by Duffy, Sue
“It used to be a hub for shipbuilding, sailboats mostly,” Jeremy informed, a clear retreat from the singeing of their earlier exchange. “The Ivy League teams used to practice sailing out here.” He slowed near the next intersection and turned right onto a residential street. It was only a couple of blocks long, ending where a chain-link fence separated pavement from the pewter slab of bay waters that mimicked the dreary, swollen sky.
Ben saw small homes lining both sides of the street. It was clear that pride of ownership vacillated house to house. Some in shabby repair stood shoulder to shoulder with a next-door neighbor’s freshly painted picket fence and manicured patch of lawn. And there was little more than a patch to work with. The homes hugged the road, offering little ground to landscape a lift to their aging, sagging lines.
Midway down the second block, Jeremy pulled in front of a trim, wood-sided bungalow with new paint, chocolate with bright white trim. Ben immediately thought of brownies and ice cream and wondered how such whimsy found its way into his smoldering mood—which threatened to reignite with Jeremy’s next words.
“You’re gonna love this part, Gentle Ben,” Jeremy said, pulling a black hood with eye holes out of the glove box.
Ben winced as if about to be struck. “No way!”
“You’d rather go in there as Ben Hafner, close advisor to the president of the United States? Is that the recognition you want? Are you out of your mind? This guy’s about to commit an unspeakable act of terrorism against the United States. He might be a wee bit nervous about one of the president’s staff dropping in on him.”
“But he’d feel a lot better about an unidentified guy in a black hood, right?”
“He knows I’m bringing someone. He thinks it’s someone like him, another member of his benevolent order of Russian hoodlums. He’ll understand the precaution.” Jeremy heaved a sigh. “Use your head, Ben. You’re Russia’s new White House mole. It’s time you understood what’s happening. You’re here to listen to this guy, and that’s all. You don’t say one word while we’re in there. Got it?”
“I thought no one would ever recognize me,” Ben noted smugly.
Jeremy sniffed. “Can’t take a chance. Here’s what we’re going to do. You can’t walk up to the door wearing this thing and sending some old-lady neighbor tripping over her fourteen cats to get to a phone. No police interference today, please.” He looked toward the house. “I’m going in first to keep this guy from seeing you until you get inside and replace your cap with this.” He dropped the hood into Ben’s lap. “See, it won’t even adhere to the contours of that ugly mug of yours. No face, no voice. No way that guy will know who you are, especially in those baggy mom jeans you got on. Where’d you get those things anyway?”
Ben shot up a warning hand. “Enough! Go do what you have to do.”
Jeremy muttered something Ben didn’t catch, then got out of the car. “Watch for my signal,” he told Ben, then closed the door and walked at a hesitant, uneven clip toward the front door of the bungalow. Ben read it for what it meant. He’s scared to death.
The van crept down City Island Avenue, slowing further at each intersection. “Don’t you know the address?” Liesl asked, surveying the unfamiliar town.
“I do. But so do others. We must be careful at each turn.” He slid an admonishing look her way. “I suggest you never leave music for spying.”
When she turned to him in surprise, he immediately looked away, but not before she caught the upturned corners of his mouth. Could the big bad wolf be in a good mood? She almost hoped. But not for long.
As soon as Evgeny took the next right turn, he pulled to the curb and idled a moment. “You must observe everything, see everyone, search every car, every house and yard. But keep your face covered. I will do the same.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just do it.” Then he locked the passenger door from controls on his own.
“What are you doing?”
“It would be extremely unfortunate if you were to leave the van for any reason.” He resumed his cruise down the street.
“Why would I do that?”
“Sometimes we do not know what we do. We just react.”
She shook her head in dismay. “Cut the garble, Evgeny, and talk to me straight.”
“Okay. I will have to shoot you if you get out of the van.”
Her mouth fell open, but she quickly recovered. “You are unbelievable,” she crossed her arms and locked them down firmly against her in an undeniable pout, which she instantly regretted.
He looked at her oddly. “You are quite unbelievable, too, Liesl,” he said with candid sincerity. And something caught in his face, something she hadn’t seen there before. Approval? No, it was more than that. Before he could turn away, she saw it clearly. Affection, though guarded.
In the second block, Evgeny called her attention to a house just ahead. It stood out from the fading little homes strung along the street. It was painted brown with white gingerbread trim. But the most remarkable thing about it was the man just approaching the steps to its front porch. The large man with the deliberate stride, the big hands that hung like hams from the fleece cuffs of his cowhide jacket—the same jacket he’d worn when Liesl last strolled with him down the Washington Mall.
“Ben!” she called and reached for the handle of her door a split second before Evgeny’s iron grip caught her other arm.
“Stop!” he commanded. No sign of affection now. “I warned you.”
She pleaded with him. “But … but I have to—”
“You have to do nothing!” He finally released her and placed both hands back on the wheel of the still-moving van. “This is why I brought you. To prove to you that Ben Hafner is the mole.”
Locked hard on Ben, her eyes filled with scalding tears. “It’s not true. Not true!”
“Quiet!”
As they passed in front of the house, Ben, now climbing the steps to the porch, turned to give the van a cursory inspection, then went inside. At the end of the street, Evgeny made a U-turn and headed slowly back toward the brown house, pulling to the curb and stopping a few doors away.
Liesl composed herself enough to ask, “Who’s in that house?”
“Jeremy Rubin and one of the sleepers. All I know about him is that he was once a merchant marine and now he spends a lot of time in pubs.”
In her mind, Liesl grabbed blindly for a reason why Ben would be there. But no reason materialized. She couldn’t fathom a single explanation for why he would be in the company of Jeremy Rubin, a man of troubling liaisons whom Ben had forbidden to enter his home.
Liesl turned to Evgeny, then spoke as one grieving a terrible loss. “Why? Why would Ben do this?”
“My source has not provided that information. But I believe, as I have told you, that it is Israel. Your president sends mixed signals about how far he would stick out his neck, as you say, to protect Israel. And there is the money, a great deal to be gained from such work.”
“Ben doesn’t need the money.”
“Then it is Israel.”
Liesl knew Ben’s devotion to his Israeli family and how much he loved to spend time immersed in their culture. Had he not worked alongside Liesl and Ava to uncover the code fingering the Russian mole in Israel and exposing the plot that might have destroyed that country? Had such devotion become fanatical enough to disable his conscience?
How did I miss that?
Chapter 28
As soon as Ben stepped through the door of the house, he slipped the hood over his head and followed Jeremy’s silent directive to sit in a chair near the door. Even through the dense fibers of the hood, his nostrils twitched at the scent of household cleansers generously applied. Through the eye holes, he saw a starkly furnished room with bare wooden floors, a worn leather sofa, two upholstered chairs in mismatched fabric, a scarred coffee table holding nothing but a remote, and the flat-screen television that reigned over the room.
Then he turned to one s
ide and noticed the only cluttered place in the room, a windowless wall paved solid with framed photographs. The same smiling young man peered from most of them.
When Ben was settled, Jeremy crossed the room to a doorway leading to a dimly lit hall. “We’re ready for you, Cyrus,” he called.
Ben heard a door open and close down the hall and footsteps approach. Then more steps, these the quicker, nail-clicking patter of small canine feet. In quick succession, the two appeared. First, the short-haired little terrier with the Benji face and twitchy tail, then the stocky man with a head thatched in faded black hair that apparently defied combing. The man wore a navy turtleneck sweater over gray sweats and sneakers. There was something distinctly unsynchronized about his walk as he headed directly for Ben and stopped just a few feet in front of him. “Who are you?” he demanded. Ben didn’t answer.
“Uh, Cyrus,” Jeremy said nervously, “remember that I told you—”
“Yeah, I remember,” he cut in, still fixed on Ben. “He’s just another mutineer like me. Real important that I don’t know who he is. Well, how come he can know who I am?”
Jeremy measured his words. “There are reasons. But I assure you he is no threat, just one of our team who’d like to meet the man about to light the fuse, so to speak.
Cyrus Neale ignored him, still focused on Ben. “So you just want to meet me, do you?” Cyrus said with sarcastic bite. “Do you want to meet Charlie Manson? How about the kook who shot that congresswoman in front of a grocery store? You think I’m a kook, too?”
Ben stiffened but didn’t respond.
“Cyrus, I told you not to talk to him. He’s not allowed to speak.” Jeremy was growing agitated.
“Well, pardon me for not following directions. I’ve had a hard time with that ever since Nam.” He leaned over and pulled up his left pants leg, and Ben understood the limp. It was an artificial leg from the knee down. “The lieutenant they’d just potty trained and sent to lead our battalion told me and two others to ferret out a sniper on the other side of an open field. But he gave us no cover. We didn’t make it twenty yards before they cut into us. I came back without my buddies and half a leg. When I got home, nobody cared what I gave up for America. Instead, America spat on me, told me I lost the leg and my friends for nothing and that I was an idiot to be there in the first place. That’s what my country did to me and the memory of all those mangled soldiers we lost.”
He walked solemnly to the windowless wall. “But that’s not the worst it did.” He laid a sun-blackened hand over the face of a young soldier in an army uniform and patted it gently. It was the face repeated frame to frame over most of the wall. “My boy was in Afghanistan just six weeks when artillery ripped him into little pieces.” Cyrus turned back to look at Jeremy first, then Ben. “It took our country nearly a year to admit my boy had died at their hands. Friendly fire. You see anything friendly about that?” he asked no one in particular. He remained near the wall. Jeremy and Ben just watched.
“I have no regrets for what I’m doing,” he finally said, straightening into military bearing. “I don’t need no army moron sending me where I shouldn’t be going. I know exactly what to do. Ain’t nothing me and my old tugboat can’t do about the death sentences this country hands down to kids like my boy.” He moved toward the center of the room and looked straight at Ben. “I’ll take care of it all by myself. Do what the man out there says do. Don’t know who he is, but I like his style.” He grunted with approval.
“What you’re doing is merely demonstrating what is to come,” Jeremy confirmed, even though, as he’d admitted to Ben, he didn’t know the exact nature of that demonstration. “Just sending a warning to the nation. No great loss of life this time out.”
“I do what the man says do.” Cyrus looked defiantly at Jeremy and snapped his fingers. His dog trotted obediently to his feet and looked up. The man leaned over to pet the scruffy head. “I’m going to miss you, little fellow.”
“You aren’t taking him with you to Russia?” Jeremy asked, then turned to explain that to Ben. “When this is over, the whole team will leave the U.S. one by one.”
“But not this little guy,” Cyrus added.
“What will you do with him?” Jeremy asked.
“Shoot him.”
It wasn’t long before Evgeny and Liesl saw the front door of the house open. From a distance, they watched Ben pause at the doorway and fumble with something on his head. “What is that?” Liesl asked.
“A hood.” Evgeny smiled, more a gloat that another of the White House’s exalted staffers had fallen so ingloriously. “I could have loaned him mine.” He wanted to laugh, but he dared not, knowing that he’d once left his black ski mask dangling like a calling card from a chandelier in Liesl’s Washington home. “I’m sorry.”
What’s wrong with me? he wondered. I don’t apologize. What is she doing to me?
His attention returned to the two men leaving the house. Ben, with a ball cap now on his head and dark glasses in place, tucked his head and nearly sprinted to the white Nissan. As they pulled away, Evgeny followed from a distance.
Once on the mainland, the sedan sped up, but Evgeny didn’t.
“Catch up with them,” Liesl urged. “You’re losing them.”
“Yes. It is okay. We know where to find Ben Hafner. And Jeremy Rubin, I suspect, will not ever be far away. Besides, we have what we came for—your proof.” He raised his eyebrows at her, soliciting her confirmation that what he’d told her about Ben was true. But that’s not what he got from her.
“You don’t know what went on inside that house.”
He sighed wearily. “The circumstantial evidence is too overwhelming to ignore. And so we will not.”
They could see the Nissan ahead through most of their route through the Bronx, but when they crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan, it went one way and the van another, west toward Central Park and the little church that had become a most unlikely base of operations, at least for Evgeny. If there really were an Almighty, Evgeny was in no mood to confront him.
After leaving the bridge, Evgeny checked his rearview mirror and fastened on the gray panel truck about four cars back. It had been there since City Island. Not good.
Who could possibly have known where he and Liesl were headed earlier that afternoon? Only Viktor. Had his secure phone signal been breached? Who was back there?
At the next light, he took the first of what would be four lefts. A circle. If the truck stayed with him, he would do what he had to do. He leaned sideways and retrieved his gun from the holster under his coat, then placed the weapon in his lap.
“What are you doing!” Liesl shrieked, her eyes blazing on the gun.
He didn’t answer. At the next intersection, he prepared to turn left again, his eyes darting repeatedly to the rearview mirror. Seeing this, Liesl turned quickly in her seat and looked out the back window.
“Turn around. I’m watching them.”
“Who?” she demanded, still backward in her seat.
“The gray truck that has tailed us from City Island.”
He could hear Liesl begin to pant. “Calm down,” he told her, then took the left. But this time the truck continued straight through the light.
Liesl whirled on him. “What was that all about?”
“I was mistaken,” he lied, leaving the gun where it was. All his instincts told him he’d see the truck again. How soon, he didn’t know. His mind ricocheted like a pinball, banking off one scenario after another as he altered course and headed once more toward the church. But should he?
He pulled over and parked at the first open spot he saw. “We’re going to wait and see if our friend returns.”
Liesl didn’t argue. Evgeny saw her focused on the rush-hour traffic as if searching for a lost child. After a while, with no more sightings, he cranked the van and left.
They soon reached the west side of the park and crooked their way back into the handsome old neighborhood with its narrow, tree-lin
ed streets. Many of Rev. Scovall’s parishioners probably walked to church on Sundays, Evgeny guessed, trying to suppress the memories of skipping alongside his grandmother en route to the Russian Orthodox church in their village. His grandmother, his sole guardian, died when he was seven. Then he entered the orphanage and, in many ways, never escaped its life sentence.
When they turned the corner near the church, Evgeny slammed on the brakes. The gray truck was parked at the side door.
Liesl gasped. “What do we do?”
Evgeny was about to throw the van in reverse when the driver’s door of the truck opened and Ava Mullins stepped out.
“Ava!” Liesl called through the closed window. She looked once at Evgeny—her face alight as he’d never seen it before. Then she reached again for the door handle. “Open it, Evgeny,” she said over her shoulder.
“You betrayed me,” he accused.
“No! I haven’t spoken to anyone but Cade, and I didn’t tell him where I was. It’s the truth, Evgeny. I don’t know how she found us.” She looked back at Ava, who stood quite still beside the gray truck, her full attention on them. “Unlock the door, please,” Liesl said firmly.
He searched the street around them, seeing no one else but Ava. Then he released the lock on Liesl’s door. She jumped from the van and ran the rest of the way to the church. The gun now firmly in his hand, he watched the women embrace, not knowing what to believe. How else would Ava have found them?
Time to go! But before he could turn the van around, Ava raised her hand in a signal to halt, then started for him, Liesl at her side. This was one of those rare times he didn’t know what to do. He would make a trophy catch for her. She should be drawing her own weapon, but wasn’t. Had she gone daft in her retirement? “Please stop,” she called to him. “I’m here to help!”