Winter Hawk (14 page)

"But you say my son told—the actor?" He was floundering now, he realized. Serov had assumed control of the conversation. His own authority seemed to have vanished. "Everything?"

"Oh, nothing of the detail, General, we're sure of that. After all, he doesn't know very much, does he?"

"Of course not." He felt his son's safety, and his villainy, working deeper and deeper into him.

"General?"

"I—I will speak to my son in the morning," he managed to say.

"I recommend—"

"I will speak to him in the morning!" Rodin bellowed in an irate voice, thrusting the receiver back onto its rest.

Dmitri Priabin yawned and rubbed his cheeks, then replaced his hands on the steering wheel. He was tired from lack of sleep after the emotions he had endured. He could not fend off those glimpses of the past hours that flickered in his imagination. Zhikin's wife, in particular. He had watched her staring at him as her face crumbled into grief and she began crying in a way that seemed to make her ache. Ugly, mouth open, eyes blind, twisting her apron.

The children had been taken by a neighbor. He'd seen to that before breaking the news of Viktor's death. After a while, she seemed to have forgotten his very presence, as if tied to her chair in a stiff, unmoving posture; staring into a storm that made her eyes stream.

Eventually, he had left her, patting her hand, mumbling justice, revenge, which she heard as little of as she had his earlier sympathy. He'd told her nothing of his suspicions—knowledge, he corrected himself—but he'd wanted her to know something would happen, something would be done to balance things. Then his flat, and sleeplessness; crowding fears, dim futures. The dangerous path—he knew about Rodin and the little actor. Rodin knew he knew. An ugly, dark standoff.

But he had to go on with it.

He opened the car door. Morning leaking into the sky. The wind chilled through him at once. He crossed the yard at the rear of the KGB's Tyuratam building toward the central garage. Rodin's narrow, somehow naked features were vivid in his mind, tempting and threatening, as he bent his face away from the wind and hunched into his overcoat. Would he have told his father? What did the GRU know, how much had he told them about his conversation, his slip of the tongue, in Priabin's office?

Rodin knew. He cleared his throat with what might have been a growl. Concentrate on that, not your own skin, he told himself. Remember they killed Viktor—whatever else, they did that.

He banged open the judas door of the garage, startling one of the mechanics.

"Well?" he snapped. They'd been working on the Zil all night, presumably. His jaw worked, masticating emotion like hot food. Revenge? No, just making things come out right. "Well, Gorbalev?" he snapped, more impatiently, catching sight of one of the forensic officers leaning out of the driver's seat of the wrecked car as it rested on a hydraulic ramp in the center of the untidy, oil-stained floor of the garage. "Anything? How did they arrange it?"

Gorbalev seemed to study Priabin for a moment, then he climbed slowly out of the car, his long legs seeming to hamper his movements, as if the dimensions of the Zil were those of a child's kiddie car.

"Colonel," he greeted Priabin, who was still posed in the doorway, the cold flowing in behind him. "There's nothing on the car," he added. "Sorry."

"Nothing?" His voice turned at once from disappointment to temper. "What the hell—?"

"We've been thorough. Everyone has," Gorbalev replied evenly, adjusting his glasses, taller by several inches than Priabin. "There's nothing here. But, come upstairs—Zhikin's body." He appeared almost ashamed. Priabin looked at the car, glaring at its stained, dented hood and empty windshield. Through that—

He shuddered and followed Gorbalev out of the garage, along green-painted corridors, through frosted glass doors into the main building. To the first floor.

Viktor's body, lying on a table. He winced in anticipation, but there had not yet been a full postmortem. The scarred, hair-covered upper torso had not been cut, damaged by the pathologist. Zhikin's grimly blank face had been cleaned of glass. The smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant might have been emitted by the gray skin of the corpse.

"Here," Gorbalev said, pulling the covering green rubber sheet back from the lower part of the body.

Flat stomach, black hair massed around the limp penis, new and old marks on the thighs and shins. Blue stains, like old ink at the knee and ankle of the right leg. An arm was damaged, too, the bone breaking through the gray skin just where the faint line of an old suntan ringed the upper arm. Above the right knee, there was a red welt, indented with what might have been heavy finger marks. On impact, the steering wheel had impressed itself heavily into the flesh.

"What?" Priabin mumbled, suddenly disoriented, frightened by the body and its distance and lifelessness.

"Ignore the arm. Knee and shin and ankle. All those breaks and wrenches and twists could have been caused by the crash or . . ." Priabin looked at him but said nothing. Viktor Zhikin was too much like Anna like this, the scene too much like that scene, when he had been summoned to formally identify her body. Zhikin's body was too real, too heavy, like hers had been. Solidly dead. Gorbalev continued: "I think his leg was broken in these places and wrenched out of shape, just to keep the accelerator of the car jammed down hard. The thigh could have been wedged under the steering wheel, explaining the mark above the knee."

Priabin looked up from the bruises and from his memories. He was puzzled, but anger was beginning even before he understood the reason for it.

He looked wildly at Gorbalev, then blurted out: "Before or after he was dead?" It seemed essential that he know.

Gorbalev took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief; waited for the question to go away, or to make sense.

"I—before," he said eventually, unnerved by Priabin's damp-eyed, bright stare. Priabin sensed himself staring into the same storm that Zhikin's wife had endured. Revenge, now—oh, yes.

"It was done deliberately. They did it." He stared at Zhikins face, which was empty, blank, asked nothing of him; yet weighed on him with an intolerable but unavoidable burden. It was easier to feel enraged by the twisted limb than by that dead face.

Zhikin's face, his wife's face, Anna's face—all the same; distinct but communal. Fellow victims.

"OK. Keep quiet about this. Your report is to say nothing, except that you're satisfied it was an accident. Understand?"

Evidently, the forensic officer was mystified, but he nodded.

"I understand, Colonel."

Priabin's fist closed on Gorbalev's lapel. He jutted his face close to that of the other man. "No, you don't understand. Just do as I tell you. Your report describes those injuries as being entirely consistent with the accident. The car reveals nothing to account for the crash Zhikin"—he looked at the body, as if he were engaged in its betrayal; not for long, he fervently promised—"must have blacked out or swerved to avoid something or simply lost control. He made a fatal mistake. Understand? There are no suspicious circumstances— none!"

He glanced, once more, at Viktor Zhikin s body, saw the ink-stained knee and ankle, the twisted shape of the whole leg, and sensed the hands that had done it, breaking the bones with a rifle butt, or even a sledgehammer. Zhikin had still been alive when—

—hopefully unconscious when they began. With time and care, they could have wedged his foot and ankle without damage. They'd hurried it, taking the violent shortcut—and they'd probably wanted to. Twiglike snaps greeted with laughter, the handling of a living human form like a child's rubber doll, bending and breaking the pipe-cleaner skeleton within the flesh and muscle. Priabin felt sick. The damage was as much a warning as the drowning, as the actor's death.

Keep out. Restricted area, under military control. Keep out. Stay away if you know what's good for you.

Priabin prayed, once more, that Viktor had been unconscious when they began breaking him.

"He was still—?" he faltered, releasing Gorbalev's lapel. He smoothed the jacket's material absently. Gorbalev, polishing his glasses with haste and concentration, nodded.

"Alive? Yes. Water in his lungs. He wasn't dead when he entered the water. Probably unconscious, though. He was hit on the back of the—"

Priabin heard no more, slamming the door of the small, bare, harshly lit room behind him and cutting off the noise of Gorbalev's voice. His chest felt tight, his throat full. He shook with the irrepressible desire to kill someone.

Colonel Gennadi Serov of Soviet military intelligence, commandant of military security for the Baikonur area, watched the screen of his television set with a withering contempt. He had not turned up the volume. The puppets appeared more wooden, more meaningless without their words, without commentary. Bobbing, smirking heads posed in front of backdrops of Moscow and Washington. Both of them in darkness, the American capital slipping into night.

the Moscow backdrop bright, jeweled with lamps. Two heads without authority. Calvin the American puppet and their own dolt, Nikitin. It was another of the endless repeats of the broadcast that Moscow television was transmitting to the entire Soviet Union, the whole of the Warsaw Pact, no doubt, just to make certain. There they were, the fools, grinning their little pact at one another; one of them relieved, the other defeated, he reminded himself. Which only made them all the more contemptible.

That fool Rodin, he thought.

Lightning.

Doubtless the father had talked to the son and then the son had whispered everything into the shell-like ear of the queer little actor. The whole matter angered Serov; it was almost an abstract emotion, tinged with his habitual disappointment regarding other people.

He stood with his back to the room, close to the television set. His hands were in the pockets of his uniform trousers, his jacket was unbuttoned; he wore a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a Russian cigarette with a cardboard tube. The strong, acrid smoke surrounded him. He stood, hunch-shouldered, staring at the two voiceless faces on the screen, as if menacing them. Then, weary of them, he switched off the set. Thursday. It was to be Thursday. Calvin was so sensitive to world opinion at that moment he had been forced to agree to the signing. He was powerless against the wave of events. The launch would take place on Thursday, to coincide exactly with the signing of the miserable treaty. The real secret would come on Friday, with—

—Lightning.

And because of Rodins sodomite offspring, and this, this
thing
now sitting on the other side of Serov's desk, quaking in its highly polished boots because a pal had dropped him in the shit up to his neck. Because of people like that,
Lightning
had been threatened.

Serov glared at the army captain, who visibly blanched. Serov enjoyed the reaction; enjoyed, too, the captain's presence. His own efficiency, his personal stock, would emerge well from dealing with this—and from making Rodin toe the line over his son. Yes, if he could manage things with a certain deftness, then he would profit.

The captain's collar was crumpled and his tie was askew. With heavy, malicious humor, Serov thought it looked like the beginnings of an attempt to hang himself. The captain had opened a Pandora's box; Serov had to find the lid and replace it. He did not doubt that he could.

The captain had been the direct cause of the flight of the computer technician, Kedrov. The man had disappeared after overhearing this buffoon's loose talk—in a lavatory, for Christ's sake.

An evening of boozing, a big mouth, the simple inability to realize he and his pal were not alone. The man wasn't just disappointing, he was a disaster. Serov deliberately leaned one fist on his desk; the other rested on his hip. The pose suggested either might strike at any moment. The captain, gratifyingly, shook visibly.

Serov began. "You're a senior telemetry officer in the main mission control room, your security clearance is high—so high that you were placed in possession of certain most secret information in order that your computations would remain valid—you are experienced, you have been in your present post for five years—and you open your mouth in the lavatory, Captain?" The voice, the long sentence and its subordinate clauses had been orchestrated to reach a climax accompanied by the banging of his fist on the desk. The captain's tall, slim frame—apparently he was something of a wow with the women—obligingly twitched in response, jumping like Serov's paperweight carved in the form of a tortoise.

"I—I—" The captain tried to protest, his mouth and vocal chords captive in the surroundings of the office, imprisoned by his sense of Serov's boundless authority in police matters.

"Shut up!" Serov raged. "This miserable little computer operator, a civilian into the bargain, has disappeared. He is the man you saw in the club toilet?" He held up a clear, sharp color print of Kedrov's head and shoulders, thrusting it at the captain like a weapon. The captain rubbed his arms as if cold. His hands were near the shoulder flashes that denoted his membership of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the elite. Not for much longer, Serov promised. It would be the Far East, if he wasn't shot. Or perhaps military adviser somewhere in Africa, deep in the bush with the niggers, the fuzzy-wuzzies. "Is it him?" he bellowed. The captain twitched again. "Is it?"