“Times like this when I miss my American,” Devra mused, her head against the seat back. “He came from California. I loved especially his stories about surfing. My God, what a weird sport. Only in America, huh? But I used to think how great it would be to live in a land of sunshine, ride endless highways in convertibles, and swim whenever you wanted to.”
“The American dream,” Arkadin said sourly.
She sighed. “I so wanted him to take me with him when he left.”
“My friend Mischa wanted me to take him with me,” Arkadin said, “but that was a long time ago.”
Devra turned her head toward him. “Where did you go?”
“To America.” He laughed shortly. “But not to California. It didn’t matter to Mischa; he was crazy about America. That’s why I didn’t take him. You go to a place to work, you fall in love with it, and now you don’t want to work anymore.” He paused for a moment, concentrated on navigating through a hairpin switchback. “I didn’t tell him that, of course,” he continued. “I could never hurt Mischa like that. We both grew up in slums, you know. Fucking hard life, that is. I was beaten up so many times I stopped counting. Then Mischa stepped in. He was bigger than I was, but that wasn’t it. He taught me how to use a knife-not just stab, but how to throw it, as well. Then he took me to a guy he knew, skinny little man, but he had no fat on him at all. In the blink of an eye he had me down on my back in so much pain my eyes watered. Christ, I couldn’t even breathe. Mischa asked me if I’d like to be able to do that and I said, ‘Shit, where do I sign up?’”
The headlights of a truck appeared, coming toward them, a horrific dazzle that momentarily blinded both of them. Arkadin slowed down until the truck lumbered past.
“Mischa’s my best friend, my only friend, really,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“Will I meet him when you take me back to Moscow?”
“He’s in America now,” Arkadin said. “But I’ll take you to his apartment, where I’ve been staying. It’s along the Frunzenskaya embankment. His living room overlooks Gorky Park. The view is very beautiful.” He thought fleetingly of Gala, who was still in the apartment. He knew how to get her out; it wouldn’t be a problem at all.
“I know I’ll love it,” Devra said. It was a relief to hear him talk about himself. Encouraged by his talkative mood, she continued, “What work did you do in America?”
And just like that his mood flipped. He braked the car to a halt. “You drive,” he said.
Devra had grown used to his mercurial mood swings, but watched him come around the front of the car. She slid over. He slammed the passenger’s-side door shut and she put the car in gear, wondering what tender nerve she’d touched.
They continued along the road, heading down the mountainside.
“We’ll hit the highway soon enough,” she said to break the thickening silence. “I can’t wait to crawl into a warm bed.”
Inevitably there came a time when Arkadin took the initiative with Marlene. It happened while she was sleeping. He crept down the hall to her door. It was child’s play for him to pick the lock with nothing more than the wire that wrapped the cork in the bottle of champagne Icoupov served at dinner. Of course, being a Muslim, Icoupov himself had not partaken of the alcohol, but Arkadin and Marlene had no such restrictions. Arkadin had volunteered to open the champagne and when he did he palmed the wire.
The room smelled of her-of lemons and musk, a combination that set off a stirring below his belly. The moon was full, low on the horizon. It looked as if God were squeezing it between his palms.
Arkadin stood still, listening to her deep even breaths, every once in a while catching the hint of a snore. The bedcovers rustled as she turned onto her right side, away from him. He waited until her breathing settled again before moving to the bed. He climbed, knelt over her. Her face and shoulder were in moonlight, her neck in shadow, so that it appeared to him as if he’d already decapitated her. For some reason, this vision disturbed him. He tried to breathe deeply and easily, but the disturbing vision tightened his chest, made him so dizzy that he almost lost his balance.
And then he felt something hard and cold that in a drawn breath brought him back to himself. Marlene was awake, her head turned, staring at him. In her right hand was a Glock 20 10mm.
“I’ve got a full magazine,” she said.
Which meant she had fourteen more rounds if she missed the kill with her first shot. Not that that was likely. The Glock was one of the most powerful handguns on the market. She wasn’t fooling around.
“Back off.”
He rolled off the bed and she sat up. Her bare breasts shone whitely in the moonlight. She appeared totally unconcerned with her semi-nudity.
“You weren’t asleep.”
“I haven’t slept since I came here,” Marlene said. “I’ve been anticipating this moment. I’ve been waiting for you to steal into my room.”
She set aside the Glock. “Come to bed. You’re safe with me, Leonid Danilovich.”
As if mesmerized, he climbed back onto the bed and, like a little child, rested his head against the warm cushion of her breasts while she rocked him tenderly. She lay curled around him, willing her warmth to seep into his cool, marble flesh. Gradually, she felt his heartbeat cease its manic racing. To the steady sound of her heartbeat, he fell into slumber.
Some time later, she woke him with a whisper in his ear. It wasn’t difficult; he wanted to be released from his nightmare. He started, staring at her for a long moment, his body rigid. His mouth felt raw from yelling in his sleep. Returning to the present, he recognized her. He felt her arms around him, the protective curl of her body, and to her astonishment and elation he relaxed.
“Nothing can harm you here, Leonid Danilovich,” she breathed. “Not even your nightmares.”
He stared at her in an odd, unblinking fashion. Anyone else would have been frightened, but not Marlene.
“What made you cry out?” she said.
“There was blood everywhere… on the bed.”
“Your bed? Were you beaten, Leonid?”
He blinked, and the spell was broken. He turned over, faced away from her, waiting for the ashen light of dawn.
Twenty-One
ON A FINE clear afternoon, with the sun already low in the sky, Tyrone drove Soraya Moore to the NSA safe house nestled within the rolling hills of Virginia. Somewhere, in some anonymous cybercafй in northeast Washington, Kiki was sitting at a public computer terminal, waiting to sow the software virus she’d devised to disable the property’s two thousand CCTV surveillance cameras.
“It’ll loop the video images back on themselves endlessly,” she’d told them. “That was the easy part. In order to make the code a hundred percent invisible it’ll work for ten minutes, no more. At that point, it will, in essence, self-destruct, deforming into tiny packets of harmless code the system won’t pick up as anomalous.”
Everything now depended on timing. Since it was impossible to send an electronic signal from the NSA safe house without it being picked up and tagged as suspicious, they had worked out an external timing scheme, which meant that if anything went wrong-if Tyrone was delayed for any reason-the ten minutes would tick by and the plan would fail. This was the plan’s Achilles’ heel. Still, it was their only option and they decided to take it.
Besides, Deron had a number of goodies he’d concocted for them after consulting the architectural plans of the building he’d mysteriously conjured up. She had tried to get them herself and struck out; NSA had what she thought was a total lock on the property records.