Operation Hail Storm

Moscow, Russia ― Sheremetyevo International Airport

Kara saw the man, the guy who had been following her since she flew out of Nizhniy Novgorod at five o’clock that morning on Aeroflot 1223. He was good. Better than most tails she had encountered during her time as a spy for the CIA.

“Spy for the CIA,” she hummed, thinking it could be a gitchy pop song. “I was a spy for the CIA, something… something… something, because crime don’t pay.” Maybe not. She was pretty happy right now. She had taken a Valium and a Xanax. It wasn’t great tradecraft to be super-stoned while she was still on the job, but her fear of flying was so debilitating, that without the drugs she would have either been climbing the walls or simply not flying.

The guy that was tailing her was dressed in summer Russian attire, which for most of the Russian public was anything they could afford. The bottom half of the man was clad in American jeans, Levi's 569 loose straight jeans, Kara thought. But the ironic thing about this particular man was his choice in black tee-shirts. The one he was wearing had three big letters that read KGB.

Kara stifled a laugh. How audacious. Some people, even Russians, might not know that the KGB on the man’s shirt stood for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti. Translated to English it meant Committee for State Security. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the KGB had been split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The original KGB didn’t even exist anymore.

The KGB guy was having coffee at the tiny café that looked out onto the crowd waiting to board the connecting Aeroflot flight to Fairfax, Virginia. He was pretending to be either texting on his phone or possibly playing a game. But he was holding his phone at an odd angle. Most people would typically hold their phone so the back of it was pointing toward the ground. But Mr. KGB was holding his phone almost perpendicular to the ground, where the back of the phone was pointing directly at her. Kara surmised that the man had the camera turned on and was watching her by watching his phone. Not the most inventive method of observation she had ever seen, but then the man was wearing a tee-shirt boasting a spy agency that had been dead for forty years. So, what could she expect?

The tee-shirt was kinda brilliant when she thought about it. After all, what spy would wear a shirt that said, “Hey, I’m a spy.”

No one. That’s who. So it was the perfect camouflage. Maybe she should consider wearing a CIA tee-shirt.

The airport was busy. Kara guessed that more than five hundred travelers were clustered between the two active gates and preparing to board. She knew that the man wouldn’t make a move with all these people around. All these witnesses. And there could be other agents lurking around as well; those men or women who were aligned with other countries and had a vested interest in Kara and her mission.

Kara couldn’t worry about all that or it would make her go insane. The best way to deal with cling-ons was one of three methods. Loose him, confront him or kill him. And at this very moment, Kara was tired. She didn’t feel like those three options, so she opted for the fourth option, which was ignore him.

Back in Nizhniy, in her hotel room, she had waited until Kornev had plugged his phone into the CIA charger for the night. Five minutes later, all the data from the Russian arms dealer’s phone had been mirrored to her own phone. In order to draw as little attention to herself as possible, she had dressed down in comfy baggy grey matching sweat pants and matching shirt and white tennis shoes. All of her curves disappeared under the baggy fabric. Before she left the hotel, she removed as much makeup as would come off with soap and water. The bulk of everything else she had brought with her went into her big suitcase. Ten minutes later, she was in a cab and heading for the airport. That resulted in zero hours of sleep. This assignment was starting to wear on her.

By now, Kornev would have inquired about her with the desk clerk to get her room number. The desk clerk would have looked her up on his computer and told Kornev that Ms. Merkulov had checked out. The desk clerk would have then handed Kornev the envelope that Tonya had instructed him to give to Mr. Kornev.

Psychologically this worked out better than Tonya simply disappearing in the middle of the night. People who checked in and checked out were responsible people with places to be. People who just left in the middle of the night were much more suspect. Kara understood that Kornev would still be suspicious about her and she didn’t want to freak him out to the point where he possibly panicked, leaving his luggage, toiletries, and God help her, his new iPhone charger in his room. Hopefully, Kornev would read the note and assume that she was what she appeared to be; a flighty kooky silly horny woman who had too much money and not many brains. If the situation played out in her favor, he would email her and they might develop a relationship of sorts. This was a one-way street, however. Kornev had to contact her and invite her to meet him. There was no way that she could run into him a second time by mere coincidence. That would get her killed.

Kara’s boarding flight was called and her stomach did a little flip-flop. She considered taking another pill but quickly dismissed the thought. There was a difference between mellow and comatose, and her mission was far from over.

Kara casually checked her periphery and noted that the man was gone. No longer at the café. No longer hovering where he could be seen. That didn’t mean that he wasn’t still around. She knew he was. Hiding behind a pole. Gone to the bathroom. Watching her from a distance. She guessed he would probably be on her plane, having had plenty of time to purchase a ticket for the flight that was only three-fourths full.

First class was announced and boarded, even before the handicapped people. Wasn’t Russia wonderful.

Kara had already checked her bag that contained one million phone chargers. If any of the security officials would have asked what one million phone chargers were doing in her luggage, she had a business card that indicated she was a reseller for an electronics supply company that specialized in iPhone accessories. These wonderful units would function seamlessly in any country and on any electrical grid. The name of the company on her business card, if she recalled correctly, was something like One Million Phone Chargers. Of course there weren’t a million of them in her bag, but who cared about the specifics.

Other than her checked bag, she had nothing to carry on but her ticket, a small purse and her cell phone. Kara stood up from her chair and without glancing around; she walked over to the boarding gate and handed her ticket to the lady. Kara then got in line and walked down the cramped jetbridge.

The Airbus A330 was a medium long-range wide-body jet. It could accommodate three-hundred and thirty-five passengers in a two-class layout. First class had several rows with single twenty-seven-inch-wide seats positioned by the windows. In the middle part of the plane, the first class seats were separated by something that looked like two padded ice chests.

Kara checked her ticket and confirmed her seat assignment. Second row in First Class. She seated herself on the right side of the plane. Kara picked up whatever magazine was in the cubby under her arm rest. She then flipped to the middle of the magazine and pretended to be fascinated by the gadgets in the SkyMall. Glancing up to adjust her air nozzle, she watched and waited for the KGB guy to make an appearance. It took a long time. A lot of air conditioning adjustments. At one point she began to second guess herself and think for a moment that the KGB guy wasn’t going to make the flight. But then, just as the line of passengers was beginning to thin out, he rounded the bulkhead and stepped onto the plane.

He wasn’t a bad looking guy. Mid-thirties. Had a long face. Maybe a little too long. He had a prominent outty nose, but not too outty. Not hooked, but it looked like a Russian or Slavic nose of some type. He had good cheekbones and kind eyes. He was average height and had a good build. The man was carrying nothing but his phone.

Traveling light, Kara thought.

Her new friend had a two-day growth of beard, or it was one of those trying to look cool things. Kara thought the new name for it was the thin facial-hair style. It looked good on the man.

His kind eyes saw her and he immediately looked away.

Kara was used to that look. Men would look at her and try to take her all in. She would then look at them and they would shyly look away. Busted. But this man wasn’t doing the shy thing. He looked away for an entirely different reason.

It should have been a surprise when he took the seat directly behind her. But it wasn’t. He had apparently done some social networking with the ticket ladies and found out where she was sitting. The air hags had probably thought it was a sex thing, male and female attraction at its finest; the steamier side of biology, the entire animal kingdom courtship ritual unfolding right there in First Class. With all their travelers safely on the plane, the ticket ladies were probably gossiping, telling tall tales of their matchmaking, wondering if the mile-high club was in the cards for the young couple.

The jet began to spin up and a flight attendant handed Kara a glass of champagne. Kara was surprised, since she hadn’t ordered the drink. After a moment of observation, she realized that all the first class passengers were being handed a glass of champagne. It must have been one of those unexpected novelties the airline offered to make you feel as though the thousands of dollars you paid for your seat were worth it.

Kara tasted the fizzy drink. It wasn’t Cristal. That was for sure, but she downed the glass in a few gulps. It could only help to further anesthetize her from her fear of flying.

The jet was pushed back and the massive machine began its long lumbering taxi toward the runway.

Kara wanted to look behind her to see what the man was doing, but that would have been a bad idea. After all, the four options were still in play; lose him, confront him, kill him, or she could choose the option that required no effort whatsoever, ignore him. She picked number four again.

The engines roared and all of the passengers were all pressed back into their seats. The passengers in the rear of the plane were pressed into worn out sixteen-inch wide seats. Kara and the lucky rich people in the front of the plane were pressed back into new wide seats with silk pillows. After more noise and more mysterious mechanical sounds that planes make, the engines calmed down and the plane leveled off. Kara began to breathe again.

Emerging from the narrow space between the window and her seat, she was startled when a hand appeared. Her reflex action was to reach down, bend it backwards and snap it at the wrist. But she didn’t. Instead, she watched the hand come to a rest at her side, then open and sit there unmoving, palm up. She saw an iPhone resting in the hand.

Kara looked at the hand for a moment and then looked around to see if anyone was watching her. Seeing no one, she removed the cell phone from the hand and replaced it with Kornev’s imaged iPhone. The hand then closed around the cell phone and withdrew, disappearing back behind her.

A disembodied voice whispered to her.

“Great job, Kara.”

Then a pause.

“Or should I say Tonya?”

She turned her head to the right and spoke softly out of the side of her mouth.

“Call me whatever you want, Jack,” she whispered into the space between the window and her seat. “Just don’t call me late for dinner.”

She added in a whisper, “I’m going to get some sleep. Watch our backs.”

“You got it,” the voice said. “See you back at the office.”

Kara said nothing. She reclined her big wide comfortable seat back as far as it would go and did her best to relax. The drugs did their thing and she fell asleep before the flight attendant could bring her a refill of the crappy champagne.