Authors: Derek Haas
“Why should I believe you?”
“You…you shouldn’t.” Clay let him go, and he stumbled back toward his stepsister. “But I’m all you have right now. If I’d been sent to kill you, there wouldn’t have been talking. I would have put bullets in both of you in the time it took to raise that knife.”
The stepbrother held her defensively behind him, an instinctive protective stance Clay found admirable.
“What do you want?”
“Only to help her. If I found you, they’ll find you.”
“She doesn’t know anything.”
“I can see that isn’t true.”
“It’s not her fault. She didn’t want any of this.”
“I believe that, but it doesn’t change what is.”
Clay lowered his arms and assumed his most unthreatening position. He moved his eyes to lock on to hers. He could feel his heart beat faster. Maybe it was the chase, the excitement a hunter feels when finding his target. Maybe…His arm continued to drip blood, but he ignored the pain. “Now, look. I don’t know when they’re coming, but they
will
come. I can get you both out of here…out of the country…someplace safe.”
“I have my studies.”
“Not anymore.”
He could see the stepbrother wince as he worked this out in his mind, all of his best-laid plans shattered.
For the first time, she spoke, and her voice matched her appearance. It wasn’t the gruff Hungarian of government agents; it was smooth and soft and guileless. “I’m so sorry, David.”
His eyes softened for just a moment, like the moon popping out of a dull sky. He looked on the verge of tears, a young man tossed in a world he didn’t understand, as though he’d thought maybe he could hide her here in this distant city on the edge of Russia and no one would come looking for them and everything would stay the same. He could be a professor or a scientist and they could have a life together. And then Clay had shown up, carrying a stark dose of reality. They were both soft, disoriented, fragile. Clay knew to keep them talking, moving.
“Do you have a car?”
Czabo shook his head, but Marika nodded. It would’ve been comical in another circumstance.
“I know I haven’t earned it yet, but you’re going to have to put your trust in me if you want to live.”
Marika spoke. “I have a cheap Volga.”
“It’ll have to do. Leave everything here, lock your door, and let’s go.”
“Can we confer for a moment?”
Clay swallowed, then nodded. “Yes, but hurry, please.”
They moved to the window to huddle together as Clay stepped toward their kitchenette. He grabbed a hand towel and tied it over his wound as he watched them. There wasn’t much privacy to be had in this tiny apartment.
The siblings spoke in low tones, and though Clay couldn’t make out the words, he understood the meaning. They were trying to assure each other that everything was going to be okay if they just stayed together. Sunlight filtered through the window, stirring the motes in the air, and the cone of light, falling right on them, reminded Clay of his porthole. He had been in his cabin, praying to a God he didn’t know to deliver him from this, to give him some kind of sign, and a beam of sunlight had broken through the clouds, penetrated his cabin, and shone down on his desk. It was jumbled in his mind now—had he prayed for the sign first, or had the sign come first and understanding later? The sunlight settled on a wood carving of Belenus he had picked up in Dublin, a carving he had stuck in a drawer years ago and only recently rediscovered. Had he left it on his desk? Had the sunlight really illuminated it or had it just missed the carving? Had he left it out in just the right place, manufacturing a divine sign? He was just a kid, he told himself, just a kid imagining a world without—
A green light shone through the window and lit Marika’s cheek.
“Down!”
She didn’t move, didn’t get down, but her stepbrother did. He lurched forward as though propelled by some invisible force and shielded his stepsister from the window, drawing the laser sight from her to him, and when the bullet came, it hit him square between the shoulders. She stumbled back as his weight fell on her, and her eyes widened in shock and bewilderment. The green laser found her again, running up her face and settling on her forehead. She dropped David, unable to support his weight anymore, and Clay showed his professional skills by darting to her and pulling her back toward the shadows only a half second before fresh gunfire split the window and ripped into the room.
“David,” she whimpered, her voice choked, her eyes fixed to his body.
“We have to move.”
“David,” she protested.
“Look at me, Marika.” Clay spoke in Russian, grave, hardening his words. “He’s dead. You’ll die, too, if you don’t keep up with me, yes?”
His words jolted her as though he had tossed a bucket of ice water in her face.
“Your car, where is it?”
“Parking lot.”
“This building?”
“Behind it.”
“Keys?”
“I…I don’t…” Her hand absently searched her pocket and came up with a set of keys. He took them from her, then squeezed her hand. He hoped the contact was enough. He tried to will trust through it.
“Okay, then…run with me.”
She took one last look at her stepbrother, and the pain in her eyes was enough to take Clay’s breath away. He couldn’t have any more of that.
“Now!” he screamed as bullets crashed once more into the room, splintering the wooden floorboards.
When he bolted for the door, she followed.
They tried to hit him in the stairwell, and it might have worked, except for his downward momentum. They opened the door on the lobby landing and swung inside, automatic weapons shouldered, but he was already halfway down that flight and he launched himself from six steps above them, hurling his full weight into them before they could pop off a shot. Marika screamed, and her cry echoed in the enclosed chamber so the sound of it masked the collision of elbows with noses, of knees with throats, of fists with temples, of heels with necks, until the echo of the scream died at the same time as the two assailants dropped.
Clay looked up at her, now with blood literally on his hands and speckled across his cheek. “Keep moving,” he growled. He thought he saw appreciation in her eyes, but maybe he was just flushed from the kill and imagined it.
They made it to the Volga before the next wave hit. How many fucking guys had they brought?
“Get in the back and lie down!”
She obeyed. He threw the car into reverse just as the rear windshield exploded.
A car roared forward and tried to box them in, but Clay stamped the accelerator in reverse and the tires held, driving the attacker backward and giving Clay just enough room to throw the Volga in drive and launch it forward between parked cars. He might not have known how to pilot a plane, but damn, could Austin Clay drive anything with tires.
He squeezed between two approaching black SUVs. They threatened to pinch him between them but chickened out at the last moment, and that told Clay he might just have a chance. Drivers afraid to wreck their government-issued vehicles would always be at a disadvantage to a man with nothing to lose.
The Volga spun out of the parking lot and slid across the asphalt like a speed skater swinging wide into a turn, until the tire treads again found purchase and the car corrected from sideways to forward. Only the sea was to his right, while the city lay to his left, and three SUVs fell in behind him as three more whipped out in front of him, closing like medieval jousters. If they had failed to bring adequate forces to take him before, they appeared determined not to underestimate him again. Well, he’d dispatched every last son of a bitch who’d tried before, so could he blame them for switching to a strength-in-numbers assault?
He set his jaw, lowered his head, and mashed the accelerator, vaulting the Volga at the trio of trucks that wished to drive him from the road.
Marika’s head peeked out like a prairie dog’s, and she let out an eardrum-shattering shriek as she saw the SUVs closing the distance in front of them.
“Down!” he snapped for the second time that day, and this time she obeyed.
He twirled the wheel at the last possible moment, and his side-view mirrors popped like balloons as he judged correctly and squeezed the Volga between two of the SUVs as they shot past him, two bullets with a hairsbreadth of space between them. The paint on the Volga’s doors might need retouching when this was over.
Nelson. Everything Nelson suspected about the girl must’ve been true. The Russians hadn’t sent a sniper after her; they’d sent a goddamn division.
As if to accentuate the point, the familiar
wut-wut-wut
of a helicopter’s rotors overpowered the whine of his sedan’s engine moments before the black beast buzzed overhead and burst out in front of him.
Well, that complicated things. The ledger was starting to bleed red, and Clay doubted it would ever return to black. If he’d thought he could outrun or outduel them, that notion went out the window now that they had eyes in the sky. No, this account had gone belly-up quickly, but Clay would be damned if he was going to cut his losses and run.
He threw up the hand brake, spun the wheel, and skidded up on two tires as he took a turn back toward the city while keeping the accelerator mashed to the floorboard. The helicopter banked and turned after him, while behind him, two of the six SUVs overshot the turn and smashed into each other. The remaining four filed in line behind him.
“You have a parking garage here? Any place I can hide from the chopper?”
“Fortress museum,” came the reply from the backseat.
She was right. Vladivostok was teeming with sprawling, unique subterranean forts built in the late nineteenth century to fend off a Japanese invasion. Later, they’d been expanded right through the cold war to house Soviet platoons and matériel. They were extensive, empty, interconnected, and everywhere under the city.
“Which way?”
She poked her head up again and did a quick scan of their position. The noise of the chopper’s rotors beat down on them like a machine gun.
“Ul Zapadnaya!” she screamed, and cowered back down, covering her ears with her hands.
He cut through the city, left, then left again, angling for the water once more. Every time an SUV attempted to slide in behind him, he cut off the angle.
The sun hit the water with a glancing blow as it descended, throwing harsh light into his eyes, and he squinted to fight off the glare. He dodged through light traffic like a mouse in a maze and then ducked left onto the wider Ul Zapadnaya.
Wider
is relative in Russia: this street managed to have two lanes going in the same direction. The chopper overhead swung low and practically filled his front windshield. He braked sharply, spun the Volga up on the curb, and cut over a grassy knoll toward the entrance to the fortress. Tourists were mostly absent at this hour, as the museum was thirty minutes from closing. Clay honked and snaked past a couple of bicyclists, then drove the sedan up the sidewalk bordering the fortress’s entry point, almost losing control as his tires hugged the curb that protected the shrubbery along the fortress’s side. As the SUVs swarmed behind, attempting to keep pace, Clay gritted his teeth and gunned the car for the glass doors of the tunnel entrance.
A sleepy ticket-taker barely managed to pivot out of the way as the Volga took out the glass and frame like a passing hurricane. Clay thought he heard Marika scream again, but it all got mixed up in the glass and debris and mayhem echoing inside the stone corridor.
One good thing about the fortress museum: they had left the tunnels intact, preserved, untouched. Two of the SUVs had overcome their reticence and barreled into the opening behind him, but the other two hung back with the helicopter, presumably to guard the exit if he should somehow manage to storm back out.
Inside, the tunnels featured curved stone ceilings and were narrow enough that only one vehicle could fit. The floor was uneven, marked with ruts, and Clay was jostled in the front seat like a lottery ball. He hoped the tires would hold.
Perpendicular tunnels opened to his right every hundred meters. If he could anticipate the pattern, then maybe he could—
Bam!
He was bumped from behind, and then
bam!
Bumped again. Fifty feet to the next opening. Forty-five. Gunfire poured through the back windshield. Thirty-five, thirty. He spotted the pattern. He was sure of it. Right? Twenty-five. Twenty. If he hadn’t got the pattern right, if he had measured incorrectly, it would end here, in this tunnel, with more questions than answers, and no one would know why he’d died or for whom. A bullet whistled past his shoulder, close enough to bury itself in the steering wheel. Ten, five.
He pulled the wheel down with all his strength, and the Volga was up to the challenge. It T-turned into an open tunnel, and the SUVs’ inertia was too strong to make the same turn. They blundered past the entrance, then tangled as they realized the vehicle they were pursuing was no longer in their crosshairs. They wouldn’t be untangling anytime soon.
Clay drove straight ahead for a good fifteen minutes before his tires blew.
They ditched the car and set off on foot, until they heard voices. Someone was calling the time, five-thirty, and announcing that Fort Seven was closing. They mingled with two dozen tourists and emerged fifteen kilometers north of downtown, without having to tussle with any security.
T
HE TRUTH
lies in the darkness.
A man can move about during the day and fill his mind with decisions and conversations and busywork so he doesn’t have to focus inward. When he crawls into bed at night, however, when it is just him and the blackness, he is forced to grow introspective. After the denials, after the protestations, after the justifications, the truth will creep in and plant its flag.
Nelson had failed his country. First, he had compromised himself by chasing an unsanctioned mission. Then he had botched that mission by getting caught. Then he had broken under torture and confessed to everything, offering every detail about who he was, how he worked, and what he had done since settling in St. Petersburg years ago. He had told them about his research into the life of Marika Csontos, and where he thought she might be hiding.
Was that somehow worse? Was throwing a young girl to the wolves even a greater betrayal than confessing state secrets? Somehow, it was. The Russians most likely knew most of what he’d told them about the way the CIA worked. He’d probably offered very few classified bits they weren’t already privy to. He didn’t even know the real names of other CIA officers. His confessions were probably typed up in a memo that sat on some low-ranking FSB official’s computer. But Marika? He had given them a road map. If she wasn’t in Stepnoy, then she was most likely with her stepbrother in Vladivostok.
Tears burned the corners of his eyes, here in the dark, with only his thoughts to sting him. The three omnipresent cameras would record his every move, but were they even watching him anymore?
He reached out and felt in the darkness for his cane where it leaned against the wall. He brought it back under the covers and rested it across his body. If his movements were noted by some sort of infrared camera, no one entered to let him know.
He felt around to the base of the cane and removed the rubber gripper. The cane was made of hard plastic, and originally, the end had been rounded off to form a knob. But Nelson had found that if he scraped it against a screw protruding from the back of his bed’s headboard, he could start to shape it into a fine point. He worked for only about fifteen minutes each night, lest he make too much noise or movement. Afterward, he would put the rubber gripper back over the point and return the cane to its position against the wall before the sun shone through the curtains.
The first few nights, he was terrified he would wake to find the cane removed and Egorov standing in its place, that half smile disappearing behind his beard as he summoned the large men with gloves. But no one had punished him yet, and still his cane remained where he left it.
Scrape. Scrape.
The point was growing sharp. He would work at it for a few minutes more, alone, with just his thoughts in the darkness to keep him company.
Adams stood in the lobby of the Renaissance hotel on Dupont Circle, waiting for the black Lincoln. He checked himself in the glass next to the elevator. Laura had bought him a new suit and picked out a matching tie and shirt. With so much going on in his head, he fired few neurons thinking about the way he dressed. This was what a great wife did—picked up his slack without asking. If he wasn’t going to put any effort into the way he looked, she would make sure he dressed the part of a confident Central Intelligence district chief.
Right on time, a dark Lincoln pulled up to the curb and a young black officer ducked out of the driver’s door and opened the rear door for him. Adams slid into the backseat and shook hands with Director Manning.
Contrary to expectations, Manning was a garrulous, warm personality with razor instincts and a gambler’s guts. He’d survived two administrations by knowing which cards to lay down and which to keep tucked under the table.
He smiled at Adams. “Thanks for pit stopping in DC, Michael. How was the flight?”
“I can’t complain.”
“You never do.”
The driver eased the car into the soup of traffic and headed toward the highway.
“The reason I wanted to grab you on your way to Prague…Michael, I’m gonna ask a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I’m gonna ask you to step up for me and run European Ops.”
Adams tried to keep emotion off his face but wasn’t sure he succeeded. Manning gave him a break by keeping his eyes forward.
“Now, I know it’s a bit of an uproot, but I gotta put a man on that horse I know can ride it without getting tossed to the ground, understand?”
Adams spread his hands. “I’d say I’d think about it but you aren’t going to let me, are you?”
“No, sir, I’m not.”
“Then I accept.”
“Good man. I wanted to get this in so you could announce it at the district head meeting and start to plan your transfer while you’re there.”
“You haven’t told Dan?”
Dan Clausen was the head of the New York district office and had made no bones about his interest in taking over EurOps.
“If he wants to talk after, I’m all ears, but he’s doing a fine job in New York and that’s just the right size sandbox for him.”
Clausen was not going to take this well, but it was part of the game and he’d have to lick his wounds and wait for the next opportunity. Adams wondered about the other district heads…what would their eyes look like when he announced the Director’s decision? He had to admire Manning’s tact: implying that this promotion would be doing him a favor instead of the other way around.
The car eased onto the beltway and headed toward Virginia.
What the hell is Laura going to say?
Adams thought. But he knew the answer.
She’s going to take up the slack like she always does.
He smiled to himself and turned his eyes out the window as they passed the Jefferson Memorial, lit up bright against the soft purple of the evening sky.
Later, Adams stood along the Mall about halfway between the Washington and Lincoln Monuments. The moon was out and the park was well lit, but only a few tourists mingled on the far side of the reflecting pool. Adams liked it here. It might have been sentimental or saccharine, but he always felt a swell of patriotism when he visited the park.
Reflecting Pool
was an appropriate name; he caught his image in the still water and his thoughts turned to the telephone call that had changed his life.
Unlike many of his peers, Adams had sought out employment in Central Intelligence, rather than the other way around. He was a mathematics major at Princeton, had stayed there to receive his master’s, and was staring down a long ivy-covered corridor at a career in academics. In the course of doing a spot of background work for his thesis, he’d stumbled across an obscure reference in the
Journal of Mathematics Research
. It pointed to an intelligence report that cited the burgeoning recruitment of young mathematicians into the CIA. He went to the library and read up all he could on American intelligence in the late twentieth century, contacted the placement office in Langley, and on a whim, filled out an application, stuck a stamp on it, and mailed it in.
Two months later, he had forgotten all about it, had defended his thesis and passed his oral exams, and had grown serious about asking Laura to marry him. He still couldn’t believe that of all the men falling over her on that campus, she had chosen him. Each day, he felt sure she would stop seeing him, would laugh, explain it was all a joke, but that day never came.
The phone rang one night as they sat on his couch, watching a David Lynch movie on his secondhand VCR. “Mr. Adams?”
“Yes. This is Michael Adams.”
“This is Kandus Simpson with the Central Intelligence Agency. We’d like you to travel to Virginia tomorrow morning for a formal interview.”
He hung up, his throat dry. When he told Laura, she beamed and hugged him. He proposed marriage that night. Whatever was going to happen to him, it would happen to them together.
The interview lasted nearly a week. It was unlike any corporate interview he’d ever heard of. It started with the basics—discussion of his goals and merits, where he’d worked, attended school, his family life, where he’d traveled, any extracurricular activities in which he’d participated. That first round concluded after a few pleasant hours in a few different offices.
At the end of that day, they asked him if he’d stay the night in Virginia; they might want to speak to him further. They put him up at a Doubletree and he slept uncomfortably, analyzing and reanalyzing the answers he’d given until they were all jumbled and he couldn’t remember anything, even the questions.
The next morning, they added a lie detector to the mix. He was grilled about the European travels he had gone on during the summer after his sophomore year, a summer backpacking adventure that was so innocent as to be laughable, only no one in the room was laughing. They knew everywhere he’d been, everywhere he’d used his parents’ credit card, every train ticket he’d bought. He tried to answer in as careful and considered a manner as he could, but he simply couldn’t remember all the details. The dates when he’d visited Prague, the date when he’d missed his train in Berlin, the night he’d spent in a hospital in Paris. They knew more than he did. He tried to find some meaning, any meaning, in the examiner’s expression, but he was at a loss. He asked for a break and they denied him one. At that point, he realized that they were testing more than his answers, maybe they were testing the
way
he responded, the
way
he handled the process as a whole. He was determined not to give them a single reason to doubt him. He had always been good at concentration, and he focused like a laser. When later they asked if he would like some water, he politely declined and told them to keep going.
Again they put him up in the Doubletree, and again he barely slept. He wanted to call Laura, but something told him maybe they were still watching him, even in this hotel room, and he would give them no arrows in their quill with which to shoot down his application.
The following two days were filled with math examinations. The exams started out easily enough, advanced algebra, spatial relationships, programming basics, but then they made the examinations progressively tougher. They introduced outside elements, like loud music and flashing lights, and still made him fill out paperwork, or move puzzle pieces around, or decode difficult ciphers. His concentration never flagged.
On the fifth day, he was seated with three other mathematicians and they were given a complex problem to solve. One man in the group, an older man with hard eyes and a clean-shaven face, insisted on his way of doing things, even though Adams could clearly see he was leading them down the wrong path. Adams started to interrupt him, but the man was insistent to the point of belligerence. They had been working half a day when the man suddenly erased half of their whiteboard and insisted they start over.
Adams had had enough. To the surprise of the other two younger men, who were frustrated but resigned that they wouldn’t be able to solve the problem with the third man making it so difficult, Adams stood up and told the angry man to leave. The man stared at him incredulously with those hard eyes, but Adams folded his arms across his chest and stood his ground.
In an even voice that never rose, Adams dressed him down while outlining why he was wrong, why he was a bully, why he was actually retarding the process instead of moving it forward, and why, as a team, they wouldn’t solve the problem while he remained in the room.
The man started to protest again, and Adams just shook his head, pointed to the door, and said, “Leave.” The man approached Adams as if he were going to hit him in the face, but instead handed him his erasable marker and left.
“Now, let’s get to it,” Adams said to the other two, and they redoubled their efforts, solving the problem with only a few minutes to spare before their time was up.
For the fifth straight night, Adams was asked to stay in Virginia, and this time, he called Laura from the hotel phone, told her he was okay and that he loved her, and that he had no idea whether he was going to have a career in intelligence or she was going to be a professor’s wife. Her voice was strong and supportive on the other end of the line. “All I want is for you to do what you love, and for us to be together.” He hung up, feeling as refreshed as if he’d taken a shower. That night, he had his first good night’s sleep since he’d arrived.
On the sixth day, he sat in a waiting room, staring at a clock on the wall. They had always come for him within a minute of 8 a.m., and here it was already ten till nine, and no one had checked to see if he was in the room. After an eternity, a door opened and a woman he hadn’t met before ushered him down a corridor.
At the end stood a door with a nameplate:
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE ANDREW MANNING.
The woman opened the door and Adams walked inside. A man stood up from behind the desk and crossed toward him. Adams was shocked. It was the man from the fifth day, the one who had been so disruptive, the man Adams had forced to leave.
He smiled, his eyes much softer than they had been before, and stuck out his hand. “Welcome to Central Intelligence, Michael. I’m Deputy Director Manning. I must say, you’ve impressed the hell out of me.”
For the first time in nearly a week, Adams was flustered. “Thank you.”
“We’re expecting great things from you,” Manning said, draped his arm over Adams’s shoulder, and guided him to a chair.
All these years later, Adams believed he had finally exceeded those expectations. His reflection in the pool hadn’t changed; not even an insect had landed on the water to upset its smoothness.
His phone rang and he retrieved it from his pocket.
“Sir?”
“Hello, Warren. Are we on a secure line?”
He waited a few seconds, then heard the familiar clicks and beeps. “We are now.”
“I have some news, and I expect you to be discreet.”
“Of course.” He could hear the tremor in Warren’s voice, and it pleased him. His wife might have to fake her enthusiasm for this promotion, but Warren would barely be able to contain his glee. Adams realized that was probably why he wanted to tell Warren first but pushed that thought from his mind.