“You are not married,” the kid said. “You wear no ring.”
Klaus blinked. He was so far out of his element, he’d been outwitted by a ten-year-old. He looked over his shoulder, a cautionary move the kid would recognize instantly. Klaus pulled out another hundred euros.
“All right. Take this, keep the phone if you want. Forget about the delivery, but take it away. Go toward the beach. Do it right now, or I will find someone else.”
Klaus held the money just out of reach.
The boy smiled, and Klaus knew his decision was made. The kid snatched the cash and the phone, and scampered away toward the northern exit.
Klaus moved into a deep shadow and watched the crowd. Hisheart sank when he spotted one of his pursuers. He wore a dark blue shirt and had a boxer’s face—flattened nose, cauliflower ears, scarred forehead. The Russians had split up to find him. The boxer held his phone in front of him as if it were a divining rod, his eyes flicking between the screen and the faces in the market. Then he stopped suddenly and whirled toward the exit—the direction in which the kid had just run off.
Klaus had guessed correctly. They were using an app of some kind to track his phone.
What else don’t I know?
He backed behind a rack of hanging blankets. The boxer swerved away and disappeared. Klaus waited, not sure where the man’s partners were. Would they all chase after the kid?
He gave it five minutes.
Then he gave it five more.
He set out to the south, more with hope than a plan. He wondered how accurate their tracking system was. Would they catch up with the kid? Possibly, but they would be looking for Klaus himself and the system didn’t seem highly accurate—they hadn’t realized he was in a different apartment earlier. Would they circle back when they realized he’d tricked them? Or were they halfway to the sea and out of ideas?
He headed into the heart of the Bni Makada arrondissement, a dense residential district. He scurried amid multistory apartment buildings and narrow streets. Each block looked the same as the last. He had nowhere to go and was running out of cash. He no longer had a phone. This last thought led to a corollary that struck like a bolt of lightning. He had ditched his phone in such a panic, he’d forgotten that it held the number of his CIA handler. He could have memorized the number easily—Klaus had a gift for numbers—yet he hadn’t bothered. One more lesson learned.
A far more important number, thankfully, was chiseled indelibly in his mind. Klaus had placed reams of damning information about the GRU’s finances in a secure online vault, one that could only be unlocked by a twenty-character password he’d memorized. If he could get back in touch with his handler, the crown jewel of his defection was intact.
Klaus entered a minor park and began wandering. The burden of his situation felt suddenly immense. The midday heat was insufferable, and a gusting wind sent swirls of dust dancing through the air. He diverted to an empty bench and sat in the shade of a jacaranda tree. A group of old men sat at tables nearby playing Dama, a variant of checkers, and mothers chased squealing children across the adjacent playground.
“What now?” Klaus whispered to no one.
It felt strange, in this digital world, to have fallen so completely off-grid. No contacts to call or message, no questions answered by chatbots. He recalled a newscast he had seen the morning after he’d gone into hiding. The American diplomatic flight he’d nearly boarded had crashed in southern Turkey. There was only one rational explanation. The Russians thought he had made the flight after all, and in their desperation, they’d taken it down.
Now, clearly, they had figured out he was still in play.
Bringing down the jet was an indicator of how badly they wanted to stop him. In truth, he wasn’t surprised. He had hard evidence of financial crimes. Hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. But there was also something else.
One time-sensitive scrap of intelligence.
Klaus was no military tactician, but he knew how the Russians operated. Something big was about to happen in Libya.
He had funneled money to resurrect a remote airfield in the Maghreb. Shifted more to hire a group of mercenaries to staff it.And he was intimately familiar, in the way only a money manager can be, with the man who was running the operation. Andrei Malenkov, the former head of the SSD, had made some very unusual financial moves in recent months. Moves implying that whatever was happening in the Maghreb, it would happenverysoon.
And if Klaus couldn’t get that information to the right people? God only knew what Malenkov was about to unleash.
He got up off the bench and started moving.
36
Incirlik Air Base
Turkey
1329 Local Time
The 39th Medical Support Squadron at Incirlik is not officially designated as a trauma center. As the only U.S. military medical facility in Turkey, the unit provides primary care for over a thousand permanently stationed military members and their families. Yet the air base’s unique location and mission—serving as a staging area for men and material across the Middle East—requires that the 39th MSS have expertise in tactical combat casualty care.
Katie walked down the corridor of the small hospital getting the usual impressions of a military medical facility. Antiseptic smells, institutional decor, a staff divided between wearing scrubs and utility uniforms. The nurse leading her down the hall was an Air Force first lieutenant. She was also strikingly attractive. At the front desk, she’d been hesitant to engage the breathless young Navy officer who’d rushed in. After Katie introduced herself as Conza’s commander, however, which wasn’t technically true, information began flowing more freely.
