Whirlwind

by Joseph R. Garber

  Mathematician. Top grades. Applied to night school at Georgetown to earn credits toward her doctorate. Wants to start this fall when she figured she’d be back from turtle duty. This is one motivated lady, a real overachiever. No, wait a minute, this is someone who is more than that. She’s driven, absolutely driven. “Failure” is not in her lexicon. She’s got the talent and she’s got the energy, but most of all, she’s got the need. Oh, yeah, Irina Kolodenkova is someone who has to succeed. Officer’s daughter, champion fencer, top-ranked student — she doesn’t know the meaning of the word “lose”; hell, she probably doesn’t know how to spell it.

  Fascinating woman. Damned fascinating.

  Charlie had tried to explain to the Agency how his talent worked. They didn’t get it. Even though every trainee was put through an exhaustive curriculum in cold reading — The Extraction of Information from Physical Appearance was the course’s official name — they couldn’t understand Charlie’s hat trick. They thought it was magic. Some people thought it was more than that.

  Back in the days when the boneheads piddled away more than a billion dollars researching “psychic warfare,” some especially witless bastard went so far as to order him tested for telepathic powers. Charlie was not known for following orders. However, he was known for taking the scalps of witless bastards. The matter ended swiftly, although not amicably. And afterward, up until the day he left the Agency in disgrace, all that anyone could — or would — acknowledge was that Charlie McKenzie had gifts that no one else had been given.

  Her father is the key. Don’t ask me how I know, but be damned certain that I do. He wanted a third son to follow him into the Navy. Instead he got a useless daughter. And she got raised by a father who wanted her to be something she wasn’t. That’s why she has to prove herself. That’s what’s behind the academic excellence, the fencing, the Olympic gold. That’s why she turned spy. The FSB is the only Russian military arm in which a woman can succeed on her own merits. Yeah, merits. She’s got ’em in spades. Plus the mind and motivation. Smart and tough, she’ll win or she’ll die. Irina Kolodenkova isn’t the kind of gal to settle for anything in between.

  What else did he now know about her? There was something. It was…it was…just beyond his grasp. He’d read it or he’d seen it or he’d deduced it, he could nearly touch it, but it was slipping away, and damnit it was important, everything was important, but this particular thing was more important than almost anything else, and unless he locked his radar in on it right this very moment…

  Oh, yeah. Of course. Obvious. He shuffled through the photographs, his eye glinting like arctic ice, and sure enough there it was. Gorgeous girl. Crappy clothing. In every damned photo she’s dressed like a frump. More than that: no makeup, no jewelry, God Almighty, her ears aren’t pierced! Okay, beautiful, now I know you, yes, I do, I know it all, especially the things you don’t want me to know, and so, my lovely lass, I own you body and soul. Irina Kolodenkova, you are mine!

  Charlie returned from a faraway place. He drummed his fingers across the top of Irina’s dossier. “Sam,” he said. Then he said nothing.

  “What?”

  Charlie drummed his fingers more.

  “Speak to me, Charlie.”

  Charlie opened his mouth then closed it. Sam threw up his hands in frustration. Charlie finally found the words, but couldn’t speak them. Laughter rendered him speechless.

  Finally, taking considerable satisfaction at the mottled purple of Sam’s face, he managed to sputter, “Sammy, oh, Sammy boy, this time you’ve got yourself a real problem on your hands!”

  The sun was in her eyes.

  East, she was driving east. Had been for hours.

  Some miles back, there’d been road signs welcoming her to the great state of Texas, drive safely, speed limits strictly enforced. Now she was seeing more signs. Big billboards advertising factory outlets, auto dealers, restaurants, and private clubs that guaranteed “the most beautiful women in the whole southwest. Friendliest too.”

  She was on a six-lane highway, the kind Americans called an interstate.

  Not good.

  Such roads were heavily patrolled. Soon, if not already, a sleepy tourist family would step out of their motel room, staring with bewilderment at an empty parking space.

  The authorities would be summoned. A police officer would take note of a nearby Jeep with bullet holes in its back. Shortly thereafter, a description of both the Volvo and the Jeep would be broadcast. Then the kennels of hell would open, the hounds beginning their hunt.

  The clock on the dashboard panel read 7:37 A.M. That would be Mountain time. Now she was in the Central zone, an hour ahead, 8:37 in the morning.

  She was running out of time.

  The outskirts of the city flew past. Every off ramp pointed to: Gas, Food, Lodging. Up ahead, at the next exit, she saw a sign she recognized. It sat atop a tall white pole, rotating slowly in the bleak morning sun: SAFEWAY, a grocery chain. One of the biggest. Irina steered up the ramp, through an intersection, into a parking lot.

  A small breeze whipped dust devils across the empty lot. Ashen tumble-weed ricocheted against a light pole. Harsh, barren, hostile — it was a place where coyotes would congregate by night, and they would sing.

  Asphalt may replace sand, but pavement alters no desert.

  At this early hour, only a few cars clustered around the supermarket’s entrance. Although she was fiercely hungry, Irina had no time for food — nor for the sleep her weary body demanded.

  An anonymously blue minivan, a Ford Aerostar, glided by. Irina tapped her brake. The van nosed into a parking space near the store’s glass front. A moment later, a woman stepped out. Trim in shorts and halter, she wore her hair tucked up in a baseball cap.

  Irina knew she should get a similar hat when she had a chance, if she had a chance.

  Sliding the Ford’s side panel open, the woman lifted two toddlers from the backseat. They were of an age to walk, but not to walk quickly. Not bothering to lock her car, she shepherded their clumsy steps toward the grocery store, chattering to them as a good mother will, and never looking behind.

  Irina gently edged forward, sliding her Volvo into the slot next to the Aerostar. The woman was herding her children to the store’s automatic doors. Both were girls, both carried baggy, floppy, cloth dolls. Once Irina’s mother had bought her such a doll. Father ordered it returned to the G U M department store. Her birthday present that year was a soccer ball.

  Two steps, three. One girl started to dart back. Her mother seized her shoulder and pointed her in the opposite direction. The doors whooshed open, hissed closed. Irina brushed her eye.

  The woman was inside shopping with her youngsters in tow. How long before she was done? A half hour, easily.

  Ample time. Irina had all the time in the world.

  Stepping warily out of the Volvo, she stood rolling her shoulders, tilting her head left and right, stretching the stiffness out while surreptitiously scanning the parking lot, studying every car to be certain that, no, grandpa was not sitting there patiently waiting for grandma to buy her morning prunes.

  No one in sight.

  It was too hot. They were all inside pushing their shopping carts down blessedly air-conditioned aisles.

  Irina walked slowly to the Volvo’s back hatch. After taking one last look to be sure that no one was watching, she moved like lightning.

  The Volvo’s hatch flew up. The Aerostar’s extra-wide side door slid open. A weighty brown object appeared from inside the Volvo, disappeared into the Aerostar. An overnight bag followed it.

  Shoulder bag between her knees, Irina was in the front seat, crouched low, tickling the wires out of the steering column. Penknife in hand, she scraped insulation off two wires, crossed them, and tapped the Ford’s gas pedal.

  She was back on the interstate in less than two minutes.

  This time, she drove west.

  The motel from which she’d stolen the Volvo was east of the place where D
ominik had died. A bullet-pocked Jeep would tell the authorities who the car thief was. In a half hour or so, a good mother gone shopping would report her minivan had been taken from the parking lot of a grocery store farther east. The missing Volvo was right next to where the Aerostar should have been.

  Three points on a map: a secret base, a bourgeois motel, a supermarket. Connect the dots. The line pointed east.

  Someone would shout with excitement: we know where she’s been! We know the direction she’s headed!

  They’d deploy their resources to the east. Roadblocks on every highway, every graveled lane. Helicopters on patrol. Surveillance planes stuttering along only a little faster than their stall speed. Local law enforcement officers, national security agents, soldiers in uniform — they’d all be there, scouring a bleak and baking landscape for a boring blue Ford Aerostar speeding east.

  Her best hope was to backtrack west. Although alone and by itself, it was a slender hope. She had her hands on a Magma Black secret. The Americans would stop at nothing to get it back.

  Of course, they’d assume she knew what the heavy brown box was; just as they’d assume she’d had time to examine the computer file in her breast pocket. Given those assumptions, given the implications of a foreign spy knowing a Magma Black secret, what must follow was simply logical: if they caught her, she would never see Russia again.

  Escaping so thorough a search would take more than doubling back. Irina thought she knew what that “more” might be. It would be riskier than hijacking a suburbanite’s minivan from a parking lot. Risky enough that she should be armed when she did it.

  Her pistol was in her shoulder bag. Driving one-handed, she fingered open the bag’s brass snaps, wrapping her hand around the familiar checkered grips of a sixty-year-old Tokarev 7.62 mm automatic.

  As she touched it, the blood drained from her cheeks. And she remembered, and she remembered…

  She is fresh from graduation, fresh in a newly commissioned officer’s crisp uniform. Lieutenant’s pips glow on her collar, her cap is squared on her head, and her well-rehearsed words are ready for the speaking.

  A shock: when she enters the apartment, he too is in uniform. The sight makes her falter. As she grew up, you see…she was only a little girl…in her earliest memories, he was always in navy blue, always in a jacket fastened by bright buttons emblazoned with the hammer and sickle.

  There is no more hammer and sickle. It disappeared years ago, the embarrassing emblem of a fallen empire. But that insignia, embossed on polished brass, is always with her. It is his badge, and every time she sees him without it, she is, in some sense of the word, shaken. The two always went hand in hand. He and the hammer and sickle were twin incarnations of all that oppressed her.

  The state. Her father. No difference between them, none at all.

  Seeing him in uniform, yet without his hated insignia, renders her momentarily mute.

  As does his seldom-seen smile. Now he is beaming, mouthing preposterous false endearments. He pulls her close, wraps his arms around her, hugs her tight, and kisses her on both cheeks. He will not stop babbling of the honor she has done him.

  No honor to him, she did it solely for herself.

  Her mouth will not form words rehearsed from the moment she first heard of his treachery, of his contempt, of the humiliation he thought befitted her. But he, filling glasses brimful of vodka, rattles on; and she cannot speak her rage, but only watch disgusted as he hands one glass to each of her brothers, one to a submissive mother standing, as ever, mute in the background.

  One for her, and one for him.

  A toast! A toast to a warrior’s child who has proven the steel of which she is forged!

  She drinks. There is nothing else she can do.

  He rambles on: a military family, through and through. First there were the opolchenie serfs pressed into uniform by the czars; then there were the sergeants, promoted on the field of battle; next the revolution that elevated a sergeant to an officer’s estate. Every member of the bloodline has served the motherland with valor and with honor!

  Vodka flows. There is no end to it, nor to the obligatory cocktail pickles accompanying every glass. She wants to vomit. She will not give her tormentor the satisfaction.

  He is lecturing now, lecturing her as always: There’s a tradition, you know, in this family there is a tradition. Every father gives every son his first sidearm. Here, this is for you. Your grandfather carried it in the Great Patriotic War. Many fascists met death when they faced this pistol; at Stalingrad alone it reduced their ranks by no fewer than seven. Take it, Irina, take it — a proud father’s gift to his third brave boy.

  He knew what he had done. Just as he knew she knew, and took pleasure in the knowledge.

  Irina felt a tear burn down her cheek. She swiped it away. The other tears, the ones of fury and chagrin, had been less easily dealt with. She was thankful that she had been drunk, more thankful that she could get drunker because in that way only could she escape, ever so briefly, that maliciously calculated disgrace laid upon her by her father….

  Something caught her eye.

  Her head snapped right. She whispered a curse. She was at, and was passing, the exit she wanted. She swerved hard. More than a single horn blared. She bounced over rocky soil, felt the Aerostar’s rear wheels claw dirt as it bumped onto the ramp.

  She pulled to an intersection a few miles west of the supermarket from which she’d stolen her minivan. She’d marked out this place earlier while driving east. Now she was back, and it was exactly what she wanted.

  The SunLand Mall. Two upscale department stores: Nordstrom and Macy’s. All the national chains: Eddie Bauer, The Body Shop, Ralph Lauren…and restaurants — six of them according to the directory at the entrance. Something for everyone: organic vegetarian to pricey faux French.

  Only the coffee shops were open now, but the other stores would be opening soon. Then the acres of parking surrounding the mall would fill. A blue SUV would be only one of many, and would go unnoticed — she hoped — until the stores closed for the night, and the parking lot emptied.

  That was twelve hours away. In twelve hours, she would be very, very far from here.

  She cruised to the end of the lot. A thirsty row of live oaks lined the mall perimeter, prime parking, the only spaces with shade. Those spaces were not what she was looking for. Her objective, marked by a small sign pointing left, was the area designated: Employee Parking Only.

  The workers will be the last to leave, she thought, the last to notice that a car has been stolen.

  She followed the sign. The Ford crept between two buildings and into a courtyard lined with Dumpsters and heaped with empty shipping crates. More than three dozen cars were already there. There were parking spaces for at least another hundred.

  After circling the lot twice, Irina chose a space nearest to the most promising vehicle: a dusty black Dodge pickup truck. She inventoried its qualities and found them pleasing: a little old, a little battered, but still sound. Four-wheel drive; off-road tires; tinted glass. No bumper stickers. That was important. Bumper stickers were second only to vanity license plates in making a vehicle easily identifiable.

  All in all, the Dodge was ideal. Here, in the American Southwest, there would be hundreds — thousands — of similar trucks on the road. For all intents and purposes, she would be invisible.

  Irina tucked her pistol behind her back, leaving her blue jumper loose so that no telltale bulge could be seen. Easing watchfully out of the Ford, she began to walk slowly down the row of parked cars.

  Past the truck, eyeing it from the rear.

  Around to the front of the parking lane, examining her target from another angle.

  She edged by it on the passenger side, glancing through its windows. The doors were locked, but that was no more than a thirty-second problem.

  Another car rolled into the parking lot. Irina kept walking, entering an alley that led out into the center of the mall. She stopped just wher
e the passageway debouched into public space. Flipping open her purse, she began to rummage through its contents — a punctual shopgirl looking for her lipstick, getting ready for her day’s duties.

  A middle-aged woman with unfortunate hips bustled out of the alley, barely giving her a passing glance.

  Irina dropped back into the shadows, turned, and sprinted. Mall workers would be coming into the parking lot in increasing numbers. What time did most of the stores open? Nine thirty, probably. Certainly no later than ten. She had to act now, before the crowd arrived.

  Moments earlier, she, who wore no makeup, hadn’t been searching for lipstick. She’d been looking for the plastic shim she kept in her shoulder bag. As she slipped it into the pickup truck’s door, just as she felt it engage the lock catch, she heard her luck run out.

  “Hey, lady, just whut the hell you think you’re doin’ with my truck?”

  Sam was hiding something, and Charlie knew it. Frustrated, he silently reflected on what tone of voice might shake the truth loose. Outrage, he decided, icy outrage: “One last time: What the hell has this girl stolen? Whatever that big brown thing is, and whatever is on that computer disk — that’s what’s driving her.” He shot an accusing finger at the national security advisor. “If I don’t know what it is, I’m just wasting my time.”

  Same as the last four times Charlie asked the question, Sam shook his head. “No can do. As I’ve explained, this is no ordinary secret. The Joint Chiefs, the secretaries of state and defense, and five of us on the White House staff are the only ones authorized — just us and the scientists assigned to the project. That’s the way it is, and that’s the way I intend to keep it. I will not, repeat will not, risk another security breach.”