Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (5 page)

A light sleet had begun to fall, tracking delicately against the pane. Outside, few people were on the street, now cast in the gauzy blaze of electric light filtered through the freezing rain.

“Hans worries me,” came the voice from behind him. Sonya Tretsky lowered herself heavily into the French provincial chair, her plump hips wedging between the slim, gilded arms with hardly enough padded cushion on top to support her own fleshier arms. “Regardless of the all-is-well picture he painted for us last night, I was doubtful enough to do some checking today. I am told he is not monitoring his people as he should.”

“Who told you that?” Ivan asked without turning from the window.

“Other overseers. There are only four of us running the whole network.
We
cannot afford mismanagement. So I routinely check on how the other three overseers are handling their people.”

“And what exactly did they tell you this time?” He lifted his glass to his lips, feeling the silky swish of his sleeve as he raised and lowered his strong arm. His seventy years were disguised by a youthful body.

“The dam engineer has not heard from Hans in months. And now the man wonders if that target has been abandoned. After all these years, he fears he has been compromised and should flee his post.”

Ivan set down his glass and finally turned to face her. He brushed a hand over his neatly clipped gray hair, then crossed his arms and studied Sonya for a moment. She was handsome, but not feminine. Her large, soft green eyes had a radiating effect, as if something hypnotic stirred behind them. She’d been the force to reckon with in his Kremlin office many years ago. Now in her fifties, she was his most loyal soldier, committed to the cause, bristling with expectancy of how high it would take her into the resurrected Soviet Socialist Republic of Russia. Take all of them. And the time was near.

He smiled at his longtime compatriot. “I am glad you made such inquiries.” He paused to think. “Let me take care of it. Perhaps Hans needs to draw closer to the action, to feel more personally invested in it. He is still a valuable member of our network.”

She looked doubtful. “Are you confident he is in full charge of the inauguration?”

“I am. Everything is in place to my satisfaction.”

“January 20 is less than a week away,” she persisted. “You can understand the security net I have watched fall over the Capitol and Mall. You are certain Hans’s Secret Service agent is completely under our control?”

“Everything is in motion, Sonya. Do not worry.”

She rose steadily from her chair and reached for her handbag on the floor. “I leave for Washington in the morning. I have much to—”

The doorbell rang. Sonya looked sharply at Ivan.

He strode casually to the door and lifted the cover over the peephole. A young man he’d never seen before stood on the other side. Ivan watched him look nervously around the hallway before turning back to the door. “Who is there?” Ivan asked bluntly.

“Uh, I’m looking for a friend and not sure if I have the right floor. Could you help me?”

Ivan paused. “What is your friend’s name?”

“Last name’s Hamilton, I think.”

Ivan knew none of his neighbors. This was one of six residences he kept throughout the world. He was about to dismiss this lost person when a sudden instinct halted him. Something wasn’t right.

Against Sonya’s low-issued warnings coming from behind him, Ivan suddenly flung open the door and confronted the visitor head-on. The young man was clearly startled. “You
think
you know this so-called friend’s name?” Ivan’s old KGB interrogative edge surfaced. He noted the awkward stance of this man who stood a head taller and probably twenty pounds heavier. “You are not even sure whom you are looking for?”

The young man stammered a reply. “I’m, uh … uh … sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” But before he turned to go, he seemed to make a deliberate attempt to look past Ivan into the apartment. “My apologies, ma’am.” Then he excused himself and walked toward the elevator, never looking back.

Even before Ivan closed the door, he motioned with his hand behind him, a clear directive for Sonya to follow the man into the street.

She threw on her coat, grabbed her bag again, and the moment the young man disappeared into the elevator, Sonya stepped quickly down the stairs. The man had already exited the building when she emerged from the stairwell. She pushed open the front door and, from behind one of the tall potted cedar trees flanking the entrance to the building, she watched him almost sprint toward a small car parked at the end of the block. He didn’t leave immediately, and Sonya was about to head that way, but the car finally pulled from the curb and approached. As it drew almost even with her position, she stepped boldly from behind the cedar to peer into its front seat, noting what she believed to be a female in the passenger seat,
her
face partially concealed by the hood of her coat and a misty film on the window.

As the car passed, Sonya memorized the license plate number, then recorded it on a pad from her bag. She looked back at the retreating car and smirked. “I’ve got you!”

Chapter 7

T
hat was no mistress,” Jordan reported when he dropped into the driver’s seat beside Cass, who fidgeted with anticipation of his news. “Fifties. Dowdy. Got that Friar Tuck haircut going. Built sort of, uh, broadly. Didn’t smile a whole lot, either. Neither did the man. He was an older, feisty kind of guy, maybe sixties.”

“So what happened?” she asked expectantly, pushing a lock of hair back under her hood.

Jordan described the brief encounter as he cranked the engine and turned in his seat, waiting for an opening in the traffic.

“Were they rude?” Cass asked.

“No, but suspicious. It’s New York. Who isn’t?” He pulled from the curb and merged with the traffic, heading toward the apartment building he’d just left. “Guy had an accent,” he added. “Sort of Russian sounding. Woman didn’t speak, just glared at … oh, I think that’s her by the door!”

Cass turned slightly to see the woman, but the side window was too fogged for a good look.

“She is really giving us the once over,” Jordan said as they passed by. He glanced in his rearview mirror. “And still looking. What’s that all about?”

Cass was at a loss to understand. She recalled her mother’s frightened face the morning she’d asked Cass to trail her stepfather. The cover-shot
face
had lost its poise and sagged into despair. But how could Cass help when all she knew was a world of make-believe?

Jordan lightly patted her knee. “You know what this is? It’s just Hans paying a house call on one of his investment clients. Don’t they do that with the high rollers?”

Cass looked appreciatively at his effort to allay her fears. “Maybe.” It was possible, she considered, and much preferable to infidelity. Cass had witnessed enough of that growing up in the household of an imperial alpha male who set no boundaries to his lusts for money, power, and other women. By her teenage years, Cass had lost hope that her mother would ever extract herself from such devastation, she alone clinging to her vows.

“I don’t believe there’s anything to this, Cass, so let’s drop it into a tall cappuccino and get rid of it. Ready?” They were approaching their neighborhood.

But Cass could only see her mother’s desperate eyes, pleading for her daughter’s help.

“Jordan, I need to see my mom. It’s time you met her and Hans anyway, now that you’re an accomplice. Will you go with me?”

He slowed the car and considered it. After a moment, he nodded. “I’d like that. Where to?”

It wasn’t far from SoHo to the Tribeca apartment of Jillian and Hans Kluen, who were now expecting them. Jordan had insisted that Cass alert them to their—particularly his—coming. “I don’t want to take anybody else by surprise tonight,” he’d said.

After wedging the Honda into the only curb space they could find, Jordan and Cass walked the two blocks to a converted textile warehouse. Jordan looked up at the ochre-hued building that rose about five floors. Like other industrial buildings in the Tribeca district, this one had been repurposed and renovated for residential space, some of the priciest in New York.

Jordan opened a gleaming oak door inset with elaborately etched glass, and they entered a lobby floored in black marble. In the center of the space was a slender, stainless-steel sculpture of something abstract and wholly unidentifiable to Jordan, he admitted to Cass.

“It’s a woman with a child in her womb,” she told him.

“Oh, well, thank you. Foolish of me not to see that such a cold, stark piece of steel represents motherhood.”

Cass grinned at him and urged him toward the elevator. “Now behave yourself,” she chided.

The elevator deposited them into a long hallway also in shining black marble, floors and walls. Cass led him to the Kluen apartment and rang a doorbell that resounded in a three-note chime. The door opened immediately and a courtly gentleman wrapped in a soft gray cardigan opened his arms to her. “Cass, sweetheart, we’re so happy to see you … and your friend, uh …”

“Jordan Winslow,” she supplied while stiffly accepting her stepfather’s embrace.

Then the man’s hand reached for Jordan’s and gripped it quite fraternally. “I’m Hans Kluen, Jordan. So pleased to meet you. And this”—he turned, extending his arm and motioning behind him—“is my wife, Jillian.”

Cass’s mother glided toward the door, her mint green caftan sweeping across a frothy white carpet, her eyes momentarily flaring conspiratorially at Cass. She extended a delicate hand toward Jordan, her forefinger mounted with a dazzling emerald cocktail ring. “I’ve been wanting to meet you, young man,” she said in a neutral tone.

Jordan slid a questioning glance at Cass.

“She means she wants to make sure that the man who lives next door to me probably doesn’t keep sharp axes and formaldehyde in his apartment.”

“Cass!” her mother protested.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Kluen,” Jordan said. “I don’t use axes anymore.”

Both Kluens fell mute, their unblinking eyes fixed on Jordan.

“Oh, brother,” Cass moaned and took off toward the kitchen. “Mom, have you got anything to snack on?” she called over her shoulder. But that wasn’t her intent in leaving the room. She glanced back long enough to catch Jordan’s eye and issue a signal for him to stay put.

When her mother followed her into the kitchen, Cass ushered her quickly into the pantry and delivered her report. “There was no one but an older
man
and a not-so-attractive older woman there, Mom. It’s got to be the same man I saw at the window last night. Nothing going on there. I guarantee it.”

Jillian looked away, her freshly powdered brow wrinkling into even folds. “But why—”

“Jordan believes he’s just visiting clients like he said.” Cass second-guessed her mother’s question. “It makes sense, Mom.”

“At that hour? Why not during the business day?”

Cass shrugged. “Maybe that’s the only time he can meet with some of them. Anyway, please don’t work yourself up over nothing. Hans told you it was business, and I believe it is.”

The thin, emerald-clad hand wavered near her mouth, painted delicately in frosty pink. Jillian Kluen never failed to mystify her daughter. In the hour of dread over the fate of her marriage, there was still lipstick and powder. And that familiar pretense so practiced and critical to survival. Cass wanted to mourn for this woman who’d given life to her child, then somehow misplaced her own. When did that happen?

“Jilly, why don’t you bring an hors d’oeuvre tray for us, dear?” Hans called from the living room.

“I’ll be right there,” Jillian answered, her voice lilting on the final syllable. Cass knew the singsong habit her mother sometimes affected to mask her distress.

“Mom, let this go,” she implored. “Hans adores you and always has. Anybody can see that. Why can’t you?”

The pink lips quivered, releasing a tremulous sigh. “I know he does.” She smoothed the flowing skirt of the caftan. “I guess after … after all the years with your father, it’s just hard to believe in adoration.” She extended a cupped hand and held it to her daughter’s chin. “Except the kind I feel for my Cassandra.” She smiled sweetly, then dropped her hand, though her clear blue eyes lingered on Cass just a moment longer. The air shifted, the mood brightened. Now scurrying to retrieve an assortment of small dishes from the refrigerator, Jillian chirped over her shoulder, “Jordan is an eyeful, don’t you think?”