Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (3 page)

Vadim, we anxiously await your upcoming visit. Enclosed is your first-class ticket. You will be pleased with our progress here in what the Americans call “the city that never sleeps.” Our own sleepers are in place throughout the country, awaiting the Architect’s signal. But first, we will give a preview demonstration of our skills, something to convince the American president of how foolish it would be to interfere with us. You shall return to us in 2013 for the start of it all. That January promises to be quite spectacular. And America will never look the same
.

Evgeny gaped into the dark. “January 2013 is now!” He clenched his jaw and read on.

You must leave Pavel behind this time. The Architect is concerned about his stability. We will discuss that further when you arrive
.

Our best to you
.

Evgeny slapped the letter onto the seat beside him. He knew the translation. There were Russian sleeper agents in the United States, most certainly saboteurs about to unleash their long-calculated destruction. That would mean inevitable retaliation on Russia by U.S. forces. His Russia brought to its knees by its own arrogant madmen.

Who was this Architect?

The letter held no signature. But Evgeny would find the writer, find them all. He was through running. He would leave immediately for New York—and begin the chase.

Chapter 3

C
ass Rodino passed the lonely vigil watching the first snowflakes dash themselves against the windshield. What did it matter that no two were the same when they all plunged anonymously toward the same fate?

A shiver of dread pulsed through her as she stared past the lamentable mush at the imposing doorway beyond. She shouldn’t be here. Not hunched down in the rusted little Honda she’d borrowed, certain that no one in this neighborhood would recognize it. Not lurking in a delivery zone near the posh apartment building where her mother and stepfather lived. Not spying on him during another of his mysterious forays into the New York night.

The call had come soon after she arrived home from the theater that Tuesday evening. “He’s leaving in thirty minutes. Hurry!” Her mother’s voice stretched into the treble of fear. Cass remembered how that voice had once resonated with strength and resolve during the long, arduous marriage to Cass’s father. Even at his sudden death, her mother never lost her composure. But now, the voice had grown reedy, halting.

A gust off the Hudson River funneled its way down the street and slapped at the aging little car as if to alert its lone occupant. The man now emerging from the glassy door ahead stepped quickly to the curb and hailed a cab. Hans Kluen was bundled in a black trench coat belted
around
his thick waist, a red scarf wrapped high on his neck, and his bald head oddly bare on a night when the windchill flirted with single digits. Cass turned the key without pumping the gas pedal. No revving motor to draw his attention. She waited until her stepfather dropped into the back seat of the cab before turning on her lights.

Pulling behind the cab, she wondered if her mother was prepared for news of an affair. Surely that was it, though they’d been married barely three years. What was wrong with men who called themselves husbands but lived by no vows? Even worse, what led a man to marry a vulnerable, trusting young woman when he already had a wife? Cass stared at the cab’s taillights, one of them broken, and remembered the night she followed her new husband for many miles out of the city, all the way to a fine Westchester house where, she discovered, he lived a part-time life as husband to someone else and father to their two children.

She hated the hot tears that now sprang unbidden. It had been four years since the debacle of her fraudulent marriage. She’d been twenty-three then, married for just six months. Everyone had said she’d heal quickly. Everyone was wrong.

Not everyone knew that the marriage was the lesser blow to her young life, that it had only sliced into an earlier, deeper wound.

Distracted by memories, Cass had let the taxi get too far ahead in a sea of identical cars. She spotted the one-eyed rear of the cab a block ahead, turning left and heading north. To what? He’d told her mother it was business. Always business.

She followed the cab up First Street past the United Nations building, then left into a tree-lined residential area. It stopped in front of a small apartment building of dark stucco with a patch of well-tended shrubbery in front. Cass slipped the little car into a no-parking zone a safe distance away, switched off the lights, and watched. Hans Kluen stepped from the cab and did something that convinced Cass this was no ordinary meeting. He slowly surveyed the street in a thorough one-eighty before hurrying inside the building. Cass had already slinked as deep into her seat as she could and pulled the hood of her jacket even lower over her shiny blond head. She was quite certain she hadn’t been detected.

She looked up at the windows of the handsome building, some shuttered or draped, some open. A few minutes after Hans entered the building, Cass saw a man step to a third-floor window overlooking the street. As he began to close the drapes, she saw a woman and a man pass behind him. The man wore a black trench coat with a red scarf at his neck. Cass couldn’t see who else might be in the room, if anyone. She made note of the position of the window, knowing she would have to return.

For nearly an hour, she watched and waited, her mind turning over possible scenarios for this gathering. The light snow turned to sleet, and the heat she’d pumped hard into the car en route dissipated. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep up her surveillance. The temperature continued to plunge, and she’d told Jordan Winslow, her friend and neighbor, that she’d return with his car by nine.

After flicking on the wipers just once to clear the windshield, she was about to open her thermos of coffee for another sip when a cab pulled up in front of the building. Cass slid down in her seat and peered through the steering wheel. Hans stepped from the front door, scanned the street, and then left in the cab, having taken no apparent notice of the Honda.

There was no need to follow him again. She looked back at the third-floor window, the light from inside still burning. And she knew what she had to do.

Chapter 4

I
t was half past nine when Cass pulled into the parking garage next to her SoHo apartment building, just two of the properties her late, industrialist father had willed to her. She locked the car and hurried to meet Jordan, who lived in the loft apartment next to hers. He was waiting for her at the coffee shop down the block.

She pushed open the door, glanced quickly around the cozy room enclosed by brick walls and a low, stamped-tin ceiling, and caught Jordan’s wave from a back table. He was with a couple of their friends, who now turned to greet her.

“This is no time of night for a defenseless young woman to be out,” said Reg Brockman, a former classmate of Cass’s and Jordan’s. He glanced at the others and winked.

“Oh yeah. As defenseless as a Navy SEAL,” said his wife, Myrna, before sipping black brew from her mug.

“Actually, I think New York muggers should be warned about the heat-packing little vigilante walking the streets disguised as the Sunbeam bread girl,” Jordan said. “Park your firearm right here.” Jordan patted the spot next to him. “I’ll get you a coffee.” As he rose from his chair, Cass caught his arm and pulled.

“Sorry to cut this little dialogue short,” she said with only a flicker of
a
smile. “But I need to talk to you, Jordan. And by the way, let’s put the concealed-weapon thing to rest. It’s just a tiny revolver.”

“And she
just
plugs the center of the bull’s-eye every time with magnum bullets from that itty-bitty gun,” Jordan noted to the others. “Furthermore, do you know how hard it is to get a concealed-weapons permit in this town if you’re not someone like Donald Trump or Nicholas Rodino’s daughter?”

Cass wasn’t in the mood for this. “Enough,” she said, pulling again on his sleeve and steering him into the hallway to the restrooms. He was six feet to her five foot three, yet he’d been following her lead ever since their college days at NYU. But now he turned and firmly planted himself before her. “What happened?” he asked, downshifting his tone to open concern.

She ran her fingers through the tangle of loose, blond-streaked curls that fell just below her ears. “I followed him to an apartment near the UN, where I saw him through the window with a woman and a man. I don’t know if there was anyone else. They closed the drapes, and Hans left about an hour later.” She shoved her hands into her pockets. “I’m going back there, and I want you to come with me.”

He raised his dark, bushy eyebrows. “Why go back?”

Cass stared at a crack in the wide-planked wooden floor. A sliver of lemon rind had wedged its way deep inside.

“He was somewhere he didn’t belong. And he was nervous about being there.”

“How do you know that?”

“When he got out of the cab, he looked around like he was worried someone might see him.”

Jordan cocked his head. “Well, I guess so if he’s having an affair.”

“I don’t know what he’s having, but I’m going to find out.”

Jordan sighed. “Think you and your mom might be reading too much into this? Maybe he’s just selling Amway on the side.”

Cass stiffened and eyed him with disdain. “Okay. I’ll just go alone.”

She turned to leave, but he caught her hand. “Fine. Fine. We’ll go, but just what are we supposed to do?”

She pressed her lips together. “I need to see who lives in that apartment. Find out anything I can. I don’t know how yet, but I will by tomorrow night. That’s when we’re going.”

He rolled his eyes. “This will be good. The Broadway set designer and the hapless shoe merchant taken hostage by Amway salesmen.”

Jordan Winslow’s gift of levity had helped pull Cass from depression after her faux marriage failed. She studied his wide-set brown eyes and the honesty she’d always found in them. “We’ll leave at seven,” she said. “See you then. I’m going home.”

He snapped a salute and turned to rejoin their friends.

“Oh, by the way,” she said, “I thought you needed the car by nine. You were going somewhere?”

“
Am
going.”

“Where?” She had no right to ask, but couldn’t help it.

“Late date.”

She nodded slightly, something in the pit of her stomach turning over.

Chapter 5

C
ass tapped the entrance code to her building and swung open the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door. Its heft had always conveyed the semblance of security, its scrolling design the notion of art as armor. Wasn’t that why she’d immersed herself in her own art? For the way its deliberate illusions shielded her from reality?

The heels of her boots sounded a staccato trail across the polished wood floor of the entrance hall. On the elevator to the fourth floor, she closed her eyes and wondered if her stepfather was home yet, if her mother had successfully feigned disinterest in yet another of his after-dinner sojourns. Cass had reported her findings to her mother the moment Hans Kluen left the UN apartment. They were useless findings that had revealed nothing about what went on behind the closed drapes.

Now home, Cass unlocked the second deadbolt in her royal purple door and stepped into a realm of her own design, not unlike the fantasies she helped construct on the boards of Broadway. She had worked on the sets of
Phantom of the Opera
,
Lion King
, and now
Wicked
. Her loft’s twenty-foot walls encased a quirky mix of those worlds.

A smaller, lighter-weight replica of the chandelier that the phantom sent crashing onto the heads of a nineteenth-century Paris audience hung from one of the exposed pipes running lengthwise just below the ceiling. A
faux
-stone staircase rose to a mezzanine level where a stuffed Lion King—and Cass Rodino—slept each night beneath tiny stars dangling over a Serengeti-like bedroom. In a world of make-believe, she just might survive.

She crossed to the kitchen, where a corner grouping of green laminate cabinets hung above black-and-white tile countertops. “Emerald City meets New York subway,” Jordan had quipped after her recent renovations to the kitchen. She flipped a light switch. A suspended tree branch strung with lights illuminated the countertop of the island below. She smiled up at her latest creation, remembering Jordan’s first reaction to it. “You’re out of control,” he’d declared.

You might be right, my friend
. Her one friend. That’s all she allowed herself at a time, realizing the risk of smothering that one person. She glanced at the oak desk across the room, at the framed photo on top. From behind the glass, the girl’s eyes followed Cass wherever she moved in the room. Why couldn’t she just put the picture away?

Cass set down the cup she’d just taken from a cupboard and walked to the desk. She picked up the photo and traced a finger lightly over the face of a laughing young woman with thick, chestnut hair, her arm draped around Cass’s shoulders. She and her best friend, Rachel Norman, newly graduated from high school, rolled diplomas in their hands and the dewy promise of new beginnings on their faces. They had just shared that pinnacle moment in their young lives when Cass’s mother took the picture. Surely they weren’t the same two girls who took the boat into the bay that night barely two years later.