The Quantum Solution, page 7
8
ROSTOV REGION, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Captain Rodion Stepanov Molchalin, tenderfoot in Kata’s Moscow cadre, stepped off the helo, jumping two feet into the snow. His first impression of the semipermanent camp Major Korokova had erected was of the absolute order in which the personnel went about their various duties. He counted twenty or so GRU soldiers and an older man he surmised was the GRU medical examiner. As the only member of FSB in the area he felt exposed, a fish out of water. The helo pilot waited until he was well clear of the rotors before he ramped them up and took off, swinging the gunship back toward Moscow.
Before he had left, Kata had briefed him on Juliet Korokova—everything she knew, which, so far as he was concerned, wasn’t a whole helluva lot. In fact, he climbed into the helo without any real sense of her at all. Perhaps, he thought now, it was better this way; he was free to make his own assessment without bias.
Then he saw her from the back and a shiver went through him. All at once he felt as if Kata had thrown him to the wolves. He’d never been much of a ladies’ man, never met a female officer he could relate to—until Kata. For whatever reason, he had taken to her immediately, had no problem taking orders from her. In fact, he barely thought of her as female at all. She was simply Kata Romanovna Hemakova, a colonel in a newly formed directorate of the FSB he had not even known existed until he was summoned to the colonel’s office to be interviewed for recruitment. He had as little idea who had recommended him as he did Directorate O’s raison d’être. Apparently, no one else outside Directorate O knew it even existed. That’s the way it was, Kata impressed on him, and that’s the way it would remain. If he was honest with himself, he liked the secrecy; it was like hiding in plain sight, a game he used to play with his father when he was five, maybe six. It was his father’s game. He always lost, of course, but each time they played he learned something more about hiding in plain sight. He won his first game on his eleventh birthday, and from that time on he never lost again. So Directorate O suited him down to the ground. He was where he wanted to be, and if that meant Kata was throwing him into the deep end of the pool it also meant she was trusting him with an important mission. He knew Directorate KV, of which the dead man was a member, was important, even if he had no idea why.
That was all right with him; in due time he would find out its importance, perhaps even while he was here. Looking around as he approached the tent village, he could sense that the dense forest around him held many secrets, not the least of which was why Major Korokova had taken over the case.
“Whatever you do,” Kata had told him at their last rendezvous, “do not step on this woman’s toes. She’s liable to bite your head off.”
“You mean figuratively, of course.”
He was about to smile, but Kata crossed her arms over her chest, said, “Do us both a favor, Rodion Stepanov, and make sure you don’t find out the answer to that question.”
His boots crunched into the skin of snow that had hardened over the ground. No more snow had fallen since Levrov’s demise. An omen? But he had to remind himself that he didn’t believe in omens, only his mother did. That belief was what drove a stake through the heart of his parents’ marriage.
He was close enough now that Korokova should have heard him. But she was in a contentious conversation—or perhaps “argument” was a better term—with the GRU pathologist, a man who looked like he was more intimately acquainted with death than life. Life was bitter, his expression said, while death had no flavor at all.
“This is insanity,” he was saying, “to make me set up shop here in the godforsaken wilderness instead of taking the corpse back to my lab in Moscow where it’s nice and warm and I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to see if I’m being shadowed by a fucking wolf pack. Plus—surprise—I can do a real autopsy.”
“Morokovsky, you shock me. I didn’t know you had water running through your veins instead of blood.” The major’s words dripped contempt.
“Please.” The pathologist waved away her response. “There’s simply no precedent for this. I demand an explanation. What the hell is so special about Ivan Levrov anyway?”
“He’s a close relative of the Sovereign,” Korokova said, as if that were a joke only she was in on. “That’s all the explanation required.”
As Morokovsky’s eyes flicked from the major to Rodion, Korokova turned around. Rodion’s heart seemed to stop, then to hammer furiously like a kettledrum being beaten. The reckless throbbing reverberated deep within him.
“So you’re Colonel Hemakova’s creature,” she said without affect. Then in a hiss, “My FSB ball and chain.”
He had the presence of mind to give her his name, standing tall and straight. He tried not to blink from the golden light coming off her like an aurora borealis.
“Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s testicle what your name is.”
She stood arms akimbo, which made his heart drop into his stomach, from whence it fell farther—much farther.
“Let’s get one thing straight, Mulchan.”
“That’s Molchalin,” he corrected. The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realized his mistake.
“What did I just tell you, Mulchy,” she snapped.
This time he bit his tongue.
“That’s your name from now on, hear me, Mulchy?” She threw him a smile he could only categorize as evil. He found it thrilling.
Behind her, the pathologist chuckled. “Why don’t you have him kiss your boots while you’re at it?”
She whipped around. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here and do your job.”
He smirked, and without any warning whatsoever she slapped him so hard across his face that he lost his balance. Staring down at him as he squirmed in the snow, she said from her height, “You’ve yet to learn your place here, Morokovsky.”
He ground his teeth, gathering himself onto his knees. “I’ll report you. I swear I will.”
“That too has been tried.” She leaned over him. “But where are those naïve people now, Morokovsky? Butyrka? Matrosskaya Tishina?” She was naming prisons. “Or perhaps Black Dolphin?”
At this last name, the pathologist shuddered, and well he might. Black Dolphin in Siberia housed the country’s most heinous criminals—child molesters, murderers, terrorists, cannibals, and serial killers, all serving life sentences.
The major turned her back on the pathologist. She didn’t utter another word until he had risen, sloping away into his medical tent.
“Now, Mulchy, I must ask you to keep your yap shut and stay out of my way.”
Still starstruck, Rodion nodded mutely, but still felt compelled to tell her, “I’m to report to Kata twice a day.”
The major’s eyebrows rose. “‘Kata,’ is it? Not ‘Colonel Hemakova’?” She squinted at him, as if she were training her X-ray vision on him. “What kind of a shop is the colonel running there?”
“Unconventional.” When he said it he couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride.
“I’ll say.”
“But then judging by your actions with Morokovsky I’d say you’re just as unconventional as she is.”
Korokova stared at him. “Are you fucking coming on to me, Mulchy?”
He was taken aback. “What?” It was as if she had pierced him, peered into his soul, picked up on his most secret desire. “No. Of course not.”
Her gaze ramped up in intensity. How did she do that? he asked himself breathlessly.
“Because that would be a bad idea. A very bad idea.”
Her voice washed over him. His mind blurred the words; they did not apply to him.
She gestured. “Walk with me. I could use a stiff drink.”
“It’s breakfast time.”
“As you’ve already discovered, I’m as unconventional as they come.” That evil smile again, making something deep inside him turn to taffy. “If you can’t drink vodka at nine o’clock in the morning you might as well go back to the short-pants boys at FSB right now.”
9
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
“Ayman Safra.” From the master’s chair behind his vast desk, Abd-El-Kader, the Syrian, regarded his visitor. “Of Joseph and Moise, the Lebanese Safras?”
Ayman Safra, sitting across from him, simply smiled. He was a large man in every way a person could be large: tall, corpulent enough that his thighs and massive buttocks overflowed the chair into which he had lowered himself in the careful manner of heavy men. He was bearded, light-eyed, with a small bow of a mouth. For such a massive man he had small feet, rather like a ballet dancer. His prodigious jowls folded over the collar of his shirt, obscured the top of his immaculately knotted tie. He was also Lebanese, which automatically put him on the Syrian’s bad side. The Lebanese were the most tenacious businesspeople Abd-El-Kader had ever encountered. They were take-no-prisoners types.
What irritated Abd-El-Kader all the more was that Ayman Safra was wearing a made-to-measure suit that, if Abd-El-Kader was any judge, cost upward of six thousand American dollars, cut and fitted in either Milan or Tokyo, where, lately, the Japanese were outdoing their Italian counterparts. On his tiny feet were John Lobb shoes that probably set him back half what his suit cost.
Abd-El-Kader glanced down at the card Safra had handed him when he strode in. There was nothing on it but his name, an internet address, and a satnav phone number.
“Who was it you said you worked for, Mr. Safra?”
That smile that never reached his cheeks, let alone his eyes. Those canny eyes. “Your benefactor wishes to remain anonymous.”
My benefactor, Abd-El-Kader thought grievously. “What do you take me for?” he bit off. “Who in his right mind would consider doing business with someone he hasn’t met face-to-face, let alone whose identity is unknown to him.” He shook his head. “This isn’t amateur night at the follies.”
“Your benefactor has made you a generous offer,” Safra said with serene dignity. “In fact, in my opinion the sum is more than your business is worth.”
This Lebanese really knew how to get under the Syrian’s skin. He pushed himself forward as if he were about to leap across the desk and physically assault Safra. “You and your master don’t know a damn thing about my business.”
The Lebanese remained unperturbed. “The fact is we know everything about your business, sir. Everything. Including your illegal trafficking in your own people, smuggling them into Turkey, using them as slave labor until they sicken and die.”
What have I done to deserve this? Abd-El-Kader asked himself. But like the last dying ember in an exhausted fire, the last of his self-pity died. He was on the attack now, no holds barred. He reached into a side drawer, took out a 9mm Makarov pistol, laid it on the desktop with the barrel pointing at the fat Lebanese.
“A Russian pistol.”
The Syrian’s eyes narrowed. “What of it?” he snapped.
Safra spread his pudgy hands. “A simple observation.”
Abd-El-Kader did not touch the Makarov, merely placed his hand beside it. “You have thirty seconds to get out of my chair, cross my office, and shut the door behind you.”
Ayman Safra ignored the weapon, stared straight into the Syrian’s eyes. “A direct threat. I had hoped our negotiations would be reconciled amicably.”
The Syrian sneered. “Now you know for a fact that they won’t.”
Safra inclined his head as if he’d asked for a refill on his drink he was never served. “I feel duty bound to inform you that your benefactor’s next offer will be substantially less.”
Abd-El-Kader laughed. His forefinger tapped the grip of the Makarov. “Tell your master to go to hell.” He lifted the pistol. “With my compliments.”
Safra inclined his head again as he levered himself off the chair. “As you wish.”
He pointed the Makarov at the Lebanese. “As I demand.”
“Pity,” Ayman Safra said, and reached for the slim briefcase he had set by his right leg. “I so abhor demands.”
Abd-El-Kader’s laughter boomed through the room as Safra made to take his leave. He paused, turned back. “I almost forgot.” He snapped open the briefcase, the sound bringing the Syrian to his feet, the Makarov aimed at Safra’s heart.
“It’s only this.” Safra extracted an eight-by-ten photo. He slid it across the desk. “I’m so absent-minded these days.” He sighed. “Perhaps a sign I’m getting old.”
Abd-El-Kader frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? You sound like a foolish old man.”
That smile again—a smile that was not quite there, that flickered in and out of existence. “I beg you to take a look at the photograph and tell me—is that your father?”
Almost against his will, Abd-El-Kader glanced down, saw that the photo was indeed of his father, in the wheelchair to which he had been confined since his stroke. There was the familiar tribal wrap he favored across his knees and lap.
The Syrian’s eyes snapped up. “What is this?”
“Please be so kind as to answer my question,” Ayman Safra said. “Is that or is it not your father?”
A pulsing vein commenced to beat a tattoo in his left temple. “You know damn well it is.”
“Good.” Safra inclined his head. “Halfway home.”
Abd-El-Kader’s face held fast to a bewildered look. “What is—?”
But Safra had already withdrawn from his briefcase another eight-by-ten photo. This he placed alongside the first one. It also showed the Syrian’s father, but this time at somewhat of a remove, in order to include the two men holding onto the wheelchair from behind. A pair of beefy men smiling into the camera. They must have been outside and a wind had gotten up, because the coat the man on the left was wearing had been caught flapped open, revealing the butt of a handgun in a shoulder holster strapped over his shirt.
“Abd-El-Kader,” Ayman Safra said in the same neutral tone he’d used from the beginning. “Do you know the two men with your father?”
“N—” But the Syrian’s throat was clogged. He couldn’t get a word out. This is a nightmare, he thought. It must be. Any moment I shall wake up, pick my head off my desk, and be alone in my office. But, of course, he knew that was a pipe dream, for here he was, a man holding a Makarov, vulnerable as a woman, helpless as a child.
“Your father belongs to your benefactor now.” Safra scooped up the photos, stored them back in the briefcase. “He will be treated as an honored guest, as befits his status.”
“I’ll kill you and your master,” Abd-El-Kader said through gritted teeth. “There’s nowhere you and that sonofabitch can hide, my people will find you and—”
“In that event, all your people will find is your father with his throat slashed, his body and face terribly abused.” Ayman Safra withdrew a sheaf of clipped-together papers. “I’m absolutely certain that is not what you want, sir.”
He placed the contract on Abd-El-Kader’s desk, and atop it a blue Parker Duofold pen he unclipped from his shirt pocket.
“You have thirty seconds to sign the contract, selling the entirety of your business to your benefactor.” An active satnav phone was in his hand. “Your father has thirty seconds to live.”
Abd-El-Kader realized oh so belatedly that he had misjudged this corpulent Lebanese. Worse, he had underestimated the power behind Safra. Ayman Safra with his moderate voice, his gentleman’s manner, had lulled him into a false sense of security. Now the trap carefully laid for him had sprung and it was too late to chew his leg off. As a man in a dream, he flipped through the contract, reading with dream eyes. “This is substantially less than the offer,” he said with a voice leaden with dread.
“As I warned you,” Safra said entirely without smugness or irony. He was a businessperson through and through.
Abd-El-Kader ran a shaking hand through hair made damp with sweat. Without another word, he signed the contract, even though he saw that the countersigner’s line wasn’t filled in either in typeface or in signature.
He was about to spin it back to the Lebanese when Safra, saving him the trouble, took it from his hand, along with the Parker, and returned them to their respective proper places.
“Good day to you, sir,” he said. “I assure you that the pleasure of doing business was all mine.”
10
ROSTOV REGION, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
She moved with a feline’s unselfconscious sexual fluidity, which, to Rodion, at least, increased her allure a hundredfold. She led him into the mess tent, one of the larger tents in the semicircle. Two lines of aluminum tables had been set up with folding chairs on either side. In the rear were a portable stovetop and oven, powered by generators. Cook was somewhere around, a hazy figure amid the steam, which was so thick it obscured the ceiling like a marine layer. Rich scents came from his pots and grills, redolent with a perfume of roasted meat that caused Rodion to salivate.
The major seated herself without even a glance at Rodion. He chose the chair across from her. As soon as he sat down, a bottle of iced vodka appeared, along with two water glasses. He looked over his right shoulder at the kitchen, wondered how the major had pulled off the miracle of requisitioning a full kitchen rather than have her cadre eating standard-issue field packets that were nutritious but more or less inedible. Kata had failed to tell him how powerful the major was, perhaps figuring it best he find out for himself. At this moment, he felt himself launched on a journey into the unknown, and the curious thing was that he felt no fear, only anticipation. Possibly that was down to the major herself.
As she handed him his glass, the tips of their fingers touched. Yet for as fleeting as the moment was he felt a needle of heat skitter across the back of his hand, firing the nerves in his arm. He looked at her to see if she had felt the same thing as he had—or maybe he’d dreamed it, because her face was as impassive as it had been since he met her.
“Drink, Mulchy.”
Another command, which he obeyed. It was only when the glass reached his lips that he realized it was half full of vodka.
ROSTOV REGION, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Captain Rodion Stepanov Molchalin, tenderfoot in Kata’s Moscow cadre, stepped off the helo, jumping two feet into the snow. His first impression of the semipermanent camp Major Korokova had erected was of the absolute order in which the personnel went about their various duties. He counted twenty or so GRU soldiers and an older man he surmised was the GRU medical examiner. As the only member of FSB in the area he felt exposed, a fish out of water. The helo pilot waited until he was well clear of the rotors before he ramped them up and took off, swinging the gunship back toward Moscow.
Before he had left, Kata had briefed him on Juliet Korokova—everything she knew, which, so far as he was concerned, wasn’t a whole helluva lot. In fact, he climbed into the helo without any real sense of her at all. Perhaps, he thought now, it was better this way; he was free to make his own assessment without bias.
Then he saw her from the back and a shiver went through him. All at once he felt as if Kata had thrown him to the wolves. He’d never been much of a ladies’ man, never met a female officer he could relate to—until Kata. For whatever reason, he had taken to her immediately, had no problem taking orders from her. In fact, he barely thought of her as female at all. She was simply Kata Romanovna Hemakova, a colonel in a newly formed directorate of the FSB he had not even known existed until he was summoned to the colonel’s office to be interviewed for recruitment. He had as little idea who had recommended him as he did Directorate O’s raison d’être. Apparently, no one else outside Directorate O knew it even existed. That’s the way it was, Kata impressed on him, and that’s the way it would remain. If he was honest with himself, he liked the secrecy; it was like hiding in plain sight, a game he used to play with his father when he was five, maybe six. It was his father’s game. He always lost, of course, but each time they played he learned something more about hiding in plain sight. He won his first game on his eleventh birthday, and from that time on he never lost again. So Directorate O suited him down to the ground. He was where he wanted to be, and if that meant Kata was throwing him into the deep end of the pool it also meant she was trusting him with an important mission. He knew Directorate KV, of which the dead man was a member, was important, even if he had no idea why.
That was all right with him; in due time he would find out its importance, perhaps even while he was here. Looking around as he approached the tent village, he could sense that the dense forest around him held many secrets, not the least of which was why Major Korokova had taken over the case.
“Whatever you do,” Kata had told him at their last rendezvous, “do not step on this woman’s toes. She’s liable to bite your head off.”
“You mean figuratively, of course.”
He was about to smile, but Kata crossed her arms over her chest, said, “Do us both a favor, Rodion Stepanov, and make sure you don’t find out the answer to that question.”
His boots crunched into the skin of snow that had hardened over the ground. No more snow had fallen since Levrov’s demise. An omen? But he had to remind himself that he didn’t believe in omens, only his mother did. That belief was what drove a stake through the heart of his parents’ marriage.
He was close enough now that Korokova should have heard him. But she was in a contentious conversation—or perhaps “argument” was a better term—with the GRU pathologist, a man who looked like he was more intimately acquainted with death than life. Life was bitter, his expression said, while death had no flavor at all.
“This is insanity,” he was saying, “to make me set up shop here in the godforsaken wilderness instead of taking the corpse back to my lab in Moscow where it’s nice and warm and I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder to see if I’m being shadowed by a fucking wolf pack. Plus—surprise—I can do a real autopsy.”
“Morokovsky, you shock me. I didn’t know you had water running through your veins instead of blood.” The major’s words dripped contempt.
“Please.” The pathologist waved away her response. “There’s simply no precedent for this. I demand an explanation. What the hell is so special about Ivan Levrov anyway?”
“He’s a close relative of the Sovereign,” Korokova said, as if that were a joke only she was in on. “That’s all the explanation required.”
As Morokovsky’s eyes flicked from the major to Rodion, Korokova turned around. Rodion’s heart seemed to stop, then to hammer furiously like a kettledrum being beaten. The reckless throbbing reverberated deep within him.
“So you’re Colonel Hemakova’s creature,” she said without affect. Then in a hiss, “My FSB ball and chain.”
He had the presence of mind to give her his name, standing tall and straight. He tried not to blink from the golden light coming off her like an aurora borealis.
“Frankly, I don’t give a rat’s testicle what your name is.”
She stood arms akimbo, which made his heart drop into his stomach, from whence it fell farther—much farther.
“Let’s get one thing straight, Mulchan.”
“That’s Molchalin,” he corrected. The words were no sooner out of his mouth than he realized his mistake.
“What did I just tell you, Mulchy,” she snapped.
This time he bit his tongue.
“That’s your name from now on, hear me, Mulchy?” She threw him a smile he could only categorize as evil. He found it thrilling.
Behind her, the pathologist chuckled. “Why don’t you have him kiss your boots while you’re at it?”
She whipped around. “Why don’t you get the fuck out of here and do your job.”
He smirked, and without any warning whatsoever she slapped him so hard across his face that he lost his balance. Staring down at him as he squirmed in the snow, she said from her height, “You’ve yet to learn your place here, Morokovsky.”
He ground his teeth, gathering himself onto his knees. “I’ll report you. I swear I will.”
“That too has been tried.” She leaned over him. “But where are those naïve people now, Morokovsky? Butyrka? Matrosskaya Tishina?” She was naming prisons. “Or perhaps Black Dolphin?”
At this last name, the pathologist shuddered, and well he might. Black Dolphin in Siberia housed the country’s most heinous criminals—child molesters, murderers, terrorists, cannibals, and serial killers, all serving life sentences.
The major turned her back on the pathologist. She didn’t utter another word until he had risen, sloping away into his medical tent.
“Now, Mulchy, I must ask you to keep your yap shut and stay out of my way.”
Still starstruck, Rodion nodded mutely, but still felt compelled to tell her, “I’m to report to Kata twice a day.”
The major’s eyebrows rose. “‘Kata,’ is it? Not ‘Colonel Hemakova’?” She squinted at him, as if she were training her X-ray vision on him. “What kind of a shop is the colonel running there?”
“Unconventional.” When he said it he couldn’t help feeling a bit of pride.
“I’ll say.”
“But then judging by your actions with Morokovsky I’d say you’re just as unconventional as she is.”
Korokova stared at him. “Are you fucking coming on to me, Mulchy?”
He was taken aback. “What?” It was as if she had pierced him, peered into his soul, picked up on his most secret desire. “No. Of course not.”
Her gaze ramped up in intensity. How did she do that? he asked himself breathlessly.
“Because that would be a bad idea. A very bad idea.”
Her voice washed over him. His mind blurred the words; they did not apply to him.
She gestured. “Walk with me. I could use a stiff drink.”
“It’s breakfast time.”
“As you’ve already discovered, I’m as unconventional as they come.” That evil smile again, making something deep inside him turn to taffy. “If you can’t drink vodka at nine o’clock in the morning you might as well go back to the short-pants boys at FSB right now.”
9
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
“Ayman Safra.” From the master’s chair behind his vast desk, Abd-El-Kader, the Syrian, regarded his visitor. “Of Joseph and Moise, the Lebanese Safras?”
Ayman Safra, sitting across from him, simply smiled. He was a large man in every way a person could be large: tall, corpulent enough that his thighs and massive buttocks overflowed the chair into which he had lowered himself in the careful manner of heavy men. He was bearded, light-eyed, with a small bow of a mouth. For such a massive man he had small feet, rather like a ballet dancer. His prodigious jowls folded over the collar of his shirt, obscured the top of his immaculately knotted tie. He was also Lebanese, which automatically put him on the Syrian’s bad side. The Lebanese were the most tenacious businesspeople Abd-El-Kader had ever encountered. They were take-no-prisoners types.
What irritated Abd-El-Kader all the more was that Ayman Safra was wearing a made-to-measure suit that, if Abd-El-Kader was any judge, cost upward of six thousand American dollars, cut and fitted in either Milan or Tokyo, where, lately, the Japanese were outdoing their Italian counterparts. On his tiny feet were John Lobb shoes that probably set him back half what his suit cost.
Abd-El-Kader glanced down at the card Safra had handed him when he strode in. There was nothing on it but his name, an internet address, and a satnav phone number.
“Who was it you said you worked for, Mr. Safra?”
That smile that never reached his cheeks, let alone his eyes. Those canny eyes. “Your benefactor wishes to remain anonymous.”
My benefactor, Abd-El-Kader thought grievously. “What do you take me for?” he bit off. “Who in his right mind would consider doing business with someone he hasn’t met face-to-face, let alone whose identity is unknown to him.” He shook his head. “This isn’t amateur night at the follies.”
“Your benefactor has made you a generous offer,” Safra said with serene dignity. “In fact, in my opinion the sum is more than your business is worth.”
This Lebanese really knew how to get under the Syrian’s skin. He pushed himself forward as if he were about to leap across the desk and physically assault Safra. “You and your master don’t know a damn thing about my business.”
The Lebanese remained unperturbed. “The fact is we know everything about your business, sir. Everything. Including your illegal trafficking in your own people, smuggling them into Turkey, using them as slave labor until they sicken and die.”
What have I done to deserve this? Abd-El-Kader asked himself. But like the last dying ember in an exhausted fire, the last of his self-pity died. He was on the attack now, no holds barred. He reached into a side drawer, took out a 9mm Makarov pistol, laid it on the desktop with the barrel pointing at the fat Lebanese.
“A Russian pistol.”
The Syrian’s eyes narrowed. “What of it?” he snapped.
Safra spread his pudgy hands. “A simple observation.”
Abd-El-Kader did not touch the Makarov, merely placed his hand beside it. “You have thirty seconds to get out of my chair, cross my office, and shut the door behind you.”
Ayman Safra ignored the weapon, stared straight into the Syrian’s eyes. “A direct threat. I had hoped our negotiations would be reconciled amicably.”
The Syrian sneered. “Now you know for a fact that they won’t.”
Safra inclined his head as if he’d asked for a refill on his drink he was never served. “I feel duty bound to inform you that your benefactor’s next offer will be substantially less.”
Abd-El-Kader laughed. His forefinger tapped the grip of the Makarov. “Tell your master to go to hell.” He lifted the pistol. “With my compliments.”
Safra inclined his head again as he levered himself off the chair. “As you wish.”
He pointed the Makarov at the Lebanese. “As I demand.”
“Pity,” Ayman Safra said, and reached for the slim briefcase he had set by his right leg. “I so abhor demands.”
Abd-El-Kader’s laughter boomed through the room as Safra made to take his leave. He paused, turned back. “I almost forgot.” He snapped open the briefcase, the sound bringing the Syrian to his feet, the Makarov aimed at Safra’s heart.
“It’s only this.” Safra extracted an eight-by-ten photo. He slid it across the desk. “I’m so absent-minded these days.” He sighed. “Perhaps a sign I’m getting old.”
Abd-El-Kader frowned. “What the hell are you talking about? You sound like a foolish old man.”
That smile again—a smile that was not quite there, that flickered in and out of existence. “I beg you to take a look at the photograph and tell me—is that your father?”
Almost against his will, Abd-El-Kader glanced down, saw that the photo was indeed of his father, in the wheelchair to which he had been confined since his stroke. There was the familiar tribal wrap he favored across his knees and lap.
The Syrian’s eyes snapped up. “What is this?”
“Please be so kind as to answer my question,” Ayman Safra said. “Is that or is it not your father?”
A pulsing vein commenced to beat a tattoo in his left temple. “You know damn well it is.”
“Good.” Safra inclined his head. “Halfway home.”
Abd-El-Kader’s face held fast to a bewildered look. “What is—?”
But Safra had already withdrawn from his briefcase another eight-by-ten photo. This he placed alongside the first one. It also showed the Syrian’s father, but this time at somewhat of a remove, in order to include the two men holding onto the wheelchair from behind. A pair of beefy men smiling into the camera. They must have been outside and a wind had gotten up, because the coat the man on the left was wearing had been caught flapped open, revealing the butt of a handgun in a shoulder holster strapped over his shirt.
“Abd-El-Kader,” Ayman Safra said in the same neutral tone he’d used from the beginning. “Do you know the two men with your father?”
“N—” But the Syrian’s throat was clogged. He couldn’t get a word out. This is a nightmare, he thought. It must be. Any moment I shall wake up, pick my head off my desk, and be alone in my office. But, of course, he knew that was a pipe dream, for here he was, a man holding a Makarov, vulnerable as a woman, helpless as a child.
“Your father belongs to your benefactor now.” Safra scooped up the photos, stored them back in the briefcase. “He will be treated as an honored guest, as befits his status.”
“I’ll kill you and your master,” Abd-El-Kader said through gritted teeth. “There’s nowhere you and that sonofabitch can hide, my people will find you and—”
“In that event, all your people will find is your father with his throat slashed, his body and face terribly abused.” Ayman Safra withdrew a sheaf of clipped-together papers. “I’m absolutely certain that is not what you want, sir.”
He placed the contract on Abd-El-Kader’s desk, and atop it a blue Parker Duofold pen he unclipped from his shirt pocket.
“You have thirty seconds to sign the contract, selling the entirety of your business to your benefactor.” An active satnav phone was in his hand. “Your father has thirty seconds to live.”
Abd-El-Kader realized oh so belatedly that he had misjudged this corpulent Lebanese. Worse, he had underestimated the power behind Safra. Ayman Safra with his moderate voice, his gentleman’s manner, had lulled him into a false sense of security. Now the trap carefully laid for him had sprung and it was too late to chew his leg off. As a man in a dream, he flipped through the contract, reading with dream eyes. “This is substantially less than the offer,” he said with a voice leaden with dread.
“As I warned you,” Safra said entirely without smugness or irony. He was a businessperson through and through.
Abd-El-Kader ran a shaking hand through hair made damp with sweat. Without another word, he signed the contract, even though he saw that the countersigner’s line wasn’t filled in either in typeface or in signature.
He was about to spin it back to the Lebanese when Safra, saving him the trouble, took it from his hand, along with the Parker, and returned them to their respective proper places.
“Good day to you, sir,” he said. “I assure you that the pleasure of doing business was all mine.”
10
ROSTOV REGION, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
She moved with a feline’s unselfconscious sexual fluidity, which, to Rodion, at least, increased her allure a hundredfold. She led him into the mess tent, one of the larger tents in the semicircle. Two lines of aluminum tables had been set up with folding chairs on either side. In the rear were a portable stovetop and oven, powered by generators. Cook was somewhere around, a hazy figure amid the steam, which was so thick it obscured the ceiling like a marine layer. Rich scents came from his pots and grills, redolent with a perfume of roasted meat that caused Rodion to salivate.
The major seated herself without even a glance at Rodion. He chose the chair across from her. As soon as he sat down, a bottle of iced vodka appeared, along with two water glasses. He looked over his right shoulder at the kitchen, wondered how the major had pulled off the miracle of requisitioning a full kitchen rather than have her cadre eating standard-issue field packets that were nutritious but more or less inedible. Kata had failed to tell him how powerful the major was, perhaps figuring it best he find out for himself. At this moment, he felt himself launched on a journey into the unknown, and the curious thing was that he felt no fear, only anticipation. Possibly that was down to the major herself.
As she handed him his glass, the tips of their fingers touched. Yet for as fleeting as the moment was he felt a needle of heat skitter across the back of his hand, firing the nerves in his arm. He looked at her to see if she had felt the same thing as he had—or maybe he’d dreamed it, because her face was as impassive as it had been since he met her.
“Drink, Mulchy.”
Another command, which he obeyed. It was only when the glass reached his lips that he realized it was half full of vodka.
