Palace of Treason (18 page)

Terrific. Now Nate had a story to tell some young case officer, just as Gable had told
him
stories about
his
shootouts. The Persian’s face was marked by four small black dots ringed in red—two in one cheek and two in his forehead. Nate’s hands were shaking, and he had an overarching sense of having screwed up—he could have run the SDR better, kept these people away from them, evaded them more cleverly.
Shut the fuck up,
Gable told him in his head. They had to defend themselves; this was not some cat-and-mouse surveillance in Moscow or Washington. This night was supposed to end with Nate and Dominika facedown in the marsh water, or flopping sodden over the downriver floor weirs, or crumpled backward on top of each other on the walkway under the Praterbrücke. And the evening was still young. There were more silhouettes moving around out there, and a shooter lying on a mat, smelling the gun oil on his hands, resting his chin on his arm, face green from the tritium-illuminated reticle in his scope.

Nate turned to Dominika and saw her lying facedown on the ground, arms underneath her, legs crossed at the ankles. Disaster. He rolled her over, wiped the dirt from her cheek, and roamed his hands over her body, the familiar contours, the sweet curves, looking for wounds, questing for pumping blood. Nothing. Her head lolled back, loose on her neck, and Nate shook her gently, frantically. She groaned. Nate supported her head and felt her skull; his fingers came away red and wet. Scalp wound. The 9mm round had creased her head, a matter of a millimeter from death, the width of the metal jacket on the slug. The contraction from the dead trigger finger of the man had clipped his agent, this blue-eyed gladiator, this passionate woman with uncommon courage and a volatile temper, the woman he loved. She could have been dead in his arms, but they’d had a little luck and he was going to get her to safety. He cradled her head and spoke into her ear. Another groan, and her eyes fluttered open.

“Domi,” said Nate urgently, in Russian, “
Vstan’,
come on, get up!” She looked at him vacantly, then her eyes focused and she took a deep breath. She nodded.

“Help me up,
dushka,
” she said, but she was slurring her words. He
lifted her carefully and put her arm around his neck, stooping to pick up his TALON case and looping it over his shoulder.

“Come on,” said Nate, “we can backtrack, get away from the river.” Dominika stiffened up.

“Do not go near the big bridge,” she slurred. “Another bridge,” she said, pointing limply downriver. “Railroad, five hundred meters downriver. We can walk on the rails. We can reach my safe house. It is not too far. I can make it.” She stumbled as she said it and slipped out of his grasp. She was on her hands and knees, head bowed, and Nate leaned over again and picked her up.

“Come on, baby,” said Nate automatically. A fierce determination to save her welled up in him with exceptional clarity. If she were not hurt, she would have given him hell at being called baby. Nate took an oblique direction away from the bridge, paralleling the river. They pushed through the trees and the reeds, sloshing through unseen black water. When he stopped to listen, Dominika slumped against him, shaking from shock and the cool night air on her wet clothes. No more silhouettes, no snapping twigs—maybe they had broken out of the net, or maybe the Iranian team had pulled back, confident that the rabbits were headed to the bridge and were already stoppered in the bottle.

Nate trudged ahead, with the big Persian’s heavy pistol in his belt. The TALON was banging against his hip, Dominika’s arm was around his neck, and he held her by the waist. She was racked with fits of trembling, and periodically sagged against him. Nate sat her on a patch of dry ground and felt her hair. Sticky, but the wound didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. Dominika tilted her head up at him; in the starlight her lips looked black and were shaking.

“Neyt, take your tablet and go ahead,” she said. “We have to protect the intelligence. I will meet you at my apartment.” Nate smiled at her and brushed a strand of hair off her face.

“Domi, we go together. I’m not leaving you.”

Dominika closed her eyes for a moment, struggling. “The Iranian information is too valuable,” she slurred.

“You’re too valuable … to me,” said Nate.

Dominika opened her eyes and looked at him. The purple cloud around
his head swirled and expanded. “Your color is so beautiful,” she whispered in Russian, closing her eyes again.

Hallucinating,
he thought.
Got to get her dry and warm fast.
“What are you saying?” he whispered back.

“So beautiful,” Dominika mumbled.

He led her through another thicket—they had to step high as vines tugged at their ankles. The Danube marshes didn’t want to let them go. Nate peeled the dripping-wet tweed coat off Dominika and put his thinner jacket over her shoulders. The hand that curled around his neck was icy cold. They had to get out of these woods.

They pushed through brush, and the stone-block pier of the railroad bridge suddenly towered above them. As they looked up, a flat-nosed, silver and blue S-Bahn train on the S80 line rumbled overhead, the arc-light snaps and pops from the overhead catenary lines lighting up their faces—Dominika’s heavy-lidded eyes barely registered the passing cars. Nate led her up a slope to the rail bed and let her rest. He walked a little way out onto the bridge along the rails. The curved upper trusses of the bridge were close alongside the double tracks—inches of clearance on either side—with only a narrow structural girder running outside above the water. They would have to cross the entire bridge before another train passed; otherwise, they would have to step out onto the knobby, riveted girder above the black river and hold on until the train passed. Even odds that Dominika in her mazy condition would teeter and fall off. Once in the water, she would be gone as completely as if she had fallen overboard at night during a gale in the middle of the ocean.

Nate looked upriver. The Praterbrücke buzzed with late-night vehicular traffic. The pedestrian walkway underneath the roadway was a soft glowing gallery—contrasted with the darkly wooded left bank, where two bodies stiffened in the night air, and where a patient sniper in a hole waited for them to enter the neon-flavored kill box. For an instant, Nate wondered whether the sniper could cover both bridges from a shooting position somewhere in between the bridges, but that would mean dealing with traversing targets instead of a straight shot. There was no alternative in any case: He had to get Dominika inside and warm if she was going to survive.

They were halfway across the bridge when the box girders started vibrating
and the overhead electric lines began humming—a noise like the one blowing across the mouth of a bottle produces—and the reflection from the big headlight came at them along the shiny rails like a fast-burning fuse, curving and speeding up. Nate helped Dominika under a slanted truss and balanced her on the girder, holding on to her with one hand while she gripped the steel with icy fingers. Their protruding heels hung over the flowing night-black river from which a bass note rose—millions of bucking brown Danube gallons racing to the Black Sea. The steel around them shook and Nate tightened his grip on Dominika as the pressure wave in front of the train buffeted them and then tried to suck them in, and the kinetoscope cabin lights as they whizzed by turned Dominika’s face into a sooty-eyed, eldritch witch, but their eyes met and Nate smiled at her, and she started laughing, and he started laughing, and they hung on until the bridge stopped vibrating.

The kaleidoscope lights of the Prater in the distance called to them, offering cover and safety. The colder air over the river seemed to revive her, but halfway across the rail bridge, Dominika stopped, hugged a girder with white-knuckled hands, and leaned out over the roiling water. She vomited into the black, her body racked by tremors interrupted only by shivers. He held her close now, helped her walk over the rest of the bridge. Nate kept listening for the trains, but he also started surveying the approaching bank and riverside drive of Handelskai, looking for a dark lingering figure, or a stationary vehicle emitting a white plume of exhaust, or a fleeting glint of a scope over the blued barrel of a Dragunov sniper rifle.
All clear, until it isn’t.
They walked through the park along Hauptallee to stay away from the river, Nate steering Dominika straight, occasionally boosting her up when her legs sagged.

They reached the amusement park as it was closing—it felt as if they’d been out all night—and they heard the sirens across the river. They walked along the esplanade, keeping out of the brightest pools of light so that no one could see the blood in Dominika’s hair and on her shirt, listening to the music and smelling the food. Dominika wobbled a little.
Too much wine,
thought the old ladies in the stalls. The wobbling hid the shivering, which was coming in waves. Music from the rides and the wind rumble of the Ferris wheel was in their ears.

They fell into the apartment, Dominika crawling on all fours while Nate secured the door with the striker-plate ratchet he kept in the bottom of his case. He picked Dominika up, carried her into the bathroom, and stripped off her sodden clothes. Her body was bruised, her back and legs and breasts icy to the touch. He laid her in the tub and started the tap, the hot water turning brown. She lay with her eyes closed as he washed her body and her hair and examined the hairline groove in her scalp. It had stopped bleeding. She opened her eyes once to look at him. Even submerged in hot water up to her chin, Dominika shivered. The surface of the dirty bath water vibrated.

“Zyuganov did this,” she said, shuddering, as Nate sponged her legs, working down to her feet. It was totally, unpredictably natural: Dominika was naked and Nate was ministering to her—there was never a thought of embarrassment.

“He put an Iranian hit team on you?” said Nate.

“No. He would not go that far. But he deliberately blew Jamshidi to the Iranians.”

“What happens when the MOIS tells the Center that they chased
two
debriefers tonight?” said Nate. He was drafting the cable to Headquarters in his head.

“The Persians will not report anything back to the Center,” said Dominika, teeth chattering. “Our services do not share. Zyuganov has deniability. When I report what happened, they will attribute it to a counterintelligence investigation—the Iranians found a traitor—but Zyuganov will imply it was a tradecraft failure on my part. I know him.”

“Do we still have a viable covert action?” said Nate, thinking out loud.

She shrugged. “Your people must do their work now, quickly. I will let you know what happens in Moscow,” said Dominika, still shivering under the water.

She let him help her out of the tub, and he dried her body and hair gently with a towel spotted pink with the last of her blood, then he steered her
to the bed and put her under the covers. She shivered and closed her eyes. Nate stood by the bed for a beat, looking down at her face turned sideways on the pillow, her neck long and elegant.

He went back into the living room, powered up his TALON, saw the titles, and opened the German- and English-language files: Wilhelm Petrs GmbH; Berlin assembly plant, Germany; KT550G Seismic Isolation Floor System; rated for III–IV MMI intensity; twenty million euros plus installation team costs. He knew they had what PROD needed. The lines scrolled past his eyes in a waterfall of data. Screen after screen.
Bingo
. A sound from the bedroom and he looked up.

“Is the information there?” Dominika said in Russian, standing in the doorway. “Did we get it?”

Nate nodded. “How much is Moscow charging Tehran for the floor?” he asked.

Dominika shivered instead of shrugging. “Over two billion rubles, I think; I’m not sure.”

Nate tapped his TALON a few times and shook his head. “Over forty million euros. Double the purchase price.”

“Of course, a lot of people will become rich,” said Dominika.

“And the mullahs get a bomb.” Nate put down his tablet.

“Then we are done,” Dominika slurred, leaning against the doorjamb. Her hair was a tangled mess; it fell forward and covered half her face. A wave of shivering racked her body. Nate shut the laptop and hurried over to her. She had wrapped a blanket around herself, but her bare feet stuck out from underneath. He wrapped his arms around her inside the blanket. Her skin was dead cold—lingering shock, he thought—and he led her back into the bedroom. She held on to his wrist, a tight grip in those graceful fingers.

“You’re still shivering,” said Nate.

“Gipotermiya,”
said Dominika absently, closing her eyes.

“Get back into bed,” said Nate. He covered her with the sheet, then a blanket, and unfolded the comforter over her. She shivered under the covers, her teeth showing through blue lips. Nate put his hand under the comforter and felt her hands, then her feet. Ice cold. He boiled water for tea, threw in four spoons of sugar, and made her drink it. She wouldn’t stop shivering.

Nate didn’t know what else to do. He quickly started unbuttoning his
shirt, pulling it off his arms—he had to backtrack so he could unbutton his sleeves. He took off his pants and slipped under the covers, turning her on her side and fitting himself spoon-tight behind her. Her haunches fluttered against his thighs. She reached behind for him, grabbed his hand, and pulled it around her waist. Her whole body shivered, felt as cold as marble.
Cold as MARBLE,
thought Nate with a little shudder himself. Nate willed his body heat into her.

They fell asleep like that. An hour later, maybe two, Nate awoke; he didn’t know what time it was. Her staccato breathing had smoothed out and her shivers had subsided. He moved slightly and she woke up, rolled over, and faced him, keeping her face close, eyes locked onto his. She was drowsy and blinked slowly. He could feel that her skin was warmer. Nate inhaled, drank her in. Everything was different—what they had been, what they subsequently became, what they were now. Surviving this night had shaken the mosaic of their relationship. Nate knew what was right, what was secure, but he now contemplated having broken every rule—sharing requirements, revealing the covert action, sleeping with his agent—with equanimity. This was something more important. As the familiar tightness began in his throat, he tried not to think of Gable and Forsyth.

They lay on their sides looking at each other. Dominika was dizzy and nauseated, but her body shivered—not with cold now but from desire, survivor’s shock, her need for him—and she remembered the feel of his skin. She mashed her breasts against his chest and snaked her leg over his hip, kicking the comforter half off them. She reached to peel off his shorts. What had stalled between them she willed from her mind. Whatever happened tomorrow had nothing to do with tonight. She felt him move closer; they were kissing each other on the lips, the eyes, the throat, and his hands pressed against her back, against her hips. Her head swam—
idiotka,
she thought,
you probably have a concussion
—but she didn’t care. His touch sent sparks up her spine and into the base of her brain.

Nate leaned forward and nibbled her bottom lip. “How do you feel?” he said. “Are you all right?” Dominika blinked at him.

“You know you don’t have to go back inside,” he whispered, his voice quiet, matter-of-fact; it was hard to talk and kiss at the same time. Dominika searched his eyes and put her hand behind his head, pulling him close for another kiss. His purple halo enveloped them both. She knew her secret
sexual self was standing in the open doorway of her hurricane room. Will you come out or duck back inside?

“Do you think I will not return to Moscow?” she said. Her words were slightly slurred. “
Dushka,
now more than ever I must go back. You know it and I know it—we must both do our jobs.”

“I’m saying you don’t have to,” said Nate. “Not after what happened tonight.”

They stopped moving. His eyes searched hers, and his purple aura pulsed and glowed around his head. “Stop talking about work,” she said.

And before the spell between them disintegrated, Dominika pushed Nate onto his back, swung her leg over him, and sat up, fighting the dizziness. Her eyes closed in concentration—it also helped to stop the room from tilting too much. Nate looked up at her half in alarm. Dominika’s mouth was slightly open, teeth partially visible; she was breathing in little huffs. Straddling him, her hands splayed open on his chest, Dominika slowly raised up, moved forward, then back, delving for him, a Sparrow no-hands trick, until she trapped him, distending and electric, and her shoulders hunched in response. She started rocking—
jangha vibhor
came into her head, the erotic position implausibly translated from Sanskrit to Russian for the long-ago Sparrow handbook. She pushed hair away from her face, kitten grunts of exertion coming faster, eyes moving behind closed eyelids. Each flex of her hips stirred her insides; each time she dragged her mons across his pelvis, she felt her
klitor—what was it in English
?—thrummed up and down, like a light switch endlessly flicked on and off.

Nate put his hands around her waist to keep her from pitching to the floor when she started tilting a little. Even as he clenched his teeth and flexed his stomach under Dominika’s genital onslaught, he suddenly, madly, flashed to the purring laptop out there in the living room loaded with secrets from the underground Persian centrifuge halls. Light slanting through the apartment blinds cast bent bars across Dominika’s silver heaving chest, and Nate saw the strobe bars of neon lighting the catwalk under the bridge, saw the black bodies sprawled on the forest floor. He closed his eyes and saw the Persian man’s eyes in the warehouse widen in shock, then fade out, pumping blood. Flashbacks. His own shock was bleeding off, too.
Jesus,
he thought,
concentrate
.

Something was happening, and Nate refocused. Dominika’s eyes were
still closed—she was rocking like Satan’s baby on a hobby horse—her hands now up in front of her, clenched into fists, and she was hyperventilating. Her eyes popped open and she fumbled, frantic, for his hands, and she clapped them on her heavy breasts. She was hung up on the cliff edge, over the foaming sea, the rear wheels spinning in empty air, the chassis teetering one way then back. The hot-bubble sensation between her legs was fading, her slick, shivering ascent was breaking up. Exhaustion, concussion, hypothermia—she breathed a desperate moan.
“Pomogi mne,”
help me.

Help me?
thought Nate.
You’re the Sparrow, I’m just your peeled willow stick.
But he remembered what a lovely girlfriend in college liked, and Nate pinched Dominika’s nipples, then held them firmly and pulled until he brought her down to him, her mouth plastered to his. He didn’t let go. The sudden pleasure-pain took Dominika by surprise as she ground her mouth onto Nate’s, and the car tilted the right way and slid off the lip of the cliff, and the familiar drum-head vibration started in her belly, and surged down her lateral lines to her feet and back again as her crotch seized up, three serious pulses, then two little ones, then the cartwheeling car hit the rocks at the bottom of the cliff and exploded, bigger than those before—combined. A stuttering moan deep from her belly wouldn’t stop.

Amid the smoking rubble of her groin, Dominika dully registered Nate’s arms now locked around her, and his breath in her mouth grew ragged. His arms squeezed her more tightly, the muscles of his stomach fluttered, his body shook violently, physically lifting her. Dominika’s head bobbled and their teeth clicked together painfully. She hung on and rode his bucking body once, twice, three times,
Bozhe,
four,
Moy,
five,
my God,
and it impossibly started again for her, different this time, not an explosion but a resonance—B flat two octaves below middle C—that surged and receded and surged again inside her. This time she whimpered into Nate’s mouth—she heard herself in her own head—and held on to him and twitched, and waited for someone to turn off the electricity.

They didn’t move for ten minutes, listening to each other’s heartbeats. She cleared the hair off her face and looked at him, then half slid off and lay beside him, found his hand, and held it in the darkness. She was still dizzy but not nauseated anymore.

“Cover us,
dushka,
” Dominika said. “I’m cold again.” Nate pulled the comforter over them.

“Do you want water?” asked Nate.

Dominika shook her head. “I swallowed enough of the Danube tonight.”

They held hands under the covers, his thumb caressing her palm, and once he turned to kiss her damp temple. Dominika was still and heavy limbed, filled with Nate in her head and in her swelling heart. He had saved her life tonight; he had bathed her body, had lain with her to share his body heat. Tonight’s lovemaking was as if they had never been apart, as if they had never struggled with their passion. A rogue tremor fluttered her thighs, and she smelled him lying beside her.

Her thoughts drifted from the corporeal to spying. The immensely risky move of introducing Nate in the false-flag operation against Jamshidi nearly ended in disaster. They had been lucky. Dominika contemplated the treachery of Zyuganov. He was free now—with Jamshidi’s brains decorating Udranka’s canary-yellow kitchen—to assume primacy in Putin’s procurement deal with Iran.
Khorosho,
very well.

She closed her eyes, her thoughts swirling. And her own future? She contemplated working in place for years, decades, as long as she survived. Would she end up like Udranka—how sorry she was for her, for all her friends, her
Rusalki,
victims of the system, the Kremlin’s Mermaids. At best, she would see Nate once or twice a year, the rest of the time operating alone on the knife edge inside Moscow, stealing secrets, defying the
shakaly,
the jackals in the Kremlin and in Yasenevo, risking her life to stanch the moral hemorrhage of Russia. She was doing it for her father, for the general, for the man who breathed softly beside her, but mostly she was doing it for herself. She knew that, better even than her perceptive CIA handlers did. She glanced sideways at Nate, and he turned his head and smiled at her. Deep purple.

He had confided in her, had shown her CIA internal-intel requirements, had brought her into the covert-action operation and broken rules significantly more draconian than the nonfraternization protocols they previously had violated. But she saw that Nate had changed: He was willing now to run her on the denied area stage of Russia, to hang the albatross of impersonal handling around her neck. She could handle the dread and risk, knowing he was determined.

Nate felt his heart reattaching itself to the hard points inside his chest, beating more slowly, getting back to normal. His fingertips and toes were
fuzzy numb, and he felt the bloom of her body heat next to him. He ran his thumb over her sweet hand, noted that her palm was slightly callused, as if she had been hauling on a rope, and a surge of emotion welled up in him. She was risking all, her existence, for him, for the Agency. It wasn’t at all a matter of feeling sorry for her—it was instead a gut-filling tenderness for this brave, mercurial creature with brown hair and blue eyes and a hitch in her stride, Russian-stubborn and Russian-passionate. And she had calluses on those elegant hands.