Thriller (40 page)

the frontier, but she had to stay out of sight. Prodding Bashkim’s

body with her hiking boot, she pulled out her passport, her

money and his wallet. She also took a small black notebook with

notations in Albanian and Arabic. Lastly she got the gun. She had

never touched one before, but she knew they had safeties. She

clicked it on and off a few times to familiarize herself with how

it worked, then shoved the gun into her waistband. The cold

metal felt reassuring against her skin. For two hours she marched

uphill, crouching behind rocks whenever she heard a car. She

didn’t dare stop, terrified that her legs might lock up for good.

In the long gaps between vehicles, Jane kept her mind rigidly

focused on the moment she’d hand the guard her passport and

306

slip across to safety. She didn’t see the olive-green truck that said

STALIN until she was right above it, in full view of the road. The

truck was parked and the young men from earlier were arrayed

around, eating. Jane froze, then instinct kicked in and she darted

off. With any luck they wouldn’t follow. Instead, she heard excited voices, then the truck wheezing into reverse as it began

backing up to a spot where it could turn off the highway and

come after her.

Jane ran, adrenaline powering a burst of speed, her breath

coming in great gulps of despair. She’d never outrace them. But

she couldn’t let them catch her. She’d seen the sporting look in

their eyes, knew how the game would end. She had to hide before they came into view and hope they’d barrel past, consumed

by the chase. She folded herself behind an insubstantial rock,

praying the afternoon shadows would conceal her, and watched

the truck bounce by just twenty feet away, ribald laughter erupting from within. Slipping from bush to rock, she followed them,

until the truck turned and headed back to the road, figuring she

had doubled back and they’d catch up with her before passport

control. That meant she’d have to go cross-country. She was so

weary but she forced herself to keep going. Another half mile and

she reached the saddle between two summits. Below her

stretched the water, dark and gloomy. Lake Ohrid. On the other

side of the lake was Macedonia, and freedom.

She scanned the shore, looking for a boat, anything to carry

her across. It was too far to swim. In the blue dusk, she made

out a solitary figure mending a net. She heard the roar of the

truck, the shouts of the Albanian men, and knew they had spotted her once more. But they’d have to follow the road’s hairpin

curves down to the lake, whereas she could plunge straight down

the mountain. The lake stretched for miles, most of it unguarded.

It was her only hope. She ran, dislodging avalanches of pebbles

and dirt, sliding on her ass and once somersaulting head over

heels to plow the ground with outstretched arms before righting herself and continuing her descent.

307

She could see the figure on the shore now. It was an old man.

She felt the steel against her skin and knew she’d kill him if she

had to. He watched her. As she drew closer, she saw a head of

white hair, blackened teeth, a map of brown wrinkles. His face

betrayed no surprise, as if deranged Western women tumbled

down the mountain every day.

“Please,” she said, sliding to a halt before him, scraped and

bleeding. “You must take me across.” She gestured to the other

side of the lake. “I can pay.
Valuta.”
She pulled out Bashkim’s wallet, thrust greenbacks and euros and Albanian dinars at him.

“For you.”

To her surprise, the fisherman shoved the money back at her.

She panicked, screaming at him in fragments of four languages.

Ignoring her, he shuffled to a bush and pulled out a rowboat that

lay hidden underneath. An ancient, frayed rope lay curled inside.

He began dragging it to the lake and she ran to help him, thanking him in every language she knew.

“But we must hurry,” she said, looking over her shoulder to

pantomime running and pursuers.

“Ska problema,”
the old man said. “No problem.”

“Besa?”
she asked. The
besa
was a solemn promise, or oath,

handed down from feudal times. Albanians would die before violating a
besa
. But did the old ways still hold?

The Albanian side of the great lake was moving into twilight.

The few houses clinging to the slopes had never known electricity. Across the water, the Yugoslav coastline sparkled in warm,

inviting twinkles of red and yellow.

She helped him push off and scrambled in.

They were about a hundred yards out when the truck came

bouncing across the side of the mountain, the men angry as a

swarm of bees. Several had already loosened their clothing. They

ran to the water’s edge and waded in, firing. She and the old man

ducked, bullets sizzling past, skimming the water. The old man

grunted and kept rowing, the ropy muscles of his arms straining against his skin.

308

Jane had the gun ready, just in case, but the fisherman seemed

oblivious to her, lulled by the repetitive strokes, the plash of the

oars in water. The cries and shouts grew distant, then ceased altogether. The wind kicked up and she shivered. They were suspended in nothingness, floating between worlds. Then the lights

began to draw nearer. She watched in greedy hunger as the resort hotels and vacation homes appeared in the twilit murk.

Then she heard a
scritch
as the rowboat hit the pebbly bottom.

“Bravo Yugoslavia,” the fisherman said. Again she tried to

press money on him but he waved it away, then placed his hand

over his heart. The
besa
fulfilled.

The old man helped her clamber into the icy, thigh-deep water.

She waved goodbye and stepped onto the shingle, legs like jelly,

and watched the rowboat already easing back into the inky

depths. Then she hiked up to the nearest hotel, got herself a room

and ordered
cvapcici
and rice from room service.

The knock, when it came, startled her.

“Who is it?” she called.

When a Slavic voice answered, she cracked the door and saw

a waiter with a tray. She opened the door wider for the food and

out stepped two men in windbreakers. Before Jane could slam

the door shut, one of them had his foot inside. The other passed

the waiter a bill. “Thanks. You can go now,” the man said in

American English.

They came inside and closed the door.

“You did very well, Jane,” the first man said. “We were watching from this side, in case anyone made it across. You understand, of course, why we couldn’t risk an incident in international

waters.”

“Who are you? How do you know my name?”

“It’s safe to stop running now. Paul was online with us, right

before the connection went dead. Why don’t you tell us the

whole story.”

He turned to his companion. “Nick, please relieve Jane of her

burden. It must have been so heavy. Where is it, Jane?”

309

But she had left the bags of white powder behind on a desolate Albanian mountainside, next to what she feared was a

corpse. How could they be so stupid to think she’d cross an international border with millions of dollars’ of heroin stuffed into

a backpack?

Jane fingered the gun at her side and considered her options.

She was a sensible girl. Not one of those high-strung ones that

fell apart at the drop of a hat.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said evenly. “And I’m the

only one who can fill you in. But first I need a square meal and

a shower. Then we can cross back over and I’ll show you where

the drugs are. There’s also a notebook that may interest you. Once

we take care of business, I’d like one of you gentlemen to drive

me to Skopje. There’s a conference I really don’t want to miss.

But I’ll be graduating soon. And I can’t see myself teaching Balkan

literature in some U.S. backwater the rest of my life. So I think

we should talk about a job. I understand you have an opening

in Tirana.”

When Eric Van Lustbader was asked by the estate of the late

Robert Ludlum to continue Ludlum’s series of thrillers featuring Jason Bourne, he told them he wanted free rein to take

the character in new directions. At the time, Lustbader was

grappling with the loss of his father. So, understandably, the

basis of
The Bourne Legacy
revolved around the thorny relationship between Bourne and the son he’d for many years assumed to be dead.

Similarly, in Lustbader’s latest novel,
The Bravo Testament,

a father-son relationship fuels the high-powered action and

emotional responses of the main characters. This familial

emotional resonance will be familiar to Lustbader’s fans, as it

stretches all the way back to his first thriller,
The Ninja.

The Other Side of the Mirror
deepens and broadens this

theme, but in other ways it’s a departure for Lustbader. He

wrote the story after one day rediscovering
The Outsider,
by

philosopher/novelist Colin Wilson, in his library.
The Outsider

had been a seminal book, one Lustbader had devoured during his college days. Reading it again he found new meaning

in his own work, which is reflected in
The Other Side of the

Mirror,
a story about a spy—an outsider, if ever there was one—

312

and the terrible toll secrecy and lies take on him. Lustbader,

who thinks of himself as an outsider, seems drawn to his sense

of apartness. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like

to be outside society, or if that’s precisely how you feel, this

story is for you.

He awakens into darkness, the darkness at the dead of night—

but it is also the dread darkness of the soul that has plagued him

for thirteen weeks, thirteen months, it’s impossible now to say.

What he can say for certain is that he has been on the run for

thirteen weeks, but his assignment had begun thirteen months

ago. He joined the Agency, propelled not so much by patriotism

or an overweening itch to rub shoulders with danger—the two

main motivations of his compatriots—but by the death of his

wife. Immediately upon her death he had felt an overwhelming

urge to hurl himself into the dark and, at times, seedy labyrinth

in which she had dwelled for a decade before he had discovered

that she did not go off to work in the manner of other people.

And now, here he is, twenty-three years after they had taken

their vows, sitting in the dark, waiting for death to come.

It is hot in the room what with all the piles of magazines he’s

amassed, ragged and torn, beautiful as pink-cheeked children.

Joints cracking, he rises, pads over to the air conditioner, moving like a wader through surf of his own making. It wheezes pa-
314

thetically when he turns it on, which isn’t all that surprising since

even five minutes later nothing but hot air emerges from its

filthy grille. Not that Buenos Aires is a Third World city, far from

it. There are plenty of posh hotels whose rooms are at this moment bathed in cool, dry air, but this isn’t one of them. It has a

name, this hotel, but he’s already forgotten it.

In the tiny bathroom, full of drips and creeping water bugs the

size of his thumb, he splashes lukewarm water on his face. Cold

is hot and hot is cold; does anything work right in this hellhole?

He wants to take a shower, but the bottom is filled with more

magazines, stacked like little castles in the sand. They comfort

him, somehow, these magazine constructs, and he turns away, a

sudden realization taking hold.

Curiously, it is in this hellhole that he feels most comfortable.

Over the last thirteen weeks he has been in countless hotels in

countless cities on three continents—this is his third, after North

America and Europe. The difference, besides going from winter

to summer, is this: here in this miserable, crumbling back alley

of Buenos Aires, death breathes just around the corner. It has

been relentlessly stalking him for thirteen weeks, and now it is

closer than it has ever been, so close the stench of it is horrific,

like the reek of a rabid dog or an old man with crumbling teeth.

The closer death comes, the calmer he becomes, that’s the

irony of his situation. Though, as he stares at his pallid face with

its sunken eyes and raw cheekbones, he acknowledges that it

very well may not be the situation at all.

He stares for a moment at the pad of his forefinger. On it is

imprinted part of a familiar photograph—from one of the magazine pages, or from his life? He shrugs, uses the forefinger to

pull down his lower lids one at a time. His eyes look like pebbles, black and perfectly opaque, as if there is no light, no spark,

no intelligence behind them. He is—who is he today? Max

Brandt, the same as he was yesterday and the day before that. Max

Brandt, Essen businessman, may have checked into this dump,

but it was Harold Moss, recently divorced tourist, who had come

315

through security at Ezeiza International Airport. Moss and