Town speed-limped to the rental car and threw it into a U-turn, just as another black and white blasted past him. He followed in its wake, in the direction of Rick Finch’s bungalow.
A block away he could see flashing lights and a clot of emergency vehicles and he turned and made his way to the street parallel to that of Finch’s. He drove slowly until a figure stood up from behind three trash bins, raised a hand and fell to the blacktop.
Town left the car idling and stepped out, expecting at any moment to take fire as he crouched over the bloody man who was unconscious but still breathing.
Town opened the rear door of the Toyota and dragged Finch to the car and managed to haul him inside, folding his legs and pushing the door closed.
He was sucking air, from exertion and fear, by the time he got back behind the wheel.
As he accelerated away a shot rang out and the rear window starred. He flung the car into a left turn and sped away, eyes on the mirrors.
Golding’s burner phone rang, and Town answered it.
“Abort,” Golding said.
“You’ve heard?”
“I’m hearing. An attack on the house. Details are scrambled.”
“Who?”
“Unclear. But get out. Now. It’s over.”
“I have him with me. The husband.”
“Shit.”
“He’s wounded.”
“Dump him. Get yourself clear. We never spoke. None of this ever happened.”
The line was dead and Town knew that the number had been sucked forever into a black hole of extinct binary code.
Town pulled over and looked at the man in the rear. He was unconscious, his breath ragged. Town could smell his sweat and the old-iron taint of his blood.
Red and blue lights bloomed in the night and a cop car barreled up from behind. Town waited for its headlights to find the shattered back window but it flew by, the wind of its passing rocking the Toyota on its springs.
Town drove on, putting distance between himself and Finch’s house. He saw a dark alley between a strip mall and a shuttered nail bar, and reversed the car off the street. He popped the trunk and found a tire iron and smashed out the rest of the window, a rain of glass falling onto the slumped form of Rick Finch.
As he drove away Town withdrew one of the cell phones from his pocket, thumbed a number and listened to the cricket chirp as it rang.
FOURTEEN
Kip Littlefield swooped up his driveway in the Lincoln, the headlight beams playing across the grand entrance of his house. He activated the garage remote and drove the SUV inside, the door clanking closed after him.
He entered the house via the hallway, smelling floor wax and that heady, unclassifiable scent of privilege. He shed his coat and walked up the stairs, his footsteps muffled by the lush pile of the carpet. Easing open the door to his two-year-old daughter’s room he was presented with an angelic sight: Chloe lay asleep in her bed beneath a fluttering flock of butterfly mobiles, her flaxen hair set aglow by the star-shaped nightlight. Littlefield crept away without disturbing her.
He went to the master suite, hesitating a moment before he opened the door a crack, allowing a finger of light from the corridor to reach in and touch the blonde head of his wife who snored softly amidst a tumble of pillows on the giant bed.
Littlefield was about to withdraw when his wife stirred and sat up, blinking, shaking her pale tresses.
“Hello, Gwen,” he said, trying to keep his voice cheerful.
“My name is Marijana! Marijana! Where the fuck have you been, you bastard!”
Gwen started to shout in her native Slovenian and jumped from the bed, a pink-nippled breast escaping her babydoll nightgown. She charged at him, long talons ready to rake his face. He was forced to withdraw into the corridor, locking the door after him, as Gwen screamed and kicked and pummeled.
The white heads of Señor and Señora Rivera appeared on the stairs and they nodded and bobbed and said, “Señor Keep,” in unison.
Littlefield greeted them and stepped aside as they stormed the bedroom, the still husky Señor Rivera grabbing Gwen in a bear hug while his wife jabbed a syringe into her arm. Gwen fought for a few seconds before folding in on herself and the Riveras carried her back to the bed.
Francisco and Martina Rivera looked like apple-cheeked seniors, but they had been in the employ of Augusto Pinchot during the worst of the Chilean dictator's excesses in the seventies and eighties, and had become famed as a torturing tag-team. Littlefield knew what they had done in that football stadium in Santiago: breaking the bones of men and women with hammers, inducing them to play Russian roulette, forcing them to eat the flesh of slaughtered fellow prisoners and to have sex with dogs.
It was for these skills that he had scooped them up from penury in Miami and installed them as the keepers of his home.
His wife’s yells had woken the child and she, too, was screaming. Señora Rivera emerged from the bedroom and hurried to the girl’s room. As Littlefield went down the stairs he heard the woman grunt and detected muffled yelps and scuffs before the child fell silent.
He crossed to the living room furnished in a clutter of Louis Quinze pieces that Littlefield loathed but his wife loved.
Señora Rivera descended the stairs, adjusting her clothes, smiling. “Some supper, Señor Keep?” she asked. “I have prepared lomo soltado just the way you like it.”
The woman’s soy-marinated beef, onions, tomatoes and aji chilies served with fries as hefty as fence posts, was a triumph, but he had no stomach for it tonight.
“Thank you, señora, it is very tempting, but I am expected in the city.”
“Of course, Señor Keep.”
“At least have this, señor,” Francisco Rivera said, appearing with a highball glass of single malt, no ice.
“Thank you.”
Littlefield took the drink and sat down as the Riveras bowed in unison and withdrew to their quarters. Something jabbed Littlefield in the buttocks and he lifted the cover of Two Weeks Notice, a romantic comedy starring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock, from between the cushions of the sofa. Clearly he’d disturbed the Riveras as they’d watched the old DVD on the massive hi-definition TV that he seldom used.
He felt a profound sadness. There were no sweet moments spent watching movies with his wife and child.
Littlefield had bought them both. He'd found his wife on a mail-order bride site and paid handsomely to get her over to the U.S. At first things had looked promising, she had a facility with languages and had quite quickly poured the molasses of an ersatz Tidewater accent over the grit of her native tongue. She was beautiful and had, at the beginning, been at pains to please him in the bedroom.
Things had started to curdle when he’d discovered that she’d lied to him about her ability to bear children. She was barren, the result of some brutal episode in her childhood, and Littlefield would not rest until he had at least one smiling bairn on the family Christmas card.
His daughter, Chloe—nee Amira—he’d procured from a family of Syrian refuges as they’d trekked across Greece into Albania. The price of the purchase of the light-haired child sired by dark-haired people had secured the rest of the family’s safe passage forward.
When he’d returned with the blonde infant his wife had been repulsed and had come to hate the child. That the baby of strangers resembled her so keenly she’d found to be sinister rather than endearing.
Shortly before Christmas, wanting to show off his wonderful house and beautiful family, he’d thrown a luncheon for the Washington elite who had their hands deep in his pockets. Gwen had become drunk and swum naked in the heated pool to the delight of the men and the annoyance of their wives. His daughter had yelled without cease and then gorged herself on sweet snacks and had projectile vomited during the entrée.
A debacle.
Littlefield finished his drink and left a bundle of cash on the coffee table and went out to his Navigator. As he drove back toward the city, searching the news
channels on the stereo for any updates on the Finch saga—all he heard were warmed-over reports of the husband’s promise of a proof of life video—he decided it was time to get rid of the woman and the child, and replace them with newer, improved versions.
If they were blonde and of approximate ages, who would ever notice?
FIFTEEN
Ann Town, sitting on a black leather bench on the fourth floor of MoMA staring at a huge monochromatic Robert Motherwell, suddenly caught a whiff of Balkan cigarettes, vanilla-scented hair pomade and something indefinable but not unlike cloves. This mélange of scents was what Arkady Andropov had left on the bedsheets after their trysts back in the eighties, and carried with it a powerfully erotic charge.
Unmoving, Ann gazed at the canvas, at the black stab wounds slashed into the pale background, listening to the distant snarl of traffic down on West 53rd Street. A muffled cough had her turning her head and looking up at a stranger, an old man with a fissured skin the color of parchment stretched tight across his cheekbones. His thick hair was white, scraped straight back, the tooth marks of the comb like blade furrows in ice.
Then she saw his blue eyes, regarding her from within a crosshatching of wrinkles and she felt a constriction in her throat as if somebody had reached down and throttled her.
“Ann,” Arkady said, his voice a parched whisper. He moved and stood over her, gesturing toward the bench. “May I?” He was wearing a very beautifully tailored charcoal suit that hung loosely on his gaunt frame.
She nodded and as he sat she heard the bitten-back moan that was the voice of chronic pain.
“It’s good to see you,” he said.
“Arkady, tell me this is a coincidence.”
“No, Ann, it’s not a coincidence.”
So she had been followed as she rode the subway from Brooklyn after that disquieting call from her husband, wanting to lose herself for a while in one of her favorite places in the city.
“You’re ill, Arkady?”
He coughed into his fist. “Yes.”
“It’s serious?”
“Rather.”
He battled for breath and then he smiled and his face rearranged itself into a more recognizable facsimile of the man for whom—though she’d never quite loved him—she’d harbored a dangerous passion, the man who had recruited her to spy on her country.
“How serious?” she asked.
He waved a hand and said, “A matter of months.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not.”
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Not to say goodbye?”
This made him laugh and the laugh became a cough and he fought for breath. When he’d recovered he said, “Forgive me. No, not to say goodbye, Ann. I’m not that sentimental.”
“No,” she said, “you’re not. So? What is this then?”
He rested a moment, breathing shallowly, before he spoke. “Not so very long ago I had the occasion to visit a village in the North Caucasus, in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district. A hotbed of jihadism. I met with the village headman and told him my requirements and his men went into the woods where the Islamists hide and brought back at gunpoint a man who had been at war for fifteen years. He had fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq and was now about to employ his talents against Russia. The people of his village wanted peace and they had no need of radicals like this in their midst who attract the ire of men like me. So I offered him a deal. I said, ‘you can fight, just not here.’”
Arkady paused and breathed. She looked at him, looked at his ruined face with the bruise-colored rings under his eyes, searching for the man of thirty years ago. But the voice was still there, when he hit his stride. That high, almost effeminate voice, with its unplaceable accent.
This discursive storytelling was familiar, too. She remembered being young and in awe of his intellect, feeling vaguely terrified as he spoke, feeling that she should leave a trail of breadcrumbs as his monologues led her along dwindling tracks ever deeper into uncharted forests.
He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and continued. “‘Go to Syria’, I told this warmongering Muslim, ‘go to Islamic State.’ And I bought him an airplane ticket to Istanbul and he was recruited by the caliphate and now he is in Raqa.”
Arkady paused again and Ann understood now where this was going. She knew she should stand without saying another word and leave this vast room with its rack lighting and its maple-colored wooden floor and walk away without looking back.
But she stayed and sat looking at his ruined profile.
“The thing is, he has a family back in Dagestan,” Arkady said. “A family who live under the eye of the headman and under the guns of his soldiers. This fighter agreed to keep me informed of events on the ground in Raqa if I guaranteed the safety of his family. So far this arrangement has been mutually beneficial.” He looked at her. “This man, my man, my asset, was in Raqa three nights ago, charged with guarding the house in which Ahmed Assir was to meet with Catherine Finch. He was posted one block away, on lookout duty. He witnessed the drone strike and the utter devastation that followed. All the people in the house, including Catherine Finch, were evaporated. Erased. There was no genetic material left for identification. Not a hank of hair nor a fold of skin.”
Ann did not speak, just looked at him and listened.
“This sham, this flim-flam, this attempt to keep her alive I understand, I even applaud, since it is in the service of a peace accord that I support, have always supported. But if it fails, if the smoke and the mirrors and the wires are exposed, it will do tremendous damage. It could set things back years. Decades. It will destroy the last bit of trust the U.S. enjoys and, after all, your country is always the glue that holds these truces together, is it not?”
“Why are you telling me this, Arkady?”
“Because I know your husband has been tempted back from retirement to stage-manage this little production.” He saw her face and flapped his hand again. “There is somebody in your presidency who occasionally whispers in my ear. Peter Town is involved. That is gospel.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I want to offer my assistance to your husband. I have access to more accurate information from within Syria than he does. I want there to be a collaboration.”
“Do your masters know about this?”
“My masters know only that I am here in New York as a guest of your government, attending a three-day conference on countering violent extremism. This meeting with you today is extra-curricular.” He sighed. “My time is almost done, Ann. I will not leave a lot of which to be proud. Hence this, literally, last-gasp effort in the service of something in which I truly believe.”
He stood, in a series of jerks, and again she heard that sob of pain.
“Talk to him, Ann. Talk to your husband. Tell him of my offer.”
“Why don’t you talk to him, Arkady?”
“Please, Ann.” He shook his head. “Anyway, he has disappeared, hasn’t he? Gone off the reservation, as you people say. But I’m sure he’s in contact with you. So? Will you do it?”
“Jesus, Arkady, how would I explain it to him? How would I explain who you are and how I know you?”
Those blue eyes held hers for an eternity before he said, “Oh, he knows who I am, Ann. And he knows that you know me. And how you know me. He has always known. He has always known everything.”
Arkady smiled his death’s head smile and turned and walked slowly away, leaving her alone in the room with the monolithic paintings that were invisible to her now.
SIXTEEN
Kirby Chance sat with her back to the mirror staring down at her lap, watching damp coils of hair fall onto her jeans. The chunky hairdresser hadn’t spoken, just grunted occasionally, coughed, and taken drags from the cigarette smoldering in a Coors ashtray on the vanity. Every few minutes she’d used a plastic bottle with a nozzle to spray Kirby’s hair, a rain of warm water falling onto her head and face, causing her to blin
k.
The woman took a step back, fixed the cigarette between her lips and squinted at Kirby through the spiral of smoke.
She nodded. “Yeah. That’s it.”
When the hairdresser gripped the chair and spun it so Kirby was looking into the mirror, her eyes moving between herself and the photograph of Catherine Finch taped to the smudged glass, she had to deal with successive blows.
The first was the sudden nakedness of her face, no longer hidden, as it had been her whole life, behind a veil of hair. The lank, drooping hair that had made her feel invisible.
The second shock was how much she now resembled Catherine Finch.
Both their faces, as her mother had observed, were square and strong-jawed. Perhaps Kirby’s nose was longer and finer, but that would only be noticeable in profile, from the front they were a match.
But their demeanor was very different. Catherine had met the world head-on, shoulders pulled back, jaw lifted, a pugnacious look in her eye, her lips curling in a small, lopsided smile, as if she’d seen it all and had come back for more. Kirby slouched, her chin almost tucked into her clavicle, staring out from under her brows, never quite making eye contact.
As if reading her mind the hairdresser grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled them back, and lifted her chin with a blunt hand.
The woman laughed. “Well, fuck me. Amazing.”
And that was when the fear hit Kirby. The fear that had been lurking in the shadows since the man with the limp had approached her in the diner. Fear that she’d held in check with the certainty that this whole crazy scheme would come to nothing, that she would never be made to closely resemble Catherine Finch, that she would never have to do what he had asked of her.
“Hey, that’s just sick!”
Kirby shifted her focus from her reflection to Joe Go’s as he came up behind her, staring, shaking his head in wonder.
He said, “Okay, we gotta move,” already on his way out of the room.
She mumbled her thanks and the woman nodded and said, “You be careful now.”
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