Requiem For a Glass Heart (19 page)

“O
UR TWO BOYS FROM
L
ONDON ARRIVED WHILE YOU WERE
out,” Hain said as soon as they walked in the door. He was standing at the tables in the living room, the telephone to his ear, holding.

“When?” Ometov was suddenly animated. “Where are they now, right now?”

“They came in a little over an hour ago, spent some time clearing customs, renting a car … They’re halfway into town from the airport.” He cocked his eyes at the telephone cradled at his neck. “This is Quantico.” He nodded at the table. “Those are photographs faxed to us from our people at Intercontinental. Good pictures of these guys coming through customs.”

Ometov shambled quickly to the tables and sat down, picking up the photographs. Erika was immediately at his side. Together they began poring over the pictures. In the background the radio system the SOGs had set up to enable the off-site to monitor the surveillance team’s progress was turned on low, and calm, sporadic voices punctuated the silence with irregular, sometimes monosyllabic communication.

“How’d it go?” Hain asked, looking at Cate.

“Good. Fine, I think,” she said, tossing her purse into a chair.

She saw Hain glance at Ann, who went straight to the kitchen to get a soft drink.

Ometov studied each individual photograph, passing them to Erika.

“These are extremely clear photographs. A lot of them. This is very good.” Even as he spoke he was taking the photographs back and laying them all out on the table side by side. Erika hadn’t said a word.

“Leo, what about it?” Hain asked, still holding the telephone.

Ometov shook his head. “I don’t know these guys.”

Hain frowned.

“Erika?”

“No. I don’t know them either.”

“Leo, you know all of Krupatin’s regulars.”

“Yes, yes, yes, I know them,” Ometov said a little testily, frowning, peering at the faxes. He shook his head again, then looked at Erika. “You know what I think? I think these men are disguised.”

“What?” Hain was still holding the telephone to his ear, but the word “disguised” almost made him forget about it. “What do you mean? Both of them? Disguised—you think they’re both disguised?”

Erika raised her eyebrows and picked up a fax in each hand, looking back and forth between them. After a moment of studying them, she slowly began to nod.

“Yes, I see … Okay, a very good possibility,” she said.

“They’re disguised?” Hain was incredulous.

Ometov ignored him and sat down at the table, reaching for his notebook file of photographs of Krupatin’s bodyguards and associates. He began flipping through the notebook, and after a moment he settled on two photographs. Cate was now looking at the faxes too. Ann had walked in just as Ometov had spoken.

Frustrated at being on hold to both Quantico and Ometov, Hain almost seemed on the verge of hanging up the telephone when he suddenly got someone on the line. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” he said. He listened. “Great—no, that’s great. Thanks,” he said, looking at his watch and tossing down the receiver. He leaned toward Ometov. “They’re disguised?”

“Yes.” Ometov was nodding. He looked up at Gate, who was standing over his shoulder. “Look at this man. Forget his
face. See his build, the way he stands, the way he holds his shoulders, this one a little higher. Even the way he carries his head. Now look at our new arrivals. You see the similarities?” He tapped a photograph from the airport customs line, which had been labeled “Nikolai Yelyutin.” “Grigori Izvarin,” he said.

Cate was struck by the cosmopolitan clothes of the two men who had checked through customs a little over an hour earlier. They could have been well-heeled businessmen from anywhere in the States. Unlike Ometov, there was nothing Russian about them. The man Ometov was referring to was tall and well built, and the way he held himself conveyed a clear athleticism.

“What the hell kind of disguises?” Hain persisted.

For the next few minutes Ometov went over the details of the appearances of the two men and pointed out what he believed were alterations in their features. In the case of Izvarin’s companion, he swore the man was even wearing false nose putty to broaden the bridge of his nose. The discussion bounced back and forth until Hain asked the question everyone was thinking.

“You don’t think this guy’s Krupatin, do you?”

Ometov pondered the faxes laid out in front of him.

“You know,” he said, “he could be.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Ann said. She was looking at the faxes too, all of them, bending over the table.

“The size is right,” Ometov said. “The weight. Take into consideration the altered nose, the hair …” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Jesus, don’t you know him well enough to be able to tell?” Hain asked impatiently. “These two guys match their passport photographs. What’re they gonna do, dress up again to leave the country?”

“Why not?” Ometov asked.

“Hell, a better question is why,” Ann said. “I mean, why do this? It’s not like they’re going to fool us with stage makeup.”

“Apparently that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Hain said pointedly.

“We don’t know that,” Ann said. “Leo’s already spotted this Izvarin guy.”

“This isn’t Krupatin,” Erika said, shaking her head with the finality of a personal conviction. “I don’t think so. No.”

Ometov looked at her. She sat down in her chair and scooted it away from the table.

“Even if the disguises are professional—and we really don’t know if this is Izvarin, Leo—but all that aside, Sergei Krupatin would never do this. This is undignified. Sneaking into the United States.”

“He’s been in here before under false passports,” Ann reminded her.

“Certainly,” Erika said, “but not
disguised, for
God’s sake. There’s some dignity in walking through customs with magnificently forged documents, having all the confidence in the world that your brains are better than the brains you are working against. That takes, …” She grasped her crotch and looked at Ann.

“Balls,” Ann said.

“Yes, the balls. But putting on a false nose …” She shook her head once, with finality. “No.”

“Maybe she’s right,” Ometov said. “That is good psychology.”

“Or maybe that’s just the kind of thinking he expects from us,” Hain said. “Jesus.”

“Well, where are they now, Curt?” Ann asked. “What does surveillance have on them?”

“About ten minutes ago they were on the Northwest Freeway, on their way into town.” He nodded at the radio on the table, its monitors a flickering trill of green lights visually mimicking the spoken voices. “Sounds like they’re poking along. Probably reading all the highway signs, trying to figure out where the hell they are.” He shook his head, looking down, pondering.

“Okay,” he said, wheeling around and going to the telephones. “I’m going to have Jernigan get a photographer over to the Chateau. If these guys take off their disguises in the car and check in under new names and IDs, I want to see it on film.”

Everyone waited while Hain worked the telephones again. When he was finished, Ann didn’t give him time to catch his breath.

“What’s the situation with the implants?”

“They’ve got a guy in the air,” Hain said. “He’s on a
charter flight, so …” He checked his watch. “He ought to be arriving at Houston Intercontinental about eight-thirty.”

“Shit,” Ann said, looking around. “Erika, you’d better get in touch with Stepanov and tell him it’ll have to be tomorrow.”

“He said he wanted to check in tonight,” Erika said tersely. “And if these two men get there ahead of him …”

“Then what?” Ann snapped. “Nothing, that’s what. They just get there ahead of him. I didn’t hear him say anything about who was supposed to be there first, for Christ’s sake. I’m not going to rush this implant thing. I want to make sure it’s working right, and I want to make sure Care’s comfortable with it. Work out something for tomorrow. And tell him about our new arrivals. See what he has to say about that.”

“We could have him look at these faxes,” Erika said. “Maybe he could see something.” “Yeah, good idea,” Hain said.

“He’ll be meeting them sooner or later anyway,” Ann said. “There’s plenty of time for him to see those if it turns out this isn’t developing like we think it will.”

Erika turned with a petulant jerk of her shoulder and walked around the table and picked up one of the telephones.

“Cate,” Hain said, reaching for a manila envelope, “these came in from Washington a little while ago. It’s your legend.”

Cate took the envelope and retreated to a chair in a far corner of the room, next to the glass wall that looked out onto the courtyard. The afternoon sun was beating down on the palms and bougainvillea, sharp light and deep shadows. Erika was going through the telephone machinations necessary to reach Stepanov while Ometov continued laboring over the photographs of the two Russians. Hain and Loder had put their heads together in a private conversation.

The envelope contained six pages of single-spaced information and a Texas driver’s license in the name of Catherine Miles, the name she had used the two times she had worked undercover for the organized crime section. Her residential address was a duplex in northwest Houston where the other side of the duplex was owned by a special support group member—one of a number of freelancers known as Gs, who provided minimal support for Bureau operations for a fraction of the cost of a full-time agent—who knew to cover for
her if anyone showed up at the door trying to verify Care’s residence. Her legend was an amalgam of the legends she had used before as well. She was an assistant manager in the personnel office of a large architectural firm. Her telephone number would be answered by an agent in the Houston field office who was Hain’s liaison in the event he needed local support. If anyone actually went to the company to inquire about her, the real personnel director was a long-time support group member and would field the inquiry.

Everything had been covered. Cate was reading through the legend a second time, double-checking the details, when Ann Loder came over and pulled up a chair.

“You have trouble with any of this?” she asked, nodding at the legend.

“Nope, seems like they took most things into consideration.”

“You can change anything you want. We just need to talk about it.”

“I don’t want to change anything.”

“Okay, good. Another matter, we need to come up with a word you can use if you want to bring everything to a halt, if you feel threatened or whatever—if you’ve simply had enough. A common word, but not too common. You don’t want to use it by accident, because it’s going to bring everything to a standstill. A phrase, maybe.”

“A personal reference,” Cate said. “I guess that would be best. Something about how I feel. Uh, what about ‘I feel hot,’ or ‘I’m burning up’? I do that sometimes just before my period starts.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay, that’ll be it.”

“Fine, I’ll put it in the operations notes, make sure everyone who needs to know is aware of it. Now, what did you think about our man Stepanov?”

“The bastard has a lot of gall,” Cate said, laying down the papers in her lap. “It’s going to be quite a ride.”

“Yeah, I think it will be. It’s hard to comprehend the magnitude of what’s at stake for him. He’s putting a lifetime on the table here.”

“What about his wife and son back in Russia? He’s just going to walk away from them?”

Ann nodded. “According to him, it’s been a bad marriage
for a long time anyway. He’s got a girlfriend in Brooklyn. Of course, the family in Moscow was supposed to be the sword Krupatin was holding over his head in case he screwed up.”

“Even for longtime buddies?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s business. Everybody understands these things.”

“So what will happen to them?”

“It depends on how this plays out. If Krupatin is really pissed, they’ll die. Sergei is big on revenge.”

“Then in essence, Stepanov is giving them up.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

Cate shook her head. “Jesus.”

Ann turned her head slightly and glanced in Hain’s direction, then turned back to Cate. “Look, about the living arrangements with Stepanov,” she said, her voice low. “He knows better than to pull something stupid, but if he tries, you don’t have to take anything off him. That’s not in the game.”

She looked at Cate. It seemed as if her gut wanted her to say something else, but her brains and her training kept her from coming out with it.

“You’re not going to tell me this is a war?” Cate asked. “That we’re soldiers, and soldiers sometimes have to do things that are ugly?”

“I don’t think I have to tell you that,” Ann said without irony. “The question you have to ask yourself going into this is just how ugly you’re willing to get.” She glanced at Erika on the telephone and then back at Cate. “She made some mistakes. Not operational ones, not legal ones. Well, legal—sometimes legal goes out the window in these operations. Sometimes it just stops being a relevant framework for consideration. Anyway, her mistakes were personal, soul-shaking. When you’re undercover, those are the real dangers, the lasting ones. The operation will be over sooner or later. They always are. People move on to a new assignment, a new operation. But the stuff that happens inside you is never over. That’s where you’ve got to protect yourself. That’s where you have to have a good inner understanding of where the lines are drawn.” She paused, her eyes motionless and deep. “Just don’t forget who you really are. And don’t do anything you won’t be able to live with when this thing is over.”