“I’ll start with coffee,” Lea said.
Ilari raised a brow when he saw it was Mischa at the door. “Come to bitch at me about ruining your fun with the woman, Mischa?” He turned back into the room, leaving the door open.
Mischa shut it. “I had a question I didn’t want to ask on the phone.”
Ilari settled in his chair. “Sit down. Play a game, while you’re here.” The Go board was still out, even though Mischa hadn’t been expected.
“Was Aslan a good player?” Mischa asked.
“Aslan?” Ilari laughed. “What a question!”
“Was he?”
Ilari’s smile faded. “I wouldn’t know. I never met him.”
“You do know who he is. You knew, the first time I ever mentioned his name. You hid it. Just now, though, you called Fabian the woman. You have all along, like it’s too much trouble to remember her name. Aslan’s name, you remember and use. You knew him.”
Ilari picked up the cigarette which burned in the ashtray.
With a hiss, Mischa moved over to the window and cranked it wide open, even though the temperature had been dropping all afternoon. “What do you know about him, Ilari?”
“That’s what you crossed town to ask me?” Ilari laughed, then coughed, as the smoke back washed. The coughing turned into a long, painful hacking which shook Ilari.
Just as he got himself under control, the black, old-fashioned rotary telephone sitting on the bookshelves rang with a jarring loudness which was startling in its unexpectedness. In all the years Mischa had been visiting Ilari, he had never heard it ring. Not once.
Perhaps that was what triggered him. He wasn’t certain. All he knew was that something goosed him into yanking the Glock out and aiming it at the center of Ilari’s wrinkled forehead.
Ilari didn’t jump or show surprise.
“How did you know I’d come across town?” Mischa demanded.
The phone kept ringing, the bell jangling against the shelf.
“Want to let me get that?” Ilari asked. “If I don’t, they might wonder why.”
Mischa weighed his options. “Answer it,” he said. “And let me hear the other side.”
Ilari rolled his eyes. “My, so suspicious.” He hauled himself out of the chair and moved over to the shelf and picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. “Yes?”
“Pasternak,” Mischa’s director said shortly. “We got the gimp just in time. That Muslim bitch has shown up.”
Mischa pressed the Glock against Ilari’s temple, his hand trembling.
Ilari’s gaze slid toward Mischa. “What Muslim?” he asked Karl.
Mischa pressed harder and glared at Ilari.
Karl was saying something, only Ilari overrode him. “What did you do with the woman?”
Karl hesitated. “Like you said. Semi to Odesa, onto the container ship and gone. No longer our problem and none of our doing, either.”
For the first time, Ilari showed any sign of fear. His gaze swung back to Mischa. He swallowed.
Mischa breathed hard, overriding the impulse to pull the trigger. He said softly, by Ilari’s wizened ear, “Get rid of him.”
Ilari licked his lips. He said into the phone, “Someone’s at the door. I’ll call you back.” He hung up and whirled to face Mischa. “We had to get her out of the way!”
Mischa shoved Ilari with both hands. The old man stumbled backward, his arms out-flung to save himself. He rammed up against the bookshelves and moaned, gripping them to hold himself up. His shirt, beneath the old man’s cardigan, was torn, the top buttons hanging loose.
Mischa lined the Glock up with the bridge of his nose once more. The trembling had gone. He put his finger on the trigger.
Ilari flinched and raised his hand in surrender. The other was needed to prop himself up. “Before you pull the trigger…!”
Mischa lowered the gun, staring at Ilari’s shoulder. The raised arm had dropped the open shirt down, to reveal the other bony shoulder. A tattoo showed upon the shoulder, faded and indistinct because the skin had stretched over the years.
Mischa moved closer, staring at it. It was a simple line drawing, which made it easier to make out what it was. A cobra, its tail coiled beneath it, the head hooded and ready to strike.
“The Kobra,” Mischa breathed. He stepped backward and raised the gun. “You’re the Kobra?”
Ilari raised his hand once more. “You think I would be stuck here at the ends of the earth if I was? Think, Mischa!”
It was something Ilari had urged him to do many times over the years, usually when they were playing Go.
Mischa gripped the gun, feeling the dampness of his palm. His heart was running way too hard. Think, he commanded himself.
Ilari’s gaze shifted. It was a tiny, momentary flicker to something behind him.
Alarmed, Mischa whirled.
There was nothing there.
He whirled back, knowing it was a feint.
Ilari stood propping himself upon the shelf. He hadn’t moved.
This time, Mischa stepped sideways, so he could take in the section of the room which had been behind him and keep Ilari in his sights, too.
Something on the shelves….
Ilari had glanced to the shelves once before, when speaking about the past. About lost love…
The photos.
Mischa’s heart lurched. “Which one is he?” he demanded.
“You don’t understand at all, do you?” Ilari said sadly.
“I understand you and the Kobra were lovers,” Mischa said. He motioned with the gun. “Over to those shelves.”
Ilari shuffled over to them and put his back to them. “Before you kill me…”
Mischa scowled. “Point to him. Which one is Krupin?”
Ilari looked genuinely shocked. “You know his name?”
Mischa shook. It came up from his toes. A wave the size of the world was about to break over him and he had his back to it. “Krupin is the Kobra. I know everything, Ilari, except why.” It was a bluff. He was groping, sorting out and slotting together train tracks right in front of a steaming express.
“Why?” Ilari repeated, sounding bemused. “Why? Why what?”
“Why have you been protecting the Kobra all this time? I told you about Aslan, which panicked you and you moved to get Fabian off the board so I wouldn’t start asking more questions. The wrong questions. The Kobra—Krupin—he was in a relationship with Aslan.”
“He loved him!” Ilari cried and smacked his hand against the shelf. “He fucking loved the boy!” He turned his back to Mischa and stood trembling, one hand on the shelves.
The edge of his hand rested against a silver frame.
Mischa stared at the photo in the frame. There were five men in the old, black and white photo. None of them were known to him.
“I warned you about how love destroys men like us,” Ilari said. His voice was muffled. Mischa suspected he was crying. “Even when Krupin and I…when we were together, he still loved someone else. It didn’t matter to me. Because I was the fool. He understood what love did and let it go, while I couldn’t. So Borya left me.”
“He went back to Moscow,” Mischa breathed. “To reap the rewards.”
Ilari wiped at his face and turned to face Mischa. His eyes glistened, although his mouth was held in a cynical, straight line. “Why wouldn’t he? He was a genius. A master strategist. He knew exactly how to tie me to him and to mother Russia. He knew how to buy your undying loyalty, too.”
Mischa felt the jolt down to his toes. “What? I’ve never met Krupin.”
“Yet he’s been pulling your strings for years,” Ilari said. “I was director of operations before Karl, remember.”
“You reported to…to Andreyavich, the Mongol,” Mischa said. He was trembling again.
“Officially, yes. I told you the Kobra bought loyalty. I reported everything to him, too. Indirectly, of course. I even told him about the recruit from St. Petersburg, the hero of the GRU, who would
be a valuable tool one day.”
Mischa raised the gun once more. It had wavered away from Ilari. “He knows about me?”
“He knows you very well. He judged exactly how to tie you to Russia in a way which would guarantee your endless loyalty.”
Mischa’s breath came hard once more. He could see the awful, terrifying shape of it. There had been a single event which had ensured he would serve Russia forever. “Yana. The children. The plane…” He swallowed. “It was a US training missile, gone astray…”
“Ah, then you did find the reports,” Ilari said, delighted. “We were never entirely sure if you tripped over them. We couldn’t just thrust them at you—you were too smart to swallow that. We had to trust you would sniff your way to them. Krupin was certain you would.”
Mischa realized the gun had dropped again. He raised it, his hand shaking violently. “He arranged it?”
“I had to stay out of it,” Ilari said. “The Kobra has very long fangs, though.”
Horror built in Mischa, a long keening in the back of his mind. “There were over a hundred people on that plane.” His voice shook.
Ilari shrugged. “Collateral damage. Well worth it, too.”
“Why are you telling me this? Why now?”
Ilari’s rheumy eyes glittered with malicious knowledge. “Because I’m a strategist, too,” he said. “I just loaded you and pointed you at Krupin. You will do what I cannot. You will kill the Kobra.”
“You love him…”
“And I hate him, too. He left me here to shrivel and die alone.”
Mischa shook his head. “I’m not your errand boy.”
“You’ll do it anyway, because now your heart is in it. Just as mine is. Unlike me, though, you won’t hesitate to fire when you must.”
Mischa had two pounds of pull on the trigger. He was within a split second of firing. He shook with the desire to take the shot, knowing Ilari was right, that he had been played. Over and over.
Don’t do the obvious. The voice whispered cold and calm.
Mischa took his finger off the trigger. He brought the side of the gun down against Ilari’s temple, dropping the man at his feet.
Ilari moaned, blood dripping from his teeth. He’d bitten his tongue.
Mischa threw his head back and screamed.
Then he shoved the Glock back under his coat, yanked the silver photo frame and smashed it against the side of the shelf. He tore the photo from the frame and shoved it into his coat pocket.
Then he got the hell out of the smoke-riddled apartment, before he completely lost what little control he had left.
[11]
Darnytskyi District, Left Bank, Kiev.
The reaction set in just as he reached the car. Mischa slid into the driver’s seat and barely managed to shut the door. It latched enough to not draw attention, which would have to do.
He hunched in the seat, shivering and gasping for breath. Slowly, he sunk into the blackness, his body imitating his mind, until his head rested against the steering wheel and his shuddering rocked the car.
It kept coming back to him. The utter ruthlessness of the Kobra, manipulating everyone around him. For years. Even the poor sod, Aslan, who had died somewhere in Austria, had spent a life dancing to the Kobra’s expectations.
Ilari, too.
And he, Mischa, had been made to dance.
He closed his eyes and wrapped his arms around his belly, wondering if he would vomit.
Was Karl Pasternak also prancing to the Kobra’s tune? Was what he had done to Fabian really the Kobra reaching out to shove Fabian around the board?
Slowly, the shuddering subsided. Mischa’s breath calmed.
He sat up and wiped his damp face. He started the car and drove. He had no destination in mind. There were eyes on him, and aimless circles would lose anyone who tried to follow. He picked random streets, areas even he did not know well. He got lost, backed up, wound in circles.
And while he ambled, he thought.
Ilari had been wrong. He and Mischa weren’t evenly matched at Go at all. Mischa had let the old man win as often as he did just to humor the bastard.
Well, no more. This time he was playing for keeps.
It wasn’t unusual for Mischa to turn up at the Embassy building at any hour of the day or night. Even the night guards let him through with barely a wave of acknowledgement.
He did what he had always done. He drove around to the staff carpark at the back of the building, used the same space he had used for years. He got out, locked the car as usual. There were two cameras on the carpark, one of them hidden. He had located both of them years ago. He made no attempt to avoid their solid gazes, though.
He used his key card to open the back door, then climbed the stairs to the third floor and moved down the corridor to the office he rarely used. There were no cameras on the third floor, for that was Pasternak’s division—the division which didn’t appear on any of the Embassy staff structures and directories.
As he passed Pasternak’s office, he put his ear to the door. A low light showed at the bottom of the door. Sixty seconds passed with no sound made.
Mischa used his key card to rifle the lock and let himself in. He locked the door behind him.
The low light came from the flat screen monitor, which Pasternak had failed to switch off. It flipped through sunny images of Russia—onion-domed buildings, snow covered steppes, miles of wooded countryside…
Mischa tapped on the keyboard, and the login screen appeared.
Pasternak was a manager who led with an iron fist instead of by good example. Mischa had learned the man’s personal login years ago. Even though they were forced to rotate their passwords every month, Karl was lazy and used a simple rotating code so he wouldn’t have to remember a new one each time.
Mischa tapped out the code for this month and hit enter.
The CPU under the desk hummed and the home menu appeared.
Mischa pulled his car keys out of his pocket and slipped the end off the fake key to reveal the USB connector. He pushed it into the port and got to work.
Twenty minutes later, he had filled the 64 gigabyte thumb drive. He didn’t stop to analyze what he was copying. He searched and dumped the search results to the drive, over and over. He didn’t bother trying to hide his tracks. There was no point. If they figured out the files had been copied at all, they would know who had done it.
Then he shut everything down again, returned the chair to the abandoned position it had been sitting in and re-locked the office.
He went back to his car, drove sedately to the gate. He waved at the guards as he left.
Around the corner, beyond the view of the CCTVs under embassy control, he floored the accelerator.
Every chair in the front room of the suite was being used. Ren sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against Dima’s armchair.
Everyone had a laptop open on their knees. It was a makeshift operations center.
“Boss,” Scott said.
“Found him,” Lochan said at the same time.
“Me, too,” Scott said.
“Scott, go,” Dima told him.
“Mikhail Sokolov. Forty-two. White Russian. Been working as an attaché with the Russian Embassy here in Kiev for seventeen years.”
“That and him standing close to Fabian makes it a sure bet he’s Russian intelligence,” Leander added thoughtfully.
Dima thought it through. “Does she have any idea what she’s dropped into?” she murmured. “The poor woman just wanted answers…”
“Boss?” Lochan said.
Dima winced. Everyone was picking up on Scott’s nickname, now. “Focus on Sokolov. Bio, personal history, whatever you can dig up. There’ll be places, patterns we can use. Go.”
[12]
Somewhere. Moving.
Fabian vomited a third time as the container swayed and rattled. As there was nothing in the dark container but two dozen terrified women—some of them barely into womanhood—
all Fabian could do was bend over in the farthest corner.
It had the side benefit of clearing out that corner of the container, pressing everyone deeper into the other three, which took the pressure off Fabian’s leg.
Fabian had woken to find herself lying on the floor of the container, surrounded by the other women. No one spoke English. Some of the girls wore head cloths. Fabian had vomited for the first time shortly after that.
She leaned tiredly over the mess she had made and wiped her eyes. The back of her throat burned and her neck ached where they had pumped the whatever into her. She wished the container would stop swaying the way it was. The truck it was on bumped over potholes and other things, too, which didn’t help calm her stomach.
When the truck came to a halt, though, Fabian wished it was moving once more. The other women jabbered and clung to each other, watching the end of the container fearfully.
She heard voices on the other side of the metal walls. Low commands and quick exchanges.
Something heavy landed against the roof, with a deep metallic clang. More shouting. Commands. Scraping over the roof. The rattle of heavy chains. The women flinched with each bang and scrape against the walls and roof. Some of them cried softly.
The container jerked and swung like a pendulum.
Fabian clutched at the wall with one hand and at her stomach with the other. She swallowed hard.
The container was being lifted. It wasn’t difficult to guess a crane was shifting it from a truck to a ship, most likely.
The container shifted under her feet, making her feel slightly weightless, like an elevator going down, which fitted with her guess.
Then a deep metallic ringing sounded as it landed upon another metal surface.
A ship’s deck or another container.
Only, they couldn’t simply stack this container in among others. No one would survive the journey to wherever the hell they were going. They needed water at the very least. Buckets for waste. Or they would all be deathly ill by the time they arrived, and most of them dead.
Heart Strike (Project Kobra Book 3) Page 10
