The Right Hand

by Derek Haas

  “I thought maybe we could go somewhere…take them somewhere.”

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  “Santa Barbara. Or Ojai. Or the other way…San Diego. Just get out of LA and get them out of the house.”

  “Book it, Danno.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ll get online when we get home and find us a place.”

  “Ojai sounds good,” he said, so she’d have that in mind. He was a member of Wilshire Country Club and liked to play golf; the Ojai Valley Inn had a great course. Maybe he could get out for a round while the girls lay by the pool or rode horses.

  Kate deftly switched from her right foot to her left and fired an off-balance shot at the goal, just missing the crossbar. Michael started to rise from his seat but sat back down, oohing when she missed. It was Laura’s turn to shout, “Great shot, Kate!” She clapped a few times, as happy as he’d ever seen her.

  “Do you think…” she started to say, but his phone buzzed in his pocket and he didn’t hear the end of her question.

  He quickly fished the phone out, saw the number, held up a finger to his wife, and moved down the bleachers so he could stand by himself.

  Pressing the Answer button, he said a curt “Hello.”

  “Is this line secure?” asked the caller, Warren Sumner, his assistant.

  “No. I’ll have to get to my briefcase in the car and call you back.”

  “Use the subcomp number.”

  “Got it.” Then, “Who’s calling, Warren?”

  “Director Manning.”

  “I’ll call back in less than a minute.”

  Adams hung up, pointed to his phone, and mouthed, “I have to take this,” to his wife.

  She nodded and smiled, but he could see concern on her face. He ignored it, walking briskly to his SUV. On the field, the ball finally found the back of the net, but he missed which girl had done the scoring.

  Chapter Three

  THE INSIDE of Nelson’s office was as sterile as the building outside. It contained a desk, a bank of file cabinets, and a fake banana tree in a planter in the corner, without which the room would have had no color at all. If Nelson owned a laptop, he’d moved it or taken it with him.

  Clay pivoted around the room with the practiced eye of a smuggler, running his hands over the plaster walls, rapping with his fists for the telltale signs of hollow pockets, while Adromatov lit a cigarette and watched him through half-mast eyes.

  “You’re looking perhaps for a magician’s false door, yes?”

  Clay continued his careful search, then spotted what he was looking for, a slight change in paint color where two walls came together, almost covered (but not quite) by a bookshelf, barely noticeable.

  “Well, I can tell you I’ve spent some time here and I’ve never—”

  Adromatov’s sentence was interrupted by the click and slide of a magnetic spring release. A section of the wall pushed in to reveal a tiny opening. The Russian pursed his lips, and a hint of a frown creased his face.

  “How did you…?”

  “You hide in plain sight, Adromatov. Men like Nelson and me, we hide by hiding.” Clay took out a small penlight and shined it into the opening. It looked like close quarters, but it was hard to see how far back the room recessed into the wall.

  He gestured for Adromatov to enter with him, but the Russian held up his palms and shook his head. “I’ll go into a tomb when I’m dead, Austin Clay. Not before.” In fairness, he did look too fat to fit through the opening.

  “Suit yourself.” Clay ducked and squeezed himself into the space. The entrance ran parallel to the wall, and if he eased himself down the strut line to the right, he could see the space widening. He reached a compartment about the size of a walk-in closet and shined the penlight over shelves of binders—some with dates, some with Russian names written in the Cyrillic alphabet, some with nonsense words that must’ve meant something to Nelson. Clay tucked the penlight in his mouth and pulled out the binder in front of him marked JUNE. Inside was a collage of printed emails, Internet site pages, maps, journal entries—all collected schizophrenically, with no piece of information appearing to be more important than any other. Still, the binder was thick, and there was a distinct possibility of gold among the silt. Quickly, he ran his fingers over the other binders, the light bouncing off their spines, and he scanned them so hastily that he almost missed the one titled MARIKA. Almost.

  He was halfway through the first page in the file when he heard a bump through the wall, then the distinctive sound a rubber-soled shoe makes as it skids across cement. He tensed, cocked his ear, but couldn’t make out anything else. An inexperienced man would have called out, “Adromatov?,” giving himself away, but Clay knew better. Binder in one hand and penlight in the other, he made his way back to the opening behind the bookshelf, then peeked out to see Adromatov down on the floor, his face painted in blood, a tall, clean-shaven Russian in a dark suit standing with one heel on Adromatov’s flabby neck. Two more Russians flanked him with pistols out but held near their sides, eyes fixed on the pummeled man on the floor. They looked younger, new FSB men, both sporting dark mustaches. Adromatov must’ve told these agents he was alone when they showed up unannounced. It was inevitable they’d find the place, but why did it have to be right fucking now?

  The three agents of the Kremlin swung their heads around at the same time, like a herd of deer that hear a hunter cock his rifle in the forest. At least, that was the way Clay liked to think of them.

  He moved quickly; this was always one of Clay’s greatest weapons. Enemies were so surprised by his adroitness, by the way his body moved, that even a moment’s hesitation gave him all the advantage he needed.

  He launched himself like a missile at the nearest guy, the one who was too busy gawking to get his gun up. The penlight connected with the fleshy part of the agent’s neck, driven there by Clay’s arcing fist. The man choked and gurgled before he knew what had happened, his neck lit up like an airport runway. Before he could fall, Clay’s right hand clasped around his wrist and wrenched his weapon away.

  The second Russian—the other mustachioed one—had the time to respond, get his gun up, get a shot off, but he was so distracted by his partner’s strange death, not to mention the sheer speed with which this battle had gone from offense to defense, that his last thought was What happened? before Clay shot him from two feet away.

  The third man, the big one, the one with his heel on Adromatov’s neck, must have foreseen the inevitable. Even in the blur of ferocious activity, he made the decision that if he was going to die, he would take one traitor with him. He raised his boot and drove his heel into Adromatov’s neck with the entire weight of his body, snapping the poor man’s spine and ending his thirty-year career as a double agent. The lone Russian standing then turned toward Clay and let out an animalistic cry, as centuries of battlefield warriors had done before him—right before Clay raised the PYa and shut his mouth.

  The Volga eased out into the light St. Petersburg traffic. He had worked quickly. Russians are meticulous by nature, especially government officials. They love their stamps on documents—stamps for CLASSIFIED, stamps for APPROVED, stamps for DENIED, stamps for CHECKING IN, for CHECKING OUT. He was sure these three FSB officers would have kept detailed records of where they were going and what their mission entailed, and soon they would be stamped MISSING. Clay dragged the bodies, all four of them, into the hidden room and then performed a cursory sweep of the place to clean up the blood and brain and body fluids. It wasn’t a thorough sanitizing, but it might buy him an extra day or two as the first wave of investigators inspected the empty location. At least, until the bodies started to smell.

  Still, Clay was in the positive column of the ledger. That was how he tended to think of every mission…a ledger book with markings in the plus column and others in the minus column. Losing Adromatov was a negative, yes, but he had gained Nelson’s binder on Marika Csontos, and that
sent the bottom line, for now, back into the black. As long as he stayed in the black, he had a chance. The black ink was life, was success—the red ink, well, that meant blood.

  The binder sat in the passenger seat, virginal. He’d only skimmed its contents while in the secret chamber—just enough to know that somewhere inside it was the answer to finding Marika Csontos. Clay had snapped the binder shut and headed back out, and it was a good thing he hadn’t sat down to read more of it or maybe he’d have been the one surprised in that office.

  One thing troubled him about the encounter, and the more he thought about it, the more certain he was his assumptions were correct. Nelson was alive, in custody, and giving up information. Clay didn’t begrudge his counterpart this; from what he remembered about the guy, it wasn’t a matter of if he would crack but when, and it was impressive that he’d held out long enough to give Clay first look at his info dump, even if it was only moments ahead of the Russians. They might have fucked up a lot of things in their country, but the one thing Russians had always done well—to the point of perfection—was extract information out of hostiles.

  It was a good sign that the FSB goons had shown up there, because it meant Nelson hadn’t spilled a bigger secret—where the girl was hiding. Otherwise, the Russians would’ve skipped to the end of the story and gone straight for her. Nelson would assuredly squawk about that soon enough, Clay supposed. He hoped he could stay a step ahead.

  The first thing he needed was a place to hole up. Whatever plans Adromatov had made for him were null now. Clay had no way of knowing what tracks Adromatov had left behind, so best to shift off-grid for a while. He’d have to call Stedding soon and download what he’d learned so far, but not until he’d had a chance to sift through the binder and maybe, just maybe, discover what information would lead him to the nanny.

  Clay took a room in the Oktiabrskaya Hotel—a big, unattractive economy job on the Ligovsky Prospekt that catered to backpackers and tourists who wanted to pop for a place one notch above a hostel. The hotel room was bigger than the room he grew up in—not too many places were quite that cramped. That fucking boat. Every now and then, Clay would see or smell something—a seashell, a whiff of sandalwood—and he would be back in that tiny cabin, bobbing on the fucking ocean like a bottle holding the message: Get me the hell out of here. The size and shape of this hotel room reminded him of that place, that coffin, and the ocean air outside didn’t help. Fuck. Bury it.

  He opened the binder to close off that part of his mind. Nelson had been thorough in his notes; little wonder he’d built a safe room to house his papers. Upon closer inspection, the binder read like a journal, with Nelson using abbreviations and shorthand for contacts and calls and locations but not exerting too much effort to obfuscate his meaning through code. Clay grinned—it was amazing how often trained officers, both ours and theirs, junked their training after a few years and grew comfortable, sloppy. An extended period of leading a double life plays tricks on the brain. You fool people for so long, you start fooling yourself: that you’re infallible, invincible. And then a train derails between Perm and Omsk and the glass house you’ve built shatters to the ground. Clay wondered if he had built one of his own, if he was as guilty as Nelson of buying into his own mythology. He knew the Agency referred to him as the Right Hand—ostensibly because they wanted plausible deniability of his methods. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. But he’d heard whispers of a different interpretation: that he was the Right Hand of Zeus, the one that hurled thunderbolts and cracked worlds. Let ’em think what they wanted. Just keep your eyes open and your emotions in check and let the storytellers write the stories. His reputation could be used to his advantage, but he wouldn’t buy into the myths as anything more than fiction.

  What would the storytellers within the Agency write about this mission? A shift. That would be the noted thing here: a shift in the objective. His mission was clear—to bring back Nelson. So why had he already changed the objective from finding Nelson to locating the girl? He told himself she was the key to finding Nelson, but every way he turned it over in his mind, it was the other way around: Nelson was the key to finding her. She was what was not in the report—and two American officers were dead or captured because of her, a young Hungarian nanny who happened to speak Russian. No one, not even Clay’s handler, Stedding, knew that the mission had changed, the objective was different. The Left Hand didn’t know what the Right Hand was doing, and Austin Clay, at this moment, liked it that way.

  Nelson had been set up. He had concluded that Marika was in one of two places—through a series of phone records, he had figured out that she had a twenty-five-year-old stepbrother who was attending school at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, where he was studying biotechnology. This option was interesting in its locale—certainly a train going to Omsk might be heading on to Vladivostok, but the binder seemed to indicate that Nelson had shied away from the choice. If he’d spoken to the stepbrother, he didn’t mention it. Something had turned his head to the second option: that perhaps Marika Csontos was being harbored by the man who ran the placement service, the company that helped get child-care workers into the homes of government officials.

  That man was a middle-aged Armenian male with no children of his own, and he had parlayed his position as head of an orphanage under the Soviet regime to a shrewd business in postwall Russia. His service was located in a little town east of Moscow…along the train route to Omsk. Nelson had contacted him fourteen times on the phone in the last six months. The content of their conversations was not recorded, but Nelson had convinced the man—Viktor Zhedenko—to meet him face to face. An exchange was to be made. Based on some of Nelson’s records in the binder, Clay surmised quickly that the trade was to be money for the girl. Nelson had set out on a train to meet Zhedenko and had never come back.

  Stepnoy is a mining town in the pocket of Ural Russia not too far, relatively speaking, from the northeast border of Kazakhstan. Clay had never been there—and after this particular piece of business was finished, he hoped never to return. Whatever the mines threw up into the air cast a filter over the sky so the city had a consistent gray pall covering it, as though it were in perpetual mourning. The people were hard as rock, forged of hopelessness and medicated with vodka. It was a cruel life, living in Stepnoy.

  Clay’s beard had grown in thick and dark, obscuring his features and camouflaging him among the town’s denizens. They all looked the way he did: unkempt and unruly. He elicited no stares when he parked his truck and walked up a street named Chelyabinskaya in the middle of the industrialized section of the city.

  Zhedenko’s office was in a corner of what had formerly been a finance ministry outpost that serviced the mines during the Soviet era. Most of the office remained unrented and unoccupied, another dying monument to Communism—except for the five hundred or so square meters Zhedenko utilized. A desk, a middle-aged secretary who looked as though she hadn’t moved since 1975, a phone, and a computer were all Zhedenko needed to keep his business prosperous.

  Clay gleaned all this from Nelson’s file combined with two days of covert observation. It wasn’t difficult to track his subject. The man moved in that sleepy, almost inanimate way that seemed indigenous to Stepnoyans, as though the same perpetual fog that covered the area covered their heads as well.

  Clay decided to confront the man in his office, in front of his secretary. There are many ways to gain the advantage in an argument, and most have the common denominator of making your opponent uncomfortable. If you can do this in his territory, where he’s most at ease, all the better.

  Clay shuffled into the room, his eyes stern, his expression annoyed. His Russian had always been flawless, and his meticulous pronunciation had the desired effect in rural areas; it made him sound officious.

  “You are Zhedenko?”

  The middle-aged man eyed him as though a wolf had just entered the room and he was a rabbit with nowhere to hide.

&n
bsp; “I am Zhedenko, yes.”

  “Vladimir Zhedenko?”

  “Yes, yes, Vladimir Zhedenko.”

  The secretary looked up from her desk, shock on her face. Clay guessed she wasn’t used to receiving too many walk-ins here at the office.

  “I am Boris Antopov, with Central Ministry. Forgive me for the unannounced arrival.”

  The secretary stood and began to gather her things.

  “Please stay, Marta.”

  She started at the sound of her name. It was like this all over Russia for men and women over forty. It was as though they expected the government to roar back into their lives at any minute. They were perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. Marta looked as though that day had just arrived. She sat quietly and stared with cow eyes.

  Before Zhedenko could collect his wits, Clay continued, raising his voice and clipping his enunciation to sound even more obnoxious. “I understand you provide service for government?”

  “Yes, Mr. Antopov. I—”

  “And I understand you do so for ministries throughout Russia?”

  “Yes, Mr. Antopov.”

  “This service is for exchange of care, yes?”

  “I do not—”

  “You facilitate child care service, yes?”

  “I…yes…”

  “You use girls for other service?”

  “What? No! Now, I—”

  “Where do the girls come from?”

  “I—”

  “Where do they come from, Mr. Zhedenko!”

  Clay pounded the nearest table, causing Marta to jump as though a gun had gone off in the room. Zhedenko looked as though he might burst into tears.