Final Target (34 page)

G
age and Alla returned to the hospital in early afternoon. Ninchenko was in a third floor, private, two-room suite, the best in the hospital, but looking to Gage like a skid-row hotel room. He was propped up in bed and being fed clear broth as they entered. The nurse wiped Ninchenko’s chin, then stepped back. Ninchenko’s guard escorted her from the room.

“How do you feel,
amigo
?” Gage asked, leaning close. Alla stood next to him. Both looking down at the pale, hollow-eyed face.

Ninchenko worked up a little smile. “Like an elephant is standing on my chest,” he answered in a hoarse whisper, his throat still raw from the anesthetic used during surgery.

“What happened?”

“He came running into the kitchen just as I kicked the door.” Ninchenko’s voice strengthened. “He got off three shots before I caught my balance. He knew he hit me so he stopped firing.”

“Big mistake.”

“He picked the wrong line of work. He didn’t finish me off.”

Gage thought back on the dead man curled up in the kitchen. The man’s heart had stopped before Ninchenko fired his last shot.

Ninchenko licked his lips. Alla poured water from a pitcher into a clear plastic glass and brought it to his lips. He took two sips, then shook his head.

“What about you?” Ninchenko asked.

“Let’s just say Razor lived by the sword.”

Ninchenko offered up another weak smile. “Aristotle was right.”

Alla’s mouth gaped open at Ninchenko. “What? Aristotle? You’re lying in a hospital with two fucking bullet holes and you’re talking Greek philosophy?”

“What he means is that things tend toward their natural end,” Gage said.

Alla shook her head. “It’s still weird.” She set down the glass and looked fondly at Ninchenko. “I thought you were just some ex–State Security thug out to make a buck. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m glad your natural end wasn’t to die last night saving me. I’ll never forget what you did.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead.

“We were both wrong,” Ninchenko answered. “I hope you’ll come back one day.”

Alla shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

Three hours into their drive back to Kiev, Gage heard the name Gravilov spoken on the car radio. He poked at Alla, waking her up.

“What are they saying?”

Alla rubbed her eyes. The announcer spoke the name again. She listened for a minute, then smiled.

“It sounds like Ninchenko’s people tricked the government into believing that nationalist terrorists attacked Gravilov’s mansion. There was a note stuck to the front door that the police think was left by the paramilitary arm of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, demanding that all Russians leave Ukraine, starting with him.”

Alla listened for another few moments, then laughed. “They’re demanding a ransom for my return. Apparently I’m Gravilov’s girlfriend.”

She looked hard at the radio, then gasped. “The police found Razor in the hyena pen, chewed into pieces.”

Gage now understood what Maks had been doing while Yasha helped Ninchenko to the car.

“What about the woman upstairs?” Gage asked.

“They claim she was raped.”

“That couldn’t be.”

“But it’s the kind of thing the government wants people to think OUN terrorists would do.” Alla pointed ahead toward Kiev. “That way they’ll believe that the president is all that stands between Ukraine and chaos if Bread and Freedom succeeds.”

“Will Gravilov really believe that’s what happened?”

“Maybe for a few days…nobody believes anything in Ukraine for longer than that.”

M
r. Green? This is Mr. Black.”

Gage swung his legs down from his bed at the Carlton Tower in London as he answered his cell phone, wincing from the pain from the twisting stitches in his back.

“Hey, Professor. What’s up?”

“Merry Christmas.”

Gage blinked. The words restarted the clock that seemed to have stopped on the day he flew into Kiev. “Likewise.”

“Your friend Mr. Matson called. Very upset. Whimpering like a puppy.”

“I can only imagine.”

“His banker told him the KTMG Limited account has been frozen and he can’t find out whether the Swiss did it or the…what do you call people in Nauru? Nauruites? Nauruans? Nauruians?”

“I don’t know. It’s never come up before.”

“Okay, Nauruians…or even why it was frozen.”

“A shame.”

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him I’m out of the country but I’ll call him in a couple of days.”

“Anything else?”

Gage paused, imagining Matson flailing around as he drifted out to sea.

“I don’t want him doing something stupid. Tell him my client wants to close the deal on the technology right away, and in cash, just like we first agreed.”

“Okay. But one more thing, just for my edification. How’d his money get frozen?”

“It isn’t.”

“It isn’t?”

“It isn’t.” Gage looked at his watch, smiling to himself, enjoying the professor’s puzzlement. “Got to go. I’ll call you when I get back to the States.”

Gage knocked on the door to Alla’s adjoining room.

“Time to get up and get your hand stamped.”

Gage and Alla arrived just on time for their meeting with the U.S. consul general in London. Gage had learned from his friend in the Justice Department that John Clyde was a careerist near the end of his service who’d topped out just one step short of his goal of becoming an ambassador. The story was that he’d even have taken a posting in Sudan just to wear the title.

An aging Ivy Leaguer with indoor skin and puffy jowls, Clyde met them at the visa section, then escorted them to his office. He sat down behind a large desk framed by U.S. and State Department flags and directed them to sit across from him.

“You must have some kind of pull in Washington,” Clyde said, opening a folder and withdrawing Alla’s
Panamanian passport. “I received a call from the head of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department.” He thumbed through the passport until he found the pasted-in visa. “And the ambassador instructed me not to notify the legal attaché or the FBI that I issued this.”

Clyde made a show of examining the page. “S visas are quite rare, you know,” he said, inviting an explanation from Gage.

“This is a special occasion,” Gage said, his voice flat.

“Does it concern London?”

“Does it make a difference?”

Clyde fixed on Gage’s impenetrable face for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t.”

Alla leaned forward in anticipation of receiving the passport, but Clyde remained immobile. She sat back, reddening, as if she had tried to shake his hand and he’d refused.

Clyde flipped to the identification and photo page and grinned. “Somehow the name Alla Petrovna Tarasova doesn’t sound Panamanian.”

“Look,” Gage said. “If you’ve got a problem, spill it. If not, let us have the passport.”

“I don’t have a problem, it’s just unusual.” Clyde closed the passport, tapped its edge against his blotter, then looked over at Alla. “I need to advise you of certain conditions: You must arrive at a U.S. port of entry within ten days. You may stay in the U.S. for no longer than forty-five days. If you fail to leave within that period, you’ll be subject to arrest.”

He waited until Alla nodded her understanding, then retrieved a sealed envelope from the folder. “You will present this letter to the immigration and customs agent
at passport control at your point of entry.” Clyde handed Alla the envelope, then retrieved a second one, unsealed. “This is your copy of the same letter.”

Clyde slid the second envelope into the passport, then stood and passed it to her. He stepped around his desk and walked toward the office door, as if expecting Gage and Alla to follow like imprinted ducklings. Alla stuck her tongue out at his back, then smiled at Gage as she rose to her feet. She glanced toward Clyde, then snagged a State Department paperweight off his desk and slipped it into her coat pocket.

They followed Clyde back to the visa section, where he opened the door and waved them through to the lobby without another word. As the door swung closed, Alla stopped to place the letters and passport into her purse.

Gage overheard a well-dressed, elderly American woman complain to the clerk behind the bulletproof glass that she’d already waited fifteen minutes past her scheduled appointment time with Clyde. Gage reached into Alla’s pocket and pulled out the paperweight, then walked up to the woman.

“The consul general asked me to give this to you to apologize for the wait.” Gage handed it to her. “Be sure to mention it to him.”

Alla covered her mouth as they left the consulate, stifling her laugh until they reached the sidewalk.

“What was wrong with that man?” Alla said, giggling, her eyes sparkling as she looked up at him.

Gage then noticed the loveliness that other men saw in her, then felt a sadness born of the fear that she’d never grow old with the kind of man she deserved because she’d always be looking past him toward the Matsons of the world.

“Maybe Clyde was offended that we went around him to Washington,” Gage said, holding out his hand to hail a cab, “or maybe it’s that he knows something.”

Gage made flight reservations for the following afternoon as the taxi drove them toward Mickey’s house in the suburbs. They stopped in long enough for Gage to assure himself that Mickey was recovering and so that Mickey could gloat about having been right about Alla from the beginning—though for the wrong reasons—and could get a closer look at the woman who’d made his old heart flutter.

From there, it was on to Matson’s flat in Kensington.

“Let’s make this quick,” Gage said as they entered the lobby.

The diminutive doorman greeted Alla by name. “I hope you had a wonderful trip,” he said, “this is the longest you’ve been gone.”

“Actually, I cut the trip a little short.”

“A shame. Mr. Matson seemed quite worried when he left a few days ago. I hope everything has returned to normal.”

“Yes, it has. Thank you.” She glanced toward the street. “Has anyone come by for me in the last few days?”

“A Russian gentleman. He said he was a friend who happened to be in London. He didn’t leave his name.”

“Did he ask for Mr. Matson or just for me?”

“Just you.”

“What did he look like?” Gage asked.

The doorman looked at Gage, then back at Alla.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“A very large man. I do say, a most unfriendly-looking friend.”

“Has he come back?”

“No. We’ve looked in on your flat every day just to make sure he didn’t decide to check for himself.”

“If he inquires again, tell him I haven’t returned to London and you don’t know when I’m expected back.”

Gage withdrew a couple of ten-pound notes from his wallet and handed them to the doorman, who slipped them into his pants pocket.

The elevator deposited Alla and Gage on the eighth floor, across the hall from the penthouse door. After Alla unlocked it, Gage stepped into the flat, where he found himself time-warped back to an early nineteenth-century London sitting room.

“Was this Matson’s idea?”

She nodded. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

Alla set her purse on a Regency mahogany writing table, then turned back toward Gage, who was standing just inside the threshold. She followed Gage’s eyes, which were focused on a highball glass resting on a pedestal secretaire. He walked over and picked it up, revealing a white water ring on the forty-thousand-dollar piece of furniture.

“He’s not coming back,” Gage said.

Alla walked across the room and through an open door. She returned moments later. “His clothes are gone.”

They searched the apartment, collecting phone records, airline ticket stubs, and notes on scraps of paper. Gage stuffed them into a paper bag while Alla packed.

“Is there anything else you want to take?” Gage asked, as Alla carried a battered brown suitcase toward the door. “I imagine this place will be seized by the UK government. You may never get back in again.”

“Nothing here ever really belonged to me. I’m just
taking what I came with.” She sighed as her eyes swept the apartment. “Sometimes life is completely absurd.”

They rode in silence back to the hotel.

“I think I need to be alone for a while,” Alla said, as they walked down the carpeted hallway toward their rooms.

“That’s fine. Maybe we’ll meet for dinner this evening.”

Alla slipped her key card into the lock and pushed open the door. She paused, then turned toward Gage and looked up at him with searching eyes.

“Is there something wrong with me?” she asked.

Gage knew the answer, but responded with a question. She needed to say it for herself to make it real. “What do you mean?”

“My husband. Stuart. They were the same greedy, conscienceless men and I didn’t see it.” She looked down, frowning. “That’s not true. I refused to see it. Stuart started to emerge from the clouds of my juvenile imagination and I looked away. I should’ve gotten out of this when he came back here after SatTek went public.”

Tears formed in her eyes as she looked up again. “I’m really no different than him. A self-deceiving little rat. You must think I’m pathetic.”

“No, not at all.” Gage was tempted to wipe away the tears, but held back, fearing that she’d seek salvation in him, rather than in herself. “You do the right thing when it affects others. You just seem to get lost when you try to create a world you can be happy in.”

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“I can’t tell you how to live. All anybody can do is try to think about what they’re doing, and not lie to themselves. Beyond that, I have no other answer.”

S
pecial Agent Zink was waiting near the customs scanners when Gage and Alla walked from passport control in the international terminal of the San Francisco Airport late the next afternoon.

“Don’t say anything,” Gage told her, “except your name. You can show him your passport and the copy of the letter if he asks. Nothing else.”

Confusion, verging on panic, flashed in her eyes. “But aren’t you required to talk to the police here?”

“No. Name, passport, letter. That’s all.”

Gage and Alla handed their customs declarations to a uniformed agent, who directed them to the green line and toward the exit. Zink stationed himself in their path as they approached the automatic doors.

Zink pulled his shoulders back. “I need to talk to your friend, Gage.”

“Sorry, we’re late for an appointment.” Gage took Alla’s arm and stepped to Zink’s left. “Why don’t you give me a call next week, I’ll see if I can fit you in.”

Zink moved over to block them. “You’re forcing me to pull rank.”

“Pull rank? I’m not in your chain of command, and neither is she.”

“She can talk to me now,” Zink said, “or I’ll subpoena her to the grand jury.”

“Do what you gotta do.”

“You’re verging on obstruction, Gage.”

Gage held out his hands as if waiting to be cuffed. “Take your best shot.”

Zink reddened. “In time.” He looked at Alla, then back at Gage. “Where’s she staying?”

“It’s on her arrival card, go take a look.”

Gage fixed Zink in place with a forearm in front of his chest, then signaled Alla to precede him to the exit.

“You don’t like that guy,” Alla said as they emerged into the arrivals hall.

“He’s a lousy investigator and a snake. He got into the FBI during the height of the cocaine epidemic. Back then they took anybody who knew what crack looked like. Now they’re stuck with him. Even worse, he’s badged his way out of a DUI and a prostitution arrest.”

“What’s badged?”

“It means he used his badge, used his position as a federal agent to talk his way out of being arrested.”

“And he was a prostitute, too?” Alla asked, drawing back and grinning.

“No, not a prostitute. A john.”

“Are you still speaking English?”

“A john is a customer. A DUI is driving under the influence.”

“Of what?”

“No one knows. As I said, he badged his way out, both times claiming he was undercover. Ever since he’s been trying to prove to the Bureau that he’s a real cop. For
him, Jack Burch is just a statistic he needs to get back on the promotion trail.”

Gage hailed a taxi that took them on the forty-minute ride to the East Bay hills. The sun had set by the time it pulled into the driveway next to the redwood stairs rising up from his house.

As the cab door shut, Gage spotted Faith climbing the steps, now lined with tiny Christmas lights. She threw her arms around Gage, who flinched when her hands pressed against his wounds.

“I’m sorry, dear,” Faith said, unwrapping herself. “I got excited.”

Faith’s motherly look at Alla told Gage that she’d understood his e-mail describing both the courage Alla had shown and her need for a woman in whom to confide. Faith hugged her, then picked up her suitcase. “You must be very tired. All you’ve been through.”

“I’m fine, really. I rested in London.”

“Not like you’ll rest here.” Faith tilted her head toward the stairs. “Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”

Faith led Alla through the house to a lower-level bedroom. Alla walked directly from the door to the corner windows facing the bay.

“Is that San Francisco?” she asked, wide-eyed at the floor-to-ceiling view that extended from Mount Tamalpias in the north to the airport in the south. The first bit of evening fog was easing its way through the Golden Gate, but had yet to mute the twinkling lights of the city or the sapphire blue of the bay. “It’s like a postcard.”

“It’s real and it’s yours as long as you can stay with us. You can freshen up down the hallway, then come back up.”

Gage was sitting at the kitchen table when Faith
walked in. She took a bottle of Budweiser out of the refrigerator and handed it to him. “From Professor Blanchard. He said you’d understand.”

Gage twisted off the top and took a sip. “Sweetheart of a guy.”

“He feels indebted to you,” Faith said, sitting down.

“It’s the other way around.”

“That’s not how he looks at it. He spent his whole career worrying that his research was being used to make weapons that would end up in the hands of the wrong people. He feels like you gave him a chance to use his knowledge for good.”

“Well, he did good. I couldn’t have gotten this far without him. I just don’t know whether it was enough.”

Faith reached over and rested her hand on Gage’s forearm. “You look beat.”

“A little jet lag, it’ll be gone tomorrow.”

“You think you can force Peterson to indict Matson for the devices?”

“Based on what? Alla can’t get up on the stand. Whoever killed Granger and the Fitzhughs will go after her if she does.”

“What about you?”

“Testify about watching Matson from a distance? It was a silent movie without subtitles—and it would be just as dangerous for Alla because I’d have to expose her role.” Gage looked across the bay toward the Federal Building, but his eyes fell on the clock tower at the foot of Market Street. “I’ve got nothing to delay the indictment.”

“How soon do you think it will be?”

“A day or two. Milsberg left a message that Zink said he’s the second-to-the-last grand jury witness, and they want him in tomorrow. At 10
A
.
M
.”