Peter Kirsanow - Target Omega

Nonetheless, Mansur was a bit troubled. Rarely did he miss clues about a person’s intentions. It was one of the things that had kept him alive and out of prison for the last several decades. Yet he had completely misread Park. Granted, he hadn’t had much time to evaluate the North Korean, having just been introduced to him by Chernin. But he had sensed nothing amiss. Only after the crafty Chernin had expressed his suspicions when they’d smoked Puros on the balcony had Mansur given any thought to whether Park’s motives were sincere.

Chernin should’ve been a spy, Mansur thought. He knew the Russian was smart, calculating. Yet he had underestimated him.

Chernin had a contingency plan in place. That much was clear. What it was, Mansur could only speculate. A place on the water in a warm climate, somewhere the SVR would never think to look. Somewhere, as Chernin had often said, he could read and drink vodka.

Shortly after Mansur had received the warning call from Chernin, the two met a block south of Mansur’s apartment and drove Mansur’s car to a small dock on the Caspian Sea just outside Chalus, where Mansur’s cousin Jafar was waiting for them in his fishing boat.

Now Mansur and Chernin were sailing to a makeshift dock just south of Baku in relative silence, Jafar carefully avoiding the lanes policed by Iranian gunboats. For Mansur, this was the most nerve-wracking part of his journey. Once he made it to Baku, the odds that he would never be detected and apprehended by Iranian intelligence improved to nearly a hundred percent.

Whatever Chernin’s plans were to disappear, Mansur believed his were at least as good. He was traveling under a false passport and had left behind no clues as to his destination. He had accumulated enough money to live the remainder of his days in what most outside the West would consider luxury. Before leaving Baku for his own destination, Chernin would make arrangements to transfer one hundred thousand US dollars to one of Mansur’s accounts, an added cushion.

Although Mansur hated the Iranian regime, he loved his country and would miss it. The familiar sights, sounds, and smells were now irretrievably in the past. The few friends he had he would never see again. He had known of this eventuality for years and had reconciled himself to it. But adjusting to life as an exile wouldn’t be easy. The reward, however, was freedom. And his life.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

JULY 17 2:32 A.M. EDT

Garin took the interior elevator to the Mayflower’s ground level. The hotel was still quiet. Olivia was secure in Room 546. She was not to open the door for anyone but Dwyer’s men.

Garin walked to the lobby and up the staircase near the front entrance to the mezzanine level, where a bank of curtained windows provided a view of the area in front of the hotel. He pulled aside one of the curtains and scanned the sidewalks, street, and buildings. The only signs of life were the cab drivers seated in the taxis along the curb. The area was clear otherwise. Garin knew that someone could be lurking in an alley, possibly on an adjacent rooftop, but was fairly confident the surveillance-detection route he’d used made that unlikely.

Garin turned to descend the stairs back to the lobby. He needed to get back to the safe house for a couple of hours of sleep before his next step.

Congo Knox was comfortable but alert. The entrance to the Mayflower had seen no traffic in nearly two hours. Nor had there been any motion within the lobby that he could see. He could acquire any target emerging from the hotel doors with ease.

A barely perceptible movement of a curtain in the mezzanine level above the entrance caught Knox’s attention. He estimated that it had moved less than an inch, remained in that position for three to five seconds, and then slowly moved to its original position.

He could see no one behind the curtain. There wasn’t even a shadow. But Knox knew that Garin would be emerging from the entrance within seconds. No one else had reason to peek from behind a mezzanine-level curtain at an empty Connecticut Avenue at two thirty in the morning. Only a person who had reason to think someone was looking for him.

Knox exhaled slowly and relaxed his muscles. The muzzle of his M110 was trained on the center of the entrance. Although he was positioned at a forty-five-degree angle to the Mayflower’s door, he had a full view of the entire entry. He would acquire Garin within a fraction of a second. A fraction later Garin would be dead.

Knox could see shadows of movement within the lobby. The shadows of a dead man. It was a matter of moments now. One shot. Another kill. Then off to breakfast.

As Knox’s earpiece crackled, he could hear the screeching tires of fast-moving vehicles pierce the quiet of the night. His scope remained focused on the entrance, where the glass door to the left was beginning to open outward. Knox listened to the low voice in his earpiece as he caught the unmistakable profile of Michael Garin appear in the portal, oblivious to Knox’s presence atop Washington Square.

Seconds later Knox’s earpiece fell silent. Knox pressed his throat mike with his left hand and gently uttered two words: “Roger that.”

As Garin walked south on Connecticut, the vague sensation of being in a sniper’s sights haunting him once again, three black Ford Explorers sped past him and braked to an abrupt halt in front of the Mayflower’s entrance. Four men sprang from each of the SUVs. Six walked rapidly into the hotel while the remainder fanned out around the perimeter of the building. To Knox, they appeared to be former military. He paid them no further attention.

Garin turned left toward the Farragut North Metro station. At the same time, Knox rose to one knee and smoothly and silently gathered his things to leave.

Michael Garin would not die by Congo Knox’s hand this day.

MOUNT VERNON, VIRGINIA

JULY 17 7:00 A.M. EDT

The identity of the amphibian who had accompanied Julian Day to dinner at the Mayflower had nagged at Dwyer most of the night. Dwyer couldn’t match a name to the face, nor could he recall where he had seen the face before. But there was something about the man, some vague recollection rattling about in Dwyer’s mind, that told him that particular face shouldn’t be accompanying Day anytime, anyplace.

Now Dwyer had another puzzle on his hands. Earlier, he had dispatched a tactical team to pick up Olivia Perry at the Mayflower. The operation had gone smoothly, although several of the hotel’s night staff were frightened by the sudden appearance in the dead of night of half a dozen large, swiftly moving men.

Olivia had given Dwyer the flash drive that Garin had obtained from the Iranians. Dwyer had promptly awakened Matt and Ray, and they drove to a DGT facility just outside of Quantico. While Olivia remained at Dwyer’s place under the protection of the tactical team, a group of DGT technicians began analyzing the contents of the flash drive. At the same time, Dwyer ran the photographs of the frog through the DGT facial recognition system.

Dwyer’s technicians told him that a full forensics analysis of the flash drive would take a while, but it was clear that the device harbored a worm — an extraordinarily complex one. The FRS, however, returned a match in relatively short order, and when it did, Dwyer immediately remembered where he had seen the frog before: the Russian embassy on Wisconsin Avenue. He was Yevgeny Torzov, an ostensibly innocuous functionary in the Russian diplomatic corps. Only a select few knew he was SVR.