Thriller (16 page)

at a mass faculty meeting, peered at the empty seat on his other

side, then introduced himself to her. “I’m the new kid,” he said

simply. They discovered a shared European sensibility, a love of

movies, and that each had pasts neither would discuss. In her

mind, she could see his kindly wrinkled face, feel the touch of

his fingertips on her forearm as he leaned toward her with an

impish smile to impart some piece of wisdom or gossip.

The problem was, he was elderly—almost seventy years old—

and so unwell the past week that he had missed all of Monday’s

events, including his own seminar. He had phoned to tell her,

but stubbornly refused to see a doctor.

As the lighthearted banter continued, and more people arrived, there was still no Arkady. He was never late. Liz speeddialed his number on her cell phone. No answer again. Instead

of leaving another message, she toasted her colleagues farewell

and wound through the throngs to the door. His apartment was

only minutes away. She might as well look in on him.

The night sky was dull black, the stars pinpricks, remote. Liz

hurried to her car, threw her shoulder bag across the front seat,

turned on the ignition and peeled out, speeding along streets

fringed with towering palms until at last she parked in front of

Arkady’s building. He lived in 2C. In a rare admission, he had

joked once that he preferred this “C” to the one that referred to

the Cellar, Soviet intelligence’s name for the basement in the

Lubyanka complex where the KGB executed dissidents and spies

and those who crossed them. He barely escaped, he had told her,

then refused to say more, his profile pinched with bad memories.

Liz ran upstairs and knocked. There was no answer. His drapes

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were closed, but a line of light showed in a center gap. She

knocked again then tried the knob. It turned, and she cracked

open the door. Just inside, magazines were strewn in piles. A lamp

lay on its side, its ceramic base shattered. Her chest tightened.

“Arkady? Are you here?”

The only sound was the ticking of the wall clock. Liz opened

the door wider. Books lay where they had been yanked from

shelves, spines twisted. She peered around the door—and saw

Arkady. His brown eyes were wide and frightened, and he seemed

small, shriveled, although he was muscular and broad-chested

for his age. He was sitting in his usual armchair, drenched in the

light of his tall, cast-iron floor lamp.

She drank in the sight of him. “Are you all right?”

Arkady sighed. “This is what greeted me after the last seminar.” He spoke English with an American accent. “It’s a mess, isn’t

it?” He still wore his battered tweed jacket, his gray tie firmly

knotted against his throat. His left hand held a blue envelope,

while the other was tucked inside his jacket as if clutching at his

heart. He was a man of expressive Rus disposition and ascetic

Mongol habits and was usually vibrant and talkative.

She frowned. “Yes, but you didn’t answer my question. Are

you hurt?”

When he shook his head, experience sent her outside to the

balcony again. A gust of wind rustled the leaves of a pepper tree,

cooling her hot face. As she inspected the street and parked cars,

then the other apartment buildings, uneasy memories surged

through her, transporting her back to the days she had been a

CIA NOC—nonofficial cover operative—on roving assignment

from Paris to Moscow. No one at the university knew she had

been CIA.

Seeing nothing unusual, she slipped back inside and locked

the door. Arkady had not moved. In the lamplight, his thick hair

and heavy eyebrows were the muted color of iron shavings.

“What happened, Arkady? Who did this? Is anything missing?”

He shrugged, his expression miserable.

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Liz walked through the kitchen, bedroom and office. Nothing else seemed out of place. She returned to the living room.

Arkady rallied. “Sit with me, dear Liz. You’re such a comfort.

If I’d been blessed with a daughter, I’d want her to be you.”

His words touched her. As a psychologist, she was aware of

her desire for this older man’s attention, that he had become a

surrogate father, a deep bond. Her real father was her most

closely guarded secret: He was an international assassin with a

code name to match his reputation—the Carnivore. She hated

what he had done, what he was. That his blood flowed through

her veins haunted her—except when she was with Arkady.

She sank into her usual armchair, where only the low reading

table separated them. “Have you phoned the sheriff’s department?”

He shrugged. “There’s no point.”

“I’ll call for you.”

Arkady gave his head a rough shake. “Too dangerous. He’ll

be back.”

She stared. “Too dangerous?
Who’ll
be back?”

Arkady handed her the blue envelope he had been holding.

She turned it over. The postmark was Los Angeles.

“Ignore that,” he told her. “The letter was sent originally from

Moscow to New York in a larger envelope. A friend there opened

it and put the letter into another big envelope and mailed it to

Los Angeles. That’s where my address was added.”

Liz pulled out folded stationery. Inside were three tiny dried

sunflowers. In Russia, an odd number of blooms was considered

good luck. The writing was not only different, it was in the Cyrillic alphabet—Russian.

“Dearest,” it began. She peered up at him.

“It’s from my wife, Nina.” He looked past her to another time,

another life. “She wouldn’t escape with me. We’d never had children, and she knew I could take care of myself. She said she’d

rather have me alive far away than dead in some Moscow grave.”

He paused. “I suspect she knew I’d have a better chance alone.”

Liz took a long breath. With the stationery in one hand, and

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the sunflowers on the palm of the other, she bent her head and

read. The letter recounted the ordinary life of an ordinary woman

living on a small pension in a tiny Moscow flat. “I’ve enclosed

three pressed sunflowers, my love,” the letter finished, “to remind

you of our happy times together. You are in my arms forever.”

Liz gazed a moment longer at the dried blossoms, now the

color of desert sand. She folded the letter and slid the flowers

back inside.

Arkady looked at her alertly, as if hoping she would say something that would rectify whatever had happened, what he feared

might happen.

“It’s obvious Nina loves you a lot,” she told him. “Surely she

can join you now.”

“It’s impossible.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Nina and I decided before I left that if either of us ever suspected our mail was being read, we’d write that we were enclosing three sunflowers. Some snooper must’ve thought they’d

fallen out, so he covered himself by adding them. The mistake

confirms what Nina surmised, and it fits with this.” He gestured

at the damage around them. “I thought I was being followed yesterday and today. The vandalism proves he’s here. And it’s a message that he can have someone in Moscow scrub Nina to punish

me if I try to escape now. He knows I know that.”

Liz remembered an official statement during the Communist

show trial of Boris Arsov, a Bulgarian defector:
The hand of jus-

tice is longer than the legs of the traitor
. A few months later, Arsov

was found dead in his prison cell. The Kremlin had been relentless about liquidating anyone who escaped. Even today, some

former operatives prowled the globe for those they felt had betrayed the old Soviet Union.

“You expect him to kill you,” she said woodenly.

“You must go, Liz. I accept my fate.”

“Who is this man?”

“A KGB assassin called Oleg Olenkov. He’s a master of im-
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personation and recruiting the unsuspecting. Even after the Soviet Union dissolved, he hunted me. So I decided to become

Arkady Albam—I thought he’d never look for me in academia.

But for him, eliminating me is personal.” He peered at her. “My

name is actually Dmitri Garnitsky. I was a dissident. Those were

desperate times. Do you really want to hear?”

“Tell me.” Liz’s eyes traveled from window to door and back

again. “Quickly.” As her gaze returned to Arkady, a small, strange

smile vanished from his face. A smile she had never seen. For an

uncomfortable instant, she was suspicious.

Day after day in the bitter winter of 1983, Moscow’s gray sky

bled snow through the few hours of light into the black well of

night. From their flat, Dmitri and Nina Garnitsky could hear the

caged wolves in the zoo howl. Across the city, vodka poured until

bottles were empty. Meanwhile in Europe, Washington was deploying Pershing missiles aimed at the Soviet Union. A sense of

helpless desolation shrouded Moscow, escalating the usual paranoia. The Kremlin became so convinced of a surprise nuclear attack that it not only secretly ordered the KGB to plan a campaign

of letter bombs against Western leaders but also to immediately

erase Moscow’s dissident movement.

Dmitri was the city’s ringleader. Still, he managed to evade surveillance and disappear for a week to print anti-Soviet pamphlets on an old press hidden in a tunnel beneath the sprawling

metropolis. Nina was with him in the early hours before sunrise

of that last day, making fresh cups of strong black tea to keep

them awake.

Suddenly Sasha Penofsky hurtled in, snow flying off his

muskrat
shapka
hat and short wool coat. “The KGB has surrounded our building!”

“Tell us.” Dmitri pulled Nina close. She trembled in his arms.

“That KGB animal, Oleg Olenkov, is under specific orders to

get you, Dmitri. When he couldn’t find you, he decided to go

ahead and arrest our people. They took everyone to Lubyanka.”

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He swallowed hard. “And there’s more. The KGB wants you so

much that they brought in a specialist to wipe you. He’s an assassin with a reputation for never failing. They call him the Carnivore.”

Nina stared at Dmitri, her face white. “You can’t wait. You have

to leave
now.
”

“She’s right, Dmitri!” Sasha turned on his heel and ran. He had

his own escape plans. No one knew them, just as no one knew

Dmitri’s. It was safer that way.

“I’ll tell them where your cell met, darling.” Nina’s voice broke.

“I’ll be fine.” They would interrogate and release her in hopes

they could find him through her. But if they believed she was also

a subversive, her life would be at risk, too.

His heart breaking, they rushed down the tunnel. He shoved

up a manhole cover, and she climbed out. His last sight of her was

her worn galoshes hurrying away through the alley’s fresh snow.

Dmitri paced the tunnel five minutes. Then he accelerated off

through the bleak dawn, too, carrying a lunch pail like any good

worker. The cold pierced to his marrow. Little Zhigulis and

Moskvich cars roared past, a stream of bloodred taillights. He

watched nervously. He knew Olenkov by sight but had never

heard of the Carnivore.

On the other side of Kalininsky Bridge, he was running down

steps toward a pedestrian underpass when the skin on the back

of his neck suddenly puckered. He glanced back. Walking behind were a young couple, an older man with a briefcase and two

more men alone, each carrying lunch pails like his. One had a

mustache; the other was clean-shaven. All were strangers.

When an evergreen hedge appeared on his right, he yanked

open a wooden gate and slipped into a small park beside an apartment building for the privileged
nomenklatura
. The skeletal

branches of a giant linden tree spread overhead like anemic

veins. He grabbed a snow-covered lawn chair, carried it to the

trunk and jumped onto the chair. Reaching up to a hole in the

trunk, he pawed through icy layers of leaves until he found his

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waterproof bundle. In it were rubles, rare U.S. greenbacks and a

good fake passport.

But as he pulled it out, Dmitri heard the quiet
click
of the gate.

He stiffened. Turned awkwardly—and looked at a pistol with a

sound suppressor aimed steadily at him. Pulse hammering, he

raised his gaze, saw the mustache. The gunman was one of the

workers behind him in the underpass.

“You are Dmitri Garnitsky.” The man spoke Russian with a

slight accent and stood with feet planted apart for balance, knees

slightly bent. About six feet tall, he was muscular but not heavy,

with a bland, expressionless face and nearly colorless eyes. There

was something predatory about him that had nothing to do with

his weapon.

Dmitri tried to think.
“Nyet
. I don’t know—”

Abruptly, the gate swung open again. The gunman tensed, and

his head moved fractionally, watching as the notorious Olenkov

marched in, impressive in his mink
shapka
hat and black cashmere overcoat. He was taller and broader—and smiling. He unbuttoned his coat and removed a pistol, which he, too, pointed

at Dmitri.

“Very good,” he told the first man. “You’ve found him.” Then