“Shit. I’ll look into it.” Matt drew a deep breath. “In the meantime, be careful, okay?”
“I’m always careful.”
Matt laughed and hung up.
Jax sat for a time staring unseeingly at the phone in his hand. Then he went to pull the folder with October Guinness’s remote viewing session out of his bag. He’d been so convinced it was all a bunch of woo-woo bullshit that he hadn’t even bothered to look at the report. The arrival of Tweed Coat changed things.
He thumbed quickly through the Colonel’s report, then read the transcript of the viewing itself. Jax had witnessed one of October’s viewings last summer, and he’d done enough research on the subject to understand how RV worked…just not enough to believe in it.
He flipped to the drawings at the back of the report and felt a faint chill run up his spine. October’s sketches were rudimentary but detailed enough that Jax had no doubt he was staring at a picture of a World War II-era U-boat resting on a long, flat barge. The barge was tied up at a wharf beside a line of what looked like warehouses. To the right she had drawn a smaller corrugated metal building located about halfway up a hill; an office, perhaps. Beyond that he could see a rocky point covered with wind-stunted pines.
Jax thumbed back through the report. He wanted to think the Colonel must have given her some indication of the target, but Jax knew McClintock was too careful, too professional, to have frontloaded the viewing that way. There was little doubt that October had “seen” a U-boat. The only question was, how accurate was their interpretation that the target location was Kaliningrad? The arrival of Tweed Coat seemed to suggest that it was pretty damned accurate.
It was nearly ten o’clock, long after Jax had finished his trout amandine and put the tray outside the door, when he heard a desultory squeak, squeak coming down the hall toward his room. He’d been reading Herbert Werner’s Iron Coffins. Now he lifted his head and listened.
The squeaking stopped outside his door. He heard a murmur, followed by a knock. A female voice with the unmistakable intonations of the Bronx said, “This is Petra Davidson. I’ve got your agricultural reports.”
Setting aside his book, Jax went to open the door.
The woman standing in the corridor was short, probably no more than five foot two. She had thick dark hair she wore cropped boylike in a style that might have given her a gamin look when she was in her twenties. Now that she was in her mid-thirties, the effect was somewhat different. Her body had begun to thicken with the approach of middle age, although she still looked solid. Jax had no doubt she ran her three to five miles every morning with the same determination as she practiced regularly at the shooting range. Her dark synthetic pantsuit was eminently practical, her low-heeled pumps sensible. She was a short woman in a man’s world, which meant she had to try twice as hard and be twice as tough.
She snapped, “Jason Aldrich?”
“That’s right.” He looked beyond her, to the two burly guys in buzz haircuts pushing a big maid’s cart covered in canvas. “And these, I take it, are the Marines?”
The Marines were obviously anxious to get out of the hall. They shoved past Jax and into the room, the wheels on their maid’s cart shrieking with each revolution. Jax glanced down at the large briefcase Petra carried. Since she hadn’t known if she was being called to the scene of a shooting or a knifing or something worse, procedure called for her to bring along first-aid equipment, luminol, and a black light. If necessary, the luminol and black light would be used to find blood traces she’d then corrupt to prevent DNA analysis, while the first-aid kit was to patch up Jax.
“You won’t need the kit,” he said, shutting the door behind her. “There’s no blood. I broke the guy’s neck. This is going to be simple.”
She whirled to face him, her face tight. “Simple? You think this is simple? I’ve got a body to dispose of. That’s never simple, especially these days. This isn’t the Cold War anymore, you know. The Germans aren’t as understanding about these things as they used to be.”
Jax held up his hands, palms outward. “I only meant you won’t need to worry about trace evidence. He didn’t even leave prints in here.”
Her frown deepening, she glanced around the room. “Where is he?”
“In the closet.”
At her nod, the two Marines opened the closet doors. Blue polyester cocoon unfurling, Tweed Coat flopped out. “Who is he?” she asked as the Marines moved to lift the body between them, one at the head, the other at the feet.
“I don’t know.”
She brought her gaze back to Jax’s face, her eyes narrowing. Her name wasn’t Petra, of course. Probably something like Gina Guiliani or Maria Centrello. She had that Sicilian look about her. She said, “I called Langley. They told me you’re just passing through here. So you-what? Had some time on your hands and just decided to kill someone?”
Jax tried to clamp a lid on his temper. “I take it you’d have preferred I let the guy shoot me? You’d still have had a body to deal with, you know-only it would have been mine.”
She shrugged. “We’d have just passed you off as some stupid dead tourist. We deal with dead tourists all the time. This-” She pointed to Tweed Coat, now being stuffed into the maid cart. “This is a political disaster waiting to happen. What do you think the Germans are going to do if we get caught with this dude? The boys here in Berlin don’t like it when we treat the place like it’s an American colony. It’d be different if we were in Cairo or Seoul or someplace like that.”
He gave her what was supposed to be a disarming smile. “I have confidence in you, Petra.”
It was a lie, of course. Until he found out how Tweed Coat came by that official photo, Jax wasn’t trusting anyone associated with the Company except Matt.
She was neither disarmed nor charmed by Jax’s smile. She walked right up to him with a bandy rooster kind of strut, her hands on her hips as she leaned forward, head tilting back. “I’ve heard about you, Mr. Jax Alexander.” She said his name slowly, just in case he missed the fact she wasn’t using his alias anymore. “You’ve caused trouble every place from Guatemala to Indonesia and back. You don’t play by the rules. You’re a loose cannon. I don’t understand why you’re even still with the Company.”
Jax picked up Tweed Coat’s gun and handed it to her. “Here. You might as well get rid of this while you’re at it.”
He watched a dark tide of anger sweep up her face. “When do you leave?” she asked.
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Good.” She shoved the Walther in her bag and turned toward the door. “See if you can get out of here without killing anyone else, will you?”
“I’ll try.”
She waited for the Marines to open the door, their cart going squeak, squeak as they pushed it out into the hall. She followed them, only looking over her shoulder long enough to say, “And don’t come back.”
16
Kaliningrad, Russia: Sunday 25 October
6:10 P.M. local time
Stefan forced himself to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. Each step had become an act of will, every mile a penance of pain. At first the salt-stiffened trousers chafing his inner thighs had been an inconvenience. Then soreness turned to raw agony. By now, he was forced to admit that if he didn’t find clean clothes somewhere, he was never going to make it back to Yasnaya Polyana.
He drew up at the top of a small rise, his breath ragged with pain. There was a cold wind blowing from the north, and he shifted into the shelter of a sturdy pine, his eyes narrowing as he studied the hamlet that straddled a stream at the edge of the wood below.
He could see a string of dilapidated cottages with a few shops, a power line, and a half-renovated church. A horse pulled a cart loaded with apples and driven by an old woman in a shawl.