The Nicholas Linnear Novels (98 page)

None of that for him. He held on, and now there was only an eerie kind of silence, rushing in the aftermath of all the frenzy and sound. Wind whistled through the partially opened window and then the car took its first unsteady bump on the side of the sheer cliff. One side hit heavier than the other, and that started the oscillation. Soon, he knew, it would get so great—on the fourth or fifth landing perhaps—that the vehicle would flip over and then he would have no chance at all.

He could see nothing that would help him. He was in the tunnel of the night, a steel coffin, and he knew he must rely totally on sensation, the feeling in his stomach, his hands, his legs, his heart.

It was now or never.

He drew his legs up so that he was kneeling on the seat, so that there was no possibility that his feet would get caught in the well. Quickly now he moved onto his back, feet first toward the swinging door.

Out he went. Watched dizzily, detachedly, the shock and pain turning him into an unconcerned spectator, as the tumbling car hit the churning water hood first and sank into the deep without a trace.

Bristol did not think much about that night now except to speculate on who it was who’d tried to kill him. At first he was certain that it had been Frank, Raphael Tomkin’s man. But that was before he had come upon the monsters. Now he was not so sure.

He had come down to Key West to find Alix Logan. Now that he had found that she was already covered, he wondered, Who were they, these monsters who never let her out of their sight? Were they working for Tomkin? Were they all part of the cover-up of Tomkin’s murder of Angela Didion? There was no way Bristol could know that until he spoke to Alix Logan. Back in New York, Matty the Mouth had given him her name. Bristol had known there had been a witness to the murder and if he was going to nail Tomkin, he would have to find her. The contact had given him the name and the place for an unconscionably large amount of money. But it had been worth it. Now Bristol knew he was very close, and he had told Matty the Mouth to get out of town for a while. He owed the man that much.

Down in Key West, after his supposed death, after he had recovered from the fractured arm, he had set himself up on watch. He had plenty of idle time when he had nothing to do but wait. Movement or stillness. Dark and light. They were all that existed for him. And Alix Logan.

Staring at her often brought the thought of Gelda to mind but that was, of course, pointless. He could not contact her in any way. He must remain dead in order to stay buried near Alix Logan, undetected and unmolested. It was a difficult enough task to shadow someone; it was all but impossible to do it when someone was trying to ice you.

Bristol. How may times during those long, cramped hours of waiting had he worked the name around on his tongue. His real name had faded out, an image in an old and bleached photo album that was long ago and far away.

He had become “Tex” Bristol and that was how he thought of himself now, just as everyone around him who knew him did. There was only one person in the world who knew he had not died in the flaming car crash that night and she would never tell. He had had just enough money left to get him up to San Antonio. He had known Marie a long time ago in New York. They had been on opposite sides of the law then. Now, he was not so sure of where either of them stood.

But she was smart and tough and she knew everyone. She had provided him with medical service and the paraphernalia of his new identity: birth certificate, social security card, driver’s license, even a passport, slightly worn, franked several times for Europe and Asia. He thought that a nice touch even though he didn’t think he’d need it. He’d taken the passport anyway, along with thirty thousand in cash.

Marie had asked no questions and when he had offered no explanations she went on to other matters. She even seemed pleased to see him. Back in New York they had worked each other to a Mexican standoff; it had been the first time for each of them and they had learned from it. You could even say they liked each other, after a fashion.

When he left, Bristol knew that he owed her more than he could ever repay.

“Sir?”

The penetrating ebon eyes lifted up into the pale mauve light, and shadows skittered about the bare walls of the room like kittens chasing each other.

“What is it?” The voice was more than brusque; it contained within its guttural growl a definite tinge of disdain that caused the young lieutenant who had come into the room to feel somehow diminished, as if he were in the presence of a being more than human.

It was a calculated tone but no less effective for that. Artifice, thought the man now as he accepted the young lieutenant’s presence, nodding him forward, ruled the world. A careful daily grooming of his voice kept things running smoothly at the safe house.

It was his experience that one could many times give the merest outline of fear and one’s adversary—whether it be this young lieutenant eager for promotion or one of the old guard back home—supplied all the rest. It left one free to pursue more pressing matters.

“The latest printouts from Sakhov IV, sir,” the young uniformed lieutenant said, handing over a sheaf of graph paper.

“And how many passes have we here, Lieutenant?” Viktor Protorov, head of the Ninth Directorate of the KGB, said.

“Just over a half dozen, sir.”

“I see.” Protorov’s gaze lowered to the sheaf. He could feel the slight relaxing of the man in front of him. “And what, if anything, does this mass hold for me, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Oh, come now.” Protorov looked up. He tapped the sheet with a rather long nail. “A new batch of highly classified printouts from Sakhov IV, what our government publicly calls a ‘digital imaging reconnaissance satellite,’ centering on that section of the Pacific Ocean between the Kuriles and where we are in the north of Hokkaido, an area we have been concentrating on for—how many months now?—”

“Seven since we moved from the aerodrome in Iturup.”

“—comes in. If you haven’t taken a good, hard look at these, Lieutenant, you’re either stupid or incompetent.” Protorov leaned back in his chair. “Tell me, are you either of these?”

For a moment the young man said nothing; he had begun to sweat beneath his superior’s intense gaze and questioning. “You put me in a most untenable position, sir. If I say yes, then my career in the Directorate is finished. If I say no, then it is obvious that I have deliberately lied to my superior.”

“Well, Lieutenant, if the day ever comes when you are captured by the Capitalist enemy, then you can be quite certain that they, too, will put you in an untenuous position.”

They had been conversing in English. “Excuse me, sir,” the young lieutenant said, “but that’s ‘untenable,’ not ‘untenuous.’”

“Answer the question,” Protorov said, beginning to sift through the visual data provided by Sakhov IV’s immensely powerful infrared video equipment. An involuntary chill went through him at the thought that the Americans might have such a potent weapon. He was only slightly cheered by the knowledge that his country’s land-based antisatellite lasers could—and had in recent days past—bring down the threat.

He got to the third sheet. “Time’s running out. It’s a sure bet the Americans won’t give you this long.”

“You won’t find what we’ve been looking for in those,” the lieutenant said at last, as if with one long breath all the air had gone out of his lungs.

Protorov’s gaze stripped him bare. “Then you
have
looked at these.”

“Sir, security regulations require that the O.D. bring all Passionate documents to me first for verification.”

“Passionate” was the rather ironic term Protorov had coined for highest-priority matter circulating within the Directorate. “Sneak peekies, you mean,” Protorov grumbled. He lifted a hand. “All right. I hope you do as well with the Americans if your day ever comes.”

“I am more frightened of you than of the Americans, sir.”

“Then learn to be frightened of them, Lieutenant.” His gaze lifted again. “Because they mean to destroy everything you and I hold dear.” But he was pleased with the young man; he had seen the only way out of the trap Protorov had set for him. He had even caught Protorov’s deliberate usage error.

Once the young man had left, he pored over the computer-generated satellite photos again.

But by the end of his second pass, he had been forced to admit defeat. There was no anomaly of any kind. Again. He did not know of course precisely what he was looking for, only had knowledge of its name:
Tenchi.
It was the Japanese word for “heaven and earth.”

Where are you? he thought now, staring impotently at the detailed pictures covering the graphs before him.
What
are you? And why are you so important to the Japanese?

Tenchi
had begun as just another routine report crossing his desk back in Moscow. Yet it had tantalized him, and once he had come out here and had immersed himself in the well of rumor, alleged fact, and outrageous fiction, he had found himself totally hooked. Until at this point he was obsessed with finding the answer. From what he had gleaned he was convinced
Tenchi
—even the knowledge of it—would give him the last of the leverage he needed for the coup back home.

How bitter it was to learn that Fedorin—one of the KGB’s own—was no better than all the rest of the career diplomats who had populated the Kremlin before him. Oh yes, at first he had seemed to be getting the sluggish leviathan that was Soviet Russia working again. Movement here and there could be discerned.

But in the end it had all been a sham, a self-serving political maneuver whose scope could not long conceal its sole purpose: to rid the Communist hierarchy of all those who might oppose the new premier.

But of course Protorov had held out no real hope that Fedorin—or anyone else in power for that matter—would grasp the one true key to awakening the USSR, the essential nature of the beast: and that was that Russia was not one country but an uneasy amalgam of many different Russias, all fiercely protective of their own part of the mother country. What did an Uzbek or a Kirghiz give a fig what was happening in Moscow anyway? Did a Belorussian or an Azerbaidzhani care how many missiles America had leveled at Vladivostok? And the Lithuanians, Estonians, Georgians—not to mention the non-Slavs such as the Tatars, Bashkirs, Mordvinians, Udmurts, or Komi—did they feel any differently? What was there to bind them together?

Protorov knew the answer to that one. Nothing.

The first step to putting Soviet Russia on the move lay in uniting all its divergent people. Because once that happened, the USSR would be unstoppable. No nation on earth—no coalition of nations—could stop her.

Fedorin had had a chance to get the new revolution underway. But he, like all the bureaucrats who ran the country, lacked the scope of vision necessary to make that one great leap, to cross the Rubicon into dangerous and unknown waters. Thus he had allowed the slothful giant to lapse back into somnolence.

Protorov knew only too well how long a time it could be between Soviet premiers. He was unwilling to wait his turn—or perhaps he was intelligent enough to understand that it might never come on its own. Therefore he had begun his own plans for cutting short the current premier’s term in office.

And now he believed that
Tenchi
was the wand of power he needed to persuade the cabal of militant generals and officers in the KGB to exert their influence at once.

A point of ignition had to be reached, Protorov knew. He must be the bridge between the traditionally feuding KGB and GRU. To that end he had spent more than six years cultivating a young GRU colonel. Powerful and ambitious, Yvgeny Mironenko would soon be in a position to also be a bridge between the factions.

For only by uniting these two mailed fists outside the Kremlin could Protorov be certain of the success of his coup. Without them, he was lost. And without him, Russia was lost. He lacked only the one element of power that would bring all of them into his palm.

And that one element was
Tenchi.

The intercom buzzed on his desk like an angry insect, and for a moment Protorov’s attention was deflected. He reached out one long finger. “Yes?”

“The subject is ready.”

“Good. Bring him in.” He reached out and extinguished the mauve light, plunging the room into utter darkness. There were no windows here and only one egress, its fifteen-inch steel door.

Protorov sat back in his chair and fought the urge to smoke. He compromised his restless hands by lacing his fingers. Presently he heard movement. The thick door sighed open pneumatically as three men crossed the threshold.

For just a moment the heavy light of the hallway streamed across the black rubberized flooring, then as the door swung shut, darkness swallowed the floating ribbons.

Without sight Protorov knew who had entered: the young lieutenant, the doctor, and the subject. Protorov and the doctor, who was a neuropharmacologica expert, had been at work on the subject for almost three days now. The American was a very stubborn man, Protorov had to give him that. He had not broken and, frankly, Protorov did not expect him to. He expected him to die.

In a way Protorov felt sorry for the man as he heard the semi-articulate babbling created by the multitude of sera the doctor had shot into the subject. This was not the way for a modern-day warrior to go, captured by the enemy, forcibly ejected into rapid-paced day-night continua so that weeks became compressed into hours until a state of body vertigo was induced. According to the prevalent theory, the body would do their work for them, breaking down the mind blockages through its own induced trauma.

Protorov believed none of it. These days there were ways to stop a ferret from talking when he did not want to: hypnosis, electronic implants. And if all else failed, he could self-destruct.

Sadness overwhelmed Protorov as the increasingly animated animal noises invaded his ears. This was not the way it should end for any of them. Better by far the fierce hand-to-hand struggle, the rising anima, the primal urges that came in the struggle to avoid death at all costs.