating the videographer’s even breathing. A few seconds into the recording, the camera zoomed in on what looked like the edge of a large pit. The person recording the video walked steadily toward the crater, the sound of crunching gravel competing with the wind.

  The picture bounced with each step before coming to rest at the edge of the hole. The videographer paused, his breath catching before the camera panned down. At the bottom of the massive excavation lay hundreds of bodies covered in filth and beset by flies. Arms, legs, torsos, and heads sprawled across the bottom as though a janitor had disposed of a pile of trash. Men, women,
and a disturbing number of children made up the horrifying tableau.

  Somewhere off camera an engine caught, choked, and rattled to life. The camera panned back to take in the lumbering mustard-yellow bulldozer pushing a wall of dun-colored earth toward the gaping gravesite. Black smoke belched from the dozer’s exhaust as it pushed the huge pile of dirt closer to the edge of the pit. The machine lurched forward the last few feet, dumping sand and dirt onto the bodies, partially burying them. A dust cloud rose from the bottom of the picture and enveloped the scene.

  Leine leaned back in her seat. Right out of the Nazi playbook.

  Finding the bodies would take a miracle.

  With a feeling of dread, Leine double-clicked the next file. In a dark room two men sat on a cot, facing the camera. The low angle of the shot suggested the person recording the video didn’t want his subjects to know they were being filmed. A time and date stamp told her the scene had been recorded several weeks earlier. She turned up the volume.

  “This whole thing is shit,” the man on the left side of the screen muttered in Russian. He glanced behind him before continuing. “I want to fight for my country, not help these barbarians.”

  The man on the right nodded. Keeping his voice low he said, “But if we disobey, we will be shot. The general—”

  Off camera another voice interrupted, “No matter what happens this does not end well. The terrorists could kill us at any moment.”

  The man on the left leaned in as if to say something else, but the man on the right stood, turning his back to the camera as he spoke Arabic to someone Leine couldn’t see. A second later the screen went black.

  Leine took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There was no way to prove who these men were or where they were at the time of the recording. The man who recorded the video, Mikhail, was most likely dead, and the others could be anywhere and from anywhere—mercenaries tended to go where the highest bidder sent them. The clips didn’t constitute enough evidence to show the files to anyone who mattered—whoever presented them would be summarily ignored, if not viewed as a conspiracy nut. She could take her chances and leak them, but in the current climate of fake news and dubious sources, getting anyone to take them seriously would be a crapshoot.

  If it turned out that Sakharov had nothing to do with diverting the arms shipment, he might agree to back up her story to keep his company from being dragged through the muck. Then she might be able to get a meeting with someone in a position to do something. She ran through names in her head, discarding all but one: Scott Henderson.

  Henderson, the boss of her former boss, Eric, still ran the black ops agency Leine worked for all those years ago and had direct access to the vice president. There was just one problem: Leine’s persona non grata status. As it was, Scott Henderson wasn’t too happy with her, hadn’t been for a long time, and scheduling a meeting with him would most likely be difficult. She supposed it was because she outed one of his favorite directors for going rogue several years prior.

  Maybe “outed” wasn’t the right word. “Caused to be dead” was more accurate.

  The culture at the agency had been such that Henderson preferred to handle “problem employees” internally. The real cause of the explosion in a rundown LA neighborhood had been covered up sufficiently so that it couldn’t be traced back to Leine or the shadowy agency. But Henderson had never forgiven her for her role in events surrounding the shakeup. Leine couldn’t have cared less.

  Until now.

  She hadn’t foreseen the need to be on Scott Henderson’s good side. True, burning bridges was never a good idea, but Leine had been left with no choice. If she hadn’t revealed her former boss’s misdeeds to his superiors, agents sympathetic to the agency would have hunted her down for her role in Eric’s death. She’d already been a target.

  At the time it was a no-brainer. Now she wished she had Henderson’s direct line.

  Life was funny that way.

  Leine shut down the tablet and put it away. She leaned her head back and stared out the windshield, looking at nothing.

  Everything hinged on finding Sakharov.

  Chapter 7

  The morning dawned clear and bright with the occasional scudding cloud in an otherwise flawless sky. The sun hadn’t yet crested the horizon, creating a violet display that would soon turn orange, then yellow, and end in brilliant white sunlight reflecting off the glassy smooth Aegean. Yearning for an espresso, Leine stretched her arms and cracked her neck, shaking off the last vestiges of a cat nap. The front seat of the car had been somewhat comfortable, although her body would pay later.

  A delivery driver and two fishermen were going about their business, but the surrounding neighborhood hadn’t yet fully awoken. Two ambitious crewmembers dressed in matching polo shirts were hosing down one of the yachts, but it would still be the better part of an hour before the area came alive.

  Leine trained her binoculars on the section of the marina where the larger yachts were berthed. The Black Swan was tied stern-first to the long concrete dock, with a black Mercedes Benz sedan parked nearby. Three men could be seen patrolling the decks. She made a note of several neighboring yachts and their country of origin, and settled in to wait.

  The sun crept skyward and slowly the marina and surrounding neighborhood began to stir. An older man driving a small delivery van pulled up to the back of the restaurant, got out, and unlocked the door leading into the building. A stray dog trotted by and slowed near the garbage bin, but finding nothing to eat resumed its original course.

  At nine thirty, two black Mercedes Benz SUVs pulled up to the marina’s guard house and stopped. The window of the first SUV rolled down and the driver’s arm materialized. The guard poked his head out, said something to the driver, and laughed. A moment later the gate swung open, granting both vehicles access. They continued past the yachts before stopping next to the sedan opposite the Black Swan. Moments later, a woman wearing oversized sunglasses and a sleeveless white, knee-length dress stepped off the yacht onto the dock and into one of the waiting SUVs. She matched the photographs of Katarina Sakharov.

  Leine started the car. She allowed the two vehicles a slight head start before she nosed into the street to follow them.

  She tailed the SUVs onto a busy freeway and drove until they reached Kifissia, an upscale suburb in northern Athens. The difference was startling. Where the majority of Athens had been hive-like, filled with graffiti and sound and chaos, the tree-lined, shade-dappled, park-adorned boulevards of Kifissia brought instant calm.

  Interesting. With her tastes, I’d have expected her to go to Kolonaki. High-end luxury shops like Gucci and Prada clustered together within a few blocks of each other at Kolonaki, the Rodeo Drive of Athens. In contrast, Kifissia was upscale, but much more low-key.

  The SUVs pulled to the curb next to a well-appointed outdoor mall of white stucco buildings with roofs like nipples rising from the wide, immaculate sidewalks. Leine pulled into a parking space two cars down and turned off the engine. A muscular man with massive shoulders exited the lead vehicle and did a perimeter check. He wore mirrored sunglasses, an earpiece, and a dark suit, and didn’t smile. Apparently satisfied with their surroundings, he turned back toward the SUV and held out his hand, saying something to the person inside. A delicate hand grasped his, and a moment later Katarina Sakharov emerged. Another man dressed identically to the first exited the vehicle from the opposite side. A telltale bulge near the men’s armpits completed the ensemble. A perfect pair of bookends.

  Leine stepped out of her rental and slid on the sunglasses before following the small group into the mall’s courtyard. Even though it was early in the day there were quite a few people shopping. Taking her time, Katarina Sakharov walked into each shop and out again before disappearing into a boutique specializing in eveningwear. Leine stayed back far enough so she could continue to monitor them but remain inconspicuous.

  Pretending to window shop, she glanced behind her.
Another man dressed similarly to the other two bodyguards stood several yards away. Leine continued to walk, feigning interest in a rack of clothes outside the boutique. Apparently, Katarina Sakharov had found something she liked—her security team took up posts on either side of the entrance.

  Leine smiled as she walked between them into the store. Their expressions granite-like, the only indication they registered her presence was a slight shift in their stances when they made their threat assessment. Evidently she’d passed. Once inside, she slid her sunglasses onto her head and let her eyes adjust.

  Artfully designed racks filled the small shop with haute-couture evening gowns sporting astronomical prices. Lute and violin music played gently over invisible speakers. The only other customers in the shop were two women who appeared to be in their late thirties. Leine greeted the shopkeeper as she perused the merchandise, all while listening to them chat.

  Most of the women’s conversation centered around where they were going to have dinner that night, how a piece of clothing worked or didn’t, and the changing weather, which meant it was time to return home. Leine detected a hint of sadness from the smaller woman’s tone, but the other seemed ready to go back to wherever she’d come from.

  “Aren’t you tired of the endless partying, Livia?” the taller one with red hair asked in a clipped British accent.

  “How can you even ask such a thing?” replied the other woman. “Going home means dreary skies and a dreary life. London’s so tedious. I’d live here year-round if Barry would agree.”

  The redhead scoffed. “That’ll be the day. Your husband is married to his job. I’m surprised you were able to talk him into going on holiday at all.”

  “If it wasn’t for you two, I’m afraid I’d be sentenced to live in jolly old England every day for the rest of my life.”