by Jan Fedarcyk
What would life be like in Russia? Sadler wondered. It had been years since his time there, just immediately after the fall, and he did not suppose it had remained the same. He hoped so, at least; in fact he had not particularly enjoyed Moscow, finding the city dirty and crowded, freezing in the winter, absolutely sweltering in the summer and uninviting year-round. But then again, Russia was the largest country in the world: there had to be some corner of it that he would find more enjoyable.
And it was better than being hauled in by the damn FBI, his secrets sweated out of him, the humiliation of a trial, the rest of his life in a cage. Probably there wouldn’t even be an announcement of his defection, it was not as if the CIA would want to alert the public to their incompetence.
He noticed the men but did not think anything of them, thickly set white guys dressed poorly, indistinguishable from a few million others living in the city. He brushed past them and headed towards the Blue and Gold, the neon sign bright in the distance, speaking of hope, of a fresh start, of salvation.
“Joseph Sadler?” one the men asked in thickly accented English.
Things clicked into place for Sadler then, too late to go for his weapon, too late to run, too late for anything but regret—and not even that for very long.
44
TOM WAS drinking a beer at a dive bar near Coney Island, trying to ease his nerves. All of these years and they never quite went away, even for an operation like this, which ought to be easy as cake. The entire thing set out in advance, the man walking blindly down a side alley in a part of town where people sometimes did, for no very good reason except bad luck, find themselves shot several times in the chest. Not a young man, Sadler; no match for thugs practiced at violence. Even Sergei and Vlad shouldn’t have had any trouble with it.
On the counter in front of him his phone lit up for a moment, vibrated against the wood. He flipped it open, saw the message in Cyrillic. He nodded contentedly, turned the phone off and removed the SIM card. On the way out he would drop the phone itself into a trash can; he had many of these, burners they were sometimes called, to be used and discarded after an operation.
From inside his pocket he picked out his real phone—one of the new iPhones; one needed to keep up with the times—and sent out a message.
• • •
In his apartment in Forest Hills, Pyotr sat quietly in his armchair. The television was on but muted. He found the flickering images somehow soothing, although the noise that normally accompanied it was unutterably annoying. He was not quite nervous—Tom had never botched an operation in all the years Pyotr had been using him—but still, he was happy when his phone beeped and he opened it to find happy confirmation that the operation was complete.
Pyotr rarely drank these days, but he got a bottle of good Polish vodka out from under the table and poured himself a shot. “To Joseph Sadler,” he said quietly, then let the clear liquor slip down his throat.
PART 3
Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
—HOMER
45
KAY DROPPED a stack of files into a brown cardboard box with a thump.
“You know, Kay,” Marshall began, “given my highly developed observational skills, a prerequisite and specialty of an FBI Agent, I’m almost getting the sense that you’re upset about something.”
“But, Marshall,” Wilson pointed out, “we found the target of operation Black Bear; if memory serves, we found it in part through the hard work of Agent Malloy.”
“This is a mystery which even my abilities seem unable to solve.”
Kay scowled, closed her box, sealed and marked it. “You two are just adorable. You should put together a vaudeville act, take it on the road.”
“I don’t really think there’s such a thing as vaudeville anymore,” Wilson said regretfully. “For real, Malloy, what’s your problem? You can’t tell a win when you get one?”
“What kind of a win is this? Our suspect dead in a ditch?”
“That such a terrible thing? You shedding a lot of tears at the unfortunate fate of Joseph Sadler, likely spy and all-around scumbag?”
“I didn’t wring any teardrops out of my pillowcase this morning,” Kay seethed. “Although while we’re on the subject, we don’t actually know for certain that he was a spy.”
“Come on, Malloy, his afternoon rendezvous with a known Illegal? That cold-drop cheat sheet you picked up out of his garbage? That man was guilty as sin.”
“We don’t know that he’s our spy,” Kay amended. “Because we never got to pick him up and interrogate him, because he was murdered in an alleyway in a part of Brooklyn where he never should have been.”
Marshall looked at Wilson. The joke didn’t seem so funny anymore. “Things happen, Kay. There are no neat endings in this business.”
“This is the neatest ending imaginable,” Kay said. “This is the sort of ending which, if one was a paranoid sort of person, one might suspect had been deliberately engineered by people disinterested in our digging further into the identity of the Black Bear UNSUB.”
“You think that the SVR gave us Sadler to distract us from the real mole?”
“Why not? Wouldn’t you? Isn’t that the clever move? Something thick enough to satisfy us, lull us into a false sense of certainty? Who’s to say he’s not still out there, lying low until our attention is elsewhere?”
“That’s a fascinating hypothesis,” Marshall said, starting to get heated. Marshall had worked as hard as anyone in the investigation; had been one of the unfortunates who had joined Kay on trash duty, week after week. Like most of the rest of the squad, he’d been, well, perhaps not happy to hear of Sadler’s demise but at least satisfied. “Unfortunately, it has a hole big enough to drive a truck through. How did the SVR know that we were onto Sadler? No one in the CIA knew that, just Mike Anthony and the Black Bear squad. What you’re suggesting, Agent Malloy, whether you’ve thought it through like this or not, is that one of the people on the team is a traitor to the Bureau and their country.”
Kay sighed, pulled her chair out and sank down into it. “Sadler could have sniffed it out on his own,” she said, although she didn’t really believe it. Their surveillance on Sadler could have been a case study at Quantico. After being burned with Vadim, everyone on the team had made damn sure there would be no screwups; they’d done everything exactly the way it was supposed to be done. “Maybe he let his handler know what was happening and they decided it would be easier to offload a corpse than go through the trouble of a defection. What do you think, ma’am?” Kay asked. Jeffries had appeared unexpectedly—in the way that Jeffries was prone to do—from her office and was leaning quietly against a spare desk and drinking from her cinder block–sized mug of coffee. “You aren’t buying this nonsense, are you?”
Jeffries looked at Kay for a long time before speaking, then pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I think that the CIA is satisfied that they got their man, even if they don’t have him any longer. I think that Operation Black Bear was officially ended by order of the Special Agent in Charge. I think that the plaque on my desk reads Assistant Special Agent in Charge, which, if the ‘Assistant’ part didn’t tip you, ranks beneath the Special Agent in Charge. And I think you, Malloy, don’t even have an ‘in Charge’ as part of your title, and therefore ought to learn to follow your marching orders a bit more closely.”
Which, of course, wasn’t an answer—not really. Jeffries caught Kay’s eye after she delivered the rebuke, shrugged, then headed back to the office.
“She doesn’t like it, either,” Wilson said, continuing with the packing.
“No, she does not,” Kay agreed.
46
NEW YORK, in Luis’s estimation, was a very good place if you were young and poor or if you were old and rich—otherwise it was probably not worth the
candle. The young, of course, could flit about the city, drinking and laughing and generally looking beautiful, taking advantage of the infinite opportunities that the metropolis had on offer. The old, by contrast, could sit in the parks and in the bars and watch the young go about their foolishness, as the old had watched the young since the species had stepped out of the primordial ooze.
There were pleasures to be found in age, and Luis enjoyed all of them: enjoyed dressing up in a nice suit and strolling through Central Park as the city swirled around him; enjoyed watching each face quietly; enjoyed the endless churn of the loudest, greatest, wildest city since the fall of Rome. Enjoyed sitting on a bench on a warm afternoon, scattering bits of popcorn to pigeons, strutting about arrogantly, distinguishable from the passing pedestrians only by their wings.
That was what he was doing that morning when the world bit down around him, when he was finally forced to pay for a long life of sin. Thirty years ago Luis would have noticed him immediately, would have smelled him in the air even before his arrival, instincts sharpened by long years of professional paranoia.
As it was, Pyotr was nearly on top of him before he looked up, and even then it took Luis a long time to recognize him. He had changed in the many years since they had first met, withered from thin to shriveled, his hair gone, his skin wrinkled and his pallor sallow. But his eyes, those cold little eyes like black dots in a swirl of pink, those Luis remembered, those Luis could never forget.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Luis croaked, the question sounding weak and vacillating even to his own ears.
“Is that any way to treat an old friend?”
“Friend?”
“Acquaintance, at least, and anyway old.” Pyotr leaned back on the bench, stretched his legs and groaned. “Of course, I have not yet taken to feeding pigeons. A bit cliché, don’t you think, Luis, both as a septuagenarian and a spy?”
Luis closed his bag and put it down next to him. “It isn’t enough that you dragged me back into this after twenty years of peace? I gave you what you wanted: her background, insight, as you called it. I’ll have nothing more to do with it. I’m out.”
“I admit,” Pyotr continued, ignoring what Luis had said completely, “I never understood the point of pigeons. Rats with wings, isn’t that what your people say about them? They carry disease, you know.” Pyotr reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a battered box of cigarettes reading BELOMORKANAL, a brand you couldn’t find in the local supermarkets or gas stations: nasty, unfiltered things unique to the poorer portions of Russia and Eastern Europe. “Would you like one? No, of course, you quit smoking ten years ago. Justyna demanded it.”
“I’d think the KGB would have better things to do than torment an old man just to show that you can,” Luis grumbled.
“You demonstrate your age again, my friend,” Pyotr said, striking a match off the bench and bringing it to his cigarette. “We haven’t been the KGB in twenty-five years. It’s the SVR these days.”
“Shit by any other name would reek as foul,” Luis muttered in Spanish.
Pyotr treated the end of his cigarette, lit it, puffed out a few good gasps, then answered in perfect Spanish, the accent oddly international, some curious and uncertain amalgam of the South American continent. “You are a seventy-year-old man, Luis. You quit smoking too late, you eat far, far too much red meat and you never lost your taste for whiskey. Your heart is bad and will not get better. I am at the peak of health. I run two miles each morning. For a Russian I barely drink vodka. Apart from the odd cigarette here and there, I hardly have a vice these days.”
“There are worse sins than overindulgence.”
“No doubt, but that’s hardly the point.”
“What is the point, then?”
“The point is that I will live to see your funeral, Luis. A lovely affair, I’m sure, your wife and your friends and old colleagues, your surrogate children”—and here he paused for a moment before continuing—“all of them strung out in black and trying to hold back weeping. The reading will be lovely; Justyna always had fine taste. Perhaps it will be in the spring and the leaves just budding. Perhaps it will be in the autumn as they change color and fall. I’ll stand near the back during the service, and afterward I’ll approach the coffin and offer my condolences. I’ll tell everyone I’m some sort of old work acquaintance—certainly you had enough of those, a diplomat with all of your gray shenanigans; I will not be pushed too hard. I will say good-bye to you in your grave, and then I will go to whatever reception is held afterward, telling properly expurgated stories of you, and take a shot of vodka in your honor. And on that day, Luis Jorge Cristobal Alvaro-Nuñez,” Pyotr hissed nastily through the thick fog of his cigarette, “on that day you will be free of us, released from your fetters. On that day and not on any day before.”
Luis had stopped feeding the birds, was holding the bag of popcorn numbly. The flock of pigeons, ravenous as ever, made brave by their endless hunger, had collected about his feet, brushing up against his sharp khaki pants and cooing expectantly.
“Really, Luis,” Pyotr said, by all impressions again as calm and friendly as ever, “you are too old for me to be explaining these things to you. This is the sort of foolishness that I would expect of a man half your age, of a stud just taken to bit. The things that we have done for you, the things that you have done for us?” Pyotr shook his head. “These are things which cannot be forgotten, which mark you forever. Or do you disagree?”
“No,” Luis said, seeming small and very tired. “You are right. They mark us forever.”
“Excellent. Now let us speak about Kay . . .”
47
WHY THE hell was Sadler in Brooklyn at two thirty in the morning? That’s what I’d like to know,” Kay said, angry the next morning, as she had been every day of the two weeks since Sadler had found himself dead.
Andrew was midway through the process of making Kay breakfast. On her counter, eggshells shared space with exhausted orange rinds. He was cutting up a green pepper, each movement swift and certain. Andrew was as good a cook as he seemed to be at everything else to which he set his hands. “Who knows? Maybe he was an insomniac.”
“You have trouble sleeping, you pour yourself a glass of warm milk, you make yourself a sandwich, maybe you go for a walk around the block. You don’t take the N train to Brooklyn and wander aimlessly in alleyways.”
“Maybe he had a girl he was seeing there. Or a boy. Maybe he had a sweet tooth for nose candy, was looking to cop his fix.” He turned and offered her a lick from the spoon he had been using to spread Nutella. He was wearing a pair of boxer shorts with a hockey logo on them and a pair of her old slippers.
“I’ve gone through Joseph Sadler’s life with a fine-toothed comb. I know him better than his wife, better than his mother, better than his confessor. The only woman he was seeing was the Lithuanian at the Sheraton—who, curiously enough, has also dropped clean off the face of the map. He didn’t do drugs, he didn’t go for midnight rambles. He was in Brooklyn for the simple reason that someone called him there, and I’d trade three fingers off my right hand to find out who.”
“I like your hands,” Andrew said, taking one and kissing it absently. “Please don’t do that.”
“I’m serious, Andrew,” Kay said, pulling free of him. “I don’t care what the suits say, I don’t care if the CIA has decided this entire thing has been wrapped up for them with a pretty red bow. There’s something here we’re not seeing, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.”
Andrew pulled the chair out and sat down beside her. He stroked her arm for a while, like one might a lapdog. “Look, Kay,” he said, his voice dripping with concern. “I’ve been there. You’ve been chasing after this bastard almost a year. You’ve eaten with him, you’ve slept with him. Now he goes and slips the noose. I get it, I get it. But things happen. You can’t let it grind its way into your
soul, and you can’t go mad seeing a conspiracy in every shadow.”
“Our prime suspect in the Black Bear investigation killed in a mugging gone wrong weeks, days, before we were ready to move on him? This doesn’t seem suspicious to you?”
Andrew shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe the SVR figured we were onto him, decided on snipping a loose thread rather than give us the opportunity to interrogate him. Sucks for us, but unless you’re planning on consulting a medium—and I’ll have to check, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a line in the budget for that—then we’re out of luck.”
“But why would they move on him now?” Kay asked, half to herself. “How could they have known that we were on his tail?”
“What are you suggesting?” Andrew asked, raising his voice a bit.
Kay shrugged and looked away. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re right. I’m just being paranoid. I can’t let go of the case.”
Andrew nodded, content. “It’s part of what makes you such a special Agent, Kay,” Andrew said. “It’s part of what makes you special, period.”
It was early June; in a few weeks the city would turn muggy and miserable, and everyone who could get to the Hamptons or out into the country would do so, and everyone who couldn’t would clog the parks and public pools. But for the moment the weather was pleasant, warm but not hot, the morning promising a long afternoon of lazy sunshine.
