Operation Hail Storm

Nizhny Novgorod, Russia ― Volna Hotel

The sex was OK.

Nothing she would write home about, as the saying goes. But then Kara didn’t have anyone to write home to. She was an only child and her parents had passed away when she was foreign language major at Middlebury College in Vermont.

The sex was just about what she had expected from the Russian. She hadn’t been man-handled in the same manner as some of her past assignments had treated her. But as she had expected, the moment they had entered his hotel room, Kornev had pressed her up against the wall, kissed her hard and had begun to immediately remove her dress. She would have been surprised if he hadn’t. After all, her dress was drop dead sexy. She was certain that Kornev thought it looked even better on his floor.

He had whispered into her ear that he wanted to make love to her, right there, right then. Wall sex at its finest. She hadn’t protested. Sex on the wall, sex on the couch, sex on the floor, sex in the bed, it was the same to her. The angle of her body, perpendicular, upright, vertical, erect, horizontal, recumbent, prone, prostrate, supine, it was just boys being boys. It was a visual thing with them, but to her it made no difference.

Kornev had used the expression, making love to her. But Kara never referred to sex with her targets as love making. Love had nothing to do with it. Love had nothing to do with most of Kara’s new life in the CIA. She had loved her parents and look what had happened to them. She thought she had loved a man in college, but once her parents were killed, that part of her heart became inert. As far as she could tell, the part of her heart and soul, the gooey intimate part that was responsible for the feeling of love, was buried in the same hole as her parent’s parts and pieces. There hadn’t been much of them left, and deep inside, Kara felt there wasn’t much of her left either. The predominant feeling that Kara woke up with every day was anger, as well as an overwhelming need for revenge.

The hotel bed was soft and the sheets were smooth and cool on her naked body. She was lying on her side facing the Russian who was staring up at the ceiling. He had recovered quickly after the wall sex and had carried her into the bedroom where they had gone for round two.

Victor Kornev turned his head and looked at her. He said, “Tonya, I have to attend a video meeting downstairs.”

Kara said nothing. She looked at him inquisitively.

Kornev repeated himself and softened a little.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I have to attend a business meeting downstairs. Do you have a room at this hotel?”

Kara said nothing again and waited right up to the point where she felt that Kornev was becoming agitated.

Finally, she responded, her voice soft and sexy, “Yes, I have a room here. Do you want me to leave?”

She said it in a tone that sounded as if the mere suggestion of asking her to leave would hurt her feelings.

Kornev thought about that for a moment.

Kara could tell he was mentally walking through his hotel room, analyzing if there was anything on the premises that could be compromised. As of that exact moment, she didn’t suspect that Kornev thought she was anything other than a lucky one-nighter, but he had made millions on being careful and this situation was no different.

“Sure, you can stay,” Kornev finally said. His body language changed and he looked more relaxed.

That was a good answer. That meant that she would have time to do what she needed to do. If it wasn’t for the sake of keeping up appearances, she would be gone before he ever got back from his meeting and he would never see her again. But that would cast suspicion upon her and could make Kornev nervous.

Kornev pulled Kara’s head close to him and kissed her on her forehead.

“I will see you very soon,” Kornev said, getting out of bed, making no attempt to cover his nakedness.

The Russian’s clothes were piled in a heap on his side of the bed. Kara watched as he pulled on his underwear, pants, shirt and shoes. All the while, Kara made mental notes of everything she saw. Kornev had two tattoos. High up on his right arm was an inked Hammer and Sickle of the USSR. It looked military and had some age to it. The colors were faded in a fashion that dated the work back a decade or more. Black and red. The ring around the sickle, as well as the star that interlaced through the sickle, was black. The sickle itself was red, with a smattering of white starbursts. The white touches gave the impression the sickle was made of metal and its edges were glinting off the sun. On the inside of his other arm was a name of some sort. As Kornev got dressed, the name flashed into view and then was gone. Two more sightings and Kara pieced together the Russian letters as Кристина, which translated to the name of Kristina. Kara also noticed an ugly wound that had not healed nicely on Kornev’s left shoulder. It looked like the result of a gunshot from a large caliber handgun at close range. It had made a big hole and left a shallow indentation that had not been sewn well. The area at the top of Kornev’s pectoral muscle had been cut away, leaving his chest uneven. As Kornev turned to locate his socks, she noticed an equally ugly scar on the flip side, where the bullet had exited.

Part of Kara’s job was intelligence gathering. Being able to positively identify Kornev under any circumstance was important. Physical identification was critical and indexing tattoos and old wounds was much better than just matching his face to a recent photo. If one of Kornev’s many enemies got a hold of him and left him dead in a field, maybe even decapitated him, then the CIA would still be able to make a positive ID from just the tattoos that Kara documented in her mind. After her assignment had been completed, all that information would be typed up and added to Kornev’s file in the CIA database.

It took Kornev less than two minutes to get dressed. He leaned over and kissed Tonya on the top of her head. He didn’t say goodbye or see you later, he simply walked out of the bedroom. A moment later, Kara heard the front door of the hotel suite close with a light click.

She waited for a minute in case Kornev had forgotten something. When she was relatively sure he was gone; Kara whipped off the satin sheets and quickly hustled out into the front room of the suite. She looked around and located her dress. She found it in a tiny heap next to her purse by the front door. She quickly stepped into the dress, pulled it up and threaded her arms through its thin straps. Wasting as little time as possible, she adjusted her dress while she walked over to the small desk-like piece of furniture. The table looked like something you could buy in IKEA, but sturdy. It was made of blond wood, chrome and glass. The table would suffice as an extra surface to hold an opened piece of luggage, but Kornev had been using it as a desk.

Kara went directly for his phone charger that was plugged into the socket on an ornate lamp. Moving quickly, she unplugged the charger from the lamp and removed the white iPhone cable that was plugged into its port. His phone charger was a little different than most of them she had seen. In a perfect world, it would have been the common white charger that Apple sold in the millions and provided in the package with each of its iPhones. But this was an aftermarket unit. It was black, not white, and smaller than the original Apple charger.

Kara knew that time was her biggest enemy. Kornev had not told her when he would be back. He had said, I will see you very soon, but how long was very soon? Five minutes? A half hour? Kara tore a few sheets of paper out of the hotel note pad that was sitting next to the lamp. She folded them over once, then twice and then once more, creating a thick square of paper.

Not bothering to put on her shoes, Kara cupped the iPhone charger in her hand, picked up her purse from the floor and opened the front door to the room. Trying to look casual, she glanced out into the hallway. Kara looked left for a moment and then right. She was pleased that the hallway was empty. She was also pleased that Kornev didn’t have any type of security detail. He must have felt that personal security was not needed since he was in his home town of Nizhny Novgorod, colloquially shortened to Nizhny for most Russians. She was told by her intelligence handlers that Kornev employed body guards if he ventured to foreign lands. If Kornev had his guards with him at the Volna Hotel they would not have prevented her from completing her current assignment. But guards would have certainly made it more difficult.

Kara stood up straight and pulled her shoulders back. Her mother had always told her that posture was everything when it came to finding a good husband. What man in the world would want a slouchy woman? What man, indeed?

With her shoulders in their perfect position, Kara opened the door and walked out. She checked the hallway again and turned around and inserted the square of paper into the area on the door jamb where the bolt met the strike plate. Being careful not to smash her fingers, she closed the door gently on the thin sheets.

Testing her work, she pulled the door toward her a few centimeters and it opened, indicating that the bolt was being held open by the paper. Confident that she would be able to get back into the room, Kara turned and began walking briskly toward her own room only four doors down the hall.

Kara reached into her purse to remove her room’s keycard. The number on her door was 407 and it was closed and locked as it should have been. Afraid she would see a mystified Kornev rounding the corner; she hurriedly opened her door and entered her dark room. During her entire stay at this hotel, she had spent less than five minutes in this room. When she had arrived earlier that day, she had done some touchups to her makeup and then went directly down to the bar. Her mission had been dependent on being on display when Kornev went to the bar for happy hour, just as he had done the night before.

The first night that Kornev had spent in the bar, had not been very exciting for him. Her CIA support team had told her that Kornev had sat at the bar and watched a high school hockey game on television. The only other people that had been in the bar were two old couples that sipped wine and had then retired early.

Kara found her large suitcase still sitting next to her front door where she had left it. She would have loved to jump into a shower and cleansed the Russian’s scent off of her, but there was no time for that.

She tossed her suitcase up onto the bed and turned on both wall lamps on each side of the bed.

The bag was a big green thing with a central zipper that circled the main section. She unzipped the suitcase all the way around and opened the flap. Inside was a small amount of clothes and a massive selection of phone chargers. Hundreds. Each charger was inserted into a plastic slot fused into a thick plastic sheet. Each sheet had ten rows and five columns of chargers. Each sheet had chargers on the front and back. There were ten sheets of plastic. The CIA tech who had packed her bag had not told her how the chargers would be organized. As she gazed down at them, the only order Kara could make out was that they were arranged by color and size. That would seem to make sense, if whoever was trying to locate a charger was in a hurry. She was in a hurry. So the arrangement worked in her favor.

The charger she held in her hand was black, so she removed all the white sheets of chargers until she found the first selection that had nothing but black phone chargers. She began the process by holding up Kornev’s charger in front of each charger nestled in its clear pocket.

Nothing on the first sheet. They were all too large.

She flipped over to the backside of the first sheet and repeated the comparison for each of the new candidates.

Nothing again. No matches.

She set that sheet aside and began on the next batch. She was optimistic of finding a match. The next set of black chargers was still too big, but they continued to get smaller and smaller. She completed her scan, found nothing that matched, so she flipped over the sheet and searched the backside.

Halfway through, she said, “Yes,” and reached down and pulled open the Velcro seal that secured a small black phone charger in a plastic slot.

Under the direct light of the lamp, she held up Kornev’s phone charger against the one she had selected. They looked just the same. She placed them next to one another and turned them around this way and that, until she was sure they were exactly the same.

Confident in her find, she placed Kornev’s charger in the night table drawer next to the bed. She put the replacement for Kornev’s phone charger in her purse. Her watch told her that five minutes had expired since she had left Kornev’s room. Not bad. Reaching over on the bed, she collected all the sheets of chargers she had removed and put them back in the suitcase. She closed the flap, but didn’t bother zipping it back up. She then moved quickly to the door. Rolling her shoulders back into pretty girl position, Kara stuck her head out and performed a quick hallway inspection. Seeing no one, she stepped into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind her.

An older couple unexpectedly exited their room as Kara was passing. Kara greeted them with the Russian Добрый вечер, which meant good evening and was used any time after six at night. The old man’s eyebrows went up when he looked at Kara. Dressed in a cocktail dress, her red hair in disarray and not wearing shoes, she guessed she looked like a high-class hooker that was sneaking out of a room with her trick’s wallet. Nevertheless, the couple politely returned the salutation and walked down the hallway in the opposite direction, whispering to one another.

Kara made it back to Kornev’s room and was relieved to see that the paper holding open the bolt was still in place. Using her index finger and thumb, she pinched the edge of the paper and opened the door. Once inside, she placed the paper in her purse. No sense in leaving strange folded objects in plain sight. She then walked over to the desk.

Instinctively, Kara looked back over her shoulder at the front door. Her paranoid side told her that Kornev would walk in on her at any moment. She retrieved Kornev’s original charging cable and plugged it into the new CIA phone charger. She then plugged the new CIA charger back into the lamp. Still paranoid, she checked the door, but Kornev had not walked back into the room. Nor did he walk into the room an hour later. Or an hour after that.

Kara took the time to pen a letter she would leave when she ditched Victor Kornev and jumped on a plane headed back for the states.

Four hours later, Kornev open the door and entered the room.

Kara had her dress on, her shoes off and was watching Russian television; a fate worse than death, as far as she was concerned. The show was a Russian sitcom called Univer. Continually translating the Russian to English was making her tired and agitated.

Kornev saw her sitting on the couch. He said nothing. He walked over to the couch and sat down next to her. He reached over and took her hand in his. There was an uncomfortable silence when two people, two strangers had just had sex together.

Kara remained silent. It was her method of control. She wanted Kornev to talk first so she could gage his demeanor. Anything could have happened while he was gone; up to and including some source of Victor’s telling him that there was a CIA spy in his room. Kara had to remain vigilant and be able to react quickly and decisively if things got ugly. Her high-heel shoes were sitting next to her on the couch. These were not shoes that could be bought from Macys. These were CIA issued shoes. The long heels in each of the shoes were metal spikes. If swung at a semi-solid mass, the heel would peel away, allowing the spike to go deep into the target.

Kornev was the first to talk.

“How are you?” he asked in English.

“Fine. And you?” Kara replied politely.

“I’m good,” Kornev said, but his heavy Russian accent made good sound more like guwt.

Kara was silent.

“Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?” He asked.

Kara was hungry, but she really didn’t want to hang around with Kornev any longer than she had to. If there had been no restrictions on her assignment, she would have ordered a big thick steak. And as she finished her last bite, she would have jammed the steak knife deep into Kornev’s neck, severing his jugular vein. She would have then calmly watched him bleed out as she slipped on her CIA shoes, picked up her purse and exited the room without looking back.

But they wanted Victor Kornev alive. Her bosses and their bosses wanted the man to continue breathing. If he was dead, then they wouldn’t know who he was working with. If Kornev was discovered with a four-inch steak knife sticking out of his neck, then the CIA wouldn’t know what countries and terrorist organizations were actively buying arms and of what type. If Kornev was planted six-feet under, then a new arms dealer would take over the trade and they would have to start all over.

The CIA’s phone charger (Kornev’s new phone charger) was indeed a phone charger. It would charge Kornev’s iPhone. But it was so much more than that. It was a very expensive, very special piece of CIA hardware.

The first time that Kornev plugged his phone into the CIA charger, several unique things would happen. First, the charger would set up a peer to peer network with a similar charger that was plugged into Kara’s lamp in her room. The (PLC) or power-line communication protocol allowed a high-speed network to be established over hotel power-lines that joined the rooms. The second thing that would happen was a small back door program would be installed on Kornev’s iPhone. That program would instantly start copying every single bit of data to the empty phone in Kara’s room. The copy program would create an identical image of Kornev’s iPhone onto Kara’s phone.

Once back in her room, Kara would connect her phone to the hotel’s WI-FI and securely transmit all the data to CIA headquarters. The CIA techs would create a virtual image of Kornev’s phone that would be mounted on the CIA’s computers. In essence, his phone now existed in the virtual world and could be accessed in a virtualized state on a CIA computer. No physical phone was required.

From that point on, anytime Kornev charged his phone or connected to a Wi-Fi signal, the virtual phone at CIA headquarters would be instantly updated with any new or modified information. As long as Kornev took his charger with him, his iPhone would continue to update its virtual counter-part. With that information, the CIA intelligence team could access and review all of his chats, texts, emails and photos.

And lastly, the little program that had installed itself on Kornev’s phone would also silently record every phone call he made. Each time Kornev plugged it in for a charge or the phone discovered an accessible Wi-Fi signal, all of those recorded calls would be transferred to the CIA as well.

Kara looked at Kornev for a moment, wondering how best to break his heart, or at least break his penis’s heart.

If she wanted to, she could hurt Kornev. Well, maybe hurt his feelings. And she really wanted to. She wanted to tell him that he sucked in bed, that he had bad breath and that his ding-ding didn’t make her sing-sing, but none of that was true.

Still, she wanted to repay Kornev with just a fraction of the hurt that he dished out to the rest of the world. His occupation was providing very dangerous weapons to those who wanted to use them to cause terror around the world. And Kornev couldn’t care less. It was all about money. It was all about compensation for devastation. What happened after that was none of his concern. Even if it meant providing surface-to-air missiles that could take down a commercial aircraft that had women and children on it.

Kara looked admiringly at the man with disgust in her heart. She hoped her smile looked convincing. She surmised that Kornev didn’t see the person behind the smile that was thinking how exposed his neck was at that moment.

Kara thought, where is a steak knife when you need one?

How long ago had Kornev asked her if she was hungry? And how long had she been simply staring at him with that dumb smile on her face, fantasizing about killing him?

“Not right now,” she said, her smile fading into a dainty frown.

“I’ve got a little bellyache” she added. “Maybe too many fruity drinks.”

She held her stomach to validate her words.

Kornev looked at her and she could see something other than hunger far back in his eyes. The look didn’t bother her much. She had seen it hundreds of times. It was the look of longing. The look of a man who had found a lovely golden watch, then just hours later, he had already lost it. But Kornev’s look was not of gold, or diamonds, or even money, it was the look of sex. He wanted to have sex with her again. No doubt about it.

But the bellyache excuse worked well in situations such as this. He would have to be an ogre to force sex on someone who was sick to their stomach. Kara sensed that Kornev was a lot of nasty things, but a sex ogre was not one of them. And if he was, then a swat from the heel of her shoe would shut him down pretty fast.

“Maybe you will feel better in the morning,” he said.

Kara replied, “I am sure I will.” But in actuality she was thinking, I will be out of Nizhny before you even wake up.

Kara stood up from the couch and held out her hand, allowing Kornev to take it in his and kiss the back of her knuckles. It was a European thing and took some getting used to.

He then tried to move in closer and kiss her on the mouth, but Kara was prepared with a little burp that stopped him in his tracks.

She put her hand up to her mouth and said, “Excuse me,” with a diminutive embarrassed smile.

Kara walked over to the door and waited.

Like a perfect gentleman, Kornev opened the door for her and she walked out into the hallway.

He said something to her in Korean.

Kara guessed it was a salutation of some sort and she smiled politely.

She took a chance and responded with the phrase, “Go fuck yourself,” in her best Mullukmulluk and turned and walked away.

Since she didn’t hear anything other than Kornev’s door closing, so she assumed that he didn’t know Mullukmulluk.