Duel of Assassins (7 page)

He gestured toward the forward galley, where a flight
steward—a uniformed staff sergeant—was busy stowing things in cold lockers.
Farther aft, just behind the door on the left side, a master sergeant with
headset was working a communications console that looked designed for two. Then
the chief flight engineer emerged from the flight deck, swung the cabin door
shut and locked it down.

Taras glanced out the portside window in time to see the
truck-mounted boarding stairs backing away from the left wing. They were
rolling forward without benefit of safety lecture or seat-belt check.

“I hope the taxpayers don’t hear about this,” Taras joked.

“There’s lots of stuff happens on these birds nobody knows
about, until maybe years later. Like back when Henry the K was conducting
top-secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, he used SAM 26000 and SAM
970 as his private taxis—all over the globe. Officially, they called ’em
‘training missions.’”

“Those were pretty important missions,” Taras said.

“Hey, all I know is, if you’re on here, so is yours.”

Brunton outlined the flight plan as they taxied toward
takeoff. They would be heading northeast up over Quebec and the Labrador
Peninsula, making landfall over Belfast. They would stop at the U.S. Air Force
base in Tempelhof, West Berlin, just long enough to refuel and get diplomatic
clearance for Soviet air space, which would entail taking on a Soviet
navigator. They would land at Vnukovo, the VIP airfield, in about eleven
hours—midnight Moscow time the next day.

*

It was about a half-hour out that the euphoria induced by
his surroundings and his sister’s deliverance began to wear off, and Taras
found himself overtaken by thoughts first of Marcus, then of Charlotte. He was
looking out the window, following the shimmering moonpath on the St. Lawrence
far below, when she gradually coalesced out there in the night, usurping his
own faint reflection in the Plexiglas.

If only he had been permitted to tell her the whole of
it—the deal to free Luiza, Anatoly and the boys. Surely, then, she would have
understood his going.

As it was, she’d have to trust him, dammit.
Don’t be too
desperate,
he told the astral image in the window.
Don’t for God’s sake
go putting some damn horny stranger in your bed. I’m coming back, no matter
what you said, and I still intend to be part of your crazy life.

And he really did. Despite Charlotte’s stubbornness, her
rapid, righteous opinions on every topic you could mention, her stormy moods,
insane hours and constant traveling—despite all these things, Taras had always
found her wonderfully feminine and vulnerable. And her fierce determination to
have a child summoned up his own deepest, most protective instincts.

But perhaps it was her honesty that Taras prized the most.
Charlotte’s need to reveal herself, and to probe constantly and painfully for
his own thoughts and feelings—and not be stopped when he went into what she
called “Slavic withdrawal”—had from the first created real intimacy between
them.

They had met on an autumn afternoon two years before at a
house party in Chevy Chase. After lunch, while the men huddled around the big
TV in the den to watch football and the women held forth among the gleaming
Chippendale in the living room, Taras had retreated toward the back of the
sprawling house with his dessert plate. An elegant, angular, dark-haired woman
had followed him onto the back veranda. Taras gauged her perhaps five years his
senior (she was actually six), and was intrigued at once, sensing—especially in
the challenging brown eyes—both intelligence and appetite for life. She had
launched, after the breeziest of introductions (“Call me Charlie”), into a
witty commentary on weekly NFL games as essential American male bonding
rituals.

Taras had reacted with appropriate amusement, but she closed
the distance quickly between them, fixing him with those dark, probing eyes and
placing, ever so lightly, the pads of her long, tapered fingers on his
coatsleeve.

“But I’m terribly serious!” In the District, she emphasized,
the dearly beloved and incredibly broad-assed Redskins were the only thing in
God’s vast creation that had ever successfully united all the polarized
factions and neighborhoods of the city and its menfolk—liberal and
conservative, black and white, blue-collar and white collar, ins and outs, even
straight and gay.

Charlotte had recently done a column on the subject, and had
many of the phrases ready to hand. Taras had been enchanted—not so much by what
she said as how she said it. The vivid gestures. The humor that came constantly
welling up from some hidden source, crinkling the corners of her eyes and lips,
twitching the delicate porcelain nose. Within fifteen minutes the attractive
lady journalist had Taras in hilarious disarray, clutching the veranda railing
and somehow unable to stop laughing, no matter what inanity she uttered.

“Charlie, please!” he said. “Mercy.”

Instead, she had gone for the kill. Without waiting around
for halftime and the compulsory gauntlet of good-byes, she spirited her willing
catch out a side door and down the graveled driveway. They drove in tandem back
to the city and whiled away the rest of the afternoon walking the Mall and
matching chapters of their life stories. Nightfall found them in a little
Ethiopian eatery in Adams-Morgan, and by morning, wonderfully spent, they lay
entwined in her antique bed.

When, several months later, they attended a Super Bowl party
near Dupont Circle, it was as a recognized couple. They were jointly
entertaining before too much longer—once Charlotte had spruced up her consort’s
wardrobe and etiquette. Taras wasn’t exactly comfortable in the host role, but
he did enjoy watching Charlotte function at such occasions—knowing everyone,
looking an angel, laughing like a courtesan and debating like a Jesuit. And he
particularly relished her wicked post-party comments on the guests and
goings-on.

In a way it was Charlotte—far more than his earlier CIA
mentors and case supervisors—who had initiated Arensky into many of the
mysteries of America, or at least Washington. She taught him more carefully how
to interpret the newspapers, evaluate the anchormen and interviewers and
columnists, how the city’s intricate and interlocking power structures
operated. And she certainly taught him “advanced shopping,” and how to properly
escort a shopping female. And, to Taras’ continual puzzlement, she seemed never
to tire of showing him off, especially among her women friends, like a hunting
trophy.

When spring came they drove out to what she called her
“ancestral Virginia acres”—a modest yellow frame house in nearby Aldie, but set
in the exclusive rolling horse-country around Middleburg. Charlotte’s mother, a
sprightly sixty, just back from church in white gloves and picture hat,
promptly took Taras into the parlor to show him all her daughter’s scrapbooks,
and then into her old bedroom, where an entire wall was covered with dusty
ribbons awarded for both writing and riding.

“Dear God, Mother, spare the poor man!” Charlotte grimaced,
and dragged Taras off, out the door and across the lawn.

“Now where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

They squeezed through a hedge and cut across a corner of a
neighbor’s pasture, hiking up a gentle slope into some low,  tangled oaks.
Charlotte proved quite nimble, leading him through the thicket of boles and
branches. After a minute they emerged into a little clearing and hopped up onto
a smooth outcrop of granite that afforded a fine lookout down the valley. A
solemn afternoon haze overhung the low, spring-green hills, a pickup towing a
one-horse trailer vanished and reappeared in an undulation of Highway 50,
woodsmoke trailed downwind from a nearby chimney.

“What do you think, Tarushka? Isn’t it special?”

“Very.”

It was her favorite childhood place. She had gone there
often, but had never shown another soul—till then. “So you are the very first,
darling—not in every way with me, perhaps, but in all the ways that count.”

“I’m honored.”

Taras had stood there beside her, thinking of that sweet
child who had come there to measure the wide world by her storybook valley, and
her innocent dreams against an unknowable future. But he had completely misread
her mood. For when Charlotte had turned to him, it was with eyes smoky with
lust.

“Tarushka—I want you now.”

The shocking imperative carried the full force of her
sexuality, and her fingers were already fumbling at his belt buckle. Taras’
response was immediate and instinctive—like being sucked into an erotic vortex.
Charlotte writhed at his first touch, as if trying to eel out of her own
clothes, but actually impeding his efforts to undress her.

“Hurry, darling,” she urged, yet made him wrestle her into
submission while he struggled to divest her of jacket and blouse and unhammock
her lovely breasts. Still she fought against him, laughing to hyperventilation
as he peeled off her suede skirt and peach-silk panties. But Charlotte had not
been totally inept, having managed to bare the essential parts of Taras’
anatomy. He stood, slightly foolish, at full point with shirt unbuttoned and
trousers about his ankles, but she could wait no longer. With a look of anguish
she leaped, girdling herself around him and crying out as they mated in a
single thrust.

Charlotte had climaxed right at the start, but hung on
willfully for the long gallop, riding Taras till he had bucked and thrust into
a final trembling spasm and stood there, breathing mightily and holding her in
his arms.

“Oughta put you out to stud right now,” she had drawled.
“Make us a
heap
of stud fees. ’Ceptin I jes’ cain’t stand loaning this
here big thang out to other fillies.”

Taras had chuckled. He did feel a little like one of the
stallions they had driven past on the way in. It was, he realized with a shock
as he eased her to the ground, the first time in his life he had ever made love
out of doors, surrounded by nature. And it had been pretty damn exciting.

By the time they had zipped and buttoned themselves into
decency, the sun had slid behind indigo hills. They walked back hand in hand
across the twilight fields, their perspiration cooling, but the pungency of
lovemaking still in their nostrils.

When they got back, Charlotte’s mother had tea waiting on
the porch, with shortbread biscuits and ollalieberry jam and the smallest
spoons Taras had ever seen. They sat three-in-a-row, chatting about trivia, listening
to crickets and watching swallows darting across the dark lawn, till the
birds—and then their own distinct faces—were lost in the evening gloom…

Taras shook himself free of the seductive reverie, took a
breath. It wouldn’t do. He had to clear his head. All right, so he couldn’t
replace Charlie, didn’t want to. What was he going to do about it?

Three weeks on this assignment, three weeks to Potsdam. At
the end, come what may, Charlotte would be there. As a syndicated columnist
specializing on foreign affairs, she routinely covered every economic and
diplomatic summit, along with a host of lesser happenings anywhere on the
globe. So when the conference was folding its tents in late Julyt, and Taras
was finally free of his presidential mission, he would find her and they could
come home together.

Unless he had really lost her.

The way it had happened before.

It had been sixteen years earlier, and Arensky a
fresh-faced, not-quite-eighteen-year-old cadet then, as now, was traveling east
with the image of his beloved constantly in mind. But instead of hopping the
Atlantic in a single night, he was crossing the wintry vastness of Russia, from
Moscow to Khabarovsk, in seven and a half days... with the conjured face of
another girl keeping pace all that way, flashing like the low sun through the
silver birches.

*

Uncle Dima had at last grown weary of Taras’ unrelenting
pleas. Pulling every string he could reach from his middle-echelon desk in the
Ministry of Defense, he had arranged a special leave for the boy after the
November Bolshevik Revolutionary holidays. So, instead of just a few days off
from his second-year studies at the Supreme Soviet Military Academy outside
Moscow, Officer Cadet Arensky would have a miraculous three weeks—plus a great
deal of make-up work when he returned.

Taras’ objective in all this was to spend as much time as
possible with his fiancée, a buxom, blond Intourist guide who had thoroughly
bewitched him the previous summer at the Odessa seaside. Unfortunately even
Uncle Dima could not alter the fact that Eva Sorokina was currently employed
eight-thousand five hundred kilometers away in the Soviet Far East.

Taras turned next to his widower father. But hardworking
Oleg, on a factory foreman’s salary of three hundred rubles a month, was quite
unequal to the demand—was, in fact, richly amused when his son begged two
hundred forty-four rubles for an Aeroflot round-trip ticket to Khabarovsk.
“Your Eva is a lovely thing, Tarushka,” he agreed, “but
that
lovely she
is not. Here are fifty-four rubles. Go to her—on the train. Uncle Dima has
agreed to pay your return fare.”

So, instead of an eight-hour flight on an IL-62, Taras had
to face an almost eight-day Trans-Siberian Railroad journey each way in “hard
class,” squandering more than two-thirds of his precious time and leaving him
less than a week with his beloved.

But he could not endure till summer to see Eva. Her letters,
one or two every week, had reinforced the spell of Odessa. Especially the
letter that contained a fat lock of her tawny hair, tied with a red ribbon into
a miniature ponytail. It was so exactly like the original, which had tossed
like a palomino’s plume in the sea breeze as she fled him over the dunes... and
was caught and wrestled down and her shrill laughter silenced with kisses—and a
blurted out proposal of marriage.

Taras had carried that lock everywhere, even to his classes,
buttoned into his tunic pocket and had extracted it again and again from its
pliofilm wrapper when no one was looking in order to savor its heady elixir.

Apparently an old Tungusi woman from Belogorsk had told Eva
exactly how much hair to cut and how to tie it, claiming it would exert
powerful magic on the object of desire. In her letter Eva had treated the whole
thing playfully, but it had worked on Taras exactly as the shaman-woman had
decreed.

Of course the love charm came along on his journey, and its
magic was meted out carefully—inhaled no more than a dozen, or perhaps two
dozen times a day. The ritual offered Taras a fleeting, perfumed escape from
the oppressive monotony of those endless, gloomy days and nights; from the
wretched hard-class carriage with sixty or seventy benumbed fellow travelers,
huddled on wooden benches, sprawled on bunks and in aisles, their pathetic
bundles and string-tied boxes heaped in every corner; from the ceaseless,
trivial onslaught of piped-in music; and from the pervasive stench of body
odor, boiled cabbage, old wool, sardines, beer and tobacco. Thank God for the
old Tungusi woman!

On the eighth and final day, Taras put away his talisman for
the last time. He should not need it again. According to the timetable posted
by the samovar at the end of the smoky car, they were now less than an hour
from Khabarovsk—where the source of the magic would be waiting in the flesh.

Since he could do nothing to quicken the plodding pace of
the train—the inaptly named Rossiya (Russia) Express—Taras stared out the
window and tried to quiet his clamorous thoughts with the empty
landscape—kilometer after kilometer of white waste, with only the barren hills
of northern Manchuria to wrinkle the horizon. The trick seemed to work, for all
at once the carriage began rumbling over bridge timbers, and steel beams
flashed by the window. Below, Taras glimpsed a white expanse of pack ice, perhaps
two kilometers wide, here and there sparkling in the low sun like sprinkled
rock salt; along its margin, boats and barges were stuck fast. They must be
crossing the frozen Amur River—on the outskirts of Khabarovsk.

Across the bridge an oil refinery reared its blackened,
industrial tracery against the leaden sky, and a smokestack flamed a ragged red
ensign. Beyond, dilapidated bungalows marched    away down empty lanes of
frozen mud, then were replaced in the train windows by abandoned-looking
warehouses of brick and concrete, which gave way in turn to grim blocks of
apartment complexes.

Arensky’s pulse accelerated as the train slowed, trundling
over uneven points into the rail yard, past stooping work crews of women in
orange canvas coveralls who scraped at the icy switches with shovels. Then, as
the Rossiya’s flanged wheels locked and squealed in metallic protest, a
roofline fanged with icicles slid into view, followed by the station itself.
Taras saw their conductor—the
provodnik
—jump down and trot alongside.

Farther down the platform a knot of soldiers sharing a
bottle turned and waved at someone as a Mongol-faced family grabbed up its
bundles and hurried forward, only to be cut off by a burly woman driving a
minitram of hitched wagons full of parcels and mail sacks.

But where was Eva? With a hollow nervousness akin to stage
fright, Taras hoisted his duffel bag and flowed with the crowd out of the
steam-heated car and into the bitter cold. He stood there on the wide, unevenly
paved platform, while a chill north wind knifed through his woolen greatcoat
and made his fingers ache inside their thick gloves. But Arensky was not
sensible of this, not at this moment. Only the pangs of his anxious heart
counted now as he searched the faces of strangers. He told himself to be
calm—to be a man, after all. It wouldn’t due to appear too eager. Of course Eva
was here somewhere. Perhaps waiting just inside, out of the cold. Or perhaps
she’d been detained for some perfectly ordinary and understandable reason. In
which case, he would simply have some tea and walk up and down, stretching his
train-cramped legs a bit, until she appeared. After seven and a half days, he
could certainly stand a few more seconds, or even minutes. But dammit, where
was she?

“Tarushka! Tarushka, here!”

He whirled and saw her at the end of the platform, waving as
she hurried forward in her heavy coat, her breath pluming in the air. But
something was very wrong, something that confirmed the dread that had been
stealing over him. A tall young man was striding along close beside her. Even
as Eva arrived and launched herself against Taras, and he bent to kiss her
flushed, laughing face, he was filled with despair. She was chattering away,
but he could not hear her words. His eyes were on those of the stranger, which
were slitted, and strikingly light-blue, like Eva’s.

What was he doing here, this young, cocky-looking foreign
bastard—dressed up like a film cowboy in an expensive
dublyonka
, a
sheepskin coat, with a black scarf wrapped around his ears, on top of which was
a black felt “gunfighter” hat? He even wore a pair of high-heeled,
tooled-leather boots, which put him noticeable centimeters above Taras.

“Tarushka, what is wrong?”

“Who is he?”

“This is Marcus. He’s an American tourist, silly. He came
yesterday on the boat train from Yokohama. He’s been assigned to me. Oh,
Tarushka, really, now don’t be jealous! I won’t have it!”

She managed to look quite stern for a half second, before a
wide grin crinkled her plump, freckled face in its wreath of gold sable. That
sunny smile, exposing just the pearly tips of her little teeth, and the
girlish, guileless laugh that followed, summed up all the things Arensky adored
in Eva Sorokina. Everything was perfectly fine then! Of course, of course. He
pressed her small gloved hand in both of his.

“I’m sorry. Evushka. I’m so stupid. Forgive me!” He turned
at once to the American and stuck out his hand. “I’m very pleased to make your
acquaintance.”

After they had been introduced, with Eva translating each
way—and mispronouncing Marcus’ surname Jolly as “Zholly”—the young American
grabbed Taras’ duffel and swung it onto his own shoulder. But Taras seized it
back, shaking his head vigorously.

“Nyet, spasibo.”

The stranger shrugged, whipping off his cowboy hat in a low
bow that exposed flaxen hair—also too much the color of Eva’s, Arensky thought.
They were two of a kind—sunny, blue-eyed Nordics. Except Eva was
round-faced—”moon-faced,” she called it —and this Marcus character had a long
horsy skull, with flat cheekbones almost like a Slav and a strong jaw every bit
the equal of Arensky’s.

“Just come along you two, and be best friends,” Eva said in
Russian and then English, linking arms with each and leading them along the
slushy platform. “We’ve got a car, Tarushka, so let’s get you a decent meal and
talk.”

*

Arensky had traveled to the end of the earth to be alone
with his beloved, to unburden the secrets of his heart to her and her alone.
Instead, he sat beside her, intoxicated by her nearness, yet unable to touch
her or speak to her as he longed to do. Worse, he had to participate in an
absurd charade—this polite, inane, interminable conversation, all laboriously
translated for the benefit of the insouciant stranger, who lounged across the
table, slurping his Siberian fish soup and grinning perpetually back at them.

They’d passed a half-hour in the restaurant of the ugly
hotel where Marcus was staying not far from the station, the Tsentralnaya on
Pushkin Street, and Taras had achieved a perfect, brooding frenzy. In addition
to everything else, the restaurant was almost as stuffy as his hard-class train
carriage, and the Hungarian wine Eva had ordered was disagreeably sweet. And
then there was Eva herself. The moment she had thrown off her coat and fur hat
and settled herself on the bench close beside him, Arensky had been overpowered
by her femaleness, and rendered giddy by her full, puissant scent which, in
fainter replica, lay locked away in his breast pocket.

Just now she was detailing how she and Marcus had gone
walking that morning out on the frozen Amur to observe the ice fishermen at
their business. She was spreading her arms wide to indicate the thickness of
the ice the old men had to chop through to drop their lines—a gesture that
stretched her white woolen sweater and emphasized her splendid bosom. Naturally
Taras couldn’t take his eyes off her; but he was very aware, peripher-ally,
that neither could the young American.

Finally, the tortured young cadet could endure no more.
Quietly, but urgently, he interrupted:

“Does he know about us?”

Eva broke off her story, her lashes blinking rapidly in
obvious annoyance. “What about us?”

“That we are going to be married?”

“Don’t speak of this now, especially in this tone. This is
still a secret. Besides, you know we haven’t decided when—”

“But Evushka! What do you think I came all this way to do?
To sit here and drink this gooey Magyar shit and talk all this Intourist
garbage? No! I came to decide our future—and to be with you, dammit, not him.”

“You are being very
nyekulturny
, Taras Olegovich. I
must attend to my work, and today Marcus is my work. And also perhaps tomorrow,
since I delayed to meet your train and both Mariana and Olya are now busy with
a coachload of Japanese businessmen.”

“So when is he leaving?”

“Perhaps tomorrow, or the day after. It depends on how long
it takes me to cover the necessary sights before he goes on to Irkutsk. We are
still arranging his itinerary. Is that good enough for you, Comrade General?
Now have some patience. And behave!”

She turned angrily and said something in English to Marcus,
which Taras of course did not understand.

“What did you just tell him?”

“None of your business. If you talk secretly to me, I can
talk secretly to Marcus.”

Taras darkened. He was now quite furious, yet afraid to say
even one more word for fear of losing her. So he sat, making impotent fists
under the table. He was at a terrible disadvantage, and knew it. He was being
made to feel like a boor, a
nyekulturny
asshole, while the handsome
American guy could sit there nonchalantly, pretending to be not only friendly
to Taras, but even deferential. It was too much!

He slapped his palm on the table, making their glasses and
cutlery jump. When Eva glared at him, he ignored her, signaling to an idle
waitress.

Eva took her strongest schoolmistress tone: “If you do not
behave, Taras Olegovich, I am going to ask you to leave us. And I am serious.”

“What’s the matter? I’m only ordering some vodka. I’m tired
of this junk.”

“And I’m asking you for the last time to be civil.”

“All right.”

“Well, then, why do you not speak to Marcus? He has asked
several times about you.”

“Sure, all right.” Taras turned and smiled millimetrically
at the American. “So ask him how he comes to be here in the Far East.”

“I already told you this. He came on the boat train from
Yokohama to Nakhodka.”

“Not how,
why
. What is he doing here?”

Eva shrugged, then translated the question. Marcus listened
carefully, nodding. Then, when the waitress brought the carafe of iced vodka,
he reached for one of the small tumblers.