Navigating the narrow streets, Wilkes, the broad-shouldered ex-marine from Oklahoma, didn’t stand out too badly. The various NGOs and international organizations providing food, medical aid, and utility services to the locals all drove around in SUVs and 4x4s, so a Land Rover driven by a Westerner didn’t inherently draw attention.
Wilkes took thirty minutes to run an SDR, or surveillance detection route, which came up dry, as expected, but in a country where the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, not to mention the Iranians, actively targeted Americans, one needed to be sure. The Tajiks were a concern, too, but GKNB didn’t venture far outside of Dushanbe.
Wilkes pulled over in front of a coffee shop across the street from Khorugh State University. Classes were in session this time of year, and the area flourished with activity. He put the Land Rover in park and waited. CERTITUDE appeared on time. Wilkes recognized him immediately and spotted the rolled-up newspaper tucked under the man’s right arm, signaling that he was clean. A newspaper under his left arm was the signal to abort.
Wilkes threw the Land Rover into gear and accelerated. He made a right at the first intersection, drove another two blocks, and passed CERTITUDE, who was still walking in the same direction, his back to Wilkes.
Wilkes stopped alongside an abandoned factory, away from the busy streets. He turned the wheel, pointing the tires to the left, the signal for CERTITUDE that he, too, was secure.
A few blocks ahead, the street eventually ran to a dead-end, a closed-off construction site that hadn’t seen any progress since Wilkes’ last visit here the previous month. Off the main street and away from the university campus and the local shops, the sidewalks and streets were much less congested here.
Stealing glances into his rearview mirror, Wilkes slowly grew anxious. A few minutes passed — he was glancing constantly at the digital clock in the console — but no CERTITUDE.
Over a minute passed, an inordinate amount of time for the short distance CERTITUDE had to cover, and long enough for it to consciously register in Wilkes’ mind as an abnormality. He shifted around in his seat and turned his head around to look back through the rear windshield.
Then he saw a figure step up beside the front passenger side door.
Wilkes couldn’t see his face in its entirety, just the stubble growth around the thin, cruel line of a mouth. The man was too tall and standing too close to the Land Rover for Wilkes to get a good look at him, but his wide, solid build, although disguised by loose-fitting gho knee-length robe, was inconsistent with CERTITUDE’s slight, gaunt frame.
It took a further millisecond for Wilkes’ brain to register certain sensory input and become cognizant of the fact that the ring-finger on the hand now reaching for the door handle did not have CERTITUDE’s trademark Pamiri ring. It was a simple and bland thing, silver with an inscription in Tajik Farsi, a gift from CERTITUDE’s wife. Its absence triggered the final alarm bell.
Wilkes’ right hand instinctively made a pass for the Glock, while his left moved to the console, to lock the door, but his finger didn’t make contact with the switch in time, and the passenger door swung open.
Wilkes never got a clear glimpse of the man’s entire face, but he saw the short barrel of the Makarov PMM double-action hover in the open doorway.
He didn’t panic, but strapped into the limited space of the driver’s seat, with no room in which to maneuver, prevented him from reacting as quickly as he otherwise was able.
Somewhere inside his mind, he heard his training instructor at the Farm reprimanding him for not throwing the Land Rover into gear and putting his foot against the gas the second he saw that the man outside the Land Rover wasn’t his contact. Too late now, he realized, that would have been the course of action to save his life, but he’d already chosen another and was now stuck seeing this one through.
The holster was on his left side. Wilkes had always been more comfortable with reaching across with his right to cross-draw, but he’d never trained to do that seated behind a steering wheel with the threat standing outside his passenger door.
Time seemed to slow and so, too, did his body, or so it frustratingly seemed. His hand felt suddenly slow and heavy in withdrawing the Glock. The weapon just wasn’t clearing the holster swiftly enough.
He heard the hammer of the Makarov’s discharge and felt the 9mms hit.
The first one grazed below a rib on its way into his liver, which ruptured. The second burrowed easily through the soft tissue of his right lung, deflating it. He convulsed in his seat and reached around with his left hand to clasp the wound in his side. Dark blood soaked through his shirt. Futilely, he continued trying to raise the Glock with his right hand, the only thing he could do, but the next shot drilled through the side of his head and terminated his brain function.
TWO
Robert Cramer’s office occupied the corner of a five room office suite on the third floor of the American embassy building on Rudaki Avenue in Dushanbe’s American Corner. Low and squat, the embassy was a yellow and gray compound made of marble and cement, with dark, reflective glass windows. Its modern trappings and fortress-like design stood out amongst the surrounding Islamic and Central Asian-style architecture and Soviet-era structures of the Tajik capital.
Cramer’s official position was public affairs assistant. Only eight people on the embassy staff — including the ambassador, deputy chief of mission, regional security officer, and the staff of the small CIA section — were officially cleared and aware of his true position as the Central Intelligence Agency’s Dushanbe chief of station, although speculation naturally ran rampant in such a small building.
Outside the embassy walls, GKNB was also probably aware of Cramer’s position. In friendly countries, like Britain, France, or Germany, the local CIA station chief was declared to the host government, and the host government was likewise informed of intelligence operations launched on their soil. While Tajikistan wasn’t hostile, it also wasn’t exactly friendly, and Dushanbe maintained much closer ties with Moscow than it did with Washington, so Cramer’s real position became a poorly kept a secret.
Currently a GS-12 on the US Government’s civilian pay-scale, Cramer had spent twenty-six of his fifty-five years in the service of the Central Intelligence Agency, and seven years before that in the air force. He’d attended Dartmouth College on an ROTC scholarship, graduating with degrees in Economics and International Relations. He was quickly assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency as a specialist in Soviet weapons systems.
Not wanting to spend his life behind a desk studying satellite photos, counting tanks and missiles, he left DIA and, now fluent in Russian thanks to the Defense Language Institute, was welcomed at the Farm, as Camp Peary was known, where new recruits underwent training in tradecraft, self-defense, and spotting, recruiting, and handling agents.
His first overseas tour was in Pakistan, toward the end of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, providing aid to the Afghan mujahedeen. He did so well there that, after the Cold War, Langley kept him in the region. He was in Nagorno-Karabakh with non-official cover during the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. He helped rig elections and buy politicians in Georgia. He’d made covert forays into Afghanistan to spy on bin Laden and provide weapons and cash to the Northern Alliance, and futilely warned his superiors back home about the threat posed by a group called al-Qaeda. After 9/11, he spent the better part of eight years on the front lines of Afghanistan and Pakistan.