Without another word, Pillonel left the conference room. Byrnes stood and looked out at the lake, calm and glassy, promising a hundred summer idylls. He was wondering where Gavallan was, if he’d made it to New York, and if even then, he could pull off his plan. Or more precisely, if Cate would allow him to.
And after that? Byrnes asked himself. What are you going to do? Go back to work? Sit back down at your desk as if the last seven days hadn’t happened? He wasn’t sure. He knew he wanted to see his kids. He thought about making amends with his wife and chucked the idea posthaste. That part of his life, at least, was over. He decided Pierre Pillonel hadn’t been so wrong to venture to his office while in mourning for his brother. There comes a point in life when your work and your self—your own idea of who you really are—grow so intertwined as to be inseparable. Byrnes realized he’d reached that point a long time ago. When you spend twelve hours a day, day in and day out for seven years, you pretty much become the job. And so, where to? Home, thought Byrnes. To San Francisco. To Black Jet. If Jett could succeed in saving the company, he wanted to be there at his side to help.
Five minutes later, Pillonel returned, accompanied by a dour, rail-thin man whom he introduced as Monsieur Buffet, the bank’s in-house counsel. The attorney shook Byrnes’s hand once, as if sealing a bargain. He had dark, depthless eyes, and as he spoke they remained drilled on Byrnes. “You realize that the bank abhors criminal behavior in every shape and form. That we do not as a matter of highest principle deal with persons of anything but the most sterling character. And that we knew nothing—I repeat, nothing—about Mr. Kirov’s activities vis-à-vis Novastar Airlines.”
“Yes, I realize all that,” said Byrnes. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
“And should the bank agree to your request, that should in no way be construed as demonstrating either our knowledge of or our complicity in Mr. Kirov’s affairs.”
Again, Byrnes nodded.
“A terrible business,” said Pierre Pillonel, waving his attorney into a far chair. “Black days. So hard to know who to trust, who not to.”
“I can imagine.”
“Naturally, we are prepared at this instant to wire the funds to the account you mention… or to any other account you may wish for us to help you set up.” Pillonel paused, but only for the shortest of moments. “A numbered account with our affiliate in the Bahamas, perhaps?”
Byrnes kept a mirthless smile to himself. What did the French say? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. “No thank you. Novastar’s account at the Moscow Narodny Bank will be fine.” He handed Pillonel a piece of stationery bearing the account numbers. “By three-thirty today, gentlemen.”
65
It was the quiet time.
The time for reflection. The time to put your personal thoughts in order, separate the good from the bad and take a measure of your life. The time to settle things. The last free moments before the operation went tactical, because once it went tactical and you were doing what you’d trained these last four months to be doing, the only things you thought about were the mission, your part in it, and maybe, if you had the courage, whether you’d get out of it on the other end alive.
The members of Team 7 sat at the edge of the landing strip, using parachutes for seats, twelve castaways eating their rations of Pop-Tarts, Fritos, and protein bars, drinking their Gatorades and Diet Cokes. They were Americans, all of them—the baseball caps and work boots, the insouciant smiles, the two-day beards. Or so you’d swear until looking closer. And then, as you examined each one by one, you would shake your head. Here, the cheekbones too high, the eyes vaguely Asiatic. There, the blond hair a shade too blond. This one’s gaze too dark, mirroring a fatalism bred over centuries. That one’s face too gaunt, hunted, fearful.
They were born of the East. Mother Russia’s children.
A stiff wind snapped at the waist-high grass that bordered the strip. Behind them, the Bering Sea lapped at a beach even more desolate than the deserted airfield. The water was calm and glassy, a dark, dark green that went on forever. If you stood on your tiptoes and the air was clear enough, which it wasn’t so late in the evening, and you had the right frame of mind, the proper imagination, you might just see the Alaskan coast forty miles away.
But none of the men looked. No one stood. It was the quiet time.
It had been a long journey to the abandoned airfield on the very edge of the Chukchi Peninsula. Seventeen hours without sleep and the mission had not yet begun. From Severnaya they had traveled to Nordvik by a rusting Tupolev transport, and from Nordvik to Anadyr by a snazzy Air Force Ilyushin. The last hundred miles had been traveled in the rear of a Kam truck that smelled as if it had been routinely used to haul sheep to the slaughterhouse. Each leg of the mission was cut off from the next. Compartmentalized. No one asked where they came from or where they were going.
They were spirits.
Ghosts that never were.
A team that did not exist.
Somewhere in the wind danced the drone of a faraway engine. The team rose to their feet and looked to the sky. The drone grew into a silhouette and the silhouette into a silver form. A minute passed and the Beechcraft 18 came into sight. It was a vintage 1960s floatplane that had earned its stripes ferrying fishermen to and from the Canadian wilds. Its new incarnation called for a more hazardous duty, and the oversized radial engines had been souped up accordingly. Pontoon floats grew from the bottom of the plane, and as the Beech hovered low over the airfield they looked like twin torpedoes, primed and ready to drop. Wheels bobbed from the floats, and the plane struck the landing strip with a military finesse.
Barely had it stopped before the commandos had pulled themselves aboard. Webbing had replaced seats in the stripped-down fuselage. Blankets would do for heating. The men took their places, throwing their chutes on the floor between their feet. Their packs, and the sensitive cargo they contained, they held in their laps.
The Beechcraft turned and roared down the runway, lifting gracefully into the gray-tinged sky. The forecast was good, notwithstanding the gusting northerlies. This high in the latitudes, the wind was a constant, and if not your friend, an enemy to be made peace with.
Inside the fuselage, the men checked their equipment a final time, then closed their eyes. They did not sleep. They rehearsed. They concentrated. They willed themselves to their highest level.
The quiet time was over.
66
In New York City, on this third Tuesday in June, the sun rose at 5:24. The dawn promised a flawless day. Wisps of cumulonimbus raked a hazy blue sky. A freshening breeze kept the temperature in the low sixties, dousing Wall Street with the honest, vital scent of the East River. Outside the New York Stock Exchange workers draped an enormous banner emblazoned with Mercury Broadband’s logo across the building’s proud Doric columns. Measuring fifty feet by thirty-five, the banner was decorated with a stylized drawing of Mercury’s helmet—the disclike headplate garlanded with two lightning bolts—and the company name, painted gold against a royal blue background.
Inside the building, television crews set up for what promised to be a hectic day. Twelve networks had constructed production facilities on the mezzanine level ringing the Exchange’s principal trading floor. Making the circuit, one passed cramped, brightly lit ministudios for CNN, CNBC, the BBC, Deutsch Fernsehen, Nippon Television… Journalists could be glimpsed applying their makeup, brushing their hair, and practicing their “good morning smiles.”