Page 54 of Denied Access (Mitch Rapp #24)

H URLEY digested the news his protégée had just relayed in silence.

Up until this moment, Rapp had only experienced the physical hardship that came with his newly chosen profession.

Sore muscles from long hours of physical conditioning, bruises that were the by-products of combative sessions on the mats, and the like.

He’d even weathered the type of damage that could be life-ending in the form of a gunshot wound to his shoulder, but he’d yet to navigate the type of pain that time never really healed.

The pain of relationships ending.

Hurley couldn’t hear Greta’s end of the conversation, but he could see thunderclouds forming on Rapp’s features.

Hurley had given up on marriage after multiple attempts, and he didn’t even try to count the nonmatrimonial relationships that had gone up in flames.

This job was an unforgiving mistress—a truth Rapp might be about to learn firsthand.

“Hang on,” Rapp said as he stood. Holding the phone against his chest, he turned to Hurley. “Bedroom?”

“Down the hall,” Hurley said, pointing to the right. “She okay?”

Rapp gave a curt nod as he brought the cell back to his ear. “Run me through that once more.” The assassin continued to voice encouraging sounds as he headed for one of the flat’s two bedrooms.

“My, my, my,” Volkov said, “intelligence work has changed since I’ve been out of the game. I didn’t realize the new generation took calls from home while working in the field.”

Hurley shot the Russian a surly glance, but didn’t bother to correct his assumption. The less the former KGB officer knew about Rapp’s personal life, the better.

Besides, Volkov wasn’t wrong.

Each of the women who’d held the title of Mrs. Hurley had known he’d worked for the CIA—attempting to hide your employer from your spouse was a fool’s errand—but none of his ex-wives knew what he actually did for the agency.

With each, he’d used some version of the story that he worked in an administrative role.

One of the legions of paper pushers for whom employment at Langley wasn’t all that different from laboring at any other federal bureaucracy.

Even then, he’d never taken a call from home while on the job.

Instead, he’d directed his wives to use an answering service set up for this very purpose.

The idea of fielding a call from a significant other while sitting in a safe house in a foreign nation was preposterous.

But here they were.

“I appreciate the relationship tips,” Hurley said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, “but maybe you should sit this one out.” He shook out one for himself, lit it, and then slid the pack and Zippo across the table to the Russian.

“That was uncalled-for,” Volkov said. “I appreciate what you did for me in Berlin, but there’s no cause to rub my face in it.

” His accent thickened as it always did when he was angry, but he still accepted Hurley’s peace offering.

Snaring a cigarette, he placed it in his mouth and lit the end in one practiced motion.

Snapping the silver lighter shut, he inhaled and then blew a sweet-smelling cloud toward the ceiling.

“I’d quit this disgusting habit, you know. ”

Stan did know.

That was the point.

Volkov loved the Indonesian kretek -style clove cigarettes for reasons that probably had more to do with their scarcity than their flavor.

For a nation that had ostensibly been consumed with seeking a communal egalitarian existence for its citizens, the old Soviet guard had certainly enjoyed flaunting their inequality.

The cigarettes were nearly impossible to get except through black-market channels, and the KGB officer had smoked them incessantly.

As would any good intelligence officer, Hurley had used this eccentricity to his advantage by presenting the Russian with hard-to-find brands of the foul cigarettes each time they met.

Besides engendering a bit of goodwill, Hurley had also been conditioning his asset to associate the flavored death sticks with providing information to his CIA handler.

By lighting up, Volkov had just signaled that he was once more on the clock.

Time to get to work.

“I’m not rubbing your face in it,” Hurley said. “You said you’d handle Stefanie, and you did. I’m just reminding you that getting caught in an East Germany honeytrap almost cost you your life. I helped you then. You’ll help me now.”

Volkov’s pinched forehead and narrowed eyes suggested that the Russian had more to say on the matter, but instead of speaking, he took another draw from the cigarette.

To this day, Stan didn’t know whether the affair between the East German woman and her KGB lover had started innocently or had been a Stasi machination from the start.

Either way, Petrov had discovered the liaison and was preparing to have Volkov arrested for his lapse in professional judgment when Stan had come to the rescue.

Volkov had responded to Stan’s warning by murdering his young lover and then reporting the attempted Stasi orchestrated honeytrap to Petrov and their joint boss, Mikhail Ivanov.

Thoroughly impressed by Volkov’s ruthless practicality, Ivanov had promoted Volkov on the spot, effectively ending Petrov’s attempt to sideline his deputy.

When Stefanie’s body was found floating in the Spree the next day, the Stasi learned a very important lesson—running intelligence operations against their KGB patrons wouldn’t end well.

Stan thought there was a second lesson to be learned as well: Love and espionage do not mix. He fervently hoped that this wasn’t a truism his assassin would find out the hard way.

“What do you need?” Volkov said.

Hurley took a final pull from his cigarette and then dropped the butt into his coffee cup.

He was all about building rapport, but the cloying film that now coated his tongue made him want to vomit.

How the Russian could smoke kreteks by the pack was beyond him.

“I paid a visit to one of our mutual acquaintances. Muller—remember him?”

Volkov ashed his cigarette into Hurley’s cup. “Of course I remember Hans. How is my former Stasi friend?”

“Dead.”

Hans Muller, along with Felix Bauer, Carl Ohlmeyer, and Volkov himself, had been a member of Hurley’s East German spy ring—the Boys from Berlin.

Muller and Volkov had both been intelligence officers, while Ohlmeyer and Bauer were bankers.

Now Muller and Bauer were dead and Volkov and Ohlmeyer were on the run.

It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

Someone was settling old scores.

The Russian paused with the cigarette halfway to his mouth. Foul-smelling smoke spiraled toward the ceiling in gray wisps. “How?”

“Officially, he fell down his apartment’s stairs two days ago.”

“Unofficially?”

“His German apartment building has no stairs.”

The cigarette hissed as Volkov added his butt to Stan’s cup. The Russian’s face was blank. The face of a master spy. The face of a man who knew nothing about recruiting a Stasi officer named Hans Muller before turning him over to be run by hotshot CIA handler Stan Hurley.

His trembling index finger said otherwise.

“Who?”

Hurley shrugged. “Not sure. My visit wasn’t in an official capacity, so I couldn’t formally ask my contacts in the BND or BKA about Muller’s death.”

Volkov shook his head. “Our Deutsch friends don’t have much of an appetite for Cold War intrigue.

I’m not sure Germany’s foreign intelligence service and national police force agree on much, but in this instance, I’d be willing to bet that they’d both concur your Stasi asset died of natural causes. ”

“Might be a tough sell, since his head was bashed in with a blunt object, but you’re mostly right. I still have a friend or two in the newspaper business, but even they couldn’t get anything out of the police.”

“They’re likely not any more interested in getting to the bottom of what really happened than their uniformed countrymen.

Germany was reunified less than a handful of years ago.

Digging up stories about East German misdeeds is a bit like lifting up a rock only to discover a coiled viper.

Some things are best left in the past.” Volkov brushed an imaginary piece of lint from his shirt.

Then he looked back to Hurley. “Who killed my friend, Stan?”

Hurley’s fingers itched for another cigarette, but he didn’t reach for the pack.

While he’d welcome another nicotine hit, enduring the sickly-sweet smoke wasn’t worth it.

“Ohlmeyer gets a package with Felix Bauer’s head inside, our best former Stasi asset takes a long fall down a nonexistent staircase, and a Russian kill team pays a visit to your retirement home.

Who do you suppose might be the common denominator between these otherwise completely unrelated events? ”

“Grigoriy Petrov.”

“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”

Petrov had been responsible for recruiting and running CIA officer Alexander Hughes while Hughes had been assigned to the Berlin Operations Base.

When the opportunity to recruit Volkov, Petrov’s deputy, had fallen into his lap, Hurley had jumped at the chance to return the favor.

Volkov had recruited Stasi officer Muller, who in turn had flipped Bauer, an East German banker who helped the Stasi finance operations against West Germany.

And just like that, the Boys from Berlin had been up and running.

While Hurley’s East German espionage cell hadn’t been able to bring back the dead assets that Hughes’s treachery had exposed, their invaluable reporting went a long way toward evening the score.

Best of all, Hurley successfully exfiltrated all three of his assets from behind the Iron Curtain before the Stasi or KGB discovered the spy ring.

In a rarity for the clandestine world, the Boys from Berlin had escaped their dangerous exploits unscathed.

Until now.

“Why is Petrov doing this after twenty years?” Volkov said.

“My guess is that he’s been planning his retribution for a long time,” Stan said.

“Maybe he watched the coup against Gorbachev fail and learned a few lessons. Maybe he thinks the new Russian president is a drunk who won’t notice if he starts knocking off a couple of former Cold War adversaries.

I don’t have a fucking clue, but you’re going to help me find out. ”

The Russian looked at Stan as if he’d lost his mind. “You can’t be serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. You’re about to pay a visit to a couple of your former KGB friends here in Vienna. Then you’re going to politely ask them what the fuck Petrov is thinking.”

“They will kill me.”

“Nah,” Stan said. “This is Vienna. Nobody kills anyone in Vienna.”

“The KGB killed a defector here in 1975.”

“Shit, that was almost twenty years ago. Besides, you won’t be meeting them alone. Rapp and I will protect you. And in case you hadn’t noticed, Rapp’s pretty damn good in a fight.”

“I’m leaving.”

Stan turned to see Rapp standing in the hallway with his backpack slung over his shoulder and the cell phone pressed against his chest.