Another Man's Freedom Fighter

by Joseph Carter

  “Thank you, General,” Berka read out loud the words on the improvised teleprompter above his video-conferencing system. “Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends, I am glad you could join us for this call. As the General pointed out in his presentation, we seek to gain nothing else than what was ours, to begin with. My pre,” he struggled with the word. “My predecessors had led our country into NATO and the European Union so that we could be part of a strong group of countries with the same core-beliefs about freedom, democracy, justice, and prosperity through free trade.”

  He paused a little and looked to his left, where Kamila sat.

  “These beliefs are not shared by the people who invaded our country and tried to extort us for money. I know, some politicians in your countries do not believe my report about the peace treaty the Russians tried to force me to sign. They even do not believe I was held captive for over a week.”

  He stopped at this point. Kamila pressed his hand firmly and put her other hand gently on this back.

  “But I was. And I can tell you, they are animals,” Berka went off script.

  ✽✽✽

  The doorbell rang just as Mark started preparing supper. Svetlana had announced her visit via TLKS message twenty minutes earlier.

  “What do we eat?” she asked entering the kitchen where some vegetables and tools were spread out on the counter next to the stove.

  “You’re welcome to join,” Mark said. “Cajun potato wedges with parmesan cheese and oven-roasted veggies,” he explained the night’s menu.

  “How vegetarian of you,” she teased Mark who normally was a daily meat-eater.

  He smiled and changed the subject. “So, what do we know?”

  “We? Well, I know a little more now, and I’m happy to share.”

  Again, Mark was baffled by her sense of humor, or lack thereof, and the odd precision of the way she used language.

  “I interviewed the regulars of C-Base. Something they said made me remember an old friend from Moscow State. Him I also gave a short call.”

  “Sounds like good detective work, just like Marlowe,” Mark agreed.

  “Who?” she said. “Doesn’t matter. This short, skinny guy, they call him Crash, told me that Dernov had asked him for a Georgian restaurant that served kharcho.”

  “A Georgian restaurant, okay,” Mark browsed his culinary memory. In Berlin, there were a handful of Georgian places plus lots of Russian restaurants that also served dishes from other formerly Soviet regions. It was a weak lead, but a lead nonetheless.

  “Of course, the guys there had no idea what kharcho is. It’s a delicious soup made of beef if you are a barbarian and made of veal if you know what you’re doing,” Svetlana explained.

  “I guess, Dernov is no barbarian.”

  “Of course not, his grandmother was from Georgia, his grandfather from Leningrad. Grandpa was a highly decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Dernov’s father studied and became a professor. Actually a rare kind of professor, he was allowed to research and teach in the West, in Italy. He specialized in Latin philology,” Svetlana recited their potential ally’s bio. “Dernov himself grew up in Turin, then later in St. Petersburg.”

  “I guess you learned that from your old friend. Dernov sure didn’t lay out his family tree to the C-Base nerds,” Mark interrupted.

  “Right, my friend had shared an apartment with Dernov in Petersburg back when his social network was still in its infancy. The guy claims to be one of the first fifty users.” Svetlana glanced around the kitchen. “Where’s Sasha?”

  “Napping,” Mark answered. “Can you refocus on the story, please?”

  Svetlana made a sad face. “Okay. He told me, Dernov was almost obsessed with the veal-kind kharcho. After his grandmother had passed, he started looking for the best kharcho, and he was almost always dissatisfied. According to my friend, he could bitch about this for hours.”

  “He’s not much of a cook, huh?” Mark asked.

  “No, apparently he hates cooking.”

  “It’s a sad life if you love food but you’re too lazy to cook yourself. You depend on the skill of strangers,” Mark said as if it was a deep philosophical truth he had just discovered.

  Then he realized how strong this lead might turn out. “We need to find the best kharcho in Berlin, maybe we’ll catch Dernov slurping it,” he deduced. “If he’s in Berlin at all.”

  “Bingo,” Svetlana chanted. “I offer to do the research out of your living room in exchange for some of your Cajun wedges.”

  “If you also go see if Xandi is awake and look after him while I cook, we got a deal.”

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” she said, turned around, and danced toward the nursery.

  ✽✽✽

  Kuvayev nervously walked up and down in his former office. The large room on the seventh floor of the uninviting building on ulitsa Grizodubovoy overlooks the northern of the two inner courtyards. It is just below the main directorate chief’s, formerly Kuvayev’s, personal helipad. Like the exterior of the building, the interior is modern in style. Compared to the feudalistic decorations in the Kremlin, that is. There are Barcelona chairs arranged around a glass coffee table for informal meetings, a desk almost as large as the president’s, and an array of LED screens on the wall showing various information feeds and maps. They can also be used for video-conferencing.

  Kuvayev had been with his successor for over two hours already. They interviewed various GRU manhunt specialists in person and some handlers and officers based abroad by phone. They decided to get back together in the morning with a working group of both agencies coordinating the hunt for Dernov from GRU headquarters. Finding this entrepreneur had become the prime objective of their war effort.

  ✽✽✽

  “Spasibo,” Svetlana said as she got up from the table.

  “You’re welcome,” Mark said. “You’ve more than earned it for your detective work.”

  Ofelia chuckled as she also got up to clear the table. “You two are detectives now. What a career move!”

  “Yeah, I’m done with the worst part, though. I hate calling strangers on the phone. Can’t understand how you live with doing that all the time, Ofelia,” Svetlana said resting her elbows on the backrest of her chair with her shoulders pulled back and revealing her beauty mark.

  “Truth is, I don’t like it too much either. I just do it,” Ofelia replied. Mark looked at her as if he wanted to say something, then did not.

  “Well, I’ll hurry home and see if I can get an address,” Svetlana said. “Mark’s theory that Dernov might order delivery from one of the two restaurants instead of going there is plausible. And considering the alternative, I really hope to come up with something.”

  “Yeah, staking out two places for a week or more would really be a pain in the ass,” Mark added.

  “Come on, you liked the khachapuri and the mzwadi,” Ofelia reminded Mark of their last visit to Restorani Tblisi, a Georgian restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg.

  “Exactly, after a week I would probably lose my appetite for them, though,” he explained.

  “Leaving you two lovebirds now. Going hunting,” Mlada announced and gave a big wet goodbye kiss to Alexander.

  Forty-One

  Mark Sanders was barely awake when his phone chirped at 6:50 a.m. He had just gotten out of bed to look after his son. Mlada asked for a call back as soon as possible. He decided to get his AirPods and call her while feeding breakfast to his son.

  “Hey, thanks for calling before I get some shut-eye. I was up all night,” she said without so much as a hallo.

  “Wow, hope it was worth it,” Mark said with serious compassion. He had not slept much either.

  “Yes and no,” she replied. “I snooped around both delivery services that have the two restaurants listed, and I downloaded their client lists going back six months.”

  “You mean you got the lists of the people who ordered from these two restaurants?” Mark asked.

  “No, I
got all the people who ordered with the two services in the last six months. The number of names is in the high six figures.”

  “Ah well, why should we be concerned with privacy laws.” Mark chuckled.

  “Exactly, doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “True, so no one by the name of Dernov in the files?” Mark asked already knowing the answer.

  “Of course not, that would be too easy,” Svetlana yawned.

  “How many have ordered at the two restaurants?”

  “About four hundred in that time frame. Georgian is not a very popular takeout,” she said.

  “Good for us. How many ordered kharcho?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Multiple times?”

  “None.”

  “Shit,” Mark swore while he balanced a spoon into Xandi’s mouth. “That, too, would have been too easy.”

  “Yeah, and it seems like Dernov will remain culinarily frustrated,” Svetlana joked audibly exhausted.

  “I’d like to look over those fifty names and addresses, please mail them over and then get some sleep,” Mark said.

  “Will do, Svetlana over and out. Stop, wait,” she shouted suddenly reanimated.

  “Yeah,” Mark confirmed still being on the line.

  “Twenty calls out tonight. The empire strikes again,” she said.

  “Alright, sounds like we’re still in business and they are clueless about us. Right?” Mark was a bit afraid of the answer to his question.

  “I think so. I will sleep tight. Bye,” the call ended.

  ✽✽✽

  “Good call to go in with massive force, Shashka,” Colonel Popov said. A visibly exhausted Shashka leaned back in his chair in the mess hall and gulped down another sip of chay. The tea was hot and strong.

  “Thank you, Comrade Colonel,” he said. “Overwhelming force is the only advantage we have right now, as long as the insurgents get warnings on this app thing.”

  The raid parties were now each platoon strength, and instead of going in with the intention of apprehending insurgents for questioning, they first shot up a safe house with a Kord 12.7 mm heavy machine gun or Shmel 93 mm RPG, then saw what remained to be taken back for analysis.

  After an attack with a Shmel’s thermobaric warhead, everyone within a confined space dies of either suffocation, severe burns, or internal bleeding from pressure-related injuries to the organs, 2.1 kilograms of isopropylnitrate do that to a human body. These rocket fuel-filled warheads have the same effect as a 122 mm artillery shell.

  This night, out of the twenty selected targets, Sergeant Major Krug and his men killed eight. The others had apparently chosen to evacuate.

  “The people in Moscow are pretty clueless what to do about the app. Apparently, they cannot shut it down,” Popov explained what he had learned in a call with the head of GRU during the previous evening.

  “And my proposal to cut off the internet altogether was rejected by the foreign affairs people. They are worried about Russia’s image.” Popov shook his head.

  Shashka said nothing.

  ✽✽✽

  Alexander played on the home office carpet. He seemed fine with rolling around and playing with his toys alone. From time to time, he looked up to his father who stared at the silver box in front of him with a frown. He probably once more wondered about this box and why his father would play with it when it was so obviously frustrating.

  Mark caught his son’s eye and laughed when he saw his quizzical look. He decided to print the list of names. In his experience, reading information on a piece of paper sometimes made one recognize things easier than on a screen. While the laser printer spouted out two pages, he got down on his knees and crawled over to his squeaking son. He picked up Xandi, got up, and collected the densely printed sheets from the printer tray.

  He slouched down on his two-seater and let Xandi crawl over his chest and play with his shirt collars. While the younger Sanders pulled and lifted the white flaps, the older folded the sheets so that only the addresses where visible.

  All addresses concentrated pretty much around two districts, Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg with some being in neighboring districts of the former. There were street names he placed in Mitte, Schöneberg, Wedding, Weißensee, Friedrichshain, or Neukölln. This was little surprising, one of the restaurants was on Schlesische Straße in Kreuzberg, the other was Tbilisi on Arnimplatz in Prenzlberg. The delivery services only accept orders their bicycle couriers can fulfill within half an hour or less. That all made sense but it did not help.

  He figured those districts were all good guesses for Dernov’s whereabouts. All were popular among expats and among the club-going types, especially Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. Mitte was the expensive part of town, which for an internet billionaire would not be any kind of obstacle. While expensive for Berlin standards, it was nowhere near as expensive as Manhattan or Beverly Hills, and short term living could be easily obtained. Plenty of people rented out furnished apartments for a night or a month, or sometimes a year while they were away traveling or working abroad. Ofelia’s brother and his wife had done just that for working on a project in Amsterdam for ten months.

  Mark made a mental note that if all else fails, he would ask Mlada to cross-reference the addresses with recent offers on platforms like AirBnB and other short-term rental sites. But for now, he would let her sleep. Tired and cranky, she was never at the top of her game. Also, she had broken enough laws for any twenty-four-hour period. Mark also felt an odd ambition to find Dernov the old way, like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe would have, or Kerr’s Bernie Günther, or Thomas Magnum.

  Xandi now banged his miniature fists on Mark’s chest. He demanded attention.

  “You’re right,” Mark said. “Let’s go for a walk and dust out the old thinking cabinet.” He gave Alexander a kiss on the head and got up from his couch.

  Too bad, we don’t have a Ferrari to drive to the King Kamehameha Club, Mark thought as he tucked his address list and a pen into the pouch on the stroller’s side. Before opening the door, he reached for the dice and threw a pair of sixes. Route twelve it is, by foot to Özgür’s, he thought and hummed the Magnum p.i. theme’s melody.

  ✽✽✽

  “Comrade Colonel, Comrade Sergeant Major, I have something new to share. May I join you?” Smagin said as he approached the two GRU soldiers still sitting in the mess hall conferring on the events of the night.

  Popov motioned the hacker to sit on the bench on the other side of the table. “You heard? Eight out of twenty targets killed. We’ve seen better times.”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel,” Smagin nodded and put a small stack of pages with color maps printed on them on the table. “While I have no solution to the TLKS problem, I have another kind of target for you. Would you like to hear it?”

  The two soldiers looked at each other then back to Smagin. “Let’s hear it,” the colonel said.

  “I had sent out one last infected message before the crackdown on TLKS. A hurried last fishing expedition if you will.” The hacker tried to leave out the tech talk completely and brightened up considerably as he spread out the papers on the table for eight. “I got lucky. Very lucky, indeed.”

  Both Krug and Popov leaned forward to look at the maps. “What are we looking at, Smagin,” the colonel asked thumbing through some of the pages.

  “These are geo-profiles of eighty-four devices I had infected with my Trojan. Those devices are still active, we have no profile on potential targets, yet. As you can see, these candidates are spread out all over Poland, the occupied and unoccupied territories.

  “There are a few that seem to travel to Germany and back. This one here for example,” Popov picked out one of the sheets and held it up. “Is that what you wanted to tell us, Captain?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it,” Bravlin said and pulled a larger sheet of paper out from under the table. “This is a plot of all the movements of the candidates on one map. Ignore the blue lines. Just look at the red line. It’s
made up of eleven candidates that go back and forth west to east on a frequent basis, some daily, some weekly. They go west to a point where, more often than not, another candidate who had moved east waited for them. Then they spent some time together, between ten minutes and two hours, after which both went back the way they came.”

  Smagin let that sink in for a moment and then presented his opinion. “To me, this looks like a bucket brigade. You know, like a bucket of water moving from man to man to put out a fire.”

  “Da, da, we know what a bucket brigade is,” the Colonel grew impatient with the nerd. “You want to tell us, these people are moving supplies or people from west to east across the German border into Poland and then into occupied territory. Is that it?”

  “Precisely, I think it’s some sort of supply chain. See, at first I didn’t see it, but then I made this overlay and let it run in a loop.” Bravlin stopped mid-sentence when the colonel raised his hand. “I can show it to you on my screen.”

  “Thank you. I will come to your office in an hour to discuss this and you explain it to me in more detail then,” Popov said and dismissed the captain.

  ✽✽✽

  “We have made history in the last seven days, chłopaki. No one would have believed we would push back the mighty Russian Armed Forces the way we did. We are making good on our promise that we gave everytime we sang our national anthem,” Captain Karasek shouted standing in front of his company on a forest clearing seven miles south of Nowy Tomyśl, thirty-eight miles west of Michał’s hometown Poznań.

  “Our fallen will not be forgotten.” His 4th Company had lost seventeen men in the week since Russia Day.

  “God willing, we will free our hometown tomorrow and drink a Lech to their memory on our rynek in the evening.”