The Target

by Saul Herzog

  She remembered what happened next very clearly.

  She’d been looking at herself in the mirror, trying to clear her mind of any potential pitfalls the guy might have been hiding.

  She knew he might be married.

  She knew he might be a womanizer.

  She knew he could have any number of weird sexual fetishes and that if she went home with him, she might not realize something was off until it was too late.

  As she reapplied her lipstick and gave herself a last look in the mirror, she told herself to quit worrying. Every guy was a risk. Any of them could break her heart. Any of them could hurt her. At least she was taking a leap with someone she was attracted to.

  She was about to leave when the woman standing next to her, an attractive woman about her own age, with dark hair that was so smooth it looked almost translucent, spoke to her.

  “If you’re thinking he’s too good to be true,” the woman said, “you’d be right.”

  Agata looked at the woman in surprise. “Excuse me?” she said.

  The woman looked around the bathroom to make sure they were alone, then leaned closer.

  “Trust me on this,” she said. “From one girl to another, you do not want to go home with that man.”

  Agata was taken aback. She didn’t know what to say. Who did this woman think she was, in her expensive Burberry coat and Hermes scarf?

  Agata was about to protest when the woman left.

  When Agata got back out to her table, she scanned the room for the woman but didn’t see her.

  She finished her meal with the man, and when it came time to decide if she was going to let him take her home, at the last minute, she decided not to go with him.

  It wasn’t until a few months later that she saw his picture on the police database. His body had been found by the Riga dockyards in what looked like a textbook Russian assassination. He’d been poisoned by Novichok, a binary chemical agent that was known to have been developed by the Russian State Chemical Research Institute. It was practically a signature for assassinations carried out by the Kremlin.

  Agata pulled up the rest of the file and saw that the man had actually been under Latvian state surveillance. He was suspected of being a handler for the GRU, and had obtained kompromat on a number of female members of the Latvian intelligence community.

  Because of what that woman in the bathroom had said to her, it looked like Agata had just narrowly escaped becoming one of those women.

  Agata looked through the rest of the file and found that it contained video footage. The area where the body was found was monitored by CCTV. While the murder itself hadn’t been caught on camera, there was footage of the suspected killer leaving the scene.

  As Agata watched the footage, she knocked over her coffee cup in shock. She had no doubt what she was seeing.

  A woman in a long, Burberry coat, with what looked a lot like an Hermes scarf pulled up around her face.

  It was the woman from the lady’s room in the restaurant. Agata was certain of it.

  And that’s where she thought the story would have ended, but for the fact that the woman approached her a second time. This time, just like the first, it happened in the lady’s room of a high-end Riga restaurant.

  “We really have to stop meeting like this,” the woman said.

  Agata was floored.

  “You’re a GRU agent,” she said. “I saw footage from the dockyard.”

  The woman nodded.

  Agata didn’t understand. “Why would you let me know that. If I tell anyone, you’re cover’s blown. Your life will be in danger.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone,” the woman said.

  Agata shook her head. “You’re wasting your time,” she said. “If you think I’m going to sell out my country, you’re sorely mistaken.”

  “I’m not trying to recruit you,” the woman said.

  “Then what are you trying to do?”

  “I’ve been watching you,” the woman said. “You’re on a GRU list.”

  “Everyone’s on a GRU list,” Agata said.

  The woman nodded. They were both looking in the mirror, and the woman looked Agata directly in the eye. “I thought…” she said, then hesitated.

  “You thought?”

  “I thought maybe, that you and I had something in common.”

  “Oh, you did?”

  “Yes, I did.

  “This is a trap,” Agata said.

  “If I wanted to trap you, I would have let that creep take you to bed. He had more cameras in his bedroom than a porn production company.”

  Agata didn’t know what to say. It didn’t make sense. This woman was a Russian, and yet, she’d gone out on a limb, putting herself at risk, just to protect her from another Russian spy.”

  “What’s really going on here?” Agata said.

  “I thought we could be…”.

  “Yes?”

  “Basically…”.

  “Basically what?”

  “I thought we could be friends,” the woman said.

  Agata looked at her, the vulnerability, the hint of blush on her cheeks.

  “You must be out of your mind,” Agata said.

  The woman arched an eyebrow. “Am I?” she said.

  “Friends? What do you think this is? High school.”

  “You tell me what the real battle is here,” the woman said. “What’s the real war we’re fighting.”

  “The same war we’ve always been fighting.”

  “Exactly,” the woman said. “The oldest war of them all.”

  “You’re not talking about the Cold War, are you?”

  The woman shook her head. “Adam and Eve, sweetie. That’s the real way we’re going to get fucked. You mark my words.”

  “So, you’re saying…”.

  “I’m just saying, sometimes, it’s beneficial to have someone looking out for you.”

  “So…” Agata said, “what you’re proposing…”.

  “I’m not asking you to do anything,” the woman said. “I’m just saying, I’m in your country illegally. I have no diplomatic cover. I receive orders from an anonymous safety deposit box in a bank, and then I seduce powerful men and blackmail them. It’s only a matter of time before I get into trouble.”

  “I’m not supposed to be having this conversation,” Agata said.

  The woman nodded. “You’re not supposed to be having this conversation,” she said. “I’m not supposed to even exist.”

  “What are you asking of me?” Agata said.

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I just know, it doesn’t hurt to have a friend. I’m not asking you to betray your country for me. I’m just saying, in my line of work, it could be helpful for me if you didn’t betray your sex either.”

  “My sex?”

  “Us girls…” the woman said.

  “Have to stick together,” Agata said quietly.

  The woman spritzed herself with perfume. She didn’t look weak. She didn’t look afraid. If anything, she looked fierce.

  But Agata understood what she was saying. She felt isolated enough at times, and she was in her own country, working for her own government, doing what she was supposed to be doing.

  This woman really was all alone.

  “Look,” the woman said. “You’ve already seen how I could help you. I didn’t sell you state secrets. I didn’t change to course of global geopolitics. I just…”.

  “Had my back.”

  The woman nodded.

  Agata didn’t know what she was doing at the time. She never in a million years would have thought about getting into an arrangement like this, especially not with a GRU agent.

  But the woman had a point.

  Which side was she really on? Truly? When all was said and done?

  Which side was almost guaranteed to get fucked, eventually, by the other?

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Because,” the woman said, “I’m going
to give you something you could use to kill me if you ever wanted to.”

  Agata looked at her skeptically. “And what might that be?”

  “My name.”

  Agata had never needed to use that name. She’d never called on the woman for help, and the woman had never called on her.

  But it felt good knowing she had it.

  That was until she saw on a NATO national security bulletin that a GRU agent with the name Tatyana Aleksandrova had defected to the American side.

  Good for her, Agata had thought to herself, thinking that was the end of the story.

  She thought she’d never hear the name again after that.

  The woman was gone. Hiding out somewhere in Iowa, or Idaho, or Ohio, under a new identity, a new name.

  She looked out the window of the cab. They were on the Unter den Linden, and ahead she could see the enormous Brandenburg Gate.

  “This will do,” she said to the driver, handing him some cash.

  He pulled over, and she got out.

  She walked the last few blocks to the American embassy on her own, picking up a newspaper on the way.

  Tatyana Aleksandrova was the one name on the planet she could be virtually certain would not sell her out to the Russians.

  20

  Maksim Mironov realized he wasn’t the only asset on the job. He’d been at the Hauptbahnhof waiting for the target, but she never showed. Another asset, Prochnow, a German, was there too, and the two men recognized each other on the platform.

  They both waited, one at either end of the train until the last of the passengers disembarked.

  The target was not among them.

  Maksim waited at the door while Prochnow boarded the train and searched every carriage.

  He came out a few minutes later and shook his head.

  “We’re going to be blamed for this,” he said.

  “Did you search the toilets?” Maksim said.

  “Of course I searched the toilets.”

  “Were any locked?”

  “I searched all of them. I looked below the seats. I checked the luggage compartments.”

  “She’s definitely not on this train?”

  “Do you want to do the search?” Prochnow said.

  Maksim looked at him. “You don’t talk to me like that.”

  Prochnow looked away.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” Maksim said, leaning in closer.

  “I heard you,” Prochnow said.

  “You show respect, or I’ll have you strung up like a pig.”

  Prochnow gritted his teeth but said nothing. There was nothing he could say. He was Maksim’s inferior. Maksim would be the one issuing the orders. If this went south and someone had to be blamed, Maksim would get to decide which of them took the fall.

  Prochnow’s father had worked for the Stasi, the East German version of the KGB, during Communism. If anyone knew how to run a police state, it was the Germans. Some of the things they’d done shocked even their KGB overseers, the very ones who’d told them to do it. There was a thoroughness about how they carried out orders, an absolutism, that was wholly unknown in Russia. When the KGB told them to monitor the population, the Stasi didn’t just open a few files, they built an archive building in Berlin that could hold rows of filing cabinets one-hundred-and-eleven kilometers long. Not only that, but they hired over a quarter-of-a-million clerks and recruited almost two-hundred-thousand informers. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, they had files open on 5.6 million East German citizens, nearly a third of the total population. They even opened files on children, and recruited other children to report on the political statements of their classmates, their teachers, even their own parents.

  That was the thing about the Germans, Maksim thought. They took everything to the extreme.

  Prochnow was a prime example. While Maksim, and virtually all of the other GRU assets he’d met, paid lip service to the ideologies of the Kremlin, Prochnow was a true believer.

  He didn’t have to work for the GRU.

  He could have had a nice, western life.

  Men like Maksim did what they had to do to survive.

  But Prochnow was there by choice.

  The Tourist, some of the other assets called him, but not to his face.

  He’d gone out of his way to get the attention of the GRU. Somehow, he’d persuaded the recruiters in Moscow that he was loyal to the Kremlin, his father’s career in the Stasi had no doubt helped, and they’d taken him in and trained him. When he returned to German a few years later, just in time for his military service, or Wehrpflicht, he was a trained assassin and GRU sleeper agent,

  Maksim had always thought there was something nauseating about the whole thing.

  If he, who’d spent his entire life in Russia, who had a Russian mother and a Russian father, couldn’t bring himself to genuinely love his country, then how could someone like Prochnow possibly do it?

  That said, even Maksim could admit that Prochnow delivered the goods. He really did seem to practice what he preached. He never balked at a mission. Maksim had seen him a German girl as young as seventeen without knowing anything about her other than that her name was on a list.

  She’d been pretty too.

  Maksim had appreciated Prochnow’s fanaticism that day. It had spared him from pulling the trigger himself. He’d killed women before, but he hated doing it.

  He did the job because it was what he’d been trained to do. It was expected of him. It paid well.

  He didn’t do it because he believed.

  “I’m going to do a second sweep,” Maksim said. “You call Zhukovsky and tell him we have a problem.”

  Maksim went up and down the train a second time, searching every inch of it, including the areas not open to passengers. He searched the storage areas. He pulled his gun on an engineer and gained access to the locomotive. He checked the roof and undercarriage.

  “What did Zhukovsky say?” he said when he got back to Prochnow.

  “He wasn’t happy.”

  “You’re a master at understatement,” Maksim said.

  “We’re to await fresh orders.”

  Maksim sighed. He lit a cigarette. Prochnow did the same.

  21

  Kirov was in his hotel room when Zhukovsky called. He’d been tense all morning. There were many moving parts to this operation, but if they didn’t manage to clean up the issue of the policewoman from Riga, then all his other plans would be for naught.

  And someone would pay. He’d do his best to make sure it wasn’t his head on the block when the guillotine came down, he would do his utmost to make sure Zhukovsky bore the full brunt of the president’s ire, but he couldn’t guarantee there would be no blowback.

  Not this time.

  The stakes were too high.

  “Is it done?” he said as soon as he picked up the receiver.

  “Sir,” Zhukovsky said, his tremulous voice conveying to Kirov all he needed to know, “she never got off the train.”

  “What the fuck does that mean, Zhukovsky? She never got off the train? Is she still on it?”

  “The train arrived at Berlin Hauptbahnhof as expected, but she wasn’t on it.”

  “Did you search it?”

  “The train?”

  “Yes, the train, Zhukovsky. The train. How do you know she wasn’t on it?”

  “The train terminated in Berlin, sir. Both your assets were on the platform. They searched it from front to back. She wasn’t on it.”

  “How do you explain the police footage showing her getting on it in Warsaw?”

  “Sir, she must have gotten off early, sir. The train had stops. We’re accessing what footage there is from those stations, but there will be gaps.”

  “So she’s gone?” Kirov said. “On the loose? In the wind?”

  “I have the assets on standby in Berlin. We’re combing the Polish and German police networks. The moment I find something, I’ll give it to them.”

  “How the fuck am I
going to tell this to the president?”

  “Sir,” Zhukovsky said, “what do we know for certain about what she saw in the forest? It could be that she has no idea what’s really going on.”

  “Zhukovsky, you fucking piece of shit. It’s too late to downplay this now. You’re the one who told me she was a problem.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “We have to call Moscow.”

  “I know what we have to fucking do, Zhukovsky.”

  Kirov slammed down the receiver with such force he almost broke it.

  He looked out the window. It was bright now. People were milling around the square, old women going in and out of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, clutching their coats and prayer beads. Three-hundred feet above, an electrotype, cast-iron dome, one of the biggest in the world, blazed in the morning sun. The gold had been obtained by melting down imperial rubles.

  During the war, the entire dome had been painted gray to avoid giving Nazi bombers and artillery units a marker.

  Kirov looked up at it and wondered would such a time come again.

  He didn’t doubt it.

  Whatever the past had seen, the future would see. Nothing could be taken for granted.

  Not peace.

  Not prosperity.

  Not life.

  In his own lifetime, he’d seen machines built to asphyxiate entire cities. He’d seen labs that did nothing but enhance the lethality of history’s greatest scourges.

  He knew life was fickle.

  And he knew the call he was about to make might be his last.

  He dialed his operator and told her he needed to speak to the president.

  “There’s no call scheduled,” she said.

  “No, there’s not,” he said.

  The operator paused, uncertain what he wanted her to do. “I need you to connect me anyway,” he said. “Directly.”

  “I see,” she said, and a moment later, he had a dial tone.

  He hadn’t been expecting the president himself to pick up the phone, but there was no mistaking the voice on the other end of the line.

  “You fucking piece of shit,” the president said, as cold and callous as if the two men didn’t know each other from Adam.