bathed in an eerie bluish light.
“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.