Yuri nodded. "Completely agree. Have Mavick call him?"
"She can. Call him at work, when he least expects it."
"His name is Sonny. Sonny Gloq."
They both sat back and sipped coffee for several minutes. Then Yuri extracted a pack of Belomorkanals and lit up. He offered the pack to Karli, who declined. Yuri puffed out a series of smoke rings and absently poked his index finger at his smoky art.
"I'm thinking something," Yuri said at last. He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette.
"What might that be?"
"I'm wondering if this entire hijacking was some kind of plot to bring spies into Russia. Maybe Ms. Gloq is not who we're after at all? Or maybe she's not the only one."
"That's paranoid. You think the CIA would set up a fake hijacking to bring people to Moscow?"
Suddenly both men stood up.
It had come to them: she was alone in the room.
They ran from the office suite and back through the cube room. When they arrived at the interrogation room, their worst fear was confirmed.
Ms. Gloq had left the building.
* * *
One hour earlier, Thaddeus and Angelina scored temporary visas, finally surrendered by an exhausted customs agent who surrendered to Angelina's insistence that they needed to enter the country for one night only. She warned him their aircraft had been hijacked and soon three hundred others would swamp his station, all of them in need of temporary accommodations. Take us first, Angelina pleaded, we got here first. Somehow her childish plea made the agent smile, at least the corners of his thick mouth twitched, as he stamped two hastily printed documents and extended his arm in the universal, "Pass on through."
An hour later they had searched for Christine with no luck. Last place to look, outside. So they found the exit and went out to the taxi stand for a final look around.
19
Thaddeus and Angelina caught up to Christine at the main taxi stand.
Christine had trotted along the walkway between Terminals D, E, and F and the Aeroexpress Railway terminal on the public access side. As did all passageways within the huge airport, the walkway eventually opened on the main taxi stand, above which extended the pedestrian bridge to short-term and long-term parking and car rental lots. She stepped into the sub-zero air and absorbed the alarming freeze of Russian winter on her exposed skin. She needed more outerwear than the tan sheepskin jacket she had brought along to manage from taxi to hotel and hotel back to taxi in Zurich. Of course, Zurich. She shivered. Zurich was a long-ago dream. Now she was in Moscow, and she had no idea what came next.
After that, she felt a hand on her shoulder and reflexively dodged down and away. She spun in her low heels and stopped. Then she slowly came upright, a smile spreading across her face.
"Thaddeus Murfee. So glad we ran into each other."
"Where the hell did they take you?" he exclaimed. "We've combed the entire airport twice."
"Did you find me?"
"Don't, please. We need to move fast."
Angelina held out a wad of bills. "I changed a Benjamin at the currency exchange. We've got rubles galore. Let's grab a cab."
Christine looked at Thaddeus, who shrugged. "We need to get some place and let me make some calls."
"No, I need to make some calls," Christine said. “This is already turning into an international incident. Uncle is going to be very upset."
Angelina walked to the nearest cab. The driver lowered his window.
She returned. "He will take us to the airport Holiday Inn for fifteen hundred rubles."
"Do we have that much?"
"Easy-schmeezy. Aren't you glad I'm here?"
Thaddeus and Christine exchanged a dour look.
"Away we go," said Thaddeus, leading the trio to the cab. Christine went in first, followed by Angelina and Thaddeus.
Angelina spoke to the driver, and instantly they lurched into the flow of traffic to their left.
"And away we go," said Angelina. "I told him the Holiday Inn would be perfect."
"Do they speak English there?"
She shrugged. "Does it matter? As long as I'm here, what difference does it make?"
"You learned Russian in college? Your family is Russian?"
"Right, Spanish-Russian. Duh. Of course college. I minored in Russian and had a second minor, almost a major, in Russian literature. Which I read in the original Russian."
"I'm impressed," said Thaddeus.
Christine stared coldly out the window. She heard none of it. She was only considering how she would exit Russia quickly without her presence there amounting to anything more than a minuscule blip on the screen of Russian intelligence. She was here briefly, but now she's gone. That's what she wanted them to say about her. Period.
The taxi headed north away from the airport, wending its way through Moscow suburbs to the Holiday Inn on Dmitrovskoe Shosse.
They passed by sullen parks where the plows had constructed their mounds. They saw small lakes that lay aching and cold cupped against rolling hills and suburban stands of timber, primeval and hellishly snowbound. The world was tight in the grip of Russian winter under cloudy, starless skies.
The drive took all of twenty minutes. Christine expected to see red lights and hear sirens closing in from behind, but none came.
The hotel portico lay two hundred meters off the main road, set back between two hillocks, where the familiar green and yellow Holiday Inn neon pierced the gloom like a sedative from home. At last, something they all recognized: an American corporation that had somehow been uprooted and landed in Moscow and flourished.
Check-in took fifteen minutes while IDs were checked and credit cards confirmed. They opted for a double queen with a rollaway and a separate living area for those alarmists who couldn't sleep.
The room was large by Russian standards, small by Chicago standards. They were exhausted, and fell across beds, studying the ceiling for five minutes or more. Angelina called the front desk. There was no restaurant in the hotel; but a pizza chain delivered, as did the Thai Palace four kilometers south. Singha Thai was ordered times three: chicken, beef, and shrimp, along with egg-fried rice for Thaddeus and chicken-fried rice for Angelina. Christine shook her head. She didn't need a side of rice. She would take the plain rice.
Three hours later they sat two on the couch and one at the desk while the TV featured Russian newsmen talking endlessly about what Angelina could only explain was a citywide election in which terrible voting fraud was rampant. Sleep was all but impossible. At the desk, Angelina was compiling screen upon screen of notes and captured dialogs in preparation for crafting her best seller.
At 3:15 a.m. she asked them to describe how they were then feeling in a sentence or two. They both stared blankly at the screen, simply ignoring yet another plea for feelings updates.
Then Christine mumbled, "Scared. Just scared."
"Why? You haven't done anything wrong."
Christine shook her head. Tears came to her eyes, but they were swept away with one swipe of a muscular forearm, forbidden to return. She was having none of that, not tonight.
"We're all emotional," Thaddeus said. "With good reason."
"Are you two keeping something from me?" Angelina said. She had collected her thoughts, made her notes and had pressed them about why Christine had been hurried off the plane by the Russian wearing the business suit when everyone else was left to the militiamen. So far, she had only run into closed doors. No one was talking. Funny looks and shrugs; that was how she described it in her notes.
"Let me just ask it point blank, then," Angelina said. "Are you two spies?"
Thaddeus let out a deep groan. "What the hell, Angelina? Everyone's trying to settle down and get some sleep. Just let it go for tonight, okay?"
"That settles it. I'm thinking you're spies. At least Ama Gloq or Christine is. She's the one who got dragged off."
20
The next morning found Angelina awake and hard at it in the livin
g area. She sat at the desk, her hands and fingers flying over her laptop keyboard. She leaned back and smiled. She had the first chapter of her New York Times bestseller. Most of the information was gleaned from a late night interview with Thaddeus before he turned in. The rest of it was purely fictional, straight out of Angelina's brain. She reviewed her work:
FROM: Thaddeus Murfee: A New York Times Bestseller
Thaddeus
by Angelina Sosa
The light in a child's eyes is in direct proportion to adult voices. When the adult messages are loving, the light burns brightly. Reports will have it that the child is a delight to have in class. Judo instructors will comment on the child's enthusiasm. Piano teachers will gush about notes and chords played beyond the child's years. But when the adult messages are hateful, the light dims, even extinguishes. Membership in Scouts is terminated over infractions. Eyes are blackened and noses bloodied in fistfights. Case workers hammer at the door. Police are called. Juvenile halls bulge with the unwashed and unwanted swept inside on the high tide. Judges admonish. Families fly apart, disarticulating host from offspring.
Thaddeus found himself, age ten, anxious in the visitors' seating of the home. He was alone and unguided, his appearance there arranged by Mrs. Mounce of the Department of Children and Family Services.
Thaddeus made a conscious effort to hide his hands and feet from the visitors and staff. His fingers were spatulate, either hand able to hold a regulation-size basketball from the top, with blue veins risen across the backs of his hands like a map of the secondary roads in Phoenix, where he found himself. Likewise, his feet were disproportionate; ten-year-olds weren't supposed to be wearing 14-C's, but Thaddeus’ feet would accommodate nothing smaller. When he walked, other children teased him, for his feet flopped like those of a frogman clapping their way into the surf. Surely, some thought, there was a grace awaiting Thaddeus at the end of a flat dive into a coming wave, where the flippers suddenly transform from absurd to powerful.
His usual posture, then, in places like the waiting room of the home for homeless children, would have been arms crossed on the chest, hands buried in the armpits, and feet crossed and scrunched back beneath the green Naugahyde chair. Camouflaged in this manner, Thaddeus became Sonoran. In a word, he imagined himself a Sonoran Desert Gila Monster. He had discovered one when he was hiking, and he had been wholly impressed with how the lizard deliquesced into the sandy arroyo, his beaded hide mixing with the sand. Transformed, his posture sent bored eyes elsewhere. Thaddeus had become a native son, adapted like the giant Gila lizard to a desperate landscape. In short, the parents were engaged in a death spiral and the children lost to the system.
Mrs. Mounce returned to his side from the reception desk. He had watched her mouth move and arms and hands gesture as she molded Thaddeus's life in the air for the receptionist to ponder. He knew she had done that; he knew Mrs. Mounce to be an all-out advocate for the cast-off child. He had even begun to believe her—or at least there was the possibility he might.
"The Administrator wants to meet you," she said, taking the chair beside Thaddeus's with an outward rush of air as she collapsed onto the Naugahyde. "He wants to ask you questions for himself."
Thaddeus continued Sonoran. But his mind raced ahead as he considered what the Administrator might want to ask. Had there been violence? Were there domestic crimes? How did he feel about other children? What did he want to do with his life?
"You'll have to answer his questions, of course," Mrs. Mounce pronounced. Her face was a tight disk of discomfiture at Thaddeus's maddening silence.
He thought he might speak, but then realized, in a quick plumb of his intellectual state, he had nothing to say. So why say anything? If there was a social equivalency bestowed by casual talk, then mark him down as failed. Frankly, he couldn't have cared less. For the bottom-line was evident: they wouldn't just turn him loose in the street. There was a safety net and even now he was flopping about in its springy depths like the blind albino fish no one cared to touch. To hell with them, he thought. Just let me be eighteen when I awaken in the morning. Eighteen and free.
Then, at the last moment, he blinked.
"Oh, so you are in there," his escort said. "I saw your eyes move. There's hope for you." She stopped, then slid a pleat of her navy skirt through her chunky fingers, thinking. "Wait, the lady's waving us over. Our turn. Come along, Thaddeus, off we go. Time to meet the wizard behind the curtain, young man."
Heaving herself out of her chair, she gave him a harsh look as if to say his Sonoran had run its course with her. Hands and feet clumsily emerged, and he stood. Unfolded, for Thaddeus was six feet tall. Six feet tall and ten years old.
She turned to him and pressed the front of his shirt with the palm of her hand. She lifted upward on his button-down collar, freeing it from the neckline of his blue coat. Turning her head to the side as a watercolorist concerned with a first wash, she slowly nodded. "It'll do," she said. "I've seen better, but it'll do. Now go like this," she said and flicked her tongue around her lips, wetting them, then wiping thumb and forefinger dramatically at the corners of her mouth. "You've coffee in the corners."
He did as he was told. She held out a tissue to his wet fingers. He took it and wiped, then placed it in a front pocket of his khakis.
"Come, then."
She led him to the reception desk, where the lady pointed at a closed door behind her. "No need to knock," she stated. "He's waiting for you. Watch out for his questions," she said, directing this final comment to Thaddeus. The boy's heart fell. Inquisitive adults, he thought, are acquisitive adults. They look to gather the feelings and thoughts of children and file them away to retrieve for reference when there comes the slightest buckle in the air. In a word, they wanted to define you and own you by it. He knew the drill, and he hated his near future for it.
He followed her into the large blue and orange office. The air smelled of cigarettes and stale coffee. Neither was evident on the man's desk. He remained standing while the administrator went back around his visitors and shut his door. With only the mildest curiosity, Thaddeus sized up the master of these halls.
The administrator was dressed administratively: blue serge suit, shiny black shoes, white shirt and thin blue necktie with a series of wavelets marching across the fabric at nipple level. Eyeglasses suspended from a coral-onyx chain around his neck, wedding ring of white gold nervously twirled by an obsessive thumb, and a sallow complexion beneath bushy eyebrows and permed black hair. Thaddeus saw a costume, a getup, giving face to a bureaucratic enterprise which, finally, failed its customers one and all. Places like this one always did. So many other kids telling the same story of failed hopes couldn't all be wrong.
This is what the child saw.
For not only was Thaddeus tall, but his IQ was unknowable; it exceeded 165 and, like Thaddeus, wasn't done growing. Which gave the child a certain slant on the world, an unequaled view of his fellows' transparency, and an inquiring mind that was never still. So he looked over this man, this administrator, who held some of the answers to his near-field life, and he saw, sadly, a shill. The man was paid to fill beds in the home he administered, to keep the inmates fed and dry and to expose them to the underbelly of a skimpy in-house educational system. In return, he was paid less per month than he could have earned selling Cadillac’s. Great, Thaddeus thought; it will be a struggle, but one day I'll hit eighteen and be done with childhood. On cue, he forced a smile and shook the pale hand thrust toward him, the connective tissue to his loco parentis—the State of Arizona.
Angelina read back over her writing. It was sufficient, a little stilted maybe, a little too imaginative here and there, but good enough for now. Especially considering the circumstances under which it was written, hiding with a fugitive from the Russian authorities.
She heard Thaddeus moan in the next room. Across from him, in the second queen bed, was Christine. She had already used the bathroom twice that morning, once around four and again at six.
Then Angelina heard voices. They were talking, and she needed to get right in there and watch her story develop.
She loved writing a Pulitzer. She loved writing a bestseller.
It was the best job she'd ever had.
21
Karli located the cab driver before the seven o'clock shift at the airport. Three passengers without luggage, one of whom spoke shaky Russian, were instantly recalled, and their destination established.
By 7:20 a.m. Karli stood in the Holiday Inn lobby, having just been handed a pass key and room number.
He considered calling for backup. The one going by Gloq was definitely CIA; but the two other two, who were reported as missing from the passenger manifest, Mr. Murfee and Ms. Sosa, these two were amateurs. Airport video followed them for a good forty-five minutes the night before, dodging and dashing through the airport, into this room and right back out, looking high and low. Their dress and manner at the taxi stand was likewise videoed and a still of them easily ID'd by the cabbie. Karli had no doubt they were holed up in the Holiday Inn; he would have them in hand within minutes. In the end, he decided against backup because they were unarmed. That didn't mean they weren't dangerous, it simply meant they were no match for the nine mm. machine pistol he carried inside his coat.
Fifteen minutes later the trio sat handcuffed together in the back seat of Karli's ten-year-old Lada Samara. They were cramped back there, he noted in the rearview; and he was glad for it.
He had some English, so he spoke to them as he headed for the metro.
"What are your names?" Karli asked. He was smiling his friendly getting-to-know-you smile. The smile was standard issue, GRU.
"Thaddeus Murfee."
"Angelina Sosa."
"Ama Gloq."
Karli smiled at this last and waggled a forefinger, "No, no, Ms. Gloq. I believe you are someone else. Am I right?" He smiled at her in the rearview.
The Girl Who Wrote The New York Times Bestseller: A Novel (Thaddeus Murfee Legal Thrillers Book 8) Page 8