“Who’s in charge now that Armitage is dead?” I asked.
That adrenalized grin came blazing back again. How had I never noticed how white her teeth were before?
“That depends,” Paula said, “on who ends up with Gobi.”
“What do you mean?”
Paula gazed appreciatively at Gobi. “She’s a human weapon, Stormaire. The best mercenary around. One in a million. Armitage seriously underestimated her capabilities, and it cost him his life. I won’t make that mistake.”
“It’s not like she’s programmable,” I said. “She’s not just some machine that will do whatever you tell her.”
“I think she will, once she finds out what I’m offering.”
“And what’s that?”
“Clearly more than you ever could.”
“She doesn’t kill people for money, Paula.”
“You’re standing up for her. How gallant.”
Throughout all of this, Gobi still hadn’t said anything. Some part of me was just waiting for her to snap into motion, dodging bullets while she opened fire on Paula and the helicopter. Paula must have been waiting for it too. The grin disappeared and her eyes went cold, and when she spoke again her voice was both louder and sharper, an announcement of ultimatum marking the close of play.
“Gobija Zaksauskas,” Paula said.
Gobi didn’t budge.
“This is the situation. If your next move is anything except putting down that gun and coming with me now, Perry’s whole family is going to die in the most horrible way that you can imagine.” Paula kept the gun pointed straight at her. “Let me repeat that. Either you come with us now, or I will kill Perry and his family. Is there anything about this scenario that you don’t understand?”
Nobody spoke. I realized that I was holding my breath. We all knew the stakes. If there was one miracle left in the night, I prayed for it to happen now.
Gobi raised the machine gun, turned, and looked at me.
“As atsiprasau,” she said. “I am sorry, Perry.”
“Wait,” I said. “Just-”
Behind the pistol, Paula tensed, getting ready. I saw the bald sharpshooter on the helicopter coil tighter around his rifle. The red dot on Gobi’s head held perfectly still between her eyes, the punctuation mark that waits for all of us somewhere in the end.
But, Gobi just put down her weapon on the tarmac and walked over to the helicopter. She got onboard without a backwards glance.
It lifted up and flew away, leaving me standing there alone.
34. “I Will Buy You a New Life” — Everclear
A half-hour later I found myself back in the center of town. The fire was finally out at the Hotel Schoeneweiss, leaving Main Street smelling like the biggest ashtray on the planet. Everywhere I looked, dozens of scorched and blinking Santa Clauses were still roaming the streets, dazed and bewildered, and the singed ClauWau banner was dangling from one of the buildings. Blue flashing police and fire truck lights flickered off the blackened foundation of the old liquor store, which had already been cordoned off by emergency crews. An upside-down sleigh lay half buried under a pile of bricks. A reindeer dipped its head to drink from a black puddle with a Santa cap floating in it.
Everywhere I looked, Swiss cops and soldiers stood with high-intensity LED flashlights, shining them on the faces of passersby, lining up eyewitnesses against the wall, asking for ID.
I turned and slunk up the other way, down an alley, and disappeared into the darkness.
I took the wad of euros that Gobi had given me out of my pocket and counted them with only slightly shaking hands. There was a few hundred here, along with the fake ID that she’d given me back in Italy, a picture snapped at a train station photo booth, a face I barely recognized as mine. I could get on another train, if I had the slightest idea where to go.
Or I could just give up. Wave the white flag. Sweet surrender. It had never been more tempting. Even if I could get my family back again, what would life back in America be like? Was “normal and ordinary” still any kind of option? Had it ever been?
A clumsy, scraping splash rang down from the far end of the alley. I heard a muffled curse and a series of slowly approaching footsteps.
Halfway down the alley, the man switched on a flashlight, and I saw his face.
The beard.
The sneer.
The camera.
There was no mistaking that combination-Swierczynski.
He was wearing a long, shabby coat with tails that practically dragged the ground behind him so that they picked up little scraps of debris along the way, which was probably his idea of going undercover. I could tell by the way he was moving that he hadn’t seen me yet.
I felt a surge of adrenaline-it felt good to be mad about something I could do something about right away. I might not know the first thing about fighting, but at this point, I didn’t care what happened to me, and that alone gave me the advantage.
Edging back into the shadows, I put my back to the wall and waited, hearing his boots shuffle closer, waiting until he was right in front of me. I remembered back in Venice when he’d tried to grab Gobi’s shotgun. He hadn’t been particularly quick about it-without the element of surprise, he had no advantage at all.
I reached out, grabbed the camera by the strap, and twisted.
He grunted and went down, already on his back by the time my knee landed on his chest.
“Still trying to tail Gobi?” I got right into his face, close enough that I could smell the pickles and sour vodka on his breath. Whatever Kaya was paying this guy, it was too much. “I might be able to help you with that.”
“Where is she?”
I climbed off his chest. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“On your feet,” I said. “We’re going to see Kaya.”
He blinked at me, not understanding.
“Right now,” I said. “It’s time to visit your boss.”
A quick, dismissive head shake. “Is not possible.”
“Oh, is possible.” I gave him a cold smile that had nothing to do with any of the ordinary reasons that people smile-happiness, humor, hope. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my tour of Europe, it’s that as human beings, we’re all a whole lot more flexible than we might think.”
“But I cannot-”
“I want to talk to Kaya. You have a contact number, an e-mail… You tell him I want a meeting right now, tonight.”
“I cannot make promises.” He was sounding more Slavic by the moment. “Is not my decision to make.”
“Ask yourself how pissed off Kaya’s going to be when he finds out that you lost Gobi,” I told him. “She was working for him, right? And you’re supposed to be her babysitter. In other words, you had one job and you screwed it up. How much of your ass do you think he’s going to chew off for losing her in Switzerland?” I waited, silently counting to ten before adding, almost off-handedly, “Especially when I can tell him where to find her?”
He recrossed his arms and glared at me even harder, then muttered something in Russian.
Twenty minutes later, we were on a train.
35. “This Is Not America” — David Bowie
There was a car waiting for us at the Lausanne train station, a gunmetal blue Peugeot 306. Its driver never said a word as he drove us out of the lot and into the Alpine night. Through tinted glass, I watched snowcapped peaks and summits slide past us in a darkly winding blur of ear-popping dips and hairpin turns, the driver hardly slowing, barely steering, as if the car knew the way by itself. Slouched in the back beside me, Swierczynski brooded in morose eastern European silence, breathing audibly through his beard and doing everything in his power to make the expensive leather upholstery smell like a Ukrainian deli. I would have been okay with opening one of the windows, except that the wind was really howling outside and it felt like it was getting colder by the minute.
I stared out at the dark mountains.
I thought about my f
amily.
I thought about Gobi.
Of course, my bluff about being able to tell him where she was had been exactly that, a bluff. But I’d gotten out of tighter spots with guys more dangerous than him, and in the end, he couldn’t afford to be wrong about me, even if it was a long shot.
After an hour of driving we came down into a small Swiss village with narrow cobblestone streets and tall church steeples rising up on either side. It was almost midnight, and the whole town seemed asleep or deserted. This place, whatever it was called, made Zermatt look like Manhattan by comparison. The Peugeot stopped in front of a little corner tavern with a few lights burning inside, and Swierczynski got out and gestured for me to follow him.
Halfway through the doorway, I stopped him.
“If this is a setup,” I said, “you’ll never see her again. You know that, right?”
He grunted like he didn’t particularly care about that part anymore and held the door, ushering me the rest of the way inside.
The tavern was sawdusty and desolate, a drafty old-world beer hall with deer and mountain goat heads stuffed and mounted on the walls above a dartboard that no one was using. At the far end of the room, long wooden tables sat in front of a roaring fire. The bartender glanced up at me for the briefest of seconds, then ducked behind a row of taps to finish polishing the stein in front of him with the determined air of a proprietor who knew when to mind his own business.
I looked across the room to where a man in a suit was sitting by himself in front of the fire with a glass of wine. For a second we just looked at each other. Usually when you describe someone, you say he was in his forties, or had silver hair or a pointed nose or whatever. But the thing about this guy was, the longer I looked at him, the less sure I was about any defining physical feature. He could have been twenty-nine or forty-six. In the firelight, his hair might have been gray, or light blond, or even silver-streaked black. The only things that really stood out were the cold indifference radiating from his eyes, and that sense of anonymity that, in itself, was deeply chilling.
“Kaya,” I said.
He snorted. A smile that wasn’t a smile twisted like a thin wire at the corner of his mouth, and he took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to me. It read:
William J. Nolan
Support Integrations Officer
Central Intelligence Agency
“Kaya,” I said, and looked back down at the card. “CIA. Nice touch.”
“Believe it or not,” Nolan said, “it started out as a speech-enabled text error. Hard C, then I, A. The original program didn’t recognize acronyms. In the end, we kept it that way. Kind of a if-it’s-not-broke-why-fix-it sort of deal.”
I don’t know why I was surprised. “So the CIA are the ones running Gobi?”
“Gobi,” he said. “That’s cute. What’s she call you-Pokey?”
“You know she goes by that name.”
“Yes,” Nolan said, “but I prefer Zusane Elzbieta Zaksauskas.” He brought out a thick folder and opened it on the table, next to his wineglass. Inside I saw whole stacks of black-and-white photos, handwritten reports, official documents, and photocopied receipts stapled together, flickering in the firelight from behind us. There were a few pictures of me in there as well, surveillance pictures from our night in New York. Nolan flipped past them without comment until he reached a page of vital statistics. “Born September twenty-third, 1988, Karmelava, Lithuania, twenty-four years old, various aliases, weapons and combat training, blah-blah-blah, whereabouts currently unknown.”
“I know where she is.”
“Right.” Nolan hardly raised an eyebrow. “Not to burst your bubble, junior, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump right up and offer to blow you for that information on the spot.”
I frowned. “So… what? If you don’t think I can help you, why did you agree to meet me?”
“First rule of poker, kid. Look around the table for a sucker. If you don’t see him, it’s you.”
“I’ve already figured that out.”
“In fact, the only reason you’re even sitting here tonight is that I wanted to be sure you actually exist. You know, they have a running bet on you back at Langley? None of the analysts could believe one guy could have such spectacularly shitty luck with women.”
He tossed another surveillance photo across the table and gave me plenty of time to look at this one. It was a shot of me and Paula from early October, walking hand in hand outside Film Forum in New York. We’d just come out of a showing of The Getaway, the 1972 Sam Peckinpah original with Ali MacGraw and Steve McQueen. The picture had been taken just as I was leaning in to kiss her, and the camera had captured a look of supremely idiotic happiness on my face. If I survived this, I secretly pledged that I’d never let myself be that happy again.
“Paula Daniels, age twenty-four,” Nolan said, “born Paula Monash, an American citizen who grew up in Dubai.” Paula was twenty-four? And Monash? I was still looking at the picture, trying to figure out where I’d heard that name before, as Nolan kept talking.
“Paula’s father, Everett Monash, was an American financier working alongside George Armitage in the UAE. She turned eighteen and got into the family business.”
“She told me her dad was a record producer.”
Nolan was in the process of sipping wine and almost snorted it out his nose. “My. God.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “How is it you are still alive?”
I looked at the crime scene picture from yesterday-or was it two days ago? — of Armitage’s body splayed across the Venetian piazza in a pile of broken glass and spilled wine. Even in black and white it was pretty gruesome, like a big pan of lasagna had fallen on him.
“Why did you have Gobi kill him?”
“If you’re asking why we picked Zaksauskas for the job, you of all people should know that. The girl’s born to kill. If you’re asking why we targeted Armitage…” Nolan steepled his fingers in front of his lips, parsing information carefully. “Let’s just say that he and his checkered past presented a problem that our government couldn’t afford to deal with publicly-and he did need to be dealt with. We’re talking about a guy who helped sell Stinger missiles to Kurdish separatists for pocket change, and now he thinks he’s Richard Branson? Sorry, no. So back in August, one of our analysts happened to read that college essay you wrote online, and your crazy little European chick seemed like a perfect bet for cleanup duty.”
“Wait.” A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. “You picked Gobi because of me?”
“It was a great essay, kid. Vivid prose. Felt like I was there.” He must have seen my face, because he shook his head. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it. You didn’t know. Once she takes care of Paula, we’ll be all finished with her.”
“You know she’s got my family.”
Nolan went quiet, all smugness gone. “What?”
“Paula. She’s got my parents and my sister.”
“As of when?”
“Yesterday at least. Paula had pictures of them on her iPad, in some room somewhere.”
“You’re sure that she’s the one who did it?”
“If she didn’t, she’s associated with whoever did.”
“You have any proof?”
“I told you,” I said, “I saw the picture. There’s a video file too, where my mom and dad are talking about her.”
“You have that file?”
“No. It was on her iPad.”
“And where’s the iPad?”
“It got blown up in Zermatt.”
Nolan grunted. “I’ve noticed that happens a lot when Zusane Zaksauskas is around.”
“We’re talking about my family,” I said. “My parents. And my sister. Why would I possibly make something like that up?”
He didn’t bother answering the question. “And you have no idea where they might be?”
“Somewhere in western Europe. They’re in a room with no windows and n
o furniture. Other than that, no.”
“Well”-Nolan didn’t look happy-“we’ll look into it.” Even he must have realized how lame that sounded, because he straightened his posture and attempted to rephrase the statement. “We’ll make it a top priority. Meanwhile, we’ve got a tight hold on the asset, so everything’s stable, temporarily at least. Once she takes care of Paula, she’ll be back.”
“The asset?” It took me a second to figure out what he was talking about. “Are you talking about Gobi?”
“Who else?”
“You’re talking about her like she’s some kind of brainwashed sleeper agent.”
Nolan snorted. “Kid, you’ve been watching too many movies.”
“Then how can you be so sure she’ll be back?”
“Money isn’t the only reason people do things.” Nolan shrugged. “Our doctors give her eight to twelve months tops.”
I stared at him. For a second the tavern around us was so quiet that all I could hear was the fire snapping and popping in the hearth.
“What?”
Nolan’s eyebrows twitched. For the second time, he looked interested in the conversation.
“What, you didn’t know?”
And he showed me the last item in his folder.
36. “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” — The Smashing Pumpkins
I’d never seen an MRI image before, but I recognized a human brain when I saw one. Nolan pointed to a white spot toward the front of the picture, just above the eyeballs.
“Glioblastoma multiforme,” he said, “stage three. Temporal lobe, they say. Aggressive as shit, the way I understand it.”
Looking at that little spot, no bigger than a dime, I thought back to Swierczynski, what he’d said back in Venice:
The bullet is already in your brain.
“Apparently she’d had cancer once before,” Nolan said, “as a child, in the thyroid. Surgeons tried to remove it back in Lithuania, I guess, with a thyroidectomy, but they kind of botched the job.” Another shrug. This guy was turning out to be the world heavyweight champion of shruggers. “Eastern European medicine… what are you going to do?”
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