The thin wooden door shuddered as a fist pounded on it three times. Barely a second passed, and the door visibly flexed inward again from another round of pounding.
His first instinct was to draw the SIG Sauer pistol in the cracked leather holster on his left side. But then he thought of the old woman cooking upstairs and the tumbling children across the hall. He wasn’t going to go out with his last act on earth being the death of some innocent from a stray round fired through a flimsy door.
Markov knelt, staying just outside the door frame, and drew the serrated five-inch boot knife he carried in a sheath at his ankle. Old habits die hard. He paused in a crouch, noticing the snow on his boots melting at his feet. The fist hammered the door again. Before it could finish the rest of the three-knock pattern its owner was so enamored of, Markov flung open the door and seized the extended hand. He twisted the arm and spun his own body, throwing the man onto his back in the middle of the room. A quick look in the hallway. Empty. And so Markov gently closed the door behind him and locked it.
The man on the floor wore a helmet and bulky protective gear. Still on his back, he reached out with his hands up, heavy padded gloves with carbon knuckles pointing at the ceiling in surrender. Motorcycle gauntlets, not military issue. His dark blue jacket and pants were covered with a spider-web pattern of reflective segments and pads at the elbows and knees. The uniform that Markov saw buzzing past him on the streets every day.
“Delivery,” said the RusGlobal Delivery courier, almost in a whimper.
“You know you’re going to get yourself killed with a knock like that,” said Markov.
Markov flipped the knife in his left hand, concealing the point along the length of his forearm. He offered his right hand to the man, who was really a wide-eyed boy, likely not even twenty years old.
“I hate Moscow,” the courier said as he swung a satchel across his chest and pulled out a padded silver nylon envelope covered with the company’s angular black double-headed-eagle logo. The courier tossed it to him, and Markov unlocked the door and let him out.
Markov set the package on the scuffed hardwood floor and knelt before the envelope. He poked at it with the knife tip. He leaned over it and listened. Then he simply sat with it and waited. After a few dozen deep breaths, he lifted it up and slightly bent the stiff envelope.
With the knife now lying alongside the package, he carefully positioned his phone and held it steady for fifteen seconds. The phone’s signal didn’t waver, meaning no interference from active circuitry inside. It could still be chem, bio, or even radiological. Yes, a slow death that last way that would be classically Russian. At least the manner in which he died would help reveal the sender.
He sliced the knife through the envelope along its long edge. If you wore white gloves all the time, then all you’d get was clean fingernails when you finally put your pistol to your own temple, he thought.
Inside was another package: a slightly smaller cardboard envelope with a FedEx logo on it. Its origin showed it had gone through the shipping hub in Abu Dhabi.
With the tip of the knife, he carefully slit the cardboard envelope open along its longest edge, listening for a click or a hiss of a switch.
Another package. This one was an inch smaller and only slightly thinner. This FedEx envelope had an American flag covering one entire side of it, as was the company’s practice these days, and on the other side was the faint LED display of the tracking tag. He activated it and it showed the package had journeyed from Honolulu to Abu Dhabi.
He broke the button-size capsule that released the envelope’s seal, and the material parted when the envelope’s magnetic seal broke. A flat, brown butcher-paper-wrapped package tumbled to the floor. It landed with a familiar thump. Only one thing made a sound like that.
He smiled as he tore off the paper that wrapped the Pushkin book. Inside, tucked next to the tea-stained opening page, was a three-by-five-inch card of solid white. Only two words — With gratitude — were typed on it.
He didn’t know whether to smile or shudder at the realization that she somehow knew where he lived. So he just opened the book and began to read again: I live in lonely desolation, And wonder when my end will come.
“You need to be careful right now. See that set? See the way it’s breaking? You’re too far forward on the board, so slide back and paddle!”
Mario Giordini was not paying attention to the waves. He found it hard to look at anything but his instructor. When she arched her back to see how the next set of waves was shaping up, it was impossible to consider anything but the curve of her breasts beneath the long-sleeved black rash guard.
The Italian banker from Milan would be turning thirty next month, and he knew his mother would soon force him to finally settle down and get married. Thank God he was not married now.
“Mario, stay with me,” she said. “You’re going to have to dive under when this wave comes, okay? All the way under this time.”
He’d actually arrived the day after the final prisoner exchanges between China and the United States had been completed, the U.S. forces taken in Guam swapped for the Chinese forces who’d surrendered after the Americans had taken back the island. The two nations had shown they could pound each other into a weakened equilibrium, but having sunk most of each other’s fleets, neither wanted to take it to the next level. So the deal was status quo antebellum, a term Mario thought funny for its naive suggestion that anything could go back to the way it was before the war. And that was the opportunity for those who had been smart enough to sit it out. Half the hotels on the island had some kind of battle damage, but location had a permanent value. As did beauty, he thought, looking at the woman he’d picked up on a site visit to the Moana Surfrider hotel.
The question was, how was he going to make this particular investment pay off? Maybe ask her out to dinner and then try the tactic of testing a bottle of Italian prosecco against a California sparkling wine, which they ignorantly called champagne? It had worked enough times here, the girls grateful for a free meal and the chance to peek at luxury, even for a night. Or was she the kind of girl who needed a little narcotic persuasion?
“Now!” she shouted. Mario leaned forward on the board just as the wave approached. He meant to shove the board’s nose deep under the water and arch his back to drive it deeper still, but he froze. He just stared up at a blue wall closing in on him.
The wave sucked him up and launched him into the air, spinning him underwater. Salt water filled every cavity, worked its way into his nose and ears. He surfaced with a desperate gasp but the board kept racing toward the beach, locked in the wave’s rushing white water. The tug on his leash dragged him back down. He flailed harder, thrashing with open hands.
The next thing Mario knew he was on the beach, coughing as if he had just smoked two packs of cigarettes. She stood over him, backlit by sunset. He felt completely disarmed and at peace in the presence of such beauty.
“You know, you really are starting to get the hang of it,” she said. “But you have to learn to trust me. How about we go back out tonight? The moon will be full. It’s so amazing, like nothing you’ve seen back in Italy,” she said.