Chasing Ivan
Authors: Tim Tigner
CHASING IVAN
AN ACHILLES NOVELLA
Tim Tigner
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Tim Tigner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, please address Vontiv Publishing via vontiv.com
For more information on this novel or Tim Tigner’s other thrillers, please visit
timtigner.com
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to the Goodreads members whose feedback on the beta version of this novella helped to make it stronger: R. James Bishop, Doug Branscombe, Ian Cockerill, Denny Eckstein, Geof Ferrell, Emily Hagman, Robert Lawrence, Margaret Lovett, Tony McCafferty, Joe McKinley, Bill Overton, Stan Resnicoff, Chris Seelbach, Todd Simpson, Marsha Stutsman, and Slaven Tomasi.
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Chapter 1
I LOVE CLIMBING. Give me a cliff face and a bag of climbing chalk and I’ll be whistling all the way to the top. But I had no chalk today. No cliff face either. I was 200 feet up one of London’s famous residential towers, clinging to the weathered stone in a dove gray business suit.
For the last eight weeks, I’d been tailing a couple of people while waiting for a legend to strike. That legend was a Russian criminal mastermind known as Ivan the Ghost, a man so skilled in the art of invisibility, his very existence was in doubt.
The CIA’s new director had learned that Ivan was planning to rig the upcoming London mayoral election by forcing the leading candidate to withdraw at the last minute. Director Rider was eager to exploit this rare intelligence coup to score political points and eliminate Ivan. Permanently and covertly. That was where I came in, as a member of the CIA’s Special Operations Group.
Ivan didn’t use guns or gangsters, and he never left a trail or trace. He concocted elaborate schemes, traps that caught his victims unaware and then kept them silent. Creative coercions and invisible operations were his trademarks, his sources of pride and fame.
We expected Ivan to strike at the mayoral candidate through one of two relatives, either his daughter Emily, or his brother Evan. But that was just a guess. Still, we were thrilled that for once, for the first time, we just might be one step ahead of The Ghost.
“Have you got eyes on him yet?” Oscar asked.
Oscar Pincus, my control back at Langley, was sporadically monitoring the situation via my earpiece. Oscar had just joined the Agency. A pet placed in a plum role by a new director more concerned with influence than competence. Oscar and I had both become excited when our electronic surveillance picked up Evan lying to his office manager about an appointment we knew he didn’t have. Our hearts really started racing when he slipped away to an apartment on the nineteenth floor of the luxury residence to which I now clung. Our hope and expectation was that his clandestine meeting was part of a cleverly construed trap arranged by Ivan. “I made it up to nineteen. Now I just have to climb over to unit B.”
“So that’s a no. Ivan’s finally about to strike, and we’re blind.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t have time for Oscar right now. My current position was more than physically precarious. The British government didn’t know I was here. In fact, I’d be screwed if they found out. Indoctrination into the SOG came with the warning that the US government will disavow agents to avoid embarrassment. Disavow. What a term. It’s the grown-up equivalent to shrugging. But then that’s politics, which resembles espionage, in that it revolves around lies. The difference, incidentally, is that spies don’t smile while lying.
I got a grip on the rail of the nineteenth-floor balcony, and began sliding left, hand to hand. I kept my legs raised out to the side as I went. That way, the residents of the eighteenth floor wouldn’t see them dangling while enjoying the view over afternoon tea. It was a clear day, so from that altitude I could see the city skyscrapers to the south, and the sun reflecting off The Regent’s Park boating lake to the west. Theoretically, that meant millions of people could see me as well. Good thing I was wearing gray.
With forty meters to cover and not a second to spare, my hands slipped into a familiar climbing rhythm. Quick but cautious. As a free-solo enthusiast, I was used to climbing without ropes or tools. The business suit, however, was working against me. It bottled in heat, which brought on the enemy. It wasn’t only job interviews where sweaty palms could be deadly. The fresh pigeon poop wasn’t helping either.
I’d just rounded the corner when crescendoing screams from the balcony below shattered the still air. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” Looking down as my heart regained its normal rhythm, I saw that the afternoon sun had cast my shadow in the wrong place at the wrong time. A silver-haired woman stared back at me, her mouth agape and her eyes bugged wide, watering the floor rather than her geraniums.
I always tried to smile in the face of adversity, and in this case the smile was literal. “It’s okay, luv,” I said, invoking a gentlemanly British accent. “I slipped, but caught myself.”
I pulled myself up onto the balcony above her with a couple quick, fluid moves, and then peered back over to reassure her. “No worries. I’m quite safe now, luv.”
As I ducked back, I heard her speaking to somebody. Then an elderly male voice said, “I’m calling the police.”
Bloody hell. The response time to an intruder alert at a posh place like this would be minutes.
I immediately dropped to the balcony floor and began a rapid low-crawl toward unit 19-B. Looking over my right shoulder through the glass wall of the flat I’d just invaded, I spotted a pigtailed girl playing with colorful figurines. She was seated facing the kitchen, where her mother was busy chopping vegetables. If her mom looked up, the police would get another frantic call and I’d likely end up playing aerial hide-and-seek with a helicopter.
I made it to the wall that separated my current location from Evan’s without drawing her eye. While that was good news, the barrier before me was not. The architect had made it virtually impossible for even the bold and the brave to use the balconies to hop between flats. I was going to have to go back over the rail and shimmy along the edge again. But I’d have to do it between floors nineteen and twenty this time since the couple on eighteen likely still watched their window, anxiously anticipating more excitement.
Still praying that the girl’s mother wouldn’t look up from her knife, I climbed onto the balcony rail, braced myself with my left hand against the wall, and mapped out my jump. To reach the lip of the balcony above, I was going to have to spring up about two feet and back about one.