Permanent Interests (38 page)

That "deer-sense," as Gary used to call it, suddenly returned to Innes. He tightened his grip on Colleen's upper arm and halted.

All his senses became magnified, as if some drug were taking effect on him. The buzz of a fly overhead, the sounds of San Francisco's traffic outside, the odor of burning candles, the clamminess of the concrete-enclosed air each commanded his highest attention. And these priests. Were they not flanking them? Just as the deer of Innes's childhood could sense something alien to the woods in their midst, Innes felt uncertain as to the presence of these cassocked men in this holy place.

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In this heightened state of alert, Innes's ears picked up behind him the ever so audible sound of stiff metal brushing against fabric. His senses told him that this man didn't smell like a priest. Faint odors of liquor and tobacco wafted through the air from his direction. Everything moved in slow motion now. He was aware of every detail of every physical thing around him. The deer-sense in him commanded him to bolt.

Innes used his grip on Colleen's arm to shove her down to the floor. In slow-motion, Innes saw Colleen's expression of fear and confusion as she hurtled downward, her eyes imploring, "Why are you doing this to me?"

Innes turned his head to the rear. Priest Number One pulled a long silvery blade from under his robe. His face was contorted as he lunged at Innes. Priest Number Two produced a revolver with a long barrel and pointed it at Innes. Events moved now in real time.

Innes bent down and hurled his body against the knife-wielder. His 180-pound frame caused Priest Number One to go flying backwards and down to the hard floor. The blade went flying from his hand. Priest Number Two fired two rounds, one of which tore flesh from the arm of Priest Number One. Innes shoved himself rearwards toward the frame holding the dozens of flickering candles to the dead.

With each hand gripping the struts connecting the legs, he raised the structure and used all his might to thrust it at the gun-toting priest. The thing knocked the man to the floor, but not without two more shots being fired, this time at the vaulted ceiling. He was covered with candles which ignited his cassock.

The first priest got up, grabbed his knife and went for Innes like an enraged tiger. Colleen picked up a missal and threw it at him. It hit the attacker in the jaw, knocking him off balance momentarily. Innes took Colleen and pulled 338 JAMES

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her away. They ran across the transept, stopped for a second at the presbytery and began to run down the nave.

Two more men coming from the main entranceway caused them to stop in their tracks. They looked back. Priest Number One had thrown holy water onto his partner to put out the flames. They felt trapped. Colleen jerked Innes toward the high altar. All the splendor of this magnificent temple of worship would not save them.

"Oh, Lord! If you really exist,
save us!!!
" Colleen shouted at the top of her lungs.

The killer-priests were now back on their feet and bearing down on Innes and Colleen. They looked all around them. Coming across the presbytery right at them were their attackers. To their backs was the glittering high altar -- sacrificial altar, it occurred to Innes. They were aware of the two other men at the far end of the cathedral beginning to make their way up the nave.

"Sacristy!" Innes shouted. "Where's the darn sacristy?

All cathedrals have them." He turned left, then right. A white curtain concealed something. Was it a statue? Or a door? "Quick!" Innes hissed, and signaled toward the curtain with his head. They ran for it. He yanked the curtain down. There was a door. It opened. They hurled themselves in and slammed the door shut. Inside the small sacristy were all the accoutrements of the sacred Anglican mass: priests robes, vessels of different sorts, altar boy garments, images of saints, tall candle bearers, incense burners, altar bells.

"Help me, Colleen!" Together they moved a stone statue of St. Francis and propped it against the door. Just then, two bodies slammed against the door. There was the crack of wood, but it held.

Innes picked up another, smaller statue, this one of St.

Paul. Like a shot-putter, he stood back, took three steps PERMANENT INTERESTS

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forward and heaved it into the small window. There was a second assault against the simple door. This one caused the hinges to loosen from the wall. Innes and Colleen stuck their heads out the window.

"It's high. We won't make it," Colleen warned.

"Do we have a choice?"

The crack of gunfire filled the cathedral. The siege against the door halted abruptly.

Innes pulled Colleen to the window ledge. "The tree.

We've got to get into the tree," he said. He stood on the ledge and squatted.

"Bob. Noooo!!"

Innes jumped up and forward out the window. His hands caught a branch and held on tightly. He quickly wrapped his legs around it and shimmied toward the tree's trunk. When he reached the sturdy middle portion of the branch, he carefully stood up and reached for the branch above. With his weight pulling it down, the branch's tip touched the sacristy window.

"Colleen! Grab it! Come!"

Colleen made the sign of the cross and grabbed the branch. With her eyes shut tight, she jumped. The branch transported her downward as though she had wings. Softly, she landed on the ground, not believing that she'd made it unhurt.

Innes scrambled down the trunk, the rough bark scratching him and tearing his clothes. Without looking back, they ran down California Street toward the Embarcadero. Out of breath and panic-stricken, they ran as fast as their legs could carry them. They ran on pure adrenalin. Perhaps in the back of their collective consciousness they saw the sea as haven, or perhaps they fantasized that they would stow away on a ship at one of the wharves. Whatever, they were escaping from the 340 JAMES

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cathedral, the holy place where their lives, for the second time, had came within a communion wafer's breadth of violent death.

Morales and Ramirez lay sprawled at the high altar, blood from their lifeless bodies spread over the floor and down the steps of the church's most hallowed spot. One FBI agent looked over them. The other searched frantically with his eyes from the sacristy window, cursing himself for losing Colleen McCoy and Bob Innes.

"Why are we here, of all places?" an angry and fatigued Colleen demanded. "Look at us. We look like a couple of bums. In the restaurant wall mirror, she looked at her scratched face, leaf-infested hair and torn dress.

"Nobody will think of looking for us here," Innes replied.

"Well, I've got news for you, Mr. Flying Walenda, there are no guest cells at Alcatraz prison. We can't stay here."

Pot-bellied middle-aged men in baseball caps with cameras slung from their necks, walked with families in tow, their frumpy women scolding hyperactive children who were o.d'd on sugar products. Some took long sideways glances at Innes and Colleen, seated at a corner table.

"I can't stand it! I want a hot bath, a hot meal and to be free from pursuing killers!" Colleen hissed. "People must think we escaped from the zoo." She self-consciously tugged at her hair to get out bits and pieces of debris.

"Look! You think I don't want the same things? You think I like this? And as for what we're doing here, what safer place can we be right now but in jail? Nobody will PERMANENT INTERESTS

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think of finding us here. At 5:00 we'll take the last ferry back and then hightail it out of the city."

"Great. Bonnie and Clyde on the lam yet again."

"Okay, Miss Gratefulness and Cooperation. I'm open to suggestions. I suppose you've got some brilliant idea to return us to our nice and cozy former lives?"

"No." Colleen pouted and sulked. "Where next then?"

"New

Orleans."

"What?! That's got to be 2000 miles from here!"

"2300, to be exact."

"That's it, Bob." Colleen rose. "I'm going back to D.C.

I can't take it any longer. Better to take my chances there.

I'll go to the media, to the courts. I'll fight it out that way."

"Nobody'll believe you. They'll take you for a crackpot, the ditsy moll of the spy and traitor, Robert 'Vladimir'

Innes."

She plopped back into the chair. In her exasperation, she sought answers. "Why New Orleans? Why?"

"They'll go after Jalbert. At the party convention. It makes sense. They'll stop at nothing to hold onto power.

Look what they're doing -- correction, trying to do -- to us.

Look at Mortimer, Wheeler. And the murders of the Russian SVR guys, there's a connection. American political bigshots making deals with mobsters in order to rake in enough cash to sway the election in their favor. The mobsters rake in cash from drug deals that the political bigwigs make possible and protect. Take that several steps further. Kill and maim those who get in the way.

Somebody's got to break it open, expose it, make the guilty ones face the music."

"And that's us."

"Right."

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"I think you misunderstood when I told you that you were like some hero of yore. You're taking it much too literally."

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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Something about the archaic decor of the FBI safehouse flat made Lydia nauseous. Whether it triggered painful memories of what passed for modern Russian house trappings or accentuated the increasingly frequent bouts of morning sickness she'd been getting, she could not say.

She wanted to tell Wentworth. Oh, how she wanted to!

Nothing focused one's thoughts more on the need to plan for the future than having a baby. But she would await the right moment. Get through the final travails that would be required to destroy Yakov and his partners in evil first.

This was the important last hurdle to freedom and a normal life.

"…we've been very, very pleased with your assistance thus far, Miss Puchinskaya…indispensable role in bringing these characters to justice…"

She managed only to half-tune in to what Berlucci was saying.
A house in the woods. What color should the
nursery be? Oh! Pink flowers and bunnies if a girl, blue
with cartoon characters if a boy!

"…we're very close to bringing this case to closure…it'll be big, very big. Some of the most powerful figures are involved…"

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Wentworth touched her hand. It broke her spell. She stared into his gray eyes, a good soldier's eyes. Eyes that reflected directness and integrity.
He'll make such a
wonderful father. So loving.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

She smiled warmly. In his presence she felt as if they were enveloped in a warm aura of love. She couldn't lose him. It was their destiny to spend the next hundred years together. It was God's will.

"Yes. I'm fine," she assured him.

"We want you to return to Yakov and find out what his next moves are. Find out what he's doing with Dennison and any other government officials. Only you can do it.

Only you. Lydia? Can you do it?" Berlucci looked at her with concern.

Lydia smiled, but was crying. She looked again into Wentworth's eyes and rubbed her tears away. Turning to Berlucci, in a barely audible voice, she answered, "Yes."

Gorygin detested much about his work. Climbing up the career ladder to become New York
Rezident
required countless meetings with innumerable sleazebags in too many unsavory locales. A family man, he loathed his occasional meetings with Yakov in the Lambda Cinema in Greenwich village. He hated pornography, and homosexual pornography made him positively ill. Despite sitting off in a remote corner of the theater, and despite his averting his eyes from the screen, the sounds emanating therefrom made him sick. He always tried to rush these rendezvous.

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Yakov arrived with Dimitrov some fifteen excruciating minutes later. Colonel Rokovsky, from the Washington embassy
Rezidentura
, sat uncomfortably next to Gorygin.

"I'll be brief," Gorygin began. He signaled to Rokovsky, who produced a leather satchel from which he pulled an envelope. From this he took out a stack of enlarged black-and-white photos.

"You know this woman, I presume?" Gorygin said. He shined a small flashlight onto the photos.

The pictures were of Lydia entering and exiting the apartment building containing the FBI safe house, of Lydia kissing Wentworth in a restaurant, of Lydia receiving instructions from FBI agent Hanks in Rock Creek Park.

Yakov's eyes were wide. He scrutinized each photo with studied fascination.

"The building has an FBI safe house. They use it to surveille our embassy. We've known about it for years.

The man in the park is an FBI agent. The man she is kissing is--"

"Malandrino's security man."

"Colonel Rokovsky can provide you with more details.

I wanted you to be aware that one of your informants may be informing on you."

Yakov's jaw tightened. He looked straight at the antics on the screen, but was clearly focused elsewhere.

Rokovsky, on the other hand, joined his boss in staring at the floor and shuffling his feet impatiently. A gay couple across the aisle was making out at an increasingly vigorous pace. Gorygin always liked to know his contacts' sexual orientation and weaknesses. It helped him assess them as intelligence assets. Yakov was an enigma, however, never letting on any interest in either sex.

"So, comrade, I leave this information with you to act on as you please. Obviously, our interest is self-protection.

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Your bad sources become our bad sources. I cannot afford to risk my people and operations over them. Goodbye."

He and Rokovsky couldn't rise and depart the place fast enough.

"Dimitrov, what do the Afghans do to traitors in their ranks?" Yakov asked softly.

Dimitrov smiled and merely nodded.