He sat on the arm rest of the seat in front of Bannerman and told them all that he knew. The shooting outside the Moscow restaurant. The nature, as he understood it, of Elena's wound. The subsequent death of the young man who had been with them. Three assassins, all dead, one of them by Lesko's hand, two others by a second pair of gunmen who were as yet unidentified.
At this, he looked questioningly at Bannerman. Bannerman nodded, almost imperceptibly.
The men in the suits had moved closer so that they could hear. Willem Brugg turned, glowering. One man shrugged an apology. They had their orders.
“These men,” Willem told Bannerman, “are here to ask you some questions and then to see that you do not remain in Switzerland. I am going to tell you why. Listen carefully, so that there's no misunderstanding. Are you listening?”
The emphasis, Bannerman assumed, had a purpose. He nodded, first tapping his finger against Susan's hand, asking her, he hoped, to show no reaction.
“You once had an agent, Carla Benedict. Blonde woman? Wears her hair in a bun?”
Bannerman nodded slowly.
”I regret to tell you she has been murdered. Here in Zurich. As she slept in her bed.”
Bannerman felt an answering tap from Susan. He glanced at her. Her expression was blank. “Go on,” he said.
”A man, also murdered, was found in her living room. His neck was broken. Small man. Dark skin.”
Not Yuri, Bannerman realized. But not Aldo either.
“In the dead woman's apartment there are other traces of blood. They belong neither to this man or this woman. Be that as it may, the Swiss authorities are perfectly capable of getting to the bottom of it and they don't want Mama's Boy conducting his own vendetta on their soil.”
One of the Swiss had moved forward as if to object. He was not a fool. He knew prompting when he saw it. But the second Swiss tugged at his jacket. This is Willem Brugg, he said with his eyes. You might want a favor someday.
“You are persona non grata in Switzerland,” Elena's cousin told Bannerman. “You are free to choose any destination, but I invite you both to come with me to Moscow. My plane departs in forty minutes. It carries a full neurosurgical team and several tons of equipment. Also two of General Belkin's aides. Major Yuri Rykov, I think you know. Lieutenant Lydia Voinovitch, I think you have known even longer.”
“Lydia.” Bannerman nodded. “Of course.”
“You'll come to Moscow?”
”I will. Not Susan.”
He felt her nails. “Susan,” she said through her teeth, “will speak for herself.”
Willem knew that the exchange had been clumsy.
But perhaps, given the circumstances, it was all one could ask. Before going to meet Bannerman's flight, he had tried to keep busy, not think about Elena. It was impossible, of course. But there was the medical staff to assemble, equipment to be dismantled and packed for shipping, technicians to go with it, arranging a satellite feed directly to that Moscow hospital so that his specialists could confer with the Russian doctors. There were all the special clearance and emergency visas, including one for the Israeli, Miriam, who is now a nurse, and one for Avram, who is now an interpreter.
With all this came the call from Irwin Kaplan. Next from Anton Zivic. Both expressing sorrow for the tragedy in Moscow but only Kaplan saddened by the death of Carla. Kaplan said a strange thing when Willem commiserated. He said it's nice that somebody gives a shit.
Irwin had also told him of the plan to have Bannerman arrested, held until he and Clew got there, then taken to Moscow under guard to keep him from going by himself.
Willem quickly put a stop to that arrest nonsense. Kaplan had not asked that he do so but the request was implicit. What they do with him on Russian soil, however, could be another matter. Moscow is not Zurich. His interference in the matter of detaining Bannerman led to an urgent call from the office of the American embassy secretary of state. Willem chose not to return it. He had enough on his mind already.
At last, with everything arranged, he goes to the airport to meet Bannerman's flight. With him is Yuri, who has been saying that they need to talk in private—it's about Carla— but until now there has been no opportunity.
They are cleared through Passport Control and are walking down the concourse toward Gate 37 when suddenly, standing by the chocolate counter, there is Carla Benedict back from the dead.
“It's what I was trying to tell you,” says Yuri, who was almost as surprised to see her.
She woke up, she told Yuri, with a man sitting on her chest and another one holding her legs.
It turned out that she knew them both. Anton Zivic had sent them. They had gained access to Yuri's flat and had been sitting with her as she slept for several hours. When she began to stir, apparently, they thought it best to avoid a misunderstanding. They neutralized her until her head could clear.
She called the boathouse but no one answered. She dressed, put on her wig, and prevailed upon the two men to drive her to Lake Zurich. She saw the commotion, had no idea where Yuri was, then decided that the airport was as good a place to wait as any. There was only one flight arriving from New York in the predawn hours. She felt sure that Bannerman would be on it.
Willem did not like her looks. She seemed dazed and distracted, a condition that was nevertheless preferable to the alternative. Yuri whispered that he had given her something to help her sleep, but it seemed more than that to Willem. He did not dwell upon it because, just then, the Swiss authorities appeared at the entrance to the concourse. Yuri reached into his pocket and produced a leather folder which he thrust into Carla's purse.
“Your name,” he told her, “is Lieutenant Lydia Voinovitch, communications officer, Russian embassy, Bern.”
She blinked at him, slow on the uptake. Not at all like the Carla that Willem knew. But now, at least, he knew the true identity of the woman who had bled to death in Carla's bed. Situation gets more confusing by the minute.
“Take her to my plane,” he said to Yuri. “Have one of the doctors look at her. Let her rest before you bring her up to date.”
Yuri nodded. Appreciatively. He turned her away from the approaching Swiss and began marching her toward a door that led to the tarmac. She was lagging behind him. He turned and barked at her in Russian, urging her on with a snap of his fingers. She did not bridle at this. Very much unlike Carla.
Perhaps, thought Willem, the thing to do was take her along. No telling what she might do when she hears about Elena. They had become so close, the three of them, Elena, Carla, and Susan. When they get to Moscow, he will try to keep her on the plane. The Russians need not be the wiser.
Best for everyone, perhaps, that Carla Benedict stays dead for a while longer.
63
For a town that rolled up the streets at midnight, thought Waldo, an awful lot seemed to be happening.
They had found their blue police Volga at the Varshavsky car-service station on the southernmost arc of the Garden Ring Road. Lechmann knew, and reluctantly admitted, that militia cars were taken there to be fixed. He'd seen as many as a dozen at a time lined up at Varshavsky.
It was more like twenty. Maintenance, Lechmann remarked, must have gone to hell since his last visit. There was only one watchman and he was asleep. It took Lechmann thirty minutes to find one that was more or less in working order. It needed a battery, which he took from another whose rear end, was caved in, and it needed petrol, which he siphoned from two others. They hid the flower van among assorted wrecks that had been towed to Varshavsky for parts.
They were cruising back north in the general direction of the Kremlin—Waldo was saving their specific destination as a surprise—when he thought he heard gunfire in the distance. They pulled over and listened.
No doubt about it. They heard, no mistake, the distinctive tat-tat-tat of an AK-47 on full automatic and the chain-saw sound of an Uzi-type weapon. And now several guns, all shooting at once. The sound was punctuated by two dull whoomps.
“Grenades,” said Lechmann.
Waldo shook his head. “Incendiaries. Look at the sky.” It was glowing. First came two red swells as if from a distant fireworks display and then a softer, flickering glow. More gunfire. Waldo switched the police radio on. There was nothing at first. They waited. Then, a stream of orders in Russian. Waldo could barely make sense of them—something about sausage—but Lechmann translated.
“It's a meat-packer . . . Abattoir #6 over on Kutuzovsky . . . under attack. They don't know by whom. They are calling all cars to the scene. They are calling for fire engines.”
Far up ahead, Waldo saw a set of blue lights blink on, flashing, and then turn left out of sight. A second police cruiser crossed right to left behind them. Good, he thought. Keep everybody busy.
“Let's roll,” he told Lechmann. “Go straight but speed up. We better look like we're on a call.”
“Are you going to tell me where we're going?”
“You promise you won't give me any shit?”
“Zivic wants noise so you're going to make noise. Just tell me where.”
“KGB headquarters,” Waldo answered. “Where else?”
Lechmann could have refused, he supposed, but he found the idea titillating and the conditions seemed ideal. They made one stop at a park near the embankment. Lechmann got out, took a handful of mud, and smeared it over the license plate·and over the numbers on both doors. They proceeded up Novaya to Lubyanka Square, crossed it, and.came to a stop outside the triple-arched front entrance of Detsky Mir. Directly across, out Waldo's side, was Moscow Center. Other than the lobby, perhaps a dozen windows were lit. No guards outside.
Waldo turned in his seat and shouldered his weapon, extending the barrel and sound suppressor through the open window. Adjusting his sights, he moved from one lit window to the next in search of movement. He saw none. But in one of these was a bronze bust of Feliks Dzerzhinski. It would do for a start. He squeezed off one shot. A loud sput and the head of the hollow bust exploded. In that office, a figure scrambled toward the door where he clawed at the light switch. The office went dark. Waldo moved on.
He put a round through each of the lighted windows, destroying two more busts and a chandelier in the process.
“Ammunition is not inexhaustible,” Lechmann grumbled as he watched their rear. “And a sound suppressor is not a silencer.”
“Just a couple more.”
He put two rounds into the face of the clock that was just below the middle pediment of the roof, stopping it.
“Next time I shoot, go,” said Waldo.
He dropped his sights to the main entrance. Double glass doors. Used mostly by visitors. Inside, he could see that an alarm had been given. Two men, uniformed, pistols out and held at shoulder level, were edging down the inner stair toward the glass doors, pressing themselves against one wall.
“Yeah, right,” Waldo muttered. “You're backlit, shit-heads. You go after a sniper, backlit, with a handgun?”
This criticism struck Lechmann as harsh. For seventy years, no one had so much as spat on the sidewalk in front of that building. The guards could be forgiven for doubting that some crazed marksman was out there, intent on decapitating every bust of their patron saint that he could draw a bead on.
Waldo fired once more. The glass in the left-hand door shattered. The two guards fell over themselves scrambling up the stairs. Lechmann put the Volga in gear and, tires squealing, sped up Pushechnaya Street passing the Savoy Hotel on his left. As he did so, his stomach rose toward his throat.
There were, at the entrance to the Savoy, at least five black Chaikas bearing KGB plates, men climbing into them, some carrying suitcases. The suitcases, he had no doubt, belonged to Lesko, Elena, and Belkin. Their rooms had been searched. Their personal effects had been taken for closer examination in the attempt to find out what had brought them to Moscow. No surprise there, of course. But if they had left one minute earlier, five cars filled with armed men would have driven right down the middle of John Waldo's little shooting gallery.
“Where now?” he asked when his heartbeat had slowed.
“There's a fountain across from the Bolshoi. Let's clean this mud off so we're normal again.”
“And what after that?” he asked, his voice still a bit high. “We could always shoot our way into the Kremlin and help ourselves to the crown jewels. We could break into Lenin's tomb and turn up the thermostat.”
Waldo ignored the sarcasm. He had turned the radio back up. The female dispatcher was giving more reports of gunfire. More bombings.
“Is this that same place?” he asked Lechmann. “The meat-packer on whatzizovsky?”
The Austrian listened. He shook his head, frowning. “This is a different location,” he said, and then held up a hand for silence. “Two ... no ... three locations, all in the Krasno-Presnensky district and ... wait...this one is now about us.”
But from what the dispatcher was saying, their own adventure was the least of the militia's concerns. “There's a report of a sniper” she was saying, “shooting up #2 Lubyanka. Go drive past. See if there's anything to it. If you should happen to see one, tell him it's not nice, what he's doing.”
Lechmann translated without comment, although, truth be told, he found such insolence unattractive. It had the sound of a coward's revenge. But his mind was more on this sudden rash of shooting incidents, one after another, in a city that was not New York.
“You thinking what I'm thinking?” Waldo asked.
The Austrian nodded. “That we are not so alone after all?”
“That maybe Zivic was straight. Maybe we do have five teams here, plus maybe even Molly Farrell setting off all those fireworks, and meanwhile we're driving around without a fucking clue.”
Lechmann could only shrug.
”I mean, maybe it's possible,” said Waldo. “Maybe they came in early, like us. Maybe Zivic thinks we know. Maybe Elena, for instance, was supposed to tell us but she got hit.”
Lechmann doubted it. Zivic, and certainly Bannerman, would not have left such a communication to chance. As for Elena, she had no reason to think that she would even lay eyes on them in Moscow. It was enough that she knew they were near.
On the other hand, farfetched as it seemed, his mind's eye was picturing Molly Farrell, an electronic device in her hand, touching off explosions all over Moscow. Why Molly, you ask? Molly was bridesmaid to Elena. She was another one, like Susan, like Carla, always whispering in private with her. Do harm to Elena while Molly is here and there would be no stopping her. She would do to this city what Hitler couldn't do.
But he knew that this was nonsense. All of it. For reasons of timing alone, it was totally impossible. Still. . .
“Let's drive out to the Lenin Hills,” said Lechmann.
“What changed your mind?”
“Don't get ahead of me,” said the Austrian. “It's only to take a look.”
At what, for what, he didn't want to say. But it would not surprise him, the way things were going, to see a certain apartment building lighting up more of the sky.
64
“Hey, Lesko?”
Katz's voice.
He'd been hearing it for some minutes. Hours. Days. He didn't know. It wanted him to wake up. That was the last thing he wanted. He didn't even want to be alive.
“Come on. Snap out of it.”
A hand, shaking him.
Since when does Katz have hands? he wondered without much caring.
“Mr. Lesko?”
A new voice. Not Katz this time. He opened one eye and saw them. Katz sitting on the edge of his bed. The other shape standing, one hand on the arm he couldn't move. He was rubbing it with something cold. Sticking him again.
“This will help you wake up,” he said.
“David?” He had to ask. Is she dead?”
Katz gestured toward the other shape. “This guy says no.”
The shape came into focus somewhat. Yeah, he thought. Bald guy with a beard. Same guy
who climbed under the table with him. Sticking him. Pulling his hair. Yelling at him that she's not dead.
”I am Colonel David Meltzer,” he was saying now. ”I am the resident physician attached to the United States embassy here in Moscow. Do you recall that you're in Moscow?”
”. . . Elena,” he whispered.
“She's alive. For the moment, she's stable. Do you see what I'm holding, Mr. Lesko?”
He tried to see. Yeah. It looked like a little white rock. It was going forward and back, forward and back, turning in this guy's fingers. Son of a bitch. Trying to hypnotize him. “Fuck you,” he murmured.
The doctor took a weary breath.
“What your wife has, Mr. Lesko, is a depressed skull fracture. This fragment of a granite carving, not you, is what did the damage. A bullet from a high-powered rifle knocked it loose and sprayed the both of you with shards of granite. While you were sleeping, I took smaller fragments out of your left arm and out of the back of your neck.”
Lesko hunched his shoulders. He did feel something on his neck. Pulling at his skin. A bandage. Arm felt a little sore, too. So what?
”I know that you think you hurt your wife. You think you crushed her head against that wall. You didn't. If anything, you kept her from being hurt worse than she is.”
Tears welled in Lesko's eyes. “How bad?” he asked.
A sigh. “Time will tell. The wound has been cleaned, the pressure on her brain relieved, she has a drain in place. In a word, she's been stabilized. There's a neurosurgeon, they don't come any better, flying here within a few hours through the efforts of Mr. Willem Brugg. He's bringing his entire team and, from what I gather, the contents of a good-sized neurological clinic. Your wife will not want for good medical treatment.”
”I want to see her.” Lesko tugged at his restraints. “Get this shit off me.”
“Ah . . .I'm afraid we'll have to discuss a few things first.”
Lesko heaved at the nylon straps. Meltzer put a hand on his chest.
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