The woman put the Siena into gear, accelerated, and merged smoothly into the oncoming traffic on the M2. Over the next ten minutes, she made numerous lane changes and exited the highway, doubled back, and re-entered the highway, heading once more in the original direction. Avery didn’t know where they were going or the route she intended to take, but he recognized a dry cleaning run when he saw one.
“We are being followed,” she soon announced, glancing into the rearview mirror. Then she looked back over at Avery, looking for a reaction, but he didn’t give her one. She was testing him. An amateur would have panicked and turned around excitedly in his seat to get a look, asking a dozen questions.
“They’re not here for me.” Avery was confident no one had tracked him here.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said. “I told no one where I was going, and I know I wasn’t followed here. The car has government plates; KGB or police. It’s likely routine. Maybe you caught someone’s attention at the airport. Or perhaps they checked the registration number on this car.”
“Is this your car?” Avery asked.
“No, it belongs to a friend, but he is someone the authorities like to monitor.”
Avery was ready to ditch this woman and go it alone, but he’d garner KGB scrutiny now anyway just by association with her.
She took the M2 into Minsk.
It was 8:30PM.
The city was well lit. With shiny glass and steel buildings, plenty of green grass and trees, including temperate forests preserved as parks, and recently refurbished streets, Minsk’s modern, clean look was a sharp contrast to Dushanbe’s drab, dusty squalor. Founded in 1067, Minsk is one of Europe’s oldest cities, although it never flourished until annexed by Russia, and there were plenty of examples of its pre-Soviet and medieval architecture on display. Nearly all of the cars on the streets were of East European manufacture, and the newest models were probably from the mid-to-late ’90s. Advertisements for the hockey championship adorned billboards, buses, and trains everywhere.
“I still haven’t gotten your name,” Aleksa said, “or should I keep calling you Mockingbird?”
Avery didn’t recognize her accent, but it wasn’t difficult to surmise that it was Estonian. Her English was good, and he thought she’d likely spent time in the West. She was still tense and had her guard up. He didn’t hold that against her. He would too, in her position. Plus he knew he wasn’t the best at making strangers feel comfortable or relaxed around him, so he didn’t try.
“Call me Nick.”
He wondered if Aleksa was her real name and decided it probably was.
A reporter could be just as bad as a spy. They were just as nosey, but not as subtle about it. She likely saw him as a source and would probe and pry for information. Why else would she meet him?
“So what’s the plan?”
“The plan, Nick, is that I will drop you off at Sputnik Hotel. That is where the KGB men behind us will lose interest in you since the staff at the front desk report to them and will notify them of any visitors you receive or when you leave the building, should the KGB instruct them to do so. I’ll give you my cell number in case you need to reach me, but it would be best not to use the hotel phones or make any calls inside your room. Wait thirty minutes, then take the stairwell to the ground floor and leave through the service exit. I’ll meet you there, after the KGB has lost interest in me, and we’ll go someplace safe to talk.”
“Are you sure you’re only a journalist?”
“Well, I suppose we have to do things differently in this part of the world than in America. You are an American, are you not?”
“Canadian, actually.” Avery knew she didn’t believe it. “Oh, I almost forgot.”
He rummaged through his pockets and produced an extra set of hockey tickets. He handed them to her. She glanced down at the tickets and frowned. “Hockey?” she said. “You know, most tourists come to Minsk for the ballet or opera, something a little more cultured. Anyway, I thought it was another interest of yours that brought you to Minsk.”
“Oh, you mean watching airplanes? Nah, that’s strictly for business.”
He explained that if the authorities did question her about what she was doing with a Canadian who’d come to see the championship, she’d tell them that she’d met Nick Ambrose on Facebook and planned to show him around and go to a game with him. He didn’t know a thing about Facebook or making friends, but he thought it sounded plausible.
“And what is your business exactly?” she asked.
“I’m self-employed.”
She pulled up near the Sputnik, a wide, five story building located outside of the city’s downtown area and known for being one of the older and more economical hotels in Minsk. It was run by the government agency Minotrel, which reported to the KGB. But the targets of interest to the KGB tended not to stay in a place like this. The spies, diplomats, and businessmen were all at the Crowne Plaza or Minsk Hotel.
Avery left Aleksa behind and checked in at the front desk. The clerk stamped his migration card and asked about his visit to Minsk. When Avery mentioned hockey, the man’s face lit up and he started going off about the championship. Fortunately, his English was poor, so Avery wasn’t forced to fake his way through a conversation trying not to let on that he didn’t know a thing about hockey other than the quick Wikipedia research he’d done on teams and players. He wasn’t the only hockey fan in the building. A group of loud, drunk German hooligans clad in jerseys stumbled past on their way outside.
The clerk gave Avery his key, and Avery proceeded to his fourth floor business-class room. It was small, drab, and stuffy, with a tatty door that looked like it’d blow over any minute, an uncomfortable bed, tiny chairs, ugly green carpeting and wallpaper, a foul smelling fridge, and a huge boxy TV with a small screen. The room looked like it was stuck somewhere in the eighties. But Avery didn’t care about the decor, and he’d told the clerk that he’d be away most of the time for the games and sightseeing.
Avery turned on the TV. The reception was poor. It offered mostly local or German stations.
He went to a local channel with coverage of the championship games. It would be a good idea to know what teams were doing what. Plus it was for the benefit of anyone who might be listening by audio surveillance or anyone that would visit his room while he was away.
As he waited, he fired up his notebook computer, connected to the Internet, and started searching. Several minutes later, he determined that his contact was Aleksa Denisova.
She was a national correspondent for an independent Russian newspaper. Her areas of expertise included government corruption, business, organized crime, and weapons proliferation. While covering a story about FSB torturing militants’ families in Chechnya, she’d been detained and interrogated by the Russian military. Later, she’d been only a half block away from a car bomb in Grozny and nearly killed. Conspiracy theorists pinned the blame on the FSB, but most likely she’d simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what happened when you spent time in warzones.
But it wasn’t just Putin and his friends she called out. She was equally critical of the West, too, especially American intervention and the games NATO played in places Ukraine and Georgia.
Avery thought she was trouble. Both the Russian and Belarusian agencies would know she was here. He also was uncertain of her motives for being here and taking the risks that she did. He’d seen plenty of reporters make mistakes and stupid decisions that got them into trouble in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he knew she didn’t make much money doing what she did. But despite his judgment telling him to ditch the reporter, he was curious as to what she might know.
Thirty minutes passed.