by Matt Rees
In the darkness, the Krokodil’s face was the only sign Verrazzano had to follow, patching and pale in the light from the clock face on the church tower. He went after it.
Then the Krokodil was gone. Verrazzano stopped and listened. There was the sound of waterproof fabric rubbing erratically against stone, and the Chinese woman screeching. She spoke some words of defiance, but quickly she switched to pleading. Then she was silent.
Verrazzano hurried toward the sounds. He was two rows of tombs away when the scene emerged from the dark. Julie Jin knelt, dead, her throat cut. The Krokodil ripped away her baseball cap and held her hair in his fist. It was barely long enough to get a hold of. His other hand took a knife to her brow. Blood ran down over her forehead as he started to scalp her.
Verrazzano lifted his H&K. “That’s enough.”
“Suck me, Frisch.” The Krokodil’s voice was like heavy sheets of paper ripping. “You want to go see Wyatt? Okay, I’ll take you with me. But get out of my face right now.”
“You shot the wrong guy.” Verrazzano moved closer. “You saved my life.”
The Krokodil spat. He kept his eyes on Verrazzano as he sawed farther along Julie Jin’s hairline.
“Now it’s time for me to save yours.” Verrazzano made a swift step and kicked at the Krokodil’s wrist. The knife flew from his hand and tinkled against a stone angel.
The Krokodil dropped the dead woman. He thrust his torso upward, held onto Verrazzano’s shoulders, and bit into his neck.
Verrazzano dropped sideways, falling on top of the Krokodil, letting his weight crush him on a sharply angled tombstone that had been pushed out of kilter by centuries in the dirt. Any other man would have snapped with the impact of the stone against his lower back. The Krokodil didn’t break, but he did open his mouth to let go of Verrazzano’s neck.
Verrazzano rolled away and trained his gun on him. “We’re the same, you and me. Wyatt did the same number on both of us. I know who you are.”
“You don’t even know who you are.”
“Wyatt sent me out to kill people. Told me it was for the good of the United States. It turned out to be just to make him rich. I know who you are.”
“Wait until your skin starts falling off. Then you’ll know who you are. Because you’ll see what’s underneath.” The Krokodil rose unsteadily, feeling his back. “Take a look at me. Imagine this happened to you. What would be under your skin?”
Verrazzano shuddered. The Krokodil smiled bitterly. “You think you know. But there’s surprises for you there, no matter how much you think you hate yourself.” He pointed a finger at Verrazzano’s chest. “Only then, you can tell me you know who I am.”
“I killed the Lebanese prime minister.”
The Krokodil halted, confused by Verrazzano’s sudden admission. “The who?”
“Prime Minister Rafik Karami was about to sign a peace deal with Israel. Wyatt told me the State Department had decided the peace would threaten US interests. I didn’t ask why. I planted a bomb in Karami’s limo and blew it up. Every time someone dies in Israel or Lebanon since that day, I get reminded of exactly what’s underneath my skin.”
“Better take another look, then, Sergeant Major.” Coughing and clutching his chest, Frisch stumbled between the gravestones. He slipped onto his backside and leaned against a tomb. His hand covered the bullet hole in his chest, but air leaked noisily out of the exit wound in his back.
Verrazzano went to him. Special Forces training pushed soldiers beyond the pain and injury that would kill another man. They were deliberately dehydrated on long runs in full kit and half drowned treading water in their boots. They were tormented and terrorized by their drill sergeants, so that no one else would ever be able to do it to them. That training kept Frisch on his feet until he reached Verrazzano, when most men would have been expiring in the gutter back on the street. Even so, Frisch clearly didn’t have much left. “I killed Karami. Not you.”
The Krokodil edged toward the body of Julie Jin. Verrazzano lifted his H&K and held it on him. The Krokodil went still.
Verrazzano whispered to Frisch, “That’s not possible. I saw the car pull away from Karami’s home. I kept a visual on it until I activated the bomb. It went up in smoke. It was totally destroyed.”
Frisch shook his head. “You blew up the limo, sure. You killed a few of the guy’s staff. But Karami didn’t take the ride. He wasn’t in the car. Wyatt heard the prime minister’s voice on a phone tap right after the bomb went off. So he had him killed at his home an hour later. He sent me. I killed the guy.”
The ground in the graveyard seemed to tremble under Verrazzano’s feet, as though the dead were disturbed to find him less of a murderer than he had supposed himself to be. “Why didn’t he tell me? Why did Wyatt keep it from me?”
A siren sounded on the main street beyond the loan office. Verrazzano saw the lights on in a few apartments overlooking the graveyard. He noticed the silhouette of a stout old woman on the telephone.
“Let’s go, Verrazzano.” The Krokodil pointed toward the dead Chinese woman. “We take the scalp. We get you back with Wyatt. He’ll explain whatever it is that Frisch is trying to tell you. The guy’s lying for sure, anyone can see it.”
Verrazzano stood still, knowing that Frisch told the truth.
Frisch tried to lift himself. “You don’t need Wyatt to explain. Listen to what I’m telling you. In boot camp, they break you down to make you do what you’re told. Even then, most soldiers shoot wide of any human target without even knowing it because they don’t want to be killers. Wyatt understands that. It’s why he never stops breaking you down.”
“Come on, Verrazzano. Let’s move,” the Krokodil said. “You’re going to die, Frisch.”
Frisch wheezed and grimaced. “Wyatt let you believe you’d destroyed peace in the Middle East, Verrazzano. He figured you’d have to go all the way bad just to stop yourself from going suicidal. You’d be his guy forever.”
The siren came closer toward the graveyard. Verrazzano ran his hand over his face. The concussion buzzed through his head. The Krokodil and the corpse of Julie Jin transformed into the prime minister and Maryam Ghattas, the woman he had murdered in front of her child to cover his tracks. So that she wouldn’t expose him as the assassin of the prime minister. Except that he hadn’t assassinated the prime minister after all. Wyatt could have stopped it at any moment. Could have told him he wasn’t guilty. That he didn’t need to kill Maryam Ghattas.
“Wyatt sent you to kill the Ghattas woman because she had sources that knew how Karami really died. She knew about Wyatt’s deal with Hezbollah. She was going to blow the whistle on him. Not on you.” Frisch choked and dribbled blood. He grabbed Verrazzano’s arm. “Wyatt thought he owned you after the Karami hit. But—”
The police car pulled up on the other side of the graveyard wall. The blue light spun on the roof and striped the old stones of the church. Frisch’s grip was insistent. “But you were too strong for him. You wouldn’t go all the way into the darkness. Not like I did. Not like the Krokodil. Remember that, Verrazzano. You were too strong for Wyatt back then. And you’re too strong for him now.”
The Krokodil edged away, moving toward the knife he had lost. Verrazzano lifted his pistol. “Don’t move.”
“‘Joy arises—’” Frisch’s voice choked off.
“‘Joy arises in a person free from remorse,’” Verrazzano said. Frisch’s sweat glistened in the moonlight on his lifeless face. He was free. Verrazzano felt a curious sadness. So few people knew who he really was. Now there was one less of them.
“You still killed that woman in Beirut in front of her kid, Verrazzano,” the Krokodil said. “You ain’t clean, no matter what Frisch tells you now.”
The voices of the policemen on the street were strained and muted. Verrazzano figured they were arguing about entering the graveyard without backup. He watched the Krokodil’s ravaged features come in and out of the light as the clouds crossed the moon. He reache
d for his phone in Frisch’s jacket. He needed to get in touch with the rest of his team. First he had to deal with the assassin lingering a couple of yards from him. The Krokodil had his eyes on the dead woman. He still wanted the scalp—that was why he hadn’t made a more determined break, even with Verrazzano’s gun trained on him. But he didn’t want to be around when the local cops came over that wall.
“Don’t even think about it.” Verrazzano raised his pistol and advanced on the Krokodil.
One of the policemen called from beyond the tombstones. “Drop the gun.”
Verrazzano glanced toward the street. A policeman climbed the wall into the graveyard. Another had his weapon trained on Verrazzano. “I’m a US law enforcement officer,” he called.
“Drop the gun, I said.”
The apse of the church shrouded the Krokodil in shadow. He ran quickly and silently out of sight into the darkness behind the building. Verrazzano went after him, but a shot cut the darkness and the silence. He felt heat in his shoulder, and he was spinning to the ground.
“Is he alive?” the cop shouted from the wall.
His partner leaned over Verrazzano and poked at his wound with his pistol. Verrazzano growled and tensed the muscles of his arm to cut off the bleed. “Ask me again in five minutes,” the second cop said. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in Verrazzano’s face.
CHAPTER 24
Feng Yi leered across the long cherrywood table in the Hotel Sacher’s art deco conference room. Minister Ma had just told the American delegation that a particular body affiliated with the Chinese government—not one completely under his control, you understand—would crash every car in the Western world the very next day if the Americans didn’t make the trade concessions he demanded. The US secretary of state’s gigantic jaw trembled with rage. But he didn’t threaten war. Minister Ma was right. The Americans had fought too many times in too many places during the last decade and a half, and their economy was too weak to sustain a conflict with the Chinese superpower.
“I have to tell you in no uncertain terms that we consider the proposition by the honorable Minister Ma to be highly unproductive.” The American’s response to Ma’s threat was as animated as an accountant with a 1040EZ. He didn’t appear to doubt China’s ability to accomplish the devastating mass crash. Feng Yi felt the power to destroy the world rippling through him.
Minister Ma was blank and unreadable. Anyone who hadn’t observed him in a negotiation before would have assumed he was thinking of something that had happened last night—something whose details he could only vaguely recall. But every cell in his brain was present, assessing each syllable from the American, calibrating and recalibrating. Feng, however, barely paid attention. He was measuring his chances of getting the Swedish woman naked that night. She had agreed to travel with him. He tapped through the alerts on his cell phone. European airports were opening, he read, though the Americans were keeping theirs in lockdown for another day. Everything was falling into place. The Swede would take him on the business trip she had planned for that evening—away from her jealous husband. He imagined posing her naked body and recording its movements with his camera. He would take thousands of pictures. He would manipulate and distort them to make them perfect in their power to arouse him. Her form was the basic ingredient he needed for the pleasure of digital editing and montage. When he had reworked the images, they would show her riding motorbikes naked and engaging in sex with famous actresses or cut open to show the computer motherboards in her belly. He didn’t even have to persuade her to sleep with him—that was for men who failed to understand the possibilities of the web and of Photoshop. Women got it. It turned them on to display themselves to him, because he understood that there was no limit to pleasure, just as women’s ecstasy was not restricted the way men’s was to the insertion of the penis and the thrusting of hips and a brief moment of animal rapture.
Then Feng saw it. It interrupted his daydream as surely as a nudge from his neighbor at the negotiating table. Minister Ma’s tongue flicked across his lips. It was an unconscious gesture of excitement that was as clear to Feng as if the old bastard would have jumped up and cried out. Feng came out of his reverie and snapped his attention back to the table. What the hell did I miss? he thought.
“Thus in light of the consequences presented to us by Minister Ma, we are reluctantly prepared to accept the three points the Minister made about patent regulations,” the secretary of state said. “These shall be subject to further negotiation in the details during the working group stage, but for the purposes of statements to be made by the Chinese and United States delegations tonight, we can accept in principle the Minister’s three points, and we will instruct our representatives on the working groups to move toward a full understanding on these points.”
No way, Feng thought. He swiveled toward his boss. Ma was all stillness, except for his ankle, which jiggled hard under the table. It was happening. They had won. The Americans were caving.
“As a second concession, we are ready to agree to the two copyright policy adjustments raised by the Minister this morning in relation to intellectual property and the theft thereof by Chinese companies,” the American said.
Minister Ma broke in. “Alleged theft.”
“Alleged theft.” The American had a pencil between the fingertips of his two hands on the tabletop. He was squeezing it as hard as he could without snapping it.
“The tariffs?” Ma said.
“The tariffs on the importation of Chinese steel.” The secretary of state stared at his hands before he continued. “We are prepared to lower the tariffs from two hundred and sixty-five point five percent to a rate fixed at a more equitable—”
“Zero.”
“Now hold on there.”
“Zero tariff. Just as American steelmakers pay no tariff to reach Chinese markets.”
“American steelmakers don’t export to China because your domestic prices are—” The American realized this was no longer a negotiation. It was blackmail. “Zero percent tariff. Agreed.”
Feng was three seats down from Minister Ma. He could smell the old man’s pleasure. It drifted through the Chinese delegation like sex pheromones and made the minister’s aides wriggle and twitch.
Then Feng started to sweat. If the American conceded, Minister Ma wouldn’t want the crash operation to go ahead tomorrow. Feng would have to stop it. Damn their weakness, he thought, casting his eye along the table of senior US diplomats and Washington cadres. If one of them failed, the worst they could expect would be a transfer to the consulate in Kabul, or they might get stuck teaching political science at a university in one of those places in the Midwest where Americans come from but never seem to live. Fail Minister Ma and Feng would, at best, be kicked to death in the bunkroom of a laogai penal camp on his way to “reform through labor.” More likely he’d confess in front of the cameras that he had betrayed the old pig and beg for the pleasure of a bullet to the head so that he might serve as a reminder to others of the importance of pleasing the great minister.
Ma beckoned to him. Panic caught Feng. He scuttled toward Ma and knelt beside his chair. The minister lifted his hand to his face to disguise the movements of his lips. “I have what I want from these Americans. Nonetheless I shall pass many hours here in further negotiations before I let them off the hook.”
Feng pretended to show pleasure at his master’s cruelty and diplomatic skill. “Minister Ma, you have scored a great victory for the People’s Republic.”
“I want to give you time to call off the operation.” He surely saw the resentment in Feng’s eyes. “If the operation is carried out, it will cost the People’s Republic many billions of dollars. Billions that this clown”—he gestured toward the secretary of state—“has just tossed across the table to me. Don’t throw them away as he has done. Are you a clown? Don’t be a clown.”
Feng bowed his head. “I will see to it, Minister Ma.”
The minister laid his fingers on Feng’s
hand to delay him. “You think you’re a big number, don’t you? Look at you, crouching at my side, staring up at me. You are a dog that yaps noisily all the time to demand attention. I do believe that perhaps you even sweat through your tongue the way a dog does.”
Feng realized that his mouth was wide open. He snapped it shut.
“When someone’s computer goes wrong, they telephone a faceless drone at a call center,” Ma said. “The poor drone helps them fix the computer. Then the customer hangs up on the drone and thinks what a waste of time it was, whether the computer was fixed or not. Do you understand?”
“I am the drone at the call center, and you are the one who called to get your computer fixed.”
“Now I am hanging up the phone.”
The power Feng had felt in his hotel room with the Swedish woman was gone. He was slack and limp. Minister Ma’s aides glared at him. The Americans watched him with contempt. He lifted himself from his knees.
For a moment, Feng thought he might speak. Tell them that he would crash all the cars anyway, and there was no amount of American concessions that could persuade him otherwise. Instead he slouched toward the exit and went into the corridor. The bodyguards turned toward him, the robotic US secret service meatheads and Minister Ma’s sleazy kung-fu practitioners with their ponytails and hair oil.
Screw them all. He would let the cars crash, and he would go to the airport with Maj and convince her not to return to her husband. He would hide himself in Sweden or Spain and fill the Internet with manipulated pictures of her body, and let Minister Ma take the rap for the failed trade talks and the billions of dollars’ worth of lost opportunities. He went into the next room, where the Chinese delegation had its secure lines. The communications woman looked up at him.
“I need to make a call for Minister Ma.” Feng picked up the phone and pulled Wyatt’s number from his pocket. He dialed the code that introduced an additional element of encryption above the algorithms already set up by the communications experts. It was a code known only to him because he had written it and uploaded the scrambler to the delegation’s system. Wyatt picked up at the first ring.