by Graham Brown
The latest series of jolts ended and Kang’s body returned to stillness. He looked at the doctor who was watching the data displayed on a softly glowing LCD monitor.
“You wait too long to speak,” Kang said. “Is the news that bad?”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Your neurological response is still weakening.”
“Then increase the stimulus,” Kang said.
“It will cause a great deal of pain,” the doctor said. “It will feel as if your skin is burning, as if a flame is cutting into you and you cannot pull away from it.”
“Yes,” Kang said. “And in my position you would welcome such sensations.”
The doctor nodded politely. “I’ll need a minute to adjust the settings.”
As the doctor scurried to a new position, Choi stepped forward. Apparently Kang noticed the look on his face.
“You disapprove,” he said.
“It is not my place to approve or disapprove,” Choi replied.
“That is correct,” Kang noted. “What do you have for me?”
“New information on the Americans. The one we thought had been killed in the mountains, the professor. It seems he might be alive.”
“So one of your failures is erased,” Kang noted.
Despite the anger he felt at Kang’s derision, Choi maintained his composure. Dying men had a habit of lashing out and Kang continued to do so.
“Let us hope,” Choi said. “What we know for certain is that either he, or someone using his password, accessed the mainframe at his old university. Information was downloaded, including satellite photos of the Yucatan.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Not precisely, but the terminal he used was in a small town, a large distance from where he and the woman were originally operating. And if she were to try and find him …” Choi let his voice trail off.
“Of course she will,” Kang said. “Where are your people?”
“In Tulum and Puerto Morelos. And in Mexico City, at the Museum of Anthropology, where they did some of their research.”
“This is good,” Kang said. “Keep them out of sight. You moved too early last time.”
Choi nodded and the doctor poked his head up from the equipment he was calibrating. “We’re ready,” he said.
Kang motioned for Choi to leave.
Choi bowed slightly and then stepped out through the cabin door, closing it behind him.
As he walked back to the communications suite, he heard a low buzz emanating from the room he’d just left. He also heard Kang grunting and wincing in unison with the electronic pulses. By the time Choi reached the communications room, Kang’s voice could be heard down the aisle, screaming in agony and pleasure.
CHAPTER 26
Hawker sat in the front passenger seat of a dilapidated, rust-covered jeep as Danielle drove. Yuri sat in the back. The three of them had been motoring along in the Mexican sunshine for hours, a welcome change to the cold drizzle of Hong Kong and the South China Sea.
As they traveled up the coastal road toward Puerto Azul, Hawker watched the sunlight shimmering off the water. In the most bizarre way, it almost felt as if they were on vacation. He and Danielle traveling like some couple, their adopted child, Yuri, seat-belted in the back, wearing a touristy sombrero and oversized plastic sunglasses.
He was quiet, even when spoken to in Russian. Yuri did not often engage. But for the most part he’d been a model child, concerned with little things right in front of him far more than the bigger picture of his surroundings.
Even now he seemed more interested in the clicking sound made by the arms of the plastic sunglasses than actually wearing them. He repeatedly took them off, opening and closing the arms seven or eight times in proximity to his right ear, before Hawker would put them back on his face.
After the tenth round of watching this, Hawker turned to Danielle. “What do you think is wrong with him?”
Danielle glanced in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know,” she said. “He seems to be in his own world. In some ways it reminds me of autism but I’m not sure. He didn’t exactly have a great start to life.”
The look on Danielle’s face was sadness, disappointment. They’d rescued Yuri from one prison but the future likely held another. Hawker understood it.
The rules were often blind to the facts and though he and Danielle could keep Yuri with them for the time being, and certainly would never return him to Kang, the diplomatic situation with Russia would be more difficult. Yuri was a Russian citizen, a ward of the state. And when the time came and the Russians demanded him back, legally there would be no way to stop them.
“Maybe we can keep him,” Hawker said, joking.
“He’s not a stray puppy,” she replied. “But we can’t send him back there.”
Hawker watched as Danielle returned to scanning the roadside and the signs. The drive had been a long one. Nine hours cross-country with only a canvas targa top to block the sun. Sweat, sand, and grime coated their bodies and the urge to stop, shower, and sleep had been hard to resist. But time was short and so they’d driven almost nonstop.
And yet Danielle looked great to him, as stunning as he remembered, in some ways even better. In Brazil, pressured by superiors to get an impossible job done under a daunting timeline, she’d been very official and intense. But here, driving the old jeep, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a crumpled cowboy hat, with her skin tanning in the sun, she seemed more natural, more at peace.
“You know,” he said, “we could’ve found a car with air-conditioning.”
She laughed, an easy laugh. “We have the two-sixty air conditioner.”
“The two-sixty?”
“Yeah, two windows down, sixty miles an hour,” she said.
“Great,” Hawker said, wiping more sweat from his face. “I bet James Bond never had the two-sixty air conditioner. Maybe next time we could get an Aston Martin.”
“This suits you better,” she said. “Kind of reminds me of your helicopter.”
He laughed at that. “Yeah, it kind of does.”
The road had taken them to a small fishing village. On the shore, a group of long boats with colorful but fading paint lay motionless side by side. They looked like sea lions basking in the sun. Up ahead was a row of small buildings.
“This is it,” she said. “If McCarter’s still in Mexico, and he wants us to find him, he’ll be here.”
“How can you be sure?”
“When we came down here, we set up shop about fifty miles inland near a ruined Mayan city called Ek Balam, the Black Jaguar. But McCarter kept talking about wanting to come visit this place. I guess he and his wife spent a couple of months here,” Danielle said. “Working all day and making love all night. Never slept a wink, according to him.”
“Sounds nice,” Hawker said. “Except for the working part … and the lack of sleep.”
“Wow, you’re such a romantic.”
She pulled the jeep to the side of the road.
By an hour later they’d checked every motel in town. There were two smaller bed-and-breakfast places up the coast, but one man they’d asked had suggested the small apartment house a few blocks inland.
Danielle pulled up in front of it.
“My turn,” Hawker said. He hopped out and went to see what he could find.
“Moses Negro,” the front desk clerk said, after Hawker described who he was looking for. “Este es loco.”
Hawker remembered McCarter as calm and measured. It was hard to imagine him as “loco” or resembling Moses in any way.
The clerk pointed up the stairs. “Trece, nueve,” he said. Third floor, room nine.
Hawker climbed the rickety stairs and made his way down a short hall.
From the outside the building had looked pretty worn down, old red brick and peeling plaster, but inside it was well kept, though dated and a little cramped.
The hardwood floors beneath his feet were scratched and fading but had been swept imma
culate. On a sofa table at the top of the stairs, a vinelike plant with deep green leaves and bright red flowers spilled out of its pot. Through a window he saw the courtyard; an old stone fountain bubbled in the center. Birds sat on its rim or chirped in the bougainvilleas that climbed trellises along the walls.
The place certainly had charm.
Hawker arrives outside room nine. He listened for a moment.
Nothing.
He knocked. “Professor McCarter?”
No answer. The clerk had not seen McCarter leave for the day, but that didn’t mean he was in. With a key he’d bought for a hundred dollars, Hawker opened the door and stepped inside.
The room was tidy but empty. The bed was made but the blanket that covered it was slightly askew. That seemed out of place with the attention to detail that marked everything else around. Hawker guessed someone had been sitting or lying on the top of the covers. A drawer by the nightstand was not quite closed.
Something felt wrong, though Hawker wasn’t sure what it was.
Movement caught his eye as the thin, gauzy drapes by the window wafted in the soft breeze. He stepped toward them and something heavy slammed into the back of his shoulders. He fell forward, stumbling to the window.
A pistol cocked behind his head.
“Who are you?!” a gruff voice shouted.
The voice was familiar. It sounded like McCarter.
Hawker began to turn around.
“Don’t!” the voice shouted. “Don’t you move!”
“I’m just trying to show you who I am,” Hawker said as calmly as he could. “That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Right,” the person behind him said. “Okay, right. Just do it slowly.”
And so Hawker turned as slowly as he possibly could.
His eyes locked on to McCarter, and he instantly understood why the clerk had considered him loco. The professor looked like a crazy man. Bushy beard, unkempt hair, eyes filled with more lines than a Pennsylvania road map.
“Remember me?” Hawker asked. “We had a hell of a time in Brazil together.”
McCarter’s face softened as if he recognized Hawker. But then he stiffened again. “Are you real?” he asked.
“Am I what?”
“Real,” McCarter repeated. “Are you real?”
Hawker wasn’t sure what to make of this. Perhaps there was more to the loco description than he’d thought.
“I am real,” Hawker said as calmly as he could. “Though I have to point out, if I wasn’t, I would probably lie to you and insist that I was real anyway.”
McCarter relaxed a bit more. He lowered the gun an inch. “Good point,” he admitted. “Perhaps this is not the best method of gauging reality.”
Hawker extended his hand and calmly directed the gun away from him. “Whatever you decide, I’d rather you didn’t shoot me to find out for sure.”
McCarter uncocked the hammer and tossed the gun on the small table beside him, then looked up at Hawker again. “It’s a cap gun,” he admitted sadly. “All I could get my hands on.”
“A cap gun.” Hawker had to laugh.
“It’s just …,” McCarter started saying. “Sometimes I see things … or hear things … and they’re not really there. And you don’t seem like someone I would run into … I mean … I wasn’t expecting …” He couldn’t find the words. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Hawker looked around, rubbing the back of his neck and trying to figure out how McCarter had surprised him.
“Apparently getting suckered by the old hide-behind-the-door trick.”
“Another reason I thought you weren’t real,” McCarter said quickly. “Who would fall for that?”
Hawker nodded. “I must be losing my touch.”
McCarter smiled. In his sudden moment of happiness he looked even crazier than before. A delirious, joyful madman.
“Still it is good to see you,” McCarter said. “Sorry about hitting you,” he added apologetically. “I don’t like hurting anyone, you know. I’m a pacifist for the most part.”
Before Hawker could reply, the sound of footsteps on the wooden floors could be heard in the hall. And then Danielle popped her head in, with Yuri holding her hand.
“We didn’t feel like waiting in the car,” she said.
As confused as he was by Hawker’s sudden appearance, McCarter seemed even more stunned by Danielle’s arrival with a young child in tow.
“It’s a long story,” Hawker promised.
As the details of both party’s stories were relayed, Danielle took a look at the wound on McCarter’s leg. It was clearly still infected.
“Despite the best care of an accredited witch doctor and my own attempts at self-medication, I’ve been having hallucinations and nightmares,” he said. “And feeling paranoid in a way I can’t quite explain.”
“Fever and lack of sleep can do that to you,” she said. “Not to mention the delayed reaction to being attacked and shot. You should be in a hospital.”
She looked at the bottle of pills he’d been taking. “These aren’t strong enough to fight what you’re going through,” she said. “You’re probably just making the infection resistant. I’m going to get you some real antibiotics. And then I’m sending you back home.”
“You’re not sending me anywhere,” McCarter said roughly. Then, as if he’d realized how it sounded, he added, “I mean, I’m the one who started this, remember. I’m not going home till we’re done.”
“This is only going to get more dangerous,” she said, hoping he would change his mind.
He took a deep breath. “You’re welcome to leave if you want. Or to stay and help, but I’m not finished yet.”
Beside her, Hawker began to laugh. “He sounds like you.”
McCarter responded, “I know you think I’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid but I haven’t. I don’t care about the NRI or the company line or any of that other stuff; I just know we have to find these stones, before someone else does.”
Danielle sighed. “Just thought I’d offer. But if you’re staying, I’m staying. For all the reasons we started this in the first place.”
McCarter looked at Hawker. “What about you?”
Hawker laughed. “I’m pretty sure this is going to end up in a train wreck of some kind,” he said. “But as crazy as it sounds, I have nowhere better to be.”
McCarter looked out the window. The ocean breeze had come wafting through the curtains once again, fresh with the salt air.
“Maybe you do,” McCarter said. “Maybe we all do.”
CHAPTER 27
Ivan Saravich emerged from the subway car and into the transfer mezzanine of the Park Kultury metro station in central Moscow. The opulent surroundings resembled a museum or the hall of some great palace. The floor was tiled in large squares of polished black and white like a giant chessboard; the walls were covered with marble and lined with ornate sculptures. The whole station was lit in a warm glow from rows of hanging chandeliers.
Unlike American subways, made mostly of functional concrete and steel, the Russian metro was more than just a mode of transportation; it was a source of pride, Russian pride now, Soviet pride when they were designed and built in the 1950s and ’60s. For a nation that considered itself a worker’s paradise, the metro stations were to be the workers’ palace, their great halls.
Saravich remembered the first time he’d walked this particular hall. A twenty-year-old recruit from the Urals, he’d come to Moscow to join the great struggle, to begin his work for the KGB. Entering this hall, he’d felt exactly what the party wanted him to feel: pride, power, and Soviet supremacy. To him it was the dawning of a new age in which the ideology of the common would overcome the oppression of the elite.
Thirty years later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had dissolved and with it went any illusions about the common and the elite.
Saravich had come to the conclusion that any form of government would inevitably evolve into extensions of the elite
. It was the natural progression; those who wanted power gathered it unto themselves. Those who craved equality lacked the ambition, ego, or selfishness to match up. And so the change.
With the new age in Russia, Saravich began to understand that even civilized life was every man for himself. With that in mind, he took to capitalism far more easily than he’d expected, even if he spent most of his time working freelance for the same people who once gave him a government check.
He was wealthier now, enough to retire five times over if he wanted, but he felt no desire to do so. As a widower with no children, no friends, and few outside interests, he saw little point in it. To him this was the true curse of capitalism: Work was rewarding in a way few other things could be, and so it diminished everything else in its wake.
Making his way down the concourse of Park Kultury, Saravich felt nothing of the pride it once stirred in him. He walked briskly, head down, hands shoved into his pockets. The mezzanine looked as splendid as ever, but it was just a train station now.
A gravelly voice broke his stride. “Comrade,” the voice said from behind him, “you seem to be in a hurry.”
Saravich slowed but kept walking. He recognized the voice and the question or at least its ilk: an old KGB habit of asking a suggestive but open-ended query, thought to startle those who might have something to hide.
The shape of a hulking man fell in beside him; the man was a hundred pounds heavier than Saravich, but not fat, just oversized, with huge arms, huge shoulders, a huge head. Saravich knew the man’s name, but no one used it. They simply called him Ropa: the Mountain.
“Why are you meeting me here?” Saravich asked. “I have a report scheduled for the morning. Is that not soon enough?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ropa said. “It is known already what happened in Hong Kong. The firestorm is growing. Soon someone will have to burn.”
“Me?”
“Or all of us.”
All of us. It was hard for Saravich to imagine that Ropa and the others who hired him would feel the heat for what had gone wrong. Most likely Saravich would find his feet being held out for the flames to lick and taste.