Mesmerized

by Gayle Lynds

  Michelle frowned and handed her keys across the desk. "I'd hoped for more of a commitment. Oh, well. In any case, you have to tell me what's really happened to you when this is over. Everything. I can't stand not knowing. But I can wait until your arrest is less imminent." She dialed her phone and spoke into it. "Dwight, bring up my Ferrari and leave it by my private entrance." As she set the phone back in its cradle, she smiled conspiratorially. "So where are you going—Madagascar? San Martin? Maybe Costa Rica? I hear they won't extradite anyone."

  "Nothing so romantic or remote. And I can't tell you. That's for both our protection." As Beth met her in the middle of the room, gloom swept through her. Yes, there was the issue of survival. If you get out of this mess . . . "I'll be happy to fill you in over a couple of glasses of wine eventually. My treat."

  "I'd like that." She was staring at Beth. "You're shaking. What's wrong, dear? Are you really that afraid?"

  It hit her like a lightning bolt. "It's nothing. I'll eat and take my meds and the shaking will stop."

  Michelle hesitated. "Well, that's not so bad. Come along. What's the advantage of owning a company if you can't have all the comforts?" She marched toward a door across the room. "Come here, dear. Food. This will be less dangerous than stopping at some horrible little fast-food joint."

  Beth joined her at the doorway. "You're right." Inside was a gleaming kitchenette.

  "Tilaina keeps my refrigerator stocked." There were bottles of Perrier, two French champagnes, fruit, pâté, crackers, and green apples. "Not particularly well-balanced, but perhaps it will do."

  "Yes, thanks. It's great." Beth smiled as Michelle packed food into her shoulder bag. "No champagne. This isn't exactly a bubbly moment."

  Michelle chuckled as Beth closed the bag, and they walked together back into her office and toward the door.

  "How can I thank you, Michelle?"

  The older woman reached for her throat again. The strange pain was gone. "Thank me? You may not believe this, but I really am sorry for what I did to you. I owe you a great deal. Just come back alive." Her small face spread in a wide smile. "We have a great deal of business to do together."

  29

  On his verandah in Pennsylvania, Caleb Bates stood up and strode away from the table, his spartan lunch finished. Cows grazed on the green hillsides behind his mansion and to his left, a farmhand touched up the paint on one of the white posts that framed the entry gates. With the verdant pastures and big, sturdy trees, it was a quiet bucolic scene to anyone from the outside. Still, as he headed into the colonial mansion, Bates felt his blood pulse with excitement. The Keepers were on the move at last toward their rendezvous with history, and there was much left to be done.

  Fully outfitted, their assignments memorized, the fanatics had been trickling out of the farm all morning in pickups and on foot. Some caught the bus a mile down the road. Others rode bicycles. It was one thing to arrive en masse, hidden by the night, in a rural area. But daylight hid few secrets, particularly in a metropolis. Eventually all would reach their next-to-last stop singly and in small groups—one of two supply depots just outside downtown Washington, where they would have slipped quietly into place by midnight.

  As he wandered through the mansion's rooms, he felt an acute tension between KGB general Alexei Berianov and whatever he had become as American nationalist colonel Caleb Bates. It was unsettling, as if neither of the two men was quite the same as he had been. Even more, as if he, Alexei Berianov, had somehow been corrupted. Bates was the kind of man Berianov had spent his lifetime trying to defang and then destroy. And yet. . . . He shook his head angrily. Bates was essential to his plan. But soon it would be over, and Bates could vanish into the same ether from which he had been created. Berianov was impatient for tomorrow. Eager for the world to—

  His cell phone vibrated against his padded chest. He resisted the impulse to pull it out immediately. Instead, he headed upstairs, nodding to one of the Keepers who passed through the foyer on her way to the kitchen. In his second-floor office, where he was alone, he answered the phone. "Yes?"

  It was Ivan Vok. Unlike Berianov and Fedorov, the burly killer had never lost his accent when he spoke English, perhaps because for him it was a third language, after his native Kazakh and Russian.

  Vok rumbled unhappily, "Is not good news, Alexei."

  Berianov answered in Russian. "Fedorov didn't get her?" Beth Convey was turning into a far bigger problem than he had ever imagined.

  Vok switched to Russian: "The first thing I saw was Jeff Hammond and Beth Convey walking around the corner from her house, and Fedorov arriving in a station wagon nearby. There was a gun fight with goddamn witnesses, and I was too far away to stop her from shooting or to kill her myself. By the time I was close enough, it was all over." He sighed heavily. "I grabbed Fedorov's gun and shoved fake tourist papers and a billfold into his pocket. What else was I to do, Alexei? It's a good thing I always carry those drops when I'm on a job."

  As he listened to Vok describe how he had decided to check on Fedorov's success and instead had witnessed his death at Beth Convey's hands, a vise seemed to grip Berianov's chest. "The witnesses will tell the police she killed him, but from what you say a lot of people could have seen him shoot first. They'll fill in the cops on that, too."

  "Yes. It's lousy. Then as soon as I left there, I sent out word to all of our other people to find them, okay? Finally one of them called to say Hammond and Convey were trapped at the Watergate." Vok muttered something in Kazakh. "But they got away there, too. Today, everyone's an amateur!"

  Berianov shook his head, worried. But perhaps it was not all bad. "At least the police will be looking for her now, too. That increases the pressure. She'll make a mistake. She doesn't know how to run, and that will help us locate her."

  "She's got help now." Vok made a disgusted sound. "She went off with that Hammond styervo."

  The vise on Berianov's chest tightened. "Tell me."

  Berianov had been standing beside his desk, his fist balled as he leaned on it. He straightened and moved to the French doors that opened to the outdoor gallery. He made himself look out onto his pastoral farm. His head throbbed with anger, but he fought down any sense of weakening. The future demanded he succeed, that they all succeed. He noted four Keepers leaving for their assignments, dressed in ordinary street clothes. That was what this aggravating exercise was all about. Tomorrow.

  He said, "Tell our people there'll be an award for the one who finds them. I'll make up a story so the Keepers will look for them, too. If you can, I want you to finish Hammond and this Convey person yourself. I don't care how you do it, Ivan Ivanovich. Don't worry any longer about making it look nice or like an accident. Just kill them. Quickly."

  He heard a rare note of pleasure in Ivan Vok's gruff voice. "I planted a tracking device in the station wagon, Alexei. That's how I found Fedorov. Convey and Hammond are in the same station wagon now." He chuckled. "Don't worry."

  In a large, airy living room in southern Maryland, the smile disappeared from Ivan Vok's face as he pressed the OFF button on his cell phone and made a series of calls to his people. He did not pace or wave his arms as he gave orders. He was at General Berianov's secret headquarters, a luxury apartment building with patrolling security guards and a view of Maryland that included portions of the District itself.

  Burly and heavily muscled, Vok headed for the glossy wood table that doubled as a desk. His blood was coursing excitedly, while his mind worked. He had a real job again. He was a quiet man who seldom spoke unless asked a direct question. Some believed that was because he was stupid and had nothing to say, but the opposite was true. Vok was intelligent, cunning, and so tight-lipped he had been the most trusted of all the KGB's assassins, until the tragic end of all he had valued. Until his beloved KGB was eviscerated, to be reborn as the Federal Security Service, the FSB.

  He came by his lethal talents naturally. His mother was Kazakh, descended from warrior Turks conquered by Genghis Khan a
nd his clan, while his father was a European Russian. Vok inherited his mother's Mongol features but his father's bloody ways. There was a saying in Kazakh: "If you are friends with a Russian, take care to have an ax with you."

  His parents' union was tumultuous, born on the bruising infinity of the Central Asian steppe where the land stretched as flat as a tabletop. Vok grew up near a city the Russians renamed Tselinograd, but which local Kazakhs still ominously called Aqmola—"white tomb." That was where his father coolly killed his mother in their domed yurt, while their dinner of bread, sour cream, sausage, and koumiss—fermented mare's milk—lay waiting on the low table. She had been desperate to stay on this wind-swept plain she claimed fed her soul, while he had announced they were leaving.

  Ivan had been fond of his mother, but not that fond. For him, her death meant liberation. His father moved him and his younger brothers to Moscow, where the older Vok had been offered promotion by the KGB in recognition of his deadly gifts. Ten years later, young Vok, who had committed several felonies as a teenager but was never caught, followed into service. He had his father's technical expertise and his mother's passion. He quickly distinguished himself with a series of cold-blooded successes.

  Honored, medaled, and respected, he was soon promoted so high that his father worked under him until his death. Then in 1991, Vok's world collapsed. The coup to topple Gorbachev and return the Soviet Union to its former honor failed.

  After that, he and many of his comrades were fired. The FSB retained mostly those who had been on the lowest rungs and therefore were less rooted in the past and more pliable. Unemployed, Vok continued to live in Moscow on a small pension that often went unpaid, growing more frustrated. He knew he was going to have to join the self-serving "democrats" who were ruining his country, or he would end up at the bottom of the pig trough as some rich oligarch's bodyguard. Russia had become a dishonorable place. Even now, the pain of it ate at him like acid.

  Then Alexei Berianov gave him a second chance by inviting him to work secretly in the United States, and he went eagerly. He quickly adapted to American transportation, food, and culture. After all, he had spent most of his adult life traveling the world on assignment. He had often been in the United States.

  There were a hundred ways to kill, and he knew each one intimately. Enjoyed each one. That was a language everyone understood. Now his blood was up. Every nerve felt alive. He sat with his notepad, a squat, massive figure with a Mongol face, and made phone calls.

  As soon as he finished, he strode into the biggest of the three bedrooms, which had been converted into a technical lab to create counterfeit people—everything from false identities to disguises, including complete face masks. Once in the old Cold War days, when two of his killers had been required to go into South Africa under cover, his artist had created masks so believable that the two white assassins had been transformed into black revolutionaries who sat and chatted so convincingly with an American diplomat in a purring U.S. Embassy limousine in Johannesburg that he had personally escorted them into the secure building, where they completed their mission. Hollywood had nothing over Kremlin techniques.

  Vok entered the walk-in closet and flipped on the overhead light. Under protective plastic hung two rows of authentic costumes in a variety of sizes—soldiers' and policemen's uniforms, priests' habits, coveralls for drivers of delivery trucks, pricey business suits, party dresses, and an array of casual clothes suitable for tourists in all seasons.

  He would not disappoint Alexei Berianov. Moreover, he would not disappoint himself. He had set his people in motion. Beth Convey and Jeff Hammond would be found soon, and they would never know who had killed them. In his mind, they were already dead.

  30

  In Tyson's Corner, Virginia, Beth and Jeff loaded the sniper's black cases into the Ferrari, and Jeff took the wheel. As he drove onto the Beltway heading north, she passed him slices of green apple and crackers topped with soft brie cheese. She ate, too, and took her meds with long gulps of Michelle's Perrier.

  It was mid-afternoon, and white clouds hung low in the sky, blocking the spring sun. The fast red sports car sliced along the shadowed highway, slowing as the Friday afternoon traffic grew more thick. They had seen several patrol cars, but none had shown interest in them or their new vehicle. They were almost beginning to feel safe.

  "This car's a beauty," Jeff decided. "Handles like a dream."

  "If the circumstances were better, I'd look forward to driving it, too."

  He smiled and nodded while she studied him—the straight forehead, the dark brown hair tucked up under his cap. His nose was aquiline, faintly curved, in perfect balance with his solid jaw. He had strong features—dense eyebrows, heavy black lashes, big ears, and a generous mouth with a lot of nice white teeth. He might not be cover-boy material, but he was someone you definitely would enjoy looking at first thing in the morning. Ruggedly handsome, she decided.

  "A question for you," she said. "You don't act like any journalist I ever met. Come on, Jeff, level with me. You're a good reporter, but you're also something else. You tell me you saved me twice, and I believe you. But ordinary reporters aren't trained to go around saving people who are being shot at. When you charged after the killer in the station wagon, you were aggressive, not some novice just off the newsprint farm. And yes, I know you used to be with the FBI. But according to the news, that was a long time ago. Amazing you've kept your skills so well-honed. It all makes me wonder . . . are you still with them?"

  His expression remained unchanged. "You have a hell of an imagination, Convey. And you're exaggerating my skills. I got mad, and I got lucky."

  "Nonsense. I saw you. And don't forget one major point. You've got a Beretta. That's not something regular people—even investigative journalists—carry concealed in a shoulder holster. It's a serious weapon with serious purposes. You're still with the FBI, aren't you, Jeff?"

  He frowned. Then he sighed. "Just one more reason to hate lawyers. I suppose I'd end up telling you anyway, since your life's on the line as well." He paused. It was difficult for him, after so many years of secrecy. "I was on the team that debriefed many of the defectors, and that's how I ended up going undercover."

  He described the influx of Soviets seeking asylum in the United States in exchange for information, and how at first the CIA and the FBI had welcomed them. Then with the stream of bodies and the repetitive information and the expense of it all, both agencies began to see little reason to continue to take them in.

  "So you knew Ogust, Berianov, and Yurimengri a lot better than you let on."

  "In some ways, yes. Berianov came out of the KGB's Department Eight, a highly secret group trained to do special-forces work, like assassinations of senior political and military figures. Then he was promoted to the top of the First Chief Directorate, the FCD, which handled foreign intelligence. It was the KGB's most elite agency, the one operatives aspired to join. Yurimengri and Ogust were colonels with the FCD, while Berianov ended up a full general, the top of that grisly totem pole. Yurimengri held posts in Africa and around the Mediterranean before he returned to Moscow. Ogust was a field agent for a while, too, then worked in the FCD's commercial affairs section, creating and running front organizations to cover and help finance overseas espionage."

  Excited, she fished in her purse and pulled out the clipping about Mikhail Ogust. "Ogust has to be my heart donor. But all I really know is what's in the story you wrote. I signed papers before the surgery promising not to try to find out about him or his family, and they signed similar papers guaranteeing my privacy. But that doesn't mean I haven't wondered. So many things have happened that might be explained if I knew more. What kind of man was he? Where did he come from? What did he like and dislike?"

  She stared down at the Slavic face in the newspaper photograph, and an odd déjà vu rushed through her. Heart, are you paying attention? This is for you.

  Jeff nodded, understanding. "He was something of a wunderkind. Very young to ri
se so fast, but that was partly because he lacked something Russians usually extol as a national virtue—patience."

  He had lived in his mind with these three men for nearly a decade, had heard their stories from their own mouths, had studied the classified dossiers on them, and then had added details and anecdotes from those who knew them. He had burned everything deep into his brain until he felt a visceral connection to the three. The mind was nothing without imagination, and much of what made a good intelligence agent—and a good journalist—was the ability to transcend dry statistics and facts.

  She said, "Almost as soon as I awoke from surgery I felt impatient and restless, even when I was still drugged. The restlessness has never gone away."

  "Sounds like Ogust. Of the three, I liked him most, although I never trusted any of them. He was enormously charming, something of a con man. But he also had a short fuse. I once saw him turn purple and ram a parking ticket into a meter maid's pocket. Petty and stupid. Of course, he ended up in jail. After the Bureau got him out, he controlled himself better. He was not only physical, but smart as hell, too. Highly educated. He came from Leningrad—"

  "St. Petersburg."

  "Right. The capital of the tsars and the cradle of communism. That's where the Soviet system was born, and he grew up with an intense sense of history, which his parents encouraged. They were academics and full members of the Communist party. Of course, he was an atheist, but he still talked about the Russian soul, sometimes even to explain why he had done something or why the KGB leadership made a certain decision. You have to understand that Russians speak of their souls as if they were as visible as their feet, which is probably one reason religion has made such a widespread comeback there. It never really left."

  "What did he eat? What were his hobbies?"

  "He never gave up his love of Russian food. He and his wife, Tatiana, often ate out at local Russian restaurants. I heard she was homesick a lot, which is probably true, since she moved back after he died. As for hobbies, he didn't really have any. You saw in the story that he was a karate master. That was a holdover from when he'd been an operative. Also, he could drive anything. Give him a tractor or a Maserati, and he was at home. But he'd like the Maserati a lot more because he enjoyed speed."