The pavement was ice-cold and the soles of her tights tore through in a matter of seconds, but at least she could run properly now. She cut right onto another street, the rue du Prince. A group of men, clad in tight jeans and leathers, were clustered outside the entrance to Le Prétexte, the city’s leading gay club.
“Help me!” Alix screamed, pointing an arm behind her at the two men. They were running now, too.
The men parted to let her through, then one of them, the club’s bouncer, stepped into the path of the two men. He was massive, dressed entirely in black. His head was shaven, but the lower half of his face was covered with a thick, piratical beard.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What are you-”
One of the men chopped the bouncer to the ground with a single blow before he could even finish the sentence. The clubbers fled from the two men’s path; then, once the men had gone, clustered around the bouncer’s unconscious body.
Alix was on her own. She was in no shape to run. She smoked too much and exercised too little. But it was not far to the end of the street now, where it hit the rue du Rhône, one of the city’s busiest roads. Half a dozen bus and tram routes connected here, and its pavements would be crowded with people. If she could just keep going, she stood a chance.
She dashed across the street, cutting across it diagonally to the corner, where it met the rue du Rhône. A car passed down the pavement behind her, briefly forcing the men to stop as it went by, buying her a few precious seconds. She looked up and down the main road, searching for a bus or a cab, and suddenly her luck changed. About fifty yards away, a taxi pulled away from the pavement, into the far lane of the broad one-way street. The driver flicked on his FOR Hire light and Alix waved frantically.
The cab was driving forward, the driver seemingly oblivious to her desperate attempts to attract his attention. Behind her, the men had started crossing the road.
“Please…” Alix implored and then, in answer to her prayers, she saw the taxi’s indicator flicking as it cut across the traffic toward her.
One of the men had spotted it, too. He gestured to his partner and they seemed to find an extra gear, sprinting even harder toward her.
Alix did not wait for the taxi to reach her. She dashed out into the road, ignoring the oncoming traffic, forcing the cab driver to brake in front of her. He flashed his headlights at her in protest, forcing her to put up a hand to shield her eyes as she dashed around the cab, wrenched open the passenger door, and threw herself onto the seat, yanking the door closed behind her.
Wheezing for breath, her eyes still dazzled, she managed to gasp the words, “Cornavin Station, fast as you can.”
It was only when she sank back onto the seat, her chest heaving and her throat gagging, that Alix noticed that she was not alone in the back of the cab.
The woman she had spotted at the bierkeller was sitting, half turned, with her legs crossed and her right shoulder leaning against the side of the car. Her arms were crossed above her lap, with her right wrist resting on her left forearm, supporting the gun she was pointing directly at Alix.
“Good evening, my dear,” said Olga Zhukovskaya.
She was one of the most powerful women in Russia, the deputy director of the FSB, the intelligence agency that was the direct descendent of the Soviet KGB. Yet she spoke with an affectionate familiarity that suggested long acquaintance, even a family tie.
Zhukovskaya had indeed been a kind of mother to Alix. She was still the wife, rather than the widow, of Yuri Zhukovski when she spotted Alix at a Communist Party youth convention in Moscow a dozen years before-a gawky provincial teenager, hiding behind thick-lensed spectacles. Yet the older woman’s practiced eye had spotted a natural sexuality of which the girl herself was entirely unaware. And just as years of training can turn a raw recruit into an elite fighting man, so the gauche, unsophisticated Alexandra Petrova had been transformed by diet, exercise, surgery, and education.
Zhukovskaya had observed Alix bewitch generals, politicians, and industrialists. She had watched her own late husband-once, like her, a KGB officer; then a ruthless industrialist-fall under Alix’s spell, and been content to let the relationship flourish as long as it suited her own purposes.
Alix had been magnificent. But now look at her-a tired, bedraggled creature in laddered tights and a cheap, tawdry costume.
For a moment, Zhukovskaya was tempted to let her go. Why waste time on someone who was already so close to the edge? But then she reconsidered. She had come a long way, after all, and gone to a great deal of trouble. There was no point in throwing away this opportunity.
Her head was tilted slightly, giving her a quizzical expression as she asked, “What made you think you could run?”
26
Mary Lou Stoller lived on Edmunds Street in northwest Washington D.C., on the block between Foxhall Road and Glover-Archbold Park.
At that point, Edmunds seems more like a country lane than a residential street just a few miles from the heart of a capital city. At the east end of the road, you can step right into the park, a rolling expanse of semirural woodland.
Mary Lou got home that afternoon around five. Her boss was out of town, so she’d left work early. It was such a lovely winter afternoon, with the low rays of the sun cutting through the bare branches and the fallen leaves crisp with frost underfoot, she couldn’t wait to take her Norfolk terrier, Buster, for a walk.
There weren’t too many people in the park, just the occasional mother with her children, or a jogger running in search of immortality. When Mary Lou saw the two men coming toward her, she felt a brief spasm of alarm. There wasn’t anyone else on the path. Her immediate, instinctive response, as a woman, was to see two large males as a threat.
She told herself not to be so silly. The men didn’t look like any muggers she’d ever heard of. They were executive types in their thirties or forties, respectably dressed. Besides, they were deep in conversation, paying no attention to her: two typical Washingtonians wanting privacy while they plotted.
As she reached the men, they politely stood to one side of the path to let her and Buster go by. One of them smiled pleasantly and touched a finger to the brim of his hat in salute. Mary Lou returned the smile with one of her own. She’d been raised a proper southern lady and liked to see a gentleman respecting proper, courtly conventions.
Distracted for a second, she didn’t really notice the other man as he stepped in front of her. She was completely unprepared when he drove his fist, reinforced by steel knuckle, hard into her midriff, forcing the air from her body and doubling her up in pain, exposing her neck and the back of her head to the next blow. The lead-weighted, leather-covered blackjack that the courtly gentleman had concealed in his other hand crashed into her skull, just as a second punch pummeled her temple. As her legs gave way beneath her, the blackjack caught her again.
By now the terrier was scampering around its mistress, challenging her attackers with sharp, high-pitched barks and nipping at their heels with its teeth. It was rewarded by a kick from a steel-capped shoe that sent it skittering across the path until jerked to a halt by the leash. It lay there moaning, barely conscious, while the two men aimed a swift, brutal series of kicks at its mistress’s head and torso.
It was forty minutes before the body was found, over an hour before police investigators were on the scene. By then the two men were checking in for the early-evening Austrian Airlines flight from Dulles International to Vienna, connecting there with a flight to Moscow. And they were hundreds of miles into their journey when General Kurt Vermulen got off the plane from San Antonio, glad to be home after his meeting with Waylon McCabe, and discovered that he was going to need another secretary.