most alert. While moving from a car to a building and back again was when most assassination attempts took place. Qaderi’s two man detail had a lot of open space to scan, and Fisher’s presence had complicated matters. Was this disheveled idiot with the soda what he seemed or something more? If the latter, was he working alone or with someone else, a gunman who was hoping the bodyguards would fixate on Fisher and make a mistake? All of these questions and more were racing through their heads as Qaderi headed for the car. Both men were in full scan mode now — heads rotating as they checked angles and fields of fire and blind spots and the soda drinker sitting on the curb…
Qaderi’s guard reached the Mercedes three steps ahead of his principal and opened the rear door. The guard looked up, glanced at Fisher, then away, scanning the rest of the parking lot. Fisher flicked his eyes to the guard standing at the hood of the car. The man was looking over his shoulder, checking the street side.
Fisher dropped his right hand down, behind the soda cup, grasped the butt of the SC, drew it, and raised the barrel. He fired.
The dart was moving too fast for him to track its course, but decades of range time and combat missions, and hundreds of thousands of rounds of expended ammunition, told him the shot had struck home: the lower seat cushion just above the door’s inner kick panel.
Fisher let the gun dangle, twisting his wrist so the SC was again hidden by his thigh. He raised the straw to his lips and took a slurp and waited for the guards or Qaderi to react. They didn’t. Qaderi ducked inside the Mercedes and sat down. The guard slammed the door shut and got into the front seat. Five seconds later the driver was behind the wheel and the Mercedes was pulling out.
“The bots are live and tracking,” Grimsdottir said four hours later. With no safe house within Fisher’s vicinity, she was once again calling on a pay phone. Fisher had found a cheap hotel on Sibiu’s outskirts, and then sent Vesa back to Bucharest. “Qaderi is in the air and headed east. We’ll know more in a few hours.”
“That’s good news.”
“How did Vesa do?”
“You might want take a closer look at him, Grim. He’s got good instincts, and he’s cooler under fire than he thinks he is.”
He recounted their tailing of Qaderi’s Mercedes from Bucharest to the convenience store in Raul Valc, Fisher’s tagging of Qaderi, and Vesa’s return forty minutes later.
“I’ll give it some thought. What’s your plan?”
“I’ve got an old, not-so-good friend in Odessa — Adrik Ivanov. He used to be a medic in the Russian army. He’s got a gambling problem, or at least he did a couple years ago. I doubt that’s changed. He’d roll his own grand-mother for ten bucks and turn me in for even less. If you got a tip that I showed up on his doorstep asking for medical treatment, would Kovac buy it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Give it a few hours, then call in Hansen and his team and brief them. Keep it sketchy for now. I’ll move tomorrow morning and let you know the particulars. I need to get Hansen someplace I can handle him.”
29
Fisher’s Carpatair flight landed at one thirty the next afternoon, and Fisher went through his now-familiar routine of renting a car and driving to the local DHL office to pick up his equipment box. He then drove to Ivanov’s last known address, a duplex near the Tairov cemetery. A woman working in a tiny garden in front told Fisher that Ivanov spent most of his leisure hours at a pub near the Chornoye More hotel. Initially suspicious, she warmed to Fisher as he asked her questions about her garden — the soil, pests, and the best time to plant tomatoes. In short order he discovered that Ivanov had added alcoholism to his list of vices and that he worked as a night watchman at a LUKOIL warehouse annex at the city’s northern industrial docks. Fisher thanked the lady and followed her directions to Ivanov’s pub, where he parked outside and waited.
At four Ivanov emerged from the pub and shuffled his way to a nearby tram stop. Fisher followed the tram back to Ivanov’s duplex, then called Grimsdottir with an update.
“Hansen and his team are due into Odessa at ten tonight. He’ll check in when they change planes in Frankfurt.”
“Keep it vague. Tell them you’re running down Ivanov’s particulars. I need to get a look at the warehouse first.”
“Got it. Sam, have you given any thought to the worst-case scenario?”
Fisher chuckled. “Grim, look what I’ve been doing for the past year and a half. You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
“I mean Hansen. What if he doesn’t buy it? What if he decides not to play nice — to try to take you?”
Fisher had already given this considerable thought. Except for perhaps Ames — who would, with luck, soon be irrelevant — the rest of the team would follow Hansen. Where he went, so went the team. And while finishing this mission would be much easier with their help, the equation was very simple: From Odessa on, he couldn’t afford to have Hansen and his people hounding his steps.
“Are you asking me what I think you’re asking me?” Fisher said.
“I guess I am.”
“Grim, this arsenal can’t get loose. That’s my litmus test. If Hansen falls on the wrong side of it, so be it.”
At five Ivanov reappeared, wearing gray pants and a gray shirt with his name embroidered on the pocket and a white on red LUKOIL patch on each shoulder. He walked back to the tram stop and boarded. Fisher followed. Alcoholic and gambling addict or not, Ivanov knew his tram schedule. At 5:50—ten minutes before the start of his shift, Fisher assumed — the tram pulled to a stop.
The LUKOIL warehouse was set back from the road, just a hundred yards from the beach, amid a quarter- mile cluster of other warehouses, most of them displaying FOR LEASE signs in Cyrillic. Carrying a lunch pail and an olive drab canvas messenger bag, Ivanov crossed the road and disappeared down a dirt alley between two brick buildings. Fisher continued down the road, then did a U-turn and found a parking lot from which he could see the alley. Fifteen minutes passed, and then a man dressed in gray pants and a gray shirt appeared at the mouth of the alley. He waited for a break in traffic, then jogged across the road to the parking lot in which Fisher sat. Ivanov’s fellow watchman climbed into a rust-streaked white ZAZ with a cracked windshield and drove away.
Fisher got out and went for a walk through the warehouse complex. Whatever purpose it now served, it had clearly once been part of a refinery hub: Like the roots of a giant tree, cracked, half-buried oil pipelines ran through the lot down and disappeared into the sand at the water’s edge. After a few minutes of walking, Fisher found the LUKOIL annex — a graffiti-covered, redbrick building with neon blue doors and a recreation yard at the rear, complete with horseshoe pit, a swing set, and a jungle gym. A thick, ten-foot-tall line of privet bushes encircled the lot; here and there sumac trees jutted from the cracked concrete. The warehouse was relatively small: fifteen hundred square feet, give or take.
He walked back to his car and texted Grimsdottir:
In place. Dispatch team to below link upon arrival. Confirm tactical comm protocols.
He included a hyperlink to a Google Earth map with a red pushpin atop the LUKOIL warehouse. She replied five minutes later:
Will alert upon touchdown. Good luck.
The team’s current OPSAT frequencies and encryption codes followed, then:
Q appears heading to Moscow.
Fisher checked his watch. Four hours.
With Qaderi on the move, Fisher didn’t expect to be in Odessa long enough to warrant checking into a hotel, but with four hours to kill, and running on a sleep deficit, he also knew he needed to take advantage of the
