Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (89 page)

“I want to speak with him,” he said. He rose, took two tottering steps, and sat back down.

Kharkishvili frowned, making him look something like the ogre in the story of Jack and the beanstalk. “In your condition I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Please have Ivan Gurov come in, then bring the poisoner here,” Jack said, a certain snap returning to his voice. “We don’t have time to worry about my condition.”

Kharkishvili nodded and left.

When, in due course, Gurov poked his head in the doorway and asked how Jack was feeling, Jack said, “Ivan, the assassin who followed us here, the one you blew off the road, do you know anything about him?”

“I checked with Passport Control at Simferopol North. His name was Ferry Lovejoy.”

“A government-assigned legend.”

“Ah, yes.” Gurov nodded. “A false name to go with the false papers the American government gives its agents overseas. But, no, I checked with FSB in Moscow. Neither Mr. Ferry Lovejoy nor anyone matching the surveillance photo I took of him is in their database.”

Jack’s mind was working at such speeds that he felt momentarily dizzy. “It’s now more imperative than ever that I speak with my would-be murderer.”

“Mr. Kharkishvili has him outside.”

“Good. But first, please have Alli come in, would you.”

While Kharkishvili went to fetch Alli, Jack put a hand on the porcelain sink and levered himself up. For a moment he stood swaying slightly. He spent his time slowing his breathing in order to get his heart rate back to a normal level. All the while his mind was running full tilt. He now had almost all the pieces to the puzzle, though there were still important gaps to fill in. He hoped he could do that before the deadline of tomorrow night, or was it already tomorrow? He glanced at his watch, but his fall had shattered the crystal face and it had stopped working.

He pulled out his cell phone and that was when he saw that there was one voice mail message. It had been flagged
URGENT
.

Alli embraced him. “Are you all right?” She had arrived before he could pick up the message.

“I’m fine.”

“Then what are you still doing in the bathroom?”

He smiled. “It makes an excellent interrogation cell.” He pulled her closer to him. “Now, listen, in a moment Kharkishvili is going to bring in the man who tried to poison me and I’m going to talk to him. You’ll watch him, listen to him, assuming he says much of anything, which is doubtful. That shouldn’t matter to you, you’ll evaluate his facial and body movements, which will tell me a lot. Okay? Think you’re up to it?”

“Of course I’m up to it.” Her eyes were large and liquid. “I’m just … I can’t believe you’ll trust me with this.”

Jack brushed back the fringe of hair from her forehead. “It’s not my trust you can’t believe, Alli, it’s your trust in yourself.”

A moment later Kharkishvili appeared with a slight, dark-haired young man who Jack recognized as one of the kitchen assistants.

“This is the sonuvabitch,” Kharkishvili said, manhandling him
through the doorway. “His name is Vlad, so he says.” He glared at Vlad. “He’s Ukrainian, that much is for certain, the accent is unmistakable.”

“Sit down.”

When Vlad made no move, Kharkishvili pushed him roughly down onto the closed toilet seat.

“You can do whatever you want to me, I’m not going to talk,” the young man said.

Jack ignored him. “Vlad, I’m going to tell you a story. This happened a long time ago, in seventeenth-century Italy. A Neapolitan woman named Toffana marketed a cosmetic, Acqua Toffana. It was a face paint that, as was the custom of the time, made women’s faces very pale, almost white. This Acqua Toffana proved astoundingly successful among the married women of the area, who were counseled by Toffana herself to make sure their husbands kissed them often on both cheeks while they were wearing the makeup. After six hundred of these unfortunate men died, turning their wives into rich widows, the authorities finally discovered that the main ingredient of Acqua Toffana was arsenic. It was the arsenic that gave it its white color.”

He shrugged. “But being an expert poisoner I suppose you know the history of arsenic. However, not expert enough, it seems, because I’m still here.”

Slouched on his uncomfortable plastic seat, Vlad looked at him, trying to seem bored. As befitted his profession he had a thoroughly unremarkable face, except for his eyes, which, when Jack looked closely, were yellowish and slippery as oil. They stared out at the world with what seemed a false stoicism, as if they were lying in wait for the enemy to appear.

“Who do you work for?” Jack said. He waited for an answer, but Vlad said nothing. His surface was as bland, as blank as the surface of polished marble, calm and curiously unconcerned by his incarceration.

“I know it’s not the United States government, Vlad, so do you work for the FSB?” Jack paused again to allow Alli to make her assessment. “Perhaps it’s the Ukrainian Security Service who employs you.”

Another pause; the silence from Vlad was deafening.

He leaned in suddenly, careful not to block Alli’s view. “I know you and Ferry Lovejoy work for the same firm.” He knew no such thing, but he wanted to observe, and wanted Alli to observe, Vlad’s reaction.

Vlad’s brow furrowed convincingly. “Ferry …? I’m not familiar with that name.”

Jack smiled, using his teeth. “You work for Alizarin Global, so did Lovejoy, but he’s dead now. Ivan Gurov blew him off the road to this manor house, didn’t he?”

Kharkishvili grinned wolfishly. “Absolutely.”

“Is that supposed to frighten me, because—”

“Okay, we’ll dispense with the formalities,” Jack said, standing up. “I have neither the time nor the inclination to interrogate you further, so I’m going to hand you over to the Russians, Vlad. Let them deal with you. Believe me, whatever information you have they’ll squeeze out of you.”

Jack made a motion with his head and Kharkishvili hauled Vlad to his feet.

A look of contempt hardened Vlad’s face. “You won’t hand me over to the Russians, you won’t be allowed to do it.”

“Allowed?” Jack said, pouncing on the word. “By whom? Who do you work for, who inside AURA?”

“It’s Andreyev, isn’t it?” Alli had stepped up to stand beside Jack. “You’re taking orders from Vasily Andreyev.”

Vlad spat onto the floor. “Vasily Andreyev is an old fool.”

Kharkishvili cuffed him hard in the back of the head.

“Manners,” Jack said, but Vlad had already revealed as much as he was going to. “Take him away,” he said to Kharkishvili.

When he and Alli were alone, he said, “Tell me what you observed.”

Alli considered. In that moment Jack saw no trace of the overprotected, narcissistic young woman who had been abducted at the end of last year.

“I’d say he definitely works for a private company.”

“What seemed to frighten him, anything?” Jack asked.

Alli’s face tensed in concentration. “One thing: being turned over to the Russians.”

Jack nodded. “That was my impression also, which tells me that the company he’s working for isn’t American, or at least not primarily American.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “Okay, what else?”

“I got the feeling that he doesn’t know Ferry Lovejoy, whoever he is.”

“The assassin who Ivan Gurov killed.” Jack had come to the same conclusion.

Also, who or what was going to stop Jack from handing Vlad over to the Russians?

“And what’s the deal with this mysterious company that sent them?”

“I’m not sure,” Jack said, “but I intend to find out.”

Dyadya Gourdjiev parked his comfortably rumpled Zil outside the front door of the manor house just as the first pallid streaks of dawn light cracked open the black-and-blue dome of night. Getting out of the car he shivered in the damp chill air and steeled himself for what was to come.

Magnussen, Glazkov, and Malenko had emerged to welcome him, but not, predictably, Kharkishvili. Though clearly startled by his unplanned visit they nevertheless were warm in their greetings.

As he walked into the entry way he felt himself transported back to the past, back to when he became aware that Oriel Batchuk was
spending an inordinate amount of time at Nikki’s house. That, in fact, was why he had come over unannounced that night, he had hoped to surprise Batchuk and, in front of Nikki, tell him in no uncertain terms to stay away from her and from Alexsei. Batchuk had easily seduced Alexsei with his power, privilege, and his ability to obtain for him the plum cases that had advanced his career, and would continue to do so. By virtue of Batchuk’s magnanimous helping hand the couple had moved out of Alexsei’s cramped one-bedroom into a spacious, light-filled two-and-a-half-bedroom in a luxurious building within walking distance of Red Square. Gourdjiev had also taken note, not without some alarm, that Alexsei had begun wearing made-to-measure British designer suits and Nikki was dressing in the latest Western fashions.

But that night Batchuk was nowhere to be found, instead he walked in on a screaming fight between Alexsei and Nikki. At first no one answered the door, but when he became insistent Nikki opened the door a crack.

He was stunned to see her looking disheveled, her face pale, her carnelian eyes fever-bright. There was a snarl on her lips that she was too upset to hide or modify as she stared out at him. She hadn’t wanted to let him in, had begun to close the door on him when he’d planted his foot on the lintel. Then he’d leaned into the door and pushed it open, stepping inside.

At once Alexsei rushed out of the bedroom where, it seemed, their argument had escalated into a full-scale battle of harsh words, hurled invective, insults, and accusations.

“It’s him, isn’t it!” Alexsei shouted. “How dare you let him in?” When he saw that it was Gourdjiev standing in the entryway, he turned away, but he was hardly mollified. “Now you call your father to take your side.”

“I didn’t call anyone, Alexsei.”

“Liar! You call Oriel all the time!” he shouted as he whirled around.

“He calls me,” she said, “it’s not the same thing.”

“It is if you accept the call.” Alexsei’s lips were drawn back from his teeth.

“You’re making something out of nothing,” Nikki said.

“Do you deny you see him during the day?” he snarled. “Go on, deny it, it would be just like you. Deny it and I’ll have my proof of what sort of woman you are, because I’ve seen you two.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

“I saw the two of you having lunch, bent over the table together, your foreheads were practically touching, I saw it and there were other prosecutors there as well.”

“Alexsei, think for a minute, if I were having an affair with Oriel would either of us be stupid enough to meet in public, let alone at a restaurant frequented by your colleagues?”

“I know him, he wants to throw the affair in my face, he’s out to humiliate me, he wants everyone to know that he’s taken you away from me.”

“You speak of me as if I were a horse or a sack of wheat.”

That was when Gourdjiev turned on his heel and left. No good would come from him inserting himself between them, especially when emotions were running so high. It was only when he emerged from the building and saw the spotlit domes of the Kremlin that he knew there was only one place for him to go.

“Is everything all right?” Magnussen said now, wrenching Gourdjiev back to the present. They stood in the villa’s entryway. “We didn’t expect you.”

“Yes, I know,” Gourdjiev said, “but there was no place else to go.”

Batchuk was inside the perimeter of the manor house before he saw a guard. The brick wall surrounding the property was high but
not particularly difficult to scale or to get over. The real difficulty was in keeping his silhouette from being seen in the gloaming of dawn. There were no trees on the cliff top, no foliage to mask his movements, but luck was with him, a light fog was billowing in off the water in ghostly waves.

Dropping down off the top of the wall he heard faraway barking and he crouched down, still as a rock. If there were dogs on the property, particularly hunting dogs, they would present a problem. With the onshore wind they would already have picked up his scent, or would at any moment. Close to the front of the house he saw the Zil. As he watched, a guard emerged from the house and drove the Zil around to where a number of other cars were parked.

As soon as the guard was back inside Batchuk ran as fast as he could, zigzagging, still bent over, heading for the left side of the manor house. He reached it without incident, but now he heard a chorus of barks, close enough for him to identify them as belonging to Russian wolfhounds. Wolfhounds were not in themselves dangerous, they liked people too much, but they would certainly sound the alarm for those inside the house. Any moment now other guards would come pouring out, following the dogs who, he was now certain, had picked up his scent.

He knew the feeling, he’d had a hound coming after him the night Nikki told him that she couldn’t see him anymore, that Alexsei had found out about them and was causing a terrible row. She told him unequivocally to stay away when he said he was coming to make sure she would be safe.

“I don’t need you to feel safe,” she had told him. “I don’t need you at all.”

“You do need me,” he had replied like an idiot, as if he were seventeen, “I know you do, Nikki, no matter what you say you can’t hide it from me.”

“You are so deluded,” she shot back, “I was a fool, weak and sad,
and you caught me in that moment, you took advantage of me and climbed all over me.”

“Don’t give me that,” he said, “you loved every minute of it, it was you who climbed all over me, if memory serves, you couldn’t get enough.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she shrieked, clearly terrified.

“I did what you wanted me to do, nothing more.”

“Liar! It was what
you
wanted.”

“You can’t fight it, Nikki, I don’t understand why you even try.”

“Idiot, because I’m married.”

“You’ll divorce him, I’ll make it easy for you.”

All at once she sounded desperate. “I pledged my heart, my life to Alexsei, don’t you get it? But, no, I don’t suppose you do, why would you? You have no soul, no humanity, you’re heartless, pitiless, you want what you want, that’s the beginning and the end of it.”