“I’m not letting Maslov’s people take them back. You don’t know what Lev Antonin’s like.”
“Maslov doesn’t care what Lev Antonin’s like.”
“Fuck Maslov!”
Tarkanian rounded on him. “You really don’t get it, do you? Dimitri Maslov and his kind own Moscow lock, stock, and vodka. That means they own Joškar and her girls.”
“Joškar and the girls aren’t part of his world.”
“They are now,” Tarkanian said. “You dragged them into it.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Well, that’s clear enough, but you have to face facts: What’s done is done.”
“There must be a way out of this.”
“Really? Even if you had money—say, if I were stupid enough to give you some—what would it accomplish? Maslov would send his people after you. Worse, considering how you provoked him, he might come after you himself. Trust me when I tell you that’s not what you want for them.”
Arkadin felt like pulling his hair out by the roots. “Don’t you understand? I don’t want them going back to that fucker.”
“Have you considered that it might be the best outcome?”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Look, you yourself said that Joškar told you Lev Antonin promised to protect her and her children. You know what she is, and the girls have her blood. If her secret gets out she’ll never be able to have a normal life among ethnic Russians. Face it, you can’t protect them from Maslov, but they’ll be safe enough back in Nizhny Tagil, where no one is going to say a word against her for fear of her husband. And listen, she’s smart enough to tell him that she and the kids were abducted to ensure your safe passage. Chances are he won’t lift a hand to her.”
“Until the next time he’s drunk or depressed or just in the mood for a little fun.”
“That’s her life, not yours. Leonid Danilovich, I’m talking to you as one friend to another. This is the only way. You managed to escape Nizhny Tagil; not everyone can be so fortunate.”
The fact that Tarkanian was telling the truth only made Arkadin angrier. The problem was he didn’t know what to do with that anger, so he began to turn it inward. More than anything, he wanted to see Joškar again, he wanted to hold her youngest girl in his arms again, to feel her warmth, her heartbeat. But he knew that it was impossible. If he met with her again, he’d never be able to let her go. Maslov’s people would surely kill him and the family would be shipped back to Lev Antonin anyway. He felt like a rat in a maze with no beginning and no end, only an eternal race chasing his own tail.
This was Dimitri Maslov’s doing. At that moment he vowed that no matter how long it took he’d make Maslov pay: Death would come to him only when he’d been systematically stripped of everything he held dear.
Two days later he watched from the shadows across the street—Tarkanian at his elbow, either for moral support or to drag him back if he got any ideas at the last minute—as Joškar and the three girls were led into a large black Zil. Two of Maslov’s muscle were with them, plus the driver. The girls, bewildered, allowed themselves to be stowed in the car as docilely as lambs to the slaughter.
For her part, Joškar, with hands on the car’s roof, one foot already inside, paused and looked around for him. As she did so, Arkadin saw not the look of despair he had been expecting, but rather an expression of infinite sadness, which tore through him like phosphorus, burning his insides as black as Yasha’s flesh. He’d deceived her, broken his promise.
In his mind he heard her voice as if she were calling to him now: “Don’t make me go back to him.”
She’d believed in him, trusted him, and now she had nothing.
She ducked down, and he lost sight of her. The car door slammed, the Zil drove off, and he had nothing as well. This was brought home to him in an even more vicious fashion when, six weeks later, Tarkanian informed him that Joškar had shot her husband to death, then turned the gun on her children and herself.
32
SHAHRAKE NASIRI-ASTARA at last! Noah Perlis had been to many exotic destinations in his time, but this area of northwestern Iran wasn’t one of them. In fact, apart from the stark towers of the oil wells and the attendant petroleum particulates, it was so ordinary looking it could have been somewhere in rural Arkansas. However, Noah had no time to be bored. An hour ago, he’d received a call from Black River informing him that Dondie Parker, the man he’d sent to kill Humphry Bamber, had failed to check in as he should have following the completion of his assignment. To Noah, this meant two things: One, Bamber was still alive, and, two, he’d lied about getting away from Moira, because there was no way he could have survived Dondie Parker on his own. Extrapolating from these hypotheses brought him to another hypothesis of vital and immediate importance to him: the possibility that the newest version of Bardem was poisoned in some way he’d never be able to discover.
Lucky for him his innate paranoia forced him to back up everything, even his computer. No point in letting his enemies know he was on to them. He’d shut down the laptop on which Bamber had uploaded the poisoned software and switched to his fully loaded second laptop, which was still running the previous version of Bardem.
He sat inside a canvas tent on a camp chair, much as he imagined Julius Caesar had sat, mapping out his successful military campaigns, centuries ago. Instead of a map of Gaul hand-drawn by Greek cartographers, he had a handmade software program analyzing this oil-rich part of the world running on his laptop. Caesar, a brilliant general in any age, would have understood instantly what he was up to, of that he had no doubt.
He had three scenarios running simultaneously on Bardem, all of them different in small but crucial ways. Much depended on how the Iranian government responded to the incursion—if they found out about it in time. That was the issue, really: timing. It was one thing to be on Iranian soil, quite another to start a military operation on it. The point of Pinprick was its small footprint, hence its name. Did an elephant even feel a pinprick? You could be sure it didn’t. Unfortunately, Noah couldn’t be as certain that the Iranian government wouldn’t feel Pinprick until Arkadin’s force of twenty men had established their beachhead and begun redirecting the oil pipeline.
Because the objective of Pinprick had always been the oil in the Iranian fields here in Shahrake Nasiri-Astara. There was nothing else of value here, militarily or otherwise. That was what was so brilliant about Danziger’s plan—the seizure of these rich oil fields under the cover of a larger military incursion by America and a sizable coalition of allies in response to Iran’s alleged act of war against the United States and, indeed, all civilized nations. If the Iranians could shoot down an American passenger jet over Egyptian airspace, what would stop them from downing the jets of other nations that opposed their nuclear program? This had been the cornerstone of the president’s argument to the United Nations, one that had proved so compelling that it had eaten through all the knee-jerk pacifistic, foot-dragging bullshit that usually infested the international body of navel-gazers and do-nothings.
Through his machinations, Iran had been proven to be a true outlaw nation in the eyes of the world. So much the better for everyone. The country’s regime was a menace; if the rest of the world needed a bit of goading to get off their fat backsides and take matters into their own hands, well, that was the way of the world. One of Black River’s specialties—one that set it apart from any other private risk management firm—was its ability to alter facts to create a reality that could be molded to a client’s wishes. This was what Bud Halliday had asked of Black River, why the NSA was paying it a fortune through one of many blind trusts that could in no way be traced back to the secretary or anyone at NSA. So far as any paper trail was concerned—there was always a paper trail, electronic or otherwise, that was a given—Black River’s client was Good Shepherd Holdings, PLC, on the Inner Hebrides island of Islay, which, if anyone cared to make the trek, consisted of a three-room office in a drafty
stone building, where three men and a woman wrote and managed insurance policies for local distilleries throughout the islands.
As for the democratic indigenous group Halliday so heartily touted to the president, it and the meetings its leaders had with Black River personnel were a part of Pinprick. In other words, they were a figment of Danziger’s imagination. Danziger had argued that the creation of the indigenous group was vital both to get the president moving further in the direction of war and as a reason to shovel virtually unlimited funds to Black River, to cover the massive expenditures for its partners: Yevsen, Maslov, and Arkadin, all of whom were paid by Good Shepherd.
One of Perlis’s men entered the tent to tell him that Arkadin’s plane would be arriving within fifteen minutes. Perlis nodded, silently dismissing him. He had disliked using Dimitri Maslov, not because he felt he couldn’t trust him, but because it galled him that he needed Maslov to deal with Yevsen. Worse, Maslov had brought in Leonid Arkadin, a man Perlis had never met, but whose curriculum vitae in the shadow world of wet work was both impressive and worrying. Impressive because he’d never failed to successfully complete an assignment; worrying because he was a wild card—in his own way, eerily similar to the late Jason Bourne. Both men had proved themselves unreliable at taking orders and sticking to the game plan they’d been given. They were both master improvisers, certainly an element in their success, but also a nightmare for anyone attempting to handle them.
Thinking of the Russians caused him to consider the raid on Nikolai Yevsen’s headquarters in Khartoum. He hadn’t stayed around to find out who had staged it or what had happened, instead racing safely to the airport, where a Black River light transport was waiting for him just off the runway. When he’d tried to contact Oliver Liss, he’d gotten Dick Braun instead. Braun was another of the triumvirate who had founded Black River, but Perlis had never reported to him before. Braun wasn’t happy, but then he already knew that the raid had been staged by a contingent of the Russian FSB-2 that, it turned out, had been on the trail of Yevsen’s business for over two years. Noah also learned that Yevsen had been killed in the raid, a mildly surprising turn of events, but one that he, unlike Braun, welcomed. As far as he was concerned the arms dealer’s death meant one less partner, one less potential security problem to deal with. He could neither fathom nor condone Braun’s white-hot fury at Dimitri Maslov’s displeasure. So far as Noah was concerned, the head of the Kazanskaya grupperovka was just another money-hungry Russian thug. Sooner or later he’d have to be dealt with—not that he said this to his boss; such a comment would only further inflame the situation. What neither he nor Braun knew was the identity of the American who had infiltrated the Air Afrika building immediately prior to the FSB-2 raid. It was too late to think about what the American might have wanted.
Unfortunately for Noah, Braun was fully briefed and, before Noah could ask him where Liss was, Braun asked him for an update on the situation with Humphry Bamber, to which Noah replied that Bardem was as secure as it had ever been.
“Does that mean he’s been terminated?” Braun said bluntly.
“Yes,” Noah lied, not wanting to get into that thorny issue on the cusp of Pinprick’s operational phase. He killed the call before Braun could interrogate him further.
Briefly, he felt a stab of concern at Oliver Liss’s continuing absence, but right now he had more pressing problems, namely Bardem. Running the three scenarios again gave him a probability success rate of 98 percent, 97 percent, and 99 percent. The main military incursion, he knew, was going to take place on two pincer-like fronts: on the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. One was far to the south, the other clear across the country, in the east. All three scenarios were the same, except in two crucial details: how long Perlis and his team had to secure the oil fields and redirect the oil pipeline before the besieged Iranian military got wind of what was happening, and what shape their military would be in once they became aware of the oil field takeover. Still, by that time Halliday would have diverted the American forces set to rendezvous with the nonexistent indigenous group to provide support and lock down the area.
Someone else entered the tent. Anticipating a progress report on Arkadin’s flight, he glanced up and started, suddenly certain that it was Moira. His heart racing and adrenaline pumping through him, he realized that it was only Fiona, another member of his elite team who had accompanied him here. Fiona, a redhead with fine features and porcelain skin heavily laced with freckles, looked nothing like Moira, and yet Moira was who he’d seen. Why was she still on his mind?
For many years he’d believed that he could not feel anything other than physical pain. He felt nothing when his parents died, or when his best friend in high school was killed in a hit-and-run accident. He remembered standing in burnished sunshine, watching his coffin being lowered into the ground, staring at the epic breasts of Marika DeSoto, their classmate, and wondering what they felt like. It was easy for him to stare at Marika’s breasts because she was crying; all the kids were crying, apart from him.
He was certain there was something wrong with him, some missing element or essential connection to the outside world that allowed everything to pass him by like two-dimensional images on a movie screen. Until Moira, who had somehow infected him like a virus. Why would he care what she was doing, or how he had treated her when she was under his command?
Liss had warned him about Moira or, more accurately, his relationship with her, which Liss had termed “unhealthy.” “Fire her and fuck her,” Liss had said in his usual economic style, “or forget her. Either way, get her out of your head before it’s too late. This happened to you once before, to disastrous results.”
The problem was that it was already too late; Moira was lodged in a place inside himself even he couldn’t get to. Other than himself, she was the only living person who seemed three-dimensional, who actually lived and breathed. He desperately wanted her near him, but had no idea what he’d do when she was. Whenever he confronted her now he felt like a child, his ferociously cold anger hiding his fear and insecurity. Possibly one could say he wanted her to love him, but being unable to love even himself, he had no clear conception of what love might consist of, what it would feel like, or even why he should desire it.
But of course, at the throbbing core of him he knew why he desired it, why, in fact, he didn’t love Moira or even the thought of her. She was merely a symbol of someone else, whose life and death threw a shadow over his soul as if she were the devil or, if not the devil, then surely a demon, or an angel. Even now she had such a perfect hold on him that he could not even speak her name, or think of it, without a spasm of—what? fear, fury, confusion, possibly all three. The truth was that it was she who had infected him, not Moira. Terrible truth be known, his rage at Moira in the form of this unwavering vendetta was really a rage against himself. He had been so certain that he’d hidden the thought of Holly away forever, but Moira’s betrayal had cracked open the receptacle in which he stored her memory. And just this memory caused him to touch the ring on his forefinger with the same trepidation a cook might use to test the handle of a burning hot saucepan. He wanted it out of his sight; he wished, in fact, that he’d never seen it or learned of it, and yet it had been years in his possession and not once had he taken it off for any reason. It was as if Holly and the ring had fused, as if, defying the laws of physics or biology or whatever science, impossible as it might seem, her essence remained in the ring. He looked down at it. Such a small thing to have defeated him so utterly.
He felt feverish now, as if the virus were advancing to another, terminal stage. He stared at the Bardem program without his usual concentration. “Just remember this last bit of advice, mate,” Liss had said to him. “More often than not, women are the downfall of men.”
Was it all coming apart, was there nothing but loss in the world? Thrusting the laptop aside, he stood and strode out of the tent into the alien atmosphere of Iran. The architectural spider-webs of the oil rigs circled
the area like prison towers. The sound of their pumping filled the oily air with the low, steady rumble of mechanical animals prowling around their cages. The screech and clang of outmoded trucks shifting ill-maintained gears punctuated the afternoon, and the smell of crude was always in the air.
And then, above it all, came the scream of the jet engines as the Air Afrika plane appeared like a silver tube against the hazed and mottled blue of the sky. Arkadin and his men were moments away from landing. Soon the air would be thick with tracer fire, explosions, and shrapnel.
It was time to go to work.
Please tell me this is a joke,” Peter Marks said when he and Willard walked into the Mexican restaurant and saw the man sitting alone at the rear banquette. Apart from this figure, Marks and Willard were the only customers in the place. The room smelled of fermented corn and spilled beer.
“I don’t make jokes,” Willard said.
“That really sucks, especially right at this moment.”
“Don’t ask me to do better,” Willard said with some asperity, “because I can’t.”
They were in a part of Virginia unknown to Marks. He had no idea a Mexican restaurant would be open for breakfast. Willard raised an arm, a clear invitation for Marks to head on back. The man sitting alone was dressed in an expensive bespoke charcoal-blue suit, a pale blue shirt, and a navy tie with white polka dots. A small enamel replica of the American flag was pinned to his left lapel. He was drinking something out of a tall glass with a sprig of green growing out of the top. A mint julep, Marks would have thought, except that it was seven-thirty in the morning.
Despite Willard’s pressure, Marks balked. “This man is the enemy, he’s the fucking anti-Christ as far as the intelligence community is concerned. His company flouts the law, does all the things we can’t do, and gets paid obscene amounts of money to do them. While we slave away in the shit-filled belly of the beast, he’s out there buying his Gulfstream Sixes.” He shook his head, stubborn to the last. “Really, Freddy, I don’t think I can.”