by Derek Haas
“I don’t understand the question, Mr. Antopov. I find the child care workers through referrals and recommendations, and sometimes they phone me directly.”
“And you interview the girls yourself?”
“Yes, I—”
“Speak up!”
“Yes, Mr. Antopov.”
“You do a thorough job of interviewing?”
“I try to be thorough, yes.”
“You sleep with these girls?”
“No! I—”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s talk about one girl. Marika Csontos.”
The trapped expression on Zhedenko’s face intensified. “As I explained to your colleague—”
“Colleague? What is this colleague?”
Zhedenko looked confused. “Mr. Uh…Mr.…I forgot his name. Your colleague from Central Ministry—”
“Remember!” Clay demanded.
Zhedenko searched his memory while each tick of the wall clock sounded like bullets from a firing squad. Tick, tick, tick…Suddenly, Zhedenko’s finger punctured the air as he remembered. “Mr. Petrasky. That was it.”
Clay would have to check to see if that name was real, but he had a sense it was fake and a strong idea who had used it.
“What did this Petrasky say?”
“He asked if I could facilitate a meeting between himself and Marika Csontos.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I did not know where the girl was.”
“You’re lying!” Clay roared at him, the sound echoing through the room. Clay was practiced in adding a level of bass to his voice when he needed it. Zhedenko took a step back as though he’d been struck. The secretary, Marta, looked as if she were shrinking, trying to make herself invisible.
“I’m not,” the Armenian offered weakly.
“Mr. Zhedenko, let me tell you a story. Would you like to hear it?”
Russians and their stories. Zhedenko nodded as though grateful he’d been granted a reprieve from talking. Clay slowly crossed the room toward the Armenian as he spoke.
“When I was a young man growing up in the North Caucasus, my father would return from his job as a truck driver, his breath stinking of tobacco. It was as though he had smoked the entire Bialowieza Forest on his way home. His clothes reeked of it, his beard, his hair. My mother would ask him if he had been drinking, too, if he had nipped vodka on his driving route, which as I’m sure you know is strictly forbidden for mountain drivers. ‘No,’ he would tell her. ‘No, my darling. I only smoke to stay awake, but I would never jeopardize my detail by drinking vodka in the truck.’ You see, even as a young man I knew he was lying. I could see it by the way he lowered his eyes, by the way his voice inflected higher as he protested. ‘No, my darling.’ I knew the excessive use of tobacco was to mask the distilled smell of homemade vodka. She believed him, but I knew.”
He had only a few more feet until he was standing directly in front of Zhedenko, their noses only inches apart.
“My father wrapped his truck around a needleleaf tree that winter, drunk as a degenerate. His face penetrated the front windshield and a shard of glass punctured his neck until he bled to death. My mother couldn’t afford to shelter my brothers and me, and we became children of the state. So don’t tell me I don’t know when someone is lying, Mr. Zhedenko! I have experience with liars! All my life, I have experience with liars!”
Clay let his voice really boom on the final word, and spittle flew from his mouth as he stressed the hard Russian consonants.
“I…I did tell him I did not know where the girl was….”
“What else?”
“I—”
“He contacted you fourteen times!”
“Yes. It is coming back to me now….”
“I’m pleased it is coming back to you,” Clay deadpanned.
“Yes, I remember now. When he called back, I said I could arrange a meeting with him. That Marika Csontos was afraid but she would trust me. You see, I had heard about Marika and her troubles.”
“You had heard?”
“Yes, that maybe she had…maybe there were relations between Marika and one of her…one of the officials who—”
“Relations?”
“Is that what this is about?”
“Yes, of course, curse you. Speak no more of it. You arranged a meeting?”
“I…attempted to.”
“Attempted?”
“I truly do not know where Marika Csontos had gone.”
Clay realized quickly where this was going. “But you pretended you did.”
“Innocently. I thought I could find her easily enough by the time he arrived in Stepnoy.”
“For a fee.”
“Yes. We’re new capitalists, right?”
Clay had heard this notion before. The new capitalism of Russia meant that whoever had the deepest pockets could acquire whatever he wanted, laws be damned. It was a corrupt notion of a pure idea.
The Armenian continued, “Except Mr. Petransky never arrived. I swear it’s true. I thought perhaps that was the end of it and I would never hear any more of this business, but now I see I am mistaken.”
Clay knew the answer to the next question, though he felt compelled to ask anyway. “Did you ever locate the girl?”
Zhedenko’s eyes shone with the truth. “No, I swear it. She disappeared, and the few records she gave me appear to be, well, invented.”
Clay lowered his eyes for the first time. If there was disappointment or relief in them, he didn’t show it. “Thank you, Mr. Zhedenko. I have learned all I needed to learn. I will ask that you forget this affair quickly if you value your business.”
The Armenian stammered, “Of—of course, of course. It is forgotten.”
“You as well, Marta.”
She jumped again at the sound of her name, then nodded vigorously.
Before Clay could leave, Zhedenko stopped him. “I met her, I want you to know. She is a very smart girl. And very pretty. I was surprised and disappointed she compromised herself in that way.”
Clay kept his face expressionless and his eyes hard, spun on his heels, and left. Better to keep the man off-balance than to let him unload his heavy heart, thinking he’d made a connection with a concerned official.
Zhedenko had told the truth; Clay was sure of it. He still had not seen a picture of Marika Csontos, but the Armenian had described her as pretty and intelligent—and Clay couldn’t help picturing the young Hungarian girl in his mind’s eye—thin; long, dark hair; curls; glasses. He wondered if he’d be disappointed when he actually saw her in the flesh. That was the plan—to find her alive, not after…
The air smelled like sulfur, that acrid nostril-singeing smell unique to mining towns. Somewhere, an impact drill was spiraling into rock, and the piercing whine of steel on stone penetrated the air. Clay was so distracted—thinking of the girl, her hair, her glasses; smart, Zhedenko had said—as he walked toward his truck that he barely registered the two men shuffling toward him.
They should’ve struck while he was preoccupied with his thoughts, while he was adding the details to the girl’s face—thin eyebrows, a slightly upturned nose—but they made the mistake of speaking first, and in doing so, snapped Clay back to the present.
“You have a smoke?” the tall one asked. This is a tactic akin to starting a chess match with an e4–e5 opening. It has been done for so long that it is only effective against amateurs. The idea behind asking for a smoke is simple: to get the opponent reaching into his pocket for a pack of cigs or a lighter, exposing his face with his hands lowered, and then bam, bam, one-two, it’s over.
Clay looked up with a smile and took in the significant details of the two men in less than five seconds. The taller one was slouched on his right side, which meant he favored it. His hands were out and his fingers were flexed, though not balled. He’d be throwing the first punch. The shorter man had a few scars on his face—the bridge of his nose, his left cheek—and so had been in some nasty sc
rapes. His left hand was in his jacket pocket, but only pushed in up to the wrist, rather than stuffed inside the way you would if you were resting your hands. The point at the end of the pocket indicated he was concealing a knife instead of a gun. He was the dangerous one.
Clay coughed—a big phlegmy bark that startled the men and had them involuntarily reeling backward, a natural reaction. Many casual observers think the shouts that martial arts masters scream before they throw a punch or kick is window dressing, a show, a Bruce Lee Hollywood affectation. In reality, voice is a weapon, too, designed to throw your enemy off-balance, to have him on his heels when he should be leaning forward. Sun Tzu–type shit. Clay’s cough achieved the same effect as a warrior’s “Ki-ay”…it was so surprising and disgusting that the moment the tall one stepped backward, Clay swung a haymaker that came almost from the ground and caught the man flush in his temple. He spilled backward but didn’t fall.
The shorter one had the knife out of his pocket in an inspired pull, and as Clay clamped one of his massive hands around the wrist holding the knife, the scrapper head-butted him backward. He came in for a second butt, emboldened by the success of the first, but that was a mistake. Clay slipped it and used the momentum to push the guy forward, off-balance, taking the knife from him before he fell. These guys made another mistake, Clay thought as he felt the weight of the tempered steel. They’d come here to capture him instead of kill him, and the guy who is willing to take a fight to its most savage conclusion always holds the advantage.
The tall man stepped forward to throw a wild punch, and Clay ducked it and buried the knife up to the handle in the guy’s throat. The man fell backward, freeing the blade but unleashing a dam-break of blood, and his comrade, starting to rise from the ground, never had a chance. He died when the knife drove straight through his chest and caught the fleshy tissue of his heart. His eyes reminded Clay of a small spot of light in a Coleman lantern as you turn off the propane…the little bit of residual orange light tries to hold on, hold on, hold on before it finally succumbs to darkness.
Clay gathered himself and checked his periphery. The street was silent, empty. He rifled through the men’s pockets but found nothing—no identification, no papers, no badges. They had sent two agents, presumably FSB, to pick him up, and those two men would soon be missed. It would do Clay no good to try to stash them or bury them or burn their corpses. The men would not report when they were supposed to report, and the hunt would begin again. If they’d tracked him from St. Petersburg to Stepnoy, they must’ve been on him from the start. Maybe that fat conversationalist Adromatov was playing both sides or wasn’t quite as stealthy as he let on. FSB must’ve been watching Adromatov even before he picked Clay up at the airport, and he’d led them right to him like a baying hound dog. Clay knew one thing: he needed to get to a secure phone.
He stopped at the first dacha that had a satellite dish affixed to the roof—probably the country home of one of the mining officials, or at least an upper-level employee. Even before the fall of Communism, many Russian officials were granted these country retreats, temporary respites from the bustle of the Kremlin. This one would do.
A quick survey of the area made him confident no one was home. The place probably had a caretaker this time of year, but it was still too chilly to live here full-time. If the caretaker had visited recently, it was hard to tell. There wasn’t much care to the taking.
Clay picked the back lock absently, the work beneath his skills. Inside, the dacha was dusty and empty and looked as though the air hadn’t been disturbed in months. It took him only a moment to find what he was looking for.
In the popular imagination, spooks carry suitcases filled with sophisticated technology and can encrypt a phone call while sending pursuers and would-be eavesdroppers on wild-goose chases as to the source of the call. He’s calling from Geneva—no, Prague! No, London, confound him! In reality, the best way to make a secure call is to break into a random house and place it from a stranger’s phone. Trying to track a call from an arbitrarily chosen phone is akin to counting the fish in the Atlantic. There might technically be a way to do it, but the sheer number of possibilities makes it impossibly impractical.
“Finnegan’s Irish Pub?” came a pleasant female voice with a hint of an Irish lilt.
“Stedding—four, two, seven, four, two, one, one,” Clay answered.
He waited for the inevitable clicks and pulses that turned the line secure on the other end. Thirty seconds later, Stedding’s gruff voice filled his ear.
“I was wondering if you might remember to check in this time.”
“How you doing, Steddy?”
Clay wasn’t sure what Stedding said in response to that, but it sounded like “Psssh.” Clay could feel the frown seeping through the line. “Get on with it, then.”
“Oh, did I catch you at a bad time? I do apologize, boss.”
“I’m not your boss, and it’s invariably a bad time to catch me. So do me a favor and give me your report.”
“Right, boss, right. Here’s what I know and here’s what I need. Adromatov is dead. The three guys who killed him are dead. And the two guys who tailed me from there are dead.”
Clay pictured Stedding rubbing his temples.
“Maybe it’d be easier to tell me who’s alive.”
“Ahh, Steddy. You have a sense of humor after all.”
“Psssh.” That sound again.
“I think Nelson’s alive, but I’m not sure how long that will be true. The girl he was trying to find is alive. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“What girl?”
“Eighteen-year-old Hungarian nanny named Marika Csontos.”
“The nanny story, huh? Nelson thought it was real?”
“I do, too. I’m going to find her.”
“Your assignment is to find Nelson and bring him back.”
“If Nelson was closing in on Csontos and he went missing, doesn’t it follow logically that she might be worth something?”
There was a pause, and Clay hoped it indicated that Stedding was thinking about it and wasn’t just involved in more temple rubbing. A Skype account would sure have come in handy, but Stedding wouldn’t be caught dead on a camera that could be recorded.
“You want to change the goal of your mission, that it?”
“I want to add a goal to my mission. Find the girl, find Nelson, bring ’em both in from the cold.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not asking permission?”
“Let the record show I went through proper channels.”
“What record? There are no records with us, Clay.”
“Even better.”
“Take care of yourself and report back in twenty-four.”
“Ahh, you care about me, Steddy. That’s so—”
But the line went dead in his hand.
In the garage behind the dacha, he struck gold. He was hoping for a truck or at least a compact car, but he knew these would be easier to track if their theft happened to be discovered by the caretaker. Instead, he found better: an old motorcycle, a Spoykin, twenty years past its manufacturing date, under a dust-covered sheet. The bike hadn’t been touched since at least the previous summer. And if he replaced the general shape of it under the sheet, it would be a long time before it was missed.
A gas can on the floor of the garage provided a full tank. The key had been left carelessly in the ignition, and when Clay turned it, the engine sputtered to life.
After the excitement of the morning, it was this kind of luck Clay needed.
The rain bit into him, spitefully cold and as relentless as a conquering enemy. Fuck. Why’d he have to find a motorcycle? A fucking motorcycle? There couldn’t have been a goddamn Mercedes in the garage? A Lifan? A truck? Anything with windows and a roof?
He had been on the road traveling east for five hours. His tank was disturbingly close to empty and he hadn’t seen a petrol station for hours. And yet the sameness of the cold, of the evergreens lining the r
oad, of his single headlight beam illuminating a yellow cone of pavement in front of him, settled his mind and allowed him to think.
The stepbrother had to be the answer. Marika Csontos had a stepbrother who was attending Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok—as far away from Moscow as was geographically possible inside the country. She had heard what she’d heard and knew she needed to flee without looking suspicious before her secret was discovered. She would’ve been terrified, hearing this official pour out his state secrets as if he were sitting in a confessional, terrified he would look into her eyes and know her secret—that she understood everything coming out of his mouth. Maybe she’d called her stepbrother and he’d told her to come. She certainly hadn’t called the agency she worked for. That much had been made clear in Zhedenko’s office. Maybe Benidrov, the loose-lipped Kremlin official, had caught wind of her phone call and put two and two together and she’d fled before he could correct his mistake.
Clay’s clothes were soaked and heavy, and only the chattering of his teeth broke up his thoughts. The route was endless country, and his only company on the road was an occasional big rig lumbering to some factory or mine or farm. The motorcycle’s needle was now on empty; if it gave out he would have to continue on foot for as many miles as it took to steal a car. He almost welcomed the obstacle, anything to break up the whine of the bike, the vibration of his seat, his stiff legs and arms and neck, the pinprick bites of the implacable rain on his face. All that was missing was the salt spray in his mouth and he would’ve been right back on the bow of that goddamn boat thirty years ago.
A hazy light on the horizon drew him forward like a moth to a candle. He throttled the bike up a hill, and as he crested it, a small town spread before him. A snippet of a poem lit the edge of his brain like light under a closet door. Much have I traveled in these realms of gold…or something like that. What the hell was that from? And why did he keep flashing to his childhood? What was it about this mission that kept churning up those muddy waters? And did he really want to dig deep enough to find out?
