Evan was at the hotel room desk, staring at the two gold Omegas when the call came in. She had taken them out of their cases, was turning them over and over between her fingers, failing to find a stamp of manufacture. Ben was at the window overlooking the front of the hotel, peering through the curtains. Her mind was still reeling from the knowledge that the death gag was meant for Ben, that both she and Ben were being targeted by what appeared to be Samuel Wells or one of his American Nemesis buddies. And when he made no indication that he’d heard her phone ring, she knew he was lost in similar thoughts.
She quietly stepped from the living area into the bedroom so as not to be overheard. She knew the call was from Lyudmila Shokova because it was sandboxed.
“I have news.” Lyudmila’s voice was like a breath of fresh air.
Her heart skipped a beat and hope rose in her. “About Wendy and Michael?”
“Not yet, no.”
As quickly as it had lit up, hope was extinguished. Evan felt a hollowness inside.
“Listen,” Lyudmila was saying, “it’s about the black jacket dossier that came from the SVR central server. Directorate 52123 isn’t SVR.”
“We surmised that.” Evan took a stab. “It’s Zaslon, isn’t it?”
“We were looking at it the wrong way around. There is no Directorate 52123, which was why we couldn’t find a trace of it.”
“Then what—?”
“Your instincts are as good as ever. Directorate 52123 is the name given to a closely guarded infiltration field ops run by Zaslon. Your sister was spearheading the operation.”
Evan was for the moment speechless.
Lyudmila continued. “Zaslon exists as a wholly separate entity, with its own aims and initiatives, under the auspices of the SVR.”
“And Bobbi was a member of it. Lyudmila, are you absolutely sure?”
“I’m afraid we are sure now, yes.”
Evan forced herself to breathe. “Do you know anything about who her infiltration target was?”
“No. Only that the group apparently still exists. It’s called Omega and is labeled by Zaslon Vragi Gosudarstva—Enemies of the State.”
All the breath went out of Evan. “Omega is awfully similar to Nemesis’s First Tribe.”
“Could be just a coincidence.”
“In our world there is no such thing as coincidence.” Evan was gripping her mobile so tightly her fingers began to cramp.
“You’re not wrong. Like the Hydra, Nemesis had many heads.”
Evan felt chilled to the bone. “Maybe we only cut off one of them.”
“As I said in Sumatra, we’re in this together, Evan. All the way.”
“Lyudmila …”
“I know, dorogoy. I’m doing everything I can to find the children.”
Evan closed her eyes for a moment. “If Omega has them.”
“I’m sure of it. The trouble is we can’t find Omega’s headquarters, don’t even know what country it’s in.”
Evan’s mind was firing on all cylinders now. “I’m beginning to think that Omega is in more than one country, and that there’s a branch of Omega here in the U.S. According to the Kobalt dossier, Bobbi was assigned to find out about Omega, but as far as I ever knew, Bobbi never left America.”
“Which means you must be correct,” Lyudmila said, “a branch of Omega is there.”
“Exactly.” She considered a moment. “One thing doesn’t track though.”
“Tell me.”
“If, in fact, Omega is an offshoot or a successor to Nemesis, why would the FSB be interested in them?”
“I would say to use Omega as they did Nemesis to continue to foment a cultural and religious divide in the American population.”
Evan wasn’t so sure but felt at this stage there was no point in mentioning her doubts to Lyudmila. Instead, she emphasized her overriding concern for her niece and nephew.
“We’ll find them, I promise,” Lyudmila said. “Now I must go.”
The connection was severed. Evan tried calling her back but to no avail. She was about to try again when Ben called to her from the other room.
“Get over here!” His voice was hushed but urgent.
She rushed in, relieved to see that his back was still to the room. But she moved too quickly, and knocked The Ugly American off the table as she passed. When it hit the floor it opened to where a card was stuck in as a bookmark.
“Evan!”
“Hush,” she hissed. “I’m here. Wait.”
Bending down, she pulled out the bookmark: a snapshot. She took it with her as she crossed to where Ben stood at the window, his attention still riveted to something outside, the curtain protecting him from being seen from the street below.
“There’s a car just there, across and down to the right from where I parked,” Ben whispered.
A black Chevy Tahoe crouched like a polecat. It had government plates. “Tennyson and Slim are tailing us.”
“Those idiots are clueless,” Ben said.
“Or else they think we’re smarter than they are.”
They both laughed at that.
“Look what Onders was using for a bookmark.” She held out the snapshot.
A couple stood in a bucolic setting—in a small field dotted with mature trees—and off in the background stood a large low modern building, hazed, vague, indistinct, save for the outline. The man and woman had their arms around each other. The man was smiling into the camera, a goofy smile that hinted he’d just had a good laugh. The woman, several inches taller, had thick, wavy hair that came down to just below her chin, and she was wearing what appeared to be an unfashionable white smock that reached to just above her ankles. It was unbelted, so it gave no hint as to her figure.
Ben rubbed his chin. “The man is clearly Onders.”
“In happier times.” Evan tapped the photo with her fingernail. “And who is this with him? Wife? Girlfriend?”
“Mistress, maybe.”
He might be right. She was classically beautiful—heart-shaped face, large eyes of an unusually deep blue, wide mouth—but also striking, which was not always true of the classical beautiful. There was something about the whole that was inescapably compelling. Evan could sense it even in the photo. Perhaps it was the size of her eyes, almost too big for her face, or her enigmatic expression. Whatever the case, hers was a face that the camera loved.
She gave him a quick look. “You can see why he was with her.”
Ben worried his lower lip. “But why was she with him? I mean, he was a nasty bit of work, to say the least.”
“Hmm.” Idly, she turned the snapshot over. On the reverse a neat feminine hand had written: To W. I love you, Ana. It was dated the twenty-seventh of June two years ago. And then in smaller letters down in the lower right-hand corner: countryside Koln: a breath of fresh air
Evan frowned. “What was Onders doing in Germany two years ago?”
“If memory serves, Cologne is in Westphalia, the North Rhine region,” Ben said. “A freaking big city.”
Evan ignored his comment. “She’s German. Köln. She used the German name for Cologne. And there’s Pine’s pack of German ciggies. Everything points to Germany.” She tapped the snapshot. “We’ve got to find Ana.”
“Really? She could be anywhere in Cologne. How can we find her? We don’t even know her last name. And Ana is not exactly an uncommon name in Germany.”
Evan took a photo of the snapshot, sent it off with a text. Ana Onders (?) Köln next stop. Then she did the same with the two gold Omegas, with the text ???
Ben was staring at her closely. “Who did you send all that to?”
“The same person who showed me the SVR file in Sumatra. Someone who will help me.”
“But no name.”
“Need to know, Ben. Moscow Rules.”
He grimaced. “So we start with Onders and go from there. But come on. That identity has got to have been whipped up by people in his service. Odds are the real William Onders has be
en six feet under for years. That’s a favorite ploy of the back-room boys for creating legends.”
“Listen.” Evan waved the photo. “This is the first real lead we’ve found. We need to follow it. Do you have a better idea?”
Reluctantly, he shook his head.
Movement along the street returned their attention to the black Tahoe. As they watched, Leyland emerged from the shotgun seat, looked around, then glanced up at the hotel façade. Evan and Ben froze, but apparently, he didn’t see them. He crossed the street, walked down to Ben’s car. Again, he looked around, then squatted down, brought a small square out of his pocket, reached under the car.
“He’s attaching a tracking device,” Ben said. “Those sonsofbitches.”
Trotting back to the government SUV, Leyland gave his boss a thumbs-up. Moments after he got in, the vehicle drove off at a sedate pace, no doubt to lay low at a discreet distance.
“Time to vacate the premises,” Ben said.
Evan gathered up the Omegas, pocketing them along with the photo. She followed Ben out the door of the suite, but once in the hallway she stopped, put a firm hand on Ben’s arm to keep him in place. He gave her a querying look. Her head was slightly cocked.
“Something’s not right.” He had to lean in to hear her whisper. “I can feel it in the silence.”
“I don’t hear anything,” he whispered in a neutral voice.
Her head cocked farther. “It’s on a waft of air coming up from the staircase.” She shook her head. “Back up. Back up now!”
She pulled him back into the room, closed the door, double-locked it.
“What did you hear?” The question was genuine. He knew better than to ignore her keen senses. They had saved the two of them more than once back in the day.
“Someone’s coming.”
“Not the FBI boys. They’re gone.”
“My guess is Onders’s partner, Pine.”
“We need to get out of here.”
Evan nodded. “In a second.” She darted into the bathroom.
“Evan! Now!”
But she was already back at his side. “Let’s go. This way.”
In the bedroom, the window looked out onto the same view as the grimy window at the end of the hallway. She unlocked it, opened it wide. In front of them was the alley filled with the maze of scaffolding between the hotel and the building ostensibly being rehabbed.
“Let’s go.” One foot on the sill, she swung out, grabbing onto the nearest vertical pipe, and from there onto a horizontal section on which a wooden board had been temporarily laid as a platform. A few paces ahead, she could see a welter of tools, carelessly left behind. A sudden lack of money will do that to workers who get paid by the hour or not at all.
Ben, crouched on the sill, suddenly turned his head and flinched. “The front door’s being broken down.”
As he turned awkwardly to close the window behind him, he lost his balance and had to grab onto the top of the window frame to steady himself.
“Ben. Ben! Get off there. Now!”
He swung onto the pipe she had vacated. As he did so, the glass in the hotel room window shattered outward in a hail of shards. Within the empty space, Evan saw a figure—Pine?—moving within the shadows of the room. He was screwing a noise suppressor onto the muzzle of his Glock. It was Pine, all right, with his close-cut hair, his thin reedy face set in an expression of absolute determination. Reaching out, she hooked her fingers around the handle of a hammer and, as the gunman leveled the Glock, she threw the hammer. She heard the skirl, followed by a grunt, and the open window was filled only with shadows and swirling drapes.
Ben was right behind her.
“Where the hell did you learn to throw a hammer?” His tone was both incredulous and approving. “Not at the Farm.” The Farm was where they had both trained.
She picked up a screwdriver, stuck it in her back pocket. “Being in the field teaches you what the Farm instructors never even thought of.”
The sketchy scaffolding swayed beneath them as they made their way through it toward the rehabbed building. Evan figured they could lose themselves in there. They kept moving from vertical to horizontal at what Evan, her senses heightened, thought a glacial pace. But trying to go any faster was too dangerous.
They had just come to the middle section of the scaffolding—the least secure part—when they heard movement down below. A heavy shudder ran through the scaffolding, causing them to grab hold of the nearest vertical pipe. Far below them, in the alleyway, Pine wielded the hammer Evan had thrown at him. With another heavy blow he sheared off the wing bolt at the bottom of one of the vertical pipes. The third blow was delivered to the inside of the pipe at the junction, causing the horizontal pipe to detach itself. He shook the scaffolding, and it listed like a ship in stormy seas.
“Come on down!” he called. He brandished the hammer. “I’m waiting for you!”
Another whack and the board they were on tilted and began to slide off the vertical bars on which it had been set. Tools and bits and pieces of detritus showered down into the alley, and Evan and Ben took advantage to swing across to the next-to-last vertical pipe before they could make the jump to the adjacent building.
But Pine was whacking away with the hammer, and now the entire structure was starting to come apart under the ceaseless blows. Vertical pipes dented, creased, then folded at the creases.
“It’s just a matter of time!” Pine called. “There’s nowhere to go!”
“He’s right,” Ben said. “We’re going to fall.”
Evan leapt to the last vertical pipe, but the horizontal bar Ben was on was falling away. Leaning out as far as she could, she grasped his extended arm, pulled. His weight almost pulled her arm from its socket. The shock caused her head pain to resurrect itself from the grave to which she’d consigned it. Grimacing, she held Ben up as his feet scrabbled for purchase before he managed to reach the last vertical.
But now the entire structure was undermined. Pieces flew off, slamming into the building walls, chipping off brickwork.
“You might as well give up!” Pine called. “I don’t know how you evaded Will, but it hardly matters now I’ve got you both!”
Recklessly suspended five flights above street level, there was nowhere to go. Holding on to the scaffolding was no longer an option.
Ben grabbed her. “This way!” Five steps away, a bundle of cable TV wire hung down the side of the building from the roof where the equipment had been installed. The last horizontal pipe lurched from under them. Ben left his feet and lunged for the bundle of wires. He caught hold, but his weight ripped the rooftop equipment from its mooring, dragging it until it fetched up against the roof’s parapet.
Ben had shot down a full floor, was hanging on four stories above the alley floor. Looking up at Evan, he called out to her, and she jumped just as what was left of the scaffolding collapsed. Grabbing onto the bundle of wires, she slammed against the brick siding, knocking all the breath from her.
The bundle slipped farther down. Their combined weight was threatening to pull the cable equipment over the parapet. Placing her boot soles against the brickwork, Evan pushed upward, arcing back as she slid down so that on the inward arc her extended feet smashed through the old glass of a window. She was inside.
Turning, she saw Ben climbing hand over hand toward her. But for every foot he progressed, the bundle slipped a few inches down as the equipment began to roll onto the top of the parapet. A moment more, and it would come crashing down, along with the wires.
Ben got a hand onto the windowsill as the equipment came hurtling down. An edge of it scored along the left side of his back, just before Evan managed to haul him over the sill, into the interior of the building.
They heard sounds through the open door, echoing up the stairwell.
“No rest for the wicked,” Ben said, gasping.
Evan drew him away from the splintered glass beneath the window. “No rest for the virtuous, either.”
<
br /> 16
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
Kobalt leaned back, elbows on the railing, and looked up at the sky, paled out by the lights from the city. Suddenly, she wanted to be away from here—away from Ermi’s boat, from Istanbul, from Omega’s wanton disregard of life, but it seemed as if she could not outrun the feeling of being found wanting. For whatever reason she had failed in her mission to sabotage Omega’s mission. She wanted another chance; they had inadvertently given it to her.
Here and there a first-magnitude star managed to struggle through the man-made pollution, making its presence felt. Kobalt knew that stars were looking down on her, judging her with their cold, cruel light. That feeling of being found wanting had arisen in her since she was just a child, when she would run out of the house after doing something wrong, something that would surely garner her a stern and outsized punishment. Slowly, her eyes closed, for some reason feeling comforted by Ermi’s waterlogged head on the seat beside her.
The child Bobbi threw herself down on the lawn and stared up at the stars, absorbing their relentless light and their objective judgment of what that light illuminated in her, allowing the celestial judgment to become part of her. Gradually, that judgment would undergo a mysterious process, be transformed by her subconscious as if into a burr lodged under her skin, there to be a constant reminder that she was different from her sister, utterly and irretrievably detached from her mother and father. She was opposed to them in every way imaginable, and, years later, after their deaths, it was a constant struggle for her not to feel that way about Evan, who knew nothing, and hopefully never would.
That’s why she liked it when her sister came outside, looking for her. And when she lay down beside her, took her hand in hers, she had no doubt about Evan’s love for her. She knew the time would come when the adults would be gone, and Evan would take care of her. Call it a premonition, call it whatever you wanted. The fact that there were secrets she kept to herself, secrets she knew and Evan didn’t, was a way of feeling better about having to rely on her older sister.
“Kobalt.”
The Kobalt Dossier Page 12