by Derek Haas
Czabo crossed the street, ducked down an alley, and headed into one of the commonplace gunmetal-gray apartment buildings that made up this port city.
If Marika happened to be out, this plan was going to go sideways fast. Clay had been thinking about her so much since he’d left St. Petersburg, he wondered how blurry his mental picture would prove to be. It was like reading a book and having a character in your head, so real you could recognize her in a crowd, and then discovering that the actress picked to play the part in the film version is nothing close to your image. Everything you had in mind before is lost forever after seeing a new face in the part. Would he be disappointed? Would he be shocked? Would she be as plain as wallpaper? He took the stairs two at a time and then leaned back to set himself outside her door.
She was hastily packing a bag when Clay kicked the door in.
One thing registered as he first laid eyes upon her: his mental image was indeed inaccurate. She was astonishingly beautiful, even more so than he had imagined. She had wide, impossible eyes, a shade of blue that seemed to absorb light. Her hair was long and black and wild, and her lips were full and intense. Goddamn, she was stunning.
The second thing he noticed was her stepbrother lunging at him with a knife. The girl’s pulchritude threw him off his game, and he reacted too slowly. The blade caught a piece of his forearm as he defended a second late.
“Hey!” he shouted in Russian, now angry. Czabo lunged again, and this time Clay met him before he could bring the knife around, popped his wrist, and Czabo’s grip wasn’t professional enough to hang on. While the kid watched the knife sail, Clay grabbed his arm, pulled him in, and held him tight.
“I’m not here to harm you. I’m here to help!” he grunted. Clay’s arm was bleeding more than he would have liked.
Marika’s face flashed emotion: terror, anger, hope.
Czabo struggled, and Clay bent his arm a little farther, until he stopped struggling.
“Who are you?”
“American,” Clay said, dropping the accent. “There are people coming for your sister. I can get her to a safe place.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“You…you shouldn’t.” Clay let him go, and he stumbled back toward his stepsister. “But I’m all you have right now. If I’d been sent to kill you, there wouldn’t have been talking. I would have put bullets in both of you in the time it took to raise that knife.”
The stepbrother held her defensively behind him, an instinctive protective stance Clay found admirable.
“What do you want?”
“Only to help her. If I found you, they’ll find you.”
“She doesn’t know anything.”
“I can see that isn’t true.”
“It’s not her fault. She didn’t want any of this.”
“I believe that, but it doesn’t change what is.”
Clay lowered his arms and assumed his most unthreatening position. He moved his eyes to lock on to hers. He could feel his heart beat faster. Maybe it was the chase, the excitement a hunter feels when finding his target. Maybe…His arm continued to drip blood, but he ignored the pain. “Now, look. I don’t know when they’re coming, but they will come. I can get you both out of here…out of the country…someplace safe.”
“I have my studies.”
“Not anymore.”
He could see the stepbrother wince as he worked this out in his mind, all of his best-laid plans shattered.
For the first time, she spoke, and her voice matched her appearance. It wasn’t the gruff Hungarian of government agents; it was smooth and soft and guileless. “I’m so sorry, David.”
His eyes softened for just a moment, like the moon popping out of a dull sky. He looked on the verge of tears, a young man tossed in a world he didn’t understand, as though he’d thought maybe he could hide her here in this distant city on the edge of Russia and no one would come looking for them and everything would stay the same. He could be a professor or a scientist and they could have a life together. And then Clay had shown up, carrying a stark dose of reality. They were both soft, disoriented, fragile. Clay knew to keep them talking, moving.
“Do you have a car?”
Czabo shook his head, but Marika nodded. It would’ve been comical in another circumstance.
“I know I haven’t earned it yet, but you’re going to have to put your trust in me if you want to live.”
Marika spoke. “I have a cheap Volga.”
“It’ll have to do. Leave everything here, lock your door, and let’s go.”
“Can we confer for a moment?”
Clay swallowed, then nodded. “Yes, but hurry, please.”
They moved to the window to huddle together as Clay stepped toward their kitchenette. He grabbed a hand towel and tied it over his wound as he watched them. There wasn’t much privacy to be had in this tiny apartment.
The siblings spoke in low tones, and though Clay couldn’t make out the words, he understood the meaning. They were trying to assure each other that everything was going to be okay if they just stayed together. Sunlight filtered through the window, stirring the motes in the air, and the cone of light, falling right on them, reminded Clay of his porthole. He had been in his cabin, praying to a God he didn’t know to deliver him from this, to give him some kind of sign, and a beam of sunlight had broken through the clouds, penetrated his cabin, and shone down on his desk. It was jumbled in his mind now—had he prayed for the sign first, or had the sign come first and understanding later? The sunlight settled on a wood carving of Belenus he had picked up in Dublin, a carving he had stuck in a drawer years ago and only recently rediscovered. Had he left it on his desk? Had the sunlight really illuminated it or had it just missed the carving? Had he left it out in just the right place, manufacturing a divine sign? He was just a kid, he told himself, just a kid imagining a world without—
A green light shone through the window and lit Marika’s cheek.
“Down!”
She didn’t move, didn’t get down, but her stepbrother did. He lurched forward as though propelled by some invisible force and shielded his stepsister from the window, drawing the laser sight from her to him, and when the bullet came, it hit him square between the shoulders. She stumbled back as his weight fell on her, and her eyes widened in shock and bewilderment. The green laser found her again, running up her face and settling on her forehead. She dropped David, unable to support his weight anymore, and Clay showed his professional skills by darting to her and pulling her back toward the shadows only a half second before fresh gunfire split the window and ripped into the room.
“David,” she whimpered, her voice choked, her eyes fixed to his body.
“We have to move.”
“David,” she protested.
“Look at me, Marika.” Clay spoke in Russian, grave, hardening his words. “He’s dead. You’ll die, too, if you don’t keep up with me, yes?”
His words jolted her as though he had tossed a bucket of ice water in her face.
“Your car, where is it?”
“Parking lot.”
“This building?”
“Behind it.”
“Keys?”
“I…I don’t…” Her hand absently searched her pocket and came up with a set of keys. He took them from her, then squeezed her hand. He hoped the contact was enough. He tried to will trust through it.
“Okay, then…run with me.”
She took one last look at her stepbrother, and the pain in her eyes was enough to take Clay’s breath away. He couldn’t have any more of that.
“Now!” he screamed as bullets crashed once more into the room, splintering the wooden floorboards.
When he bolted for the door, she followed.
They tried to hit him in the stairwell, and it might have worked, except for his downward momentum. They opened the door on the lobby landing and swung inside, automatic weapons shouldered, but he was already halfway down that flight and he launched himself from
six steps above them, hurling his full weight into them before they could pop off a shot. Marika screamed, and her cry echoed in the enclosed chamber so the sound of it masked the collision of elbows with noses, of knees with throats, of fists with temples, of heels with necks, until the echo of the scream died at the same time as the two assailants dropped.
Clay looked up at her, now with blood literally on his hands and speckled across his cheek. “Keep moving,” he growled. He thought he saw appreciation in her eyes, but maybe he was just flushed from the kill and imagined it.
They made it to the Volga before the next wave hit. How many fucking guys had they brought?
“Get in the back and lie down!”
She obeyed. He threw the car into reverse just as the rear windshield exploded.
A car roared forward and tried to box them in, but Clay stamped the accelerator in reverse and the tires held, driving the attacker backward and giving Clay just enough room to throw the Volga in drive and launch it forward between parked cars. He might not have known how to pilot a plane, but damn, could Austin Clay drive anything with tires.
He squeezed between two approaching black SUVs. They threatened to pinch him between them but chickened out at the last moment, and that told Clay he might just have a chance. Drivers afraid to wreck their government-issued vehicles would always be at a disadvantage to a man with nothing to lose.
The Volga spun out of the parking lot and slid across the asphalt like a speed skater swinging wide into a turn, until the tire treads again found purchase and the car corrected from sideways to forward. Only the sea was to his right, while the city lay to his left, and three SUVs fell in behind him as three more whipped out in front of him, closing like medieval jousters. If they had failed to bring adequate forces to take him before, they appeared determined not to underestimate him again. Well, he’d dispatched every last son of a bitch who’d tried before, so could he blame them for switching to a strength-in-numbers assault?
He set his jaw, lowered his head, and mashed the accelerator, vaulting the Volga at the trio of trucks that wished to drive him from the road.
Marika’s head peeked out like a prairie dog’s, and she let out an eardrum-shattering shriek as she saw the SUVs closing the distance in front of them.
“Down!” he snapped for the second time that day, and this time she obeyed.
He twirled the wheel at the last possible moment, and his side-view mirrors popped like balloons as he judged correctly and squeezed the Volga between two of the SUVs as they shot past him, two bullets with a hairsbreadth of space between them. The paint on the Volga’s doors might need retouching when this was over.
Nelson. Everything Nelson suspected about the girl must’ve been true. The Russians hadn’t sent a sniper after her; they’d sent a goddamn division.
As if to accentuate the point, the familiar wut-wut-wut of a helicopter’s rotors overpowered the whine of his sedan’s engine moments before the black beast buzzed overhead and burst out in front of him.
Well, that complicated things. The ledger was starting to bleed red, and Clay doubted it would ever return to black. If he’d thought he could outrun or outduel them, that notion went out the window now that they had eyes in the sky. No, this account had gone belly-up quickly, but Clay would be damned if he was going to cut his losses and run.
He threw up the hand brake, spun the wheel, and skidded up on two tires as he took a turn back toward the city while keeping the accelerator mashed to the floorboard. The helicopter banked and turned after him, while behind him, two of the six SUVs overshot the turn and smashed into each other. The remaining four filed in line behind him.
“You have a parking garage here? Any place I can hide from the chopper?”
“Fortress museum,” came the reply from the backseat.
She was right. Vladivostok was teeming with sprawling, unique subterranean forts built in the late nineteenth century to fend off a Japanese invasion. Later, they’d been expanded right through the cold war to house Soviet platoons and matériel. They were extensive, empty, interconnected, and everywhere under the city.
“Which way?”
She poked her head up again and did a quick scan of their position. The noise of the chopper’s rotors beat down on them like a machine gun.
“Ul Zapadnaya!” she screamed, and cowered back down, covering her ears with her hands.
He cut through the city, left, then left again, angling for the water once more. Every time an SUV attempted to slide in behind him, he cut off the angle.
The sun hit the water with a glancing blow as it descended, throwing harsh light into his eyes, and he squinted to fight off the glare. He dodged through light traffic like a mouse in a maze and then ducked left onto the wider Ul Zapadnaya. Wider is relative in Russia: this street managed to have two lanes going in the same direction. The chopper overhead swung low and practically filled his front windshield. He braked sharply, spun the Volga up on the curb, and cut over a grassy knoll toward the entrance to the fortress. Tourists were mostly absent at this hour, as the museum was thirty minutes from closing. Clay honked and snaked past a couple of bicyclists, then drove the sedan up the sidewalk bordering the fortress’s entry point, almost losing control as his tires hugged the curb that protected the shrubbery along the fortress’s side. As the SUVs swarmed behind, attempting to keep pace, Clay gritted his teeth and gunned the car for the glass doors of the tunnel entrance.
A sleepy ticket-taker barely managed to pivot out of the way as the Volga took out the glass and frame like a passing hurricane. Clay thought he heard Marika scream again, but it all got mixed up in the glass and debris and mayhem echoing inside the stone corridor.
One good thing about the fortress museum: they had left the tunnels intact, preserved, untouched. Two of the SUVs had overcome their reticence and barreled into the opening behind him, but the other two hung back with the helicopter, presumably to guard the exit if he should somehow manage to storm back out.
Inside, the tunnels featured curved stone ceilings and were narrow enough that only one vehicle could fit. The floor was uneven, marked with ruts, and Clay was jostled in the front seat like a lottery ball. He hoped the tires would hold.
Perpendicular tunnels opened to his right every hundred meters. If he could anticipate the pattern, then maybe he could—
Bam! He was bumped from behind, and then bam! Bumped again. Fifty feet to the next opening. Forty-five. Gunfire poured through the back windshield. Thirty-five, thirty. He spotted the pattern. He was sure of it. Right? Twenty-five. Twenty. If he hadn’t got the pattern right, if he had measured incorrectly, it would end here, in this tunnel, with more questions than answers, and no one would know why he’d died or for whom. A bullet whistled past his shoulder, close enough to bury itself in the steering wheel. Ten, five.
He pulled the wheel down with all his strength, and the Volga was up to the challenge. It T-turned into an open tunnel, and the SUVs’ inertia was too strong to make the same turn. They blundered past the entrance, then tangled as they realized the vehicle they were pursuing was no longer in their crosshairs. They wouldn’t be untangling anytime soon.
Clay drove straight ahead for a good fifteen minutes before his tires blew.
They ditched the car and set off on foot, until they heard voices. Someone was calling the time, five-thirty, and announcing that Fort Seven was closing. They mingled with two dozen tourists and emerged fifteen kilometers north of downtown, without having to tussle with any security.
Chapter Six
THE TRUTH lies in the darkness.
A man can move about during the day and fill his mind with decisions and conversations and busywork so he doesn’t have to focus inward. When he crawls into bed at night, however, when it is just him and the blackness, he is forced to grow introspective. After the denials, after the protestations, after the justifications, the truth will creep in and plant its flag.
Nelson had failed his country. First, he had compromise
d himself by chasing an unsanctioned mission. Then he had botched that mission by getting caught. Then he had broken under torture and confessed to everything, offering every detail about who he was, how he worked, and what he had done since settling in St. Petersburg years ago. He had told them about his research into the life of Marika Csontos, and where he thought she might be hiding.
Was that somehow worse? Was throwing a young girl to the wolves even a greater betrayal than confessing state secrets? Somehow, it was. The Russians most likely knew most of what he’d told them about the way the CIA worked. He’d probably offered very few classified bits they weren’t already privy to. He didn’t even know the real names of other CIA officers. His confessions were probably typed up in a memo that sat on some low-ranking FSB official’s computer. But Marika? He had given them a road map. If she wasn’t in Stepnoy, then she was most likely with her stepbrother in Vladivostok.
Tears burned the corners of his eyes, here in the dark, with only his thoughts to sting him. The three omnipresent cameras would record his every move, but were they even watching him anymore?
He reached out and felt in the darkness for his cane where it leaned against the wall. He brought it back under the covers and rested it across his body. If his movements were noted by some sort of infrared camera, no one entered to let him know.
He felt around to the base of the cane and removed the rubber gripper. The cane was made of hard plastic, and originally, the end had been rounded off to form a knob. But Nelson had found that if he scraped it against a screw protruding from the back of his bed’s headboard, he could start to shape it into a fine point. He worked for only about fifteen minutes each night, lest he make too much noise or movement. Afterward, he would put the rubber gripper back over the point and return the cane to its position against the wall before the sun shone through the curtains.
