Mesmerized

by Gayle Lynds

As she turned west off onto another Pennsylvania highway, Beth studied Gettysburg, which had escaped the urban commercialism of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Out of the way, still a center of farming, the countryside remained similar to what it had looked like in 1863 when the North and South had fought the bloodiest battle ever on American soil. Now bathed in the violet light of dusk, the neat orchards, small stands of woods, and old farmhouses were interspersed with fields of rich, dark Piedmont earth. Stone walls outlined many of the roads, while rolling ridges towered in the distance. Fireflies flickered off and on along the roadside and out into the fields and woods.

  Finally Beth woke Jeff. "We're almost there." Following the directions she had memorized from the advertisement, she turned the Ferrari south onto Emmetsburg Road. They passed President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farm, now a national historic site, and continued south through more farmlands.

  He asked, "Anything happen while I was asleep?"

  "It's been quiet. I've been wondering what we'll find. Maybe this has all been just our wild speculation. Maybe some nice elderly couple from Buffalo bought the place and live there with their grandchildren and a bunch of milk cows."

  "I've been thinking something like that, too. Either way, we'll know soon."

  "On the other hand—" Numbered posts marked driveways. As she read them, she said, "I once had a client tell me, 'You Americans are like lapdogs. We Russians are like street dogs.' In a way, he was right. They had to learn to survive by their wits."

  Jeff nodded. "Brezhnev made everything worse. After the nineteen-seventies, criminals started to organize, and the government sanctioned it by looking the other way. That solidified a perception that if you could get away with it, it wasn't really a crime. Now people wonder why we've got the Russian mafia."

  "Still, the Soviet Union educated its people. From what I saw in my practice, they could figure out any system. And they didn't get hung up on race, religion, or ethnicity. What mattered was making money. They'd do business with anyone. A sort of profit-based tolerance."

  "But sometimes it's been taken too far—doing business with criminals, for instance. And it's partly our fault. We ignored a critical weakness by expecting the Russian state to be a vehicle for orderly change when it was really just a fat bureaucracy stuck in graft, incompetence, and political infighting."

  "You're right. After seventy-four years of communism, they couldn't have produced an Alan Greenspan or a Robert Rubin or anyone close to mastering market economics."

  "I remember when our fiscal specialists were flying over there for three weeks at a time to advise," he said. "We were so naive, so excited and hopeful, that we thought intensive bursts of good old American know-how would compensate for three generations of institutionalized ignorance. If the IMF and World Bank hadn't hurled Russia into the free market, sink or swim, we might have been able to help them lay solid groundwork, just as we did Germany after World War Two. But there wasn't time, and it still hasn't happened."

  "That reminds me of one of my clients last year. He started two health clubs in Moscow that were hugely successful. Then all of a sudden, he was desperate for new members. Why? Because so many of the old ones had been murdered in mob hits."

  "I've got another shocker," Jeff said worriedly. "Some of our intelligence analysts believe Russia's returned to its usual cycle of disintegration and fragmentation, and this time it'll stop only when some leader—probably from the military—reassembles the country by force. Of course, that makes me think of Berianov."

  "Good point. He's not strictly military, but he was part of the KGB leadership, which means he'd have had plenty of military contacts in both defense and security." She stopped, her gaze caught by the address on a white post. "This is it." She nodded at the post, which stood on the highway outside a chain-link fence with rolled concertina wire on top. Beyond the fence and up on the slopes of a hill stood a red barn, other outbuildings, white-fenced pastures, and a three-story white colonial mansion with columns. "That's the house I saw in the advertisement."

  His head swiveled. "They've got good security."

  The fence fronted the country road and extended back on either side of the farm. Inside the property, pine trees dotted the fence line. White posts framed the driveway and connected the fence to a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates. Although decorative, the gates would be difficult to breach, and the fence with its sharp wire posed even more difficulties.

  As they drove past, two men in jeans, denim jackets, and work boots slipped out the gate and walked away down the road in the moonlight. She cruised onward another half-mile in the deepening twilight, turned around, and retraced the route. Now the two men were standing at a bus stop. Fireflies danced around them. She continued along the road until they passed the dairy farm a second time and were heading uphill.

  He said, "Let's park on the other side of this rise and walk back to watch."

  She drove over the crest so they were beyond the farm's view. As she parked off the road, he pulled out night-vision binoculars from the sniper's box of surveillance equipment. It was dark now, and stars were just beginning to twinkle across the vast sky. The temperature was dropping, and the air was ripe with the scent of raw soil.

  He asked, "Just how comfortable are you with that gun? I know you said your father took you to target practice. Obviously you know how to shoot."

  "Yes, but I'm not well trained. I can aim and fire, and I've got common sense. If you're worried I'm going to try to tell you what to do, forget it. I know my limits."

  He nodded. "Good."

  They padded through the dark night. For a moment she allowed herself to enjoy moving alongside him, as if they had more in common than survival. He had a long, graceful stride, a man who enjoyed his body and what it could do. But he had changed toward her. Loneliness, an emotion she knew intimately, overcame her, leaving her chilled. Ever since she had told him about her medication and they had talked about what it meant to her future to have had a heart transplant, he had been withdrawn, as if he were far away in a land to which she was not invited. It hurt her. Was this what she would have to deal with the rest of her life? Fear of her heart transplant, of the unknown? Pity and distance?

  He indicated a spot behind a large boulder that shielded them from the road. She crouched there, and he settled beside her. She watched as he studied the farm through the binoculars. It seemed to her he was particularly male as he focused utterly on the task at hand. In the cooling air, the heat of his body in the tight jeans and herringbone jacket was almost tactile

  "No activity," he muttered. "The dairy herd's been taken into the barn or someplace else. No light there or in any of the other outbuildings. But someone's in the big house. There's light upstairs in two of the central windows and downstairs to the right of the front door." He handed her the binoculars.

  She studied the farm's immaculate grounds, wondering whether danger lurked.

  "See anything?" he asked.

  She described the various buildings, the light, the absence of cows and vehicles. Everything was just as he had said.

  "Check out the farm's entrance again."

  She moved the binoculars to scrutinize the ornate wrought-iron gates, the posts, and the chain-link fence. "Looks sturdy. What did you see?"

  "Look at the pine trees on either side of the gates."

  She moved the binoculars slowly, scanning the needles of one of the young trees. "A camera!" She moved the binoculars again. "There's a second one. The entrance is under surveillance!"

  "Yeah. No way to know for sure about motion sensors, but my guess is the fence and gate are equipped with them, too. Whoever's in there has major security concerns. That's all it tells us, but it's sure enough to keep me interested."

  "Wait a minute. I see a pickup. It's coming out of a building at the base of the hills. Probably a garage." She studied the structure's opening—more than wide enough for two cars and unusually tall for a simple garage. As soon as the pickup cleared, the door began to l
ower.

  He said, "All I can see is headlights moving onto the drive."

  "There's something in there. People. Equipment. Hard to make it out."

  "Let me."

  She handed him the binoculars.

  He quickly adjusted them as his gaze sought the building. "Damn. They've sure dropped that door fast. Can't see—" He stopped. "Notice something?" he asked softly.

  She continued to stare in the direction of the structure's light. And then she knew what he meant. "The light's gone. Suddenly. All of it at once. You can't tell me all those people turned out every single bulb at the very same instant. Or that someone threw a master switch when there were people inside. It's illogical."

  He nodded. His voice was still soft, and she had the sense of a cobra waiting to strike. "I'll bet the light's still burning in that building."

  "How could it? Light seeps out around windows and doors, through cracks. It'd show somewhere. They'd have to have blackout curtains."

  "Exactly. Somehow they've made the place light-proof. I want to know why." He handed her the binoculars so she could look again.

  She glared at him through the night. In the rising moon, his light brown hair had a bright sheen. She warned, "You're not going in without me."

  He looked startled, then gave a sardonic grin. "Figures. I'm resigned to my fate."

  Tension grew as they watched and analyzed. Every half-hour or so, people left the garage. Sometimes it was just one on a motorcycle or a bicycle. Other times it was two or three on foot, in a car, or in a pickup.

  "No one's going in at all," he said grimly. "It's an exodus. But where in hell are all of them headed?"

  "And where inside the farm are they coming from?" Restlessness gripped her. It was that same relentless energy she had felt after her transplant. Silently she told Mikhail Ogust to go away. It's my heart now. "Next time some of them come out on foot, let's try to grab them. We've got to find out what's going on in there."

  34

  Beth and Jeff lay in a black shadow beside the fence, far enough from the dairy farm's entrance to be outside the cameras' view. Baby frogs chirped and serenaded. The night air was full of the sweet scent of new grass. But there was no way Beth could enjoy the pastoral atmosphere. Her blood raced, waiting. When eventually another two men left the farm's double-wide gates on foot, Jeff touched her shoulder and mouthed the words "Not yet." She nodded, irritated he would think she would move too soon.

  The men headed down the country highway toward the bus stop, talking quietly. As soon as they passed, Jeff touched her shoulder again. In unison, they jumped up and ran on the grass beside the highway, hiding the sounds of their footfalls. As soon as he was close enough, Jeff crashed the barrel of his Beretta down onto the spot where the shoulder met the neck of the man on the right. At the same time, Beth slammed a foot straight between the shoulder blades of the one on the left. He flew forward and landed hard. Since the first man had been knocked unconscious, Jeff turned and pressed his Beretta into the second man's ear.

  Beth patted him down and lifted his jacket. "He's got a gun." It was holstered in the small of his back. She pulled it out.

  "Get up," Jeff told him. "Do it carefully."

  "Who are you?" he demanded. "What do you want?"

  The fellow's voice was strained. But Beth heard repressed excitement in it, too. He was worked up, ready for something. He rose slowly to his feet. He had a long face, clean-shaved, with close-set dark eyes barely visible in the night. He looked down at his companion, who was starting to move and would soon be conscious.

  "We're just a couple of folks with a real big problem," Jeff told him. "And that's you and your friend. Who are you? And what's going on at that farm?"

  Beth was already searching the fallen man for a weapon. "He's armed, too." She pulled a pistol from beneath his windbreaker, located just where it had been on his companion.

  "What are you anyway—police?" the man demanded. "ATF?"

  Jeff ignored the question. "Tell us about Caleb Bates and Alexei Berianov. Vi gavaréetye pa-rússky?" Do you speak Russian?

  "Don't know who you're talking about," the man said with a sneer. "What kind of sick language is that?" But he had flinched at Caleb Bates's name and looked terrified at the sound of the Russian words. He bent to his fallen companion. "Wake up, Chet. Dammit, man. Wake up! They've caught us. You understand, man? We're caught. The Feds."

  "We're a lot worse than the Feds," Jeff told him.

  "Fuck you!" the standing man said.

  The prone man rolled over, his face white, and in an exchange so fleeting that neither Beth nor Jeff had time to react, the two men looked into each other's eyes. A silent message seemed to pass between them, and they moved their jaws.

  "No!" Jeff bellowed.

  The standing man collapsed, his limbs thrashing, and Jeff tried to pry open his mouth as the second man also went into convulsions. Froth appeared at the corners' of the men's mouths, and their bodies arched, writhed, and shook. Their faces were twisted in awful pain.

  "What's happening?" Beth said. "Tell me what to do!"

  Jeff groaned and sat back on his heels. "Too late."

  "My God. What was it?" She stared at the pair, who were ominously motionless. "It was so fast. What did they do?"

  He leaned down and sniffed above the face of the first man, then the second. "I can smell bitter almonds. On both of them. Which means they had cyanide capsules hidden somewhere in their teeth. Maybe in place of teeth. All I know is they had to have been huge doses to kill so quickly."

  She fell to her knees beside Jeff and stared in shock from one man to the other. "They committed suicide," she said numbly. "I've been fighting to stay alive for more than a year, and, just like that . . . they kill themselves." She paused, trying to understand. Finally, she recited in a whisper, " 'The secret of human life, the universal secret, the root secret from which all other secrets spring, is the longing for more life. The furious and insatiable desire to be everything else without ever ceasing to be ourselves.' " She lifted her gaze to stare across the two corpses at Jeff.

  "Who said that?"

  "Miguel de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher, wrote it. This is unbelievable. Horrible. What could possibly be so bad that they'd choose to die? All we wanted to do was talk to them."

  "I guess they couldn't take the chance they'd reveal something they shouldn't. It's a tragedy, all right." He looked through the pockets of the first man. "We can't stay out here beside the highway long. We don't want to be discovered by some passing motorist."

  She searched the pockets of the second. "Imagine the power of a group so blindly dedicated that they're willing to kill themselves rather than put some goal at risk. Whatever's happening in that farm, it's made complete believers of them."

  "We're getting close to finding out what it is. That's for sure. And I don't like any of it. Fanatics are the worst kind of danger. When they're this far gone, they're almost impossible to stop except by killing them dead in their tracks. And that's not something our government's willing to do, at least I hope it's not. And I'm sure as hell not, either. The question is, what's so important that they're willing to die for it?"

  "I'll bet it's not going to improve society."

  "Yeah, the word bloodbath comes to mind. We need to find out everything we can." He pulled the windbreaker off the bigger man and put it on over his herringbone jacket. It was short in the sleeves. "It'll do."

  "They didn't have Russian accents." She tried on the other man's jacket. It fit almost perfectly.

  "It would've been a lot simpler if they'd had. What it means is we still don't know for sure who or what we're dealing with."

  They dragged the bodies across the dark road and into a small woods. As they returned to scoop up the men's things, dread filled her. Whoever was behind all this had so little regard for human life—not even valuing his own people's—that he had sent them out with what was essentially an order to die if they so much as sensed failure. Th
e leader—Alexei Berianov, Caleb Bates, or whoever—was not just a murderer, he was a monster, and if these were his methods, he would stop at nothing to succeed.

  * * *

  Moving urgently through the farm's mansion, Alexei Berianov locked the door to his bedroom and went into his private bath. He stopped before the full-length mirror to study his heavy body and face. There was a solidness to Caleb Bates that promised stability and authority. From his squarish face to his thick torso, he was a success in all ways. Now he would die, like the male black widow spider, his job done. Berianov smiled, bidding Bates farewell.

  With relief he pulled out his rubber mouth inserts. His cheek contours collapsed, altering the proportions of all his facial features. No longer did his nose and eyes appear small. Instead he once again had even features—straight nose, blue-brown eyes set handsomely apart, and a wide mouth. Very northern European. His face had a mobile strength he always controlled. He greeted himself in Russian and studied himself. Soon all of this would be over. It was worth it, he promised.

  Berianov stripped off Bates's padded clothing as he returned to his bedroom. From his closet he took old jeans, a flannel shirt, and a faded denim jacket. He put them on. They fit perfectly.

  He returned to the bathroom and leaned toward the mirror. He frowned. He smiled. He studied the lines that resulted on his face. He took out a mascara pencil and deepened the lines. He brushed ash color beneath his eyes and into the hollows of his cheeks. As he worked, Berianov's face grew older . . . sixties . . . seventies. And stopped. He painted brown age spots on the backs of his hands, and, as a final touch, he returned to his closet for the thrashed, dirty Stetson he had hidden there.

  He put it on in front of the full-length mirror and laughed aloud with pleasure. He looked like an old cowhand or farmer, someone ravaged by the elements but still spry enough to get around and be useful. Perfect.

  Using the Ferrari's two small map lights, Jeff and Beth examined the items they had taken from the two dead men.

  Discouraged, she said, "Nothing."