Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (68 page)

Doubt felled few of his kind, however. More often, if it wasn’t a bullet or old age, years of stress delivered the knockout blow via a dyspeptic stomach, ulcers, or worst of all, irritable bowel syndrome. Nothing, he thought, would take you out of the field faster than having to hug the porcelain horse unexpectedly and in debilitating succession. Martin had developed none of these symptoms. Not that he didn’t feel the stress; it worked its corrosive magic on even the most inhuman of agents. But he relieved the stress by being angry; the more stress he felt the angrier he got. Anger kept him sharp, kept him close to his instincts. Even more important, it kept doubt at bay.

“Yes?”

At last his master’s voice entered his ear via his cell phone. “Can you talk?”

“What do you have for me?” General Atcheson Brandt, said.

“There’s another faction in the field,” Martin said.

“What, precisely, do you mean?”

Martin could feel in those words the General coming to full attention, as if he were a pointer who’d smelled blood. “Someone else was at Rochev’s dacha—someone who belongs neither to Kirilenko nor to the SBU.”

“I trust you can be more specific,” Brandt said with all the considerable asperity at his disposal.

Martin began walking, more to dispel nervous energy than toward any specific destination. His lack of success in finding Annika Dementieva was going to be last on his discussion list with the General.

“There was a sharpshooter hidden in the woods,” Martin said. “He took a shot at one of the people who were in the dacha—” He stopped right there, knowing he’d made a mistake.

“You let them get away?” Brandt’s voice was like a rumble of thunder heading Martin’s way at tremendous speed. “How did that happen?”

At this very instant Martin hated his job with a malevolence that set his heart palpitating. “There was a fire, confusion, everything collapsed into chaos, and when we—”

“Most convenient, that fire, wouldn’t you say? Most clever.”

Martin, leaning wearily against the plate-glass window of a men’s clothing store, found himself staring at an Italian cashmere sweater he yearned for but couldn’t afford. He needed to slow his heart rate, to learn not to hate so much, but it was too late, the venom was in his blood, in the very marrow of his bones.

“Yes, sir. They used the fire to escape.”

“They, you keep saying ‘they.’” Brandt’s voice buzzed in his ear like a trapped wasp. “Who, precisely, are ‘they’? Besides Annika Dementieva, of course.”

That was the crux of the issue, Martin thought sourly—he didn’t know and, worse, he couldn’t tell the General that he didn’t know. It was clear that he had to change the subject, go on the offensive, take the pressure off himself, deflect the General’s questions by raising others the General needed to answer.

“I hope to God you haven’t been keeping anything from me—”

“Keeping what?” the General said. “What are you talking about?”

“—because out here in the field where tough decisions, terrible decisions, life-and-death decisions have to be made in an instant, not knowing the complete playing field could prove fatal.”

“Listen—”

“If you know anything—anything at all—about this other faction, who, it must be assumed, are after the same thing you are, then I need to know about it now, not tomorrow, not later.”

“I don’t cotton to being interrupted.”

The General’s voice was like a fistful of fury, and Martin knew it was fortunate that he wasn’t in the same room with his boss. There was a story about Brandt: As a senior in the Academy he threw a rival out a second-floor window, breaking his leg. Anyone else would have been summarily expelled, but Brandt was so brilliant, his family so well connected, that no disciplinary action was taken nor was there a civil suit filed. Though the story might very well be apocryphal it nevertheless served the General well, having lent him a mythical sheen all through his career.

“It goes without saying that if I knew anything about a rival faction in the field I’d let you know,” the General said, filling the awful void that had sprung up between them. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’ll tell you one thing: I sure as hell am going to find out.”

While staring at the cashmere sweater with its V-neck, double stitching, and magnificent silky texture, he discovered that he didn’t believe the General, not for a minute. On the contrary, he knew in his bones, in their very venom-riddled marrow, that the General was lying through his teeth. Of course he knew about “another faction,” he’d known from the beginning of this wretched assignment. And at that precise moment Martin suspected this mission would be the death of him. Worse—far worse, as far as he was concerned—he finally understood, with a godforsaken clarity, the underlying reason why he loathed his job with a seething, poisonous intent. The General was like Harry Martin’s father, so much so, in fact, that he now couldn’t for the life of him understand why he hadn’t seen it before.

“In that regard,” the General carried on, “your instructions vis-à-vis
Annika Dementieva are hereby changed. Finding her and taking her into custody will no longer suffice. I want her terminated ASAP.”

Leaning with his forehead against the cool plate-glass window, he closed the phone and at the same time thought,
It’s that damn cashmere sweater.
It reminded him so much of the one his father used to wear around the house, swapping his suit jacket for the sweater, but never taking off his tie, not at dinner, not afterward. Martin remembered wondering whether his father slept in his tie, except the next morning he’d emerge from the marital bedroom in a crisp white or blue shirt with a different tie knotted perfectly at his Adam’s apple.

I want that cashmere sweater because it was my father’s,
Martin thought now. He turned away from the shop window display, lurched over to the gutter and, bending over the gap between two parked cars, vomited up his breakfast. He hadn’t done that since he was fifteen and, sneaking home after curfew, had encountered his father in the light-less foyer, who had struck him so hard across the face his outsized knuckles had drawn blood from his son’s nose and cheek. Turning on his heel, the old man had climbed the stairs and closed the door to his bedroom without uttering a single word.

Martin had raised himself to his knees and, without thinking, spent the next twenty minutes wiping his blood and vomit off the wooden floor, scrubbing and polishing the boards until they shined even through the darkness. With each tread he climbed, his dread at encountering his father again mounted until, as he reached the second-floor landing, his hands were shaking and his knees refused to carry him any further. He collapsed there, rolling onto his side, curled up like an injured caterpillar, and eventually fell into a sleep made fitful by images of himself running from a pack of grinning dog-faced boys in military uniforms.

Standing abruptly erect Martin staggered away from the scene of his unspeakable humiliation and sought refuge in a tea shop down the
block, where he slid onto a chair by the window and stared bleakly at the hurrying masses of bundled, red-faced Ukrainians. What his mind saw, though, was the General, or rather his father—now they were murderously interchangeable. He thought when he’d buried his father that would be the end of his misery, his suffering, his neediness, but no, he had chosen a job, or perhaps it had chosen him, that mimicked the relationship he had found both intolerable and indispensable. What was he now in middle age, he asked himself, but the same adolescent whom he’d despised for so desperately needing the approval of a man he loathed.
How does the human mind do it?
he wondered.
How can it thrive on antithetical, antagonistic, diametrically opposed absolutes?

And then, his mind still unable to let go of that cashmere sweater, he began to think of Sherrie because—and this was the really strange part—in the wintertime she had liked to walk around the apartment in an oversized man’s V-neck cashmere sweater. Just the sweater and nothing else, her long, pale legs emerging from the bottom, and when she turned around, a glimpse of the bottom of her lush buttocks. She liked to tease him that way, a behavior that must have been a form of revenge, because one evening when he returned from overseas—Munich or perhaps Istanbul, he couldn’t remember which— she was gone: Sherrie, her suitcase, and her cashmere sweater; the drawers in the bedroom, the shelf in the bathroom, the half of his closet he’d ceded to her empty. The smell of her lingered like a last cigarette, but only for a day or so. By that time he’d called her more than a dozen times, had gone by her apartment at night, like a stalker, looking for lights, for her silhouette against the drawn Roman shades. Nothing moved, nothing remained, and eventually he forgot her.

But he hadn’t forgotten her, because here she was now, or at least the memory of her, as he stared bleakly out into the crowded Kiev street, haunting him as if she had just left him moments before, or yesterday, instead of three years ago. He wished she were here now, though what he’d say to her he had no idea. Not that it mattered; he
was alone. There was no Sherrie, or any of the girls before or after her, whose faces folded into each other along with their names. They were all gone, they’d never actually been there, he hadn’t let them.

The waitress took his order, returning almost immediately with a small pitcher of cream and miniature bowls of sugar and honey. She smiled at him but he didn’t return it.

His eyes were red-rimmed with bloodlust, his heart a blackened cinder beyond any hope of repair or remediation. He wanted neither; he wanted only to kill someone, to steep his hands in blood, Annika Dementieva’s blood.

“Yukin is going to want tangible concessions,” General Brandt said as he and President Carson landed in Sheremetyevo airport. “That’s how it works here, they’re Russians, talk means nothing—less than nothing. People say things here—Yukin among them—they don’t mean. The air needs to be filled with buzzing, any form of buzzing will do, in fact, the less truthful the better.”

“I know all this,” Edward Carson said. “Lies obfuscate, and as far as the Russians are concerned, the more obfuscation the better.” He wore a neat charcoal suit with a red tie and an enamel pin of the American flag affixed to his lapel. Brandt, on the other hand, had decided to come to Russia in his military uniform, complete with his chestful of medals. Uniforms impressed the Russians, they always had. They were like the worst bullies on the block, lashing out with strained aggression to compensate for their insecurities. They knew better than anyone that the Western powers viewed them as semicivilized, as if they were apes pretending to be human beings.

Having slowed to nominal ground speed, Air Force One turned off the runway and began the long slow taxiing to the VIP terminal.

“We have prioritized the concessions we’ve put into the final draft of the accord,” Carson continued, “chief among them the revision of our missile defense deployments around Russia.”

“The conservatives are going to scream about that one,” the General said.

“They forfeited the right to complain when they fucked things six ways from Sunday when they were in power,” the president said. “Besides, General, you and I both know the technology for the missile defense system is still not in place. If we had to implement it today or next week or even six months from now it would be a joke.”

“It’s real enough to President Yukin.”

“Because it surrounds Russia like a noose.”

The General nodded. “I’ve gone on record on both ABC and CNN that our proposed MDS is the main reason for Yukin’s recent aggression into Georgia.”

Carson lifted a finger. “One thing I need to make clear. Yukin can’t expect unilateral support from us, I’m not coming to him on bended knee.”

“Absolutely not. That would give him an advantage he’d never relinquish. But that can’t happen now, because he wants something from us only we can give him.”

“I hope to God you’re right, General. Everything depends on this security accord being signed.”

Brandt sat back, never more sure of the plan he’d outlined to the president days after his taking over the Oval Office. It was crucial, he’d argued, to enlist Russia in the crusade to keep nuclear weapons out of Iranian hands. They knew through intelligence and back-channel diplomatic sources precisely what missile parts Russia was selling to Iran. Nothing the previous administration had done had had any effect on Yukin’s business dealings with Iran, a result Brandt had predicted with unerring accuracy. Carson was different, however; he’d listened to reason, had agreed when Brandt had outlined an alternative method of weaning Yukin away from the dangerous Iranian teat.

If the diplomatic rapprochement was the foundation method,
then the security accord was the cornerstone to its success. Which was why Brandt was replaying in his mind the disturbing phone call from Harry Martin. Of course he knew about the other faction in the field—that was the whole point of Martin’s mission to intercept Annika Dementieva. Annika was the key to everything. That Martin had not yet been able to find her was unsettling enough, but the fact that he had now gotten wind of the other faction meant that it was far more advanced in its plans than he knew about or had been led to believe. One of two conclusions could be drawn from this: Either the other faction had suddenly gained in power or the sources he’d been relying on had underestimated it. Neither possibility was a happy thought, especially with the accord signing imminent.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and standing up. “I need to make a call.”

Going forward down the wide aisle, he punched in a number that was too secret to keep either on his speed dial or in the cell’s phone book. It was a number he’d committed to memory the moment it had been given to him.

As the connection was going through he reflected on just how much he hated dealing with the Russians. To a man, they were a treacherous lot, the long shadow of Josef Stalin stretching into the present. They were all Stalin’s students, the General thought, whether or not they were aware of it. His viperous double- and triple-dealing became the political template—not to mention the KGB’s modus operandi—set in the kind of monumental stone it was impossible to undermine, let alone destroy.