“Let’s save our scheduled discussion for the Au Bon Pain in the St. George terminal,” Thornton whispered to Peretti. The Staten Island side’s morph of traditional French café and McDonald’s did brisk business at mealtimes but transacted little more than the odd cup of decaf this late. Anyone following them there would be easy to spot.
Manhattan receded in the ferry’s wake, the engines churning smoothly. Thornton and Peretti chatted about what had become of his former rugby teammates. He used to play in the United Nations’ recreational rugby league, primarily to develop sources; she enjoyed the games. The lavender scent of her hair vaulted him back to those days, which he now viewed through a golden filter.
He felt a twinge of disappointment when the Staten Island terminal came into view. An announcement instructed all passengers to prepare to disembark. The man in the Yankees jacket was among the first off, greeted by a Hispanic woman of about thirty carrying an excited little boy who wore a Yankees cap.
Peretti turned to Thornton, her cheeks reddening. “My imagination got the better of me, I guess.”
“Better than the alternative,” he said.
He steered her into the Au Bon Pain, deserted but for a pair of hollow-eyed young women behind the counter.
While Peretti was looking up at the menu board, a thickset man emerged from the men’s room. He wore a black woolen overcoat, blocky glasses, and a tight orange ski cap. From inside the coat, he drew a sleek Ruger, pointed it at her, and pressed the trigger. The silenced barrel coughed twice. A plastic seat back flew end over end, cracking the glass fronting the café. Peretti dropped as though the floor tiles had been whisked from beneath her feet.
Thornton threw himself over her, to protect her from another shot. She lay facedown, her brown wig having fallen off. Blood seeped through her true blond locks. There was a second bullet hole in her suede jacket, between her shoulder blades.
The shooter knelt, inadvertently knocking a tented advertisement off a tabletop as he extended his gloved left hand to collect his bullet casings from the floor. The ad bounced off his face, then sailed away. Biting back a wince, he pocketed both casings. He shoved the Ruger into his waistband as he rose and strode out of the café.
Thornton clutched Peretti’s shoulders and turned her face toward him. Seeing the dark hole between her eyebrows made his body temperature plummet. Blood burbled from the exit wound beneath her left collarbone. She’d lost consciousness but was still breathing.
“Call nine one one,” he shouted to the two employees crouched behind the counter. Then he took off after the gunman.
A line of taxis idled at the curb just outside the terminal building, their exhaust blurring the dozens of people getting in and out. Thornton didn’t see an orange ski cap but spotted the gunman anyway. He’d taken off the cap, but his leisurely pace gave him away: New Yorkers don’t do leisurely.
Making a beeline for the guy, Thornton slowed to avoid a uniformed policeman, who sure as hell had not been paying attention.
The gunman waved toward the man in the Yankees jacket, now buckling the little boy into a booster seat in a Vanagon. A taxi suddenly darted into view from behind the Vanagon. The gunman opened the taxi’s rear door.
Thornton turned to the cop for help, but a metallic thunk jerked his attention back to the taxi.
Leaning across the front passenger seat, the heavyset taxi driver balanced a black tube the size of a paper towel core atop the open passenger window. Aiming at Thornton, he tugged at a trigger. There was no click, no flash, but the air all around Thornton grew hot, searing away his consciousness.
4
When building his four-story Arlington Financial Center in the late 1980s, the developer hoped to lure boutique financial firms from downtown Washington. So many of the principals lived in Virginia; it made sense. Clad in mirrored glass, the structure was a perfect cube, except where the front half of the lower two stories should have been, there was nothing, or so it appeared. A closer look revealed a concrete pillar keeping the top two stories from collapsing. Critics lauded the bold architecture. At the same time, warehouses in downtown D.C. were replaced with decent-enough-looking buildings, transforming Foggy Bottom into Washington’s answer to Wall Street and forcing the developer of the Arlington Financial Center to subdivide his sprawling suites for lower-rent entities, including a travel agency, an orthodontist, and a massage therapy collective. For the past two months, South Atlantic Resources, LLC — an engineering supplies distributor, if anyone asked — had been renting the three-office suite in the corner above the pillar, the building’s least accessible area. Canning’s reason for concocting South Atlantic Resources and signing a one-year lease — using an alias, of course — was to gather intelligence produced by the eavesdropping device he’d implanted in Bella Sokolova, his ultimate goal being the assembly of his own Sokolov E-bomb.
Every night, he came to the South Atlantic offices from his day job in the city and listened to the day’s feed. Usually it began with Bella, back from the Cleveland safe house and home alone in Port Washington, Wisconsin, talking to her late husband Leonid as if he were lying in bed beside her. She didn’t broach the topic of electronic weapons, or even science. Just memories, of walks together along the shore in Yevpatoriya, their daughters’ births, family vacations — in short, nothing Canning wanted to hear.
When she finally got out of bed, Bella invariably switched on the TV in the den and watched whatever happened to be on, for hours on end, never changing the channel, getting up only to pad into the kitchen, dispense fresh ice cubes and pour more — Canning surmised — vodka. She spoke of work only when informing her DARPA handler, an excessively gung ho young case officer named Hank Hughes who called every couple of days, that she couldn’t bear to go into the lab. Her daughters encouraged her to come visit them in Miami or Seattle, where they lived with their own families. When that failed, they encouraged her to at least get out of the house. She promised she would, but she didn’t, not once in four weeks after the burial. The gate guard ran errands for her, leaving grocery bags and packages from the pharmacy outside the kitchen door.
The next week, Hank Hughes called to say DARPA could harden a laboratory for her in either Seattle or Miami. Bella felt it would dishonor Leonid to continue their work anywhere but their old lab, which DARPA had stealthily dismantled within hours of the Flight 89 accident.
A few days later, Hughes called again with news that the old lab had been restored. Too many estate issues still to settle here, Bella replied, before drinking away another week.
In their next talk, Hughes told Bella that DARPA had deployed two of its brightest scientists to Wisconsin to assist in the E-bomb effort. Would she at least bring them up to speed?
Leonid’s fatal accident turned out to be a stroke of luck, thought Canning, listening to the call from the Arlington office and envisioning himself harvesting Bella’s details of the E-bomb from soup to nuts.
She said she would think it over. If she indeed thought about it during the next two weeks, it was while watching game shows and drinking.
This week, once again, the DARPA man called in hope of getting Bella to go to the lab. He tried several of the same exhortations that he had in the past, including repaying the country that had brought her and her family from Russia, contractual bonuses, the chance to perfect the “peacekeeping contraption” that would be her and Leonid’s legacy, and a trip to Oslo to pick up another Nobel Prize. Once again, Bella said no.
This morning, however, soon after waking up, she called Hughes and said, “Na miru i smert’ krasna.”