The Solomon Effect (12 page)

Jax frowned at two big Kawasakis parked at the end of the lane. “It comes in handy sometimes.”

She was silent for a moment. “Funny, I never thought about it, before.”

“About what?”

“How much spies lie.”

He gave a sharp laugh. “Don’t like it, do you? See, there are some advantages to letting me do the talking.”

“When you know the language.”

“When I know the language,” he agreed, his attention drawn again to the men at the end of the block. Both riders had the visors on their helmets down. He could hear the motorcycles’ powerful roar as they revved their engines impatiently.

She said, “It’s sad about the boy.”

“Baklanov’s nephew? Maybe more curious than sad.” Jax opened the door for her. “I looked at the photographs of every man killed on that salvage ship. I could be wrong, but I didn’t see anyone who looked like young Stefan. In fact, I’d say none of those men was under twenty-five.”

Closing her door, he went to slip behind the wheel, aware of the Kawasakis pulling away from the curb. He thrust the key in the ignition and listened to the old Lada grind painfully over and over again without catching.

“Shit,” he whispered under his breath.

“What’s the matter?”

He threw a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “See those two motorcycles behind us? I think we’re in trouble.”

The Lada coughed. Caught.

Jax threw the old car into gear and stepped on the gas as the motorcyclists came up behind them. October skewed around in her seat to watch them out the back window. The Kawasakis were nearly identical, one dark blue, the other black.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “What are they doing?”

“At the moment, they’re just following us. It’s when we get out of town we’ll need to worry.”

She cast a quick glance around at the dwindling houses. “This is a very small town.”

“I’d noticed.”

Leaving the last straggling houses behind, they cut through wild dunes of soaring sand that disappeared beneath a thickly planted pine grove. But beyond the trees the sandy dunes reemerged, untamed and windblown. Deserted.

“Shit,” said Jax as the leather-jacketed men gunned their engines, roaring right up on his ass. He already had the accelerator floored.

“Why are they getting so close?” she shouted over the whine of the engines.

He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as the bumps and dips on the pavement bounced the old car wildly from side to side. “Because this road’s so bad, they’re going to need to get close to get a good shot at us.” Glancing in the rearview mirror, he saw one of the riders reach beneath his coat. He jerked the steering wheel violently to the left and yelled, “Get down!”

The rear windshield shattered in a rain of glass.

Tires squealing, he spun the wheel to the right again, careening back and forth across the centerline to keep the motorcyclists from getting a steady shot. He heard a ping, then another as bullets buried into the Lada’s metal frame.

“Sonofabitch,
” he swore. “Brace yourself!”

He stood on the brakes. The Lada’s backend broke loose, sending the heavy car into a sideways skid that filled the air with the screech of tires and the stench of burning rubber.

Too close to stop, the thug on the blue motorcycle jerked to the right, laying down a line of black rubber as he shot off the side of the road to crash head-on into a massive pine tree. They heard a whooshing explosion, and rider and bike disappeared in a ball of fire.

The black biker’s reactions were a split second slower. Hitting his brakes, he slammed into the Lada’s left rear fender with a tearing shriek of metal and a jarring thump that reverberated through the heavy old car. And then he was airborne, a black leather blur that sailed over the Lada’s trunk to land in a sprawling skid that carried him far down the old blacktopped road and ripped off his helmet. When he finally slid to a halt, he didn’t move.

“Oh, my God,” whispered October.

Jax was out of the car almost before it stopped. The air was thick with the black smoke from the burning bike down the road. A sickly sweet stench of charred flesh mingled with the smell of the pines and the briny breeze blowing in off the sea.

Crouching down, he stared into the second cyclist’s wide, unseeing eyes. He glanced up and down the narrow deserted road and pushed to his feet. Walking back to the Lada, he straightened the rear fender enough to be sure the wheel would turn. Then he got back in the car, threw it into gear, and hit the gas.

They drove on in silence, the Baltic a sun-struck shimmer of endless water on their right. Finally, Jax glanced over at October and said, “You all right?”

She pushed the loose hair out of her face with a hand that wasn’t quite steady. “Yeah.”

She was quiet for another moment, then said, “Someone seems to be pretty serious about making sure we’re dead. How can you be so positive it isn’t your buddy Andrei?”

“Andrei is not my buddy. But if he wanted us dead, he’d do it quietly, in a basement, or an abandoned quarry somewhere, with a single shot to the back of the head. He wouldn’t send someone to hit us in the middle of the city or ambush us out on an open road.”

“So who are these guys?”

“Someone who thinks we’re getting too close for comfort.”

“You’re kidding, right? We don’t know jack shit.”

“Yeah. But they don’t know we don’t know jack shit.”

She put her head down between her knees. After a moment, she said, “Do you ever rent a car without wrecking it?”

They found the town of Zelenogradsk near the tip of the Sambian Peninsula, where the dunes of the spit just began to rise. It wasn’t on the map, and they’d driven right past it on their way to Rybachy.

“I don’t see how an entire town can be a military secret,” said Tobie as they rolled down weed-choked streets nearly
empty except for the inevitable stalls selling amber. “The map makers must have left it off by mistake.”

Once a thriving resort, Zelenogradsk did not appear to have fared as well under the Soviets as Rybachy. Most of its elegant, prewar seaside villas had been reduced to rubble by the fighting of 1945, while the few old houses that remained were largely abandoned and covered in moss.

“I don’t know,” said Jax. “I think I’d be tempted to keep this place a secret, too.”

Jasha Baklanov’s office lay on the second floor of a seedy, two-story Soviet-era concrete block a few hundred feet from the water. Leaving the car parked in the rubbish-strewn square out front, they entered the open street door and climbed a set of dirty concrete steps to a frigid second-floor hall lined with rows of battered slab doors. A small, chipped sign on the door at the end of the hall read BAKLANOV SALVAGE.

“Why did he need an office?” she whispered, hugging herself against the chill of the concrete building. “A smalltime operator like this?”

Slipping a silver pen from his pocket, Jax quickly disassembled it into a set of picks and eased a slim tension wrench into the lower portion of the keyhole. Applying a light torque to the wrench, he thrust a pick into the top of the keyhole, his eyes closing with concentration as he deftly eased each pin out of the way. There was a faint click, then the cylinder turned and the door opened. “I suspect the people our Jasha was doing business with weren’t exactly the type he wanted visiting his family.”

Tobie watched him pack away the lock-pick set. “They teach you to do that in spy school?”

“Yes.” He put a hand on the door and pushed it inward.

The hinges squealed in protest. A single, uncurtained dirt-encrusted window on the far wall let in just enough light to show them a square cubbyhole sparsely furnished
with a desk, a table with a couple of chairs, and a battered filing cabinet that looked as if it had been salvaged from an old ship. A chessboard, a half-empty bottle of vodka, and a couple of glasses littered the tabletop. But the chess pieces had been knocked into disarray; a glass lay on the floor, shattered. The drawers of the filing cabinet and desk hung open, their contents spilling out onto the floor.

“Looks like whoever hit the
Yalena
beat us here,” said Jax, quietly closing the door behind him.

“How do you know it wasn’t the militia?”

“Because the militia would have taken the vodka.”

“Ah.” She reached to turn on the light, but he put out a hand, stopping her. “Better not.”

Her gaze met his, and she nodded.

While she started on the files, he went to hunker down beside the shattered drawers of the desk. After ten minutes of searching, she let out an exasperated sigh. “If there ever was anything here to find,” she said, picking up another handful of scattered papers, “it’s gone. You know that, don’t you?”

But all he said was, “Just watch out for broken glass.”

They worked in a tense silence punctuated by the rustle of paper, the thump of furniture being righted. She was gathering up the last of the scattered files when she found a half-spilled box of business cards, printed on cheap stock. They looked new.

She pulled one out and held it up to the fading light.

BAKLANOV SALVAGE

Baltiskaya 23b

Telephone: 7–4112-21352

Fax: 7–4112-31698

She started to put the card back, then stopped to look around. “Do you see a phone?”

“There isn’t one,” said Jax, nodding to the fax machine that sat at a drunken angle on the edge of the desk. “Looks like he just had a dedicated fax line.”

“Who has a fax these days?”

“People who do business with the Third World.”

“But if he only had a fax, then why is there a telephone number on his business card?”

“Let me see that.” Reaching out, Jax took the card between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s a cell phone.” He gave her a grin. “See. You did find something.”

“This is good?” Tobie pushed to her feet. “Why is this good?”

“Because even as we speak, the geeks at the NSA are busy snooping on the telecommunications of the world. We like to think we’re the only ones doing it, but the truth is, every country with a good tax base does it, too.”

She took the card back and stuck it in her bag. “Which means?”

“Which means, now that we know Baklanov’s cell phone number, Matt ought to be able to pull his records.” He glanced toward the patch of smudged sky visible through the window. In the fifteen minutes they’d been in the office, the sky had grown significantly darker.

“It’s getting late,” said Tobie, following his gaze.

“No shit. We’ve got just enough time to make it back to the cathedral before Andrei turns us into pumpkins.”

It was when they were backing out the door that Tobie noticed the sheet of paper that had slipped beneath the desk, one small white corner protruding from the edge.

“What’s that?” Jax asked as she reached over to pick it up.

“It’s a fax. And oh, look; you’re in luck. It’s in English.”

“Very funny,” he said, pulling the door shut behind them. “When was it sent?”

She frowned. “According to the dateline, it came through less than an hour ago. From somebody named Kemal Erkan. In Turkey.”

“Turkey? Let me see that.”

He scanned it quickly, then grunted. “Listen to this. “Been trying to reach you for two days now. Have buyer lined up for steel from U-boat. Great price. Let me know when to expect arrival.’”

“Nothing ominous-sounding about that,” she said. She was walking ahead of him and had almost reached the stairs when she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck, and slowed.

“What is it?” said Jax, just as a black-leather-gloved hand appeared around the corner from the stairwell with a Glock 17 held in a professional grip.

She lunged forward, grabbing the unseen assailant’s wrist with both hands to yank the gun up just as he fired off three suppressed shots in quick succession.

Sounding like muffled pops, the percussions filled the narrow hall with the stench of burnt powder and a film of blue smoke, and knocked chunks of plaster off the dingy walls. The man let out a roar of rage, swinging around to knee her, hard, in the small of her back. She went down on all fours.

The black-jacketed motorcyclist was pivoting toward her, the Glock leveled at her head when Jax’s fist caught him under the chin, snapping his head back. Jax pounded him again and again, knocking the Glock flying and sending him stumbling backward toward the top of the stairs.

“You sonofabitch,” said Jax, landing a roundhouse kick that caught the assassin just above the ear. He wavered a moment, then tumbled back, falling heavily against the wall before pitching awkwardly down the rest of the concrete steps.

“That guy needs to learn to stay away from stairs,” said Jax, breathing heavily. He swung back to Tobie. “You all right?”

“Yeah. Just winded,” she said, wincing slightly as she tried to straighten.

Picking up the Glock, Jax went to stand at the top of the steps and brought the knuckles of his right fist to his mouth. “The sonofabitch,” he said again. “I hope this time he broke his neck.”

Andrei Gorchakove’s voice drifted up to them from the bottom of the stairwell. “From the looks of things, I’d say he did.”

“How did he find us here?” whispered October.

Jax threw her a warning frown and shook his head. “Just let me do the talking, okay?”

“I don’t know what it is you’re always so afraid I’m going to say,” she hissed as they walked down the stairs to where Andrei stood leaning against the grimy concrete wall, the dead man at his feet.

At their approach, Andrei reached inside his jacket and came up with a half-empty pack of cigarettes. “Must you always leave a trail of bodies wherever you go, Jax?”

“Body. One body.”

“What about the two motorcyclists the militia found on the road from Rybachy?”

“Motorcyclists?”

“The ones who shot up your Lada.”

“Ah. Those guys.” Jax hunkered down to study the dead man’s ruddy-cheeked face. Wide and sightless blue eyes stared up from beneath straight, sandy-colored brows. It was the motorcyclist from the cathedral.

Andrei stuck a cigarette between his lips. “Ever see him before?”

“No,” lied Jax, pushing to his feet. “Any idea who he is?”

“You tell me. He’s not carrying ID, but I checked the labels on his clothes. They’re American. If this is one of your terrorists, Jax, I’d say Washington needs to rethink some of their suppositions about what’s going to happen come Halloween.”

Jax stared beyond Andrei, to where the blue-and-white militia van waited, its Tatar driver beside it, beefy arms crossed at his chest. “I must be losing my touch. I’d swear I wasn’t being followed. Either by you or”—he jerked his head toward the dead motorcyclist sprawled at their feet—“by him.”

Faintly smiling, Andrei pushed away from the wall to saunter outside. He reached beneath the Lada’s right front fender to come up with a small black box with an antenna.

“Shit,” said Jax. “How did that get there?”

“After I dropped you at the cathedral, I had every car rental agency in the area notified that you might be coming. They were told to give you the ‘special.’”

“It’s nice to be predictable.”

Andrei struck his lighter, his eyes narrowing against the cigarette’s harsh blue smoke. “Did you find anything?”

“Not really.”

Andrei nodded to his driver. “You won’t mind if we verify that?”

The Tatar patted down Jax’s pockets and drew out the fax from Turkey. “Well, there was that,” said Jax.

His jaw silently bunching and flexing, the Tatar grasped October’s bag and upended its contents across the hood of the Lada.

While Attila pawed through her iPod, passport wallet, lip balm, and sunglasses case, October said, “The tracking device explains how you found us.” She jerked her head toward the dead man in the stairwell. “But what about him?”

“Perhaps he was here waiting for you.” Andrei took one last drag, then dropped his half-smoked cigarette to grind
it beneath the sole of his boot. “Come. You have a plane to catch.”

“Are you done with my bag?” said October. When Andrei nodded, she scooped up her things and shoved them back inside.

No one had even glanced at Jasha Baklanov’s business card.

Jax stared out the wide plate-glass window at the darkened runway below. The window was filthy, streaked with water marks on the outside and smeared by children’s sticky fingers on the inside. Andrei had personally escorted them to the departure section of Kaliningrad’s decrepit airport, and he didn’t seem to be going anytime soon. Jax had been reduced to calling Matt from the men’s room to ask him to look up a guy named Kemal Erkan in Turkey, and to pull Baklanov’s cell phone records.

Standing now beside Jax, the Russian lit another cigarette and blew out a long stream of smoke, his gaze on October. “So tell me about the woman,” he said quietly.

Jax cast a glance at where she sat on one of the departure lounge’s hard chairs, her head bent over a Chinese textbook. “What about her?”

“She’s pretty, but she doesn’t seem like your type.”

“What’s my type?”

“Tall, long-legged. Very high maintenance.”

Jax gave a short laugh. “We’re just working together.”

“I thought you liked to work alone?”

“I do.”

Andrei’s eyes narrowed with amusement as he drew on his cigarette. “We might get further if we cooperated on this, you know.”

“I am cooperating.”

“You just forgot about the fax in your pocket, did you?”

Jax kept his gaze on the runway, where a plane was slowly
taxiing in, its landing lights winking out of the darkness. “According to Anna Baklanov, the captain’s sixteen-year-old nephew was supposed to be on the
Yalena.
But I don’t remember seeing a boy in the militia photos of the dead crew.”

Andrei frowned. “You think the boy was cooperating with the terrorists?”

“I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. According to his widow, the captain was like a father to the boy.”

“The killers could have thrown his body overboard.”

“True. But, why him?”

“Maybe he went over the rail when he was shot.” Andrei ground out his cigarette. “Why are you so interested in this boy?”

“If he’s alive…”

“He’s not alive.”

There was a stirring amongst the assembled passengers as a uniformed woman appeared at the gate. “You’re in luck,” said Andrei. “Only an hour late.”

He stood for a moment watching Jax shoulder his carry-on bag. Then he said, “You’re going too easily, Jax. I think you found something else—something you’re not telling me. What happened to détente? Glasnost? International cooperation and the New World Order?”

“I don’t know anything you don’t know.”

Andrei glanced at October. “Are you kidding? I still don’t know why she’s here. Her Russian is better than yours, yes. But yours isn’t as bad as you like to pretend. So why is she with you?”

October shoved her textbook in her bag and stood up. “His Russian is terrible.”

“See?” Jax nudged her toward the gate. “Go.”

“I will find out, you know,” Andrei shouted as they started down the ramp. “This is what’s wrong with the world today. You Americans, you all think you’re still cowboys.”

Later that night, Rodriguez stood in the backyard of the old German house in the exclusive enclave in Mendeleevo, his legs splayed wide, his thumbs hooked in his hip pockets, his head tipped back as he watched a wind-whipped stream of clouds scuttle across the cold face of the full moon.

In the last twenty-four hours, he’d lost four men—three dead, one missing. He didn’t care about the Russians; they were expendable. Cannon fodder. But Dixon was a good kid. An American. He had a wife back home in Arkansas and a baby girl just two months old. That was tough.

He heard the back door of the house open and footsteps cross the terrace. He was aware of Salinger coming to stand beside him, but he didn’t turn. “Any word yet from Borz on the little shit?”

“Not yet,” said Salinger. He hesitated. “We just got a confirmation from our contact in Turkey. They have someone to make the hit on Kemal Erkan.”

“Good.” They had no way of knowing how much Baklanov might have told the Turk, but Rodriguez wasn’t taking any chances. He glanced at the man beside him. “We need that guy shut up, and we need him shut up fast. How much do they want?”

“The usual.”

“Tell them to move. I want Erkan dead by this time tomorrow.”

The night had turned so cold they could see the exhalation of their breath hanging like a white fog in the darkness. Salinger still hesitated. Rodriguez said, “What is it?”

“According to our contact at Aeroflot, Alexander and the Guinness woman were on the last flight to Berlin. The General’s not going to be happy we missed them.”

Rodriguez pressed his lips into a thin line and said nothing.

Salinger said, “You think they found anything?”

“Nothing that’s going to do them any good.”

Salinger nodded. “When do we leave here?”

“When we get the kid,” said Rodriguez, and headed for the back steps.