here? They know?”
Zoya nodded. “Don’t play stupid. That’s what happened last night.” She cocked her head, relaxed her grip on the weapon behind her. “What were you talking about?”
“Miriam called me a half hour ago. Her contacts told her that BfV was following both of us after dinner. You didn’t go up to your room like you told me, you went for a walk. An intelligence officer following you was murdered. An officer following me was attacked and injured.” He added, “You and I are both burned. Miriam wants us to get out of town.”
There was nothing in the world Zoya would like more than to skip town now, but she knew she had to do her best to remain on her mission. She needed to be here, in the middle of Shrike’s intelligence operation against Iranian actors in Berlin, to find out what the hell was going on.
Ennis said, “We’ll go together. Safety in numbers. Pack quickly, we can be on a train in a half hour.”
Der’mo, she said to herself again. Her entire operation was falling apart around her.
FORTY-FIVE
In suite 401, Anya kept her eyes on the hidden cameras in Zakharova’s suite down the hall. “It looks like they’re fighting. Arguing about something.”
Inna posited the reasons for the fight. “Ennis found out about the guy Semyon killed. He wants to know why she was running an SDR last night. She’s angry because we are here, and she blames Ennis.” Then she looked back to Maksim and said a third time, “Abort. We stand down till he leaves.”
But Maksim shook his head. “Nyet. We’re going.”
Inna couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What’s wrong with you? You know our orders; it’s supposed to look like a—”
“A suicide? Da, it is.” He spun to the other three dramatically, a flourish of his hand like an actor on a stage. “A sad, sad course of events. Two work colleagues are meeting for an early morning of intimacy, a clandestine affair no one in their office can know about. An argument breaks out between them. Infidelity, jealousy, a refusal to leave another and commit, whoever knows with these things? It gets heated. She pulls a gun on him, emotional; she doesn’t mean it, but it makes her feel powerful to wave it around.”
Anya and Semyon stared in rapt attention. Inna looked at him, as well, but she was clearly unconvinced.
“The gun goes off. Mr. Ennis is killed. Zakharova is stunned by what she’s done, but ultimately resolute. The poor girl then turns the weapon on herself.”
Inna Sorokina blinked in surprise now. “You are saying a murder/suicide?”
Maksim nodded, a smile growing wider as he winked at Semyon, slapped him on the arm, and opened the door.
“That could work,” Inna said, but she said it to Maksim Akulov’s back, because he was already heading out the door with his cart full of food.
* * *
• • •
In suite 405, Ennis stood just inside the door and Zoya stood in the middle of the living room, her back to the open windows overlooking Unter den Linden. “I’m not leaving Berlin! I have a job to do for Shrike, and the killing of General Rajavi last night is only going to make Iranian operatives in the West more of a threat.”
“We are blown! I’m blown by the Germans, at the very least. But you, you are compromised to Germany and Russia. There is no job here for you to come back to. You are a complete liability for Shrike Group. You’re fired. I’m fired. We have got to get both our asses on the next train out of town.”
She shook her head. “You go wherever you want. I’m not—”
“This is bigger than you know. This is more dangerous than you know.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ennis seemed to weigh the option of saying more, before finally speaking. “The drone strike in Baghdad last night.”
“What about it?”
“There is an assumption that the Iranians will retaliate. But what if I told you the Iranians are being set up?”
“What do you mean?”
“For the last six months, Shrike has been creating a trail between Iranian intel officers at their Berlin embassy, a trail that links them to Quds Force operatives in Europe. A link that doesn’t exist.”
“What?”
“Miriam was tasked with finding the Quds operatives, learning their patterns, putting them under surveillance. But I . . . my team, we were tasked with taking Miriam’s intelligence and using it to plant physical evidence on the sleeper cell and on embassy intelligence staff here