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.
C.I.A. agent Scott Stiletto leaned in the alcove of a building just off Place des Armateurs, the rippling 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 the 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 the enemy discovered him, and he 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 seat 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.