“That’s a relief.” Marks twiddled a fork between his thumb and fingers. “What we don’t need is another crisis. I’d be happy with someone who can right this listing ship.”
“My sentiments exactly.”
“The reason I’m here,” Marks said, “is I’m having a staffing problem. I’ve lost some people to attrition. Of course, that’s inevitable. I thought I’d get some good recruits graduating from the program, but they went to Typhon. I’m in need of a short-term fix.”
Feir chewed on a mouthful of gritty clam bits and soft potato cubes. He’d diverted those graduates to Typhon and had been waiting for Marks to come to him ever since. “How can I help?”
“I’d like some of Dick Symes’s people to be assigned to my directorate.” Dick Symes was the chief of intelligence. “Just temporarily, you understand, until I can get some raw recruits through training and orientation.”
“Have you talked to Dick?”
“Why bother? He’ll just tell me to go to hell. But you can plead my case to Hart. She’s so snowed under that you’re the one best suited to get her to listen to me. If she makes the call Dick can yell all he wants, it won’t matter.”
Feir wiped his lips. “What number of personnel are we talking here, Peter?”
“Eighteen, two dozen tops.”
“Not inconsiderable. The DCI is going to want to know what you have in mind.”
“I’ve got a brief detailing it all ready to go,” Marks said. “I shoot it to you electronically, you walk it in to her personally.”
Feir nodded. “I think that can be arranged.”
Relief flooded Marks’s face. “Thanks, Rodney.”
“Don’t mention it.” He began to dig into what was left of the chowder. As Marks was about to rise, he said, “Do you by any chance know where Soraya is? She’s not in her office and she’s not answering her cell.”
“Unh-unh.” Marks resettled himself. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Something in Feir’s voice gave him pause. “No reason? Really?”
“Just, you know how office scuttlebutt can be.”
“Meaning?”
“You two are tight, aren’t you.”
“Is that what you heard?”
“Well, yeah.” Feir placed his spoon into the empty bowl. “But if it isn’t true-”
“I don’t know where she is, Rodney.” Marks’s gaze drifted off. “We never had that kind of thing going.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
Marks waved away his apology. “Forget it. I have. So what do you want to talk with her about?”
This was what Feir was hoping he’d say. According to the general, he and LaValle required intel on the nuts and bolts of how Typhon worked. “Budgets. She’s got so many agents in the field, the DCI wants an accounting of their expenses-which, frankly, hasn’t been done since Martin died.”
“That’s understandable, given what’s been going on in here lately.”
Feir shrugged deferentially. “I’d do it myself; Soraya’s got more on her plate than she can handle, I imagine. Trouble is, I don’t even know where the files are.” He was going to add: Do you? but decided that would be overselling it.
Marks thought a minute. “I might be able to help you there.”
How badly does your shoulder hurt?” Devra said.
Arkadin, pressed against her body, his powerful arms around her, said, “I don’t know how to answer that. I have an extremely high tolerance for pain.”
The airplane’s cramped bathroom allowed him to concentrate exclusively on her. It was like being in a coffin together, like being dead, but in a strange afterlife where only they existed.
She smiled up at him as one of his hands traced its way from the small of her back to her neck. His thumb pressed against her jaw, gently tilted her head up while his fingers tightened on the nape of her neck.
He leaned in, his weight arching her torso backward above the sink. He could see the back of her head in the mirror, his face about to eclipse hers. A flame of emotion flickered to life, illuminating the soulless void inside him.
He kissed her.
“Gently,” she whispered. “Relax your lips.”
Her moist lips opened beneath his, her tongue searched for his, tentatively at first, then with an unmistakable hunger. His lips trembled. He had never felt anything when kissing a woman. In fact, he’d always done his best to avoid it, not knowing what it was for, or why women sought it so relentlessly. An exchange of fluids, that’s all it was to him, like a procedure performed in a doctor’s office. The best he could say was that it was painless, that it was over quickly.
The electricity that shot through him when his lips met hers stunned him. The sheer pleasure of it astonished him. It hadn’t been like this with Marlene; it hadn’t been like this with anyone. He did not know what to make of the tremor in his knees. Her sweet, moaning exhalations entered him like silent cries of ecstasy. He swallowed them whole, and wanted more.
Wanting was something Arkadin was unused to. Need was the word that had driven his life up to this moment: He needed to revenge himself on his mother, he needed to escape home, he needed strike out on his own, no matter the course, he needed to bury rivals and enemies, he needed to destroy anyone who got close to his secrets. But want? That was another matter entirely. Devra defined want for him. And it was only when he was certain he no longer needed her that his desire revealed itself. He wanted her.
When he lifted her skirt, probing underneath, her leg drew up. Her fingers nimbly freed him from his clothing. Then he stopped thinking altogether.
Afterward, when they’d returned to their seats, making their way through the line of glaring passengers queued up to use the lavatory, Devra burst into laughter. Arkadin sat watching her. This was another thing unique about her. Anyone else would have asked, Was that your first time? Not her. She wasn’t interested in prying his lid open, peering inside to see what made him tick. She had no need to know. Because he was someone who had always needed something, he couldn’t tolerate that trait in anyone else.
He was aware of her next to him in a way he was unable to understand. It was as if he could feel her heartbeat, the rush of blood through her body, a body that seemed frail to him, even though he knew how tough she could be, after all she’d suffered. How easily her bones could be broken, how easily a knife slipped through her ribs might pierce her heart, how easily a bullet could shatter her skull. These thoughts sent him into a rage, and he shifted closer to her, as if she were in need of protection-which, when it came to her former allies, she most certainly was. He knew then that he’d do everything in his power to kill anyone who sought to do her harm.
Feeling him edge closer, she turned and smiled. “You know something, Leonid, for the first time in my life I feel safe. All that prickly shit I give off is something I learned early on to keep people away.”
“You learned to be tough like your mother.”
She shook her head. “That’s the really shitty part. My mother had this tough shell, yeah, but it was skin-deep. Beneath it, she was a mass of fears.”
Devra put her head against the headrest as she continued, “In fact, the most vivid thing I remember about my mother was her fear. It came off her like a stink. Even after she’d bathed, I smelled it. Of course, for a long time I didn’t know what it was, and maybe I was the only one who smelled it, I don’t know.
“Anyway, she used to tell me an old Ukrainian folktale. It was about the Nine Levels of Hell. What was she thinking? Was she trying to frighten me or lessen her own fear by sharing it with me? I don’t know. In any case, this is what she told me. There is one heaven, but there are nine levels of hell where, depending on the severity of your sins, you’re sent when you die.
“The first, the least bad, is the one familiar to everyone, where you roast in flames. The second is where you’re alone on the summit of a mountain. Every night you freeze solid, slowly and horribly, only to thaw out in the morning, when the process begins all over again. The third is a place of blinding light; the fourth of pitch blackness. The fifth is a place of icy winds that cut you, quite literally, like a knife. In the sixth, you’re pierced by arrows. In the seventh, you’re slowly buried by an army of ants. In the eighth, you’re crucified.