Watchlist (28 page)

8

DAVID CORBETT

H
arold Middleton regarded the crumpled butt of Korovin’s Marlboro, mashed into his plate of
zakuski
, and for some reason it brought to mind Felicia’s rebuke that he too often lacked the time or inclination to look beyond the obvious. He would have very much liked a view beyond the obvious at that moment: Bits of tobacco flecked the pickled onions; the charred aroma of cold ash lingered with the vinegary jolt of stewed beets and smoked herring.

A glance at his watch—what sort of phone call would demand so much time? Perhaps, Middleton thought uneasily, his secret entry into Russia at Domodedovo was no longer secret. Perhaps Korovin was being dragged across the coals by a younger, more officious and less forgiving man, his replacement in Russia’s new intelligence megalith, the FSB.

Then again, maybe poor Ruslan was merely arguing with his wife. Or his lover—and Azerbaijani perhaps, or a sultry Uzbek.

Look beyond the obvious, he reminded himself.

He sank into a guilty humor. Felicia had barely escaped death in London, the cost of her staying at his apartment. How much misfortune can you visit upon a friend, he thought, before the friendship twists into a curse? And what of Charley—hadn’t he inflicted the same jeopardy on her, insisting she join him on this quixotic crusade? What kind of father does that to his daughter?

The questions lifted him from his overstuffed chair and sent him ambling ruminatively toward the window. The distant reaches of Moscow sprawled beneath layers of urban haze fouling an ashen, moonlit sky. His impression of a transformed Russia had vanished. Trash fires dotted the less central reaches of the cityscape, surest testament to the country’s lingering Third World status. The putrid stench of the rancid smoke filtered through the window glass: shoddy glazing, one more relic from the worker’s paradise.

The gloss of prosperity he’d glimpsed on his way into Moscow was no more substantial than the paint-on-rust veneer of the Soviet era, the main pretense to wealth being the surge in petro revenues the past few years. Even that was suddenly at risk with plummeting oil prices—so much so, even oligarchs like Arkady Chernayev had to seek bailouts from the government. Just last week, he’d been literally moments away from losing his chief subsidiary to European banks.

Oil, Middleton thought. The mephitic sinkhole of modern politics. Correction, he told himself: oil and drugs. Those were the two gluttonous wants that kept the U.S. beholden to tinhorn despots like Putin, Chavez and Ahmadinejad, kept it tied to dubious friends like Saudi Arabia and Colombia or perpetually failing states like Nigeria and Mexico. Somewhere during the course of my life, he mused, the country I grew up in, the land of self-reliance and initiative, devolved into a daytime talk show populated by the obese, the whiny, the addicted. It was enough to make a patriot weep.

Which brought him back to Felicia—Polish by birth, she was in truth a gypsy. He suddenly felt the shock of an impossible and poignant envy, in which he sensed that what promise the future held belonged to the Felicias of the world—those with talent for a passport, as long as they kept moving, maintaining an ever fluid distance from men with patriotic obsessions and idealistic whims—men like Devras Sikari. Men like Harold Middleton.

The door to the back room swung open and Middleton turned to greet Korovin returning at last from his interminable phone call—except it wasn’t his bearish friend who approached. It was the ancient waitress. Perhaps it was because he’d just had Felicia on his mind—or more to the point, her reproach of his inattentiveness—but he detected now what he should have noticed before, something artificial in her shambling gait, a subtle vigor in her movement that belied the woman’s age. And the snowy white hair, offkilter just slightly: a wig.

Middleton intuited instantly that his friend, Ruslan Korovin, was dead, the insight slamming home at the same instant his gaze met the imposter’s pale gray eyes.

He reached inside his jacket, tugged the SIG Sauer P229 from his belt as the waitress lost all pretense of disguise and lunged forward. Middleton thumbed the safety down, pulled the trigger, point blank range: nothing. The gun didn’t fire. In an instant of adrenalin-compressed recollection he wondered whether he’d loaded it, remembered that he had—no, the clip was full, he’d even chambered a bullet. By then the fake waitress was upon him, delivering a kick to the chest that sent him reeling backwards into the room, crashing against the low serving table with its tray of
zakuski
. The attacker’s wig fell free, her real hair was closely cropped, a manlike burr. She pulled a knife from inside the shabby white blouse. Middleton struggled to his feet, slipping in the briny mess, changing his grip on the pistol to use it as a club, sensing vaguely that the ex-KGB officers in the room were stirring, ready to rise.

The attacker hadn’t bargained on Middleton’s discernment. She’d hoped for a quick kill, a darting escape. She lunged, not slashing with the knife but thrusting with it, no hesitation, no squeamishness—slashing was for cowards. Middleton fought off the blow with the pistol, parrying it, but the woman responded with a thundering left that caught him at the temple—his vision went white, his knees buckled. His mind coughed up a single word: Charley.

The unmistakable pop of a Makarov PM erupted seemingly inside his ear—from somewhere close behind him, one of the old
apparatchiks
had stirred to action, choosing at least for now the side of the American whom one of his old cohorts had befriended.

Through the watery film his field of vision had become, Middleton saw the waitress clutch her shoulder, tumble back a step, crumple to one knee.

The old KGB man stepped forward and murmured something brief and blunt in Russian. The knife fell from the shorn woman’s hand. The man kicked it across the room where one of the others shuffled hurriedly to retrieve it.

The woman was panting, clutching her shoulder, pale hand over the growing bloodstain.

The old KGB man looked down at Middleton, eyeing the worthless SIG Sauer in his grip. His lips curled into a withering smile as, in syrupy English, thickly accented, he said, “An excellent icon. The Novgorod school, yes?”

“Nothing speaks to good old Anglo-American homesickness like a bowl of oatmeal.”

Charley glanced up from her
Wall Street Journal Europe
. The man addressing her was the same natty stranger who’d been tailing her yesterday as she’d walked along the Champs Élysées, lunching in the sunlight with the Étoile and the Arc de Triomphe in the distance. He was handsome in an aging, rough-trade sort of way, tanned, fit, salt-and-pepper hair. He dressed expensively, conspicuously so, like a social climber hoping to escape the inescapable, his class. So British, she thought. Too British.

Why, she wondered, does he want to kill me?

He said, “Might I join you?”

His accent had a flat Mersey drag to it that she recognized from specials on the Beatles. She hadn’t understood then that John Lennon’s accent wasn’t perfectly upper crust—or lardy, as they said. If the Beatles weren’t nobility, who was?

“Please do,” she said, resisting a glance toward Leonora Tesla who sat across the hotel’s elegant dining room. She’d flown over from London to warn her that her life was in danger and to watch over her. Felicia Kaminski had been kidnapped from Middleton’s Bloomsbury apartment in the mistaken belief she was Charley.

The dapper Brit pulled back the opposite chair, sat down. “Ian,” he said charmingly, extending his hand.

“Charlotte.”

“I know.”

A dark-skinned busman appeared—Algerian perhaps, maybe a Turk—bearing a coffee pot. Barrett-Bone declined.

Charley, affecting an ingénue’s innocence: “You know my name?”

“You’re in considerable danger, Ms. Middleton. I’d like to help—”

Leonora materialized behind him, nudging the back of his chair. One hand rested inside her pocket, the other settled gently on his shoulder. The hand in her pocket held a pistol, with which she gently prodded the back of his head.

He broke into a helpless smile. “You Yanks . . . ”

“It would appear,” Charley responded, gesturing for the check, “that there’s considerable danger all around.”

“That wasn’t really necessary, you know.”

They were seated in the back of a taxi, driving aimlessly through the Eighth
arrondissement
, the cabby’s
rai
music turned down so they could talk. Prayer beads strung from his rearview mirror rattled with every turn. Ian Barrett-Bone sat between the Volunteers; Leonora Tesla still had her pistol trained on him from her coat pocket. Glancing out the back window, Charlotte Middleton watched for trail cars.

Tesla demanded, “What do you want with Charlotte?”

She was concerned, but not overly so. She’d gotten his name from his British passport—it was one of several, of course—and called somebody in another country; he could tell that from the number of times she punched the keypad. The information that came back was, as he knew it would be, that Ian Barrett-Bone was a business consultant without any criminal record and did not appear on a single watchlist around the world.

“There’s a lot of money at stake in this matter.”

“What matter?”

“Oh, Sikari’s efforts, his companies . . . I would like to participate in a little of it. To that end, I’d like to get a message to Harold Middleton.” He was perfectly calm, vaguely amused. “I might be able to spot him a few details on Sikari.”

“Such as?”

“You can understand why I might want to share that solely with Colonel Middleton.”

“And you can understand why that won’t happen.”

Barrett-Bone feigned a sulk. “Pity.”

“You’ll talk to us.”

“And if I don’t? Please don’t throw out idle threats. Your reputation precedes you. That’s the problem with being honorable, you know. Damn hard to scare people.”

Tesla took his face in her hand, squeezing till his lips pursed. “You tried to kill an innocent woman.”

He shook off her hold, but for a moment his insouciance wavered. “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. The people I represent and I had nothing to do with that. That was Sikari’s cock-up. A woman on his payroll named Jana. South Asian lass, lovely to look at, nasty disposition. None too trustworthy, either.”

“And what people do you represent?”

“I think you missed a subtle hint in what I just said. This Jana, she’s none too trustworthy. She’s a bit of a loose bird. She’s playable, if the conditions dictate. And the price is right.”

“Why should we believe you?”

“Well for fuck’s sake, luv, why should anyone believe anybody?”

Tesla leaned close. Whispering in his ear, she said, “If you call me luv again, I’ll shoot you for the sheer pleasure of it.”

He regarded her with mock horror. “What is it with American women?”

“What people do you represent?”

“Look, I’ve already put a few cards on the table here.”

“Who’s the Scorpion?”

He withdrew behind a mask of coy bemusement. “I’m not sure I know who you mean. Sounds like a comic book hero to me.”

“A villain, I’m betting.”

He shrugged. “The narcissism of minor differences.”

The driver honked at a wayward cyclist, who responded with a hand-flick to the chin. Tesla said, “You work for him. The Scorpion.”

“I’m here, talking to you, on my own graces. And just to confirm my bona fides, I’m going to fill you in on a little detail that should make it clear I know of what I speak.”

He cocked an eyebrow. The two women waited.

“You’ve seen a bracelet, no doubt. You took it off the body of a poor sod named Kavi Balan. Jana was the one who blew him up—the old exploding cell phone ploy. Understand she damn near got you with the laptop.”

“So she was the one at Cap D’Antibes.”

“That’s right. The bracelet has a certain significance, a meaning, if you will. The elephant, the spray of water—”

“The moon,” Tesla said.

“Quite.”

“Tell me what the moon means.”

Barrett-Bone cocked an eyebrow. “And you’ll . . . ?”

“I’ll consider your request to speak with Colonel Middleton more mindfully.”

He sighed. “You’re a tough one, miss.”

“The moon. Tell me.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve realized it has nothing to do with Islam. Sikari being Hindu and all.”

“Go on.”

“The crescent moon as a symbol predates Islam, actually. Byzantium chose it long before Mohammed ever came upon the scene, as it were. It represented the goddess Diana. She was a huntress—stop me if you know the story—but she was also a protector of the weak and vulnerable. A heavenly light in the darkness, oh my.” He fluttered his hand, a music hall wave. “Sometimes you see her as a torchbearer, lighting the way for others. She was regal, proud, majestic, driving her chariot through the wilderness.”

“What does that have to do with Sikari?”

He shook his head. “The question you should be asking is: What does it have to do with Jana?”

“Well?”

“She’s looking for the Scorpion. Everyone’s looking for the Scorpion.”

“Sikari too, I assume.

“What if I were to tell you that Sikari’s dead?”

Tesla struggled to conceal her shock. The man who was the center of the Volunteers’ mission—dead!

Barrett-Bone continued, “And killed by his own son, it seems. But Jana’s still a loose cannon.”

“Looking for the Scorpion.”

“And maybe that’s not all.”

“Go on,” Tesla snapped. “Tell us.”

“Look, one more hint, then I’m finished. Have you heard about the Baglihar hydroelectric dam?”

Despite herself, Charley Middleton stiffened. Wiki had been hacking and cracking nearly round-the-clock the past few days, trying to break through encryption codes and fending off countermeasures—Trojan Horses, root kits, backdoors, key loggers, bots, zombie attacks—in an attempt to determine what Sikari’s next move would be. That effort had revealed the existence of the Scorpion—though no details about him—as well as turning up mentions of the Baglihar dam.