Chapter 35
The Medina
Tangier, Morocco
Gunther Klaus rushed through the souk with his head on a swivel.
He wasn’t exactly running. Bounding was more like it.
He moved with frenzied imprecision, pinballing between human bumpers, lurching left and right.
The market was what it had been for a thousand years, a baffling sprawl of people, spice stalls, and food carts.
Klaus only hoped he could vanish in the madness.
His one advantage was familiarity. He had been to this market many times.
He knew its channels by heart, although the individual stalls and storefronts were amorphic, a shape-shifting maze that altered day by day.
The sweet smells of cinnamon and jasmine blended with the tang of sizzling fat.
He felt sweat trickle down his spine beneath his loose cotton shirt. The heat had nothing to do with it.
Surrounded by a sea of faces, he scanned each for an anxious instant.
Most were locals, dark Berber features and wiry black hair.
He also saw tourists: Europeans, Americans, a smattering of Asians.
Thankfully, there was no sign of the faces he hoped not to see: three men whose distinctly Slavic features were emblazoned in his mind.
He collided with an old man in a fez, a grizzled merchant who gave him a nasty look.
“Pardon,” Klaus said reflexively, spinning a full turn before rushing away.
He’d come here in desperation, hoping the crowd would be in his favor.
The fact that he wasn’t already in the back seat of a sedan with a boot on his neck validated that he’d made the right move.
The chaos around him, however, was a prison of its own.
Escape and evasion was not his forte. He was a banker, not a spy.
A man who ran spreadsheets and created shell companies.
The problem, which admittedly he had long seen coming, had to do with his client list. The bankers at UBS and Credit Suisse didn’t find themselves darting through spice markets with assassins on their tail.
No, he thought breathlessly, they worked for a far more refined breed of crook.
Klaus skidded around a corner, his heart rate spiking as he scanned the crowd ahead. He saw none of the three men. But they were here, somewhere.
He knew he should have been more prepared.
Turning to the Americans was a decision he could not take back, and it had almost worked.
After receiving the note he’d transferred through the old beggar in Algiers, they’d gotten in touch immediately.
Klaus had been assigned a CIA handler and an escape from Tangier was arranged on a diplomatic flight.
He had thought it a brilliant plan…that is, until he’d shown up at the executive terminal and encountered a man he knew.
The name escaped him in that terrible moment, but the face was one he would never forget—probably why the man had been chosen for the encounter.
He was a Czech national who had once employed Klaus to arrange funding for a large load of Semtex.
As the Czech approached Klaus that night, he’d frozen near the terminal entrance. Then fate had intervened. A Moroccan policeman blocked the man’s path and pointed to the car he’d left parked on the curb. Klaus didn’t wait to see the outcome.
On pure impulse he’d run into the terminal and bolted toward the security station.
The security men regarded him suspiciously, and when Klaus saw no sign of his CIA handler, full-blown panic kicked in.
Was the whole scheme a setup? Was there even an American jet outside?
Was he minutes away from being bundled onto a flight to Moscow, a one-way ticket to hell?
Seeing nothing but threats, his thoughts had stuttered and tumbled until there seemed only one way out. He’d bolted toward a side door and run through a mazelike corridor that spilled into a parking lot. A cab, a wad of cash, a spare key. Thirty minutes later, he had successfully escaped.
In the days since, Klaus’s life had been on a constant downward trajectory.
He had initially gone back to his apartment, but quickly had second thoughts.
The Russians surely knew where he lived.
Instead of remaining in his own flat, he’d moved to a neighbor’s unit—his friend was out of town, and he’d given Klaus a key so that he could feed the parakeets.
With his getaway from Tangier ruined, the fear that had gripped him in recent weeks turned to paralysis.
He was afraid to go outside and kept the curtains drawn tight.
Then this morning, as he’d been sitting in his neighbor’s living room eating canned beans, his world had inverted once again.
The closed-circuit security feed of his building’s streetside entrance, displayed on his neighbor’s computer, showed three big men bustling in off the street.
None of their faces were familiar to Klaus, but he’d done enough work for the Russians to recognize them for what they were—a gaggle of GRU thugs.
He’d hurried to the door and monitored the peephole.
The apartment with the birds was on the second floor, and soon he heard three sets of boots thundering up the stairs.
Klaus held his breath behind the viewing port, willing the men to continue upward toward his fourth-floor unit.
When they did, his knees nearly buckled from relief.
But he knew he couldn’t stay where he was.
The Russians suspected he was in the building, and if he didn’t turn up in his own unit, they might start searching the others.
Klaus waited thirty seconds. He threw a cup of seed into the birdcage.
Then, with nothing more than his phone and wallet, he’d bolted out the door and run for the stairs.
Outside, he turned toward the souk, which seemed like the best place to disappear.
Moments later, however, he had looked back and seen the Russians in pursuit.
For ten minutes now Klaus had been running, turning, hiding. How long could he keep it up? He weaved amid shelves of cumin and ginger, rounded tables full of clothing. How had they tracked him to his building?
Then, suddenly, it dawned on him.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. That had to be it. Phones could be located. He considered simply turning it off. Would that be enough? Since the handset was obviously compromised, he decided he would never use it again anyway.
Just get rid of it!
He eyed a fruit stall and considered depositing it beneath a pile of dates. No, they’ll only find it. I should give them a moving target.
He saw the answer in a corner, idling behind a smoking grill.
A young boy stood in the shadows. He was roughly ten years old, a stick figure in baggy pants and a knock-off Real Madrid jersey.
His body was motionless, but his eyes were active, flicking across the crowds.
He had to be a pickpocket, or some variation.
Klaus knew there was an army of such street urchins here, kids who were hungry and desperate.
He checked over his shoulder. Seeing no immediate threat, he hurried toward the boy.
“Parlez-vous francais?” he asked breathlessly. In this part of Africa, French was spoken more widely than English.
“Oui,” the boy replied, his face suddenly young and innocent.
“I want to hire you for an errand.” Klaus took out his wallet and removed a one-hundred euro note.
“I want you to deliver this phone to an apartment.” He gave the address of his shoreside condo.
“Knock on the door and my wife will answer. Give her the phone and she will give you another hundred euros.”
The boy looked at him warily, trying to decipher the scam. He would be weighing the odds of getting the second hundred euros. Estimating the black-market rate for a late-model iPhone.
“You are not married,” the kid said. “You wear no ring.”
Klaus blinked. He was so far out of his element, he’d been outwitted by a ten-year-old. He looked over his shoulder, a cautionary move the kid would recognize instantly. Klaus pulled out another hundred euros.
“All right. Take this, keep the phone if you want. Forget about the delivery, but take it away. Go toward the beach. Do it right now, or I will find someone else.”
Klaus held the money just out of reach.
The boy smiled, and Klaus knew his decision was made. The kid snatched the cash and the phone, and scampered away toward the northern exit.
Klaus moved into a deep shadow and watched the crowd.
His heart sank when he spotted one of his pursuers.
He wore a dark blue shirt and had a boxer’s face—flattened nose, cauliflower ears, scarred forehead.
The Russians had split up to find him. The boxer held his phone in front of him as if it were a divining rod, his eyes flicking between the screen and the faces in the market.
Then he stopped suddenly and whirled toward the exit—the direction in which the kid had just run off.
Klaus had guessed correctly. They were using an app of some kind to track his phone.
What else don’t I know?
He backed behind a rack of hanging blankets. The boxer swerved away and disappeared. Klaus waited, not sure where the man’s partners were. Would they all chase after the kid?
He gave it five minutes.
Then he gave it five more.
He set out to the south, more with hope than a plan.
He wondered how accurate their tracking system was.
Would they catch up with the kid? Possibly, but they would be looking for Klaus himself and the system didn’t seem highly accurate—they hadn’t realized he was in a different apartment earlier.
Would they circle back when they realized he’d tricked them?
Or were they halfway to the sea and out of ideas?
He headed into the heart of the Bni Makada arrondissement, a dense residential district.
He scurried amid multistory apartment buildings and narrow streets.
Each block looked the same as the last. He had nowhere to go and was running out of cash.
He no longer had a phone. This last thought led to a corollary that struck like a bolt of lightning.
He had ditched his phone in such a panic, he’d forgotten that it held the number of his CIA handler.
He could have memorized the number easily—Klaus had a gift for numbers—yet he hadn’t bothered. One more lesson learned.
A far more important number, thankfully, was chiseled indelibly in his mind.
Klaus had placed reams of damning information about the GRU’s finances in a secure online vault, one that could only be unlocked by a twenty-character password he’d memorized.
If he could get back in touch with his handler, the crown jewel of his defection was intact.
Klaus entered a minor park and began wandering.
The burden of his situation felt suddenly immense.
The midday heat was insufferable, and a gusting wind sent swirls of dust dancing through the air.
He diverted to an empty bench and sat in the shade of a jacaranda tree.
A group of old men sat at tables nearby playing Dama, a variant of checkers, and mothers chased squealing children across the adjacent playground.
“What now?” Klaus whispered to no one.
It felt strange, in this digital world, to have fallen so completely off-grid.
No contacts to call or message, no questions answered by chatbots.
He recalled a newscast he had seen the morning after he’d gone into hiding.
The American diplomatic flight he’d nearly boarded had crashed in southern Turkey.
There was only one rational explanation.
The Russians thought he had made the flight after all, and in their desperation, they’d taken it down.
Now, clearly, they had figured out he was still in play.
Bringing down the jet was an indicator of how badly they wanted to stop him. In truth, he wasn’t surprised. He had hard evidence of financial crimes. Hundreds of billions of dollars were at stake. But there was also something else.
One time-sensitive scrap of intelligence.
Klaus was no military tactician, but he knew how the Russians operated. Something big was about to happen in Libya.
He had funneled money to resurrect a remote airfield in the Maghreb.
Shifted more to hire a group of mercenaries to staff it.
And he was intimately familiar, in the way only a money manager can be, with the man who was running the operation.
Andrei Malenkov, the former head of the SSD, had made some very unusual financial moves in recent months.
Moves implying that whatever was happening in the Maghreb, it would happen very soon.
And if Klaus couldn’t get that information to the right people? God only knew what Malenkov was about to unleash.
He got up off the bench and started moving.