by Tom Cain
They split the bar. Larsson didn’t eat the cake so much as let it melt in his mouth and trickle down his throat. Carver took a good look at him, checking out the lower half of his face, the area that had been exposed to the wind, for any sign of white, waxy patches that would indicate frostbite.
“Looks clear,” he said. “But you could still have frostbite on the way. Is your face prickly, itchy?”
“Nuh.” Larsson shook his head. It wasn’t exactly sparkling repartee, but at least he was responding.
“I’ll get you some food,” Carver said, and went away to boil up some rice and mix hot water with the freeze-dried curry.
By the time they had eaten, darkness had fallen. Carver climbed into his own sleeping bag. Over the next few hours, he made more drinks. Larsson seemed to stabilize. The shivering subsided, and when he finally fell asleep, his breathing was shallow but reasonably even. Carver knew, though, that even though the immediate crisis had passed, the fundamental threat had not. Unless Larsson could be rescued from the mountain and given expert medical care, he had only hours to live.
49
Kady Jones was reading e-mails, an affectionate smile on her face. A few days ago, two of her favorite people at Los Alamos, Henry Wong and Mae Lee, had got married. They’d gone on a honeymoon to Rome and, being techies, they hadn’t sent postcards home by snail mail. They’d found an Internet café instead. Mae’s message to Kady was chatty, detailed, and intimate: one close girlfriend to another. Henry’s had consisted of a couple of lines, assuring her that Rome was pretty cool, plus a bunch of digital holiday photos, with captions attached.
His favorite was a shot of Mae posing in a park on the Aventine Hill, with a view across the Tiber to the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. She looked great, her face suffused with a happiness that seemed to light up the whole shot.
“Man, am I one lucky bomb-geek!” he’d written on the caption.
Kady was looking at the shot on her lab computer, whose screen was far larger, with much better resolution than the one in the Roman café. So she noticed what Henry hadn’t, that there were two guys talking in the background of his shot, and the perspective made them look like weird midgets growing out of Mae’s armpit. Out of idle curiosity she zoomed in on them to take a closer look.
And then she gasped. “Holy shit!”
The man on the right was only vaguely recognizable, but his companion was all too familiar. If the two of them were having anything other than a casual, social conversation, this innocent holiday photograph had suddenly acquired a whole new level of significance.
She dialed a number in Washington. FBI Special Agent Tom Mulvagh, the man who’d supervised the operation at Gull Lake, had been transferred to D.C. to work on the secret team searching for the Russian bombs. They’d built up a good working relationship. She told him to expect an e-mail and waited a few seconds.
“Do you have the picture on your screen?”
“Yeah, thanks for sending me that, though e-mailing shots of hot broads is most often a guy kind of thing.”
Kady could picture Mulvagh’s grin. He liked to kid around a little when the situation allowed. She didn’t have any problem with that.
“Very funny, Tom. That ‘broad,’ as you call her, is Mae Wong, the beautiful, sensitive, and highly intelligent wife of my associate Henry Wong. And she’s not what I want you to look at. Go in on the two guys…”
“What, the ones in her armpit?”
“Exactly… Recognize them?”
There was silence on the line while Mulvagh thought, then: “The one on the right looks familiar.”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed Kady. “I’m pretty sure I saw his picture in a magazine. He’s that general. His assistant got killed in the park in D.C.”
“Vermulen,” said Mulvagh. “Right, I remember. But what’s the significance to you or me?”
“Well, it’s not him that caught my attention. It’s the other one, with the darker hair. He’s Dr. Francesco Riva. He’s Italian, came over here in the late seventies, got a masters at MIT, and worked at Lawrence Livermore National Lab for more than a decade. That’s where I got to know him, and you can take it from me, Mulvagh, Frankie Riva is really a fantastic nuclear physicist.”
“And I should care about this because…?”
“Because, for one, Frankie’s specialty was the miniaturization of nuclear weapons; and for two, he quit the lab five years ago and disappeared right off the map. You’ve got to understand, pretty much everyone in our business knows everyone else, by reputation or in person. We know who’s doing what, and where. But for the last few years, Frankie Riva hasn’t been doing anything. Not in public, anyway.”
“And now you’re going to tell me what he’s been doing in private.” said Mulvagh.
“Well, I don’t know. Not for sure. But the thing about him was he didn’t live like a nerd. He wasn’t at home with his PC and his pizza boxes. He liked European sports cars, pretty girls, and dinners for two at the kind of place where the maître d’ had to translate the menu.”
“So he needed money.”
“Exactly,” Kady continued. “That’s why he quit Livermore. He said he wanted a private-sector salary. That’s not unusual. Plenty of guys go to commercial research labs. But Frankie’s not at any lab I know. The word on Nuke Street is he’s been selling his skills to people who want bombs, and who’ll pay whatever it takes to get them.”
“How come we’ve never heard of this guy?”
“If he’s gone back home to Italy, he’s not in your jurisdiction.”
“But no one from the Agency’s mentioned him to me at any of our briefings.”
“Well, you know, Tom, I don’t want to sound disloyal or unpatriotic, but the Agency’s not always as well informed as it could be…”
Mulvagh laughed. “I hear that!”
“Okay, so now ask yourself, What would Frankie Riva be doing with General Vermulen? I checked out the general’s clippings on Lexis. There are claims he’s a middleman in international arms deals. His old assistant gets murdered in a park where no one’s been killed in years. He takes a sabbatical from his job to travel in Europe, and a couple of the gossip columns say he’s taken his hot new assistant along for the ride. And now he’s in Rome, having a private conversation in a secluded park with a nuclear scientist who knows everything there is to know about the kinds of bombs we’re looking for. I mean, doesn’t that strike you as… I don’t know… interesting?”
“I don’t know how it strikes me, Kady,” said Mulvagh. “I don’t exactly understand what you’re telling me here.”
“I’m telling you that a man who has high-level contacts all over the world, who deals in weapons for a living, and who is supposed to be on holiday screwing his secretary, is having secret meetings with a guy who could make a basic gun-design suitcase nuke with his eyes closed, and upgrade an existing one even easier. I’m telling you that we may not be the only ones who know that Lebed was telling the truth.”
“I get that,” said Mulvagh. “But I don’t know that I buy it. And even if I did, I’d want to be damn sure of my evidence before I took this any further. Vermulen has friends, the kind that could end my career and yours if we start making false accusations-”
“We don’t have to accuse him of anything,” Kady interrupted. “Not yet… But you could check him out, you know, discreetly. I mean, if Vermulen met Frankie Riva in Rome, maybe he had other meetings in other cities. And if we knew who he talked to, that might give us a picture. Plus, and you can put this down to feminine intuition if you want to be sexist about it, I just think it’s kinda convenient that secretary number one-a woman in her fifties, by the way-gets knocked on the head, and five minutes later, in comes a hottie who just happens to be hanging on the general’s arm as he tours the romantic hotspots.”
“Maybe you’re just jealous,” suggested Mulvagh.
“Now why would I be jealous of a woman younger than me who hooks up with a great-lo
oking, unmarried general? Seriously, Tom, this could be worth looking into. It’s not like we’ve got a million other leads to distract us. Just run a few checks through a few databases. I’ll buy you a drink next time you’re out west…”
“Well, in that case, Dr. Jones, how could I say no?”
50
At some point in the night, Carver must have given way to his exhaustion, because he suddenly found himself waking up and realizing that the rising sun was shining in his face. As he screwed up his eyes, adjusting to the light, he noticed something else: the silence. The storm had passed.
Now he had to get help for Larsson. Up in the mountains, cell-phone signals were patchy, at best. The only way to be sure of getting through was to get to one of the hikers’ huts the local tourist authorities had scattered around the countryside and use the emergency telephone there. Carver consulted the map. The nearest hut was about three miles back the way they had come the day before. The journey was mostly downhill. He heated up bowls of porridge for himself and Larsson, promised his friend that help would soon be on its way, and set off back down the trail.
As he skied through the fine powder of freshly fallen snow, which dazzled in the sunlight from a cloudless sky, Carver realized that he was overcome by an entirely new and unexpected sensation. He felt great. He had faced and passed a supreme physical and mental test, and that knowledge filled him with confidence. Now he was ready to set off on his quest and find the woman he loved. In the meantime, he had no fear for Larsson. When he reached the hut and contacted the rescue team, he had absolute confidence that they would get to the cave in time. It came as no surprise to Carver, when he in turn was picked up by a cheerful figure on a snowmobile, that Larsson had been admitted to the hospital in Narvik, still badly sick, but with every prospect of making a full recovery.
Carver was also taken to the Sykehus, as the hospital was called, just to be checked for signs of frostbite or hypothermia. After he’d been cleared on both counts he visited Larsson, made sure he was doing all right, and promised to be back in the morning.
“Don’t worry-I’ll be fine,” Larsson said, summoning up an exhausted smile.
A nurse had come over to check his pulse and temperature. She was a classic Norwegian beauty: tall, blond, and blue-eyed.
“I’ll bet you will be,” Carver said.
He wandered out of the hospital, thinking he’d grab a beer and something to eat before finding a cab back to Beisfjord. Then something caught his eye.
There was a man standing a few steps away, just by the front door, reading an English newspaper. He looked up, saw Carver, and smiled.
It took a couple of seconds before Carver registered who it was.
“What are you doing here?” he said, his good mood vanishing as instantly as it had arrived.
“I got bored waiting for you to turn up on my doorstep,” said Jack Grantham. “Thought I might as well turn up on yours.”
He grinned and slapped Carver on the shoulder like a long-lost pal. “Come on. My hotel’s not far away and I’ve got a car waiting. I think you’re going to be interested when you hear what I’ve got to say.”
51
Grantham had one of his men waiting by the door of the car. Another was behind the wheel. They drove only a few hundred yards to a little old-fashioned hotel. There was a small lounge off the main reception area: a sofa and a couple of armchairs, ringing a fireplace; an ornate chandelier hanging from the ceiling; a tapestry on the wall; a coffee table in front of the chairs.
One of Grantham’s men handed him a laptop, which he placed on the table. Then the man joined his colleague standing a few yards away, keeping an eye on their boss and, by their very presence, discouraging anyone else from coming into the room.
“Pull up a chair-make yourself comfortable,” said Grantham, beckoning Carver closer.
“So what’s your big news?” Carver asked.
Grantham opened his laptop and clicked on a PowerPoint file. The screen was filled with a formal photograph of a U.S. Army officer in full dress uniform.
“His name is Kurt Vermulen,” said Grantham. “Until a few years ago, he was a three-star general in the U.S. Army.”
He gave a quick rundown of the general’s military career.
“Captain America,” said Carver.
“Something like that.”
“So why do you want me to kill him?”
“I didn’t say we did.”
“Why else would you come all this way?”
“Depends,” said Grantham.
“On what?”
“On what he’s really up to…”
Grantham opened a new page. It showed a series of grainy color photographs of Vermulen, now dressed in civilian clothes. Some were lifted from closed-circuit TV footage, others had been shot by photographers. He was in the crowd at a fancy theater, walking by a Venetian canal, standing by a crossing on a busy city street.
Carver looked at them all with equal indifference.
“Well, good luck with that,” he said. “I’ve got other business to take care of.”
“I know,” Grantham said. “Just like old times, isn’t it? But before you go, there’s something else you should see.”
“I don’t think so.” Carver got up to leave.
Grantham remained unruffled. “I’d stay if I were you. You’ll want to see this.”
Carver looked at him. Grantham had the calm of a man who was absolutely sure of his hand. The only way to see what he had was to call him on it.
“Okay,” said Carver, still standing. “Show me.”
“Take another look at these,” said Grantham, flicking through the shots of Vermulen once again.
“I told you already-I’m not interested.”
Grantham smiled. “Now watch,” he said.
He opened a new file. Up popped the same set of photographs, but this time the frames of the pictures were wider. They revealed the figure who had been cropped from the first set, the woman who was standing next to Vermulen in a satin evening dress at the Vienna opera, who was with him, and a black couple, outside the Hotel Gritti in Venice, who was sightseeing with him in Rome. And then, in a final sequence of new pictures, they showed Vermulen and the woman on a yacht; him in white Bermudas and a polo shirt, her in a bikini, sunglasses pushed up into her blond hair. The shots were grainy, extreme long distance. The couple was standing under an awning near the stern of the boat. In the first shot they were talking. Then she put her hand on his chest. Carver couldn’t work out if she was playing, or trying to ward the man off. By the third frame his hands were on her upper arms. In the fourth he was leading-or was it dragging?-her into one of the yacht’s staterooms. And they were gone.
“You shit,” hissed Samuel Carver.
“Yes,” said Jack Grantham. “Thought that would do the trick.”
52
Ever since he’d started putting himself back together, Carver had been wondering what he really felt about Alix. As his recovery progressed he began to piece together images of the few short days and nights they had spent together. A woman brushed past him in a store in Beisfjord, and as he caught a waft of her perfume in the air he knew at once, without thinking, that Alix had worn the same scent, and suddenly it was as if she were lying next to him again. And of course, he and Thor Larsson had talked about her, Larsson telling stories of the months in Geneva before her disappearance, or joking about his own first sight of Alix, dressed in La Perla lingerie and a brunette wig. She’d been getting ready to seduce a Swiss bank official who was their only link to the hidden men who had bought Carver’s deadly services, betrayed him, and then tried to have him killed.
“Man, she looked good,” Larsson had said wistfully. “I was seriously jealous of you. I mean, I could tell what you’d been doing!”
Larsson had laughed out loud and Carver had laughed along with him. But though he could recall a vague image of Alix in that hotel room, and though he knew, as a historical fact, that they had made
love that afternoon, the memories were fleeting and insubstantial, unreal ghosts of a time that had vanished beyond recovery.
And then he saw the picture of Alix on the yacht, being grabbed by another man’s hands, and all the emotions that had been hidden out of his reach burst through, and the pain he felt was like a branding iron on his heart.
“Sit down,” said Grantham. “I’ll get you a drink. You look like you could use it.”
He flicked a finger at one of his men, as if summoning a waiter. “Whiskey, chop-chop.”
Carver looked at Grantham’s smug features.
“You don’t give a toss, do you?”
Grantham let the anger wash over him.
“On the contrary-I certainly give a toss about the job I do, and the country I do it for. That’s why I’m here. Someone assigned Alexandra Petrova to do a honeytrap on Kurt Vermulen. And I’m sure you’ve worked out, same as I have, that she’s gone back to her roots, working for the Russians. I don’t know why. Maybe she got bored sitting around, waiting for you to wake up-”
“She was paying my bills,” said Carver.
“How admirable. Sacrificing her somewhat tarnished virtue for the man she loves.”
Carver looked at Grantham, glanced across at his men, then leaned forward.
“It’s a funny thing, the way my memory comes back. You talking like that reminds me of the last time we met. You made another one of your smart-arsed remarks, and I pointed out that I could kill you with your own pen. Do you remember that?”
“Point taken,” said Grantham. “It was a cheap shot. So let’s get down to business. Do you know how they got to Petrova, put her up to this escapade?”
“It was Yuri Zhukovski’s widow. She went to the place where Alix was working. Alix tried to escape. Obviously, she didn’t make it.”
“Ah, yes,” murmured Grantham appreciatively. “We thought this had the touch of Deputy Director Zhukovskaya-a very powerful, impressive lady, that one. Call me a cynic, but it strikes me Miss Petrova may well have been working for her all along.”