Then, through the corner of his eye, he noticed the dark sedan pull away from the curb and followed them.
How in the hell had they found him? He had used cash and traveled throughout the city without using anything traceable.
Now he needed to change his flight plans again. If these men followed him into the terminal they could simply detain him and interrogate him. In doing so, they would also discover his Spanish credentials. He would have to burn one of his personas now. But which one? Eventually, he guessed, he would need his Russian identity more than his Spanish one, since that’s why the Agency had sent him to Russia in the first place for immersion.
Yet, if he went to the airport and used his Spanish identification, these GRU officers probably had already flagged his travel under that name. After all, they already knew who he was based on his Spanish phone and his apartment in Murmansk. He was studying here under a visa through the Russian government.
Karl had made a huge tactical error getting caught with the drone. He had no choice now but to claw his way out of the hole he had dug for himself.
He kept track of the car behind him, verifying they were following him, by glancing back through his phone camera. He even took a couple of photos, which didn’t show much, considering the car kept its distance.
Once they got to the road leading to the airport, the men behind him had to know he was leaving Murmansk. They moved in a little closer now.
Karl watched the taxi meter click away and he had enough money to hand the driver, without leaving too much for a tip. Russians were notoriously small tippers, and that’s what he was pretending to be now.
When the taxi driver pulled up to the departures area, Karl handed the driver money and rushed out the right back door. Without actually looking, he caught the men tailing him through the reflection in the windows. It was the same two men from who had confronted him in the park the night before. The older man was still limping slightly from when Karl had snapped his knee with a kick.
Since Karl had printed his boarding pass, he went right to the security area. With his Russian passport, he breezed through without a problem.
As he rounded a corner, he saw the GRU officers showing their credentials to the security officers. Yep, that confirmed it. They were either FSB or GRU.
Karl quickened his pace, heading toward the gate for the flight he had booked under the Spanish passport. Before the Russian officers rounded the corner, Karl ducked into a small business area with computers and private cubicles. Crouching down, he pulled off his heavy leather jacket and set it aside. Then he found a dark brown hoodie in his duffle bag and put that on, zipping it up to cover his black shirt. Now he found a wool watch cap and put it on his head. He topped off his new look with a pair of black glasses with fake clear lenses. His only problem was his black duffle bag. No way around that, he thought.
He peered over the top of the cubicle and saw the two Russian officers strolling down the concourse toward the Spanish flight he was supposed to be on. Once they got down a distance, Karl got up and went back out to the concourse, turned right and went in the opposite direction. Checking his watch, he realized he needed to hurry. Although the flight he had booked under Nicolas Lobo still had about an hour to depart for St. Petersburg, the flight to Helsinki under Nikolai Krupin was currently boarding.
At the gate, Karl glanced down the concourse, but the Russian officers were nowhere to be seen. He barely made the flight. The door to the gate was closed behind him.
He settled into the half-empty flight and waited impatiently for the plane to depart. Hopefully, he had lost the men.
6
Anton Zima, the first Russian president to rise through the ranks during the new Russian era after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a tall, slim man with a wisp of red hair attempting to cover an otherwise bald head. Zima had risen through the Russian Army in the missile forces before his extended years with the GRU, where he retired as a colonel. From that retirement, he rose quickly in politics. His election as president recently surprised the world, and perhaps even himself.
Now, Zima had set up a meeting with a couple of operatives he had worked with as a GRU directorate chief. These officers of Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR, had proven themselves to Zima, and he rewarded both competence and loyalty. But even The First Deputy Director of the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation, was not present at this meeting. Zima wasn’t sure if he could trust the director yet.
Instead, Zima had summoned senior officer, Sergei Zubov, and his younger partner, Polina Kotova, to meet with him in his secure office.
Sergei was a short, stocky man with a flattop of indistinguishable white/silver hair. Polina stood nearly five inches taller than her partner, and had the body of a volleyball player, with strong shoulders and Nordic blonde hair. Zima had a thing for the female officer, but knew his wife would cut off his balls in his sleep if he did anything more than admire her from afar.
Zima waved his hands for his two officers to take seats in the plush leather chairs in front of his own cherry desk.
“I understand you have an update,” Zima said.
Sergei took the lead. “Yes, sir. The ship has departed Murmansk.”
Zima already knew this. He was tracking the Magadan by GPS on his laptop. “Continue.”
“There was a problem on the ship with the first officer,” Sergei said.
Now Zima couldn’t help himself. “Yes, I heard the man decided he didn’t want to leave the Barents Sea.” He smiled knowingly, making sure his officers knew that he had sources everywhere.
Sergei nodded agreement, his gaze shifting momentarily to his younger associate and then back to the president. “But we are investigating another problem.”
Swiveling in his chair back and forth, Zima suddenly stopped. “Go on.”
“Our friends in the GRU caught a man last night flying a small drone over the ship at an inopportune moment.”
“I hope they confiscated this drone,” the president said.
“Yes, sir. But the video was recorded to a cell phone.”
“Tell me they also got the cell phone,” Zima said.
Sergei turned to his young associate for this answer.
Polina Kotova said, “The video recorded to the cell phone and we believe it was uploaded to the cloud. Then it was immediately deleted from the phone by design.”
Zima raised his hands, palms up. “Is this normal for the average person? Or was this an intelligence officer?”
Polina continued, “Many of these European systems do so, sir. It saves from filling the internal memory of the phone.”
Zima turned from the pretty officer to her senior partner. “Tell me the GRU pulled this drone operator in for questioning.”
“Not exactly,” Sergei said reluctantly. “They got in a fight with this man when they took the drone and the cell phone. Then they searched the man’s apartment to make sure they had everything.”
“Who is this man?” the president asked.
Sergei said, “A Spanish man studying at Murmansk State Technical University.”
“And you’ve backgrounded this man?” Zima asked.
“In progress, sir, both in Murmansk and in Spain,” Sergei said. “So far the man checks out.”
Polina was about to say something, but she held back.
“You want to say something?” the president asked her.
“As you know, sir, our resources are not as extensive within the borders of Russia,” she said.
That was by design, Zima knew. The FSB and the GRU dealt with intelligence and security issues within Mother Russia, and the SVR handled foreign intelligence. But the GRU also had more officers on foreign soil than any other intelligence agency from Russia. “I understand that implicitly. Rules are funny things in the intelligence field, Polina.” He hesitated to ponder her true meaning, and to observe her beauty. “What are your concerns?”