“I told you before that you appeared to be inordinately tense. But I sense that you are also distraught.”
“My sister—my late sister’s—children have been abducted. I’m trying to find them.”
“Ah. I think now you tell me the truth. And you think Ana is somehow involved?”
“I don’t know. But the man she was with in that photo surely was. Since he’s dead, I have to find Ana and ask her.”
“Mm. Possibly I can help with that.”
“How? Tell me how.”
“Nurture or nature—”
“How does that—”
“Indulge me if you will. Nurture or nature, which plays a greater role in the formative years of a child? This question is endlessly debated, most fiercely, without a shadow of a doubt, in the psychiatric community. It has been my experience that when we examine the early life of a single child, we inevitably find that nature is triumphant. The single child must rely on him or herself more and thus his or her traits are forced to the fore more quickly, more forcefully. Whereas, with siblings the opposite is true. Because siblings rely on each other in their formative years, nurture is the primary guiding force.”
A gentle rustling. “Are you with me so far?”
“Mm.” She laughed softly. His voice had become aqueous—the lake itself or the underground pool—they seemed to have merged. The apple tree was gone. In its place, shadows passed across the jagged rock ceiling like clouds. Her eyes were closed as she sank into the dark icy water.
“So. Then what do we learn when we are confronted with twin sisters—or brothers, hm? Curiously, I have discovered that these two siblings—it must be two for this to hold true—are opposites. In other words, for one nurture takes the upper hand, for the other, it is nature.”
She found herself tumbling backward in time to when she and Bobbi were young.
“I find myself wondering, dear Fraulein, whether this is the case with you and your sister. I am very much interested in your response. Perhaps you will be kind enough to enlighten me.”
“I was born on the last day of the year in the Black Hills of South Dakota. My sister, Bobbi, came two years later, almost to the day. Our parents owned a large horse ranch, along with tin and copper mines. Drive an hour or two west and you’d be in Wyoming. I loved to explore the nearby hidden cave system.”
“What about Bobbi?”
“Bobbi liked the caves, or said she did …” The shadows skittered away from her every time she looked for them on the inside of her closed eyelids “… up to a point.”
“Up to what point?” Reveshvili asked in his soft singsong voice.
“I don’t … remember …”
“Of course you remember,” Reveshvili urged gently. “Every memory of your life is stored inside your brain. It is merely a question of opening the right door.”
“This door … I think this door is locked.”
“Mm, and who locked it, dear Fraulein?”
Evan became confused. “Who?”
“Carla.” Reveshvili leaned forward. “That is your given name, yes?”
A pause. “Yes … No …”
“What shall I call you now,” Reveshvili said, “as it appears Carla is not your real name?”
“Ev … Evan.”
“Ah.” He allowed a short silence to fall, as if at the end of the first act. “So, Evan, who locked that particular door?”
“I did.”
“Then you must have the key.”
“I don’t … What if I don’t want to open it?”
“I think,” Reveshvili said, “that it is already unlocked.”
The black water purled all around her.
“I think you have unlocked it,” Reveshvili said. “You have unlocked it right here, right now.”
He was right, she knew he was right. The veil between the world inside her and the world outside seemed to have vanished. She swam through the door. “I did it.” Her voice was hoarse, throttled.
“You did what?” Reveshvili asked.
“I left her in one of the caves … Bobbi.”
“When was this?”
“I was … almost thirteen, I think. So Bobbi was ten, almost eleven.”
Evan took a breath, let it out with a soft hiss. “It was growing dark outside and she wanted to get back, be home. I didn’t. She kept badgering me. We fought. She broke down crying and it was too much. I left her there.”
“You left Bobbi in the cave for how long?”
“Overnight.”
“Did she ever tell your parents?”
“No.”
“Did you talk with her about it subsequently?”
“I couldn’t.”
“And she wouldn’t.” Reveshvili made a low humming sound between his half-open lips. “Why is that, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Another deep breath, ragged this time. “But nothing was ever the same between us after that, not on the inside anyway. On the outside, we needed each other, especially after our parents were killed.”
Reveshvili leaned even closer. “Evan, can you say why you left Bobbi in the cave?”
“I already … She got on my nerves.”
“Overnight.”
Evan drew another breath, even more ragged this time. “Yes. Overnight.”
“You fought in the caves.”
“Yes.”
“What did you fight about, Evan?”
The shadows were moving ever faster; vertigo took hold of Evan, its sharp nails digging into her flesh.
Two vertical lines appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Bobbi had a secret.”
“A secret.”
“Yes. She knew something I didn’t. Something important. I knew it was important because she told me she found it among our father’s papers when she was skulking around the house being bored.”
“Why do you think she wouldn’t tell you.”
“She could be a bitch when she wanted to be.”
“And?”
“I tried to find it, but I couldn’t. And she would never tell me.”
“I believe you know that is not what I meant.”
Evan hesitated for some time. Finally, she said so softly, Reveshvili had to lean over to hear her, “She felt helpless in the caves. She wanted … she needed some control.”
“But you wouldn’t let her have it.”
“I was so angry.”
Reveshvili sat back, hands in his lap. He watched her carefully, carefully marked the emotions scudding across Evan’s face.
“Evan,” he said at last, “I believe very strongly that you have the answer to Bobbi’s secret. It is inside you. It is a secret you both share.”
“I don’t know … I don’t … Where should I look?”
“Memories—memories of you when you were very young, four, possibly three.”
Silence. Then, “Toys, games, seeing Bobbi as a baby. One day, just like that, as if she was delivered by a stork.”
“Perhaps she was. What else?”
“N … Nothing. But …”
“But what?”
“I used to have a dream. It repeated, it …”
“Can you say what it was about?”
“Shadows, shadows moving on the wall, across the floor, fast as a bat’s wings.”
For long minutes Reveshvili was lost in thought. “You know, Evan, dreams and memories, they are not so very different.” He smiled. “Every once in a while there is no difference at all.”
“But they told me … my parents told me it was a dream. To just forget …”
His smiled faded. “Tell me please, Evan, how many fingers do you have on one hand?”
In her current state, the question didn’t seem odd. “Five.”
“Five, yes. There is your key, Evan: the number five.”
“I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“In time you will,” Reveshvili said. “Have faith.”
She was asleep now. Fast asleep. She had reached
the end of her tether; she couldn’t go on. Rising, Reveshvili understood this. He scooped her up, laid her gently down on the sofa. He placed a pillow under her head. For long minutes he studied her. It was a deep meditation, as if he were committing every last inch of her to memory.
He covered her with a light blanket, turned off the lights, and silently as a shadow retreated back to his desk, where he unlocked a drawer, drew out one of two dossiers, opened it to the correct page and, taking up his beloved Montblanc fountain pen, began to write. Every so often he would glance up, his eyes resting on Evan. It was impossible to know what thoughts were now filling him up.
38
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
It was after 1 a.m. of a star-spangled morning when Gurin invoked his FSB ID to get past PP&J’s velvet curtain. PP&J, on Tverskaya Street, not far from Red Square, was a nightclub, strip joint, restaurant and, of importance to Gurin, a private club. Each section was gifted with a different décor. The bar was typically gaudy—a polished copper-top stainless-steel affair presided over by four female bartenders, all of whom were in constant motion serving drinks to the young, rich, wild black-clad revelers crowded three deep. The restaurant was a poshly seated affair, with tables far enough away from each other so discreet conversations would be no problem. Here, minor government officials and their mistresses rubbed elbows with middle-management criminals and their plasticized models moonlighting as escorts. The pole-dancing was off to the left. Nicknamed Siberia, it was for goggle-eyed businessmen, intent on dropping as much money as they could before they got laid.
The private club was an animal of a genus altogether different. The lizard-world was confined to the first floor; up here on the second floor was where the charismatic megafauna roamed, grazed, and plotted destruction and wealth.
The club was accessed by a deliberately narrow staircase at the top of which stood a pair of ex-wrestlers, probably sprung out of prison expressly for the purpose of keeping the riffraff out, no matter how many bills they waved in their faces. The pale Norwegian wood paneling started on the way up, interspersed with small shaded wall lamps.
The club itself was split into three separate areas: the lounge, with its low leather chairs draped with sheepskins and the ubiquitous quartet of Andy Warhol’s lithos of Marilyn Monroe, each in a different colorway. In the middle was a bar, smaller than the one down below, and not in the least bit glitzy—all of that had been left to the riffraff and non-members. The third area was the inner sanctum, where the club elite—high-level mobsters and their main contacts in the legitimate world—smoked cigars, drank iced vodka, toyed with their arm candy, and eventually, after the girls were temporarily exiled to the lounge, got down to the serious business of cyber-extortion, blackmail, money laundering, and worldwide cryptocurrency scams.
The lights were lower here, the music Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin instead of Venom and Alcest, black-metal bands whose hellhound music was prone to give Gurin an ocular migraine.
Even Gurin’s normal FSB card, identifying him as an adjutant, would have no sway up here, but he was carrying a different card, one that made him out to be a full colonel, which bought him an immediate entrée.
Gurin saw the group of men who, for a usurious fee, had recommended the professional murderers to him, the two men who had failed to kill Evan Ryder and were now no longer among the living. He needed to go several steps beyond these people, who had once seemed so formidable.
He cut right, sat at the bar, and ordered three shots of vodka, downing them one after the other without a pause. When the bartender asked if he wanted a refill, Gurin waved him off. He had chosen a swivel seat that had a clear view of the door to the inner sanctum, three steps up from the other areas. The guard looked like an automaton, his flat Slavic face devoid of any expression, let alone emotion. No one was admitted, no one even made the attempt, and after twenty minutes of this Gurin was considering what his plan B might be when the door opened and a woman stepped out. Gurin caught a brief glimpse of the interior, which was so befogged with cigar smoke the occupants were reduced to two-dimensional shadows.
The woman came down the three stairs as if she were a queen descending from her throne. Unlike many of the showgirls here and downstairs, she was elegantly clad in a little black dress that sheathed her curves perfectly. A gold choker was around her throat, a ring sporting a square-cut emerald as big as a baby’s knuckle on her right index finger. Diamond studs pierced her earlobes.
She was a veritable ice queen—pale skin, pale blond hair, pale gray eyes. She wore nude lipstick. When she walked over to the bar her hips swayed provocatively. Click-clack went her high heels against the granite floor. Click-clack.
She was striking without Gurin understanding quite why. In other circumstances—when she woke up in the morning, for instance—she might have even been plain looking. But right now in this milieu, dressed as she was, she was anything but.
She sat next to Gurin without looking at him. She was an inhabitant of another world. To her, Gurin scarcely existed.
She ordered a vodka martini, dirty, with a raft of three olives. She knew what she wanted, and the bartender knew it. He knew her as well, for he said, “Immediately, Ms. Hemakova.” And she received it immediately, precisely as she asked for it. She took her first sip, put the glass down, and lit up a cigarette.
Sinatra was singing “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.” Without looking at him and at the same time exhaling a plume of smoke, she said, “I’ve often wondered whether this song is optimistic or pessimistic.”
At first, he wondered whether Ms. Hemakova was actually talking to him because he couldn’t for the life of him imagine why she should. Then she turned to him slowly and deliberately and he knew that for some reason beyond his comprehension she had been speaking to him.
He cleared his throat, realizing he felt a bit giddy. “Well, it certainly is melancholy.”
“So much of Sinatra’s repertory is, don’t you think?” She gave him the once-over, assessing him with the same sharp knowledgeable gaze an assay officer might turn on a lump of shiny ore to ascertain whether it was iron pyrite or gold.
“I do,” he said at length. “But as for this specific song I come down firmly on the optimistic side. I think he will see her again, finally tell her he loves her, before she falls into his arms.”
“So you’re neither an optimist nor a pessimist,” she said. “You’re a romantic.”
“Aren’t all Russians?”
She shrugged her beautiful shoulders. “That’s what Lermontov would have you believe, anyway.” Mikhail Lermontov was a poet and novelist of the mid-seventeenth century, Russia’s leading Romanticist. She laughed, a low lovely purr. “As a girl I used to have a crush on Pechorin, Lermontov’s greatest creation.”
All at once, she held out a hand, slim and long fingered. “Kata.”
He looked at her as if she had just landed from Venus. This was the assassin Baev had sent him to meet? The idea fairly took his breath away.
A Mona Lisa smile transfigured her face.
He took her hand and was immediately astonished by the flash of heat that went through him. This was followed by his surprise at how tough and calloused the palm was. “Yuri.” He gave her the false name on his ID.
“So.” She took another puff, shot the smoke out of the corner of her mouth away from him. “Yuri, are you not a Russian Romantic?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I’m afraid I am normally too much of a pessimist.”
“Mm. That must be on account of your work.”
“You know what my work is?”
“FSB. Word gets around. As to the specifics, I am content to remain in the dark.”
He smiled. He liked this woman, which was unusual for him. Now he needed to gather himself to say what he needed to say. “Kata, I am looking for someone.”
“And you believe that I can help you.”
“That is my hope, yes.”
“Hope. This is not the precinct of
a pessimist.”
He laughed into her smile. “So. Perhaps you have unearthed a bit of the optimist in me.”
“You know, Yuri, we have been talking for perhaps ten minutes and not once have you made an off-color remark or made a move on me.”
“Are you pleased or disappointed?”
That purring laugh again. “I like you, Yuri. I really do.”
“Thank you, and I return the compliment.”
They stared at each other while Dean Martin sang “My Rifle, My Pony and Me.”
“This song,” she said with a wry twitch to her lips, “I would think the Sovereign has this playing every night after dinner.” Her lips formed a moue. “Or shouldn’t I say that in front of an FSB officer?”
Gurin smiled. “I would think, Kata, that you’re the kind of person who can get away with saying anything she wants.”
Again, he felt the intensity of her gaze as she reassessed him. “You said you wanted to find someone,” she said, stubbing out the butt of her cigarette. “I will help you.”
He looked at her more closely, trying and failing to judge Baev’s choice. “Kata, are you someone who will kill without either remorse or regret?”
“Precisely so.” She drained her glass
“Full disclosure. This target is a stone-cold killer. She has no remorse. She will not hesitate to kill you.”
A slow smile spread across Kata’s face. “Just my type of target.”
“Kobalt is indeed.”
Gurin knew that Baev mistook him for a spineless toady who would never buck an order, and Gurin had made good use of that misconception recently. He had already tried to kill Kobalt twice, the first time by clandestinely betraying her identity to Omega, the second by hiring a “farm hand” to go after her in Istanbul; good thing he didn’t have to pay that fee.
Baev never knew, he was quite certain, so it wouldn’t occur to Baev now that Gurin might give Kata a remit other than the one he was sent here with—to have Kata kill Evan Ryder. But Gurin had no intention of setting this supreme assassin after Ryder when he could manipulate her into terminating Kobalt, who he knew, with the confidence of the short-sighted, was a threat to the State and to his own lofty ambitions. He was already imagining the kudos he would reap when his initiative in ridding Russia of an American mole would be revealed to his superiors.
The Kobalt Dossier Page 26