Vektor (7 page)

Hubner strolled along the wide, tree-lined sidewalk, scanning his surroundings. Despite the appearance of a relaxed lifestyle in Munich, he remained ever vigilant for threats. Turning onto Georgen Strasse, headed for his apartment two buildings away, his eyes were drawn to the red umbrellas of a comfortable biergarten nestled away behind the trees near the street corner. The gated patio served light food and excellent beer in generous one-liter, frosted glass mugs. He felt the pull of a crisp Augustiner Edelstoff and started to angle toward the gate. A sharp pain in his left thigh snapped him out of his reverie.

He turned his head left and noticed a student continuing up the street toward Leopold Strasse. The man’s face was hidden, but the backpack, dark corduroy pants and untucked shirttails gave him the distinct impression that he was a student. White headphone wires trailed down his neck, appearing from the bottom of his bushy, brown hair. The pain in his thigh had disappeared by the time he reached down to caress and examine the spot. He didn’t see a rip in his dark blue, designer jeans, and started to wonder if he had experienced a cramp or some kind of transient nerve impingement. The kid turned right and crossed Georgen Strasse, headed south on Leopold Strasse, toward the university. He disappeared behind a thick stand of trees next to the tall apartment building on the corner. Hubner shrugged and continued on his walk, distracted from his thoughts of cold beer.

He made it halfway to his apartment building before the first wave of sluggishness struck, signaling that he was in serious trouble. He felt like he was pushing his legs and arms through a viscous pool of petroleum. He started to turn his head to stare back at the corner of the Leopold Strasse, in what he knew was a futile attempt to spot the cleverly disguised fucker that injected him with some kind of toxin.

There wasn’t much he could do at this point. He would either be dead or incapacitated within a short period of time, and death might be his better option. Defying his body’s newly defined gravitational attraction to the earth’s core, he struggled to reach his jacket’s inside pocket, straining as his vision started to narrow. He found the phone just as his body toppled to the stonework walkway, trapping his arm under his torso. There was no way he could pull his phone out at this point. He could barely move his fingers. The last thing he registered as his vision closed was the sound of footsteps approaching.

***

Vadim Dragunov continued walking along Leopold Strasse, slowing his pace. He glanced behind him, just in case something had gone awry, leaving Hubner capable of pursuit. He saw nothing. He turned to face south on Leopold, catching sight of the Siegestor, or Victory Gate, a few hundred meters down the wide boulevard. The three-arched structure, similar in style to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and Arch of Constantine in Rome, was crowned with a statue of Bavaria riding a lion-quadriga. Dragunov appreciated the simple, yet masculine architecture of the one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old landmark looming ahead. The Siegestor was dwarfed in size and significance compared to the Brandenburg gate. Berlin reminded him of Moscow, where each successive ruler felt compelled to make a bigger mark on the architectural landscape.

He heard a motor vehicle slow on the street next to him, which drew his attention away from the gate. The SVR team’s silver minivan pulled into the bicycle lane several feet in front of him and stopped. The right sliding door opened, and he casually walked into the van, glancing around one last time for the police before closing the door. Blocking a bicycle lane in Munich, even for a few seconds, could attract more attention from the police than running a red light. These fucking Germans were obsessed with their bicycles, and it was a matter of pride to get from one place to another without using a car. In Moscow, only the poorest migrant workers rode bicycles, and even that was a rarity.

“Are you trying to get us arrested?” he asked in Russian. “You have to pay close attention to the roads here. There’s a parking strip, clearly marked by a solid white line. You can pull over and park on the other side of the line, as long as you don’t block the bike path.”

The driver protested as he drove the van forward, continuing down the bike path. “How the hell was I supposed to know it was a bike path?”

The van crossed over a small lip in the road as he merged back into traffic.

“By observing the damn curb,” Dragunov said.

“I barely felt that,” the driver continued.

Dragunov shook his head and stared at the lead agent, who he only knew as Mihail.

“Take it easy, Stepka. This man’s observations will keep us out of trouble,” the leader said.

Dragunov leaned his head over the headrest, glancing into the third row. Konrad Hubner lay crumpled on the seat cushion next to a detached-looking agent. He hoped this team wasn’t filled with sociopaths. They were all sociopaths on some level, but so far this crew’s attitude hadn’t impressed him. Maybe he was misjudging them, since he had become more accustomed to working alone. He would have preferred to keep walking down Leopold Strasse, but his order had been crystal clear. He would lead Hubner’s interrogation.

The German businessman had been photographed in Stockholm, driving the van involved in the Zaslon massacre. SVR got lucky with a traffic camera, which took a clear picture of the driver and front passenger. Konrad Hubner had been the driver, and a Serbian war criminal named Marko Resja had been his passenger. None of it made sense, which was why headquarters wanted Dragunov personally involved in the interrogation. Not only was he a Zaslon operative, but he was considered to be one of the organization’s top interrogators, specializing in long, drawn-out torture. Everybody confessed to Dragunov, eventually.

“No problems on the street?” Dragunov asked.

“Everything was perfectly timed. Nobody on the street saw us load him into the van,” Mihail said.

“Good. The next step is to get us to a secure location east of the city. If your driver can follow simple directions, I can have us there in less than an hour. Another hour beyond that will put us at the Czech border.”

The driver didn’t take the bait and allowed his team leader to respond, which was the proper response under these circumstances.

“He’s extremely capable, as long as we don’t run into anymore bike paths,” Mihail said, trying to alleviate the tension.

“I never saw a bike path before coming to Germany,” Dragunov admitted. “Who the fuck has time to ride a bike?”

Chapter 11

10:14 AM

Chejlava National Nature Reserve

Two Miles east of Zhur, Czech Republic

Vadim Dragunov squeezed out of the two-story barn and took in a deep breath, savoring the rich mixture of forest scents. The sharp fragrance of the occasional spruce or fir tree faintly stabbed through the overwhelming smell of new foliage from the ever-present towering beech trees beyond the clearing. The fresh smell of spring competed with the musty aroma of moist, decaying leaves from last fall’s seasonal shedding. He missed spending time in the countryside. He glanced toward the dirt path leading from the forest into the tight clearing and nodded at an SVR agent leaning against a thick tree alongside the road.

Movement inside the barn drew his attention, and he turned to see two agents carrying a bloodied body into the light cast through the half-opened barn door. He pushed the heavy, reinforced steel door along its well-lubricated track, giving the team a larger opening. Dragunov stood aside and paid his respects as the men struggled with the corpse. Whoever this man had been, he was by far the most skilled and resilient operative Dragunov had come across in a long time. A worthy adversary on every level.

They had arrived at the safe house during the early evening hours and wasted no time commencing Konrad Hubner’s interrogation. The interrogation had yielded scant details. Hubner had expertly twisted and turned them in multiple false directions throughout the night, wasting precious time and exhausting them as the dawn approached. Just when they thought they had achieved a breakthrough, they found themselves thirty minutes into another dead end, with Hubner smirking. Even without lips, which agent Osin had removed at an early point in the night, the man still managed to smirk.

Around nine in the morning, they took a short break to eat some breakfast and formulate a new game plan. Unendurable pain and agony would continue to be the centerpiece of their strategy. There was only so much a human could withstand, and they still had some evil-looking tools in the kit they had unearthed from the barn, along with a vial of acid. They had re-entered the barn, expecting a long morning, but Hubner had other plans. Without warning, he managed to impale his neck on Osin’s knife, severing the carotid artery. In less than a minute, he bled out onto the concrete floor of the small cinderblock room, taking the rest of his knowledge down the metal drain under his chair.

The two agents carrying Hubner’s body had been given specific instructions regarding the preferred disposal method for this site. The stand-alone barn structure did not contain a proper “bath house,” so bodies had to be buried at least two hundred meters into the forest, in a westerly direction. A poorly maintained, lightly used trail had been discovered several hundred meters to the southeast, tracking north, so they avoided any unnatural activity east of the site.

The property itself enjoyed a high degree of privacy, buried deep within the national preserve. Only accessible by foot, they had parked their new van in a cleverly constructed hide site a few hundred meters south of the clearing, slugging their way along a relatively unfriendly, twisting path until they reached the barn. Motion detectors hidden along the barn’s roofline had confirmed the location’s privacy, recording mainly twilight activity commonly associated with deer. This was Dragunov’s second visit to Site 93, and Mihail Osin’s team’s first. He’d uploaded coordinates to an encrypted GPS device to locate both the vehicle hide-site and the barn. Site 93 hadn’t seen much activity since the end of the Cold War, which was why Dragunov had chosen it. He liked isolation for jobs like these.

Mihail Osin trailed the body by several feet and stopped in the doorway. Dragunov glanced in his direction, expecting the agent to make an unnecessary excuse for Hubner’s early demise. A few moments passed, but the agent remained quiet. He was impressed with Osin. Directorate S Spetsnaz were an impressive group, but this agent was different. He carried himself extremely well, exuded an unspoken leadership influence on his team, and had natural interrogation skills…aside from the rookie mistake that prematurely killed Hubner. He might recommend Osin for consideration within the Zaslon ranks.

“What happened to Hubner is extremely rare. I’ve seen suspects attempt to choke themselves on their own restraints or try to enrage their interrogators to the point of murder. I’ve never seen or heard of one cutting their throat like that. Lesson learned. No need to include this in the report. The suspect expired on his own…which is true,” Dragunov said.

“That was a first for me. Fuck. This guy was something different altogether,” Osin said, stepping into the rays of light peeking through the eastern tree line.

“Very different. At least we got a few new names out of him. Headquarters should be very interested in this Sanderson guy. We also confirmed that they were given Reznikov’s address at the last second.”

“Either the FSB has a mole, or we do. That alone made this trip well worth the effort.”

“He was holding out on us about Marko Resja. Something was off. I could smell it,” Osin said.

Dragunov considered his comment for a few moments, staring off into the forest. He agreed with Osin’s assessment about Hubner’s partner in Stockholm. Whoever they had captured on camera in the passenger seat was a mystery that Hubner didn’t care to expose.

“He wasn’t familiar with the name, which leads me to believe Marko Resja might have been an alias he’d never heard of. I’m starting to wonder if the entire team in Stockholm had been assembled from multiple sources. It doesn’t matter at this point. We pass the information on to Directorate S, and let them sort it out,” Dragunov said.

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this one. This isn’t a typical setup for the Americans. This is something very different,” Osin said.

“We don’t even know if the Americans are behind this. That’s the real problem here. The U.S. embassy was involved, but even those details are sketchy. Hubner never confirmed that the address was passed by the CIA station chief,” Dragunov said.

“I led the assistant station chief’s interrogation. He confirmed that this was a CIA operation. They were never given the address. That came directly from another source,” Osin said.

“That’s what the station chief told him?” Dragunov said.

Osin nodded. “Correct.”

“The link to the Americans keeps thinning,” Dragunov said, shaking his head. “The station chief could have been working for anyone. Reznikov represents an unchecked financial opportunity for some extremely dangerous, well-funded groups. If this was a mercenary crew working for one of these groups, Russia could end up in the deepest shit pile imaginable. Our job is to shed some light on who was behind the abduction. At this point, I hope to hell it was the Americans, but I’m no longer optimistic.”

Both of them turned their heads toward the sound of crackling underbrush and swearing at the edge of the clearing. The burial team had begun their long trek through the forest.

Chapter 12

3:30 PM

The White House

Washington, D.C.

The president sat back with a bleak face. He glanced at his National Security Advisor and raised both eyebrows, but Karl Berg could tell that James Quinn didn’t plan to make the first comment on their proposal. Jacob Remy, the president’s chief of staff looked eager to take the first shot in what Berg expected to be a concentrated salvo of opposition against the plan. The president didn’t wait.