Last to Fold (40 page)

Foos said, “She’s gone.”

“What happened?”

“Don’t know. We went to Lombardi’s with Pig Pen, came back, she said she was tired, wanted a nap, and stretched out on the couch. I thought I heard a cell phone ring a little later, and when I came out to check, she was gone.”

“Dammit.”

“She’s a sweet kid, but a real head case. Ratko screwed her over pretty good. Probably best for her he croaked. He would’ve broken her heart otherwise. It’s pretty damned fragile as it is. She’s still too hung up on him to see what was happening.”

“Sounds like she told you a fair amount.”

“I just bought the pizza and listened. Been a long time since anyone took an interest in what she thinks.”

“She say anything about her mother?”

“Uh-uh. Only that she and Ratko talked about family a lot. His parents were dead. He was always asking about hers.”

No surprise there.

“Can you tell who called her?”

“On it right now.”

The
Potemkin
’s tires squealed as I accelerated through Lachko’s gate. I knew why I’d been tricked into visiting Brighton Beach. The trickster wanted Eva. I didn’t know why, but I had a good idea who. The list of potential tricksters was growing short.

CHAPTER 39

“Disposable cell phone,” Foos said. “The one that called her.”

“Fuck your mother.”

He ignored me. He’d heard it before. “Call came in a few blocks from here. Dover Street.”

My head whipped around. I yelped as my neck sent a shot of pain down my right side.

“You okay?” Foos said.

“Yeah. Where on Dover?”

“Dover and Front. Right under the bridge.”

The pain vanished as I ran for the door.

*   *   *

Spies are a paranoid bunch. For good reason. There usually is someone out to get us. That doesn’t mean we lack humor.

One of the trickiest challenges I faced in a foreign city was finding secure venues to meet agents. America’s most crowded metropolis, New York, offers wonderful anonymity. Everyone consciously ignores everyone else around them. But it’s still difficult to find places where one is truly alone—and out of the reach of prying eyes, ears, cameras, microphones, and binoculars, should there be any interested, which, of course, we constantly assume there are.

I found a few good venues in my time—the bar at the Village Vanguard, any number of undervisited rooms at the Metropolitan Museum (ditto for the Cloisters), the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens (less crowded than its Bronx brethren), windswept piers on either river, especially in winter, and, one of the very best, a well-traveled, thoroughly anonymous gay men’s pickup spot in the parking lot of a Queens park. I appreciated the irony of that one more than my agents. By far my favorite was the old Civil Defense shelter in one of the stone piers supporting the Brooklyn Bridge. I happened on it completely by accident, in the mid-1980s. The lock had rusted to the point of breaking, or maybe someone had broken in and run away, leaving the iron door banging in the wind on a sleeting winter night, the noise echoing around the chamber of the bridge’s understructure. I was walking to the subway after meeting an agent on one of the East River piers. There was nobody on the street, so in I went.

I found a forgotten Cold War fallout shelter. Big, damp, dirty room, stocked to the ceiling with cases of high-protein crackers (date-stamped 1962), drums of water, crates of medicines, and boxes of blankets. There were some wooden chairs and tables, two dozen folding canvas cots, some kerosene lanterns and multiple cans of fuel. Iron rungs climbed to a second exit in the bridge ramp. Whether the stone of the superstructure was enough to protect the inhabitants from the feared nuclear winter was anybody’s guess, but the early 1960s—the months of the Cuban Missile Crisis (we knew it as the Caribbean Crisis)—were hardly a rational time in America. Everyone was scared, for good reason.

I wedged the door shut that night and returned the next day with a heavy-duty combination lock. I spent a good hour kicking it around the street to make it look old. I checked the place periodically over the next three months. So far as I could tell, no one ever got near it. I used the shelter more than a dozen times over the next two years. I never saw evidence that anyone else even knew of its existence. My agents were evenly divided. Half found it fascinating. The rest disdained the dirt and damp. I took pleasure in the irony every time I visited.

Another summer thunderstorm tonight. I ran through seven blocks of rain to Dover Street, clothes glued to my body when I got there. Early evening, sunset still hours away, but it might as well have been midnight. No lights from the buildings. No one on the street. Dim pools of reflection on the asphalt from a few streetlights. The hulk of the bridge weighed heavy above. An urban no-man’s-land, bereft of life, except for the rumble of traffic on the ramp.

Lightning flashed off the door to the old shelter. No way to tell if anyone had been there since my last visit in 1988. I took refuge in the entrance of an unlit building and waited. No motion, no people, nothing. The rain slackened some but still fell hard. I didn’t have a good idea—I didn’t have any idea except to hope the lock was still my own and take my chances. The exertion of running made everything ache. I hadn’t brought a gun. A good hand to fold.

I waited another few minutes on the grounds that summer storms pass. The rain kept falling.

Muttering under my breath, I started across the street at a trot. I could see the old iron door more clearly as I got closer, the pockmarks of rust and age brightening in the lightning flashes. I could almost see there was no padlock on the latch when a strong arm grabbed my shoulder and pulled me around. My feet gave way on the asphalt, slick with rain, and my butt hit the pavement, setting off a chain of pain through every bruised muscle I had.

Damned fool! Of course he’d have someone watching.

I looked up, expecting to see the bullet that would split my skull, thinking about Victoria and Aleksei and Eva and my own stupidity.

An eye patch. Then a hand grabbed mine. “This way. Move!”

Petrovin pulled me to my feet and shoved me to the refuge of another pier. Eva Mulholland was huddled in the shadows, hair matted around her head, soaked shirt clinging to her frame.

Petrovin had traded his white suit for black jeans and a black T-shirt. He hadn’t lost any of his presence.

“I was following Polina,” he said. “I think you had someone on her, too.”

I nodded.

“She brought me here and went inside. That was four o’clock. Eva came at five. I waylaid her.”

I looked at Eva. “Why’d you leave the office?”

“She c … called.” Her voice was between a squeak and a whisper.

“And?”

“She n … needed m … m … me. Said I had to c … come. Then…”

“Then what?” Pretrovin said, with a gentleness I doubt I could’ve managed.

Tears welled. “She screamed. It w … w … was aw … aw … awful.”

“I know this place,” I said to Petrovin. “I’ll go.”

“You armed?”

“No. Are you?”

He shook his head. “Are you sure you’re in shape…”

“I’ll be fine. It’s an old fallout shelter, one big room. If I’m not back out in two minutes, get her out of here and find a cop.”

Nobody came or went while we talked. The rain picked up a little, then slowed. It was falling harder again when I took a breath and started for the rusted door a second time.

The padlock lay on the pavement, cut open, off to the side. Same one I’d bought two decades before, looked like.

I put my back to the wall beside the door, reached around, pushed it open a few inches. If anyone made any noise, it was drowned by the traffic rumble above. I peered into the dark. Couldn’t see a thing. There was a light switch to the right of the door. I’d been amazed years ago when it worked. Who was paying the bill? Where was the bill sent? I was just as amazed now.

I flicked the switch and gave the door a hard shove. It struck something. Glass broke. A trail of fire skittered across the floor around a stack of water drums—a whoosh and a flash and flames and shadows danced on all four walls. I could feel the heat and smell the oil.

Behind the drums a circle of fire raged, fed by kerosene-soaked blankets, flames leaping six to eight feet. In the center I could just make out Polina, tied to a chair, head falling forward. A funeral pyre of blankets burned under the chair.

No time. She’d be dead in a minute and the whole place an inferno a minute after that. Holding a dry blanket in front of me—an ineffective shield if there ever was one—I made my way around the fire circle to the back. No room between the fire and the wall. The designer of this execution chamber had done his work well. The heat scorched everything. The fire burned all around—no spaces, no breaks. My clothes would be alight in a second.

I held the blanket out in front and jumped through the fire. I screamed as the flames seared my skin, the smell of burning flesh mixing with kerosene. I wrapped the blanket around Polina, lifted the burning chair off the pyre, and ran through the other side, giving her a final shove as I fell to the floor and rolled, trying to extinguish burning linen and skin.

“STAY STILL!”
Petrovin barked. I stopped, and he covered me with blankets. The burning eased. The smell remained. He took more blankets to Polina and covered her. As I sat up, I saw Eva by the door, her whole body shaking. She let out a wail—the sound of a lifetime of fear, pain, and sorrow reverberating around the stone walls before she collapsed to the floor.

“Get the fire out,” Petrovin yelled.

“Water drums,” I said. “Soak the blankets.”

He went to work on one of the metal cans. It took forever—probably just a few seconds—to get one open. We suffocated the kerosene-soaked blankets. The space filled with black smoke. The stench of fuel, wool, and flesh made me gag.

Polina’s clothes were badly charred, her skin black and red. The burns could be the least of her problems. She’d been worked over with a blade—disfigurement by a thousand cuts. The wounds puffed and oozed. I put my nose next to one; it reeked of kerosene. I fought the urge to throw up.

Her hands were bound to the back of the chair, and her feet to the legs, with duct tape wrapped thick. Tape covered her mouth. I looked for something to cut her free. A box cutter lay in a corner, blood on the blade. The torture weapon. I slashed the tape on her arms and legs and the chair fell away. I pulled the piece off her face as gently as I could. She was unconscious and barely breathing. I pulled out my cell phone. No way not to get my hands dirty this time.

Victoria got on the phone immediately. “Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” I lied. “Ambulance. ASAP. Front and Dover. In the bridge support. Felix Mulholland. Severe burns and lacerations. Loss of blood. Blood poisoning. She doesn’t have long. Cops, too. I’ll wait.”

She hesitated half a second, a hundred questions running through her mind. She didn’t ask one. “I’ll call back.”

Mulholland next. “Your wife’s badly hurt.” I repeated the essentials. “Ambulance on the way. New York Hospital?”

“Yes. I’ll meet her there. Tell me—”

“Time for that later.”

He understood urgency, too. “Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

Petrovin sat on the floor, Polina’s head in his lap. He stroked her hair. I thought I saw tears in his good eye, but that could have been the smoke. When he saw me looking, he put his finger to her neck.

“Pulse very faint,” he said.

“Odds aren’t good. Bastard worked her over with that box cutter and put kerosene in her wounds.”

“Jesus! What kind of…”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. His shoulders started shaking, and a new look came over his face, one of barely controlled fury. He was close to explosion. Time to get him and Eva out of here.

“Take the girl and go somewhere safe, before the entire New York City police establishment arrives. She’s the target now. That fire was set; the door was booby-trapped. She was supposed to set it off—burn her mother to death before her eyes, herself, too, maybe. I’ll deal with the cops.”

He kept his eye on me as he stood, cool returning. “I don’t disagree with your assessment, but why are you doing this?”

“Why are you?”

Hard to make out in the dim light, but I think he smiled. “Perhaps we’re on the same side after all.”

“You’re the only one who ever doubted that. Does anyone know where you’re staying, anyone at all?”

He hesitated.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Don’t go back there. Someone knew about Chmil, remember?”

I dialed the office. Foos was still there. “Emergency. I need hotels with vacancies, fast.”

“Give me five.”

“Call this number.” I gave him Petrovin’s cell phone.

Eva didn’t want to leave. She started screaming and dove at her mother. I put myself between them. Polina’s back was to her—Eva couldn’t see the extent of her wounds. Petrovin talked quietly in her ear from behind. I couldn’t hear what he said, but his calming influence took hold.

“Polina’ll be at New York Hospital,” I said. “Don’t answer your phone after my friend calls back. If I want to talk, I’ll call twice. I’ll hang up after the third ring the first time. Answer the second call on the second ring. You’d better move.”

Petrovin nodded and took Eva’s hand. He pulled her to the door. He turned back when he got there, looking at Polina on the ground.

“You know as well as I do there’s only one—”

“I know,” I said.

CHAPTER 40

The police got there first, the ambulance second.

I called Bernie as soon as Petrovin left. “I need a lawyer. Someone who can keep me out of jail.” I told him where I was.

“I heard about that place, back at Langley. We never touched it, waiting for someone to return. How bad is it?”

So much for my irony. “Bad.” I gave him the details. “I’ve called Mulholland. Ambulance and cops are on the way. But your former partner’s going to have my ass.”

“Word is, she already has.”

“I’ve got newfound respect for the CIA. I still need help.”