He always reached his goal.
He took a sip of cold coffee as Princess Ida blinked herself awake and rose to her feet, stretching one yellow foot out behind her, then the other. Sikari smiled at the sight of his poultry diva, craning her feathered neck to stretch it out, too, making herself taller and more powerful. Princess Ida was the dominant hen, and he watched her ruffle her wing feathers, then settle them back into place, the simple motion bringing Yum-Yum, Peep-Bo, and the Women's Chorus to their feet, where they all began scratching and pecking at the brownish grass, following Princess Ida's lead. It reminded Sikari that all of nature had a pecking order, which insured stability.
He thought to himself, Stability will be restored once my pecking order is restored. That's all. It's that simple.
It made his decision for him and there was no time to delay. He set his coffee mug on the ground, reached into his moleskin pocket, extracted his cell phone, then pressed one letter. When the call was answered, he said into the phone, "Come to the coop. And bring your brother." He closed the phone with a snap and re-pocketed it, his gaze falling on Princess Ida.
The hen looked back at him, with approval.
Ten minutes later, his twin sons stood before him, with identical half-smiles, and as always, the sight pleased him. They were part of the plan, too. He couldn't say exactly that he loved them, for he traveled too much to know them, but he liked the notion that he had two such bright, active, good-looking sons. They were six feet tall and with their curly dark-blonde hair, round blue eyes, and confident grins, Archer and Harris were almost impossible to tell apart. They couldn't have looked more different from Sikari, but of course, he wasn't their biological father. He had bought them as babies on the backstreets of Prague; he had no idea where they had come from and it didn't matter anyway. He had told them, his farm staff and the tutors who home-schooled them that he was their godfather, a dear friend of their deceased French parents because he knew that passed for exotic here in the boondocks.
"Aren't you two cold?" Sikari asked, because neither wore coats. They were dressed in a way that people used to call preppy: turtlenecks, khaki pants and navy crewneck sweaters.
The boys shook their heads. "No, Dad," they answered, almost in unison. They were more than each other's best friend; they were so close they were almost the same person. It was the way Sikari had wanted it, essential for what would be expected of them someday. They had been trained in the martial arts and were both remarkably gifted, schooled especially in geology and the sciences; their IQs tested even higher than his. They both were slated to enter Harvard next year, but that would change now. College couldn't teach them what he could; he could offer them the world, literally. They'd be too young to succeed him, even in ten years time, but Balan's death had left him with no choice. Sikari would be around to guide them for the next thirty years or so and if he started grooming them now, they'd be ready ultimately to take the helm.
The problem was, he only needed one of them.
He had known this day would come, which was why he had bought twins, so he'd always have a back-up, the heir and the spare. But now he had to choose one and he wasn't sure how. They were doppelgangers and their temperaments were the same, as far as Sikari could tell.
"When did you get home, Father?" Archer asked, his tone casual, and duplicate sets of blue eyes looked at him.
"This morning. You boys were in the gym. Listen, we have a problem."
"What?" Archer asked.
Harris cocked an eyebrow. "Arch did it," he said, and the twins laughed, echoing each other.
Sikari smiled, for show. "Listen to me. This is serious. You have been preparing for this day your whole life. You just didn't know it."
The two boys fell silent and blinked at exactly the same time, which Sikari found eerie. They'd had their own language as toddlers and he'd always wondered if they were talking about him.
Princess Ida began to peck at Archer's loafer, but the boy didn't notice.
Sikari said, "I need one of you to succeed me in the family business, when the time comes. But I need only one of you. I assume you both want to ascend."
"Of course," they both answered, and suddenly neither looked over at the other, their gaze fixing on Sikari.
"So how do I choose between you?'"
Archer smiled crookedly. "Whoever can catch Princess Ida gets the job."
"Great idea!" Harris clapped his hands together, like punctuation at the end of a sentence. "How about it, Father?"
"Ha!" Sikari laughed, and this time it was genuine. They had no idea of the enormity of the position they were vying for. It was like drawing straws to become President of the United States. For some reason, the absurdity of the notion appealed to him. He smiled to himself. "But nobody can catch Princess Ida."
"I can," Archer said.
Harris gave him a playful shove. "So can I, you loser."
Archer's mouth dropped open. "I'm the one who catches them at night."
"Not without my help," Harris shot back.
"Whoever catches her first then," Sikari said, standing up. He had no better way to choose between them and it may as well be arbitrary. If the twins were that much alike, either would do. He raised his right hand. "When I say 'Go.'"
Archer and Harris planted their feet in the dirt and bent their knees slightly, a perfect footballer's stance. The chickens reacted instantly, sensing something afoot. Princess Ida flapped her wings, signaling to the Women's Chorus, and Peep-Bo and Pitti-Sing clucked loudly, rousing from their dirt baths and scampering around.
"Ready, steady, go!" Sikari said, bringing his hand down.
"On it!" Archer cried, taking off, but Princess Ida ran full tilt toward the chicken coop, with Harris sprinting after them both. The clever hen veered to the left before she reached the little door to the coop, which sent Archer crashing into the wall, and Harris gave chase, bolting after Princess Ida, his legs churning and his arms pinwheeling comically. The speedy hen dodged this way and that, half-running and half-flying from the boys, squawking loudly in alarm and protest, refusing to be caught.
"Go, Ida, go!" Sikari heard himself shout, lost for a moment in the spirit of the contest. It charmed him to see these two strapping young men laughing and running, prime specimens in the fullness of their youth and promise, their golden hair blazing in the sunlight, and Sikari found himself wishing he had been a real parent to them.
"BAWKKK! BAWWKK!" Princess Ida screamed, as the two boys chased her toward Sikari, and he stepped back so they wouldn't barrel into him. The twins ran neck-and-neck next to each other, their faces alive with the thrill of the battle, and just as Sikari was about to shout again, he noticed Archer's expression darken as if a storm cloud were passing over his features. In one unexpected movement, Archer raised his right arm and whipped it backwards into Harris's neck.
"No!" Sikari heard himself cry, and the sound was drowned out by a sickening guttural noise that emanated from Harris's throat. The boy's eyes widened in shock, his hands flew reflexively to his crushed Adam's apple, and bright red blood spurted in an arc from his gaping mouth.
Sikari couldn't believe his eyes. He was accustomed to violence, but not here, not at home, not now. He couldn't process what was happening. He watched in horror as Harris crumpled to the ground, his legs bent gro - tesquely under him, his face crashing into the dirt. Instinct drove Sikari to the stricken boy's side and he threw himself on the ground calling, "Harris, Harris, Harris." He turned the boy over by the shoulders, but Harris was already dead, his eyes fixed at the sky, his mouth leaking his life's blood. Cradling Harris, Sikari looked up in shock and bewilderment. Above him stood Archer, with Princess Ida tucked under one arm.
"I win," Archer said simply, and Sikari found his voice.
"Why?" he asked, hushed.
"Because I'm stronger, smarter and better than him. And because my time has come."
"But . . . He was your brother."
"So? Don't worry, Father. I can handl
e the responsibility. I know what's required of me. I know everything."
"What? How?" Sikari asked, astonished.
"I've been through your papers. I've hacked into your computer. I even broke the code on your passwords. I know everything I need to know. You understand what that means?"
Sikari understood, but he went for his holstered Berretta a split-second too late. The last thing he saw was the tip of Archer's loafer, kicking forward to drive his nose into his brain.
Devras Sikari realized that his successor was now in place and that the new king was smarter, stronger, younger and even more ruthless than the old one.
And as he died, he thought: What have I unleashed upon the world?
8
DAVID CORBETT
Harold Middleton regarded the crumpled butt of Korovin's Marlboro, mashed into his plate of zakuski, and for some reason it brought to mind Felicia's rebuke that he too often lacked the time or inclination to look beyond the obvious. He would have very much liked a view beyond the obvious at that moment: Bits of tobacco flecked the pickled onions; the charred aroma of cold ash lingered with the vinegary jolt of stewed beets and smoked herring.
A glance at his watch--what sort of phone call would demand so much time? Perhaps, Middleton thought uneasily, his secret entry into Russia at Domodedovo was no longer secret. Perhaps Korovin was being dragged across the coals by a younger, more officious and less forgiving man, his replacement in Russia's new intelligence megalith, the FSB.
Then again, maybe poor Ruslan was merely arguing with his wife. Or his lover--and Azerbaijani perhaps, or a sultry Uzbek.
Look beyond the obvious, he reminded himself.
He sank into a guilty humor. Felicia had barely escaped death in London, the cost of her staying at his apartment. How much misfortune can you visit upon a friend, he thought, before the friendship twists into a curse? And what of Charley--hadn't he inflicted the same jeopardy on her, insisting she join him on this quixotic crusade? What kind of father does that to his daughter?
The questions lifted him from his overstuffed chair and sent him ambling ruminatively toward the window. The distant reaches of Moscow sprawled beneath layers of urban haze fouling an ashen, moonlit sky. His impression of a transformed Russia had vanished. Trash fires dotted the less central reaches of the cityscape, surest testament to the country's lingering Third World status. The putrid stench of the rancid smoke filtered through the window glass: shoddy glazing, one more relic from the worker's paradise.
The gloss of prosperity he'd glimpsed on his way into Moscow was no more substantial than the paint-on-rust veneer of the Soviet era, the main pretense to wealth being the surge in petro revenues the past few years. Even that was suddenly at risk with plummeting oil prices--so much so, even oligarchs like Arkady Chernayev had to seek bailouts from the government. Just last week, he'd been literally moments away from losing his chief subsidiary to European banks.
Oil, Middleton thought. The mephitic sinkhole of modern politics. Correction, he told himself: oil and drugs. Those were the two gluttonous wants that kept the U.S. beholden to tinhorn despots like Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad, kept it tied to dubious friends like Saudi Arabia and Colombia or perpetually failing states like Nigeria and Mexico. Somewhere during the course of my life, he mused, the country I grew up in, the land of self-reliance and initiative, devolved into a daytime talk show populated by the obese, the whiny, the addicted. It was enough to make a patriot weep.
Which brought him back to Felicia--Polish by birth, she was in truth a gypsy. He suddenly felt the shock of an impossible and poignant envy, in which he sensed that what promise the future held belonged to the Felicias of the world--those with talent for a passport, as long as they kept moving, maintaining an ever fluid distance from men with patriotic obsessions and idealistic whims--men like Devras Sikari. Men like Harold Middleton.
The door to the back room swung open and Middleton turned to greet Korovin returning at last from his interminable phone call--except it wasn't his bearish friend who approached. It was the ancient waitress. Perhaps it was because he'd just had Felicia on his mind--or more to the point, her reproach of his inattentiveness--but he detected now what he should have noticed before, something artificial in her shambling gait, a subtle vigor in her movement that belied the woman's age. And the snowy white hair, offkilter just slightly: a wig.
Middleton intuited instantly that his friend, Ruslan Korovin, was dead, the insight slamming home at the same instant his gaze met the imposter's pale gray eyes.
He reached inside his jacket, tugged the SIG Sauer P229 from his belt as the waitress lost all pretense of disguise and lunged forward. Middleton thumbed the safety down, pulled the trigger, point blank range: nothing. The gun didn't fire. In an instant of adrenalin-compressed recollection he wondered whether he'd loaded it, remembered that he had--no, the clip was full, he'd even chambered a bullet. By then the fake waitress was upon him, delivering a kick to the chest that sent him reeling backwards into the room, crashing against the low serving table with its tray of zakuski. The attacker's wig fell free, her real hair was closely cropped, a manlike burr. She pulled a knife from inside the shabby white blouse. Middleton struggled to his feet, slipping in the briny mess, changing his grip on the pistol to use it as a club, sensing vaguely that the ex-KGB officers in the room were stirring, ready to rise.
The attacker hadn't bargained on Middleton's discernment. She'd hoped for a quick kill, a darting escape. She lunged, not slashing with the knife but thrusting with it, no hesitation, no squeamishness--slashing was for cowards. Middleton fought off the blow with the pistol, parrying it, but the woman responded with a thundering left that caught him at the temple--his vision went white, his knees buckled. His mind coughed up a single word: Charley.
The unmistakable pop of a Makarov PM erupted seemingly inside his ear--from somewhere close behind him, one of the old apparatchiks had stirred to action, choosing at least for now the side of the American whom one of his old cohorts had befriended.
Through the watery film his field of vision had become, Middleton saw the waitress clutch her shoulder, tumble back a step, crumple to one knee.
The old KGB man stepped forward and murmured something brief and blunt in Russian. The knife fell from the shorn woman's hand. The man kicked it across the room where one of the others shuffled hurriedly to retrieve it.
The woman was panting, clutching her shoulder, pale hand over the growing bloodstain.
The old KGB man looked down at Middleton, eyeing the worthless SIG Sauer in his grip. His lips curled into a withering smile as, in syrupy English, thickly accented, he said, "An excellent icon. The Novgorod school, yes?"
"Nothing speaks to good old Anglo-American homesickness like a bowl of oatmeal."
Charley glanced up from her Wall Street Journal Europe. The man addressing her was the same natty stranger who'd been tailing her yesterday as she'd walked along the Champs Elysees, lunching in the sunlight with the Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. He was handsome in an aging, rough-trade sort of way, tanned, fit, salt-and-pepper hair. He dressed expensively, conspicuously so, like a social climber hoping to escape the inescapable, his class. So British, she thought. Too British.
Why, she wondered, does he want to kill me?
He said, "Might I join you?"
His accent had a flat Mersey drag to it that she recognized from specials on the Beatles. She hadn't understood then that John Lennon's accent wasn't perfectly upper crust--or lardy, as they said. If the Beatles weren't nobility, who was?
"Please do," she said, resisting a glance toward Leonora Tesla who sat across the hotel's elegant dining room. She'd flown over from London to warn her that her life was in danger and to watch over her. Felicia Kaminski had been kidnapped from Middleton's Bloomsbury apartment in the mistaken belief she was Charley.
The dapper Brit pulled back the opposite chair, sat down. "Ian," he said charmingly, extending his hand.
"Ch
arlotte."
"I know."
A dark-skinned busman appeared--Algerian perhaps, maybe a Turk--bearing a coffee pot. Barrett-Bone declined.
Charley, affecting an ingenue's innocence: "You know my name?"
"You're in considerable danger, Ms. Middleton. I'd like to help--"
Leonora materialized behind him, nudging the back of his chair. One hand rested inside her pocket, the other settled gently on his shoulder. The hand in her pocket held a pistol, with which she gently prodded the back of his head.
He broke into a helpless smile. "You Yanks . . . "
"It would appear," Charley responded, gesturing for the check, "that there's considerable danger all around."
"That wasn't really necessary, you know."
They were seated in the back of a taxi, driving aimlessly through the Eighth arrondissement, the cabby's rai music turned down so they could talk. Prayer beads strung from his rearview mirror rattled with every turn. Ian Barrett-Bone sat between the Volunteers; Leonora Tesla still had her pistol trained on him from her coat pocket. Glancing out the back window, Charlotte Middleton watched for trail cars.
Tesla demanded, "What do you want with Charlotte?"
She was concerned, but not overly so. She'd gotten his name from his British passport--it was one of several, of course--and called somebody in another country; he could tell that from the number of times she punched the keypad. The information that came back was, as he knew it would be, that Ian Barrett-Bone was a business consultant without any criminal record and did not appear on a single watchlist around the world.
"There's a lot of money at stake in this matter."
"What matter?"
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