we are on mission and fully capable.”
“Why? Why does he matter? Why does she matter?”
“Inna, don’t you see it?”
“See what?”
“This is the ending I’ve been dreaming of. I didn’t care about killing some stupid SVR bitch who pissed off the wrong people at Yasenevo. Who fucking cares? But now? Now I have something to live for.”
“Wow,” Inna said. “Even when sober, you don’t make any sense. This is something to live for, but it’s the ending you wanted?”
“I will kill Sirena, and I will kill the world’s most revered assassin, and I will go out on top.”
Sorokina thought she understood. She said, “Go out?”
“I’ll put a bullet in my brain, blast myself all over the bodies of my last, and greatest, victims.”
She sighed. She wanted to tell him he needed a fast ride in the back of a van back to Mental Hospital Number 14. But she knew when to challenge him, and she knew when to back off. This was not a fight she would win. She could only do her best to steer her assassin back on track.
“Can you fight him? Like that?” She motioned to his shirtless body, covered in welts.
“I hurt him worse than he hurt me. Now that I know who he is, I will be ready to finish the job.” He stood now, wincing with the motion. “When Anya gets back, she needs to work to get us a new fix on Zakharova. We find her, we find him, and I will defeat them both. In the meantime, I’ll report in, and I’ll start to heal from yesterday. I’ll be ready.”
He pulled out his phone. His decision had been made, and Inna would go along.
But she was more certain than ever that Maksim Akulov would end up getting her killed.
FIFTY-FOUR
Haz Mirza sat on his bed in his little flat at Gielower Strasse 41, doing his best to control his breath, to calm himself. Finally, he picked up a burner phone tucked in the sheets in front of him and tapped the icon to open Threema, the end-to-end-encryption private messaging app he used to communicate with the phones owned by members of his sleeper cell.
Mirza was using a solid approach to private communications, but he was unaware that Annika Dittenhofer had had him tailed months ago by a coordinated team of her denied assets. Through this she learned that he bought his burners at a small Chinese-run electronics shop in the eastern Winsviertel neighborhood, far from Mirza’s apartment in Neukölln.
And then, after winning a fight with Rudy over the cost of the operation, Annika purchased one hundred of the phones, then had them specially altered. The new phones she repackaged in shrink wrap, so that they were indistinguishable from models for sale on shelves around the city.
She then had them slipped into DHL shipments heading to the electronics store. The Shrike-altered phones had an actual digital transmitter implanted in them, with a tracking device and audio pickups that allowed whomever was monitoring the line to hear both ends of a phone conversation. There was also a keystroke logger installed, and this gave her the ability to read the owner’s outgoing text messages.
The operation had been a resounding success. Less than a month after the units were put in place, one of Mirza’s men entered the store and bought eight of the burners.
Within two weeks, Haz Mirza himself began using one of the eight.
Now four of Mirza’s nine subordinates carried Annika’s phones, giving her incredible access to the cell. Sometimes Mirza placed his phone in a Faraday cage, a small box used to block electromagnetic fields, and when he did this, he went dark, but he had to take the phone out to use it, so she always picked him up when he made calls or texts.
A similar operation, inspired by Annika’s work, was conducted by another Shrike intelligence officer, and this endeavor put phones in the hands of sleeper cells in three other European countries.
With these two initiatives, Shrike now had deeper knowledge of Quds sleepers in Europe than the Germans or the Americans by a wide margin.
Haz Mirza was unaware of all this, of course. He’d been here in Germany for over two years; if anything, as far as he was concerned, there was less heat on him now than when he arrived. Today he simply sat on his bed and smoked while he waited for the other end to answer the Threema call, with no concerns whatsoever that he was being listened in