Angel Eyes (28 page)

Tori unsheathed her knife, drove it upward in a shallow arc, into the soldier's lower belly. He gave a cry, his machine pistol sprayed the air, then he fell to his knees.

There was plenty of life still in him. He smashed his fists into her side, and she grunted, twisting the knife, dragging it through his viscera. He hit her again in the kidneys and her strength momentarily left her. Then, gathering herself, she drew the knife upward and across, disemboweling him.

In a moment Russell was at her side. He put his .45 against the soldier's head, pulled the trigger. He hauled Tori to her feet.

"You okay?"

She nodded. ''Nice bit of shooting. Right between the eyes.''

He had to help her a little until the running could work out the soreness in her abdomen and side. Her jaw still ached from where she had taken the shot with the stock of the machine pistol.

They caught up with Estilo on the edge of the tarmac. The Twin Otter sat waiting, closer than ever. They trotted out onto the airstrip.

The airplane loomed up, and Tori thought, We've made it. Just then they saw another Jeep careen onto the tarmac. It headed for them at full speed, machine pistols blazing.

"Around the other side!" Estilo called. "Get the plane between us and those guns!"

They ducked beneath the wing of the Twin Otter. But as soon as they did, they could make out an advancing column of troops appearing from out of the jungle on that side of the plane. They were caught in a tightening net.

"The plane's our only hope now," Estilo said. "We've got to get inside."

"But the moving stair is on the other side," Russell said. "Those machine pistols will cut us to ribbons if we show ourselves."

"Nevertheless," Tori said, "Estilo's right. If we don't take off in this plane, we're finished." She checked her Uzi. "Reload,'' she said. "Make sure you've got a full magazine. Okay.'' She looked at their faces, pale and grim in the reflection of the sodium are lights. "Let's go!"

They began to fire even before they came around beneath the gleaming belly of the Twin Otter. The Jeep was closer than they expected, the fusillade from the soldiers withering. Already, they could hear the pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic rifles from the column of soldiers on the other side of the plane.

''We'll never get the moving stair in place!'' Russell shouted over the din.

Tori saw that he was right. "Quick!" she shouted back. "In there!" she indicated the open cargo doors.

Russell grabbed Estilo, shoved him into the cargo bay. Tori got off a quick burst at the Jeep, saw one of the soldiers slump back. She covered Russell, still firing, as he climbed in himself. She shot off a final burst, scrambled in, closed the doors behind her.

The semiautomatic fire was like hail against the side of the plane.

"Shit, shit, shit." Tori, forward of them, was scrabbling at a plate in the ceiling. She pulled her .45, shot off the lock, shoved the panel aside, and light flooded downward. She clambered up, Russell right behind her.

They ran forward. There was no one on the plane, and she said a prayer for their luck. She slid into the pilot's chair, began throwing switches. "I'm not sure of the takeoff," she said. "Once we're in the air I'll be okay."

Russell sat in the copilot's seat, went through the pre-takeoff checklist. The engines started up. There was no problem, except for the semiautomatic fire directed their way.

"Time," Russell said, and they began to taxi down the airstrip. Faster and faster he fed the engines, adjusting the mix, then pulled back on the throttle, and with a great rush they were airborne, lifting slowly away from the llano negro, the insane cocaine city, the unknown enemy, powerful, plotting, hidden beneath layers of deceit, working the soft cell.

BOOK TWO

THE HARD MACHINE

Perfection of means and confusion of goals

seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age. -ALBERT EINSTEIN

SIX

MOSCOW/STAR TOWN
?????NGELS???
TOKYO

The next time Irina saw Natasha Mayakova, it was face-to-face. As it happened, Natasha ran an acting school for women. There were four instructors, and she herself gave one class a week. Irina had enrolled in this class.

She had to audition, of course, but oddly, this had posed no great problem. Irina suspected that her recent work burrowing in between Valeri and Mars had made of her a fairly decent actor. She found that she had no fear or trepidation at all. She read from a scene in Chekhov's Three Sisters, which she privately thought was the height of irony. She must have done well, because the next day she was informed that she had been accepted into Miss Mayakova's class.

The class was attended by six women. They sat in a dusty back room of the new Moscow Arts Theater, which Irina did not like nearly as much as she did the old one, where Natasha performed five nights a week.

Irina had not, of course, given her real name. Her goal was to discover what Valeri was secretly doing with Natasha Mayakova, and to find some way to use it against him so that she could get out of him the information Mars needed on the nationalist group, White Star. Here, she was Katya Boroskaya.

Mars had been delighted to provide the false documentation Irina needed for enrolling in the acting school. It was too early to give him any information, and he had not asked why she required new identity documents. ''I want you to think of yourself as a free agent," he had told her. "I trust you."

The first night, Natasha Mayakova had told her students that this class would not have been possible before perestroika. She said this with the kind of pride someone tells her girlfriends that her father has granted her the privilege of staying out past midnight. Irina thought the speech disgusting in its naivete, frightening in its implied condescension.

"Here we will study such American playwrights as Edward Albee," Natasha continued. "I have chosen Albee because in plays such as Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance, we can discern distinct Chekhovian antecedents. The characters' existential terror is not so far from the despair with which Chekhov imbued his characters in Three Sisters or The Cherry Orchard. Both Chekhov and Albee understood the dynamics of inertia, and its ultimate power to affect an audience."

Natasha asked them to do "cold readings," because, she said, "I want to see what you can do when I throw you without warning into an icy stream."

She chose two students, one of whom was Irina, to read passages from Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Natasha asked Irina to play Martha, the role acted by Elizabeth Taylor in the American film version Irina had seen in a tiny Cambridge revival theater. Irina remembered sitting in the dark, surrounded by American students and the smell of popcorn, and feeling as if she were swimming naked in a sylvan mountain lake. She had felt so ... free. And then the enlarged image of Elizabeth Taylor had sprung up in front of her, her acting transporting Irina away, away, away ...

After class was over Natasha Mayakova asked her to stay behind. Irina was immediately terrified that, somehow, despite her precautions, Natasha knew who she was and was now prepared to confront her.

When they were alone, Natasha said, "Do you have time for a glass of tea?"

Because it was fairly late, they went to the night bar at the Metropole Hotel, one of the few places in Moscow to stay open past midnight. Muscovites often frequented the hotel because it had been a favorite speaking spot of Lenin's. Now it seemed faded, worn, almost shabby beneath the ornate gilt.

When they had ordered, Natasha said, "I wanted a chance to speak with you, Katya, because your reading of Albee intrigued me." She stirred sugar into her tea, watched the crystals melting. "It's from Finland, this sugar, did you know that? I don't know why there's never enough sugar and never any milk here. Where does it all go, do you suppose? I've heard that White Star hijacks the trucks and trains that bring these staples to Moscow, but it's difficult to credit such stories."

Irina said nothing, sensing that Natasha was merely musing, not asking a question. Instead she dissected the other woman with her eyes. Natasha was indeed a beauty: blond, blue-eyed, with a dynamic face that might have been judged overly aggressive save for her mouth, which was soft, gentle, inviting. Irina hated that face.

"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not an easy play to decipher," Natasha said. She took a sip of her tea, wrinkled her nose. "Not strong enough. This must be for the tourists!" She gave Irina a small smile that was at once so shy and so genuine that Irina was taken aback.

"And also the characters are so complex," Natasha continued, "perhaps also stupefyingly American." She paused, as if momentarily unsure how to continue. "You handled the character well. Very well, indeed."

"Thank you." Irina thought Natasha so glamorous, with the actor's natural ease and grace in all situations, that she had begun to grind her teeth in envy and rage.

"As I've no doubt you are aware, Martha requires a certain inner rage, like a pot untended for too long, simmering on the stove, its contents about to burst out and scar the kitchen forever." She looked up at Irina and, with the actor's impeccable timing, said, ''But I sensed in you a very real anger, a deep pool of rage from which you created your Martha. I wanted to speak to you of this anger because I wonder if you are aware how completely you are in its grip."

Irina did not know what to make of this; was she, perhaps, offended by it? But then she thought of her recurring nightmare, her living prison, where even the moon was barred. Sometimes she awoke from this nightmare so upset that she felt nauseous. Could that be the result of rage? She looked at Natasha Mayakova with renewed suspicion. She had had friends for years who would never think to ask her such a personal and disturbing question. "Is this more of your 'perestroika' talk?" she said.

Natasha gave her little laugh again, and there was the shyness again, playing around her face like an imp, defusing Irina's deliberate sharpness. "Oh, that foolishness. Well, it's what my students want to hear, what they expect. It's harmless, really, but I've found it immediately puts them at their ease."

"It isn't foolish," Irina said, "It's dangerous talk."

"Really? In what way?"

''What your 'harmless' speech says is, shouldn't we be happy now, shouldn't we be content because today is the day we are allowed to run around Daddy's garden without a leash."

"What's wrong with that?"

"It's all wrong," Irina said. "Because the leash isn't the issue. Woof! Woof! We're still treated like dogs."

Natasha ordered vodka for them both and a platter of zakuski-a kind of Russian antipasto. When they were alone again, she said, "Olga, Masha, and Irina, Chekhov's three sisters, sit around for hours on end talking about how, one day, they will get to Moscow. They never do, of course, and by the end of the play we've discovered that they live only a few kilometers from the city. I think this is what you are speaking of.''

Irina again felt overcome by the irrational wave of jealousy, as if she wanted to shriek at Natasha, What are you doing with Valeri Bondasenko? Are you making love to him every afternoon before rehearsals? Or do you share his bed on the nights when I am not there?

Ridiculous! Impossible! Yet why was she thinking it? Irina held herself together with an effort, wondering again whether she was on the brink of a breakdown. She said, trying to clear her mind of its disturbing emotional clutter, "How smug you are. You think you know just what you are and what you're doing. You run your little school secure in the thought that you're preserving a better place in the state for women. But the truth is, you're blind.

"You're part of the system, and, in a sense, you're worse than the KGB. Everyone knows what the KGB is and what it does. It's no secret. But you are one thing while pretending to be another. You perpetuate the system by telling your students how well off they are now, how grateful to the state they must be for their new, improved status. But what really is your message? Don't complain, be happy, do as you're told. Look how well-off you are. Look how free. It's bullshit!"

"You must want to leave my class, then," Natasha said, finishing off her tea.

"No, I don't. I can put up with the bullshit, just as long as I learn how to act."

"It seems to me," Natasha Mayakova said as the drinks and food were served, "that you won't need many lessons."

They ate in silence for some time. Irina was acutely aware of the tourists, especially their clothes, which she loved to look at and longed to wear. In Boston, in a lingerie store, she had tried on a silk Charmeuse teddy, and had almost passed out from the erotic sensation of the divine material gliding against her flesh. She shot a clandestine glance at Natasha. How she wished she could share her decadent memory with someone. Her whole mind ached to open itself up, to let the secrets piling up inside spill out, to share, to share.

"In acting," Natasha said softly, "we learn to dissect the different personality types found in lead and secondary roles. You have proved tonight that you already possess that talent."

She said it in such a way that Irina found herself saying, "I'm sorry," when she knew she could not possibly mean it.

"Don't be," Natasha said. She wiped her lips on a paper cocktail napkin. "I imagine I deserved it. I haven't been carved up as skillfully since my own first weeks in acting class. I had an instructor who was a marvelous actor, but he was an absolute ogre in the classroom. I worshiped him, and nearly died of delight when he accepted me into his class. From then on I burst into tears in front of him more often than not. I used to lie awake at night, replaying his murderous criticisms, miserable as could be. I could hear his rantings echoing in my dreams. His words stalked me like an apparition, until all I could think about was making him stop."

"Did you?" Irina asked.

"Yes. I became an accomplished actor." Natasha ordered more vodka. "That's all he ever wanted from me. He saw in me-as opposed to the majority of his other students-a potential for greatness. Those are his words, not mine. He made certain I lived up to that potential."