At length, Joškar instructed Arkadin on what to say when she placed Yasha onto the funeral pyre. The girls were crying again as they watched their brother‘s little body being consumed by the flames. Joškar said a final prayer, and then they were done. Arkadin had no idea how much time had passed, but Tarkanian and the car were still waiting for them when they broke out of the tree line and returned to civilization.
I made a promise to her, Arkadin said.
— This fucking baby factory? Maslov scoffed. -You‘re stupider than you look.
— You‘re the one who risked two of your men-one of them totally incompetent-to bring me back here.
— Yes, you shithead, not you and four civilians who belong to someone else.
— You talk about them as if they‘re cattle.
— Hey, fuck you, bright boy! Lev Antonin wants them back, and that‘s where they‘re going.
— I‘m responsible for her son‘s death.
— Did you kill the little fucker? Maslov was fairly shouting now. The muscle had been drifting closer and the tyolkas were doing their best to look in another direction.
— No.
— Then you‘re not responsible for his death. End of fucking story!
— I made a promise that she wouldn‘t be sent back to her husband, she‘s dead scared of him. He‘ll beat her half to death.
— What the fuck does that mean to me? In his fury, Maslov‘s mineral eyes seemed to shoot sparks. -I have a business to run.
Tarkanian stirred. -Boss, maybe you should-
— What? Maslov turned on Tarkanian. -Are you gonna tell me what I should do, too, Mischa? Fuck you! I asked you for something simple: Bring this kid back from Nizhny Tagil. And what happens? The kid beats the shit outta Oserov and you come back like a fucking pack mule with a shitload of problems I don‘t need. Having effectively silenced Tarkanian, he turned back to Arkadin. -As for you, you better get your fucking head screwed on right, bright boy, or I‘ll send you back to the shithole you crawled out of.
— They‘re my responsibility, Arkadin said levelly. -I‘ll take care of them.
— Listen to him! Now Maslov was shouting. -Who died and made you boss?
And whatever gave you the crooked idea that you have a say in anything that happens here? His face was red, almost swollen. -Mischa, get this motherless fuck out of my sight before I rip him apart with my bare hands!
Tarkanian dragged Arkadin out of the Pasha Room and took him over to the long bar on one side of the main room. A stage, lit up like it was New Year‘s Eve, featured a tall nubile tyolka with very little on, who spread her milelong legs to a beat-heavy song.
— Let‘s have a drink, Tarkanian said with forced joviality.
— I don‘t want a drink.
— It‘s on me. Tarkanian caught the bartender‘s eye. -Come on, my friend, a drink is just what you need.
— Don‘t tell me what I need, Arkadin said, his voice suddenly raised.
The absurd argument carried on from there, escalating enough so that a bouncer was summoned.
— What seems to be the trouble? He might have been addressing both of them but, because he knew Tarkanian by sight, his eyes were firmly fixed on Arkadin.
With a venomous glare, Arkadin reacted. He grabbed the bouncer and slammed his forehead against the edge of the bar with so much force that nearby drinks trembled and the closest ones tipped over. Then he kept slamming it until Tarkanian managed to pull him off.
— I don‘t have a problem, Arkadin said to the stunned and bleeding bouncer. -But it‘s clear you do.
Tarkanian hustled him out into the night before he could do any more damage.
— If you think I‘m ever going to work for that pile of dogshit, Arkadin said, — you‘re sorely mistaken.
Tarkanian held up his hands. -Okay, okay. Don‘t work for him. He guided Arkadin down the street, away from the club‘s entrance. -However, I don‘t know how you‘re going to make a living. Moscow is a different-
— I‘m not staying in Moscow. Breath, condensing in the chill, was shooting out of Arkadin‘s nostrils like steam. -I‘m going to take Joškar and the girls and-
— And what? Where will you go? You have no money, no prospects, nothing. How will you feed yourselves, let alone the kids? Tarkanian shook his head.
— Take my advice, forget about those people, they belong to your past, to another life. You‘ve left Nizhny Tagil behind. He peered into Arkadin‘s eyes. -That‘s what you‘ve wanted all your life, isn‘t it?
— I‘m not letting Maslov‘s people take them back. You don‘t know what Lev Antonin‘s like.
— Maslov doesn‘t care what Lev Antonin‘s like.
— Fuck Maslov!
Tarkanian rounded on him. -You really don‘t get it, do you? Dimitri Maslov and his kind own Moscow lock, stock, and vodka. That means they own Joškar and her girls.
— Joškar and the girls aren‘t part of his world.
— They are now, Tarkanian said. -You dragged them into it.
— I didn‘t know what I was doing.
— Well, that‘s clear enough, but you have to face facts: What‘s done is done.
— There must be a way out of this.
— Really? Even if you had money-say, if I were stupid enough to give you some-what would it accomplish? Maslov would send his people after you. Worse, considering how you provoked him, he might come after you himself. Trust me when I tell you that‘s not what you want for them.
Arkadin felt like pulling his hair out by the roots. -Don‘t you understand? I don‘t want them going back to that fucker.
— Have you considered that it might be the best outcome?
— Are you out of your mind?
— Look, you yourself said that Joškar told you Lev Antonin promised to protect her and her children. You know what she is, and the girls have her blood. If her secret gets out she‘ll never be able to have a normal life among ethnic Russians. Face it, you can‘t protect them from Maslov, but they‘ll be safe enough back in Nizhny Tagil, where no one is going to say a word against her for fear of her husband. And listen, she‘s smart enough to tell him that she and the kids were abducted to ensure your safe passage. Chances are he won‘t lift a hand to her.
— Until the next time he‘s drunk or depressed or just in the mood for a little fun.
— That‘s her life, not yours. Leonid Danilovich, I‘m talking to you as one friend to another. This is the only way. You managed to escape Nizhny Tagil; not everyone can be so fortunate.
The fact that Tarkanian was telling the truth only made Arkadin angrier. The problem was he didn‘t know what to do with that anger, so he began to turn it inward. More than anything, he wanted to see Joškar again, he wanted to hold her youngest girl in his arms again, to feel her warmth, her heartbeat. But he knew that it was impossible. If he met with her again, he‘d never be able to let her go. Maslov‘s people would surely kill him and the family would be shipped back to Lev Antonin anyway. He felt like a rat in a maze with no beginning and no end, only an eternal race chasing his own tail.
This was Dimitri Maslov‘s doing. At that moment he vowed that no matter how long it took he‘d make Maslov pay: Death would come to him only when he‘d been systematically stripped of everything he held dear.
Two days later he watched from the shadows across the street-Tarkanian at his elbow, either for moral support or to drag him back if he got any ideas at the last minute-as Joškar and the three girls were led into a large black Zil. Two of Maslov‘s muscle were with them, plus the driver. The girls, bewildered, allowed themselves to be stowed in the car as docilely as lambs to the slaughter.
For her part, Joškar, with hands on the car‘s roof, one foot already inside, paused and looked around for him. As she did so, Arkadin saw not the look of despair he had been expecting, but rather an expression of infinite sadness, which tore through him like phosphorus, burning his insides as black as Yasha‘s flesh. He‘d deceived her, broken his promise.
In his mind he heard her voice as if she were calling to him now: “Don’t make me go back to him.”
She‘d believed in him, trusted him, and now she had nothing.
She ducked down, and he lost sight of her. The car door slammed, the Zil drove off, and he had nothing as well. This was brought home to him in an even more vicious fashion when, six weeks later, Tarkanian informed him that Joškar had shot her husband to death, then turned the gun on her children and herself.
32
SHAHRAKE NASIRI-ASTARA at last! Noah Perlis had been to many exotic destinations in his time, but this area of northwestern Iran wasn‘t one of them. In fact, apart from the stark towers of the oil wells and the attendant petroleum particulates, it was so ordinary looking it could have been somewhere in rural Arkansas. However, Noah had no time to be bored. An hour ago, he‘d received a call from Black River informing him that Dondie Parker, the man he‘d sent to kill Humphry Bamber, had failed to check in as he should have following the completion of his assignment. To Noah, this meant two things: One, Bamber was still alive, and, two, he‘d lied about getting away from Moira, because there was no way he could have survived Dondie Parker on his own. Extrapolating from these hypotheses brought him to another hypothesis of vital and immediate importance to him: the possibility that the newest version of Bardem was poisoned in some way he‘d never be able to discover.
Lucky for him his innate paranoia forced him to back up everything, even his computer. No point in letting his enemies know he was on to them. He‘d shut down the laptop on which Bamber had uploaded the poisoned software and switched to his fully loaded second laptop, which was still running the previous version of Bardem.
He sat inside a canvas tent on a camp chair, much as he imagined Julius Caesar had sat, mapping out his successful military campaigns, centuries ago. Instead of a map of Gaul hand-drawn by Greek cartographers, he had a handmade software program analyzing this oil-rich part of the world running on his laptop. Caesar, a brilliant general in any age, would have understood instantly what he was up to, of that he had no doubt.
He had three scenarios running simultaneously on Bardem, all of them different in small but crucial ways. Much depended on how the Iranian government responded to the incursion-if they found out about it in time. That was the issue, really: timing. It was one thing to be on Iranian soil, quite another to start a military operation on it. The point of Pinprick was its small footprint, hence its name. Did an elephant even feel a pinprick?
You could be sure it didn‘t. Unfortunately, Noah couldn‘t be as certain that the Iranian government wouldn‘t feel Pinprick until Arkadin‘s force of twenty men had established their beachhead and begun redirecting the oil pipeline.
Because the objective of Pinprick had always been the oil in the Iranian fields here in Shahrake NasiriAstara. There was nothing else of value here, militarily or otherwise. That was what was so brilliant about Danziger‘s plan-the seizure of these rich oil fields under the cover of a larger military incursion by America and a sizable coalition of allies in response to Iran‘s alleged act of war against the United States and, indeed, all civilized nations. If the Iranians could shoot down an American passenger jet over Egyptian airspace, what would stop them from downing the jets of other nations that opposed their nuclear program? This had been the cornerstone of the president‘s argument to the United Nations, one that had proved so compelling that it had eaten through all the knee-jerk pacifistic, footdragging bullshit that usually infested the international body of navelgazers and do-nothings.
Through his machinations, Iran had been proven to be a true out-law nation in the eyes of the world. So much the better for everyone. The country‘s regime was a menace; if the rest of the world needed a bit of goading to get off their fat backsides and take matters into their own hands, well, that was the way of the world. One of Black River‘s specialties-one that set it apart from any other private risk management firm-was its ability to alter facts to create a reality that could be molded to a client‘s wishes. This was what Bud Halliday had asked of Black River, why the NSA was paying it a fortune through one of many blind trusts that could in no way be traced back to the secretary or anyone at NSA. So far as any paper trail was concerned-there was always a paper trail, electronic or otherwise, that was a given-Black River‘s client was Good Shepherd Holdings, PLC, on the Inner Hebrides island of Islay, which, if anyone cared to make the trek, consisted of a three-room office in a drafty stone building, where three men and a woman wrote and managed insurance policies for local distilleries throughout the islands.
As for the democratic indigenous group Halliday so heartily touted to the president, it and the meetings its leaders had with Black River personnel were a part of Pinprick. In other words, they were a figment of Danziger‘s imagination. Danziger had argued that the creation of the indigenous group was vital both to get the president moving further in the direction of war and as a reason to shovel virtually unlimited funds to Black River, to cover the massive expenditures for its partners: Yevsen, Maslov, and Arkadin, all of whom were paid by Good Shepherd.
One of Perlis‘s men entered the tent to tell him that Arkadin‘s plane would be arriving within fifteen minutes. Perlis nodded, silently dismissing him. He had disliked using Dimitri Maslov, not because he felt he couldn‘t trust him, but because it galled him that he needed Maslov to deal with Yevsen. Worse, Maslov had brought in Leonid Arkadin, a man Perlis had never met, but whose curriculum vitae in the shadow world of wet work was both impressive and worrying. Impressive because he‘d never failed to successfully complete an assignment; worrying because he was a wild card-in his own way, eerily similar to the late Jason Bourne. Both men had proved themselves unreliable at taking orders and sticking to the game plan they‘d been given. They were both master improvisers, certainly an element in their success, but also a nightmare for anyone attempting to handle them.
Thinking of the Russians caused him to consider the raid on Nikolai Yevsen‘s headquarters in Khartoum. He hadn‘t stayed around to find out who had staged it or what had happened, instead racing safely to the airport, where a Black River light transport was waiting for him just off the runway. When he‘d tried to contact Oliver Liss, he‘d gotten Dick Braun instead. Braun was another of the triumvirate who had founded Black River, but Perlis had never reported to him before. Braun wasn‘t happy, but then he already knew that the raid had been staged by a contingent of the Russian FSB-2 that, it turned out, had been on the trail of Yevsen‘s business for over two years. Noah also learned that Yevsen had been killed in the raid, a mildly surprising turn of events, but one that he, unlike Braun, welcomed. As far as he was concerned the arms dealer‘s death meant one less partner, one less potential security problem to deal with. He could neither fathom nor condone Braun‘s white-hot fury at Dimitri Maslov‘s displeasure. So far as Noah was concerned, the head of the Kazanskaya grupperovka was just another moneyhungry Russian thug. Sooner or later he‘d have to be dealt with-not that he said this to his boss; such a comment would only further inflame the situation. What neither he nor Braun knew was the identity of the American who had infiltrated the Air Afrika building immediately prior to the FSB-2
raid. It was too late to think about what the American might have wanted.
Unfortunately for Noah, Braun was fully briefed and, before Noah could ask him where Liss was, Braun asked him for an update on the situation with Humphry Bamber, to which Noah replied that Bardem was as secure as it had ever been.
— Does that mean he‘s been terminated? Braun said bluntly.
— Yes, Noah lied, not wanting to get into that thorny issue on the cusp of Pinprick‘s operational phase. He killed the call before Braun could interrogate him further.
Briefly, he felt a stab of concern at Oliver Liss‘s continuing absence, but right now he had more pressing problems, namely Bardem. Running the three scenarios again gave him a probability success rate of 98 percent, 97
percent, and 99 perc
ent. The main military incursion, he knew, was going to take place on two pincer-like fronts: on the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. One was far to the south, the other clear across the country, in the east. All three scenarios were the same, except in two crucial details: how long Perlis and his team had to secure the oil fields and redirect the oil pipeline before the besieged Iranian military got wind of what was happening, and what shape their military would be in once they became aware of the oil field takeover. Still, by that time Halliday would have diverted the American forces set to rendezvous with the nonexistent indigenous group to provide support and lock down the area.
Someone else entered the tent. Anticipating a progress report on Arkadin‘s flight, he glanced up and started, suddenly certain that it was Moira. His heart racing and adrenaline pumping through him, he realized that it was only Fiona, another member of his elite team who had accompanied him here. Fiona, a redhead with fine features and porcelain skin heavily laced with freckles, looked nothing like Moira, and yet Moira was who he‘d seen. Why was she still on his mind?
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