by Scott Blade
“She’s out? Freed?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?” the voice asked.
“I’m staring at her. Right now.”
“Where?”
“Edward’s place.”
The voice asked, “What about him?”
“Expelled.”
“Does she know?”
“I’m sure she does. I watched them go in and come out.”
“Them?”
“She’s with some guy.”
“What guy?”
The man in black breathed heavily over the phone, leaving an air of menace. The Listener on the other end heard him.
The man in black said, “I have no idea. Just some guy. A big guy. Tattoos all over his arms.”
“Russian tattoos?”
“Don’t know. Don’t think so. But I wasn’t close enough to see them.”
The voice on the phone said, “I don’t know who that is. Must be some friend of hers or something.”
“I don’t know.”
“How the hell did she get out?”
“Maybe her friend helped her.”
“Maybe. That means she might know about what Farmer was planning.”
The man in black stayed quiet.
“Where are they now?”
“Upper East Side.”
“You know where they are going?”
“Only one place that I can think of,” the man in black said, and then he told the person on the other end with one two words.
“Eva’s handler.”
The voice said nothing.
“Want me to kill them?”
“No. Not yet. We need to know more.”
“Want me to intercept them?”
The Listener said, “Not yet. Wait for now. See where they go. They may lead us to her handler. A bonus. Call me if anything changes.”
The Listener hung up the phone and the man in black slipped his phone back in his inside pocket, near his gun. He pulled down the visor on his helmet and watched the Russian spy and the stranger.
CHAPTER 34
EVA HELD A COFFEE MUG of cheap hot tea as if her life depended on it. Even with Widow’s sweater pulled over her, the tight dress underneath kept her freezing. Greasy spoons are notoriously cold all day, all night. Widow figured it had something to do with a happy staff over happy customers. The wait staff, the kitchen staff, and whoever else worked back there moved around a lot. They brought this out and took that back. They hauled heavy items from way back in the walk-in cooler and stocked items and took out heavy trashcans. Naturally, they were always hot.
They had originally gone on the search for a bakery or a doughnut shop that was open early enough for them to grab a doughnut and some coffee. Their search took them to an all-night greasy spoon first. Which was just fine with Widow. He liked these places.
Nowadays, doughnut shops and bakeries were parts of chains anyway. They were restaurants designed to look quaint, but truthfully they had bigger corporate faces. Not all of them, but many, and many here in the city.
Widow was glad to find a diner, locally owned, instead.
Eva was not interested in coffee; she said it wasn’t her thing. She asked the waitress for some kind of herbal green tea crap, with three different names. All were plants that Widow had heard of before. All sounded healthy, in that overboard kind of way.
It was the last nail in the coffin of a fantasy that was birthed in his head about him being her kind of guy.
Eva was a refined woman and a Russian spy, which Widow wasn’t sure meant that she had been trained to be refined or if she had been born that way, reared that way.
Either answer did not matter because she was refined now. And a refined kind of woman was not going to be interested in a man like him.
Widow said, “You sure you don’t want anything to eat?”
She looked up from her tea and he stared into her eyes. There was something there. A sense of desperation, Widow figured. Like she was part scared, part worried, and part completely confused, all of it adding up to utter desperation.
She said, “No thanks. I have no appetite.”
“You really should eat something.”
She stayed quiet.
“In the SEALs, we say if you want to eat an elephant, you have to eat it one bite at a time.”
She stared at him blankly, which was a better expression than her desperate look. He guessed.
“What does that have to do with eating?”
Widow shrugged, said, “Nothing.”
“What the hell does it mean then?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“You mean idiom,” she said.
He shrugged again, his shoulders fell and he took a pull from his coffee.
“Same thing. I suppose,” he said.
“So what does it mean? Idioms are strange to me. English has too many.”
“I guess we do have a lot of them.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It just means that if you want to achieve something, something huge, like an elephant, then you have to take small steps toward it. I guess. That’s what I always thought it meant.”
“Makes sense.”
Widow took another large pull from his coffee and finished it and put the mug down on the edge of the table, an old trick Widow had learned years earlier. Put the mug down on the edge of the table and the waitress thinks it’s empty and she comes by to refill it, like a white flag of surrender, in a way, he figured.
Eva stared at him and looked away, toward a group of four older ladies who walked in from the cold. All white, grandmotherly types. All wore their Sunday best, which made sense because to them, it was early morning. And old ladies across the globe often go to church on Sunday morning.
Right then, Widow realized something that he should have thought of an hour earlier, when they were standing in Edward’s apartment. He literally face-palmed himself.
“What is it?” Eva asked.
“Today’s Sunday.”
“Yeah?”
“Sunday.”
Widow started to explain what he was thinking, but he did not have to. She got it.
Eva said, “She won’t be there today.”
They had planned to go see her handler, a lawyer who worked near the United Nations building, but law firms aren’t normally open on Sunday. That was basically all over the world, not just in New York City.
“Shit,” she said.
“Do you know where she lives?”
“Nope.”
“She doesn’t trust you very much.”
“She doesn’t trust anyone. She’s been in America for a long time. I guess there’s a reason for that.”
“I guess so.”
“What now?”
“Do you have a phone number for her?”
“Of course.”
“I guess we call her then. Have her meet us somewhere.”
“Okay. When do we call her?”
Widow looked over Eva’s shoulder, searched the room for a wall clock, but did not see one.
He did see that a waitress looked over at him while he looked around. She saw his empty coffee mug and she stepped back behind the counter, picked up a pot of black coffee and walked over to their table.
She stopped and poured coffee into his mug. Then she stepped back and picked up the empty plate that Widow had eaten a breakfast meal off. The plate looked licked clean, which he hadn’t actually done, but he had used a fork to scoop, scrape, and shovel up every last drop of eggs and hash browns.
The waitress asked, “Ready for the check now?”
Widow said, “We are. And what time is it?”
The waitress pulled a handwritten check out of her apron, placed it upside down on the tabletop, center edge. Then she fidgeted with a loose wristwatch and stared at it.
“It’s almost five in the morning.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress walked away and Widow took the check, studied the amount,
and shoveled out the correct bills for it, as well as an additional five-dollar bill as a tip.
“It’s too early to call now. Let’s wait a little longer and give her a call.”
“She’s probably still not going to be awake.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’ll wake her up. This is important. Besides, you’re not going back anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t go back to your old life now. She’s gonna figure out what you were planning, whether you tell her or not.”
The look of worry overcame her other partial expressions.
She said, “Widow, they’ll kill me. I can’t tell her.”
“You’re safe now. Don’t worry. You’re not going back with her. She won’t tell Moscow that you were planning to defect. Trust me.”
“How do you know?”
“If she’s been here for twenty years, then she’s not going to want to be exposed. We threaten to tell that she’s here. That she’s a Russian spy.”
She nodded and listened.
“And I don’t mean we tell the Feds. We threaten to tell the New York Times. Her law firm must have a website. I bet she has a profile there with a headshot. She’s probably got a LinkedIn profile too. We take her information and her photos and threaten to give them to the Times. They love stories like this. Her face will be blasted all over the place. The Feds will deport her. She’ll be forced to return to Moscow, where she doesn’t want to be.”
Eva nodded, said, “That could work. I know for a fact she’s terrified of losing her life here. She loves her status. In Moscow they’ll have her sitting behind a desk. If she’s lucky.”
“See. We can do this. We can figure this out.”
“I’m not worried about me that much. I worried about my father. What if they have him?”
Widow said, “We don’t know that for sure.”
But he did know it for sure. If she had been abducted for two days and this Farmer guy was supposed to arrange a meeting with her father onboard his submarine, it had probably already happened.
Farmer had already shown that he has the manpower. Four well-trained guys with high tech equipment had revealed themselves to Widow already, back at the Plaza.
Plus, the dead guy that Eva had been dating, the turncoat. Whoever had killed him wasn’t an amateur. Widow pictured Edward’s dead body in his mind. The guy was shorter than Widow, but he hadn’t been any kind of slouch. He could pass as a New York firefighter, as he pretended to be. His dead body appeared to have spent some time in the gym.
The killer had used a garrote. Widow was sure about that because of the deep wounds around his neck.
Garrotes weren’t the kind of weapons that could be bought at a hardware store or even a gun store, or any store for that matter. Maybe it could be ordered off the internet. Or it could have been homemade.
Either way, the person who used it was strong and knew exactly what he was doing. Widow figured that the only way he could have strangled Edward like that was with a quick snag of the wire over his head, from behind, and then the killer made a fast turn from the feet and hips and then he pulled in the opposite direction, taking Edward off his feet.
The killer had wrenched him over his back, facing the opposite direction.
Strangling someone with a garrote is very difficult. Besides taking immense strength and coordination, it also has a huge risk factor when the victim has his hands and feet free.
Edward would’ve been flailing around and struggling to fight back. That’s not what you want when using a garrote.
The killer would want him immobilized and the only way to do that was either to tie him up or to twist and hoist him over the killer’s back like a guy with a meat hook towing a heavy chunk of beef.
Widow imagined the entire scene and it was brutal. Edward had gone out with a violent death that Widow did not want to experience.
Eva asked, “What are you thinking about?”
“I was thinking that we gotta get you into warmer clothes soon,” he lied.
“I’m okay for now. I’ve worn less in colder places.”
Widow smiled and they sat there, waiting for the dawn.
CHAPTER 35
THE WATERS OFF THE EASTERN SEABOARD were cold, but the crew inside Karpov’s hijacked Russian submarine had not known that by the sense of touch. They knew it from being educated about it, because not one of them had ever been this close to the United States before.
Technically, they weren’t breaking international law, which stated that the boundary between a nation’s shores and international waters was universally accepted as twelve nautical miles. They weren’t in violation of this law. However, the United States Navy was known for being suspicious of any foreign vessel that came anywhere within double that amount. And for Russian submarines, with nuclear-tipped missiles onboard, the number of nautical miles was triple, if not more.
Farmer waited for his man to give the go-ahead and then he started to climb the ladder, past the tower and up to the surface.
Karpov was still standing against an unmanned station on the bridge. The redheaded soldier had assigned one of his guys to watch over Karpov.
He remembered the redheaded soldier saying, “If he flinches, shoot him.”
Ever since then, the soldier watching him had done nothing else but blink a few times. Karpov knew for sure that’s all he had done because he watched the soldier in exchange. He studied the man’s patterns. Trying to discern a rhythm to his standing there, breathing, and guarding Karpov.
Farmer had taken away Karpov’s gun and his bridge crew’s weapons as well. And of course, Travkin went overboard and was dead. But there was one last handgun that Farmer and his men did not find. It was in Karpov’s quarters. It was an old black-and-brown US Army issued Colt 1911. Supposedly left in Eastern Berlin by a US paratrooper on some covert mission that Karpov did not know the details of.
The gun had been given to him as a gift by a now-dead Russian commander that he used to know.
He had the gun encased in a box with a glass lid. It was on display in his quarters, on the back wall. There were seven bullets lined at the bottom of the case on the red velvet behind the gun.
Colt made good-quality guns. He knew that. If the origins of his Colt 1911were true, then it was over seventy years old. Would it even fire after all this time? Under normal circumstances, probably not. But one of his favorite stress relievers was to take out that 1911 and polish it and clean it and oil it.
Although, he had never fired it, not with live ammunition, he had dry fired it before. Plenty of times. And it seemed to work.
If only he could get to it.
CHAPTER 36
FARMER LOOKED AT HIS WATCH, which was luckily waterproof because the waves ripped and collided with the bow of the submarine, splashing over it with powerful, quick gushes of white-capped water.
In one wrong moment, one of the waves could have swept him and the redheaded soldier off the bow and into the Atlantic.
They both held onto the railing, above the hatch that led down to the bridge. The water splashed hard enough to send droplets beating across their faces.
Farmer’s blue windbreaker rippled around him from the intense icy wind blowing off the ocean surface.
He took several deep breaths trying to adjust his lungs to the cold air.
Then he pulled a sat phone up from a long cord that hung around his neck. The cord secured it so that it wouldn’t get blown away. With one hand on the rail and one free on the keypad, he dialed a number from memory, initiating the call that was slightly ahead of schedule.
Still the recipients of the call would answer because they were already in play. And they worked for him. They had better be awake and waiting, even though in New York City it was early in the morning.
Farmer listened as the satellite phone whirred and rang. The connection was there, but the sound quality was closer to a CB radio than a ten-thousand-dollar phone stolen from the US military.
The phone rang and rang and rang. No one answered.
Farmer waited, looked at the redheaded soldier.
No one answered.
He hung up.
“What?” the redhead asked,
Farmer shrugged, said, “No answer.”
“Try again.”
Farmer tried again. Same result. Same frustration.
“They are supposed to answer. They know that.”
“What now?” the redheaded guy asked.
Farmer did not answer. Instead he dialed another number and put the phone to his ear, listened to the ring.
A voice answered that wasn’t asleep. The voice sounded rested and awake, but frustrated as well.
“We have a problem,” Farmer said.
“The girl is free,” the Listener answered. The Listener already knew the circumstances.
“What?”
“She is free. Your boys messed up.”
“How do you know that?”
“My guy. He saw her. On the street, outside Edward’s apartment.”
Farmer asked, “Why was he at Edward’s?”
“Why do you think?”
A pause and a cold breath exited Farmer’s lips.
He said, “You didn’t need to kill him.”
“Apparently, I did. I’m tying up loose ends. Your loose ends.”
“How the hell did she get free? My guys aren’t answering.”
“She escaped.”
“Impossible. She had four former Special Forces guys with her.”
“She got away from them.”
Farmer repeated the same protest of disbelief.
The Listener said, “She had help.”
“What help?”
“I don’t know. Some stranger.”
“Who is he?”
“I just told you. He’s a stranger.”
Farmer said nothing.
The Listener said, “Don’t worry. My guy is watching them.”
“He needs to retrieve her. Now.”
“We can’t do that. She’s out in the open and we don’t know who this guy is. What if he’s FBI? We need to know the scope of who knows what first.”
“Have your guy pick them both up. Interrogate him.”
The Listener said, “Not that simple. It’s New York City. There are witnesses everywhere.”
