Triandos looked at him.
“You yourself are not at fault in this matter, of course,” Lopez continued. “You were simply following instructions. Merely an instrument of your employer, yes?”
Again, nothing from Triandos. Sweat poured from his forehead and his eyes bulged. Lopez wondered idly whether that would help matters.
“Bosses are nothing but trouble,” he said equably. “People such as you and I, we do all the work and take all the chances, while they live like kings, hoarding money or spending it as they will—but not spending much of it on us, eh?
“You were in America last month, Triandos. Las Vegas, in the state of Nevada. Do you recall?”
Triandos continued to stare. Lopez smiled and raised his hand.
“Forgive me again. That was a rhetorical question, Triandos. You need not bother to answer. You were in the lobby of a hotel, and you were instructed to watch for and to follow—because why else would you watch for him?—a certain man. You were unsuccessful in this, but that is of no importance. My client had instructed your boss that he was to be neither observed nor followed. Again, you are not to blame; but my job is to demonstrate to your masters that my client means what he says. And to that end—”
Lopez’s hand darted out, his index finger extended. The finger jabbed sharply into the socket of Triandos’s right eye. There was an odd squishing sound, and the bodyguard’s eyeball prolapsed onto the man’s cheek. Lopez took the subluxated globe between his middle two fingers and with a sudden movement, pulled it away from its supporting muscles as easily as a child might pluck a grape. Triandos’s body twitched, but otherwise there was no response from his paralyzed neuromuscular system. Lopez took the eyeball and dropped it onto the floor, where he crushed it beneath his shoe. A small stream of blood and fluid trickled out. Lopez looked up. The empty socket, red and black, showed nothing, and the bodyguard’s remaining eye rolled back in his head, almost as if it were looking for protection. Lopez slapped Triandos a few more times. He didn’t want him passing out, not just yet.
“You know the old saying, I am sure: if thine eye offend thee and all that. Perhaps I am misinterpreting the meaning, but then again, I was never much of a religious person.”
The finger flashed out again, this time into the other socket. Triandos’s left eye came out just as easily as the right. Again, Lopez dropped it to the floor and stepped on it. Then he bent and whispered, soothingly almost, into the blind man’s ear.
“Do not worry, Triandos. I will let someone know where to find you,” he said. “Please be sure to convey my employer’s good wishes to your master,” he said. “I hope he has a suitable disability plan in place for you.”
Chapter Six
The silver and blue Aeroflot A320 glided in out of a cloudless sky and touched down on the Pulkovo-2 runway in St. Petersburg four minutes ahead of schedule. I closed my copy of Chess Life, glanced at my watch, adjusted the old Foster Grants, and looked out the window as the barren airport landscape rushed past. The local time was 22:46 and the evening sun glared at me from well above the northwestern horizon.
I gazed back at it, not glaring. This was the time of the White Nights: at high latitudes, a period of several weeks around the summer solstice during which, to quote a popular reference website, “sunsets are late, sunrises are early and darkness is never complete.” The article went on to say that the White Nights were a time of festivals and celebrations, the most famous of which took place right here in St. Petersburg, by far the most populous city in the world to experience the phenomenon.
I didn’t feel like celebrating anything. For reasons I couldn’t explain, the sight filled me not only with fascination, but also a nagging uneasiness, a sense that there was something wrong about the sun being up there at this hour.
It was nonsense, I told myself. It was the same sun I’d known all my life—I’d just never seen it stay out this late before. There shouldn’t have been anything inherently disquieting in that. My lack of mental equanimity could as easily have come from something I ate, or the screaming headache I always got any time I flew more than a couple hundred miles, or the seven time zones of jet lag that I knew would take me days to recover from. It probably was one of those things. Or two. Or three.
Whatever the cause, I should have been used to it by now. Nagging uneasiness had been a way of life for me ever since Cramer told me I was coming here—for that matter, I thought bitterly, ever since I signed up with his chicken outfit. After springing the Russia thing on me Friday, he then provided my incipient ulcer with an added boost by letting me stew all weekend over which of the Rodina’s six and a half million square miles he had in mind before finally deigning to give me the details on Monday morning—eight hours before my flight.
(And how did he know I knew Russian? I spent my time thinking about that as well. Yes, I’d spent forty-seven weeks of my Navy career learning the stuff, courtesy of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, but Cramer could only have gotten that from my service record…and he could only have procured that from somewhere very near the top of the chain of command. I wondered where—and how.)
He opened the briefing by firing a blue and yellow ball at me as I walked into his office. Soccer ball, I thought, but I didn’t get my hands up quickly enough and it thudded into my chest, where I managed to trap it. When I examined the thing, I saw why I was late. It was smaller than I expected—maybe seven inches in diameter versus eight and a half or so for a soccer ball—and the difference in size threw off my depth perception. Now what? I wondered, but as I looked back up at Cramer, I tried to keep from showing it. I was damned if I’d give him the satisfaction.
If my cigar-store Indian—sorry, Native American—act impressed him, he kept it to himself. He took a long pull at his cigar and blew out a cloud of smoke big enough to plug the hole in the ozone layer.
“How much do you know about handball, my boy?” he asked.
“My boy” was better than “son,” I guessed, but not by a wide margin. I held the ball up for a second and considered throwing it back at him before remembering how much my biweekly take-home pay was going to be. I’d worked it out the night before. Twice, because I didn’t believe it the first time. I tossed the ball into a nearby chair and sat down.
“Team handball? Nothing, apart from what I see on TV during the Olympics, for about fifteen minutes every four years. Sort of a cross between basketball and ice hockey, I always thought.”
Cramer nodded. “A crude description, but apt enough. Ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the country is ignorant even of that,” he said. “And it’s a shame. We don’t even have a national team, not since the USOC decertified them back in 2007. One can see the committee’s side of it, I suppose: team’s record in international competition was four wins and twenty-six losses, but it’s our own fault for not developing and publicizing the sport as we should have done.
“The game is tailor-made for Americans,” he continued. “We’ve got the best athletes in the world, especially when we’re allowed to use our hands. All the game involves is throwing, catching, dribbling, and running with a ball.” He pointed. “That ball.”
“You’re sending me to Russia to cover a handball tournament,” I said.
“Correct. Ostensibly, at least. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have deduced it any better. St. Petersburg, to be precise. International women’s tournament. I thought I’d give you something easy for your maiden voyage—get you properly broken in and all that.” Cramer leaned back and puffed at his cigar, as satisfied with himself as a Boy Scout who had his quotidian good deed out of the way and could now continue with business as usual.
He might have been satisfied, but I felt like I’d just stepped off an elevator onto the fourteenth floor of a twelve-story building. I didn’t know a damned thing about handball. Sherlock Holmes, my ass. If I had any of his smarts, I wouldn’t be in this screwy situation in the first place. And easy? Like the Titanic’s maiden voyage was supposed
to be easy? She got properly broken in, too, as I recalled—against an iceberg in the middle of the North Atlantic. But I wasn’t too stunned to miss the keyword.
“Ostensibly?”
“Your specific duties, by and large, I leave for you to decide. You’re going to cover a handball tournament, yes; but if that’s all you find, I’ll be very much mistaken.”
“What does that—”
“It means you’re on your own, just the way you like it. Carte blanche, my boy. It means that you follow your instincts and go where the news is. It means that you don’t call me for approval when you have to take a leak. My time is far too valuable to spend in pointless conversation with my operatives. I provide the stage; the performance you give is up to you.” He leaned back in his chair and waved the hand with the cigar at me, leaving an arrow-straight trail of blue-gray smoke in its wake. “Far be it from me to constrain your God-given talent. Even farther be it from me to deprive you of the opportunity to further develop your journalistic skills.”
When it came to ego manipulation, Cramer never used a needle when there was a two-by-four close to hand. And what was that “if that’s all you find” stuff? Not only did I have to go halfway around the world to cover an event I knew jack shit about, I had to do extra credit work, too?
“What if I don’t?” I asked. “Find anything else, I mean?”
Cramer shrugged. “Then you don’t. But you will. I’ve been doing this job for thirty-five years, and I have yet to fire one single employee. Do you know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because I hire the right people in the first place, my boy. One hundred percent of the time. Therefore, you too will succeed. I think my employees do a much better job for me, knowing they don’t ever have to worry about where their next meal is coming from. Right?”
“Right,” I said. You’re a lunatic, I thought. And what did that make me? I was working for him!
Cramer stood up. “Good. Anything else? No? Excellent. Good hunting.”
From this I gathered that Question Time was over. Served me right, I supposed, for not being quick enough. I stood up too, and we shook hands across the desk.
“You’ll be gone about two weeks,” he said. He pointed toward the outer office. “Meet me out front in fifteen minutes. I’ll take you to the airport myself.”
Back on the plane, there was a chime as the seat belt sign went off, followed by a loud click over the public address system. The Airbus slowed to walking speed as the ground crew maneuvered her toward the gate. Our lead flight attendant, Tamara, who looked like she just stepped out of a travel poster and who could easily have induced me to fly all the way to Mars with her, headaches and jet lag be damned, stepped into the aisle and gave us instructions on what to do next in Russian and English. I feigned ignorance of the former, feeling it gave me at least a nebulous psychological edge to know something that nobody else here knew I knew. Nebulous or not, I needed all the edges I could get.
We disembarked without incident. My luggage was all present and accounted for, and Customs was a breeze. The young uniformed inspector glanced at my passport and then looked up at me with what seemed a sincere smile.
“And the purpose of your visit, Mr. Mallory?” His English was word-perfect and without accent. So was mine.
“Business. I’m a journalist, here to cover the handball tournament.”
“I see.” He handed my passport to me and smiled again. “Both your papers and your belongings are well in order. Welcome to Russia, Mr. Mallory, and I hope you will enjoy your stay.”
That made two of us. But I had my doubts.
I procured a cart for the luggage and lumbered off in search of the rental counter, where my car—a gorgeous six-speed Audi the same color as the late evening sky—was ready and waiting for me. Maybe Cramer was a manipulative bastard, like Pam said, but at least he was a bastard who took good care of his minions.
Again with Pam. Out of sight wasn’t out of mind—not yet, anyway. To shake the memory, I found a news program on the car radio and immersed myself in getting used to hearing the language again. I was rusty, but it came back quickly. Then I tried out my voice with a few Russian tongue-twisters. I sounded fine. According to the map, the drive to the hotel was a short and simple one, basically a straight shot from the airport, and that turned out to be the case.
Although “hotel” seemed to me a woefully inadequate word to describe the place I pulled up in front of twenty minutes later. The Holiday Inn was a hotel. Cramer had booked me into a palace. The Europa Hotel on Nevsky Prospekt was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and I wasn’t about to argue with that assessment. I stuck to English and got checked in with the help of my brand-new Cramer Press Syndicate credit card, and the bellboy seemed more than delighted to get his tip in the form of American dollars.
When he left, I switched off the light, then took off jacket, tie, and shoes, and walked over to my fifth-floor window, which opened onto a small terrace with a beautiful view of the St. Petersburg skyline. The sun was finally on the horizon now—at ten minutes past midnight. Below me in the street, I saw the beginnings of dusk; above, the sky remained a bright azure blue.
The view of the post-midnight sun still continued to captivate and unnerve me. Exhausted as I was, I could have watched for hours, but I also felt my headache pounding away hard enough for me to calculate my pulse rate from it. I slid the door closed and went back inside. I fiddled with the bedside radio and found some classical music near the middle of the FM dial, then cranked the volume down to the point where it was barely audible.
The room came with almost every amenity I could think of, but I next gave my attention to the minibar. No Red Stripe, so I selected a blue bottle of Baltika-3 from the refrigerator and dug into my carry-on bag for the bottle of aspirin I never left home without. I took two tablets with a swig of the beer (which proved to be a quite drinkable light lager), stripped down to my underwear, and collapsed onto the bed without bothering to turn down the covers. The pillows were exactly as firm as if I’d had them made to order. Now that I was finally horizontal, for the first time in the last thirty hours, my headache began to fade almost immediately. I closed my eyes and wondered what in the world there was to feel uneasy about.
Nothing, dammit, I decided. Hell, I had it made. A hundred grand a year, a dream assignment, the best lodgings on the Continent, and a brand-new Audi to tool around in. I had Bentley Livingston Cramer to thank for it all.
And if my nagging uneasiness continued, I thought, seconds before I fell asleep, I had only myself to blame.
Chapter Seven
With the velocity, if not the accuracy, of a laser-guided missile, the pass from the deep left corner of the court streaked toward its intended target on a line, far too high and far too hard.
Or so I thought.
Croatia’s Katarina Babic reached up with her right hand and speared the ball easily at the top of the opposing semicircle, six meters out from goal. With one flick of her wrist, she then instantly tossed it back over her head, where her teammate was already airborne. Teammate Nikola Horvat took the no-look pass cleanly at both its apex and hers, and fired it past the helpless Greek goalkeeper before crashing to the floor at her feet. Horvat’s shot came from almost point-blank range, but because she started her leap outside the arc and released the ball before landing, it was a legal goal and added to Croatia’s already insurmountable lead with less than half a minute to go.
The play was a work of art, and the capacity crowd of seven thousand at the North Star Sports Palace roared its collective appreciation. That they could roar at all astonished me: this was the fourth and last game of the day, and most of the fans had been in their seats yelling themselves hoarse for the last eight hours.
In a distant corner of the huge but still overcrowded press box, I made a notation on my homemade scoresheet, then another when Greece scored on a seven-meter penalty throw in the waning seconds to cut the final margin to 27-22.
The final buzzer had the effect of a stopper being pulled from a bathtub. Most of my colleagues streamed downstairs in the direction of the interview room and, more important, the complimentary food and drink therein. Only a few remained hunched over laptops, typing furiously to meet deadlines.
I took a swig from a green plastic bottle of Narzan mineral water, screwed the cap back on, and leaned back in my chair to study the ceiling. A deadline was one of the few things I didn’t have to worry about. Ten p.m. here was only three p.m. in New York. My eyes closed and somebody pushed the “Play” button of my subconscious…
I was on my way to Kennedy in the back of Cramer’s limousine, a navy blue Cadillac Fleetwood that was at least thirty-five years old and looked and ran like it came off the showroom floor that morning. The liquor cabinet in the back featured single malt Scotch even older than the Caddy, and I was still trying to get my boss to delineate my assignment more precisely.
Good luck with that, Mallory.
“But what—” I said.
“I provide the canvas, my boy,” Cramer said. His cigar hand described an arc that left a perfect blue-gray contrail in its wake. “The paints, the brushes, the palette—even the subject—are all at your disposal. You have merely to use them as you will.” His tone left no doubt as to which of us had the more demanding role.
“But if—”
“Carte blanche, son. Carte blanche. You are familiar with the term, I trust?”
I nodded, keeping the smart-assed reply I’d formulated to myself. I’d already learned that one of Cramer’s conversational techniques was the unexpected change of pace, which I guessed he used as a sort of rough-and-ready test of how his people would react under pressure. I wondered how I was doing so far.
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