Evan gulped down mineral water; she wasn’t yet ready for alcohol. Ben was turning the glass holding his bourbon and ginger beer around and around between his hands. Watching the light play off the tops of the ice cubes.
She stared at her glass, frowning. “There’s something else. Something buried.”
Ben said nothing, looking at her expectantly. He was not about to push her.
She drained her glass. Ben did the same with his, never taking his eyes off her. “After Bobbi turned sixteen,” she began, “I told her that as a present I’d take her anywhere she wanted to go. We spent some time planning, and inexplicably—well, it was inexplicable at the time and for years afterward—she chose Copenhagen. I’d chosen Sumatra, and we did go there afterward. She was seventeen by the time we made the trip.”
Ben refilled her glass from the bottle of mineral water, called for another drink for himself. “Drink more,” he said, and she did.
“It seemed odd at the time. So bland a choice. I mean, this was our first trip outside the States,” Evan went on. “But then we had such a great time there, Bobbi—my morose, teenage sister—was so happy, happier there than in Sumatra, although I know she enjoyed that too … the thought never occurred to me. Until I got to Sumatra and saw that dossier.”
“What thought. What do you think happened in Copenhagen?”
They both sat back and kept quiet as the waitress set down Ben’s bourbon and ginger, their plates of spaghetti and meatballs, a shaker of Parmesan cheese and a basket of cut Italian bread, sprinkled with a handful of foiled pats of batter.
“Anything else?” But the waitress was already turning away, Ben’s empty cocktail glass on her tray, and in any case, they needed to get back to their conversation.
“Bobbi got recruited, that’s what happened there. The FSB got to her somehow, someway.”
Ben twirled spaghetti around the tines of his fork. “The meet must have been prearranged, Evan. You must know that.”
“Of course.” She bit her lip. “Whoever it was I’d like to do to him what I did to fucking Pine.”
“The question is how far back does the contact go?”
“It had to have been before she was sixteen, clearly. She had to have been in touch with the FSB before we went to Sumatra and Denmark because she begged me to spend more time in Copenhagen than we had at first planned. But my sense is that she was first recruited early on.”
“Why would you think that?” Ben asked. “She’d be just a kid. Why would she be susceptible—”
“Something triggered her, something profound,” Evan replied. “I don’t know what, but it’s the only logical explanation.” Her eyes shifted. “See, the thing is I don’t think she needed to be convinced. I think she wanted to be recruited.”
Ben’s eyebrows lifted. “What? Like she was waiting for it?”
Evan nodded, which only made the pain in her head flare up so badly she had to put her head in her hands.
“Bad?”
“Like an insane clown posse is riding through my brain, firing at every nerve ending in sight.” She finished off the bottle of mineral water, then called for a beer. She was ready for a real drink. Then she attacked the food with all the gusto of an avid orca.
Though it was already past 3 A.M., the place had actually filled up, or at least the bar had. Apart from the two of them, no one was eating. Men in rumpled suits come from parties, whores’ arms, other bars, stood shoulder to shoulder with working men—truckers, all-night maintenance crews, getting smashed on their triple-overtime. It was mob-deep at the bar with more trailing in. The place was a nexus, a kind of oasis in the midst of the post-industrial desert of the interstate. The decibel level kept rising. Somewhere Miley Cyrus’s voice was blaring “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” from the neon-lit speakers of a digital jukebox.
“Miley’s right.” Evan tore a bit of bread in half, buttered it savagely. “The world hurts you deeply and leaves a scar.”
“Bobbi?”
She wiped tomato sauce off her mouth but said nothing.
“I know you feel guilty that you weren’t in DC to protect her.”
That isn’t it, she thought. That isn’t it at all. It was Bobbi who hurt me deeply, not the world. It was Bobbi who left the scar, just like I left a scar in her. But she didn’t say any of this to Ben; she never would. Not even on the point of death.
He took a large swallow of his drink. “Let’s get this train back on track.”
Evan nodded. “I was Onders’s assignment. I was meant to be tortured—by who I don’t know. But I’ll bet it was Onders who was going to shove the death gag in my mouth when they killed me.”
“Oh, God.”
“And you were Pine’s, according to the death gag we found in his hotel room.”
“And the one in Paul Fisher’s mouth?”
She considered a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Onders and Pine were sent to deal with me and you. And Onders was on my flight … but Pine was already here when the kids were abducted and Paul murdered. So maybe Pine was involved with that, or there was another team sent out for the kids and Paul.”
“Two teams then perhaps—but one group.”
Evan nodded. “My contact tells me that Onders and Pine were part of a group that calls itself Omega. They’re the group that Bobbi was assigned to infiltrate.”
Ben’s face clouded over. “Why did you keep this from me?”
“There hasn’t been time, Ben. And I’m telling you now.”
“Do you not trust me?” His expression was even darker now. “Is that it? And, again, where is this intel coming from?”
“I told you—I can’t say. For my contact’s own protection.” He was still tense, still had his antagonistic face on. “Come on, Ben. Don’t be a dick. You know I’m doing the right thing—adhering to strict security protocols.”
He looked away from her, but his shoulders came down from around his ears.
“Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s just stick to the situation we’re in now. What we do know. Omega has taken your niece and nephew, murdered their father, and the group has—had—at least two members resident here in America.” He spread his hands. “What else?”
“There’s the Germany connection in those photos and the cigarettes,” she said. “And I’m willing to bet that’s where both Onders and Pine were trained.”
That refocused his attention. His gaze snapped back to her. “In Germany. Of course. The photo from outside Cologne. But that photo of Ana and Onders is two years old.”
“Which is when the training could have taken place.” She tapped her forefinger on the tabletop. “We need to find Ana. Both Onders and Pine carried her photo. She’s the key.”
“Hold that thought,” Ben said. “Our FBI shadows have finally found us.”
Evan turned. Tennyson and Leyland had entered the diner. Tennyson hitched up his pants as he looked around. Then he spied them and headed in their direction. Like the Red Sea, the boisterous crowd parted for them.
Tennyson, eyes narrowed menacingly, loomed over them. “Get up.” He snapped his fingers. “Get up now. We’re arresting you for tampering with a federal crime scene and violating national security.”
PART THREE
18
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
“Children.”
“Anton, when you say that word it sounds like ‘Martians.’” Kobalt shot him an icy look. “Wendy and Michael. Those are my children’s names.”
Zherov shifted from one foot to another. “How old were these children when you decided to leave them?”
“Three and a half years younger than they are now.”
He made a sound that might have been disgust or irritation, as if to say, Women. They can’t be trusted. “But you left them without a backward glance. You were exfiltrated out of Washington, DC, out of America. Out of your life. Which, if the reports aren’t dezinformatsiya, you despised.”
She turned the wheel over hard to starboard. �
�I despised my life. I despised my husband.”
“And your children?”
“I felt nothing. I feel nothing. And now I’m dead to them. That’s the way it was always going to be.”
“You left them with a man who you despised.”
“They have my sister,” Kobalt said.
“Don’t you despise Evan, as well?”
“Perhaps. But I also trust her.”
“How odd.”
Kobalt took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, allowing her anger at him to move freely out of her. “Tell me, Anton, have you any siblings?”
“I’m an only child.”
“Then you wouldn’t know.” It would take more than one breath to get all her anger out. “So. Have you any children?”
He gave a peculiar little laugh, not unlike a hiccup. “I haven’t been married.”
She cut the boat’s speed to one quarter. The day was already growing warm, the humidity thickening. Soon it would cover the city like a blanket. “I didn’t ask whether you were married.”
He turned away from her. “I want to be back on dry land.”
“Don’t we all.” She cut the engines.
Belowdecks, she opened the fore hatch, sat down at the edge, and kicked hard at the hose attached to the sea cock. The hose and the seal attaching it to the sea cock was a weak point in all boats. As water started to fill the boat below the waterline, she rose, went back up on deck where Zherov stood waiting for her.
“I’ve started the scuttling process,” she said. “Get ready to swim.”
They moved to the port railing. She tied her jacket around her waist.
“You didn’t answer my question, Anton.”
He jumped and she went just after. In the water, she directed him. They swam for perhaps a hundred yards, into an area where the water abruptly turned aquamarine. Shortly thereafter, they reached the sandbar Ermi had pointed out to her during their cruise together.
“Brave teens sometimes swim out here to get away from their parents,” she told him as they took a breather on the wet sand, “and to fuck their brains out.”
“I’ve never done it on a sandbar,” Zherov said.
“And you won’t today either.” She wrung water out of her jacket. “But keep obfuscating, by all means.”
He sat beside her, opened his sopping shirt wider, then wrapped his arms around his drawn-up legs. “So,” he began, then stopped completely as if the clockwork mechanism inside him had suddenly run down. He shook his head, wiped down his hair. “So. There is someone. A daughter.”
Kobalt wasn’t surprised, given his previous reactions. “How old is she?”
“Not sure. Nine or ten, I think.”
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned to him. “You don’t know the name of your own daughter?”
“I’ve never even seen her. My former mistress forbade it.”
“She forbade it?”
“She’s a high-ranking apparatchik inside the Kremlin.” His voice had taken on an unfamiliar tone, darker, more sinewy, as if all his bravado had been short-circuited. “And to be honest it didn’t bother me. I hated her then, hated her for leaving, for getting pregnant. I felt she had no right.” His hand cut through the air like a knife. “Then, too, I was wrapped up in my work. I was wholly focused on killing enemies of the State on foreign soil and coming back alive. I didn’t care. I forgot.”
She knew there was more. “Then.”
“Yes, then.” He looked miserable, and, all at once, he seemed more than a killing machine honed by Dima and his Zaslon instructors.
“And now?”
“Now? I’m a decade older. The thirties are not like the twenties, not at all.” He pursed his lips. “Now I feel as if I’ve lost something and I don’t even know what it is.”
They sat like that, engulfed in a strange sort of silence freighted with their pasts.
Kobalt had turned her face up to the sun, closed her eyes, and thought about being reunited with her children. How strange even that idea was to her. To want to see them, talk with them, be with them.
At length, she opened her eyes. “Have you ever read Peter Pan? Or seen the films?”
“What? No.”
“Peter Pan was one of London’s Lost Boys who never grew up. Instead, he found his way to Neverland. He returns to London and takes three children, Wendy, Michael, and John, with him back to Neverland.”
She laced her fingers together, broke them apart, laced them back together again. “Here is what I’m offering you, Anton. We work together. We find Wendy and Michael, my lost children, and once they’re safe I will find a way to bring you and your daughter together.”
He gave a little laugh that contained a nervousness that sparked like electricity. “If only you could bring her to Neverland. I have made inquiries of late. Her mother does not treat her well. Perhaps the child reminds her of me.”
She regarded him in all seriousness. “We’ll deal with that then.”
He studied her face for some moments, perhaps needing to assure himself that in this she was being sincere. Then he grasped the hand she held out.
Kobalt rose, stepped to the water’s edge. “I don’t know about you, but I need a good breakfast and a stiff Bloody Mary.”
Then she dove in, and, with powerful strokes, headed toward shore. Zherov followed soon thereafter.
Behind them, the boat was just a memory.
19
WASHINGTON, DC
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Ben said to her, under his breath.
“You’ll be the first to know if I don’t.” The noise level in the bar covered their asides. Then she turned to the agents as if she hadn’t heard Tennyson’s declaration of war. “What a surprise, gentlemen.” She gestured. “Have a seat. Take a load off. Your knees must be killing you after all the tailing you’ve done today. Am I right?”
Tennyson’s face pinked up.
Ben’s expression was unreadable. “Like the lady said, Tennyson, take a pew.”
“I think we’ll stand. We don’t want to spoil your dinner.”
“Too late,” Evan said without the slightest inflection.
Leyland took a step toward her, brushing past his boss. Bending forward he said, “Show’s over.” He put his hand on the butt of his holstered sidearm. “Get up. Now.”
She looked up at him, batted her eyes. “Take a chill pill, Daddy-O.”
Leyland goggled at her. Tennyson’s mouth was a grim line.
“She’s just winding him up,” Ben said equably.
Leyland turned to his boss, but shrugging, Tennyson said, “This is good experience for you, Jason.”
Evan dug the transmitter Leyland had placed under their car from her pocket and threw it on the table.
“I really do think you want to sit down, Tennyson.” Ben gestured. “You’re going to want to hear what Evan has to say.”
The agent stared at the transmitter as if it were a scorpion ready to strike. “I don’t—”
“I have more presents for you,” Evan said.
Ben nodded. “And then you’re probably going to want a drink.”
Tennyson looked at Ben, glared at Evan, then looked around the jumping bar, possibly hoping for the cavalry to come riding to his rescue. Then he said, “Fuck,” and sat down.
Leyland’s nose wrinkled as if in response to a foul odor, but he kept quiet. Maybe he was learning. He stood, like a sentinel, observing the scene as it unfolded.
The juke had segued into the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Jagger’s voice hauntingly augmented by that of Merry Clayton.
Tennyson sighed, ran the heel of his hand across his sweating forehead.
“I think he needs that drink stat,” Evan said.
Ben raised a hand, ordered a bourbon neat when the waitress responded to his hail.
“Make that a double,” Tennyson mumbled. “It’s been a long day.”
When th
e drink came, he downed it in one, set the glass back on the table. “Okay, let’s have it.” His eyes watered and his cheeks were taking on a rosy glow.
Ben sat back. This was Evan’s show and he wanted to enjoy it.
“The first thing I checked after I ID’d Paul Fisher’s body was for material under his fingernails.”
“Defensive wounds. Forensics is on it.” Tennyson nodded. He looked bone weary, as if he’d aged a year in a day. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the identity of Paul’s killer.” Evan placed the baggie that had housed the passport, license, money, and death gag on the table. In it now was the stubbed-out cigarette butt they had found on the bathroom sink. This is what she had gone back into the bathroom to retrieve before she and Ben had fled through the hotel room’s window.
Tennyson glanced at the baggie, then gave Evan a gimlet-eyed stare meant to stop an oncoming lineman in his tracks. “Yeah. So?”
“Your forensics team will run DNA on this butt and find that it matches the material found deep under Paul Fisher’s fingernails.” For once, Tennyson had nothing to say. His mouth hung half-open. “On the fourth floor of an abandoned building across the street from the Majestic Hotel”—she added the address—“you’ll find the body of the man who buried Paul alive. He’s got a line of scratches on the left side of his neck where Paul got to him before he was thrown into the pit.”
“I’ll be fucking banjaxed.” Leyland squinted at Evan.
His boss said, “Please don’t tell me you know who this bastard is, too.”
She handed him Pine’s driver’s license.
“An American,” he growled.
“Or something else entirely,” Ben said.
Leyland frowned. “Meaning?”
“There’s a German connection.” She slid over the pack of cigarettes Ben had found in Pine’s hotel room.
“Pine might be American,” Ben said. “Or he might not.”
“Either way,” Evan added, “the tobacco is fresh. It’s clear he’s been in Germany recently. So … our bailiwick.”
The Kobalt Dossier Page 14