Black Sun: A Thriller (17 page)

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.”

I
van 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.

“What were you thinking, hiring that American?”

Saravich turned to face Ropa. “It seemed a good way to keep us out of the picture. And it has. You notice there is no backlash.”

Ropa laughed and Saravich wondered if the laughter was directed at his attempt to justify the failure or some other, deeper fact. Whatever the truth, Saravich was too tired to worry about it tonight.

He turned and began to walk again, soon reaching the stairwell.

Ropa followed, just a foot or so behind him. It gave Saravich the distinct impression of being herded somewhere.

The two men exited into the frigid Moscow air. Snow was falling, illuminated by the city lights. Five inches or more already coated the streets. A light snow by Russian standards. Waiting in that snow was a black Maserati sedan. Twenty years ago it would have been a boxy Zil, the Russian equivalent of an American Lincoln or Cadillac. But with the new wealth in Russia, Mercedes and BMW were favored. Always looking to top his peers, Ropa went a step beyond.

A Maserati with oversized, studded snow tires. What would the Italians think? It was like a runway model wearing galoshes.

“You’re coming with us,” Ropa said.

“Where?”

“To explain yourself.”

With that Saravich felt Ropa’s paw of a hand fall heavily on his shoulder. It guided him to the sedan’s rear door.

A moment later Saravich found himself in the back with another man, one he didn’t recognize. Ropa squeezed through the front door and filled the passenger seat to capacity as the driver put the car in gear.

So this is how it ends
, Saravich thought.
On a snowy night in Moscow I’ll disappear. Perhaps not to be found until the spring thaw
.

The car moved through traffic and crossed the Moscow River. A minute later they were pulling to a stop at the very center of Red Square.

Would they really do it here? Maybe, if they want to send a message
.

Another vehicle pulled up beside them, pointing the opposite direction and berthing so close that neither vehicle could open a door.

Ropa lowered his window. Quick words were exchanged and he snatched something being held out by the passenger of the other car.

“Let’s go,” he said to the driver.

As the Maserati began to move, Ropa did what he could to turn and face Saravich, handing him a padded envelope.

“You have one more chance,” Ropa told him. “The orders come straight from the FSB now.”

“What are they?” Saravich asked disdainfully.

“Go there, find the boy, and bring him back to the Science Directorate. If you can’t capture him, then you are to kill him and everyone who has touched him.”

Saravich looked inside the envelope. A new passport, cash, instructions. “I don’t do that kind of work anymore,” he said. “Tell them to send one of their own.”

“It was your disgrace,” Ropa said angrily. “Petrov was your brother.”

“My half brother,” Ivan insisted.

“Still,” Ropa said. “It is your family that has ruined this. You must be the one to pay for it.”

Saravich looked outside. He’d done much and given up much for the Soviet Union, but despite a life of work, his name was now a mark of dishonor. Then again,
what did he care of honor anymore? What had it ever gotten him?

“You will be met in Mexico City,” Ropa added. “The men will take orders from you, but you will not be free to leave them. Do you understand?”

Of course he understood. The men would be FSB, from the ninth directorate, assassins with orders to kill whomever he asked them to kill. And then to eliminate Saravich himself if they did not bring the boy home, or perhaps even if they did.

“You may think you have nothing to lose,” Ropa told him, “but you still have nephews, nieces. These people will suffer if you do anything less than what’s necessary.”

Saravich stared at Ropa, but the Mountain did not blink. The threat was real. He tucked the envelope in his jacket and glanced out the window. They were approaching Moscow International. He would be boarding a plane without ever going home.

Apparently there would be no rest for the wicked.

T
he thirty-foot V-hulled fishing boat sliced across the Gulf of Mexico with surprising grace; surprising because the boat itself was a battered veteran of twenty years, with dents, peeling paint, and saltwater corrosion plainly visible on every surface. Even the engines had sputtered and coughed when Danielle had started them, sounding like old tractor motors as the boat traveled at low speed.