by Michael Crow
She laughs, keeps holding tight to my left arm. I see two of the major’s men dragging one of the cuffed Ivans through the hole where the door used to be. There’s a narrow steel staircase there. Down they go, followed pretty close by two guys with the other Ivan. Then Bolgakov, looking like he’s had the worst vodka binge of his life, and Tchitch, only semiconscious still.
Four more men come in, snap open two body bags, shove Westley and JoeBoy into them. Fast, neat, and down again.
I walk, carefully and slowly, over to the table, punch a button on the Wizard’s laptop, eject the disk, put it in the jewel case. “Package secured,” I say to Nadya. “You want to tell me why this had to go so loud?”
“A little later, Terry. When we’re clear.”
“One small detail before you’re that,” the major says, taking the jewel case. “Something here belongs to us, I think.”
“Nadya?”
She only nods. The Russian opens that titanium box, flicks open a second interior compartment and extracts three disks. He puts them in a leather case, zips the case into the breast pocket of his black jumpsuit.
“As agreed, no? The Siemens disk is yours if you want it.”
“Oh, I do,” Nadya says.
“And the others go back where they came from.”
“As agreed,” she says. I retrieve my attaché. The major puts Tommy’s laptop into its case, takes that.
We go down four flights of the narrow steel staircase, emerge into an alley behind the PrimorEx building. Two of the ops team are dragging a bagged body. Must be the door guard. They toss it into the back of a drab van. It thuds on the bags holding what used to be Westley and JoeBoy. I can see the two Ivans, hoods with no slits tied over their heads now, facing the two generals, also hooded, all hunched on benches. A couple of the major’s men jump in. He slams the door, raps twice on it. The van pulls away. The rest of the assault group is already in an idling SUV with no markings.
“Interesting encounter, but I do hope we don’t—what’s your word?—ah, ‘intersect’ again,” the major says, shaking Nadya’s hand. He nods to me, disappears into the SUV. It goes.
Nadya turns me around. There’s a silver Audi S8 sitting there. She eases me into the shotgun seat, goes around the front and settles into the driver’s. Engine hums smoothly when she twists the key.
“Where’d the German metal come from?” I say.
“Oh, a very friendly local dealer,” Nadya says, putting her foot to the floor hard so I’m pressed back against buttery leather as we squeal off into the Vlad night.
Nadya throttles down, syncs with the traffic flow, as soon we hit a main street. I’m fuzzy on where we are, but it doesn’t seem as if we’re headed toward the airport, or in any particular hurry to get anywhere at all. And the process starts. Always the same, for me and everyone I know who does my kind of work, that process. The euphoria of coming out alive does a fast fade, and you enter the blank, the big empty. You don’t know what just went down, what part you played in whatever it was. You’re in a hole of time—no before, no after, not even a recognizable now. You just are, you’re breathing and your heart’s beating, but that’s it.
Then you drop back into the shit. You feel yourself pulling the trigger, see the flashes, hear the booms and the shouts, smell the burn and the blood. You feel a despair so deep you think you’ll live in it forever, without hope.
But you rise up out of the pit. Into any one of a number of zones: satisfaction, bewilderment, elation, pride, disgust, anger. That’s the only variable in the process, which zone it’ll be, and there’s often no logical connection between the nature of the op and where you wind up.
I rise into anger. Nadya hits another region entirely. That’s clear as anything can be. When she breaks the silence we’ve been in for I don’t know how long, she does it in rapid, excited English.
“Rather neat piece of work, I think. Perfect timing, smooth execution, agile departure. Textbook!”
“Goddamn goat-fuck,” I say. “The deal was made, we’re moments from being out the door with the package, mission accomplished. Clean and quiet. Then I got to waste two men, and you and your Russkis go pyscho-dramatic. For what? For fucking what? I don’t mind doing Westley. But why? And why JoeBoy? Why’s he got to take a bullet in the brain?”
“He was Westley’s man, Terry,” she says. “He was Westley’s insurance against you and Sonny. He’d have done you if things had turned a certain way.”
“Turn? Turn? There wasn’t gonna be a turn. A clean deal, everybody ready to walk away happy. Westley would have done anything to make sure Kim reached Pyongyang with the package. I know it.”
“True, absolutely. As far as it goes. But there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“Bullshit, Nadya. Yeah, I don’t know the official reason the Company wanted Kim to deliver a power-grid control system to the DPRK, but I can guess. A little stabilization effort, like the food aid against the famine there, to keep Kim Jong Il from maybe going berserk, maybe going nuke, in desperation.”
“True again. As far as it goes, Terry. But it goes a great deal further than you comprehend.”
“Does it? Or did the Langley cowboys fuck over the Langley suits just for the action rush?”
“Actually, no. The cowboys saved the suits from a major, major goat-fuck, as you like to call such things.”
“Damned if I’m buying that.”
“Then I’ll be blunt, Terry. It does not matter a wit if you buy it or not. Your contract’s completed,” Nadya says. She turns the Audi into what seems to be an alley. I look out. It isn’t. It’s a narrow lane between stacks of shipping containers. We’re in the port. She kills the lights, kills the engine, unlocks her seat belt, turns slightly toward me.
Completed, I’m thinking. Or about to be terminated? A little fear chill rises against my will. Aw, no. Please. I do not want to Boker Nadya. But I will, if she’s the one.
“I’m not obliged to do this, Terry. But I want to, if you reckon you can actually hear,” she says. “I won’t even ask you to hand over that knife you’re still carrying.”
“I’ll hear,” I say, an unwanted tightness in my voice.
“Kim was going to be burned, definitely. But not as you’d imagine,” she starts. “By Westley. No one else. Westley sold the thumbsuckers at Langley a simple proposition. North Korea’s about to erupt in chaos, famine raging, Chairman Kim getting desperate. As you surmised. We’ve got to stabilize, but can’t be seen doing it, before the maximum leader goes berserk with his admittedly limited WMDs. Food aid, help with major problems like power supply, usual package. Country’s more stable, maximum leader less likely to detonate. As you surmised.
“Only Westley’s hard hard-core. Has his own agenda, doesn’t he? Those extra disks the major took? They were long-range missile-guidance programs, Terry. Russia’s best. The one thing the North doesn’t have, can’t seem to develop, can’t find on any black market. Westley uses Kim to unknowingly deliver that along with the grid program. Then he plans to rat Kim out. All of a sudden the U.S., China, Russia have got proximate cause to come down on the North. Shock and awe.”
“Yeah, real success in Iraq, that shock-and-awe thing.”
“Well, of course. Military action on the Korean peninsula is a doomsday proposition. So. As you may or may not know, our intelligence agencies have been cooperating with their Russian counterparts on matters of mutual interest. Very recently the Russians inform us that they have been closely watching two particular generals whom they believe are up to something bad. What strikes them as peculiar—and irks them immensely—is that said generals seem to have close ties to an American agent. Who turns out to be Westley. The thumbsuckers get quite nervous, quite shaken. Scurry over to operations—never admitting it was their undertaking in the first place—and beg them to stop Westley, if he’s operating his own agenda. Clear so far?”
“Reasonably,” I say.
“Well, operations look into it. Liaise with the Russi
ans, open the books on the thumbsuckers’ brief to Westley. Two days ago, the Russians send Langley a red alert. They strongly believe Bolgakov and Tchitcherine are peddling extremely sensitive missile-guidance programs, with Westley as the middleman. Destination: North Korea. The very last thing anyone wants. Our operations team and their Russian counterparts agree on a joint operation to stop it. I’m ordered to inform that Russian major of the exact time and place of the deal. And to participate in stopping it. So we stopped it. As you saw.”
“Persuasive, Nadya. Almost believable. It would account for your saying ‘brilliant’ when I gave you the meeting place. But why not just haul Westley home, throw him in a padded cell somewhere with all the other CIA burnouts who got too zealous?”
“Because Westley crossed the one line that cannot be crossed. He was taking a rather large cut of the generals’ seven point five. And because the Russians said he was our player, and our responsibility to apply the stroke. If we did not, they would terminate him on the spot, and cease cooperating with us in other touchy places, such as Afghanistan.” Nadya sighs, raps something against the Audi’s gearshift. It’s her SIG. “Now, Terry, please get out of the car.”
thirty
IT’S DANK IN THE CONTAINER CANYON AND DIM, ONLY ambient glow from arc lights far off, around the perimeter of the port. Can’t recall exactly how we got in here. Did we pass a security checkpoint somehow? I look up. The towering steel stacks seem to be leaning in, narrowing toward the top. Nadya tells me to place my knife and the attaché—which still cradles the Korth and grenades—on the Audi’s hood. Very slowly, very gently. Then step forward seven paces, facing away from the car.
She’s good. She doesn’t give me any kind of opening. There is no move I might make that wouldn’t be suicide. I’m feeling skanked and shitty.
“Right, Terry,” she says. “Here’s the procedure. We’re heading for a particular ship. Between here and there will be a few security people. Mobile, except for one fixed post, which we’ll give a wide berth. It’s to your best advantage to cooperate with me. You will be a good boy, won’t you? Do we understand each other?”
“Hard fucking not to, Irena,” I say.
“Ah, Terry. There’s much you’ve not considered yet, love. I know you’re hardly in the mood, but really you must trust me a little longer.”
“Did I ever trust you, bitch?”
“Hard words, Terry. But certainly you did, though you never liked to admit it. You considered it unprofessional or something, I suppose.”
We’re walking straight down that corridor. More and more I’m getting the sensation that the stacked containers are about to topple over on us. Very faintly, at some distance, there seems to be a whirring of winches, a low rumble of wheeled cranes. But the only distinct sound is the regular click of my wing tips heels striking concrete, echoing. Nadya moves silent as a cat; probably wearing Vibram-soled assault boots, to match her black jumpsuit.
“Hey, Irena, ever make that IED from the stuff you picked up on our shopping trip? You remember that one, and what came after, don’t you?”
“Well of course I made it. Would have been a waste not to, surely. In point of fact, it’s ticking merrily as we speak in the boot of dear General Tchitcherine’s almost new Audi, the lovely machine that brought us here. Should pop off in, oh, an hour or so, long before daylight.”
“You stole Tchitch’s personal car?”
“We required transport, did we not? It’s a well-known vehicle, locally. Special plates, you see. Unlikely anyone would think of stopping it. Likely we’d be waved right through any gates around here.”
I’m about to step out from between those oppressive walls when Nadya hisses. “Don’t! Tricky bit here. There are clear sightlines five hundred meters right and left. Can’t stroll along the middle, can we?”
“So, what? We duck and dodge around these container rows?”
“A bit showy. Also a bit wearing. Look straight ahead fifty meters.”
I do. I see a three-meter chain-link topped by coils of concertina, nothing but black on the other side. Then I see lights flick and waver, vanish and reappear on the black. Water. The harbor. Also notice high sedge, both sides of the fence.
Then I hear a sharp, fast snap. Nadya’s two meters to my right, heavy-duty wire cutters working in one hand. “Snip a single slit, slip past the fence, go red Indian style through the rushes. To the left. The ship we want is that first one, about five hundred meters off. Our destination.”
She tosses me the cutters, I almost fumble the catch. “We hit the fence together, you cut, go through, I follow.” She peeps around the container, makes a quick scan. “On my mark. Ready? Go!”
Goes like a training exercise. We’re across the open space, into the weeds, slit’s cut, and we’re through in ten seconds. I trot left in a half-crouch, toeing in like one of her red fucking Indians, silent except for a soft whisping as I brush the rank leafage. Halt, crouch when we reach the concrete wharf. Shabby little freighter, badly scabbed with rust. Longshoremen are working way down at the stern under floods, wharfside, and on board. But the bow’s only twenty-five meters from us, unlit. I turn my head. Nadya’s scoping the bow with a night-vision monocular.
Now? Fuck. She’s got the SIG leveled on my lower spine. No move.
“Rope ladder,” she says. “Just past the forward mooring line. We move to the bollard, take a last look round, then it’s up the ladder like pirates. Are you feeling piratical, Terry?”
No answer required. We sprint, crouch, scramble up and over. Then we’re on the rough steel plates of the fo’c’sle deck, squatting by a big anchor capstan.
“Friendly ship, Terry. Not much to look at, true, but she sails,” Nadya says. “Skipper’s our man. Carlos came in on this hulk from Busan. That trouble you at all? Cast any shadows on your soul?”
“All depends on who’s going out on her. And how far. Doesn’t it?”
A tall, slim figure detaches from the outline of the superstructure, starts walking toward us. Too dark to make out a face.
“Stand up, Terry,” Nadya says. “Hallo, Allison. Job’s well and truly done. And see who I’ve brought you.”
thirty-one
NIGHTS HERE ARE SOFT AS VELVET, THE AIR ALMOST too rich with scents of frangipani and bougainvillea. I sit easily on a sandy patch up among the rocks of a natural little redoubt above the beach, watching the faint lights of slim fishing canoes flicker like fireflies far offshore. That’s my reference anyway; fireflies don’t exist in these latitudes. When I look up, I see the glimmer of mostly unfamiliar constellations, and that crooked Southern Cross. I can hear the whispering lap of sea against shore when there’s a pause in the clatter and whoops of the jungle behind me.
It’s almost peaceful. But provisional. Too often I’m back on that tramp freighter. Really back, hi-rez, sight and sound and feeling. Just me on the dark foredeck with a woman I knew as Nadya, one I knew as Allison. A gesture, so fluid yet so very swift and sure. Then it’s just me, there on the deck.
Allison coming toward us, Nadya and me moving to her. Allison saying, “Excellent. Great work, really,” when we’re close enough to touch. “Well, of course!” Nadya replying, something small and silver sliding from her sleeve into her palm, palm flowing toward Allison’s neck, the small silver thing just brushing the tender spot behind the jaw. One pop, no louder than a kid’s cap. Allison’s eyes widening slightly, body toppling as if her legs had been scythed out from under her.
Nadya looking then at me, the small silver thing in her hand a .22 revolver, derringer-size and style, not even a trigger guard. The weapon favored by the best mafia hit men, the ones cold enough to work so close. Little hollow in the forty-grain lead bullet filled with candle wax, it penetrates soft tissue an inch or so, expands and fragments. There’s a tiny hole that scarcely bleeds just beneath Allison’s ear. But the thing splayed awkwardly on the deck is not Allison anymore. A fist-size piece of her brain has been shredded.
I’m a
bout to die.
Then Nadya tosses the .22 over the bulwark. There’s hardly a splash when it hits. She opens my attaché, dumps the Korth and the grenades into the oily harbor waters. She hands the attaché to me.
“I know you’ve got a Company backup passport. Best not to use it, though,” she says. “I’m quite sure you’ve also got your own emergency one in there, name and nationality known only to you. You should take it now, Terry.”
I rip the lining, grab the passport, slip it into the breast pocket of my suit.
“Why? Why Allison?”
Nadya gazes at me with those canted, arctic-blue eyes. “Don’t know, actually. Compromised by Westley perhaps? Operation a bit untidy? Too many loose ends? She was in charge, after all.” A shrug. “My orders were to clean up.”
“And me?”
She laughs silkily. “You, darling, seem to have escaped and evaded. One of your specialties, I gather. They’ll expect that of you.”
“You, Nadya?”
“Heading home. Long way round, I’m afraid. Via Moscow. Can’t be helped. One never goes out the way one came in.”
“They teach you that at the Farm?”
“Well of course!” She clicks a plastic buckle, removes a fanny pack. “You’ll be put ashore in Fukuoka. If I were Terry, I’d go somewhere by air from there. Though not too far! Then I’d go quite far by other means.”
Nadya throws the fanny pack high. When I make the grab and look back, she’s gone.
Escape and evade.
Smart enough, I figure, to buy a ticket from Fukuoka to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, which keeps first-rate passenger manifests, but fly out four hours earlier to Manila on Garuda, which keeps none. Easy enough, in the pulsing human anthill of Manila’s domestic terminal, to secure a first-class seat—under a name I invent but don’t have to document—on a Philippines Air island-hopper to Davao City. Simple enough to travel nameless by bus, jitney, and taxi a few hundred klicks of jungle and mountains to Zamboanga.