Mazurka (29 page)

Did she know of the plan? If not all of it, did she know any part? Did she know enough to cause the destruction of the scheme? Even if she didn't – could Epishev take that kind of chance?

All such speculation was finally fruitless. How the woman had come into Pagan's life, the nature of her information – he could dwell on these matters to infinity and still solve nothing. The solution didn't lie in further pointless rumination. The answer lay elsewhere – in action.

He skirted the wall. He reached the street, looked up once more at the lit window, then he gazed along the pavement at the police car. He stood very still, merging with the trees behind him, becoming in his stillness just another inanimate shadow. He saw the red glow of a cigarette behind the windshield, then the spark as the butt was flicked away. It was very simple. He'd walk straight towards the car. He wouldn't look extraordinary at all, just a man taking the night air. He moved out from beneath the branches.

He put his hand in the pocket of his raincoat and curled his fingers around the gun. Then he paused, conscious of the flare of a match inside the police vehicle and the sound of a man's voice carrying along the pavement –
I
told the missus, I said the last thing we needed was another bleedin' crumbsnatcher
, and then there was silence. Epishev kept going. He was about twenty-five yards from the patrol car now. He took the gun out of his pocket and held it against his side, so that it was concealed by the folds of his coat. Fifteen yards.

One of the policemen was staring at him now from the car. Epishev had the impression of a face half-lit by a streetlamp. Cigarette smoke drifted out of the open window. Epishev called out “Maxwell! Maxwell!” and kept moving until he was only a couple of feet from the vehicle. Then he called the name again “Maxwell! Here, Maxwell! Come to me!”

The policeman with the cigarette asked, “Whatsamatter?”

Epishev stopped at the window of the car, lowered his face, looked inside.
There were only two of them, nobody concealed in the rear seat
.

“I am missing my cat,” he said. He wondered if he sounded suitably concerned. “Brown male with white paws. Very distinct markings. Impossible to overlook.”

The smoking policeman turned to his partner. “Seen any cats, Alf?”

Alf shook his head. “Sorry, chum.”

Epishev shrugged. He smiled apologetically, as if he were ashamed to have wasted the valuable time of these two guardians of law and order, then he brought the silenced pistol up very quickly and fired it twice into the squad car. It was brutally efficient. The policeman closest to Epishev dropped his cigarette and slithered sideways and his head slumped on his partner's chest. Alf, the younger of the two, lowered his face like a man dozing. Blood stained his blue shirt in the region of his heart.

Epishev stepped away from the car and crossed the street swiftly to Pagan's house, climbing the steps, stopping outside the brown door, checking the lock. It was a simple affair and easily forced, nothing more than a little quiet surgery undertaken with a pen-knife – and then he'd be inside, he'd be climbing the stairs to Pagan's apartment, where perhaps both Pagan and the woman were in bed even now, making love. Two quick shots, Epishev thought. The ultimate orgasm.

He took out his knife, selected a short thin blade from the selection of ten or more available to him, forced it into the lock. He turned it gently, listening for the inner mechanism to be released. Then, breathing in the patiently shallow way of the safecracker, he heard the lock click and felt the door move. He nudged it a little way. A darkened hallway faced him, a stairway. He didn't step into the house. He was wary of the silences and the lack of light.

He put his knife away, took out the gun again. The hallway smelled of stale air and a hint of damp. All he had to do was to stride along the hall and rise quietly up the stairs – and yet he hesitated, because his instincts told him something was not quite right here, something was out of joint and he wasn't sure what.

He didn't move. It was only when he heard the sound of the car draw up and he turned his face back to the street and saw the bright headlamps that he knew –

Frank Pagan wasn't at home
.

He'd gone out, leaving the woman with the police to guard her, and now he was back. Epishev heard a door slam and he saw Pagan get out of an American car and come quickly along the pavement, then pause in the manner of a man who has forgotten something. Pagan turned away.
He walked back across the street to the police car
.

Epishev saw Pagan incline his face to the window of the police vehicle, then he raised his pistol even as Pagan, stunned by the sight of the dead policemen, turned his face in the direction of the house. Two things occurred to Frank Pagan almost simultaneously – one was the realisation that a man was about to fire a gun at him from a darkened doorway across a narrow street. The other was that this same man might already have been up to the apartment where Kristina was alone –

Pagan threw himself to the ground, rolling as soon as he hit concrete, twisting his body in the manner of a burning person trying to douse flames, sliding for the safety of the underside of the squad car. He saw powdered concrete rise up inches from his face, dug out of the ground by the violent impact of a bullet. And still he kept twisting, until his body was jammed against the exhaust system. He reached behind him for his own weapon, a manoeuvre that called for a certain double-jointedness in the cramped space between exhaust-pipe and ground. He fumbled the weapon free and fired it twice but his angle was low and useless and his shots struck a garbage-can on the pavement. They were loud though, wonderfully loud, spectacularly so, and they echoed along the street with the intensity of a car backfiring, except worse.

The gunman took another shot from the doorway of the house and Pagan heard the bullet slice into one of the tyres of the patrol car, which immediately deflated so that the vehicle listed to one side, making Pagan's position even more uncomfortable. But it was the last shot of the brief encounter because now windows were being thrown open along the street, and lights were turned on, and cranky voices, disturbed in sleep, were calling out a variety of obscenities.

Pagan squeezed himself out from beneath the car as the gunman, afraid of all the public attention, started to run. Pagan glimpsed the man's sallow face briefly under a dim streetlamp – somebody you wouldn't look at twice in the street. Then the gunman headed for the darkness of the square, jumping the stone wall and vanishing into the trees. Pagan got to his feet and considered the idea of giving chase, but his mind was on Kristina Vaska now, and he hurried towards the house, rushing the stairs, finding the door of the flat locked, pounding on it, then hearing the deadbolt being drawn and seeing Kristina Vaska standing there, bright and freshly-showered, in one of his robes, an old paisley thing that had never been worn with anything like this kind of elegant sexuality –

“I thought,” he said. The relief he felt was like a narcotic. He was stoned by it.

“Thought what?” she asked.

Pagan put his arms around her and pulled her towards him and felt her wet hair pressed against his cheek. He wanted her with a ferocity that astounded him. And he knew it was reciprocated, he could feel her heart beat against him and the heat of her breath on his skin, he knew that he would only have to slide a hand between the folds of the robe and touch her lightly on the breasts – he understood he'd have to travel only a very short distance before he'd be lost.

He stepped back from her. He was thinking of the two young cops in the squad car, how they lay so very close together in a position of intimacy that only death had the chilling skill to choreograph. Two young cops – and they'd been murdered because of a situation they knew nothing about, something that should never have touched their lives, events from a history of which neither of those two men would have been aware.

It was waste, bloody waste.

In a frustrated gesture, Pagan pressed his large hands together until the knuckles were white. He walked over to the window. Below, people were milling around the squad car. Gore drew them out. Violence magnetised them.

He was aware of Kristina Vaska standing at his side. He said, “Two young cops are dead down there. Uncle Viktor's handiwork.”

Kristina Vaska shut her eyes and bit very gently on her lower lip. Pagan put an arm round her shoulder and thought how this intimacy provided no real defence against the brutality of the street below.

12

Trenton, New Jersey

In the early 1950s the facility had been an active USAF airfield but now it was used solely for training pilots and mechanics. Three vast hangars, located nineteen miles from downtown Trenton, contained a variety of aircraft in different stages of dismemberment. Young men worked under the guidance of their instructors, welding, soldering, exploring the mysteries of electronic circuitry.

Some distance from the three main hangars a fourth was situated at the place where the field was surrounded by barbed-wire. This construction, smaller than the others, contained an F-16 simulator. Andres Kiss stood with his hands on his hips and a certain arrogant expression on his face – though the look was less one of arrogance than of supreme confidence, that of a man so sure of his abilities he is contemptuous of any attempt to test them. He swept a strand of blond hair from his forehead and smiled at Gary Iverson, who produced a length of black cloth from his pocket and dangled it in the air. He knew Kiss would pass the blindfold test without difficulty, but Galbraith, whom Andres Kiss had never heard of, had to be reassured because the fat man's eye for detail was like that of an eagle for its food supply. Galbraith could spot an overlooked detail or a sloppy piece of business with uncanny accuracy.

Andres Kiss climbed inside the simulator, which was a working cockpit of an F-16 fighter plane. He studied the panel layout, but it was all so familiar he could have sketched it from memory. He took the blindfold from Iverson's hand and pulled it over his eyes, knotting it at the back of his skull. Because there wasn't enough room in the cockpit for two, Iverson had to stand on the platform attached to the simulator, from which position he could verify the results of the blindfold test.

“We don't need to go through this,” Kiss said.

“Do it for me, Andres.”

Andres Kiss adjusted the blindfold. He perceived Iverson as a necessary conduit for the Brotherhood's plan. Without Iverson, the scheme would have been nothing more than the sentimental yearnings of old men. What Iverson brought to the plan was reality in the shape of an aircraft, which might have been otherwise impossible to obtain.

Kiss and Iverson went back some years together to a time when Andres had first learned how to fly a fighter plane and Gary Iverson had been his instructor. Kiss was the most willing student Iverson had ever had, the most adept. The young man's affinity for flight was unnatural. Earthbound, Andres Kiss wasn't the kind of man you'd want to spend an evening with. Pub-crawling with Kiss became an exercise in profound tedium even for somebody like Gary Iverson, whose own social graces were tepid at best. But when you put Kiss inside an aircraft he was transformed, some miracle of transmutation took place, and Kiss was touched by a radiance, an ease he otherwise didn't have.

Now Kiss rubbed his fingers together like a man about to shuffle a deck of cards. “Go,” he said.

“Manual pitch override switch,” Iverson said.

Kiss moved a hand to the left console, touched the switch. He did this without hesitation.

“Antenna select panel,” Iverson said.

Kiss smiled and reached for the right console, his fingers passing over the engine anti-ice switch to the place Iverson had requested.

“Master caution light.”

Andres Kiss reached forward to the instrument panel. With blindness imposed upon him like this, he relied on an inner vision which in its own way was even more clear than ordinary eyesight. It was as if there existed in his brain an illuminated map of the cockpit. He touched the master caution light in the centre of the instrument panel.

“Oil pressure indicator,” Iverson commanded.

Kiss found it to the right of the panel. It was all so goddam easy. Iverson asked for the ejection mode handle and Kiss went to the right auxiliary console without thinking. He did the same for the fuel master switch on the left console, the autopilot switch, the cockpit pressure altimeter – everything Iverson asked for Andres Kiss found without hesitation.

“Can I take this goddam thing off now?” Kiss asked.

Iverson said he could. Kiss undid the blindfold, crumpled it in his hand, passed it back to Iverson. Then he climbed out of the simulator. Both men stood in silence for a time, dwarfed by the height of the hangar. There was a very small skylight set in the roof and morning sun shone through. Andres Kiss experienced the same kind of awesome sensation in a hangar that a devout Christian might in a vast cathedral.

Iverson made a fist of his right hand and glanced at the antique Air Force ring he wore on his fourth finger. He'd bought it twenty years ago in a pawn shop. It was at least a half a century old and it gave Iverson a sense of continuity, of belonging to an exclusive club. Now he remembered Galbraith's instruction to probe Andres about Sundbach, to feel him out. He relaxed the fist and smiled at the younger man. “When I saw your uncle last night I got the impression of … I want to say uneasiness, Andres.”

“He's getting old, Gary. That's all. Old men are apprehensive.”

Iverson thought of the meeting yesterday in the house in Glen Cove and the way Carl Sundbach had walked out. “It wasn't apprehension. I got the feeling he was keeping something back from me. I mean, you guys aren't having problems, are you? Is there anything I'm not being told, Andres?”