The Target

by Saul Herzog

  She hadn’t started the engine, and she ducked down below the dashboard, carefully shutting the door and praying some feature on the car didn’t beep or flash or otherwise give away her presence.

  The parking lot was about half full, and she knew it wouldn’t take them long to find her if she stayed where she was. She was still holding the pistol, and she rose her head up slowly to peek out over the dash.

  The men were walking purposefully along the rows of cars, searching the gaps behind them, beneath them, looking for her.

  She pressed the button to open the passenger window and then aimed the gun at the nearest of the two men.

  She fired four shots.

  Glass shattered, the alarms in the cars around him sounded, and in the confusion, Agata turned her ignition and jolted her vehicle out of its spot.

  The second man ran out in front of her and raised his gun.

  She slammed right into him before he could get a shot off, and he rolled up over her windshield, over the roof, and onto the ground behind her.

  He was about to get up when she jammed her brakes, then flung the car into reverse.

  The car made a gruesome sound as it rolled over him.

  The other man rose up from between two cars to her right and opened fire. Webs of shattered glass stretched across the windshield, and the loud clang of bullets on steel filled her ears.

  She jammed the car into drive and lurched forward, her tires screeching on the smooth concrete as they struggled for purchase. As she passed the man’s position, she reached out and fired through her open passenger window.

  She had no idea if she’d hit him or not and didn’t slow down to check. She had to go around the row of cars and then turn back toward him on the next aisle before exiting the lot. As she passed his position, the back windshield shattered. She ducked as three bullets struck it.

  She turned sharply onto the ramp, and the car’s undercarriage sparked as it scraped on the concrete. She sped out onto the deserted street without checking to see if there was any oncoming traffic.

  She sped to the first set of lights and drove right through them, then the next, then turned onto a side street. She sped along it as the sound of police sirens closed in from all directions.

  She turned into an alley between two large office buildings and jammed the car behind a large dumpster. Then she killed the engine.

  She got out of the car and, using the edge of a nail file, removed the license plates from the front and back of the vehicle.

  Above her, a police helicopter flew in and began scanning the area.

  She looked at her watch.

  The police sirens were getting louder.

  She didn’t know what to do. If she couldn’t trust Kuzis, if she couldn’t trust the police, then she didn’t know where to turn.

  Who could she go to?

  Who would listen?

  Then she thought of her. Her ally. The one person she might be able to trust.

  She straightened herself up, wiped the blood from her hands, and walked down the alley toward the street. On her way, she powered off her phone and threw it in a dumpster. She made her way to the Central Railway Station a few blocks away and checked the international departures. There was a train leaving for Warsaw in twenty minutes.

  13

  When Laurel’s flight landed in Dulles, she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. She had an apartment of her own, a barren place full of dead plants and an empty goldfish bowl.

  She hadn’t been there in a while and didn’t relish the thought of going back to it.

  Roth had been in the process of moving her and Tatyana into a fancy townhouse in Georgetown, a place he’d been planning to set up as the new headquarters of the Special Operations Group, but it had been infiltrated. The Russians had managed to find out where it was and had attacked.

  That made it useless now as a base of operation, and Laurel had already listed it for sale with a high-end Georgetown realtor.

  She pulled her cell from her pocket and dialed Roth’s number.

  “Are you back?” Roth said, dispensing with small talk.

  “I’m at Dulles. I’ll come to you now.”

  “You can’t. I’m in Bismarck, North Dakota.”

  “What are you doing out there?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “All right,” Laurel said. “I guess I’ll take a cab to Langley.”

  “No, don’t go there. I’m going to keep you completely off the grid this time. No leaks. No infiltrations. Just you and the few people you choose personally to work with.”

  “And do you have a place in mind for us to work out of?”

  “A few, but I’m open to suggestions.”

  “I might have one or two.”

  “All right,” he said. “Why don’t you go home, freshen up, and meet me tonight at the Saint Royal. I feel like I owe you dinner.”

  Laurel hung up and looked at her watch. It was noon. She left the terminal in search of a cab. It was a gloomy, gray day, and she pulled her coat tightly around her neck.

  “Where to?” the driver said.

  Langley, Virginia, was where she should have lived. It was a leafy suburb within easy driving distance of the city. But instead, she’d chosen to pay twice as much to live in a downtown loft. It was worth it to be close to the action.

  “U Street,” she said.

  Sitting in the back of the cab, watching the dreary DC streets pass by, a feeling of melancholy began to drift over her. January in DC had never been her favorite season, but this was more than that.

  Since her first day with the agency, she’d always known her goal. She’d had one mission, and that was to recruit Lance Spector, to lure him back into the fold, to take over as his handler.

  Now, he was gone.

  Gone for good.

  And not just physically.

  The position he’d occupied in her mind, the symbol of strength, the sense of purpose he’d given her, all of that was gone too.

  And it left her strangely empty.

  The cab pulled up outside her apartment, and she got out. She rummaged through her bag for her keys, it had been so long since she’d used them, and unlocked the double bolts on the steel door. She let herself into the apartment, and if she’d felt depressed before, she felt doubly so now.

  The apartment was cold. She had one of those smart thermostats that could tell when you were away, and it had saved her money by letting the temperature drop to that of a morgue.

  She put it up to eighty and switched on the lights.

  It was a nice loft, airy, with that restored industrial look that was so fashionable, but looking around it now, it felt barren and vacant.

  There were some potted plants by the windows, all dead. There was a goldfish bowl on the kitchen counter, empty. She’d flushed its dead inhabitant down the toilet last time she’d returned from a mission.

  She put a pod in her coffee machine and brewed a frothy americano. Then she turned on the TV and watched the headlines while sipping it.

  The news had moved on from the attacks in Moscow and Beijing. Lance’s name had been cleared. The story of the day was a big national park the president was dedicating.

  It was truly incredible how quickly the public’s attention could be drawn to new things.

  The embassies in Moscow and Beijing were still smoldering, anyone with half a brain and a modicum of imagination knew the Russian and Chinese governments had to have been behind the attacks, and yet, all of Washington had bent over backward to avoid casting blame.

  They’d kept the peace.

  Kept things stable.

  And shown their adversaries that they were too scared to stand up to a challenge.

  Maybe Lance had the right idea. Get out now, while he still could.

  Everyone said Washington was a swamp, filled with self-interested politicians who passed legislation only at the behest of their wealthy corporate donors and special interest groups.

  I
t wasn’t about governance.

  It wasn’t about helping people.

  It was quid pro quo on a scale to rival ancient Rome.

  She shook her head.

  She didn’t believe that.

  She wasn’t that cynical.

  Not yet.

  Maybe the day would come when she lost all faith in the system, when she was a jaded as Lance, but that day had yet to come.

  She still believed America was a beacon of light, a bastion of democracy, a protector of the rule of law in a world that skewed increasingly toward the opposite poles of authoritarianism and anarchy.

  It wasn’t easy.

  It didn’t always feel good.

  The work was dirty and, when the end came, there would be more blood on her hands than she could probably even imagine.

  But she believed in it.

  And she was still willing to give her life for it.

  She went into the bathroom and ran a hot bath. Then she poured herself a glass of wine and climbed in. She lay there for an hour, up to her neck in suds and bath salts, and when she lay down on the bed afterward, she fell into a deep sleep.

  14

  Kirov looked out the window of his hotel room and blew cigar smoke against the pane. It was night, and Saint Isaac’s Square, lit by tall electric street lights, glowed with an unnatural bluish tint. Snow swirled around the lights like angry moths and swept around the enormous base of the Tsar Nicholas the First monument.

  The enormous statue, a bronze Nicholas on horseback, loomed fifty feet above the square like Goliath. When it was unveiled in 1859, it had been lauded as a technical marvel because of the amount of weight the engineers had managed to support from the prancing horse’s two hind hooves.

  Those two narrow ankles were the sole reason the statue still stood.

  The Soviet government, which pulled down countless other monuments to the Russian aristocracy, allowed this one to remain because of its technical merit.

  Kirov had a cigar in one hand and a phone in the other. The phone was a landline, solidly built of brass and thick, black plastic, and weighed a full five pounds. He held it by the nook beneath the receiver and waited for the GRU’s military exchange to connect him to Oleg Zhukovsky.

  He was in the field. Out there at the border overseeing military preparations. It was his job to make sure the officers involved kept their mouths shut about what was being planned.

  Kirov knew Zhukovsky was more than capable of keeping them in line. He was a sadist. Cruel. They were terrified of him.

  They’d all heard the rumors.

  Zhukovsky was a weirdo. A freak. He tortured things. The police had found animals in his basement, dogs, cats, raccoons. A veritable zoo of mangy, suffering creatures. Rows of cages that were kept in the dark twenty-three hours a day.

  The officer who found it had been responding to a complaint from a neighbor. He didn’t know who Zhukovsky was, but he learned soon enough. So did the neighbor. They were found in a meatpacking plant, suspended by their ankles, a gallon and a half of blood in a pool beneath each of them.

  Zhukovsky had bled them.

  He’d made a point.

  And he’d kept his job.

  Kirov pictured him now, out there in the wilds of the frontier country, schlepping around a muddy field, barking orders at a bunch of pimply-faced recruits who had more experience peeling potatoes than war-fighting.

  Zhukovsky terrified people, but physically, he was frail. He’d fallen into the hands of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in a war that ended over thirty years ago, but he still bore the scars. The things they’d done to him would haunt him to his grave, and one of those things was that he couldn’t stand the cold. It made him ache.

  Ordinarily, he did his work from an office, an extremely warm office, at GRU headquarters. It had been specially adapted to his needs.

  Which was why it amused Kirov to think of him out on the Latvian border in the middle of January.

  Kirov looked at his watch.

  It was three in the morning.

  He was hungover and had a thumping headache. His mouth tasted like something had died in it.

  After his return from dinner, he’d spent two hours throwing up, holding onto the porcelain toilet bowl until he thought he was going to bring up an organ.

  The thought of a cow’s milk curdling in the intestines of her calf, mixing with the maggots from the cheese and the six whole songbirds he’d been forced to ingest, was too much.

  When his stomach finally settled, he’d called for some tea to be brought up, and sat in the bed dozing and sipping it when the phone rang.

  It was a call from GRU headquarters in Moscow telling him to get hold of Zhukovsky urgently.

  He rubbed his eyes and slumped into the armchair by the window. He was wearing the plush, brown robe supplied by the hotel but still felt a chill.

  When Zhukovsky’s voice came on the line, Kirov recognized its harsh and dry tones immediately.

  “Jacob Kirov,” Zhukovsky said. “Sorry to have made you wait. This close to the border, the communications protocols are very strict.”

  “I received a call from Moscow,” Kirov said, purposefully neglecting to greet him. “I take it there’s a problem.”

  “There’s a problem, sir. Yes.”

  “And are you going to make me guess what it is?”

  “One of their caches has been found,” Zhukovsky said.

  “Caches?”

  “They’ve committed to delivering Riga within six hours of the invasion,” Zhukovsky said. “In order to make that happen, they need provisions in place close to the border.”

  “And someone found them?” Kirov said.

  “That’s correct, sir. I’ve already had the officer responsible taken into custody.”

  “I bet you have, Zhukovsky.”

  “It appears to have been a Latvian police officer who saw the cache.”

  “So kill him,” Kirov said.

  “It’s a her, sir, and we tried.”

  “What do you mean, you tried?”

  “She’s with the national security division. She must have some special training. A team was sent to her apartment thirty minutes ago, but somehow she bested them.”

  “A woman police officer bested a GRU team?”

  “It wasn’t one of our teams, sir. Her commanding officer is on my payroll. He sent his own men.”

  “So she’s on the run?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And she knows what we’re up to.”

  “She knows enough, sir.”

  Kirov said nothing, letting a silence fill the air. He was always distracted when speaking to Zhukovsky, picturing him in the basement with the animals, wondering what on earth it was that he was doing to them.

  “Well, Zhukovsky,” he said, “I don’t think I need to explain to you what’s at stake here. If you don’t put a lid on her, it will be both our heads.”

  “I’m already on it, sir. I’ve activated every asset in the region. When she pops up, I’ll have someone ready to get her.”

  “Hopefully it’s someone more competent than last time.”

  “These are GRU assets, Kirov. They’re very competent.”

  15

  Mikhail Smolov was in bed with a Warsaw prostitute when his phone rang.

  He didn’t pick up immediately. He finished what he was doing.

  Then, he laid some money on the dresser and told her he had to leave.

  She remained in the bed, watching him dress disinterestedly.

  “Maybe I’ll come back in an hour or two,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  The elevator in her building never worked, and he ran down the four flights of stairs. He didn’t call Zhukovsky until he was a block away.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Zhukovsky said.

  “I was doing something.”

  “Well, I’ve got something for you to do. I’m sending a picture now.”

  Smolov pulled the p
hone from his ear to look at the picture.”

  “Pretty. Who is she?”

  “A Latvian police corporal.”

  “Shame.”

  “This is very important,” Zhukovsky said. “Do not fuck it up.”

  “I think I can handle her.”

  “Don’t underestimate her. She’s had training. She took out a team in Riga.”

  Smolov was a trained GRU assassin. Whatever training the Latvian police had, he was confident it was nothing compared to what he was capable of.

  “Where’s she located?”

  “She’s arriving on the Riga train in thirty minutes. Can you get there?”

  “I can get there,” Smolov said, looking up and down the street for a cab. “Is she alone?”

  “Yes,” Zhukovsky said, “and as I said, don’t fuck this up.”

  Smolov hung up and lit a cigarette.

  It was frigidly cold, even by Warsaw standards, and there were no taxis. He pulled up the collar on his coat and began walking at a brisk pace toward Warszawa Centralna.

  Apart from the snowplows, the streets were empty. The wind whipped around him bitterly, and he opened and closed his hands in his pockets to keep his fingers from going numb.

  He didn’t have a gun with him, and there wasn’t time to get one, but he could operate without one.

  He crossed the wide, concrete plaza in front of the cultural palace and entered the station through the main entrance.

  Above the concourse, on a large digital display, the international arrivals were listed. The train from Riga was running right on schedule, arriving in ten minutes.

  The central station was one of the few places in the city that truly operated around the clock, and he went up to a kiosk and ordered a cup of hot tea. The lady behind the stall, wrapped in layer upon layer of scarves, pressed a button on a machine and handed him the little plastic cup that came out.

  Smolov held it in his hands, letting the warmth bring his fingers back to life, then took a sip. It tasted like lemon water with sugar.