by Ward Larsen
The inspector had ended near the window, and he was looking down toward the pool when a second email arrived. It was from his sergeant, who’d begun interviewing the staff.
Vasiliev returned moments later, and Hadad said, “The Iranian interpreter, Sofia Aryan. Are you aware she was thrown off the roof?”
“Thrown?” Vasiliev repeated.
“Apparently there was a witness, the hotel gardener. He heard a scream and looked up, saw a set of hands helping her over the edge.”
“Did he see who it was?”
“No.”
Vasiliev’s face crinkled beneath his beard. “I am a soldier, not a detective. But … do you think Kravchuk might have murdered this woman?”
“The way she fled so suddenly … it has to be considered. For the time being, it helps drive our search. We can call her a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“I suppose it might help. But make no mistake: President Petrov does not want this search to be taken public. Kravchuk’s disappearance is to remain an internal Russian matter.”
“I understand,” said Hadad.
And truly he did. Given what he knew so far, Hadad would bet his pension that Ludmilla Kravchuk, by all accounts a mild-mannered interpreter and matron of Russia, had probably never thrown trash on a sidewalk, let alone a healthy young woman from a thirteen-story building. He smiled reassuringly at Vasiliev. “Tell your president to rest assured. She cannot have gone far.”
Although Hadad would not realize it for days, he was in fact quite right.
SIX
The woman they were looking for was, at that moment, wandering the streets of the nearby Arnous district in a daze. The city around her seemed a blur. Noxious clouds of diesel belched from buses and crowds choked the sidewalks. Street vendors sold meat from grills, the scent of cooking flesh drifting past in waves. Because Western clothing was more or less the norm in Damascus, Ludmilla drew little attention from passersby.
But it was not the casual faces on the sidewalk that worried her.
Not for the first time, she wondered if she’d made a terrible mistake. Bolting from the hotel had been rash and impulsive—completely at odds with her typically thoughtful conduct. She tried to imagine some way to surrender herself, a rational reason for her unconscionable blunder. Every time she did, the disturbing images came back, flickering like so many snapshots in a terrible scrapbook. The two presidents at the door whispering to one another. The glance back at their interpreters. A desperate Sofia Aryan coming to her room, pleading for help. And soon after—Aryan’s scream as she fell from the roof of the building.
The associations couldn’t be clearer. Couldn’t be more damning.
No, Ludmilla thought, there was no turning back. Petrov’s men had seen her running away. She had served in the foreign ministry long enough, even as a lowly interpreter, to know how such defections were handled. Only last year she’d seen an army major try to defect from the embassy in Cairo. He was captured within hours by the SVR, put hurriedly on a specially arranged flight back to Moscow. The rest could only be imagined. A car ride to an FSB interrogation facility—nothing so explicit as Lubyanka, but one of the smaller off-the-books prisons that were today preferred by the agency.
And then?
Ludmilla didn’t want to think about it.
Like it or not, she was committed. Running for her life.
She was completely lost in this bleak train of thought, and stepping across a dirty curb, when out of nowhere a hand clamped over her arm. Ludmilla jerked upright, and in the next instant a bus rushed past, horn blaring. Recoiling in a swirl of dust, she half turned to see an old man, his bony hand on her bicep. He stared at her with the compassion one might confer upon a stray dog.
“Thank you,” she said in Arabic.
The old man gave her a quizzical look, then went on his way. The light turned red and the traffic came to a stop. Ludmilla fell in with the crowd crossing the intersection. Her heart was racing, her nerves shot. She felt near a breaking point.
This dilemma was unlike any she’d ever faced. Hers was a world of meeting minutes and transcripts. Of staid conferences and numbing briefing papers. But now? Now her life had been distilled to something far more elemental—she had to get out of Syria alive.
Since ditching the cab an hour ago, she was sure she’d made a hundred mistakes. Ludmilla forced herself to think logically. She needed help, and there seemed but one obvious source: the Americans.
The logistics of that, however, were not so simple.
It had been decades since the Americans kept a diplomatic presence in Syria. There was no longer any embassy or consulate, the relationship between the countries having long ago sunk beneath the threshold of such pretenses. Ludmilla knew, however, that there was one possibility. As was customary in such diplomatic estrangements, the United States had arranged for a third party—in this case the Czech Republic—to serve as its diplomatic surrogate. Getting word to the Americans, therefore, meant going through the Czechs.
Ludmilla began stepping more quickly as her plan took shape. She soon realized that before she attempted contact, more pressing needs had to be addressed. To begin, she needed a place to stay.
No, she corrected, I need a place to hide.
A bus approached a stop just ahead, and she hurried to board it. Settling into an empty seat near the back, her paranoia began to ease. Like public transportation the world over, everyone on the bus was wearing their thousand-yard stare. Ever so slowly, the shock was wearing off.
Ludmilla realized she was not completely helpless. She had been posted to Syria twice, most recently three years ago. She spoke the language fluently, knew the local customs. In her time at the embassy, she’d received countless briefings on how to stay out of trouble. She knew which neighborhoods to avoid and where the militias prevailed. Her best resource of all: Ludmilla had once had her share of friends.
But which would still be here?
Who was safe to approach?
The first few names that came to mind were staff from the Russian embassy. She’d had a handful of close acquaintances, and some might conceivably still be posted in Damascus. Ludmilla had also gotten to know a handful of Syrians, locals who were tied to the embassy by various means: messengers, caterers, cleaning crews. Her hope then faltered when she realized that all such contacts had to be avoided. The staff at the embassy would soon be apprised of her disappearance, ordered to report any contact.
She had to find help elsewhere.
The solution came in the middle of a busy commercial block when through her window she saw the marquis of a high-end hair salon. As it turned out, Ludmilla knew of another such place, although decidedly more egalitarian. During her time at the embassy, the salon’s owner had become the closest thing she’d had to a friend in Syria.
And a friend was very much what she needed.
* * *
Her feet were aching twenty minutes later when Chez Salma came into view. Ludmilla paused at the front window and peered inside. The business day was nearing its end, and she saw the proprietor unwrapping strips of foil from a customer’s hair. The other two stylist’s chairs were empty.
Ludmilla walked in, and Salma saw her immediately. The two exchanged a warm embrace before, predictably, the hairdresser pulled back. She regarded Ludmilla’s much neglected pageboy with a jaundiced eye and a tsk tsk noise. Her brown hair was due for a tint, the gray beginning to win.
“I know,” admitted Ludmilla. “I need the works.”
“I can put you on the schedule tomorrow.”
“That would be wonderful. How is business?”
Salma frowned. “Terrible. Too many husbands tell their wives that food is more important than style.”
“How shortsighted.”
This brought the slightest of grins. “Everyone has cut back during the war. Everyone except those living in Qasr ash-Shaab,” she said, referring to the presidential palace. She looked up and down at Ludmilla’s dress
and shoes. “Are you back at the embassy?”
Ludmilla faltered. It was a question she should have predicted. “Yes … but only for a short time. They are performing some renovations in the temporary living quarters at the station, so I need a place to stay for a few nights.”
She held her breath, hoping things were as she remembered. Salma lived on the second floor with her husband, who drove a bus in the city. On either side of their residence were small rooms they rented out. Ludmilla remembered Salma complaining about the high turnover rate.
When Salma didn’t reply, Ludmilla prompted, “Perhaps you should ask your husband.”
The hairdresser’s expression went cold. “Adil died,” she said flatly.
“Oh God, no,” Ludmilla said. “I am so sorry.”
“It’s been two years,” Salma said, as if that made a difference.
“And Naji?” Ludmilla asked, referring to Salma’s son who’d been an infant when she’d last seen him.
“He was two when his father died. In the beginning it was easy, but now Naji asks about him every day. I tell him what I can, the stories I remember. But there was so little time when we were all together. That’s what war does to families—it steals their chances to make memories.”
Ludmilla looked around the salon. As an infant Naji had often been in a playpen in the corner. “Where is he now?”
“Upstairs. My mother watches him most days. One day each week we go south to Mezzeh. Naji has become close with an uncle there.”
“Achmed, the one you once told me about?”
Salma nodded. A hard silence descended until she forced a smile and said, “As it turns out, you are in luck. One of my renters moved out last week. But I haven’t had time to clean the place.”
“I’m sure it would be fine. I could tidy it up myself.”
And just like that the deal was struck. Ludmilla settled on a price for five nights, thinking that would give the Americans plenty of time. She used half the cash in her wallet to pay in advance. Salma gave her a key, then went back to the coloring in progress.
“There is one more thing,” Ludmilla said.
Salma looked at her inquisitively, wet foil in her hand.
“My phone has stopped working.” She pointed to an old computer and a hard-wired phone at the front desk. “Might I look up one phone number and make a call?”
Salma waved a hand to say that she could.
SEVEN
The call to the Czech embassy went smoothly, or so Ludmilla thought—clandestine communications were not her forte.
She had tried to think everything through beforehand. It was crucial that she give enough information to draw interest, some of which had to be backstopped as verifiable. Once that was settled, she took the direct route. She called the embassy’s switchboard, asked if the line was being recorded. The operator assured her it was, and for the next thirty seconds Ludmilla stated her case. She ended by giving a time and place for a rendezvous, then abruptly disconnected.
Salma was putting the final touches on her last customer of the day, and with an hour to kill until her rendezvous, Ludmilla headed upstairs to see her new flat. She was nearly to the second-floor landing when she wrenched the heel of one shoe on a crooked board in the staircase. She caught the handrail, righted herself, and reached the landing. Room 3 was at the end of the short hall. Ludmilla unlocked the door, stepped inside, and sank the deadbolt behind her. For the first time since this morning she felt safe.
Her first look at the room reinforced what Salma had said—it did need to be cleaned. There was trash on the floor, the bed was unmade, and dead bugs lay strewn about the tiny kitchen. No matter, she thought. I’ll have plenty of time. It was a small room, even by Russian standards, everything wedged into a continuous space. There was a bed in one corner with a mattress like a taco shell. Someone had thrown a sheet over the listing couch. Ludmilla made the mistake of lifting it and saw upholstery that was grossly stained. She sighed and thought wistfully of her tidy flat on Tverskaya Street.
A place she would never see again.
She let out a long sigh and settled on the couch. The springs groaned in protest. After her rendezvous later, there would be nothing to do but wait. Hours, days, weeks. Whatever it took for someone to rescue her. She reached down, removed her shoes, and began to massage her blistered right foot. As she did, she remembered catching her heel on the stair. She picked up the right shoe, held it by the toe.
And that was when Ludmilla got her final shock of the day.
* * *
Thirty minutes later, across town from Chez Salma, Tomas Kovacs walked out of the Czech embassy into a gathering evening. He took up a purposeful stride along the ruined sidewalks of Al Jalaa Street. Having been posted to Syria on three occasions since joining the foreign service, Kovacs had a good measure of the city’s suffering. Once-thriving coffee shops and bakeries had gone under, never to return, and municipal funding for the likes of roads and sewers was all but a memory. Still, people adapted. Planks spanned washed-out gutters, and traffic cones appeared to mark the worst potholes. Damascus today was like an aging ship—a serviceable craft that carried on wearily, disinterested in whatever storms lay ahead.
Kovacs was dressed for the office: a stiff button-down shirt over tan chinos, dress shoes that had not yet been broken in. He’d had no time to change into something more suited to counter-surveillance. His usual jeans, Barcelona jersey, and trusted Nikes were in his apartment closet. Lamentably, cold contacts were like shooting stars: they never came with advance warning.
Kovacs was an ordinary man in appearance. He carried ten more pounds than he should have, had a modestly receding hairline, and was generally soft spoken. Less prosaic was the fact that for two years running he had been the U.S. State Department’s default proxy in Syria. Or in the lexicon of his D.C. liaison, who’d played American football in college: their Hail Mary receiver.
In practice, of course, most of those who tried to contact the Americans via the Czechs tended to be cranks, lunatics, or amateur terrorists. This was no less a problem for the Syrians, who knew full well of the arrangement, and who put considerable effort into intercepting the embassy’s incoming calls and emails. Still, everyone played along, spy versus spy, on the odd chance of the system working—some desperate contact providing critical intelligence.
Today’s caller had, if nothing else, sounded desperate.
The recording from the embassy’s communications center was of an anxious woman who claimed to have vital information regarding Iran and Russia. The few details offered were intriguing, and it hadn’t been lost on the embassy staff that the woman made her claim in reasonably proficient Czech. An astute staffer in the communications center recalled that the Russian president was indeed in Damascus that day for a summit with his Iranian counterpart. There had also been rumblings about a dust-up at the Four Seasons, where both delegations were staying. It was far less a long shot than most tips, and enough of a coincidence that the duty officer committed to a response.
He dispatched Tomas Kovacs.
EIGHT
Kovacs approached Sibky Park with a casualness that was not entirely manufactured. It was a lovely evening in Damascus, the low sun bathing in a gentle breeze. With the war winding down, people were getting out, pent-up wanderlust after so many years of bunkering up. Even the birds and squirrels seemed more active, instilled with a new freedom.
For Kovacs, however, this posed a problem.
He entered the park with diminishing ease. The crowds were thick, coursing over sidewalks and roaming the lawns. A band was setting up to play on a makeshift stage in the distance, a few dozen people already staking out the front row with blankets and coolers. To undertake a meeting in such a public place, in Kovacs’ view—and in broad daylight no less—was a dreadful bit of tradecraft. There were too many people to have any hope of spotting a tail. He put the odds at fifty-fifty that he was already being followed. To say the park was centrally located in the c
ity was a gross understatement. To the east he saw Syria’s Parliament building. To the west was embassy row, at least a dozen diplomatic stations—some friendly, others less so—in plain sight. Kovacs imagined there was not a more heavily monitored ten acres in all Syria.
To the positive, he was not in any personal danger. The Syrians followed him regularly, at least to the limits of their manpower, which had been strained during the war. The Mukhabarat knew perfectly well who Kovacs was and what he did for the Americans. This made him something of a known evil, and imbued him with a kind of immunity—the Syrians had never once bothered to pick him up during meetings gone bad. The same could not be said for those on the other end. He’d watched helplessly on a half dozen occasions as government defectors and hopeful asylum seekers had been swept up and thrown into cars—or in one case, the trunk of a ZIL limousine. The Muk had its charms.
He walked directly to the meeting point, a surveillance detection route being pointless. His instructions were to proceed to the center circle and stand by a specific topiary. Kovacs reached the spot and stood with his hands in his pockets as if admiring the sculpted gardens. He felt about as unobtrusive as a tour guide with a pink umbrella.
He saw the woman coming from a hundred paces. Her dress had an almost rectangular fit. Indoor complexion and purposeful gait. Take away the cheap sunglasses, and he was looking at his accountant’s receptionist back in Prague.
She came straight at him, and without any salutation whatsoever said in heavily accented English, “Should we take a walk?”
Kovacs weighed a smarmy reply that running might draw more attention. He said, “Why not.”
