Mesmerized

by Gayle Lynds

  "What time yesterday did you fly in?"

  They must have already checked, since they knew he had arrived by air. "Around three o'clock."

  The veteran agent nodded knowingly. "The kids were shot sometime between three and five last night. And the local cops have evidence you did it. Compelling evidence. We're taking you back to Washington. Check him out, Thoma."

  Despite the pudginess of Thoma's face, his grip was muscular. He grabbed Hammond's shoulders and shoved him hard against the alley wall. Thoma was like many men in service to his country, more in love with his small portion of power than was healthy. Thoma patted him down more rigorously than necessary, but Hammond had expected that. He would deal with Thoma later.

  Hammond said, "If it's a local matter, local cops should arrest me. It's their jurisdiction."

  "Wrong," Thoma said with satisfaction. "This is a national-security issue. The Bureau's in charge, not a bunch of hayseeds." He stood back. "He's clean. No weapon. He must've dumped it somewhere."

  "Where is it?" Graham's lined face was cold and unmoving.

  "I told you," Hammond growled, "I didn't kill them. Why would I? Think about it. It makes no damn sense."

  "Not to us maybe," Graham said. "But to you obviously. I don't know what happened back then, Hammond, but something did. You fought with everyone before you left and pissed everyone off. Then you went to work for that Commie-rag Post. Now look at you. Hair long enough to braid, and a gold earring, too. You look like some kind of queer. You're a freak, Hammond. Let's go."

  They re-formed themselves around Hammond, pincers in a battle already won. As they moved him onto the street, they focused their pistols on him with the concentration of robots. Hammond got the message: No way were they going to let him escape.

  Hammond demanded, "What does Bobby say about this?" Bobby Kelsey had been his boss and was part of the Bureau's top management.

  Thoma chortled. "Something about Icarus flying too close to the sun."

  It was a typical Bobby Kelsey response, but it also told Hammond more: It was a message, and Bobby was in charge of this operation.

  Hammond nodded neutrally. "Sounds like Bobby."

  Thoma growled, "Yeah, Bobby's not your number-one fan. Guess you just have a talent for making enemies. Get in, asshole."

  Although the Bureau had changed and modernized, some things were hard to erase. The long history of unshakable loyalty, of taking care of one another no matter the cost, of being pit bulls in an eternal battle against a danger-filled world where violence lurked around the next building, had forged an esprit de corps that tolerated little aberration. And Hammond had been very aberrant.

  They stopped at a midnight-blue Lincoln Continental parked in the dark midpoint between two street lamps. Thoma shoved Hammond's head down, and Hammond crawled into the backseat.

  Hammond looked up at Graham. "Come on, I'm entitled to know what's going on. What kind of 'compelling evidence' do the locals think they have?"

  Graham frowned. "I've told you enough. National security, remember?"

  "Where are you taking me?"

  "No more questions. You know the drill."

  After that, the agents were silent. It was to be the pattern for the night, an attempt at psychological intimidation. The problem for them—and they knew it—was he recognized their tricks. He'd had the same training and advanced through the same ranks. He had important work to do, and they could not stop him. They would know that soon enough.

  As the night grew colder and the shadows of the Appalachians seemed to loom claustrophobically, Special Agent Eli Kirkhart watched his colleagues put Jeff Hammond into their car. He recognized the dogged, not-too-bright Thoma and the veteran Graham. They were all nervous, their pistols ready for trouble.

  A flash of his badge at the air-service office yesterday had got him Hammond's destination: Stone Point, West Virginia. The deputy attorney general's budget for expenses was a lot better than the Bureau's, so he booked a plane and pilot and followed Hammond. It had been dusk when he landed, and the next morning he spotted Hammond in the parking lot—they were staying at the same motel.

  After that, Eli kept his distance. In a rented car and on foot, he followed Hammond, talking to everyone he talked to. Now, far up the dark street in his rented car, he watched Graham and Thoma climb into the backseat with Hammond, while the other three agents took the front. When the Lincoln drove off, Kirkhart pulled out into the dark night, following.

  18

  A rising wind rustled the woods surrounding the house in Chevy Chase. When a small animal suddenly scurried through the undergrowth in front of her, Beth flinched. She continued to walk around and study the estate, and the place seemed increasingly familiar.

  She followed the front porch and stepped onto a stone walk that trailed around the house's left side and into the back where a koi pond, lush hibiscus, and tropical vegetation in large earthenware pots gave the patio a sense of the exotic. She looked in all the windows and saw no sign anyone was there. Moonlight revealed the perfectly made beds to be flat, unoccupied. The furnishings were attractive and traditional. She peered into the garage. There was no motorcycle or any other vehicle parked there.

  Emboldened, she tried the house's back door. It was locked. She checked the side and front doors and windows. Everything was locked. She noted the alarm system. It was monitored by the same company that took care of hers, which was not unusual, since it was the area's largest, well established even before Jackie Kennedy had hired it to help protect her privacy after Jack was assassinated.

  She paused on the walk between the garage and house, where the wind skittered flower petals across her athletic shoes. She needed to get inside. That was when she had an idea. For her twelfth birthday, her mother had given her a fully loaded toolbox, the beginning of her love affair with everything from tack hammers to jackhammers. As it turned out, it was one of the attributes that made her competitive as an adult. She had no fear of cars or computers, and when she had to talk oil, pipes, or circuits on a large or small scale with international clients or other attorneys, she was pleasantly at home.

  She returned to her car, opened the trunk, where she carried a full set of tools, and took out wire-cutters and a flashlight.

  She had learned this trick when her own system had gone haywire shortly after she had moved in. Her boyfriend at the time had inadvertently tripped the alarm by not punching in the primary code fast enough. But neither he nor she had memorized the instructions about what to do when that happened. When she could not find the information sheet, and the alarm continued its maddening shriek, she had simply rammed the wire-cutters up behind the box and snipped. It was against the rules, of course, but it worked. The man monitoring the alarms at the security company office had been prepared to alert the police, but when the alarm stopped, he took the lazy way and chalked it up to a case of the homeowner's finally getting the key code right. It happened often enough at the company to be routine, and the cops were rarely notified.

  She hesitated, weighing an arrest for breaking and entering against everything else that had occurred in the last thirty hours. Stephanie's grisly murder—and nearly her own—made the choice simple. She returned to the kitchen door and used the wire-cutters to smash a pane. The alarm screeched, splintering the night.

  She had no time to lose. She reached inside, unlocked the door, and, even though she was sore from the car crash, sprinted past kitchen cabinets to the small alarm box on the wall. It looked just like hers at home—white with a numerical keypad. But there was a problem: It was so close to the wall it could have been glued on, unlike hers, which gaped against old, crooked plaster. Somehow she had to get the wire-cutters to the wires, which would be routed through a hole in the plasterboard behind the alarm. Fast.

  As the nerve-wracking alarm continued, she jammed the wire-cutters up into the sheet rock. Plaster dust exploded, but she was not far enough in yet. As the handle bit into her palm, she rammed the wire-cutters into
the wall again and again until at last she felt the opening. She clipped the wires.

  And there was silence. The quiet was so profound her ears rang with it. With luck, just as it had happened before, the security person monitoring alarms at headquarters would shrug the incident off, and the cops would never know about the tripped alarm. If not, she was in trouble. But she was getting used to that.

  She turned on her flashlight and trained its funnel around the striking modern kitchen with its upscale appliances. She hurried through the rest of the house—living room, dining room with wrought-iron chandelier, office, recreation room with a handsome English billiards table, master suite, two other suites, and five baths. The house was dusted, vacuumed, and polished. She backtracked and looked more thoroughly. No trash lingered in the waste baskets, and no perishables waited in the refrigerator.

  Even more important, there were no mementos to reveal the life of the person who lived here. No family photos, awards, collections, or books sitting out on end tables with markers to indicate where the reader would resume his or her literary journey. She did find a man's wardrobe in one of the closets in the master suite. He had a medium build and conservative tastes. In the medicine cabinet were toothbrush, aspirin, and shaving equipment. That was as intimate as it got.

  It seemed to her the owner had moved on . . . or had never really lived here, which would be a strange extravagance. Then she had another thought: Maybe he had died, and the family had taken away his personal possessions.

  She returned to the office, which was dominated by bookcases and heavy leather furniture. It was dark and masculine, with a strong hint of cigar smoke. She looked around for the cigar case and spotted it on a side table beside a leather armchair. It was carved and darkly handsome, expensive. She opened it. Inside were fine Cuban Cohiba cigars, treasured by connoisseurs, and the case was full to the top with them. She picked it up, balanced it in her hands, thinking.

  The quiet ticking of the electric clock on the mantel caught her attention, and she listened again for other sounds: The wind had strengthened, and the pittosporum bushes squeaked against the den's windows. The noise made her shiver—like fingernails on a chalkboard. There were no traffic noises. The street was far enough away and the house so well insulated she might as well be in the middle of nowhere.

  Reassured, she put down the cigar box and went to the desk, where she sat in the tall executive chair behind it, flicked on the gooseneck lamp, and searched. The top right-hand drawer held nothing interesting—just the usual pencils, pens, and pads of note paper. But the second drawer looked significant. Here were unopened bills, and all were addressed to . . . Alexei Berianov. She stared. Riveted.

  She knew the name. Alexei Berianov. It was one of those that had tumbled through her mind after her surgery. Who was he? She hesitated. Could he have been her donor? Was that why this house felt so deserted—Berianov, its owner, had died last year, his family had donated his heart for transplant, and they had taken away his things?

  She ripped open the envelopes and found recent bills—all for utilities for this house. In the next drawer were files of earlier bills, preserved for, or by, the mysterious Berianov. But the rest of the drawers held nothing interesting, just more of the usual desk accoutrements such as a stapler, paper clips, and unused file folders. There were no credit cards, no checkbooks, not even a business card, and no personal correspondence. She studied the room. There was no computer.

  Her gaze returned to the cigar box. What was it about that? She crossed the room again and this time sat in the leather chair. She opened the box again, studied the neat rows of cigars. She had an odd feeling about it. . . . Impulsively she dumped out the cigars and studied the interior base. One side of the wood was slightly darker than the other, perhaps from use. She pried and prodded, and the base suddenly popped up, revealing a small stash of papers.

  She stared. On top was an invoice from a fencing company in Stone Point, West Virginia. Stone Point. That was the place Colonel Yurimengri had told her about and where Jeff Hammond had gone. Then she saw the name on the bill. It was not for Alexei Berianov. It was for . . . Caleb Bates.

  She sat back, remembering. That was the name of one of the new owners of HanTech Industries. It was peculiar that the name would be here in the house of Alexei Berianov, when so many of HanTech's new owners were Russian. Or was it? If this Bates were associated with Russians in business, why not in other ways? She thought about the weapons-grade uranium HanTech was buying up.

  She stared at the bill a moment longer then set it aside. Beneath it were two more invoices, one for poured concrete and the other for electrical lines, again for the Stone Point property and addressed to Caleb Bates. She paused, mulling, then set them aside as well. Next was a yellowed newspaper advertisement for a dairy farm for sale near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She studied it. Someone had circled the photograph of the farm's colonial mansion.

  She set it aside, too, and picked up the last clipping. It was a news story about a man who had died last year. Her hands trembled. She stared at the mug shot. And stared longer. Here was the stranger she had killed in her nightmares and who had later appeared around the campfire. The same broad forehead, the short snub nose, the shock of gray hair combed straight back. Killed over and over. The motorcycle had roared out of the garage. She had jumped on and deliberately crashed it into him. This man. In her mind, she saw his look of awful pain and surprise. Watched him arc up high into the air and smash head-first onto the drive.

  She read the name: Mikhail Ogust. She stifled a gasp. It was another of the names from her nightmares. She stood up and paced around the room, feeling like a trapped animal. Her heart thundered. How could she have seen that face in her dreams, the face of another real man who had died? She continued to walk, rubbing her hands together as if struck by a chill. It was too much to deal with. Too many coincidences, or too much evidence her heart had indeed been "talking" to her all along.

  After a time, pacing and resisting her own thoughts, she felt calmer. Of course, she would have to deal with it. She had to know. That was why she had taken the risk to be here—to learn as much as she could. She reminded herself all information was neutral. It was what you did with it that made it good or bad.

  Steeling herself, she returned to the desk. She sat, picked up the clipping, and read:

  Soviet defector Mikhail Ogust, 41, who lived near Dupont Circle, died early yesterday following a motorcycle accident in Rock Creek Park.

  According to police who were called to the scene, it appeared he had struck an abutment, which threw him off his motorcycle. He landed on his head. Doctors report he died of brain injuries. No safety helmet was found, and he had no other serious wounds.

  Ogust defected in 1991 and was highly thought of in local Russian philanthropic circles. A karate instructor and sports car enthusiast, he made a fortune exporting athletic equipment to Russia while importing such delicacies as caviar.

  In the years before he defected, his work was rumored to be clandestine and violent. He was an influential KGB colonel in Moscow. . . .

  Trembling, she checked the date on the clipping and collapsed into the desk chair. She stared at the window, where the wind pummeled the bush against the glass. She should have been exhausted, ready to keel over and sleep, but instead she was in turmoil. All she could do was think. . . .

  Ogust was a man, forty-one years old, and Travis Jackson had said her donor was male and in his early forties.

  Ogust had died in "a traffic accident" just a few hours before her transplant surgery.

  With head injuries only, his heart would have been unharmed, and it would have been a short distance from the transplant center where she lay dying.

  Plus, he was Russian, a karate expert, and he liked sports cars, which could mean he was a very good, fast driver. She remembered the other elements in her dreams—the Russian-made AK-47s, the atmosphere of constant danger, and her amazing sense of confidence and skill when violence threatene
d. She recalled Dave, the hospital aide who had made her jumpy and suspicious—he had turned out to be a thief. Ogust had been KGB, trained in ways that would account for everything.

  She nodded to herself, trying to absorb it. After all this time, after so much confusion and worry . . . after all the bizarre experiences . . . yes, Mikhail Ogust was a perfect fit. He must be her donor—yet he was the one she killed in her nightmares. She recalled Stephanie's warning: Dreams were not direct information. They gave clues—bits and pieces—but no one could trust them for the whole picture. If they were cellular memory, her job was to make sense of the parts.

  The story about Ogust explained a lot, but it left out more. It presented the skin of the man, not the flesh. Not who he really was, not what he thought about, or where his passions lay. Was he short-tempered, as she thought? Was he aggressive? She hesitated: Was he a killer?

  She wanted to know more. She especially wanted to know why his heart had led her to find Colonel Yurimengri's body, and then why it had sent her here. The three must have known each other—Colonel Ogust, Colonel Yurimengri, and Alexei Berianov.

  Her heart donor, Mikhail Ogust, was dead. Colonel Yurimengri had died in her presence. So where was Berianov, the one who paid the bills for this house? Dead, too? A chill sped up her spine. She snatched up the clipping, looking for the byline. She was not surprised: Jeffrey Hammond again. She scanned the rest of the story, hunting for names. But neither Yurimengri nor Berianov was mentioned.

  As she folded the clipping and put it into her bag, she scanned the room, wondering where else to search. She knelt at the low bookcase between the two windows and systematically opened each leather-covered volume, turned it upside down, and shook it for papers or photographs. As she worked, she wondered whether Hammond had written an article about Berianov, too. Then she had a disturbing idea: In the past, journalist credentials had been a traditional source of cover for spies and double agents of all countries. Maybe the reason reporter Hammond knew so much about Soviet defectors was that he had spied for the KGB against the United States during the Cold War. Maybe he was still a spy.