by Ward Larsen
They set out on the nearest path, wandering beneath the sparse shade trees. Kovacs considered her selection of language. She’d spoken Czech when she’d talked to the embassy operator, but it had been rough and rather rehearsed—he’d listened to the recording three times.
“Why are we speaking English?” he asked.
“I thought it better for us to not use Arabic in such a public place and my Czech is not the best. I am more comfortable with English and I assumed you would be proficient.”
Kovacs considered her logic, allowed that it was solid. “You are Russian?” he ventured, fairly confident of her accent.
“Yes. I am an interpreter.”
“With the visiting delegation?”
A pair of young men approached in the opposite direction. She waited for them to pass before saying, “Yes. I was Petrov’s interpreter for his summit this morning with President Rahmani.”
Kovacs came to a stop. The woman did the same. Nothing in her face caused him to doubt what she had just said. “You are Petrov’s interpreter?”
“For this trip, yes. And on a few other occasions.”
“And the information you claim to have … it relates to today’s meeting?”
The street was a short distance ahead, and the woman turned and began walking back the way they’d come. Kovacs rolled his eyes and fell in beside her.
“Let me start at the beginning,” she said. “My name is Ludmilla Kravchuk…”
* * *
For the next five minutes Kravchuk talked quickly. She explained what had happened to Sofia Aryan, and covered her escape from the Four Seasons. Then, in a very general way, she told Kovacs what she’d heard at the meeting.
“An attack with a chemical weapon?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what the target will be?”
“What I know is for the Americans.”
“All right. And is there anything else you want me to pass along?”
“I want them to get me out.”
“Out of Syria?” he asked, just to be clear.
“Yes.”
In truth, Kovacs was relieved. He had been half expecting the woman to ask for refuge in the embassy—ever since Julian Assange had commandeered Ecuador’s London mission, it had become the de rigueur request.
He said, “I can’t speak for them, of course, but I will pass along what you’ve told me. If it is enough, they may wish to get involved.”
She looked at him incredulously. “How could it not be enough?”
He steered her toward a new path with fewer passersby. “You must understand … what you are asking carries great risk. The Americans get many vague promises of ‘things overheard.’”
“There was nothing vague about what I heard—and I can prove it.” She told him what she’d found in her shoe. “I don’t know why this was done, but I can tell you the device ended up in my possession quite by accident.” She explained the confusion over two pairs of shoes.
As had been the trend for the last fifteen minutes, Kovacs’ interest ratcheted up another notch. “How can you be sure it is what you think it is?”
“I admit, I am not a technician. But I know our president better than most. It is precisely the kind of thing he would do.”
Kovacs considered it.
In that pause the woman’s agitation seemed to grow. Her eyes flicked across the park. Kovacs doubted she was sensing a specific threat, but rather a more generalized fear. He knew the signs all too well.
Kravchuk stopped and gripped him by the elbow. “Whether I have the proof or not, the Americans must be informed.”
He nodded and pulled away slightly. “Very well. I will pass along what you’ve told me. From there, you understand, it is out of my hands. Where will you be staying?”
To his utter surprise, Kravchuk gave not only an address, but told him how to reach it and explained why she’d chosen the place.
“Do you think that is … safe?” he asked.
“The woman who owns the salon is a friend.”
He thought, She won’t be after the Mukhabarat batters down her door. What he said was, “All right. I suggest you go back now, and don’t venture outside.”
Kravchuk hesitated, then turned and hurried away. In that moment she looked more like a grandmother late for choir practice than what she was—a presidential interpreter walking the tightrope of treason.
Kovacs watched her until she disappeared. To his mild astonishment, no squad of regime thugs materialized from the trees. No cars bounded to the curb to cut her off. Kravchuk simply blended into the crowds and disappeared. Not lost on Kovacs was that she was heading directly toward the address she’d given him.
Against all odds, she’d somehow succeeded. She’d called the embassy on an open line, arranged a clandestine meeting, and gotten away with it—right under the Muk’s nose.
“God have mercy on the amateur,” he mumbled. Turning back toward the Czech embassy in the waning evening light, he wondered what might come of it all.
NINE
Two days later
As counter-surveillance routines went, it was the most epic David Slaton had ever run. But then, he’d never had such motivation to stay clean.
He kept a steady pace on the sidewalk, doing his best to blend in. In the heart of Montevideo, it was less a chore than might be imagined. He was slightly over six feet tall, and his sandy hair and regular features were vaguely Scandinavian. Fortunately, nearly ninety percent of native Uruguayans traced their lineage to Europe. Slaton had a number of more distinguishing physical characteristics, but these—the various scars that marked his body—were not in view.
He did not carry a bag or a coat, or for that matter anything to suggest he was a traveler. It had taken him two days to reach Montevideo, one of the world’s oft-overlooked great cities. Three airplanes, one train, two buses, three taxis. And today, at the end of it all, countless miles of walking. For all the world’s procedural funnels—the increasingly complex web of passport control stations and immigration queues and municipal camera networks—the simple act of walking through an urban maze remained the most effective countermeasure against being followed.
The best chance to disappear.
In truth, being tailed here would not be of particular concern. More pressing was to not leave a single crumb, no trace of a digital footprint that could be tracked to the origin of his journey. For the first time ever, Slaton was more worried about concealing where he’d been than giving away where he was going.
He paused at the final crosswalk, a buzz-saw intersection in the heart of the old city. Behind him was Parque Rodó, and beyond that the temperate shoulder of Rio de la Plata, the wide estuary that bounded the city’s southern shore. In the course of two previous forays to the city, Slaton had never visited this park. On general appearances it was the sort of common found in virtually every capital, with all the usual adornments. There were walking paths and gardens for those prone to contemplation, amusement rides for those seeking thrills. Calorie-laden confection stands seemed planted on every corner, and the playgrounds were thick with darting children and hovering parents.
If there was a uniqueness to Parque Rodó, Slaton decided, it would be the countless specimens of artwork scattered across the broad lawns. Statues dominated, although not the portrayals he would have expected. There was the odd Spanish explorer and a few Uruguayan legends, but the majority of the subjects held a more scholarly outlook. Einstein was depicted in stony contemplation, and Confucius stood reflectively before a thick glade. More lightheartedly, an entire ensemble of stone clothing stood as if worn by invisible bodies. Slaton found it all bemusing, but rendered no judgment. He himself was something of an artisan when it came to stone, yet sculpture was not his domain. His expertise leaned toward the more practical: the creation of retaining walls and patios and foundations. By any measure, masonry had become his second career.
Unfortunately, repercussions from his first career
intervened all too regularly.
The light at the intersection changed, and Slaton crossed amid a thick crowd reveling in the welcome October spring. On the far side he referenced his watch before turning right on the sidewalk. He glanced back and saw nothing suspicious.
The address he’d been given was near, across the street to his right. This was his preferred method of approach: studying an objective from across a street gave a wide perspective, and the traffic served as a defensive barrier if anything went wrong.
It turned out to be a three-story residential building, a nondescript façade of brick, mortar, and glass. From the walkways of the park he’d performed a more distant survey and found the place unremarkable. He saw nothing to change his opinion up close. It was a building like a thousand others in Montevideo. Like a million across the world. He’d been given no unit or apartment number, and that omission was telling. Slaton had arrived in the right place at precisely the right time. The rest, he was sure, would soon become evident.
He knew perfectly well who he was here to meet. Indeed, there were but two people on earth he trusted enough to draw him away from his family. One was Anton Bloch, the former chief of Mossad. Bloch had recruited him into that service, an act of malice Slaton had forgiven only after Bloch, some years later, had risked his own life to save Slaton’s wife.
Today, however, it was the other person Slaton had come to see.
She appeared right on cue.
* * *
He spotted her behind the wheel of a dove-gray Nissan a hundred feet ahead. The car edged out of light traffic and drew smoothly to the curb. There was no tap on the horn, no flicking of headlights. The two hands high on the steering wheel made not the slightest of gestures. The driver simply waited. Knowing he would see her.
Slaton never broke stride. He climbed in the Nissan’s curbside passenger door, and for the sake of anyone watching even manufactured a smile. He wasn’t surprised when the driver, a Nordic-stock blonde, leaned in to exchange an amiable peck on the cheek. They could have been husband and wife, brother and sister, or simply close friends. All the bases covered with one simple gesture.
Anna Sorensen pulled cautiously back out into traffic.
“Hello, Anna,” he said.
“Hi, David. Thanks for coming.”
“I’m not completely sure I had a choice … but you’re welcome.”
She shot him a guarded look. Anna Sorensen headed up the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Special Activities Center. In effect, she ran the agency’s black operations across the world, and kept a direct line to the director of the CIA. That Sorensen had herself come to meet him at the bottom of South America, certainly undercover, was testament to the secrecy of their affiliation.
“I told you before,” she said. “You always have a choice.”
Instead of arguing the point, Slaton studied the car’s interior. An envelope tucked between the seats told him they were riding in a rental. The gas tank was full, the back seat empty. His right hand dropped to the side of his seat. No electric buttons, but a manual recline lever—good to know if he needed to duck in a hurry. He adjusted the seat for a better view of the right rear quarter in the side mirror.
Sorensen was watching. “You never let up, do you?”
“Given my circumstances, would you?” His gaze snagged on an unfamiliar device on the dash. The unobtrusiveness of its design was certainly intentional. Made of smooth gray plastic, it was the size and shape of a Styrofoam coffee cup, albeit inverted. It appeared to be mounted on the dash with an adhesive pad. “That’s no air freshener,” he said.
“It’s a jammer,” she explained. “The rental car companies all track their fleets these days.”
“So, it blocks the GPS signal?”
“Among other things. I’ve been told it covers a wide range of frequencies. I think the DST guy used the term ‘barrage jammer.’ It supposedly scrambles the most common devices used for tracking.” DST was the agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology.
“You don’t sound convinced,” he said. “I think my paranoia is rubbing off on you.”
“Maybe so. I see it as a layered precaution. I was very careful in how I got here.”
“Not as careful as I was,” he assured her.
Slaton’s relationship with the CIA was something new. Less than a year ago he’d single-handedly pulled the agency out of an epic bind, thwarting a nuclear attack by North Korea. In the course of it, his wife and son had been kidnapped. Everything turned out as well as it could have, and when the dust settled he’d had a very long talk with Christine. They agreed that, for the safety of their son, Davy, only one option remained. It was time to make a pact with Langley. Or more precisely, with Sorensen.
A longtime Mossad operative, Slaton had tried to leave the black world behind for a normal life with his family. He’d parted ways with Israel years earlier and gone off-grid, becoming, effectively, a man without a country. His disappearance was aided by the fact that he’d been reported on at least two occasions to have met his demise. Despite it all, his attempts at isolation were a failure. Try as he might, Slaton repeatedly found himself drawn back into the folds of both Mossad and the CIA.
After the previous year’s close call, however, he realized his only hope was to strike a bargain, and of the two devils he chose the Americans. The CIA had placed Slaton and his family into their “asset protection” program. New identities, new lives, security as needed. It put his family on a tightrope, the only net being anonymity. Or at least, that and a damned well-stocked gun safe. So far, the scheme had worked, yet that sanctuary came at a cost: Slaton allowed that the CIA might occasionally call upon his services for certain missions.
The kind of services few could imagine.
David Slaton was, by all accounts, the most accomplished assassin ever created by the state of Israel—given that nation’s rich clandestine history, something akin to being the fastest car ever built by Ferrari. When combined with his ethereal background of recent years, it made him something unique: a top-flight assassin who, in an increasingly connected world, was as close as one could be to a ghost.
The question of what missions Slaton might be tapped for remained unclear. The CIA’s Special Activities Center, or SAC, kept a full stable of competent special operators, some internally trained, others drawn from elite military units. The problem with those assets, for all their expertise, was that they could invariably be linked to the United States. Slaton, by either fault or virtue, offered a new and unique option: a first-tier operator who was virtually untraceable.
The arrangement with Sorensen had been sealed over café Americanos in the Cape Verde islands. Christine had been in attendance, and she’d agreed reluctantly in principle. After the debacle in North Korea, she reasoned, something in their lives had to change. Or as she’d put it so succinctly, “The safety of our son is everything.”
While Sorensen had gone back to Langley to make the arrangements, Slaton and his family sailed to Brazil. They sold the boat and receded into their new life. All had been going well until two days ago.
That was when Slaton received the first call from his new employer, arriving via an ultra-secure comm device—he kept the handset in the basement of his Idaho farmhouse inside a special gun safe that not only gave physical security, but also acted as a Faraday Cage to keep electronic intrusion at bay. Twice each day he removed the phone and checked for messages. On the day in question, after preparing lunch for his son—peanut butter sandwich, no jelly, with a sliced banana—Slaton checked a screen that for seven months had remained blank. And there, finally, he saw a message. There were no allusions as to why he was being summoned, no hint of what he would be asked to do. Only an address along Calle Patria in Montevideo, along with a time and date that gave a reasonable allowance for travel.
That afternoon he’d discussed the summons with Christine, and they agreed to terms. Slaton would make the meeting with Sorensen to find out what was being asked o
f him. Yet he would accept the mission only if certain requirements were met. That much settled, Slaton had responded.
Will comply, require backup.
Two hours later, a contingent of six serious individuals, five men and one woman, had arrived at the front gate of their ranch. Slaton gave them a thorough briefing, and they’d asked enough questions—the right questions—to convince him they were competent.
Security in place, Slaton had set out toward Spokane. Thirty-six hours later, he was standing on the given street at the prescribed time.
“How are Christine and Davy?” Sorensen asked. She knew them both, having personally overseen their security during a previous mission.
“They’re good,” Slaton said. “Davy started preschool.”
“Preschool? They grow up fast.”
“I know, right? And thanks for the team you sent. They were a solid bunch.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“What about you?” he asked. “Still seeing your flyboy?”
“Jammer? Yeah, he’s good. If we both weren’t so busy, something might come of it.”
“Don’t wait too long. This business we’re in … it can swallow your life whole.”
“You of all people would know.”
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Somewhere quiet. We need to talk, and I’ve got a few things to show you.”
“Okay.” Slaton settled back in his seat and relaxed. Having come this far, he decided he could give Sorensen the courtesy of patience.
TEN
Traffic was modest by big city standards. Slaton liked the choice of Uruguay for their meeting. It was among the most stable countries in South America, a placid harbor amid the continent’s ocean of scandal and corruption. Even better, a place where few clandestine services were active. An under-the-radar venue.
As they progressed eastward Sorensen opted for small talk, or at least what passed for it in intelligence circles. She inquired about the security measures Slaton had installed around his ranch, which somehow led to the vulnerability of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank.
