The Nicholas Linnear Novels (131 page)

Pyotr Alexandrovitch Russilov was a graduate from Protorov’s Ural academy. But he was special in many ways. For one, he had graduated at the top of his class. For another, he had adapted superbly to the field. Protorov had found through bitter experience that academic life had little in common with the awesome pressures at work in the field. Many graduates did not make the adjustment and were “retired” to the Ninth’s bureaucratic section, where they never again came into direct contact with Protorov.

But
Gospadin
Russilov was different in another way. He was an orphan. Early on the State—or, more properly, Protorov—had taken him over. He was a reclamation project of the first rank.

Because Protorov was married to his job, and also perhaps because sex had never meant that much to him, there had only been one woman in his life. She was someone he would have preferred to forget but could not. Alena was the wife of a Jewish dissident. After Protorov, then head of the First Directorate, had sent Alena’s husband off to a gulag, he took her to bed. It had been far more pleasurable for him than he had ever imagined.

Whether it was because of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the incident or whether it was something within Alena herself Protorov could not say. He thought of himself as a basically dispassionate man, able to see clearly and objectively all situations. Yet he had never been able to fathom this one. It remained like a great ice floe, hidden beneath arctic waters, mocking him with its opacity.

But like it or not, Alena was all he had, in reality, and then, after he had her sent down in Lubyanka, in his memory. Until Russilov. Without quite knowing how it had happened Protorov had come to look upon his protégé as family. Son was not too strong a word to use. When Protorov retired from the Ninth, which would not be very long now, he knew that Russilov would run it well.

Now that he had received the signal from Colonel Mironenko that the KGB-GRU summit was scheduled for a week away, his time at the Ninth was coming to an end. But he had to have penetrated
Tenchi
by then. Tengu, his second agent inside the Tenshin Shoden Katori
ryu,
had been mysteriously murdered as he was escaping with the prize that Protorov had been seeking since he had received the information that that particular ninja
ryu
was safeguarding
Tenchi
’s written records. It was a frustrating setback, Protorov thought now. But not a fatal one by any means.

“Sir?”

Protorov looked up, his train of thought disturbed. “Yes, Lieutenant Russilov.” He liked the way the young man addressed him as “Sir” and not “Comrade.” Rank was important in the Ninth Directorate and, unlike the hypocrisy running rampant in the Kremlin, Protorov made no bones about it.

Russilov entered the soundproofed chamber through the vaultlike door. He held a sheaf of computer printouts in his hands. “I believe Sakhov IV has given us a clue after all.”

Immediately Protorov cleared his desk of paper, stacking files. Russilov set the sheaf down in the open space. It was open to the fourth page. Both men stared hard at the readout broadcast from the tracking satellite’s onboard computer. It showed a gridform geographical tableau approximately 150 by 200 kilometers. The land-sea area was quite familiar to the Russians. It was the section of sea between the northerly end of Hokkaido and the most southerly of the Kuriles, Kunashir. Part of that area was Japanese territory; part was a Soviet possession.

The young lieutenant’s finger stabbed out. “You see here, sir”—the pad of the finger roamed across the Nemuro Straits—“there is nothing. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Now”—he reached up and flipped to the next page—“just here.” His finger hovered over one small point in the Straits.

“What is it?” Protorov asked, knowing quite well what it was. He did not want to deprive Russilov of the fruits of his victory. That would have been unfair.

“An emanation of heat,” Russilov said. Protorov looked up at him for a moment. He had to give the young man credit. There was no triumph in his voice, though surely he must be feeling it. “Very strong.”

“Volcanic action,” Protorov offered. It was the most plausible explanation.

“Oh, this is much too localized for that. Besides, the known northerly fault is here.” His finger moved off to the southeast.

“I see.” Protorov sat back.

“What is it, then?”

“Tenchi.”

Oh yes, Protorov thought. That’s precisely what it was. Because they knew from reliable sources that
Tenchi
was some form of monumental industrial or resource project. What Protorov and his unit had been searching for all this time was some discrepancy. Now Protorov felt it was here. Then, as he glanced down at the readout, something else caught his eye. He did some rapid mental calculations, then mulled it over for a time before saying anything.

“Lieutenant,” he said meditatively, “this intense heat activity. Where would you place it, exactly?”

“That’s difficult to say, sir.” Russilov bent over the readout. “As you know, this comes from a long way up. And, of course, our technicians have had to piece it together to get the whole.”

“Nevertheless,” Protorov pursued, “I want your best guess.”

Russilov took his time, producing a jeweler’s loupe with which he routinely scanned the readout. At length he stood up, dropping the magnifier into his cupped palm.

“If I were put to it, sir,” he began, “I would have to say that part of the activity is coming from Japanese territory.”

Protorov’s pulse picked up a beat. “And the other part?”

“The other part, it seems to me, is coming from Russian sovereign territory.”

Alix Logan was in the shower. Croaker sat in an easy chair in the large, neatly furnished room. He was sipping a bourbon and water that room service had brought up.

He was tired and he let his head fall back against the chair, closing his eyes. He still felt the slight motion vertigo from having been in the car eighteen straight hours. He would have preferred to fly out of Key West but that would have been suicidal, like putting a “Come Follow Me” sign on their backs.

No, all things considered, a car had been best. At the least it afforded them the option of changing destinations any time they pleased.

Dimly he heard the shower running. He thought again of what it had felt like to have Alix Logan sitting beside him for all that uninterrupted time. The sun-streaked hair falling now and again on his shoulder, those piercing green eyes, the model’s lithe, taut-fleshed body, the skin tanned and smooth as cream.

And that led him to thoughts of Angela Didion, the other model and Alix Logan’s best friend. But none of the fame Angela Didion had amassed, none of the myriad rumors about her mattered a damn at the moment Croaker had entered her apartment and found her sprawled across her bed, naked save for a thin gold chain around her waist, and very dead.

She was no beauty queen then, no superbly madeup sex goddess, the vision of every man’s fantasy. Stripped so harshly of life she was merely a young girl, pathetic in her ultimate vulnerability. And she had moved Croaker more then than she ever had in life.

He remembered that moment well. How he had wanted more than anything else to wave some magic wand and resurrect her. Not for himself. Just for her. In death she was only a human being and therefore far more than she ever had been as a cover girl for
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan,
where she had been drenched in two-dimensional unreality.

In one sense that seemed a very little thing to set him on this long, torturous quest. A tiny thing over which to lose one’s own life. But when one thought of it another way, it was the only truly honorable thing to do. And Lew Croaker had learned about the importance of honor from his best friend, Nicholas Linnear.

Now Alix opened the door to the steamy bathroom and emerged with a thick towel wrapped around her, another, smaller one wrapped as a turban around her hair.

Croaker’s eyes snapped open and for a moment he saw not her but Angela Didion and he found renewed determination not to let Alix Logan die, which she surely would if the Blue Monster ever caught wind of their whereabouts.

“You’re next,” she said, giving him that direct, disconcerting look that seemed to penetrate his skull. “You look like death warmed over.”

Croaker grunted and finished off his drink. “Funny. I feel worse than that.”

She sat down on one of the double beds, her hands in her lap. “Why are you doing this? That’s what I’d like to know. They’ll kill you if they catch you. You know that, don’t you.”

“It’s because of Angela.”

“You didn’t even know her,” Alix said. “You were in love with that face just like everyone else.”

“You don’t get it at all,” he said, shifting in his seat.

“And I never will,” she said archly, “unless you explain it to me.”

“She died on my turf.” He swirled the ice around the empty glass, staring at the cubes but looking at nothing at all. “Someone did her in; I want to find out who. Because she was a person just like anyone else. She deserved that much, at least.”

Alix gave a short laugh. “I’m in a better position to know what she deserved.” She paused for a moment as if gathering herself. “She was a bitch, Lew. She was mean, vindictive, insanely jealous, and absolutely venal.”

Croaker looked up at her. “None of that matters. To me she was no better or worse than anyone else.”

Alix poured herself a drink from the bottle of Old Grand-Dad. “You should’ve spent some time with her,” she said, taking a swallow neat. “A couple’ve days, that’s all it would’ve taken.”

Croaker took the glass out of her hand, finished what she had in there. “Were you in love with her?”

“That’s none of your goddamned business!” she flared at him. Her hands clenched into whitened fists and her lips compressed into a thin unattractive line. Then her face began to break apart a small piece at a time.

“Just because you saved my life, what makes you think you can expect answers like that out of me?” By then she was weeping, her sun-baked shoulders heaving, her hands covering her face.

Croaker watched her for a time, suppressing the urge to reach out for her and comfort her; he knew her well enough now to know she would pull back from such a gesture.

After a while her hands came down and she wiped at her eyes. She seemed a great deal calmer. “The truth is,” she said softly, “Angela was in love with me.” She ran long fingers through her wet hair after unwinding the towel. She began to rub it through her hair. “I could never remember my mother, and Angela was strong. I guess there was a lot of the male in her. Not that she was masculine. It wasn’t that at all. I’m talking about something inside. Her personality or whatever.

“She caught me. I honestly don’t know how else to put it. I knew she was a bitch from working with her. And I knew she was into drugs: opium and coke. Nice combo, huh? But I thought…Oh, I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I blinded myself to all those things because I needed a mother; someone to show me the ropes and protect me.”

Alix stopped fussing with her hair, sat again with her hands in her lap, so that she appeared very young, almost a little girl, innocent, made of spun pink candy. “We fought all the time. In many ways she made my life hell.”

“You could have walked out,” Croaker pointed out.

But Alix was already shaking her head. “Like I said, you didn’t know Angela. What she wanted, she kept until she was tired of it. She would have ruined me professionally if I’d tried to leave. She could have done it easily; she was quite the expert at it. I saw her do it once to a young model coming up who said the wrong thing to her one day. Angela made one phone call and no one in the business even spoke that girl’s name again. Angela had the power of a pharaoh.”

Her head came down so far that Croaker could see the soft bit of light down at the nape of her neck. “But the truth is, I didn’t have the strength to leave her. She…frightened me and, oddly I suppose, within the power of her manipulation I felt more secure than I had outside on my own in the world.”

There was a silence that stretched itself, filling the room with an odd kind of chill.

“Then what happened?” Croaker prompted.

“Then everything changed,” Alix said, her voice so soft Croaker had to lean forward to hear her properly. “Angela met Raphael Tomkin.”

Jesse James had picked up the bastard’s name, Tex Bristol, from the harbormaster at the Key West marina when the man and several others who had been on the dock at the time had noticed his boat leaving its slip just after Alix Logan’s had.

James did not know who the bastard really was, but he promised himself he would soon find out. He had asked for Bristol by name at the front desk, figuring the bastard wouldn’t see any reason to change the alias at this stage, but he had been wrong. He had been told that no Bristol with the first name of Tex or with any other first name had registered that day.

The Blue Monster had launched into explanation C, going the full route, showing a badge. He was a private detective, a case of adultery, here are the descriptions of the pair, nothing to get het up about, just serving divorce papers, et cetera. He got their room number. One room. Very cozy, James thought. What does this bastard have that I don’t? He took the elevator up.

The doors opened and Jesse James emerged onto the third floor of the hotel.

Croaker had just come out of the shower. He felt thirty years better. Toweling himself dry, he put on the lightweight slacks, dark blue T-shirt with “KEY WEST IS BEST” stenciled in green across the chest, and his tattered topsiders that he had brought with him into the bathroom.

Alix wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a pink cap-sleeve silk shirt. Her bare toes curled on the bedspread. She was sitting up, her back against a pair of pillows, reading a paperback book she had picked up at the place along the highway where they had stopped for lunch.

“This thing’s as bad as the food we had this afternoon,” she said, throwing the book away from her. “Vampire’s in the bayous. Who’s kidding who?”