by Tom Cain
Alix hurried through the dressing room, barely breaking her stride as she grabbed her coat and handbag. She was pushing a fist through the arm of the coat as she burst through a second door at the back of the room and ran down a short corridor toward the staff exit. By the time she stepped out onto the street, she had pulled the coat tight around her and was huddling against the sharp winter wind, just like the other pedestrians scattered up and down the street, her collar up, one hand clutching the coat lapels tight around her neck.
Every nerve in her body was screaming at her to run, but she forced herself to walk at a normal pace. She had no hope of escaping her pursuers if it came to a foot race. Her only hope was to look inconspicuous.
She was about twenty yards down the road before she realized she was still wearing her wig. It wasn’t such a big deal. The pigtails were tucked away out of sight. In the sulfuric glow of the street lamps, one blond head would look pretty much like another. But Alix was too tired, too stressed to make such dispassionate calculations on the run. She panicked and tore the wig from her head. She threw it into a public garbage can, then pulled away the nylon stocking cap from her hair, letting it fall to the pavement.
The sudden movement gave her away. Alix immediately heard the sound of quick, heavy footsteps behind her. She turned her head and saw two men striding toward her. One of them was speaking into a wrist mike. Desperately, she started to run, her ankles twisting every time her high-heeled shoes hit the ground. She stopped for a second to kick off the shoes, helpless as her pursuers drew closer, still marching, inexorably, as though they knew they did not need to break a sweat. Then she set off again in her stockinged feet.
The pavement was ice-cold and the soles of her tights tore through in a matter of seconds, but at least she could run properly now. She cut right onto another street, the rue du Prince. A group of men, clad in tight jeans and leathers, were clustered outside the entrance to Le Prétexte, the city’s leading gay club.
“Help me!” Alix screamed, pointing an arm behind her at the two men. They were running now, too.
The men parted to let her through, then one of them, the club’s bouncer, stepped into the path of the two men. He was massive, dressed entirely in black. His head was shaven, but the lower half of his face was covered with a thick, piratical beard.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What are you—”
One of the men chopped the bouncer to the ground with a single blow before he could even finish the sentence. The clubbers fled from the two men’s path; then, once the men had gone, clustered around the bouncer’s unconscious body.
Alix was on her own. She was in no shape to run. She smoked too much and exercised too little. But it was not far to the end of the street now, where it hit the rue du Rhône, one of the city’s busiest roads. Half a dozen bus and tram routes connected here, and its pavements would be crowded with people. If she could just keep going, she stood a chance.
She dashed across the street, cutting across it diagonally to the corner, where it met the rue du Rhône. A car passed down the pavement behind her, briefly forcing the men to stop as it went by, buying her a few precious seconds. She looked up and down the main road, searching for a bus or a cab, and suddenly her luck changed. About fifty yards away, a taxi pulled away from the pavement, into the far lane of the broad one-way street. The driver flicked on his FOR Hire light and Alix waved frantically.
The cab was driving forward, the driver seemingly oblivious to her desperate attempts to attract his attention. Behind her, the men had started crossing the road.
“Please . . .” Alix implored and then, in answer to her prayers, she saw the taxi’s indicator flicking as it cut across the traffic toward her.
One of the men had spotted it, too. He gestured to his partner and they seemed to find an extra gear, sprinting even harder toward her.
Alix did not wait for the taxi to reach her. She dashed out into the road, ignoring the oncoming traffic, forcing the cab driver to brake in front of her. He flashed his headlights at her in protest, forcing her to put up a hand to shield her eyes as she dashed around the cab, wrenched open the passenger door, and threw herself onto the seat, yanking the door closed behind her.
Wheezing for breath, her eyes still dazzled, she managed to gasp the words, “Cornavin Station, fast as you can.”
It was only when she sank back onto the seat, her chest heaving and her throat gagging, that Alix noticed that she was not alone in the back of the cab.
The woman she had spotted at the bierkeller was sitting, half turned, with her legs crossed and her right shoulder leaning against the side of the car. Her arms were crossed above her lap, with her right wrist resting on her left forearm, supporting the gun she was pointing directly at Alix.
“Good evening, my dear,” said Olga Zhukovskaya.
She was one of the most powerful women in Russia, the deputy director of the FSB, the intelligence agency that was the direct descendent of the Soviet KGB. Yet she spoke with an affectionate familiarity that suggested long acquaintance, even a family tie.
Zhukovskaya had indeed been a kind of mother to Alix. She was still the wife, rather than the widow, of Yuri Zhukovski when she spotted Alix at a Communist Party youth convention in Moscow a dozen years before—a gawky provincial teenager, hiding behind thick-lensed spectacles. Yet the older woman’s practiced eye had spotted a natural sexuality of which the girl herself was entirely unaware. And just as years of training can turn a raw recruit into an elite fighting man, so the gauche, unsophisticated Alexandra Petrova had been transformed by diet, exercise, surgery, and education.
Zhukovskaya had observed Alix bewitch generals, politicians, and industrialists. She had watched her own late husband—once, like her, a KGB officer; then a ruthless industrialist—fall under Alix’s spell, and been content to let the relationship flourish as long as it suited her own purposes.
Alix had been magnificent. But now look at her—a tired, bedraggled creature in laddered tights and a cheap, tawdry costume.
For a moment, Zhukovskaya was tempted to let her go. Why waste time on someone who was already so close to the edge? But then she reconsidered. She had come a long way, after all, and gone to a great deal of trouble. There was no point in throwing away this opportunity.
Her head was tilted slightly, giving her a quizzical expression as she asked, “What made you think you could run?”
26
Mary Lou Stoller lived on Edmunds Street in northwest Washington D.C., on the block between Foxhall Road and Glover-Archbold Park.
At that point, Edmunds seems more like a country lane than a residential street just a few miles from the heart of a capital city. At the east end of the road, you can step right into the park, a rolling expanse of semirural woodland.
Mary Lou got home that afternoon around five. Her boss was out of town, so she’d left work early. It was such a lovely winter afternoon, with the low rays of the sun cutting through the bare branches and the fallen leaves crisp with frost underfoot, she couldn’t wait to take her Norfolk terrier, Buster, for a walk.
There weren’t too many people in the park, just the occasional mother with her children, or a jogger running in search of immortality. When Mary Lou saw the two men coming toward her, she felt a brief spasm of alarm. There wasn’t anyone else on the path. Her immediate, instinctive response, as a woman, was to see two large males as a threat.
She told herself not to be so silly. The men didn’t look like any muggers she’d ever heard of. They were executive types in their thirties or forties, respectably dressed. Besides, they were deep in conversation, paying no attention to her: two typical Washingtonians wanting privacy while they plotted.
As she reached the men, they politely stood to one side of the path to let her and Buster go by. One of them smiled pleasantly and touched a finger to the brim of his hat in salute. Mary Lou returned the smile with one of her own. She’d been raised a proper southern lady and liked to see a gentleman respecting proper, courtly conventions
.
Distracted for a second, she didn’t really notice the other man as he stepped in front of her. She was completely unprepared when he drove his fist, reinforced by steel knuckle, hard into her midriff, forcing the air from her body and doubling her up in pain, exposing her neck and the back of her head to the next blow. The lead-weighted, leather-covered blackjack that the courtly gentleman had concealed in his other hand crashed into her skull, just as a second punch pummeled her temple. As her legs gave way beneath her, the blackjack caught her again.
By now the terrier was scampering around its mistress, challenging her attackers with sharp, high-pitched barks and nipping at their heels with its teeth. It was rewarded by a kick from a steel-capped shoe that sent it skittering across the path until jerked to a halt by the leash. It lay there moaning, barely conscious, while the two men aimed a swift, brutal series of kicks at its mistress’s head and torso.
It was forty minutes before the body was found, over an hour before police investigators were on the scene. By then the two men were checking in for the early-evening Austrian Airlines flight from Dulles International to Vienna, connecting there with a flight to Moscow. And they were hundreds of miles into their journey when General Kurt Vermulen got off the plane from San Antonio, glad to be home after his meeting with Waylon McCabe, and discovered that he was going to need another secretary.
27
The gun remained quite still in Olga Zhukovskaya’s right hand.
“So,” she said, “tell me how my husband died.”
Alix stayed silent. She wondered what form the widow’s revenge would take. But Zhukovskaya took her by surprise, stretching out her left arm and resting her hand on Alix’s forearm. She gave it a gentle, soothing squeeze.
“It’s all right. It was hardly your fault. Yuri caused his own trouble. I spoke to him that afternoon. He told me the Englishman was flying over to Switzerland, hoping to rescue you. He thought that was funny. He was looking forward to humiliating him.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Men and their stupid egos . . . Why didn’t he just shoot him?”
That sounded like a rhetorical question. Certainly, Alix had no explanation.
“I’m just trying to establish what happened,” said Zhukovskaya casually. “You know that for Yuri and me it was always more professional than romantic. I would not have encouraged him to take you as his mistress otherwise.”
Alix relaxed a fraction and asked a question of her own: “Did he leave a will?”
Zhukovskaya laughed out loud.
“Ah, that’s my little Alix! So practical, so direct. I’ve missed you these past few months.”
“Well . . . ?”
“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. Naturally, I have inherited the bulk of his holdings, but you have not been forgotten. I will give you the details in good time. But first, I need to know: the bomb. How did Carver do it?”
“He was carrying a laptop computer—he said it contained all the files about how Yuri had arranged the death of the princess. He was hoping to trade it for me. But the computer wasn’t booby-trapped—Yuri made the men check it. So the bomb must have been in the bag it was carried in.”
“And you knew nothing of this?”
“No. The last time I’d spoken to Carver had been in Geneva, two days before. We had an argument . . .”
She paused as a thought struck her. “I guess that was the last time I ever spoke to Carver. Spoke properly, I mean. . . .”
Zhukovskaya nodded sympathetically.
“He touched you deeply, this Carver. After all these years, finally someone got through. . . . And now you blame yourself for his suffering?”
Alix gave an exhausted shrug.
“I don’t know what I think anymore.”
While they’d been talking, the taxi had headed out of town, along the northern shore of Lake Geneva. Mansions clustered along the shoreline displayed the insignia of nations represented at the United Nations headquarters in the city. One set of gateposts bore the double-headed eagle of the Russian Federation. The gates swung open and the taxi swept into the graveled forecourt of a magnificent waterside villa.
The driver walked around to open the two passenger doors.
“Why don’t you go and freshen up?” said Olga Zhukovskaya. “Your room has everything you will need.”
Upstairs, a sable-trimmed mink coat had been hung up next to dresses by Chanel, Versace, and Dolce & Gabbana: Alix’s coat, her dresses. She ran her fingers through the soft, luxuriant fur, then rippled her hand over a multicolored flutter of silk, sequins, and lace. Below the clothes, shoes were arranged in a line across the cupboard, each higher and flimsier than the last.
Here were the trophies of a Moscow mistress, the pretty little fruits of her labors.
Her underwear, blouses, and tops had been folded away in a mahogany chest of drawers, her makeup arranged on the dressing-table, her soap and body oil left in the bathroom that opened off the bedroom, her favorite photograph of her parents placed on the bedside table. Alix sat on the edge of her bed, still dressed in her absurd Heidi outfit, looking around at all the luxury laid out before her, contemplating this womanly power play.
Yuri and Carver had fought each other like men, in brutal, physical conflict. Olga Zhukovskaya, however, had chosen a very different form of attack. She had entered Alix’s Moscow apartment, removed her most intimate possessions, and brought them some fifteen hundred miles to a particular room in Geneva, Switzerland, in the absolute certainty that Alix would also end up there.
And now she was tempting her: Just give in, bend to my will, and all this can be yours once again.
Zhukovskaya must have known that Alix would feel violated by the penetration of her home and the seizure of her property. That effect, too, would have been calculated: Resist me, and I will remove you as easily as I removed those dresses.
Alix undressed and showered. Afterward, she got dressed again in her working uniform. She went barefoot. She didn’t put on any makeup.
She left the room and walked down a great baronial staircase. A white-jacketed servant was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. “Madame Zhukovskaya is waiting,” he said, leading her into the main reception room.
The deputy director was sitting in an armchair by a mighty, open fireplace filled with blazing logs. She was wearing reading glasses and examining the contents of a ring-bound folder. An identical chair had been arranged next to hers.
As Alix drew closer, Zhukovskaya closed the file, took off the spectacles, and looked her up and down with a faint grimace of distaste.
“Could you not decide what to wear?”
Alix let her look, without reacting in any way, then sat down in the empty chair.
Zhukovskaya watched her for a few more seconds, then nodded to herself.
“I see. Well, then, let us get down to business.”
She reopened the file and put her glasses back on. There was a photograph paper-clipped to the inside cover of the file, a color portrait of a U.S. Army officer in full dress uniform. He looked strong, determined, golden-haired, and square-jawed. She passed the photo to Alix, who looked at it for a few moments, then handed it back.
“A handsome man,” she said, without any hint of enthusiasm.
“His name is Lieutenant General Kurt Vermulen,” said Zhukovskaya. “This picture was taken three years ago. At the time, he was leading the U.S. Special Forces Operations Command at Fort Bragg, having previously commanded the First Battalion of the seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment and served a tour of duty at the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
“An American hero,” murmured Alix dryly.
“Oh, yes,” Zhukovskaya continued, “he is a true soldier. He began his career as part of the Americans’ imperialist adventure in Vietnam. He won a Distinguished Service Cross there, one of the very highest awards for gallantry the American army can bestow. One should respect a man, even an enemy, who possesses such a decoration.”
Alix pursued h
er lips dismissively. Zhukovskaya continued, regardless.
“Vermulen retired from the army in May 1995, age fifty, soon after that picture was taken. His wife was dying of cancer and he wanted to be with her in the final months. After that, like a good American, he began to make himself rich.”
“So why are you telling me all this?”
“Because of this.”
Zhukovskaya removed another photograph from her file. It was a grainy, long-range shot of Vermulen, now dressed in civilian clothes, talking to a middle-aged man with a mustache.
“That is Pavel Novak, a former officer in Czech military intelligence.”
“What is he doing with Vermulen?”
“That is precisely what we want to know. Twenty-five years ago, Novak became a double agent, passing secrets to the Americans. He did not know that we were aware of his treachery, so we used him as a means of passing false, misleading information. He was, in effect, working for us all the time. For part of that period Novak’s American handler was this Vermulen. In recent years, Novak, like Vermulen, has become a businessman, but perhaps a less respectable one. Today, he trades our secrets to Arabs, Asians, and Third World countries. And of course, we still know and monitor what he does.
“But never before has he had any business dealings with the Americans. So why is he making contact now? What can he offer them that they could possibly want? Novak may wish Vermulen to be some kind of middleman. Or maybe the Americans are playing another game we don’t even know about as yet. This is what you must find out.”
Alix frowned.
“Me? How?”
“By doing what you do best, my dear. Since his wife’s death, Vermulen has only had one or two casual affairs. It is time he fell in love once again.”
“Not with me. I won’t do another trap—not with him or anyone else.”
The good humor vanished without trace from Zhukovskaya’s voice, replaced by a Siberian chill.