Beloved Enemy (22 page)

“In what ways is she vulnerable?”

“If we attack her,” the voice in his ear said, “we’ll only attract more unwanted attention. My position isn’t under scrutiny—yet. I don’t want to do anything to change that.”

“Disruption is our business,” the Syrian said. “I trained you well. Figure something out. Act in a way that will throw suspicion on one of your colleagues. The more confused these Americans are, the better for us.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will.”

Namazi put the car in gear, drove to where the kites were feeding. Their keen eyes had spotted a polecat that must have been hit by a speeding vehicle. He watched them, greedy birds, feasting on the beast’s flesh. Death came to everything, he thought, and everyone.

“About Atlas,” he said.

“These things take time.”

“Even for you?”

Laughter rang in his ear. “You’ve been away from the States too long. You’ve forgotten how paranoid we Americans are.”

“This is why I rely on you,” Namazi said. “Don’t make me use what I have on you.”

There was a short silence, during which Namazi, like a preening carnivore, basked in his supremacy.

“The first operational phase of Atlas is about to be deployed,” the voice said.

“I need the names of its operatives,” Namazi said. “The people who hired me need to disrupt them, feed them disinformation, then pick them off, one by one.”

“Disinformation works both sides of the street.”

The kites’ sharp beaks were bloody, strung with bits of flesh and organs. This was life at its most elemental. There was no hate in the kites’ hearts, no envy, no bitterness for injustices done them or their kin. They were driven simply by the need to eat, to live.

“Meaning?”

“I have heard the whisper of a rumor that someone—CIA, DCS, I don’t know—is sending out disinformation regarding Atlas.”

“An attempt to smoke you out.”

“Yes.”

Namazi’s laugh was as harsh as a jackal’s. “What a joke these people are!”

“And yet it would be a mistake to underestimate them. Dennis Paull was definitely onto something, after all.”

“And now Dennis Paull is dead,” the Syrian snapped. “Leaks are only dangerous until they’re stopped up.” He made an animal noise in the back of his throat. “Go on then. Get on with it.”

*   *   *

Elady Zukhov, standing in the deep mansard shadows thrown by the Paris roofs in twilight, had never married. He had no children of his own. His protégés were his children; he could love them no less than if they were blood of his blood. In his lifetime, he had trained three; Caro was the last and the best.

Zukhov took Caro’s concerns very seriously. It was inconceivable that he would stand by while something untoward happened to her. Like a wolf—his hacker handle—he would rip the throat of anyone who threatened her.

There were many ways to trap a stalker, but none more effective than putting yourself between him and his intended victim. This path was not without danger, but Zukhov had been raised on a steady diet of danger from the time he was eleven years old, when he lived in the great shaggy cemetery-city in Prague, where the ghosts of murdered Jews built their golems in the hours between midnight and dawn.

These were the stories the night watchman used to tell him, trying to scare Zukhov away from witnessing the unholy business from which the watchman made his living—grave robbing and drug dealing.

Far from being frightened, Zukhov, an enterprising orphan whose parents and siblings had been killed shortly after arriving from the Russian heartland, wanted to believe in avenging ghosts and their undead instruments of revenge. But since he never encountered avenging spirits—never even caught a glimpse of them—he decided to become one.

Someone needed to protect the dead, so it might as well be him. He figured there must have been a reason that he was left washed up in that cemetery. That was the closest Zukhov ever came to believing in a divine power, and at last, some weeks later, he took up a rusty, dirt-clotted shovel and stove in the side of the night watchman’s head. What else but the divine spirit could have lent such power to a child’s hand?

Now, watching the night steal over the jewel-like square far below, he recalled those ancient days in Prague with the painful fondness one feels for a lost love.

His head turned. With the darkness came movement, just a blur at the edge of his field of vision, but it was enough. Zukhov had had enough experience with the Syrian to know what—if not who—was coming for Caro. Over the years, as his weight ballooned, he had taught himself to compensate. He moved like a sumo wrestler, like a dancer, his weight centered in his lower belly. Despite his size, he was as deceptively quick as he was agile. When he wished it, his weight seemed to melt away.

This time, however, as he stood on the rooftop of Caro’s building, he had no need to move. Raising his right arm, he fired a bolt from a mini-crossbow he had manufactured himself. The release made virtually no noise. The bolt, traveling almost as fast as a small-caliber bullet, buried itself just below the stalker’s sternum, thrusting him backward, so that he staggered.

Zukhov, springing forward across the canted tiles, caught him before he could pinwheel over the parapet. For a moment, their eyes were at equal level, before Zukhov dropped him to the rooftop. He slid down a little, curled around Zukhov’s feet like a stricken cat.

Lowering himself to his hams, Zukhov slapped the man’s cheek, causing his eyes to flutter open. His face revealed his Middle Eastern origins to Zukhov, who could see that he had recently shaved off his beard, no doubt before he had entered France. His expression, though stoic, could not completely hide the terrible pain he was in.

“You had no chance to get to her,” Zukhov said softly, as a night bird sang on a nearby chimney pot. “No one the Syrian sends to kill her will.”

“He didn’t send me to kill her, or even to hurt her,” the man said slowly and haltingly. “He wants her to come back.”

Zukhov grasped the fletched end of the bolt. “I don’t believe you.”

The man licked his parched lips. “He needs her; no one else can fathom the algorithm protocols she created and set in place. Without her, his financial empire is in shambles. Soon, if he cannot access his money, he will be in real jeopardy.”

“All the more reason for Caroline to stay away.”

“He believes she will return. The financial rewards are substantial.”

“I can only imagine,” Zukhov said dryly. “And if she were to refuse? Then what?”

The man closed his eyes. His blue lips were trembling. “I don’t know.”

Zukhov moved the bolt as if stirring a pot of stew. “Of course you know.”

The man groaned. He seemed to be bleeding from his eyes.

Zukhov searched him for the weapon the Syrian had given him to use on Caro should she refuse his offer. What he found chilled him to the bone: it was a lead vial.

“What is in this?” Zukhov said, though, being Russian, he suspected he already knew.

The assassin shuddered as his breath sawed in and out of him. “I had orders to poison her,” he said, “with plutonium.”

*   *   *

What would it be like to be broiled alive? Jack, sweltering in the heat emitted by the powerful UV, awoke to the groggy feeling of being a lobster in a pot with its claws bound with stout rubber bands. The difference was, he’d probably go blind before he was fully cooked.

Keeping his eyes squeezed shut, he reached up, fumbled behind his head. Every tanning bed had a kill switch embedded in the lid. He found it, after a short search, but when he depressed the button nothing happened. The lamps were still burning brightly. The kill switch on this bed had been deactivated.

Now he pushed with both palms against the lid, but it was firmly shut. He could not budge it. The adrenaline pumping through his system was working overtime at dissipating the drug he had ingested with the hot chocolate. As a result, it was running its course prematurely. He could feel an unmistakable lethargy beneath his frenzy, and this, more than anything, terrified him. When his overtaxed system stopped producing adrenaline, he was finished.

He tried to move faster, but that only resulted in him becoming even more aware of how debilitated he was. Between the drug, the UV lamps blasting him, and the confined quarters, he felt himself drifting away on a tide of resignation and, worse, surrender. He recalled reading accounts of people on the verge of freezing to death feeling exactly this way just before they were saved. But there was no one to save him here. The invidious hotel staff was arrayed against him.

He felt his lips peeling, then splitting painfully. His ears and forehead were blistering, and he was having trouble breathing. He forced himself to concentrate, but the drug was still working its way through his system and he kept having three- and four-second blackouts, after which he had to spend precious moments gathering thoughts that had exploded away from him, toward the dark margins of his consciousness.

He managed to raise one hand over his head. Turning his head to one side, he curled his fingers into a fist, smashed it into one of the UV tubes. It didn’t shatter, as he had expected. He tried again and again, but the glass was thick, coated with a special material that spread the UV rays evenly over the length of the lamp, and on his back he lacked both the leverage and the space to bring all his strength to bear.

Tears of frustration creeping out from between his squeezed-shut lids seemed to sizzle on his cheeks, evaporating almost instantly. The vault of artificial suns continued to beat down on him, determined to be his sole companions into death.

*   *   *

“Is that all?” Dickinson said. “Is that all there is to it?”

“That’s all,” Jonatha said, as she collated papers on her side of the table at which Henry Dickinson had been sitting, answering her questions for the past twelve minutes. She regarded him from beneath long lashes. “You seem disappointed.”

He laughed. “Relieved. Bemused, maybe. But not disappointed.”

“Tell me.” Jonatha laced her fingers together. “What were you anticipating?”

“I don’t know. Something more along the lines of an interrogation. Especially after…”

Jonatha’s eyes sparkled in the overhead lights, which she had softened to a rosy glow before Dickinson had stepped into the room. The whispered voices coming from the hidden speakers in the floor were all female, like the cooing of doves. “Imagine interrogating the acting director of homeland security!”

He laughed again, this time with a measure of uncertainty. “It’s in the realm of possibility. After all, Dennis Paull was killed on my watch and, of course, we’re talking about Atlas.”

“Yes, Atlas.” Jonatha tapped the butt end of her pen against her papers. “Tell me about Atlas.”

Dickinson shook his head. “Atlas is strictly need to know.”

“Do you think Director Krofft would have assigned me to head up Arclight without briefing me on Atlas?”

“I have no idea,” Dickinson said. “But if that’s so, then you have no need to ask me about it.”

Jonatha smiled, as if to herself. “You’re free to leave, Director.”

He stood up. “Did I pass?”

She stared up at him impassively.

“Of course.” He nodded and turned to go.

“Henry…”

He turned back, his hands gripping the back of the chair on which he had been sitting. “Yes?”

“What is it you wish to ask me?”

“What are you, some kind of…?” He waved away his words as if paddling upstream. “I did want to ask you something.”

She tilted her head his way, the subtlest of gestures. “Please.”

“We got off to a rocky start. My bad. Maybe there’s some way … I was wondering if you’d have a drink with me sometime.”

“How about tonight?”

Dickinson stared at her, his mouth partly open. “I didn’t—”

“Well, what would life be without surprises?” She stood. “Shall we say eight, at the St. Giles’s Club?”

“I’m not a member,” Dickinson said.

“No worries,” Jonatha said with a farewell smile. “I am.”

*   *   *

Jack woke, passed out, only to rise again into his living nightmare. His situation was now desperate and he concentrated all his energy into a single point, like a dark blade, in an attempt to push the drug through his system, metabolize it faster and faster. This was easier said than done. Certain endorphins, which caused the metabolism to speed up or slow down, had to be activated, either through pain or fooling the autonomous nervous system into believing it was in imminent danger of dying. And yet, Jack possessed the ability to accomplish this difficult task.

Was it his imagination or was his mind clearing? Marshaling his thoughts, he put them into action. The cramped space made maneuvering his arms terribly awkward, but after several false starts, he managed to get one hand back down by his side. Jamming the hand into his pocket, he drew out Scheiwold’s gravity knife. Securing it between his teeth, he manipulated one hand to open the blade, which was beautiful, blinding in the UV light, and narrow, which suited his purpose.

Using the same hand, he took the knife out of his mouth and applied the tip of the blade to the locking mechanism, working the tip back and forth, praying that the force required wouldn’t snap it off.

Behind his tightly closed lids, brights spots were blooming, blinding flowers, spreading their petals, proliferating at an alarming pace as the UV rays penetrated the thin skin and started to effect his eyes. If he didn’t get out of here soon, he’d be permanently blind.

Sweat rolled down the sides of his face from both the heat and the intense concentration required to get the knife tip through the lock. Once or twice, he was sure the tip was going to snap, and even though it cost him in fear, he eased off, allowing the steel to come back to true. Then he began all over again, listening to his heartbeat, the blood rushing in his temples, his shallow breathing, and, beyond all of that, the tiny telltale sounds of metal against metal that told him his progress was slow but steady.

He needed for it not to be slow, he needed to find a way to speed up without endangering the blade. Turning his body just a fraction allowed his other hand to assist, and now with both hands guiding the blade, he felt the lock give, then give again.