Parallax View (12 page)

“If you want to
get those bloody pants off, I’ll be right back with the shorts.”

She nodded
tiredly. He pulled the door closed as he was leaving and heard her say “Thank
you” as he was walking away.

The wound was deep, but to Shane’s
eye looked clean. He went to work on it, washing it as gently as he could with
warm, soapy water and then disinfecting it with hydrogen peroxide. Her burns
appeared minimal, and Shane knew she had been extremely lucky. Tracie was
mostly silent, stoic, occasionally grunting or gasping through gritted teeth,
but she never complained and even helped steady her leg with both hands.

After patting the
wound dry with a clean towel, Shane pulled a new, sealed Ace bandage out of his
medicine chest. He opened the package and began wrapping the stretchy gauze
around her leg as tightly as he dared, closing the sides of the puncture wound
together and sealing it. The bleeding had stopped, more or less, and when he
had finished he examined his handiwork and said, “Well, you still should be in
the emergency room for stitches, but it looks like you might survive another
day.”

“I was afraid of
that,” she answered jokingly. “Now if this invisible guy will stop hitting me
in the head with a baseball bat, I’ll be good to go.”

“Concussion?”
Shane asked.

She nodded.
“Probably. I know I’m supposed to get woken up every hour or something, but
screw that. If I can get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, I’m sure I’ll be
as good as new. If you don’t mind helping me back to your couch, I’ll sleep a while
and then I’ll be out of your hair in the morning, I promise.”

“No worries,”
Shane said, helping her to her feet. “Except you’re not going to use the couch.
You’re sleeping in my bed.”

She raised an
eyebrow. “Assuming an awful lot there, cowboy, aren’t ya?”

He laughed. “Don’t
worry, you’ll be alone. I’ll take the couch.”

“I’m not going to
take your bed and make you—”

“I know, I know,
you’re tough as nails. A real badass. We’ve already established that. You could
sleep on a bed of hot coals if you had to. Just do this one little thing for
me, okay? My mom would never forgive me if she found out I made an injured
woman sleep on the couch. You’d actually be doing me a favor,” he said with a
smile.

She sputtered and
shook her head, but allowed herself to be led into the apartment’s only
bedroom. He helped her under the covers and turned out the light. “Goodnight,”
he said, but she was already asleep.

20

May 31, 1987

8:40 a.m. local time

Moscow

“We have a problem.” The man on the
other end of the secure telephone line spoke in a hushed voice, but the concern
was plainly evident in his tone.

“Of course we do,”
Vasily Kopalev said. “There is always a problem.” As head of the KGB’s American
Operations Branch, Vasily spent most of his time dealing with one emergency or
another from one of his small cadre of operatives stationed throughout the
United States. He lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply, savoring the bite of
the tar and the smooth flavor of the smuggled Lucky Strikes.
The Americans
may be a threat to Mother Russia,
but they make a damned fine cigarette.

“Maybe so,” the
voice continued, “but this problem is bigger than most.”

“Get on with it,
then. Are you going to make me guess?”

“The airplane
carrying Gorbachev’s letter has crashed, and—”

“That was the
plan, remember?”

“No, you don’t
understand. The plane did not disappear over the ocean. It crash-landed near an
airport here in the U.S. In Bangor, Maine.”

“What?”

“That’s not the
worst of it.”

“Of course not,”
Kopalev muttered. Suddenly his Lucky Strike tasted bitter. He sucked down a
deep drag anyway. He was going to need it. “Tell me,” he sighed, exhaling
cigarette smoke.

“All of the crew
members are dead, except the woman.”

“Except the
woman.”

“That’s right. The
CIA operative has vanished. Virtually the entire B-52 was destroyed in a
massive fire following the accident, so it is of course possible the letter
burned up in the blaze, but given the fact the agent has disappeared, it would
seem likely the letter survived and disappeared with her.”

“Yes, it would
seem likely,” Vasily agreed. He was silent for a moment, thinking. “We can’t be
certain what is contained in that letter, but I have a pretty good idea.”

The man on the
other end of the line waited patiently. Vasily knew he didn’t care what was in
the letter, it was not his job to care what was in the letter. His job was to
carry out Vasily’s instructions, thus his words were irrelevant until they
contained those instructions. “You are stationed in Boston, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you have two
comrades also stationed in Boston, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And what is the
distance from Boston to Bangor, Maine?” Kopalev leaned back in his chair and
consulted a map of the United States posted behind his desk. The map was
enormous and took up one entire wall. Vasily did the calculations along with
the agent. He knew the answer before the man spoke.

“It is roughly a
three-hour drive in normal traffic conditions.”

“Very good. Take
your two comrades and get up there immediately. Recover that letter. The agent
was involved in a plane crash. Even if she escaped, she must have suffered
injuries. She probably wandered away from the wreckage and is even now lying
dead somewhere. If that is the case, find her body and relieve it of that
letter before someone else does. It is not enough to keep the communique from
President Reagan. It must be kept from
anyone
who would have the ability
to publicize its contents.”

“And if she
somehow survived?”

“Your mission
remains unchanged. Get that letter. Whether the CIA operative lives or dies is
of no concern.”

21

May 31, 1987

7:30 a.m.

Bangor, Maine

The ringing of the telephone worked
its way into Shane’s consciousness gradually, pulling him out of a deep sleep.
He had been dreaming about a young red-haired woman, mysterious and sexy. In
his dream they were sharing his bed, and he was doing things with her he had
not done since the break-up of his marriage over a year ago.

He burst into
wakefulness like a swimmer surfacing, the dream already fading, Shane reluctant
to let it go. He glanced at the clock on the living room wall as he crossed to
the kitchen. Seven thirty. He had gotten barely five hours of sleep and still
felt exhausted and weak. His entire body ached, leg muscles complaining, back
stiff, joints popping. And he needed coffee.

He picked up the
phone. “What?” he barked into the receiver. It came out harsher than he had
intended, but he didn’t much care.

“Shane, this is
Marty Hall. I understand you had quite an adventure last night.” Marty was the
FAA Air Traffic Manager at Bangor Tower, an older man with a mop of thick white
hair and a heavily lined face who had spent his entire adult life working his
way up the FAA ladder. Shane barely knew Marty because they rarely had the
opportunity for interaction beyond the occasional nod and smile as they passed
in the hallway of the facility’s base building stationed next to the control
tower.

“Hi, Marty. Yeah,
you could say that.” Shane remembered Chuck McNally’s statement that he would
have to come in and talk to the NTSB accident investigators and cursed under
his breath. He wanted nothing more than to lie back down on his couch and sleep
for another couple of hours. Or days.

“Listen, Shane, I
know you’re supposed to be off for the next couple of days, but the crash team
is going to be here at nine and would like to talk with you as soon as
possible. Think you can get in here by then?”

He sighed. It’s
not like this was unexpected. “I’ll be there,” he said, then hung up the phone
and this time cursed out loud. There would be no going back to sleep today.

He padded past his
bedroom on the way to the shower and saw the bedroom door ajar, as he’d left
it. He eased it open and peeked in at his injured guest. She was lying on her
side in a fetal position. He took two steps into the room and saw her breathing
deeply and steadily. She looked impossibly small and helpless.

Her back was to
him, so it was difficult to see how the bandage on her leg was holding up.
Shane thought for a moment about trying to take a quick look at it while she
slept, then imagined her waking up to see him bent down over the bed, looking
at her bare legs. He remembered the feeling of staring into a gun barrel last
night and decided the bandage was probably holding just fine. He eased the door
closed and continued to the shower.

22

May 31, 1987

7:40 a.m.

Hampden, Maine

The early-morning air was cool and
crisp, and the slanting sunlight reflected off the windshields of dozens of
vehicles parked in the truck-stop lot. Anatoli Simonov stepped out of the
rented Chevy Caprice and shaded his eyes against the glare. The relative warmth
reminded Anatoli how far he had come from his childhood in Siberia, where the
bitter cold was so complete it was like being stabbed in the lungs if you tried
to breathe too deeply.

But the desolation
felt familiar. Dysart’s Truck Stop was located south of Bangor, Maine on
Interstate 95, and apart from the truck stop buildings and the big paved
parking lot, he was surrounded by a massive expanse of mostly unpopulated
landscape, thousands of square miles of rolling terrain filled with millions of
evergreen trees, the city of Bangor just a rumor to the north.

“Come on,” Bogdan
Fedorov urged, climbing out of the back seat along with a second KGB operative.
“We have much to do, and standing around is accomplishing nothing.” The three
men hurried across the tarmac and into the truck stop for breakfast.

***

They ate mostly in silence,
preferring to interact with the locals as little as possible. It was easy to
blend in with the Americans visually, much more difficult when you spoke in
heavily Russian-accented English, as Anatoli’s two companions did. Anatoli had
long ago achieved a certain familiarity with the language, so he ordered for
everyone, and their conversation ground to a halt whenever the waitress—a
heavy-set middle-aged woman with rust-colored hair and an aggrieved
demeanor—approached to refill their coffee.

An ancient
black-and-white television suspended in one corner of the dining room was tuned
to a local channel, the volume cranked to a decibel level roughly equivalent to
that of an air raid siren. Local programming had been pre-empted to carry
continuous coverage of a breaking news story—last night’s crash of an Air Force
B-52 jet.

The men ate their
omelets, drank their coffee, and paid close attention as a female reporter
gazed solemnly into the camera and said, “It appears as though there was at
least one survivor of last night’s fiery airplane crash in a heavily wooded
area north of Bangor International Airport. Sources close to the investigation
have confirmed that a passing motorist witnessed the crash and braved an
out-of-control fire to pull a young woman from the wreckage.”

Anatoli lowered
his coffee cup to the table, unable to believe his good fortune as a graphic
was superimposed on the lower right hand corner of the screen, depicting a
head-shot photo of a youngish man, perhaps in his late twenties. The television’s
distance from their table and the small size of the picture made it impossible
to distinguish any details of the man’s facial features.

The reporter
continued: “Sources tell us this man, Shane Rowley, an air traffic controller
living in Bangor, was on his way to work at the time of the crash and managed
to rescue the as-yet unidentified woman. Her condition and whereabouts, as well
as the whereabouts of Rowley, are at this time unknown, but we’ve learned Mr.
Rowley is scheduled to meet with NTSB investigators as well as representatives
of the Air Force at nine a.m. at the control tower building at BIA to assist in
the investigation. More on this story as it develops. Jane Finneran, WBGR News
9.”

Anatoli tried to
keep from smiling but just couldn’t do it. He tore his eyes from the television
for the first time since the news report had begun and saw that his fellow
operatives were smiling also.

“This would be
considered good news, yes?” Fedorov said softly between bites of omelet, flecks
of cheese peppering his black beard.

“It most certainly
would,” Anatoli agreed.

“What is next?
Find out where this Shane Rowley lives and force him to lead us to the girl?”

“We could do
that,” Anatoli said, “but why wait to take him at his home? This is a matter of
no small importance, and, according to Colonel Kopalev, it is extremely
time-critical. We know where and how Mr. Rowley will be spending his morning.
Our instructions are to retrieve the letter absolutely as soon as possible.
Since we don’t know when Shane Rowley will be alone again, I suggest we pay
these investigators a visit and remove Mr. Rowley from his meeting. Once we
have secured Rowley, we can find a nice, secluded location—that shouldn’t be
difficult, there is nothing much in this wasteland but trees—and extract the
information we need. Now, let us finish our delicious breakfast. It seems this
will be a busy day.”

23

May 31, 1987

8:20 a.m.

Bangor, Maine

Tracie’s eyes fluttered open and
she felt a rush of intense panic. She saw no one. Recognized nothing. Had no
idea where she was or how she had gotten here.