“Think he’ll lead us to our man?” asked Conley.
“He’d better,” said Morgan. “Because I’m getting tired of this shit.”
C
HAPTER
31
M
organ and Conley caught up with Hodges’s town car in a few minutes, and Conley maintained a distance of a few blocks between them. They avoided visual contact—there was no need for it while they had the tracker. They drove for nearly an hour, as the city gave way to an industrial suburb. As the cars grew sparser, Conley had to keep a greater distance to avoid being seen, until they were almost a mile behind their quarry. Finally, the little dot on the map came to a stop.
They were driving alongside a row of warehouses, run-down and separated from the street by a rusty old chain-link fence topped with equally rusty barbed wire. He could see Hodges’s car peeking out of a gaping section of one labeled Warehouse 6, which was about two hundred feet away. As Conley drove past without slowing down, Morgan saw Hodges get out of the driver’s seat and stride furiously into the warehouse, where two guards were posted at the door. Conley turned into a narrow side street and parked the car.
“Got the camera?” asked Conley. Morgan pulled out a digital SLR with a massive telephoto lens. They got out of the car and slinked toward Warehouse 6, which was now half a mile away. They were halfway there when Conley held up a hand, in their old signal that meant “stop.” “Hold on,” he said. “I think someone else is coming.”
They bolted behind a Dumpster as another car, a sleek silver Audi sedan, rolled in through the gate in the fence and into the open warehouse door.
Morgan scanned the surroundings. He couldn’t go in through the same gate as the car, or he would be seen, and the fence was too high to climb over. The warehouses closest to them, he had noticed, were liberally covered in graffiti. His eyes ran along the fence, looking for something he knew must be there. He found it, a short way back toward where they had parked—a gap in the fence, concealed, not large, but large enough for him to squeeze through.
“Conley, I’m going in.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I need to see who it is. I need to hear what they’re saying. Do you have your comm?” Conley nodded. “Good. Try to get a clear view of the inside from out here. I’ll keep you posted when I can.”
Before Conley could protest, Morgan ran for the gap in the fence, pulling a thread in his shirt as he wriggled through it. He dashed for the warehouse, taking cover behind car-sized boxes wrapped in tarp that were arranged in the yard, until he approached number six.
Now what?
He was too likely to be seen if he approached from the front, but coming in from the back would put a huge empty warehouse between him and his targets. That’s when he looked up at the graffiti again.
It hung down like a hem over the edge. The roof here was not at the very top of the warehouse but was over a squatter area that jutted from its side. The kids who tagged it had to have gotten up there somehow. If they could, so could he. He ran along the side of the warehouse through the little alley between it and the one next to it. He got his answer when he rounded the back corner and found a service ladder that led to the roof.
He climbed it, slowly, steadily, as quietly as possible, until it took him to the top. Over the edge, he saw—beyond the small nest of discarded joint tips and cigarette butts—just what he hoped for: windows, waist-high from the top surface of the lower tier.
His real problem, of course, was the roof itself. It looked strong enough to hold him, but even a light step might reverberate loudly in the expansive hollow of the warehouse. This was the time to be careful and methodical. He made his way across the roof, one . . . step . . . at . . . a . . . time.
What should have been a thirty-second walk at a leisurely pace took him nearly three minutes of cautious, deliberate movement. He could just barely hear the voices of two men barking at each other below. Standing right above them, he peeked into the window, concealing himself as much as possible. He could see them both, but it took him a few seconds to make out the other man’s face through the glare from the clear blue sky.
Son of a bitch.
“Cougar,” he said, only loud enough for Conley to hear him over the comm, “it’s Nickerson. It’s Senator Edgar Nickerson.”
“Shit,” said Conley, through his earpiece. “We got him, Cobra. That’s all we needed. Now get the hell out of there.”
“I need to hear what they’re saying.”
“Cobra, don’t be stupid. We have our lead. Sticking around is suicide.”
Morgan chose to ignore Conley. Chances like this didn’t come around every day. He edged closer to the window. The roof underneath him creaked, and he froze. But the two men seemed to take no notice, so he leaned in and listened.
“The son of a bitch knows, Ed. He’s got proof.”
“He didn’t ask for anything?”
“No. He basically came out and said that the point was just to rattle us.”
“I’m glad to see that’s not working at all.”
“You think I’m scared? I’m not scared of that . . . that piece of crap. He’ll be begging for me to let him die by the time I’m done with him.”
“I’m sure. Do you know who that piece of crap is, Les? He’s a former CIA spook. A good one, too. You think your hired monkeys can take him? You think they can outsmart a man like him? You think
you
can, Les?”
“I took care of the journalist, didn’t I?”
“You sent your goons to ‘disappear’ some uppity little basset hound who got a whiff of a Pulitzer, and you think you can handle this?”
“And what would you do, huh?”
“Forget it, Les. I’ll take care of it. Just have your men stay out of my way.”
The roof under Morgan creaked again. Nickerson looked up. “What was that?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
It wasn’t nothing. The surface under Morgan’s feet was wobbling. The corroded structure of that corner of the roof was buckling under his weight.
“It’s just some animal or something, Ed.”
He had to get out of there. He got up, slowly, but even the shifting of his weight was too much, and the whole roof deck emitted a long, low groan.
“There’s someone up there!”
It took about five seconds from when Nickerson said those words to the moment shots began flying at Morgan. With no thought of stealth, he made for the ladder. Bullets punctured the roof, which shook unsteadily underneath him. Each step telegraphed his location to the shooters, and the bullets were never very wide off their mark. He ran to the edge.
The ladder. There was no time to turn around. He bent down and, holding the top rung, swung over into empty space. But he was too heavy, the structure too old. The screws that held the ladder in place were ripped out, and Morgan, clutching the ladder tightly, fell backward into empty space.
The ladder twisted with a metallic whine, bending under his weight and hurtling him toward the ground. He braced for impact; but instead, it jerked his arm hard, holding him some three feet off the ground. It held, bent like a decrepit old man, but it held. Morgan breathed a sigh of relief and dropped to the ground.
With shots still resounding inside the warehouse, Morgan ran, taking the back route to Conley and the car. They would reconvene and find a way to get to Nickerson. They would—
A pipe swung out of nowhere in front of his eyes, and then pain, blinding pain, and he was on the ground. His addled brain tried to make sense of things.
Someone hidden around the corner of the next warehouse, waiting for him
. He was struggling to hold on, to stay awake, but oblivion washed over him in waves. Just before he was completely submerged, he saw the sinister, arresting beauty of T’s face looking at him and smiling, perversely, like a rogue elf at Christmas.
C
HAPTER
32
M
organ and T collapsed together on the bed, side by side, taut young bodies glistening with sweat.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” Morgan said, still gasping for air.
“I think it may have left a few,” she said as she looked him over.
His own eyes followed the curves of her nakedness and how the morning light, filtering in through sheer curtains, played on her porcelain skin. Outside, birds chirped, and intermittently he heard the dull ring of cowbells, and an occasional moo—the sounds of an alpine village.
“I hope,” said T, stretching catlike on the bed, “that we have not bothered Frau Kappel. There isn’t another inn for miles and miles.”
He smiled at her and stroked her soft hair. She leaned in and gave him a lingering kiss. “I love you,” she said in a whisper.
Morgan, at a loss, didn’t respond. He knew, of course, how to lie, and had this been an assignment, he would have reciprocated convincingly. But his relationship with Natasha had long since ceased to be an assignment, and the last thing he would do would be to deceive her. The truth was, he could not honestly tell her the same. She looked down, disappointed at his hesitation.
“Checkers?” he suggested hopefully. It was clumsy, but it was an out for both of them. She nodded weakly. He arranged the pieces on the board, which was already laid out on a table from an earlier game. She looked out the window silently, then sat across from him.
They had played more than a hundred games of checkers since that first night. Every game had been riveting, a true match of wills, and all their matches, every single one of them, had ended in a stalemate. But her game that day was slow and distracted, and she made two mistakes toward the beginning that put even the stalemate into jeopardy. She seemed agitated, nervous.
“Hey, listen, T, I . . .” he began. “I’m sorry, all right?”
She scowled at him. “It’s not that, you idiot.”
“Then what is it?”
“The mission. Going back there. It frightens me.” She grimaced, scrunching her delicate face, and then with a roar of rage flung the checkerboard at a far wall. The board made a visible dent in the finish.
“You could just stay, you know,” he said softly.
“No. I can’t.”
“There’s no reason for you to go back.” he insisted. “Stay here. Let us take care of this for you. We’ll bring your brother to you.”
“No. You know that if I don’t go back, they will kill him.”
He didn’t have an answer for her. He knew it was probably true. He’d gladly trade her brother’s life for hers, any day. But her feelings for her brother, he knew, went beyond just familial piety. She loved him, loved him dearly. “He kept us alive,” she had once told him. “When my father died, and as my mother slowly killed herself with drink. He was my father and mother then. I owed him the shoes on my feet and the clothes on my back. I owed him my daily bread. I would have languished, cold and starving, without him. But he provided for me, and he taught me to live. If I had many lifetimes to give, it would still not repay—” Her voice cracked, and she turned away from him, covering her face. That was the only occasion he had ever seen her cry.
“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do to convince you to stay?” he asked her, one last time.
“No. Just hold me,” she said. Outside, a cowbell rang.
He held her tight and made love to her one more time.
C
HAPTER
33
M
organ regained consciousness with a start and found himself in a room with concrete walls, a concrete floor and ceiling, and exposed pipes that emerged from concrete to end in concrete. It was all concrete except for a rusted metal door that looked shut tightly from the outside.
Still groggy, he tried to move his arms and noticed that he was handcuffed to one of the pipes, which was thicker than his thigh and stretched from floor to ceiling. He was seated on a metal chair, his feet tied to its legs. The only other thing in the room was a table against a side wall. He saw all this by the dead yellow light of a dim, incandescent bulb that hung from a wire. The room was dark and damp. Why did these places always have to be dark and damp?
He racked his brain, trying to remember being brought there, how long he’d been out, or any clue as to where he might be, but it was no use. He wondered about Conley. Had he tried to attack T after Morgan was captured? If so, was Conley sitting in an identical room, a few yards over? Or maybe he was dead and stuffed in the trunk of a car. But there was nothing Morgan could do to help him now, and he had to assume that Conley had no way of helping him, either.
He ran his fingers along the handcuffs. They were high-security, hard to pick even if he had something to pick them with. Nor would he have time to, he realized when he heard footsteps echoing faintly from outside the door, getting louder. They stopped just outside, he heard the sliding of a dead bolt, and the door creaked open. It was T. Beautiful, deadly Natasha, wearing formfitting black pants, a black top, and heavy boots that contrasted starkly with her fair skin and hair.
“I see you are awake. I was getting concerned that you would be out for the whole day.” She was calm and breezy, a cat playing with her prey.
“I’m not dead yet,” he said, shaking off the haze. “Which means you must still want something from me.”
“How very American of you,” she said. “All business. No time for old friends.” She was still stunning, and even now, her presence woke something intoxicating in him. He had the feeling she knew it, too. Even now, she moved seductively, looking at him with those deep, alluring eyes. “Well, then, here is the business, Cobra. You have some photographs. Photographs in which I believe I am featured.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to worry, sweetheart. They got you on your good side.”
T smirked. “Ah, yes, I had forgotten. Cobra laughs in the face of death. But you won’t be laughing very long, I don’t think.”
“Oh, is it the threat portion of our evening already?”
“I assure you,” she said, her eyes narrowing, “it will be very short.”
“Then let’s get to it, shall we? Tell me you’re going to torture me until I tell you what you want to know. Tell me I can stop it at any time, whenever I want, that all I have to do is talk, and you’ll let me go.”
“I will not tell you that I will let you go. I believe that would be an insult to your intelligence. You know very well that I will not let you leave this room alive. But answer my questions, and I promise you that your death will be quick.”
“Go ahead and make it slow if you want to. My schedule’s wide open.”
She remained unflappable. “Humor,” she said. “The last refuge of the weak. You won’t be cracking jokes after I’ve worked you over for a few hours.”
“I’ll be cracking jokes until long after you’re dead,” he said.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I like it when they are cocky. It’s that much sweeter when they break. Do you want to know how it’s going to go, Morgan? Why don’t I tell you, you know, out of professional courtesy? We are going to start off light. I start you off with no permanent damage. No toys, no tools. If you talk then, you will still be a reasonably good-looking corpse. But if you don’t answer all my questions, then I start getting creative.
“I like to improvise—did you know that? I’m not one of those who likes to carry around a little toolbox with dainty little instruments like a surgeon. Why would you want to, when you know the damage you can do with everyday implements—a hammer, a pair of pliers, a vise. Who needs all this precision equipment when all you really need is access to your neighborhood hardware store?”
“I tend to prefer Home Depot myself,” he said. “They have the best selection of torture gadgets anywhere in the lower forty-eight. Listen, if you’re going to go on much longer, do you mind if I step out to use the bathroom?”
She didn’t hold back her laughter. Morgan knew that she was in control, and so did she.
“Why don’t we get started, then?” she said.
“Please, go ahead,” he said, nonchalantly. “Here, I was starting to think you had decided to bore me into talking—”
The back of her hand hit him across the face before he saw it coming, stinging his cheek. The impact made his head and his injured nose ring with pain.
“Where is the memory card?” she demanded. He stared ahead. She hit him harder.
“Who else knows?” Another smack jangled his senses, followed by another and another.
He touched his tongue to where his teeth had cut into his stinging cheek and tasted blood. He looked into her eyes and gave her a mocking, red-toothed smile to mask his anger. He wasn’t going to give her any satisfaction. “You hit like a girl.”
“You really think you can annoy your way out of this situation?”
He shrugged. “Worked once in Nicaragua.”
T laughed uproariously. “You amuse me, Cobra, even now. You really haven’t changed. Still the same posturing fool you were before. Tell me, do you still believe that all you did was justified by a noble cause? Do you still believe you are an honorable man?”
“I don’t believe it, T,” he said, with a serious tone in his voice. “I know it.”
“Ah, so certain, so pure,” she said sarcastically. “A killer with a pristine soul.”
“I know I’m not like you,” he said. “I’m not a mercenary. I’m not a traitor.” This last word had a sharp edge to it. It was meant to cut deep.
She laughed again, this time bitterly. “You are exactly like me in every way except that you will not admit it. Instead, you play house with your wife and daughter. You pretend to be a normal person in your suburban home with your white picket fence and your dog and two-point-five automobiles. But you know what you are inside. You’re a killer. A willing puppet of the CIA, an agency you knew was corrupt and decadent and weak. An executioner who dresses your murderous instinct in the ideals of nationalism. But beneath it all, Cobra, you’re a killer and nothing more.”
“Believe what you like,” he said. “I know what I know.”
“Do you want to know something else?” she continued. “I was like you once. A believer. Do you think I defected to America because I found it convenient, or because the CIA offered me more money or a more comfortable life? You know different. I didn’t care for those things. It hurt me deeply to leave my homeland. But I had grown to abhor the history of my country, and the crimes that persisted even after the Soviet Union fell. All the while I grew to believe in American ideals. In freedom. I truly wanted to be an American. I was willing to risk my life for it, and to continue to risk my life in the service of the country I chose.
“And then,” she continued, her voice rising to a fever pitch, “I found out you murdered my brother. What hypocrites—this government, the Agency, and you, with your own double standard. You, Cobra, who’s supposedly so full of honor, so loyal! But I finally found out the truth. There is no honor, no higher calling or true cause. Only petty men lusting for power and money. The truth, the truth that you know deep down inside, Cobra, is that the lying scumbags are right. Power is the only currency of the world. It is the only thing that matters in the end. I know you know this, because I learned it from you.”
“That’s a pretty neat story . . . very deep stuff,” he said acerbically. “Except it’s all bullshit.”
“Liar!” she cried, suddenly livid. “Is it bullshit that my brother is dead? Is it bullshit that you killed him, murdered him in Prague when you were supposed to help him escape—when his survival was the only condition, the only thing I asked for in return for my defection? No! The bullshit, the lie, is what was fed to me after that, told to me by the people I had trusted, by the very government that I had sworn my allegiance to at great personal peril. You told me Andrei was killed by Russian Intelligence in Prague, isn’t that right? Isn’t that the official story? Isn’t that what was told to me to cover up the fact that
you
killed him?”
He sighed, looking down. “You weren’t supposed to know.”
“So do you admit it, then? From your own lips? You admit you killed Andrei?”
“Yes, Natasha,” he said, looking her in the eye and keeping a steady voice. “I killed your brother. I don’t deny it. But I did not betray you;
he
did. He was giving you up to his superiors. It was going to be a big feather in his cap—an agent so loyal, he turned in his own sister.”
“More lies!”
“It’s true, T. We wanted your brother on our side as much as we wanted you. Why would we want to kill him? He had already betrayed you. If I hadn’t stopped him, you would never have made it to Paris.”
“No,” she said, but her confidence was wavering. “Andrei would not have done that. He couldn’t have!”
“Couldn’t he, Natasha? Wasn’t that the kind of man he was? Fiercely loyal to Mother Russia, no matter what?”
“No,” she said weakly, but it didn’t sound like she believed it anymore. She was hunched over, the palms of her hands on the table supporting her weight. All the catlike elegance was gone, all pretense of seduction. She seemed all of a sudden weak and defenseless.
“We’re not enemies, T,” he said, in the most comforting voice that he could muster. “There’s no reason for us to be fighting.”
She looked at him, and, for a second, he thought she was moving to untie him, that he had gained an ally, made his enemy a friend. Then, like flipping a switch, her face contorted into an expression of bitter amusement, all the vulnerability that had been there a second before, gone. She cackled like a hyena. “Well done, Cobra. No wonder you survived so long in the business. Not only are you quick on your feet, but you can spin a good story in a tight spot. You even got me—
me
—there, for a second.”
“Natasha. Natasha. T, listen to me. I’m not lying to you,” he insisted. “We should be on the same side.”
“Of course you are lying. We are all liars.” She took a dirty, oily cloth and stuffed it into his mouth. “You chose your side when you killed Andrei. There is nothing else to say.”
She swung her hand hard across his face once more, and he bit down hard on the cloth in his mouth. “Okay, Cobra,” she said. “Let us get started, then, shall we?”