at seven a.m., then reached up and fingered the small SIG Sauer P365 pistol she kept inches from her face.
All the thoughts from last night came back to her in a flood. The walk through the memorial garden, the confrontation with Sorokina, the gunshot and the shattering glass.
It was more than a minute before she started thinking again about the operation Hanley had sent her to Europe to undertake, and she wondered if she would ever get the intel on Shrike Group the Agency needed, especially now that she’d been so utterly compromised by the Russians.
Who had exposed her? She’d lain in her faux bed in the closet for over an hour before sleep last night trying to answer this very question. It had to have been Ennis, or this Miriam character, real name Dittenhofer, although she’d never met the woman. She didn’t think it would have been Moises or Yanis, but she couldn’t rule them out, either.
She checked her phone and found that a text had come in over the night from Suzanne Brewer. It was a link to a news article on UPI.
Iranian general killed in drone strike.
Zoya assumed this had happened in Yemen, but she clicked on the story. In seconds she saw why Brewer had sent her the piece.
Shit. So the U.S. fragged the commander of Quds Force. When Zoya spoke with Brewer last night, just after her encounter with Inna Sorokina, Brewer had promised her that Berlin station would put men on her, at a safe distance, to keep any Russian hit team at bay. It hadn’t really calmed the Russian woman to learn this; she expected that Maksim Akulov and his team would run robust countersurveillance of their own operation and adapt accordingly. But even last night, Zoya had known her work was important.
Someone was killing enemies of Quds Force in Berlin, and now she’d learned that this had been going on directly in advance of an American assassination of the Quds Force commander.
This was no coincidence.
She sat up slowly, the stress firing burning acid throughout her stomach.
She told herself she was safe for now, at least in the hotel, and that exercise would help her calm down. She climbed out of the closet and headed to the bathroom, with plans to go downstairs to the gym.
* * *
• • •
At the far end of the hallway, inside suite 401, there was a flurry of activity. Semyon Pervak stood shirtless in the bathroom, using his big, brawny arms to hold the much smaller and utterly naked Maksim Akulov under an icy shower to revive him from the lingering effects of the night before. In the suite, Inna Sorokina and Anya Bolichova had dressed and armed themselves, and they had packed all their luggage save for what they needed for the assassination, placing all the Gucci bags by the door.
They then returned to the three laptop workstations on the kitchen table to monitor the various camera feeds split onto two of the computers as well as the real-time room service log on another.
Zoya had slept in her closet; this, both women assumed, was due to Inna’s encounter with her the night before causing her enough terror to upset her normal routine. They’d only sat down and confirmed through the room service screen that Zakharova had yet to order her daily breakfast when they saw their target’s closet door open on the bedroom camera. Zakharova stepped into the bathroom near the door, then exited it a few minutes later.
Her two watchers fully expected her to go to the room phone to place her breakfast order, but instead she got dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt that read Universität Heidelberg.
Bolichova said, “She’s adopting some kind of college student disguise, maybe?”
Inna did not reply, she only watched the feed.
Both Russian women next saw their target slip a holstered pistol into a backpack, along with a one-piece swimsuit, a room key, and a few other items.
Then she headed for the living room of the suite.
Both Inna and Anya rose to their feet; Bolichova ran to the door’s peephole to look out and Sorokina hurried back through the bedroom, into the bathroom, where she encountered a very naked but surprisingly sober-acting Maksim. Semyon was no longer holding him; the assassin stood on his own two feet next to the shower, his impossibly lean and sinewy body covered with both scars and tattoos.
He raised an eyebrow at his intelligence officer, Pervak tossed him a towel, and Maksim nonchalantly