Sweat glistened on his cheeks. His lips and eyes were wet, too. “Wh-why are you here?”
“I’m here,” I said, “because you are doing something very sneaky and very dangerous, but you’re not as slick about it as you seem to think.”
“I’m not—” Rolgavitch began, but I cut him off by raising the barrel to point at his nose. Impossible target to miss.
“Do not under any circumstances waste my time by saying that you aren’t a bad guy. I know you are. This is not up for discussion.”
Rolgavitch said nothing. He couldn’t know what or how much I knew, or that I was largely bluffing. I mean, sure, Nikki had found the earthquake references and that Yuri was a pen pal of Valen Oruraka, but that’s all we really had. No actual details. Quite frankly I didn’t know how deep he was into Valen’s activities.
“What do you think I know?” he asked with a confused smile, trying to sound innocent and even contriving to come off as aggrieved. Nice try, but I wiped that smile off his face with what I said next.
“Tell me about Valen Oruraka.”
I watched his eyes when I dropped that name. They widened until I could see whites all around the irises. His mouth sagged open, too. Yeah, he knew.
“Or should we call him Oleg Sokolov?” I asked.
In a hollow voice filled with equal parts shock and dread, Rolgavitch gasped, “How do you know this name…?”
“How about we accept that I do know it and go from there?” I said. “What’s really on the front burner here is what you can tell me about him.”
“No! No, I can’t,” he protested. “They will kill me.”
I gave him a wide, white, toothy smile. The kind of smile I never show to people who I care even a little bit about. The kind of smile I’d never show to my lover, Junie Flynn. I’ve been told that it is not a very sane smile. Fair enough.
“They’re not here right now, Yuri,” I said quietly. “I am.”
Ghost gave a soft whuff.
When he sat there and stubbornly shook his head, I reached over to the row of framed photos on his desk and turned them around, one by one. Wife. Teenage son. Preteen daughter. Baby. I angled the pictures so that their faces were looking at him. I sat down on the edge of the desk and laid the pistol on my thighs.
“Go on,” I said quietly, “tell me how badly you want me to have to insist?”
CHAPTER NINETY-TWO
BALTIMORE MARRIOTT INNER HARBOR AT CAMDEN YARDS
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Lilith sat at the small desk in a far corner of the hotel. Her travel bag lay open but unpacked on the bed and she was methodically strip-cleaning the two unregistered handguns left for her by the local Arklight team.
Her laptop, a small Oracle remote unit in a hardened case, stood ready on the desk. The beatific face of Mona Lisa smiled benignly at her for hours. Then, suddenly, a voice spoke.
“You have a call from your sister Qadira,” said the voice of Oracle.
Lilith set down the bottle of gun oil and tapped a key. The wizened face of the field team leader filled the screen.
“Tell me you found something,” said Lilith.
“Ohan was working for a group of Russians. He said they claimed to be a private organization, but when I, um, pressed him, Ohan said that he believed that some or all of them may have ties to the Kremlin.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“He only knew one of them. A woman who calls herself Gadyuka.”
“Ah,” said Lilith. “So, she’s real, then?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say about her?”
“More than he wanted to. He was very afraid of her.”
Lilith nodded. “Which makes sense if Gadyuka’s reputation is to be believed. The viper is supposed to be very dangerous. Highly skilled. An assassin who is making the move into management. Does he know her real name?”
“He did,” said Qadira, emphasizing the past tense. “Ohan trusted no one and put his own spies on her. They’ve been keeping her under surveillance for him. Ohan even allowed Gadyuka to capture and kill two of them to make her think she had cleaned up the surveillance. The two sacrificial lambs were fed information that implicated a different person, so she never suspected who was tracking her. But Ohan’s network is huge and subtle and very practiced. In the end, though, he gave me everything.”
“Then give it to me.”
“I’m transferring it all to you through Oracle,” said Qadira, then added, “Lilith, this Gadyuka is in the United States. In Washington, D.C.”
Lilith hissed. It sounded like she was in pain, but it was something else entirely.
CHAPTER NINETY-THREE
ROLGAVITCH TECHNOLOGIES
KOTELNICHESKAYA EMBANKMENT
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
We had a very nice talk, Yuri Rolgavitch and me.
He kept looking at the pictures of his family. He ugly cried. I handed him the box of tissues from his desk. He sat on the leather visitor chair and I sat on the edge of his desk, swinging a foot. Chatting. Ghost came over and began sniffing at Yuri’s naughty bits. The dog has a theatrical flair at times.
Rolgavitch gave me what he had. Every other sentence out of his mouth, though, was him begging me not to hurt his family. He peed his pants. Tears and snot ran down his face. He told me absolutely everything he knew.
The bad news was that he didn’t actually know what Valen was up to. They were friends from high school and he swore he’d tried to talk Valen out of changing his name. The story his friend gave him was that he was reinventing himself because there was a lingering stink on the family. His uncle, Dr. Abram Golovin, had been the structural engineer at Chernobyl and was blamed for that catastrophe. It was a good story, because I’d encountered enough former Soviets who had also re-created their lives and identities as a way of distancing themselves from things they may have done for the Party. Rolgavitch sold it hard, too. He said he kept in touch because Valen was a friend.
I sat for a while just smiling at him. Letting him wonder how much of it I believed.
“Why did Valen study seismology?” I asked.
“Because he did not believe Dr. Golovin was really at fault. It always hurt Valen that everyone blamed his uncle. Valen went to great lengths to obtain his uncle’s design plans and bulk research. He even got materials that had been classified above top secret during the old Soviet Union days. Valen studied seismology but also geophysics and structural engineering. He reconstructed the landscape and geology of the area around Chernobyl to an incredible degree. Three-D models, spreadsheets, deep data analysis. He wanted to prove that the accident was because of a fluke earthquake or something else that a standard geological survey would not have predicted. He learned everything he could about random earthquakes and plate tectonics. He surpassed many of his teachers. Valen is a genius.”
“Uh-huh. So, tell me, what has your genius friend been doing with all that knowledge about earthquakes?”
“I … well, I really don’t know. We haven’t spoken in quite some time.”
“Uh-huh.”
The last e-mail between him and Valen that Nikki found was six years old, but I didn’t for a minute believe they were no longer connected.
“You know something about it, though,” I prompted.
“I really don’t know,” he insisted, fresh sweat rolling down his flushed cheeks. “I asked once but he told me that I wasn’t allowed to know. People have been killed for asking about these things.”
“That’s not my problem,” I said. “Maybe you saw the news yesterday about what happened in the United States. Yeah, I can see you have, so tell me something that will keep me from doing very bad things. What’s Valen up to?”
“I don’t know,” he said quickly. “I’m not on that level, and was warned never to ask more than I was told.”
“Warned by who?”
He hesitated. I made a subtle finger movement that was a cue for Ghost to growl and show his teeth. Yes, I traine
d Ghost to do that. What can I say?
Rolgavitch flinched. “A woman. I don’t know her real name. No one associated with this uses real names. She is called Gadyuka.”
I wanted to close my eyes and say Ahhhhhh, but did not. I am, after all, a professional.
“Tell me about her,” I said, giving him more of that smile.
None of Yuri’s communication with Gadyuka was ever done via the Net or over a phone. That’s what we thought. In a high-tech world, some security protocols are going very low-tech. There was no footprint at all, no trail to follow. These people were, after all, world-class cyber warriors who were fully cognizant of all ways the CIA, the NSA, and shady organizations like the Department of Military Sciences could follow even small threads and counterattack. It was a sensible blend of caution, paranoia, and plausible deniability that left us nothing actionable, nothing we could bring to the U.N. or a world court.
Rolgavitch’s involvement was clearly on a pretty low level, and it corresponded with what Nikki had learned. His company handled the logistics of shipping items manufactured at a number of companies. Most of the materials he shipped for Gadyuka came from a company called Pushkin Dynamics. Rolgavitch said that he had never visited that factory, and knew the contents only through the manifests which he was provided. He was notified when a “special order” was ready. He never called Gadyuka and had no numbers with which to do so, anyway. When she needed to talk to him she showed up. Never at the office. She might suddenly be standing next to him on a train platform or walk up to him on the street. She always looked different, too. Sometimes very tall, other times average height. Heavy or thin. Well dressed or shabby, looking fifty or forty or thirty. A real chameleon. Even the timbre of her voice changed, as well as her accent. Bottom line, Rolgavitch couldn’t tell me anything about her except her gender and code name.
So, I asked the obvious question. “How can you be sure it wasn’t a bunch of different women using the same code name?”
He looked at me and shivered. “No,” he said quickly. “If you ever saw her, you’d know it was her. She’s … she’s…”
“Pick an adjective,” I suggested.
“She’s not human. She’s a snake. Like her name. No matter how she’s described, the feeling is the same.” He shivered again.
“What kind of orders does Gadyuka give you?”
He gave his lips a nervous lick. “Mostly she contacts me about when and where to ship materials … and before you ask again, no, I really don’t know what kind of materials. Everything is boxed and sealed with the kind of tape that changes color if it’s been tampered with. I make arrangements and that’s all. I’m not important enough to know more. I’m a middleman.”
I slid off the desk, nudged Ghost out of the way, and squatted down in front of Rolgavitch. I smiled my best blue-eyed smile. “Here’s the problem, tovarisch. I’m running out of time and I don’t think you’re telling me everything you know.”
“I have answered all of your questions,” he said. “Please, please, don’t hurt my wife, my kids.…”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, “but you see, our problem is that maybe I don’t know the right questions to unlock you. I’m admitting that. I’m up front about that. But it kind of pisses me off. It’s frustrating and it makes me feel bad. Cranky. That’s an English word. Cranky. It means that I’m getting out of sorts and I’m about to go all peevish and petulant.”
He said nothing.
“My instincts tell me two things, Yuri,” I told him. “Want to know what they are? The first is that you probably know something really useful that would put a happy smile back on my face. No need to say anything, because we both know it’s true. And the second thing my gut tells me is that if I put a bullet through one of your kneecaps, you’ll tell me. It’s what we call a ‘come to Jesus moment.’ If I put bullets through both of your kneecaps you’ll beg to tell me. But then there will be all that blood, all that screaming, and it would spoil this happy moment we’re currently having, am I right?”
He stared at me like I was a complete monster.
Still holding the gas dart gun in my right hand, I used my left to remove his own automatic from my belt. I placed the barrel against the front of his right knee.
“This will really hurt, Yuri. I can assure you that even with a total knee replacement you’ll never walk right again. From this angle, the bullet will take off a chunk of the femur and maybe furrow all the way up and clip your femoral artery. Depending on the load in the bullet, it might even punch a big red hole through one of your nuts. Bet that would hurt.”
He was crying now. And his nose was running. His whole face looked like it was going to disintegrate. I pressed the barrel harder against his knee.
“Now … tell me something that will put a smile back on both our faces.”
He sobbed. A bigger, heavier, deeper sob than before. It shook his body. I did not blink or change my expression. If he saw madness and horror in my eyes, then he was seeing into a part of me where the Killer lived. Of the three people in my head, the Modern Man was a civilized and compassionate person; the Cop was the rational and pragmatic aspect that usually drove the bus. The Killer was neither civilized nor compassionate. He was in that dark evolutionary space between lizard brain and monkey mind. He was ugly and vicious, utterly pragmatic, and uncompromising. I seldom let him out to play, because when I did, very, very bad things happened. Each time I let him out he was more reluctant to go back to his cave. I could feel him behind my eyes and, worse, behind my smile. That is not a smile I would ever show to my Junie, or even to my best friend, Rudy. It is not a smile I ever show to anyone whose life I care about.
Yuri Rolgavitch saw the Killer, and when his eyes cut toward Ghost he saw something behind my dog’s eyes as well. He saw the wolf. A primitive version, maybe a dire wolf; old and patient and merciless.
I said, “Tell me about the things you ship. From where, to where? All of it.”
He started talking Pushkin Dynamics. That was where the shipments came from. He said he’d once heard one of the technicians there use the phrase “deep silence.” It wasn’t said to him, but was part of a whispered conversation he overheard. It made him believe that whatever was being manufactured and shipped from that place was connected to that project.
Rolgavitch sold all of this to me hard. He kept looking into my eyes, kept catching glimpses of the Killer. That was good. It kept him honest. It loosened his tongue.
But … he just did not know enough. Finally, he sagged back, shaking his head, begging me to believe that it was all he could tell me.
“What do you know about what Valen did in the United States?” I asked, purposefully not mentioning D.C. Rolgavitch frowned and looked genuinely confused. “I did not know he was in America. The last time I heard from him he was in Greece.” He paused, reading my face. “You must believe me. This is all I know.”
I studied him, read his eyes, and saw the truth.
“I believe you,” I said.
And shot him.
CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Church visited Sam Imura and lingered for a while, carefully reading the postsurgical reports that had been prepared for him. The doctors were not optimistic, but that was to be expected.
Church placed his hand flat over Sam’s heart and felt the beat. He closed his eyes and was like that for a long time. Brick stood outside and made sure no one came in.
“Peace, little brother,” said Church as he withdrew his hand.
He turned and left the room. He and Brick walked four rooms down, to where Aunt Sallie lay.
“Give me a moment,” he said. Brick touched Church’s arm and they shared a long look. One of the silent conversations they had come to have over the last few years. Church smiled and nodded, and Brick stepped back and took up a station outside the room.
Once inside, Church stood for a long time saying nothing, becaus
e the woman in the bed could not hear him. She was deep down in a dark place.
Instead, because he was alone and because he cared, Church bent and kissed her very gently on the forehead.
“If you have to go,” he murmured, “then go. My love and blessings go with you.”
There was no answer but the steady beep of her heart monitor.
“If you choose to stay, then you will always have a place with me. You are my sister and my family, Alexandria Sally Peters. Knowing you has made me a better man.”
He kissed her again and straightened.
Brick entered the room and offered Church a paper napkin. Church nodded and dried his eyes. They both cast a last look at Aunt Sallie, then they left, heading for the elevator and the waiting car, and the jet that was already fueled. Neither spoke. They understood each other so very well.
The war was waiting.
CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE
ROLGAVITCH TECHNOLOGIES
KOTELNICHESKAYA EMBANKMENT
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
I shot Rolgavitch with the gas dart.
I mean, c’mon … I’m not actually a monster. Mind you, if I thought for a second that he was complicit in the attack on Washington, it wouldn’t have been a gas dart. Might not even have been a bullet. The Killer in my head had very specific ways of dealing with his enemies.
He went instantly limp and slid out of the chair onto the floor. The chemical cocktail in the darts works that fast. When he woke up he wouldn’t remember much, and would probably pee in his pants, but he’d be alive. The horsey would break down in his bloodstream, too, so there would be nothing for anyone to find except a poor schlep who got blindsided and robbed. I’d even given him a very precise and careful rap on the back of his head so he’d have physical proof to sell the whole robbery thing.
Oh, and for the record, I had no intention of laying a finger on anyone in his family. Sure, I’d mind-fuck him all day, but I’m not evil.
I tapped my earbud and Bug was right there. “You get all that?”
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