“Greg?”
Drummond looked up, his eyes exhibiting a fear his friend had never seen before. “Mike, if Castro is willing to defend the thing, willing to sacrifice those troops, then it means he’s just buying time.” His voice cracked on the last words, the memories of his youthful experience with Armageddon assaulting his perception of the here and now. “He really has it, and he’s going to use it.”
Healy looked past the DDI to the drawn shades. The sun would be rising soon, and for the first time in his life, he wondered, really wondered, if he might not see it. This was more serious than even the crisis thirty years before that had made it possible. This was really going to happen. One of the goddamn things was in the hands of a desperate man, and he was going to use it. “What are we going to do?”
The DDI searched the emptiness of his brightly lit office for the magical answer that would make it all better, the same kind of wish he had made when his child walked in front of the ice-cream truck two years before. It hadn’t worked then, and it wouldn’t work now. Skill had saved his son’s life then, and skill this time was all they had.
“Say a prayer and get to work pinpointing it,” Drummond said, adding that which he believed had really saved his son and hoping that the Man upstairs would help him return the favor by saving a few himself.
Tunney found it amusing that it took the poet Pushkin’s use of the thirty-three-character Cyrillic alphabet, known as the “modified civil alphabet,” in his writings to bring about an unofficial standard that gave the Russian people a true national language. Before that it had been a contest of usage between the Cyrillic used by the Orthodox Church and that introduced by Peter the Great. State versus the power of God. And a poet had settled it!
The Russian language itself was much more difficult for Tunney to master than the mere act of memorizing the stylized Cyrillic alphabet, which he did with ease. He had learned the language with some difficulty after joining the Agency, through courses sponsored by the Department of State. Conversational use of a language was a far cry from committing important phrases to memory, and, though he could easily ask for the bill in one of Moscow’s dreadful restaurants—Dai’te, pazhah ’lsta shshot—he still had trouble understanding the rapid-fire practice of the language that the locals were adept at.
Thankfully this assignment would require no verbiage. Just a comparison of what he saw with what he remembered. His territory.
The stacks of file cartons were surprisingly well organized considering that more than seventy years of military death and prisoner records were stored in such a small space. Actually that made his job easier this day, for all he had to do to put himself in proximity to the area of his interest was to feign disgust with the cramped work area and carry an armful of folders to where he wanted to be.
Once there, it was just a matter of time to locate the Red Army death records for the year of 1962, paying close attention to those departed soldiers whose service jackets showed assignment to artillery units. Two hours into his workday he had found what his superiors had requested. It was time to report.
“Anna.”
She turned to see her co-worker gripping his stomach. An ‘I told you so’ look followed. “The bliny and caviar, huh? What did I tell you?”
“I’m sorry,” Tunney apologized, assuming the required stooping position to simulate severe cramping. “Can you get me a car back to the embassy? Please?”
The woman stomped off, swearing under her breath that she was not going to let any more of her team members eat in the city until the job was done. Now she’d have to pull Patrick’s share of the load today. The only justice was that he’d be throwing his guts up back at the embassy.
Tunney followed dutifully, using the skills he’d acquired as a child to fool his mother, but had an almost impossible time holding the laughter in as he thought of asking the chief of station for a note explaining his sudden illness. That would be worth framing!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THUNDER
Frankie closed the front door easily, only a soft click from the lock signaling that she was home. A single light was on in the living room to her left, and she could see her mother stretched out serenely on the couch, a blue-and-yellow afghan covering her from knee to shoulder. She smiled and took a blanket from the closet and laid it over the woman who had always been there for her and was still, planting a soft kiss on her forehead that caused a slight stir.
She switched off the light and made her way down the hall toward the back bedrooms. Hers was on the right, the door open, and she went to it and tossed her jacket onto the unmade bed. Her penchant for cleanliness and order had been superseded by events. Next she unclipped her holster and laid the weapon in the recessed shelf of her nightstand. There it would be close, not so much because she feared intruders, but she had learned early from the needless deaths in her old stomping grounds that a gun in the wrong hands, of the little variety particularly, was deadly. On the few occasions it was not with her — agents are never really off duty — she kept the weapon in a locked safe high on a shelf in her closet. Little Cassie would someday learn about guns, something Frankie believed was much preferable to her picking one up at a friend’s house and not knowing what it was capable of. Knowledge was power, and it was safety.
Little Cassie. Frankie pushed the cracked door open enough to poke her head in. The Winnie the Pooh night light cast an angelic glow on the singular, constant beauty in Francine Aguirre’s existence. She was still a mama’s girl, barely four, a quietly intelligent child who never complained when Mommy had to work late but was as possessive as a pit bull when she knew it was “their” special time together. There was never enough of that. Never would be. Looking down on the slender face and the thumb that still found its way to the mouth despite all the talk of being a big girl, Frankie wondered if there ever would be.
She wouldn’t disturb her angel’s sleep with a kiss, which would surely wake her. It always had. The light sleeper syndrome, just like her mother. But she didn’t really mind those few times when Cassie would awaken. In fact, she had to selfishly admit that it was a purposeful plot on her part sometimes. But not tonight. It was late, actually early, and her daughter was an early riser. Frankie would give her the biggest hug she could in the morning before she went off to preschool. The biggest hug from her, and one from Art, and…
Frankie shrank back from the opening, the tears for some reason spilling as though a dam had burst. She backed into her own bedroom and pushed the door almost closed, leaving enough of an opening so she could hear if Cassie started fussing. Her hands came up and covered her face, save the eyes, to muffle the quiet sobs that accompanied the tears.
Why again? she silently asked the darkness. Why was she still hurting so much? Hadn’t it all come out the night before? Thom was gone. Gone! She would grieve, she knew, just like she had when her brother died in the car accident a decade before, but why the flood of emotions? It was supposed to ease, wasn’t it? Yet it wasn’t. It was getting worse. Almost two days later the pain was coming from a deeper place. She remembered the place, but strangely it wasn’t where the sorrow had emerged from when her older sibling, her only one, wrapped his new Camaro around the light pole on Mulholland. That was pain. True pain. So was this, but there was something more, a mix of feelings and clouded thoughts that somehow made it worse.
Worse than Johnny’s death? How could that be? They were both senseless, stupid things that shouldn’t have happened because the victims were both good people. Very good people. Beautiful people. Why?