And there, just inside the door, a security man shadow just behind his left shoulder, stood Our Host.
He was tall, slim, sharp featured, and distinguished looking. His face was lined around the eyes and mouth. His whiter-than-white teeth were small, and the canines were extremely pointed, giving him a vaguely predatory look that was amplified by short, black, flecked-with-gray hair spikily moussed to perfection. I noticed that his double-breasted tuxedo lapels were done in understated grosgrain, not showy silk, and that all the buttons on his jacket cuffs buttoned.
At his shoulder stood the missus, a slim woman with no bra, tiny aroused tits, and upswept hair, sporting an off-the-shoulder, form-fitting dress that must have cost more than most people make in six months. Oh, I knew them from their pictures, just as his eyes told me he knew me from mine. A half-smile crept across his face, then he turned the charm rheostat up all the way to overload, and the half-smile transmogrified into a hospitable, warm expression as he beckoned us forward.
He gave Ashley a quick-flash-of-teeth-nice-to-see-you-so-delighted-you-could-come shake of the head, then passed her off to his wife with the sort of professional, horizontal-motion handshake common to those used to being in long receiving lines. Then he fixed me with his baby violets. Yes, friends, he had purple eyes. I know—people don’t have purple eyes. So I guess he was wearing contacts. Why? Don’t ask, because I sure don’t know. But it did give him a distinctive, wolfish aura, when you combined the eyes with the spiky black-going-silver hair, the thick eyebrows, and the thin, sharp features. I wondered whether his nose was cold and wet, but suppressed any inclination to find out.
He looked me square in the face, his unblinking eyes probing my own, his cool, dry hands sandwiching my right hand, his long, aristocratic fingers reaching as far as the pulse in my wrists.
That was when he growled in one of those generically unidentifiable European-type accents, “I am Stephan Sarkesian, and I am truly delighted to meet you, at long last”—he paused—“face-to-face, Captain.”
Oh, yes, oh, yes, oh, yes. He was speaking English now, but it was . . . Da Voice. That same distinctive, deep, mellow, unctuously lubricious tone I’d first heard on the late and unlamented POG’s cell phone. Now, the pieces fell into place: he knew that I knew that he’d sent a team of Rogue Russkies out to kill me. And he was gauging just how I was going to digest that info.
Okay, now, since this is all going on in Slo-Mo, let me explain what Stephan Sarkesian, aka Steve-o, who is pretty fuckin’ smart, had just managed to do.
What he’d done was that he’d put me on the poly-graph. Oh, not, perhaps, so elaborate as the lie detectors that Christians In Action use to double-check their agents. But I was being given a flutter, just as thoroughly as if I’d been sitting in a chair and with the straps around my chest and wrist, and rubber cups on my fingers.
But he was doing it all manually. He was checking my eyes for the sorts of micromomentary fluctuations that signal mendacity in answers. Simultaneously, his hands were monitoring my pulse, and my sweat, and my tactile reactions.
Was it perfect? No. But I had to hand it to him (literally!): he’d wrapped me up pretty fuckin’ good and I hadn’t seen it coming.
But here, my friends, is where the ol’ rubber really meets the road; where we separate the Warriors from the also-rans and the wannabes. The Warrior, you see, is Always In Control. In control of his body; in control of his mind; in control of the whole fucking situation. When my chute malfunctions at thirty-seven thousand feet—seven miles above what Chief Gunner’s Mate/Guns Butch Wells calls terror firmer—I may be surprised by the malfunction itself, but I am not surprised by the situation. Why? Because I have already war-gamed what I will do. I will take control and defeat the malfunction.
When my body is immersed in fifty-three-degree water sans benefit of wet suit, and I still have to make my way across six hundred yards of frigid chop, I WILL PREVAIL because I will control my body; I will not allow myself to become hypothermic. Now, could I do that for an hour, or more? The answer, as you can probably guess, is a resounding NO. The laws of physics can be challenged, and they can be bent by dint of sheer will or sheer adrenaline. But in the end, they are natural laws, and natural laws cannot be permanently altered.
Here and now, in this situation, with Steve Sarkesian’s eyes boring into my own, and his hands, sensitive as any surgeon’s, waiting to perceive any minute change in my physical state, I used every molecule of my existence to MAINTAIN CONTROL OVER MY MIND, MY BODY, AND MY SITUATION.
And so, I looked directly back at him, my eyes hooded as a cobra’s, so he could not see what I was thinking, my hand absolutely steady; the pulse in my wrist and my heart all as controlled and slow as I keep ’em when I’m on the range working out at eight hundred meters with a Remington PSS sniper’s rifle, and an errant heartbeat can cause a missed shot. Oh, no—I gave him NOTHING.
I said: “It is a pleasure to meet you face-to-face, too, Sirzhik. I have learned a lot about you and your organization in the past day. Your employees leave a lot to be desired when it comes to efficiency and thoroughness. But a small part of what I discovered has been helpful to me and to my colleagues back in the United States, as well.”
That’s right—it was MY turn to put him on the spot and see how he handled it. I’m sorry to have to report that Steve-o flunked lunch. How did I know that? I knew it because I was watching the expression on his face. It was changing as quickly as one of those fucking dime-store kaleidoscopes I used to play with as a kid. The ones whose patterns changed when you twisted the cardboard cylinder in front of your eye. Well, Stephan Sarkesian’s expression went from charming, to rage, to confusion, to bewilderment, to horror, to the final comprehension that I’d just performed a classic “Gotcha” on him—all in a matter of about a half-second (let me remind you again that this is all happening in Slo-Mo).
I smiled. “Just kidding.”
He knew I wasn’t kidding. I could tell by looking into his eyes. The eyes really are the doorway to the soul, my friends. And among the things they told me was that this particular asshole had no soul. None at all.
But he was a game player, and so, he played his game gamely. “Really,” he said.
“Really,” I replied.
He took me by the arm, turning to Ashley as he did. “I hope, my dear Major Evans, that you will not mind if I steal Captain Marcinko for a few minutes.”
“Not at all, Mister Sarkesian.”
He looked at me with his violet eyes, took the back of my arm, and guided me toward the door of a small antechamber. “Captain . . .”
I shrugged. “It’s your party, Sirzhik. You want to talk, I’d like to listen.”
He closed the door, leaned on it, and frowned. “I do not use that name anymore, Captain.”
I grabbed a quick look-see. There was probably a couple of million bucks’ worth of art in this room, which didn’t measure more than ten by twelve. The guy obviously had good taste. Or at least his decorator did. “But you named your foundation the Sirzhik Foundation.”
“That,” he said, his face growing serious, “is to remind me who I was; and where I came from.” He paused, as if searching for the right words, even though he struck me as the kind of guy who never, ever, had to search for the right words.
“Captain,” he finally said, “I’d like to lay out for you a few realities about this part of the world.”
“I’m listening.”
And listen I did. The monologue lasted about a quarter of an hour, and it would take up far too many pages in this book for me to give you the whole, unexpurgated text. But let me play Thos. Bowdler for a couple of minutes, and give you the short version of what he said.
He claimed that NGOs56 now play a quasi-official role in diplomacy and finance, especially in emerging economies such as Azerbaijan’s, and that, as such, he considered the Sirzhik Foundation to be an equal of the United States, or any other government, when it came to encouraging diplomacy in
the Caucasus, because of the sheer amount of money he was bringing into the region. “This office,” he told me seriously, “is like an embassy. My chief of staff here is the equivalent of an ambassador. And what we provide is foreign aid.”
He explained that as a European, he understood, much better than anyone in Washington, what Azerbaijan needed in order to develop its natural resources. He insisted that the Americans, being market driven, operated in their own narrow political interest, while he and his foundation tried to operate in the interest of the entire region.
He insisted that missions such as mine only served to divide the host nations. Why? Because I was dealing with the military, and in places like Azerbaijan, the military was seen as callous, brutal, and repressive by most of the population, a throwback to the days of Soviet control. Only NGOs, he said, could bring the Azeris forward into the twenty-first century by encouraging the “right kind” (as he put it) of controlled market economy.
He gave me a real concerned look as he told me he knew about all my current problems with the Navy, and the White House, and how my career was hanging on a thread, all of which had exacerbated my drinking problem. He told me there was a real good place he could get me into if I wanted to dry out without anyone at the Navy knowing about it. I gotta tell you that Tony Merc had laid it on kind of thick when he slipped all that disinformation to the folks who were looking for dirt on moi.
But I guess it worked, because the next thing I knew, he was hinting that there could be big bucks in it for me if I was to share some of the “wisdom,” as he put it, I was gaining during my visit here, with him. He was careful never to mention the words intelligence, or spying, or anything like that. In fact, I gotta tell you that he was smooth, and practiced, and entirely professional. That’s what made him so fucking dangerous.
Well, friends, I listened to him as he piled the manure higher and higher. And it was indeed all horse puckey. Every bit of it.
Now, I wasn’t going to let on that I knew about his ties to all those crime organizations. Or that I suspected he was using his NGO to launder money. Or that I thought he was as dirty as any double-dealing, pond-scum-sucking sphincter I’d come across in a long, long time. I also knew that it was time for me to give him the sort of wake-up call that would rattle his teacup. But I had to do it carefully. If I didn’t play the part right, he’d take me seriously. And I didn’t want him doing that. Not yet. Not until I’d had the opportunity to take a real close look at his operation—and his office. Not until I had the goods on him, put him in the crosshairs, and was s-q-u-e-e-z-i-n-g the trigger.
“That’s all very interesting, Sirzhik,” I said. “But in point of fact, people like you can’t do fuck-all.”
He looked at me as if I was crazy. “Now, Captain—”
I didn’t allow him to continue but stepped in, took him by the lapels, and let him see into the depths of my WARRIOR’s soul by giving him my War Face, up close and personal. “Y’see . . . Sirzhik,” I said, “let’s take a fucking NGO like your foundation. Oh, you have economic clout. And you know a bunch of people who can pull strings. But that’s it. You can’t make policy, because you don’t have a military to back it up.” I paused. “You got a few goons here, a few goons there, but they don’t mean shit. Now me? I’m here as a fucking projection of America’s strength and power.” I lifted his feet clear off the deck and shook him like a shaman’s rattle. “See what I’m talking about, Sirzhik?” I asked, shaking him some more. “That’s fucking power.”
He tried to wriggle away, but I held him close to me. I knew he spoke French, so I told him, “Jap bed, scumbag.”
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “What?”
“Fut-on. Get fucked, asshole.” I shook him some more. “Lemme put that in Russkie. Yob tvoy mat—fuck you.” He struggled, his feet tap-tap-tapping the floor as I held him. But I wasn’t about to let him go. No way.
Then I gave him the Crazy Roguish Biker Gangster Jesse Ventura Look—the one where I cross my eyes and spew saliva when I speak. “They sent me here because I’m a fucking killer, Sirzhik.”
He tried to pull back, because he was getting wet. Oops. He couldn’t move. Now it was time to set the hook. He knew I was dangerous. His body language told me that. But now he had to think I was a complete fool, so he’d leave me alone and let me do my job. I let his feet touch the floor, but I kept hold of his tux. “Now what really makes me mad is your saying I have a drinking problem. I don’t know where you heard it, but it ain’t fuckin’ true. Got that?”
His head bobbed up and down.
“Good. Because lemme tell you, the next time you talk about my fucking drinking problem, Sirzhik, which is a problem I DON’T FUCKING HAVE AND NEVER FUCKING DID, I’m gonna come visit you and disassemble you, piece by fucking piece.”
I started to let him go, and then, as if I’d just remembered something else to say, I grabbed him and pulled him even closer. “Because nobody tells me I have a fucking drinking problem. Nobody.” I squinted at him to make sure he was receiving my message loud and clear. “Got that, Sirzhik?”
From the look on his face, he had indeed Got It. He realized that I was an alcoholic in full denial; that I couldn’t handle being confronted with my problems; and that when I was confronted, I became belligerent and violent. And from the pace of his pulse, which I could feel through his tux, he didn’t like having Got It one fucking bit.
Then it was my turn to take him by the back of his arm. Except I applied some real Roguish pressure. Enough to make him wince.
“So, now that we’ve had our little tête-à-tête, maybe we should go back and join the ladies.” I elbowed him in the ribs hard enough to make the cartilage crack. “Mine’s a real piece of ass, ain’t she? And hey, yours ain’t so bad for a broad without tits. Maybe we switch, huh?”
His eyes went all crazy on me. He struggled in my grip, but there was no way he could escape my grasp. Not until I decided to let him go. “And Steve—”
He looked over at me, his face contorted in pain. “No sweet speeches about me tonight, okay? I kind of like my privacy.”
His expression told me I didn’t have to worry about that one iota. Good. I opened the door with my left hand, and walked him through. His feet were barely touching the floor. We rejoined the receiving line, The missus gave him a nasty glance for deserting her. But Sirzhik wasn’t looking at her. He was searching the crowd.
I held him close. “Thanks for the conversation, baklan,” I stage-whispered, and then I licked his ear in the Hells Angels style just for emphasis.
He yanked himself away from me, turned, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket, and rubbed his ear. He saw that people were staring at the two of us, and self-consciously he stuck the hankie back in his pocket. But he was out of my clutches, and obviously feeling safer now.
He backed toward a pair of his security guards and stood between ’em. “Our conversation was . . . very instructive.” He looked at me with undisguised repugnance. But he was every inch The Diplomat he considered himself, because he managed to clench his teeth and say, “Please, go and enjoy yourself, Captain.” He put another three feet of space between us. “I expect,” he said through clenched teeth, “that we will have a chance to deal with one another in a . . . less public venue in the near future.”
Steve Sarkesian paused, and cocked his head like a hunting falcon who’s just noticed raw meat nearby. “I have just decided to remain in Baku for the foreseeable future,” he said to no one in particular. His violet eyes caught the light from a chandelier and flickered brilliantly. “There is so much work to do here.”
“You got that right, Sirzhik—that’s what I always say: ‘So many assholes to kill, so little time.’ Right, huh?”
He started to give me that kaleidoscopic look again. But I moved on, giving Mrs. Sirzhik a Roguish leer as I passed.
Ashley took my elbow and steered me toward the bar. “What was that all about?”
“Mind games,” I said. “I’m
up one set to nil.” I looked across the mansion-size blue-on-red Azeri beneath my feet, saw a familiar figure, and waved. “Yo, Avi—”
The little Israeli waved back. He was in what passes in Israel for a dress uniform, although it’s a lot less “dress” than most Park Avenue doormen wear on a regular basis. But that’s always been the case with the Israelis. They prefer killing to cocktail parties, and their uniform reflects that fact.
But more important than Avi, there was Mikki, his wife. She stands six inches taller than Avi—and she’s a lot better looking, too.
We shouldered our way through the crowd and I picked Mikki up off the floor, whirled her around, kissed her on both cheeks in the French style, and then made the proper introductions.
Avi looked approvingly at Major Evans. “You know this crowd, of course,” he said offhandedly. And when Ashley demurred, and hinted that she’d been left out of the social loop by the ambassador, Avi grinned and spread his arms wide. “Then let me tell you all about the who’s and who’s and vhat’s and vhat’s of this magnificent Baku intelligentsia,” he said, a playful twinkle in his eye.
Ashley interrupted him right then by tapping her index finger below her own right eye in the French sign of skepticism. “Baku intelligentsia? Isn’t that an oxymoron, Avi?” she asked.
That broke the ice. It wasn’t five minutes before Ashley and the Ben Gals were chatting as animatedly as any old friends. I brushed up between Ashley and Avi and told them I’d be back in a few minutes, after I’d scoped the place out. But first, I went in search of succor—which I found at the bar. Lots of it, in fact. Standing at the end of the room, an old-fashioned glass of Bombay Sapphire on the rocks in my paw, I had a good opportunity to eyeball the party for a while, gauging the ebb and the flow of the place. I saw where the surveillance cameras had been placed. I noted the likely locations of hidden microphones. Then I ambled back up the main corridor toward the loos, stuck my head inside both, to take note of their layout as well (shocked the shit out of a bejeweled dowager socialite when I emerged from the stall next to hers, too).
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