Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (49 page)

“Whatever.” Jelena shrugged. She spoke English with no foreign intonation at all, unlike Annika, whose English was freighted with a heavy Russian accent.

“I see you have no trouble talking to strangers.”

“If I did, I’d be out of a job,” Jelena said. “I handle the hotel’s overseas bookings.”

Annika signaled the bartender. “What will you have …”

“Jack,” he said. “Jack McClure.”

Annika nodded. “What’s your poison, Jack McClure?”

“Single malt,” Jack said to the bartender. “Oban, please.”

“Right away, sir.” The bartender went to retrieve the bottle of scotch.

“I hope you have a strong constitution, Mr. McClure.”

“Shut up, Jelena.” Annika shot her friend a daggered look before turning back to Jack. “Ignore her. She’s developed a lurid imagination from reading too many American thrillers.”

“I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.”

The bartender set his drink in front of him, then backed away as if they were all radiating plutonium.

“You might as well tell him, Annika.”

“That seems like a good idea,” he said, taking a sip of his Oban.

Annika sighed. “My ex—his name is Ivan Gurov—is a minor— and I stress
minor
—member of a Russian
grupperovka.”
Her eyes locked on his. “You know this word?”

Jack did. “He’s part of the Moscow mafia.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Jelena said with more emotion than she’d shown up until now.

“As you can see, Jack, Jelena didn’t approve of my involvement with Ivan.”

“He’s a bloodsucker,” Jelena said, clearly warming to the topic. “He’s trash washed up in the gutter, who’d as soon slit your throat as look twice at you. He gets more pleasure out of blood than vodka, that’s for sure.”

“My friend needs to learn to have an opinion,” Annika said with a good-natured laugh.

“And you need to watch out behind you,” Jelena said soberly. “You, too, Mr. McClure. I saw the look Ivan gave you.”

“I take it that means he won’t be thrown in jail.”

“His friends would see he got out in a heartbeat,” Annika said, “which is why the police won’t bother pursuing the matter.”

“More likely they don’t want to wind up in an alley with a bullet in the back of the head,” Jelena said. “They have a serious aversion to being taken out with the garbage.”

Jack took another sip of his scotch. “Count me in on that group.”

“Don’t worry,” Annika said. “Jelena tends to overstate the case when it comes to Ivan. He’s pretty far down the
grupperovka
food chain.”

Jelena made a derisive sound. “That doesn’t stop him from killing people.”

“You don’t know that for a fact.”

“I hear things, Annika, same as you.” She shook her head. “You’re so naïve sometimes.”

Jack had had about enough Halloween stories for one evening. He had zero interest in seeing Ivan Gurov again, but he didn’t have any expectation that he would, especially since by tomorrow morning he’d be in the air, on his way to Ukraine.

He finished his drink and stood up. “Ladies, it’s been interesting, but all things considered it’s time for me to leave.”

“You see what you did, Jelena,” Annika pouted, “you’ve driven away another man.” She rose and threw some money on the bar. “I promised to make sure you got to your room.”

“That’s right,” Jelena said with a sardonic edge. “That disgusting pig of yours might be hiding in the elevator.”

Jack held up his hands. “Ladies, I like women fighting over me as much as the next guy, but, really, I can find my way upstairs by myself.”

Alone in the elevator, he still felt Annika’s cat’s eyes following him, and he wondered whether she or Jelena had been seriously coming on to him. Maybe that was just male ego talking. Then again, it could be that both of them had been flirting with him, which had long been a fantasy of his, one he shared with about a billion other men. One thing was for certain, his brain and theirs had been vibrating on two distinct frequencies. Between the assignment in Ukraine, secret from even the president’s staff, and the escalating friction with Sharon, his mind had no room for flirtatious Russian women, especially when one had a mobster for a boyfriend, ex- or otherwise.

He got off at the top floor, nodded to the Secret Service personnel on duty, and entered his room. Something about his talk with Carson in the stairwell bothered him. Why had he dismissed his bodyguards before he brought up the subject of Jack’s assignment? When Jack had queried him, the president had said: “
I
trust you, Jack. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Did Dennis Paull suspect a mole inside Edward’s staff—in the president’s own Secret Service detail? If true, it would be a devastating blow to Edward’s work guiding the administration. What if his political enemies—who, as he said, were still powerful—knew his every move before he made it? Carson hadn’t spoken their names, but Paull had: Miles Benson, the former director of the CIA, a hardheaded,
take-no-prisoners war veteran; and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the credible neocons, bellicose, nervy, with recently revealed ties to several companies manufacturing war materiel. Between them, the two men had almost sixty years of service and networking inside the Beltway, formidable opponents indeed. They could not only stymie the president’s agenda, but also undermine his standing in the country. These days, polls were everything. The appearance of failure was all that was needed to send Carson’s popularity skidding.

He thought about calling Sharon, but he needed something to calm him. Maybe a hot shower. As he stripped off his clothes and padded into the bathroom, he made a mental note to follow up on his line of reasoning, either with or without Carson’s approval.

He turned on the shower, and had to wait for the hot water to come up, but a man’s voice arrived before the heat did.

“Toss the entire fucking room.”

Jack, listening closely, turned off the water and put his head near the pipe.

“I want to find her secrets, something I can use against her.”

Ivan was speaking in Russian, a language Jack had learned while at the ATF because of his work with terrorists. He’d used Rosetta Stone to learn Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, all within an eight-month period. He already had been fluent in Spanish. As long as the foreign language was delivered aurally, his dyslexia allowed him to be an astonishingly quick learner. He was able to see the words, phrases, tenses, and colloquialisms in three dimensions as he heard them, and thus remember them instantly and without need for repetition.

He sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub, bent over, straining now to pick up every word. Clearly, Ivan hadn’t been handed over to the police. So much for law and order in Russia.

“I thought you knew this bitch inside and out,” another male voice said now.

“Do you know your bitches inside and out?” Ivan said irritably.

“My bitches are
tyolkas.
Young girls in heat are unknowable and, anyway, who the fuck cares? There’s tons of new
tyolkas
at Bushfire every night— Hey, what’s this?”

“What’ve you found?”

“Hmm, just a pair of sweaty panties. This bitch is a pig.”

“If I know her, she left them there on purpose, just for prying eyes like yours,” Ivan said. “Which means we’ve been looking in the wrong places.”

“I already checked under the drawers and behind the toilet tank.”

“Too obvious.”

“Ah,” said the second voice, “let’s try the shower drain.”

There was an answering grunt, then, a moment later: “Found something—look, a monofilament line tied to the drain, almost invisible in this light.”

“What’s on the other end of it, Milan Oskovich?” Ivan said in a hushed voice, made slurry by its journey up the pipe.

Jack leaned forward, the better to hear.

There was no sound from below, and for a moment, Jack was afraid the two men had left the bathroom. Then: “It’s a necklace,” Ivan said.

“A cameo,” Milan corrected.

“No wonder she hid it, it must be worth a lot of money, especially on the black market.”

From what Jack had seen of Annika’s attitude and style, she did not seem the type to wear a cameo.

Apparently, Milan didn’t think so either, because he said, “I’m not sure she hid it for its monetary value. Could the cameo be hiding something inside?”

Silence again, and Jack found that his muscles were tensed as if anticipating a blow.

“Fuck!” Milan said. “It’s an ID.”

“She’s FSB.” Ivan’s voice held a note of incredulity.

Jack knew that the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service or FSB for short, was the successor to the Soviet Union’s KGB.

Milan was laughing. “You poor dope—you’ve been fucking an undercover FSB officer.”

“Shut up!”

“You’d better not let Arsov get wind of this.”

“I said shut the fuck up!”

Jack knew from his pretrip briefings that Kaolin Arsov was the head of the Izmaylovskaya
grupperovka
in Moscow.

“He’ll have your nuts over an open flame.”

Jack heard the sound of a brief scuffle, and he imagined the two thugs going at it. Why was he listening, this had nothing to do with him. But at once an image of Annika, blond hair and carnelian eyes, long legs crossed one over the other, flashed across his mind. He heard the silvery peal of her laughter, which morphed into Emma’s last appeal:
“Dad, help me!”

“Calm the fuck down.” Milan was panting hard. “You can be sure I’m not going to tell anyone. It’s the bitch you have to worry about, not me.”

“I know that.”

Silence again, then a length of unintelligible whispering. What was Ivan dreaming up, Jack wondered.

“Annika? It’s Milan…. No, for God’s sake, don’t hang up. Ivan’s been shot…. That’s right, shot. He’s alive, but … We’re at Bushfire … on Tverskaya … That’s right, near Red Square, just down the block from Nightflight. No, I haven’t called anyone else. Ivan said to call … You’ll come, then? All right, we’re around back in the alley.”

“Let’s go!” Ivan said. “We’ll only have a couple of minutes to beat her there.”

3

The snow had left a moon of dubious value, but the wind had picked up, turning the flakes that had settled into the gutters or at the base of stony walls shooting upward, striking Jack’s face like grains of sand. With his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat and his shoulders hunched against the near-arctic chill, he crossed Red Square on the diagonal, on his way to Bushfire, whose address he got from the leering concierge on his way out.

“Hold onto your wallet,
gospadin,”
the concierge had said as he wrote on a slip of paper.

“Just tell me the address,” Jack had told him, ignoring the useless paper.

As he’d crossed to the elevator on the top floor, his eyes had met those of Alli, who was leaning against the door to her room, smoking one of the clove cigarettes that were among her new passions.

“Go to bed,” he said.

She exhaled a cloud of aromatic smoke. “I will when you do.”

He glanced down to where she was looking, jammed the Sig Sauer P250 further down in his waistband.

The elevator door opened. “I won’t be long.”

“I’ll wait up,” she said as he stepped in. “You can tell me all about where you went.”

The doors closed on her enigmatic smile. Jack shook his head, wondering what it would take to get the murk of her incarceration out of her system. Perhaps she’d never fully overcome what had been done to her; who knows what psychic damage the brilliantly deranged Morgan Herr had inflicted on her? Who knows how deep it went? Not her phalanx of shrinks, who had finally released her into her parents’ custody because she either derided or ignored the therapists who had tried to get her to open up about her nightmare experience at Herr’s hands. The only thing known for certain was that he hadn’t raped her, which was a blessing. But what, exactly, had he done to her? That was the billion-dollar question.

The buildings, flood-lit from below, seemed even more monumental limned against the milk-and-ink sky. The darkness lent the onion domes a fairy-tale aspect that belied the structures’ lugubrious history. But, then, as Alli had so rightly pointed out, history was being rewritten here every day. He walked quickly, but not with his head down as most people tend to do in such unpleasant weather. Instead, he was on the lookout for Ivan and Milan, though he was certain they had made it out of the hotel before he’d even had time to dress. More pressingly though, he was looking for Annika, because if he saw her he could cut her off, tell her what he’d overheard, and drag her away from heading into the ambush. But apart from an old babushka, thin and arched as a black alley cat, he saw no one.

Briefly, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. He was here on presidential business, he had a charter flight waiting to take him to Ukraine at Carson’s request. It seemed the height of madness to be striding across Red Square in the dead of night toward an ambush
between two Russian mafia hit men and an FSB agent. Part of him said that Annika could take care of herself, but another, deeper part— the part that had been permanently scarred by his daughter’s death— said that unless he intervened she’d be found dead tomorrow morning with a bullet in the back of her head. If this were America he could phone the police, but as Annika herself had pointed out, this was Russia, and Russia had a very different set of rules that had little or nothing to do with the law. He’d have to get used to this new reality for as long as he remained here.

But, at the moment, there was a deeper issue at work. For him, the present was always infused with the past. What if he hadn’t been too busy with a drug bust to listen to Emma when she’d called for his help? Would she still have lost control of her car? Would she have veered off the road and careened into the tree? He would never know, of course, but he could ensure nothing like that happened again. He knew it wasn’t his job to save Annika; he scarcely knew her. He knew it was potentially a stupid thing he was trying to do, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He knew she was going to die; he could never live with himself if he allowed that to happen.