Beloved Enemy (32 page)

Krofft returned her smile. It was warm and inviting. He tapped the document. “You’ve done your country a great service, Alix.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Robby. Please.”

A laugh bubbled up from her throat, and all the humiliation she had endured today circled the drain and vanished. She nodded, her cheeks reddening.

He cocked his head, clearly considering a decision. “You seem to have a natural nose for ferreting out secrets. Tell me, are you happy in your job?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Robby.”

“Of course, Robby, but—”

“But what?” he pressed.

Her sly smile was back. “Opportunities are where you find them, don’t you agree?”

“I most certainly do.” He checked his watch. “I’m late for a meeting and, to tell you the truth, I’m up to my ass in meetings today.”

She laughed again, and he looked pleased.

“But I have a proposition to make you. Would dinner tonight suit you?”

“Tonight? I don’t know what to say.”

“Of course you do.” Krofft rose, and she with him. The interview was almost over. “My car will pick you up at eight.” He held out a hand and she took it. “In the meantime—” he rattled the papers “—this is just between us, yes?”

“Absolutely.”

When she had left, Krofft rose, recrossed the room, and, with a grim face, fed the document into a shredder.

*   *   *

“Giles Legere,” Jack said. “You expect me to believe Giles Legere is your client.”

Noemie shrugged. “Why not?”

“Let me count the ways.” Jack ticked them off on his fingers. “The world believes Giles Legere is dead. I have been following his son, Pyotr, from Bangkok to here in Zurich. Pyotr’s people almost killed me not an hour ago. They killed a woman named Romy Kirsch. I tried to escape with Pyotr, but he was shot to death, presumably by his own men. I call my friend Caro and she sends me to perhaps the only person in the entire city who knows Giles Legere is alive.” He shook his head. “These are coincidences that defy logic.”

“Annika said you’d say that,” a male voice replied. “She must know you as well as you know yourself.”

Jack turned and immediately recognized the tall slim man.

“Radomil,” he said.

The last time Jack had seen Radomil Batchuk, Annika’s half-brother, he had mysteriously helped Jack escape from the Syrian’s villa, just outside Rome. That was a year ago. A lot had changed since then; but then again, Jack realized, some things would never change.

Noemie was smiling. “Now do you see it?”

“The circle,” Jack said.

She nodded. “Yes.”

He looked from her to Radomil. “You all belong to Gourdjiev.”

“To Annika now,” Radomil said.

“But Annika is in league with the Syrian.”

“Because Dyadya was.” Noemie was watching him with undisguised curiosity, as if he were a new species whose responses to stimuli were unpredictable.

This was the question Jack had been asking himself—one without a suitable answer. “All of you,” he said now. “Even Ripley.”

“Even Ripley,” Noemie nodded again.

“Then how—?”

“A means to an end.”

Jack took a deep breath. “And if the means and the end are the same?”

“Then,” Radomil said, “we’re all damned.”

Jack turned to him. “That night at the Syrian’s villa in Rome, when I ran into you outside—you were prepared to keep the dogs at bay, you knew the way out. Why did you save me?”

Radomil jammed his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “I was ordered to save you.”

“By whom?”

The smile had never left Noemie’s face, as if this new species in front of her was an endless source of surprise and delight. “By this time,” she said, “you shouldn’t have to ask.”

*   *   *

Krofft was behind her desk when Jonatha returned to her office. He was stretched out with his feet up on her desktop. When she stepped in, he glanced up from a sheet of paper he had been scrutinizing.

“Don’t be shy. Come on in.” His voice was uncharacteristically gentle.

Following a small hesitation, Jonatha dragged a chair over to the space in front of her desk and sat down.

He spun the sheet across the table to her.

Jonatha picked it up. It was Lale’s arrest sheet with which Rogers had threatened her. Her heart seeming to beat in her throat, Jonatha looked up at him. Curiously, he was smiling.

“Calm down,” he said. “It’s a fake.”

“What?” She looked from him to the arrest report, back to him.

“D’you really think my people would’ve missed something like this?”

Jonatha swallowed. Relief and anger vied for the upper hand. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“Of course you weren’t. You love Lale; your only thought was to protect her. Which is what Rogers was counting on. Emotions cloud judgement, Jonatha, you know that as well as I do.”

“Damnit,” she said bitterly, “emotion often is what I myself use against suspects.”

“We all have a blind spot. Even you.”

“Rogers—”

“I know you’re going to want to take care of him yourself,” Krofft said. “But trust me on this. I know how to deal with the fucker.”

*   *   *

Caro, riding the Métro’s 2 line, thought about Dyadya Gourdjiev. She had met him in Paris, where all runaway girls go when their bitter hearts are filled with fury. She had fled her life in D.C., fled her mother, a woman who had once been her father’s mistress, who had never treated her like a daughter. Never held her, comforted her, provided solace in any form.
Would it have killed her,
Caro had often thought,
to have shown me a modicum of affection?
Caro’s assumption was that she had never wanted to give birth, never wanted to be burdened with a child. But Henry Holt Carson, with his outsized ego, hadn’t allowed her to abort her fetus, and with money and, perhaps now and again, his cock, had kept her in close orbit until his tastes led him elsewhere.

What kind of life would she have led were it not for Gourdjiev’s intervention? She had run into Elady Zukhov in one of those louche Left Bank cafés that in those days was filled with smoke, laughter, and fuzzy beards and talk of anarchy that amounted to nothing but navel-gazing. Although, in hindsight, it was clear that Zukhov had run into her. The meeting had not been coincidental.

When Zukhov had sat down at her table, Caro had almost gotten up and walked away. Even in those days he was none too appealing to look at, but when he began to speak something changed. He offered her not only an income but a way of life that appealed to both her talents and her mind-set. It was only much later that she learned she had been working for Gourdjiev all along.

Caro got off the Métro at the Père Lachaise cemetery stop. Crossing the street, she entered the cemetery, known affectionately to Parisians as
la cité des morts
. Within its beautiful precincts, among serenely winding paths and thick, clattering foliage, lay the remains of so many of history’s famous, from Chopin to Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde to Seurat, Molière to Jim Morrison.

Here in the city of the dead Caro felt more alive than she did out on Paris’s wide streets and leafy boulevards. She felt a kinship with the dead, and in Père Lachaise she could listen as they spoke to one another, their quavering voices lifting and falling on the breeze.

She sat on a bench across from an old pergola that was in the process of being rebuilt. Raw boards lay across sawhorses, temporary posts held up part of the roof, which would otherwise have collapsed. At one time, birds had nested under the eaves, but their eggs had hatched, the fledglings fed by their doting parents until the time came for them to take wing and fly away.

The sight of that nest, once filled with activity, now abandoned, caused tears to sting Caro’s eyes. She’d had neither a mother nor a father; she had fled the nest before either of her parents had had a chance to eat her alive.

This last attempt on her life seemed to have acted as a final straw, pushing her into darkness. In this unfamiliar state, she saw her life reflected back at her, and didn’t like what she saw. Who was she, always running, looking over her shoulder for knife-edged shadows bent on her destruction. Zukhov was as close as she would ever come to a father figure, but he was getting old; how much longer could she count on him?

She heard the flutter of wings and lifted her head, looking around for the bird. She saw it then, a male cardinal, bright body, inquisitive face, hiding in the shiny dark-green foliage of a boxwood. It seemed to be watching her. She stared at its obsidian eye, polished as a bead.

The cardinal seemed to want to communicate with her, or perhaps it already had. Because she was wrong; there was someone else who had treated her with respect and genuine affection. Jack.

Hauling out her mobile, she punched in the number nine. The speed dial did the rest, connecting via an eleven-digit number. The line rang for such a long time Caro was on the point of hanging up instead of leaving a message she knew would not be returned.

Then she heard the voice, familiar even though she hadn’t heard it in some time.

“Yes?”

Caro felt a flutter in the back of her throat, her voice quavered like those of the dead who continued to converse all around her. “Can you talk?”

“Not really.”

“Then I’ll do the talking.”

“As you wish, but there’s not much time.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Speak.”

“Annika,” she said, “you have to stop these mind games with Jack. They’re evil and they’re dangerous. One day you’ll go too far and it will mean the death of you.”

Silence.

“Are you still there?”

“Barely,” Annika said in her ear.

Her voice was sharp, metallic. Caro knew Annika must be annoyed at this breach of protocol. She didn’t care.

“Unlike me, you have a chance for happiness,” Caro said, her voice growing desperate because she wanted—needed—Jack to be safe. He never would be if he and Annika were at odds. “It’s so rare—so rare. You have to take it.”

“It’s too late.”

“Why do you say that? You know it’s not true.”

“You have no conception of evil.”

Caro ignored her. “No matter the cost, Annika. Do you hear me?”

“You’re shouting.”

Caro rose off the bench. She could no longer see the birds’ nest. “I need you to understand me clearly. If you destroy what you’ve built, you’ll never forgive—”

She stopped abruptly, sensing a subtle change on the line. “Annika? Annika!”

The air around her was more alive than the connection. The call was lost, the link severed from the other end. Reluctantly, she put her mobile away.
Would nothing in the world work out?
she wondered. She broke down, then, weeping in earnest, while the dead, oblivious, continued to chatter away about nothing and everything.

*   *   *

When Annika saw Rolan step out into the crowded Fez street in front of their car, she heard Iraj curse as he slammed on the brakes.

“He murders one of my men and now he comes back?” Namazi said. “He must really be insane.” He threw the car into neutral and began to open his door. “I’ll fucking kill him.”

Annika put a hand on his arm. “How many times do I have to tell you that he was defending me?”

“I have only your word for—”

“If my word isn’t enough for you,” Annika said with steely conviction, “then we’re done, right here, right now.” When he continued to glare at her, she added, “You decide, Iraj, once and for all. I am fucking exhausted by your suspicions, your innuendos. I have more discipline, more backbone, than three-quarters of your men. But now you force me to ask myself what I’m doing here with you.”

“Doing your duty. Following your grandfather’s wishes.”

“My grandfather is dead. Every day that goes by he’s more dead. Do you understand what I mean, Iraj? I’m not a disillusioned Islamic youth. I’m not blindly following orders—either yours or his. Either you trust me or you don’t. This is my line in the sand.”

Iraj turned, staring through the windshield.

“We may need Rolan,” she said.

“Really? What for?”

Annika looked into Iraj’s eyes. “He’s a killing machine. We’re going to Zurich to kill, let’s not pretend otherwise.”

“He’s unpredictable.”

“Not with me.”

“I don’t like this.”

“You don’t have to like it, you just have to accept it.” She smiled coolly. “Let me handle him.”

She was out of the car before the Syrian had a chance to continue the argument.

“What are you doing?” she said as she approached Rolan.

“I’d ask you the same question. I was supposed to…” He put a hand to his temple, rubbing the skin so hard it turned red.

“What is it?” Annika said. “What’s the matter?”

“Hurts,” Rolan said. “I’ve been having bouts of … pain … ever since your shitbag lover pulled me out of the clinic.”

“Iraj isn’t my lover.”

“Please.”

“He’s my business partner.”

“What the fuck kind of business are you in all of a sudden?” The patch on Rolan’s right temple was beet red. His eyes were slitted with pain.

“It’s not all of a sudden,” she said. “And you’re better off not knowing.”

“I don’t know about that.” Rolan’s eyes were slowly clearing. He seemed to be breathing better, as well. “But then these days I don’t know about anything, do I? I’ve been in prison for seven years.”

Annika stared mutely up into his face. There was no point in answering.

“I missed my chance to snuff him,” Rolan said. “Where are you and the shitbag going?”

The cacophony of bleating horns, as the traffic backed up farther and farther, was on the verge of becoming overwhelming.

“Zurich.”

“You’re in such a rush it must be important,” Rolan said. “I’m coming with you.”

*   *   *

“He’s peering over my shoulder,” Namazi said.

Annika, siting next to him on the plane, said, “He’s two rows behind us and he’s asleep.”

The Syrian twisted in his seat, rising up over other people’s heads so he could see Rolan. “Well, he looks asleep,” he said.

“Trust me, he is.”

He turned to her. “We’ll be landing soon.” He placed a hand on her thigh. “Let’s take advantage and get ourselves into one of the restrooms.”