by Craig Thomas
You know something, she thought with a pang of excitement.
You know why we’re here and what we want to know.
John Lock sat in” the neat, aseptic emptiness of Vaughn Grainger’s study, its large window overlooking the lights of Phoenix. He was staring at the silent fax machine. The housekeeper and the butler had retreated to their bungalow in the grounds and the maid was ensconced — probably with a man in her flat over the garage. He was alone in the house. The barely tasted beer and the uneaten sandwiches that had been prepared for him sat beside his elbow.
The large house was silent, funereal, in the late night. It placed a deadness on his nerves, dulling his anger into a deep gloom.
Tran filled his thoughts. There were no features he could employ to personify the object of his stifling rage, only a Vietnamese name.
The ample room contained two TV sets, the fax machine, a broad oak desk inlaid with green tooled leather, a typewriter, numerous telephone extensions, a VDU and keyboard. But the place seemed hardly used, as if a film of desert dust covered its surfaces. There were some photographs, measuring the passage of time. He avoided the one of Beth and Billy at their wedding.
There were pictures of Vaughn, one of him in uniform which must have been taken in Vietnam, but the majority of the snapshots, colour or monochrome, were of Billy Grainger. Lock himself was in one of them, taken in the field in Afghanistan, he and Billy posed in front of a wrecked MiL helicopter gunship, laughing, ringed by cold and alien mountains.
His anger ate at him cancerously, as he cursed the fax machine’s silence. The large second hand of the clock on the wall measured time in strained, faltering movements, and the slow ticking of the English longcase clock was as ominous as distant thunder.
Lightning flickered among the Superstition Mountains beyond the city, walking on the hilltops. He closed his eyes heavily on the image …
… then jerked awake at the signal from the fax machine. He stared at it, then at the clock on the wall; slowly realising that he had slept in the swivel chair for almost two hours. There was the faintest colouring along the horizon. It would be dawn in an hour. The page began sliding as smoothly as oil out of the machine, which chattered its satisfaction with itself.
He lifted it up and began reading, even as the pages continued to ease themselves into the room.
Tran hadbeen a Special Immigrant, as he had guessed. Arrived in May ‘75, from a screening camp in the Philippines. Flown in on a CIA flight — he recognized the code-numbers of the flight.
No innocent civilians had gotten themselves flown Stateside. Lock read on. Nguyen Tran, described as a retail trader in Saigon, had been born in a village to the north of the capital … Left Saigon in late April ‘75, as part of Operation Frequent Wind, the eighteen-hour airlift that had taken the remaining Americans and their most valuable Vietnamese allies from either the embassy roof or the Tan Son Nhut pick-up point. He’d have been flown in an H-46 out to a waiting ship.
He glanced ahead of himself, at the succeeding sheets. Copies of documents, mostly. He was disappointed. Tran had obviously been valuable — must have worked either for the Company, the Marines or Special Forces in some capacity or other. Tran was no simple, above-board retailer, he was a Company man or close enough to it. whisi
He caught, as the fax stopped after the fourth sheet and whistled in self-satisfaction, a glimpsed snapshot in the corner of eyesight, Billy Grainger’s features, grinning into strong sunlight.
Billy had been airlifted out of Saigon during that same operation.
He’d been CIA in Saigon for over a year when the final invasion came and the Viet Cong forces raced for the southern capital.
As Billy had always said, laughing, every time they were in a tight spot in Afghanistan — or even when Grainger Technologies had looked like it might run into the buffers in the late ‘70s, after the oil-price hikes by the Arabs — he’d already been in the tightest possible spot and gotten out alive. While he and his people were still on the embassy roof, waiting for the last helicopters, the Viet Cong were already looting the lower floors of the building. Billy could hear the childlike rapture of Charley and the occasional single, executioner’s shot before the rotor noise drowned them. So don’t talk to me about tight spots, he would always conclude after recounting the story.
Lock sniffed loudly in the again-quiet room.
Tran was set up* Stateside, with Company slush money, in a laundry business in Sausalito. Slowly, he had expanded the business into a chain of laundromats … Which is where. Lock realised. State lost interest in him, just as the Company would have. Tran fulfils the American dream, becomes a US citizen in
1981, and vanishes from official records. He glanced again at the other pages of the fax. Documents, including the green card, the citizenship, Tran’s address — out of date by maybe three million dollars — and other trivia.
Tran, however unimportant he had become to State and Langley, had prospered — by means of heroin — on the West Coast.
Red horse — Russian-derived heroin, made in Russia, grown in …? Wherever the gasfield workers came from — the Moslem Triangle, for sure. It came up from there, was refined in Novyy Urengoy, and smuggled out by means of GraingerTurgenev.
Using the company’s flights, maybe even using the company’s people on the ground. And the executives Billy had discovered running the operation were in and out of there all the time. It was perfect. A frontier town thousands of miles from anyone who might care lo stop them or investigate what was really going on.
Tran, however, was only the distributor on the Coast, or one of them. All he’d have would be names … but prominent names, really important — noise of a window breaking somewhere in the house.
Lock looked around the room, as if he expected to find he had broken a piece of porcelain. He strained to hear other noises beyond the heavy silence of the study. Nothing. The second hand of the clock moved jerkily as a crab’s claw, limping the seconds away. Nothing —
— for almost a minute, then something creaked like old wood, something else sounded as if snapped like a fragile bone. His hands were spread on the desk in front of his body, empty. Then the right one jerked out towards the small console and switched off the lights in the room. The darkness immediately brought rustling noises, like cloth breathing against skin. Gently, very slowly, he opened the top left-hand drawer of the oak desk and touched the Colt automatic Vaughn always kept there. Withdrew it and, as it caught the glow of the city dully, he slid the ammunition clip into the butt after scrabbling it from the same drawer. The noise as he eased a round into the chamber seemed betrayingly loud. He could hear his heartbeat.
And footsteps, soft and coming towards the study. From the lounge, the rustle of drapes being automatically drawn. Then a strip of light showed beneath the study door. He sat in the darkness, his heart loudening, a fine line of perspiration springing out on his forehead, the gun quivering in his grip. He could think only that it was Tran. Or his people. It wasn’t accidental, casual — it was too like Beth’s murder. He shivered. The footsteps paused outside the door — voices, whispering? He’d forgotten to put on the alarm system and remembered that Billy could not have done so at the Virginia house. He was as exposed as Billy and Beth had been.
Door handle being eased. He sensed the city behind him, beyond the window, outlining him, but could not move. Beth had been as helpless, asleep. Gleam of light, shadow beyond it.
He saw the door open a few inches from where his less-helpless body had now placed him. He’d ducked behind the oak desk, his head peering over its rampart. The shadow bulked in the doorway, made neat by the foresight on the Colt. Made vulnerable.
A gloved hand reached in beside the door, searching for the switch, its black fingers moving like a spider’s legs. He squeezed the trigger and there was a scream and the black spider withdrew, hurt. Voices and groaning. Lock swallowed the saliva of excitement. A quarrel, then the inevitable returned fire, a gun gleaming in th
e doorway for a moment, fired blindly into the room. He fired back, twice, at the already retreating footsteps and the muttered curses speaking a foreign language that might have been Vietnamese.
A door slammed. The study reeked of explosives. There was a hole in the window behind him, a gouge in one of the upholstered chairs. Lock rose to his feet, shaking with exhilarated nerves. Then he stumbled to the door of the study and looked out into the corridor leading to the hall. A scuffed and disturbed Indian rug, a patch of blood on the pale wall near the door. The noise of feet on gravel coming through the open door as he reached the hall.
He thought he caught the voice of the butler, ihen lost all other sounds in the noise of a car engine. He ran onto the gravel drive which sloped up to the country road that wound past the house. Headlights moving off. His adrenalin pumped more fiercely than his heart, making his imagination wild, his body taut, invulnerable. He heaved open the door of the Toyota Vaughn had put at his disposal, fumbling in his pocket for the ignition key. He started the car, seeing the maid’s bemused features at a curtained window above the garage just before he squealed the car around to face the slope and accelerated in a scream of gravel towards’the road.
He reached it and turned out. Their car was already out of sight around a bend in the road as it descended the mountain.
He knew, with utter certainty, that they were heading for the Biltmore Hotel and Tran. What was ridiculous, but which magnified in his thoughts even before he took the first bend with a scream of tyres, was the idea that the men ahead of him had killed Beth and Billy. Ridiculous … but compelling.
His heart jumped as he saw the glare of brakelights at another bend in the road, less than a quarter of a mile ahead of him. If they’d killed Beth, if if…
He had to force himself to decelerate, keep his distance.
I don’t like you, Vorontsyev thought as he smiled in imitation of David Schneider’s open grin. But he wondered if it was because he mistrusted Americans in general, or because it was Schneider. Perhaps innocent Americans, especially if they’re idealistic doctors, possess ready smiles and casual good manners, together with a supreme confidence, even when confronted with a senior police officer enquiring about a friend’s murder?
He didn’t know. Instead, he sipped the good Dutch coffee that Schneider had offered him. The American had asked him not to smoke out of deference to his intolerance, but it was no hardship and did not irritate Vorontsyev. It was the smile that did that, its readiness, breadth, warmth.
Or perhaps the spaciousness of the office created envious dislike, or perhaps the leather chair in which he sat or the rosewood desk …?
He’d had to wait most of the afternoon to interview Schneider, but had spent that time investigating the Russian who had claimed to be a Dutchman on the false passport and who had died in the Gogol Hotel of a heart attack. A Dutch accountant.
A Russian, from the Ukraine, who was a minor subcontractor to the gasfield companies. He’d talked to Kiev. There was no Pomarov who owned or worked in an executive position for any such company. He’d faxed Kiev Central CID the photograph of the dead Pomarov and the more animated passport photograph.
By that lime, Schneider had been free to see him and he had all but lost interest, absorbed by the identity of the dead man who had pretended — or was about to pretend — to be Dutch and who was, perhaps, not even Ukrainian Russian. He had died of a heart attack. Lensky was certain of that … no, not poisoned, Alexei, I swear, nor bludgeoned or stabbed to death… Laughing as he assured him.
Yet now Schneider, too, intrigued him. Another distorted impression in a hall of mirrors.
‘I really am sorry I can’t help you. Major. Jesus, I’d like to, Allan Rawls was a good friend, a college friend … But what can I tell you?’ Variations on that theme had occupied them for the entire ten minutes of the interview.
Schneider raised his large, long-fingered hands, gesturing at the room and the Addiction Unit beyond it. Where Dmitri’s daughter had been brought, OD’d and dead on arrival …
Schneider was a busy, important man in the Foundation Hospital.
His manner suggested he felt piqued by the unspoken suggestion that his idealistic nature might have any connection with something as sordid as murder. Even the murder of a friend.
And the man was well qualified, Lensky assured him, and could be making a great deal more money back in America. The Addiction Unit was lucky to have him, everyone said so.
Schneider had been in Novyy Urengoy for more than a year, a long tour of duty at the unglamorous end of the hospital’s business. He lived in one of the largest company apartments in the most luxurious block. A succession of young women nurses, a singer, a cocktail waitress, a businessman’s daughter
— Lensky knew most of the lubricious details — had preoccupied or distracted his leisure time. All partings had been amicable.
‘So, Mr Rawls came to see you, and for no other reason did he attend the hospital during that week?’ Vorontsyev summarised stiffly, as if reading from a notebook.
Schneider laughed. ‘Sure — if you want to put it that way. He came to see me — out of friendship and because he was charged with writing 2 report on our work for (he head of the Foundation, the older Mr Grainger. He takes a personal interest in the work of the Unit. And he demanded good briefings from people like Allan. That’s why Allan was being so meticulous. Major why he came up here so often!’ His grin faded and his features adopted seriousness reluctantly but properly. ‘As to what happened to him, what he was doing out on that road in the middle of the night, I have no idea.’
‘I see. You visited him at the Gogol?’
‘Sure. For a drink-‘ He looked ostentatiously at his gold watch. ‘Is there anything else. Major? I guess I’m bushed. Time to go home, get some sleep.’
Vorontsyev put down his cup and stood up. ‘Of course. Thanks for your help. Doctor’
‘Sorry I couldn’t tell you anything helpful. It’s a terrible business’
‘Thank you. I won’t detain you any longer.’ He shook Schneider’s cheerfully proffered hand, returned his ready smile, and went.
It was another ten minutes before Schneider left the hospital.
Vorontsyev watched him cross the car park, his tall, angular frame leaning into the bitter wind, the sodium lighting catching the blowing snow and the lanky, easily recognisable figure.
Vorontsyev wiped the windscreen clear of the fug and switched on the wipers. They squeaked against the sprinkling of snow.
He started the car’s engine as Schneider reached and unlocked a small, dark BMW. Vorontsyev rubbed his stubbled chin and sensed himself as a creased, morose, awkward figure seated opposite Schneider in his warm, well-lit office. Then the doctor started the BMW’s engine and he was merely a suspect being tailed and the authority of their encounter passed to himself.
The snow chains ground across the parking area. Schneider had more expensive studded tyres fitted to his car. The BMW pulled out of the hospital car park and turned towards Novyy Urengoy, which gloomed out of the snow like the wreckage of a metropolis, lights fitfully gleaming from a few of the tower blocks. The traffic was light. There weren’t many cars in the town, despite its being awash with foreign currency and drug money and gangsters’ profits. Cars were for show or shopping.
To go anywhere you had to fly — for long hours if you wanted to arrive anywhere that pretended to civilization. He slotted in behind a light van which was fifty yards back from the German saloon. Schneider was going home, in all likelihood … well, it’s not out of my way, is it?
He just wanted to be sure, to still the nagging toothache of doubt; quell the cynicism, he admitted, that could not accept someone so patently good as Schneider. Perhaps it was a national rather than an habitual failing in him.
The town closed around them, the caravans and dreary, decaying tin huts and wooden dachas growing as monstrously as the tower blocks and squat factories and shops. The smell of bread on the icy air f
rom a bakery, its windows glowing out over the patient, immobile queue. Then he turned into the neon glare of Mockba Prospekt. Slowed quickly enough to cause the car to skid as the BMW pulled into the kerb. Schneider got out.
Vorontsyev steered across to the far side of the prospekt and hauled on the brake. Schneider was paying a thin, stunted youth to watch his car while he entered the blaring lights of the McDonald’s. Vorontsyev wound the window down so that he could make out the tall figure inside the restaurant, then wound it back up and lit a cigarette. The youth sat proprietor]ally on the bonnet — probably as much to keep warm as for any reason of security.
The place was filled with people, as it was every day. The pavement was especially widened to accommodate the queues.
Money rattled its gold chains and flaunted its foreign clothing at the bright windows. Outside, there was a hot potato stall with its own smaller, imitative queue. The faces were mostly darker or more peasantlike there. An ancient woman — he’d seen her before — was selling vegetables outside the restaurant.
Vorontsyev settled down to wait.
Rubbed his eyes and roused himself quick as an alarmed dog.
The BMW was moving, the youth watching his source of heat and money retreating. Vorontsyev’s engine fired a third time and he skidded out into the middle of the prospekt a hundred yards behind Schneider.
He wiped furiously at the fuggy windscreen, then settled to tailing the other car. Along the Mockba Prospekt, through two intersections, then into 1c Street. The tunnel of garish neon assaulted Vorontsyev as it always did; blatant, gaudy, tasteless.
The BMW was moving easily on the cleared snow and new ice.
The tail of the ZiL threatened to escape his control at every moment, despite the snow chains. Stripclub followed bar followed cafe followed cinema followed stripjoint along the street, their doors like dark mouths beneath the vulgar promise of their neon eyes.
The BMW turned into an alley and Vorontsyev slowed the ZiL until he was opposite the entrance. A sign for car parking, Patrons Only it insisted in green neon, for the Cafe Americain.