“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 waited 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 own situation. Maybe he should have done more to minimize the chances of a disaster.
“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.”
“Try not to get seasick.”
Stiletto scoffed. He hated boats for that very reason. “Last thing I need,” he said. 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 watched a newsfeed 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 the 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.