Deep Black (28 page)

61

Karr stayed in the shower until his toes wrinkled. The hot water washed away seven thousand miles’ worth of grime, then ground
away at his skin, shaving off several epidermal layers. Back in the kitchen in fresh clothes, he made a whole pot of very
strong coffee and sat at the table, reading an old issue of
Car and Driver
stowed here at his request. The magazine was several years old and he’d already read it cover to cover perhaps three dozen
times; one of the cars it featured was no longer even offered for sale. But he read it eagerly, even thoughtfully, his mind
absorbed by details of the Mazda RX-8’s cornering ability and a rant about how hard you had to mash the Z car’s gas pedal
to get it
really
moving.

Between the coffee and the shower, Karr decided he was awake enough to forgo a stimulant patch; the time-released amphetamine
made him feel a little too jumpy and he’d only used it once since coming to Russia. It allegedly wasn’t habit-forming, but
he figured that was complete bull. His concept of the body as temple for the spirit did not preclude trading vodka shots,
eating double cheeseburgers, or forgoing some of the precautions they preached in health class, but he was enough of a control
freak to dislike operating in a submerged haze of consciousness.

He closed his magazine and got up from the table. He retrieved a large metal attache´ case from the bottom cabinet next to
the stove, opened it, and took out a laptop. Then he went back to the table, pulled out the chair he’d been sitting on, and
got down on his hands and knees, feeling carefully for the right tile—he could never remember which of the four beneath the
table it was. Finding it, he pressed on one corner and tried lifting it with his fingernails, but they weren’t quite long
enough. He tried two more times—he’d actually managed to get it the last time he was here—then gave up and got a pair of knives
whose thin blades were hooked slightly; he jostled up the tile with a flick of his wrists, retrieving a large coaxial cable
from a compartment next to the plug.

The system took a while to boot up and then check itself. Karr poured himself a cup of coffee in the meantime, sliding back
into the chair. As the test pattern came up, he took out his satellite phone and called Blake Clark in St. Petersburg, an
MI6 contact whom he’d asked to meet Martin when he arrived. The British agent answered the phone with a sharp “Clark.” Glasses
clinked in the background.

“How’d my package do?”

“Arrived and left.”

“Take the flight to Finland?”

“Said you’d told him there was a change in plans,” said Clark.

“Yeah. Which plane?”

“You didn’t tell me I had to baby-sit the chap.”

“He’s gone now?”

“At least an hour.”

“You’re sure he got on a plane.”

“He didn’t come out of any of the entrances. My people were watching for him.”

“Thanks, Blake. I owe you one.”

“Actually, if we’re keeping track, you owe quite a bit more.”

Karr hit end, then keyed Bori Grinberg. Grinberg answered on the first ring.

“
Da?”
Grinberg’s accent—and language—always started out somewhere around Berlin but could range over to Paris, up to Krako´w, and
back to Moscow depending on the circumstances.

“It’s Karr. So?”

“Meter never moved.” Grinberg’s English had a Russian tint to it, which made Karr suspect that he was in fact Russian, though
definitive information was impossible to come by. His first name was Norse—but names meant nothing.

“You’re at the terminal?”

“
Da.”

“OK, I need you to walk through the building, back near the gate, rest rooms, all that, see if the marker was offloaded. Keep
the line open.”

“Walking.”

Karr had slipped three pimple-sized “markers” onto Martin’s clothes before packing him onto the aircraft. The markers contained
radioactive isotopes, chosen for their uniqueness and ability to excite the detector Grinberg had in his hand. Karr had told
him to wait at the airport and see if the meter flipped.

Grinberg was a freelancer believed to retain ties to Russian intelligence. Karr found him valuable nonetheless, though admittedly
he had to use some precautions—such as, in this case, not identifying whom Grinberg was looking for.

Unfortunately, to get Grinberg to do the job, Karr had had to blow one of his equipment cache points in St. Petersburg. Such
points were difficult to come by, and replacing it would take several days of angst—not to mention a trip to St. Petersburg,
a city he didn’t particularly like. It also meant he compromised all of the technology in the cache, which Grin-berg could
be counted on to help himself to.

Which was why all of the technology—the most notable items beyond the tracking gear were some eavesdropping kits and a pair
of stun guns that looked like wristwatches—had been purloined from the Russians themselves.

“How we doing?” he asked Grinberg. He could hear him walking through a crowd.

“Nee-yada.”

“You trying to say ‘nada’?”

“
Da.”

“You have to work on your slang. But before you can do that, you have to figure out your nationality,
ja
?”

“
Hai!”
he said.

“I haven’t heard Japanese from you before. Thinking of moving?”

Grinberg let off a string of Russian curses, apparently aimed at someone who had bumped into him in the airport. It was already
clear to Karr that Martin had in fact boarded an airplane—that or bribed Grinberg and Clark to make it look as if he had—and
so he turned his attention to the laptop. After clearing himself into the system, he initiated a program that put him on the
Internet, spoofing a German gateway into thinking he was in Du¨sseldorf. From there he accessed a file on a server and downloaded
a program to his laptop’s prodigious RAM—there was no hard drive. With two keystrokes Karr hacked into the reservation system
controlling flights out of St. Petersburg, a destination he had chosen specifically because he found this system so easy to
access.

“
Ne
rein,”
said Grinberg.

“French, right?” said Karr, recognizing the phrase for “nothing.” “No trace anywhere in the airport?”

“Nope.”

“Now comes the hard part—I’m going to give you a plane to check out.”

“Plane?”

“Yeah. Actually, it’s still at the gate. I know the flight.” If Grinberg didn’t find the markers on the plane, then Martin
had to be still wearing them, which would make the next step considerably easier. Karr keyed his computer and saw that the
flight would be leaving in exactly forty-five minutes. “I need you to check the trash and then the plane—they won’t have vacuumed
it.”

“
Mon
dieu.”

“Yeah—uh, you’ll find a ticket waiting at the gate. Round-trip.” He hesitated, waiting for the screen to refresh. The hack
was perfect, but the system wasn’t particularly user-friendly—he had to enter Grinberg’s name with an asterisk before each
letter. He screwed something up and it came out as “Grinnberg,” which he figured was close enough. “You’re misspelled in the
computer, just so you know.”

“They will ask for my credit card,” said Grinberg.

“So give me the number and it’ll be there.”

“You’re going to make me burn a good card?”

“You buy them by the hundreds, don’t you?”

“Karr—”

“Come on, plane’s boarding. It’s worth another thousand euros. Going into your account now.”

Grinberg got the card out quickly. Dean put in the number, then told him he’d call back in about forty minutes, by which time
he expected him on the plane.

Twelve flights left St. Petersburg in the hour or so since Clark had lost contact with Martin. Karr looked through the different
passenger lists, looking for single passengers paying cash and added to the manifest at the last minute. He found three likely
candidates on three different planes—one flying to London’s Heathrow Airport, one to Poznan in Poland, and one to Moscow.

London wasn’t worth checking out, Karr decided; if Martin really was coming west he would have taken the flight Karr had arranged.
Poznan was in central Poland, not particularly handy to anything—which would make it a clever choice. But if Martin was being
clever, he would have simply bribed someone and taken his ticket, gambling that the airline wouldn’t bother matching passengers.

Not a good gamble these days, but maybe worth the risk.

Nah. Not after everything else he’d been through.

But Moscow seemed too easy.

Karr backed out and went over to an airline Web site that helpfully provided flight information. The plane from St. Petersburg
was due in about an hour.

Tight, doable.

Easy, though. But maybe he was due. He did live a good life.

62

Certain habits are so ingrained that they are impossible to change—the way a man sucks in the last swirl of beer at the bottom
of a glass, the way he moves over a woman when making love, the way he squints into the high sun when he’s been up too long
for too many days running.

Among Charlie Dean’s many inherent habits was one of considerable benefit under the current circumstances—the ability to look
at a site and read it for the best possible sniper locations. Standing at the chain-link fence around the construction site
Kurakin was scheduled to visit, he spotted a dozen great ones, another four or five good ones, and even a few marginal ones
that might be chosen for specific reasons. Dean wanted to check them all.

Lia held him back. “Hold on. We have some work to do first.”

“Like?”

“For one thing, figuring out how to get past the guards at the gate. For another, eliminating some of the possibilities. At
least a few will be covered by video devices our friends have already planted. So are the entrances.”

“The guy could’ve come in days ago.”

“We’ll check everything out that needs to be checked,” said Lia. She crossed and began walking up the street, part of a residential
area in southeastern Moscow.

“You’re going in the wrong direction,” Dean told her.

“You know, Charlie, sometimes I wonder how you get your clothes on right in the morning.”

“You know, I think it’s about time you and me had a talk,” said Dean.

“Not the birds and the bees again.”

“You always have to be a wiseass, huh?”

A look of regret flickered across her face but changed quickly into a sneer. Lia quickened her pace.

“See, I don’t think you are an asshole,” said Dean.

“You’ve been wrong before.”

“Not about that.” Dean tried to grab her arm, but she pulled away, then spun, and put her finger at his throat.

“Don’t fuck with me, Charlie. Let’s just get it done, OK? This is a shitload more important than anything you’ve ever done.”

“You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“I know everything about you. Everything—Khe Sahn, the highlands, the lowlands, California, South Africa. I know your fuckups
and your successes. I know how many medals you have, and how many people you killed. I also know how many got killed saving
your ass. I’m not going to be one of them.”

She whirled away before Dean could find something to answer.

Lia found a small park two blocks up from the housing site. A few mothers were watching kids and talking; she sat on a bench
out of earshot, then took her handheld out and punched into the SpyNet portal. It took almost a minute for the system to register
and authenticate her; Dean, still sulking, trudged over slowly and sat down.

She wondered if he kept doing things to piss her off on purpose.

“So?” he asked.

“Hang tight,” she said. She thumbed in the most recent satellite picture of the site, then had the computer render it as a
schematic. After she deleted the topo lines, she showed it to Dean. “Use the stylus to highlight the places you wanted to
look at.”

“Kind of small,” he said after taking the computer.

She took it back and pulled down the zoom. The area was now displayed on four screens. As she started to show him how to go
from screen to screen, she noticed that one of the women in the distance was looking at them.

“Put your arm around me,” she told him.

“What?”

“Charlie, do you need an instruction manual on that, too?” Lia leaned into him and he finally figured it out.

A little too well—he leaned down and kissed her.

Not unpleasantly, though she pulled back to break it off. The old biddy who’d been watching frowned and moved on.

“In the line of duty,” he said quickly.

“Four screens,” she told him. “Use the compass arrows.”

She continued to lean on him. She might have admitted it felt good—but only under severe torture.

“I think I have them all.”

“Don’t
think
you have them—
have
them.”

Lia waited as he went through the screens again. Probably she wasn’t
really
attracted to him—he was too old and at times a bit obtuse.

Good-looking, though, with the chiseled shoulders and arms she liked, tight butt, soft but deep voice. He’d be good in the
bedroom but probably—certainly—get too attached.

No, she probably wasn’t really attracted to him, except in the most theoretical sense. The
problem
was that she didn’t have sex enough. This stinking assignment—her fucking life since what, joining the Army?—had turned her
into a nun.

Just about.

Karr was nice but too nice, too up all the time; he never turned that bullshit smile off. And Fashona—very nice guy, very
not her type.

“Done,” Dean said. “Want me to explain?”

Stuff like that.
That’s
what pissed her off.

She pulled the computer away and reduced the magnifi- cation. Then she sent the image back to the system for analysis.

“Just because there’s no one there now,” said Dean, “doesn’t mean they didn’t set up already.”

“Really? You think?”

“You want me to help or not?”

The screen came back up. Out of the nearly three dozen places Charlie had identified, only six had had IR readings over the
past twenty-four hours. Two were covered by the video cameras the CIA agents had planted, and another was near a microphone.

“These images are made every ten minutes,” she explained. “So it’s conceivable that someone very, very fast could get in and
out without detection. But the approaches are being monitored, so really we’re down to four spots.”

“What if they came in a couple of days ago?”

“OK. That screen will take a little longer,” she told him. “The schedule was only set yesterday.”

“They may have staked out the site a month ago.”

“Possible,” she said. “But not probable.”

Extending the analysis to sixty-four hours—that was the longest period available—yielded two other sites.

“I gotta tell ya, I don’t trust all this high-tech shit,” said Dean when she showed him.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you guys have been smoked twice. It never works right.”

“Hold on—when were we smoked?”

“Getting Martin out.”

“How?”

“You didn’t know where he was.”

“Well, shit, this isn’t a movie. You think we could have gone in with four people—four people, only two of whom were on the
ground—without all our gear? Jesus.”

“How come you didn’t know where he was?”

“He doesn’t have a surgically placed locator,” she told him. “Just like you don’t. You lose your gear and we lose you. Even
then, the system has gaps. Shit, nothing’s perfect.” She realized she was talking way too loudly and took a moment to lower
her breath. “How would the Marines have done it?”

“Well—”

“That was rhetorical, Charles. I’m not looking for an answer.” She stood.

“I bailed you out at the car place.”

“Yes, you did. Thank you.”

Dean got up, standing close to her. “You don’t say it like you mean it.”

One or two of the women on the playground were staring. Lia turned and looked up into his face. “You know?”

“What?”

Good question, she thought. What?

Dean put his hand on her shoulder.

“Let’s just do our jobs, OK?” she said.

“Fine with me.”

“Then we’ll go our separate ways.”

“Perfect.”

“Start by removing your hand.”

Dean pulled it back with an exaggerated sweep. Lia shook her head and sat down.

“All right,” she said. “We have to get in and check these sites.”

“There are a couple of good windows and the roof in the apartment block,” said Dean, sitting back down as well. “They’re at
the far end of the range, but possible.”

“We’ll check them, too. First we get into the site, get that out of the way.”

“How?”

“Technology,” she said, jumping from the seat. “And a little T and A.”