And that was when I made my biggest mistake.
I told him about the developments in my work. About how I had refined my device’s powers and greatly extended its range.
“Show me what it can do,” he said, a feral animus radiating out of his deep-set eyes.
I could not refuse.
AS I WRITE THIS, after our return from those most horrific of days in the Urals, I am lost as to what I should do.
The words of Rasputin, the ones that shook me to my very soul as we stood outside the doomed mine and contemplated the result of our cursed deed-they still haunt my every waking moment.
“How?” I remember asking him. “How does this monstrous crime that we’ve just committed ensure the salvation of our people?”
“They won’t listen to me anymore,” he said, his tone guttural but unusually coherent. “They want war. They want bloodletting. They think that is the righteous path that God wills. Well… if they want war, I’ll give them war. I’ll show them the true glory of savagery. We will ride to the front, you and I. And we’ll ride right up to the enemy’s lines and stand back and watch as they slaughter each other at my command. And when these fools see this, when they see the extent of my power… the enemy will beg for mercy, and the tsar will grant me anything to curry my favor.” He smiled and directed his mesmeric gaze into me. “He will even grant me the throne.”
I am lost in a maelstrom of torturous thoughts.
“Everything drowns in great bloodshed,” he had told the tsar in his warnings against the war. Now we are the ones doing the drowning.
I fear my old master has lost his way. He has fallen into a state of grave spiritual temptation. The purity of soul needed to prophesy and heal has turned into a dangerous gift now that he has succumbed to the Antichrist.
I have to do something to stop him. To save Russia.
I have to do something to save his soul.
54
I was like a caged animal all afternoon, with competing feral instincts battling inside me.
I felt we were really on to something with the van and my theory and wanted to keep pressing ahead with it. At the same time, I felt Kurt had given me a real opportunity to get closer to Corrigan than I’d managed after months of trying, and it was an opportunity I might not get again.
I had to juggle both, if only for a few hours.
We checked on and debriefed Ae-Cha at the hospital, then got back to Federal Plaza and went straight into a video conference call with, of all people, an analyst at the CIA.
They’d gotten a hit on the voice print of Ivan that we’d sent across to them and to the NSA. No ID, sadly. Not a name, or a photograph. But it did tell us a couple of things. One was that they’d heard his voice before, on a couple of occasions. Once in a wiretapped conversation in Dubai, shortly before the disappearance of a Ukrainian businessman who was a growing force in the opposition movement to his country’s Kremlin-backed regime. And in Marbella, a few days before the drowning of a senior Russian banker.
Ivan got around.
The other was that while they didn’t have a name for him, they had a code name. “Koschey.” From a character in a Russian folktale. Also known as “Koschey the Deathless.”
Terrific.
They wanted him, of course. So did several governments around the globe. Beyond that, there wasn’t much they could tell us, nor was there much we could add to their wafer-thin profile. It wasn’t like we needed any confirmation about the guy’s competence or his ruthlessness.
I also got the info Kurt sent me via a dead-drop Yahoo mail account he’d set up. The hotel’s address and a picture of Kirby, just as I’d asked. There was nothing in the photograph to suggest that he was anything other than a middle-aged, middle-rung professional with a middle-American life. Albeit in a slightly more sensitive line of work than your average salary man. He did, however, have few wrinkles and a full head of hair, which, considering he was in his early fifties, was no lean achievement. Maybe his illicit trysts were keeping him young.
I checked my watch, then went online and looked at airline schedules. There was a flight leaving JFK at 5:15 that landed at Washington National Airport at 6:40. Assuming it left on time, it would give me enough time to grab a cab to Georgetown and be there when Kirby and his playmate arrived at their secret assignation on M Street. I wondered how the hell he managed to pay for four nights a month at a fancy boutique hotel like that and not feel the pinch. Maybe I’d ask him about that, too.
By four thirty, it was time for me to make a decision. I’d be taking a huge risk. A potentially irresponsible one. Koschey was still out there, with Sokolov and the van. We had an APB out on the latter two. But we didn’t have anything else to go on, and I didn’t think we’d be having any more Kevlar moments with him. Larisa had suggested we lean on Mirminsky together, but the Sledgehammer was no longer with us, and I couldn’t think of any other avenue we could still pursue, anything we could do besides wait and stay sharp and hope something broke. And I wouldn’t be gone for more than five or six hours.
A tough call, but I decided to do it.
Which meant I had to tell my partner.
“I need you to cover for me,” I told him as I closed the door to the empty conference room. “I need to be somewhere for a few hours.”
He stared at me curiously. “Where and to do what?”
“I can’t tell you.”
He snorted. “You can’t tell me?”
“Yep.”
He studied me curiously for a moment, then his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You got something going on with our Russian hottie?”
“Of course not.”
He grimaced with faux-annoyance. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He turned serious. “What’s going on, Sean?”
“I really can’t tell you.”
Aparo got angry. “Hey, this is me you’re fucking talking to.”
“I can’t. Not now.”
“Not now? When then?”
I had to go. “Soon. Look, it’s better this way. For your sake.”
That really pissed him off. “You’re giving me deniability now? Seriously? Since when did I care about that bullshit?”
“It’s just for tonight,” I insisted. “Let me do this. If something comes out of it, you’ll be the first to know.”
As I reached the door, he asked, “This about Alex?”
I stopped. We hadn’t been partners for ten years for nothing. “I gotta go, man. Anything breaks, call me.”
“At least tell me where the hell you’re going?”
I kept my hand on the door handle, then I said, “DC.”
I heard him mutter, “Shit,” then I left the room.
IT WAS TIME FOR A BREAK. More important, it was the agreed-upon time for Koschey’s follow-up phone call.
He escorted Sokolov back to his familiar holding spot on the floor by the radiator and tied him to it. They’d made good progress in dismantling the gear from the inside of the van, but there was still a lot of work to be done.
Throughout, Koschey had gotten Sokolov to give him a running commentary about what he was doing, what each component was, how it all worked. Working alongside him, he gained a firm grasp of Sokolov’s ingenious invention. He’d also told Sokolov to divide it into two separate stacks instead of just one. Moving it to yet another vehicle, or packing it into crates, would be easier that way. It wouldn’t all need to be dismantled again.
He left Sokolov in the small office and stepped outside by the vehicles to make the call.