Authors: Blair Bancroft
Limbo Man (2 page)
Tingley scowled, his fist thudded onto the conference table. “He may be shining us on, we can’t tell—the miserable bastard even passed a polygraph—but he claims amnesia. Says he doesn’t remember a damn thing before waking up in the hospital. Not his name, his country, his job, his mother . . .”
The voice of the man from Homeland Security trailed to a halt, his face a furious mix of skepticism and frustration. He leaned toward Vee. “We need the information in Tokarev’s head, Agent Frost. There’s more to this than the arms trade. We need to know if he’s faking. And if he isn’t, we need someone to help him remember. Someone to get close to him, turn him, get his cooperation. This is
vital
, a matter of life and death.
Thousands
of lives.” Tingley paused, straightened up. “Sorry. I got carried away. But the truth is, we all feel you’re the best person for the job. Will you do it?”
Vee sat very still, hoping her severe case of the quivers didn’t show on the outside. Silently, she analyzed Tingley’s words, examined his anxious face. Unfortunately, she’d heard him right the first time. There was no way around the implications of what he’d just said, but before she jumped off a cliff, she’d better make sure she understood the bottom line. “Just to make things perfectly clear,” she said, “you’re pimping me out to a high-ranking Russian mobster.”
Tingley huffed, didn’t meet her eyes. “I wouldn’t put it exactly like that—”
“I would. You think some tough, sleazebag Russian is going to go all gooey and reveal his secrets just because I’m nice to him, when, from what little you’ve told me, that’s going to take an awful lot of ‘nice.’”
Tingley waved a hand, palm out. “Okay, so we want you to babysit the guy. He’s spent ten days in the hospital, been interrogated up the ying-yang by everyone, including psychiatrists and hypnotists. Nada. Zip.”
“And you think a bit of feminine charm might do the trick.” Vee’s lips curled in disgust.
Tingley shrugged. “A little charm, a few good meals—”
“A medicinal fuck or two.”
The DHS agent rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling. “I said the job was voluntary,” he mumbled.
“And then you hint it’s a matter of vital national importance, something that might divert a disaster.”
“Well . . . yeah. It is.”
With her index finger Vee drew random circles on the conference table’s shiny surface. She had to find the right words. “You must know I’ve never done anything like this before, never even considered that something like this could be part of my job.”
“We know.” Tingley’s aging boxer face elongated to hangdog.
Just for a moment Vee thought she caught a flash of sympathy. More likely, he was a great actor. Inwardly, she winced as another thought struck her. They’d probably run this assignment by her father. They wouldn’t have dared not to. The man known as Jack Frost, Jack the Ripper, and Jack the Giant Killer swung a big club. Good old dad. She could always count on him putting the job first.
“You’re the right person for this job, Agent Frost,” Tingley insisted. “I wasn’t lying when I said the situation is desperate. We aren’t talking about stopping just another load of RPGs. We had to ask.”
Blast it, the man was begging
. “This may seem pretty shallow,” Vee muttered, “but do you have a picture of your wiseguy?”
“Sorry. The bandages are beginning to come off, but his face is still swollen, more black than blue. As for his past, Tokarev was camera-shy. The only thing we have is a paparazzi telephoto on some fat cat’s yacht, most of it focused on some Bollywood actress never before revealed in a bathing suit. For what it’s worth . . .” Tingley opened a file folder and handed her a close-up of Tokarev that had been extracted from a newspaper reproduction and further fuzzed by a fax machine.
As Vee frowned at the way-less-than-revealing photo, Tingley added, “All I can tell you is that he’s somewhere in his late thirties to early forties. Brown hair the hospital had to shave off, green eyes.”
In the photo Tokarev was standing next to a diving board, looking up at the actress who was poised for a dive into the yacht’s pool. All she could tell was that Sergei Tokarev was tall and looked good in a bathing suit. He might have been handsome, but with his face partially turned away from the camera, it was impossible to be certain.
“Rumor says he’s a ladies’ man when he’s not coordinating arms sales to rebels and third-world countries,” Tingley added.
Vee stifled a sigh. This case had all the earmarks of a major career-maker. If the Russian looked like Frankenstein’s monster, she was still going to do it. So why was she stalling?
Maybe because she didn’t want to add whore to her job description.
Ask what you can do for your country . .
. Vee didn’t think this assignment was quite what President Kennedy had in mind. Or maybe not. She’d heard he had a real eye for the ladies.
But what about Cade? Friend. Partner. The guy who always had her back. Who would have her back when she was making nice with a Russian wiseguy?
Vee lifted her chin, fixed a steady gaze on Wade Tingley’s asymmetrical features. “So when do I get to meet your Russian?”
Chapter 2
The first time he opened his eyes, nothing made sense. Except
hospital
. Stark walls, unrelenting bright light, the steady beep-beep of monitors, the smell of antiseptic . . . other smells that were much worse. Hospital. Not good, but the best place to be if you were hurt. So why was everything
wrong
? Foreign. Menacing. Even the guy on the wall, hanging on a cross, seemed like a warning:
Watch out! This could be you.
Govnó!
His head screamed, his body moaned, as he forced himself to turn toward the door, toward the IV drip, the bank of monitors. There was a sign on the back of the door. Big letters. Letters that danced before his eyes. He squinted, focused, discovered they were gibberish. As were the letters on the monitor, the manufacturers’ names on the machines themselves.
If he didn’t feel so damn bad, he’d be scared.
The next time he opened his eyes, a nurse was changing his IV drip. Young, nice looking. He asked her for water.
She gasped, nearly dropped the IV. Then she beamed at him, but the words that came out of her mouth were incomprehensible.
“Voda
,” he begged.
“Voda.
” Stupid girl finally caught on, holding a container of water for him while he sipped through a straw. Not the easiest maneuver as he discovered the hard way that bandages encased his head, leaving only a series of slits for eyes, nose, and mouth.
As the nurse left the room, her steps brisk as if she couldn’t wait to impart news of his return to the living, he caught a glimpse of a uniform outside his door.
Oh-oh. Not good
. He eyed the guy hanging on the wall. Oh, yeah, he could feel for him. But all that swallowing had exhausted him. He slipped back into sleep.
The third time he opened his eyes, some old man was camped out in his room, sitting in a fake leather armchair in a corner, reading the newspaper. The nurse was a lot better looking, but, hell, maybe this guy could understand him. Which was a good thought until the questions started. The old one asked his name in a whole panoply of languages, almost all of which he understood. The problem was, he didn’t know the answers in any damn one of them.
That was when a whole host of profanities popped out, proving that no one can be as creative with the word
mother
as a Russian. After that, the old man interpreted the doctors’ words in Russian, explaining that severe trauma often resulted in temporary amnesia. He knew they were lying. A person as badly battered as he was might lose a few hours, even a whole day, but not his whole fucking life.
A chill settled in the pit of his stomach and stayed there.
In the next forty-eight hours he discovered two things—the language he was most comfortable with was Russian and he was a good actor. Particularly adept at pretending to be too exhausted to continue his interrogation. Because that’s what it was. They’d taken his fingerprints, but kept their mouths tight shut about the results. He’d faced a succession of suits, whose questions were duly translated by the little old man. And if his interrogators were frustrated, it was times ten, or maybe a hundred, for himself.
They didn’t believe him, but, hell, what else was new?
They informed him they were going to call him Nick.
Fine. What the hell—a
rose by any other name would smell as sweet
. Even as he thought it, he knew it didn’t fit. Surely no Russian quoted Shakespeare. So why . . .
Nothing. That’s as far as his mind would go. The newly minted Nick closed his eyes and went back to sleep.
On his third day trapped in this antiseptic hell where the questioning seemed endless, the food barely passable, and he was still too weak to even pee by himself, his world tilted, went belly-up, crashing into a new universe. The old man was sitting there as usual, reading the sports section of
The New York Times
. He folded the front page over, and Nick saw the headlines. “Shit!” he exploded. “The Red Sox took the Yanks by seven?”
The old man, whose name was Burt, lowered the paper and stared at him. His gray shaggy eyebrows almost reached his Einstein mop of equally gray hair. “We seem to have missed something,” he remarked in English, his gray eyes alight with interest. “Just how long have I been superfluous?”
Nick considered the question with the thoroughness it deserved. He looked at the sign on the back of the door into the corridor, at the monitor screens, at their manufacturers’ labels. They weren’t Cyrillic letters, but they all made perfect sense. He could read English as easily as Russian. “Since now,” he drawled. “I woke up, and I could read and speak English.”
“And with a perfect American accent. Interesting.” Burt pushed his way up from the chair and approached the bed. “You realize I’ll have to report this immediately. Now that I’m no longer needed, I fear I’m going to miss my short moments in a far more interesting world than usually comes my way.” He held out his hand. “
Dasveedanya
, Nicolai. And good luck.”
Nick felt a pang of regret as well. The old man had been a friendly face in a sea of hostility. “
Spasiba
,” he murmured, managing a creditable grip of farewell. As the door slowly swung shut behind the translator, he caught a glimpse of the bored face of the uniform sitting outside. Well, at least a couple of the nurses still smiled at him, if a bit nervously. The younger ones. The medical doctors were brisk but efficient, while the shrinks couldn’t quite maintain their blasé bedside manners as they probed and analyzed the why of his blank brain. Obviously, the man called Nick was a genuine curiosity.
So maybe only the men in black thought he was slime. They didn’t have to say it, he could feel it. A miasma of hostility swarmed ahead of them when they entered the room, forming an aura so gray he could almost see it. But in the days that followed Nick began to sense something else—an excitement, an eagerness, a ray of hope. The question was: did the ray of hope from his interrogators indicate something good or something bad for poor lost Nick?
When the bandages came off, they wouldn’t give him a mirror, so he dragged himself into the bathroom for a good look. They found him with his legs and arms tangled in his rolling IV and his head knocked up against the toilet, bleeding from a re-opened wound. It was worth it, though. The docs kept the suits out of his room for a full twenty-four hours.
And he’d learned something. His face—stitched, swollen, and a sinister rainbow of colors from dark red to charcoal—was unrecognizable. Even his best friend, if he had one, wouldn’t know him. He doubted he’d ever again have the face of the man who’d been beaten and thrown off a bridge into a river. As for women? Big
nyet
to that one. If he’d ever been a stud, those days were over.
But somehow he had a feeling women had never mattered except for the moment. He was a man who kept his eye on the prize. And at the moment, the prize was solving the who, what, where, and why of Nick. And that wasn’t going to happen while he was flat on his back.
But would they let him out? They’d told him the guard was there because it looked like someone was trying to kill him and the police were playing it safe. But that could be a lie. Or only a partial truth. Maybe it was the cops who beat him up and were now breathing a sigh of relief because he couldn’t remember. Maybe when they sprang him from this place, jail was his next stop. Could they do that—put a man in jail for something he couldn’t remember doing?
These guys could. The first set of suits—local detectives, he guessed—had been replaced by men identifying themselves as FBI. And then came a third set. Homeland Security. Nick was pretty damn sure the last bunch could lose him forever and no one would care. He was trapped in Limbo, smack on the border of Hell. What was that quaint American expression?
Up shit creek without a paddle
. Oh, yeah.
So he cooperated with every trick the head doctors tried, even hypnosis. All the docs learned was that the man called Nick was a bad subject for hypnosis, but maybe that was because there wasn’t anything in his head to remember. His previous life was simply gone. Some wise soul suggested that amnesia often occurred when a person didn’t want to remember. If Nick had been strong enough, he would have clocked him.
Want to remember?
They had to be kidding. He’d give his right arm . . . well, maybe not, but nobody should have to live like this.