Skilled actors use their entire bodies to create a character. Charlie, hampered by a handcuffed left wrist, did his best to become someone an FSB-trained agent would badly misread. He jutted his jaw and wagged a remonstrative finger. “I said, look, son, you’re earning twice your best-ever commission on this deal; now here’s the thirty-eight grand; I’m walking up the street to buy a couple of burgers to eat in my new luxury sports-ute; when I get back, either you’re going to have that X5 waiting outside with the engine running, or I’m going over to the Mercedes showroom and buy an M-Class. Well, he was unhappy, wasn’t he? Here he was making more money off a single sale than he’d ever seen, and I was taking all the fun out of it. Ruined his day. Howsomever, the X5 was waiting when I got back. I signed the forms, climbed in, and floored it. While I was picking up your lunch, I’d timed the stoplights. I knew exactly when to peel out of that dealer’s lot. One of the FBI boys following me tried to run the light, but, you know, he didn’t make it. I was miles away — switching license plates, actually — before the rest of the feds managed to get around the wreckage.”
Irina licked her fingers, wolfed down a handful of French fries, and chug-a-lugged a swallow from her giant-sized Coke. Charlie still couldn’t quite read her reaction, although her words were encouraging. “And you claim you were not followed? You claim you are alone?”
“Like I said earlier, there’s no SWAT teams hiding in the bushes. I’m all by my lonesome. No one here but you and me.”
She started unwrapping her second hamburger. “You are lying. Saying that you are not here to arrest me — this also is a lie.”
“I could sort of tell I was having credibility problems when you chained me to this pipe.” Damn, Charlie thought, it’s fun telling the truth to someone who doesn’t believe you.
“Why should I trust you?”
“Well, for one thing, I’m unarmed. For another, if I’d wanted to take you down, that hamburger you just finished eating would have been spiced with enough thorazine to knock out an elephant.”
Irina goggled. She dropped her hamburger and flung up the toilet seat. “I will put my fingers down my throat!”
“Oh, give me a break! We both know that if I’d sprinkled that stuff on your lunch, you’d already be asleep on the floor. Calm down and eat the rest of your food. It’s good for you.”
She gave him a disbelieving look. “A Big Mac?”
Charlie snorted. Good, he thought, she made a joke. We’re making progress. “Look, just like I said when you stuck that shooting iron in my face, I’m not who you think I am, and I’m not doing what you think I’m doing.”
Lowering the toilet lid, Irina sat down again. She leaned forward and thrust the Tokarev’s muzzle under Charlie’s chin. Oops, maybe we’re not making progress. “So then tell me what you really are, Mr. McKenzie. In your wallet there is a Central Intelligence Agency identification card with your photograph on it, and I do not believe it is a forgery.”
I’ll be damned. She didn’t buy a single word of my act. Nuts. No choice now but to be myself. “It isn’t. I tried to explain things earlier, but you weren’t in the mood to listen. This time,” he snapped, “try to pay attention. One: I spent my whole life with the Agency. Two: they screwed me. Three: I’m going to get even. Four: you’re the way I get even. Five: P.S. I get to clear my good name into the bargain.”
She gave him a narrow look. “Why has a disgraced agent been assigned to my case?”
Charlie let his voice turn into a growl. “Because I am very, very good at what I do.” Her nostrils flared. He’d struck the right note. “And because they are very, very worried about what you’ve got. Too damned worried. If they’re desperate enough to hire me, they’re worried about more than whatever you filched.” He showed his teeth. It wasn’t a smile. “Now that little fact piques my interest. I think they’re covering something up. If I can find out what that something is, if you help me —”
She was taken aback. “Why should I help a secret policeman who wants to arrest me?”
Now he’d make her a little scared. “Because they’ll kill you if you don’t.”
“Nonsense!” Irina tossed her head. “America does not execute intelligence agents. Show trials are a valuable source of propaganda.”
“Do you want to know how I know they plan to kill you?”
Almost sneering, she replied, “Convince me if you can.”
“Because I’m the one they sent to pull the trigger.” A bald-faced lie, of course, since Sam had called off that part of the job — not that Charlie planned to sanction the girl anyway. Regardless — be it truth or be it lie — his words produced the desired effect. Irina Kolodenkova was stunned into silence. Well, I believe I’ve scored a point at last.
Her pistol was still aimed at Charlie’s head, but — no question in Charlie’s mind — there was considerable uncertainty in the way she held it. She gasped a half dozen short breaths before managing to speak. “I should shoot you now. Yes, this is the right thing to do.”
Charlie grinned. Good line, he thought, crappy delivery. You weren’t cut out to be an actress, my girl. “Killing me would be the dumbest thing you could do.”
The pistol wavered. Not defeated, but surely indecisive, she murmured, “Why?”
“ ’Cause I’m the only one who can get you out of this mess.”
“Oh? Is that what you think?” Her eyes sparked. The color returned to her cheeks, and there was anger aplenty in her glare. Uh-oh, Charlie thought, I just said the wrong thing. “You think I am a weak little girl who cannot succeed on her own. If that is what you think, Mr. McKenzie, your thinking is in error.”
He had no choice but to bull his way through it. “Maybe. Maybe not. You’re good, Irina. You wouldn’t have gotten this far if you hadn’t been smart, nimble, and fast — a damned fine tactician. But tactics is all it is. There’s no strategy, no plan. You’re just thinking on your feet, and grabbing opportunities. That’s no criticism. Hell, if I was your boss…” Or your father, but I’ll leave that unstated. “…I’d be proud of you. All I’m saying is that you are new to the job, and simply do not know what the other team will throw at you. You need somebody experienced enough to tell you how to get past them. You need a strategist. You need me.”
“I can do very well on my own, Mr. McKenzie.”
“I don’t doubt it for a moment.” Reinforce her, build her up. “My point is that ‘very well’ isn’t good enough. They want you bad, and they’ll send the best they have to bring you down.” She’s thinking. Good. Now let’s knock her a little off balance. “There’s another reason why you need my help. You don’t have a clue as to what you’ve stolen — Project Whirlwind and that computer disk.”
“The DefCon Enterprises presentation?”
Charlie could barely control his glee. DefCon, eh? Now I’ve got a name, and that is one hell of a lot more than Sam gave me. “Exactly. You know if you try to read the disk, it’ll blow up?”
“Of course. I am no fool.” She raised the pistol. “And you are mistaken. I know precisely what I have my hands on.”
Nice bluff, lady. “You know as much as I know — zero, zip, zilch, nada. Both of us are in the dark. All we can be certain of is that you’ve got your hands on a secret worth killing for.”
“You are mistaken about what I do or do not know.”
“Baloney. They faxed me a topological map of the base you burglarized, and a floorplan of the lab. I measured the distances, and I checked the times — when the generator failed, when the backup came online. Under the best of circumstances, if you and your partner had been standing at the fence line when the lights went out, you had ten minutes in that lab. Probably less. You stole the disk because the presentation on it looked interesting. You stole Whirlwind because…why?…my guess is because your partner, a trained engineer, knew what it was.”
“He did. And he told me.”
“No, he did not.” Charlie could see it now, see how it unfolded. Given the time
and distances involved, there was no other way it could have happened. “You didn’t have a chance to chitter-chatter. With armed guards all around, the most you two did was whisper a few words to one another. You sure as blazes kept silent once you were out of the lab and running for the fence. Dominik Grisin may have known what he was stealing — or at least made a good guess. But he didn’t tell you. Don’t lie to me, Irina, you’re everything a spy should be, but you simply aren’t seasoned enough to fool an old fox like me.”
Resignation in her eyes, she nodded. “You said you were good at what you do. This is true, I think.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. “Thank you. Now are you going to do the right thing?”
“What is the right thing?”
“Whatever you think is right.” Her eyebrows shot up. Oh, yeah, score one for Charlie! She was expecting some fatherly quote-advice-unquote, same as I bet her dad gave her every minute of her waking life. Nope, my sweet, I’m not falling into that trap. “Look, I’ve been in this racket a long time. I know what I’d do if I were in your situation. I also know that when I was your age the last thing I’d do would be to trust an enemy who claimed he had a grudge against his own people. So, like I said, you do whatever you think you should. If it works out for you, great. If it doesn’t, I’ll be around to give you a hand.”
She smiled. Pretty smile! “I think not. You will be handcuffed to a sink for quite some time. I will be far away.”
“Sure you will. But I’ll be coming after you.”
“You don’t know where I’m going.”
“Wanna bet?”
She drove one-handed on an empty highway, night surrounding her, darkness shrouding her soul.
To be born Russian is to be born in bitterness, centuries of oppression your only heritage. You are a child of a nation that has bowed beneath the indistinguishable tyrannies of czars, of Party apparatchiks, of elected kleptocrats and their Mafya henchmen. No matter how many joys life may bring, fore-boding and suspicion weigh upon your every thought. Distrustful of life, resigned to death, you look upon the outer world as an impoverished child looks through the window of a toy store, angrily envious of delights that can never be yours.
Hope is denied. Despair is certain.
But now, just at this time, she had a chance to rise above a fate foretold. An accomplishment beyond the grasp of ordinary men lay within her reach. All she need do was seize it. Then would be a victory that none could question, none belittle.
Good grades are not enough. I expect no less of my blood than perfection. Sit with me, girl, I will show the proper way to approach these problems….
Being a member of a winning team is an achievement of little individual merit. You will come with me tomorrow. A Navy trainer will make you a true athlete…
The state honors you for your Olympic medal. In four years, they will honor another. You will be forgotten….
They would honor her again, honor her for a triumph that none could deny, none could denigrate. Irina set her jaw. You will salute me, father! You will stand at attention and salute your superior!
She’d made a mistake. She was running. The enemy expected that. Doing what they expected was the wrong thing to do.
What, she asked herself, would they not anticipate? No police can search every hiding place. She had to find a place where they would not think to look.
If that McKenzie man had been telling the truth, and he probably was, the Americans had concentrated their security forces to the east — although, no doubt, hunters prowled every point of the compass. North, south, east, or west, they expected her to run somewhere. And therefore unexpected was…
She flipped on the Dodge’s turn signal, eased into the right lane, and took the next exit. She turned left, then left again — back onto the interstate, back to the city whose borders she’d left an hour earlier.
They know I was there. They will be sure I have moved on. What is the most unexpected thing a fugitive can do? Answer: not flee.
She wouldn’t run. She would stay put. It was the only feint they might not foresee.
Besides — she cursed herself — only a fool would drive this barren countryside at night. In the empty hours, out in the vastness of New Mexico and Arizona, hers would be the only vehicle on the road. Easily seen, easily stopped, she might as well have painted a bull’s-eye target on her truck.
Lay low. Find a motel. Get out of sight.
What kind of a motel? Her choices were limitless. She could afford anything.
The very peculiar Mr. McKenzie had shouted at her as she left Mitch’s house: “My car doors are open. There’s a present for you on the backseat.”
An understatement. She found a large brown shoebox on which, in an elegant script, he’d written, “For Irina Kolodenkova.” It contained fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred dollar bills, a Texas driver’s license bearing her photo but another woman’s name, and both a Visa and a MasterCard. He’d attached a small note to the driver’s license: “Irina, the credit cards are issued by an Israeli bank. They’re prozrachnyj, what my side calls glassies, totally safe and untraceable. The cash has been laundered. The driver’s license comes from the Mossad’s finest forgers. Good luck, Charlie.”
She’d gaped. McKenzie never expected her to cooperate. He’d walked unarmed into Mitch’s house knowing that she would take him prisoner, and knowing that she would flee.
What is his game? Does he truly seek revenge against his own?
She shook her head. The questions were not answerable. Clearly he had his own agenda — an agenda that must be as dangerous as the man himself. The best she could hope for was to elude him the same as she planned to elude all the others who sought to keep her from her victory.
An hour later she saw the sign: Airport, Next Exit.
Perfect. There will be motels nearby. Everyone will be a transient, and I just another traveler passing through.
She swung off the expressway onto a four-lane artery. Three stoplights later, she passed a T intersection — the airport access road to her left, to her right a row of motels with familiar signs: Ramada, Day’s Inn, Motel Six, Marriott Courtyard, and — the largest, a convention hotel with trade show facilities. I will be lost in the crowd — the Airport Hilton.
Pulling into the parking lot, she glanced at her overnight bag. She’d kept it with her all day, transferring it from Jeep to Volvo to Aerostar to Dodge pickup truck. It was not large, but she thought it large enough to look like an air traveler’s luggage. The desk clerk might not notice.
The desk clerk did not notice. She was an older woman, olive-skinned, perhaps of Mexican blood. She asked only if Irina had a reservation (“No. My flight was canceled. I drove straight here from the airport.”), whether she preferred a smoking or non-smoking room (“Non-smoking, please.”), and what credit card Irina planned to use (“Visa,” said Irina, handing her a card bearing the name Caroline Sonderstrom).
Five clocks were fixed above the reception desk — one showing local time, the others marked Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, and New York. How pretentious, Irina thought. Although, perhaps, Americans did not grasp the subtleties of time zones as readily as other nationalities.
“Thank you, Miss Sonderstrom. You’re in room four-oh-four. Checkout’s at eleven. Complimentary continental breakfast is in the lobby lounge between seven and ten. The elevator’s just past the restaurant on your left. You have a nice stay, hear?”
Irina nodded politely, picked up her bag, and started toward the elevator.
Behind her she heard the lobby’s automatic doors hiss open, then a Germanic voice so resonantly basso that it made her turn: “Sleep comfortable tonight, gentlemen. It could be a long time between soft mattresses.” The speaker was slender, pale, aglow with power. Even though it was nighttime, he wore tinted glasses. She could not see his eyes. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she was certain they were as cold and grey as the North Sea.
Other men crowded behind him — two Africans, a s
ingle Arab, and a half dozen crop-haired whites. None looked like the man with the dark glasses, but, in some sense they all looked like one another: well exercised beyond civilized norms, primitively muscular, insolently self-confident. They swaggered with a braggart’s arrogance, spoke with a bully’s contempt: “Long way between women, too. I wish we had that Russki blonde babe to play with tonight.”
“Patience, gentlemen. All good things come to him who waits. Even tasty young spies.”
Whispering among themselves, they snickered of their appetites, and how they’d sate them.
Charlie almost missed the party. Thank Kolodenkova for that. No sooner had he pulled his spare handcuff key out of his socks than he noticed something a wee bit wrong with the lock. The damned girl had stuffed chewing gum in the keyhole.
Sneaky, devious, and tricky. I admire that in a woman.
What he didn’t admire was the sweaty work it took to pry a rusty drainpipe out of the wall, or the time wasted running hot water over the cuffs to loosen the gum. Add to that more distractions: first, freeing an angry cowboy hog-tied in a closet; second, calming down the aforementioned wrangler; third, swindling the lad into doing something imprudently dangerous; fourth, jury-rigging the wires of a shattered, 1960s-vintage telephone to his PowerBook computer so that, fifth, he could send urgent e-mails to an Israeli friend and to a hacker who called himself Sledgehammer.
Add it all up and it was just about nine in the evening when he belly-crawled to the top of a low bunker some distance from the airport terminal. He’d expected to spot a few suspicious planes parked near the general aviation hangar. That he arrived in time to watch — through the clear bright lenses of 10×42 power Leica binoculars — a private jet taxiing toward the de-barking area was a lucky bonus.
Whirlwind Page 10