“You were involved with the Nazi gold operation?”
Didenko nodded. “And we damned near pulled it off, your brother and I.”
“Except for McGarvey.”
“He was better than Arkasha. Had been all along.”
“Or luckier.” Nikolai sat back with his beer. He’d looked up to his brother, but he’d never really known him. Aloof, a sometimes rough sense of humor, though Nikolai could never remember his brother laughing out loud, and he could never remember any physical contact; a hug, kiss after a vodka. It was the Russian way, or had been in the old days.
But he clearly remembered the strength and confidence that fairly exuded from his brother’s pores. He was a man extremely capable in whatever he did. You just knew that everything would turn out for the best if Arkasha were involved.
He was everything that Nikolai held sacred and pure and real in a world that had gone all to shit after the empire had disintegrated. Except for Putin, finally, Russia had gone through a horrible period of not knowing what it was or even what its existence meant.
That, however, had never been a problem for Nikolai. He knew exactly who he was, and he knew exactly what his existence meant.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said, looking up.
Didenko laughed. “Don’t be so sure.”
“He’s an old man now.”
“Fifty.”
“An old man — his reactions are slower, his strength less, maybe he loves his life a little more than he should. Maybe he has people he cares for.”
“You won’t be sanctioned.”
It was Nikolai’s turn to laugh. “That doesn’t matter. But I’m going to play with him. I’m going to make him feel pain, like my brother must have in the sea off Cyprus and in the tunnel in Portugal. I’m going to become his shadow. Wherever he goes, I will be right there, and in the end, he will die.”
“We called your brother the Chameleon, but his real work name was the Shadowman. He was always there right out in the open, right next to his prey — but no one recognized the danger, because a shadow is as natural as the light of the sun or the moon.”
“Then I’ll become Kirk McGarvey’s shadowman,” Nikolai said.
“Why?”
“Because I can. Because I want to. Because it amuses me to take on an old man.”
Didenko stared at him for a long time. “Think before you start this; you’d better be a lot more sure of your reasons than that.”
2
“If nothing but the truth and only the truth were written down, all our university libraries would be housed in tiny little buildings. The thing is, however, we would know a lot more than we ever did, and we would understand it better,” Voltaire had written.
Kirk Cullough McGarvey looked up from the screen of his laptop and shivered. A cold wind had suddenly passed through him, leaving behind a vague sense of foreboding. Someone or something was coming his way again. On top of that, he didn’t know if he believed Voltaire any longer. Too much had passed — too may lies, too much deceit to believe or even understand much of anything.
He was a solidly built man around fifty, with broad shoulders but narrow in the waist because of a strict regimen of exercises that included swimming or running every day. He had pleasant features and eyes that were green on some days and gray on others, often depending on his mood. Today, they were gray.
The view out the third-floor window of his converted lighthouse on the Greek island of Serifos was stunning, especially this morning because of the early spring weather that was perfect — low humidity, pleasant shirtsleeve temperatures, only a few puffy clouds in a brilliantly blue sky, and almost no tourists.
After the last business with Pakistan, which had very nearly ended up badly, he’d come back here to his retreat — his safe haven — to finish his second book on the philosophy of Voltaire, especially as it pertained to government. After the CIA, and between freelance assignments for the Company, he taught philosophy at New College in Sarasota, part of the State University System of Florida. It was a liberal arts school and one of the best small schools in the country.
“You like teaching, I think,” his friend and sometimes lover Pete Boylan said.
That had been a couple of years ago, after they’d gotten back from Paris and he was getting set to return to school. At thirty-seven, Pete was a lot younger than he, but she admitted more than once that she was madly in love with him, and no matter what he did or didn’t do or say, her feelings wouldn’t change. The point is she was a lot closer politically to the kids than he was.
“Teaching makes you think,” he’d told her.
Sometimes he’d take his class outside to the water’s edge on Sarasota Bay, and they would continue their discussion of some point in minute detail, often at the tops of their lungs, everyone talking at once. It was fantastic.
Voltaire had taught, among other things, that common sense wasn’t so common, after all. That the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman. That men used thought only to justify their wrongdoings and speech only to conceal their thoughts. And one of Mac’s favorites:
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
It was getting close to lunchtime. Mac saved the page and went downstairs to the tiny kitchen, where he poured a glass of ice-cold Retsina wine and went out to the stone patio.
Writing about someone else’s life — someone he admired — often made him reflective of his own past. A lot of water under the bridge, his old friend Otto Rencke would say. More people killed in the line of duty, often for some presidential directive or national objective, or sometimes for something as minor as greed or even ego. The CIA’s old acronym for why people became defectors was MICE, which stood for Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Eego. In actuality, the reasons people became traitors to their own countries were a lot more complicated than that.
But what was even more complicated, even for McGarvey, was why people stood with their toes to the line, ready and even willing to give their lives for their countries. For some cause, sometimes for words, sometimes for leaders, sometimes for ideals.
He’d never had his own answers, at least none that were satisfactory, beyond the facts that by chance he’d been born in the U.S. and that ever since he was a kid, he’d hated bullies.
But those sentiments had cost him dearly. Just about every woman he’d ever been involved with had been assassinated because of who he was and what he’d been doing at the moment, including his wife, Katy, and their grown daughter, Elizabeth.
Liz’s husband, who had been a CIA operative, had been shot to death in the line of duty. Mac, Katy, and their daughter, all of them devastated, had gone to the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. Afterward, the girls had ridden in a separate limo, Mac in the Lincoln just behind them.
Staring down across the rocky valley and the path that led up and over the next hill and down to the ferry dock in town, the day at Arlington stood out in vivid detail in his mind. The afternoon was too bright, too clear, the weather too mild for a funeral.
“Hurry back to me,” Katy had said to him. He was in the middle of a mission that was going sour.
He reached inside and kissed her, but Liz said nothing.
Watching them drive away, he remembered feeling that something heavy was in the air. At the time, he put it down as nothing more than his own grief, his overactive imagination.
Pete was riding with him in the second limo. “They’ll be okay,” she’d said. Because of Todd’s murder, Katy and Liz had been assigned CIA minders. “Once they get to the Farm, no one will be able to touch them.”