“Who sent you?” Quinn whispered. He had no time for a lengthy interrogation. Every second put Drake farther away. “I will ask you only once more. Who sent you?”
Tokko-fuku’s lips pulled back over bloodstained teeth in a maniacal grin. Shaved eyebrows and a false widow’s peak gave him a ghoulish, Kabuki-like appearance. Instead of speaking, he released a long, rattling breath. Rushing forward, he impaled himself on the gleaming blade, then, glaring hard at Quinn, twisted sideways as if wanting to inflict the most damage.
Quinn felt a sickening scrape as the dagger known as Gentle Hand grated on bone, then snapped. He stepped back immediately, withdrawing the blade to find three inches of steel remained inside the grinning youth. Gasping, Tokko-fuku stepped forward. The mangled remnants of his bloody hand clawed at the air as he fell.
Beyond the hedgerow a boat motor burbled to life. Quinn’s phone began to buzz again, more urgently this time, it seemed. He ignored it.
Quinn stood rooted in place, his broken dagger dripping blood. The entire event had lasted less than half a minute. He scanned the three dead attackers before turning his back on them. As the Chinese said, dead tigers kill the most hunters.
He made it through the hedge in time to catch the glimpse of Drake’s bomber jacket as he stepped into the cabin of a powerboat fifty meters away. An Asian woman with black hair piled up in a loose bun held the door, then followed him inside. Quinn didn’t get a good look at her face, but judging from the height of the cabin door, she was as tall as Drake. She was older, maybe in her late fifties. She’d surely been the one to station the young goons to watch Drake’s back trail, which meant she was likely also Japanese.
Focused on a rapidly departing boat, Quinn grabbed his BlackBerry. He had to find someone who could get eyes-on while he worked out how to follow. The phone began to buzz with an incoming call before he could punch in a number.
“Quinn,” he snapped without looking at the caller ID.
Fifty meters away, the boat backed out of her slip and onto the Potomac, headed south toward points unknown.
“I need you to come in.” The president’s national security advisor charged ahead as soon as Quinn picked up. In the mind of Winfield Palmer, if you answered, you were available on his terms. If you didn’t answer, he simply called over and over until you did. It was no consequence to him that you might be holding a bloody weapon or standing over a dead body. When he wanted to talk, the boss expected you to listen.
“Sir, Drake is on the move,” Quinn said, exasperated. “We need to get with the Coast Guard and have them track the ves—”
“No time, Jericho,” Palmer cut him off. “There’s been a bombing.”
Quinn stopped. “A bombing?”
“Listen, I’m attending a funeral,” Palmer plowed on. “Can you meet me at the Tomb of the Unknowns in half an hour?”
“I’ll be there,” Quinn said. He glanced down at the dead bosozokus at his feet. A knot of puzzled onlookers already gathered across King Street, staring at the broken killing dagger in his fist. “But I might need your help with Alexandria Police.”
Quinn ended the call, then used his phone to snap a photo of each dead man. He felt sure the Asian woman on the boat with Drake had hired them — making it a good guess that she was Yakuza. Maybe there was another way to find out who she was. Before heading back to the bike, he stooped to pick up Tokko-fuku’s severed fingers. Rolling them in a blue bandana, he shoved them in the pocket of his leather jacket.
Back on the BMW he turned on the FM radio, letting the horrific news of panic and death surrounding the dirty bomb flood the speaker in his helmet. Hartman Drake, terrorist mole, murderer, and Speaker of the House, would have to wait.
CHAPTER 4
Aleksandra Kanatova slumped against the wheel of her black Lada sedan and wiped the tears from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She was smartly dressed in a white down ski jacket, gray cowl-neck wool cardigan, and jeans snug enough to show off the round hips of her gymnast’s body. A stylish blue fox ushanka sat low over her ears against the cold. The splash of freckles across her tawny complexion made wearing makeup an afterthought.
At first glance one would say she was the icon of a young Russian professional. But something was not quite right. The clothes she wore were crisp and fashionable — but her fingernails were chewed down to sorry nubs. Golden green eyes that should have sparkled in the glow of streetlights held the damaged, sidelong stare of a young woman with a deep bruise on her soul.
Aleksandra’s grandmother was one of the few in generations of Soviets who had consistently read the Bible despite the atheist views of her government. She called Aleksandra a pretty whited tomb with dead men’s bones inside, ever chiding her for some unatoned sin. Babushkas were known more for their unbridled candor than their tact.
Aleksandra was well aware that she carried a heavy load of unresolved sins, but these were not the cause of her darkness. Her eyes had once shone as they should have, before Mikhail was dead. There was nothing she could do to bring him back, but such deep and abiding sadness was not a thing she could peel off like a dirty cloak and exchange for a new one. Death was final, and now, so it seemed, was despair.
The coffin-like cold inside the musty car and the heaviness in her heart pressed against Aleksandra’s chest and threatened to rob her of all auspices of control. She pounded on the steering wheel with both hands and screamed at the top of her lungs for a full minute. Then, drying her eyes, she squared her shoulders and cursed herself for such weakness.
The Lada’s fan had a difficult time keeping the windscreen free of encroaching frost. Aleksandra had to lean forward with her eyes just above the top of the steering wheel, to peer through the tiny oval of clear glass as she drove. With such a small view of the world, it was difficult to make sense of everything amid the flashing lights and glowing ice fog outside. It was chilly enough in the car to make her blue fox hat a necessity to keep her ears from freezing while she drove. Some men in her unit insisted that the sedan was in perfect order and it was she who frosted up the windows with her frigid heart.
Traffic on Zagorodny Prospekt had snarled to a standstill with gawkers and arriving politsia vehicles. A heavy snow poured from the blackness above the city as if from a sieve, choking arterial roads and slowing emergency vehicles. Mournful wails of the wounded — and Russian women were masters at wailing — mingled with the hi-lo sirens of arriving ambulances.
In well-practiced Soviet bureaucratic fashion, a roadblock had been erected even before rescue efforts had begun, as if it was a foregone conclusion that there was something to hide at the blast site. Two bleary-eyed politsia sentries in navy-blue waist-length parkas with curly gray Astrakhan collars and hats stood in the swirling snow. The shorter of the two, an Asian-looking woman with almond eyes and huge metal hoop earrings, held back while her male partner, a young man with the piercing look of a Cossack, stepped officiously in the middle of the street and flagged down Kanatova’s black Lada. His Astrakhan hat was thrown back on his head at a cocky angle. Both officers were more bone than muscle, and looked as if they wore the uniforms as a costume instead of a badge of authority.
Kanatova rolled down her window and extended the credential card identifying her as an agent of Federal’-naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Federal Security Service. The modern progeny of the heavy-handed Soviet KGB, FSB agents still commanded fear if not actual respect from local politsia.
Presidents Putin, Medvedev, and then Putin again had vowed to clean up corruption among the nation’s police forces. Judging from the two standing outside Kanatova’s sedan, their proposed housecleaning hadn’t made it as far as the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin.