Watchlist (22 page)

“I’d like to write a story about the brilliant young Kashmiri who turned his back on the West and became an independence fighter. The benefactor who funded his education and was then betrayed when Sikari returned to Kashmir is part of that story. The name ‘the Scorpion’ came up in several conversations. So, will you confirm that you are the benefactor? The Good Samaritan who was betrayed?”

“There are occasions when it’s far better for everyone to remain anonymous,” the man replied. “Besides, as you said yourself, with two of the men dead and the third likely gone mad, I hardly think anyone would want to take credit for the experiment.”

“The ‘experiment’? That’s even more intriguing. What did you hope to accomplish?”

“No, no. I wasn’t the one. If I were, and I didn’t want you to know, I’d simply dodge your questions. I had nothing to do with any of it.” He held up a manicured hand. “Please, let me finish. At the same time, I’d like to know more, too.”

“Why?”

“A man can’t have too much knowledge. If I give you the address of a place where you’re likely to uncover new information, will you promise to let me know in detail what you discover?”

Crane was surprised. He had expected the Scorpion to try to stop him, and any help he got from the mysterious rich man would have to be wormed—or tricked—out of him.

“Why don’t you go yourself?” Crane demanded.

Again there was a twinkle in the older man’s blue eyes. “Through you, I will. It is, shall we say, more discreet this way. From everything my people tell me, you’re a man of your word. What’s your answer?”

“All right, I’ll give you a report. After that, I make no promises.”

“Be very careful when you go there. There’s a man who’s pursuing Sikari. He’s former U.S. Army, in fact former military intelligence. Well-trained and ruthless.” He slipped his hand inside his suit jacket and brought out a color photograph. “This is him. His name is Harold Middleton. Be cautious of him at all times.”

Crane glanced at the photo, but when he looked up he stopped listening. He was riveted by the scene on the other side of the car window—another black limo had appeared and was running without lights next to them on the cramped, two-lane residential road. It was keeping perfect and very dangerous pace, its front fenders aligned with their limo’s front fenders. Cold moonlight reflected off the darkened side windows. He could see no one inside. His lungs tightened.

The chauffeur spoke. “I’ve been watching it.” Crane liked the sound of him—there was authority in the voice, a man who knew how to get things done.

The chauffeur floored the gas pedal. The limo’s tires spun and screeched, and the acceleration threw them deep into their seats.

As they left the other limo sucking their exhaust, the chauffeur commanded, “Get out the weapons.”

Crane saw his host jab a button on his plush armrest. A door dropped open behind the driver’s seat. He pulled out an MP5 submachine gun and quickly slid it over the seat to the chauffeur. Then he grabbed the other gun for himself and rested it gingerly on his lap.

“It’s Jana,” the driver said angrily. “I could see her through the windshield. How did she find us?”

“How should I know?”

“It’s your job, dammit! You’ve screwed up!”

Crane was stunned. The chauffeur was questioning the Scorpion. He was giving the Scorpion orders. He was telling him he had failed. And the Scorpion was doing nothing to take back control.

As the limo raced onward, Crane noticed that the window between the front and rear seats had remained open the whole time. The chauffeur had heard everything. Crane thought back quickly, remembering when he saw the man in the tenement foyer and asked whether he was the Scorpion. ‘You’re a smart lad,’ he’d said, and that was all he’d said, which was no answer at all. He had dodged the question.

Crane felt his heart pound. The disguise of chauffeur was perfect to conceal the Scorpion’s legendary secret identity while carrying out business. There was only one answer that made sense—the chauffeur was the boss. Could the chauffeur be the real Scorpion?

The second limo pulled up again and the window on the front passenger side rolled down. Crane looked inside. He caught a gauzy image of the driver—a beautiful woman with long lustrous dark hair dancing in the slipstream. Her left hand was on the wheel. Her right, out of view.

She glanced at Crane and he felt a shiver—from her beauty and from what he saw as a fanatic’s fire in her eyes. Captivating, terrifying. Then she lost all interest in him and instead focused on the other two men in the vehicle. Something about her gaze as she looked at the driver registered disappointment. She hesitated only a moment then lifted a machine pistol. Perhaps an Uzi, perhaps a Mac-10. As Crane gasped and cringed, a firestorm sprouted from the muzzle and, like amplified hail, the bullets slammed in the windows, flicking loudly but ineffectively off the armored sheet metal and bulletproof glass. Dismay spread on Jana’s face and she wrenched the wheel to the right, forcing their limo into a grassy shoulder, where it bounced to a halt.

Jana’s vehicle vanished into a cloud of dust.

“How did she find us?” the driver snapped.

“Followed him?” The man in the backseat glanced at Crane, who noticed that he held his pistol firmly in a steady hand. He wondered if he was about to die.

The driver spun around and snapped, “You can never underestimate anyone in this. Never.”

The man beside him said, “What do we do about him?”

The driver considered. “Mr. Crane, there’s a train station at the end of that road there. You see it?”

“Yes.”

“You can get a train that will take you back to Paris. I’m afraid we have other concerns.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Follow the London lead. But be careful. Whatever you do, be careful.”

Crane climbed out of the limo, which rocked out of the soft shoulder and made a U turn, the opposite of the direction Jana had sped in.

The reporter, now shaking and breathless from the incident, began hiking toward the road. His reporter’s instinct gave him an important message: The woman had been intent on killing the Scorpion but the frown of disappointment when she saw the men in the limo told him that neither man was, in fact, that reclusive character.

Anyone with common sense would walk away from this story. It was beyond dangerous, but somewhere deep inside him he, the Crane, loved that. He was ugly, but his mind and spirit were beautiful. His curiosity was inflamed, and like a lover in the first fiery flush of requitement, he would see himself skinned and beheaded before he would let go of this amazing story.

He pulled out his cell and ran down the street. In the distance, police sirens screamed. He ignored them. His mind was on London and what he would find there.

3

DAVID HEWSON

F
elicia Kaminski was playing Bach—Partita number two in D minor, the Chaconne, some of the most difficult solo violin music ever written—when the man with the gun burst through the door.

There was a woman behind the frantic, worried figure moving forcefully into the front room of the little terraced cottage on London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street. She was tall and elegant, with long dark hair and something that looked like a machine pistol—Kaminski wished weapons were not so familiar—extended in her right hand.

The young Polish musician placed her Bela Szepessy fiddle and bow on the antique walnut table by the window and said, “Harold. Leonora. So nice to see you again. How is the music business these days? Slow or fast? Looking at you at this moment it is difficult for me to judge. Are you here for my debut at the Wigmore Hall? If so . . . ” She placed a slender finger, the nail trimmed down to the quick, on her cheek. “I have some sartorial issues, I must say.”

“Oh crap.” Middleton put away the weapon and Leonora Tesla followed suit, if a little more slowly. He slapped his forehead theatrically. “I’m sorry, Felicia. We saw there was someone inside. I forgot you had the keys.”

“They shoot burglars in London, Harold? Such a beautiful little house. You don’t remember who you lend it to?”

Middleton glanced at the woman with him. “I said Felicia was welcome to use the place. For her . . . ” He stumbled over the details.

“ . . . for my debut at the Wigmore Hall,” Felicia repeated, picking up the fiddle and showing it to them. “I thought you wanted to see me play this. It cost you a lot of money.”

Harold Middleton—she refused to shorten his first name since she wasn’t, Felicia wished to say, a colleague—had proved a good friend of sorts. He saved her life on more than one occasion when she was enmeshed in the deadly game of terror and crime that should have ended in a massacre at the James Madison Recital Hall in Washington, D.C., while she performed as the principal soloist for a newly unearthed work by Chopin.

There had been many more favors in the intervening two years. Over that time she ceased to be an impoverished young Polish émigré, without friends at first, without parents, and had began slowly to adjust to the life of a professional musician, taking the first steps on the international orchestral ladder, occasionally and only when absolutely necessary, using Harold Middleton’s many connections. She was grateful. She was also intensely aware that a part of his generosity stemmed from some private, inward guilt for introducing her to the dark and violent world to which he had now returned, one a million miles away from the music which he truly loved.

“I will see you play,” Middleton insisted.

“We both will, Felicia,” Leonora Tesla added.

Middleton winced when he failed to remember the date of the recital.

“Tonight,” she interrupted with a scowl. “Seven o’clock. I texted you. I emailed . . . ”

“I’m sorry. Give me time, please. Life’s a little . . . ”—he exchanged looks with his colleague—“ . . . hectic right now.”

Middleton strode over to the tall wardrobe in the living room, a hulking, ugly piece of furniture—the only out-of-place item in the room and one hidden in shadow so that it couldn’t be seen from the long double window that gave out onto the street. The cottage was in a narrow Georgian lane in a backwater of Bloomsbury, walking distance from the West End and the concert hall where she was due that afternoon for a final rehearsal. It was a quiet, discreetly wealthy part of central London away from the crowds and the tourists, a village almost.

When he threw open the wardrobe’s doors, Felicia found herself looking at the object she had found there when she was poking around the place two days before, after arriving from New York—a black, heavy-duty metal security cabinet with a rotary combination lock, like that of an old-fashioned safe. Middleton dialed the numbers then pulled on the handle to open the door. Felicia caught her breath, though in truth she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. A small armory—pistols, rifles, boxes of ammunitions, other items she didn’t recognize—was neatly lined up inside.

Leonora Tesla put down her shoulder bag, joined him and starting picking at the hardware. Middleton had brought two grey hold-alls for their booty. The two of them looked like a couple in a fancy chocolate store, trying to decide what delicacies to take away with them.

“So the Volunteers are back in business,” Felicia said.

“Supply and demand, kid,” Tesla replied, taking down what looked like a pack of small metal balls. Grenades of some kind maybe. “Be grateful you’re in a nicer business.”

Middleton and Tesla were so utterly absorbed Felicia didn’t feel too bad about poking around at something else while they were so preoccupied.

After a minute, she said, “I am grateful. Yet still, in your new job, you find time to buy nice jewelry. Nora, is this for you?”

They stopped packing weaponry into the soft grey cases and turned to look. In her delicate pale fingers, Felicia held the glittering object that had caught her attention as Leonora Tesla placed her bag on a chair by the dining table, the top half open. The article was enclosed in a transparent plastic evidence packet and tagged with a NATO label bearing the previous day’s date, and what sounded like a French name. It occurred to Felicia that they must have been in a hurry indeed if they sought weapons before delivering what must, she imagined, have been something of importance.

“You know, when we first got to know one another I don’t recall you being in the habit of going through people’s things,” Middleton told her.

“I got older, Harold. Quickly. You remember? With the company you introduced me to it seemed to make sense. What is this?”

She opened the evidence bag and removed the gleaming bright bracelet, studying it closely. When she was done she examined the two other items that had been alongside it: a slip of paper and a recent Indian passport in the name of Kavi Balan. The photo inside showed an inoffensive-looking Indian man perhaps 30 with a bland, perhaps naïve face. He had, she thought, very prominent and unusual eyes and wondered whether they had noticed. Probably not. Harold Middleton and Leonora Tesla were both intelligent, hard-working officers, trapped, Felicia had observed, inside an organization they seemed unable to leave. But small details often escaped them. They possessed neither the time nor the inclination to look much beyond the obvious.

“Our business, not yours,” Middleton announced.

“He’s dead, I imagine,” she said, and they didn’t reply. “Didn’t you notice his eyes . . . ?”

She was stalling and they knew it. As she spoke, she scanned the sheet of paper. The writing was in Harold Middleton’s hand, easily recognizable for its cultured yet hurried scrawl.

It read:
Kashmir. Search for water. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.

“It sounds like a puzzle,” she said. “I love riddles. I never knew you did . . . ”

“I hate them.”

“What does Scorpion refer to?”

“It was a reference in an email from Sikari. I think it’s a person, but I don’t know if he’s allied with Sikari or is a threat to him.”

“The bracelet is beautiful.”

It looked like copper, though the color was lighter, more golden than most bangles of its type. In Poland, copper wristbands were popular among the elderly who believed they warded off rheumatism and disease. The jewelry she saw hawked around the cheap street markets in Warsaw looked nothing like this. The metal here was softer, paler, as if it were some kind of subtle alloy, the edges, flecked with green, more finely worked, with a line of writing in a flowing, incomprehensible Indian script, and, most curious of all, an oval feature like a badge, a mark of pride for its wearer perhaps.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“I wish I knew,” he replied. “We think it’s from Kashmir. An identity bracelet, maybe denoting membership in a gang, a cult, an organization of some kind. Presumably the emblems stand for something. It could be connected with India. Or Pakistan. They’ve been fighting one another over Kashmir for half a century. I need to get it to the lab, get the inscription translated.”

Felicia stared at it and frowned.

“You have any ideas?” he asked.

“What? Some little kid Polish musician? What would I know?” She looked at the copper bracelet again. “You never do crosswords do you?”

“I told you. I hate puzzles.”

“That’s because you think logically, in one direction only. Crosswords are like Bach. Or jazz. They demand you think in several different directions simultaneously. Call and response, question and answer, all in the same moment.”

She examined the bracelet again.

“The point is . . . All the information you need is there. In front of your face. Nothing is missing. You just have to make the links.”

Middleton looked interested. It was the mention of Bach that did it.

“My problem,” she added, “is I still think in Polish, not English. I love crosswords but they’re too hard for me in your language. I used to wish you could see them instead of read them. You know what I mean? Look at cross
pictures
. Not words. That way language isn’t so important.”

They had what weapons they wanted. They were ready to go. Middleton held out his hand and she passed to him the note and the photograph of the dead Indian with the curious eyes. He placed them back in the evidence packet and slipped them into his carryall. She clung to the copper bangle, waiting for the question.

“If the pictures on the bracelet were a crossword,” Middleton asked, “what do you think they might mean?”

Leonora Tesla shook her head. “We’re giving these to a bunch of forensic people, Harry. Not a crossword expert.”

“That’s a shame,” Felicia said.

They looked at her.

“Because? . . .” Middleton asked.

She pointed at the moon on the bracelet

“This would be the answer, I think. The part that is calling. See how it’s separate, and the other two elements are subsidiary to it, as if their response somehow answers everything. The elephant. The way he blows his trunk comically into the sky, like a fountain, except that the liquid doesn’t go very far, does it? The stream falls to earth so quickly, as if it weighs more than it should. This seems obvious to me.”

“Obvious?” he asked.

“Look! It’s an elephant. The biggest land animal on the planet. What’s he doing? Trying to spray the moon, and failing. Two words. Maybe it’s me being crazy but remember: I was born in the year of Chernobyl. We weren’t far away. Five hundred kilometers maybe. At school they came along every six months and took our blood to see if the explosion had done something bad to us.”

That blunt needle, the same one they used on everyone, hurt which was why she had read so avidly to understand its cause.

She put her finger on the carefully carved beast on the bracelet and said, “Heavy.”

Then she indicated the fountain of liquid rising from the beast toward the sky and falling back again, too quickly. “Water.”

Felicia Kaminski couldn’t help but notice that Harold Middleton went a little paler when she said that.

“Chernobyl happened because there was no heavy water,” she said quickly. “The Russians used some cheap and useless method of their own to produce a nuclear reactor which was why the plant exploded. I’m sorry. This is doubtless just me . . . As to the moon, I’ve no idea.”

They didn’t say anything for a moment as Middleton looked at her, his benign, bland face creased with concern.

“You’re practicing here for the rest of the day?” he asked.

“Practice, practice, practice. After a while . . . ”

“Stay indoors. I’ll arrange a cab to the Wigmore Hall and a hotel for you this evening. Pack your things. Leave your bag here when you go to the concert. We’ll pick it up for you later.”

“But . . . ”

They didn’t wait for anything except a few short pleasantries. Felicia Kaminski watched them go, wishing they could have stayed a little longer. She knew no one in London. She felt a little lonely and bored.

“Practice,” she hissed. “If I practice one more time I’ll go mad.”

As the door closed, she picked up a piece of paper and scribbled down the words she remembered from Harold Middleton’s note.

Some forensics people would be running through every last one to try to forge a link. Maybe—she was worried, slightly, by the look on Middleton’s face when she threw in her idea about the bracelet—they would be looking to see what the term “heavy water” meant in relation to India, Pakistan and the Kashmir question. Quite a lot, possibly, not that she wanted to think much about that. The dark shadow Chernobyl had cast over Eastern Europe had never quite lifted from her.

She looked at the grandfather clock by the fireplace. Two hours remained before she had to leave, a little less if she packed as Middleton had wanted. She had time. There was something else she could use too, something she felt sure Middleton and Tesla would never have countenanced.

Felicia Kaminski went to her laptop computer and pulled up the web page for Bicchu, the new search engine she’d stumbled upon only a month ago. It was all the rage in the social networks. The answers were sharp and relevant, almost as if someone were reading the question then thinking about its context and perspective before responding. It felt smart and human, not part of some dumb machine. Best of all, Bicchu promised to pay you for being online, for typing in queries and following through on the results. Just a few cents but it was something. For all the glamour of an appearance at the Wigmore Hall, she still felt like a music student when she looked at her bank balance. It would be years before she could even hope to command a reliable income.

Felicia glanced down and typed in the words on her scribbled note.

Kashmir. Search for water. Geology. Copper. Bracelet. Scorpion. Devras Sikari.

Then she added a phrase of her own:
heavy water
.

And another:
copper ring around the eyes.