by Ward Larsen
After a bracing inhalation, she pulled open the door.
Vasiliev barged inside. “Your shoes,” he demanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“My man brought you a pair of shoes last night—you wore them at today’s meeting. They must be returned.”
Ludmilla blinked. It was not uncommon for interpreters to be issued wardrobes, particularly for head-of-state summits. Indeed, her closet at home displayed an entire rack of grain-sack-cut skirts and neutral blouses, issued like so many uniforms to a diplomatic corporal. As far as she could remember, this was the first time she’d ever been asked to return anything.
She set out toward the closet, feeling Vasiliev’s eyes on her. It was more a watchdog’s gaze than anything leering. This Ludmilla knew all too well. She had not been chosen as the president’s interpreter based solely on her language skills. Solid as they were, a dozen men and women in the foreign ministry were every bit as proficient. What set her apart were her physical attributes—or, more bluntly, her lack thereof. Her peasant’s jowls and thick build had been with her since childhood. So too, her stern facial set and officious manner. Yet what had proved a social handicap as a young woman she’d turned to an advantage amid her small community of interpreters. At the apex of Russia’s male-dominated pyramid of power, she had claimed a niche with her plain, undistracting appearance. Payback of sorts, she told herself, for a lifetime of doors not being opened and catcalls missed.
She went to the closet and saw the shoes in back.
As an interpreter, Ludmilla was something of a professional listener, an expert in the nuanced details of spoken phrases. That being the case, she recalled precisely what Vasiliev had just said: a pair of shoes.
Singular.
His minion had yesterday delivered the dress she’d worn to the meeting, along with two identical pairs of shoes—two, she’d been told, because they had been unsure of her size. It seemed rather wasteful, but Ludmilla thought little of it at the time. This morning she’d slipped on the larger pair. They were tight—her mother’s side of the family was cursed with big feet—yet by the end of the day the shoes had broken in nicely. She also thought them rather stylish, at least more so than the chock-heeled black wedges that dominated her closet back home.
In a decision any Russian would understand—and one that would soon change her life forever—Ludmilla retrieved the smaller pair she’d never worn and handed them to Vasiliev.
He took them in his hairy hand and was out the door.
THREE
The second knock on Ludmilla’s door came twenty minutes later. She assumed Vasiliev had come back for the second pair of shoes, and prepared to feign forgetfulness. One look through the viewing port, however, converted mere disappointment to alarm. An agitated Sofia Aryan stood rocking on her heels, her gaze alternating between the door and the hallway.
Ludmilla put on a stern face and opened the door. “You should not have come here!” she admonished.
Much like Vasiliev, Aryan shouldered in without invitation. “They are following me!” she said breathlessly.
“This is highly…” Ludmilla’s protest faded. “Who is following you?”
“Two men—I’m sure they are VAJA,” she said, referring to Iranian intelligence. “I was returning from lunch and they tried to seize me on the sidewalk outside the hotel. As they dragged me toward a car I began screaming, and fortunately a group of soldiers were passing on the sidewalk. They tussled with the men long enough for me to get free. I was able to get away in the confusion, but I can’t return to my room—it is the first place they’ll look. I didn’t know where to go. Then I remembered that you were staying at the Four Seasons as well.”
“How did you know my room number?”
“During our coordination meeting this morning … you used your key to access the business center. I saw the room number on the sleeve.”
Ludmilla stared at the woman with newfound respect. She was clever, or at the very least observant. She was also clearly terrified. Her hair was mussed, and one cuff of her dark blue overcoat had suffered a jagged tear.
Aryan took Ludmilla’s hand and looked at her pleadingly. “You are the only one who could understand. We are in the same position … you heard the same things I did today. You know what is being planned by—”
“No! None of that concerns us! It is a grave breach of protocol for us to discuss anything we’ve heard!”
The gentle lines in Aryan’s pretty face deepened, and her lively dark eyes lost some of their luster. “You know what it is like in Iran. I can’t go back now. If they find me, they will—”
“Out!” Ludmilla demanded. “Out of my room now!” She herded Aryan through the still-open door and into the hall. The woman looked on the verge of panic.
“Don’t you understand?” Aryan argued. “If they have come for me, they will come for you as well! If not VAJA, then Petrov’s SVR! You and I heard far too much to be allowed to—”
Ludmilla slammed the door shut and threw the bolt.
She expelled a great breath and put her shoulders on the door as if to prevent another assault by Aryan. She waited, expecting her pleading voice or frantic pounding. What she heard was something else.
A man somewhere down the hall was shouting in Farsi: “Stop! We mean you no harm!”
That was followed by multiple footfalls. The first set were light and quick, scampering like a deer. These were followed by what sounded like a stampede of bison. More shouting, the words unintelligible. Ludmilla heard a door slam somewhere down the hall.
Then an uneasy silence.
She tried to remain calm.
She crossed the room tentatively, retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the bedside stand. Cracking the cap, she took a deliberate sip, trying to right her disjointed thoughts. She recalled the panicked look on Aryan’s face. Then the conversation the two of them had heard and translated this morning. And now? Now Iranian thugs were chasing the poor woman down the hall. It was some minutes later—how many she could not say—that the last underpinnings of her steadfast world were removed. It would prove to be the moment she remembered above all others. The one that forced its way to her nightmares.
A scream.
It began with disconcerting suddenness, full-throated and desperate. More curiously, the cry changed swiftly in pitch and volume, like the screech of a passing subway car. She didn’t know precisely where it was sourced, but it ended with dreadful abruptness. Soon after, Ludmilla was drawn to the window by a chorus of shouts. Ever so slowly, reluctantly, she crossed the room.
She looked down at the pool deck. No longer vacant, three uniformed hotel employees stood in a perfect triangle, and between them a body lay splayed facedown on the stone patio. A body in a dark blue coat. The arms were outstretched, almost as if pleading. A puddle of red was growing quickly beneath, oozing toward the empty pool.
Ludmilla’s knees buckled, and she leaned involuntarily into the wall next to the window. She gasped for breath, as if the room had suddenly gone to a vacuum. Thoughts that had been brewing only moments ago, fleeting and ill-defined, seemed to fuse with a crushing weight. More shouting broke the spell, this time from above. The words were muddled, yet the tone was easily distinguishable. An alarm being raised. Commands given in Russian.
It was coming from Petrov’s suite.
She stood frozen, stilled by indecision. A lifetime of conformity collided with far more basic instincts. The likes of fear and self-preservation. Slowly, glacially, Ludmilla’s methodical nature reasserted itself. She knew what she had to do … at least in the next sixty seconds.
She retrieved her purse from the nightstand, double-checking that her passport and wallet were inside. She suspected her phone could be tracked, so she set that aside. She considered packing a bag, but a door slamming somewhere above ended the thought. She yanked her light jacket from a hanger in the closet. On another day she might have remembered sunglasses, or perhaps a scarf with which to cover
her hair. Then again, on another day she might not have been so bold. Only later would Ludmilla realize that the most crucial decision she made in those seconds was quite accidental. From the closet she picked out the shoes she’d worn that morning.
Moments later she was out the door and rushing through the hall. The elevator seemed quickest, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened to present an empty car. In the lobby she made a beeline for the front entrance where the doorman ably waved up a taxi. She gave the driver an address that she knew to be across town—not because it was her destination, but because she didn’t have one. She needed time to think. As the car pulled away, Ludmilla glanced over her shoulder. She saw two men bustle out the hotel’s revolving front door. They skidded to a stop on the curb and began conferring with the doorman. He pointed to her receding cab like a witness pointing out a murderer in a courtroom.
Ludmilla shrank instinctively in her seat. She opened her purse and pulled out a fistful of Syrian pounds—she’d intended to go shopping, but had run out of time. In an impulse that was completely at odds with her frugal nature, she threw a wad of cash into the front seat. “I wish to change my destination!” she said in perfect Arabic, adding the name of a hotel less than a mile away. “Please hurry! I am late for my daughter’s wedding!”
The driver glanced at her in the mirror, then looked at the lump of cash on his seat. The car accelerated.
Ludmilla ventured a final look back as the cab turned onto a side street. She didn’t recognize the two men as being from Vasiliev’s detail, but their Slavic features and the way their eyes tracked her cab left no doubt.
There were Russian.
And they had come for her.
FOUR
News of Ludmilla Kravchuk’s disappearance spread through the top floor of the Four Seasons like fire through a wood-rotted saloon. Her harried departure, witnessed by the SVR team who’d been sent to collect her, had all the hallmarks of a defection. That scenario seemed even more likely when it was learned that the woman now splattered on the hotel’s Italian travertine pool deck was in fact Kravchuk’s Iranian counterpart.
Petrov, who had been enjoying a late lunch on the expansive balcony, made a series of snap decisions. To begin, he ordered his regrets to be given for a state dinner with the Syrians scheduled for that evening, explaining that he faced “pressing business on the home front.” In seeming contradiction, he declared that he and his entourage would stay in Damascus for another day, perhaps two. The presidential finger then landed squarely on his security chief.
Vasiliev trailed Petrov into his private suite like a wayward student being led into the principal’s office. As soon as the door closed, Petrov began in a low voice: “Do we know why this woman has run?”
“Who can say?” Vasiliev said weakly.
Petrov, of course, already knew the answer: the woman feared for her life. After this morning’s meeting, President Rahmani had pulled him aside, in full view of both interpreters, and suggested that the women had heard more than they should have. Petrov, whose English was only passable, recalled falling back on one of his standard catchphrases: “I will take care of the problem on my side.” He had arranged for Kravchuk to be sequestered and debriefed once they returned to Moscow, and to be reminded that for a woman in her profession, discretion was inviolate. In Petrov’s Russia, no more was necessary.
Not so, apparently, in Rahmani’s Iran. The Iranian president had taken care of his half of the problem by unleashing his VAJA thugs whose inelegant solution was to throw the interpreter off the roof. In all likelihood, Kravchuk had seen it happen and fled for her life. A perfectly understandable reaction.
But what risks does it introduce? Petrov wondered.
He circled the room like a caged animal. He recalled seeing a cursory background check on Kravchuk. She had a solid reputation at the foreign ministry, nearly twenty years in service. Her linguistic skills were solid, although professionally she was seen as something of a plodder—not necessarily a bad thing. She had interpreted for Petrov twice before without issue. There had been but one red flag, and that a distant one—her husband had died eight years ago, not long after an awkward separation.
Had that affected her allegiance? Made her unstable? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible. At the very least, it was something Petrov should have considered. The woman had few remaining ties to Russia.
He paused at the window and regarded the Damascus skyline. Compared to the glass and steel of Moscow, the mosques and sandstone architecture before him seemed from a different world. Petrov cursed inwardly. Given what was at stake, he should have looked at Kravchuk more closely. Would he have made such a mistake twenty years ago? Had he gotten lazy, become too reliant on those around him? He had risen through the ranks of the KGB as a detail man, finding every threat, identifying weaknesses to be exploited. Over time, as the scale of his empire expanded, he’d been forced to delegate more and more. That was an inescapable consequence of having reached the pinnacle. Yet today seemed different. For an operation of this magnitude, of such importance, he should have been more careful. The woman had heard too much.
And now she’d disappeared.
Petrov turned back to the silent Vasiliev, his reptilian eyes fixed. His voice was calm when he said, “Your job is to keep me safe, and you have done so admirably. Today, however, I need something more. I cannot stress enough the importance of finding this woman.”
“I have men searching for her,” Vasiliev said, his tone reflecting more confidence than he likely felt. “But please understand, we brought only eighteen men to Damascus. Nearly all of them are needed to maintain security here. We will have to rely on the Syrians to find this woman. They have unlimited manpower, and we are on their ground.”
“See to it then.”
Vasiliev said that he would. “She cannot evade us for long. She is not trained.” He then paused before adding, “I should tell you, sir … there is one other problem.”
Petrov’s gaze never wavered.
“It has to do with the shoes. It seems she was given two pairs.”
“What are you saying?”
“Mikhailov wanted a good fit … to ensure that she wore them. I had no knowledge of this until only moments ago. When I went to her room to retrieve them, she returned only a single pair—according to our technician, they are not the ones she wore to the meeting. We have checked her room, but the other pair are gone.”
A barely perceptible twitch came to the presidential brow. “Are you telling me that she—”
“We are trying to find out. I sent a man to check the hotel’s video footage from the lobby.”
After a motivational pause, the president said, “Do you have any doubts as to your current mission?”
“None sir!”
“Then get on with it!”
Vasiliev did precisely that.
FIVE
Vasiliev wasted no time in sending a message to his Syrian security liaison, a midlevel man in the Ministry of the Interior. That the request was coming directly from Russia’s president caused considerable hand-wringing in the ministry’s upper ranks. After an unusual amount of departmental churning, orders were sent down to the Damascus Police, criminal investigations division. A certain inspector was to report without delay to the Four Seasons Hotel and give every assistance in the matter of a missing Russian interpreter.
His name was Omar Hadad.
Hadad was a long-tenured captain and senior inspector in the division. He was a slightly built man with thinning hair and a methodical nature. Wire-rimmed spectacles sat upon a thin nose, and behind them were a set of inquisitive brown eyes. He was, by most accounts, including those of his colonel and his wife, a serviceable man. Hadad had been on the force for twelve years, a detective for eight. In the course of his career he had earned a solid reputation, although the consensus was that he’d reached the top rung of his personal ladder.
Hadad was given instructions to begin at the hotel, and wh
en he arrived he took the elevator to the twelfth floor. He found the Russian he was to meet in the room where Ludmilla Kravchuk had been staying. He extended a hand and introduced himself in passable Russian. A number of the detectives in his section had a rudimentary grasp of the language, a consequence of the two nations’ long and arduous history.
The man, whose name was Vasiliev, shook his hand wearily and launched straight into business. “It is imperative we find this woman. She is a traitor to Russia.”
Hadad nodded sympathetically. “My orders were very explicit. I can assure you every national resource is at my command.”
Vasiliev gave a quick rundown of what he knew so far—or at least, what he was willing to share. His level of angst, Hadad thought, likely reflected that of the Russian president himself. He sensed more at stake than a simple defection.
The first order of business, the two agreed, was to establish a constellation of checkpoints: every highway leaving the city had to be covered. “That,” said Hadad, “should at least confine the field of play. Do you have a photo of our quarry?”
“There is a digital image on my computer upstairs. I can send it to you.”
Inspector Hadad scrawled down an email address on hotel stationery. Vasiliev headed for the door, promising to be right back.
Alone, Hadad began wandering the room. As he did so he took up a series of phone calls, bounding between various regional police divisions. He emphasized the importance of finding Kravchuk, and while everyone agreed to help, Hadad recognized the all-too-familiar hallmarks of dysfunction: many of the regional commanders suggested the woman had likely fled to a quarter more lawless than their own. Just as Hadad’s last call ended, he saw an email notification and opened it. He studied a decent image of Ludmilla Kravchuk, and wondered how much damage could really be wrought by such a nondescript suspect.
