by Brian Drake
Siyana jammed the Uzi back under the seat as Boris slowed for city street traffic.
ZUBAREV SAW the Uzi too late.
He yelled something as Valeriya screamed, the bullets ripping through the back of the car. Val’s scream stopped short, Zubarev snapping his eyes to her. The side of her face was gone, torn away, pieces of her on the dash and upholstery, her blood on him, he realized, as he absently looked forward again. And then the bullets ripped into his back, the stabbing pain sending electric bolts through his entire body. He might have screamed again, but he couldn’t hear. His hands slipped from the wheel, and as his vision faded he felt the car jolt as it left the road, heading for a cluster of trees on the shoulder. He passed out fully before the trees caved in the front of the car.
Chapter Two
THE BUZZING finally stirred Anastasia Dubinina from sleep.
She groggily reached for the phone on her nightstand and pressed a button. The vibration stopped. She tapped in her passcode and the screen lit up. A text message. Short. Frightening.
Zubarevs killed in New York. Wait for orders.
Anastasia hopped out of bed in a panic. She paced the floor of the dark room, letting out a sharp gasp, suddenly petrified by the open window before her. It let in the night air to keep the room cool, and she’d left the drapes half-open as well. She hurried around the other side of the bed and dropped to the floor. Her window was almost level with the roof of the building across the street. Was there a sniper waiting for her there?
She held the phone close, her thin nightgown bunched up around her waist.
She finally slowed her breathing and gathered her wits. This was an emergency of epic proportions and she couldn’t just “wait for orders”. She dialed a number and kept her head below the top of the bed as she pressed the cell phone to her head.
Vladimir Glinkov answered right away. Glinkov was a Major in the SVR, which had replaced the KGB after the fall of communism. He was, like her, also one of the leaders of the group plotting the coup.
“Are you okay?”
Her voice shook. “I’m hiding on the floor of my bedroom. I don’t want to go near the window. What do we do?”
“I’ve been checking on everybody. So far the FSB hasn’t knocked down any doors. If this was the start of a mass arrest up we’d be at the prison now.”
“Or worse.”
“This is no time to panic. Get out if you have to but the safe houses might be compromised.”
Anastasia’s hand started to shake.
“I’ll wait here. I think. I don’t know.” She let out a string of curses.
“We’ll know more in an hour. Can you hold out that long?”
“Yes.”
“Call back if you don’t hear from me.”
Glinkov ended the call and Anastasia set the phone down. She crawled around the bed to the nightstand, opened the drawer, and took out her Makarov pistol. She was an agent with the FSB, Russia’s internal security service, and she ran through a stream-of-conscious thought process of how she was behaving like a rookie who had never been tested in battle. But it was one thing to know you could be arrested and tried for treason; it was another thing entirely to know you would be arrested and tried for treason. Her hand still shook as she brought the gun back to the other side of the bed, but if anybody came through her door, people she worked with or anybody else, she’d take one or two with her before either falling to their bullets or turning the gun on herself.
Brussels, Belgium
THE INFORMANT was late.
Scott Stiletto leaned in the alcove of a building just off Place des Armateurs, the ripping water of the Brussels-Scheldt Maritime Canal directly across the street. A speed boat waited there, its supercharged motor burbling, the agent at the wheel ready to go full throttle once Stiletto boarded with his informant.
But the informant was late.
Stiletto was in Brussels to collect Naadir Mussa, an ISIS operative working in Belgium, where jihadist activity had been growing, and where the local cells had launched coordinated strikes against Brussels airport and the Maalbeek metro station in March of 2016. Problem was, Naadir had a conscience, and while he had eagerly signed up for the war against the infidel, over time he could not shake the idea that what they were doing was wrong. He began feeding the C.I.A. information on European ISIS operations after the airport and metro attacks, but he had been discovered, and needed to be brought in from the cold. Stiletto, who had recruited Naadir, drew the assignment and developed the extraction plan. Pick up Naadir, hop in the speed boat, and race up the canal to the ocean where a Navy submarine waited to collect them. It might have seemed complicated, but ISIS had the country well-penetrated, and they needed to avoid airports, roads, and trains.
It was a quarter past four a.m., the street was quiet, and Scott felt like the last man in the world. He had been on so many missions such as this, waiting in alleys and doorways, that he should have been used to them by now. But his senses always remained on alert, his focus sharp. He almost liked these jobs because they kept his edge honed. The alcove protected his back; the canal protected his front; his danger scan regularly shifted left and right. So far, everything was clear, and that was the problem.
Naadir should have arrived at 3:30.
They should be in the boat and halfway up the canal by now.
Stiletto shifted in the alcove, the weight of the Colt Combat Commander .45 ACP autoloader under his left arm dragging on his side. His lower back hurt from standing for so long, the three sides of the cold concrete hiding spot unmercifully uncomfortable. His feet were okay thanks to excellent inserts in his shoes. He wanted out of there, fast, with Naadir, but it was beginning to look like ISIS had reached him first.
Unfortunate, because Naadir still had plenty of information inside his head that that C.I.A. wanted very badly.
Tires screeched. Stiletto’s eyes snapped right. A car turned the corner, fishtailing, sideswiping a lamppost and almost bringing it crashing down. The car crossed both lanes of the road before settling in a straight line right at Stiletto’s position. It screeched to a halt a few feet away from the doorway. The driver’s door swung open and Naadir tumbled onto the sidewalk. His clothes were a wrinkled mess, but nothing was torn; his face covered in sweat and bloody welts. He struggled to get to his knees.
Stiletto left the alcove and helped him up.
“They almost had me,” Naadir said. He was gasping for air. Stiletto checked the man’s body for other wounds, found none. Naadir was in fight-or-flight mode and no mistake.
“It’s gonna be fine, let’s go.”
Naadir nodded and kept pace beside Scott as they ran across the street. He suddenly stopped mid-stride, but momentum carried him forward. His face hit the pavement with a sharp smack, and then the whip-crack of the sniper shot that brought him down echoed up the street.
Stiletto dived and rolled as a second bullet whistled past him. The crack of the shot followed. The boat pilot yelled something. Stiletto jumped up and ran the rest of the way, getting closer and closer. No other shots reached him, the sniper probably having vacated his nest after the second shot. But he’d scored one of the two kills he’d been sent to make. Stiletto’s body burned hotly as he leaped, leaving the pavement, clearing the gap of water between the pavement and speedboat. He landed hard, falling to his knees, lurching back as the speed boat surged forward, the water behind exploding upward as the motor’s twin propellers spun.
Stiletto sat up and looked back. He hated leaving a man behind. He’d lost informants before, but they were always personal losses, because when you recruited somebody to spy for you, you had to meet them at an emotional level very few others could reach. One had to try and remain detached, but in Stiletto’s experience, that wasn’t always possible.
The speed boat jostled over the water, the street fading in the distance. More of the city on either side, rushing by, but the view did not hold his interest. He stood and moved up the narrow boat to the sea
t beside the driver and fell heavily into it.
“Are you hit?” the driver said.
“I’m fine. We lost our package.”
The driver held his course.
Stiletto stared forward.
IT WASN’T a short boat ride by any means.
The canal wound through Brussels and Antwerp before cutting east for the North Sea. Stiletto assisted with keeping the gas tank topped off via their spare fuel cans. They reached the North Sea around mid-day.
The boat reached the rendezvous point, the driver easing back on the throttle, the boat chugging along as the ocean waves rocked it up and down and back and forth. The sun beat down on them, but the clear sky was gorgeous and, for a moment, brought Stiletto out of his reverie.
The crash of sound about forty yards away snapped his attention away from the sky. The angled sail planes, like wings on top of the dorsal sail, broke through the surface first, followed by the rest of the upper portion of the submarine body. It looked like a long black sausage and created a 360-degree shock wave that hit the speed boat very quickly. Stiletto and the driver held tight as they went up and down over the crests. When the sea settled, the driver pushed the speed boat forward toward the sub. A deck crew had a ladder lowered over the side as he pulled up. Stiletto thanked the driver and started up the ladder. As he reached the deck, stepping close to the sail in the middle of the deck so he wouldn’t slip, he heard the speed boat power away.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” a chief petty officer said, a young blonde kid. His team pulled up the ladder. “We were expecting a second person as well.”
“So was I,” Scott said, the salty wind whipping at his face. “I need to get below.”
“Follow me.”
STILETTO SHUT the door of the private communications booth and called his boss at C.I.A. headquarters via Skype. He wasn’t exactly sure where the booth was located on the ship. The CPO had led him through the byzantine maze that made up the inside of the submarine to the booth, and was waiting outside.
Stiletto worked for General Ike Fleming who ran the Special Activities Division of the C.I.A. He was one of the better “skull smashers” as they called themselves, the agents directly responsible for the covert missions and the wet work and whatever other dirty job that came along. Stiletto didn’t hide his grimace as his boss’s face appeared on the display. Scott had recruited Naadir; he had made promises in return for his help. He felt responsible for failing to bring him in.
“I don’t like the look on your face, Scott.”
“I failed, sir.”
Stiletto explained what happened.
The General nodded sympathetically. “You know what I think, Scott.”
“You think I get too close to these people.”
“Other than that. You did the best you could.”
Stiletto clenched his fist. Was it really his best? Should he have counted on a sniper? Naadir had told him he could get away clean; he’d trusted the man’s evaluation of his situation, but he himself had said his escape had created a situation where they “almost had him”.
Just another case where even if he thought he was in control, he wasn’t really. At all.
“Whatever other information he had,” Stiletto said, “died with him. We’re back at square one.”
“That’s not for us to worry about right now. Get home and we’ll talk further. We’ll have another opportunity.”
“See you in few days, sir.” He clicked off the machine. These chats with Fleming always made him feel like he was talking to his father, the army vet whose constant moves from base-to-base left Stiletto with a problem making friends as a child. He was still learning how to do it as an adult, and maybe that’s why he got too close to his recruits. Made the more than the usual promises. Showed up at the first sign of an S.O.S.
He stared at the blank screen, and his reflection in it, for a few minutes. His face had a few character marks and he still looked younger than his 40 years, or so he thought. He needed a shave. Stiletto rose from the small chair and found his way out. He needed a cup of tea and something to munch on first. He would try not to second guess what happened on Place des Armateurs, a street he would now forever associate with failure.
STILETTO SAT at a steel table in the galley, making circles with his paper cup. The tea inside was half gone and a trail of steam rose from the center.
A turkey sandwich and the tea had been good. He felt refreshed, but still bothered. He had to tell himself again and again that what happened was part of the spy business. Wouldn’t be the first or last time such a situation happened, to him or any other agent.
Pots and pans clanged in the kitchen and the voices of the head chef and his cooks provided a running soundtrack to the consumption in the galley itself, with sailors moving in and out with their meals in shifts while Stiletto remained a fixed point. Luckily they had a wide screen television playing cached recordings. As he sat, Scott watch CNN and news that was already 24-hours old.
There was no sound but he read the closed-captioning to get the drift of what was happening.
Presently a story caught his attention and forced other thoughts away. A redhead anchor with sky blue eyes read about Ravil Zubarev and his wife dying in a car crash after being fired on by another vehicle. Somewhere in New York City. They showed photographs of the couple and a picture of the wreck.
The Zubarev name meant nothing to Scott, but as the story described Zubarev’s role in Moscow politics, he couldn’t help but become suspicious. Why was he in the U.S. raising funds? Had the Kremlin machine found a way to take him out? And what for?
There had been a time when neither Stiletto or anybody else in the intelligence community would have wondered if this had been a hit. But Putin and his hatred for those he considered treasonous was well-known. The man was on record as saying one had to have enemies. Enemies could live as long as they were kept at bay. But traitors could not live. They had to be made an example of. Putin had made such an example of Alexander Litvinenko.
Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, had been part of an operation to take on organized crime figures throughout Russia. The task proved nearly impossible, as the mafia clans’ connections to powerful people in the government assured their protection. Later, Litvinenko accused his government of participating in the attempted assassination of a Russian oligarch named Berezovsky, whom Putin had wanted snuffed from existence for a long time and for reasons that would fill three seasons of a soap opera. (Berezovsky, long after Litvinenko’s own death, was later found dead of an apparent suicide.)
The charges made Litvinenko persona non grata and he fled to London, where he became a British citizen, consulted with British intelligence, and started writing books. His books alleged that Putin organized bombings and other terrorist acts to keep him in power, ordered the murder of a journalist named Anna Politkovskaya who threatened to expose evidence of such crimes, and also had a working relationship with the Russian mob, using them to do his dirty work while he portrayed himself as a powerful and righteous figure on the world stage.
Such words Putin could not abide.
Litvinenko was poisoned and later died in November 2006 by what was revealed as radioactive polonium-210.
The critic—the traitor—had been silenced.
And now Zubarev. Had the man done something to earn Putin’s wrath? And had local Russian mob contacts carried out the killing? Stiletto knew from various reports that passed through his office that the Russian mob was a growing threat to U.S. law enforcement, especially on the coasts, New York and California being their preferred stomping grounds. They were not opposed to doing Putin’s bidding anywhere in the world. They were the perfect proxy. Their orders could not be traced back to the Kremlin.
Of course, as an operative for the C.I.A.’s Special Activities Division, it wasn’t any of Stiletto’s business. Not yet. Probably not ever, unless a case came up outside the U.S. where the Russkie mob threatened U.S. security. The F.B.I. would take charge of t
he death investigation and see where the evidence took them. Stiletto was probably being paranoid. But as a child of the cold war, albeit the end of it, he was always suspicious of the Russians, and it was his opinion that Putin wanted nothing less than to rebuild the former Soviet Union and restore his country to the superpower it once was, by any means necessary.
He had no real faith that the F.B.I. could bring the case to Putin’s door, if it even went that far. When the British had investigated Litvinenko’s death, they pointed to a Russian operative named Andrey Lugovoy and accused him of the killing. Lugovoy remained in Russia despite the UK’s extradition request, but after so many years, and leadership changes in Britain’s government, they had ceased efforts to bring Lugovoy to trial. It wasn’t worth the diplomatic nightmare to keep bringing up the subject.
The same would probably happen in the Zubarev case.
Unless it was strictly a local matter.
But Stiletto didn’t buy that for a second.
He took a deep breath and finished what remained of his now-cold tea. The kind of shenanigans perpetrated by Putin made him angry. Authoritarianism of any kind made him angry. The suppression of those who only wanted to speak out against the men in power wasn’t something he could abide, and fought it at every opportunity. They were the people he felt he was speaking for. The forgotten victims. The powerless. Those without a champion.
It was an endless fight. It was a thankless fight. But somebody had to do it.
