by Greg Rucka
“How much of a priority?”
“High enough that I want you to reach out to someone who knows him. She might be able to get him to talk. She was next to him for over eighteen months, after all.”
Bell watches his thumbnail pick at the rolled edge on the top of his coffee cup. “He’s not very fond of her.”
“Better for us. You have a problem with this, Master Sergeant?”
“She hasn’t had any time to reintegrate. She was under for two years, more, and she comes out and she thinks it’s over, and it’s not over.”
“Which means she’s not done. You think she’s compromised?”
Bell shakes his head, maybe a little too quickly, maybe a little too vigorously. Yes, she is compromised, but not in the way Ruiz means; she is compromised in the way that Bell is compromised, he realizes; his failed marriage a symptom like her broken identity, the demands of two different worlds.
“So you trust her.”
“I trust her loyalty.”
“But.”
“I don’t trust her mind-set.”
“Then it seems to me you’re worrying about a null sum, Master Sergeant. She goes into that room as the chief, she goes into that room as her cover, both get us the same thing, just through different avenues.”
“I think she’s having trouble telling the difference between the two, that’s what I’m saying.”
“I ask again, do you trust her?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ruiz looks at him hard. “There is a timer running, and we don’t know how long until zero. The only people on this we can trust are the people we know weren’t involved in California, which numbers your team and a Bravo-Interdict operator who warned us about it in the first place. I am willing to extend that to her handler, who could’ve killed that intel before dissemination but clearly did not, but it ends there. So you will bring the chief on board with you, and you will proceed to interrogate Heatdish together.”
“And then?”
“And then you will deploy to terminate the sons of bitches who are threatening American lives on American soil.”
Bell tries more of his coffee. It’s sitting sour in his stomach. He makes a face.
“Where is she now?”
“I understand she’s staying at the Hotel Palomar,” Ruiz says. “But you already knew that.”
Chapter Fourteen
THE PROBLEM NESSUNO has is that she knows she hates Vosil Tohir, but she also kind of loves him.
It takes her only eight minutes from Heath’s wake-up call to the shower to her clothes to downstairs, through the lobby of the Hotel Palomar, which looks entirely different during the day, and then outside. She cannot get a fix on what she feels. She walks east two blocks to Dupont Circle, jaywalks across into the park, passes the Red Line entrance at the metro station. She’s missed the morning rush hour, but the dregs remain, a few people scurrying, the rest of them tourists.
Unbidden, she’s remembering riding the U-Bahn, the S-Bahn, with Tohir just before Christmas. The trip, he’d claimed, had been nothing more than a vacation, a spur-of-the-moment break for the two of them, though Nessuno knew better than to believe him. Whatever business had brought them to Germany, she never found out. He stayed with her almost constantly, doting, spending money in a frenzy, almost all of it on her.
“Vosil,” she’d said over dinner at Fischers Fritz, after he’d ordered Champagne. “What is this about?”
He’d smiled, shook his head. Adjusted his glasses as the wine was poured, waited until they were alone again at the table. “Does it have to be about anything?”
“With you? Always.”
“Maybe I want to be alone with you, maybe that. You think that might be possible, Elisabet?”
“You have me to yourself quite often. Is this business?”
“There’s always business. Business can wait. This is for us, just us.”
She’d left it at that. Pressing him was always risky, and she was always careful about her timing. Over dinner wasn’t the moment, nor was there one for it the next day, when he took her shopping at The Corner. It was their last night in Berlin, lying in bed in the dark, waiting for him to fall asleep. He always fell asleep before she did, a calculation on Nessuno’s part, a safety measure that was more illusory than practical. If he was asleep, he couldn’t be watching.
The room had been terribly dark, no ambient light at all, and she had been listening for that last change, the rhythm of his breathing settling, fighting her own drowsiness. When he spoke, it took her by surprise.
“You know I am not faithful to you,” Tohir said. “When we are away from one another, there are other women.”
“I know,” she said.
“You know and have never said anything about it?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Her answer was flawless Elisabetta. “Would it change anything?”
“No. No, I do not think it would.”
“You’re mine,” she said. “You always come back to me.”
She had been lying on her stomach, and she felt his touch on her again, palms against her backside until his hands settled on her hips. He’d shifted, lying on her, slid one hand between her and the bed. His fingers began to play.
“No.” His voice in her ear. “No, Elisabet. You are mine.”
The sight of Heath appearing from the metro stop brings her back. From the edge of the fountain, Nessuno watches her approach, rises to join her. Heath veers south, and they begin walking together, crossing the street—again jaywalking—to follow Connecticut Avenue down toward the Mall.
“It’s still coming in,” Heath tells her. “I have only the rough. Word is they were moving him this morning and got hit during the transport.”
Nessuno thinks about Bell, but doesn’t want to ask. Turns out she doesn’t have to.
“Far as I know, he was the only fatality,” Heath says. “Local law enforcement crawled up everyone’s ass tout suite. Rumor is that they’ve got the protective team in custody.”
“This is confirmed?” Nessuno asks. “This is real?”
“This is what I know that I’m sharing with you.”
“Where are we going?”
“Belvoir.”
“We walking there?”
“We’ll double back for my car, which I presume you still have, and besides, walking is good for you.”
“How’d they fuck this up?”
“Somebody talked, that’s how they fucked it up.” Heath is staring straight ahead, walking with her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her windbreaker. There’s no need for the jacket, not this morning, not with the heat and the humidity, and Nessuno guesses that means she’s carrying. “Somebody talked, and it’s got to be on their end.”
“Because I’m still breathing.”
“There’s that, and frankly, I’d like to keep it that way. Also, first anyone on our end knew he was being moved was when I got the call it’d gone tits-up. Though.” Heath shoots her a look. “I am forced to ask where you were last night, what you did following your departure from the house. Why you changed hotels.”
These are reasonable questions, and Nessuno knows they’re ones that must be asked, but it annoys her anyway.
“You think I did it?”
“No. I just know you wanted it done.”
“After we’d wrung him dry,” Nessuno says.
“So?”
“So the hotel was a piece of shit, and maybe I also did some damage to the room, and the management didn’t appreciate that. I had to find another hotel.”
“Hmm.”
“You want an alibi for me, you can talk to Master Sergeant Bell. He spent the night.”
Heath grins. “You got laid; good for you.”
“You’ve got an unnatural fascination with my sex life.”
“It comes from not having much myself.”
Nessuno doesn’t say anything.
“If he was on the detail, I don’t know,”
Heath says. “If you’re worried.”
“Why would I be worried? I fucked him, I didn’t marry him.”
“Aw, look at you. You’ve got a crush on the shooter who saved you.”
“How the fuck did this go wrong?”
“That,” Heath says, “is a very good question.”
They drive out to Fort Belvoir, and Heath is uncharacteristically quiet, which leaves Nessuno alone with her thoughts. Memories of Tohir keep pushing their way forward, carrying conflicting emotions, and Nessuno is no closer to discerning her feelings than she was in the minutes after waking.
It had never been a question of what Tohir would do to her. He would have killed her, plain and simple, and done it slowly. It would have been the farmhouse outside of Prague, except it would’ve been her in the stall, and it would have been unimaginably worse. The torture would have begun with a search for the truth—who she really was, whom she really worked for, what confidences she had betrayed—but that would, perhaps, have been only secondary. Tohir would’ve made her pay for her betrayal, for his broken heart, with a cruelty limited only by his imagination. The end wouldn’t have been pretty, and Nessuno had known that as a certainty for years.
All this, and still some part of her had fallen in love with him in return—the Elisabetta part, the part that reveled in his attention and could be what he wanted, what he needed her to be. Abstractly, she knows this was a survival mechanism, that it was inherently false, but there’s the problem. The heart can be deceived—she wonders if her heart isn’t already deceiving her about Bell—but once it is set, its mind is not changed easily. She had pretended to be his lover, and to survive, had come to love him. She tells herself again that it was Elisabetta, not Petra Nessuno, feeling these things, but it makes no difference. They are the same.
Tohir had been funny—not a comedian, but a quiet and very sharp wit. He had been smart and, with few exceptions, always very gentle, if not always so in the bedroom. He had loved her, in fact, and Nessuno wonders if that isn’t part of what she’s mourning; never mind what she feels about him. A man who loved her is dead. It would be absurd of her to expect to feel nothing. He had given his heart—a part of it, at least—to her.
And she had betrayed him. She had delivered him into the hands of the men who had gotten him killed. She had, if she were to be particularly savage to herself, slept with the man who had gotten him killed. Incidentally, yes; accidentally, perhaps; but she feels there’s something profound in that, though she cannot be certain what.
“I think I’m mourning him,” she tells Heath. “Jesus Christ, I think I’m mourning him.”
“Don’t,” Heath says.
The rest of the day they’re at Belvoir, using an office that’s supposed to be tasked for accounting. It’s not strictly cover, but it’s out of the way, and they’re left alone to try to gather the information as it comes in, as they’re able to find it. In the early afternoon, they determine that the body has been recovered from the Loudoun County sheriff’s department, is on its way to Bethesda for autopsy and verification.
“Apparently,” Heath says, “there’s not a lot of him to work with.”
Nessuno remembers, unbidden, Tohir’s hand along her spine, the light touch of his fingertips stroking the small of her back. An instant of sense memory, the scent of him, cigarettes and cologne, his breath and then his lips at her shoulder and neck.
“We know the means?”
“Sniper,” Heath says. “Multiple head shots.”
“And the shooter?”
“Got away clean.”
Heath sends Nessuno out of the room while she makes a call, and roughly two hours later they get a positive ID on the body, and Heath sends her out again. Nessuno figures she’s talking to Brock or someone higher on the chain, that there’s some additional level of security to all this. It makes sense, but it makes her self-conscious, makes her wonder, irrationally, if she’s somehow under suspicion herself. When she comes back in, Heath is packing up her notes, tells Nessuno to do the same, then takes the whole collection and stows them in the burn bag they’ve acquired for the occasion. She scans the office from her seat, looking for signs of anything they might’ve left behind, tapping the pen in her hand against the edge of the desk in a rapid, staccato burst. She settles her gaze on Nessuno.
“You might want to be careful.”
Nessuno shakes her head.
“If it was Echo who settled Tohir, he may be looking to settle with you.”
“Echo doesn’t know about me,” Nessuno says.
“He didn’t know where Tohir was or that he was being moved, either.”
“If he knew about me, I’d be dead.”
“Somebody talked,” Heath says. “About what, we can’t be sure.”
Nessuno returns to the Palomar a little after seven that evening, making her way there alone after Heath drops her at the Blue Line. She gets off at Farragut West, but instead of making straight for the hotel, she lets herself wander, telling herself that this is due diligence, that she’s being as careful as Heath has urged. Shoulder checks and changes of direction, but it’s a lie, and she knows it. She finds herself on Pennsylvania Avenue, looking at the White House through black bars and wiping tears from her eyes. An irrational anger in her grief, anger at the men inside that building who don’t even know her name, fury at herself for even shedding these tears.
She clears her eyes, reorients, heads for the hotel. She wonders where Bell is, what he’s doing. There’s no other way to view Tohir than as a high-level asset, an asset Bell had been charged with protecting, an asset he’s gotten killed. At the minimum, there’s a dereliction of duty question at work. If he’s not cooling in a stockade somewhere, he damn well should be.
She realizes she’s angry with him. Furious, really.
She finds him waiting in her room, her bag already packed.
“I need you to come with me,” Bell says.
Chapter Fifteen
THE MAN BRIGADIER General Emmet Brock, the soldier, has named the Architect, the man CW2 Petra Graziella Nessuno, also known as Blackfriars, calls Echo, the man Zoya, who uses the name Jordan Webber-Hayden, calls her Lover, has rules:
Never meet face-to-face if at all possible. Use dead drops and cutouts, witting or unwitting, whenever available. Engage in direct communication only when absolutely, unavoidably necessary, and keep it brief. Avoid acting in haste, and always engage with caution. Honestly evaluate your successes and, more vitally, your failures. Rely on intelligence over force. Use force with precision. Where precision fails, overwhelm. Employ the best wherever possible, but admit that who you have is not always who you want and account for their failings. Remain anonymous, even among those you trust most.
Never remain in the same place for longer than twenty-four hours.
It is this last rule that has made the Architect a nomad. In a world of cell-phone triangulation, surveillance satellites, closed-circuit television, and rapid response teams, even twenty-four hours is a terrible risk. He is more comfortable on the move and grows easily restless now. He has been doing this for almost twenty years. It has become habit. He eschews the permanent address.
When he communicated last with Zoya, four days ago, the Architect was in a furnished rental apartment in Berlin—relatively close, at least on the global scale in which he works, to where the capture team touched down at Ramstein AFB in Kaiserslautern, in fact. Since then, he has made his way south, and three hotels later he is now in Zurich, staying at the Swissôtel under the name Kranzler. He had considered, briefly, taking a room at the Baur au Lac, but Herr Kranzler is a businessman, and such ostentatiousness would not fit him. Tomorrow he will continue south, but he will make an adjustment to the east and spend the night in Milan, in a room already waiting for him there under the name DeMartino. Eventually, he’ll cross the Med down into Africa to deal with business that requires his attention in Bissau. That is his intent, at any rate, but plans change, and he endeavors to always be f
lexible.
At the Swissôtel he takes half an hour to shower, shave, and dress in fresh clothes. He sends out his dirty laundry to be cleaned. He travels with two bags only, one an appropriate and innocuous briefcase, the other a Tumi rolling bag. He has four sets of clothes, one of them for exercise, chargers for all his electronics, and appropriate toiletries. He does not carry a gun, and he does not carry a knife, though he is sure of himself with both. He carries a laptop, because that is the most devastating weapon he has ever wielded.
It is the summer season, and he walks in the late afternoon sunlight with his briefcase until he finds a busy café and a Wi-Fi connection. He orders in German, an affogato, takes small spoonfuls of his espresso-soaked vanilla ice cream while an automated program of his design dances from one e-mail account to another, downloading and, where appropriate, decoding messages. There are reports from operatives all around the world, but none is so pressing that he risks compromising security by reading them in public. He is pleased to see that Zoya has sent him multiple files, heavily encrypted and bounced through countless accounts before they could reach him. This is the information he has been waiting on from Brock, he’s certain.
He finishes his treat, closes his laptop, and goes for a walk through the Altstadt, treading carefully on ancient cobblestones. He has been to Zurich more times than he can count in his travels, but the visit he always remembers is the one with Zoya. Despite knowing better, they had gone out together for an evening, a dinner and a long walk, before returning to his hotel to make love. He had held her hand while they walked, and then he lingered an extra day in the city after letting her believe he’d departed, just to check on her progress and her lessons, all the time fighting the desire to be with her again. Walking now, he misses her more acutely than ever. He knows what he feels is a weakness, the same weakness that she has learned to exploit in others.
Once, he fought against these feelings, tried to silence them, and, failing, came to a horrible conclusion. It wasn’t that he was in love with her; it was that he was powerless to not love her. He could not help himself.