Colonel Andreyev stood in her doorway.
“My brother is unconscious in the Brenner suite. I’ll let him fill you in on the embarrassing details when he wakes up.”
She stood up. “I’ll go at once. What happened to him?”
“Can’t you forget about your lover for two seconds?” he snapped. “This is a time for celebration.”
One look at his bloodshot eyes and Galya realized that the Colonel had been celebrating to excess.
“Dr. Kurt Brenner has defected,” he said smugly. “He just went public at a press conference. He’s coming over to us as soon as he deposits his annoying wife in Zurich.”
“Congratulations, Colonel!”
Her enthusiasm was forced. Her smile was not.
And when this intelligence “coup” blows up in your face, may your superiors take it out on your hide.
Minutes later, Galya was bending over the inert figure on the couch in the Brenner suite.
Bravo, Kiril! You seem to have thought of everything, even down to the redness in Dr. Brenner’s left eye.
She opened Brenner’s shirt. Sure enough, she found the thin scar she had lightly followed with her fingertip on the beach. As she rebuttoned the shirt, her hand shook a little as she realized it was Kiril’s shirt.
Get on with it.
Straightening the tie, she raised Brenner’s head and pressed both eyelids open. The pupils had shrunk to the size of pinpricks. She wondered what drug Kiril had used. Wondered how long it would last.
As she passed by the bedroom she glanced at the open closet door. She saw a few garments inside.
She saw a patch of beige.
A lovely gown the color of rich cream…
So you’ve left me a gift, after all, Adrienne Brenner. What an odd trick of fate that I no longer want it.
On the way back to her own room, she stopped outside Kiril’s. The door was unlocked. The sight of the cheap suitcase, lying empty on his bed, was hard to bear.
Worse was a closet, because it wasn’t empty. She touched the things he had left behind. A robe. A few shirts and a pair of shoes. The new gray trousers they had picked out together on the day before they had left Moscow for East Berlin.
At least I’ve been spared the hardest thing of all. He never knew what I did. What I became.
She took a last lingering look in case something incriminating had been left behind. In case Dr. Kurt Brenner woke up ahead of schedule.
Nothing.
She checked out the bathroom—a more purposeful examination this time…
Nothing on the metal shelf above the sink. Something in the medicine cabinet maybe—a razor?
As she moved closer for a better look, her foot knocked over a waste basket. Stooping automatically to right it, she spotted an empty bottle—
A syringe had spilled onto the floor. Perfect.
But did she have the courage to go through with it?
Her hand tightened on the syringe.
Leaving the bathroom, she passed a long mirror over the four-poster bed and caught a glimpse of her reflection.
Drab black dress that complemented the dark circles under her eyes. Hair pulled back, giving her the pinched dry look of a spinster—
No!
She rushed down the corridor and reentered the Brenner suite.
A few minutes later, she stood once more in front of the long mirror, only this time she wore a cream-colored floor-length gown, her lustrous blonde hair swept down around her shoulders.
A glass of champagne in her hand, she tried to drink away her regrets, her desolation, her abject terror.
It took a while—an eternity—before all three disappeared.
It took what she herself set in motion as she walked about the room until she was quite breathless, head held high, arms slightly apart, stealing glimpses of herself in the mirror whenever she passed it.
Ending with a graceful pirouette.
She smiled one last time, indifferent to the tears because this time, her smile was right and true.
Then she returned to her own room.
How still he is.
Kiril should have revived by now, Aleksei thought. Could someone remain unconscious for three hours from a simple blow on the head—even a concussion?
And where the hell was Galina Barkova?
He leaned over Kiril’s body to press his fingertips along the back of his scalp.
He found the lump. Of course there was a lump! Why would Brenner lie about something like that?
There was no reason to be uneasy, he told himself, knowing damn well he’d been uneasy since he had first laid eyes on Kurt Brenner.
Uneasy, but not apprehensive. There was nothing unique about the strong resemblance between Kiril and Kurt Brenner. The Index was full of people who resembled one another. In some cases the men or women in question were virtually identical.
He shrugged off his anxiety. It was a trick of nature, nothing more.
But his “something-is-missing” feeling, liberated from the mental turmoil and stress of a long tension-filled day, persisted.
A clever man could turn a trick of nature to his advantage.
Could his brother be that clever?
Certainly Brenner would have had no conceivable reason to drug Kiril—
He forced himself to complete the sentence.
—but Kiril would have had damn good reason to drug Brenner.
Why didn’t the possibility occur to me sooner?
But he knew why. Too many distractions. The aftermath of Stepan Brodsky’s attempted defection on the bridge. Intense pressure from General Nemerov about the microfilm in Brodsky’s cigarette lighter. Organizing a time-consuming search for the lighter only to discover a security leak spelled out in seven ominous words. A false assumption that Ernst Roeder was in league with Adrienne Brenner, culminating in Roeder’s fatal heart attack. Talking a venomous Colonel Emil von Eyssen into joining forces for their mutual preservation.
What he’d had to cope with in a very short span of time would have distracted anyone, he thought, willing himself to remain calm.
He stared at the form on the bed, thinking that the hair looked peculiar. He pulled at a few strands, wishing he could pull Kiril’s brain into consciousness. Instead, he chose hairs at random.
No wig. The hair was real! It was also slightly damp.
He removed Kiril’s dark glasses, remembering that he was supposed to have had some sort of eye infection—the left eye? He lifted the lid.
Of course the eye was infected!
He turned to Luka with obvious relief. “See if Galina Barkova is back in her room.”
“Barkova woman asleep,” Luka said.
“Really? When did you check her room?”
“One hour ago, maybe two.”
“Wake her, please, and bring her to me.”
Luka was back in five minutes. “She won’t wake up,” he reported, his brow furrowed. “Not even when I shake her.”
Aleksei shot to his feet and rushed down the hall.
She was stretched out on the bed, fully clothed in a gown of some kind. “Galina?” he said sharply.
His voice trailed off as he noticed the belt of a black dress tied tightly around her upper arm. A syringe dangled from her forearm.
“Why?” he cried out.
But he knew why.
His own words came back to haunt him. When he’d tapped his “most charming co-optee” to spy on her lover, he’d spelled out what he was after.
There are things a woman can see—and sense—more easily than a man.
Had she sensed something that he had not? Come to think of it, what was the matter of “great urgency” she’d wanted to speak to him about while he was bartering with von Eyssen and, in a fit of temper, had sent her packing?