The Kobalt Dossier

by Eric Van Lustbader

  Tennyson stowed away the driver’s license, along with the cigarettes, the baggie, and the now disabled transmitter.

  His head swung slowly from side to side. “You fuckers.”

  Evan lifted a forkful of spaghetti. “You’re welcome.”

  He looked at her for some time, rapped his knuckles twice on the table before setting his card down in front of her.

  “The full resources of the FBI are bent on finding your niece and nephew. I will find them. That’s a promise.”

  She nodded.

  That was as close as he could come to recognizing her as a professional.

  20

  NIGHT FLIGHT

  “You don’t really believe Wendy and Michael are still in the States.”

  “I don’t,” Evan said. “But it doesn’t hurt to have Tennyson believe that they are, because if I’m wrong …” She let the sentence sink of its own weight.

  They were seated in the first-class section of the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. From there it would be a short hop to Cologne. Ben had paid for the tickets. When she had said, only half-jokingly, that if they went on like this he’d blow through his severance in no time, he had just shrugged and told her not to worry about it.

  They had boarded the plane last, as they always did. Strict protocol, checking out all the passengers before they stepped aboard. She heard him on the phone with Zoe while they waited, even though he’d stepped away. She turned her back to him to give him privacy, looked out over the tarmac, watched a plane, lights blinking, come in for a landing.

  Then she heard Ben’s voice behind her. “Someone wants to speak with you.” He was holding out his cell. He was smiling. She took the phone.

  “Hey, Poppet.”

  “Hi, Deckard.”

  Pirates of the Caribbean and Blade Runner. Their two favorite films, which they watched whenever they were together. They used to argue about whether Rick Deckard was a Replicant, even placed a bet on it, until they saw Blade Runner 2049, which settled the issue. Evan still owed Zoe a dinner out, having lost the bet.

  “Everything going okay?” Evan said.

  “Everything is everything,” Zoe said. Translation: I’m fine. “I miss you guys.”

  She turned to glance at Ben. “We miss you too, Poppet.”

  “Evan …”

  She gripped Ben’s mobile more tightly. Something serious was coming. “What is it, honey?”

  “I just heard about Wendy and Michael being missing. I’m guessing that—”

  “No guessing,” Evan said. “Promise fiddle.” Translation: pinky swear. “Okay?”

  “Sure. I get it.”

  “There’s the girl.”

  “Will I see you soon?”

  “Soon as we get home.”

  Zoe was smart enough and used to their comings and goings not to ask when.

  Ben was tapping his watch.

  “Gotta scoot.”

  “Deckard, take care of him.”

  “Always, Poppet. Always.”

  *

  “You’re not wrong,” Ben said, continuing their conversation as they finished their dinner. “There was no ransom contact made.”

  “Nor will there be,” Evan affirmed. “What Tennyson doesn’t get is that this abduction is beyond the scope of normal guidelines. It doesn’t fit into the picture he’s already assembling. There was no point in telling him because he wouldn’t understand.”

  She paused as the flight attendant took their dinner trays and told them the dessert cart was on its way.

  “So what do you think the abduction is all about?”

  “What gives me pause is Paul’s murder. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment idea to get him out of the way. It was as carefully planned and orchestrated as the abduction.”

  “By Omega.” Ben turned to her. “So much for my theory about Wells orchestrating the abduction.”

  Evan closed her eyes for a moment, aware that her heart rate had become elevated. She struggled to keep the terror of Wendy and Michael’s unknown fate in a far corner of her mind. In the face of the unknown she tended to imagine the worst. If she allowed that to flood her, the powers of reasoning and planning she relied on would be muddied, beyond useless. She did not open her eyes until she had regained full control of her emotions.

  “That never made sense to me,” she said. “Paul was doing a lot of Wells’s dirty work through Wells’s Super PAC. He certainly wouldn’t want him murdered. So we might rule out Wells being part of Omega.”

  He frowned. “You don’t look certain.”

  “I wish I was.”

  Ben put his head back against the seat rest. “I so would like to sleep.” He closed his eyes.

  Evan rose, went forward to the toilet, locked herself in. She stood in front of the mirror. Her attention was drawn to the single orchid stuck in a slender glass vase attached to the wall.

  “You poor thing,” she whispered, “stuck in here with no sunlight or any way to escape.”

  Sudden tears overran her eyes, slid down her cheeks, leaving tracks shining in the artificial light.

  Oh, Wendy, oh, Michael, she thought. Where are you? She watched her reflection weeping and wondered who that was. I will find you. Wherever they have taken you, wherever you are, I will find you.

  Ben hadn’t turned his seat into a bed, nor were his eyes closed. The privacy screen was still down between their shells. He glanced at her as she slid back into her seat, saw the red rims around her eyes.

  He looked straight ahead at his screen, where Wendezeit—1989, A Spy Story was silently running, but he didn’t seem to be paying attention.

  Evan wiped at her face, more a gesture of anger than pulling herself together. “I’m sorry I lost it with Pine.”

  “He wasn’t going to give us squat,” Ben said gently. “I think we both suspected that from the get-go.”

  “Still.” She took a breath. “We could have tried.”

  “What’s the point, Evan?” He turned to her. “Unless you’re getting a masochistic kick blaming yourself.”

  She looked him in the eye. “I am blaming myself, but not so much for that.”

  He waited, patient now. The dessert cart arrived, and she asked, “Any Butter Brickle ice cream?”

  And Ben understood now. Still, he would wait for her to tell him in her own time, in her own way.

  “I’m afraid not,” the flight attendant said. “But we do have butter pecan.”

  “Yes,” Evan said, brightening somewhat. “Hot fudge sundae with two scoops, and extra fudge.”

  “Make that two,” Ben said.

  “I didn’t know you were a butter pecan fan,” Evan said.

  “I’d prefer Butter Brickle,” he replied. “But this will do.”

  She gave him a questioning look, then a brief nod of acknowledgment.

  When dessert had arrived and they were alone again, she dropped two pain pills into her mouth, took a couple bites of her sundae before she put her spoon down. “So I’ve been thinking … I’ve spent a lot of whatever downtime I’ve had with Zoe.”

  “Don’t think she’s not grateful. She thinks of you as her aunt. What you’ve done for her is just what a girl who’s lost her mother needs.”

  “It’s what Wendy and Michael need, too. I’ve spent as much time with them as my job allows, but I’m away so much …” She shook her head. “And now that they’re gone I’m racked with guilt.”

  “Evan, you spent a great deal of time with them,” Ben said. “How often did you bring Zoe over to play with them?”

  “But still I feel like something was missing.”

  “Ideas?”

  She stared down at the small crater she’d made in the rapidly melting sundae. “What I suspect … because … because of my … complicated relationship with Bobbi, I didn’t get as close to them as I could or should have.”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it. First, there was their father, who didn’t like you, to put it mildly. Second, all you need to do is
recall how their faces lit up every time they saw you.”

  She bit her lip. “Maybe I was being selfish.” Perhaps she wasn’t listening.

  He reached out, placed a hand over hers. “Evan, you’re the least selfish person I know. You had only so much off time—the nature of your work wouldn’t allow a moment more. You gave your love to Zoe and to Michael and to Wendy, I’m sure in equal measure, and they’re all the better for it.”

  “But if they’re lost. If they’re somehow … gone forever.” She choked. “I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

  “That’s not how this chapter of our lives is going to end.”

  Her eyes held steady on his, enlarged by her incipient tears. “You can’t know that.”

  “We’ll make it so.” His hand squeezed hers. “Together.”

  *

  After, with the lights low, their seats made into beds, heads on pillows, covered with duvets, Evan slept, and in sleeping, dreamed. She dreams of being in the stream near their house. Bobbi is with her. Bobbi is laughing at her, repeating over and over, I have the power, not you. Never you, but in the manner of dreams, she doesn’t understand what that means. Anxiety builds in her to unbearable heights.

  That’s when Bobbi reaches out, places both hands on the crown of Evan’s head—You want power? Here’s power—and pushes her down under the water. When Evan struggles, Bobbi wraps her legs over her sister’s shoulders, and keeps her down.

  Down …

  Down …

  Down.

  21

  DAY PART

  The Russian-built aircraft, one of a small fleet that was the pride and joy of the SVR, sat grounded due to mechanical trouble. Kobalt and Zherov had already boarded the plane, changed into fresh clothes, and were preparing for takeoff when the captain informed them of the problem and suggested they would be more comfortable waiting in the diplomats’ lounge in the private section of the Istanbul airport. He was right, because since this was Turkey and the jet was Russian built, what had been promised in an hour or two might well wind up taking twenty.

  They were now in the process of demolishing yet another bottle of ice-cold vodka, sitting side by side at the semicircular bar, on plush stool-like chairs with low backs. At some point, the bartender placed before them an array of mezze, which they picked at now and again.

  “The question must be asked,” Kobalt said, “Who was the Russian criminal, the tattooed ex-con, working for?”

  The lounge was modern and over-air-conditioned, an open rectangular space with a few scattered sitting areas. Blown-up photos of the city hung on the walls were interspersed with framed posters for Turkish Airlines. Spare but comfortable, impersonal indirect lighting. By contrast, sunlight threw itself against the plate glass windows, creating splashes of butter-yellow lozenges along the carpeted floor. Apart from the two of them and the bartender, no one was in the lounge. Outside, on the tarmac, they could see their plane. It was impossible to tell whether the mechs who had been swarming under and over it for hours even knew what they were doing.

  Kobalt rotated her glass a quarter turn and drank from it. “There are a number of entities who would use a man like him—a murderer inside prison and here in the real world.”

  Zherov’s expression was pensive, even perhaps concerned. “I was just thinking—for the past six months or so SVR has been using ex-cons to do their wet work. It’s a neat trick, since if anything goes sideways there’s no blowback. SVR’s hands are clean.”

  “SVR’s hands are never clean.”

  “Well, but you know what I mean.”

  She frowned deeply. “I’ve been entertaining the same idea.”

  “Well, if you ask me, it’s the right one,” Zherov said. “It seems clear that Ermi was a lawyer of no little repute. He was discreet, and also dirty as sin, as we ourselves have seen. He may have been the clearinghouse for any number of SVR or FSB upper echelons.”

  “You’re saying he sold me out for a client who was paying him more than I did.”

  Zherov nodded. “What seems most likely is that someone inside SVR or the FSB got wind of this mission of yours.” He watched her. “They don’t like personal initiatives. You must know that. I know Dima does.”

  “But the intel about my children came straight from our own HUMINT division,” she countered.

  He shrugged. “A leak? In any case, someone in SVR has decided you’re not trustworthy. Maybe he thinks you’re a double.” He peered at her. “You’re not, are you?”

  She snorted. “Don’t be absurd. My heart is Russian.” She gestured. “It’s curious, though.”

  “What is?”

  “That this SVR attack on me comes right after Omega abducts my children.”

  “If you’re distracted by what’s happened to them you’re singularly vulnerable,” he pointed out.

  She squeezed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “You’ve been in this game longer than I have. Maybe you could tap a few contacts and find out who has voiced distrust in me.”

  He reflected for a moment. “I can try,” he said. “And now that I think of it, the pool of suspects can’t be too big. My understanding was this remit was between you and Dima.”

  “Apparently not.” Her eyes narrowed. “There’s HUMINT, whoever there received and passed on the intel to me. And then there’s you, of course.”

  His incipient laugh died on his lips. “You can’t possibly suspect me. I’m Dima’s man, he sent me. And I was the one who engaged with that psycho in the knife shop.”

  She smiled. “Now I suspect everyone, even Dima, though God alone knows why he’d want to kill his golden goose.”

  “He wouldn’t. You’re his pride and joy.” He smirked. “Even though you won’t let him into your pants.”

  “Right.” She made a sarcastic sound. “But not to worry overly, Anton, you’re at the bottom of the admittedly short list.”

  Zherov blew air out through his lips. “You really are some piece of work.” He took a sip, shook his head. “I wish I’d gotten the Russian to talk. I’d love to know who inside SVR hired him.”

  “It would have been a waste of time,” she said. “There’s only one thing a man like that does, and it’s definitely not talk.” She finished off her vodka, poured herself more. She was aware that she was drinking more than Zherov, but then again, she suspected she could hold her liquor better than he could. “He was a specialist; he was only interested in killing.” She smacked her lips. “A psycho like him gets his jollies from watching people die.”

  “Jollies?”

  “Killing is his heroin.”

  Zherov nodded. Here was something he could understand down to its roots.

  She studied him for a moment. “It felt good, didn’t it?”

  He frowned. “What?”

  “Killing him.”

  “I tried not to.”

  “You didn’t try hard enough,” she said. “Clearly.” Her gaze kept steady on his face. “So. It felt good. It was freeing. Society wasn’t in the equation; it had ceased to exist. It was you and him. Until it was only you.”

  Zherov narrowed his eyes. Then, abruptly, he laughed. “Has it been an hour already? I owe you a hundred dollars.”

  “Psychoanalysis is more like four hundred an hour these days.” Her lips turned up at the corners. “But, of course, that comes with a prescription for something that will put you right out of your misery.”

  “As if you never felt freed by killing someone.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone.” She didn’t know why she lied; maybe it was a compulsion, maybe it was just plain bloody-mindedness.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She shrugged.

  He leaned in, his gaze intense. “You know why I don’t believe you? Because you’re intimate with the psychology. The mechanism inside us that makes us do what we do. And yes, I mean us. In this, if not in anything else, we’re the same, you and me.”

  Kobalt took a time-out to cal
m her breathing, to return her rage to the little wooden box she had fashioned for it when she was younger. She had spent the better part of a year on that project.

  She sat back to further calm herself. Also, to distance herself from him. He was the strangest of bedfellows, but she needed him as a buffer. “They swept you up out of the gutter, didn’t they, Anton?”

  “Actually, they resurrected me out of prison.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty,” he replied. “Almost.”

  “And why were you incarcerated?”

  “That time?” He took up a bit of hummus on his fork, swallowed it down. “I knifed a man in a bar.”

  “You were involved in a fight.”

  “Not at all. The prick said he knew my kind. He said I was nothing, that I’d always be nothing. He laughed at me, shamed me. I watched him die with a smile on my face.”

  Something deep inside Kobalt felt chilled. “So you felt nothing.”

  He took up some more hummus. “What d’you mean? I felt elated, vindicated. Finally. He got what was coming to him. He asked for it.” Zherov tossed his head. “Up to that point everyone treated me like a piece of shit they cleaned off the soles of their shoes. Never again. Now people were afraid of me. Now I had status.” He ate the rest of the hummus. “Even the cops who took me in were impressed. They must have told someone high up. I was only inside a week before they came and got me.”

  “The FSB.”

  “Initially. But I was too much for them; after three weeks, they sent me down to SVR, where I trained. I came under the jurisdiction of Dima. He plucked me out and gave me my first remit. When I came back, he brought me into Zaslon.”

  He took a drink of vodka. “You look shocked, Karin.” He was careful to use her current legend here though only the bartender was around.

  She shook her head. “Shocked, no. Aggrieved.” She emptied the bottle, called for another. “Aggrieved that you were the one Dima assigned as my nursemaid.”

  “It worked out in the end.” He poured from the new bottle. “Didn’t it?”

  “So far, anyway.” She looked away, squinted into the bright sunshine spinning off the fuselage of their wounded bird.