Unforgettable - eARC (8 page)

“He’s with me,” she said in Russian, jerking a thumb over her shoulder in my direction.

The bouncer gave me a nod and let me pass.

Once inside the door, we had to pass through a metal detector. Yelena handed her purse to another bouncer, who took a casual look inside. The gun didn’t faze him—he closed the purse and handed it to her on the other side.

The closest thing I had to a weapon was the carbon-composite lockpick set I had stowed in the waistband of my underwear, so I made it through the detector without setting off any alarms. Taking my hand, Yelena guided me through the mass of gyrating bodies on the dance floor to the rear of the club.

I couldn’t help worrying that she would feel the sweat on my palms. Maybe she would think I was too nervous about the operation and would abort. I was nervous, I realized, even though missions like this were almost routine for me. The difference was that this time I had an audience I needed to impress, and who could remember if I messed things up.

After Yelena vouched for me, the guard let us into the private rooms. As the door closed behind us, the club’s sounds faded to only mildly ear-shattering. Yelena led me up a narrow flight of stairs, then knocked on a solid-looking wooden door.

We were admitted by another guard. Thick red carpet—which looked just about the right color to hide bloodstains—muffled our footsteps as we entered the office. When the guard closed the office door behind us, the remaining sound from the club cut off. I couldn’t help but wonder if the soundproofing was to keep out the constant dance music or to keep in any gunshots or screams.

From the file I’d read on the Bukharin syndicate, the latter possibility did not seem unlikely, although Yelena had told me that in the secure area of the facility the Bukharins had a special interrogation room more suited to the task of torturing people they had business disagreements with.

A silver-haired man sat behind a large glass desk. I recognized him as Dmitri Ivanovich Bukharin, one of the three brothers running the syndicate.

When he saw us, he rose.

“Yelena, it is always a pleasure,” Dmitri said in Russian. “I just wired payment for the Barcelona job to your account.” He glanced at me and added, “And who is your guest?”

“His name is Nat Morgan,” she said. With one quick movement, her gun was out of her purse and shoved into my ribs.

“Yelena!” I said. “What are you—”

“Shut up.” Her voice was all business as she backed away, keeping her gun aimed at me. She continued in Russian, “He’s a CIA officer who interfered with me during the Barcelona job. He tracked me down, so I pretended to let him convince me to help find the Iranians’ lab.”

Dmitri chuckled, then spoke in English. “You should be more careful who you trust, Mr. Nat Morgan of the CIA.”

“Obviously,” I said.

Chapter Ten

Two of Bukharin’s black-suited goons handcuffed me and took me down two flights of stairs. One of them had his eyes scanned in order to unlock a steel vault door that slid smoothly into the wall to let us through.

“The CIA will figure out where I am,” I blustered. If I didn’t manage to get out of here, the CIA wouldn’t even remember me until Edward decided to clean up his files. “Then you guys are in for a world of trouble.”

We passed a door with a male stick figure on it, so I said, “Hey, can I use the bathroom?” When they didn’t respond, I tried it in Russian, but that didn’t fare any better.

They pushed me into a bare, windowless room, and locked my handcuffs to the back of the chair that was bolted to the floor in the center. The cement floor was stained reddish brown around the drain under the chair.

“This isn’t supposed to be the bathroom, is it?” I asked.

Ignoring me, they locked the door behind them.

Yelena had executed the first part of the plan to perfection: I was in the secured area of the Bukharins’ headquarters, and in less than a minute only she and I would know that. Now it was my turn.

It took a couple of minutes to get one of the lockpicks out from the waistband of my underwear. Fortunately, the Bukharin syndicate had not yet upgraded to magnetic-lock handcuffs, so it only took me moments to undo them. I slipped them into my pocket just in case.

I removed the rest of the lockpick set from my waistband and made quick work of the door lock.

I looked back at the chair. Its solid construction might make it useful. Using a pair of pliers decorated with some suspiciously bloodlike stains, I managed to unbolt the four legs from the floor.

Peeking out, I made sure the hallway was clear and then, carrying the chair, made my way back to the bathroom I had spotted. I waited in one of the stalls.

Eventually, someone would have to go.

Since they’d taken my watch, I wasn’t sure how long it took, but it seemed like hours before someone entered the bathroom and walked to a urinal.

I flushed the toilet and opened the stall door. The man at the urinal, back toward me, wore the type of black suit that seemed to be the security guard uniform of the Bukharins. I lifted the chair and charged.

The chair legs squeezed on either side of him, pinning his arms in front of him, and the crossbars pushed him up against the wall and urinal. The urinal flushed as he yelped in surprise.

Leaning against the chair with as much strength as I could muster, I reached under his suit coat and pulled his gun from its holster.

He pushed back against the chair. I couldn’t hold him, so I let go and jumped out of the way, allowing him to crash to the floor.

Aiming the gun at his chest, I said,
“Nye dvigat’sya,”
and added, “Don’t move,” in case he was bilingual.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“CIA assassin,” I said. “But I’m not after you. Turn facedown and you will live.”

He complied.

“I’m going out into the hall. If you come out of that door in less than five minutes, I will kill you. Understand?” He’d forget my warning in less time than that, but for now I wanted it to sound convincing.

“I understand.”

“Good. I’m going to ask you a few questions, some of which I already know the answer to. If you lie, you die. Where is the records room?” While Yelena had been to both the interrogation room and the records room a few times, she wasn’t able to give me detailed instructions as to how to get from one to the other.

“Turn right, go to end of hall. Turn left. Is glass doors on left.”

“How many guards inside?”

“One.”

“Thank you. Now stay here.”

Gun held tightly in one hand and chair in the other, I slipped out into the hallway. I took the chair because I didn’t want to give the guard any physical evidence that he did anything but slip and fall. He might spend some time looking for his gun before probably concluding that he had left it somewhere accidentally.

I left the chair in the hallway. If someone recognized it as the chair from the interrogation room, they might waste a little time trying to figure out why it was there. Anything that kept people away from the records room helped.

The guard hadn’t lied—I found the records room exactly where he said it was. Beyond the glass doors, I saw a man’s head and shoulders above dual computer monitors.

I ducked away and considered how to proceed. According to Yelena, the doors to the records room were always locked from the inside by the guard on duty. There was a keyed lock to get in, though, in case of emergency, but only the guard on duty and the three Bukharin brothers had keys. At least that meant there was something for me to pick.

However, Yelena must have forgotten that the doors were made out of glass. I felt a twinge of satisfaction at the evidence that she could be “sloppy,” too. But that didn’t solve the problem: picking the lock would take time, and the glass doors would allow the guard to see me.

And there was no way I was going to break through the glass, even if I went back for the chair: it was almost two inches thick, reinforced by wires embedded in the glass. A bullet from the gun would leave a mark, but that was about it.

So I had to convince the guard inside to open the door, or else scrap this attempt, escape, and try again later with a plan taking the glass doors into account. And I wasn’t ready to face Yelena and admit that I hadn’t been able to help her.

Delivering a pizza here wasn’t going to work. But perhaps I could lure him to the door and see what happened. So I marched right up to the door and knocked.

The guard looked up and frowned when he saw me. I frowned and beckoned him over.

He got up and walked over. “Who are you?” he asked in Russian.

“There’s a CIA assassin in the building,” I said. My accent was terrible, of course, but the Bukharins occasionally hired foreigners for various things, so I could at least hope he might believe me. “Maintain radio silence and make sure no one gets through this door.” Then I turned and ran down the corridor until he couldn’t see me anymore.

* * *

From what I had seen, there were two possible outcomes when the memory of me disappeared from people’s minds and they found themselves in a different situation than they had been before meeting me.

If there was no plausible explanation that didn’t involve me or another third party, then there would be a disconnect—like the sudden appearance of pizzas for Carlos the guard at InterQuan. He couldn’t remember me bringing the pizzas, but he wouldn’t be able to remember someone else bringing the pizzas, either.

However, if there was a plausible explanation for the new situation, then that explanation became the new memory. For example, the security guard in the bathroom had been at a urinal before our encounter, but on the floor after. If I had not been there, a plausible explanation would be that he had slipped, so that would be what he remembered.

Sometimes that plausible reason worked in my favor.

* * *

I could only guess what the security guard in the records room remembered once he forgot about me. He had been in his chair and now he was next to the door, so a plausible explanation was that he was going to exit the room for some reason—maybe to go to the bathroom.

He unlocked the door and came out.

I aimed the gun at him and said, “
Nye dvigat’sya.
Don’t move.”

He froze. Then he dove back into the records room. I ran to the door, before he could close it behind him. He had his gun partway out of his holster before I was able to aim at him again.

“Let go of the gun, or I will kill you,” I said in Russian.

He released the gun and raised his hands over his head. I took his gun and threw it in the wastebasket. Using the handcuffs I’d removed earlier, I cuffed him to the door, which was far enough away from the computer terminal that I wouldn’t have to worry about interference.

“Who are you?” he asked in English. My atrocious Russian accent must have given me away.

“CIA assassin,” I said, “but you’re not my assignment so I won’t kill you unless you try something.”

* * *

In seven years as a CIA officer, I had never killed anyone. I had only shot at someone three times, and only hit someone once, in the leg—and that had been a ricochet.

So I was not, in fact, a CIA assassin. I used the CIA assassin line on paid guards because it worked. If they believed I was a deadly killer, but that I wasn’t going to kill
them
, they usually decided that their lives were more important than their paychecks.

Of course, if I had wanted to be a CIA assassin, I could have been. After I’d been with the CIA for a couple of years, Edward broached the subject, pointing out that my talent would help avoid one of the biggest problems faced by close-range assassins: getting away without being caught.

I told him I didn’t like killing, and he must have made a note of it in my file, because he never brought it up again.

* * *

At the computer terminal, I had to hunt-and-peck on the Cyrillic keyboard to spell out the names of Yelena’s sisters in order to run a file contents search. Because it might take several minutes to scan through all the files on the hard drives, I took the time to put my lockpicks back into my waistband.

The file search brought up a list of several files containing the names Ekaterina and Oksana.

I clicked on the one with the most recent date and it opened. The file showed a picture of twin blondes with mouths that smiled and eyes that didn’t. Their identical faces matched the photo Yelena had shown me.

Skimming the file as quickly as I could, I discovered that Ekaterina and Oksana had been auctioned off eight months ago to Bidder 948, who had taken delivery of them in Tehran.

Earlier I had seen a folder labeled Bidders, so I found it and located the file on Bidder 948. I opened it up. I sounded out the Cyrillic characters of his name: zh-a-m-sh-ee-d-ee. Jamshidi.

So the Bukharins were supplying Jamshidi with more than just stolen technology.

Excitedly, I began looking through the file to see if there was any information about the location of the secret lab. This private mission to help Yelena had suddenly turned into my real assignment.

The door lock clicked. I looked up to see four guards burst into the room, followed by Dmitri Bukharin and Yelena. The guards all had their guns trained on me.

I had placed my gun on the desk during the search. They couldn’t see my hands, but I didn’t reach for it. Instead, I used the mouse to start the computer’s shutdown process. I didn’t want to endanger Yelena and her sisters by letting Bukharin see what files I’d accessed before my talent had a chance to affect the computer’s memory.

“He’s a CIA assassin!” yelled the guard I had handcuffed to the door.

“Keep him alive for questioning,” said Dmitri.

“Raise your hands,” said one of the guards.

I raised my hands. “Here we go again,” I said as they handcuffed me.

Chapter Eleven

The previous time the Bukharins had caught me, I had been taken to the interrogation room. I fully expected that to happen again, and it did. As before, they ignored my request to use the restroom.

What I didn’t expect was that this time, Dmitri Bukharin would tell Yelena to go home and follow along with his guards.

“What happened to the chair?” asked the guard holding my left arm after we entered the room.

“I think I saw it out in the hall,” said the guard on my right. He retrieved the chair and they pushed me down onto it, not bothering to bolt it to the floor again. They attached the handcuffs to the back of the chair, almost dislocating my left shoulder in the process.

Dmitri pursed his lips for a moment, then spoke in English. “Well, Mr. CIA Assassin, if you were sent to kill me tonight, you did a very poor job of it.” He chuckled.

“The night is still young,” I said, with as much bluster as I could manage. I needed to give him something to think about, something that would make him leave me alone for a minute. “But I wasn’t sent to kill you. My assignment is to kill one of your clients.”

“Why break in here then?” he asked.

“Because you know where your client is, and I don’t.”

“And the name of this client who is destined to die at your hands?”

“Kazem Jamshidi. Since stealing the information didn’t work, the CIA would be willing to pay you for his location in Iran.”

Dmitri emitted a sharp bark of laughter. “You are doubly a fool, Mr. CIA Assassin. First, because Jamshidi can afford better protection than your President. And second, because I do not know Jamshidi’s location. You have come here for nothing.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, if you just have your men undo these cuffs, I’ll be on my way then.”

Dmitri chuckled. “I like you, Mr. CIA Assassin. I will enjoy seeing how long you can maintain your sense of humor before dying.” In Russian, he said to one of his guards, “Bring me a coat hanger.”

I didn’t know what kind of killing torture required a coat hanger, and I had no desire to find out. “Listen, the CIA will pay to get me back alive. Let me give you a phone number to—”

“The CIA can offer me nothing that Jamshidi can’t.”

Getting myself sold to Jamshidi wasn’t the worst option available. It would give me a chance to let my talent work so I could escape. If I were really lucky, I might even get the location of Jamshidi’s lab. But, of course, I couldn’t let it seem like that was what I wanted.

I shook my head. “You gain nothing by turning me over to Jamshidi except the CIA’s attention on your own operations. Whatever he pays you won’t be worth it.”

Dmitri stared at me and scratched his temple. After a long pause, he said, “You may have noticed that I speak English pretty well.”

“Yes,” I said, caught a little off guard by the change of subject.

“The post-communist generation learn English because it is the language of opportunity. I learned it earlier because it is the language of Hollywood.”

“I see.” I didn’t.

“My father had bootleg videocassettes of many American movies when I was a boy, and I used to watch them over and over. And your request not to be turned over to Jamshidi reminded me of Disney movie
Song of the South
.” He leaned forward and said in a sing-song voice, “Oh, please don’t throw me in that briar patch.” He continued in his normal tone, “You are playing the part of Br’er Rabbit. For some reason, you want to be sent to Jamshidi. Maybe you have a tracker installed in your body.”

“Or maybe I’m smart enough to pretend to play the part of Br’er Rabbit so you’ll turn me back to the CIA,” I said. Dmitri was obviously a thinking man—if I made things complicated enough, maybe he would take time to do his thinking elsewhere.

The guard returned with a simple wire coat hanger and handed it to Dmitri, who unwound the top of it.

“Get his hands,” Dmitri said. One of the guards unchained the handcuffs from the back of the chair, then uncuffed my left hand.

“Before you start with the torture and killing,” I said, “can I at least go to the bathroom?” My heart pounded.

The guards forced my hands in front of me and reattached the left handcuff, then used a chain to fasten the cuffs to the crossbar on the chair’s front legs. I could move my hands a bit, but could not raise them more than six inches above my lap.

“When you kill me,” I said, trying to keep my rising desperation out of my voice, “my sphincter muscles will relax and I’ll mess up this lovely room of yours. I wouldn’t want to stink up the place.”

Dmitri squeezed the hook part of the hanger, narrowing it to about a half inch.

I ran out of things to say.

With practiced precision, Dmitri straightened out the major bends in the hangar.

“We will start with the pinkie of your left hand,” said Dmitri.

In my mind, I began to recite the list of Vice Presidents of the United States. John Adams. Thomas Jefferson. Aaron Burr. I could even imagine my mother sitting across from me at our kitchen table, as she checked off each name after I said it.

The lights dimmed, then went out. Pitch darkness filled the room.

I didn’t make a sound, although if they forgot me, I wasn’t sure I could explain my way out of being handcuffed to their torture chair.

Dmitri swore and said in Russian, “Check if it’s just this room.”

Someone opened the door, and no light came in. “Another blackout,” said one of the guards.

“Everyone stay where you are,” said Dmitri. “The backup generator will kick in after thirty seconds.”

So I didn’t have a minute. My talent couldn’t save me. And even if I could reach the lockpicks in my waistband, the lights would be back on before I could get them out.

Not caring if the chains made a sound, I reached out toward the place where Dmitri had been holding the hanger. I felt thick wire, and I snagged the hook with a finger.

Dmitri yelped.

Pushing as hard as I could with my feet, I tipped the chair back. The hanger came free of Dmitri’s grasp. Despite holding my head forward as I fell, when the chair hit the ground my head whipped back and smacked against the concrete. Bright sparks seemed to explode before my eyes.

Shouts in Russian sounded around me. The chair jerked beneath me as someone bumped into it.

By feel alone, I jammed the tip of the coat hanger wire into the right handcuff keyhole and twisted. The cuff unlocked, and I pulled my right hand out.

“Get the lights back on.” Dmitri’s voice was more distant. He’d probably backed toward the door.

Right hand freed, I made quick work of the left handcuff. I rolled off the chair to one side, smashing into the legs of a guard. He toppled to the floor.

“Grab him,” Dmitri ordered.

The fallen guard’s hands grappled me, but my hands found what I was feeling for: the guard’s gun. I pulled it out of his holster and shot him in the torso—even in complete darkness, it was hard to miss with the muzzle pressed against the target. He grunted and let go of me.

A small square of white light appeared—a cell phone screen. I fired at it. I missed, but its owner turned it off.

One of the guards fired his gun and it hit the wall behind me. The brief flash revealed his position, but the darkness was so disorienting that I couldn’t be sure I could aim the gun properly. Besides, if I fired the flash from my gun would give them a target again.

“Fool,” said Dmitri, “you’re more likely to hit one of us than him. Wait for the generator.”

Years of counting off seconds gave me a pretty good sense of time, even in confusing circumstances. The thirty seconds were almost up, if they weren’t gone already. I couldn’t come up with a plan for surviving once the lights came on, so I decided I would try to make my death count for something by shooting Dmitri. I aimed my gun in the general direction of his voice and waited for the chance to pull the trigger.

The silent seconds stretched out in the darkness.

I started to think my time sense had been knocked out of whack by the bump on my head, because it felt like at least forty-five seconds since the blackout began, and the backup generator still hadn’t kicked in.

Then one of the guards said, “There must be something wrong with the generator.”

“Just wait,” said Dmitri. “Sometimes it takes longer.”

I held my breath. How long had it been since I fired the gun? It felt like twenty seconds, but I couldn’t be sure.

Every additional second brought them closer to forgetting me.

Finally they did.

“The generator must be down,” said Dmitri. “I guess we’ll have to feel our way out.”

The man I had shot moaned, then said, “Don’t leave me.”

I realized his gunshot wound was physical evidence that I had been there. Would they start looking for whoever had fired the shot?

“I have little use for a guard so clumsy he accidentally shoots himself when the lights go out,” said Dmitri. “But Ivan can call an ambulance.”

A square of light lit up Ivan’s face as he dialed.

I pressed myself against the wall, my eyes half-closed so they wouldn’t reflect the light, still not letting myself breathe. My good luck with the power outage and backup generator failure would be wiped out if one of them spotted me now.

Ivan moved out into the hall, taking the cell phone light with him. I didn’t breathe until all but the man I’d shot had left the room.

It took over forty minutes of creeping around in the dark, and then in the light as power came back on, but eventually I descended the narrow stairs into the pulsing beat of the music. I nodded to the guards at the bottom, as if I had just come from a meeting and had every right to be there, and they nodded back.

I wondered if Yelena had given me up for dead when they took me away, or if she would still be waiting at the rendezvous spot, a café down the street from Klub Kosmos.

She waved from her seat at a table when I entered. “I am sorry,” she said as I sat down. “Silent alarm go off in Dmitri’s office warning of unauthorized access to records room. I go with them, in case I can help you, but too many.”

“I understand.”

She shook her head. “Your talent is very strange. First they are talking about who could have broken in, then”—she snapped her fingers—“they are talking about playing at cards with guard in records room. Until they see him handcuff to door. But you escape. That is impressive.”

“Truth is, I got lucky. If not for the blackout, I’d be dead. And then it turned out their backup generator…” My voice faltered as I noticed her smirk. I was so accustomed to working alone that the possibility of help hadn’t occurred to me. I sat there and stared at her, mouth agape.

“You owe me one,” she said. “Two, maybe. I think if they not see you, maybe easier to escape.”

“You think good,” I said. Then, remembering, I said, “I found out who bought your sisters.”

She leaned forward. “Who?”

“Jamshidi.”