by Blake Banner
“Us, but she refused to be more precise than that.”
“Did she tell you what her mission was?”
“Yeah,” I lied, “to get close to Yushbaev and kill him.”
Seventeen
He took a pack of Camels from his jacket pocket and showed it to me.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“You can burst into flames as far as I’m concerned.”
He smiled and nodded as he pulled a silver Zippo from the other pocket and flipped it open. “The old ones are always the best.”
He lit up and inhaled deeply. As he blew the smoke at the ceiling he pulled a Glock 19 from his jacket and laid it on the table.
“Harry, I am going to need to know who you are.”
I looked at the weapon a moment, and then at Colonel James Armitage.
“That may be so, Colonel, but I don’t need to tell you. I thought we were pals now and we were going to cooperate.”
“That’s precisely why I need to know who you are. There are too many unanswered questions about you. I’m assuming you’re from the Company, but the CIA deny your existence and you have not confirmed you’re with them. You simply haven’t denied it. So before we go any further, I want to know who you are. I have a team five minutes away who will happily take you to the Incirlik airbase where we will waterboard you until either you talk, the CIA claim you as their own, or you vomit up your lungs, which is probably the most likely outcome of the exercise.”
“Or I could break your damned neck and throw you off the terrace.”
“You could certainly try, but the condition you’re in, and the shape I’m in, I wouldn’t recommend it. Also,” he looked thoughtful, “something tells me you’re not a guy who’d find it easy to kill an American officer who was simply doing his job.”
I sighed. “You have a better opinion of the CIA than most Americans have, Colonel.”
I pulled my cell from my pocket and dialed the brigadier.
“Harry, the team is on its way.”
“Yeah, there’s been a development. The colonel has left.”
“What?”
“And Colonel James Armitage is here with me. He found me on the floor with the remains of a broken vase around my head.”
“She attacked you?”
“From behind. But here’s the thing. Colonel Armitage believes we should collaborate. As an alternative, and if I can’t prove to him that I am with the Company, he proposes to take me to the Incirlik airbase and waterboard me until either you claim me, I start talking or I vomit up my lungs.”
“I am inclined to let him do that. How the hell could you let her get away?”
“She was wearing a towel…”
“You slept with her?”
“No, sir! Look, can we discuss this later? The colonel is getting away, we are wasting time and I don’t want to throw Colonel Armitage off the terrace.”
“No, you have made quite enough blunders for one day, Harry. Don’t compound it by killing a US Air Force colonel. All right. I’ll see what I can do, but getting legitimate CIA papers at this short notice… Tell him to stand by. Where did she go?”
“Colonel Armitage believes she went back to the yacht. He has people watching it to see if she turns up.”
“You don’t agree, do you?”
“You might well think that, sir, but time is of the essence.”
“All right.”
He hung up and I looked at Armitage. “He said to stand by.”
“Who is he?”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh, not even your boss would let you know that. You find out who I am, and then you forget.”
“Suits me.”
It was a long, tedious half hour, after which there was a knock at the door and I went to open it. I wasn’t all that surprised to see Araminta there with an attaché case.
“Good evening, Harry. Can I come in?”
I stood back and gestured to the dining table. Armitage stood. I said, “Colonel James Armitage, US Air Force, this is Jane Doe. Jane Doe, meet Colonel James Armitage.” To her I said, “Can I offer you a drink?”
“Sure, bourbon, two rocks.” She laid the case on the table and sat.
“OK, Colonel, I have a number of documents here, one of which will satisfy your curiosity, if you get to see it.” She reached inside her dark blue jacket and pulled out a leather case, which she handed to Armitage. “I am a CIA officer, Araminta White, and I am authorized by the Central Intelligence Agency to provide you with information regarding this man’s operation, in so far as it affects the Air Force’s attempts to recover Colonel Jane Harris. However, there is a condition.”
“There always is with you people.”
“You must accept, in writing, that you are aware, and it has been made clear to you, that the information I am about to give you is subject to Title Eighteen of the United States Code, Crimes and Criminal Procedure, Chapter Thirty-Seven, Section Seven Ninety-Eight, Disclosure of Classified Information. Do you understand that, and are you willing to sign said document?”
He handed back her badge. “Yes, I understand, and I am willing to sign your document.”
She opened her case and slid a piece of paper across the table to him. He glanced over it and signed it, then handed it back.
“This is Ronald Eastman, he is an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency investigating the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of Colonel Jane Harris of the United States Air Force. He is not, I repeat not, authorized to collaborate or cooperate with any other government agency or department in this investigation. In fact, if we could, Colonel Armitage, we would request that the Air Force suspend its investigation until we are done. But we can’t. Is there anything else I can help you with, Colonel?”
He had been staring at me throughout. Now he shook his head. “Eastman, huh?” He sighed. “No, there is nothing you can help me with. But you can be damned sure we will not suspend our investigation, and we will be watching you, Mr. Eastman, like hawks.”
He stood and made his way to the door. There he stopped and looked back, smiling. “That’ll be one for the club, huh, Harry? SAS man turned CIA officer rendered unconscious by a female US Air Force colonel.”
He closed his eyes to laugh more thoroughly, then opened the door and left. Araminta turned to look at me and burst out laughing too.
“That’s funny, real funny. Even I can see the humor in that.” I picked up my glass. “Oh, wait, I was wrong. No, I can’t.”
“The great and fearsome destructive force that is Harry Bauer…” She hooted. “Mr. Primal, Macho Man himself!” She hooted some more.
“Are you done? Your hooting is hurting my head.”
She toned it down to a chuckle. Then said, “The brigadier is not happy.”
“He can join the club. I am the president.”
“How’d it happen?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because he told me to tell you to tell me so I could tell him.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Have you been practicing that on the way here?”
“No, I’m a double Gemini, we find that kind of thing easy. Now what happened?”
I went through it in detail, then told her, “Once we got back here she said she had been blackmailed by Yushbaev.”
She looked skeptical. “Jane, blackmailed? How?”
“That’s what I asked her. Apparently there were a couple of years when she dropped out of college. She was a bad girl back then and hooked up with a Hell’s Angel by the name of Bull. That was in California. She rode with the gang for almost two years.”
“Jane?”
“I know. It’s hard to imagine. I’m just telling you what she told me. She described herself as a one hundred percent biker bitch. They grew marijuana in the basement, sold coke, did all the stuff crazy bikers do. Her parents had no idea what had happened to her. We should check if there was a missing persons report filed by them at that time.”
Araminta s
hrugged. “So she smoked some dope and snorted some coke. I did a lot worse than that, I told my superiors, assured them I had left all that behind and that was the end of it. Hell, if we sacked everyone in the intelligence community who has smoked dope and snorted coke, we’d have to close down national security!”
“Yeah, I know. I’m not sure I share your bleak view, and besides, the Air Force is not the CIA. But she did a lot more than smoke cannabis and snort coke. According to her she smoked maybe a dozen joints a day before, as she put it, crawling into bed at four in the morning. She was permanently stoned and drunk, but the worst part is that she trafficked the stuff.”
“Colonel Jane Harris trafficked marijuana? I can’t believe that!”
“And coke. Apparently they used to drive down to Arizona, collect it from the Mexican border, then take it back and sell it.”
“So why did she stop? How did she miraculously transform into Miss Driven Probity?”
“OK, tone it down, Araminta. I’m just telling you what she said. And try to remember she’s a friend of mine and I care about her.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Did you let her go?”
“Will you just shut up and listen?”
“Fine, shoot.”
“According to her, she woke up one morning with, in her words, one suicidal hangover too many. She took her bike, rode it to the bus station, called the cops and told them where her boyfriend’s stash was, and went back home to her parents. She cleaned herself up, went back to college, and joined the Air Force.”
“Her boyfriend was called Bull? That’s what that story is, a load of bull. Jane is not a bad girl. She is Miss Driven Probity and has been since she was born. I’m sorry if you don’t like me talking about her like that, Harry. I do happen to like her, but there is no way she was driving around on Harleys when she was eighteen, smoking dope and snorting coke. I don’t buy it.”
“Have you read her file?”
“No.”
“Then shut up.”
“So how did Yushbaev get this information to blackmail her?”
“We know Cavendish and his Sinaloa pals were watching me and sharing information. Apparently Yushbaev was in on that too. Cavendish told me on his yacht that they had noticed I had a relationship with the colonel. So Yushbaev investigated her background and found there were two years missing. They dug a little deeper and found Bull.”
“Well if Yushbaev found Bull, so can we, and check if he was prosecuted back when Jane was eighteen or nineteen.”
I nodded. “We need to do that, and we need to sanitize her.”
“Sanitize her? After what she’s done? Are you out of your mind?”
“What has she done, Araminta?” I found myself echoing the colonel’s own words. “She just did exactly what I did in Panama, with you in fact[10]. She told them she worked for the CIA’s Special Activities Center. She did not compromise us.”
“If all of this is true, Harry, and you seem to be willing to buy it, why is she so desperate to get away? Why did she crack you over the head with a vase and run? And if Colonel Armitage is right, she went running right back to Gabriel.”
“Because Yushbaev has information, and photographs which, if she does not go back to him, he will send to the Air Force brass. She could face prison time, she could be found guilty of spying for the Russian Mafia, and if the Air Force digs deep enough they could find her ties to Cobra. In her words, the best she could hope for was that she would be disgraced and lose her career. The worst would be to go to prison for the rest of her life. In either case, Yushbaev’s organization would come after her and kill her. What she wanted was for us to let her deal with it her way. I got the idea her intention was to kill Yushbaev. She said I of all people should have understood that, and she’s right.”
“Then she cracked you on the head, stole some of your clothes and escaped.”
I nodded. “She did what I would have done. And that’s interesting.”
“Interesting. Yes, I guess you could say it was interesting.”
I pointed at her. “She behaved like a badass biker bitch.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Huh…” She made a face, sipped her drink and smacked her lips. “So, what now?”
“Her cracking me on the head notwithstanding, she is not me, and if she tries to kill Yushbaev the consequences will be unthinkable.”
“Yeah, well, your ill-concealed feelings for the colonel notwithstanding, there is also the fact that her innocence is far from proven with that crock of shit she sold you. And even if it is true, there is the fact that if Yushbaev gets tired of playing her as a bait to try and catch you, he might just start cutting bits off her until she breaks and tells him everything he wants to know.”
“That is another way of looking at it. Either way, I have to go and kill Yushbaev before she tries to.”
She opened her case and withdrew a familiar manila envelope which she dropped on the table in front of me.
“Anthony Sams, if anybody asks, you play the stock market, you’re an entrepreneur based in San Francisco. You’re in Russia on holiday but scouting for investment opportunities. But ideally, don’t talk to anybody. Just find him and kill him. By the way, the Apollonis is moored at Kabardinka, only now it’s called the Lady Jane.”
“How appropriate.”
“I told him it was a bad idea, but he insisted. The brigadier has his moments of whimsy. It’s got the same cargo it had in Koufonisi, only there is some additional stuff. I have rented you a Range Rover which you can pick up at the airport. You’re booked in at the Primorskiy, Ulitsa Mira Five, in Kabardinka, where the yacht is moored. And Harry?”
“What?”
“Get it right this time.”
“Count on it. Do we have any intel on the house, the grounds…anything?”
She shook her head. “Zero, nada, zilch, squat. Well,” she danced her head from side to side, “I’m exaggerating. We have a few fuzzy satellite photographs.”
“Good, good, that’s great.”
“And there is something else.”
“What?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s two AM, and you fly at ten tomorrow morning. It’s an air taxi, you’re really pushing up your expense account on this job, pal. Flight time is about an hour, so you’ll get there at eleven. Collect your baggage and your car, you should be at the hotel in time for lunch. Orders from the brigadier: Take the afternoon to formulate a plan. Execute it that night or the next day at the latest. He told me to tell you, there is no time.”
I nodded. “I am aware. The plan is, break into the palace, kill everybody and bring the colonel home.”
“Seems to cover it.”
I sighed and drained my glass. “I’d better get some sleep.”
She nodded but didn’t move. I frowned at her. She sucked her teeth and looked at the wall for a moment.
“Harry?”
“What?”
“You might not come back.”
“Thanks. I know that.”
“I like you. I’d kind of miss you.”
I scowled for a moment, then said, “Thanks.”
“Do you think you might need some help getting to sleep?”
I was about to tell her to go to hell, but then wondered why I would do that. So instead I said, “Yeah, maybe. And you can drive me to the airport in the morning.”
Eighteen
Anapa International Airport was not what I had expected. I had expected a grim relic from the Soviet era, but it was big, bright and modern, and milling with people in Bermuda shorts and open shirts. I collected my Range Rover from the rental parking lot and, at just after eleven thirty, I pulled out of the airport complex and onto the M25, headed south and east toward Kabardinka and my yacht, the Apollonis; now renamed the Lady Jane.
I mused, as I cruised through the dry, yellow fields with scattered copses of trees I did not recognize, that the brigadier should have known that it was considered bad luck to rename boats. I doubted he’d
bothered with the whole renaming ceremony, but who knew? The Brits were by and large crazy, and Brits like the brigadier were crazier than most.
As I came in sight of the sea I intoned, “Oh mighty ruler of the seas and oceans, to whom all ships, and those who venture upon your vast domain, are required to pay homage, I implore you in your graciousness to expunge for all time the name Apollonis, which has ceased to be an entity in your kingdom. As proof thereof, I submit this ingot bearing her name, to be corrupted through your powers, and forever be purged from the sea.”
I smiled. I couldn’t remember it exactly, but it was something like that. I would have to cast a bottle of wine and a silver dollar into the sea to appease Poseidon when I climbed onboard. I am not superstitious, but it pays to be careful.
After half an hour I arrived at Novorossiyskaya Bay. It was about nine or ten miles across, shallow, with the Novorossiysk port at the western end, and the small holiday resort of Kabardinka at the eastern end. There was no word for what I saw of Novorossiysk other than just plain ugly. The best you could say for it was that it had a lot of trees. But you couldn’t help feeling that was purely accidental in a town that had worked so hard to eradicate all human warmth from its architecture, design and city planning. It was an industrial port that had humans in it because they were needed to make the port work.
Kabardinka was different. It was almost pretty. As I entered the town I had the sudden feeling of having slipped through a warp in space-time and wound up in rural northern California. It was leafy and green, laid-back, with curious, eclectic architecture and roads that rambled through suburban woodlands just because it was nice to do so, not because they had to get anywhere.
At the market on Ulitsa Revolyutsionnaya I turned right into Ulitsa Mira which led among abundant trees, roadside cafés, restaurants and gift shops, to the beach and eventually my hotel, the Primorskiy.
It was a small, cozy guest house on the outskirts of the town, overlooking the southeastern end of the bay. It had a small parking lot at the back of the building, where I left the Range Rover, and a flight of seven broad steps rising to an entrance porch with shiny brass handles on shiny, plate-glass doors.