by Saul Herzog
“I have stories that would shock a priest,” Timokhin said.
Igor laughed.
“Really,” Timokhin said.
“Then I can tell you,” Igor said, “this slut, Tatyana.”
“Yes?”
“She had a way of scratching my itch that will not be easy to replace.”
“Igor, Igor, Igor,” Timokhin said. “The first lesson of the top floor you need to learn is that everyone can be replaced.”
Igor knew he had to dangle something juicy if he was to get anywhere. “Not this,” he said, eyeing Timokhin. “This was something really … specific.”
“How so?”
“It’s a niche thing,” Igor said. “Not something your average whore would be willing to accommodate. Even for extra.”
Timokhin was wondering what it could be that would give even a whore pause. Igor knew he’d be interested. Even by Igor’s standards, Timokhin was a deviant creep. This was right up his alley.
“She really is unique,” Igor said.
“You’re sorry to see her go.”
“Like you told me,” Igor said, “all fathers have their favorites.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Timokhin,” Igor said. “I’m wondering if it’s avoidable.”
Timokhin smiled. He liked this feeling of power. It was the reason he was where he was, sitting behind this desk on the top floor, and why he’d gone to hell and back to get there.
He leaned back. “Whatever is it that she does for you?” he said.
“Use your imagination,” Igor said.
Timokhin smiled. He was beginning to smell a rat.
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re really up to, Igor.”
“I want to bring her back, Timokhin.”
“You can’t be that naive,” Timokhin said. “She’s a traitor. It’s beyond question. I don’t care what she can do with her cunt.”
“If she was speaking to the Americans,” Igor said, “that’s something we can use.”
“Disinformaciya?”
“We could use her to feed them a crock of shit. We’ve done it before.”
“We’re already using her, Igor. We’re drawing out her contact in the CIA. We’re ready to pounce.”
Igor brought the glass to his lips, but paused. “She’s so talented, Fyodor.”
“She’s a rat.”
“She’ll be your rat.”
“She lied to you, Igor.”
“We all lie in this place, Timokhin. Who knows what she was up to, or why? Maybe she was obeying someone else’s orders.”
“Your agent, Igor. Your slut. Taking orders from someone else?”
“Let’s at least bring her back for questioning. Find out what’s going on.”
Timokhin drained his glass and slammed it sharply on the table. “Enough,” he said. “This is nonsense. She sold us out. Now she’s got to pay. You know the rules.”
“Timokhin.”
“You’re fishing Igor, and I don’t like it.”
Igor refilled Timokhin’s glass. “Very well,” he said, raising his glass. “A final toast.”
“Very well,” Timokhin said.
“Only the good die young.”
“The good die young,” Timokhin said, and drank.
Igor knew he needed to offer something of value now. He looked at Timokhin. “Tell your man she carries a Browning pistol in her purse, chambered in a 9x19 millimeter round.”
Timokhin nodded.
Igor had to be very careful next. He was feeling the booze. Timokhin’s guard was up. The wrong move could blow everything.
“I know who was watching her,” he said.
Timokhin laughed. “If you did, you wouldn’t be up here plying me with vodka.”
“It was the hag,” Igor said.
Timokhin laughed. “You’re guessing, Igor.”
And that was it. As simple as that. Igor’s secretary was no spring chicken, but she was far from the only hag he might have been referring to. For Timokhin to get the reference so quickly, that was the slip.
“I think,” Igor said, wiping his brow, “that I’ve had too much to drink.”
Timokhin’s eyes were glazed. “You’re a soldier, Igor,” he said. “You’re not paid to think.”
Igor made to get to his feet. He had to steady himself on the chair. He was drunk.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Timokhin said, pouring two more glasses.
“Very well.”
“Sit,” Timokhin said.
Igor slumped back into the chair.
“The reason I called you here,” he said, “the reason I’m dangling the prospect of a top floor office.”
“Yes,” Igor said, a little too eagerly.
“We’re going to war, Igor.”
Igor watched him form the word. He said it with such relish, like he was saying the name of a lover. “If that’s true….”
“It is true, Igor. Straight from the top,” he said, nodding to the portrait of the president on his desk. “We’re done staring at the Americans across the curtain. We’re finally going to war.”
“Real war?”
“Real war, Igor. The war we’ve been waiting our whole lives to fight.”
Igor reached for the bottle, almost knocking it over. It was Timokhin who caught it. “But we can’t win,” he said.
“We don’t have to win,” Timokhin said. “We only have to prove our loyalty.”
“And how do we do that?” Igor said.
“By sacrificing our souls, Igor. By sacrificing our souls.”
31
Lance pulled up to the departure terminal. Sam was sitting in the truck next to him, looking at him.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What difference does it make to you?”
“It doesn’t. It just … I don’t know … feels right.”
“Feels right?”
“You’re a soldier, Lance. You belong over there.”
He let out a long sigh. He was still conflicted about the decision, but there was something about what Sam had said, about him letting Laurel go and fight his fight, that didn’t sit right. He knew he couldn’t let her do it alone.
“So I can trust you to hold down the fort?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“I swear, Lance.”
“Because it wasn’t so long ago you were calling me a kidnapper.”
“I was upset.”
“You said I was going to lock you in the basement.”
She shrugged.
He took the keys from the ignition and handed them to her.
“A lot of things in life,” he said, “they end up not working out.”
“You’ll just have to trust me,” Sam said.
“Just don’t mess up my truck.”
“I won’t.”
“Or my place.”
“I won’t, Lance.”
“And take care of yourself.”
She looked at him. “I’ll try.”
He hoped that was true. If she managed to turn things around, that would be something he’d hold onto, something he’d be able to point to and say it had worked out, in a world where very few things ever did.
He knew that better than anyone.
All the things he’d ever done, things that were supposed to make the world a better place, a safer place, the people he’d killed, the targets he’d taken out, the men he’d trained and led into battle.
All the oaths he’d sworn, the allegiances he’d pledged, the God in whose name he’d fought.
All of it had turned to dust.
It had brought him nothing but loss and anguish and the death of everyone he’d ever loved.
He’d read something once. The tree that bears no fruit is fit for the fire. That was how he felt.
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br /> But there was a part of him that refused to give up. He did his best not to listen to it, to keep it buried down at the bottom of his mind where he couldn’t hear it, but it was there. And that was the part of him now that told him if things worked out for Sam, if she found some sort of peace in the world, that would be a fruit he’d be able to hold on to.
He’d packed a single bag and it was on the seat behind him. He grabbed it and got out. Sam came around the truck and hugged him tighter than he’d expected.
“You’re going to miss me,” he said.
“I’m not going to miss you.”
“Sure you are.”
He’d walked to the entrance of the terminal when she called out, “You come home now, you hear?”
He raised a hand but didn’t turn back.
On the flight he said a prayer for the first time in years.
“Keep her safe.”
When he landed at Dulles he realized he hadn’t been in the capital since Clarice’s death.
So many people were dead. Everyone he’d ever cared about. His family, the people he’d grown up with, the men he’d trained with, the men he’d gone to war with.
Outside the arrivals terminal he found a cab.
“Where you headed, buddy?”
It was late and he didn’t see the point in wasting any more time.
“You know Monroe’s Diner in Foggy Bottom?” he said.
When Lance lived in DC, he’d had a practice of always eating breakfast at the same diner. If Roth or anyone else wanted to meet him, that was where it happened. He called the habit his own personal Monroe Doctrine.
As the cab got onto the highway and sped up, Lance leaned back in the seat and looked out the window.
He had the card Roth had left and he dialed the number on it. It went to voicemail.
“Roth. I’m back. Call me when you get this. I’ll be at Monroe’s.”
When the cab arrived at Foggy Bottom, he got out and entered the diner.
“Hello, stranger,” the waitress said when he entered.
He looked at her. “I didn’t think anyone would still recognize me,” he said.
The girl blushed. “Where have you been?”
“Montana.”
“So you’re here for a visit?”
He nodded and she showed him to the table that had been his regular place. He didn’t know the waitress’s name and she didn’t know his.
He sat and looked around the diner. Nothing had changed. The same ketchup and mustard bottles on the tables, the same ceramic coffee mugs with the handles slightly lower than normal, the same plastic-coated napkins that repelled more grease than they absorbed.
“What’ll it be?” the waitress said.
“You remember my usual?”
She smiled and left. A moment later she came back with black coffee.
Everywhere Lance looked, the past came flooding back to him. The way Clarice flipped her hair from her eyes, the way she looked away when he said something she especially liked, like she thought what he’d just said was too good to be true and that she might jinx it by looking at him.
Whatever they’d had sure as hell was jinxed.
She’d been his handler from day one, from the day he came out of training at the Farm, and when she died, he swore he was done for good.
32
Sheldon Goldin sat in the back of a town car, looking out the window.
“We can’t sit here all night,” the driver said.
They were on Madison Avenue at Twenty-Fourth. Across the street was an upscale bar called the Beverly, the type of place where the waiters wore tuxedos and the drinks came in crystal glasses.
“There’s cars lined up behind me, boss.”
Goldin glanced over his shoulder at the traffic.
“Move when I tell you to move,” he said.
The driver, a large man, sank into his seat like he was trying to hide. He winced each time a car behind them honked.
Goldin examined his fingernails, he’d had them manicured that afternoon, and put on a pair of leather gloves.
“There she is,” he said.
Timokhin had sent pictures. The girl was a real piece of ass, the kind that practically begged to be used as a weapon. There were many ways to wage war. This creature, in her black dress and pearls and dangerously high stilettos certainly was one. Just looking at her gave him the same thrill as the sight of a new piece of military hardware.
He bit his lip in anticipation of spending a night with her.
Russians killing Russians, that was how he justified himself. Not that he lost much sleep over it. He’d long ago sold his soul.
The first time Timokhin approached him, almost thirty years earlier at a conference in Warsaw, Goldin had been employed by a big defense contractor.
“I’m no traitor,” he’d said to Timokhin.
“I understand that,” Timokhin said in his gravely voice. His accent was so thick he sounded like an actor in a low-budget Dracula movie. Even his laugh was like that, like that puppet on Sesame Street with the numbers.
Since then, the two men had been through a lot together. Goldin’s prospects as an assassin rose as Timokhin climbed the ranks of the GRU. Now, Goldin was as tried and true as anyone on the GRU’s books.
Initially, his targets had all been Russian, which was what allowed him to tell himself he wasn’t betraying his country. He was just doing dirty work for a foreign government.
Very dirty work. That paid very well.
Then, targets from NATO countries began showing up in his briefs. That gave Goldin the briefest pause, his atrophied conscience finally raising its head, but the pay increased correspondingly. And as always, Timokhin had the sense not to push the envelope too far too fast. He sent targets from Eastern Europe, Turkey, nationals of the most recent NATO additions, countries he knew Goldin wouldn’t think of as real allies. It was years before Timokhin sent the first French, British and Canadians targets.
And only after years of that did he graduate him to killing Americans.
Goldin had trained himself to carry out his jobs without thinking of any of that. He focused on the mission at hand and didn’t worry whether or not it made him a traitor.
He lived a double life. When he was performing hits for the GRU, he lived the life of a playboy in an expensive New York apartment. The rest of the time, he lived in his childhood home with his mother in New Jersey, mowing her lawn on Saturday mornings, cooking her breakfast. In the psyche profile Timokhin had commissioned in Moscow, they said Goldin probably had a split personality.
This job was a classic. Russian on Russian.
Easy money. Plus, he was getting laid.
His target was a GRU agent. She’d done something to upset someone up the chain, broken a rule, or just found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever it was, they wanted her dead, and that, as far as Goldin was concerned, was that.
Timokhin had sent the file a few hours earlier. The target, Tatyana Aleksandrova, was classed as highly dangerous.
She’d been told Goldin was a senatorial aide being targeted for kompromat. Goldin was no expert on the doings of senators and their aides, but it was a role he knew how to play. His job was to let her seduce him, make her think her mission was going well, then follow her after it was done.
She was expected to make unauthorized contact with someone in the city, someone on the American side. Timokhin needed to know who she was meeting. Goldin was to film the exchange. Then he was to kill her.
It was straightforward, but because of Tatyana’s training, he’d have to be careful. She was as familiar with killing as he was, and wouldn’t think twice about it. She was trained to look for the slightest signs of incongruity. Any slip ups and he’d be done for.
His advantage was that she had no reason to suspect him. She thought he was her target, a soft, dimwitted slob. Nothing he did in the bedroom would cause her to think otherwise.
His phone rang.
It was Timokhin.
“Hey, asshole,” he said to the driver. “Get out.”
“What?”
“Get the fuck out of the car.”
The driver unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the car.
“Close the door, dipshit,” Goldin said.
The driver closed the door and waited on the sidewalk.
They were still blocking the lane, traffic wasn’t heavy at this time but that didn’t stop every second car from honking.
“What is it?” Goldin said into the phone.
“She’s arrived,” Timokhin said.
“I saw her.”
“You know how to do Rhode Island accent?”
“Close enough,” Goldin said. “She won’t know the difference.”
“She’s smart, Sheldon.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“She thinks you work for a senator.”
“I read the file.”
“Just be careful. This is … important. Sensitive. I need footage of the meeting.”
“I got it, boss.”
“We have to get confirmation of who she’s meeting. That’s critical.”
“Any idea what to expect?”
“I just received more data. I’m sending you photos now. Male. American. Thirty-eight. Very dangerous. Used to be Delta Force.”
“Delta Force?”
“Just film the meet. Don’t approach them. He’s extremely dangerous.”
“The file said kill her.”
“Forget that. This new data changes everything. If her contact shows, just film them. Under no circumstances are you to approach. From what they sent, this guy is some sort of assassin. Film them. Keep your distance. But stay the fuck back.”
“And what if the man doesn’t show up?”
“He’ll show. This meet is the only reason she’s in New York. She’s risked everything.”
“All right.”
“Let her do all the work. She’ll be motivated.”
“Oh, she’ll work. Believe me.”
A police cruiser pulled up behind him and flashed its lights.
“I’ve got to go, boss. We’re blocking traffic here.”
“She keeps a gun in her purse.”
“I know. A Browning. I told you, I read the file.”
33
When Tatyana entered the bar, heads turned. People made way.