Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (27 page)

“You know, Evgeny, another time and I might try to turn you as we did Schell Devoe.”

“And look what happened to him.” His flinty eyes remained on her. “But you must know by now that I can never return to Russia. It is no longer my home. It probably never was, but I still fight for her. It is the only reason you are sitting safely beside me now.”

“No, it isn’t,” Ava said confidently. “You didn’t come to Charleston for Russia. You came to save Liesl.”

Liesl was unprepared for Evgeny’s transparent response.

“She had suffered enough.”

The silence inside the van threatened to crystallize before anyone spoke again. Then Ava cleared her throat. “We have work to do, don’t we?” altering the course of dialogue.

Evgeny eyed her sharply. “The reverend didn’t know where we were going today. How did you find us on City Island?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.” Her face was impassive. “And what I know is too little to arm us.”

“Us?”

“Inside the church are two FBI agents who once helped me protect Liesl from you … before you decided she had suffered enough.” Ava poured grit into that last remark.

The tension suddenly grew palpable. “Get out, both of you!” Evgeny commanded.

“No, Evgeny!” Liesl cried. “Isn’t this what you wanted? To prove what was happening to someone who could stop it?”

“That is what you were to do—after I was gone!” Evgeny snapped. “Do not think for a second the CIA would not love to throw a net over me and haul me in.”

Liesl turned to Ava. “You can’t do that, Ava. He’s trying to help and you need him. You don’t know the things I’ve seen.” She leaned hard toward Ava. “We saw Ben Hafner enter the home of a Russian spy! He was
with
Jeremy Rubin. Do you know what that means?” She was still reeling from the sight.

Ava searched Liesl’s face. “Yes, I do. And I’m sorry, Liesl. I know that’s painful for you.”

Liesl reared back and frowned at her. “How long have you known?”

“Never mind that.”

Liesl summoned her composure. “Well, what about Cass Rodino? You don’t know what’s happened to her.”

“I do now. I’ve already spoken to her. I came here to the church first. She told me about her stepfather and the break-in at her apartment.”

Evgeny threw up his hands. “What is this, a talk show?” he fumed, rounding on Ava. “Your whole country is about to blow wide open and all you want to do is talk!” He reached for the ignition key. “And I’m not waiting around for my own hanging!”

Just as he turned the key, though, the side door to the church opened and Cass emerged, followed by Jordan and two dark-suited men. Ava instantly sprang from the van. “Stay inside!” she ordered, and Liesl realized she was addressing the two agents. They stopped and stared at her, their hands reaching for weapons. “Stand down!” she ordered again, advancing on them. “Go back inside.” The men took obvious affront to the orders, but retreated just inside the doorway. They left the door open and their path to the van clear. They now watched it like hungry hawks.

Ava and Cass drew close to each other, discussing something of apparent urgency. Moments later, Ava returned with Cass to the van, leaving Jordan in the company of two agitated agents.

As soon as the sliding door to the van opened, Cass announced, “Hans is leaving the apartment at five o’clock. I finally reached my mom. She’s in a panic to know where he’s going.”

“Does she have any idea?” Evgeny barked.

“No. But it’s already after four. We have to follow him!”

Evgeny looked away a moment, obviously sorting through his options.

“Evgeny, you and I have a job to do … together,” Ava insisted. “Now, let’s get on with it.”

He turned and looked severely at Ava. “You come alone and keep your boys away from me. Understood?”

Ava agreed, then raced to the gray truck, grabbed her bag, and returned to the van. “Jordan isn’t happy about staying behind,” she told Cass as the van sped from the church. “But we’ve got too many civilians in tow as it is.” Then she turned to Evgeny. “I need to order surveillance on the Kluen apartment.” She eyed him carefully, as if for approval. “Far away from you,” she added, using his words. “But we’ve got to have it.”

He eyed her sternly, then nodded. She grabbed her phone, addressed someone named Mark, and ordered immediate backup and surveillance on the Tribeca building. After the call, Liesl asked, “Was that Mark Delaney?” She remembered the FBI special agent who’d first ushered this mania into her quiet Charleston home. He and his men had callously probed its sacred places in an exhaustive search for the sonata code, mindless of the already fractured soul of the house. But Liesl had finally understood.

“Yes,” Ava answered, but her attention was on Evgeny. Liesl watched her eyes probe his granite expression. “There’s something you should know, Evgeny,” she finally said. “I coerced my way into this operation. Timing was everything. I recently discovered that our intelligence had picked up signals about something huge going down soon within our borders. Then you showed up in Charleston. I entered this equation the instant you grabbed Liesl.

“But there’s something else you should know,” she added. “I had to convince my superiors that if the things you told Liesl about this Architect—which, by the way, Cade immediately related to me—were true, our greatest assets were you and your contacts. It wasn’t an easy task to call the authorities, especially Mark Delaney, off you or get them to allow me to work alongside you.”

“Terrific. I have a sidekick now … who knows nothing about nothing.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Ava said. “But this isn’t about competition between old enemies, which of us knows more. We don’t have time for that. If you’re real and not some elaborate KGB foil, you and I will have to consolidate everything we know to abort this thing. Can you do that?”

Evgeny took a corner well over safe speed, and Ava grabbed her door handle with both hands, flinging a visual reprimand his way.

“Can
you
?” he snapped.

Before Ava could reply, Evgeny swung into a parking spot near the Kluens’ building. It was almost five.

The four of them watched the door to the lobby and waited, but not for long. “There’s the punctual man now,” Cass announced bitterly. Dressed in a loose-fitting jacket and dark woolen pants, Hans Kluen headed down the sidewalk to an adjacent parking garage. Most notably, he rolled a small suitcase behind him. “He looks like a man leaving home,” Cass noted, now with a trace of sadness.

“So he’s got a car parked in the garage?” Ava asked.

“Yes,” Cass answered. “Hardly uses it.”

“But you’ll know it when you see it?”

“Big old navy blue Mercedes. The only thing missing are those little foreign diplomat flags on both sides of the hood.”

“As soon as you identify the car for us, you must leave us and go to your mother,” Evgeny instructed.

Cass pounced on that. “But I want to go with you. Don’t leave me out of this.”

“That is not the case at all,” Evgeny said emphatically. “You are providing a service to us and certainly your mother. If Hans contacts her soon, we need to know what his message is.” He glanced back at Cass. “Beyond that, I should think you would want to comfort her.”

Cass stared at the floor a moment, then raised her head. “You’re right.” She grabbed the backpack beside her and looked compassionately at Liesl. “Keep your head down.”

“Liesl won’t be going with us, either,” Ava announced. “Delaney is ordering a security detail around you both.”

“Oh, this again,” Liesl bristled. “The what-do-we-do-about-Liesl scenario.” She leaned forward. “Ava, don’t you think I’ve earned enough stripes in the trenches with you to be treated like one of the soldiers now?”

“Never,” Ava replied, turning to face her. “You were never meant to be a soldier. Only a survivor. And I intend to see that you remain one.” Her
voice
dropped somberly. “I failed you in Charleston yesterday. It’s not going to happen again.”

Liesl fixed on her friend’s battle-weary face, at the complexity sizzling beneath. Was this the same woman who’d taught music alongside Schell Devoe at Harvard? Had his treason and her role in uncovering it so transformed Ava Mullins that she’d forgotten where she left her old self?

But as Ava turned back to face the road, Liesl remembered that the woman had once told her, “There is something more powerful than guns and missiles that will save our troops. Something that would have prevented the deaths of thousands on that morning of September 11—information. It’s the most critical weapon we have against our enemies.”

When Liesl had probed for more, knowing there had to be something else driving the agent, Ava had answered, “My son is a marine serving in Iraq. Every moment, his life depends on the accuracy of information his commanding officers receive from people like me. That’s why I never returned to Harvard once the CIA recruited me. You might say the war drowned out the music. … I begged the agency to take me on full-time. I had no choice but to protect my son in that way. But now that I know the things I know, I do it for all those who go to sleep at night
not
knowing those things.”

Now, Liesl watched Ava’s profile, the scanning eyes taking in her surroundings, the raw energy pulsing through every limb. Her CIA personnel file may be stamped
retired
, but her superiors who knew the resilient undergirding of the fifteen-year veteran—especially as she related to the lightning rod Liesl Bower—had ranked her a perennial asset on call.

“Okay, Liesl,” Ava said. “You and Cass go with those agents just pulling up now.” Liesl watched a dark sedan park across the street. There appeared to be three or four people inside. “You’ll wait with them until your escort back to the church arrives. From there, you’ll go to an FBI safe house.”

Cass shot forward in her seat. “There’s the car!”

They watched the Mercedes ease from the garage. “Wait until he turns and cannot see you,” Evgeny instructed. “Then you girls hop out and go with your guards.”

When the Mercedes took a sharp right out of the garage, three men
and
a woman emptied from the sedan and approached the van. As the agents escorted Liesl and Cass toward the apartment building, Evgeny merged with traffic and fell in behind the Mercedes, a couple of taxis separating them. Liesl looked over her shoulder at the departing van.

“Feel like yesterday’s garbage?” Cass asked as the agents opened the glass door to the lobby and led them inside. “Like once you were vital, and now you’re not?”

What’s clawing at her?
Liesl wondered. She watched Cass push a lock of blond hair off her fine-boned face. Liesl turned to the agents and asked them to wait a moment before taking Cass upstairs, then pulled the young girl aside. “Would you like for me to come with you to your mom’s apartment? Maybe I can send my babysitter escorts away when they arrive.”

Pressing her lips together, Cass shook her head and smiled weakly. “Mom would freak even more if a stranger arrived while she was having one of her meltdowns.” She looked toward the agents, two guarding the door, the other two standing nearby. “I’ve spent years trying to sugarcoat the hard times for her,” Cass continued, a wary eye on their bodyguards. “I just wanted to make her believe things weren’t so bad, that my father, her first husband, didn’t mean to slap her … or me. Didn’t mean to bed down every woman he could. When those things happened, I’d take her for walks in the park. We’d go shopping and spend obscene amounts of his money. I’d force her to lunch in the Oak Room, then gorge her with Godiva chocolates—like creature comforts would numb her to the misery at home. But that was a lie, and we both knew it.”

Liesl waited a moment, then asked, “But what about you, Cass?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you tell yourself lies?”

Cass stepped back, and Liesl regretted her ill-timed inquisition. But then the expression on the young face changed. Unexpectedly, Cass broke away and approached the agents. Liesl heard her ask if they’d allow her and Liesl to sit in a back alcove of the lobby. She got the go-ahead.

“Come with me,” she said to Liesl when she returned. “We’ll keep an eye out for your babysitter.” Liesl could see something just behind the eyes, behind the airy talk. And she could hear it, a plaintive cry.

They crossed the black-marble floor and passed near the abstract sculpture at the center of the lobby. “Tell me what you see,” Cass urged, nodding toward the imposing form.

Liesl paused to examine the sculpture, the nuance of human form, the fluid lines, curves of slick steel, one inside another. “It’s a mother and her unborn child.”

For some reason, the shock on Cass’s face pleased Liesl. It was raw and honest, concealing nothing.

“Wait till I tell Jordan about this.”

Liesl looked at her curiously but kept following. They entered the alcove and settled onto a cane-back settee with a view of the street. Cass squirmed and clasped her hands together. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, Liesl, except that right off, you saw me for what I am.” She looked down and repeatedly slid the toe of one boot in a tight elliptical pattern against the marble. Then the foot halted. “Maybe my mom and your ride to the church will hold off long enough for me to do this.” She placed her backpack on the floor in front of her, her foot on the move again, flexing back and forth against the bag’s canvas side. “Something happened between me and a good friend when I was nineteen. She didn’t survive. I’m not sure I did.”