Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (69 page)

Brandt himself had become a secret student of Stalin’s, of his history of blood, broken bones, and broken promises, in order to prepare himself for taking on the Soviet Bear. The dissolution of the USSR hadn’t fooled him the way it had others. Russia’s power might have been broken, but he knew it to be temporary; its flinty spine, fortified by Uncle Joe’s vampiric shadow, was still very much intact.

“I have three minutes.”

The voice in Brandt’s ear caused him to bristle inwardly, but he swallowed his outrage because he knew that, in fact, he only had three minutes. “My man in the field has just informed me that the opposition is gaining ground.”

“Even if that’s the case,” Oriel Jovovich Batchuk said, “these people are no match for
Trinadtsat.
They have neither the manpower nor the resources to take advantage of the situation.”

Batchuk wasn’t denying it! Brandt massaged his forehead with his fingertips while shielding his eyes with the palm of his hand, dispelling the possibility that anyone on board Air Force One might inadvertently see the expression of consternation on his face. “It seems to me that we have to entertain the possibility that the situation on the ground is being rewritten even as we stand here talking to one another.”

“A hiccup, that’s all,” the deputy prime minister said. “We still hold the high ground, that’s all that matters.”

Batchuk had power in spades, that was indisputable, but what they were aiming for was so complex that no one man could guarantee its success. Acknowledging this reality was, after all, the prime reason he and Batchuk had forged this risky alliance and even riskier plan, why each of them was wagering their power and their influence—everything they possessed—with their respective presidents. For Brandt, however, there was another matter: money. He’d never had it, had been forced by his expertise at political maneuvering to be around those who did, and he burned with envy. He wanted his share of the gravy train and God help anyone who stood in his way.

“To ensure our success,” he said now, putting stress on every word, “I’ve put out an immediate sanction on Annika Dementieva.” He expected a response, possibly an irate one, from Batchuk, but his words were met only by silence. “I’m convinced she’s causing this hiccup, as you call it. A cure is needed, even for a hiccup.”

“I would find it difficult to disagree with you,” Batchuk said. “Who has been given the assignment?”

“Harry Martin. He’s the assassin-in-place.”

“Where is he at the moment? At Zhulyany, I assume.”

“If he was at the Kiev airport,” the General said, growing annoyed at the note of condescension in Batchuk’s voice, “I’m sure he would have told me.”

“Hmm, interesting.”

Now the General really was annoyed. “How so?”

“Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko, the FSB officer your man Martin is supposed to be shadowing—”

“I know who the hell Kirilenko is,” the General said, beginning to lose his temper despite himself.

“Kirilenko’s name has just shown up on a flight manifest departing Zhulyany in forty-three minutes, bound for Simferopol North Airport in the Crimea.” Batchuk cleared his throat, the better to emphasize what he said next: “Either your man Martin is an incompetent or he’s decided to play both ends against the middle.”

“I know Harry,” the General said, “and he’s neither.”

“Then figure out your own explanation,” Batchuk said.

The General immediately phoned Martin and informed him of Kirilenko’s whereabouts. The moment he heard the surprise in Martin’s voice he resolved to put another man in the field ASAP. This he did the moment his call to Martin was over.

He shifted from one leg to another, his body creaky and diminished inside the perfectly pressed uniform with its splendid show of medals and commendations.

“General, it’s time.”

The president’s voice, strong and firm as always, caused him to return down the aisle at his usual crisp pace to where Carson was now standing, waiting for the door to open while the contingent of Secret Service operatives buzzed around him like horseflies.

“You look gray-faced, Archie,” the president said under his breath. “Is there anything wrong, anything I need to know?”

“No, sir,” Brandt said, struggling to regain his composure, “of course not.”

“Because we’re on the firing line now, about to go into battle and, to paraphrase Sonny Corleone, I don’t want to come out of this aircraft with only my dick in my hand.”

The General nodded. “Understood, sir. I have your back, your guns are loaded, and all your ammunition is dry and awaiting your orders.”

“That’s the spirit,” Carson said with a tight smile.

The flight attendant spun the door wheel and it opened inward. The first of the president’s agents took command of the rolling stairs, then others checked out the immediate vicinity. For a moment, they spoke with their opposite numbers in the Russian secret service, then one of them turned, gave a brief, reassuring nod to his commander in chief.

“Okay, General,” the president said. “Here we go.”

These days Dennis Paull never slept; he never stayed in one place for very long, either. It was as if he needed to keep one step ahead of the banshee that was on his trail. That banshee—or demon or ghost, whatever you wanted to call it—had a name: Nina, the woman he’d had an affair with who had almost killed Edward Carson at his inauguration. Only Jack McClure’s timely intervention had saved the president. For that Paull would be eternally grateful. If only Jack could exorcize the demon or ghost or banshee that haunted Paull’s waking life, but Jack was just a man, not a sorcerer.

Paull, who had set up a temporary office in a Residence Inn on the outskirts of the District, planned to spend his nights unearthing all there was to know about the members of Edward Carson’s inner circle. He sat at a drab desk in front of his souped-up laptop, scanning
a screen full of information from yet another government database he’d hacked into. Factoids from the public and private lives of Vice President Crawford, Kinkaid Marshall, G. Robert Kroftt, and William Rogers floated across his screen like messages from a phosphorescent universe. He was particularly interested in Crawford. Like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before him, Carson had been drawn into a shotgun wedding with the old-line and conservative Crawford in order to carry Texas and the other swing states in the old South. The two men never got along. Though their public face was all smiles, behind closed doors their politics was fraught with friction and, at times, animosity. Though Crawford wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the intransigent members of the party, Paull didn’t like him; he certainly didn’t trust his style of backroom wheeling and dealing. Who knew what insidious pols Crawford was in bed with.

This was the work Paull had been doing since he arrived at just after six in the evening. It was now half past eleven. To one side was an open cardboard box with the remaining two slices of pepperoncini pizza from Papa John’s. He rose, went to the bathroom, and washed the olive oil off his hands. Then he crossed to the window, peering through the slatted blinds at the smeared headlights on the highway. The traffic’s constant drone made him feel as if he were inside a beehive, an appropriate sound track for his working environment.

All at once he shivered and, focusing on the reflection of the room in the glass, thought he saw Nina, or more accurately her shadow, passing from right to left. Whirling, he confronted the half-dark room, lit only by the lamp that shed a pool of light over the desk, his work area, one corner of the stained pizza box, bloody with tomato sauce.

He wanted to laugh at the empty space, at his own foolish fears, but something stopped him, a sense of foreboding, perhaps, that he couldn’t shake. There was, for him, a sense of things ending, instead
of beginning as they should have with the installation of the new administration. The world appeared to be sliding away from him, as if it were falling off the edge of a table into darkness.

Of course he was furious for allowing himself to be deceived by Nina, but that was in the past and it belonged there. Nevertheless, he was still furious, possibly more so, because he couldn’t forget her, because he missed her. She hadn’t been just another fuck, she hadn’t been just another sexy woman. When she betrayed him she’d devoured a piece of him he now knew he’d never get back. In the wake of her betrayal he felt diminished, not simply foolish or abashed. She’d stolen something vital.

Turning back to the window he stared out at a world hustling by, indifferent to his pain. He was alone, as he would be in the moment before death took him, and this made him think of his father, who was alone when he died because Paull was busy studying for his graduate school finals. He wished his father were here now, because he was the only person Paull had ever been able to confide in. Even Edward Carson, arguably his best friend, didn’t know everything Paull’s father had. The man had been compassionate enough to forgive Paull his sins and mistakes no matter their severity. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you,” he said once, “you’re my son.” And then, continuing, said, “Your mother’s gone and forgotten. You’re all I’ve got, I have to forgive you.” And yet he died alone, Paull thought, as we all do, whether we forgive or not, whether we hold people close to us or push them away, as Paull had his own wife, who was in the final, horrifying stages of Alzheimer’s, locked away in a facility. He went to see her less and less these days; she didn’t know him, but what did that matter, he had an obligation, didn’t he, he’d taken an oath: in sickness and in health. But he’d distanced himself from her, both physically and emotionally. She was like a painting, or someone perpetually asleep, dreaming a life he could never understand. Did a radish dream, or a head of cabbage? She never responded in the slightest
way to the music he put on during his visits—Al Hibbler singing “After the Lights Go Down Low,” for instance, or the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” songs they had loved and, in their youth, had danced to. He’d thought of this, a calming consolation, when six months ago he’d taken up one of the spare pillows and prepared to lower it over her face that, in her infirmity, had grown round and shiny as a metal globe. She wouldn’t know what was happening, what he was doing to her, and if she did, he was certain she’d be grateful. What kind of life was this she led? Even cows had it better, but not, perhaps, radishes. He was seconds away from doing it, his fingers gripping the sides of the pillow, his mind already made up, set on its path, when the music came on: Roy Hamilton’s “Don’t Let Go.” It seemed somehow sacrilegious to commit murder—even compassionate murder—while that song was playing (“I’m so happy I got you here/Don’t let go, don’t let go”), and something inside him shifted, everything changed and, turning, he put the pillow back where he’d found it. Then, without a backward glance at his wife or the radish, he left and hadn’t been back since.

He turned back into the hotel room, away from the glare of the headlights, and sat back down at the dingy desk and the endless lines of information scrolling across his laptop’s screen.

Why wouldn’t he forgive Nina, she was all he had.

But Nina was beyond his forgiveness, Jack had shot her through the heart before she’d had a chance to poison everyone at the inauguration with the vial of anthrax given to her by Morgan Herr. This, then, was Dennis Paull’s dilemma as he sat scrolling through the so-far innocuous mountain of electronic data: He was indebted to Jack McClure for saving Edward Carson, but he hated Jack for killing Nina.

Rhon Fyodovich Kirilenko had just enough time to swing by his office and pick up the photos his assistant had pulled off the CCTV
cameras at Zhulyany Airport before transferring to a waiting FSB vehicle that took him, at reckless speed, to board his scheduled flight to Simferopol.

While his driver was weaving through the clogged arteries of Kiev he studied each of the three photos. The first was of the three people: Annika Dementieva he could see clearly enough. Behind her, his face partially obscured, was a man who looked vaguely familiar. Kirilenko spent several fruitless minutes trying to place the visible features before moving on. The second photo was of the young girl, who bore no resemblance to anyone in Kirilenko’s memory bank. He studied this photo in a rather abstract manner; for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what she was doing with the two adults. To his knowledge, which was extensive to the point of encyclopedic, Annika Dementieva had no sisters, and the girl was too old to be her daughter. So who on earth was she? Sighing in frustration he turned to the third and last photo, which was a full-face shot of the man. Almost immediately a galvanic shock rode up his spine. He knew this man, he worked for the President of the United States. What the hell was he doing with Annika Dementieva?

Kirilenko stared out the window, seeing nothing but his own muddled thoughts. He knew his duty was to inform his superior of this shocking development, but something—a stubbornness, resentment, a feeling of being at once played and betrayed—stayed his hand. He was tired of being manipulated. Bad enough to be fucked over by the Americans, that kind of treatment was a given, but to be fucked by his own people, who had to know they were throwing him into an international arena filled with land mines, was more than he could tolerate. But there was something else—something deeper—at work in his mind. He was finally in possession of information not available to his superiors; now, fate had given him a modicum of power, and he was not willing to part with it so quickly. Shoving the
photos away, he resolved to keep his own counsel until he could determine just what was going on.

It was too bad for Kirilenko that he wasn’t carrying the only copies of the photos his assistant had taken off the airport CCTV. Twenty minutes before he’d arrived, Oriel Jovovich Batchuk, standing in front of Kirilenko’s desk, confronted his assistant. He received the latest oral report from a young man he’d found it ridiculously easy to suborn, with half his mind still chewing over his disturbing conversation with Gourdjiev

When it came to the subject of Annika there could be no equivocating, no ending, no exit for either of them. No matter how hard either of them tried to fight it their roles were set in stone, there was no reversing position, no going back. But the knowledge of what had happened, of what could never be changed, was a hateful thing, a spider spinning its malevolent web in his mind. And this was because of one simple fact he’d never uttered to anyone, but which he suspected Gourdjiev knew: Even if he possessed the impossible power to change the past, he wouldn’t. He did what he had to do, something a man like Gourdjiev could never understand, let alone condone. Batchuk was a man who could not afford to second-guess himself; rather, he preyed on others’ not wanting to know, not wanting to see the truth about themselves or those whose acquaintance was politically or financially important to their careers; preyed on people afraid of conviction, of being wrong, who would rather close their eyes and listen to his guidance. Gourdjiev had done that once—only once—to his unending sorrow, a situation Batchuk could read on his face every time they met.