by Cap Daniels
I tried not to react to the obvious uppercut, and I stood and shook his hand.
He pressed a business card into my palm. “Give me a call if you ever need anything or just want to chat.”
I watched him walk away with his confident stride and step into the back of a black Chevy Suburban. It had been parked near the entrance to the marina the entire time we’d been aboard Aegis. Before sliding it into my pocket, I glanced at the card Pennant had given me. It was plain white with a telephone number written in blue ink, nothing else. I returned to my seat and handed Dr. Richter another drink and a very nice Cuban Cohiba. He produced a punch and lighter and soon had the cigar glowing cherry red.
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked.
“That, my boy, was a debrief and a job interview,” he said as he examined his cigar.
“I don’t need a job, and I’m pretty sure he already knew everything I told him tonight.” I drew a long draw of sweet smoke and let it slowly escape my lips.
Dr. Richter looked sternly at me. “We always need another job, Chase, but I think you’re correct about Pennant already knowing what happened in Cuba.”
I didn’t necessarily agree that I always needed another job, but I chose to let that bit of wisdom linger for the moment. I had too many other things that I needed to discuss before we talked about future work.
I looked across the marina at the Suburban as it drove out of sight. “What was that bullshit about knowing my father?”
Dr. Richter looked at the taillights and shrugged.
“Listen, Coach. I need to tell you some things, and then I need some advice. I can’t promise that I’ll take the advice, but I want to hear what you have to say. Okay?”
Dr. Richter drew in another mouthful of some of the finest tobacco smoke on Earth. “I already know most of what you’re going to tell me, and I probably know what you’re going to ask. I’m sure there’s nothing happening in your head that hasn’t happened to almost every man who came before you, including me, but I’ll listen and I’ll give you the best advice I can. I didn’t always take the advice of those older and wiser than me, so I know you probably won’t take mine. That’s just the way of things.”
There was no way he could know what I was about to tell him. I was confident that my situation was entirely unique.
“So, you already know what happened in Cuba. It was a train wreck in a swamp in many ways, but ultimately, I think I accomplished what I was sent there to do.”
“Actually, Chase, you didn’t.”
Those words echoed through the night air like thunder. Dr. Richter was telling me I’d failed. I was speechless.
“You see, you weren’t actually sent there to kill Suslik. You were sent there to flush him out and muck up his plan to assassinate the secretary of state. No one expected you to get close enough to kill him. Everyone believed you’d stumble around and find Suslik, but everyone expected him to see you coming a mile away and scamper back to Europe rather than risk an encounter with American intelligence operatives. You were a pawn, Chase. Everyone at your level is a pawn. Don’t let it piss you off. You surprised everyone. Even me.”
I couldn’t believe that I’d been sent to Cuba to risk my life, just to get under one of the world’s foremost assassin’s skin, to send him scurrying back home. It did piss me off. If I’d been told to scare him away, I would’ve done that, but I was told to kill him. Everything in my training had taught me to accomplish the mission. I didn’t need to be misled. I would do what I was told without the necessity for deception. I started to protest, but Dr. Richter cut me off.
“Don’t get upset, Chase. Again, it’s just the way of things. You live in a world of deception now. You aren’t always going to know the whole truth. Hell, most of the time, you aren’t going to know any of the truth. You’re an implement of policy, a very sharp tool in a very large toolbox. People like you and me exist so people like Pennant will have the instruments at their disposal to accomplish the big-picture plan. It has to be that way. I know it’s hard to understand, and it will never make sense, but we just have to learn to swallow it.”
His pep talk didn’t go very far towards making me feel better, but I did understand his point. As angry as I was about the deception, it was a small part of what I needed to discuss with him.
“Okay, whatever. I understand I’m a low-level nobody, but none of that matters right now.”
“No, Chase. You were a low-level nobody, but what you accomplished has catapulted you well toward the top of the totem pole in D.C. Very important and influential people are impressed. You are most certainly not nobody anymore. You’re the prize pig at the state fair. Operators have been trying to find and kill Suslik for over a decade. He’s proven to be one of the most elusive foreign agents in history. It’s almost like he was a ghost. You caught and killed a poltergeist, my boy.”
The word “ghost” rang in my ears like a church bell. It was exactly what Anya had called Suslik when she told me he wasn’t dead.
“Coach, I have a lot to tell you, so I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible. You know about the sniper I saw at Belmont.”
He looked at his feet. “Chase, trust me. Nothing good can come of that. I know better than anyone what happens when operators get involved with foreign agents. It never ends well for anyone. You have to get that girl out of your head.”
“No, Coach, you don’t understand. It’s not like that. I saw her again. I mean, I did more than just see her. She came after me. She chased me for three weeks across a dozen islands and a couple thousand miles of ocean. She found me in St. Thomas with Dutch.”
Dr. Richter’s eyes came to life. “You saw Dutch in St. Thomas?”
“Yes,” I said. “He actually found me there the same day I saw Anya on the beach.”
“Wait a minute. Dutch found you?”
“Yes. He found me at a tiki bar on the beach in Charlotte Amalie. I was having a drink and watching Anya on the beach.”
“Who the hell is Anya?”
“Anya . . . Anastasia, the sniper from Belmont. She’s actually SVR and not a sniper at all. She prefers edged weapons. I mean, she can shoot, but she just doesn’t like to shoot.”
Dr. Richter shook his head, “Slow down, boy. What the hell are you talking about? How do you know all of this about her, and how do you know her name, for God’s sake? And wait a minute. Anya isn’t short for Anastasia.”
I didn’t know how to make him understand. If he didn’t stop interrupting me, it was going to take two weeks to explain it all.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Dutch found me. We talked. Anya snuck aboard Aegis, drugged me, tied me up, and cut my tongue in half.”
I stuck out my tongue to show him the scar. Thankfully it had healed nicely, but a mark ran the length of my tongue as proof that I’d survived Anya’s knife.
“I’m going to need another drink,” he said as he lifted the bottle from the deck and poured his glass well past half full.
I lifted my glass toward him and he poured at least as much in mine. “It’s going to be an interesting night,” I said.
He raised his glass. “It certainly is. Now, go on. Make me understand what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Okay,” I continued. “So, she wanted to know why I’d tried to kill Dmitri Barkov and who sent me. She didn’t believe that I wasn’t sent to kill Barkov. Oh, as it turns out, he’s a pretty bad dude, too, but we’ll talk more about him later.”
An ominous and dark look consumed Dr. Richter’s face. He set his glass down and leaned toward me with a glare that looked like fear tempered by hate. “Don’t fuck around with Dmitri Barkov, Chase. Don’t get tangled up with him. There are none worse than that bastard. He eats the souls of everyone around him.”
I was confused and frustrated. I wasn’t getting tangled up with Barkov. I didn’t know anything about him except he had a thing for racehorses and he was some kind of big shot in the Russian mafia.
“We’re getting way off track,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you about Anya. She sort of works for Barkov.”
That got his attention. “Wait a minute!” he said. “I thought you said she was SVR.”
“Yes, she is SVR, but she also works for Barkov, I think. I don’t really understand it yet, but that’s not what’s important.”
“That’s the only thing that’s important, Chase! Slow down and make sure you’re telling me exactly what you know. This Russian SVR agent named Anastasia, who you call Anya, works for Dmitri Barkov, the Russian mafia kingpin? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, but that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that she thought I was sent to kill him instead of Suslik. But it gets even weirder. She doesn’t believe he’s dead.”
“She doesn’t believe who is dead?”
“Suslik! She doesn’t think he’s dead. In fact, she said he can’t be killed because he’s a ghost, or actually, the ghost of a cat or something. That’s the same thing you said about him. Why does everyone keep calling him a ghost?”
Dr. Richter sat back against the coaming of my boat and looked skyward. “This is getting hard to follow, so let’s slow it down,” he said. “First, I’ll tell you about Suslik. Then, you have to tell me what happened to Dutch. No one has heard from him in over two weeks. Then, we’ll talk more about this Anastasia, but we have to talk about Barkov, too.”
I sat back, ready to listen.
He said, “Okay, Suslik is a ghost because he has an unearthly ability to be in several places at once. We’ll have an agent photographing him in The Hague while another is watching him kill a diamond broker in South Africa. He can be on opposite sides of the globe within hours of a confirmed siting. Thanks to you, we know for sure that he’s graveyard dead and making his way through the stomachs of some very happy sharks off Havana.”
I considered what he told me. “None of that makes sense. There was nothing ghostly about him when I yanked him from Barkov’s yacht. He died just like any other man would’ve died, but I just can’t get over how much Anya, and now you, seem to think that he was something supernatural.”
Dr. Richter squirmed, obviously uncomfortable. “It’s about time you get used to things not making sense, Chase. This is not a world of working nine-to-five and making sales calls. We don’t live in the same world as everyone else. Our world is almost entirely made up of characters who are far more than they appear. That includes you. Speaking of ghosts, when did you last see Dutch?”
“Dutch is dead,” I said matter-of-factly. “Anya killed him in his bungalow on St. Thomas. He was working for the Russians, Coach. Somebody had flipped him and he was getting paid. Remember when I told you that Anya had drugged me and tied me up?”
He listened intently.
“Well, Dutch snuck aboard Aegis while Anya was interrogating me and he shot at her, but she escaped through the hatch without a scratch.”
Dr. Richter looked doubtful. “Are you saying he shot at her but he didn’t hit her?”
“Yes, that’s part of the problem. It doesn’t make sense that he wouldn’t have shot her in the head from less than fifteen feet away, but he didn’t even graze her. That’s part of why I know he’d been flipped. A drunken monkey could’ve made that shot, but Dutch missed. I just don’t buy it.”
“Neither do I,” he said.
It was clear he was trying to process the whole scene in his mind, but it wasn’t coming together for him. I had lived it, and it didn’t make sense to me, so I could only imagine how confusing it was for him.
“Anyway, Anya killed Dutch in his bungalow because . . . hell, I don’t really know why. Why isn’t really important, but she killed him and then tried to drown me in the lagoon, but I shot her in the foot, and then we kissed.”
He dropped his highball glass and his jaw fell open. “Wait a damned minute!” he roared. “She killed Dutch? Our Dutch? But you were able to shoot her in the foot while she was trying to drown you?”
“Yes, precisely. She was holding me on the bottom of the lagoon, and she stuffed my snorkel full of sand and saltwater after lassoing me. I was barely able to get my finger on the trigger through the skin of my dry bag, but I got off one shot and it took off her little toe. I had no choice. I was going to be dead in a few more seconds. I had to do something.”
“Yeah, yeah, I get that. You had to shoot her. But why the hell would you kiss her after she tried to kill you and after you shot off her toe?”
“It just happened. She was on top of me and we kissed. It was one of those bizarre things that just happens. I can’t explain it. I took her back to the boat and sewed up her foot where her toe had been. We spent the next several days together and now she wants to quit, Coach. She wants to defect.”
“Bullshit! She’s playing you, boy. She’s trying to recruit you. Don’t let it happen, or you’ll end up like Dutch, or worse.”
I wanted to protest, but from his perspective, there was no other way to see it. It didn’t matter how I felt about her. To Dr. Richter, she was just an SVR agent and I was her mark—nothing more.
I finished the story, including the part about the American who had been sent to kill me, but he seemed most interested when I described Anya.
“You can’t imagine how beautiful her eyes are. They’re unforgettable. There’s something so familiar, yet so unique about them, Coach. Her mother was killed when she was a child and she never really knew her father. She didn’t actually say how her mother died, but it was clearly painful for her to talk about her childhood.”
Dr. Richter stared at me until it became uncomfortable. When he finally spoke, he did so in a soft, almost timid tone. “Tell me about her eyes again. Look at me and tell me about her eyes.” His tone was troubled and haunted.
I didn’t know where the conversation was going.
“Tell me again about her eyes. It’s very important.”
“I already told you. They’re like the eyes of a cat. It’s as if she can look into my soul. They’re sometimes blue and sometimes gray, but sometimes, they’re both. And she stares with such intensity. It’s impossible to look away from her, Dr. Richter. She’s simply perfect.”
“What exactly did she tell you about her name?” he asked.
“She told me to call her Anya. Apparently, her real name is Anastasia, but it infuriated her when I called her Anastasia. She said only her mother called her that name, and no one else. I know Anya isn’t traditionally short for Anastasia, but maybe that’s just the name she uses. I don’t know. Maybe that’s the name they gave her when she became an SVR officer. Do you think she was lying to me about her name?”
“No, I don’t think she was lying to you. How about her last name? What’s her last name, Chase?”
I looked at him as if he’d asked me how many rocks were on the moon. I didn’t know what her last name was or if Anastasia was her real first name. It occurred to me that I knew very little about her, but every little thing I did know made me want to know more.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think she ever told me her last name. She knew mine, though. She knew all about me, in fact.”
“That’s okay. Listen to me, Chase. Listen very carefully. That girl is the most dangerous thing you’ll ever encounter. She can kill you without a thought, or she can take your body and mind places you never imagined going. If you let her, she’ll become your greatest weakness and your undoing. There are some things in life that are more important than everything else. It’s up to you to determine the difference between what makes you alive and what simply makes you keep breathing. Those are two very different things. Do you understand?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m lost.”
He smiled for the first time in over an hour. “It’s okay, my boy. It’ll all come to you in time.”
I wanted to shake him and tell him I wasn’t Daniel-san and he wasn’t Mr. Myagi, but I wasn’t sure he’d get the Karate Kid reference. I said, “You’
re welcome to stay on the boat with me tonight if you want.”
He politely declined the invitation, then he looked up at the star-filled sky. “So, you killed Suslik, then your handler got dead at the hands of a Russian SVR agent who you then shot in the foot before she screwed your brains out. Does that about cover the last month of your life?”
“Well,” I said, “I think I’d include a few more details, but you hit the high points.”
“I have a way of reducing minutia to its core and summing things up,” he laughed. “Get your butt back home. There’s work for you to do. Now that Pennant thinks you’re the newest American James Bond, he’ll be throwing assignments at you like candy."
I grimaced. "I don't think I like the sound of that. I'm not interested in being his errand boy. Besides, I don't work for him."
Dr. Richter looked over his glasses. "No, you certainly don't work for him, my boy. Don't be afraid to say no. You can always say no." He stood and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks for the cigar and the drinks. I’m proud of you.” He looked at me with the same expression from earlier that made me feel uneasy. “Protect her, Chase . . . especially from you.”
29
Commandments
I lay awake trying to piece together the puzzle my life had become. It seemed the more I learned about my new life, the less I truly understood. Why would I warrant a visit from the deputy director of operations for the CIA? If it was Pennant’s intention to make me his private one-man-army, I wasn’t interested. I would’ve preferred to remain anonymous. I feared Dr. Richter had just delivered me into the hands of the man who could become my greatest ally, or perhaps my albatross.
Dr. Richter had always been mysterious, but his dramatic change of position on my feelings for Anya had me baffled. Why would he tell me to protect her? A woman like her needed no protection from someone like me. She was far more capable of taking care of herself than I ever could have been.
