Requiem For a Glass Heart (13 page)

I
T HAD BEEN A LONG DAY, BEGINNING IN
W
ASHINGTON FOR
Ometov and Hain and in New York for Loder and Jaeger.

When Cate and Ann returned to the off-site with pizzas and salads and several more six-packs of beer, they all gathered around the rented dining room table and ate, their conversation falling into a general discussion about the differences in law enforcement procedures in Russia and Germany and the United States.

This casual exchange only highlighted Ometov’s weary sense of humor and Erika Jaeger’s natural inclination to sobriety regarding just about everything. They were both exceptionally inquisitive, sometimes asking questions about the validity of impressions they had gotten about the United States from American films. The dinner conversation ranged over a wide variety of issues, none of which had anything to do with their reason for being there. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement to set it aside for a while, if only for the length of time it took to eat a pizza. Which was only as long as it lasted.

Putting a last bite of pizza in his mouth, Curtis Hain sat back in his chair, one hand resting on his bottle of beer as he crunched the crust. He was thoughtful for a moment and then looked at Cate.

“Cate, we’ve been holding out on you a little bit,” he said. “Well, not holding out. Maybe holding back is a better phrase.”

Cate felt her face flush and simultaneously realized she had no reason to be having this reaction. Still, in her own personal spectrum of emotions, his remark had the effect of the other shoe falling. But it didn’t frighten her. It simply verified the vague feeling she had had all day that for some reason she was not getting the full picture here, despite the fact that much of the briefing had been directed to her specifically. Everyone else was already up to speed.

She took her eyes off Hain, looked at the olive on the slice of pizza she was holding, and then put the slice down on her plate. She was a slow eater; she wasn’t through, but her appetite suddenly had deserted her. Giving a little shove to her plate, she wiped her mouth with her napkin.

“Okay,” she said. “What is it?”

“I’m going to get right to the heart of this,” Hain said. “You’ve been buttonholed for a special job here. I mean special even among this special group of us. And you’ve been selected for a number of specific reasons. One, to be blunt, Ennis Strey said you had the balls for it. Two, you’ve got the right looks for it. Three, Ennis Strey said you had the brains for it.”

“In that order of importance?” she asked.

“Actually, yeah, it’s pretty damn close,” Hain said. He took a swig from his bottle of beer. “We want to try to put someone personally close to Krupatin, especially if it looks like he’s going to set up here for a while. We don’t have a lot of time to try to do that, but we have a card up our sleeve that we hope will give us an edge.” He stared across at her. “A couple of years ago Krupatin set up one of his most trusted lieutenants in New York. Brighton Beach. His name is Valentin Stepanov. He seems to be the cornerstone of Krupatin’s infrastructure here in the States. Stepanov has been summoned to Houston by Krupatin. That’s the real reason why we’re so sure he’s coming here. Stepanov is ours.”

“Christ.” Cate was stunned. She looked at Ann Loder and then back at Hain. “How did that happen?”

“It’s complicated,” Hain said.

“You should tell her,” Ometov put in. “If we are going to
ask her to do this, she ought to know everything, all the details.”

If Hain was irritated by this intrusion, he didn’t show it.

“Stepanov came up through the ranks with Krupatin,” he said, “ever since the early Moscow days when they were blasting their way into criminal stardom. Stepanov and Krupatin were equals, best friends, but as their careers progressed, Stepanov’s position gradually emerged as subordinate to Krupatin’s. He became Krupatin’s most trusted lieutenant rather than his equal. As Krupatin’s fortunes rose, so did Stepanov’s, though not as extravagantly as Krupatin’s. There’s never room for more than one at the top. When Krupatin made his move to the U.S., he put Stepanov in charge of holding the ground here.”

“A while back Stepanov made a mistake,” Ann said, nibbling on a slice of cucumber. She looked weary; her eyelids were sagging, gravity having its way at the end of an exhausting day. “We got him on tape setting up, in detail, an extortion arrangement. Big bucks. Corporate-level stuff. He was looking at a big chunk of time without parole. We talked to him, and he rolled over.”

“When was this?”

“Nine months ago.”

“Then he’s opened up on Krupatin?” Cate asked.

“Oh no, he’s tougher than that,” Hain said, shaking his head. He picked up a piece of pepperoni and put it in his mouth. “But for starters he gave us some stuff on one of Krupatin’s big German operations. The BKA handled it very well and broke up a deep, multiheaded organization there. Losing that organization cut seriously into Krupatin’s German interests. That’s where Erika came in, working undercover in that operation.”

“Stepanov could do that because he knew the cell there,” Ann said. “He used to run it. Being all the way across the Atlantic and not having been directly involved in it for nearly two years, he was well protected from suspicion. But he was stubborn about the U.S. operation. He said if he gave it up, Krupatin would kill him, whether Krupatin could prove he had had anything to do with it or not. The boss heading the German operation was blown up, along with his three guards, as he was being transferred from one prison to another in
Mainz. That’s the way it works. Krupatin never lets anything slide. You screw up, you pay.”

“Then we got the intelligence from legat Moscow.” Hain was leaning his chair back, rocking on its back legs. “We immediately contacted Stepanov. He admitted he’d received communication from Krupatin to meet him in Houston. Swore to God Almighty he knew nothing more than that. Wouldn’t, or couldn’t, help us out, threats or no threats. But he did agree to help us put someone inside.”

There was a pause.

“Why me?” Cate asked.

“The reasons I gave,” Hain said.

“What did you mean when you said I had the right looks for it?”

“There were four women in the running for this,” Ann Loder said. “One in the San Francisco field office, one in the Chicago field office, and one in our Brussels office. And you.”

“And?”

“We showed Stepanov all the photographs,” Loder said.

“You understand,” Ometov interrupted, speaking softly, politely, “Valentin has known Sergei all of their lives. He knows him … intimately.” He shook his head, and a soft smile of inevitability accompanied a slight shrug. “His finger”—Ometov tapped the table beside his plate—“selected your picture. ‘This is the one,’ he said.”

It was the most curious procurement procedure that Gate had ever witnessed, especially since it was directed at herself. There was no need for an explicit elaboration of the ramifications of accepting such an assignment. She knew them. Once she was inside—if she got inside—no one was going to ask her how she got her information. If it was indeed information they wanted. They were not going to be asking for a breath-by-breath account of how she got what she got. She would be on her own in matters of intimacy. You went however far you had to go. The realities of the business were that the information was so important that no one was going to blame you for anything you had to do to get it.

All of them were looking at her, but her eyes were still fixed on Ometov.

“You’re wanting information, I assume.”

“To be precise,” Ometov said, “anything—everything.”

She looked at Hain. “You’re not going to ask me to wear a wire, are you? That’s impossible.”

For a millisecond Hain looked as if he, didn’t know how to frame a response, but before he could put something together Ann Loder leaned forward with her forearms on the table.

“Cate, have you ever used Norplant?”

“No.”

“But you know how it works.”

“Sure.”

“The techs at Quantico have come up with two devices. Same size as Norplant. Same application. One is a very sensitive, incredibly sensitive microphone, uses human tissue as a kind of antenna or something. Shit, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The other is a burst transmitter. Left arm, right arm. We know where you are at all times.”

“And you hear everything … all the time.”

Loder nodded. “It never turns off.”

“I’d be a walking microphone.”

“It
never
turns off,” Loder repeated significantly.

There was silence for a moment.

“Jesus Christ,” Cate said. “And what is it you expect me to do?”

“Stepanov has agreed to take you with him. He’s married. You’d be his mistress.”

“I thought I was supposed to be … available to Krupatin.”

“Krupatin … well, he has a reputation for taking what he wants. The fact that you’re Stepanov’s mistress is irrelevant.”

“Oh, shit.”

“No, no no no,” Erika said quickly, eager to correct a possible misunderstanding. She looked all around the table before her eyes settled on Cate. “Look, it’s not so …
ungehobelt
—what, crude. He is not a beast, not in that way. No. He will not hesitate to take you away from Stepanov, but he will do it with guile and romance, with some civility. Insulting to Stepanov, no doubt, but not insulting to you. He is not going to jump on you, have sex with you right there in front of everyone.”

“Then how does it work?” Cate asked. “What could I expect?” She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.
In her own mind she really wasn’t committed to this. But she was curious, very curious.

“As I said.” Erika frowned and furrowed her clear, unwrinkled brow. “He will flirt with you. This is common with him. He just does it if he wants. He would flirt with the Virgin Mary in front of Jesus Christ. You know, no rules in this. What belongs to his lieutenants belongs to him—if he wants it.”

“What you’re saying,” Cate said, trying to read between the lines, “is that to some extent I could control the situation. I don’t have to be afraid of rape.”

“God, no.” Erika shook her head. “The smarter you are, the longer you can drag it out. He likes—what, the game of it. But,” she said, holding up a hand, index finger extended in caution, “if you have to have sex with him, you had better be prepared for a crazy situation. When I was undercover in Berlin, I talked to women who had slept with him. He is cruel. It’s that simple. Watch out.”

Erika’s blunt references to the sexual possibilities in this assignment were like a splash of water in the face. Her European frankness was far out in front of what either Loder or Hain would have ventured, but Cate noticed that neither of them was rushing in to qualify her remarks. Clearly everyone felt that the stakes here justified a considerable ethical leniency.

It was quiet as Cate looked at her plate: scattered crumbs, a bit of lettuce or green onion, a charred corner of pepperoni, an oily drool of salad dressing. She thought how odd it was that these trivial scraps would even catch her attention. The proposition put before her was entirely out of proportion to anything she had ever done.

“What about backup?” she asked. “Just how far out there am I expected to operate?”

“I don’t think we need to go into operational details at this point,” Hain said quickly, dismissively. “What we need to do is to give you some breathing space here. We’re all exhausted. It’s been a hell of a day. Let’s clean up this mess and get to bed. Cate, think about it. Sleep on it, if you can,” He smiled weakly. “Tomorrow morning we’ll talk. But we’ve got to know then. This is tough, I know, and I’m sorry we’re having to do it this way, but we haven’t been given a lot of time. If you decide to pass on this—and you’re perfectly welcome
to do that, it doesn’t affect your career one way or the other … this is an off-the-record proposition. But if you pass on this, we’ve got to know soon so we can get agent number two down here pronto. Understand? This is pressuring you, I know, but this is the way it’s got to be.”

It seemed she had lain awake for almost an hour without having made any measurable progress toward a decision. The pros and cons were so integrated as to make her choice nearly impossible. She played them all out, strung them in scenarios that resulted in everything from laudatory success to grim disaster. She had never imagined having to make such a choice. And yes, she thought about Tavio. She made all the comparisons, made all the rationalizations about how this was different, but she was inwardly embarrassed at how easily she paled at what he had done routinely for years. Too many years.

She was just about to slip into an exhausted sleep when she thought she heard voices in the hallway. But when she lifted her head from the pillow the aural perspective changed, and she realized the voices were coming from the courtyard. Throwing back her sheet, she got out of bed, went to the window, and parted the blinds slightly. The only light in the courtyard was the glow from the city reflected off the gulf clouds that had drifted in with the cooling temperatures of the night. A stone barbecue pit was built against the rear wall of the courtyard, and Curtis Hain was sitting on the side of it with his arms folded across his chest, head down as he listened to Ann Loder, who seemed to be delivering a heated monologue, leaning toward him and occasionally gesturing with one arm, flinging it toward the sky to make her point.