"That'd be nice, Raisa. Thank you. Grapefruit, if you don't mind. With a straw. And, please, call me Joseph."
"Zikher. Of course."
He didn't really favor the drink. He found it much too sweet for his tastes, and he privately wondered if many of the people who'd grown up with it felt the same way. Maybe with a splash of rum, perhaps, to add some bite. Pity he didn't have any with him at the moment.
In any case, he knew better than to turn down an offer of the unofficial national beverage, especially in these small family-run establishments. He didn't want to give Raisa anymore reason to view him as the outsider he was.
Be forgetful. Blend in.
It wasn't as easy a thing to do sometimes.
The woman bowed her head slightly, then slid away into the narrow double doors to Joseph's right, into the darkness of the interior dining area. An aroma of frying oil, baking dough, and spilt ouzo took her place.
He returned his attention across the street.
Another figure appeared in the doorway of the Hotel Bialik, another man, again alone. He was a close match for the ex-husband— right age and build, skin and hair the same color. But when he stepped out onto the sidewalk and unfolded one of those tourist maps from the rack inside the hotel, Joseph knew it wasn't his target.
According to the hotel manager, the man he was looking for had been renting a room on and off for several months, but he was very private, coming and going at odd hours, sometimes staying in his room for days on end, sometimes not returning for weeks. All of this he knew from what the cleaners told him. As for the photograph, the manager hadn't been convinced it was the same man. Nor had he recognized Angel, when Joseph pointed her out. The man had been useless.
Joseph dropped his gaze to his tea again. He lifted the cup and took a sip.
The syrupy sweetness exploded on his tongue, cloyingly warm and thick. It slipped down the back of his throat like an oil slick. Slowly, he lowered the cup to the saucer and pushed it away toward the center of the table.
The man was staring at him.
Odd.
A bus passed in a cloud of dust and a clatter and squeal of worn shocks on the ancient cobbled road. When the street cleared a moment later, the opposite sidewalk was empty.
Very odd.
But almost certainly inconsequential. Nevertheless, a feeling of disquietude came over Joseph, a reflex tempered by years of surveillance. He felt suddenly exposed, no longer anonymous. Maybe it was time to move inside.
Getting paranoid in your old age?
But paranoid of what? There was no reason to fear David Eitan. The man might be a wild card in the game that Cheong was playing with Angelique de l'Enfantine, but he wasn't dangerous. Far from it. More like a loose end that Cheong needed tied up than anything else. He did tend to obsess about loose ends. But Eitan was about as dangerous as a part time history lecturer at the local community college. He was simply a scientist, and not a very good one at that. Nor had he been much of a husband, either. And he certainly wasn't smart enough or physically capable enough to be a personal threat to anyone like himself.
Which was why it chafed so much that Cheong had assigned him, his best man, the task of tracking him down. It felt like busy work. Like keep-away-from-me work.
The way Cheong had explained it, buried in the stack of papers they had collected from Angel's Manhattan apartment were fund transfers from her account to a Hotel Bialik in Haifa, Israel. A simple phone call confirmed it was for a room, and that it was currently occupied. Since the woman was in Paris doing charity work, the room had to be for her ex-husband. It wasn't out of the question. She still paid for his apartments, even though they were technically separated and, by all appearances, didn't communicate with each other.
As it turned out, Joseph spent two days surveilling the wrong hotel. It was the branch that processed the payments, but the room being paid for was at one of its smaller satellite branches in an area away from the city center.
He should have realized the mistake sooner, but the main branch was on the beach, upscale, and expensive, and he could see the ex-husband abusing Angel's generosity, living a lavish lifestyle on her dime. So he was surprised to find that the room was located here, in a poorer, more out-of-the-way section of the city. The hotel was as old and plain and rundown as the café. And it was run more like a boarding house, with residents staying for months at a time, even years.
He secretly blamed Cheong for the mix-up, although he knew the lost time was all on him. He should have confirmed the details sooner.
In any case, he'd finally corrected the mistake the previous morning and arrived to question the hotel staff by early afternoon. By that evening, he was sitting in this very seat, watching and waiting for the man to return from wherever he had spent the day.
Assuming, of course, he was even still in the country.
"What's your game, Cheong?" he wondered aloud. He scanned up and down the street, mentally checking off each individual until no one was left. Just random pedestrians, shoppers, people. Old men and women. A soldier standing on the corner smoking a cigarette. None of them watching him or pretending not to watch. Just another wild goose chase.
"Why am I here, Cheong? What's got you so wrapped up in this woman?"
Their initial searches of David Eitan's apartments had turned up nothing interesting. They looked like someone lived in them, but they didn't feel like it. Staged was the word Cheong had used. He insisted that that was, in and of itself, peculiar.
"Why won't you tell me what happened in China?" he muttered.
"China?"
Raisa appeared beside him. She had donned a straw hat to keep the sunlight off her face. Better than sunglasses, he realized, since she was constantly stepping into and out of the shade.
"You were talking to yourself."
She set the bottle on the table before him along with a straw. The drink was already sweating, and Joseph longed for the coolness, despite the taste he knew awaited him. "May I take this?" she asked, gesturing at the teacup.
"Yes, thank you."
She gathered up the dishes and wiped the spilt honey off the table.
"You are waiting for someone?" she asked, and the way she did made him realize that she'd been looking for a reason to inquire, probably for hours by now, but had not wanted to pry. But any sense of formality had gone out the window once they began calling each other by their first names.
He raised his hand toward his pocket to retrieve the photograph, silently rehearsing the tired story in his mind. But he never got the chance to show her, as his phone began to vibrate in his shirt pocket.
"I'm sorry," he apologized. He coughed, clearing his throat, which was starting to hurt. Damn this heat and dust. "I have to take this."
He could sense her lingering, even as she took her leave, weaving slowly between the tables, pausing to wipe some imaginary speck off of one and chasing the sparrows away from another. He couldn't blame her. After all, he'd spent most of the morning sitting at one of her tables and hadn't ordered much more than malawach and tea.
He was surprised to see that it was Cheong, who asked him where he was.
"In a café just north of Haifa. Got my eye on the—"
"How soon can you get to Iceland?"
Joseph frowned. "What about the husband?"
"I'll send another guy. I need you in Iceland. New development."
Joseph checked his watch, calculating the time it would take to get to the airport in Tel Aviv and the likelihood of catching a connecting flight to Keflavik. "Have they opened up air travel yet?"
"Still restricted."
"Bus or train, then," he said, favoring neither option. "A week, maybe."
"Do it. Try to get here sooner, if you can."
"Who's replacing me?"
"I have a man in Jerusalem. He can be there in a couple hours. Leave the dossier in your room. Standard drop procedure."
Joseph cleared his throat, coughed, and tried to swallow some of the sugary liquid
. It helped lessen the soreness a little. "You want to tell me what this is all about?"
"China," he said.
Chapter Thirty Six
Angel was blasted off the chair and hurled across the floor. She came to rest against the base of the far wall, dazed, blinded, and hurt. It was quite possible she had blacked out, but she couldn't be sure. There was no light to distinguish the darkness around her from a loss of consciousness.
Something warm dripped down her forehead to her cheek, then onto her neck. She pressed her fingertips against the skin, smearing the sticky liquid. It tasted like blood and pulverized stone. The air smelled the same way.
There were gunshots now, coming in short, rapid bursts from somewhere beyond the walls of this place. Dozens of tiny explosions. But no shouting. She expected to hear people screaming. Without it, the situation seemed almost surreal.
Then a sudden crescendo of noise, and she flinched, expecting—
What?
The sound receded, taking the gunfire with it as the vehicle sped away.
Sparks erupted from somewhere in the middle of the room, a small electrical volcano erupting from a shorted wire in a dark corner. There was a pop, the tinkling of glass. A crash.
Overhead, one of the fluorescent lights flickered on, dangling eviscerated wires. Bits of false ceiling crumbled to the floor, bleeding dust. Through the smoke and haze, she saw that an entire wall had collapsed, creating a gaping hole that led outside. At the bottom, a short pile of rubble. Bricks lay scattered all about her.
Someone limped past outside, grunting in pain.
Dogs barked, far away. Frantic. She hoped they were chained up. The chaos would draw them here if not. The smell of blood would drive them into a frenzy.
Her nose pinched as a breeze filled the room with the stench of burning plastic, burning fabric. And scorched flesh.
She had to move.
Shirt torn, skin tingling, blood dripping down her arms and face, she stumbled to her feet. Fell and caught herself. She made it to what remained of the desk, one side in splinters, rocking on three legs. She slipped to her knees.
The monitor had been caught up by the force of the explosion and tossed away like a barn door in a tornado. It lay broken and twisted, the cord frayed, severed from its connection with the wall.
Sirens now, in the distance, farther away than the dogs. Echoing. Urgent.
How far?
She couldn't tell.
She had to get up, get out, hide. She couldn't be caught here. They'd detain her, ask her what she was doing. She couldn't be here.
My bag!
She couldn't find it.
No time! Go!
Climbing over the pile of rubble was a chore. She had no balance, and her ears hurt. They were starting to ring, and the ringing made her head spin. Her muscles didn't want to work right. She kept falling, skinning her knees and elbows. Scraping her shoulder. Her shins stung. They felt like they were bleeding.
Staggering out onto the ground outside, her relief at finding fresh air was short-lived when she saw the bomber's intended target across the road. Six stories high at least, judging by the size of the heap, now reduced to a mountain of gravel and rebar.
Tiny funerary pyres sprouted up here and there. The air a blizzard of tumbling paper, some of it still burning.
Had the destroyed building been empty? She still didn't hear any cries.
The sirens, however, were louder. So, too, was the barking.
Where the hell was she? Which way was the hotel?
Bits of couches and lamps and shoes lay all around her, flung from inside the downed building. An apartment complex, she suddenly realized. She weaved her way through the destruction, numb to the death, and yet keenly aware of it. Tripping, catching herself again and again and failing every third or fourth try until her palms were skinned.
A piece of a toy, a doll missing the head, its arms and legs askew, charred. Another shoe. She kicked at it and saw that the foot was still inside, smoking, the bone fragments glistening black-red in the wan light of a street light a block away.
Suicide bomber.
And then a piece of a familiar knit sweater.
She bent over and tried to vomit.
Nothing in her stomach, though it didn't stop her body from trying to turn itself inside out.
She heard shouting then, up ahead. Cries of horror, wails of disbelief. People began to emerge from the adjacent buildings.
Yet behind her, still no voices. Just the sharp chemical crackle of flames and the rumble of crumbling debris. Not a single person there crying out for help. All dead, mothers and fathers and little children. Dead in an instant.
And in the spaces between, the sirens growing louder and the dogs barking closer.
She turned to view the wreckage and the hole out of which she had crawled, and her relief flared when she saw that she was not the only survivor. Out of the smoke and flames lurched a solitary figure, a man. Then came another. Both were covered in blood, the redness glistening in the light of the fires. Their clothes were shredded and charred, like hers, and—
Oh god! He has no arms!
The image froze her. Illuminated by the fires, she saw that the flesh had been flayed from the one man's face, leaving it bare and smooth, nothing but a grinning mask of bare bone.
She tried to turn, tried to run, but the dogs had arrived. Like spirits, they slipped from heap to heap, sniffing, feasting on the charred dead.
She pitched forward, began to fall, and was immediately grabbed. Strong hands out of the darkness, covered in blood and dirt. Blackened nails. The smell of charred flesh and burnt powder suddenly strong in her nose. She gasped for air. Tried to get free. Tried to—
"Steady! Slow and steady, Angel. You're going to hyperventilate."
The grips on her arms loosened. She could feel the fingers peeling off her skin, stiff with dried blood and sticky with sweat. The heat was unbearable. She was suffocating in it.
"You were dreaming."
"Norstrom?" She still couldn't believe he was alive. "I slept?"
"For hours. You were exhausted."
The anger returned, flaring briefly as she remembered how she had tried to run from those horrid figures stumbling out of the wreckage, how she had failed to recognize that it was him back there, Norstrom. He and Farid. She cursed her stupidity for not realizing sooner that they would have been held nearby. Kurtz had given her enough clues. He had practically admitted as much when he told her why phones weren't allowed, not to prevent her from calling out or recording anything, but, because of the risk of activating the nanites in Farid's body and turning him into a—
zombie
—a crazed killer, like the ones she had seen at Nordqvist's. The audio and video feed between her and Kurtz and the room holding Norstrom had to have been closed-circuit.
Direct feed, Kurtz had said.
She should have known.
They were two floors below her, and the concussion had collapsed part of the ceiling onto them. Kurtz had escaped. In the chaos, Norstrom freed himself and Farid. She'd mistaken the smoothness of the mask for bare skull, and his arms were still bound behind him so that it appeared they were gone.
"What time is it?" she asked. "It is so dark. Is it still night?"
"It's midmorning," Norstrom said. "Had to stop for supplies." He scooted from her side to lift a corner of the flap away from the back of the truck. Light stabbed in, blinding her. He dropped the canvas right away, to her relief, but she wished for more of the cool fresh air.
"What supplies?"
She could hear cars passing on the road outside, the sound of construction machinery in the distance. The bray of sheep and the call of a child. The lonely clatter of his shepherd's bell. It was all so . . . so normal.
"Food and water. Phones."
"No phones!" she cried.
"It's okay. Just follow the instructions. Once you get to Gökçetepe, there will be a boat there to take you to Athens, so wh
en—"
"Take us, you mean."
"No. You know I can't go with you. Just you and Farid. Cheong won't trust you if I'm involved."
"He doesn't have to know who you are!"
"I can't take the chance he doesn't already know."
They had fled the site of the bombing on foot and stopped just long enough for them to catch their breath. Norstrom had insisted she call Cheong at that point. They had no other choice. The bunker was the only place where Farid might be safe.
"How do I convince him?"
"By saying you're ready to tell him everything about China."
"Am I?"
"Yes. Just leave me out of it. But he must take you in along with Farid. They'll be looking for you both."
Cheong had been surprisingly reluctant, particularly when she demanded to be taken into the bunker. But in the end he relented. She had given him enough to whet his appetite.
"All air traffic has been grounded," he told her. "Borders are closed. Getting you all the way to Iceland won't be quick or easy."
Two hours later they were in the back of a truck heading for the coast.
"You are going to look for Kurtz, are you?" she asked Norstrom.
"He's probably long gone by now. But . . . yeah. I have to."
"You killed the other men, the ones who were guarding you and Farid."
There was too much blood on his shirt for it to be all his own.
"Well, I don't blame you," she said, when he didn't answer. "They were all crazy anyway."
"Fanatical. There's a distinction."
"Either way, there is no reasoning with them."
He sniffed. "For all of Kurtz's smooth talk, I was afraid you'd start believing him. I was very nearly convinced by it myself."
"He is a hypocrite. He says he respects life and dignity, but he kills without a second thought. He tortured you!"
"Not really. I knew the game was up when he told me he knew about the relocation. He threatened to terminate the refugees if I didn't at least give him Nordqvist's number to negotiate their release. I didn't know he would use the phone to control them. Or kill them."
"How did he know about me?"
"From the man you'd been helping."
Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2) Page 24
