Authors: Dale Brown
Chisinau, Moldova
C
ommunications from the Russian embassy were routinely monitored and translated, but the private homes of the leading members of the mission were not. Nuri had Reid put the request in; it wasn’t clear how long it would be before it was executed, let alone what it might yield.
Getting approval to bug the house itself—absolutely necessary in the case of a diplomat, Nuri knew—would take at least several days at best; by then the Kiev meeting would be over. He wasn’t sure it was worth the risk.
So for now their best bet was to concentrate on the doctor. They set up more video bugs in the area, enough so MY-PID could track his car to the main road. Then they rented two more cars, so they could wait in either direction to follow him. It wasn’t an ideal setup, but Nuri figured that it would give them a good chance at sticking a tracker on the doctor’s car. Once they had that, MY-PID would take over entirely, watching him as he moved around the city.
Danny, though, was getting impatient. Three more of his people—Sergeant Clar “Sugar” Keeb, Paulie Christen, and a tech specialist named Gregor Hennemann—were due to arrive in Kiev by nightfall to help McEwen and Hera. He knew he ought to get there himself, to make sure everything was set up. He also had to make the final call on whether to work with the NATO and local security. At the moment he was leaning toward doing so.
Sugar was a covert CIA op like Hera, though different from her in almost every way. A little older, with a much more easygoing personality, she had become something of a big sister to most of the newbies.
Christen was a surveillance and security expert who’d been recruited from the FBI right after the team’s first mission. While Danny and Boston had a great deal of experience in security, they hadn’t set up pure surveillance networks, and Danny thought the operation in Africa and Iran could have gone smoother with more help.
Hennemann was a technical whiz kid who’d come to Whiplash from the NSA. There wasn’t a computer in the world he couldn’t hack into or rewire. Neither Hennemann nor Christen were what was generally referred to as “shooters”—weapons-oriented team members. Danny would have to decide whether to bring more on, and when. He couldn’t make that assessment, or felt he couldn’t, from Chisinau.
Unless, of course, they caught the Wolves here.
“Hey, he’s coming at you,” said Nuri over the team radio. “You see him?”
Danny glanced in his mirror, waiting.
“He should be just about to you,” added Nuri.
A black Mercedes swept into view. Danny had to wait for two more cars to pass before he could get out, but the Mercedes was still in view.
“Heading toward the city on 581,” said Danny.
“I’ll be behind you in a few minutes,” said Nuri.
“Flash?” said Danny.
“I’m down on Stefan cel Mare, the big cross street.”
“Cut over.”
“Yeah, well, you should see the damn traffic down here. Looks like every car in the country is in front of me. They got some sort of construction going on, and a cop’s directing traffic.”
“Did you see his face?” Nuri asked.
“No,” said Danny. They still didn’t have an image.
The jam-up actually helped them. The doctor got bogged down in traffic a half mile from the city limits. He took a few turns through the side streets, but they were clogged as well.
Downtown, the doctor pulled into a lot near one of the larger buildings in the business district. Danny saw him get out of the car as he passed.
He was short and fat, bald—he didn’t have time to see the doctor’s face.
“Car’s in the big lot you’ll see on your left,” he told Flash, who was about a block behind him. “Get the tracker on it.”
“On my way.”
Danny went down the block, then turned down the side street. There was plenty of parking, so he pulled in. He got out of the car and trotted back to the building.
There were half a dozen people inside, waiting for the elevator. Danny glanced around—there was a man very close to the button panel, short and fat, bald. He was wearing brown pants.
Was it him?
He thought so, and yet he wasn’t positive. Several minutes had passed—the doctor could be upstairs already.
The doors opened. Danny had to push himself in, squeezing against a pair of middle-aged women who looked at him as if he were the devil. They said something in Moldovan that he didn’t understand. He smiled as if it were a compliment, though he guessed it was anything but.
The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. A man got out. The two women got out on the seventh. Danny stepped to the side, watching the man he thought might be the doctor. The man stared at the doors, studiously avoiding his gaze.
It might be because I’m black, Danny realized. In America, the fact that he was black would hardly be noticeable, in most contexts anyway. But in Moldova, as in most Eastern European countries, people of African descent were relatively rare.
He took out the control unit for the MY-PID, looking at it as if setting up an app. He tilted it slightly, then pressed the button to activate the video camera. Turning to his right, he held the camera up, getting a good view of the man’s profile.
Most of the occupants emptied on the twelfth floor. Only he and the fat man remained as it continued upward. Danny realized he hadn’t pushed the button. He glanced at the panel; they were heading toward the twentieth floor.
He reached over and hit 23. Leaning back, he smiled at the man. He didn’t smile back.
The doors opened on the twentieth floor. Danny stepped back, watching the man leave.
“He got out on the twentieth floor,” he told the others, pulling the earphone back up and turning the MY-PID back onto active coms. “I have an image on the video.”
“All right. You sure that’s him?” asked Nuri.
“No.”
“No?”
“It took me too long to get into the building.”
“You want us inside?” asked Flash.
“Hang back,” said Danny, stepping out into the hallway as the elevator stopped. He found the stairs a few paces away and descended to the twentieth floor.
There was only one door in the hall, plain and brown. There was a list of names on a sign next to it.
Danny took out the MY-PID control unit and pointed the camera at the sign.
“What’s that say?” he asked.
“Dr. Acevda, Dr. Bolinski, Dr. Kulsch, Dr. Nudstrumov, Dr. Zvederick.”
“No Ivanski?”
“Rephrase question.”
“Is there an Ivanski?”
“Negative.”
“Check to see if there is any correlation between Ivanski and any of those doctors,” Danny told MY-PID. “In the meantime, tell me how to ask to make an appointment.”
The computer gave him the words. He repeated it twice but couldn’t get the pronunciation right.
“Danny, I can do it,” said Nuri from outside. “I’m almost there.”
“It’s all right,” said Danny. “I just want to see if we can get images of the doctors. There’s no sense you coming in, too. The fewer of us he sees right now, the better.”
The door opened into a reception room. Several men and women were scattered among a dozen and a half chairs lining the walls. A television sat in the corner but it was off. The receptionist’s desk was next to a closed door that led to the interior offices.
The woman asked in Moldovan if she could help him.
Danny started to ask for an appointment, but midway through the words failed him; he switched to English.
“I wanted to make a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “My throat.”
The woman asked him if he could speak any Moldovan. Danny pointed to his throat. She pointed at a seat, then picked up the phone and called someone inside.
The patients were middle-aged and older, most a lot older. Danny wondered if he could fake a sore throat. He tried a cough, wincing.
A few minutes later a nurse came through the door and walked over to him. Danny rose.
“You speak English, yes?” she said. Her accent was thick but the words understandable. She was in her early twenties, with an expression somewhere between concern and light annoyance. “How can we help you?”
“Yes, my throat hurts,” said Danny. “I was hoping—”
“This is a specialist clinic, for diseases of endocrines.”
“Endocrines?”
“Glands. Disorders with the metabolism,” said the nurse. “Diabetes, and things more complicated. I’m sorry, but for a sore throat we could only recommend cough drops.”
“I see.”
She put her hand to his forehead. She had to stretch to do it. Danny caught a slight scent of sweat.
“No fever,” she said.
“It’s just my throat.”
She frowned. “I can send you to another clinic. These doctors. Very good.”
“OK, thank you,” he said.
She went over to the desk and asked the receptionist for a card. Danny sat back in his seat, realizing he’d forgotten to plant a bug.
Spycraft 101,
he reminded himself. Another course he’d skipped.
He was being watched. It wasn’t necessary to plant it here—he could do it in the hall where it would be less conspicuous.
“Go to these doctors,” said the nurse, returning. “There is a nurse who speaks English.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, taking the card.
Chisinau, Moldova
T
he Black Wolf had considered this job many times. He hadn’t wished for it but sensed that someday it would come. And now it had.
He didn’t like Nudstrumov at all. In the beginning he was neutral, but over the years he had come to despise him. He had a certain haughty way of acting. Like the other day, when he kept him waiting. He had made it seem as if it was nothing, undeliberate, but the Black Wolf knew better. He knew.
He would take him leaving his office, going from the door to the car. It was easier than the house, where there would be some inconvenience getting in. The office, though, was all routine. Nudstrumov parked in the same place, left at the same time, always at ten past three. He was a most punctual man.
The Black Wolf chose his weapon—a Dragunov SVD-S with a folding butt, very common and untraceable. Technically not a sniper rifle, but he would be shooting from only across the street. The semiautomatic gun and its lead core bullets were extremely accurate.
He had already scoped the roof of the building across the street. Getting away would be as easy there as anywhere else.
It was all a matter of planning.
He checked his watch. It was past one. He had less than two hours to get into position.
Chisinau, Moldova
T
wo doctors worked at the clinic on Thursdays. One was a woman. The other was a man in his sixties named Andrei Nudstrumov.
Nudstrumov had an extensive medical background that did not intersect with Dr. Ivanski’s at all. He had come to Romania from Russia five years before, applying for medical certification. His background was extensive and he was granted “all honors,” as the registering agency called it.
He was an endocrinologist. Ivanski had been a general practitioner.
Still, Nuri was sure the two men were the same. Danny remained unconvinced, even when the short fat man who’d driven the Mercedes didn’t come out of the clinic after an hour. In the meantime, MY-PID trolled across the Internet, picking up data on Nudstrumov. He’d used a credit card a few months before, not far from the town Danny had visited. He’d bought gas, eaten breakfast and dinner, and purchased merchandise, all in a small town about seven kilometers south of the town Danny had visited.
MY-PID then correlated that series of purchases to a somewhat similar set by a third man—or at least a third name. This man had been making regular visits to the area over the past seven years. The match was not perfect—there were a few additional charges in the mix—but several things immediately jumped out at Nuri as he looked at the pattern: the visits were only once a year, at the same time of year, and the card was only used for those visits.
The man’s name was Rustam Gorgov. According to the records, he owned property in the area—a large farm about two kilometers outside of town.
So why did he stay at a motel?
“Maybe he’s got his mother-in-law at the farm,” said Flash. “That would do it.”
Flash and Danny were sitting together in the front seat of the rented Dacia, five blocks east of the building where the clinic was. Flash’s car was parked right behind him. Nuri was several blocks away in the opposite direction. They were waiting to follow the doctor out of the clinic.
“You sure these are all the same person?” Danny asked Nuri.
“Of course not,” said Nuri. “But here’s what I think. Ivanski stayed in Moldova after the camp was closed. But he didn’t practice medicine, for whatever reason. At some point either he got antsy or needed money. He adopted Nudstrumov’s identity.”
“Or he was Nudstrumov, and living in Russia,” offered Danny.
“Exactly. He buys the property under the Moldovan name, but for some reason decides he can’t practice as Ivanski. He already had his credentials, but maybe it’s the connection to the place he didn’t want known. In any event, Ivanski more or less disappears, and we have Nudstrumov.”
“And Rustam Gorgov?” asked Danny.
“Totally fictitious—the computer hasn’t found any other data on him at all. I’m sure there’s more. We just haven’t found it.”
“Where’s the connection to the assassins?” asked Flash.
“We don’t know yet,” said Nuri. “That’s why we keep looking. But there’s definitely enough that’s suspicious.”
“Maybe he’s just trying to keep an affair quiet,” said Flash. “Or he’s a drug dealer on the side.”
“He may grow marijuana on that farm,” said Nuri. “It’s a cash crop in Moldova. We have to check it out.”
“Man, I wish we’d do something more than check things out,” said Flash. “I’m getting—stale, I guess.”
Danny turned and looked at Flash. Like him, Flash was action oriented—give him a clear-cut assignment, and he was good to go. This was far more nebulous—this was like wandering through a fog and hoping to come out on the other side. There was no clear-cut path to the right door.
God, he thought, we’re miles and miles away from getting a real handle on this.
“The doctor may take us to some other connection,” said Nuri. “We have to be a little patient.”
“The problem is time,” answered Danny.
“I can follow the leads here,” answered Nuri. “You can get back to Kiev.”
“We may do that.” Danny glanced at his watch. It was five to three. The doctor should be leaving soon.
N
uri checked the signal on the tracking device, to make sure it was working. The radio signal was being sent through a commercial GPS satellite system, and was accurate to within roughly a third of a meter. Adapted from a commercial design used to track trucks over the highway, the device worked extremely well in open areas. Inside cities it could be problematic, however, as the larger buildings and other obstacles occasionally shielded the signal.
Nuri was sure they were tantalizingly close to figuring this out. All they needed was one more strategic bit of information and they’d know where and who these guys were.
They might already have it. He had originally thought the doctor was an unlikely choice to be the leader of the assassin group, but the fact that he had at least two other aliases gave him some hope. Underlings, he reasoned, had no need for multiple names.
Nuri didn’t buy most of the speculation about the human experiments. He thought Stoner was probably involved, but wondered if the helicopter crash hadn’t somehow been arranged. That wasn’t something the Agency would be too ready to admit or even investigate—it implied that whatever intelligence they’d gathered in the Revolution operation—Danny’s name for it—had been tainted, fed to them by a double agent.
Stoner.
Maybe Stoner had felt the Agency was closing in. Maybe he just wanted a change of venue. Or occupation.
Becoming an assassin, Nuri thought—well, there was a money-making retirement option he had never thought of.
His watch beeped. It was 3:00
P.M.
A
t exactly 3:05, MY-PID announced that Dr. Nudstrumov was coming out of his clinic and heading toward the elevator.
“Bankers’ hours,” Flash told Danny. “See ya in a bit.”
Danny waited as Flash got out of the car, then put his signal on and checked the traffic. He pulled out behind a bright red Fiat and drove toward the building. He wanted to time it so he got there just as the doctor was getting into his car. But he’d been a little too anxious; he was a block away before Nudstrumov finally got into the elevator to go down to the lobby.
“I’m going to pull into the lot,” Danny told the others. “Flash, hang back.”
“Yeah, copy that.”
“Nuri?”
“Right.”
A panel truck turned into the lot just ahead of Danny, then stopped, waiting for a car that was pulling out. Danny stopped, still in the roadway. He glanced in his mirror anxiously—the last thing he wanted right now was a car accident.
The truck finally pulled ahead. Danny took his foot off the brake. The door to the building was on his right.
“Subject exiting building.”
There he was, just ahead on the right. He was short and rotund, not particularly distinguished looking. If you were Hollywood, he thought, and you were going to cast someone in the role of assassin mastermind, Dr. Nudstrumov wouldn’t be it.
Nudstrumov glanced over his shoulder as he began walking to his car. Danny got a glimpse of his face. He looked somewhat annoyed, not quite angry but not relaxed either.
The doctor kept walking, his chubby legs stroking quickly. A car on Danny’s left started to pull out into the aisle. Danny stopped, waiting for her to go—he’d pull in, then wait for the doctor to leave before following.
He looked back at the doctor. He was only a few meters from his car now. He had his keys in his left hand.
Suddenly the doctor seemed to spin to his left. Danny thought for a moment that he had recognized him through the car window somehow. Then in the next moment the right side of his forehead exploded, bursting into a red splatter of blood.
“Shit!” yelled Danny. “He’s been shot! Nudstrumov’s been shot!”