Palace of Treason (17 page)

Nate’s thoughts raced. If there were Iranians out there—had to be them—it would be a special surveillance team, maybe Qods Force or that
Unit 400, which did its own version of
mokroye delo,
wet work, for the mullahs. If they were going to try something, it wouldn’t be before they verified who Nate and Dominika were, and that would be the end of DIVA’s career as CIA’s penetration of SVR.

Time check. Almost 2300. The street grew quiet, and there were fewer lights on in the buildings. Nate walked, listening for footsteps on the pavement behind them, for the soft squeal of tires ahead at the next corner, for the ill-timed scratch of a match ahead of them. Nothing. He could see Dominika spotting to her right and left, quick glances made without turning her head or shoulders. He caught her eye; she looked worried. Nate was worried. They had been out for fifty minutes, and they hadn’t seen what top pros call anomalies—not a single demeanor error, no car caught out of position, no three men smoking on a street corner then hurriedly separating, as if strangers. The trouble was that Nate and Dominika both knew what they felt: There was coverage out there. And two dead people in that candy-cane apartment, with the blood, and the flies, and the lampshade fringe stirring. And the nuclear secrets of Iran in the tablet around Nate’s neck. And Dominika’s single-shot lipstick gun effective out to two meters, first developed on Stalin’s orders in 1951 to shoot an East German traitor in Berlin. And two cheap steak knives.

They approached a corner—Langobardenstrasse and Hardeggasse—and the shadow of a man stepped out of a doorway and walked ahead of them, keeping a half-block distance. At the next corner, he peeled off down a cross street and disappeared. A woman with a long coat and head scarf hurried past them on the opposite side of the street, and Dominika whispered without moving her lips that the woman carried no purse, or string bag, or parcel.
Maybe we’re stretching them a little,
thought Nate,
and they had to throw some feet closer in.

They picked a narrow little street—Kliviengasse—that ended in a set of steps down to a path through backyard gardens. Nate stopped Dominika with an arm, and they stood in the shadows and listened. Nothing. They were tight with the tension, weary from the stress. The night wind had come up a little and there were wind chimes on someone’s back porch, and a dog barked, and a wooden gate swung in the breeze, clattering as it hit the latch. Nate looked at Dominika and she shrugged,
I don’t know.
He leaned toward her and put his mouth next to her ear.

“Time to go provocative,” he whispered. Ratchet up the pace, complicate the route, make them choose between hanging back, staying discreet, and losing the eye, and moving closer and showing themselves. Dominika turned her lips to his ear.

“How provocative?” she said. It was insane to be flirting out here, with some amorphous black beast stalking them, but the tension was making her jittery. Nate’s halo flared, not in anger, she noted, but he took her by the hand and pulled. They turned south on Augentrostegasse, stopped for thirty seconds, then ran west on Orchisgasse, crouched behind a fence for two minutes, then ran south again on Strohblumengasse, narrow little lanes with smaller buildings, and more garden plots. At one turn, they saw the silhouette of a woman under a tree.
How?
The night was very quiet as Nate and Dominika walked past a boarded-up swimming camp with a log cabin and furled umbrellas—Strand Stadlau beach was a miserable grassy plot on the Danube canal, but the bare bulb over the cabin cast a shadow of a man standing stock-still, the toes of his shoes showing from around the corner.
Jesus Christ,
thought Nate,
for two hours we’ve been pushing an aggressive, stair-stepping foot route, turning corners, changing directions, and this guy is here
ahead
of us.

It was getting colder. They could smell the river, and the mud, and the spilled fuel oil in the marshes ahead. They walked south on Kanalstrasse, then jogged west on Múhlwasserstrasse, heading toward the green and red lights of a rail semaphore about a half mile away.
Let them get around a rail yard,
Nate thought, but he was feeling a little nervous now, a little impatient—it’s not panic unless you start screaming—and he hurried a bit more, listening for the sound of running, or the bumblebee buzz of a motorbike, or the squelch break of a radio. They high-stepped over a single set of rails, then two, then five, slipping on black tarry ties, the smell of diesel in their noses. Standpipes throughout the rail yard—curved pipes coming out of the gravel—vented dripping steam that was blown sideways in the rising wind, and they ran through the sour plumes, and over more rails, toward a group of warehouses in a row.

There was runny mud around the warehouses, and rusted engine parts, and tilted rolling-stock axles, and cracked iron wheels on their sides; they saw the black maw of an open warehouse door and ran up the sloped ramp and inside, then sat on a wet cement floor with their backs to a splintered
wooden crate and eased their aching legs. Nate was thirsty and cursed himself for not thinking of bringing water. A leak in the roof dripped rainwater into a large puddle on the floor with a metronome
plop-plop.

“How many of them?” said Dominika, her head back and resting. Her designer boots were muddy and scuffed.

“I don’t know,” said Nate. “More than a dozen. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“How are we going to get across the river?” said Dominika. Nate looked at her and thought wildly about making a run for the front gate of the US Embassy. No. Impossible. It would burn Dominika and be the end of the DIVA case. But at least they would be alive.
Jesus, no.
Nate could already hear Gable screaming at him.

“Gable told me something once,” said Nate, sitting up. “What the Iranians did in Beirut, what they taught Hezbollah.” Dominika was too tired to turn her head.

“They used surveillance to drive a target into a funnel—a street or an alley or a deserted square—where they could use a scope.”

“What does that mean?” said Dominika, looking over at him.

“A rifle, a sniper, who has the position and range already dialed in.”

“Do you think we are being herded?” said Dominika. “How could they?”

“Every turn we’ve taken since the apartment, we’ve gotten a hit. They’re putting people in our way, and we’ve responded by moving away from them. In the direction they want.”

“So where are they pushing us?” said Dominika. The clank of metal on metal came from outside. Dominika got to her feet and looked at the entrance to the warehouse, then motioned him to move. Nate followed Dominika to flatten against the warehouse wall, partially behind a rusted electrical conduit. They did not breathe. There was no moonlight, yet a faint shadow preceded the single figure as it walked up the ramp and stopped, hands on hips, to survey the dim, sprawling interior of the warehouse. Dressed in dark jeans and a nondescript jacket, the figure turned directly toward Nate and Dominika—they were invisible in the shadows—and started walking toward them. Nate reached for Dominika’s sleeve to signal her not to move, but as the person drew even with them, Dominika’s arm shot out in a backhand strike to the base of the nose with the sullen slap of a bat hitting a side of meat.

A surprised grunt morphed into a liquid gurgling as the man staggered back a few steps and sat down heavily on the floor, hands holding his ruined nose, now flowing with blood and swelling closed. Dominika squatted beside the choking man, grabbed a fistful of hair, and turned his head to look directly into her face. Beneath furry dark eyebrows, the man’s wide-open eyes were jet black. His chin was covered in blood, mouth open to breathe. Dominika leaned close to him.

“
Hvatit,
enough,” said Nate.

Dominika ignored him. “Her name was
Udranka,
” said Dominika, shaking the man’s head by the hair.

The man knew. He looked at Dominika and whispered
Morder shooreto bebaran,
curse the person who washes your dead body, go straight to hell, as Dominika wrenched his head violently to one side, exposing his throat, and shivered the tip of the steak knife into the crook between his neck and collarbone, holding his head still.
Be about right,
thought Nate,
carotid artery, four seconds.
The man’s eyes went wide, his legs twitched, and his head went back. Dominika took her hand out of his hair and let him fall backward to the floor with a thud.

Dominika straightened and looked at Nate. “Do not tell me anything,” she said. “I do not care what you think.”

The man’s eyes looked up at the ceiling.
“Udranka,”
said Dominika again, looking down at him. Dominika bent and unzipped his jacket, flipped it open, and felt the man’s pockets. She held up a phone, which Nate took, powered off, and tossed into the darkness. They could not speak or understand Farsi, and they didn’t need to carry what was essentially a beacon to make it easier to track them. Dominika wiggled a small handgun out of an inner pocket and handed it to Nate. A German Walther, mag fully loaded; it looked like .380 caliber, what Gable would call a purse gun, but Nate checked the safety and put it in his pants pocket. Nate regretted interrupting this biblical moment, but he grabbed Dominika by the shoulder and pulled her away before she began sawing the Iranian man’s head off with the steak knife for a trophy. She shrugged off his hand and glared at him.

They slipped out a broken back door and through a fenced supply yard, weaving through twenty derelict engine blocks tumbled widely in the mud like giant dice strewn in melted chocolate. The last warehouse in the row was close to a stand of trees, and they quickly got into the shadows
and stopped to listen. They could hear the roar of the traffic crossing the Praterbrücke over the Danube; the hulk of the bridge loomed beyond the trees.

“When they find that man they will all come,” said Dominika. Her face was ashen and determined. Nate peered into the night, looking for movement. She put her hand out to stroke his cheek, an unspoken apology. He was fighting to protect her, and she had been out of her head.

“I think we have to risk crossing the bridge,” said Nate. “I thought we could wait, but we can’t stay out here in the dark. We can’t last out here.” He put his arms around Dominika’s shoulders. “We have to get into the city.”

Dominika nodded.

“We work our way through the trees to the bridge,” said Nate. “You say there’s a walkway underneath?”

Dominika nodded, then looked up at him in alarm. “Neyt. No. That is where they will shoot. It is a straight catwalk under the bridge. It is lit with neon bulbs. Of course. It is a
zasada,
an ambush. They can shoot from either end, and there is no cover when crossing.” It was then that they heard the sound of footsteps crunching on the forest floor, several pairs of footsteps, coming quickly. Had they found the man in the warehouse so soon? They were coming for blood. Nate gestured with his head and they both started running through the trees, around clumps of brush and vines, over forest litter, Nate all the time feeling the icy patch between his shoulder blades where the bullet would hit. Dominika was three steps ahead of him, running well, when she ran hip deep into a marshy patch and fell face-first into brackish water. She got up spluttering, and was about to grasp Nate’s extended hand when she instead clasped her hand over his mouth and pulled him down among the tall weeds at the edge of the little bog. The stinking water seeped into their clothes, and got into their noses. Dominika held her lipstick gun out of the water, and Nate quietly shook his pistol dry. A misfire would kill them both.

“They are coming through the trees,” said Dominika. “Two of them.” Nate could see two silhouettes moving forward. There had been a plague of silhouettes tonight, phantoms all around them—on the street, behind buildings, under trees—herding them as delicately as a collie curls around a flock of sheep. It was getting late and Nate knew they were in considerable danger. The approaching silhouettes were spaced a small distance
apart. By their size and shape, Nate estimated they were a woman and a large man, dressed in black jeans and dark jackets. He saw a glint of metal in the woman’s hand. They approached with purpose, making enough sound to be heard, looking to the sides and behind—these two were driving them toward the bridge. Nate knew he and Dominika were running out of space—they had to begin moving in the opposite direction, maybe lie flat in the water and reeds and let these two walk past and try to break through.

Dominika’s tactical solution was somewhat more Gothic. She whispered in Nate’s ear, “I will eliminate the one on the left. Can you shoot the other one?” She looked at him as if she were discussing a recipe for raisin bread. Nate hefted the little automatic in his hand, then looked at the approaching surveillants, now about seven feet away, and tried to remember the precepts of shooting.
Combat pistol distance, focus on the front sight, lock the wrist, press the trigger, don’t jerk it.

In the instant before she moved, Dominika bizarrely thought of her father, and Korchnoi; she turned and looked at Nate, reaching out and squeezing his hand briefly. He was adjusting his crouch to time his jump to hers—he was intense, pale, determined. His purple aura pulsed with his heartbeat, and Dominika told herself she would not let him be harmed.

The woman in front of Dominika was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and Dominika lifted herself out of the cattails, streaming water. Smoothly and without haste she stepped forward and put the lipstick tube against the clear visor of the helmet and pushed the plunger. There was a
click
and the plastic instantly looked like the bowl of a blender processing tomatoes and tofu. Her frontal lobe now the consistency of summer gazpacho, the woman collapsed in a heap.

Meanwhile, Nate also stood up from behind the tall grass, raised the pistol in both hands, put the little white dot of the sight on the bridge of the man’s nose, and squeezed the trigger three times. There were three indistinct
pops
—the little gun did not buck in his hand, and Nate was able to keep the barrel level. He looked up at the Persian. The big man shook his head and a knee began to buckle, but there was an ugly automatic in his hand coming up slowly, so Nate got down over his sights again and shot him twice more in the forehead. The man fell backward, arms flung to the
side, reflexively squeezing the trigger twice, the rounds going into the night sky. “Lady’s gun,” Gable would have said. Nate walked over to the man with the pistol ready, but he was down.