Beloved Enemy (7 page)

“Why? Why are you with me?”
The tip of her tongue traced the outer whorls of his ear.
“I am a Russian, and a murderer.”

“We’re all murderers.”
His voice was thick with desire.

Her palms pressed against his shoulders as he pinned her to the wall.
“You know that’s not true.”

“But it is. For us, killing is as much a part of life as eating or breathing.”

“Or making love.”

“No. Making love is entirely different.”

“How is it different? Tell me.”

“When we’re together, making love, we’re different. We’re better people.”

“Only for a time—the space of a breath.”
She took his hands, placed them on her buttocks.
“Or a sigh.”
She sighed deeply, an ecstatic sound.

“Even that is enough.”
He pulled the fullness of her hips to him.
“My fear is that we’ll become like those before us. Living in the shadows, at the edges of society, gives us certain privileges, privileges that feed our egos, inflate them, until we believe that we’re beyond the law.”

“But, darling, we
are
beyond the law.”

“I don’t believe we are. These moments together, no matter how brief, prove to us that we can go on with this life we’ve chosen.”
His hands sought her bare breasts.
“Without them, there’s only a descent into a perpetual dark from which we’ll never return.”

She looked up at him.
“Do you think we’re criminals, that we kill without remorse?”

“I hope not.”

“But you don’t know. You can’t because it’s unknowable.”
She put her fingers across his lips.
“We do what we have to do. There is no choice.”

Then the last, blinding flash overtook him, and he relived another searing moment, from a year ago, in a lavish villa outside Rome:

“I can’t go with you, Jack.”

“What are you talking about? Come on, Annika, the Syrian is coming.”

“I know he is, Jack. That’s why I have to stay.”

Anguish gripped him just as it had then.
“I don’t—”

“Get out of here.”
Annika shoved him toward the front door.
“Now!”

“Annika—”

“Good-bye, Jack.”

At that moment, he got it, his reality collapsed like a house of cards, and his heart shattered. She wasn’t coming. She didn’t love him. Like her mysterious grandfather, she had aligned herself with the enemy. She had gone beyond the law, above it. It seemed incredible, and yet he was confronted by the truth.

He had fought with the Syrian, but in the end, outnumbered and already in mourning, he ran and had only escaped the villa through the inexplicable intervention of Annika’s half-brother, Radomil Batchuk.

The flashing ceased, the lights dimmed, and Jack’s dream slid away from him, falling faster than even he was, into the inky blackness.

*   *   *

“A mole,” Krofft stared across his desk as Jonatha Midwood.

“Seems like very old times,” Jonatha said. “There hasn’t been a spanner in the works since Robert Hanssen in 2000.”

Krofft nodded. Jonatha Midwood was an analyst of his, one of a very special nature, who he had recruited himself. She was smart as a whip and twice as clever. She worked alone and apart. Almost no one within the Company knew of her existence, which was just the way Krofft wanted it.

“It used to be that ideology could motivate a mole,” she said now. “But not these days.”

Krofft pressed several buttons on his vast desk. Multiple LCD screens rose like ghosts from the tops of low cabinets placed along three walls. The fourth wall was entirely taken up by a complex electronic monitoring station, manned by four IT technicians.

“Ideology has gone the way of the corded phone and the fax machine,” she continued. “A forgotten, shadowed relic, a curio, nothing more.”

Krofft laced his fingers together as his hands lay in his lap. “So what are we left with?” His voice had assumed a professorial tone.

“Money.”

“Money, perhaps.” Krofft nodded. “But in Jack McClure’s case, I doubt it.”

Jonatha shrugged. “What else is there?”

“Love.”

The LCD screens were showing footage from Syria and Afghanistan, all of it unrelentingly loud, brutal, and bloody.

Jonatha tore her gaze away from bodies strewn along a rubble-encrusted street. “Love? Surely you’re joking!”

Krofft shook his head. “I’m deadly serious.”

“Share, if you please.”

Krofft smiled. He loved her occasional anachronistic phrases. “McClure is a formidable agent. He’s proved that time and again over the last several years while he was building up his bona fides with Dennis Paull and with homeland security in general, but he has a fatal weakness.”

Krofft swiveled around and signaled to one of the IT techs. At once, the war-torn images were wiped off the LCD screen directly in front of them, to be replaced by the face of a beautiful woman. Her thick, lustrous hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing a wide forehead and a widow’s peak. Her large, slightly uptilted eyes were a light brown with a scattering of reddish pinpoints, her lush lips sensual even without meaning to be.

“This fatal weakness has a name: Annika Dementieva.”

The image switched to a snowy scene in what was clearly Moscow. It showed Annika with Jack and an older man, who had the predatory eyes of a shark.

“She’s the granddaughter of the late, unlamented Dyadya Gourdjiev, the old man shown here,” Krofft continued. “A more devious, dangerous sonofabitch has never existed. It was a happy day for the United States when he was the victim of a hit-and-run in Rome last year.”

Jonatha contemplated the photo, her gaze roving from one figure to the next. “So McClure’s in love with the old man’s granddaughter. So what?”

“So,” Krofft said slowly, “it’s my belief that Annika Dementieva has taken control of her grandfather’s business interests.”

“Which are?”

For the first time, Krofft’s expression lost a semblance of its sharp edge. “Could be steel, oil, ore mining, arms trading, terrorist training. Might even be all of the above.”

Jonatha laughed softly. “You mean you don’t know what the old fucker did.” Not too many people could speak that way to the director of the CIA. She was one of the few.

“What we do know is that over the decades he was comrades with every powerful Russian official who occupied a Kremlin office,” Krofft said. “And if he wasn’t a friend of theirs, he was an enemy, which was too bad for them, because shortly thereafter, they disappeared, never to be heard from again. Suffice it to say that he dipped his beak into more pies than we can count, all of them stinking to high heaven.”

“Meaning?”

“We think he was supplying some of the top terrorists.”

“Jesus. And McClure is cozy with the granddaughter.” Jonatha drummed her fingers on Krofft’s desk. “That can’t be good.”

“No,” Krofft acknowledged. “In fact, it’s very, very bad.”

Jonatha pointed. “Let me see the girl again.” When the close-up of Annika returned to the screen, she said, “Is the rest of her as erotic?”

Krofft raised his hand and another shot of Annika appeared, this one shot from a distance. Though it was slightly grainy, her long, powerful legs were clearly visible.

Jonatha nodded. “If you know about the relationship, Paull must have as well.”

“What I can’t figure out is why he didn’t put a stop to it.”

Jonatha spread her hands. “Maybe he tried.”

“And maybe he didn’t. McClure was his golden boy. I think that’s what cost him his life.”

“But we know that the Syrian is running the mole.”

“What if he was running McClure through the Dementieva woman?”

Jonatha nodded slowly. “That makes perfect sense, but as of now it’s just speculation.”

“Not all of it,” Krofft said. “Everything fits.”

“Neat as a pin.” Jonatha considered a moment. “How d’you want to play the Dementieva angle?”

“It’s clear Dickinson blew his chance to capture McClure. McClure’s on the run. Where d’you think he’s going to go?” He inclined his head toward the image on the screen. “We find the Dementieva woman, we find McClure.”

“That presupposes she’ll be easier to find than McClure.”

A thin, predatory smile split Krofft’s face. “I have a line on her. I know where she is, or, rather, where she was forty-eight hours ago.”

“Who have you tasked with the mission?”

“Better for you not to know.” Krofft’s forefinger stabbed out and the screens went black.

P
ART
T
WO

T
WO
H
EADS
A
RE
B
ETTER THAN
O
NE

S
IX

T
HE
S
ÜMELA
Monastery, built into an immense ledge carved into a steep cliff of Melá mountain, in Turkey’s Trabzon Province, reached its height in 1204. Legend had it that it was founded by two priests who discovered an icon of the Virgin Mary in a massive cave set into the ledge. A crumbling ruin now, the buildings were still the site of pilgrimages from the Greek and Russian Orthodox faithful.

As she looked out at the inner edge of the Altindere valley, Annika wondered about the origin of the legend. From the time she was a little girl, she had been fascinated by myths and legends, not the least this one, for she had been making her own private pilgrimages to this valley for years.

The Assumption of Mary Clinic, through whose gates the car that bore her was now proceeding, spread its wings on either side of the green-gravel driveway that swept through lush stands of towering pine trees. The clinic was situated just inside the southern perimeter of Altindere, which nowadays was a national park.

The city of Trabzon lay along the southern curve of the Black Sea. In centuries past, it had been a major port, where merchants from Greece, Italy, and Belgium met with their brethren from the east, buying and selling all manner of goods. The rise of the Ottoman Empire brought this brief, highly lucrative golden age to an abrupt close. From that time forward, the line between east and west had been indelibly drawn in the blood of Crusaders and Janissaries alike.

The late afternoon was cloudless. The sun struck the stone structure of the clinic at a sharp, raking angle, turning it a deep bronze color, as if it were made of metal. An odd, purplish tint stained the vault of the sky, below which the black crosses of vultures silently wheeled.

Iraj Namazi, the large-framed, charismatic man sitting beside Annika in the backseat, had been speaking about the philosophy of terrorism. “It’s a matter of dislocation,” he was saying now. “After the bomb goes off, the gas is released, the plane or train is blown up, what is your real and lasting accomplishment? Beyond the immediate carnage, you have cut off the survivors—the families and friends of the victims who die in the attack—from the security of the past, while at the same time showing them the absolute uncertainty of the future. You have effectively isolated them in a present they can no longer recognize. That is the essence of terror.”

The car stopped at the portico, held up by six fluted Greek columns. Namazi said, “
Chérie
, you are unusually quiet. What are you thinking?”

Annika was considering that it was horribly dangerous letting the Syrian anywhere near here. This was, after all, her sacred space, and truth be told, her grandfather’s, long before her, but she was bound to a wheel that only went forward. She had made a promise to her grandfather to keep moving closer and closer to Namazi. This particular form of intimacy was a vital part of his plan—never mind that she hated it. One did what one had to do—that was how her grandfather had raised her. Doing his bidding was ingrained in her, like the grit of dust in the boards of an old house sitting on the prairie. Long ago she had sacrificed her own life to be part of her grandfather’s plan. And how could she not? He had saved her from a father who had abducted her, abused her both physically and emotionally. That was a debt she would never be able to fully repay, though every day she woke up into a nightmare, trying.

“I was thinking what a discussion between you and Friedrich Nietzsche would be like,” she said in a perfectly neutral voice.

“Do you think me a nihilist, then?”

“All terrorists are, by definition, nihilists.”

“But,
chérie
, I love living so much!” Namazi opened the door, but before he could step out, she put a hand on his forearm.

“No, Iraj.”

His dark eyes searched her face, so that she felt scorched inside.

“You don’t want me with you?”

She kissed him on the lips. “You’re sweet,” she said quietly.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t have phoned him.”

“Dr. Karalian was a close friend of my grandfather’s, his longtime chess opponent. Sometimes bad news must be delivered in person. Please wait for me here.”

He took a deep breath, then nodded. “Very well.”

She stepped over him and onto the gravel of the driveway. Before she could turn away, he took her hand.

“Take as much time as you need,
chérie
.” He kissed the back of her hand and let it go.

She smiled at him, then faced the clinic’s stone facade. A brisk wind brought the lemon-balsam aroma of frankincense as the pine branches dipped and swayed. She lifted her head to the cliff face, to the ancient monastery. There had been good times here, as well as evil.

For a moment, time froze, as she stood paralyzed on the wide, basalt steps, crushed by the irony. Then, sounds and colors returned to normal, and she went up the remainder of the steps, into the cool, dim interior, echoing with the footsteps of doctors and nurses. The interior was lush with tropical plants, spotlit with sunlamps. The domed ceiling was encrusted with a mosaic of the luminous night sky and its constellations, depicted as the heroes and creatures of their names: Hercules; Draco, the dragon; Ursa Major and Minor, the bears; Lynx; Leo, the lion; Serpens Caput, the serpent. Overstuffed chairs in small groupings were placed on either side of the circular space, which was dominated by the receptionist’s station made of Lebanese cedar, polished to a high gloss.