The Coil

by Gayle Lynds

  Seething with grief and guilt, Blase searched through the milling crush, ignoring the stares at his mauled tuxedo, until he found Johann Jozef, Viera’s brother. Johann was sitting on a bench, his back curved over, his face buried deep in his hands.

  The bench was full, but as Blase angrily zeroed in on Johann, the older man sitting beside Johann took one look at his expression and scuttled away.

  Blase dropped in next to Johann. “How could you let her do it?” he raged in Slovak, each word louder than the last. “Damn you, Johann!”

  Johann jerked up. Burly and in his late twenties, not quite six feet, he radiated shock and grief from his posture to his grimy face.

  “Because I damn well didn’t know what she was damn well planning!” He groaned, and his lips peeled back in a grimace of pain. “We got separated. I shouted at her to stop, but I was too far away. Oh, God.”

  “You’re her brother,” Blase hammered, incensed. “You should’ve known! You planned the demonstration together. She must’ve said something. It was obvious she’d been practicing exactly how to pull it off.”

  Johann fired back, “Why didn’t you know? She told me she’d be at your place last night. Dinner at the Korzo, then your apartment afterward. A celebration of today, she said. You’re the one she would’ve told!”

  Blase saw Viera again in his mind the last time they were together, alive and high-spirited. He felt her slim arms around his neck, smelled the natural perfume that seemed to infuse her skin. He could hear her voice clearly as she passionately recounted some new globalization evil—more jobs lost, more children starving, more natural resources sold off by corrupt governments and then turned into profit by greedy corporations.

  She had liked him, and he had liked her, and the sex was explosive. Still, the truth was, that was all it had been—friendship, attraction, great sex. The casual cynicism of the relationship trivialized the parts that had been good.

  “She canceled our date,” he said woodenly. “I didn’t see her at all yesterday or today.”

  A fresh wave of guilt engulfed him. He turned away from Johann. He no longer wanted to fight him. Viera had been dodging him all week, probably—he realized now—to hide her plans. Busy himself, he had hardly noticed. A fatal error.

  Johann was staring at his clothes. “You’re wearing a tuxedo! Like them. That’s why you got so cozy with Viera! You’re a fucking spy!” He lunged for Blase’s neck.

  As if splashed with ice water, Blase focused. Others in the cell had heard Johann’s accusation. They stared with mounting suspicion. With both hands, Blase clamped onto Johann’s wrists, holding the distraught man away from his throat.

  “You’re wrong,” Blase told him between clenched teeth. “I had a plan. I needed a tux because I was going to talk my way into the embassy and corner that bastard Stanford Weaver. It would’ve worked, too, if the protest hadn’t gotten out of hand. If Viera hadn’t—” He blinked, regrouped, talked faster. “First, I was going to wait until Weaver was surrounded by the other bastard globalizers; then I’d ask him to sign our petition. He would’ve brushed me off, of course, but I planned to keep after him until someone called in the marines. There’d have been a nasty row, and they’d have thrown me out. The press would’ve loved it. They would’ve jumped on the story like a hound on a bone. I could see the headline—‘Chief of Globe’s Richest Bank Refuses to Help Poor.’”

  For a second, Johann smiled. “The coverage would’ve been just what we want.”

  Blase dropped his hands. “It was worth a try.” His face twisted with anguish. “How could she hide her plans from both of us, Johann?”

  Johann’s shoulders slumped. “Viera could keep a secret,” he said gloomily. He collapsed back against the wall.

  The tension in the packed cell broke. Everyone watched the two men with sad sympathy. The brother and the lover.

  “No one could talk Viera out of anything,” Blase decided.

  Johann nodded miserably. He peered down, flexed his fingers, then looked around as if hoping someone would explain the unexplainable, the unendurable.

  Blase heaved a sigh. As Johann turned to talk to the man on his other side, Blase saw that everyone was settling into the role of detainees, organizing themselves to take turns sitting and standing. As the sharp edge ebbed from his rage and shame, he remembered the hand that had slipped into his back pocket.

  He glanced around, reached into his pocket, pulled out a small crumpled paper, and read: “Sir Robert was murdered. If you want to know who did it, meet me.” Blase inhaled sharply. There was no signature, but the message was followed by directions into St. Martin’s Cathedral. The person would be waiting in a certain pew in a certain chapel at five A.M. The words were English, neatly printed in pencil.

  The cell door clanged open. Blase looked up alertly, shoving the note back into his pocket. Everyone turned. The tank grew ominously quiet as four uniformed police guards pushed into the throng. Three grabbed two men who had been speaking German.

  The fourth spotted Blase and advanced. “You! Yes, you. This way,” he ordered in Slovak.

  When Blase did not stand fast enough, the guard grabbed him by the lapels and hurled him toward the cell door. Hands reached out to steady Blase, keeping him on his feet until he reached the bars. The door rolled open, and the guard slammed a forearm across Blase’s back, propelling him out into the corridor. Blase landed with a thud against the opposite wall. Pain ricocheted through his body. His head swam.

  “Zatote vl’avo,” one of the guards commanded.

  Blase and the two other prisoners turned left, as ordered. The group marched down the hall. The guard who had spoken opened a door. “In there.”

  Blase was pushed again. As he plunged inside, he heard the same guard warn one of the Germans, “Your interview room is next.”

  The door closed and locked.

  Ada Jackson, the British embassy’s law-enforcement liaison, was sitting alone at a scarred table, drumming her fingers. She glared at him. “Christ Almighty.”

  She was small and compact, with perfectly coiffed black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Dressed in a tailored skirt and suit jacket, she looked completely professional even at this early hour. There were two other straight-backed chairs in the room, plus a wire cage in the corner, no doubt for unruly prisoners too bad or too opinionated for the potential camaraderie of a tank cell.

  But what he focused on was a second door, which, from the wall it was in, looked as if it opened onto the outside world. He inhaled with relief. The guards’ taking him and the two Germans from the cell had been a ruse. His cover would remain intact.

  He had almost been fooled, too. “You took your sweet time.” He headed for the door.

  She followed. “You’re in one hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “With you or with Whitehall?”

  She was also the local MI6 station chief. She unlocked the door. The thick night air rushed in, and they stepped out of the jail.

  “With all of us, Simon. Get in the damn car.”

  With Ada Jackson driving, the nondescript embassy sedan headed through the old city’s narrow streets, past medieval houses and Baroque churches, in the general direction of the Danube. Bathed in silver moonlight, the peaked roofs and soaring towers of centuries-old Bratislava were iridescent. Once a favorite of Magyar kings and Habsburg emperors, the charming city seemed asleep—innocent and untouched. Simon Childs envied it.

  Aware he had again crossed some imaginary line with his higher-ups, he settled alertly into the front passenger seat, glad for the blast of the air conditioner. With a tight grip on his composure, he described the demonstration and Viera’s awful death. He listed the protesters he recognized, repeated conversations, analyzed the overall organization, and hid his guilt.

  As she drove, Ada queried every detail. He considered her profile, the glasses perched on her short nose, and the unchanging severity of her face. From her cap of smooth black hair to her pragmatic pumps, there was pr
ecision in her movements, the same sort of precision she brought to her thinking. Sometimes too precise and therefore inflexible.

  He studied her hands on the steering wheel as she drove. She wore no rings. If she had ever had a romantic assignation or even an ordinary date, he had never heard. She was in her late thirties, very pretty, but she gave off that stay-away scent of a woman taken. In her case, he figured it was not a man on her mind, but her “career.”

  “You should never have left the embassy when you did,” she told him, her voice severe. “It was the middle of the party, for God’s sakes. Blast it, Simon, you had an assignment, and you didn’t do it. Whatever possessed you?”

  He had been walking a fine line; she was right about that. He was MI6’s expert on antiglobalization groups in Central Europe, more successful at penetrating them than the Americans, Germans, or French. With so many terrorist fears, apparently no one had blinked when the World Bank chief, freshly anointed, requested a personal briefing from Whitehall with its mysterious antiglobalization source—him.

  After all, the bank lent billions of dollars to governments in the region, and one of the major complaints across the protest movement was that the money went to destroying countries, not building them. So the plan was to disguise him in a tuxedo and slip him into the U.S. Embassy, where he would wait in a back room until Stanford Weaver could make time for him.

  Simon pretended indignation. “I went outside for a few minutes to get a toss of fresh air. And I shouldn’t think I was the only one. Those parties are numbing. ‘Dull’ is an enthusiastic description. I was bored, and that takes off the sharp edge.”

  “‘A few minutes’ was all you needed to get yourself into trouble,” she reminded him. “No one enjoys command-performance parties, but we take them in stride. What are you now, thirty?” That made him look at her. “Yes, thirty. It’s time to quit acting like a boy, Simon. You’re too handsome for your own good. Too charming, and too cocksure.” Her small upper lip curled with distaste. “One wonders whether being in dark undercover with a bunch of borderline hoodlums is the only kind of assignment you’ll ever be good at.”

  He closed his mouth before he uttered one of his whiplash retorts, settling on, “I don’t suppose I should thank you for that.”

  “Wrong. Thank me. I doubt anyone’s bothered to tell you the truth about yourself. Or maybe you just never listened.”

  She stopped the car at the waterfront, parking the nose downhill, toward the river. She turned off the engine and lights, and they sat in the dusky silence, alone in the parking lot, where no one would overhear their conversation or see through the darkened windows. To the left and right stretched the Danube—in Slovak, the Dunaj—magnificent and dark, tipped with mercury ripples, thanks again to the bright moon. To their left was the futuristic SNP Bridge, which stretched south from the old city to the sorry concrete-slab high-rises of Petralka, where Bratislava’s suicide rate was the highest. Those apartment buildings and all the other ugly, boxy projects on the outskirts of Old Town had been thrown up by the Communists—a stark cement legacy of the former Soviet Union.

  “I mean no disrespect, Ada,” he said, “but I shouldn’t think it’s the end of the world. I’ll talk to Stanford Weaver whenever he likes. Name the time and place, and I’ll be there. You know that.”

  She glared from the shadows. “It’s too late. He’s gone.”

  “Already?”

  “The Americans got him out fast. But then, embarrassment’s a great motivator. Viera Jozef’s theatrical death is going to be the top news story at daybreak. It’s duck-and-cover time for both the Yanks and the World Bank. Listen to me, Simon. Hear me clearly. Your behavior wasn’t part of the plan. Tonight you were supposed to have had a very important conversation with a very powerful new ally for Britain. Not only did you basically flip him off, you created an additional mess for him and the Americans. Dressed in that tux, you stood out in that motley crowd like a robed priest at an orgy.”

  There was something to her complaints, but in the high-stakes world of MI6, both in the field and in the office, you could show no weakness, reveal no doubts, or you were dead—sometimes literally.

  “What I learned tonight needs attending to,” he insisted. “The police, the media, and the public always know in advance when there’s going to be a big demonstration, because organizers abide by the laws and register. At the same time, they’re usually so excited they can’t keep their mouths shut anyway. But not last night.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Somehow, more than five thousand protesters got past Slovakia’s border guards. I heard not a whisper ahead of time, and neither did the authorities or anyone else. Add to that tonight’s self-immolation—the first one, thank God, but you can bet it won’t be the last. Viera was no religious-based extremist. No al-Qaeda killer in the making. She was a young schoolteacher who donated her free time to hospitals and soup kitchens. Her whole life was ahead of her, and she had the face of an angel. Perfect for front pages and the top of the news. She’s a poster child for martyrdom.”

  “There’s a point to this?” Ada said coldly.

  “The point is, I may not have been holding some cheeky banker’s hand, but I was doing my job. I was assigned to be a penetration agent because we were worried the antiglobalization movement could breed soldiers for terrorist groups. Right?”

  She shrugged. “That was one reason.”

  “A bloody damn large reason. The zealousness I saw out there tonight was a wake-up call. Viera used violence to get attention for her group’s grievances, and by morning, they’ll see the headlines and know her sacrifice worked. It scares the piss out of me to think what would happen if every antiglobalization group figured that out and started to act on it. It wouldn’t be long before they’d redirect their violence away from themselves and against the people they hold responsible for their problems. Then what happens if they actually figure out a way to work and plan together? If they unite, it could get worse than the sixties, and that almost tore apart Europe and the United States.”

  She shook her head angrily. “You’re exaggerating. Those people are too weak, too happy to think of themselves as victims. Besides, existing institutions like the IMF and World Bank are one hell of a lot better equipped to deal with poverty and the world’s other problems than the whining adults and ignorant kids we saw screaming and yelling out there tonight. If your agitators haven’t convinced me, they sure won’t convince many others either. So what if they nab a few headlines? They’re still singing to the choir.”

  “That choir, as you call them, could explode. One should never underestimate the potential of the underdog. Especially if the underdog feels cornered.”

  She turned to face him. He did not like the look in her eyes. Her voice was arctic. “You excuse what you did by bringing me information. That’s all smoke screen for your fucking up. I’ve sent my people to check the media film that was shot tonight. It’s inevitable some of the photographers and camera people recorded you. I’ll have to tap my contacts, which I don’t like to do on something that should never have happened in the first place.” She made a weary sound in her throat. “Even if I manage to find every scrap of film and get it scrubbed, remember you were protected only going into the embassy. It’s possible somebody there saw you sneak outdoors and then co-star in the riot. With so much press coverage, any witnesses will likely wonder about you. You’re sloppy, Simon.”

  “I do my job.”

  “That’s the problem. It’s just a job to you. You like to pretend your work means something, but the truth is you treat it like a shell game. You haven’t a real opinion about what these people you’ve been informing on for the past three years are doing. You don’t think they’re right or wrong. You don’t think our government is either. Where’s the real Simon Childs? Where’s he hiding?”

  God, she was annoying. “I care about Britain. I should think that’d be enough for you. Do you have anything else you wish to discuss?�
� Thinking about loyalty and Britain brought a dull ache to his chest, the same pain he associated with his father’s death. Sir Robert Childs had been almost a national institution—member of parliament, beloved leftist, and respected by the other side of the aisle. Like Viera, he had died by his own hand. Simon had investigated thoroughly at the time, but he had been unable to find even a suggestion his father’s death was anything but a suicide.

  He kept his face neutral as he resisted the urge to look at his watch. He did not want to be late to the meeting with the nameless person who had written that note.

  Ada Jackson fired up the car’s engine. “I want a full report of everything you saw and your conclusions. I’ll expect it at the bridge drop by eight A.M. The media’s going to be sniffing for details about Viera and her life—the more intimate, the more spicy and gory, the better. Tell your friend Johann that you’re so distraught that you’re taking some time off. He’ll spread the word, and the press will pick it up. I’ll have a safe house lined up for you by the time you turn in your report. I want this whole thing to die down. Blase Kusterle must vanish.”

  Six

  Santa Barbara, California

  The twilight traffic was heavy on the 101 as Liz sped her Toyota sports car north toward the dean’s party. Tense and wired, she was caught in fight-or-flight syndrome—that atavistic survival mechanism hard-wired into the subcortical region of the human brain. She was like a car whose driver had one foot flooring the accelerator and the other slamming the brake. The orderly, peaceful world she had created over the last five years had been abruptly shattered, and she was reeling.

  She had left a message for Kirk, telling him what had happened and asking him to recall everything that was said in his conversation with the Sheriff’s Department. Then she went looking for anyone who might have seen a stranger break into her office, a fellow jogger push her off the cliff, or the fake deputy who had interviewed her. After learning nothing useful, she canceled her vacation to Paris and left a message of apology on Sarah’s cell. She must stay in Santa Barbara until she uncovered the truth.