The Nicholas Linnear Novels (153 page)

Of course Alix had tried to stop him. She had called him everything from a madman to a moron; she had even cried and, at the end, begged him not to go.

By all this Croaker surmised that she was genuinely afraid for him. But he was not at all sure. After all, she was a consummate actress, making love to the camera every day when she worked. She could turn on or off any emotion as easily as she applied mascara each morning and wiped it away at night.

But then it occurred to him that she had no earthly reason to act in this case. What would she get out of deterring him from flying off to Washington besides seeing him safe? She knew full well who it was who had tried to kill him or at least who had ordered it. The same person who had now contracted for both their deaths, breaking his oath to her.

C. Gordon Minck, the man before whom Croaker now stood.

“Where the hell are we,” he said looking around at the leafy patio, “the goddamned African veldt?” He did not like the edge to his voice. But he was frightened, not only of this man and the power he wielded to cut off pursuit, to twist the law to his own design, but also of what he himself was thinking of doing to Minck.

Minck contrived to laugh and Croaker glared at him, his tightly controlled emotions flaring. “I ought to kill you right here with my bare hands,” he said low in his throat.

Minck was still trying to recover from seeing a man standing next to him who up until just a moment ago he believed dead and buried at sea. He put one hand tentatively up to his temple, as if with that gesture he could press away the pain that now throbbed there like a traitor.

“You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Lieutenant.” It was the best he could do for the moment; he needed some time to marshal both his emotions and his thoughts. This day was rapidly turning into one of the worst in his life and he was determined to give his full attention to it lest matters deteriorate even further. He gestured. “Please sit down.”

“Which one of these chairs is mined?” Croaker said with a sneer.

“Just what’s that supposed to mean?” Minck said despite himself. He had promised himself that he would not vie with Lieutenant Croaker on his own base ground. But the pain in his head was unsettling him.

“You’ve tried to kill me three times; you’ve tried to kill Alix Logan twice. What else would you expect me to say walking in here?”

Minck sat heavily down. He groaned inwardly as the pain increased. His heart rate was accelerating. “What are you talking about?” His voice was a trifle shaky, his face pasty beneath his rich tan. It was only now that the true gravity of the situation was beginning to dawn on him. Croaker’s expressed threat echoed in his mind like a taunt. How had he managed to miss this tinkering?

Croaker, observing all this, was curious. The edge of his anger had dulled. “Alix and I were pursued out of Key West. Once in Raleigh, North Carolina, and once in New York City, we were attacked. That’s attempted murder, Minck.”

Minck shook his head. “I don’t understand this,” he said to no one in particular. “I never sanctioned Mix’s death.” He looked up, as if abruptly aware of Croaker’s presence. “I would never do that. I told her I wouldn’t. You must believe me.”

Words, as Croaker knew well, were cheap. But there was something in Minck’s eyes, a kind of pleading, that caught him. He saw that somehow Minck, who through Alix’s eyes he had come to see as a master spider spinning his unbreakable web from the absolute sanctity of the nation’s capital, was enmeshed in a gray area just as he himself was. Suddenly they were both lost, both confused as to which direction was up, who was good, who bad. In that moment, their adversary position had somehow been dissipated. For the first time since he had entered Angela Didion’s plush apartment and found her naked body as cold as ice, Croaker began to see that there was more here than one model’s murder. Much more. “Then who did?” he said gruffly.

And Minck was forced to another inescapable conclusion. To whom had he given over custody of Alix? Who had he entrusted to keep her safe from all harm? Tanya Vladimova, that’s who. The same Tanya who had been gone from the building—God only knew where—for the last forty hours or so.

He grabbed up a phone, asked for a trace on Tanya’s movements during the last three and a half days. He was immediately patched through to the ARRTS computer. He repeated his question and waited impatiently for the answers. When they came, he stared openly at Croaker.

“Tanya,” he said slowly.

“Who the hell’s Tanya?” Croaker asked.

“She’s the woman who sanctioned both your deaths,” he improvised, telling a half truth. Something had begun to spin inside Minck’s mind. One dark and tiny satellite that needed some space and time to grow. The germ of an idea. The beginning of a massive salvage job. A kind of miracle, even, if such things actually could be said to exist. Minck did not believe in God so therefore it followed that he could not believe in miracles. Until this moment, perhaps.

In a more normal tone of voice, he said, “About Alix. Is she all right?”

“She’s confused, angry, frustrated, and maybe her life’s been ruined by all this crap but, yeah, she’s essentially okay.”

Minck found some genuine solace in that. If he had suspected for any amount of time that he was merely indulging himself by keeping Alix Logan alive, he now dismissed such thoughts entirely. The relief that swept through him went deep indeed.

He took a breath, but before he could continue, Croaker said, “Don’t think for a minute I’ll tell you where she is, though. If you make any move against me now, she’ll go straight to the State’s Attorney General with everything she knows. I know you can’t afford that. You’ve gone to great lengths to prove it.”

Minck paused for a moment as if weighing Croaker’s words. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll propose a truce…a kind of bargain, if you wish.”

“What kind of bargain?” Despite observing Minck’s genuine feelings for Alix, Croaker was a long way from trusting this man.

“What I propose is this. I will not harm you or seek to find Alix’s whereabouts, unless she wishes it, of course. In return, you will sit down and listen to what I have to tell you and consider it carefully.”

“Then what?”

Oh, good, Minck thought. This man
is
clever in addition to being resourceful. He has killed two of my agents and evaded termination from another—my most deadly, my most traitorous Tanya. Perhaps he can do what none other I can call on could. Perhaps, he thought, as he began to talk of Tanya Vladimova and her ultimate betrayal, of her manipulation of the “Spearfish” ops, which was Alix Logan’s detention / protection, this man can destroy that which Protorov and I, jointly, created.

Inside, C. Gordon Minck began to glow. Like a man who has won back his life at the brink of death, he was suffused with an eerie kind of elation that made his fingertips tremble.

It was not difficult to sell Croaker on what he must do. Minck had two powerful motivations which he offered the man sitting across from him and which Minck was quite certain he could not refuse. If the situation were reversed, Minck was aware, he would have been hooked just as much as he perceived Croaker was becoming.

Revenge and patriotism. These were the two reasons that Minck suspected Croaker would accept this bargain. Tanya had personally tried to kill him and his charge; that was something Croaker could not tolerate. He wanted her now, and Minck could not blame him at all. They both wanted her, he explained. It was merely that Croaker was in a position to get her while Minck was not.

Then there was the Russian angle. No one liked that, least of all Minck himself. Croaker was right behind him there.

“You’ll have full diplomatic immunity,” Minck concluded, “a new identity as far as Customs and Immigration are concerned. You’ll have full support over there if you need it.” He waited a beat. “And you’ll be linking up with an old friend of yours, Nicholas Linnear.” He had saved what he suspected would be the best for last. The clincher.

And Croaker bit.

But a half hour after the detective lieutenant had been provided with a new passport, birth certificate, business papers, et al; money in the form of American dollars, Japanese yen, and American Express traveler’s checks, and delivered to Dulles International to make his flight to Tokyo, Minck abruptly broke down and, for the first time since his long incarceration in Lubyanka, wept bitter tears. He thought of what had been done to him and what, in retaliation, he had been forced to do.

Meanwhile, the object of Minck’s love and hate was at the moment debarking at Narita Airport outside smogbound Tokyo. She had not had a pleasant flight. Just after takeoff from Kennedy she had taken two sleeping pills and had fallen into a leaden slumber which had been dominated by visions from her childhood. Protorov stalked her dreams like a sentry, on horseback and on foot, weaponed and booted; wherever she went he was there before her.

Tanya was back in grade school in Rechitsa, the closest town to the rural hamlet where her family lived. Already there was friction at home. Her older brother, Mikhail, did not approve of their father being a policeman. As such her father was in touch with the KGB, whose black-raincoated agents appeared at the house from time to time to remind him to report all unpatriotic activity within his purview.

Within six months Mikhail would leave him, and within a year, at eighteen, would become one of the more militant—and successful—dissidents working inside Russia.

But by that time the headmaster of the school in Rechitsa had journeyed by an old and dilapidated car out to Tanya’s house to speak to her parents. She had been offered a scholarship to a fine academy with facilities that, regretfully, the headmaster’s school lacked. She was an extremely bright girl, he said, and deserving of this chance. But certain sacrifices had to be made. This new academy was in the Urals, a good 750 kilometers away.

Tanya’s mother had cried at the prospect. After all, her son had already gone. But Tanya’s father was firm. He was only a country constable, he said, and he wanted at least one of his children to have the benefits he had never had.

So it was settled, much to the relief of the headmaster since a great deal of pressure had been put on him by Protorov himself to bring Tanya to his academy. Quite naturally, her parents and Tanya herself had no idea of the skew of the new school’s curriculum.

After she arrived there and discovered where she was and what she would be made into, she dutifully wrote home every week. Never did she hint to her parents or to anyone else, for that matter, as to the academy’s true nature, though in truth, perhaps, she longed to tell her father, knowing how proud he would be and how this knowledge might help assuage the terrible ache he felt inside from Mikhail’s betrayal.

Protorov. She tried him from the airport while waiting for her one bag to come through, then again when she reached the pulsing overpopulated heart of Tokyo. She used the four-digit access code and received the same answer both times: dead air.

That in itself was not alarming, but Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov’s presence at her hotel was. She registered, had her bag sent up to her room, then allowed the lieutenant to guide her back outside where they strolled amid jostling throngs of gray-suited men carrying black rolled umbrellas just as if they were Londoners. Many wore white masks over nose and mouth, an increasingly common sight in this city.

Tanya judged that Russilov did not look at all good. His color was pale and he had picked up a nervous habit sometime recently of turning his head to see what was happening behind him. She liked none of this.

But she liked even less what he had come south to tell her.

Her skin was like crepe, the most delicate of rice paper crumpled beneath a powerful fist, translucent still even after seventy-nine years.

“I will be eighty tomorrow,” she told him. There was no pride in her voice, merely wonder that life could last so long.

Even now she was one of the most beautiful creatures he had ever seen. As a child he had often compared her beauty to his mother’s. He had always found her perfect symmetry losing out to Cheong’s more exotic beauty. It was natural, perhaps, for him to be loyal to his mother. But there had been something more: he had hated her for being Saigō’s mother, and was blinded.

“Is there anything else I can get you?” Itami asked.

His head was lowered. “No,
Haha-san.
” Mother. Much had passed between them for him to be able to call her that, from the time he had come stumbling to the portals of her house.

She lived where she always had ever since he had known her, on the outskirts of Tokyo, to the northwest, not far from the spot where Sato and Akiko had been married. Nicholas had made an arduous journey south from Hokkaido, breaking into a clothing store at night and, armed with fresh clothes and some money, trekking down to Hakodate. He could have stolen a car but did not want to leave such a clear trail to those who might follow or even for the police who would inevitably investigate the break-in at the clothing store. They would pursue their investigation with the assiduousness with which the Japanese approached every task. The less he gave them, the more secure he felt.

He used buses occasionally and, when he was able, hitched rides. He avoided both main highways and railways, however, knowing trails were more easily left there.

At last, at the southern coastal town he took the ferry across Tsugarukaikyō to Aomori on Honshu’s rocky northern tip.

Lacking papers, he could not rent a car, and in any event preferred to utilize buses again, heading roughly south in a zigzag, nonlinear route.

He had been terrified at the thought of seeing his aunt again. It was he who had murdered her only child; it had been Nicholas’ father who had garroted her husband, for which Saigō had in turn poisoned the Colonel and, years later, had pursued Nicholas all the way to New York.

He did not know how she would greet him; he could not imagine what he could possibly say to her. What were words—
any
words—in the face of the finality of death. Nicholas thought that the words “I’m sorry” were perhaps the most inadequate in the English language. But there was nothing much better in Japanese or in any of the world’s tongues for that matter.