Sorokina’s phone rang while she sat in the passenger seat of the Russian hit squad’s rented Mercedes coupe. She looked down at the number and saw it was Maksim’s burner.
Again.
It was almost ten p.m. now; they’d spent the entire day sitting in the car in an underground garage a couple of blocks from the Kempinski, worried about vehicle checks on the road in the wake of the chaos in the hotel at Pariser Platz. Now they were tired and stressed and they hadn’t been able to get a signal on their sat phone to send in a distress call to Moscow.
Inna knew she had to make that call, but she told herself she first needed to remain vigilant while Anya drove, to make certain they hadn’t been tailed.
The call could wait. Maksim and Sem weren’t going to get any more dead in the interim.
A steady rain fell, and as they headed south out of the city, the sky grew darker and darker.
A minute later the phone rang again.
Anya said, “Why don’t you just answer it?”
Sorokina turned it off now. “Someone found it with his body and has been calling the last number dialed, probably the only number dialed, trying to find a relative or a friend of the idiot who put on a room service uniform, murdered one or two foreigners in a hotel suite, depending on whether they think Semyon was a victim and not an aggressor, and then died trying to escape out the window.”
“If that’s what the authorities think, does that mean we’re in the clear?”
Inna shook her head. “Not at all. They will work out quickly that the man dead on Unter den Linden had confederates, and they’ll be hunting for them. Pulling the fire alarm bought us some time; they’ll have a lot of people to look over on the camera footage, but you can bet we’re burned.”
Anya turned right off Potsdamer Strasse and up the little driveway of a lake house on lake Templiner, south of the city of Potsdam. It was a wooded area with more houses dotting the shore, not as remote as Sorokina would have liked, but, she had to admit, Anya had found a safe house with a good balance between accessibility to central Berlin and an out-of-the-way location with multiple avenues of escape, if necessary.
They entered the four-bedroom home at ten thirty and immediately set up their computers.
Anya said, “You have to call this in.”
Inna nodded and sniffed. “What do I tell them?”
“What happened, I guess.”
“Right.” Inna pocketed her phone, then stepped over to the little bar by the glass windows to the back deck with the view of the lake. “I’ll send a distress call to Moscow. But first we can have a drink in honor of Maksim. The fool got himself killed, he got Sem killed, and he failed to eliminate his target, but at least he didn’t get us killed.” Anya gave a stressed laugh, then went over and drank a shot of tepid vodka with her team’s intelligence officer.
“That man today,” Anya said. “Whoever he was, he was extraordinary. Maksim in his glory days wouldn’t have had a problem with him, but Maksim’s glory days are long past.”
“All his days are past,” Inna said solemnly, then poured herself another drink.
Just as she brought the little shot glass back to her mouth, she and Bolichova simultaneously heard a noise near the front door. They produced their pistols in an instant and trained them towards the sound just as the door opened.
Both women had their fingers on their triggers, and when a figure stepped into the room, out of the darkness and the rain, both women let out a gasp.
Inna blinked hard, as if the image in her eyes would just reset, turn into something else, something that made sense.
But when she opened them back up, the image remained.
Maksim Akulov stood before them in a black raincoat, dark slacks, and soaking-wet dress shoes. He stepped into the room, under his own power, and in his left hand he held a bottle of cheap bourbon.
It was clear from the bottle and from the man holding it that a few shots had been downed already.
The two women just stared uncomprehendingly, until both slowly lowered their weapons. They looked at each other, as if to say, Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Akulov stepped into the house fully, shutting and locking the door behind him.
And then he said, “I bet you two are just full of questions.”
Neither woman spoke, so Maksim