Palace of Treason

by Jason Matthews

  Dominika straightened and looked at Nate. “Do not tell me anything,” she said. “I do not care what you think.”

  The man’s eyes looked up at the ceiling. “Udranka,” said Dominika again, looking down at him. Dominika bent and unzipped his jacket, flipped it open, and felt the man’s pockets. She held up a phone, which Nate took, powered off, and tossed into the darkness. They could not speak or understand Farsi, and they didn’t need to carry what was essentially a beacon to make it easier to track them. Dominika wiggled a small handgun out of an inner pocket and handed it to Nate. A German Walther, mag fully loaded; it looked like .380 caliber, what Gable would call a purse gun, but Nate checked the safety and put it in his pants pocket. Nate regretted interrupting this biblical moment, but he grabbed Dominika by the shoulder and pulled her away before she began sawing the Iranian man’s head off with the steak knife for a trophy. She shrugged off his hand and glared at him.

  They slipped out a broken back door and through a fenced supply yard, weaving through twenty derelict engine blocks tumbled widely in the mud like giant dice strewn in melted chocolate. The last warehouse in the row was close to a stand of trees, and they quickly got into the shadows and stopped to listen. They could hear the roar of the traffic crossing the Praterbrücke over the Danube; the hulk of the bridge loomed beyond the trees.

  “When they find that man they will all come,” said Dominika. Her face was ashen and determined. Nate peered into the night, looking for movement. She put her hand out to stroke his cheek, an unspoken apology. He was fighting to protect her, and she had been out of her head.

  “I think we have to risk crossing the bridge,” said Nate. “I thought we could wait, but we can’t stay out here in the dark. We can’t last out here.” He put his arms around Dominika’s shoulders. “We have to get into the city.”

  Dominika nodded.

  “We work our way through the trees to the bridge,” said Nate. “You say there’s a walkway underneath?”

  Dominika nodded, then looked up at him in alarm. “Neyt. No. That is where they will shoot. It is a straight catwalk under the bridge. It is lit with neon bulbs. Of course. It is a zasada, an ambush. They can shoot from either end, and there is no cover when crossing.” It was then that they heard the sound of footsteps crunching on the forest floor, several pairs of footsteps, coming quickly. Had they found the man in the warehouse so soon? They were coming for blood. Nate gestured with his head and they both started running through the trees, around clumps of brush and vines, over forest litter, Nate all the time feeling the icy patch between his shoulder blades where the bullet would hit. Dominika was three steps ahead of him, running well, when she ran hip deep into a marshy patch and fell face-first into brackish water. She got up spluttering, and was about to grasp Nate’s extended hand when she instead clasped her hand over his mouth and pulled him down among the tall weeds at the edge of the little bog. The stinking water seeped into their clothes, and got into their noses. Dominika held her lipstick gun out of the water, and Nate quietly shook his pistol dry. A misfire would kill them both.

  “They are coming through the trees,” said Dominika. “Two of them.” Nate could see two silhouettes moving forward. There had been a plague of silhouettes tonight, phantoms all around them—on the street, behind buildings, under trees—herding them as delicately as a collie curls around a flock of sheep. It was getting late and Nate knew they were in considerable danger. The approaching silhouettes were spaced a small distance apart. By their size and shape, Nate estimated they were a woman and a large man, dressed in black jeans and dark jackets. He saw a glint of metal in the woman’s hand. They approached with purpose, making enough sound to be heard, looking to the sides and behind—these two were driving them toward the bridge. Nate knew he and Dominika were running out of space—they had to begin moving in the opposite direction, maybe lie flat in the water and reeds and let these two walk past and try to break through.

  Dominika’s tactical solution was somewhat more Gothic. She whispered in Nate’s ear, “I will eliminate the one on the left. Can you shoot the other one?” She looked at him as if she were discussing a recipe for raisin bread. Nate hefted the little automatic in his hand, then looked at the approaching surveillants, now about seven feet away, and tried to remember the precepts of shooting. Combat pistol distance, focus on the front sight, lock the wrist, press the trigger, don’t jerk it.

  In the instant before she moved, Dominika bizarrely thought of her father, and Korchnoi; she turned and looked at Nate, reaching out and squeezing his hand briefly. He was adjusting his crouch to time his jump to hers—he was intense, pale, determined. His purple aura pulsed with his heartbeat, and Dominika told herself she would not let him be harmed.

  The woman in front of Dominika was wearing a motorcycle helmet, and Dominika lifted herself out of the cattails, streaming water. Smoothly and without haste she stepped forward and put the lipstick tube against the clear visor of the helmet and pushed the plunger. There was a click and the plastic instantly looked like the bowl of a blender processing tomatoes and tofu. Her frontal lobe now the consistency of summer gazpacho, the woman collapsed in a heap.

  Meanwhile, Nate also stood up from behind the tall grass, raised the pistol in both hands, put the little white dot of the sight on the bridge of the man’s nose, and squeezed the trigger three times. There were three indistinct pops—the little gun did not buck in his hand, and Nate was able to keep the barrel level. He looked up at the Persian. The big man shook his head and a knee began to buckle, but there was an ugly automatic in his hand coming up slowly, so Nate got down over his sights again and shot him twice more in the forehead. The man fell backward, arms flung to the side, reflexively squeezing the trigger twice, the rounds going into the night sky. “Lady’s gun,” Gable would have said. Nate walked over to the man with the pistol ready, but he was down.

  Terrific. Now Nate had a story to tell some young case officer, just as Gable had told him stories about his shootouts. The Persian’s face was marked by four small black dots ringed in red—two in one cheek and two in his forehead. Nate’s hands were shaking, and he had an overarching sense of having screwed up—he could have run the SDR better, kept these people away from them, evaded them more cleverly. Shut the fuck up, Gable told him in his head. They had to defend themselves; this was not some cat-and-mouse surveillance in Moscow or Washington. This night was supposed to end with Nate and Dominika facedown in the marsh water, or flopping sodden over the downriver floor weirs, or crumpled backward on top of each other on the walkway under the Praterbrücke. And the evening was still young. There were more silhouettes moving around out there, and a shooter lying on a mat, smelling the gun oil on his hands, resting his chin on his arm, face green from the tritium-illuminated reticle in his scope.

  Nate turned to Dominika and saw her lying facedown on the ground, arms underneath her, legs crossed at the ankles. Disaster. He rolled her over, wiped the dirt from her cheek, and roamed his hands over her body, the familiar contours, the sweet curves, looking for wounds, questing for pumping blood. Nothing. Her head lolled back, loose on her neck, and Nate shook her gently, frantically. She groaned. Nate supported her head and felt her skull; his fingers came away red and wet. Scalp wound. The 9mm round had creased her head, a matter of a millimeter from death, the width of the metal jacket on the slug. The contraction from the dead trigger finger of the man had clipped his agent, this blue-eyed gladiator, this passionate woman with uncommon courage and a volatile temper, the woman he loved. She could have been dead in his arms, but they’d had a little luck and he was going to get her to safety. He cradled her head and spoke into her ear. Another groan, and her eyes fluttered open.

  “Domi,” said Nate urgently, in Russian, “Vstan’, come on, get up!” She looked at him vacantly, then her eyes focused and she took a deep breath. She nodded.

  “Help me up, dushka,” she said, but she was slurring her words. He lifted her carefully and put her arm around his
neck, stooping to pick up his TALON case and looping it over his shoulder.

  “Come on,” said Nate, “we can backtrack, get away from the river.” Dominika stiffened up.

  “Do not go near the big bridge,” she slurred. “Another bridge,” she said, pointing limply downriver. “Railroad, five hundred meters downriver. We can walk on the rails. We can reach my safe house. It is not too far. I can make it.” She stumbled as she said it and slipped out of his grasp. She was on her hands and knees, head bowed, and Nate leaned over again and picked her up.

  “Come on, baby,” said Nate automatically. A fierce determination to save her welled up in him with exceptional clarity. If she were not hurt, she would have given him hell at being called baby. Nate took an oblique direction away from the bridge, paralleling the river. They pushed through the trees and the reeds, sloshing through unseen black water. When he stopped to listen, Dominika slumped against him, shaking from shock and the cool night air on her wet clothes. No more silhouettes, no snapping twigs—maybe they had broken out of the net, or maybe the Iranian team had pulled back, confident that the rabbits were headed to the bridge and were already stoppered in the bottle.

  Nate trudged ahead, with the big Persian’s heavy pistol in his belt. The TALON was banging against his hip, Dominika’s arm was around his neck, and he held her by the waist. She was racked with fits of trembling, and periodically sagged against him. Nate sat her on a patch of dry ground and felt her hair. Sticky, but the wound didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore. Dominika tilted her head up at him; in the starlight her lips looked black and were shaking.

  “Neyt, take your tablet and go ahead,” she said. “We have to protect the intelligence. I will meet you at my apartment.” Nate smiled at her and brushed a strand of hair off her face.

  “Domi, we go together. I’m not leaving you.”

  Dominika closed her eyes for a moment, struggling. “The Iranian information is too valuable,” she slurred.

  “You’re too valuable . . . to me,” said Nate.

  Dominika opened her eyes and looked at him. The purple cloud around his head swirled and expanded. “Your color is so beautiful,” she whispered in Russian, closing her eyes again.

  Hallucinating, he thought. Got to get her dry and warm fast. “What are you saying?” he whispered back.

  “So beautiful,” Dominika mumbled.

  He led her through another thicket—they had to step high as vines tugged at their ankles. The Danube marshes didn’t want to let them go. Nate peeled the dripping-wet tweed coat off Dominika and put his thinner jacket over her shoulders. The hand that curled around his neck was icy cold. They had to get out of these woods.

  They pushed through brush, and the stone-block pier of the railroad bridge suddenly towered above them. As they looked up, a flat-nosed, silver and blue S-Bahn train on the S80 line rumbled overhead, the arc-light snaps and pops from the overhead catenary lines lighting up their faces—Dominika’s heavy-lidded eyes barely registered the passing cars. Nate led her up a slope to the rail bed and let her rest. He walked a little way out onto the bridge along the rails. The curved upper trusses of the bridge were close alongside the double tracks—inches of clearance on either side—with only a narrow structural girder running outside above the water. They would have to cross the entire bridge before another train passed; otherwise, they would have to step out onto the knobby, riveted girder above the black river and hold on until the train passed. Even odds that Dominika in her mazy condition would teeter and fall off. Once in the water, she would be gone as completely as if she had fallen overboard at night during a gale in the middle of the ocean.

  Nate looked upriver. The Praterbrücke buzzed with late-night vehicular traffic. The pedestrian walkway underneath the roadway was a soft glowing gallery—contrasted with the darkly wooded left bank, where two bodies stiffened in the night air, and where a patient sniper in a hole waited for them to enter the neon-flavored kill box. For an instant, Nate wondered whether the sniper could cover both bridges from a shooting position somewhere in between the bridges, but that would mean dealing with traversing targets instead of a straight shot. There was no alternative in any case: He had to get Dominika inside and warm if she was going to survive.

  They were halfway across the bridge when the box girders started vibrating and the overhead electric lines began humming—a noise like the one blowing across the mouth of a bottle produces—and the reflection from the big headlight came at them along the shiny rails like a fast-burning fuse, curving and speeding up. Nate helped Dominika under a slanted truss and balanced her on the girder, holding on to her with one hand while she gripped the steel with icy fingers. Their protruding heels hung over the flowing night-black river from which a bass note rose—millions of bucking brown Danube gallons racing to the Black Sea. The steel around them shook and Nate tightened his grip on Dominika as the pressure wave in front of the train buffeted them and then tried to suck them in, and the kinetoscope cabin lights as they whizzed by turned Dominika’s face into a sooty-eyed, eldritch witch, but their eyes met and Nate smiled at her, and she started laughing, and he started laughing, and they hung on until the bridge stopped vibrating.

  The kaleidoscope lights of the Prater in the distance called to them, offering cover and safety. The colder air over the river seemed to revive her, but halfway across the rail bridge, Dominika stopped, hugged a girder with white-knuckled hands, and leaned out over the roiling water. She vomited into the black, her body racked by tremors interrupted only by shivers. He held her close now, helped her walk over the rest of the bridge. Nate kept listening for the trains, but he also started surveying the approaching bank and riverside drive of Handelskai, looking for a dark lingering figure, or a stationary vehicle emitting a white plume of exhaust, or a fleeting glint of a scope over the blued barrel of a Dragunov sniper rifle. All clear, until it isn’t. They walked through the park along Hauptallee to stay away from the river, Nate steering Dominika straight, occasionally boosting her up when her legs sagged.

  They reached the amusement park as it was closing—it felt as if they’d been out all night—and they heard the sirens across the river. They walked along the esplanade, keeping out of the brightest pools of light so that no one could see the blood in Dominika’s hair and on her shirt, listening to the music and smelling the food. Dominika wobbled a little. Too much wine, thought the old ladies in the stalls. The wobbling hid the shivering, which was coming in waves. Music from the rides and the wind rumble of the Ferris wheel was in their ears.

  GAZPACHO

  * * *

  Blend country bread, ripe tomatoes, and seeded cucumber in a food processor with a splash of red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, and cumin. Process until smooth. Push liquid through a medium sieve for a velvety consistency. Chill and served with diced green pepper, cucumber, and white onion.

  11

  They fell into the apartment, Dominika crawling on all fours while Nate secured the door with the striker-plate ratchet he kept in the bottom of his case. He picked Dominika up, carried her into the bathroom, and stripped off her sodden clothes. Her body was bruised, her back and legs and breasts icy to the touch. He laid her in the tub and started the tap, the hot water turning brown. She lay with her eyes closed as he washed her body and her hair and examined the hairline groove in her scalp. It had stopped bleeding. She opened her eyes once to look at him. Even submerged in hot water up to her chin, Dominika shivered. The surface of the dirty bath water vibrated.

  “Zyuganov did this,” she said, shuddering, as Nate sponged her legs, working down to her feet. It was totally, unpredictably natural: Dominika was naked and Nate was ministering to her—there was never a thought of embarrassment.

  “He put an Iranian hit team on you?” said Nate.

  “No. He would not go that far. But he deliberately blew Jamshidi to the Iranians.”

  “What happens when the MOIS tells the Center that they chased two debriefers tonight?” said Nate. He was drafti
ng the cable to Headquarters in his head.

  “The Persians will not report anything back to the Center,” said Dominika, teeth chattering. “Our services do not share. Zyuganov has deniability. When I report what happened, they will attribute it to a counterintelligence investigation—the Iranians found a traitor—but Zyuganov will imply it was a tradecraft failure on my part. I know him.”

  “Do we still have a viable covert action?” said Nate, thinking out loud.

  She shrugged. “Your people must do their work now, quickly. I will let you know what happens in Moscow,” said Dominika, still shivering under the water.

  She let him help her out of the tub, and he dried her body and hair gently with a towel spotted pink with the last of her blood, then he steered her to the bed and put her under the covers. She shivered and closed her eyes. Nate stood by the bed for a beat, looking down at her face turned sideways on the pillow, her neck long and elegant.

  He went back into the living room, powered up his TALON, saw the titles, and opened the German- and English-language files: Wilhelm Petrs GmbH; Berlin assembly plant, Germany; KT550G Seismic Isolation Floor System; rated for III–IV MMI intensity; twenty million euros plus installation team costs. He knew they had what PROD needed. The lines scrolled past his eyes in a waterfall of data. Screen after screen. Bingo. A sound from the bedroom and he looked up.

  “Is the information there?” Dominika said in Russian, standing in the doorway. “Did we get it?”

  Nate nodded. “How much is Moscow charging Tehran for the floor?” he asked.

  Dominika shivered instead of shrugging. “Over two billion rubles, I think; I’m not sure.”