When Karl went to open the door, he noticed the dead bolt lock looked scratched. He hesitated and considered his options. Having no gun, he had to react like any other college student would. So, he swung the door open and flipped the light switch.
His placed was trashed.
“What the hell,” Maya said, moving into the living room. Then she began to spout off every Russian swear word imaginable. And some that Karl had never heard before.
Karl quickly went to his bedroom and the bathroom, clearing the small apartment and confirming that the Russian officers were no longer there. He wandered back into the living room.
“What did they take?” she asked, glancing about the apartment.
“My laptop,” he said, and then realized he should be more pissed off, so he also went on a contrived rant for a few moments, practicing his Russian vocabulary. To make it even more real, he switched to what Maya thought was his native language, Spanish, and familiarized her with a number of choice phrases in that language.
Finally, Karl slumped into his small sofa covered with a blanket to hide holes and stains.
Maya sat next to him and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Nico. Russians can be real assholes.”
“Not just Russians,” he reminded her.
“Do you think this had something to do with the men in the park?” she asked.
He hesitated to consider his words and the language he would use. Nothing good would come from scaring her. “I don’t know, Maya.” He thought about what else might be in the backpack, and realized he had made a huge tactical error. “There was a receipt from the college with this address on it. They must have found that and decided to see what else they could steal from me.”
“This is crazy. We must report it to the police.”
Karl shook his head. “It will do no good. It was just an old laptop. I can’t even write my school papers with it, since the keyboard is not set up for Russian.”
She glanced at the small desk across the room. “They left the keyboard.”
“Yes, I saw that.” Karl had purchased a cheap Russian keyboard when he got to Murmansk, which he plugged into one of the laptop USB ports.
“What was on the laptop?”
“All my school work since September,” he said. “But I backed up everything on a jump drive and to the cloud.”
“Still, that’s a stupid thing to steal a student’s laptop.”
Now he had to wonder if he had been burned in Murmansk. The Agency would decide that for him, he guessed. But why? He had not even had a chance to see what he had recorded with the drone.
Finally, Karl said, “I can replace everything. They were just things, Maya.”
“Does your family have money?” she asked.
His legend had him coming from modest means, since it would be too easy to find the affluent Spaniards. “Not really,” he said. “But that’s why God made credit cards.”
“My family is not rich either,” she divulged.
They had not really discussed their families much since meeting. Their conversations had been mostly about school and world economic policy. And, of course, personal likes and dislikes, including sex. He could have a PhD in the discovery of her body, which was nearly flawless as far as he could tell. She was a natural beauty. When he first saw her green eyes, he asked if they were contact lenses. She had been offended somewhat, until she simply asked him if he plucked his eyebrows. He didn’t. Checkmate. Her breasts were not huge, but well-proportioned for her five-foot six-inch frame. And he liked the way they curved up like little ski jumps. Her small nose did the same thing, giving her the appearance of a Scandinavian. Which made sense, considering her family was from just across the water in St. Petersburg.
There was something about danger that made them both amorous if not simply lustful. They quickly found their way to the bedroom and made love hastily, as if this was the last time they would be together — which could have been true, since the Agency could pull him out in the morning.
When they were done, and Maya had fallen asleep naked in his bed, Karl got up, slipped on his underwear, and found his Agency SAT phone in his jacket pocket.
Crap. He had missed a message. The Agency had not gotten the video.
Karl opened the encrypted folder with his videos and clicked onto the first one, which showed the rear end of the ship, the Magadan, in the Murmansk harbor. Unfortunately, the video quality wasn’t that great. Part of that was the crappy over-the-counter camera on the drone, but the atmospheric conditions also contributed, with the darkness and the haze caused by factory smoke stacks and wood burning houses here in the Arctic north. He clicked on the second video, the one that was more important. This was the money shot. The lights from the ship and the pier gave him a better video quality. This showed the crane lifting military equipment from the train car onto the ship.
“Holy shit,” he whispered in English. This was the first time he had spoken his native language since September.
The crane was lifting what had to be a mobile missile launcher. Worse yet, he thought, was the fact that these had to be nuclear weapons.
He quickly sent them to his contact at the Agency and waited for a response.
Ten minutes later he got a simple question. ‘How is school?’ But this came in Spanish.
In other words, give them a status update. He also typed in Spanish that he had been mugged and his apartment had been trashed. He would have to buy a new drone, phone and laptop.
Five minutes later came the worst possible response. ‘Come home.’
Crap. He was being recalled. They thought he was burned.
‘The semester has not ended,’ Karl texted.
‘Your mother is sick.’
Yep. They thought he was compromised. Karl acknowledged with a simple one-word response. The ‘mother is sick’ phrase meant he needed to get out ASAP, traveling a predesignated route.
Karl sat on the sofa and thought about what had gone wrong that evening. He could wrap his mind around that later. Now he just needed to prepare to leave Murmansk. What would he tell Maya? Perhaps his father had been right. It was almost impossible to have any kind of lasting relationships in this game.
The Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, was a small sound-proof room with no personal electronic communications allowed. This SCIF contained an operations team that analyzed incoming data on various missions worldwide. The Director of Operations leaned back in a swivel chair like a Star Trek captain viewing a massive monitor that filled most of the wall. Most lower-level operations didn’t rise to his level unless an analyst considered a finding had major geopolitical significance. Sherman Swanson was a career CIA officer, having risen through the ranks during the post-Cold War era. Because of his experience, analysts knew not to try to bullshit him. If Sherm was called down from his office, either someone had to be dead or the globe was about to be on fire. He was a professorial type with disheveled silver speckled hair and thick glasses that were always in need of a cleaning.
Also in the room were a Russian analyst, Roddy Erikson, a short skinny man who had recently completed the first hack at the incoming video, along with an expert on foreign military weapons. The director wanted to keep this information compartmentalized to as few people as possible. At least for now.
“Run the video,” Swanson said.
The Russian analyst clicked the remote and a video from a drone showed what appeared to be the stern of an ocean vessel of some kind.
“Why do I care?” Sherm Swanson yawned and twirled his hand, meaning to proceed.