by Jack Du Brul
He gasped as her hand slid across his shoulder, forcing fresh blood to well to the surface. As he sank to the floor, Aggie went down with him, her arms still around his neck, her eyes still fastened on the body only a few feet away.
“That’s, that’s…” she stammered but could not continue.
“What is it?” Mercer panted, his heart racing three times normal speed, his hands only now beginning to tremble from the fear he’d been able to ignore.
She tore her eyes from the body and noticed Mercer’s wound. “He shot you.”
“I’m all right. The bullet only grazed me.” Even as he spoke, he gingerly pulled her arm off his damaged shoulder.
“Jesus Christ,” Harry admonished at the entrance of the bar. “I’ve had my leg shot off and you end up with a woman in your arms.”
Aggie gasped when she saw the source of the voice. Harry leaned against the doorjamb between the bar and the library, his body supported by only one leg. The tube of his other pants leg dangled emptily. He held the dismembered limb like a rifle at high port. Mercer couldn’t help but laugh at the demented image.
“You look like an extra from a bad horror film, Night of the Legless Drunks.”
“And fuck you too.” Harry snorted. “What the hell just happened and who the hell is that?” He pointed the leg at Aggie like an accusing finger.
“What happened was the second attempt on my life in the past twenty-four hours and this is Max Johnston’s daughter, Aggie. Aggie, this pathetic excuse is Harry White, my oldest chronological friend and the man we both owe our lives to. Harry, if you hadn’t barged in, those guys would have caught us with our pants down.” Mercer realized his gaffe and quickly added, “Figuratively speaking, of course.”
Aggie waved timidly, smiling a small greeting. Harry caught the direction of her gaze and lowered his artificial leg. “Don’t worry about this. I lost it so long ago I forget what it felt like to have two.”
He hopped across the room, steadying each leap against a piece of furniture until he could plant himself at the bar, leaning his dismembered leg against the footrail like an umbrella. “Are you going to get me a drink while I call the police or do I have to do everything myself?”
His unflappability roused Mercer from the floor. That was the one thing Mercer could depend on Harry for, his ability to break down any situation and place it in a context that couldn’t possibly disturb the pace of his life.
“Good idea.” Mercer grabbed a handful of bar towels and laid them over the body before pouring a Jack Daniel’s and ginger ale for Harry and a heavy slug of brandy for himself. It was a better anesthetic for his shoulder than the pills he would get at the hospital. “Aggie, another stinger? I think you could use it.”
Aggie shot a glance at the body before responding, “No, I have to get out of here, now.” The urgency in her voice jarred Mercer.
“It’s all right,” Harry growled. “He won’t hurt you anymore.”
“That’s not it.” Aggie leaped to her feet and started to the door.
Mercer followed her, catching up at the top of the spiral stairs. “Are you okay?”
It was natural for her to want to put as much distance as possible between herself and the scene of such violence and horror, but Mercer was sure there was something more behind her reaction. He’d been in enough bloody confrontations to know how people react, especially first-time witnesses to a fatal shooting, so he knew that she was fleeing for some other reason, something unrelated to what had just transpired. He put his arms around her.
“What is it?” Concern softened Mercer’s voice to an intimate whisper.
“I can’t be here,” she replied, shaking out of his embrace. “I can’t be found here when the police come.”
She raced from the house, the door slamming with a finality that hurt Mercer more than his shoulder.
Anchorage, Alaska
Kerikov slammed the phone so hard against its cradle that the slim executive handset snapped in two, the halves joined by only a few tendons of wire. His rage not yet vented, he plucked the entire unit from the end table and threw it at the far wall of his hotel suite. The phone disintegrated against the hard oak paneling. In a gesture bordering on manic, he raced across the room and crushed the remains under his heel, grinding them into the carpet until he felt shards jabbing into his foot through the sole of his shoe. His breathing and heart rate had accelerated, and sweat beaded his broad forehead.
He turned to look through the picture window high over Alaska’s largest city. His suite was just one floor below the Captain Cook room of the Anchorage Holiday Inn, arguably the city’s finest hotel. While he’d been in the room only a few hours since returning from the interrogation of Howard Small in California, he’d had time to notice the room’s view of the snow-peaked Brooks Range and the outline of Mt. McKinley making a rare appearance from behind a layer of cloud. Between the city and the mountains were the wide black ribbons of Elmendorf Air Force Base.
When he’d first gotten into the room, Kerikov had seen AWACS radar planes flying out of the base, their distinctive flat-dish antennas clinging to their backs like some engineer’s afterthought. Watching one lumber into the sky, greasy trails of smoke trailing the quadruple engines, Kerikov wondered why the Americans bothered. There was nothing left for them to spy on.
He stood staring across the late afternoon vista for several moments, concentrating on his breathing, clearing his mind, vainly attempting to corral his emotions. He knew he’d just had what he called an “episode,” a period where he lost conscious thought and moved purely on raw emotion. He had lost all control of his actions, his mind blocking out anything that might have occurred. These usually violence-marred times were becoming alarmingly frequent and longer-lasting. When they had first started, during his assignment as an interrogator for the KGB in Afghanistan, they would last only a fraction of a second and occurred maybe once every two or three months.
At the time, he thought they were caused by stress, brought on by fighting on the dirtiest front of an unwinnable war. By war’s end, he would black out for a day at a time, sometimes regaining consciousness in other parts of the country with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there or why. The episodes stopped when the war came to a close. After the conflict ended and the Soviet Union had withdrawn her troops with the ignominy of America’s withdrawal from Saigon, Kerikov was free of blackouts for several years. Even the memories of the occurrences faded. But during the late 1980s and early ’90s, they returned. When the futility of his career at the KGB became apparent, as one by one the Soviet satellite states reformed and westernized and his own beloved Rodina vanished under the capitalist wave, his blackouts came back, their duration and frequency increasing exponentially. By the late 1990s, men were dying during Kerikov’s blind rages. He had come down from one such episode during his final months in Russia to find four subordinates dead by his own hand, each arranged around a conference table with his throat slit. He had no recollection of the acts or how he’d managed to subdue each man as he dispatched the others.
Knowing that he’d just returned from the violent edge of his own mind, Kerikov turned quickly to see if his untethered rage had caused another death. His guest, a thin, academic young man in black jeans and turtleneck, stared at him through thick glasses, his misty eyes registering incomprehension of the display he’d just witnessed.
Ivan Kerikov hid his relief at seeing the young American still alive by recrossing the room and pouring three fingers of Scotch into a thick glass tumbler. Disdaining ice, he forced the drink neat, its fire ripping at his insides like claws. He carefully set the glass back on the coffee table, making sure that it stood precisely in the center of the narrow rim of spilled liquor on the glass top. The tiny ritual was a gesture of the orderliness that was wholly unobtainable in his mind.
He stood over the young man, folding his thick arms across his chest in a gesture that intimidated as strongly as if he were shaking a meaty fist. His voice was w
ell modulated and even, the racking emotions temporarily checked behind his personal facade. “Because of the incompetence of others, your job has just been made much more difficult.”
Ted Mossey said nothing. He perched on the edge of the overstuffed easy chair like a frightened bird about to take flight.
“That was my contact in Washington.” Kerikov nodded in the direction of the destroyed telephone. “There have been two unsuccessful attempts to stop an enemy who will now be coming on the offense. I know him well, and I know that our only chance to defeat him is to step up our timetable. You must be ready within forty-eight hours. Otherwise we may be forced to abandon the project.”
“No!” The anger in Mossey’s voice charged his entire body, squaring his narrow shoulders and firming the soft flesh that passed as a chin.
Ted Mossey had a face shaped like a spade, his weak chin forming its point and his rounded cheeks forming the bowed top. He had no cheekbones to speak of, so his face appeared to slope in on itself; only his small nose added any definition. His glasses were hooked behind wildly recurved ears that were nearly hidden by lank blond hair. Angry red scars pocked his face, adolescent acne that followed him into early adulthood with embarrassing ferocity. But Kerikov had not hired Mossey for his appearance. He’d taken him into the fold of Charon’s Landing because the twenty-eight-year-old was a computer virtuoso.
He could debug one program while simultaneously writing another, one keyboard under each of his ambidextrous hands, his eyes shifting between screens so fast that they would blend into one homogeneous image. Mossey was responsible for the parent 3-D generators used on the next-generation video games, and a program he’d designed as a geometric data cascade was so advanced that it could not be used until computer speed increased another hundredfold.
However, there was another aspect of Ted Mossey that had attracted Kerikov above all the other hotshot computer geniuses that the United States produced in alarming numbers. While many of Kerikov’s earlier candidates certainly possessed the skills he needed, only Mossey had the element that made him an easy recruit. Mossey was a rabid environmentalist, an ecoterrorist who used his knowledge of computers to wreak havoc among timber companies, mining concerns, and heavy industries. While many environmental activists seemed more impressed with publicity than results, Mossey preferred to work from the shadows, destroying computer systems and causing millions of dollars in damage to those he saw as destructive to the planet. Once Kerikov approached Mossey and outlined in brief strokes the principle behind Charon’s Landing, the young American almost begged to join.
“I won’t let that happen,” Mossey said angrily. “This is too important. I can do it in forty-eight hours, no problem.”
Kerikov recognized the bravado in Mossey’s voice. He didn’t need assurance; he wanted the truth, so he spoke accusingly. “You’re not scheduled to work at the Marine Terminal again for three days, and I’ll need you at the terminal within two. How will you manage it?”
“Simple. Right after I got the programming job at Alyeska, I inserted a virus into their system that will lock out all the workstations from the mainframe. No one will be able to use their computers. I can unleash the virus from my system at home and freeze every computer on the Alaska Pipeline. In the past few months, they’ve come to see me as the resident expert, so they’ll call me to get the system back on line.” When Ted spoke about computers, he had an authority that masked his physical frailty.
“Won’t they know that their system has been accessed from outside the facility?”
As much as he dared, Mossey shook his head at such an insult to his abilities. “I’ve already deleted the backtrack subroutine of their antivirus program. They’ll have no record of an outside contact.”
“If that’s the case, can’t you initiate my primary program in their mainframe from your own computer?” Kerikov asked reasonably, the subtleties of computer hacking lost to him yet hoping to avoid the security risk of placing Mossey within the confines of the Alyeska Marine Terminal.
“I told you before,” Mossey sighed. “Your program was buried inside the computer core during the 1986 system upgrade. When your programmer hardwired it into the mainframe, he made it impossible to activate from anywhere other than the main computer room in Valdez. That way, no one could ever stumble across it at a desktop unit or find it by hacking into the system. He made it impossible to discover and at the same time very difficult to access. My antibacktracker is child’s play compared to the protection your guy put into the system.”
Kerikov understood that there was no other option than to get him into the computer room at Valdez in order to initiate the programs planted over a decade ago by one of Kerikov’s best agents. The computer sabotage had been the only active element of Charon’s Landing Kerikov had carried out prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Everything since then had been his own doing, with financial backing from Hasaan bin-Rufti and others. The computer codes were the only items Kerikov needed to pirate the former KGB operation.
“How soon can you lock them out and get yourself to the facility?” Kerikov asked, the ripe scent of victory already detectable. Philip Mercer might still be alive, but there wasn’t anything he could do to stop Kerikov once the control program was primed.
“About four hours after I get to my apartment in Valdez. Once I freeze the system, they’ll call me within minutes. After that, I can start your program in just a few hours.”
“Excellent. I want you to drive back to Valdez tonight, but don’t lock them out until I call you. The delay shouldn’t be more than twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the most, understand?”
“Yes, sure, but why wait?”
“Initiating my computer program is only one phase of the overall operation; there are others that you are not aware of. I have to make certain that everything is in place before we take over the system entirely.” Kerikov wasn’t in the habit of explaining his orders.
Kerikov didn’t wait for Mossey to leave before he strode from the living room to his bedroom. The phone extension there was now the only working unit in the suite. As he dialed an in-house line to reach Abu Alam two floors below, he fished in his pant’s pocket for his pack of cigarettes and lighter.
“Yes,” Alam answered.
“We are leaving in a few hours. There has been a slight complication. The people in Washington failed.”
“Mercer is still alive?” Despite his instability, Alam retained enough professionalism to ask the right questions.
“Yes. Rather than try again, I’ve decided to draw him to Alaska, then send him on a wild-goose chase. We can take care of him later. To ensure he comes, we need to return to Homer. Fuel the car. I’ll meet you in the lobby” — Kerikov looked at his watch — “at ten o’clock.”
“Should we be armed?” Even Alam had some respect for American law enforcement and traveled with his beloved SPAS-12 semiautomatic shotgun only when necessary.
“Yes. We will take my own men on this trip.” Kerikov needed the steadier hands of his two German guards instead of Alam’s murderous Arab gunslingers. While the former Stasi agents had bungled the interrogation of the fisherman and his son, they were well trained and disciplined, and tonight’s work would need their professionalism. He cut the connection and immediately redialed the phone.
“I can’t speak now, we’re still loading,” a voice responded brusquely, then hung up.
Kerikov looked at the mute instrument for a moment, but since he’d called to get a situation report from his agent, he was satisfied. He made another call, ignoring the time difference, not caring that he’d wake the man at the other end.
“Hello,” came a sleepy voice after a few rings.
“You’ve failed again. Mercer is still alive.” Kerikov could hear the man swing himself out of bed.
“That’s not possible. I sent my best man. He’s never failed me.”
“One of my old contacts in Washington just called me from Mercer’s block. There are
about two dozen cops there right now and he said he saw Mercer talking to Dick Henna himself.”
“Was anyone else involved?”
“What does that matter? Mercer is alive, and now you’ve failed me twice. Your ineptitude is intolerable.” Kerikov left his last statement hanging in the silence.
“He’ll be dead tomorrow if I have to kill him myself.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Kerikov barked. “He’s under the protective custody of the FBI now. The only way to stop him is to lure him to Alaska, where I will take care of him personally. I have an old score to settle.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing for the moment. Is everything set with Rufti?”
“I spoke with him this evening. He says that Khalid Al-Khuddari is suspicious, but he assures me that he’s ready to strike before Khuddari has figured just how real the threat to the royal family is.”
“The weapons?”
“Are stowed aboard the Petromax Arabia, which is berthed in Abu Dhabi for an unscheduled maintenance inspection as you planned.” As the other man spoke, his voice grew more confident. “The Arctica should be leaving Valdez within a couple of hours, so everything is on track. Even with Mercer still alive, there’s no way to stop everything we’ve set in motion. Don’t worry, Ivan. Within a couple of days America’s last source of domestic oil will become inaccessible, petroleum prices will double, and the map of the Middle East will be redrawn again. And this time, no one will be able to lift a finger to change it back. All three of us get what we want — you your money, me my profits, and Rufti his own country.”
“I will believe that when it occurs. Hubris has taken down greater men than you,” Kerikov chided before his voice took on a thoughtful calm. “I’m concerned about Rufti. I just don’t believe that fat bastard has the guts or the brains to pull off his part of the operation. If he fails, everything will come unraveled.”
