“This man Divine—what’s his first name?”
“Archer,” he responded.
“Archer Divine. Honestly, that sounds made up. Can you describe him to me?”
Wally watched as Tiger summoned a visual image of this guy Divine.
“Strong physique, more than six foot,” Tiger said as he sat back down with her. “Perhaps fifty-five years old. Silver hair.”
“Does he have children that you know of?” Wally had begun to feel certain she knew who “Divine” was.
Tiger gave her a curious look but nodded.
“Is there a son? Maybe named Kyle?” Her voice had taken on a sarcastic, angry tone that she couldn’t control.
“Yes, Kyle. When we work, his name is “Seth,” but he rarely works with us, unlike his sister. He’s privileged.”
Shit. As she’d begun to suspect, Richard Townsend and Archer Divine were the same person. Kyle had really done a job on her, spinning his complicated lies while all the time luring her to this place. Wally felt sick to her stomach.
“My God,” Wally whispered, her mind reeling at the implications. “I am such a fucking idiot.”
She stood up and paced the floor anxiously as she explained to Tiger about Kyle, how she had fallen for the tragic account of his abusive father and tried to help him find his biological mother—all of it bullshit, apparently. She kept her head turned away from him most of the time, afraid to see his response to the pathetic tale. She’d been foolish and naive.
“His father’s identity—Richard Townsend or Archer Divine. Maybe one is made up, maybe both. It doesn’t matter. The plan all along was to lure me out.”
Wally thought about the trip to the Adirondack lodge, and the intense connection that she and Kyle had supposedly shared there. In fact, his only goal was to get her in a vulnerable place where she could be taken. The men there—Alabama, and the one she had shot and killed—had been working with Kyle the entire time. She thought about his “screams” when he had supposedly been interrogated by the men. All faked.
Wally felt her stomach turn all over again.
“Why do this?” Wally asked. “What’s their game?”
Tiger didn’t answer, but Wally could see he had been considering different possibilities in his mind, and all of them were dark—dark for Wally, and almost certainly dark for Tiger. Wally silently cursed herself and continued pacing. Lewis had told her to be careful, to be sure that she was making choices for the right reasons, and she hadn’t listened.
“What’s Divine’s business?” she asked Tiger.
“We do different jobs for him,” Tiger said. “But his main trade is weapons.”
Like Klesko, Wally thought to herself. And Tiger too. She had read the international warrants that awaited Tiger in the real world, and many of the crimes named involved black-market weapons. Wally thought about the reporter, N. F. Queely, and the story he’d written about the intense competition among Americans trading black-market arms overseas. Maybe Jake’s guess had been right—maybe Queely really had died for that story.
Maybe Divine had ordered his murder.
27.
“WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT OUR mother?” Wally asked.
Wally and Tiger had both been there when Claire Stoneman had died, holding her in their arms as she lay bleeding in the fresh November snow on Shelter Island. Wally had lived most of her life with Claire, but for Tiger, that one tragic moment of connection was all he had to cling to. Wally felt the enormity of the responsibility she carried: Tiger’s knowledge of his mother would be created now, through her words.
“Ne perezhvai,” he said again, averting his gaze. “You needn’t bother.”
“Well,” Wally said, “now you’re just pissing me off.”
He looked toward Wally, surprised by her tone.
“What’s done is done,” Tiger said, simply.
Wally glared at him, feeling both angry and hurt by his refusal.
“You can pretend you don’t care,” she said, anger decorating every word, “but that’s bullshit. You’ve looked for information about me online—I traced your searches. We wouldn’t have met face-to-face that night if you hadn’t been seeking me out the same way I’ve been looking for you.”
Wally could see him stiffen, embarrassed to be exposed in that way. She thought of a movie she had seen once about a man living alone in the wilderness who tried to forge a friendship with a wild wolf. It had taken months of the man laying out one morsel of food at a time, each day just a little bit closer until he finally could reach out and touch the animal.
“Claire held so much back,” Wally began, setting out a “morsel” for him. Who knew if she would have another chance to share her memories? “She lied to protect me, so I’m always questioning how well I really knew her. I can tell you she was a good person, and she was capable of love.”
Wally wanted to say that Claire had loved her, but then what conclusion would Tiger be forced to draw? That Claire had not loved him? That she had abandoned him as a child because she loved her daughter more than her son? Wally knew it wasn’t true.
“She was sad a lot of the time,” Wally went on, “and I never really understood why until I learned about you. I sometimes wonder at how she lived with it—leaving you, I mean. It was obvious that she carried around a ton for the rest of her life. It must have been horrible.”
Tiger said nothing, but he was clearly deep in thought, the flickering light of the fire playing on the features of his face, which were delicate and hard all at once.
“You look like her,” Wally told him, only just realizing it herself. And now she had his attention. “Your profile,” she continued. “The shape of your nose and brow, so intense. It makes me remember her to look at you. It hurts.”
She had reached him. “I’m afraid to ask you about your life,” she blurted out, surprising herself. “Because I was given so much. And you were left practically on your own.”
“I didn’t need anyone. I made my way and asked for nothing.”
“It’s not supposed to be that way, you know,” Wally said.
He merely shrugged. She realized that breaking through Tiger’s defenses would be a long-term challenge, and she wouldn’t be able do it without his help.
Noticing the similarities between Tiger and Claire had made Wally wonder something.
“Am I like him?” she asked.
Almost against his will, Tiger looked at Wally, contemplating her features. She watched as his eyes finally settled on hers.
“Yes,” she said. “I know. Ochee chornya.” Dark eyes. Deep gray, almost black. The one feature Wally undeniably shared with their father. “I think about it,” she said. “About my nature, and where that comes from. I’m selfish and reckless. I’ve brought harm to the people I cared about most. My mother wasn’t like that, so where does that come from if not from him?”
“You can believe me,” Tiger said bitterly, “you are nothing like him.”
By the tone in his voice, Wally couldn’t tell if his words were a compliment or an insult.
She suddenly felt exhausted. Carrying on ninety percent of a conversation was brutally difficult work.
“I’m hungry,” she said, scanning the room. “And I have to pee.” She got up and found a filthy, crudely constructed bathroom in the far corner of the room. Once inside, she sat on the cold seat, facing the yellowed ceramic sink. A small hairbrush, a toothbrush, and a half-used tube of toothpaste rested on its surface. The dismal tableau made Wally even angrier than she was already.
“Where do they feed you?” Wally asked Tiger when she reemerged.
“The sixth floor,” he said. “There are things to make sandwiches and leftover food in the refrigerator.”
Wally made her way to the locked door and po
unded on the dense metal surface.
“We’re hungry,” she shouted. “Open up!”
Tiger stood and approached her, looking cautious, but Wally signaled for him to keep back.
“It’ll be fine,” she told him.
There was no response to her pounding, so she began kicking the door with her boots again and again. Each hit sounded like thunder as the metal creaked and echoed through the warehouse. After half a minute, the lock turned and the door opened to reveal two people standing outside. One was a young woman with brown hair tied back in a bun and a tremendously buff physique—juiced, probably. She held a 9mm Glock at her side, one finger resting on the trigger.
The second person was Alabama, whom she’d last seen chasing her down through the Eagle Rock Reservation. He had gauze on the side of his face and neck where she had burned him, and small dark spots had formed on the bandage where the oozing fluids from his wounds had begun to seep through.
“Alabama,” Wally nodded at him. He returned her greeting with a stare so cold and murderous that it sent a shiver down her spine—but Wally was determined not to let him know that he was intimidating her in any way.
“What do you want?” the girl asked.
“We need food.”
The girl mulled it over. “I’ll give you one minute in the kitchen. Come with me.”
She continued into the hallway, catching the silent exchange between Alabama and the girl. He relocked the door and held his post while the girl followed Wally up the stairs. As they climbed upward, Wally could see a dozen or more closed doors in the hallways of the upper floors—the only other person they encountered was another guard, tall and wiry, who raised a shotgun as Wally passed by.
“What’s your name?” Wally asked the girl as they climbed the stairs.
“Shut the fuck up,” the girl growled.
“Catchy.”
The sixth floor was one large, open room with a kitchen-and-dining area and a lounge space with a big-screen TV. There was a row of locked offices at the inside wall, and Wally could see a large computer monitor on one of the desks—the same computer, she guessed, that Tiger had used to watch her.
Wally went straight to the kitchen area and easily discovered leftovers in a large industrial refrigerator. There was pepperoni pizza, along with some green apples. She couldn’t be sure how long they would be held in the room downstairs, so she grabbed pretty much everything that looked edible, including some sweet things. There was beer in the refrigerator, and Wally grabbed a few bottles. She found an empty grocery bag and stuffed the goods inside.
Back inside Tiger’s room, Wally heated the cold pizza on the top surface of the woodstove until the air was full of the salty, greasy, delicious smell of pepperoni and cheese. Wally was gratified that Tiger ate with her, at least.
They each ate two apples and drank the bottles of beer, but they were both still hungry. Wally dug through the remainder of what she had grabbed from the kitchen, including most everything from the cabinet that held the sweet things. There were some gingerbread cookies, graham crackers, marshmallows, two large jars of applesauce, and some chocolate bars.
“Oh my God,” Wally said, pulling the graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate from the bag. “S’mores.”
Tiger looked confused.
“It’s kind of a dessert,” she explained.
Wally found some wire hangers that Tiger had used to hang up a couple of shirts. She unbent the hangers and produced two long, thin metal skewers. Tiger watched curiously as Wally speared two marshmallows on each skewer and handed him one.
“You hold them over the flame,” she said. “It’ll only take a minute.”
Wally held her marshmallows over the hot embers of the woodstove, and Tiger followed her lead. They watched as the heat began to caramelize the surface of the marshmallows, turning them dark brown.
“Mom made these for me,” Wally said, thinking back. “The first time, we had rented a beach house for a week on Martha’s Vineyard—I think I was seven or eight years old. One night we made a little fire pit in the sand down by the water’s edge. As the sun went down these swarms of mosquitoes descended on us, so we huddled close to the fire and the smoke kept them away. It was so . . . just, really nice. Mom brought the ingredients out and told me they were called s’mores. As in, if you eat one you’ll always want some more.”
She could feel Tiger watching her as she relayed the memory, and couldn’t help but wonder—did he have even one memory in his troubled life to equal hers? Could he even relate to the sensations and feelings that she was describing? That expression on his face, was it resentment—anger, even—as he was forced to listen to the details of happy moments between mother and child that he had been forced to live without?
When the surface of the marshmallows started to char, Wally pulled hers from the stove and motioned for Tiger to do the same.
“Here,” Wally said. “Let me.”
She broke a graham cracker in two, placing a large piece of chocolate on one half. She then took Tiger’s skewer and placed his toasted marshmallows onto the chocolate. Setting the second half of the graham cracker on top of the marshmallows, she pressed down on the cracker and pulled the skewer away, creating a sandwich with chocolate and toasted marshmallows on the inside and graham crackers on the outside. She passed it to Tiger.
“It’s important to squeeze down now,” Wally said. Tiger obeyed, pressing on the sandwich until the hot, gooey insides of the marshmallows broke through the charred outer skin and spread out onto the chocolate, melting it.
“That’s it,” Wally said. “You have to eat it right now.”
Wally watched as Tiger bit into his s’more, a vivid expression of pleasure crossing his face as the sweet flavors mixed together. His mouth stopped moving, and his eyes glazed over as he focused all his attention on the sensation of taste, as if the flavor was some kind of revelation. Wally could feel her heart breaking—for Tiger, for herself, and for their mother, Claire. For all the moments the three of them should have shared, but had missed and lost forever.
They came for Tiger at dusk: Divine and Rachel and four of their men, all except Divine armed and training their weapons on Wally and Tiger.
“Tiger,” Divine said simply. “Let’s go.”
Wally turned to Tiger and looked into his eyes. Had she reached him, in any way? She felt a surge of panic, all of a sudden worried that the few hours spent together were all they would ever have, and that she had failed. There was nothing in his expression to confirm her fears or reassure her, either. She stepped forward and wrapped him up in her arms, holding him as tightly as she could.
He didn’t return her embrace, but he took advantage of the moment to whisper in her ear.
“The south wall,” he said. “Search the loose bricks.”
“But—”
“Believe nothing they say,” he added. “Just run.”
28.
THE HELICOPTER STAYED HIGH OFF THE GROUND,
in order to attract as little attention as possible on its trip west. Tiger was fairly sure he knew their eventual destination, and if he was right it would only be a few minutes before they arrived.
“You know where we’re going?” Divine said, practically shouting over the noise inside the cabin. His words were more a statement of fact than a question.
“Sweet,” Tiger replied.
Divine nodded. “Sweet and I have some conflicting business interests,” he explained. “And our relationship has become strained recently. Something is going to happen regardless, so I might as well control what that something is.”
“I would have done the job,” Tiger said. “There was no need to involve my sister.”
“I’m not sure you would have—not the way I need it done.”
“How?”
“I need you to show your face.”
Tiger thought about this, realization sinking in. Sweet had long-time partnerships with crime families around the world, associates who would lose money if Divine managed to get rid of his rival. There would be consequences—blowback, as the Americans called it—fatal ones. If it was known that he—Tiger Klesko, son of Alexei—was Sweet’s killer, blame for the incident would be placed somewhere else, somewhere thousands of miles to the east: Piter. The Vory would deny their involvement, of course, but who would believe them?
With Sweet’s security team always surrounding him, a close-up killing was a suicide mission for Tiger.
“For five years I’ve been looking for a way to get rid of Sweet,” Divine continued, a hint of triumph already on his face. “Then, five months ago you showed up at the Ranch. Goes to show you the virtue of patience.”
So, Tiger thought, he had been doomed from day one at the Ranch. All the work he had done for Divine had been a waste. Tiger’s hopes of a new life for himself had been foolish, and he silently cursed himself for not realizing it sooner.
He scanned the cabin of the helicopter. There were five of them besides the pilot—Tiger, Divine, Rachel, and two other gunmen he had seen before but never worked with. No chance for an alliance there. To the rear of the cab was an impressive array of weapons, both small arms and assault weapons, plus two grenade launchers—a backup plan, no doubt. If Tiger moved quickly enough he might be able to reach the pilot—there were several ways he could imagine bringing them all down, to end the mission before it even got started.
“I like your spirit,” Divine said, as if reading Tiger’s thoughts. “But my instructions to the Ranch were clear—any interruption of our plan, and your sister will die.”
“You’re going to kill her anyway.”
Instead of denying this immediately, Divine reached into a side compartment and pulled out a small stack of photographs, which he passed to Tiger. They were surveillance photos—taken from a distance with a long lens—of his sister Wally, in the company of two other teenagers, a petite Asian girl and a fit, clean-cut guy. They looked familiar to Tiger, and it only took a moment for him to realize that this same couple had been part of Wally’s street crew several months earlier.
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