It was an eternity—it was a full thirty seconds—before Kiril could bring himself to ask, “Depends on what?”
“On whether you can convince me I won’t be in any real danger of getting caught. My wife tells me that Mongolian thug seldom lets you out of his sight. You even share the same room. How were you planning to deal with him?”
“Infused diazepam—valium.”
“Administered when?”
“When my ‘shadow’ is asleep. He’ll stay that way for at least four hours. I have some diazepam in my room. And I’m sure I don’t have to prove to another doctor just how fast the infused diazepam will kick in,” Kiril said eagerly.
“It’s a damned effective drug, all right. Next question. What happens if you run into trouble between here and the border? Were you able to smuggle in a gun?”
“No. They search us too well for that.”
“I take it you have an alternative?”
Kiril smiled. “Morphine sulphate. I picked up a bottle of it, along with a hypodermic needle, in the clinic this morning.”
“Powerful stuff. Your English is surprisingly good, Dr. Andreyev. Your American slang is even more impressive.”
“What’s the question?”
“Are you good enough to impersonate an American?”
“I’ve had long years of practice. They can’t jam all the foreign radio broadcasts. Sometimes they don’t even try.”
“Your plan won’t work.”
Kiril felt as if he were on a roller coaster—up and down up and down He closed his eyes. “Why not?”
“Our hair. How can both of us walk out of here with white hair?”
“Oh, that,” he said with a flood of relief. “What do you think I was doing in your bathroom? Washing the brown out of my hair.”
“But do you have enough? What if you run out?”
“I won’t. I had the foresight to fill an extra bottle with brown rinse. More than I’ll ever need.”
Brenner stood up, one hand gripping the iron bedpost for support, his decision made. “I have to go,” he said.
“So what’s the plan? You refuse to succumb to my brother’s blackmail and insist on leaving tonight or—”
“Not quite. As soon as I finish packing, my plan is to see a man about a trade—mutually beneficial, of course,” Brenner said softly. “Colonel Aleksei Andreyev hands off his damning evidence against me in return for my equally damning evidence about his brother’s defection plan. In exchange for my silence about diazepam, morphine sulphate, and brown hair rinse, he’ll hand over a primitive tape recorder and a spool of wire. The authorities here will never believe that Colonel Andreyev wasn’t in on his own brother’s escape plan. Brothers help each other.”
Brenner’s words were tumbling out one after another, as if he couldn’t wait to get out of a room that threatened to suffocate him.
“You people don’t operate on proof over here,” Brenner said, avoiding eye contact. “All your intelligence apparatchiks need are suspicious circumstances. He’s smart, your brother. He’ll agree to my terms now.”
“You know your man, all right. My brother Aleksei will frame me for something that can’t possibly reflect on him. Then he’ll have me shot.”
“You’re exaggerating. He’s your own brother! You’d say anything to stop me.”
And do anything.
Kiril caught Brenner off balance with a single blow.
Chapter 40
The man with brown hair, lying on the four-poster in the bedroom of the Brenner suite, wore a shabby blue suit and dark glasses.
The man bending over him wore a dress shirt, a black bow toe, and a tuxedo. His hair was white.
The white-haired man straightened up, went into the bedroom, and examined himself in the floor-length mirror. His lips curved into a practiced smile—contemptuous, amused. With an impatient gesture, he brushed away a few rebellious strands of hair that had fallen onto his forehead before stepping back for a final appraisal.
Closing Adrienne Brenner’s suitcase, still on the bed, he put the other suitcase in the closet. A gown and a bathrobe hung there, along with a raincoat and a woman’s cape. He put on the raincoat, took the cape, and picked up Adrienne’s suitcase.
He was about to shut the bedroom door when he spotted the glass on the bureau. Not much gin and tonic left, but the twist of lime was still there. He squeezed a few drops of lime juice into the half-sprawled man’s left eye, once again adjusted the dark glasses on the comatose face, and did one last check No more brown spots on the neck. A small spatter of the rinse had washed off easily.
He picked up the telephone and dialed, bracing himself for the tense voice on the other end. “Sorry it took me so long,” he told Aleksei in Russian. “I know I said I’d call right back, but things got a little unpleasant… No, nothing like that. Brenner’s initial panic is over.”
Kiril continued in Russian. “… Get ahold of yourself, Aleksei. You sound ‘drunk as a skunk,’ as the Americans say. Yes, he’s agreed to everything. However, he has one precondition. Hold on. Brenner wants to tell you himself.”
Kiril held the phone against his chest, wondering if Aleksei could hear the rapid beating of his heart. After a few seconds, he lifted the receiver as a string of American slang expressions flashed through his mind. “You win, Colonel,” Kiril said in English, his voice more sonorous, and more than a little belligerent. “But get this straight. Any blackmail threats you people concocted against my wife are out of bounds. I’m taking Adrienne to Zurich out of harm’s way… .Of course I’ll be back! I can’t afford not to, can I? It won’t be forever, you said… . Right.”
A pregnant pause.
“One more thing, Colonel. That ‘unpleasantness’ your brother alluded to just now? Forgive my crudeness, but it seems that ever since he laid eyes on my wife, he wanted to get into her pants. He’s about to find out what I think of that offensive notion.”
Hanging up before Aleksei had a chance to reply, Kiril grabbed suitcase and cape and rushed down an empty corridor to his room. After stuffing a few items into the suitcase, he hurriedly dumped the brown hair rinse bottle into a waste basket in the bathroom, along with the diazepam and the syringe, then covered the contents with soiled towels.
For a long moment, Kiril closed his eyes. The next thing he knew, he was walking with brisk authority down the hallway toward an elevator in the characteristic stride he’d zeroed in on the moment Dr. Kurt Brenner had stepped off a plane in East Berlin.
When he realized that he’d begun to swing the suitcase as if it were a tennis racket, he felt a surge of adrenalin.
Maybe, just maybe, I can pull this off!
Aleksei had left the table he’d shared with his brother and Adrienne Brenner and was huddled with the press contingent in a lounge just outside the banquet room. When Adrienne’s husband headed for the table, Aleksei cast a suspicious glance at the suitcase in his hand.
“My wife’s things. She’s no part of this. Adrienne is not going anywhere near the Soviet Union. Given her political sentiments, I could barely get her to East Berlin,” he said waspishly.
Aleksei made his way back toward the table out of earshot of the press, teetering slightly, as if he were crossing the deck of a sailboat.
“Where’s my brother?” he asked.
“In the master bedroom—out cold on the bed. I trust you won’t take it personally.”
“I always take family matters personally but not in the way you mean. I picked up on my brother’s attraction to your wife. Nor do I rule out the possibility that it was mutual,” Aleksei added, unable to resist chipping away at Brenner’s pride after all the trouble the bastard had put him through. “Romance aside, Dr. Brenner,” he said, his words slightly slurred, “what will you tell your wife about your forced separation?”