Father Night (9 page)

Jack knew most of this family history of obsession and death, but he found it informative to hear it retold from another point of view.

“I have no doubt that she would give up her life for him,” Katya went on. “This is the basic problem, one which you need to keep in the forefront of your mind, because when and if she goes down, she’ll take everyone close to her down with her.”

Jack glanced out the window. Annika was driving very fast. Up ahead loomed the enormous brutalist structures of Chertanovo.

“Does Annika have any idea what we’re going to do once we arrive at the Zolka factory?”

“There’s a leak in Gourdjiev’s inner circle,” Katya said. “Someone is gunning for her and Gourdjiev. She’s going to find out who that someone is and kill him.”

“No matter who it might be?”

Katya nodded. “That’s right.” Then she cocked her head. “Why?”

“Because I think Omega is her half-brother, Grigori Batchuk.”

“Believe me,” Katya said, “that won’t stop her.”

At that moment, Annika pulled into the Zolka factory parking lot. Jack got out and walked around to the front. Annika was already standing beside the van. She was staring with fixed intensity at the redbrick factory.

“Bring out the driver,” she said without looking at him.

“What are you going to—”

“Just do it!” she snapped.

“Annika,” he said softly, “I’m not the enemy.”

“Good thing, too.” She had a murderous look in her eye when she turned to him. “Bring him, Jack.”

Against his better judgment, Jack fetched the cowering driver out of the van, where Boris had been keeping a wary eye on him. Taking him by the back of his collar, he brought him to Annika, who stood, spread-legged, staring at him.

“Who do you work for?”

“I already told you.”

She hit him, hard, on the point of the chin. His head snapped back, and Jack caught him before he hit the side of the van, brought him upright again.

“Who is Omega?”

“I don’t know. Jesus!” he exclaimed as she hit him again. His nose began to bleed again. He whimpered when he wiped it with his sleeve.

“Omega is such a stupid name, I think you made it up.”

“What? No, no, of course I didn’t! That’s who he said—”

Annika hit him a third time, with such force that his head slammed against the side of the van. His knees buckled and Jack raised him up. He opened his mouth to voice a protest, but Annika gave him a sharp shake of her head. Jack had enough experience with interrogation techniques to know that Russians responded to force, and force only. The good cop/bad cop routine would only make them laugh. Much as he hated to admit it, Annika’s approach was the right one. They were in a life-and-death situation. What choice had they been given?

“Listen,” the driver said, “I—”

Annika hit him twice, in the mouth and on the nose. He collapsed into Jack’s arms, moaning.

“All right, enough. All right.” He lifted his bloody face to stare at her. “Omega is a false name, but it’s not my invention, it’s his.”

“Who?” Annika said, her fist cocked.

The driver shuddered. “He’ll kill me.”

“When we let you go, you’ll still have a chance,” she said. “Otherwise, you die right here, right now.”

The driver nodded, at last admitting defeat. “Omega’s real name is Grigori Batchuk.”

*   *   *

“I
’M OFF
caffeine,” Dennis Paull said as he sat down. “Just some ice water,” he said to Elsie. When she had gone back behind the counter, he affixed a small metal octagon to the window.

“Plate glass is a terrific conductor of vibrations, including voices,” he said.

Four suits were in the diner, eyeing the small number of patrons. Apparently satisfied, they split up into pairs, taking the booths on either side of where the trio sat. They had to displace one guy, hunched over his grits and eggs, moving him to the counter, where he grumbled incessantly. The suit who accompanied him slipped into the kitchen, possibly to interrogate and thoroughly terrify the staff.

“Alan,” Paull continued, “I assume you’ve told her.”

“Told me what?” Nona said, suddenly on guard.

“In fact, I haven’t,” Fraine said. “Not yet, anyway.”

Paull drank half his glass the moment it came. Elsie refilled it before she departed. “Why else would you wake me out of a sound sleep?”

“We have a problem,” Fraine said.

Paull frowned. “What sort of problem?”

“It involves Leonard Bishop,” Nona said.

Her comment caused the secretary to turn, his attention riveted on her. “Please elaborate.”

Five minutes later, when Nona had finished telling what had happened to her, Fraine said, “We need you to get Bishop off Nona, as it were.”

Paull’s lips twitched in the semblance of a sardonic smile. “That’s one way to play it,” he said.

Nona’s stomach contracted. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Secretary, but from where I sit that’s the
only
way to play it. You don’t know what it’s like dealing with this dickwad.”

Paull sighed. “I understand your feelings, of course I do.”

“All due respect, Mr. Secretary, you’re a man.”

Paull pursed his lips. “Perhaps I misspoke, and, certainly, if that is your wish I will do my best to see that he no longer molests you.” Leaning forward, he placed his forearms firmly on the table, his hands loosely clasped. “But what I’m asking you to do now, Ms. Heroe, is to take a step back, take a look at the big picture before you say another word or make a decision you may come to regret.”

“After a night with that piece of shit, nothing’s going to change my mind.”

“But you’ll listen.” Taking her silence as assent, Paull continued. “Two days ago, I approached Alan about the two of you joining a SITSPEC I’m putting together with all due speed.” He waited for her to ask what a SITSPEC was, but she remained silent. He continued. “I don’t have to detail the momentous events in Egypt over the last year that have rocked the entire Middle East. The political situation there is treacherously fluid. We’re still trying to figure out who will be the new power brokers in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. The Salafis are a loose coalition of Egypt’s hard-line sheikhs, who have cleverly embraced Egypt’s new wave of populism, gaining power in the first elections. They are honing the politics of resentment that is the staple of right-wing groups the world over.

“The Salafi upsurge has rightfully frightened and angered the Egyptian military. The army has been caught flat-footed, primarily because it’s mired in its own internal problems: there’s a power struggle going on between the older, Soviet-trained generals who were loyal to Mubarak and the younger, American-trained officers. Still, the military is the key to Egypt’s future because it’s so deeply entrenched in the country’s economy, which literally cannot function without it.”

Paull raised his head as the suit returned from his interrogatory tour of the kitchen personnel. Paull nodded minutely, acknowledging the suit’s all-clear hand sign.

He returned to his discourse. “On an international level, we not only have the traditional powers of the Great Game—us, England, and Russia—vying for footholds in the new government, but we also have to deal with Israel, the Palestinians, Iran, and China. Egypt may not have the oil reserves of the Saudis, but it controls the Suez Canal. As such, its strategic importance cannot be overstated.”

Paull drank off another half glass of water. “As you know, everything in the Middle East, especially the transition of power, is vastly complicated by religious versus secular factions, by Sunni versus Shiite Islamic sectarianism, orthodox versus moderate constituencies, and, of course, by fanatical terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, though by no means limited to it. As of now, all of these disparate elements are vying for power within Egypt’s chaotic political structure. Instability is exacerbated by the deep-seated terror the rulers of both Iran and Saudi Arabia have been feeling ever since Mubarak resigned under the duress of the Egyptian people. With mounting turbulence in Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan, and Algeria, the question on every entrenched despot’s mind is,
Am I next?
Whoever gains ultimate power in Egypt will have the upper hand in deciding who stays and who goes elsewhere in the region.”

“Al-Qaeda is likely to worm itself into those breaches,” Fraine said.

Paull nodded. “Unfortunately, it’s not only al-Qaeda we need to worry about now. All this unrest has emboldened Iran, and, especially because of its nuclear program, what will eventually play out there is really the billion-dollar question.”

He paused while Elsie cleared the plates. They all declined the selection of pies and more coffee.

“All these fingers in the pie would be bad enough,” Paull said, “but as it happens there is yet another group—a cabal, really—that figures to benefit from Egypt’s ongoing chaos. There’s no way to say what their goal is as yet. But I strongly suspect that they want to control the Suez Canal, Egypt’s decades-old peace treaty with Israel, and the country’s influence with the Saudis for exclusive oil contracts.”

Nona felt herself getting sucked into the secretary’s terrifying scenario. “Who are these people, this cabal? Russian oligarchs, the Irani supreme leader, the Beijing high command?”

“None of the above,” Paull said. “The cabal is composed of Americans.”

Both Nona and Fraine sat for a moment, stunned into silence.

“Alan, I told you that this SITSPEC was special, even for a black-ops group, and this is why. We’ll be going after our own people, and I have no doubt whatsoever that most of them are highly placed government officials.”

“How do you know that?” Fraine asked.

“Because,” Paull said, “after a great deal of the most boring digging we have managed to identify one of them.”

A light suddenly went on in Nona’s head. “Oh, no.”

Paull nodded. “Oh, yes.”

Fraine looked from one to the other. “Who the hell are you two talking about?”

Nona looked at him with a bleak gaze. “Leonard Bishop.”

“Fuck me,” Fraine said.

Paull, a master of dialogue management, waited a beat. “Nona, I can get him off your back today, this afternoon, if that’s still your wish. But I beg you to consider the extraordinary gift we have been given.”

Nona closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m already on the inside.”

Paull nodded. “And I’d like you to stay there, dig deeper inside, in fact.”

“You’re pimping her out,” Fraine said. “I won’t have it.”

Nona, smiling, put a hand on his arm. “Easy, there, big fella.”

Paull turned to her. “No one can help you here, Nona. You have to listen to your conscience. But consider also your unique qualifications: you know the Middle East, you speak every dialect of Arabic, and, just as important, Farsi. Your brother—”

“Don’t bring Frankie into it,” Nona said at once.

“I apologize,” Paull said in a placating tone, “but let’s not kid ourselves, your brother’s current condition, the fact that he was grievously wounded in the Horn of Africa, is a factor in your decision process.”

“You bastard, that’s what this is all about,” Fraine cut in angrily. “You came to me to get Nona. You said domestic—”

“I didn’t lie, Alan. As I said, these people are American—likely they’re all here in the D.C. area, if not all inside the Beltway. To my mind, that makes it domestic.”

“But not for Nona.”

Paull took a breath and addressed Nona. “I admit that, yes, there may come a time before this is over that we’ll need to send you overseas. Are you willing?”

Nona turned to Fraine. “Alan, I know you would move heaven and earth to protect me, and, believe me, I appreciate it more than you can know. To be honest, I despise doing this, but I have to. Secretary Paull is right. If not me, who?”

F
IVE

A
S
J
ACK
and Annika, accompanied by Katya, Boris, and Gourdjiev on the gurney, pushed into the Zolka building, the lobby personnel rushed out to help them.

The lobby was smaller than Jack would have imagined, and dingier, though this was a factory, not a corporate showcase. The profits had obviously been used elsewhere; doubtless, much of it resided in Swiss banks, far away from Moscow’s outlaw society, where the government was just as apt to seize your earnings as rival oligarchs were.

Jack pointed to the elevator and led the way over to it. They rolled the gurney inside, then stepped in, and Annika pressed the button for the sixth and top floor. The elevator doors closed and they began their ascent. But just before they reached the fourth floor, the cab lurched to a halt.

*   *   *

K
ATYA, HOLDING
on to Gourdjiev, looked from Jack to Annika for reassurance. They had none. Leaning over, Jack whispered in Annika’s ear. Nodding, she helped him pry open the doors. One-third of the elevator was above the fourth floor. One by one, Jack and Annika levered themselves up. Annika, with her ear to the stairway door, heard the tramp of men on the stairs. Now everything depended on timing.

She swung open the stairway door just as three gunmen reached the landing. Jack waited until he heard the male voices raised in query and Annika’s deliberately officious responses before he leapt through the open doorway, barreling into the three men as they stood grouped around Annika, consumed by equal parts suspicion and lust.

The goon closest to him went flying into the concrete wall. Annika stepped in between the two other men and Jack, impeding their view. As one moved to shove her to one side, she kneed him hard in the crotch. He doubled over and she slammed him into the stairwell railing. The third man reached out to grab her, a mistake he realized too late. By then she had wrenched his right arm back behind his shoulder blade, making him vulnerable to an elbow to the side of his head. He struck back, delivering a vicious blow to her kidneys. She staggered, and he reversed their position, bending her back over the stairway railing. Lifting her off her feet, he shoved her back, trying to hurl her over. Annika gripped the top rail and kicked out, striking him in the chest. His grip on her loosened, and she kicked again. This time he was ready, dodging her attack and slamming his shoulder into her so hard she felt as if her shoulders had dislocated.