Deliver Us From Evil

by David Baldacci

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you’ll agree to have dinner with me tonight. If yes, I’ll be here at least another day. If not, I’m out of here right now.”

  Reggie glanced down.

  “Problem getting away?” said Shaw.

  “Actually we’ve all been given a spot of time off. But if anyone sees you. Whit or—”

  “No one’s going to see me. I’ll go back out the way I came in. I kind of make a living sneaking around. But to be on the safe side let’s meet in London around eight tonight.” He gave her the name of a side street off Trafalgar Square. “We can pick a place to go after that.”

  “Can I let you know?”

  “Yeah, right now, or I’m flying out tonight. And I doubt I’ll be back, Reggie.”

  “You don’t give a girl much time to make up her mind.”

  “No, I really don’t.”

  “All right. But what are we going to talk about at dinner?”

  “Oh, I’m sure we’ll find something of mutual interest. And if we’re lucky, it might even be entertaining too.” He looked over her shoulder at the sunken ground of the cemetery. “And it might cheer you up a bit. Looks like you need it.”

  “I guess it seems weird to you, my staring at graves.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I do it too.”

  CHAPTER

  69

  FEDIR KUCHIN had nothing, and because he had nothing the man was growing increasingly frustrated. In ninety-degree angles he paced the three-thousand-square-foot cabin perched near an ocean whose water temperature never got much above fifty degrees even in August. Kuchin’s mood was tied directly to his underling’s failure. Alan Rice had purchased access to a dozen databases and yet there had not been one hit on any of the digital images made from his drawings or the photo. Every other avenue of investigation he’d pursued had ended with a similar lack of progress. Kuchin’s large hands clenched and then loosened as his nimble mind galloped along trying to envision some way to move forward.

  Finally, Kuchin drew on a parka and walked outside. He had taken with him a rifle and scope and some cartridges. It was summer but one wouldn’t know it by the weather. It wasn’t cold enough to snow, but as he looked around the terrain reminded him starkly of his birthplace in the Ukraine. Perhaps that’s why he’d built a home here with nothing else around for miles. He had two guards with him who stayed in another building five hundred meters from his house. Yet there wasn’t much danger out here. Other than the threat of being gored or trampled by a moose or a caribou, Kuchin felt fairly secure.

  He trudged over ground that brought back memories of a little boy trailing his burly father as he went off to work. Work was fishing on a commercial trawler in the Sea of Azov. Forty thousand square kilometers in area, the Azov’s deepest point was surprisingly less than fifteen meters. It was in fact the shallowest sea in the world. Because of that its waters were turned over quickly. This did not keep it fresh, however. When Kuchin was a child the pollutants from factories and oil and gas exploration were already pouring into the sea’s meager depths.

  By the 1970s dead and mutated fish by the thousands were piling up on the shores, clearly victims of man-made toxins and radioactive poisons. To swim in the waters today would be suicidal. Yet all the children in Kuchin’s village had spent their summers in waters whose temperatures would soar toward thirty degrees Celsius in July. In winter the sea would be frozen solid for months and the children would take their homemade skates and have races until their mothers would call out to them from shore to come eat their dinners. Kuchin could even remember lying facedown on the ice and licking it with his seven-year-old tongue.

  Now Kuchin had heard that the Azov was in danger of becoming a dead sea and that commercial fishing should be banned for twenty years. This was not as draconian as it sounded. For forty years fishing yields had been reduced to nearly zero simply because all the sea life was dead. And yet he could recall vividly his father cleaning the fish he’d caught for their personal table with his big gutting knife, efficiently slicing up perch, sturgeon, and mackerel that his mother would then fry up in her big iron skillet with secret spices and ingredients that Frenchwomen seemed to naturally possess.

  South of here was the Strait of Belle Isle, across from which was the region of Newfoundland. Kuchin had hiked there often and watched the cargo ships pass through the narrow channel. Indeed, some of his human cargo passed through these same waters. Before he reached adulthood Kuchin’s life had been inextricably tied to water, polluted water as it turned out. He realized it was probably a miracle he was not dead from some horrible cancer rising from the shallow depths of the Azov. Yet there could be tumors right now growing in his body, wrapping silently but lethally around essential organs, crushing blood vessels or invading his brain.

  However, despite the environmental dangers of his childhood, growing up there had provided him with an ambition to succeed that had been inexhaustible. Everything he’d ever set out to do he’d achieved, which made this present situation unacceptable.

  He made the trek to the Belle Strait and stared out at seawater that represented the most direct route to Europe for ships coming from either the St. Lawrence Seaway or Great Lakes ports. Yet fogs, gales, and ice-choked seas for ten months of the year made navigation here some of the most treacherous in the world. The strait could hold wondrous sights too, however. These included humpback whales doing spectacular flips and wandering icebergs calved from glaciers in Greenland and bundled south by the Labrador Current before starting to come apart, with massive crashes, into the warmer waters off the coast. And Belle Isle, after which the strait was named, meant “Beautiful Island.” It sat at the eastern tip of the waterway and was roughly halfway between Labrador and Newfoundland, which together formed the Canadian province of the same name.

  Beauty in the midst of nothing, thought Kuchin. He believed, however briefly, that he’d found beauty in Provence. A woman who intrigued him, bewitched him, even; one whom he thought he might like to possibly entertain for longer than one night without a bloody mess to clean up afterward. And yet the beauty had almost killed him. It was a sense of betrayal—even though realistically the woman owed him no measure of loyalty—that fueled Kuchin’s smoldering rage.

  He walked up to the top of a small knoll, the strait behind him and the land in front of him flat for as far as the eye could see. Newfoundland was known as “the Rock.” Its eastern region used to be part of northern Africa. The last glaciation had scraped almost all the soil off the southeastern coast, leaving it with more rock than anything else, hence the nickname. Labrador, the easternmost section of the Canadian Shield, had roughly three times the landmass of Newfoundland but with approximately five percent of its population. Its climate was technically classified as polar tundra, and polar bears indeed prowled the coastal areas and caribou outnumbered people by over twenty to one. Here, Kuchin had his pick of massive mountains to hike, isolated bays in which to fish, barren tundra to ski across, and breathtaking and brutal fjords cut into bedrock by glacier saws to view. The slopes were often sheer and the current in the water deceptively fast.

  Kuchin drew a bead with his rifle, sighting through a scope manufactured by Zeiss, the same outfit that had supplied the Third Reich. It had everything an experienced shooter would expect in a high-end sighting device, including O-ring seals and nitrogen fill for fogproofing, all in a lightweight package with enhanced field of vision.

  When hunting large game it was generally agreed that a minimum of a thousand foot-pounds of force from the round was necessary. For the biggest game like moose that requirement ratcheted up to roughly fifteen hundred foot-pounds at about five hundred yards. He was using pointed boat-tailed 140-grain rounds that would drop just about anything on four hooves and certainly anyone on two feet.

  Kuchin had had this rifle custom built. It was lightweight for ease of carrying and maneuve
rability and he had fought his ego and opted for somewhat less power because that translated to less recoil, which resulted invariably in greater accuracy. He had splurged on a premium barrel because that played a major factor in the only thing that mattered: whether you hit your intended target or not.

  The small coyote was wandering along about two hundred yards away from him, its agile gait carrying the animal along rapidly over the flat terrain. It was early for the beast to be searching for food, thought Kuchin, but here one never knew. Kill when you can was probably a good motto for such a desolate place. It was probably a female, Kuchin noted as he examined through the glass the small chest and frame of the animal.

  He lay prone on the ground, carrying the weight of the weapon on his elbows. He steadied himself, fixing his grip around the stock and underbelly of the gun, but relaxing his muscles. This was the magic recipe of the successful sniper and long-range hunter, firm but loose, heartbeat and breaths mellow, unhurried but with any possible vibration removed. The butt of the weapon hard to his bicep, his index finger dropped to the trigger guard and from there to the slender bit of curved metal. With one pull the immediately heated round would burst from the elongated barrel, lands and grooves branded into its metal hide from the force of the rapid expulsion. The quarter-gram metal missile would cover the distance between man and beast roughly six times faster than if it had been perched in a seat on a commercial jet aircraft.

  And yet with the coyote dead in his sights Kuchin did not pull the trigger. He lowered the weapon. The beast, unaware of how close it had come to annihilation at the hands of a far more dangerous predator, scampered along until it was nearly out of sight. Kuchin trudged the solitary miles back to his cabin. He had never enjoyed killing wildlife. Fishing held little interest for him either despite having been his father’s trade.

  It was only living things that looked like him that had ever motivated Fedir Kuchin to pull the trigger, light the match to the gas-filled pits, kick out the stool from under the noosed victim, or plunge the knife into someone’s chest. It was just who and what he was.

  He returned to his cabin, slid the parka on a hook by the door, locked his rifle back up in his gun safe, and returned to his desk. There was a blinking light on his phone. The message on the recording dispelled all the bad thoughts Kuchin had been harboring for most of the day.

  It was Alan Rice.

  “We found him.”

  CHAPTER

  70

  REGGIE LOVED Trafalgar Square. For her it seemed to define all things British in one sparkling geographic footprint. One had Lord Nelson on his forty-six-meter-high granite column, the savior of the British Empire honored for all time for his heroic death at the Battle of Trafalgar. And even if every school-aged child no longer knew exactly who Nelson was or what he’d done, his statue still stood as a memorial to the indomitability of the British people.

  And yet there were also the great beastly pigeons. Though Nelson had been scrubbed clean several years ago and the city had taken steps to rid the area of the cooing winged creatures, the birds were simply an unstoppable force, such that the poor admiral was routinely covered in pigeon shit. Down below every make, model, and manner of human being walked, sat, danced, cried, ate, drank, performed, snapped pictures, read, flirted with their neighbor, and occasionally had sex late at night. This all went on while colorful cabs covered in advertisements and red elongated bendy-buses sped by with the intensity necessary to survive in one of the world’s great metropolises. It was the perfect blend of the staid historical and the radical new and Reggie took it all in, forgetting for the moment that she was going to meet a man who could possibly destroy her.

  Although it seemed a bit absurd considering all she had to think about, Reggie had been most nervous about what to wear. She had washed all her clothes and selected a pale green dress of simple design that tapered at the waist, showed off her tan, and stopped several inches above her knees. Its front was scooped but not too much. She had pulled out and then discarded the one push-up bra she owned, selecting a more modest one instead. She had decided against wearing a sweater over the dress because the weather in London had not matched that in Leavesden, which was often the case. The skies had cleared, the temperature had cracked seventy, which was cause for celebration across the city, and the slight breeze from the south was even more warming. Her heels were high, taking her to within eight inches of the man with whom she would shortly be having dinner. She had packed her hair up high, letting a few strands drizzle down her long neck. Chunky aquamarine earrings and a matching necklace she’d purchased years ago in Thailand completed the ensemble.

  As she walked down the side street where he had arranged to meet her, Reggie surreptitiously checked her makeup in the side mirror of a parked motorbike while pretending to admire the machine. With his height he would be easy to spot even with all the people around. Yet the street also had many places of hidden observation. He was probably watching her right now, in fact.

  She thought for a moment and then just decided what the hell. She pirouetted in a tight circle, one heel spike firmly planted against the pavement, while slowly waving in all directions like a beauty queen on display. This action made her briefly forget her troubles on a rare gorgeous summer’s eve in the city she adored above all others.

  The touch on her shoulder made her jump. She stopped spinning and faced him. Her first observation was that he’d also dressed carefully for the evening, in pressed gray slacks with a sharp crease, white polo shirt, and a navy blazer. His short hair had the shine of shampoo and he was freshly shaved. His scent reminded her of the luxurious beach in Thailand where she’d bought the necklace and earrings from a pale-skinned man carrying a shabby briefcase full of trinkets and wearing a Speedo. Shaw’s smell was balmy, sand, ocean, the sway of exotic trees; it settled just firmly enough in her nostrils to make her feel a bit unsteady on her feet.

  “You look great,” he said.

  “No more seasickness. I promise.” She tapped the ground with her spike heels. “Firmly on terra firma.”

  Shaw glanced around before returning his gaze to her. Reggie could sense in that one motion that he had assessed all potential threats and filed them away in some neat data bank in his mind.

  “You like seafood?” he said.

  “That’s actually my absolute favorite.”

  “I know a place in Mayfair.”

  “Sounds brilliant.”

  He looked hesitant for a moment and then held out his arm. She quickly slipped her hand through it before he could reconsider the offer. His hesitation had made Reggie inwardly smile. Uncertainty humanized a person so wonderfully, she thought. Reggie slightly increased the pressure on his arm to show him he’d made the right decision.

  “It’s not too far from here,” he said. “It’s a nice night, we can walk.” He glanced down at her shoes. “Can you manage in those things? We can cab it if you want.”

  “I can walk over in these heels. I just might not be able to walk back.”

  “I can always carry you.”

  They walked down Haymarket Street, cut through Piccadilly Circus, and over to Mayfair.

  “It’s only a few more blocks,” said Shaw as they ambled slowly along. “Just off Grosvenor.”

  “I’m good.”

  He glanced down at her. “You do seem good.”

  She interpreted his remark as she glanced around at other couples doing exactly what they were doing. “It’s just nice to pretend to be normal. I guess that seems weird.”

  “No it doesn’t. In our professions those moments are few and far between.”

  The restaurant was set midblock, and had a green awning out front partially obscuring a pair of formidable mahogany doors. Inside, the ceilings were high, the wood dark, the booths leather-backed, the linens starched, and the napkins poofed up in cut crystal water glasses. Topping chest-high wood cabinets were iced platters of lobster tails, shrimp, black-shelled mussels, and spidery crab legs arranged i
n concentric circles. Shaw had made a reservation and a curvy young Indian woman in a black dress tight enough to reveal her choice of thong underwear led them to their table. It was situated in the back diagonally across from the entrance.

  Shaw took the seat opposite the mahogany doors.

  This had not been lost on Reggie. “Firing lines sufficiently established?” she asked impishly.

  “They’ll do. Unless that platter of steamed squid fouls the shot.”

  “Why do I think you’re not joking?”

  He picked up his menu.

  She did the same. “Any recommendations?”

  “Pretty much anything that has a fin, gills, and/or a shell is a safe bet to be classified as an aphrodisiac.”

  She dropped the menu. “Then why don’t you pick for me?”

  Shaw’s gaze topped his menu. “Indecisive?”

  “Actually, cautious enough to defer to another’s enhanced expertise.”

  “There’s a lot that can be interpreted from that remark,” he said candidly.

  “There is. But for now, let’s limit it to the food.”

  He put his menu aside. “Then we’ll double down on the Primavera Frutti di Mare.”

  They ordered their food and a white wine to go with it. The waiter drew out the cork and poured the small taster portion, which Shaw approved with a sip and a nod. The waiter filled their glasses, set a basket of bread and a bottle of olive oil between them, placed the wine in a chiller sleeve, and left them alone.

  Shaw held up his glass and Reggie dinked it with hers.

  “Is the pretending to be normal period almost over?” she said resignedly.

  “Almost, but not quite.”

  “I love London,” Reggie said, looking around.

  “There’s a lot to love,” agreed Shaw.

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  He remained silent but stared at her expectantly.

  “You mentioned back in the cemetery at Harrowsfield that you stare at graves too. What did you mean by that?”