“Doctor? Would you take a look at this, please?”
Hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Gulko got up wearily, and went back to look at the woman on the slab.
“Well? What has baffled you this time?”
“See for yourself, Doctor,” the young woman said, holding out the press guide from the handball tournament.
“Do not keep me from my supper with your stupid games,” he barked. “What am I supposed to divine from that?”
The assistant flinched.
“It gives Karin Fessler’s height as 1.72 meters.”
“And?”
“Based on the measurements we have made, the height of the victim cannot possibly be more than 1.70 meters. Even assuming an unusually large—”
“Give me that, you slob.” Gulko snatched the booklet from her hand and glared at it for a few seconds. Then he tossed the thing into a nearby trash can and picked up the folder containing the information they’d received from Interpol only an hour ago.
“What of this?” he said, waving it in the girl’s face. “Does it not clearly give Fessler’s height as one meter seventy?”
“Yes, but—”
“And were not the fingerprints a perfect match?”
“Yes, Doctor, but—”
“But what, girl?” he shouted.
She hung her head.
“Nothing, Doctor. I only wanted to bring the discrepancy to your attention.”
“Noted. Now may I return to my supper—if, that is, your stupid interruption has not ruined my appetite?”
“Yes, Doctor. I am sorry, Doctor.”
“Many thanks. Now take your friend and get out of my office.” He turned and stalked off across the room.
The interns hurried out of the morgue, up to the main floor of the complex, and out through the revolving door. They were in the parking lot before either of them dared to speak. Even then, they were careful to keep their voices low. The young man gestured with his head in Gulko’s general direction.
“Asshole,” he said.
The woman nodded agreement. “He is the best at what he does, but at times, I wonder whether it is worth the trouble.” She shrugged. “What does not kill us makes us stronger, I suppose.”
“You know your Goethe, I see.”
“I thought it was Nietzsche, in ‘Twilight of the Gods.’”
“Yes, but Goethe said it first.”
The couple walked to the woman’s car—a battered Lada whose chief merit was that it was easy to push on the many occasions when it broke down. She got in, then reached through the open window and patted the man on the arm.
“Thank you, Tolya,” she said, smiling. “Until tomorrow.”
“Until tomorrow, Larisa.”
The Lada sputtered to life, and the man stood watching her until the car was out of sight around a corner. Then he looked around. The parking area was deserted. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and punched in the number he’d been told to commit to memory. At the other end, the receiver buzzed once.
“3284,” said the voice at the other end.
“1642,” he replied. (The countersign was always one-half the original number.)
“Yes?”
Tolya related what had happened in the morgue.
“I see,” the other man said. “But the coroner positively identified the body as Fessler?”
He chuckled. “Yes, obviously.”
For perhaps thirty seconds, there was silence on the line, and the young man wondered whether the call had been dropped. When the voice came back, he found himself wishing that it hadn’t.
“In future, when I ask you a question, you will confine yourself to simple answers. You will not elaborate. Is that clear?”
The kid gulped.
“Yes.” He didn’t elaborate.
“Thank you.” The connection broke with a loud click, and the young medical let out a long breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. As he walked to his own car, he also discovered that his legs were shakier than they ought to have been.
When he got home, he locked the door behind him and turned on the radio. He used a small hammer to utterly destroy the phone, breaking it into the smallest bits possible before flushing the remains down the toilet—as he had been instructed to do. It took three flushes before everything finally disappeared.
It was strange, but the phone wasn’t his in the first place and, remembering the face and size of the man who had given him the thing, it seemed as well to follow instructions. He was nervous, but he still had fifteen thousand rubles in his pocket that weren’t there last week, and that helped. He put the hammer back in its drawer in the kitchen, and poured himself a tall glass of vodka. It would help with the nervousness, too. His not to reason why; his but to do and die (though surely things wouldn’t come to that).
And that quotation was neither Goethe nor Nietzsche, he knew. It was Tennyson.
At the other end of the “conversation” just ended, the man looked thoughtful for a moment. Probably it was nothing to worry about, but the Chameleon wasn’t one to take unnecessary chances. Nor did he care much for insolence. He punched a number into the phone and, having received and given the necessary signal, issued a few terse instructions.
“Understood,” came the cheerful reply.
“When?”
“Six hours. Perhaps eight.”
“Thank you.”
Chapter Seventeen
It has been my all too limited experience that when one wakes up to find an unexpected and beautiful naked woman in bed with him, one does not stop to consider the reasons, much less the ramifications. Instead, one—well, two, I suppose—simply gets on with the matter at hand. Talking almost never enters into the equation.
Still, it seemed only polite to say something. (I told you I was new at this.)
“You’re not wearing any clothes,” I said.
“And you are,” Lori replied, smiling. Her breath was minty fresh, and her perfume—she couldn’t have used more than a drop—smelled faintly of lilac. She hadn’t been wearing perfume earlier. She caressed a cheek that needed a shave before taking the lapel of my shirt between thumb and forefinger and giving it a gentle tug. “Do you not see something wrong in that?”
Yes and no, I thought, but before I could come up with a clever answer, she had her hands under my shirt, where they somehow managed to find and tickle every single hair on my chest. I still wasn’t fully awake, but parts of me were getting more and more awake with every passing second.
Something had to give, and something did. Me. I pulled her toward me and we kissed. Our mouths opened simultaneously, and I felt her tongue inside me, darting here, there, and everywhere, exploring places that even my own tongue never knew existed. In the middle of all this, my shirt came off—though I’d have sworn we never broke the kiss—and I found myself on top of Lori without quite knowing how I got there. Her hips thrust rhythmically against me, and her hands moved down to begin working on getting me out of my pants and into hers. So to speak, that is. I didn’t have any idea where her pants had gotten to, and I didn’t much care.
But because of our respective (if not respectable) positions, she couldn’t do it. Finally, panting from a combination of physical effort and desire, she stopped and pushed me away.
“You do it,” she gasped, pointing. “Hurry, please, Paul. I want you. Now. At once.”
I thought that was the greatest plan of action since the Normandy invasion. I was stark raving bonkers with lust. I couldn’t have worked out 2 + 2 on my fingers or identified the capital of the United States—hell, I couldn’t have told you my name unless I read it off my press pass, and I wasn’t about to stop to look for that right now. With difficulty, I got off Lori and out of bed, leaning against the nearby wall for support. I couldn’t get my breath for a few seconds, somebody else seemed to have borrowed my knees, and my vocal cords felt like they’d been dipped in ground glass. The room was dark, but the combination of my acclimated vision an
d the White Nights seeping in around the edges of the blinds made it easy for me to see everything that was worth seeing on Lori: tousled blonde hair, inviting eyes, parted lips, heaving breasts, flat stomach, and open legs that looked far, far longer than they had any right to be. In short, everything that was worth seeing on Lori was…everything.
“Hang on a second,” I finally croaked. I staggered into the bathroom, not bothering to switch on the light. I turned on the faucet in the sink and drank about a gallon of water from my cupped hands as I tried to splash myself back to reality. When I opened my eyes, I found them on a level with the toothpaste, comb, shaving cream, and razor I’d used yesterday, all lined up in a neat and accidental row. I stood up and then sat down. Eventually, I started thinking straight again; unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing about me that was straight.
This was too bad, because as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t think of a single scenario where getting it on with Lori was the right thing to do. She was either crazy or lonely or both, but whatever it was, I couldn’t take advantage of it. Sir Galahad wouldn’t have approved. Furthermore, she was a news source, and I was fairly sure there was something in my journalist’s code of ethics handbook somewhere that precluded messing around with them.
So why was she here, if it wasn’t to have a roll in the hay with Paul “Scoop” Mallory, ace reporter and God’s gift to women? I sat there in the dark thinking about it, and as my red corpuscles reluctantly returned to their assigned seats, the thinking got a little easier. Thankfully, so did everything else.
I threw out Lori’s story—mystery men and orders not to talk to the police, what kind of crap was that?—and tried to make something fit from the little bit that I knew. I didn’t get anywhere, unless you count the feeling I had that I should have been getting somewhere—that I had enough to figure it out if I could only get it lined up correctly. Like the comb and the toothpaste and the razor and the shaving cream.
Shaving cream…
And then I got it. At least I thought I did: every piece of information I had fit the theory. I could still be wrong, probably was wrong, but I wouldn’t be any worse off for trying.
I stood up and got my pants buttoned and zipped without incident. Piece of cake. Now all I had to do was go back in there and convince a naked, available, eager, and eminently desirable woman that having sex with her would be a bad idea.
She must have come to the same conclusion, because when I emerged from the bathroom, she was sitting demurely on the edge of her bed, fully dressed except for her shoes—and why would she put those on at two o’clock in the morning anyway?
If it was possible to be relieved and disappointed at the same time, then that’s what I was. Crossing the room, I glanced down. It occurred to me that even her bare feet looked incredibly sexy.
But that way lay perdition. I looked up again.
“Hi,” I said. Words are my business.
She looked up. That little smile was back on her face.
“Paul—”
I cut her off. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, nodding at the minibar behind her. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
“Well, I’m going to. I’m parched.”
As I moved past her, I pretended to stumble. I stuck out my left arm as a counterbalance, grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled. She squealed with pain, but the blonde wig came off beautifully—just the way I thought it would. With my free hand, I reached into the fridge for a Coke, popped it open and took a long drink. Then I turned around and tossed the wig over to its owner. She caught the thing, gazed at it for a second or two, and set it down on the bed. She looked even sexier as a disheveled brunette than she had as a blonde. Down, boy.
“Okay, Karin,” I said. “Start talking.”
Chapter Eighteen
Elsewhere
138 Krevny Prospekt, flat 4-A
Illyurin, Russia
(twelve kilometers northeast of St. Petersburg)
Third-year medical student Anatoly Zarkin reached his flat at a few minutes before twenty-three hundred, and took the lift up to the fourth floor. Holding a small bag of groceries in his left hand, he fumbled for the keys with his right.
It took a few extra seconds to find the ones he wanted, mostly because one of the locks on the front door was new: a “deadbolt” type that the makers contended was impossible to breach. He had found it on the black market—specifically, he had found it in the trunk of a car of a friend of a friend—and paid half his week’s wages to procure the thing. He considered it a sound investment.
He worked the key, and the lock slid back; then he used the second key on the original door lock underneath and let himself in. Then he switched on the lights in the tiny living room and lost no time in securely locking the door again. For good measure, he then engaged the heavy security chain that was bolted not merely to the molding around the door, but all the way through to the door unit itself. Over six hundred kilograms of force would be required to break the chain; over eight hundred, to tear the latch from its moorings. So said the specifications. That done, Zarkin permitted himself a small smile and a sigh of relief.
Then, before he could inhale again, a loop of wire dropped gently over his head and tightened around his neck, just enough that he could feel it all the way around. The wire was not smooth; it felt to him as though it had been treated with some form of abrasive material. Were the coil to be tightened, it would at the very least cut into his skin. Even now, he thought he could feel himself bleeding, though he couldn’t be sure.
“Coated with industrial diamond chips,” the man said, reading his mind. “I had this little thing custom-made in South Africa some years ago. In a pinch, it would saw your head off. Interesting, no? Don’t you think it works marvelously well? I could even tell you who made it, but then—” he laughed softly—“I would have to kill you.”
Lopez. The young man felt as though his blood had frozen, despite the years of medical training that told him such a thing was impossible,. His extremities went numb—distantly, he heard the bag of groceries crash to the wooden floor that suddenly seemed a million kilometers away—and his stomach, a cold dead block of ice, seemed to weigh him down and root him to the spot. Terror screamed at him from all sides, obliterating whatever else his brain might be trying to suggest—though God only knew what useful options it could offer him at this stage.
“How very good to see you again, Tolya,” Lopez said, “although I am disappointed that the feeling does not appear to be mutual. Did you seriously entertain the idea that something as simple as a lock on a door would deter me?”
The medical student tried to take a deep breath, but as he did, Lopez tugged at the garrote and it tightened yet another imperceptible fraction.
“No, no, my young friend,” Lopez said, his tone gently reproving, as it would be with a misbehaving infant. “You must see that struggle is, how to say, contra-indicated. Come with me over to the chair. You will find it much more comfortable.”
The pressure on the wire relaxed—Lopez’s control over the device was exquisite—and Tolya complied, as if by doing so, he might still escape whatever this monster had planned for him. The chair was a low, squat thing, upholstered in dirty and tattered red fabric. Beneath the foam rubber seat cushion, he could feel the broken springs of the undercarriage against his buttocks. Still holding on to the garrote, Lopez moved around to the back and took a seat on a folding chair. From this position, Anatoly could not so much as twitch without Lopez knowing it and taking whatever action he needed to forestall anything his victim might try.
“Now then,” he cooed. “Isn’t that better? Are you quite comfortable?”
The medical student tried to speak, but nothing came out save for a strange rasping sound. Lopez smiled.
“Good,” he said. “Now, to business. Our employer thought it necessary that we have a short get-together. Okay?”
Tolya could barely make out Lopez’s words at
this point, and of the words he heard, he could make no sense. His eyes were full of tears, blinding him, and there was a curious roaring in his ears that he couldn’t explain. His underwear and the crotch of his khaki slacks were soaked clear through with his urine.
Lopez was talking again. The words were calm and, oddly, reassuring.
“Specifically, I have been asked to speak to you about your insolence,” he said. “It is a common enough failing among the young; one that personally, I would be willing to take a lenient view of, especially at the first offense. I sincerely wish that the decision was mine to take, but, sadly, that is not the case. I have been instructed to give you an object lesson.”
Lopez pulled the garrote tight. The young man’s head jerked. His eyes bulged wide and he thrashed helplessly in the chair, neither his arms nor his legs getting anywhere near his assailant. Blood oozed from Anatoly’s neck where the wire cut deeply into it. His sphincter let go and his bowels evacuated themselves.
The grotesquely unequal struggle lasted for only a few seconds. Then there was only the reflexive twitching of the body, which took no more than another few seconds to subside.
By keeping directly behind the chair, Lopez stayed clear of the blood. After a few seconds, he loosened the garrote, slipped it back over the dead man’s head, and went into the kitchen, where he meticulously rinsed the device off in the sink, examining the result before returning it to its specially designed case.
Lopez walked out into the foyer. He found the keys to the front door, then turned back to what was left of his victim. He shook his head slowly.
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