to the south gave her the impression the weather was about to change.
The university was to the right, but she made a left on Königin-Luise Strasse, careful to meticulously catalog the faces she saw around her without giving any hint that she was doing so. She glanced in shop windows, scanned patrons at a sidewalk café, eyed a young man on a motorized skateboard as he whizzed towards and then past her.
Normally an American intelligence analyst, formerly of the National Security Agency, would have no special concerns about walking through a European capital, but Stephanie Arthur was, in fact, Zoya Zakharova, and Zoya had more than enough reason to be on guard. She knew good and well the Russian government wanted her dead, and she knew her cover had been blown, at least to her employer. She didn’t know if the Kremlin was aware she was here, but she had spent the last couple of weeks operating under the assumption that killers lurked around every corner.
She continued down Königin-Luise until she was flush on the sidewalk with Eis Zeit, an ice cream shop nestled on the tree-lined street between a perfumery and a hair salon. She didn’t go into any of the shops; rather, she stepped out into the road and climbed into the back of a parked blue van with a collection of ladders attached to the roof and sides.
The van’s engine wasn’t running; consequently, neither was the AC. It was warm inside, even in the darkness that had Zoya ripping off her Tom Ford sunglasses and slipping them into her purse as soon as she sat down. And though it was hotter in here than on the sunlit street, that wasn’t the only discomfort. Her left shoulder was pressed against the side of the van, and a low table lined with monitors and other equipment was wedged against her rib cage on the right side.
Two men were in there with her; they were all three packed so close she could smell the sweat under their armpits, mixing sickeningly with the scent of hair gel off one of their heads.
Both men were in their twenties; Moises was Israeli, a translator and technician for Shrike International Group who spoke fluent Farsi. Yanis, also a Shrike employee, was French Algerian, and Zoya could see he was the one with the gel spiking his short black hair.
These were the techs Stephanie had been assigned for her first operation with the company. Yanis drove the van and monitored equipment when not doing his main job, which was black-bag ops. He led the pair on clandestine break-ins and other operations where they would set microphones, photograph documents in buildings, and the like. But in the van, Moises was in charge of this operation.
And Stephanie Arthur, Shrike International’s newest case officer, was in charge of them.
Zoya had met the two younger men on her first day on the job two weeks earlier, and they had worked together since as a small team, setting up surveillance on several Iranian embassy staffers. Yesterday, she received a new targeting order. She’d briefed Yanis and Moises, who had then gone directly to this neighborhood to the southwest to install listening devices in the man’s roomy flat three stories above the ice cream shop.
Zoya hadn’t joined them for the operation to emplace the bugs, but she’d spent the balance of the evening looking over her target’s portfolio.
Javad Sasani was a thirty-six-year-old Iranian consular affairs officer here in Berlin, and Shrike Group had been hired by its mysterious customer to investigate the man to see if he was, in fact, an operative with VAJA, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security.
Zoya didn’t know why Sasani was suspected of ties to Iranian intel, nor did she even care. Her real mission wasn’t to out this one potential spy in an Iranian embassy that was surely bursting at the seams with spies. No, she was really here on a Poison Apple initiative to acquire intelligence about Shrike Group from the two men seated next to her.
In her short time at the company, she’d only met Ric Ennis, the man who hired her, and this pair of young men. Ennis was certainly a more prized target for her to plumb for intel relating to the corporate intelligence firm, but Moises and Yanis were here, with her, so she got right to work on them.
Just like she’d done most every day for the past two weeks.
She’d already placed a tracker on two of their vehicles,