“Why did you have Gobi kill him?”
“If you’re asking why we picked Zaksauskas for the job, you of all people should know that. The girl’s born to kill. If you’re asking why we targeted Armitage…” Nolan steepled his fingers in front of his lips, parsing information carefully. “Let’s just say that he and his checkered past presented a problem that our government couldn’t afford to deal with publicly—and he did need to be dealt with. We’re talking about a guy who helped sell Stinger missiles to Kurdish separatists for pocket change, and now he thinks he’s Richard Branson? Sorry, no. So back in August, one of our analysts happened to read that college essay you wrote online, and your crazy little European chick seemed like a perfect bet for cleanup duty.”
“Wait.” A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “You picked Gobi because of me?”
“It was a great essay, kid. Vivid prose. Felt like I was there.” He must have seen my face, because he shook his head. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it. You didn’t know. Once she takes care of Paula, we’ll be all finished with her.”
“You know she’s got my family.”
Nolan went quiet, all smugness gone. “What?”
“Paula. She’s got my parents and my sister.”
“As of when?”
“Yesterday at least. Paula had pictures of them on her iPad, in some room somewhere.”
“You’re sure that she’s the one who did it?”
“If she didn’t, she’s associated with whoever did.”
“You have any proof?”
“I told you,” I said, “I saw the picture. There’s a video file too, where my mom and dad are talking about her.”
“You have that file?”
“No. It was on her iPad.”
“And where’s the iPad?”
“It got blown up in Zermatt.”
Nolan grunted. “I’ve noticed that happens a lot when Zusane Zaksauskas is around.”
“We’re talking about my family,” I said. “My parents. And my sister. Why would I possibly make something like that up?”
He didn’t bother answering the question. “And you have no idea where they might be?”
“Somewhere in western Europe. They’re in a room with no windows and no furniture. Other than that, no.”
“Well”—Nolan didn’t look happy—“we’ll look into it.” Even he must have realized how lame that sounded, because he straightened his posture and attempted to rephrase the statement. “We’ll make it a top priority. Meanwhile, we’ve got a tight hold on the asset, so everything’s stable, temporarily at least. Once she takes care of Paula, she’ll be back.”
“The asset?” It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. “Are you talking about Gobi?”
“Who else?”
“You’re talking about her like she’s some kind of brainwashed sleeper agent.”
Nolan snorted. “Kid, you’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Then how can you be so sure she’ll be back?”
“Money isn’t the only reason people do things.” Nolan shrugged. “Our doctors give her eight to twelve months tops.”
I stared at him. For a second the tavern around us was so quiet that all I could hear was the fire snapping and popping in the hearth.
“What?”
Nolan’s eyebrows twitched. For the second time, he looked interested in the conversation.
“What, you didn’t know?”
And he showed me the last item in his folder.
36. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings”
—The Smashing Pumpkins
I’d never seen an MRI image before, but I recognized a human brain when I saw one. Nolan pointed to a white spot toward the front of the picture, just above the eyeballs.
“Glioblastoma multiforme,” he said, “stage three. Temporal lobe, they say. Aggressive as shit, the way I understand it.”
Looking at that little spot, no bigger than a dime, I thought back to Swierczynski, what he’d said back in Venice:
The bullet is already in your brain.
“Apparently she’d had cancer once before,” Nolan said, “as a child, in the thyroid. Surgeons tried to remove it back in Lithuania, I guess, with a thyroidectomy, but they kind of botched the job.” Another shrug. This guy was turning out to be the world heavyweight champion of shruggers. “Eastern European medicine… what are you going to do?”
I thought of the scar across her throat, the one that Erich had mentioned to me back in Zermatt. I wanted to say something, anything, but all the moisture seemed to have disappeared from my mouth.
“But this puppy?” Nolan tapped the white spot on the MRI. “Going to be a whole lot trickier. I’m told there’s maybe five or six neurosurgeons in the world who can get it out without permanent brain damage, and even then…”
“And you promised her the operation if she took care of Armitage for you.”
“I told her what I had to.”
“What about now?”
“That’s the beauty of it.” Nolan grinned, and took another sip of his wine, which was almost gone. “She’s not our problem anymore. See how everything works out? That’s what makes America the greatest country in the world.”
Before I knew what I was doing, I grabbed the table and flipped it over, sending it forward with a splintering crash. Papers, photographs, and the bottle and glass all hit the floor. Nolan jumped up, and when he looked back to me, it was with the startled unease of a man who’d just discovered that the dog he’d been taunting wouldn’t just bark but might actually jump up and bite.
“There’s no need to get bitchy, kid. We’ll figure out what’s going on with your family—I already told you that. Twenty-four hours or less, we’ll get a phone call, bring ’em out all smiles and do the CNN shuffle.” He pointed at me with a big blunt finger. “Don’t piss in the wind on this one.”
“You owe her,” I said.
“Shit.”
“You made her a promise.”
Nolan studied me for a moment. Some of the intensity lifted from his face, and when he spoke again, his voice was different, almost earnest—suddenly he was a man who genuinely believed what he was saying and wanted to be understood.
“Let’s get something straight, Perry. I told you before, Zusane Zaksauskas is a born predator. She’s a dirty bomb with a pulse. It’s what she is—and it’s all she is. If she wasn’t doing this for us, she’d be doing it for somebody else.” He blinked, all watery-eyed and sympathetic, like maybe there was still a way that we could all walk away friends. “I’ve got kids of my own, all right? Two beautiful girls—they live with their mom back in Virginia. Amazing young women. They play violin and ride dressage. Someday they’re going to grow up and go to college and raise kids of their own and live long, happy lives.” His expression fell. “But somebody like this?” He looked at the Gobi file, scattered around his feet. “I don’t mean to sound callous, but short of a bullet to the head—cancer’s the best thing for it.”
I stared at him. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”
There must have been something threatening in my voice, because I saw a second man standing up in the corner of the room, where I hadn’t noticed him until now. Without taking his eyes off me, Nolan gestured for the other agent to sit down.
“It’s okay, Jeff,” he said. “Kid’s emotional, that’s all. The teenage years.”
“I’m not emotional,” I said, and saying those words aloud, I realized it was true. I had finally remembered where I’d heard the name Monash before, and I felt calmer than I had in days. If I’d put my fingers to my carotid artery, I would’ve felt my heart rate running a steady sixty beats per minute, maybe even slower. “Let me see those pictures again.”
Grudgingly: “Which ones?”
“Of Paula, when she was little.”
With another almost indiscernible shrug, Nolan squatted down and picked up the papers that I’d spilled when
I’d dumped the table. After gathering them up, he shoved them in my direction so that I could sort through them. Here she was standing in the Dubai Hilton with her nanny; here she was in Paris, walking along among the chestnut trees on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées toward the Arc de Triomphe with a pretty blond woman that I recognized from framed photos in Paula’s apartment as her mother. When I got to the next one, I stopped.
“This was her dad?”
“Everett Monash, yeah. The one that Gobi hit outside the train station, before Armitage.”
I looked at the snapshot. Paula, probably six or seven at the time, was sitting on his shoulders in Piazza San Marco, in front of the cathedral where we’d just stood two days ago. I looked at Paula’s young, smooth face, and then down at Everett’s—a tall, vaguely satanic-looking bald man with a trim goatee that looked much like it did when I’d seen it earlier tonight, when he’d been sitting in the helicopter—the man who had been pointing the rifle at Gobi. The man I’d first seen bursting out of a steamer trunk in the Grand Canal.
I pointed down at his face. “He was Gobi’s first Venice target?”
“That’s right. Monash. He and Paula were part of Armitage’s organization.”
“You know he’s still alive, right?”
Nolan’s eyes widened just a millimeter. “Bullshit.”
“It’s true,” I said. “He and Paula have Gobi right now. And they seem to think they can turn her to their side.” I looked at him. “You better hope she believed you when you lied about getting her that surgery, Agent Nolan—or I don’t think you’ll ever see her again.”
“You’re lying about Monash. We got independent confirmation that Gobi shot him and dropped his body in the canal.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and who do you think was in that canal with him when he opened his eyes?”
“Word of advice, kid. Don’t shit a shitter.” Nolan grabbed back his files, shuffled them away, then picked up his coat and slipped it on, all business now. “Here’s the deal. You’re going to let Jeff here drive you back to the embassy, and you’re going to sit there like a good boy and let us do our job, and nobody’s going to mention anything about Zusane Zaksauskas ever again. Got it?”
“Sure,” I said. “There’s just one problem.”
Now he just sounded tired. “What’s that?”
“I don’t trust you to save my family. I don’t think you know half of what you think you know.” I pointed straight at him. “And I definitely don’t trust the CIA to do anything more than what serves its own purpose to help me out of here.” I looked back over at the guy who’d stood up when I’d called Nolan an asshole. “And that means that whatever arrangement you might have planned with Gobi, I’m about twelve hours from pulling the whole thing down on your heads in the most publicly humiliating way possible.”
Nolan turned red, then purple. His fists tightened at his sides, clenched and pink and somehow anal. On the satisfaction scale, it wasn’t quite on par with watching him try to pass a kidney stone, but it was close.
“You smart-ass little punk, what makes you think—” He stopped himself mid-rant, and his whole face went stone cold, all trace of emotion gone, all at once. “You do not want to get involved in this, Perry. I promise you. I will make your life hell.”
“Too late,” I said.
In my pocket, something began to vibrate.
37. “Don’t Let Me Explode”
—The Hold Steady
Nolan had already turned and started walking away. “You ready to go?” he asked, angling toward the door.
I slipped my hand into the pocket of the heavy winter parka that Gobi had tossed me back at Erich’s and felt the small rectangular shape vibrating inside. After sneaking out the cell phone that I hadn’t known was there, I flipped it on and glanced at the three-word message on the screen.
men’s room now
I dropped the phone back in my pocket. “I gotta hit the bathroom before we go.”
Nolan gave me a distrustful glance. “It’s cold and dark out there, kid. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Don’t worry.” On the way past the bar, I brushed past Swierczynski, who’d been sitting there with a thick mug of coffee, to the heavy wooden door marked HERREN. In the background I heard Nolan’s voice continuing to warn me not to be stupid.
I swung the door open. The men’s room was freezing cold, and right away I saw why. The window was wide open and Gobi was standing in front of me with a thick slab of wood in her hands. For a second all I could do was stare at her in shock.
“You are late.”
“Gobi, how—”
She pushed past me and jammed the wooden beam against the door, wedging it into the tiles and blocking it shut from the inside.
“Crawl through window.”
“What happened to the—”
“No talking.” She boosted me through the open window and out into the darkness, where I fell straight down into a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and bags of trash. A cat squalled and took off running. Gobi, having crawled through and dropped down after me, took my hand and yanked me up onto my feet. As we ran around to the front of the restaurant, I heard voices from inside, Nolan and the bartender and good old Swierczy, shouting, coughing, hammering on the door. There was an ice machine pushed in front of the main entrance, blocking it shut, and thick smoke oozing from the slight gap, but the door wasn’t opening any farther than that.
I looked up at the roof.
“You blocked the chimney?”
“Watch out.” She pointed at the unconscious body of the driver sprawled on the ground next to the Peugeot, then opened the driver’s-side door. “You can still drive stick, yes?”
I got in and started the engine.
38. “Needle Hits E”
—Sugar
“We have to talk,” I said.
She pointed out the intersection up ahead, where a rectangular yellow sign read MULHOUSE, FR—50 KM. “Turn left here.”
“How did you escape from Paula?”
“Is not far from here. Roads are clear.” She checked her watch.
“How did you find me?” I looked down at the phone that she’d dropped in my pocket. “Does this thing have a GPS tracking beacon on it or something?”
She closed her eyes and sat back as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Are you even going to answer me?”
She didn’t move. The Peugeot’s tires hugged the road, its high-performance engine barely making a sound above the low, steady whir of precision engineering. My hands tightened on the wheel and I checked to make sure we were both wearing our seat belts. Coming around the next bend, I swung to the side of the road and slammed the brakes hard enough to make her sit up straight and stare at me. Her face was taut and strained, and the glare in her eyes could have smelted pig iron.
“That asshole back at the restaurant told me everything,” I said. “I know about…” Even then, as upset as I was, I couldn’t make myself say the words your brain tumor. “What’s happening to you.”
Gobi just kept glaring at me. Her silence was a void, like no other silence in the world. It seemed to collapse inward, sucking all other sound into it, like the aural equivalent of a black hole. For a long moment we just sat there, facing each other like the last two people in Switzerland.
“Is nothing,” she murmured.
“Bullshit.”
“Is epilepsy.”
“Bullshit.”
“Who tells you these things? Kaya?” She snapped a glance back in the direction that we’d come. “They lie.”
“Gobi, I saw the images of your brain.”
“And of course medical pictures cannot ever be altered. Images doctored. Different names put on.”
“If they’re lying, then why were you working for them?”
She stared at the window, and I felt my heart race harder, like a gallon jug glugging out its contents into the hole at the bottom of my chest. I didn’t realize until that moment how m
uch I’d been hoping for another explanation, any explanation, hoping for anything besides what Nolan alleged to be true. Partly because I’d already decided that Gobi was the only way that I was going to save my family, but also because Gobi was Gobi. She was twenty-four years old. She belonged in the world—if not my world, than at least some version of it, somewhere.
“Look,” I said. “I know that guy Nolan promised you the operation if you took care of Armitage and Monash and Paula. He told me all about it.”
“Is not for you to worry.”
“Oh, okay, I’ll just stop. I’ll just switch off my worrier.” I reached for her hand, and she jerked away as if I’d given her a shock. “You know what, if you can’t stand me so much, why the hell did you even bother coming back for me?”
“You would not survive five minutes on your own.”
I felt a quick sting of anger. “Yeah, well, meet me in a year from now and we’ll see who’s doing better.”
She stiffened, drawing in a sharp breath, then exhaled with a little shudder and looked at me. The shadows across her face made it hard to see her expression, but her eyes gleamed around the rims in the light of the dashboard.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “That was harsh. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”
“You are doctor, Perry, yes? Go to medical school?”
“No.”
“But you are genius, yes? Smart American boy, you can see everything, you know what is right for everybody else?”
“Gobi—”
“You want to worry about someone, worry about yourself, falling in love with some rich girl who would sleep with your father to get what she wanted.”
“Don’t even go there.”
She spat out something, a curse in Lithuanian that didn’t require any translation. “Just drive.”
I took my hands off the wheel. “Forget it.”
“What?”
“I’m trying to help you,” I snapped. “Don’t you get that? I’m the only one that you can actually trust.”
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