Maksim Akulov, an insane hit man of incredible skill, was here targeting her.
And the only reason he would know to come here, to be able to find her, was that her masters at Shrike Group had somehow slipped Moscow the intel. Wittingly or unwittingly, she had no idea, but for a woman who trusted no one, her mistrust had now reached a crescendo.
She swam faster and faster, anxious to get her workout in and return to her room.
Her plan to obtain intel for the CIA was thin today, this she knew, because her focus was fixed firmly on her other plan, her plan to dodge Russian assassins.
FORTY-THREE
Quds Force sleeper operative Haz Mirza climbed out of the Westphalweg U-Bahn station in Berlin’s southern Mariendorf neighborhood, looked up at a low gray sky, and wondered how soon he would die.
It was only eight a.m., but Mirza had been up since five, when he’d received an encrypted text from a cousin in Tehran, telling him to check the news. Any news.
The twenty-four-year-old opened Twitter, and the first tweet he saw described the death of General Rajavi, no doubt at the hands of the Americans and the Jews. There were photos from the scene, and it was brutal. One close-in shot of the debris showed a severed arm at the end of which a graying hand wore Rajavi’s distinctive watch.
Haz was an angry young man already; this, he knew instantly, would send him over the edge.
And over the edge was exactly where he’d wanted to go for some time.
As a sixteen-year-old boy he’d been trained by the Iranian military; he’d shown special aptitude and unique intelligence, so he left the infantry and moved into special operations. He fought in Yemen and Syria and Libya as a Quds Force paramilitary fighter.
Mirza had been recalled to Tehran three years earlier, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, and ordered to study German. Day and night, month after month. In addition to his studies, he also met with higher-level Quds operatives, and they taught him tradecraft, more advanced weapons, and technology.
When he was twenty-two, he was no longer a zealous war fighter. He was a highly trained operative. Yet he remained as fervent as ever. When he was deemed ready by his masters, he was secreted into Europe, given the papers he needed to find residence and work, and told to recruit a cell.
And then, this done, he was told to wait.
Mirza had been proud to serve on the vanguard of Iranian interests as a spy, but he became disillusioned with the work when there was no work to do. He got a job driving a truck, the men he recruited mostly worked in the trucking industry, and they all lived very normal, if very boring, lives here in Berlin.
Mirza wanted to serve, he wanted to martyr himself, and he wanted a mission so the men he led would not grow lazy and weak and become nonbelievers, like regular Germans.
In the last few months, Mirza himself began to question his own resolve. He felt himself softening by the day.
But no longer. First thing this morning, after the shock left him, he felt as if he’d been pumped full of a powerful drug.
He would seek his jihad now, there was no doubt about it. He’d drawn up plans years ago, before Germany and much of the rest of the EU relaxed their sanctions on Iran, and he merely had to receive his orders from Tehran. He and his men would no longer be told to remain in place, to abide by all local laws, and to wait for the day when they would be activated.
No, today he would be activated, he had no doubt. He just needed the call.
One of his plans was an attack against American interests here in the city. As he was certain America was the culprit in the death of the general, he expected this plan to be the one his orders centered on.
Yes, Germany and the rest of the EU had relaxed their sanctions, but Mirza didn’t care about sanctions; he didn’t care about politics; he didn’t care about anything other than doing his job. And his job was that of an agent provocateur.
The West would call him a terrorist, but he knew that though his martyrdom would result in the death and destruction of many Americans here in Germany, he could never in a million years cause the terror that his people had undergone at the hands of the United States and its proxy