Moscow X, page 31
At the bar the drunks had traded places. The one who had been asleep now argued with the barman. His companion had slumped over.
Maybe a smoke to clear my head.
Outside, she sat on the bench and lit a Dunhill with shivering fingers. The courtyard was quiet. Lights flicked on as night gathered over Moscow. In one window she saw the twinkle of a New Year tree. She burned down three cigarettes in quick pleasureless agitation. Sirens bayed in the distance.
Anna returned to her table. Both drunks were now arguing with the barman. A couple at one of the corner tables picked at plates of herring and black bread. The man looked at her funny, she thought. Maybe. Running a finger over her upper lip, she noticed that it glistened with sweat. She wiped it on her coat.
She called Luka again. No answer. Checked her watch.
She slipped the gift and the cognac in her purse and pushed past the drunks to pay the barman. “If he comes by, tell him I’m at the apartment,” she said.
“I will,” he said. He looked her over with concern. “Are you all right?”
“I’m just fine.”
“He stand you up?”
“I don’t know.”
Into the winter night, the sirens still wailing. Louder as she walked toward the apartment. She stumbled on a wavy rise of mangled plitki, breaking her fall with her hands before tumbling into a pile of black snow. The contents of her purse slipped into frozen mud. She examined the chessboard. The paper had torn. Half the bow was caked in mud. She wiped it with her sleeve but it just smeared the paper. She cursed again. More sirens. A passerby looked down at her, frowned, and kept on walking. Anna stuffed the chessboard halfway into her purse, yanked the cognac bottle from the snow, and righted it on a pavestone between her legs. Still seated, she fished her phone from the purse and called him again.
No answer.
She stood, cursing, and threw the cognac bottle into the street, but it didn’t break. She went into the road and put up her hand for an oncoming car to stop, but it honked, its headlights flickered, and she jumped to the side at the last minute and screamed as it sped off. Then she picked up the cognac and smashed the bottle properly. An old woman on the sidewalk shook her head as if saying damn drunk kids. Anna’s shoes crackled over broken glass and she pulled her purse tight into her body and left the woman behind.
She smelled the smoke just before she turned onto the Street of All-Holidays. Blue and red lights were dancing on a patch of ice in the road, on the windshield of a parked car, in the darkened windows of the corner building.
Around the corner she saw fire trucks, and acrid smoke invaded her nostrils. Not woodsmoke. Evil, chemical smoke. Flames escaped from the windows.
My windows.
A thick plume of smoke rose above her apartment.
She ran to the trucks.
The hoses were streaming into the neighboring apartments. She may have blacked out for a moment, because when she could again think she was arguing with one of the firemen and there were two more standing around. She had the creeping sense she’d hit one of them, because he was rubbing his jaw and muttering that she was nuts. “The fire was too big, too hot, we got here too late,” he kept saying. “No one is inside. We cannot save your apartment. We must keep the flames from spreading.”
They probably thought she was drunk. Cognac was splattered on her shoes and pants, she was wild-eyed, there was a battered gift tied with a muddy bow peeking from her dirty purse. They left her alone. Firefighters moved here and there, trucks came and went, thin crowds gathered and dispersed.
Her apartment burned for a long time.
When the flames were embers and the mansion was at last a blackened husk, she turned to see an old, stooped man standing beside her reviewing the dead house. He wore a black greatcoat and a ratty ushanka and round eyeglasses with wire frames. He looked like he had escaped from a photograph of Stalingrad. He gripped a long package under his arm.
“Was it your house?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
His eyes sparkled behind the thick eyeglasses, tongue wetting his lips.
The package, she thought, was about the length of the box they’d left in the RusFarm stable. Maybe shorter, it was hard to tell in the dark. His energy made her want to run away. She felt like the poor horses trapped in her stables.
Something dripped from the corner of the package. Another drop plopped to the ground. Drip, drip, drip. Red spatter on the snow. Had this man been in her stables?
He pressed the package into her hands, blood dripping from the corner, wetting her mittens. She now noticed how short he was, shorter than even her, because he had to shove the package up to meet her arms. He was licking his lips, forcing the wet paper against her body, tongue sticking out a bit, his eyes bright with concentration. Sopping package in hand, she retreated a step.
“Chernov sent me,” he said, “to tell you this: There was a sacrifice. And it went badly, Anya. It went badly because you did not listen. Sometimes the sacrifices are sweet, sometimes Russia is merciful, but not always. Not always, poor dears. And sometimes there is a message in the sacrifice, but this time there is not. The message in this one is only punishment.”
Then he straightened his glasses, turned, and walked off.
ANNA DID NOT KNOW HOW MANY TIMES SHE FELL ON THE WALK BACK to Ostozhenka, but at some point she’d busted her lip and bruised a cheek on the ice. When she opened her apartment, she half expected to see the little old devil there. She shut the door behind her and scanned, a few blocks of light shimmering through the picture windows into the well of shadows that was her living room. At least it felt empty. Her breathing was staccato.
She slumped to the floor and began unwrapping the package. Had those animals butchered Penelope? This is probably what shock feels like, because things are just happening and I can process nothing. She was only floating, she could not think, she barely knew where she was. She pulled back the paper.
The skin on this horse is white.
This is human skin.
A human arm.
Luka’s arm.
AFTER SHE HAD VOMITED, AFTER SHE WEPT, AFTER SHE TURNED OVER the bookshelves and smashed the coffee table to bits and ripped the sterile pictures from the wall and kicked holes in the plaster, Anna went to the bedroom and sat in a chair for the rest of the night, her chilly blue eyes shining with hate.
- 46 -
Moscow / The road to RusFarm
WHEN MORNING CAME, SHE ENTOMBED LUKAS ARM IN PLASTIC wrap and set it on ice in the tub. She then covered the tub in plastic wrap and closed the bathroom door and stuffed nitrile gloves into the crack to hem in any smells. She was not sure what else to do. Chernov’s men have this apartment wired, she thought. They will deal with it. She scrubbed the tile in the entryway where she had dropped the package the night before. She did not want to leave Luka’s blood out on the floor like that.
In the guest bathroom she took a shower to clean the blood from her hands and split lip. She applied makeup, careful to cover the bruise on her cheek, and dressed in clean clothes.
From her closet safe she pulled an envelope stuffed with euros. Selecting another purse from her closet, she went out and rode the metro to Moscow State University. She walked the campus and surrounding neighborhoods for several hours, until she had convinced herself they had not bothered to put physical surveillance on her. They had her phone covered, of course, along with the apartment, and they’d probably beaconed her car. They knew where she was—why bother following her?
Skirting through crowds, Anna searched for the right profile: young, a student, not obviously wealthy, meek, intelligent, impressionable eyes. Outside a lecture hall Anna sidled up alongside a young woman in a white dublyonka who could not have been more than twenty. She smiled brightly, and in a firm voice said, “Hi. Are you running off to class?”
“In a few minutes,” said the young woman, surprised. She stopped walking and her eyes narrowed. “Do I know you?”
Anna shook her head. “I’ve left my phone in my apartment. Could you help me?”
“Okay, sure.” The woman began fumbling through her purse.
Anna gently, but with authority, placed her hand on the woman’s arm. “Could you buy one for me?”
Now the woman was frightened. Her arm did not move; it was still stuck halfway into the purse.
Anna deftly slipped the envelope of cash from her coat pocket into the woman’s opened purse. Her eyes said: Look.
The woman cracked open the envelope. Her eyes widened at the cash: just over two thousand euros. She looked afraid and excited, in equal measure.
“Buy me a phone?” Anna asked. “Not an iPhone. Garbage reception and all. You know how it goes. Maybe an old Nokia? Not a smartphone. One that flips open. You keep the change.”
“I keep the change,” the woman repeated. She was biting her lip.
“Yes. And in return for keeping the change,” Anna continued, “after you buy the phone you will take it apart: SIM card, battery, all of it. Take it apart outside the shop and put all the pieces in the bag. Then you bring it back to me. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You know an electronics store around here?”
“There is one down near Leninsky. A short walk.”
“You can still make your class?”
The girl checked the time on her phone. She nodded.
“Well,” Anna said, “what do you think?”
The poor girl’s teeth had almost slid through her lower lip. “Bring it back to you here?”
Anna shook her head. “No. There is a little alley behind the building across the square.” She nudged her head. “Bring it there. And one more thing—make sure it’s got at least a few minutes of charge before you leave the store.”
For twenty minutes Anna stomped around the campus checking for physical surveillants; finding none, she met the girl in the alley and accepted the bag with the pieces of the phone.
Returning to the garage below her apartment, she collected her Range Rover and drove north out of Moscow. After an hour, deep in the endless Russian woods, she pulled the car to the side of the road. Her iPhone went into the glove box. Checking to be sure no one was around, she took the bag with the Nokia parts and tramped into the forest. After ten minutes she came to a small clearing. She assembled the phone, then dialed a number she had memorized with Sia in Switzerland. Not a permanent solution, but the laptop was gone, destroyed in the fire.
As expected, no one answered. A Russian voice said that KLP Shipping Solutions regretted that they had missed her call, but please leave a message and an associate would call back promptly. In her message, Anna explained that there had been problems with the shipments, she would be unable to travel to see customers to deal with those problems, and that she wished she had a better way to speak to the fine people at KLP Shipping Solutions but there had been an unfortunate accident. This was all she had right now. She explained that a visit from friends might be helpful to rectify the communications issue. She said she would not have this number much longer. Perhaps no more than thirty minutes. She hung up. She dusted snow off a log and sat, staring into the trees.
Fifteen minutes later a man called back and said his name was Anatoly. He asked if Anna would have this number going forward. She said no.
“Might we use your bank email?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Technical problems.”
“I see,” Anatoly said. A pause. “You are going to where, exactly?” “The farm.”
“I see.”
“I want to see her,” Anna said. “Understand? Tell me you understand, Anatoly.”
“I understand.”
“They should come in as soon as they can,” Anna said. “They bring equipment. But most of all they bring her. I want to look her in the eyes and ask a few questions. If they land at Pulkovo I can probably arrange things. She should come with him, otherwise it will look odd. They come with good news about a horse, a sale. They can think of something.”
“Maybe you travel out to see us?” he offered.
“No,” she hissed. “Fuck. I told you, I cannot. Not now. Tell me you understand.”
“I understand.”
She hung up. She took the phone apart, put the components in the bag, and trudged back to her car.
Outside Kirishi, Anna stopped at a gas station and took the Nokia into the bathroom. She checked the stalls to be sure she was alone. She smashed the phone to bits, stopping only to flush pieces down the toilet.
When it was done, she continued onward. To RusFarm.
- 47 -
Langley
PERSEPHONE’S EMERGENCY SIGNAL WHIPPED UP A FEEDING FRENZY on the CIA’s Seventh Floor: everyone wanted a bite. Procter had fought to keep crowds small, but the Director’s appetite had been whetted, and when the Director got a taste, that meant meetings, the kind where gobs of useless deskhumpers would materialize so they could take notes and share those notes back with their component organizations on email distro lists so broad they probably included the green-jacketed contractors who watched over the uncleared maintenance crews working on the toilets.
That’s what’s happening, Ed, Procter shouted into the phone when she saw the list for the Director’s Russia update, freaking toilet guys going to get this intel. We’ll have PERSEPHONE’s true name splashed in the papers by the time I’m done throwing up after the meeting. And it’ll be in disgust, Ed. I’ll be vomiting in righteous disgust. This meeting is a fleshpile, Ed, pure and simple. Gotta trim this list to me, you, maybe the Director. We gotta make this like the powwows in the spy flicks where there are three people involved in the operation, tops.
Bradley had hung up on her.
Now Procter stood in the Seventh Floor hallway outside the Director’s conference room. There was a pack of about twenty people waiting for the door to open. The afternoon Counterterrorism update was running long.
It was Bradley who finally swung open the door. “Director can’t make it,” he said. “I’m running this one. Everyone come in.”
Procter commandeered a seat beside him. The hallway crowd spilled into the windowless room, filling the oversized leather chairs at the long table and the mismatched backbench chairs ringing the walls. An analyst—at the table! the goddamn nerve—pulled talking points from a folder as if someone had asked for a lousy Russia briefing. The wall behind Bradley’s seat was clotted by clocks, but unlike most at headquarters, in the Director’s conference room the red block numbers were perfectly synchronized.
Before Bradley could open his mouth, Artemis Aphrodite Procter began an unsolicited address. There would be no meeting minutes, she said, no transcript. One Moscow X analyst, backbenching in the corner and out of her view, did manage to scribble a few notes, but he soon became too frightened to distribute them later. Had he done so, his teammates would have been treated to a speech promising bodily, occupational, emotional, psychological, and spiritual harm to anyone who so much as repeated a word of this discussion. When she had finished, Bradley opened the meeting and asked Procter to set the scene.
Procter started with PERSEPHONE’s emergency signal through the cutout. And you know what? I buy it, she said. Girl’s been producing, she’s crossed plenty of lines, we’ve got a pretty clean poly, and, further, she’s actually listening to us. An unwitting support asset, pretending to be a tourist in Rastrelli Square, snapped a photo of the horse figurine in PERSEPHONE’s office at the bank. Statue does nothing, of course. It’s hollow. But it’s a test, and she passed. She did what I asked her to do in Switzerland. The techies have confirmed that her clancomm is not active, so the emergency signal makes sense.
Of course, it is always possible that she’s been found out, Procter conceded. That paunchy, sweaty FSB troglodytes are on the other side of these comms, but then, she mused, why go through the trouble of breaking the clancomm and using the cutout? Seems unnecessary. We’ve also got a recording of PERSEPHONE’s call for help. OMS voice intonation specialist says she sounds more angry than fearful, which I say is a mark against hostile control.
“Fine, Artemis,” Bradley said. “Let’s say we buy PERSEPHONE. But what do we gain from sending one or both of our officers back inside right now? We’ve got a lot to lose—just like the first time—but now, with the Russian delivering, what’s the rush? Dropping a computer inside Russia is no cakewalk, but we could eventually get PERSEPHONE a new laptop without exposing your people again.”
There are, Procter said, a few problems with the wait-and-see view. One is that PERSEPHONE is a necessary cog in this operation; in fact, Procter said, she is the primary cog. Her intel makes it possible, and we’ve got to be in real-time communications with her when we start because we need to know how it’s landing or if we need to adjust things. The second, and larger, problem with the wait-and-see option is that it leaves PERSEPHONE high and dry. There is a mushy emotional component here, Procter insisted. Can’t be denied. We’ve got an asset on the ground inside Russia who’s been delivering, and she wants to know if our moves are going to wreck her life. And we’ve got people who can travel into Russia. In fact, we’ve got platforms designed for such travel.
We owe it to PERSEPHONE, Procter said, to give it a shot. And with that she nodded at Bradley to signal she was done.
Bradley thought for a moment, hands clasped, head turned to the ceiling. “I am not saying yes or no today. I want to meet the NOCs,” he said, turning to Procter. “Make that happen.”
- 48 -
San Cristobal
MAX WATCHED A NERVOUS YEARLING COLT DEFECATE IN THE SAND. He was thronged by American bloodstock agents and advisers, all scattered around the ring at San Cristobal to review the horseflesh he’d opted to withhold from the Kentucky sales for this private auction. A groom led a chestnut-brown yearling into the ring. Max flipped open the sales book and his trainer started in with the pitch. Pedigree, then conformation: the legs, the muscle definition, bone structure, length of the neck in relation to the head. Max liked the symmetry in the legs. The agents scribbled furiously in their notebooks.
