Conviction (2009)

  Ten minutes later Qaderi appeared, coming down an escalator with a bodyguard in the lead and one in tow. All three were dressed in conservative blue suits: executives traveling on business. The bodyguards were good, scanning ahead, to the sides, and behind with an economy of motion that told Fisher they were muscle with brains. This was good in one respect alone: They would react in predictably professional ways.

  As the group moved toward the Europcar desk, Fisher’s phone trilled and he answered. “Go ahead, Vesa.”

  “I’m here. The attendants are urging me to move on, however.”

  Fisher checked his watch. “Drive once around, then park and lift your hood. “Tell them you’re having car trouble.”

  “Okay.”

  Fisher disconnected.

  Qaderi himself took care of the paperwork at the rental desk. Fisher waited until the clerk handed Qaderi the ubiquitous trifold envelope, then turned and headed for the exit marked with the Europcar logo. He crossed to the lot, nodded at the attendant, and walked down the rows of cars to the exit. Ahead he could see Vesa standing beside a powder blue compact Opel, talking to another attendant.

  “Vesa!” Fisher called. “There you are! Is she giving you trouble again?”

  Vesa turned, and he stared at Fisher for moment before answering. “She? Oh, yes, the car. Something’s wrong with the . . . the, uh . . .”

  “The starter? Again?”

  “Yes.”

  As he reached the car, he gave the lot attendant a friendly clap on the shoulder. “We’ll be out of here in two minutes.” He had no idea if the attendant spoke English, but as he opened his mouth to protest, Fisher smiled broadly and made a shooing motion. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

  He turned his back on the man, said, “Get in,” to Vesa, then ducked under the hood. The attendant loitered a moment, then shrugged and walked away. Fisher leaned out and looked past him, back down the row of cars, where Qaderi and his companions were being led to a Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Eyes fixed on Qaderi, Fisher kept tinkering with the engine, wiggling hoses and tapping on parts, until he saw the Mercedes’ reverse lights come on.

  “Try it now,” Fisher called.

  Vesa turned the ignition, and the engine puttered to life. Fisher slammed the hood, gave the attendant—who had turned back around—a wave, then climbed in the passenger seat and told Vesa, “Go.”

  28

  “NOT too fast,” Fisher ordered, then adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see Qaderi’s car. “Let them pass you.”

  “Okay,” Vesa said nervously.

  “You’re doing fine,” Fisher said.

  “Your case is in the back.”

  Fisher glanced over his shoulder and saw the familiar Pelican case lying across the seat. He said, “First chance we get, I’ll let you out and you can hail a cab.”

  “I can help. I can drive. I am a good driver.”

  Fisher shrugged. “If that’s what you want.” Fisher clicked on the dome light, leaned back between the bucket seats, and punched the correct code into the case’s pad. He was rewarded with six green lights, a beep, and three mechanical clicks. He reached in and groped around until his hand found the butt of the SC pistol. He pulled it out and closed the case, then loaded the Ajax darts.

  Qaderi’s Mercedes passed them and got on the E70 and headed north toward Piteşti, where it joined the E81 and continued north into the foothills of the southern Carpathian Mountains. As night fell, and the Mercedes passed Râmnicu Vâlcea, the highway joined with the Olt River as it wound its way deeper into the mountains, through the villages of Călimăneşti, Brezoi, Balota. . . .

  “I think he’s heading to Sibiu,” Vesa said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s the next biggest city. The man we’re following doesn’t strike me as someone who enjoys drives in the country. He’s a man of purpose.”

  “You have a good eye.”

  “It’s just logic.”

  “How far is it from Bucharest to Sibiu?”

  “Two hundred thirty kilometers.”

  About 170 miles, Fisher thought. The Mercedes’ range was far greater than that, so there was little hope for a refueling stop.

  At Căinarii Mari, the Mercedes’ taillights flashed once, twice; then Fisher saw the car’s headlights swerving right, taking a fast turn over a bridge.

  “Don’t slow down,” Fisher said. “Keep going.”

  “They’re going to lose—”

  “They’re checking for tails. Trust me.”

  As the Opel pulled even with the bridge, Fisher darted his eyes sideways and caught a glimpse of the Mercedes, its lights now off, doing a U-turn on the bridge.

  “Were they there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they spotted us?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll know shortly.”

  Three minutes passed; then the Mercedes’ headlights reappeared in the rearview mirror. Fisher watched closely, trying to gauge its speed; it was gaining ground but not at an alarming rate. Over the next fives minutes the Mercedes continued closing the gap until it was a foot from the Opel’s bumper.

  “What’s he doing?” Vesa said, hands tightening on the wheel.

  “Relax. When they pass, make sure you glance at them.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it’s the natural thing to do when a car rides your tail like a maniac, then passes. Glance at them, gesture, get mad.”

  Fisher pulled his cap down over his eyes and nose and laid his head back on the rest, letting it go loose as though he were napping. “Let me know when they’re passing.”

  “What if they shoot at us?”

  “Then we know they spotted us. The first shot usually misses,” Fisher added. “It’s harder than the movies make it look. You’ll have a second or so before the second, better, shot comes.”

  “I am not reassured.”

  “You’re doing great.”

  “He’s getting ready to pass us. He’s in the other lane,” Vesa reported.

  “How fast?”

  “Not too fast.”

  “Did he signal?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good sign,” Fisher muttered from under his cap.

  “They’re coming even with us.”

  “Give them the okay sign?”

  “The what?”

  “Form your thumb and forefinger to make a circle. Do it.”

  Vesa complied. After a few moments he said, “They’re pulling ahead.”

  Fisher looked out from under the brim of his cap.

  “What did that mean?” Vesa asked. “The circle.”

  “You called him a zero. Or, worse, an asshole.”

  “Oh.”

  Predictably, Qaderi’s driver mostly obeyed the speed limit, never straying more than a few kilometers per hour under or over. Vesa’s Opel had no cruise control, but he did a good job of keeping the car at a steady pace.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Wait. And hope we get a break.”

  THEY did, twenty minutes later, as they rounded a bend in the river and pulled into the town of Râul Vâlc. Again Fisher saw the Mercedes’ brake lights flash a few times, but this time the turn was done slowly and evenly. A hundred yards back, Fisher could see the Mercedes had stopped at a gas station/convenience store.

  “Drive past,” Fisher ordered, and Vesa complied.

  When the lights of the convenience store disappeared behind them, Fisher said, “Turn right here. Stop.” Fisher reached up, toggled off the dome light, and opened his door. He climbed out and pushed his seat back into its fully reclined position. To Vesa he said, “Get back on the highway and keep heading north. Stay five miles under the speed limit. When the Mercedes passes you, wait until it’s out of sight, then turn around and come back for me.”

  “And if they don’t pass me? If they take another road?”

  “I’ll try to let you know. If it happens, get b
ack as fast as possible. Go on, now.”

  Fisher slammed the door and started walking back to the convenience store.

  HE had no plan and no time to come up with one, so he kept walking, trusting his training and his experience to recognize an opportunity.

  The lights of the convenience store appeared ahead. Ten feet before the sidewalk ended at the driveway, Fisher remembered his cap. He took it off and tossed it into the bushes, then turned into the parking lot. He jammed his hands into his coat pockets, hunched his shoulders, and loosened his gait, letting his right foot slap unevenly on the asphalt. The Mercedes was beside one of the pumps. One bodyguard stood pumping gas. The other stood just inside the store’s front door. Qaderi was nowhere to be seen.

  Fisher could feel two sets of eyes on him, but he ignored them and kept walking, head down, until he reached the door, which he pulled open weakly. He shuffled past the bodyguard and headed toward the self-serve soda pop area. He bumped into a candy bar display and turned to set it straight; in the corner of his eye he saw the guard had turned toward him. His suit coat was unbuttoned and both hands were clasped at his belt. It was a classic ready-gun-hand pose, but Fisher couldn’t be sure if the man was armed or simply stood that way out of habit.

  Fisher lifted a cup from the stack, stuck it beneath the ice chute, then the soda machine. Somewhere at the rear of the store came the sound of a door opening, then closing. Footsteps clicked on the linoleum. Fisher didn’t look up. He took his half-filled cup and shambled to the counter, where he dumped out a handful of euro coins, mumbled something incoherent, then turned and headed for the door. Qaderi was coming down the aisle toward him. Fisher ducked his head and sipped at the straw. The bodyguard took a step toward Fisher, simultaneously blocking and slowing down his principal. To his credit, Qaderi reacted as a good client, taking the hint and pausing behind his guard, who watched until Fisher had pushed through the door and turned right down the sidewalk, past a stack of bundled firewood.

  Now, Fisher thought. He stopped and plopped down on the curb, knees bent and shoulders hunched as he brought his soda straw to his lips. Directly across from him, twenty feet away, was the Mercedes. The second bodyguard stood at the hood of the car. Fisher waited for the guard to look away, then pulled the SC from his waistband and tucked the barrel between his left thigh and the sidewalk, with the butt hidden by his leg.

  He heard the ding of the convenience-store door opening. Qaderi and his guard appeared in the corner of his eye.

  Transitions were the most dangerous times for VIPs and, as a result, the time when bodyguards are at their 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.

  Now.

  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,” Grimsdóttir 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 Râul Vâlc, 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

  ODESSA, UKRAINE

  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 Grimsdóttir 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 b
ack 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 Grimsdóttir: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.