Chalthoum frowned. “Has he worked for the Egyptians before?”
Yusef shook his head. “Not to my knowledge.”
“You don’t use him, do you?” Soraya was examining what was left of Ahmed’s face. “I don’t remember seeing his name on any of your reports.”
“I wouldn’t trust this scum to bring me a disk of bread,” Yusef said with a curl of his upper lip. “In addition to being a professional murderer, he’s a liar and a thief, always, even when he was a small boy.”
“Remember,” Chalthoum said with a grim look at Soraya, “I want at least one of them alive.”
“First things first,” she said. “Let’s just concentrate on getting out of here alive ourselves.”
He was still trying without success to brush the odors of quicklime and death off his clothes, but this business allowed Soraya to take the lead—which, again, was something he deplored. Ever since they’d arrived in Khartoum something had taken possession of him, a sense of protectiveness toward Soraya that clearly made her uncomfortable. Possibly it was being away from Egypt; he was in unknown territory, after all, and he knew only too well that he was most sure of himself in his own territory.
She heard him call softly to her but resisted the urge to turn and look at him. Instead she moved steadily forward in a semi-crouch until she came to the first courtyard. There were positions to the left and right on either wall where snipers would have an excellent field of view. She fired a shot at each spot in turn, but there was no answering fire. That was it for the shooter’s .45, so she dropped it and took out the Glock that Yusef had given her. After double-checking that it was loaded she moved out across the expanse of the grim-looking courtyard, keeping to the shadows thrown by the walls. Not once did she look back, trusting that Amun and Yusef were not far behind her and would provide cover if she got into trouble.
Moments later the second, central courtyard, larger and more intimidating than the first, presented itself. Again she fired shots at the likely sniper positions, again without any result.
“There’s only one more,” Yusef said. “It’s smaller, but because it’s at the front there are more places to defend it.”
Soraya saw at once that he was right, and that no matter what they did they’d never be able to reach the parapets on either wall without being shot dead.
“What now?” she said to Amun.
Before he could think of a reply, Yusef said, “I have an idea. I knew Ahmed all his life, I think I can imitate his voice.” He looked from Chalthoum to Soraya. “Shall I give it a shot?”
“I don’t see how it can hurt,” Chalthoum said, but Yusef didn’t move until Soraya nodded her assent.
Then he brushed by ahead of her and, crouching in the shadowy mouth where the corridor debouched onto the courtyard, he raised his voice. It wasn’t his voice, but one neither of them had heard before.
“It’s Ahmed—please, I’m hurt!” Nothing but echoes. He turned to Soraya. “Quick!” he whispered. “Give me your shirt.”
“Take mine,” Chalthoum said with a glower.
“Hers will be better,” Yusef said. “They’ll see it’s the female’s.”
Soraya did as he asked, unbuttoning her short-sleeved shirt and handing it over.
“I’ve killed them!” Yusef called in Ahmed’s voice. “See here!” Soraya’s shirt fluttered onto the cobbles of the courtyard like a bird settling onto its nest.
“If you’ve killed them,” a voice came from their left, “come out!”
“I can’t,” Yusef replied, “my leg is broken. I’ve dragged myself this far, but I’ve fallen and I can’t take another step! Please, brothers, come fetch me before I bleed to death!”
For a long time nothing happened. Yusef was about to shout again when Chalthoum cautioned silence.
“Don’t oversell it,” he whispered. “Be patient now.”
More time passed, it was difficult to say how much since in their situation time was bent like taffy, minutes seeming like an hour. At length, they discerned movement on their right. Two men could be seen making their way down to the ground. They moved cautiously, keeping their sides toward the mouth of the hallway. The third man—the one who had queried Yusef—was nowhere in sight. Clearly, he was covering them from his hidden position on the left.
Chalthoum motioned silently to Yusef, who lay down and moved slightly so that the two men could see that one leg was drawn up under the other. Soraya and Chalthoum retreated several steps into the gloom.
“There he is!” one of the men cried to the man covering them—who was, it appeared, their leader. “I can see Ahmed! He’s fallen, just as he said!”
“I don’t see any other movement,” the leader’s voice floated down from the parapet. “Go get him, but make it quick!”
Running in a semi-crouch, the two men approached Yusef.
“Hold it!” their leader said, and they obediently squatted on their hams, their rifles laid across their thighs, their avid eyes on their fallen comrade.
There was movement from the left as the leader abandoned his eyrie, clattering down stone steps to the courtyard.
“Ahmed,” one of the men whispered, “are you all right?”
“No,” said Ahmed. “The pain in my leg is terrible, it’s—”
But he’d said enough at close range for the other man to move back a pace.
“What is it?” his companion said, aiming his rifle into the mouth of the hallway.
“I don’t think that’s Ahmed.”
That was when Chalthoum and Soraya, Glocks firing, moved out on either side of Yusef. The two crouching men were struck immediately, and Chalthoum kicked their weapons away from where they lay sprawled on the ground. The leader, scurrying to find cover where there was none, fired off-balance and Chalthoum went down with a grunt.
Soraya, running, aimed and fired at the leader, but it was Yusef, from his prone position, who shot the leader in the chest. The man spun around and fell. At once Soraya veered toward him.
“Check Amun!” she called to Yusef as she stooped, picking up the leader’s rifle. He was writhing, bleeding from his right side, but he was breathing. The bullet hadn’t punctured a lung.
She knelt down beside him. “Who hired you?”
The man looked up at her and spat in her face.
A moment later she was joined by the two men. Amun had been shot in the thigh, but the bullet had gone through and the wound, Yusef said, looked clean. He’d tied off the area above the wound with a makeshift tourniquet made from her shirt.
“Are you all right?” she said, looking up at Chalthoum.
He nodded in his usual dour way.
“I’ve asked him who hired him,” she said, “but he’s not talking.”
“Take Yusef and see about the other two.” Chalthoum was staring intently at the fallen leader.
Soraya knew that look of determination. “Amun…”
“Just give me five minutes.”
They needed the information, there was no question about that. Soraya nodded reluctantly and, with Yusef, walked back to where the other two men lay near the mouth of the hallway. There wasn’t much to see. Both had taken multiple shots to the abdomen and chest. Neither was alive. As they gathered up the rifles, they heard a muffled cry that, in its inhumanity, sent shivers down their spines.
Yusef turned to her. “This Egyptian friend of yours, he can be trusted?”
Soraya nodded, already sick at what Amun was doing with her consent. There was silence then, except for the desperate voice of the wind, keening through the abandoned rooms. After a time, Chalthoum returned to them. He was limping badly, and Yusef handed him a rifle to lean on.
“My enemies had nothing to do with this,” he said in a voice that had not been changed one iota by what he’d just done. “These men were hired by the Americans, specifically a man known ridiculously as Triton. Mean anything to you?”
Soraya shook her head.
“But these might.” She saw
four small rectangular metal objects swinging from a length of cord. “I found these around the leader’s neck.”
She examined them when he handed them over. “They look like dog tags.”
Amun nodded. “He said they came from the four Americans who were executed back there. These bastards murdered them.”
But she had to admit the tags weren’t like any she had ever seen. Instead of carrying name, rank, and serial number, they were laser-engraved with what looked like—
“They’re enciphered,” she said, her heart beating fast. “These might be the key to proving who launched the Kowsar 3, and why.”
Book Four
31
LEONID DANILOVICH ARKADIN roamed the passenger area of the Air Afrika flight that had been sent for him and his cadre in Nagorno-Karabakh. He knew their destination was Iran. Noah Perlis was certain that Arkadin didn’t know the specific site, but Noah was wrong. Like many Americans in his position, Noah believed himself smarter than those who weren’t American and able to manipulate them. Where Americans got that idea was something of a mystery, but having spent time in DC, Arkadin had some ideas. America’s smug sense of isolation might have been shaken by the events in 2001, but not its sense of privilege and entitlement. When he’d been there, he’d sat in district restaurants, eavesdropping on conversations as part of his Treadstone training. But at the same time he’d listen to the neocons—men of power, substance, and influence who were convinced that they had the keys to how the world worked. For them, everything was childishly simple, as if there were only two immutable variables in life: action and reaction, both of which they understood completely, and for which they planned. And when the reactions were not what their brain trust had anticipated—when their plans blew up in their faces—instead of admitting their error, in a tide of amnesia they redoubled their efforts. To him, it was madness that turned these people deaf and blind to real events as they unfolded.
Perhaps, he thought now, as he checked and rechecked the readiness of his men and their equipment, Noah was one of the last of his kind, a dinosaur unaware that his age was ending, that the glacier that had been forming on the horizon was about to plow him under.
Just like Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov.
She has to go back,” Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov said, “she and the three girls. Otherwise there will be no peace with Lev Antonin.”
“Since when does a shit-kicker like Antonin dictate to you,” Arkadin said, “the head of the Kazanskaya grupperovka?”
Arkadin had the sensation that Tarkanian, who stood by his side, had winced. The three men were surrounded by sound, amplified to an earsplitting level. In the Pasha Room of Propaganda, an elitny club in downtown Moscow, there were only two other men—both Maslov’s muscle. All the other attendees—of which there were more than a dozen—were young, long-legged, blond, busty, gorgeous, and sexually desirable, which pretty much defined them: tyolkas all. They were clothed—or, more accurately, semi-clothed—in provocative outfits, whether miniskirts, bikinis, see-through tops, plunging necklines, or completely backless dresses. They wore high heels, even the ones in bathing suits, and plenty of makeup. Some reluctantly returned to their high school classes each day.
Maslov stared hard at Arkadin, assuming that like everyone else he confronted, he could intimidate him just by a look. Maslov was wrong, and he didn’t like being wrong. Ever.
He took one step toward Arkadin, which was an aggressive step, though not a threatening one, and his nose wrinkled. “What’s that fire smoke I smell on you, Arkadin, are you a fucking woodsman on top of everything else?”
Five miles from the Orthodox cathedral, Arkadin had taken Joškar into the dense pine forest. She was cradling Yasha in her arms and he was holding an ax he’d drawn out of the trunk of her car. Her three daughters, sobbing hysterically, trailed along behind the adults in single file.
When they’d left the parked car, Tarkanian had yelled after them, “Half an hour, after that I’m getting the fuck out of here!”
“Will he really leave us here?” she asked.
“Do you care?”
“Not as long as you’re with me.”
At least, that’s what he thought she’d said. She’d spoken so softly that the wind had taken her words almost as soon as they were out of her mouth. Wings fluttered by overhead as they tramped beneath the swaying pine branches. Once they crunched through the thin crust, the snow was soft as down. Overhead, the sky was as woolly as Joškar’s coat.
In a small clearing she set her son down on a bed of snowy pine needles.
“He always loved the forest,” she said. “He used to beg me to take him to play in the mountains.”
As he set about finding felled trees, deadwood, and chopping it up into foot-long logs, Arkadin remembered his own all-too-infrequent trips to the mountains around Nizhny Tagil, the only place where he could take a deep breath without the oppressive weight of his parents and his birthplace withering his heart and sickening his spirit.
Within twenty minutes he had a bonfire going. The girls had stopped their sobbing, their tears freezing like tiny diamonds on their ruddy cheeks. As they stared, fascinated, into the building flames, the frozen tears melted, dripping from their rounded chins.
Joškar delivered Yasha into his arms while she said the prayers in her native language. She held her daughters close to her as she intoned the words, which gradually became a song, her strong voice lifted through the pine boughs, echoing into the thick clouds. Arkadin wondered if the fairies, elves, gods, and demi-gods she had invoked in her stories were somewhere close, watching the ceremony with sorrowful eyes.
At length, Joškar instructed Arkadin on what to say when she placed Yasha onto the funeral pyre. The girls were crying again as they watched their brother’s little body being consumed by the flames. Joškar said a final prayer, and then they were done. Arkadin had no idea how much time had passed, but Tarkanian and the car were still waiting for them when they broke out of the tree line and returned to civilization.
I made a promise to her,” Arkadin said.
“This fucking baby factory?” Maslov scoffed. “You’re stupider than you look.”
“You’re the one who risked two of your men—one of them totally incompetent—to bring me back here.”
“Yes, you shithead, not you and four civilians who belong to someone else.”
“You talk about them as if they’re cattle.”
“Hey, fuck you, bright boy! Lev Antonin wants them back, and that’s where they’re going.”
“I’m responsible for her son’s death.”
“Did you kill the little fucker?” Maslov was fairly shouting now. The muscle had been drifting closer and the tyolkas were doing their best to look in another direction.
“No.”
“Then you’re not responsible for his death. End of fucking story!”
“I made a promise that she wouldn’t be sent back to her husband, she’s dead scared of him. He’ll beat her half to death.”
“What the fuck does that mean to me?” In his fury, Maslov’s mineral eyes seemed to shoot sparks. “I have a business to run.”
Tarkanian stirred. “Boss, maybe you should—”
“What?” Maslov turned on Tarkanian. “Are you gonna tell me what I should do, too, Mischa? Fuck you! I asked you for something simple: Bring this kid back from Nizhny Tagil. And what happens? The kid beats the shit outta Oserov and you come back like a fucking pack mule with a shitload of problems I don’t need.” Having effectively silenced Tarkanian, he turned back to Arkadin. “As for you, you better get your fucking head screwed on right, bright boy, or I’ll send you back to the shithole you crawled out of.”
“They’re my responsibility,” Arkadin said levelly. “I’ll take care of them.”
“Listen to him!” Now Maslov was shouting. “Who died and made you boss? And whatever gave you the crooked idea that you have a say in anything that happens here?” His face was red, almost swollen. ??
?Mischa, get this motherless fuck out of my sight before I rip him apart with my bare hands!”
Tarkanian dragged Arkadin out of the Pasha Room and took him over to the long bar on one side of the main room. A stage, lit up like it was New Year’s Eve, featured a tall nubile tyolka with very little on, who spread her mile-long legs to a beat-heavy song.
“Let’s have a drink,” Tarkanian said with forced joviality.
“I don’t want a drink.”
“It’s on me.” Tarkanian caught the bartender’s eye. “Come on, my friend, a drink is just what you need.”
“Don’t tell me what I need,” Arkadin said, his voice suddenly raised.
The absurd argument carried on from there, escalating enough so that a bouncer was summoned.
“What seems to be the trouble?” He might have been addressing both of them but, because he knew Tarkanian by sight, his eyes were firmly fixed on Arkadin.
With a venomous glare, Arkadin reacted. He grabbed the bouncer and slammed his forehead against the edge of the bar with so much force that nearby drinks trembled and the closest ones tipped over. Then he kept slamming it until Tarkanian managed to pull him off.
“I don’t have a problem,” Arkadin said to the stunned and bleeding bouncer. “But it’s clear you do.”
Tarkanian hustled him out into the night before he could do any more damage.
“If you think I’m ever going to work for that pile of dogshit,” Arkadin said, “you’re sorely mistaken.”
Tarkanian held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Don’t work for him.” He guided Arkadin down the street, away from the club’s entrance. “However, I don’t know how you’re going to make a living. Moscow is a different—”
“I’m not staying in Moscow.” Breath, condensing in the chill, was shooting out of Arkadin’s nostrils like steam. “I’m going to take Joškar and the girls and—”
“And what? Where will you go? You have no money, no prospects, nothing. How will you feed yourselves, let alone the kids?” Tarkanian shook his head. “Take my advice, forget about those people, they belong to your past, to another life. You’ve left Nizhny Tagil behind.” He peered into Arkadin’s eyes. “That’s what you’ve wanted all your life, isn’t it?”