“Birds of a feather,” he said. “Far from the professional behavior I expect from my people, fraternizing-is that the right word for it? — with the enemy.”
“Amun Chalthoum isn’t the enemy.”
“Clearly he isn’t your enemy.” He stepped back, a clear sign for his bodyguards to close ranks, blocking whatever limited access she’d had to him. “Good luck getting another government position, Ms. Moore.”
R. Simmons Reade smirked in the background before turning away, following in the DCI’s wake as, surrounded by his entourage, Danziger strode into the Occidental. The bystanders closest to them were staring at her. Putting a hand to her face, she discovered that her cheeks were burning. She had wanted her day in court; however, this was his court and she had seriously misjudged both his intelligence and the scope of his knowledge. She had mistakenly assumed that Secretary Halliday had inveigled the president to install nothing more than a cat’s-paw, a dimwit whom Halliday would have no trouble controlling. More fool her.
As she walked slowly away from the scene of the disaster, she vowed she’d never make that mistake again.
The man on the phone, whoever he was, was right about one thing: The warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow was indistinguishable from those around it, marching away in neat rows. Boris Karpov, hidden in the shadows across from the front door, checked the address he had written down during his phone conversation with the man who called himself Leonid Arkadin. Yes, he had the right location. Turning, he signaled to his men, all of whom were heavily armed, armored in bulletproof vests and riot helmets. Karpov had a nose for traps and this one stank of it. There was no way he would have come alone, no matter how well armed, no way he was going to stick his neck into a noose devised for him by Dimitri Maslov.
Why was he here then? he asked himself for the hundredth time since the call. Because if there was a chance the man actually was Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and he was telling the truth, then it would be a criminal mistake not to follow up on the lead. The FSB-2 and Karpov in particular had been after Maslov, after the Kazanskaya as a whole, for years now, with little success.
He had been given a mandate-to bring Dimitri Maslov and the Kazanskaya to justice-by his immediate superior, Melor Bukin, the man who had lured him away from FSB with a promotion to full colonel and a command of his own. Karpov had watched the meteoric rise of Viktor Cherkesov and was determined to get on board. Cherkesov morphed the FSB-2 from an anti-drug directorate into a national security force that rivaled the vaunted FSB itself. Bukin was a childhood friend of Cherkesov’s-which more often than not was how these things worked in Russia-and now he had Cherkesov’s ear. Bukin, being Karpov’s mentor, had brought Karpov that much closer to the top of FSB-2’s pyramid of power and influence.
Bukin was on the phone when Karpov had told him where he was going and why. He’d listened briefly, then waved a cursory benediction.
Now, having silently deployed his squad in a close perimeter around the target, Karpov led his men in a frontal assault on the warehouse. He directed one of his men to shoot out the lock on the front door, then he took them inside. He signaled to his men to take each aisle between the stacked crates. It was hours after the end of the normal workday, so they didn’t expect workers, and they weren’t disappointed.
When all of his men inside had appeared and checked in, Karpov led them through the door into the bathroom, which was where the voice had said it would be. The urinal trough was on the left, while opposite was the line of stalls. His men banged open the doors as they proceeded down the line, but all were empty.
Karpov paused before the last stall, then charged through. Just as the voice had described, there was no toilet, only another door set flush with the rear wall. Karpov, a cold ball of dread beginning to form in his stomach, disintegrated the lock with a furious burst from his AK-47 assault rifle. At once he shouldered his way through to find an interior set up with an office against the rear wall, raised off the floor and accessed by a metal ladder.
No one was in the office. The phones had been pulled from the wall outlets, the upended file cases and desks, their drawers open, mocked him with their complete barrenness, the obvious haste with which they had been denuded. He turned slowly in a circle, his practiced eye running over everything. Nothing, there was nothing.
Contacting his men at the perimeter, he confirmed what the ice ball growing in his stomach already told him: No one had entered or left the warehouse from the time they had arrived in the area.
“Fuck!” Karpov set one ample buttock on the corner of a desk. The man on the phone had been right all the way down the line. He had warned Karpov not to tell anyone, warned him that Maslov’s people might be warned. He had to have been Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.
The Rolls-Royce was gargantuan, something out of the automotive Jurassic age. It stood gleaming like a silver train at the curb outside the office building. Stepping ahead of her, Lionel Binns opened the curbside rear door. As Moira bent and stepped inside, a wash of incense rolled over her. She sat down on the leather seat as the attorney closed the door after her.
As she settled herself, her eyes slowly adjusting to the murky gloom, she found herself sitting beside a rather large, blocky man with walnut-colored skin and windswept eyes, dark as the inside of a well. He had a great shock of dark hair, almost ringlets, and a beard long, thick, and as curly as Nebuchadnezzar’s. Now the cardamom tea made sense to her. He was some sort of Arab. Inspecting further, she noticed that his suit, though clearly Western, draped his shoulders and chest like a Berber robe.
“Thank you for coming,” he said in a great, booming voice that echoed off the finely polished walnut surfaces of the spacious interior, “for taking a small leap of faith.” He spoke with a heavy, almost guttural accent, but his English was impeccable.
A moment later the driver, unseen behind a walnut panel, pulled the Rolls out into traffic, heading south.
“You are Mr. Binns’s client, correct?”
“Indeed. My name is Jalal Essai, my home is in Morocco.”
Yes, indeed. Berber. “And you had a laptop that was stolen.”
“That’s right.”
Moira was sitting with her right shoulder against the door. She felt abruptly chilled; the interior now seemed suffocatingly small, as if the man’s presence had spilled out of his body, invading and darkening the backseat, stealing over her, worming its way inside. She tried to catch her breath and managed only to shiver. The air seemed to fizz or shimmer, as if she were seeing a desert mirage. “Why me? I still don’t get it.”
“Ms. Trevor, you have certain, shall we say, unique abilities that I believe will be invaluable in finding my laptop and returning it to me.”
“And those abilities would be…”
“You have successfully taken on both Black River and the NSA. Do you think that I could find a single private detective who has also done so?” He turned and smiled at her with a set of large, brilliant white teeth shining out of a dusky cardamom face defined by flat planes, high cheekbones, and deep-set eyes, hooded as a hawk’s. “No need to answer, that wasn’t a question.”
“Okay, I’ll ask you a question: Do you believe that clandestine agencies were involved in the theft?”
Essai appeared to consider this for some time, though Moira had the distinct impression that he knew for certain.
“It’s possible,” he said at length. “Even likely.”
Moira crossed her arms over her breasts as if to protect herself from the way his logic was chipping away at her resolve, the waves of dark energy emanating from him like nothing she had felt before, as if she were sitting too near a particle collider. She shook her head emphatically. “Sorry.”