Devra moved over as Arkadin took the wheel. Clouds had slid across the moon, steeping the road in dense shadow as they made their way through the mountain pass. There was no traffic; the only illumination for many miles was the car’s own headlights. Finally, the moon rose from its cloud bed and the hemmed-in world around them was bathed in an eerie bluish light.
“Times like this when I miss my American,” Devra mused, her head against the seat back. “He came from California. I loved especially his stories about surfing. My God, what a weird sport. Only in America, huh? But I used to think how great it would be to live in a land of sunshine, ride endless highways in convertibles, and swim whenever you wanted to.”
“The American dream,” Arkadin said sourly.
She sighed. “I so wanted him to take me with him when he left.”
“My friend Mischa wanted me to take him with me,” Arkadin said, “but that was a long time ago.”
Devra turned her head toward him. “Where did you go?”
“To America.” He laughed shortly. “But not to California. It didn’t matter to Mischa; he was crazy about America. That’s why I didn’t take him. You go to a place to work, you fall in love with it, and now you don’t want to work anymore.” He paused for a moment, concentrated on navigating through a hairpin switchback. “I didn’t tell him that, of course,” he continued. “I could never hurt Mischa like that. We both grew up in slums, you know. Fucking hard life, that is. I was beaten up so many times I stopped counting. Then Mischa stepped in. He was bigger than I was, but that wasn’t it. He taught me how to use a knife—not just stab, but how to throw it, as well. Then he took me to a guy he knew, skinny little man, but he had no fat on him at all. In the blink of an eye he had me down on my back in so much pain my eyes watered. Christ, I couldn’t even breathe. Mischa asked me if I’d like to be able to do that and I said, ‘Shit, where do I sign up?’ ”
The headlights of a truck appeared, coming toward them, a horrific dazzle that momentarily blinded both of them. Arkadin slowed down until the truck lumbered past.
“Mischa’s my best friend, my only friend, really,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“Will I meet him when you take me back to Moscow?”
“He’s in America now,” Arkadin said. “But I’ll take you to his apartment, where I’ve been staying. It’s along the Frunzenskaya embankment. His living room overlooks Gorky Park. The view is very beautiful.” He thought fleetingly of Gala, who was still in the apartment. He knew how to get her out; it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
“I know I’ll love it,” Devra said. It was a relief to hear him talk about himself. Encouraged by his talkative mood, she continued, “What work did you do in America?”
And just like that his mood flipped. He braked the car to a halt. “You drive,” he said.
Devra had grown used to his mercurial mood swings, but watched him come around the front of the car. She slid over. He slammed the passenger’s-side door shut and she put the car in gear, wondering what tender nerve she’d touched.
They continued along the road, heading down the mountainside.
“We’ll hit the highway soon enough,” she said to break the thickening silence. “I can’t wait to crawl into a warm bed.”
Inevitably there came a time when Arkadin took the initiative with Marlene. It happened while she was sleeping. He crept down the hall to her door. It was child’s play for him to pick the lock with nothing more than the wire that wrapped the cork in the bottle of champagne Icoupov served at dinner. Of course, being a Muslim, Icoupov himself had not partaken of the alcohol, but Arkadin and Marlene had no such restrictions. Arkadin had volunteered to open the champagne and when he did he palmed the wire.
The room smelled of her—of lemons and musk, a combination that set off a stirring below his belly. The moon was full, low on the horizon. It looked as if God were squeezing it between his palms.
Arkadin stood still, listening to her deep even breaths, every once in a while catching the hint of a snore. The bedcovers rustled as she turned onto her right side, away from him. He waited until her breathing settled again before moving to the bed. He climbed, knelt over her. Her face and shoulder were in moonlight, her neck in shadow, so that it appeared to him as if he’d already decapitated her. For some reason, this vision disturbed him. He tried to breathe deeply and easily, but the disturbing vision tightened his chest, made him so dizzy that he almost lost his balance.
And then he felt something hard and cold that in a drawn breath brought him back to himself. Marlene was awake, her head turned, staring at him. In her right hand was a Glock 20 10mm.
“I’ve got a full magazine,” she said.
Which meant she had fourteen more rounds if she missed the kill with her first shot. Not that that was likely. The Glock was one of the most powerful handguns on the market. She wasn’t fooling around.
“Back off.”
He rolled off the bed and she sat up. Her bare breasts shone whitely in the moonlight. She appeared totally unconcerned with her semi-nudity.
“You weren’t asleep.”
“I haven’t slept since I came here,” Marlene said. “I’ve been anticipating this moment. I’ve been waiting for you to steal into my room.”
She set aside the Glock. “Come to bed. You’re safe with me, Leonid Danilovich.”
As if mesmerized, he climbed back onto the bed and, like a little child, rested his head against the warm cushion of her breasts while she rocked him tenderly. She lay curled around him, willing her warmth to seep into his cool, marble flesh. Gradually, she felt his heartbeat cease its manic racing. To the steady sound of her heartbeat, he fell into slumber.
Some time later, she woke him with a whisper in his ear. It wasn’t difficult; he wanted to be released from his nightmare. He started, staring at her for a long moment, his body rigid. His mouth felt raw from yelling in his sleep. Returning to the present, he recognized her. He felt her arms around him, the protective curl of her body, and to her astonishment and elation he relaxed.
“Nothing can harm you here, Leonid Danilovich,” she breathed. “Not even your nightmares.”
He stared at her in an odd, unblinking fashion. Anyone else would have been frightened, but not Marlene.
“What made you cry out?” she said.
“There was blood everywhere… on the bed.”
“Your bed? Were you beaten, Leonid?”
He blinked, and the spell was broken. He turned over, faced away from her, waiting for the ashen light of dawn.
Twenty-One
ON A FINE clear afternoon, with the sun already low in the sky, Tyrone drove Soraya Moore to the NSA safe house nestled within the rolling hills of Virginia. Somewhere, in some anonymous cybercafé in northeast Washington, Kiki was sitting at a public computer terminal, waiting to sow the software virus she’d devised to disable the property’s two thousand CCTV surveillance cameras.
“It’ll loop the video images back on themselves endlessly,” she’d told them. “That was the easy part. In order to make the code a hundred percent invisible it’ll work for ten minutes, no more. At that point, it will, in essence, self-destruct, deforming into tiny packets of harmless code the system won’t pick up as anomalous.”
Everything now depended on timing. Since it was impossible to send an electronic signal from the NSA safe house without it being picked up and tagged as suspicious, they had worked out an external timing scheme, which meant that if anything went wrong—if Tyrone was delayed for any reason—the ten minutes would tick by and the plan would fail. This was the plan’s Achilles’ heel. Still, it was their only option and they decided to take it.
Besides, Deron had a number of goodies he’d concocted for them after consulting the architectural plans of the building he’d mysteriously conjured up. She had tried to get them herself and struck out; NSA had what she thought was a total lock on the property records.
Just before they stopped at
the front gates, Soraya said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
Tyrone nodded, stony-faced. “Let’s get on wid it.” He was pissed that she’d even thought to ask that question. When he was on the street, if one of his crew dared to question his courage or resolve that would’ve been the end of him. Tyrone had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t the street. He knew all too well that she’d accepted a huge risk in taking him in off the street—civilizing him, as he sometimes thought of the process when he felt particularly hemmed in by the rules and regulations of white men he knew nothing about.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he’d ever have stepped into the white man’s world were it not for his love of her. Here was a woman of color—a Muslim, no less—who was working for the Man. Not just the Man, but the Man squared, cubed into infinity, whatever. If she didn’t mind doing it, why should he? But his upbringing was about as different from hers as it could get. From what she’d told him her parents had given her everything she needed; he barely had parents, and they either didn’t want to give him anything or were incapable of giving it. She had the advantage of a first-class education; he had Deron who, though he’d taught Tyrone many things, was no substitute for white man’s education.
What was ironic was that only months ago, he would have sneered at the kind of education she had. But once he’d met her he began to understand how ignorant he really was. He was street-smart, sure—more than she was. But he was intimidated around people who’d graduated high school and college. The more he observed them maneuvering through their world—how they talked, negotiated, interacted with one another—the more he understood just how stunted his life had been. Street smarts and nothing else was just what the doctor ordered for picking your way through the hood, but there was a whole fucking world beyond the hood. Once he realized that, like Deron, he wanted to explore the world beyond the borders of his neighborhood, he knew he’d have to remake himself from the toes up.
All this was on his mind when he saw the imposing stone-and-slate building within the high iron fence. As he knew from the plans he’d memorized at Deron’s it was perfectly symmetrical, with four high chimneys, eight gabled rooms. A spiky fistful of antennas, aerials, and satellite dishes was the only anomalous feature.
“You look very handsome in that suit,” Soraya said.
“It’s fuckin’ uncomfortable,” he said. “I feel stiff.”
“Just like every NSA agent.”
He laughed the way a Roman gladiator might as he entered the Colosseum.
“Which is the point,” she added. “You’ve got the tag Deron gave you?”
He patted a place over his heart. “Safe and sound.”
Soraya nodded. “Okay, here we go.”
He knew there was a chance he’d never come out of that house alive, but he didn’t care. Why should he? What had his life amounted to up until now? Shit-all. He’d stood up—just as Deron had—made his choice. That’s all a man asks for in this life.
Soraya presented the credentials LaValle had sent her by messenger this morning. Nevertheless, both she and Tyrone were scrutinized by a bookend pair of suits with square jaws and standing orders not to smile. Finally, they passed muster, and were waved through.
As Tyrone drove down the snaking gravel drive Soraya pointed out the terrible gauntlet of surveillance systems an intruder would have to pass in order to infiltrate from beyond the property’s borders. This monologue reassured him that they’d already bypassed these risks by being LaValle’s guests. Now all they had to do was negotiate the interior of the house. Getting out again was another matter entirely.
He drove up to the portico. Before he could turn off the engine, a valet came to relieve him of the car, yet another square-jawed military type who’d never look right in his civilian suit.
General Kendall, punctual as usual, was at the door to meet them. He gave Soraya’s hand a perfunctory shake, then eyeballed Tyrone as she introduced him.
“Your bodyguard, I presume,” Kendall said in a tone someone would use for a rebuke. “But he doesn’t look like standard-issue CI material.”
“This isn’t a standard CI rendezvous,” Soraya returned tartly.
Kendall shrugged. Another perfunctory handshake and he turned on his heel, leading them inside the hulking structure. Through the public rooms, gilt-edged, refined, expensive beyond modern-day imagining, along hushed corridors lined with martial paintings, past mullioned windows through which the January sunlight sparked in beams that stretched across the plush blue carpet. Without seeming to, Tyrone took note of every detail, as if he were casing the joint for a high-end robbery, which in fact he was. They passed the door down to the basement levels. It looked precisely as Soraya had drawn it from memory for him and Deron.
They went on another ten yards to the walnut doors leading to the Library. The fireplace contained a roaring blaze, a grouping had been set with four chairs in the same spot where Soraya said she had sat with Kendall and LaValle on her first visit. Willard met them just inside the door.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Moore,” he said with his customary half bow. “How very nice to see you again so soon. Would you care for your Ceylon tea?”
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
Tyrone was about to ask for a Coke, but thought better of it. Instead he ordered another Ceylon tea, having not the faintest idea what it tasted like.
“Very good,” Willard said, and left them.
“This way,” Kendall said unnecessarily, leading them to the grouping of chairs where Luther LaValle was already seated, staring out the mullioned windows at the light gathered to an oval over the western hills.
He must have heard the whisper of their approach, because he rose and turned just as they came up. The maneuver seemed to Soraya artfully rehearsed, and therefore as artificial as LaValle’s smile. Dutifully, she introduced Tyrone, and they all sat down together.
LaValle steepled his fingers. “Before we begin, Director, I feel compelled to point out that our own archives department has unearthed some fragmentary history on the Black Legion. Apparently, they did exist during the time of the Third Reich. They were composed of Muslim prisoners of war who were brought back to Germany from the first putsches into the Soviet Union. These Muslims, mainly of Turkish descent from the Caucasus, detested Stalin so much they’d do anything to topple his regime, even becoming Nazis.”
LaValle shook his head like a history professor recounting evil days to a class of wide-eyed students. “It’s a particularly unpleasant footnote in a thoroughly repugnant decade. But as for the Black Legion itself, there’s no evidence whatsoever that it survived the regime that spawned it. Besides which, its benefactor Himmler was a master of propaganda, especially when it came to advancing himself in the eyes of Hitler. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the role of the Black Legion on the Eastern Front was minimal, that it was in fact Himmler’s fantastic propaganda machine that gave it the feared reputation it enjoyed, not anything its members themselves did.”
He smiled, the sun emerging from behind storm clouds. “Now, in that light, let me take a look at the Typhon intercepts.”
Soraya tolerated this rather condescending introduction, meant to discredit the origin of the intercepts before she even handed them over. She allowed indignation and humiliation to pass through her so she could remain calm and focused on her mission. Pulling the slim briefcase onto her lap, she unlocked the coded lock, extracted a red file with a thick black stripe across its upper right-hand corner, marking it as DIRECTOR EYES ONLY—material of the highest security clearance.
Staring LaValle in the face, she handed it over.
“Excuse me, Director.” Tyrone held out his hand. “The electronic tape.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot,” Soraya said. “Mr. LaValle, would you please hand the file to Mr. Elkins.”
LaValle checked the file more closely, saw a ribbon of shiny metal sealing the file. “Don’t bother. I can
peel this back myself.”
“Not if you want to read the intercepts,” Tyrone said. “Unless the tape is opened with this”—he held up a small plastic implement—“the file will incinerate within seconds.”
LaValle nodded his approval of the security measures Soraya had taken.
As he gave the file to Tyrone, Soraya said, “Since our last meeting my people have intercepted more communication from the same entity, which increasingly seems to be the command center.”
LaValle frowned. “A command center? That’s highly unusual for a terrorist network, which is, by definition, made up of independent cadres.”
“That’s what makes the intercepts so compelling.”
“It also makes them suspect, in my opinion,” LaValle said. “Which is why I’m anxious to read them myself.”
By this time, Tyrone had slit the metallic security tape, handed the file back. LaValle’s gaze dropped as he opened the file and began to read.
At this point Tyrone said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
LaValle waved a hand. “Go ahead,” he said without looking up.
Kendall watched him as he went up to Willard, who was on his way over with the drinks, to ask for directions. Soraya saw this out of the corner of her eye. If all went well, in the next couple of minutes Tyrone would be standing in front of the door down to the basement at the precise moment Kiki sent the virus to the NSA security system.
Ivan Volkin was a hairy bear of a man, salt-and-pepper hair standing straight up like a madman, a full beard white as snow, small but cheerful eyes the color of a rainstorm. He was slightly bandy-legged, as if he’d been riding a horse all his life. His lined and leathery face lent him a certain dignified aspect, as if in his life he’d earned the respect of many.