This made no sense to Datsik. “A gun battle? How is that possible? The pigs want the boy alive. He’s useless to them dead.”
“I can only assume that it was a kidnap attempt,” the woman said. “No other motivation would make sense.”
“How big a team did they send? And what kind of amateurs could lose—”
“Datsik, I keep telling you not to underestimate the abilities of Jolaine Cage. You insist on referring to her as a maid or as a nanny, and I’ve told you from the very beginning that that was a mistake. Now you understand why.”
Though anger boiled in his gut, Datsik nonetheless felt admiration for the young lady he’d never met but about whom he’d heard so much. The Chechens fielded professionals for missions such as this. He could only imagine that they, too, had underestimated their opponent. “What was the damage done to the assault team?”
“Six dead. I don’t know if any got away.”
“And how were they able to find them when you and the entire United States government could not?”
“What’s done is done,” she said. “What difference does that make now?”
“It makes a great deal of difference,” Datsik said. “It comes down to an issue of competence, doesn’t it? An issue of trust. Wasn’t trust what this was all about in the first place? Isn’t that what you told us?”
“I don’t know what went wrong,” the woman said. “I think it’s clear that the Chechens had access to information that we did not.”
“I think more than that is clear,” Datsik said. “I think that you must find a way to become more intelligent, and that that needs to happen quickly. I have people working on this as well, you know. If we find the boy first, there will be no need for you. As we have discussed before, you do not want to become irrelevant. Irrelevance shortens lives.”
He clicked off without waiting for a reply. In situations like this, it was always best to keep the other party on edge. People achieved remarkable feats when they understood that the alternative was death.
He’d spoken too long as it was. Whenever on a cell phone or on any broadcast device, he made it a point to speak in single syllables whenever possible, and always as short a time as possible. While his phone was untraceable, he had no doubt that the American security services were listening in, cued by a voiceprint that was buried in the database.
He needed that boy, and he preferred to have him alive. It was troubling that young Graham knew what he knew, but that was a problem to be solved with a single bullet. More troubling was the fact that he knew anything in the first place. Datsik and his superiors needed to understand the flow of that information. They needed to know at least as much as the Americans knew, and that could take time. Taking custody of the boy would cure the problem of the codes — if, in fact, he even had them, as Datsik’s sources had alleged — but extracting additional information could take both time and patience. And quite a lot of discomfort.
Datsik wished that he disliked such things, but the truth was quite the opposite. One could not excel in a skill if one did not enjoy the practice of it. He found hurting children to be distasteful, but sometimes it had to be done.
Besides, the Mitchell boy was, what, fourteen, fifteen years old? For generations, that was the age of soldiers. They and those even younger were heroes of the Motherland during the Great War.
Graham Mitchell was an adult in soldier years.
Bringing him into custody was the single hurdle. From there, the diplomatic channels had already been greased, as the Americans liked to say, for the boy to be whisked to Russia, where the real work would begin.
The lady on the other side of the table had a nice smile, but hard eyes. Graham didn’t trust her. In fact, as he sat there, sipping his Coke and eating his Twix bar, he realized that he didn’t trust anyone anymore. They sat in a yellow-brown concrete block room, where the only furnishings were a beat-up steel table and two chairs that were both bolted to the floor.
After being beaten up by the cops who arrested him, he’d been put in a car and driven to this building that he assumed was a jail. For a long time, he’d just sat here by himself. They’d taken the cuffs off his wrists, and they hadn’t said anything about walking around, but there was nowhere to walk, nothing to do.
It was sort of a relief to have another person in the room. At least she was willing to talk — more than he could say about every cop in the building, who pretended that he wasn’t even there. She wasn’t particularly friendly — in fact, she seemed intent on being the opposite of friendly — but at least she was another heartbeat in the room.
“I asked you if you know why you’re here.” The lady said her name was Peggy, but Graham didn’t believe her.
“Because the police brought me here,” he said. It was a violation of the say-nothing rule that Jolaine had sworn him to, but he’d learned the hard way that saying nothing pissed people off way more than saying something that sounded like an answer, but really was not.
“And why do you think that happened?” Peggy asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess.”
Graham hesitated, worried what the reaction might be, then decided to roll the dice. “Because they had nothing better to do tonight?”
Peggy’s cold eyes hardened even more. “Do you think this is a funny time?”
“No,” Graham said. Finally, a chance to be 100 percent truthful. “I think this is a scary time, and I think you are a scary lady.”
She seemed to enjoy that. “Really.” She said the word as a statement, not as a question. “Why do you think I’m scary?”
Graham hesitated. Then he said nothing.
“Come on, Graham. You can answer. What makes you think that I am scary?”
He hesitated again. He sensed that Peggy was trying to trap him into saying the wrong thing, and that the wrong thing would get somebody hurt. At this point, silence was his most loyal ally.
Twenty seconds passed. “Graham, you realize you’re in custody, right? You realize that I control your future. That Twix bar could be the last bit of food you get for the next two weeks.”
“There,” he said. “You just threatened to starve me. That’s what makes you scary. I think you want something from me, and I think you want that something more than you care whether I’m dead or alive.”
He’d intended that to be startling, but Peggy took it in stride. In fact, she might have looked pleased. “Tell me what has happened over the past couple of days.”
“You go first,” Graham said. “Tell me what you think has happened.”
Peggy’s face morphed into something ugly. She probably thought it was a smile, but it looked more like pain laced with raw hatred. “So something did happen,” she said. “I wasn’t sure, but you just confirmed that for me. That’s how it works here. If you don’t tell me the truth, I’m going to find it out anyway. You don’t want to screw around with me, kid.”
This bitch wanted him to cry, or panic, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Jolaine’s words raced through his mind — don’t say anything to anyone, don’t reveal any details — but Jolaine wasn’t here to help him. She wasn’t anywhere, in fact. For all he knew, she was dead, or she was saying things that would get him into trouble.
His mind raced for words that would create the feel of sharing information without actually sharing it. Were the cops even allowed to talk to kids without some other adult around? Didn’t he read a book or watch a movie or maybe a Law & Order episode where everything turned on the presence — or in the case of the program, the absence—of an adult during questioning?