“No,” snapped Sokolov.
Yakovlev withdrew his hand as though an electrical charge had just run through it. He looked like a child who’d just had his knuckles rapped.
Sokolov immediately reverted to the deep and arrhythmic intonation. “They’ll think you mean them harm. Go over to the window and see if they are still watching you.”
The man’s entire face was now covered in perspiration. He stood, leaving the gun on the glass table, and wandered silently over to the window. He peered outside, taking several seconds to scan every element of the window’s aspect.
Sokolov remained in the armchair, motionless. “Do you see them?”
“Yes.”
“So now, you can understand why I need to talk to my wife. She will be worried. About both of us.”
Yakovlev nodded, then took out his cell phone and pushed a speed-dial button.
And then it happened.
At that exact moment, a fire truck’s siren pierced the air outside. A blaring wail ripped through their ears and kept coming. Yakovlev blinked twice, looked down at his empty right hand, then swiftly located the gun on the glass table. But before he managed his first step away from the window, Sokolov had launched himself out of his chair.
He threw himself across the room and crashed his entire body weight into the off-balance target, sending the man smashing through the glass, then shoving him over the windowsill and out through six stories of New York air and onto the sidewalk below.
Sokolov heard the splat and the screams, but he didn’t dare look out the window. His heart was kicking and screaming its way out of his chest. He looked around in desperation, then acted. He picked up the cell phone from the carpet where Yakovlev had dropped it, and slipped it into a pocket. He also picked up the handgun that had fallen from the Russian. Then he crossed to the shelves and hit the Eject button on the multi-CD player. While he waited impatiently, the tray slid out. He fished out the disc that was in the front-most position and slipped it into another pocket.
Then he rushed out of the apartment, wondering if he would make it out of the building alive and unseen.
SOKOLOV’S MIND SNAPPED BACK to the present as his eyes settled on the ’80s-style LED clock on the side table.
It read 10:5-. He assumed that meant ten fifty-something. He wished he had some of his sleeping pills. He wished he could lie down and just fall asleep. He wanted to burn away as much of the night as he could, to let the nightmare dissipate and allow a new day to rise and wash away this insanity and let his real life resume its normal course. He needed to delay, as far into the future as possible, the moment when he would have to make a decision.
But that wasn’t the solution.
That wasn’t going to get his wife back.
A siren-another damn siren-broke through the hubbub outside the hotel. And although Sokolov had a passion for sounds and what some would mistakenly call noise, he hated pointless, random cacophony, which is what was assaulting his senses through the hotel’s loose-fitting window. When he had first come to America, it had taken him a long time to get used to the constant noise of the big metropolis. Moscow had been deathly quiet when he left, way back then. He knew everything had suddenly changed. For better, first-and then, for worse.
He rubbed his face and glanced at the side table again.
His wallet was there, with what was left from the thousand dollars he’d taken from an ATM not long after he’d slipped out of his building’s service entrance. That was his daily limit, and he knew he needed to make it last, thinking it would probably be unwise to use the card again. The gun and the cell phone that he had taken from his unannounced Russian visitor were also there, beside the broken clock. He needed to hide them-he half expected that they’d be stolen during the night. He saw the TV remote and picked it up, stuck the single battery back inside the remote with the final few molecules of glue left on the frayed black tape, and switched on the pawn-shop TV that was pointlessly anchored to the wall.
He flicked through the channels until he found the local news.
An update soon appeared, about a Russian diplomat falling to his death in Astoria. The reporter said there were no witnesses and no suspect-but then Sokolov’s face appeared, right there on the screen for the world to see. His face, and Daphne’s, side by side. Not as suspects, but as the occupants of the apartment the man had fallen from.
The nerve endings throughout his body flared with alarm.
He knew the bastards were only telling the Americans what suited them. Which meant the siloviki henchmen were in charge of the playbook, and New York’s finest were watching from the sidelines.
He threw the remote at the screen in disgust, but missed. It split into pieces and fell to the floor.
What do I do?
I can’t go to the police, he thought. A Russian agent just went through my window, for God’s sake. What would I tell them, anyway? “The KGB”-no, the FSB, that’s what these gangsters call themselves today, even though they were the same people, the same sadistic thugs, just a shiny, new, supposedly democratized version of the same old murderous machine-“the FSB took my wife?”
“Why would they do that, Mr. Sokolov?” the cops would ask. What answer could he give to that, what answer could he possibly give that wouldn’t trigger an entirely different brand of pain from an entirely different brand of murderous machine, pain not just for him but for God only knew how many others… all because of a futile, misguided attempt to save her. More than misguided. Pathetically naïve, really, because he knew that calling for help would end in dismal failure. He knew the Americans would never let him go either. They’d never leave him the freedom to carry on with his harmless little life and live happily ever after with his beloved Daphne. Not once they knew who he was. And certainly not after they got what they wanted from him.
Then another realization hit him.
If they don’t know who I really am, then they must think I’m a murderer.
A wanted man. A fugitive, on the run-even if they’re not saying it yet.
Were they just trying to lull him into handing himself in?
Maybe they know.
His quivering increased.
No, he couldn’t go to the cops.
Which didn’t leave him many other options. None at all, in fact. He was on his own, cast out of his home in the darkening city, on a citywide alert, the Costa Rica holiday picture they took from his apartment popping up on computer screens in police cruisers all over town, a man wanted for questioning in the suspicious death of a Russian government official.
He was on his own.
The thought tightened around him, and the city felt darker and meaner than it ever had before.
He had to make things right. For Daphne’s sake. He had to do everything he could to save her. Nothing else mattered. She was the one beacon in his life, the one good thing to have ever happened to him. An outlier in a life that had been plagued by bad choices.
He wondered what shape she was in right then. His imagination veered into horrific territory and he tried to rein it in. His throat tightened at the thought that Daphne would have no idea why she was being held. She would be scared, terrified even-though she wouldn’t give her captors the gratification of showing it. Thirty-eight years as a nurse-the last eleven at Mount Sinai in Queens-had given his wife the toughened exterior of a Marine, even though Sokolov knew that inside she was still the delicate, sweet-hearted girl that he’d first met thirty years ago.