Deliver Us From Evil (30 page)

R
EGGIE LOVED
Trafalgar Square. For her it seemed to define all things British in one sparkling geographic footprint. One had Lord Nelson
on his forty-six-meter-high granite column, the savior of the British Empire honored for all time for his heroic death at
the Battle of Trafalgar. And even if every school-aged child no longer knew exactly who Nelson was or what he’d done, his
statue still stood as a memorial to the indomitability of the British people.

And yet there were also the great beastly pigeons. Though Nelson had been scrubbed clean several years ago and the city had
taken steps to rid the area of the cooing winged creatures, the birds were simply an unstoppable force, such that the poor
admiral was routinely covered in pigeon shit. Down below every make, model, and manner of human being walked, sat, danced,
cried, ate, drank, performed, snapped pictures, read, flirted with their neighbor, and occasionally had sex late at night.
This all went on while colorful cabs covered in advertisements and red elongated bendy-buses sped by with the intensity necessary
to survive in one of the world’s great metropolises. It was the perfect blend of the staid historical and the radical new
and Reggie took it all in, forgetting for the moment that she was going to meet a man who could possibly destroy her.

Although it seemed a bit absurd considering all she had to think about, Reggie had been most nervous about what to wear. She
had washed all her clothes and selected a pale green dress of simple design that tapered at the waist, showed off her tan,
and stopped several inches above her knees. Its front was scooped but not too much. She had pulled out and then discarded
the one push-up bra she owned, selecting a more modest one instead. She had decided against wearing a sweater over the dress
because the weather in London had not matched that in Leavesden, which was often the case. The skies had cleared, the temperature
had cracked seventy, which was cause for celebration across the city, and the slight breeze from the south was even more warming.
Her heels were high, taking her to within eight inches of the man with whom she would shortly be having dinner. She had packed
her hair up high, letting a few strands drizzle down her long neck. Chunky aquamarine earrings and a matching necklace she’d
purchased years ago in Thailand completed the ensemble.

As she walked down the side street where he had arranged to meet her, Reggie surreptitiously checked her makeup in the side
mirror of a parked motorbike while pretending to admire the machine. With his height he would be easy to spot even with all
the people around. Yet the street also had many places of hidden observation. He was probably watching her right now, in fact.

She thought for a moment and then just decided what the hell. She pirouetted in a tight circle, one heel spike firmly planted
against the pavement, while slowly waving in all directions like a beauty queen on display. This action made her briefly forget
her troubles on a rare gorgeous summer’s eve in the city she adored above all others.

The touch on her shoulder made her jump. She stopped spinning and faced him. Her first observation was that he’d also dressed
carefully for the evening, in pressed gray slacks with a sharp crease, white polo shirt, and a navy blazer. His short hair
had the shine of shampoo and he was freshly shaved. His scent reminded her of the luxurious beach in Thailand where she’d
bought the necklace and earrings from a pale-skinned man carrying a shabby briefcase full of trinkets and wearing a Speedo.
Shaw’s smell was balmy, sand, ocean, the sway of exotic trees; it settled just firmly enough in her nostrils to make her feel
a bit unsteady on her feet.

“You look great,” he said.

“No more seasickness. I promise.” She tapped the ground with her spike heels. “Firmly on terra firma.”

Shaw glanced around before returning his gaze to her. Reggie could sense in that one motion that he had assessed all potential
threats and filed them away in some neat data bank in his mind.

“You like seafood?” he said.

“That’s actually my absolute favorite.”

“I know a place in Mayfair.”

“Sounds brilliant.”

He looked hesitant for a moment and then held out his arm. She quickly slipped her hand through it before he could reconsider
the offer. His hesitation had made Reggie inwardly smile. Uncertainty humanized a person so wonderfully, she thought. Reggie
slightly increased the pressure on his arm to show him he’d made the right decision.

“It’s not too far from here,” he said. “It’s a nice night, we can walk.” He glanced down at her shoes. “Can you manage in
those things? We can cab it if you want.”

“I can walk over in these heels. I just might not be able to walk back.”

“I can always carry you.”

They walked down Haymarket Street, cut through Piccadilly Circus, and over to Mayfair.

“It’s only a few more blocks,” said Shaw as they ambled slowly along. “Just off Grosvenor.”

“I’m good.”

He glanced down at her. “You do seem good.”

She interpreted his remark as she glanced around at other couples doing exactly what they were doing. “It’s just nice to
pretend
to be normal. I guess that seems weird.”

“No it doesn’t. In our professions those moments are few and far between.”

The restaurant was set midblock, and had a green awning out front partially obscuring a pair of formidable mahogany doors.
Inside, the ceilings were high, the wood dark, the booths leather-backed, the linens starched, and the napkins poofed up in
cut crystal water glasses. Topping chest-high wood cabinets were iced platters of lobster tails, shrimp, black-shelled mussels,
and spidery crab legs arranged in concentric circles. Shaw had made a reservation and a curvy young Indian woman in a black
dress tight enough to reveal her choice of thong underwear led them to their table. It was situated in the back diagonally
across from the entrance.

Shaw took the seat opposite the mahogany doors.

This had not been lost on Reggie. “Firing lines sufficiently established?” she asked impishly.

“They’ll do. Unless that platter of steamed squid fouls the shot.”

“Why do I think you’re not joking?”

He picked up his menu.

She did the same. “Any recommendations?”

“Pretty much anything that has a fin, gills, and/or a shell is a safe bet to be classified as an aphrodisiac.”

She dropped the menu. “Then why don’t you pick for me?”

Shaw’s gaze topped his menu. “Indecisive?”

“Actually, cautious enough to defer to another’s
enhanced
expertise.”

“There’s a lot that can be interpreted from that remark,” he said candidly.

“There is. But for now, let’s limit it to the food.”

He put his menu aside. “Then we’ll double down on the Primavera Frutti di Mare.”

They ordered their food and a white wine to go with it. The waiter drew out the cork and poured the small taster portion,
which Shaw approved with a sip and a nod. The waiter filled their glasses, set a basket of bread and a bottle of olive oil
between them, placed the wine in a chiller sleeve, and left them alone.

Shaw held up his glass and Reggie dinked it with hers.

“Is the pretending to be normal period almost over?” she said resignedly.

“Almost, but not quite.”

“I love London,” Reggie said, looking around.

“There’s a lot to love,” agreed Shaw.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said.

He remained silent but stared at her expectantly.

“You mentioned back in the cemetery at Harrowsfield that you stare at graves too. What did you mean by that?”

“Not graves,
grave
, singular.”

“Whose?”

“It’s in Germany, an hour’s ride outside of Frankfurt, a small village.”

“That’s where, but
whose
grave do you look at there?”

“A woman’s.” The strain on Shaw’s face was perceptible.

“I take it you two were close?”

“Close enough.”

“Can you tell me her name?”

“Anna. And now I think the pretending to be normal period
is
over.”

F
EDIR
K
UCHIN
was impatient, which meant he was irritable, which meant he was once more pacing in his precise ninety-degree grids. A leased
jet had just touched down forty kilometers from here. He envisioned Alan Rice climbing in an SUV and setting off to come and
meet with him. In his possession was information that Kuchin now craved more than he had anything in his life.

But he had to wait. Forty kilometers over mediocre roads. An hour, perhaps more if the weather continued to deteriorate as
it had threatened to do all day.

“Everything okay, Mr. Waller?”

He stopped pacing and looked up to find Pascal standing in the doorway. He wore jeans, boots, flannel shirt, and a leather
jacket. Always a jacket and always a gun underneath the jacket, Kuchin knew. His mother had been small, spare, and Pascal
had taken after her instead of his tall father. The facial features too were hers. Greek had trumped Ukrainian in this genetic
instance. Those features were now marred by yellow and purplish bruises, thanks to the tall man who’d beaten them both in
the catacombs of Gordes.

“Just thinking, Pascal. The others will be here in about an hour.”

“Yes sir.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Not bad.”

The little man was tough, Kuchin could not deny that. His arm could be dangling by a sliver of skin and he would probably
only ask for aspirin or more likely nothing at all.

He is tough, like his father.

The affair had been brief but memorable. Kuchin had taken a holiday in Greece as reward for his good work in Ukraine. Under
brilliant sunlight that did not seem to exist in the Soviet Union, at least that he’d experienced, Fedir Kuchin had bedded
a woman and together they’d made a baby. Kuchin had not been there for the birth but he had named his son. Pascal was a Francophone
given name for a male. In Latin it meant relating to Easter and in Hebrew to be born or associated with Passover. Kuchin had
named the boy in honor of his French mother, who was also a Jew, though she’d converted to Catholicism when still a young
girl. He’d never told anyone about her ethnicity, nor of her and his religious beliefs. In the power circles of the Soviet
Union, that would not have been looked on in a positive way.

“You do good work, Pascal,” said Kuchin. Searching the other man’s features, as he sometimes did, Kuchin would imagine he
saw a glimmer of himself there. He had sent his son off to various skirmishes across the world as a mercenary. Pascal had
been trained by some of the best military minds around. He’d fought in places like Kosovo and Slovakia, Bosnia and Honduras,
Colombia and Somalia. He’d always returned to his father with a smile on his face and more experience grafted into his DNA.
Kuchin had taught him some old tricks of the trade as well, taking some fatherly pride in doing so, but not too much. He was
a bastard child after all. But he was also all Kuchin had in the way of descendants. Not smart enough to run the business,
but smart enough to protect those who did.

“Thank you, sir, you need anything, you just let me know.”

Pascal moved off and Kuchin rubbed the scars on his wrist. They’d been caused by ten-pound fishing line that had cut into
his skin so deeply as a child that the marks had become permanent. This was his father’s way of teaching his son to obey.
These lessons were usually accompanied by drunken screams and thundering fists. He would be strung up like one of his father’s
catches, his toes barely touching the icy floor. This would go on for hours until Kuchin thought his hamstrings would collapse,
his Achilles tendons dissolve.

His back too held the marks of violent intrusion. A belt, a strap, a fishing rod whose metal guides had bitten into his prepubescent
skin and stung like the blitzkrieg of a thousand-wasp army. These were his father’s choices, his father’s life lessons to
his only child.

His good mother would always fight for him and even attack her far larger husband, whose height and girth eventually had been
passed on to his son. And for her loyalty to her child the woman had been dealt with more cruelly. For hours afterwards they
would lie on the floor and cradle each other, nursing wounds, sharing tears, speaking in French in low voices so the father
and husband could not hear, for it would undoubtedly drive him into another rage.

Kuchin had lied to Alan Rice and later to Janie Collins or whatever her real name was. His father had not died from a fall
at the cottage in Roussillon. Kuchin’s father had never been to Roussillon or even France at all. A poor family from rural
Ukraine during that time would never have had the money nor the permission to travel abroad. They would never even have made
it to the border. No proper papers, no reason to be leaving the Soviet empire. They would have been executed on the spot,
their bodies left where they fell like trash flung from a truck as a message to others contemplating disobedience. And Kuchin
had to admit, that message could be very effective. He’d later conveyed such messages himself.

It was only after he’d risen to his post in the KGB that out-of-country travel was possible for the most loyal, which included
him of course. He had gotten special permission to take his mother to the town of her birth. By now she was clearly old before
her time, and the years left to her were few. The cottage had been empty, and Kuchin, though he did not have much money back
then, had found a way to purchase it for her. She lived there for five happy years until her death. Kuchin visited her when
he could. She would call him by a French name that in her diminished mental state she believed to be his real one. A Soviet
to the core, Kuchin would have killed any man who called him that, but when his old, failing mother did so he would merely
nod and shed a tear or two and hold her withered hand, answering her queries like a nice little Frenchman looking to appease
his beloved mama.

Kuchin stared out the window of his cabin, toward the not too distant coast. Yet his hearing was attuned to the swirl of rubber
over crushed gravel that lay on the opposite side of the house. He checked his watch. Alan Rice should be here in no more
than twenty minutes. His gaze returned to the nearby waters and another memory entered his thoughts. This time it was a happy
one.

The Sea of Azov was far too shallow for his plan, of course. That was why one moonless night in October several decades ago,
a grown-up and very strong Kuchin, now a valued member of the deeply feared Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB,
had dragged his father from his shack, loaded him on a boat, and set off to deep water. Through the Strait of Kerch they had
entered the Black Sea, which had an area over ten times the size of the adjacent Azov. More importantly, the deepest point
there was over two thousand meters.

Kuchin had anchored down and he and three of his comrades who had come to help him had used the strongest fishing line they
could find to tie up the old man. The senior Kuchin’s eyes bulged with the terror of what was happening to him. Attached to
the line and the heavy metal cables that they’d draped over his head and shoulders were two fifty-gallon metal drums filled
with sand. It was a favored disposal technique for the Soviet security forces. Indeed, some of the KGB officers had started
terming this pairing the “golden slippers.”

Kuchin had looked into his father’s eyes one last time. The roles were reversed now. The large was now small and the young
child was now a strong man more than capable of defeating the monster that had punished him relentlessly for so long. He spoke
to him in two languages. First he said the words in French, which he knew the old man could understand, however grudgingly.
And then in Ukrainian, which he knew would be crystal clear to the bastard.

Then over the gunwale the drums went and seconds later the cables drew taut and the old man sailed overboard too, screaming
in terror. In a few seconds it was finished. Kuchin took the helm and steered them back to where they had come. He looked
back only once at the spot where the man who had plagued him would carry out the last few seconds of his life. And then he
turned back and thought no more of him.

The SUV came into view. Alan Rice was here with the promised intelligence.

For Fedir Kuchin it was time to track down and catch another adversary who would dare seek to harm him.