by Duffy, Sue
“While he’s explaining that,” Jordan said, “I hope he won’t use words like proclivity.” He grinned at Liesl as he handed her a stem of grapes. “I want to clearly understand what this Russian hornet has planned for us.”
“Why not ask the hornet himself?” Evgeny walked in and stiffly appraised Jordan. Rev. Scovall hung back near the door.
“Well, uh, all right,” Jordan ventured. He put down the dishcloth he’d been using and drew himself up tall before Evgeny.
Cass couldn’t imagine what he was going to say. “Jordan …” she said in a cautioning tone.
“It’s okay, Cass,” he said over his shoulder. “If this doesn’t go well, you can have my car and my stuffed armadillo.”
When he turned back to Evgeny, the tone changed. Jordan looked him straight in the eye. “If Liesl says you’re an okay guy now and won’t be murdering any of us in our sleep, I’ll buy into that—until you prove her wrong. And if you do that, well, even this shoe salesman who doesn’t like guns too much will come after you.”
Evgeny regarded Jordan as one would a foolish child. But that didn’t stop Jordan.
“You look around this room. I care about these people. Yeah, I just met Ms. Bower, but I sure do like her. As for Rev. Scovall here, I don’t know what you two were talking about, but I hope something he said made you think of that lightning bolt that’ll take you out if you mess with one of God’s own.” Then he turned to Cass. “And this one?” He looked at her with transparent affection. “I like every hair on her head just where it is.” He looked back at Evgeny. “I wouldn’t want to find even one of them missing.” He stared quietly at Evgeny a few more moments, then finally looked away and nodded his head up and down as if confirming with himself everything he’d just said. Evidently pleased, he looked back at Evgeny. “Now, how was your trip? Any trouble finding the place?”
After Liesl and Evgeny had revived themselves with a bit of food, Rev. Scovall said, “I hope you’ll be comfortable in my little dwelling down the hall. But before I take you there, would you mind coming with me a moment?”
He led them all, Evgeny included, into the sanctuary and ushered them to a grouping of loose chairs at the back of the room where they could face each other.
“Before you go off to bed,” the reverend began, “I want just a few words with you, knowing what you’ve been through already and having no idea what’s to come. Please just listen to this old man who’s learned a few things that might sustain you.” He looked toward the coffered ceiling, then back at them. “It’s almost the fourth watch of the night. In Roman times, that was between three and six in the morning—the coldest, bleakest hours.” He peered intently into the faces before him. “That’s the sinking hour when Jesus did what I certainly have never seen anyone do. You’ve heard the story. The storm hit and the disciples’ boat began to sink. They’d tried everything they knew to stay afloat, but the elements overpowered them. They had only one hope—their Lord. In their utter despair and helplessness, they finally called to him. In their darkest hour, they called to Jesus. And he came. Over the water, just in time.”
The reverend glanced toward some point near the front of the room. Liesl couldn’t tell which. She watched the others. Evgeny’s face was impassive, Jordan’s also unreadable. But it was Cass who visibly locked on every word.
“Sometimes our struggles must take us into the darkest, grimmest hours,” Rev. Scovall continued, “to humble us, to teach us. To make us trust. Then God does what no one else can do. Through the drowning storm of that fourth watch, he comes to save us.”
Chapter 23
Dane Bruton stood on the back steps of his farmhouse and gazed over the pasture. Its winter stubble stretched to the distant tree line, broken only by the sluggish little creek that wandered off the Mohatchy River. It was one of the last tributaries to cut away from its host waters before the massive, man-made basin downstream sucked the river into containment, otherwise known as Lake Jenowak.
Zipping his jacket against the chill, he watched the eastern sky announce the coming day, its golden palette issuing a peaceful glow at odds with his convulsive thoughts. After all the years of thoughtful preparation, was he ready to do the unthinkable? How many lives would it take? Too few to matter, he told himself, then started for the chicken coop.
Even in the half-light of dawn, he could see the bright rose combs of his dominickers as they strutted their handsome selves about the pen. He’d bred the distinctive birds with the black-and-white barred plumage first for their company, then their eggs. Odd that a man would seek companionship from chickens. But he knew the origin of that. As a boy in Russia, returning home after school each day, he’d always run first to the Orloff pen behind the house. The hardy white chickens with black spots never failed to gather in welcome at his feet, each pushing ahead of the other for his attention. He relished the affection of even these dumb creatures who were more forgiving and caring than the humans who lived in the cold-hearted home of his birth.
When he unlatched the gate and entered the pen, the dominickers recalled for him the simmering hope of his boyhood—to escape the lifeless village and attend a university, which he had done. There, he caught a patriotic fever that swept him into a myopic, all-for-Mother-Russia brotherhood of intelligence watchdogs. Fearing a wife and children would only drag him into the smothering restraints he’d grown up with, he was content to journey alone. That made him infinitely valuable to the Architect and the secretive ring of saboteurs spawned in the waters of his underworld.
Waters. He had come to know what power they held. Now an engineer, planted in the United States just ten years ago, he would stir the waters with his unrighteous right hand.
An hour later, Bruton drove his pickup truck down the long, pot-holed drive from his house to the road, his headlights etching the pines along the way. After a decade, he’d come to own the brand of the rural American South—the farm, the truck, the guns and dogs, the livestock, and most of the accent. He’d worked hard to repress his native tongue.
It was fifteen miles to the Lake Jenowak dam and hydropower plant. He could have driven it blindfolded, sensing when to turn and pause along the lakeside route. When he arrived that Sunday morning at the massive structure that held back the river-fed waters, he only slowed at the guardhouse. They knew him. He brought them good-natured greetings and fresh eggs. When they waved him through, he followed the narrow, descending roadway to the base of the concrete dam that rose more than one hundred feet from downstream ground level. From there, it plunged deeper to bedrock.
It was a medium-sized dam. But the river that coursed through the middle of the lake and out the other side of the dam—in critically controlled volume—ran straight to a major city.
Dane grabbed a small tool bag from the back seat and headed for the entrance to the power plant. His usual station was at a bank of computers that controlled many operations, including the flow of water from the intake towers in the lake, through the penstocks, and into the massive turbines of the dam, which harnessed the wild force of the river and converted it to electricity.
But this morning, he stopped at his computer just long enough to log in his security code and shut down a pair of surveillance cameras. Afterward, he went straight to one of the tunnels that led through the belly of the dam. Alone in the tunnel at this early weekend hour, he retrieved a few instruments from his bag, brand new tools ordered online, the kind he’d need to dismantle the plates covering valve heads inset in the concrete walls along the tunnel. He then stopped at three strategic points along the way and tested the tools. When each of three steel plates yielded to his force, he quickly retightened them to their original position, placed the tools back in the bag, and returned to his post at the computers, his heartbeat zinging in his neck as he reactivated the cameras.
Seated alone at his station, his mind’s eye saw the charges hidden in weatherproof bags in his barn—enough to deliver all of Lake Jenowak to the city downstream.
&n
bsp; Because the town had been built on a high ridge above the Mohatchy, and because the banks of the river from the dam to town rose like cliffs and supported few dwellings, there would be minimal loss of life. But the weapons-grade chemical plant south of town, designed to divert enough river water to cool its machinery, sat on a plain that sloped to the river.
When Dane arrived home that afternoon, he went straight to his chickens. At least they would be safe. He’d leave instructions for how to feed them with the people who’d just bought his farm. Everything was ready. One morning soon, the Architect himself would transmit the signal, and Dane would report to work one last day. He would work late, deactivate the appropriate surveillance cameras, dismantle the plates, conceal the charges inside, time them to blow after the remaining crew had clocked out for the evening, clean out his locker, and head straight to the airport. He should touch down in Moscow about the time the chemical plant slid into the raging flood.
Chapter 24
Despite Jordan’s earlier tirade, Evgeny found himself strangely comforted by the company of those so unlike himself. He had never been his own favorite person. In fact, he rather loathed himself. That’s why caring for others had been so difficult. But there was something about the unbridled regard these people had for each other that intrigued him. He couldn’t relate to them on a normal level, though, so he’d attempted to withdraw from them altogether. When he’d announced to Liesl that she should remain at the church and he would stay elsewhere—in one of the escape warrens he’d dug for himself in the New York underworld—she’d objected. “No. We have to stay together,” she’d insisted. He’d never taken orders from a woman, certainly not the mother who bore and later abandoned him. But he remained at the church at the entreaty of one person.
It had been a quick and efficient meeting with Rev. Scovall in the sanctuary that night. Oddly enough, the pastor and the shoe salesman, though separately and in remarkably different ways, had immediately drilled toward the same objective, to probe the intentions of the assassin in their midst. Evgeny had left the reverend with assurance that his only objective was to disarm cataclysmic events whose timers had been set by his own countrymen and were, at that moment, ticking. He also was there to protect Liesl Bower from those seeking revenge against her.
But when Evgeny later tried to leave the church and seek shelter elsewhere, Liesl pursued him onto the sidewalk and insisted he stay. Not until Rev. Scovall appeared beside her with his own request, though, did Evgeny return with them. The reverend had simply said, “Don’t run anymore.”
That was all. Had someone just given him permission to live, it might have felt no different. Though he had, indeed, lived on the run his whole life, surely that wasn’t living. But what was?
He tried to imagine a different sort of life as he now lay in a tiny room with the snoring Jordan in a twin bed much too close for Evgeny’s comfort. It hadn’t taken long that night for Jordan to initiate peace between them, over something as benign as toothpaste. Evgeny had none. “Use mine,” Jordan had offered as Evgeny headed for the bathroom. “I guess going off to spy on foreign countries isn’t like packing for camp, is it?” Jordan had quipped. “And where’s a Walmart when you need one, right?” Jordan chuckled as he threaded a length of floss between his teeth.
His own mouth slightly ajar, Evgeny stared at Jordan for an extended and bewildered moment, then took the proffered toothpaste and went quietly away, wondering how this peculiar union had come to be.
On his return from the bathroom, he paused outside the bedroom assigned to Liesl and Cass, but heard nothing. Could they have fallen asleep so quickly? It was almost two when Rev. Scovall had ushered them into his private quarters to sleep. Evgeny now felt the tug of fatigue and headed back to his room. That’s when he heard Liesl’s voice coming from outside the entrance to the apartment. He moved quietly toward the sound.
She was on a phone. “Yes, Cade, in New York. I can’t tell you where. … No, not now. It’s too dangerous for you. … I know how terrible this is. I know where you and I should be this night, but please try to understand. I’ve told you all I know for now, everything Evgeny told me about this man who calls himself the Architect. … Yes, I trust him. I can’t explain why. I guess there’s something going on that’s so much bigger than we are, something so awful that I have to overlook what he did before. If God brought him to save me from that gunman, well, … Yes, I know how unbelievable it is.”
Evgeny couldn’t listen anymore. He went to bed with the image of himself as pure evil. How could God, if he existed at all, possibly use him to do anything good? He soon fell into the intermittent sleep of one who never relinquishes all consciousness, who must always listen for the uninvited footfall.
So when his phone buzzed just four hours later, he answered instantly. It was Viktor, his friend and informant who prowled the back corridors of Russian intelligence, siphoning up just pieces of whole truth. Evgeny knew this dark labyrinth to be the netherworld of conspiracy, the land where Andreyev and Fedorovsky had once fleshed out their heinous plot to kill their own president and that of Syria, to fraudulently “prove” Israel had ordered both hits, and to watch an outraged U.S. stand by as the Arab world finally extinguished Israel. All the while, Andreyev and Fedorovsky were to seize control of Russia.
Every bit of it according to the dictates of their shadowy commander-at-large, the Architect. But the whole thing had crashed and burned at the feet of a lovely young pianist and the code she found in her music.
When the call ended, Evgeny sprang from bed and shook Jordan awake. “We have to go. Wake the women and tell them to dress quickly, then meet me at the side door of the church. All of you must bring something to conceal your faces. Scarves, hats, sunglasses, whatever you have.” Before retiring that night, Rev. Scovall had gathered warm clothing from the church’s charity closet, especially for Liesl, who’d fled with nothing but what she was wearing in balmy Charleston.
Jordan mumbled acknowledgment of the orders. In the time it took him to wrestle himself from sleep and finally throw back the covers, Evgeny was dressed and out the door.
Hoping not to wake the reverend from wherever he had bedded down that night, Evgeny slipped out of the church and went quickly to the van. Rev. Scovall had arranged for him to park it in the private space of a church member who lived across the street but spent her winters in Florida.
In the smoky dark of predawn—long before the first parishioners would arrive for Sunday-morning service—Evgeny stopped the van at the curb and watched as three figures approached from the side door of the church. Once they were settled inside, the van drove off at a cautious pace. No need to draw unwanted attention.
“What’s going on, Evgeny?” Liesl asked in a sleep-thick voice.
“Cass’s stepfather is on the move,” he answered.
“What?” Cass asked, startled. Evgeny watched her reaction in the rearview mirror. He needed to know every nuance of this little cast of cohorts he’d been saddled with. He wanted nothing more than to stalk Hans Kluen alone, to follow him straight to the Architect. But Evgeny needed Cass to identify her stepfather, to educate Evgeny on the slippery ways of the traitorous Wall Street banker. He needed Jordan Winslow only to identify the Architect, if indeed that was the man in the UN apartment. But Evgeny couldn’t be certain of that if the man stood before him right now. No, it was better to track the known than chase blindly after the unknown. At this point, there were entirely too many unknowns to suit an undercover agent who’d always been sure of his mission, his target.
And Liesl. Yes, her role was critical. She was the credible one, the surest path to those who would release the Architect’s maniacal hold on Russia. Still, this wasn’t supposed to be a group effort.
“What do you mean he’s on the move?” Cass persisted.
“Someone is waiting to signal him. I need to know who and where.”
“How do you know this?”
“My contact tells me so. That is enough for
you to know.”
Cass glowered at him. “You know, we’re going to get along a lot better if you stop treating us like unintelligent matter. I have a feeling I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t need me. You probably don’t know what Hans looks like, do you?”
Evgeny squinted at her in the mirror. “That is correct,” he conceded.
“Thought so,” Cass said. “But here’s a better question. What if he happens to see me?”
“He cannot if you remain concealed in the van.” Evgeny shifted his focus to Liesl. “You must observe everything, Liesl. That is why you are here. You must record everything you see in order to convince the CIA that we are tracking something real and imminent—as if the inauguration and Supreme Court blowups weren’t convincing enough. Still, we must prove the greater conspiracy.”
“If everything you tell me is true,” Liesl said, “and I have no reason to doubt it, I’ll have no trouble convincing Ava and Ben to act on it.”
Evgeny immediately swerved to the curb and stopped. “Liesl, I must talk to you alone. Come with me.” He looked at the wide-eyed faces behind him, where he preferred they sit. “Please remain in the van,” he told Cass and Jordan. “We will not be long.”
Liesl climbed warily from the van.
“Please come,” he urged her as he walked a short distance away, stopping in the receding doorway of a closed tobacco shop. No one else was on the street when he turned to face Liesl. She was about to speak when he said sharply, “Listen to me and don’t interrupt.” He ignored her glare. “You will, under no circumstances, contact Ben Hafner or anyone else in the White House. I have proof that the Architect is running an undercover informant inside the Executive Office. Again.” He let that sink in, watching Liesl recoil at the insinuation. “This informant works for the president.”