The paint was cracked and peeling.
The aging wood creaked and complained as the white caps roared toward the shore and slapped angrily against the hull.
The boat rocked back and forth in the sea water.
Reagan lost his balance.
He grabbed for the rail to keep from falling.
The wind wailed.
Rain hammered the docks.
It pounded the shoreline like fists against a brass cymbal.
The waves beat like kettle drums against the boats.
Sand motioned for Reagan to stay where he was.
“What’s wrong?” the British agent asked.
“Something’s not right.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Wilcox should have shot us by now.”
VALERY DERNOV SAT in the front seat of a black Moskvich 2142 Sedan, his binoculars trained on a line of boats wrestling with their ropes in the harbor.
The wind was howling.
The wind was threatening to rip them loose and toss them back to the sea.
A dark gray topcoat was wrapped around his shoulders.
The color matched the fedora he was wearing.
His hands were steady.
He needed a shave.
Some said he always needed a shave.
A faint smile creased his hatchet face.
His friends knew him as the Butcher.
It was said he could make a dead man talk.
“There are two of them,” he said to the Russian Colonel sitting beside him.
His voice was like ice.
He removed the binoculars and let them hang around his neck.
His eyes were as cold as his voice.
Colonel Gorya Krupin shifted uncomfortably in his seat and adjusted his wire-rim spectacles.
His bulldog face was scarred with pockmarks.
His full dress uniform fit a size too tight.
He had gained twenty pounds since he bought it.
His eyes were a dull green, little different from the color of scum on a poor farmer’s pond.
He was blowing on his hands to warm them.
“The businessmen from the airport?” the Colonel asked.
Dernov nodded and again raised the binoculars to his eyes.
The rain had formed a fine mist that lay thick and ghostly white upon the Black Sea.
“I did not trust them when I saw them,” Krupin said.
“That’s why we have not let them out of our sight.”
“The American. He is looking for the woman, too?”
“That is my belief.”
“Does he know where she is?”
Dernov shook his head. “No. But he will find her.”
“How do you know?”
“A man like that won’t stop until he does. And when he finds her, we will take the lovely Pauline Bellerose to stand trial for treason.”
“He may not give her up.”
Dernov shrugged. “A bullet is a great persuader.”
The Colonel chuckled. “Do you think Pauline Bellerose will ever stand trial?”
“Of course, Colonel.”
A crooked grin spread across Dernov’s face.
“You will be the judge,” he told the Colonel. “And I will be the executioner.”
Krupin removed his spectacles and dried the rain from the lens.
“She is a beautiful woman, Valery. Too beautiful to die.”
“I have a simple solution.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It will be a long trial,” Dernov said matter-of-factly. “We will give her every opportunity to save herself.”
The rain grew more intense.
Dernov strained to see a blurred outline of the boat.
The docks faded into a mist as gray as the undercurrents of a boiling sea.
It was as if the rain had stormed across the sea from afar and washed the boat away.
Rainy Night 15
SAND FOUND WILCOX seated in the captain’s quarters, both arms placed on a desk, his fingers intertwined, his chin resting on his chest, and his face blown away by a large caliber slug, probably from some Russian pistol that possessed the same firing power as the Desert Eagle .50 caliber semi-automatic.
He no longer had a face.
It was a bloody, ragged hole of torn skin, flesh, and bone.
His desk was neat but piled with year-old magazines and stacks of copy paper that appeared to have been untouched.
A whale oil lamp was burning next to a newspaper folded beneath a cup of stale coffee.
Sand set the cup aside and picked up the newspaper.
He couldn’t read a word.
A bottle of Starka Krakowkska whiskey had not yet been opened.
Each time the boat was whipped without mercy by a wild wind, strange, kaleidoscopic fingers of color cavorted along the walls, blue and golden dancers spinning up toward the beams, locking with the shadows and falling away as if a dying day had taken them and tossed them into a sea as black as its name.
Sand waited until Reagan walked uneasily into the room.
“It appears that someone surprised him,” he said.
Reagan stared in stunned dismay for a moment, then sat down on the corner of the desk.
He held his head with both hands.
“They didn’t give him a chance,” he said.
“In war, they never do.”
Reagan raised his hands in resignation. “But we aren’t at war.”
“Declared. Undeclared. On land. At sea. In No Man’s Land. At home. Among strangers. When a man from one country tracks down a man from another country and kills him,” Sand said, “it’s war whether it takes place on a battlefield, in an alley, on the streets, in a bedroom, or in a captain’s cabin. No one remembers our wars, Reagan, because we don’t have large casualties. One dies here. One dies there. An assassin’s bullet hits home. An assassin is dumped in a ditch. Our stories don’t wind up on the front page and usually not in an obituary column. Our wars are reduced to agate type and wedged at the bottom of the page, somewhere among the want ads.”
“You make what we do for our countries sound rather insignificant, old boy.”
Sand nodded. “It is.”
“Then why do we do it?” Reagan wanted to know.
“I don’t know about you, old boy,” Sand said. “I do it because that’s what I was trained to do, I’m pretty damned efficient at it, and I don’t know how to do anything else, nor do I want to take time to learn.”
Reagan pushed himself off the desk and ambled to the doorway. “You think it’s just a job?” he asked.
“I do,” Sand replied. “I travel the world. I meet beautiful women in beautiful places. I buy their wine, give them someone else’s name, hint at love without ever promising love, take five seconds to line up a split second shot, kiss the closest girl goodbye, and then I’m gone. It’s a regular job.” He winked. “But I must say it does have its fringe benefits.”
He began thumbing through the stack of paper piled the highest.
Maps.
Rules.
Regulations.
Weather charts.
Weather reports.
He imagined every boat, large or small, tied to the docks had a similar stack on the captain’s desk.
“Do you think they took Pauline?” Reagan asked.
He fell into a chair against the far wall.
Once it had been white.
Now it was yellowed.
Flecks of blood had soaked into the fabric.
“I don’t think she was here.” Sand said.
“Then why did they kill Wilcox?”
“Anger. Frustration.” Sand shrugged. “They were cold. They were wet. They had been working all night and all day. They were probably tired of looking for a beautiful needle in a dirty haystack. They fully expected to find Pauline here. They didn’t. They asked Wilcox where she was, and he didn’t even know she was missing. They thought he was lying. In some
circles, there is no crime greater than lying. It seems somebody got mad, stuck a big gun in his face, and pulled the trigger.”
“But Wilcox was the only lead they had.”
Reagan glanced down and saw his hands trembling again.
He crossed his arms to hide them.
“Wilcox was a dead end.”
“So where is Pauline?” Reagan sounded agitated.
“Waiting for us.”
“She doesn’t even know we’re coming.”
Sand grinned.
He felt the tension ease in his shoulders and work its way down his back.
“It’s called hope,” he said.
“If she’s got hope,” Reagan said, “she has more than we do.”
He glanced down at Wilcox.
His eyes were filled with pity.
Then again, Sand thought, Reagan might just be feeling sorry for himself.
He was not a front line soldier.
He didn’t give orders.
He merely typed them so someone else could carry them out.
He didn’t concern himself with the consequences.
Good.
Or bad.
He didn’t have to.
He had other orders to type.
Reagan didn’t see the dead.
He sent planes so someone else could bring the corpse home.
Soldiers ceased to become flesh and blood.
They were only names on a tombstone.
Someone wept for them.
Reagan tried not to remember them.
“What do you propose we do with Wilcox?” the Brit asked.
“We’ll cut the ropes on the dock when we leave,” Sand said, “and let the sea take him wherever it wants to go.”
Reagan spun around with an indignant look on his face. “That doesn’t seem like the proper treatment to give a man who has sacrificed so much for his country.” He spit the words out. “Wilcox deserves better.”
“Don’t worry,” Sand said.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Wilcox won’t mind.”
“You’re a hard sonuvabitch,” Reagan snapped.
Sand’s grin turned to a grateful smile. “That, old boy, just may be one of the nicer things anyone has ever said about me.”
He opened the trunk between the wall and the sofa and found what he thought he might find.
He reached in and pulled out an armload of clothes.
He pitched a pair of fleeced-lined Ripstop snow pants and a dark Navy woolen sweater toward Reagan.
“Put these on,” Sand said.
“They may not fit.”
“They’re dry.”
“I don’t like wearing a dead man’s clothes,” Reagan muttered.
“He won’t need them.”
“They give me the creeps.”
“It’s better than pneumonia.”
Sand pulled on a pair of dark green snow pants and worked his arms into a black woolen hoodie.
Reagan was right.
The clothes didn’t fit.
Sand didn’t care.
They had not yet fought a losing battle against the rain.
In the closet, he found a pair of Bekesha Russian sheepskin coats.
Thank God for Wilcox.
He was prepared for the cold.
Sand wondered if he had prepared to die.
Or had he grown careless?
In a small war that was fought more aggressively with propaganda, stolen data, and smuggled secrets, it was easy to become negligent.
Someone came aboard.
Wilcox must have known him.
Maybe he had offered the man jigger of a whiskey.
Sand assumed it was a man.
He had known women even more lethal.
Whoever it was didn’t stay long enough to quench his thirst, if he had one.
He had other things on their minds.
One man.
Maybe more.
No names.
No faces.
It might be the greatest danger confronting anyone trapped and immersed in a small war where casualties were hardly ever counted and never made the front page of any newspaper.
Forget to look over his shoulder one time, day or night, and a knife would cut his heart out.
Sand knew.
Sand owned the knife.
Rainy Night 16
THE NIGHT HAD grown darker, encased in a chamber of fog and rain that melded the sky and earth together like straps holding a man inside a grave before he closed his eyes for the final time and took his last breath.
The wind had calmed.
The whitecaps had become more subdued and less hostile than before.
But the storm showed no signs of departing Odessa.
It was like an unwelcome guest who had stayed too long, talked too much, and left his host’s nerves in tattered shambles.
Rain could pick at a man’s sensibilities, make his skin crawl, settle into his mind like a nightmare he could neither remember nor forget, leave him chilled even on a hot day, and when the night was cold, rain could put a gun in a man’s hand and convince him to pull the trigger.
Life was all mud.
And blood.
Hope turned inside out.
Love gone wrong.
Screams unheard.
Prayers unanswered.
And why was Pauline Bellerose missing?
And where would she go?
And who would find her first?
Sand paced the floor.
He was a man in the dark.
It was not an unfamiliar feeling.
He allowed the fragments of his memory to replay the last thirty-six hours.
It was not something he liked to do.
He sometimes had little choice.
Most likely he had no choice.
The only face he remembered belonged to a man named Hancock.
Who was Hancock?
And why did he die?
Who pulled the trigger?
And why did Roland Sand feel so guilty?
Only a sparse handful of words leaked out of the darkness.
“Is he good with numbers?”
“They make sense to him.”
“How about puzzles?”
“He can take them apart or put them together.”
“Even the tough ones?”
“Sand’s mind doesn’t work like yours and mine.”
Numbers.
What did this assignment have to do with numbers?
He tried to search a memory bank that a bullet had shattered like a coating of ice beneath heavy boots.
He could still feel the boots kicking the back of his head.
When did it starting hurting?
Would it ever stop?
And where were the numbers he must find?
Train schedule?
Hotel address?
Room number?
Phone number?
Life was filled with numbers.
He saw them everywhere he looked.
And where had he looked last?
Sand sat back on a chair in the captain’s quarters and laughed.
Sand never laughed.
It was so simple.
Why did he always make it seem so hard?
He had held the numbers in his hand.
They had been scrawled in ink across the top of the tape recorder he had found hidden beneath Pauline’s mattress.
He walked across the room and picked up his tweed overcoat.
It was soaked with rain.
It was cold to the touch.
He reached inside the pocket and removed the Bible.
Opening it, he looked again at the numbers.
Someone had written them in a hurry.
Someone had written them on the run.
Twenty.
Seven.
Twenty-Seven.
Could it be the combination on a lock?
Possibly.
But where was the lock?
/> Was it a street number?
Perhaps.
But what was the name of the street?
Was it an account number?
Maybe.
But what was the account?
Was it a page number?
Could be.
But where was the book?
A curious stillness settled over his shoulders.
Sand tightened his grip on the Bible.
Maybe he was holding it.
He turned to page twenty-seven.
On it was the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis.
He looked at verse twenty-seven.
It read: And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See the smell of my son is as the smell of the field, which the Lord hath blessed.
Sand frowned.
It didn’t make sense.
He took the words apart from the sentences and tried to rearrange them differently.
He felt foolish.
None of them made sense.
Maybe someone had been wrong.
Maybe he wasn’t able to solve puzzles after all.
He sat down on the sofa and stared at the numbers.
So simple.
So elementary.
So elusive.
Sand tried a different approach.
He again opened the Bible and looked at the books of the Old Testament.
He counted down.
The twentieth book was Proverbs.
Sand took a chance.
He turned to Proverbs and found the seventh chapter.
He looked for verse twenty-seven.
He read: Her house leads to Sheol, descending to death’s catacombs.
He paused.
He felt a cold shiver wandering down his spine.
Was that the message?
Were those the words Pauline had left for him?
Did they mean what he thought they meant?
He looked at Reagan, sitting on the edge of the desk. “How familiar are you with Odessa?” he asked.
“I was here before the war.” Reagan removed the pipe from his mouth and blew a small circle of blue smoke toward the window. “I left when Ukraine decided to cut itself loose from Russia and go it alone. I’ve met with Wilcox a time or two. That’s it.”
“What about the underground?”
“You talking about a spy network?”
“I’m talking about catacombs.”
Reagan thought for a moment before answering, “Well, Odessa is fairly well known for its catacombs. They’ve been stacking bones back in those tunnels for the last five hundred years. Probably longer.”
“What do you remember about them.”
Rainy Night To Die Page 8