by James Thayer
The twins had never been to Sam Owl's gym, and they seemed spellbound by the skipping, sparring, and bag punching.
Gray decided to show off. "Watch this, girls."
Then Adrian Wade entered. Sound seemed abruptly sucked from the room. The speed bags were silenced. The boxers lowered their gloves. The heavy bags swung loosely. The gymnasium became as still as a photograph. Her eyes swept left and right as if her head were a turret.
Gray groaned when Adrian Wade's gaze found him. She marched around the ring in his direction. In the faded, steamy, tumbledown gymnasium she was wildly out of place, an electric flash of fierce colors. A spotlight seemed to pick her up, and the gym became even duller, with its olive and pea-green and dun shades fading away. Even the magnificent boxing mural lost its luster. All eyes were on her, ogling and appreciating as she made her way to the speed bags. Adrian seemed aware of her effect and accepted the silence as her due. The slightest of smiles—perhaps one of mild cynicism—passed across the surface of her face like a breeze.
From the ring Benny Jones said, "Thank you, God. My dating service finally came through."
She winked at him, a slow, lascivious, welder's torch of a wink. Jones returned a gratified grin.
She was wearing a tight black skirt that ended two inches above her knees and a cedar green jacket over a white silk blouse. Around her neck was a thin silver chain. Again Gray was startled by the contrast between her fire-red mouth, raven hair, and blue eyes, immaculate colors setting off her bone-white face. She was carrying a manila envelope.
"It smells like old sweat socks in here," she said to Gray.
"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?"
"I've got news, none of it good."
"That bench is my new office. Come on over."
The twins drew themselves up, awkwardly and anxiously, prepared for an introduction. But their father said briskly, "Girls, I need to talk to this lady. Will you excuse us?"
"Your daughters?" Adrian asked. "Introduce me."
The twins might have been witnessing the raising of the dead from the Gospels. They seemed incapable of expression, their faces frozen by bafflement. Carolyn and Julie had never seen their father with a woman. Maybe a thank-you to a sales clerk or a quick word with a librarian. Mrs. Orlando didn't count. This was a real woman, someone their father's age, and so thoroughly attractive, a woman who belonged on a fashion magazine cover. This was a person of fluent confidence and obvious dignity, someone plainly of substance. And—could it be?—she had come to visit their father. It simply wasn't within their experience. Their eyes mirrored their wonder. Gray missed it, but Adrian rapidly searched their faces and may have understood.
She stepped close to the twins and extended her hand, first to one, then the other. Her smile might have been given to long lost loved ones. Her eyes engaged them fully and excluded all else in the gym, and certainly Gray. For a few moments it seemed all that mattered in the world were Owen Gray's daughters. They flushed with the attention and fairly stammered their replies. After a few minutes, Adrian Wade had learned much about school and piano practice and Bay Ridge and Mrs. Orlando.
Gray thought it a calculating inveiglement. She was overpowering his daughters and entrancing them, doubtless to irk him. He scanned the room. The fighters were slowly returning to their workouts. Joe Leonard smiled knowingly at Gray and mouthed, "Wow." Sam Owl was still staring at Adrian Wade as if she were an alien.
"We'd love to," both girls said as one. They were bouncing with excitement.
"Give me a few minutes with your father, then off we'll go."
Gray hadn't been listening. "Off you go? Where?"
She looked at him. "It's time for your girls to wear a little lipstick."
"Looks like you've got plenty to spare," he said, pleased with himself.
She ignored the jab. "I'm going to show them a few things at Bloomingdale's cosmetics counters."
"That place is the gate to hell. I don't want Carolyn and Julie anywhere near there."
"Well, that's settled," Adrian said, grinning at them. "We'll catch a cab uptown in a minute, girls."
The twins cheered.
"Am I just bumping my gums here?" Gray objected. "Is anybody listening?"
She took him by an elbow and turned him to the bench. The girls moved to a corner of the gym near the water fountain but could not remove their eyes from her.
Adrian lowered herself to the bench. "Your friend Sergeant Able at Quantico has been hurt. So has Sergeant Blackman."
Gray drew in a sharp breath.
She told him about the assault at the rifle range the night before, and ended with "Sergeant Blackman will be all right, a week in the hospital and then he'll need physical therapy. Sergeant Able has a broken nose, and was treated and released from the base hospital. He is back on duty already. The sergeants were hurt by someone who knew how to do it, someone with experience who was fast and competent."
"But what was he doing?"
She replied with gravity, "The only thing taken was your sniper rifle from Vietnam. Your Winchester .30–06."
Gray sank back against the chipped wall. He was wearing a blue sweatshirt that hid the scar on his neck. He peeled off the mitts to wipe sweat from his forehead. He ran his fingers through his dark hair. "I should've pitched that goddamn thing into the South China Sea when I had the chance."
She pulled a five-by-seven photograph from the manila envelope. "This is our man. Nikolai Trusov. It's his service ID photograph. General Kulikov wired it from Moscow this morning and we had it blown up. There isn't a sheriff or police department or FBI office on the east coast that doesn't have a copy by now. Kulikov also sent Trusov's fingerprints. The police agencies have them, too, and the prints have already produced results."
"Jesus." Gray stared at the photograph. "I wouldn't want to run into this guy in a dark alley."
With nothing but hard angles and sudden planes, Nikolai Trusov's face seemed chopped out of a log with an axe. The face was over-featured, with a broad and blunt nose and a jutting long chin with a slightly off-center cleft. His cheekbones were so rocky they threw shadows on the face below. Blond eyebrows had vanished in the photographer's flash. The brows were low and sunk deeply, and under them were flat, expressionless eyes. His forehead appeared too small because curly yellow hair was brushed forward. Hair on the sides of his head was short. His ears were button-sized and tight against his head. His mouth was crooked, and the left side might have been about to smile while the right was set in a stiff pedagogic line. It was a brawler's face, a dangerous face.
"What happened to him, do you think?" Adrian pointed at Nikolai Trusov's forehead. "A meat cleaver, looks like."
"He took a mean shot, that's for sure."
Trusov's forehead had a shallow trench in it, a furrow that ran from an inch above his right eye to disappear under the hairline. The groove was covered with puckered skin three shades darker than the rest of his face. The bone on both sides of the furrow was irregular, with chinks and facets. Skin alongside the fracture was pleated from surgeon's stitches. Gray guessed that the depression was half an inch below the curve of his forehead and crown. The trough and the corrugated skin added to the asymmetry and dissonance of Trusov's face.
"This injury would've killed most people," Gray said. "Did General Kulikov give an explanation?"
"So far he has found only Trusov's Spetsnaz file."
"Aren't a Russian soldier's files all in one place?"
"You'd think so, but not this guy, and I don't know why." She slid out a stack of paper from the envelope. "These were also faxed to me this morning from General Kulikov. It's Trusov's Soviet Army record from 1977 when he joined the Spetsnaz to 1988 when he left it."
"But he was in the Red Army before and after those dates, wasn't he?" Gray's wet shirt was clinging to his back, chilling him. His daughters were still staring at Adrian.
"He was already a Red Army sergeant when he entered Spetsnaz training, according to this."
<
br /> She flipped through several pages. They were copies of military forms, some with unit formation signs printed alongside the letter-head. They were in Russian and Gray could make out nothing from the mass of Cyrillic letters. General Kulikov was being cooperative, but even so a number of lines had been blacked out with a heavy pen on each page before they were faxed to the United States.
She went on. "In 1988 he was transferred from the 1st Brigade, 1st All-Arms Army of the North West Front to a Spetsnaz training brigade in the North Caucasus military district at Rostov. He trained for eighteen months at Rostov. He was taught explosives, hand-to-hand combat, communications, parachuting, survival, and the like. But he taught rifle marksmanship."
"So he was already a shooter?"
She held up a page from the file, as if he could read it. "Trusov won a gold medal at the 1976 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck in the biathlon. Shooting and skiing."
"That's an asinine sport."
She looked up from the file. "You'd think a sniper like you would love that sport."
"I'm talking about the skiing part of it. If God wanted man to ski He wouldn't have invented the snowmobile."
After a moment she said, "Is that another attempt to be funny?"
"Probably." Gray exhaled slowly. "Where did Trusov go after his commando training in Rostov?"
"To a Spetsnaz company in the 3rd Army of the GSFG, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. He was posted there until a little while after the Afghanistan invasion, when his Spetsnaz company was transferred to the Turkestan Military District. The file shows he was in Afghanistan four years. That's where he killed the seventy-eight people."
"They weren't people," Gray corrected her. "They were enemy soldiers."
"I see now why you went to law school," she said with a school-teacher's inflection. "To learn to distinguish, which is what law school is all about. Not to understand, not to appreciate, not to sympathize, but to distinguish. It is one of the lesser talents."
"Were I to give it any thought at all," he said with seeming indifference, "I would conclude you are a bonebrain."
Her face turned a gratifying pink, and for a moment Adrian appeared to be chewing on her tongue. Then she said in the tone and cadence of a typewriter, "I'm not going to get into a kindergarten name-calling match with you. I know Russians and you know sniping. You and I are going to concentrate on finding Nikolai Trusov."
"I was being childish," Gray said equably. "But that doesn't mean you aren't a bonebrain."
Gray had a good nose, a trained nose. It had saved his life more than once in Vietnam. Adrian was wearing a perfume that was somehow both faint and arresting. The fragrance was not flowery but was darker and more veiled, maybe an exotic spice. It seemed to be dulling his senses. Calling her names, for Christ sake.
She gamely continued. "Here's more bad news. Nikolai Trusov has obtained a copy of your Marine Corps file, the same one I've read."
Until that revelation, a slight—admittedly an exceedingly slight—chance had remained that the Russian sniper's actions were unconnected to Gray, that the killer's plan, if indeed he had a plan, was impersonal, and that mad coincidence was playing a ghastly trick on Gray. No longer. Intelligence—knowing the enemy—was the heart of sniping. The Russian now knew more about Gray than Gray had let anyone learn in twenty-five years.
"How'd he get the file?"
"A Freedom of Information Act request, just like anybody else can get your file." She slid the photograph and file back into the envelope. "I mentioned that the fingerprints have produced results. Pete Coates and I have been wondering how Trusov is funding himself. Soviet soldiers are usually penniless, and even the Red Army sponsorship that sent his father and him here for the surgery would not have given him enough money to rent an apartment like he did and do the traveling he is doing."
Gray rubbed the back of his neck. He never used to get stiff like this, not playing high school football or in boot camp.
"Two weeks ago a cash machine near Great Neck was smashed and over ten thousand dollars was taken."
"I read about it in the paper. The robber used a backhoe."
"Instead of a hoe there was a pneumatic breaker hammer, like a big jackhammer, installed on the hydraulic arm. A Con Ed crew had been using the John Deere to tear up a concrete road to install electric lines underground. Sometime during that night he hotwired the tractor and drove it a block to a First New York cash machine. He used the breaker hammer to tear away the front panel and spring the money cartridge from the machine, then rupture the cartridge. He walked away with the money."
"Fingerprints?"
"The robber did nothing to hide his prints. They were all over the John Deere. But the FBI drew a blank when they tried to match them."
Gray said, "So when General Kulikov sent you Trusov's prints, you forwarded them to the FBI?"
"All this morning. The FBI just reported that Trusov is the cash machine robber. So we know how he bankrolled himself."
They sat for a moment watching Joe Leonard lashing into a heavy bag. Then she asked, "Have you ever been to Russia?"
"Never."
"Or Afghanistan?"
Gray shook his head.
She demanded, "Then how does this Nikolai Trusov know you?"
"I've thought of little else lately. I have no answer."
"Maybe the only connection is that he heard of your reputation, and he can't stand the idea of someone out there better at killing than he is. You had ninety-six kills, he had only seventy-eight. This town ain't big enough for the both of us, partner, that kind of macho testosterone foolishness."
Gray didn't feel like arguing with her. His workout had worn him down.
"I imagine that's why you became a sniper, isn't it?" she asked pointedly. "Testosterone?"
"You see that fellow over there?" Gray inquired obscurely. "The black fighter working the heavy bag? He's a middleweight named Joe Leonard. Why don't you ask him for a boxing lesson? I had a lesson from him and I learned a lot."
She rose from the bench. "I don't need a lesson. I'm already tougher than him. And you."
Gray prided himself on his poise and dispassion and his ability to step back from a situation to assess it critically. But her adeptness at reducing him to childish responses bordered on the bizarre. So he was delighted when he did not burst out with his first reaction: Oh yeah? Says who?
Still, he could not prevent himself from replying, "We are talking about different things here. You are tough only in an affirmative action, I Am Woman Hear Me Roar kind of way. You are not tough compared to me."
Gray finally caught himself. "Jesus, I'm arguing about who's bigger and meaner, you or me." He laughed in a brittle way and shook his head. "I apologize."
Her smile could have melted paint from a Chevrolet. "Let me show you something. Take a swing at me."
Take a swing? Alarms went off inside Gray's head. He brought his eyes up to hers, but they were unreadable. Unfathomable, maybe forever unknowable. But Christ they were blue.
"You mean hit you?" he asked. "I'm an adult, a member of society."
She laughed brightly, genuinely, Gray thought. Was this an awkward attempt at a truce?
"You don't have to actually hit me," she said. "Throw the punch but bring it up short."
Gray pushed himself up from the bench. "You know judo and I'm going to get my butt kicked. Am I right?"
"I don't know judo from jellybeans," she said.
"But I'm going to get hurt, right?" Gray asked warily.
"If we are going to work together you need to learn to trust me. Throw a jab and I'll show you something. Trust me."
Was this the siren's song that lured sailors upon the rocks?
She stepped closer, then tilted her head, presenting a target. Her hands were at her sides. Joe Leonard and Benny Jones paused in their workouts to watch. The girls were smiling widely, perhaps thinking Adrian Wade was lifting her head for a kiss.
Gray brought his hands up in good imit
ation of Muhammad Ali, he thought. He gently—very gently—jabbed his left hand at her face, intending to stop his fist well short of her chin.
She moved with a startling rapidity. Suddenly she was standing next to him, her black scented hair in his face, her hip dug into his thigh in a manner that in any other situation would be erotic. At the same instant, Gray felt her leg sweep into the back of his legs, low on his calves. Her arms shot up. His feet left the ground and began a wide arc. He swung on the axis of her hip, and the floor suddenly seemed to be above him. Her hand was at his throat and his windpipe felt like it was collapsing. He had no contact with the world, no stable point of reference except where their bodies were joined at their hips. He spun in a helpless cartwheel.
The gym's wood floor must have been traveling fifty miles an hour up at him. The entire length of his body from nose to toes slammed into the floor with a sickening crack. His mind fluttered to whiteness, then regained itself. A surge of nausea rose from behind his breastbone. He tried to look up, but her foot was across his face, pinning his head to the floor.
Carolyn and Julie stared but did not move toward him, perhaps thinking their father had just shown their new friend Adrian some self-defense technique. Joe Leonard and Benny Jones and Sam Owl were fond of Owen Gray, and were trying not to laugh, but with only limited success.
"You do have one tiny endearing element to your personality," Adrian said from high above him.
"Get your foot off my face." Gray's words were muffled by her shoe pressed against his lips.
"You are delightfully naive."
"Get your foot off my face." He was sprawled on the floor like a rag tossed aside, one arm twisted painfully under his back, his legs splayed out.
She removed her foot. Gray found he could focus his eyes. She was wearing the same smile. The girls ventured over.
"You okay, Dad?" Carolyn asked.
"I'm fine," Gray said weakly.
"He was showing me one of his moves," Adrian deadpanned. "How to make a gymnasium floor surrender."