Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (24 page)

Evgeny went straight to the little room he’d shared with Jordan and closed the door. The others could hear him conversing with someone in Russian. Jordan looked to Liesl for interpretation. “I never got the hang of their language,” she admitted. “But I trust him. I shouldn’t, but I do.” She looked at Cass, then back at Jordan. “Do you mind if Cass and I talk privately?”

Jordan looked around as if for another place to go.

“You can stay here, Jordan.” Liesl pulled her scarf more snugly about her neck. “But you’ll still need your coat where we’re going, Cass.”

With Jordan settled willingly in a tattered old recliner in front of a small TV, Liesl led Cass into the front hall, whose doors were closed to the sanctuary. They could hear Rev. Scovall’s amplified yet soothing voice from inside. Liesl pictured him perched on the bar stool, alone on the stage in front of the crudely hewn cross, delivering a simple message for complicated times.

Near the entrance to the church, they turned down a short hall to a stairway leading to the belfry. Liesl closed the stairway door behind them before they began their ascent. “I have a history with bell towers,” she told Cass. “I hope you don’t mind indulging me. I do know where I’m going.”

Cass voiced no objection, but Liesl could sense her apprehension.

When they reached a landing, Liesl opened a small door to a narrow, spiral staircase, and shuddered at the downward blast of bitter air. After a vigorous climb, they entered the open tower with its four bricked arches, and the cold didn’t matter anymore. The tower rose no higher than perhaps a fifth-floor level in another building, but the 360-degree view over this residential neighborhood was engaging enough to dismiss the chill for a while.

Liesl turned Cass’s attention to the twin bells above them. “We don’t have long before those things announce the end of services.”

Cass looked curiously at her. “Why are we here?”

Smiling at the expected question, Liesl said, “Rev. Scovall brought me here the night Evgeny and his men tried to kidnap me. And who knows what else they might have done.” She still wondered. “I nearly knocked the reverend down when I barged through the side door of the church, frantic for a place to hide.” She looked out over the rooftops and the anonymous lives contained beneath them. “I was always hiding, even on
a
concert stage.” She looked back at Cass. “You’re a set designer. You know how grand the deception can be, don’t you?”

Cass drew her coat hood about her face and buried her chin inside the collar. “Yeah. I’m pretty good at it, too.”

Regretfully, Liesl saw herself in Cass. “Back home in Charleston, I used to hide from my drunken father in the bell tower of St. Philip’s Church. Later, I hid in my music, but no longer from him. I hid from hurt, so much of it. Most everybody I loved died horribly, and I couldn’t stand any more. So I detached myself from everyone and everything else that might threaten. And you know what?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “That was the same as dying.”

Cass turned toward her. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I wonder if anyone ever has.”

Cass looked away.

“Rev. Scovall told me he comes up here alone to listen.” Liesl pressed on, not fully understanding her own need to do so. Or was it a prompting?

Beneath Cass’s hood, Liesl could see the puzzled eyes. “To listen to God. He said that sometimes when he was just too busy being him, he couldn’t hear God’s voice inside. And if that was true, he said, what good was he to others?” She hesitated, then added, “I remember wondering what that voice must sound like. Then later, I heard it.”

The eyes beneath the hood glistened with silent tears.

“I just wanted you to know that no matter how things look to us right now—how deep into that dark fourth watch we are—God is the one in control. Not some Russian dictator. Not the haunts of our past. I don’t know what hurts you, Cass. But he does. Give it all to him.”

After a long silence that made her fear she’d overstepped her bounds with this woman she hardly knew, Liesl glanced at her watch, then laid a hand on Cass’s shoulder. “These bells are going off in about twelve minutes. We’d better go.”

Cass shook her head. “Go on.”

“But—”

“I’ve got twelve minutes, don’t I?”

Chapter 26

W
alter Kolenski stepped off the ferry onto Ellis Island, just like his great-grandfather had done in the century before. Unlike the first of his ancestors to leave Poland, though, Walter had lived past his thirty-eighth birthday. At fifty-three, he had lived longer than his two grandfathers and his father.

He was the only one of his immigrant family to ever have a bank account. As hard as they labored, the others couldn’t make enough to support themselves and had to rely on handouts and petty crime to feed and shelter their young. The land of dreams they’d flocked to through the gates of Ellis Island had betrayed its promise. Generations of Walter’s family had slipped so far into poverty and despair that they never recovered. One grandfather hanged himself rather than endure the shame any longer. Walter’s own father, among the last wave of immigrants to pass through the legendary clearing house in New York Harbor, gave up trying to succeed and sacrificed himself and his liver to whiskey, but not before his wife and children abandoned him. Only Walter continued to see his father right up to his death. For hours he had listened to the man rail against America and its heartless, unfair treatment of defenseless, foreign-speaking immigrants. The elder Kolenski was convinced this country was ruled by gangsters who stole the wages of the helpless and that the devil
was
in control of the White House. He convinced his oldest son it was true.

Now, as Walter removed his coat, displaying the security badge he wore five days a week, his dad’s words returned to him. “America is no good for you, Son. They don’t like us Poles. They killed our pride and destroyed our families. Make ’em pay! Make ’em pay!”

Walter had believed it all, even though in earlier years he had made a minimally subsistent wage working as a security guard for a small department store in Flatbush. He was divorced and lived alone. His health had begun to falter, but the insurance his employer provided wouldn’t cover preexisting conditions, of which he had many. It infuriated him every time he was denied benefits, which only fed his disdain for the system.

But when his best friend, a Taiwanese laborer with six children, had been killed for crossing a picket line at a New Jersey factory, Walter plunged into a tailspin of rage, venting it to whoever would listen and to some who promptly fled his seething.

Walter hung his coat in an employee locker, thinking about the one person who had listened attentively to his rantings—Cyrus Neale, an old seaman from City Island, where Walter still lived in a cramped and dreary apartment over a grocery store. It hadn’t taken long for the two to become ideologically linked. That is, they had fueled each other’s hatred for America, drawing attention to their public diatribes in the taverns of City Island.

One night, they were approached by an engaging fellow who floated a proposition before them. It involved spying. “We can do that,” Cyrus and Walter both agreed. Sabotage? “Just tell us where and when,” they chimed. Money? “Even better.” And asylum in Russia, should they desire it. Walter knew he did, but Cyrus wasn’t so sure. After all, his soldier boy was buried here.

So Cyrus had his work to do, and Walter had his. In a few minutes, the first boatload of Sunday tourists would descend on Ellis Island. The prospect of destroying that portal to shame and then fleeing the country consumed him. With the help of the man from Russia, Walter had gotten a job as a security guard at the historic monument. He was placed in such
duty
for one reason. The signal would come, and a day later, Walter would wear a special coat—unusually heavy and stiff—to work that morning. He would hang it in his locker like always, only he would never retrieve it. At the end of his shift, he would pull an identical coat from the same locker—one already in place—and leave the island for the last time.

Just as his father had been one of the last immigrants to enter Ellis Island, Walter Kolenski would be one of the last to leave it … intact. A national museum and historic treasure was about to litter the bottom of New York Harbor.

Chapter 27

W
here are we going?” Liesl asked as Evgeny pulled away from the church.

“My contact in Moscow has hit a vein of communication between the Architect’s people here and at the Kremlin. His latest tip is very rich. You will see.” And he said no more.

Liesl wondered at her options for dealing with him, finally realizing she had none. She was bound by a peculiar allegiance to this evasive man who cut no discernible profile, only immeasurable contradiction. He was a Russian undercover agent defending America against his own kind, risking all to protect the woman he’d once sought to destroy, waging a battle against this Architect he couldn’t identify.

Who is Evgeny Kozlov?
Liesl stole a glance at the sunken face that rarely secreted emotion, the eyes now boring through the windshield in what she hoped was no maniacal, revengeful pursuit—with her and that young couple back at the church its victims.

She closed her eyes and conjured images of home, of Saturday’s kitchen full of those she longed to hold. To feel Cade’s arms enfold her and his lips against hers. To playfully tug Ian’s beard. To bask in her father’s epic return. To comfort the frail Lottie who’d long been Liesl’s refuge. To walk the aisle in a white dress at St. Philip’s.

And then she thought of Ava. How curious to find a motherly solace in
the
hard-wired CIA agent who’d sprung at her after Schell Devoe’s murder, subjecting her to a merciless interrogation by a team of CIA and FBI agents. Liesl wondered what avenues the agent might be charging down this moment to locate the one she’d been charged to protect. Liesl regretted the guilt she was certain her friend now suffered.

Retired from the agency and teaching school in Charleston, Ava Mullins still lived on the alert. Liesl knew she had moved to Charleston not for the weather, maybe for the company of Ian O’Brien, but certainly to keep a watchful eye on Liesl. Ava had never trusted that after Liesl’s code aborted a conspiracy hatched in hell, that all was well on the Russian front—the one that bordered the old house on Tidewater Lane.

As if a hypnotist had just uttered the word to dispel the rumination, Liesl jerked at the sound of Evgeny’s voice. “Listen,” he said brusquely, “you must not be recognized. Tuck your hair inside your hat again, keep your scarf high over your chin, and wear your sunglasses at all times.” He then pulled the fur-lined hood of his own jacket over his head and dug sunglasses from one of its pockets.

“Recognized by whom?”

He didn’t look at her. “You will see.”

Jeremy Rubin hugged the wheel of a white Nissan compact like it was a go-cart on a crowded track. This Sunday afternoon, though, the Bruckner Expressway into the Bronx was flowing smoothly, more so than the conversation inside the car.

“I don’t know why you’re so upset,” Jeremy said. “You’ve gotten your first payment, which should buy all the fine antiques my sister could ever want. Pretty soon, you’ll have enough to buy the mansion to put them in.”

Ben Hafner squirmed in his seat. “This is not going to happen again, Jeremy. I don’t care how much your Russian mob pays me. What if someone recognizes me?” He touched the bill of the baseball cap he was wearing, then adjusted his dark glasses.

“Are you kidding? It’s not like you’re on
Meet the Press
every Sunday.
Sorry
to topple your pedestal, Mr. Domestic Policy Chief, but I guarantee you the people on this road wouldn’t recognize your face any quicker than if you mooned them.” He chuckled. “Especially where we’re going.”

Ben clamped his hand around the armrest of the small sedan and pumped, as if the repetitive motion would inflate his mood. It didn’t. “Your superiors should be content with keeping me at my job and not gallivanting all over New York with an illegal alien. What if we were stopped?”

“Russian forgers know their stuff. My driver’s license, car registration, even the insurance card are as clean as yours.”

“And what’s so critical about my risking association with you just to meet one of your subterranean rats?”

“Uh-oh. Bad attitude. Wouldn’t want that Russian mob, as you call them, to think you’re insulting their brotherhood of esteemed saboteurs. Not you, the big man who’s going to deliver Travis Noland’s administration directly to their pocket—when the time is right.” He glanced at Ben. “The whole point of this little meeting today, according to the Architect, is to put a face on the brotherhood for you, to make you see one of its own up close and personal. The boss is just a tad bit queasy about your commitment to him. So he wants to send you up front into one of the trenches to convince you that the battle is real, that it’s about to begin, and you’d better be wearing the right uniform. You got that?”