Deception (23 page)

“There's really no difference,” she said then.

“The craft
is
the engine.”

“Right.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

She considered elaborating for his benefit: painting a picture of the ramjet sucking down oxygen, turning the oxygen into fuel, the fuel into speed, creating a never-ending, always-increasing loop.

Instead, she summoned her courage. She set down the napkin and said: “I'm not sure I have a problem with that.”

His brow creased.

“I like you needing me,” she said flatly. “Because I need you. And fair's fair.”

For a moment, she thought that she had pressed the wrong button. She remembered the man putting his hands on her, in the suburbs outside of Istanbul. If he came for her now, how would she defend herself? Her fingers moved a fraction of an inch toward the haft of the dull knife. If she had to, she could do it. If she had to, despite the fact that he outweighed her by eighty pounds …

Then he relaxed—once again just a laid-back, harmless man nearing the far side of middle age. His eyes twinkled, distantly amused.

“I think,” he said mildly, “you should learn to trust a little more.”

“I haven't told you all of it, you know. Without the rest, you'll be about ten percent short of a working blueprint.”

A few moments passed in silence. Then he reached for his pack of cigarettes. He lit one and tapped an ash onto his plate. The ash began to shiver, jigging along with motion of the train.

“You're not the only one who needs to trust,” he said. “For all I know, you're with Keyes.”

“I'm not.”

“But I have no way of knowing that.”

“I'm only with myself.”

“And with Frank,” he said. Again, his eyes glinted. “Whoever that is.”

She exhaled—hoping to imply impatience.

“Frank,” she said, “is my ex-husband. He works for NASA, on the Pegasus rocket booster. That's used to launch the X-forty-three.”

“The what?”

“I told you. You don't know all of it.”

He considered. “And NASA is working with ADS?”

Hannah nodded, although she didn't know what ADS was. Then it occurred to her that the man might have been testing her. And she—in her eagerness to drive home the fact that she was still necessary to him—may have failed the test.

She watched him, wondering if it had been a trick.

He was still considering.

Her eyes moved to the knife again. If it happened, it would happen fast.

Half a minute passed. The train rocked back and forth, clattering the silverware against the china teapot, shivering the ash.

“Trust,” he said once more. “There's no need for either of us to be suspicious. As long as no one gets greedy …”

He offered his hand.

Another few seconds passed; she reached for it. They shook.

Then she looked out the window again. The man smoked his cigarette. The train chugged on, racing with the sun.

TWENTY-TWO

1.

Jeremy was in fine form today.

Keyes liked to think that he bore some responsibility for Jeremy's performance: two runs, here in the third inning, with the promise of more to come. He had taught the boy how to choke up, after all. And the choking up was the main reason Jeremy was doing so well today. He kept finding the sweetheart part of the bat, and clubbing them out deep into left field …

Choking. Choking up.

The phone was ringing.

The call was on his direct line. But he couldn't take any more bad news. He would collapse … dissolve … implode. He answered the phone anyway. “Yes,” he said dimly.

It was Brown, the DIA agent. “We've got him,” Brown said.

He was out of breath. Keyes could hear traffic in the background. The man was calling from outside, by a highway.

“He went to his sister's ex-husband's house, in Jersey. We made the arrest five minutes ago.”

“Bring him here,” Keyes said.

“All right. But he wants to know what he's charged with. And he wants an attorney.”

“Put a blindfold on. Gag him. Bring him here.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Do it,” Keyes said.

“All right.” Brown sounded uncertain. “But—”

Keyes hung up.

2.

“By the way,” the man said as he took the turn.

Hannah glanced at him. He looked almost comically cramped, in the driver's seat of the little rental car, with his knees sticking up on either side of the steering wheel.

“From what I understand, Ismayalov's a tough customer. If he thinks he can cut us out of the loop and take the book for himself, he won't hesitate.”

Meaning, Hannah thought, that she wasn't to provide enough details on the formula to make the two of them dispensable.
Way ahead of you
, she thought darkly.

“I don't want you to run him around too much—but I do want to leave some things unsaid. Make it clear that the deal comes with us, or it doesn't come at all. And when it comes time to doing the actual bargaining, leave it to me.”

“Fair enough,” she said, and looked out her window again.

The colonial-style mansion they were approaching was shaded by eucalyptus trees, set far back from the road. Blue sky unrolled above it, speckled with white clouds. As they drew closer, Hannah saw a woman working in a garden out front. She stood, taking off her gloves, and came to meet them. She was in her thirties, brunette and quite beautiful, with a joyless smile on her sun-browned face.

A man appeared at the mansion's front door: twice the woman's age, with a sharp nose and a crooked mouth. “Madeleine,” he called. “Get us something to drink.”

The woman bowed her head. She slipped away as the man came forward. He considered his visitors without much apparent interest. “You made good time,” he said.

“We were on the road when I called.”

“Come inside. I'm eager to hear how Andrei's doing.”

He swept an arm cordially toward the mansion; they moved inside, with Hannah in the lead.

3.

The elevator opened into subbasement three.

Keyes stepped out, moving cautiously so as not to drop anything. One hand held the cane, the other a briefcase; in the crook of his arm was a thick manila file. He moved slowly down the corridor, following a yellow line painted on the concrete floor. Overhead, the fluorescents flickered and buzzed.

David Brown was standing outside detention area B-14: a large, bearish man with thick shoulders and a high widow's peak. When he saw Keyes, he rushed forward to relieve him of the briefcase. Keyes rearranged the file under his arm. Then he looked at Brown and nodded. Brown reached for the knob on the door and twisted it.

Andrei Yurchenko sat behind a featureless white table, the blindfold still covering his eyes.

He wore a limp linen suit, and kept both hands clearly visible on the table. He was a tall, gaunt man in his mid-fifties, with a thin neck grizzled from overshaving. His demeanor was that of a motorist pulled aside by an overeager state trooper—innocent, but more than willing to go through the rigmarole of due process, perfectly confident that he would come out in the clear.

Keyes and Brown exchanged a glance. They moved to the two chairs opposite the table from Yurchenko. Keyes set the file down on the table, and went to remove the blindfold; Brown set down the briefcase and took a seat.

Inside the briefcase was a Psychological Stress Evaluator—a polygraph, which used a pneumograph tube across the subject's chest and a blood pressure pulse cuff around the subject's arm to monitor reactions to questions. Impulses were then recorded by a needle on a moving graph paper. In truth, the PSE was not the most effective polygraph on ADS grounds. The Voice Stress Analyzer, which detected micro-tremors in the subject's speech, was a more accurate lie detector. But the VSA used columns of LED lights to display its results, and in Keyes's opinion, the old-fashioned moving graph paper possessed greater visual impact. Visual impact was all he was concerned with. There was no time left for games, for half-truths. Yurchenko would be broken, and would cooperate completely, or he would not cooperate at all.

Similarly, the thick file, which had Yurchenko's name typed in capitals on the identifying leaf, consisted almost entirely of blank pages. The actual FBI file on Yurchenko was eight pages long. Keyes had added another three dozen sheets of paper, hoping to send a clear signal: They knew everything there was to know about Yurchenko, and more; resistance would be futile.

He pulled the blindfold away with a small, theatrical flourish.

Then he moved around to the other side of the table and sat. Yurchenko reached up and rubbed at his eyes. Slowly, he absorbed the room: the cinder-block walls, the cement floor, the plastic table, the windowless door. His eyes moved over the file and the briefcase, moved up to Keyes's and Brown's faces, then moved back to the file and the briefcase.

Brown reached into his pocket, withdrew a portable tape recorder, depressed a button, and set it on the table. “August fourth,” he said. “Subject Yurchenko, Andrei. Present are David Brown and James—”

Keyes reached out and shut off the tape recorder.

Two pairs of eyes turned to his face.

“This is off the record,” Keyes said quietly.

Yurchenko guffawed. Keyes looked at him. The man spread his arms apologetically, and said, “I'm sorry.”

“Is something funny?”

“No. It's just …”

Keyes waited.

“Good cop, bad cop,” Yurchenko said. “You know. He puts out the recorder, you turn it off …”

“Ah.”

“He protects my civil rights, you trample on them …”

“I see.”

“‘We have ways of making you talk,'” Yurchenko said, smiling. There was only the slightest hint of a Russian accent in his voice. He turned to Brown. “Then he says, ‘Wait a minute. Take it easy.' Then you say …”

“You've got it all figured out,” Keyes said.

Yurchenko kept smiling, without much humor, and shrugged modestly.

A few seconds passed. Then Brown took the tape recorder and returned it to his pocket. Keyes reached for the folder. He opened it and flipped some pages. He looked over the top of the file at Yurchenko, significantly. He flipped some more pages, then closed the folder and set it on the table.

“Well,” he said. “Where would you like to start?”

4.

The sad-eyed, beautiful woman—Madeleine, Hannah remembered—set down a tray of water with lemon. Then she quickly removed herself, before her husband could send her away.

Ismayalov took a glass and squeezed a slice of lemon into it. “So,” he said.

Hannah nodded. She leaned forward again on the couch. The room around them was cool, done in stone and antique furniture. On the coffee table between them sat the book, unopened.

“Mach 8,” she repeated. “A flight that takes twenty-four hours would be cut to two. But of course, the real applications are military. Hypersonic bombers, cruise missiles …”

“And it's a NASA project?”

“NASA is one of the agencies involved.”

“So what we've got here”—he indicated the book—“is a blueprint.”

“Not precisely a blueprint. A formula, which describes the workings of the engine.”

He reached for the book, opened to the back cover, looked at the chicken-scratch there, and closed it. “Hm,” he said.

“Andrei seemed to think you might know of a buyer,” said the man by the window.

“I might,” Ismayalov said reflectively. “I might at that.”

“Of course, you'd be compensated for your efforts. Say, five percent of whatever figure is decided upon?”

Ismayalov frowned.

Hannah looked from one man to the other. Her role in this, it seemed, already was finished.

“The usual figure, for an introduction such as this, is fifteen,” Ismayalov said.

The man turned from the window. “Fifteen.”

“Open to negotiation, of course. But yes. I think fifteen would be the usual.”

“You see my problem with that. Andrei introduces me to you; you introduce me to a buyer; and if everyone along the way nips fifteen percent, my associate and I are left with precious little.”

“Hm,” Ismayalov said.

“Not that I'm not open to a compromise …”

5.

A phone was ringing.

The men looked at each other. “It's not me,” Brown said.

Keyes reached for his cell phone. Indeed, it was he. He used the cane to lever himself to his feet, then stepped out into the corridor and brought the phone to his ear. “Yes.”

It was Daisy; her voice was shaking. “Jim. You'd better come up here.”

“Why?”

“You just got a call from a, uh, from a cop in Belmont, Massachusetts …”

He looked at the fluorescents. Was it right that they were buzzing so loudly?

“… he wants to talk to you. He's got news, I guess.”

“What kind of news?” Keyes asked calmly.

“I think, um … I think you'd better come up here and …”

He realized that she was on the verge of tears. “Daisy,” he said in a monotone. “What is it?”

“You'd better just come up here. I think that would be best.”

“I can't right now,” Keyes said.

“It has to do with Rachel …”

“Tell her I'll call her back.”

“No—you don't understand. It's …”

“I'm in the middle of something,” he said, and terminated the connection.

Before opening the door again, he took a moment. His breathing was even. His hands were steady. But they would not be for much longer. Time was ticking away. And Rachel had been found; police were calling his office.
Time
, he thought. That was what it all came down to, wasn't it? There was never enough time.