The Weapon (14 page)

The beam steadied, a white dazzle that tracked them as they gyred in a waterlogged waltz, hitting an eddy as the turn south approached. Then the light lurched and started to bob. It jogged along the embankment after them.

The FSB were in pursuit. Even with the current, they could make better time than Dan and Jack could through the water. All they had to do was keep pace till they gave up.

Or went under. Dan felt fingers grapple in his sweatshirt and lock tight. Byrne began hauling himself up on his chest, thrusting him under. He kicked and sculled, but felt himself being gradually dragged under in a horrible slow grapple. Byrne was heavier. Byrne was desperate. The cold penetrated his brain, made him want to give up.

He fought back to the surface for a snatched breath, then was forced under again in a welter of bubbling black shot now with a red glare he didn't think was from anywhere but inside his own racked lungs, his oxygen-starved, panicking brain. He straight-armed Byrne in the chest but the other didn't flinch.

A flailing knee caught his groin and he saw red for real. He fought his way back up one more time, sucking air so hard pain snapped through his head like barbed wire being dragged through his cortex. He was paddling with stiff pieces of waterlogged lumber. He felt guilty, not that he was about to die, but that he'd taken a friend with him. In the world he'd made his life in, what mattered wasn't how hard you tried, but whether you succeeded.

He hadn't, not in anything. Not with his first marriage. He hadn't been much of a father. His career? A couple of times he hadn't done badly. Stood up for what was important.

Only what a stupid,
stupid
idea he'd picked to go out on—

A black shape hissed through the water toward them. A
low voice chanted syllables that did not cohere into sense. He ducked as a shadow flicked over his head, sharp and fast and close as a guillotine blade, and knifed into the water and flicked back and cracked hard into his ear.

The side of the racing shell rushed past above them, dragging a rushing burble and the deep sucking breaths of trained bodies giving enormous effort.

Byrne went suddenly motionless. Dan took advantage of it to twist the other's fist out of his clothes. He oriented after the passing shape and struck out with five or six desperate crawl strokes. Something hard and small whacked his arm lightly. He twisted after it, felt nothing. Lunged in sudden terror, and felt another whack along his ribs. This time he twisted his numb arm into the smooth, swiftly fleeting line. It twitched out of his grasp and slid quickly away until his groping hand hooked into a bight.

A terrific jerk, and all at once he was being hauled through the black water so fast his head went under, and he fought to keep from twisting like a trolling lure. Byrne shouted as Dan crashed into him. He seized him with his free arm, nearly dislocating it before they were both on their backs, gasping, snorting, fighting on the end of the towline.

He yelled and after a moment it slacked. A voice called something, and he reached for a splash and got Byrne's arm into a second bight. He waved and the lines came taut again, the dark blades flashed, the chant resumed.

The light, which seemed weaker now, steadied on them again. Angry shouting followed it. Then a reddish flash and an echoing pop came from the embankment. And after a short interval, another.

It sounded like pistol fire, but though he waited there were only the two reports, two flashes. The chant went on from ahead and above, rhythmic and lulling. He forced himself awake. That sleepy comfort was hypothermia, the cold dropping his core temperature. He concentrated on holding tight and staying awake. But it was growing harder. For an indeterminable time he lay in a soft warm bed, then bungeed back to awareness as his head went beneath the river
again and he was dragged along willy-nilly, fighting to right himself but feeling only that terrible lassitude. He came up choking, coughing. He tried to haul himself forward on the line but his hands wouldn't cooperate. He let himself be dragged, eyes frozen open.

The oars wove and dipped like dragonflies. Orangeish globes slowly rose above the far shore, became pedestal sconces at a waterfront bar. A slant of wet black stone rose to pilings. Across the narrowing water came the shouts and screams of a rowdy crowd and the bass bumping from a not very good hard rock screamer band.

The chant stopped. The low torpedo they followed curved smoothly and slid beneath an overhanging structure hung with arcs of vibrating scarlet luminescence. The drag against their wet clothes lessened as something slid over the sky. Then came voices and the hollow clunk of fiberglass against wood.

When hands reached down and voices called he could not move or speak in response. The hands found the nylon towlines and unwrapped them. They dragged them up from the black water into air that had to be chilly but felt tropical. He crouched shuddering on all fours, panting and trying not to lose consciousness. Concrete was rough under slime beneath his hands. Something hot ran down his neck. He heard Jack Byrne's voice, low and unnatural. “Who the fuck are you?” and de Cary's answer, “Lafayette, I am here.”

“Jack. Jack?”

A grunt, then hacking as if Byrne's pancreas was coming up. “What the . . . what the
fuck,
Lenson?”

“That was for the bridesmaid.”

“Never
touched
the fucking bridesmaid . . . was all over me, though . . . Just fucking drown me. Fucking swallowed half the river.” More coughing, then, “
Jesus,
that's cold. Where the . . . what just happened?”

“We bought the Moscow Rowing Club a new shell.”

“And where . . . we going now?”

“Figured you'd have a suggestion. Someplace the FSB doesn't know about.” He had to stop, he was gagging. Boone
Clinic had insisted his shot card be up to date. He hoped it covered whatever he'd just swallowed.

“Right. Out of country ASAP. I know a . . . a safe house. Just got to . . . make a call.”

Headlights came on. An engine started. Henrickson trotted toward them from a parking lot, carrying blankets. Dan tried to get to his feet but halfway up his muscles seemed to lose power. The concrete came up and slammed into the side of his head. Then the black river rolled over him, freezing, smothering, and he didn't think any more at all.

The first thing he did at the apartment was pull off his clothes and head for the shower. Their night swim had been two days before, but he still felt filthy. In those forty-eight hours they hadn't had more than quick spongedowns with toilet paper in the rocking, jolting W/C compartments of a series of local trains.

He ached all over. His feet were so swollen from sitting up for two days he had to pry off his shoes. Fortunately there were three bathrooms in the apartment, which was beautifully furnished with polished parquet floors, Afghan rugs, and modern paintings that looked real, not prints or reproductions. It was in a secure building with its own guards. The other tenants, Byrne said, were expats or Poles, all wealthy.

The marble-lined shower was big enough to play handball in. The fixtures were gold-plated and the water exquisitely hot. He lathered from head to toe, and when it was soaked through he carefully peeled the bandage off his ear. It itched, which was good. He let it air. He found a woman's razor in a cabinet and shaved.

When he came out, wrapped in a heavy bathrobe—it was tight in the shoulders and short, and he guessed it belonged
to the same woman as the razor—Byrne and Henrickson and de Cary were sitting in their underwear in the kitchen eating cheese and bread. There was a bottle of white wine, too. The kitchen was filled with shining German appliances and tall bottles of peppers, onions, and olives, floating in saffron-tinted oil. “How's the ear?” Byrne asked him.

“Okay. How's the hands?”

“Skinning over. Anything in the place, help yourself. I know the girl who lives here. State Department. Air Force Reserve, flies to London every month for her weekend drills.”

“She mind if we smoke?” Monty asked him.

Dan said, “I didn't know you smoked, Monty. Wait a minute. You don't.”

“I might start.”

“For a Polish cheese, this is not bad,” said de Cary.

Byrne scratched his crotch. “I guess you could. Only thing to watch is—see that balcony?”

“That one?” de Cary turned.

“No, the far one. See the roof below it? The gray pebbly one, with all the antennas? No, don't look!”

“We see the antennas,” Dan said. “What about it?”

“That's the Russian embassy. Right next door. So the balcony's off-limits, okay?”

“Thanks for getting us out, Jack,” Dan told him. “We'd probably still be locked up in the Embassy.”

He'd come to with the raw fire of brandy in his mouth, someone's undershirt tied over his bleeding ear, and his head lolling in the back seat of a Lada. He'd sputtered and spat out the taste, as all the tension and terror had swept back in a rush.

Their first stop after the rock bar had been a hole-in-the-wall flat five stories up in what smelled like an old brewery. Byrne said it was a joint safe house, shared by several agencies. This use would burn it, but there were towels and canned food, bottled water, clean clothes, money, and most important, false passports. The airports would be watched, so they'd have to go by train. Security was laxer on rail travel.

So for two days they became drunken Polish vodka dealers. Byrne spoke Polish, Henrickson broke up his Russian to sound foreign, and Dan and de Cary simply sat with bottles in their laps looking stone drunk. This was an excellent disguise on a Russian train; the only difficulty was when another drunk wanted to share. They'd headed east first, then north, before turning west again, buying local tickets at each change, and staying in third class with the farmers and families. They'd crossed the border near Pskov, handing over bottles of Wyborowa with their documents; the border guards spent more time examining the labels than their passports. They'd felt safer in Estonia, but still kept to themselves in first-class compartments through Riga and Kaunas. Dan was impressed with the trains. They looked romantically old-fashioned, with wood and glass and velvet curtains, but were clean, cheap, and on time. Byrne found an Internet café at one stop, and a van was waiting for them at the Wschodnia station. It had taken them to the Embassy clinic for exams and shots, then to this apartment.

“Thanks for getting
me
out,” Byrne told him. “I'd be in the Lubyanka, sweating out how much I could take before I told them—well, I've had access to data we wouldn't like to become public knowledge. By the way, they're apeshit over there. The Russian government is enraged. We're being portrayed as escaped spies.”

“You
are
an escaped spy,” Dan pointed out.

“
Un espion echappe,
” de Cary put in. “Unfairly we will be tarred with that same brush. By the way, I should very much like to inform my superiors of my location. So far as they know I am still in Moscow.”

“No calls from here . . . not with those antennas next door.”

“Those are comm antennas, not surveillance antennas,” Dan told him.

“Not that I don't believe you, but let's play it safe, all right? I'll take you over to the main building. There are secure phones there . . . or would you rather go to the French Embassy?”

“Anywhere will do.” De Cary shrugged. “It will not need to be on a secure line.”

The bread was fresh and crusty. The cheese was wonderful. He got up and searched the fridge and came up with apple juice in a cardboard box. He munched and took a sip of juice. He closed his eyes and felt like melting through the chair and running all over the Italian tile.

“When you guys are ready, I'll take you over,” Byrne said, getting up.

 

The Embassy was a warren, with shabby covered walkways connecting small back buildings. Their contact's office was in one. Byrne hadn't said what the bald man's job was, but since he'd picked them up at the train station in civvies, Dan assumed he was the Agency resident. Adding to that impression was the huge Rottweiler that had sat in the back of the van with them as they edged through the streets of Warsaw. Bone, the man called him. Bone didn't bother them, but he didn't beg to be petted, either. He carried himself like a professional; courteous, but detached. The kind of dog a man owned when he had reason to carry a gun but wasn't allowed to. Today when Byrne knocked, the bald man was sitting at a terminal, in a sweater vest with his collar open. A suit jacket hung behind the door. “Hey, Jack. Dan, right? Look better than you did this morning. Coffee, guys?”

Dan said sure.

“Where's
le capitaine?
”

Byrne: “At his embassy. Any news out of Moscow?”

“Merle says they declared two of our guys non grata. Out of the attaché's office.”

“Not Siebeking—”

“No, no, two others—actually one was sort of tangentially involved. With what Jack was doing, not what you were doing.”

If the expellees were from the attaché's office, and Siebeking hadn't known what they were doing, somebody wasn't telling the whole truth. But there was no point going there with this guy. Later, though . . . “Speaking of that, I'd like to
figure out who let us go in overt at the same time a covert mission was working the same tasking,” Dan told him. “I realize it's probably beyond my need to know and over my pay grade, but I'd just like to raise the issue.”

“It's not uncommon, to run two ops,” Byrne told him, in the tone of a dad explaining to a six-year-old how the motor makes the car go.

“Without letting your right hand know?”

“Even that.”

“My guess, and it's only a guess, is that the FSB set you up with Komponent from the start,” the bald man mused.