“Duck?” Fielding said.
Seeming to snap to, Drummond said, “Sorry, it’s been a long night.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine, fine. Yourself?”
“Not so fine. But I’ll be better when I find out if you’ve spilled Placebo.”
Drummond looked him over. “Oh, I thought you were the fellow who was here before.”
Probably he meant O’Shea, the guard who stood outside the conference room. O’Shea had fair hair like Fielding. He also had fifty more pounds and twenty less years. Fielding was troubled by his mentor’s failure to recognize him, but only insofar as he couldn’t tell whether it was attributable to illness or artifice.
8
Ventilators the size of jet engines heaved fresh air into the complex. Still, the tunnel from the Perriman subbasement was clammy, the way Charlie imagined a submarine would be. It ended at an ordinary door, through which Dewart ushered him into a stark, concrete hallway lit with fluorescents that caused the walls to shimmer in a dull blue.
In the sporadic dark offices and meeting rooms on both sides, activity was minimal. Charlie saw only a desk chair roll partly into view and a shadow fluctuate just so. His hope that Drummond was still alive rested in large part on the length of time it took to fly an interrogator from the Caribbean to New York. Twice when he tried to ask questions, Dewart shushed him.
Dewart stepped into the employee lounge, an alcove whose amenities included a spotty coffee urn and a refrigerator on which somebody had taped the note THROW OUT OLD MILK. Still clacking a dry tongue, he opened the refrigerator and plucked out a bottle of Gatorade.
“Have a throne,” he said to Charlie, indicating a bridge table surrounded, incongruously, by a quartet of high-backed, gilded chairs that could have come from Liberace’s dining room. “Coke or something?”
“I’m good,” Charlie said. He sank into a velvet-covered cushion.
This was hardly the interrogation upon which his plan hinged.
Dewart plunked his Gatorade onto the table and sat as well. “So there’s a small matter I wanted to run by you, Chuck. We have a recording of a cryptic phone call this evening between you and twice-convicted felon Leonid Grudzev, a.k.a. Leo Kuchna and Leo the Terrible. Do you have any interest in explaining this?”
“Well…” Charlie said. It was about time.
“ Well, what?”
“You’re not going to be too happy about this.”
“I promise you, I’ll be a lot less happy if you don’t tell me.”
“Okay, have it your way. Once Mr. Hattemer was killed, I figured anyone else in this country with the power to help me probably would be having a bad fall down a flight of stairs or something like that. I called Grudzev because he knows people in low places, and I hoped one of those places might be the new KGB.”
“The SVR?”
“That’s the one. As everyone’s favorite philosopher, Sun Tzu, put it, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ I figured if the Ivans knew about Placebo, it wouldn’t be much of a secret anymore. I know this isn’t the ideal solution, but it’s more ideal than getting killed because I know the secret myself.”
“ ‘My enemy’s enemy’ is an Arab proverb,” Dewart spat. He jerked Charlie up from his chair, slung him against the refrigerator, and handcuffed him to the adjoining refrigerator and freezer door handles, slapping on the cuffs with more force than necessary. Then he was off; Charlie heard his hurried footfalls long after he’d disappeared down the corridor.
Charlie had misattributed the “enemy’s enemy” quote on purpose: it was misdirection, designed to distract attention from his actual intent. His call to the Washington Post and his intentionally clumsy cell phone tradecraft also had been misdirection. As Sun Tzu in fact had counseled, “Even though you are competent, appear to be incompetent. Though effective, appear to be ineffective.” If Charlie’s incompetence act worked, the Cavalry would worry that spilled beans were now rolling toward the Kremlin. Which meant the spooks would hold off neutralizing him or Drummond. And before they determined that Charlie’s story was pure fiction, hopefully Leo the Terrible would arrive and shoot the place up.
9
Leonid Kirilovich Grudzev parked an anonymous cargo van on the uptown side of West 112th Street. Through a windshield steamed by their breath, he and his men studied the Perriman Appliances building, trying to plot a way into the Manhattan Project complex.
Breaking into the appliance company offices ordinarily would take a good three days of casing and planning, Grudzev reflected. Doing the whole deal tonight was additionally complicated by the American popped by Charlie Clark. They’d found the kid in the narrow alley behind the sweet shop, gagged and practically mummified from the waist up in twine. He lay unconscious in the back of the van now, the bullet wound much worse than Charlie had estimated. Despite Karpenko’s makeshift compresses and other on-the-fly remedies, the life was spilling out of him. Once he died, his retina would start to decay. According to Charlie, if that happened as little as five seconds before they reached the retina scanner at the entrance to the Manhattan Project tunnel, they might as well turn around and go home.
Grudzev tried to hide his worries from his men. “I’m thinking we go in through the little offices on the fourth floor,” he said in Russian. Perriman took up the first three of the building’s six stories. One-man travel agencies, tarot card readers, and such had the upper floors. Most building managers, in his experience, were lazy, cheap, or both, and put alarms on only the lower two floors, occasionally the third, and sometimes the roof.
“What if somebody sees us and calls nine one one?” said Pyotr from the passenger seat. The onetime Red Army weapons specialist was so tall and burly it was a wonder the van didn’t list to his side.
He and Grudzev both turned to the backseat to Veshnijakov, a veteran second-story man everybody called Bill, short for Chernobyl, a reference to his face, badly pitted by childhood acne. Although too old to scale buildings, he still had the wiles, as they say in the old country, to outfox a wolf.
“A couple roach traps ought to solve that,” he said.
Grudzev, who considered himself a religious man, muttered a quick prayer, then pressed a few buttons on the intercom panel at the front door of the apartment building that neighbored the office building. As most New Yorkers knew, getting into a locked apartment building in the middle of the night was as simple as hitting enough buttons on the front door panel until a resident intent on getting back to sleep decided he just wanted to shut the buzzer the hell up. Grudzev was thus in the lobby in twelve seconds.
Many of the wall-mounted mailboxes were swollen with mail. No surprise there: It was Christmastime. Affixed to Apartment 4A’s box was a note instructing the residents to contact the post office upon their return to receive overflow items.
Grudzev climbed the stairs and knocked on the door to 4A. When no one answered, he slipped on cotton gloves, flicked a torsion wrench and a feeler prong into the lock, then fished around. Thirty seconds later, he was gratified to hear the faint snap of the bolt skipping free of the doorframe.
The apartment was hot and smelled of dust-good signs in terms of occupancy. He groped for the intercom panel and buzzed in Bill, who would admit the others.
The bedroom had been hit by a hurricane of last-minute packing. Stepping over a skirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts that hadn’t made the cut, he raised the window and looked out onto the sliver of an alley between the apartment and the office building.
The one-room Globetrotter Travel office would be a short jump. A mist of streetlight outlined a diagonal grid of metal mesh within the pane there: shatterproof glass, the best kind from the burglar’s point of view in such a situation. When knocked in properly, a shatterproof pane falls in one piece, as opposed to a regular pane, which rains bits of glass and gets the attention of everyone within a couple of blocks.
When Grudzev felt certain no one was watching, he climbed out the window and onto the
ledge. He stepped across the dark alley, touching down firmly on the far ledge.
Police sirens ripped into the night, freezing him, until he gratefully recalled Bill’s “roach traps.” To cut down the number of cops available to respond to a call here, Bill had dispatched a man to do a torch job in Riverside Park, a block west, and a second man to heave a garbage pail through one of the storefront windows up by Columbia, to which the university’s ass-kissing 26th Precinct gave disproportionate attention.
Grudzev kicked the pane as if it were a soccer ball. Other than a dull thud, nothing happened. Undaunted, he tried hitting the glass with an open palm. The entire pane recoiled and plunged into the travel agency, landing with a muted tap on pile carpet. He slid into the office, then beckoned the silhouettes massed at the bedroom window across the alleyway.
Although loaded down by Kevlar and weapons, the men crossed the gap like birds. First Karpenko, then Bill, and finally Pyotr with the unconscious American cradled in his massive arms. Grudzev helped them into the office. He thought the vapor seeping from the American’s mouth a beautiful sight.
Habitually wary of building employees working late, Grudzev used gestures to direct his men into the dark hallway and toward the rear stairwell, clearly demarcated by an illuminated sign. They raced down the stairs to the basement, where, beneath the monstrous growl of the furnace, they were free to speak.
Pointing to the utility closet, Grudzev said, “That’s where our guy thinks the entrance is.”
It wouldn’t open, not even when Pyotr tugged.
“We need to find a service box,” Bill said.
“Got it.” Pyotr pointed to the box ten feet down the dark wall. “But…”
The access panel was padlocked shut.
“No problem.” Bill drew a can of Freon from his overcoat and sprayed. The lock glistened but nothing more.
With a condescending snort, Karpenko aimed his AK-74 at the lock.
“No, wait, stop!” Grudzev shouted.
Karpenko held his fire, but he didn’t lower the gun. Grudzev sought short, simple words to explain to the trigger-happy brute that they’d yet to spot any heat or motion sensors, and that they wanted to postpone announcing their presence to the Manhattan Project complex security guards until the last possible instant. If the guards could be taken by surprise, they would be limited to the weapons on them-likely sticks and stones compared to what the Russians had. Along with a. 357 Magnum and a Walther machine pistol designed for close-quarter combat, Grudzev’s XXXL leather overcoat concealed an AK of his own with an underbarrel grenade launcher capable of piercing armor two football fields away. Karpenko packed at least as much punch, Bill carried incendiary devices, and Pyotr was a walking arsenal.
Bill said, “Abracadabra” and struck the padlock with the base of the spray can. The frozen lock shattered as if made of porcelain. Grudzev expected Karpenko’s face to be red, but the big fool gaped as if he’d witnessed real magic.
Bill opened the service box and pulled the lever inside. The utility closet door sprung outward, revealing a flight of stairs. Ecstatic, Grudzev led the charge down.
There were no lights in the giant subbasement, but the fluorescent ring in the stairwell was enough to reveal the door-sized ventilation grate on the far wall.
“That’s gotta be it, yeah?” Grudzev said.
Advancing for a closer look, Bill said, “The plating’s awfully thick for a vent.”
“That better be it,” said Pyotr with uncharacteristic anxiety.
A glance at the young man in his arms explained it: He’d lost color, and his breathing was barely noticeable.
Bill examined the grate. “Did the horses guy have any idea where the scanner is?”
“No, but I’m sure we’ll find it,” Grudzev said, keeping private his fear that they wouldn’t. Studying the huge, essentially featureless room left him at a loss.
“Maybe hidden inside a cinder block, yeah?” Karpenko said, tapping the wall beside the grate.
“Yeah, could be,” said Bill. “A pressure-sensitive or spring-loaded deal. But…”
The wall was a good twenty meters of cinder blocks. And who was to say the scanner wasn’t in one of the other three walls? With no better option, Grudzev began rubbing his palms along the rough, musty cinder blocks. The others followed his lead.
“Probably at eye level,” Bill suggested.
Seconds later, Karpenko pressed a cinder block about six up from the floor and the same distance from the left of the grate. The facing hissed sideways, revealing a scanning module like a telescope eyepiece. Grudzev thanked God.
Pyotr took up the American like a puppet, pulled open his right eyelid, and positioned his eye before the scanner. The machine within it whirred, glowing green, then faded back to black. The ventilation grate didn’t stir.
Grudzev said of Charlie, “I’m gonna make that cocksucker eat one of these fucking cinder-”
Locks were heard popping open within the wall.
10
The first shot sounded high caliber, like the rounds in battle footage. As the report resounded along the raw cement corridors of the complex, Charlie envisioned a zealous Karpenko brandishing some sort of shoulder-mounted cannon, and he felt like jumping for joy. With his hands cuffed behind him to the handles of the heavy refrigerator and freezer, he could barely move.
More weapons joined in. Among the blasts and jolts, bullets hissed, whined, and pinged off the walls and floors. Things began to pop and shatter, building to one continuous, deafening peal. To Charlie it was a symphony. Lights flickered and a fog of dust rolled into the employee lounge.
Suddenly, as if someone had thrown a switch, the shooting ceased. The complex settled, the familiar hum of the ventilators and fluorescents returned, and the air regained most of its clarity.
Charlie heard someone approaching the employee lounge. He pictured himself momentarily giving Grudzev a bear hug.
Dewart batted through a dust cloud and entered the lounge. His face was streaked with perspiration and blood. A fragment of ceiling tile clung to the back of his neck.
“Hey,” he said flatly.
Charlie was too stunned to muster even that much in response.
Dewart uncuffed him from the refrigerator, nudged him aside, and opened the door. He lunged in for a fresh bottle of Gatorade and drained most of it with his first gulp.
Charlie got out, “What happened?”
Dewart wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “We had three men to their four. They had vastly superior weapons. But one of the guards here was alerted in time for us to put a couple of rifles on tripods and wait inside the tunnel entrance. You see, criminals without qualms about nuclear devastation is a key demographic of ours, so one of their men was really one of our men.” Dewart flicked a hand at the hallway.
To Charlie’s shock, Karpenko appeared, hauling a giant assault rifle. As most PlayStation veterans would have, Charlie recognized the iconic AK-74 fitted with a big-mouthed underbarrel grenade launcher. Despite the burden, Karpenko stood more erect than usual, his jaw no longer jutting and his eyes shining with intelligence in place of the usual demonic possession.
“Fortunately, Charlie Clark, you have qualms about nuclear devastation,” Karpenko said. His accent was now no more Russian than Charlie’s. “You went to elaborate lengths to convince us you were the new town gossip, but all you really did was give Grudzev vague details. None of his surviving goons know anything of consequence. And now we’ll be able to spin it so I can get in with Bernie Solntsevskaya, who’s a much greater threat than Grudzev ever was.” The past tense slapped Charlie. “Also, the way things worked out, we were able to save Pitman.”
Charlie reflected that his rescue mission had amounted to saving the life of a traitor, almost certainly at the cost of his own life. Through a thick gloom, he said, “Super. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
11
The interior of the Blue Lion Pub was paneled in mismatched sheet
s of dark wood, all nail-gunned into place, many of them warped. The effect was more utility shed than pub. Alice had chosen the Blue Lion for its view across Broadway onto West 112th. She’d been sitting by herself in a window booth for half an hour, nursing a pint of Guinness while immersed in a copy of the free weekly she’d taken from the pile in the entryway. Or so the wizened barkeep and three solitary drinkers were meant to think.
Really she was using the neon Rolling Rock bottle in the window as camouflage of sorts while watching the Perriman Appliances building. Earlier she’d followed Cranch there from the heliport. The night vision lenses in her otherwise superfluous eyeglasses allowed her to see him admitted from the dark vestibule to the Perriman reception area by a young man who wore a powder-blue Columbia rugby shirt-but probably was no Columbia student. Although baby faced, he had that boxy build indigenous to ex-military contract agents.
Her job now was to determine the right time to send in her backup unit, augmented shortly after Cranch’s arrival by sixteen SOCOM weapons and tactical specialists, all of them in dark gray Nomex jumpsuits with body armor vests, Twaron/Kevlar helmets with protective face covering, night-vision goggles, gas masks, and combat steel-reinforced boots. They were armed with either nine-millimeter Heckler amp; Koch MP5 submachine guns or Remington 870 shotguns. All carried semiautomatic handguns as well. Their tactical aids included a battering ram, flash bang grenades, Stingers, tear gas grenades, and-probably most useful of all-extension poles with mirrors on the ends for looking around corners without putting the looker in the line of fire. If the Clark exfiltration went according to plan, they would need to fire only a couple of paintball guns. The paintballs were packed with oleoresin capsicum, an upmarket pepper spray.
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