Requiem For a Glass Heart (43 page)

“J
ESUS
C
HRIST
A
LMIGHTY!”
H
AIN MOANED AND SLUMPED BACK IN
his chair, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands, his head tilted back. “Oh, shit!”

Ometov said nothing. He shook his head and stared intently at the lights on the electronic console in front of them. He had been sitting very still, listening silently.

Hain was a restless waiter; his huge frame and athletic energies were a poor combination for stakeouts, despite the fact that he did this sort of thing for a living. When he listened to wire transmissions, he chewed dozens of sticks of gum, one after the other, spitting them out as soon as the sugar was gone, and moved his arms and legs, stretched, drank coffee, grunted as he twisted his back muscles, shifted positions in his chair hundreds of times.

Ometov, in contrast, listened to the transmissions like a stone. When he needed a break, he calmly would take off the headphones and walk to the windows and look out at the courtyard. Sometimes he would step outside and smoke several cigarettes, walking along the paths, one hand in his pocket, his head down.

Ann Loder said nothing and did nothing. She and Erika had been drinking diet soft drinks, making regular trips back and forth to the refrigerator in the kitchen and to the bath
room. Erika had both forearms on the table. She was looking at Ometov.

Hain turned off his microphone and raised his right arm in the air and began massaging his shoulder with his left hand. He too was studying Ometov, who had grown noticeably quiet during the last few minutes. Hain reached out and pulled over a chair and propped his feet up on the seat. He picked up his coffee mug and rested it on his stomach and regarded his Russian counterpart. Both of them were drinking coffee; Hain’s was black, Ometov’s thick with cream.

“You knew this, didn’t you?” Hain said. For the first time his voice could not hide his anger.

Ometov studied the blinking lights and sipped his coffee. His rounded shoulders seemed weighed down by the lateness of the hour, by the tension, and by the heft of his own personal history with the woman they were discussing. He pushed his chair away from the table, wiped his forehead with his hand, and shook his head.

“I do not know if she is killing for Krupatin,” he said. “I have no proof. But yes, I suspect she has been doing that, yes.”

“How long have you suspected it?”

“Even before I recruited her in Venice.”

“Jesus God.” Hain was furious. “And you could never confirm it?”

“No. But I am sure that Krupatin used her for strategic killings. Not for killing others who were in the killing business. He used ex-KGB for that. Her targets were civilians, people whose lives had become entangled with Krupatin’s, people who used him as much as he used them—bankers, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, powerful people who were willing to look the other way in order to have access to his money, to make a quick fortune off his illegitimate involvements by bringing him into legitimate enterprises.”

“Then why is he hitting them?”

“Things change.” Ometov shrugged. “They use up their usefulness. Somehow, for countless reasons, they become a liability. Sergei decides he would be much better off without them, then he gets rid of them. Rather, Irina does.”

“Damn.”

“She must have started out as one of his ‘surgeons,’” Ometov mused, looking into his cup, “taking a life to spare
another. But he never let her go. If you kill once in order to save the life of someone who is held hostage, then it is a horrible thing. You do it. It’s over. But then he comes to you again. Incredible. A nightmare. But your choice is the same. And you make the same decision. Then he comes again. And again. Then one day you wake up, and it has become a way of life. Your life is now beyond horrible. It is unbelievable. You have become an assassin. But the hostage is still alive.” “Félia.”

Ometov nodded. “Yes, Félia.”

“She’s going to kill him,” Ann said bluntly.

“Krupatin?” Ometov shook his head without looking at her. He started to say something, then seemed to change his mind. “I don’t know.”

Ann snorted in disgust. “I know,” she said. “She’s going to blow his face off.”

“Wait a minute.” Erika looked around at each of them. “Stepanov. Izvarin. Wei. And perhaps Krupatin.” She tilted her head. “Who is out of the picture here?”

“Bontate,” Hain said quickly. “She’s turned to the Sicilians.”

“And who else?”

“Volkov,” Ometov said, nodding slowly, looking at Erika and realizing what she was thinking. “You are right … yes, exactly. Irina is bringing Krupatin down. She is Volkov’s opportunity.”

“Jees-us!” Hain hissed. “This is an incredible thing here.”

“And what are we going to do about it, Curt?” Ann asked. “Are we going to let her do it?”

“Who believes her story about Wei?” Ometov asked. “About the poison?”

“Shit, I believe it,” Hain said.

“Why?” Ometov pressed his point. “Why would she reveal something like that to Cate? This is something that bothers me. Why would she tell her?”

“Maybe we are underestimating how well Cate has done her job,” Erika said. “Maybe she really has managed to gain Irina’s confidence. The woman cannot be perfect all the time. She is human, after all. Maybe you were right, Leo. Loneliness is her weakness. She sees something in Cate that makes her open up. She talks to her, she tells her too much. A fatal
mistake in her business. But these people don’t live forever, do they?”

“It seems to me the question is not, why did she tell?” Ann offered. “It could be that Erika is right. But if Erika is wrong, then the question we should be asking is, why would she lie about it?”

“You mean you think Irina suspects Gate is undercover?” Hain asked.

“No, I’m not saying that.” Ann shook her head. “I’m just saying this is a question we need to answer. If we can’t, then we have to assume that Irina did in fact give Wei a lethal dose of poison.”

“I cannot think of any reason why she would lie about it,” Ometov said. “I don’t know what she would gain by it.”

“The only reason she would lie about it,” Hain said, “is if she thought Cate was a plant of some kind—for us, for one of the other organizations—and she wanted the people Gate works for, or who she thinks Cate works for, to believe she’s killed him.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Erika said firmly. “What kind of scenario would accommodate a situation in which it would be a benefit to someone to have someone else think Wei was dead when he wasn’t?” She looked around at everyone. “No, I think we are trying too hard to find conspiracies. We are going to outsmart ourselves and miss the obvious point. The woman is lonely. She talked too much. Her mistake. Our gain. It is that simple.”

“I think she’s right,” Ann said.

Ometov raised his hand tentatively as he took a sip of coffee.

“Okay,” he said, wiping his mouth, “I have a question. What if Irina is not going to kill Krupatin? What if … I don’t know, what if she has to create this one last deception before Krupatin will free her daughter? What if all of this is an effort by Krupatin to flush out traitors? Stepanov. Izvarin. And now, because he was willing to plot with Irina, Volkov.”

“So where does that leave Wei?” Hain asked.

Erika nodded. “And Bontate?”

“I don’t give a damn where it leaves them.” Ann couldn’t contain her impatience any longer. “We’re not discussing the questions we ought to be discussing here.”

Hain looked at her. “Okay.”

“Are we going to let this rock on as a collection effort only?” she asked. “Are we going to intervene? What are we going to do about Cate?”

“Last question first,” Hain said. “Is she safe?” He looked around the room. No one answered immediately. Then Ometov nodded slowly.

“Yes. I don’t know whether anyone around her is safe, but I think she is.”

Erika did not answer immediately, and when she did, she began shaking her head slowly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I disagree again. As we have seen, we have a lot of unanswered questions here. We do not know what any of this means for Cate. What if she
has
been discovered? Or if not, after all she has seen, what if she is considered a risk that cannot be ignored? If not by Irina, then what about Volkov? What about Bontate? These men only have to give the word and she is gone.”

“And one possibility we haven’t mentioned,” Ann interjected. “What if there is someone in Wei’s camp who is in essentially the same position as Volkov in Krupatin’s camp, an ambitious Judas? Maybe Irina’s in collusion with a faction of the Chinese too, in some way we haven’t figured out.”

“I thought you were tired of theories,” Hain said.

“The fact is, Curtis,” Ann said evenly, “this thing has gotten out of control. Wei, Bontate—we didn’t know they were in the mix. Krupatin’s inexplicable behavior. We thought he was coming down here for a straightforward meeting with his people. Our agent’s been killed. Our undercover operative is—shit—having sex with his killer. Her ‘best friend.’ Does this sound under control to you? Does this sound stable to you?” She paused. “What are you going to say to the guys in Washington if we lose her?” She looked at him. “What are you going to say to Ennis Strey?”

There was a long silence as Hain and Ann stared at each other. Then Hain took his big feet out of the chair where he had been resting them and said, “This is a fucking undercover bonanza. I want to hear Krupatin’s voice. I want to hear him breathing on those goddamn implants. As long as we don’t have anything but a bunch of bullshit theories, we don’t have anything. Where is Bontate? Who’s goddamn conspiracy is this, anyway? Who’s in charge here? If Krupatin’s being squeezed out, who’s squeezing? If all these guys—Wei Tsing,
Carlo Bontate, Sergei Krupatin—if all of them end up dead at the end of the day, who the hell’s taking their places? Somebody always does, and you know damn well that if we don’t know who the new players are, we are back at square one. We’re starting from scratch. We’ve
got to
know who’s giving the orders to these organizations when the dust clears here, or we’re worse off than when we went into this.”

He stopped and fixed his eyes on Ann Loder.

“And Cate is our only hope of finding out the answers to these questions.” He shook his head. “No way am I going to pull the plug on this thing at this point. We’ve got to have the guts to stick it out. I mean, these organizations are going through a sea change right here before our eyes. If Cate hadn’t been inside this thing, not only would we not know that these people had had a meeting here, we wouldn’t know that, apparently, some new people will be taking over. God knows how long it would have taken us to figure this out. And in the meantime they’d be growing, spreading out. Way ahead of us.”

Hain had grown red in the face. He was tired of Ann’s second-guessing him; he was tired of having to justify his decisions to his own people. He slammed his coffee mug down on the table beside his headphones.

“We are intelligence, not operations,” he added. “So we are going to gather intelligence. We are not going to call in operations and risk having those damn cowboys blow this thing wide open. I don’t even want the damn
wind to
shift right now. Cate is about to walk into the same room as Sergei Krupatin, and I don’t want
anything to
screw that up. Especially some kind of weak-kneed, bullshit theory that we can’t take the risk. We sure as hell fucking can! That’s what we’re all about. That’s what our undercover people
do”
He was still glaring at Ann. “We sit tight, and we
listen.”

He swung around in his chair, snatched up his headphones, slapped them on his head, and flipped the toggle switch on the radio.

“Jernigan. Give me an update.”

Cate would remain on her own.

T
HEY DRESSED QUICKLY
, I
RINA SUDDENLY MOVING WITH AN URGENCY
that seemed to have been born of nothing other than Cate’s agreement to go with her. It took only minutes to slip on their dresses, and then Irina, carrying her shoes in her hand, walked over to the Asian.

She crouched down beside him, looking at him on his level, at his profile as he stared out at the city lights. He was no longer smoking, only staring.

“We are leaving,” she said.

He didn’t react. She looked at him a moment. He was oblivious. She reached out and put her hand on his bare leg, still looking at him, both of them silent. Then she stood, and she and Cate walked out of the green marble and glass room, away from the scarlet stone bed suspended above the city, away from the small universe where Cate had experienced the most startling sensations of her life.

When they emerged from the gold room downstairs, the two Asian women who had ridden with them in the limousine met them in the long, lunar-lighted corridor and ushered them out the rear of the house and into the back seat of a silver Jaguar. One of the women drove the car while the other sat beside her in the front seat. Both wore earpieces and microphones similar to those worn by the men
who had intercepted the Sicilians’ Mercedes earlier in the evening, and both kept up a constant soft-spoken communication with others through their headgear.

Cate and Irina both looked out their windows and rode in silence. After a while Irina reached over and took Cate’s hand, though she continued to gaze out at the city. It was not so much a gesture of affection as one of comfort, or one of seeking comfort. Her grip on Cate’s hand was firm, almost too firm, more like a grip of desperation than anything else. It was extraordinarily odd, and Cate found herself being frightened by the fierceness of it, as though it were the gesture of someone in
extremis.

Cate lost track of time, staring out the window, her mind racing. She wondered if Hain and the others had panicked when she had blacked out her transmissions—she secretly had removed the bandage while she dressed—and whether she should say something now to reorient them.

Suddenly the car pulled over to the side of the street and stopped under a long canopy of trees. She hadn’t been paying attention, but she thought they must be in Memorial Park. She shot a quick glance at Irina.

“Everything is all right,” Irina said without explanation.

Within moments a taxi drove up and parked just in front of them. The woman in the passenger seat turned to them.

“The taxi will take you back to your hotel,” she said, and then both Asian women got out of the Jaguar and opened the back doors for them.

Within moments they were in the taxi and traveling back to the main streets. In less than ten minutes Cate realized they were nearing the Chateau Touraine again. Just then Irina asked the driver to pull into a convenience store.

“I have to make a call,” she said, looking into her purse. She took out a card. “I will take only a moment.”

“Okay. I’m going to see if they have a bathroom.”

Irina didn’t even hesitate at that, and the two got out of the taxi and asked the driver to wait. Irina went straight to a telephone kiosk while Cate went inside, asked for the rest-rooms, and headed toward the back of the store, past boxes of stock and cleaning supplies to a tiny restroom. She flipped on the light and went inside and closed the door. The place stank; the floor was gummy.

“Okay,” she began, speaking quickly, softly. “I’ve spent
the last hour at the home of a Chinese national. You heard Irina tell me about him so you know he works with Krupatin. Only one thing happened you should know—I saw Irina do something to some grapes which this guy later ate. I asked about it. She claims she poisoned him. A slow-acting poison. I don’t know if this … Also, I think she hits professionally for Krupatin.”

Someone knocked on the door.

“God.” Cate jerked her dress up, shoved down her panties, and sat down on the toilet just as another knock followed and the door was pushed open. It was Irina.

“We have to hurry. Come on.”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

Irina closed the door, and Cate stood quickly, pulling up her panties. It was only then that she noticed the toilet was stopped up, toilet paper and urine floating in its bowl. She stood back from it, straightened her panties, and dropped her dress, her heart hammering.

After they returned to the taxi, it was not more than ten minutes before they were turning into the curving drive that led to the hotel, where the doorman was waiting in the softly lighted portico. He smiled pleasantly at them, as though they had been out to a quiet dinner.

Once they were upstairs and safely in Irina’s suite, Irina looked at her watch and went straight to the fireplace in the living room. Crouching down in front of the opening, she reached up into the flue and worked a few moments with something she had obviously hidden there. When she finally succeeded in detaching it from its niche, she pulled out a small package wrapped in brown butcher paper. Kneeling on the rug between the sofas in front of the fireplace, she began unwrapping it.

With surprising dexterity, she proceeded to assemble a SIG-Sauer P220, a 9mm autoloading pistol with a chrome silencer, which she screwed into place and tightened with a final firm grip.

“What do you need a gun for?” Cate asked anxiously. “I thought we were just going to pick up some money.”

“We are,” Irina said. “But it is going to be a lot of money, and I do not want it taken away from us.” She stood up and looked down at her black evening dress. “Come on, let’s get out of these things.” Holding the P220 in one hand and a box
of cartridges in the other, she looked at her watch and headed for the bedroom, where she tossed the pistol and cartridges onto the bed and began taking off her dress.

When they both had finished changing clothes, Irina was dressed in a long-skirted shirtdress of navy silk with pale ivory moonflowers. Her hair was pulled back in a freshly and smoothly combed chignon, and she looked for all the world like an indulged society wife from one of the Villages in west Houston. She was innocent and gorgeous, a magnolia blossom with a brown recluse spider hidden in the creamy center of her beauty.

Bending over the bed, she opened the box of cartridges, picked up the spring-loaded magazine of the P220, and pressed nine rounds into it. Ramming the magazine home into the butt of the pistol, she slammed back the slide, putting one bullet into the chamber, and flicked on the safety with her thumb. Her efficiency was disconcerting, and Cate noticed that her manner had significantly changed. Her concentration was so intense she even moved differently, with economy of motion, with more purpose than grace.

Again she checked her watch. Quickly pulling the covers from her bed, she stripped off one of the sheets and folded it as small as she could, to purse size, and put it under her arm.

“Now we have to go,” she said.

“What’s the sheet for?” Cate asked. But Irina didn’t answer. She was already striding out of the bedroom.

They went down in the elevator and into the cavernous lobby. Cate suddenly was stricken with a panicky desire not to leave the hotel. That which so often in the past had seemed impersonal to her—hotel lobbies, no matter how ingratiatingly they might be decorated, always struck her as unfriendly—that which had seemed so lacking in warmth, suddenly became the very epitome of comfort and security. For a moment she feared an overpowering impulse to break and run. Then she thought she was going to hyperventilate. She did neither. Within moments they were outside under the porte cochere, getting into a waiting taxi that had just arrived.

“Well, hello there,” the driver said with surprise, beaming at them over the back of the seat. “I’ll be damned. You must’ve saved my card after all.”

“Of course I did,” Irina said, smiling sweetly. “Did you think I would not save it?”

The taxi driver, a woman in her mid-thirties, shrugged. “Hey, you never, never know.” Obviously gay, she wore her hair in a severe masculine cut, had a cigarette tucked behind one ear, and wore a faded blue denim work shirt with jeans. The sleeves of the shirt were rolled back on the forearms. She was a thin woman, but rather buxom.

“Well, so where do you girls want to go?” She was grinning as if they all shared a secret, clearly delighted to have them in her car.

“We have a small, special problem,” Irina said. “We thought you might be just the person to help us.”

‘“I’ll, give it my best shot,” the woman said. Cate saw her license on the dashboard but couldn’t read the name from the back seat.

“It will take maybe twenty minutes,” Irina said, “and we will be very generous with you.”

“Twenty minutes, huh?” She paused. “And how generous might that be, honey?” She cut her eyes at Cate, her grin brightening even more.

“We would be happy to pay you five hundred dollars.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Whoa! That’s a pretty good rate for half an hour.” She hesitated and wrinkled her brow. “I don’t have to break any laws, do I?”

“Oh, no, of course not.”

“Hey, I’m in,” the woman said.

“Good. I will explain to you while we are driving.”

The driver radioed her fare in to the dispatcher. She was picking up a couple of riders at the Chateau Touraine and taking them to the Burlewood condominiums, just off Westheimer. The ride was not a long one, and all the while Irina kept up a chatty conversation with the driver; she was coy, almost seductive, and her effect on the driver was nothing less than captivating.

When they arrived at the Burlewood, the driver took them down into the underground parking area and found an isolated spot at the far end of one of the rows. Irina and Cate got out of the back seat and the driver opened the trunk. Irina spread the sheet out on the floor of the trunk, which was, luckily, large and clean, since the taxi was a new one. Then they crawled inside and arranged themselves as comfortably as possible. When they were ready, the driver gently closed the
lid, tapping on the top twice when it clicked shut. Gate was curled into the curve of Irina’s body like a sleeping lover, but the dark, confining space made her tense.

“You will be all right,” Irina said. “You will be safe,” and she embraced her gently. Cate could smell her fragrance briefly, and then the driver started the car.

As they drove out of the Burlewood garage, the driver radioed that she had just dropped off her two fares and that she was going to a nearby diner for a cup of coffee. At the diner she bought a cup of coffee and a doughnut and chatted a little while with the waitress. Then she went back out to her car.

She drove back into traffic and after five minutes radioed to her dispatcher that she was picking up a fare at a certain address on Fountainview and would then be headed to an address in Park West. Then she turned around and pointed her taxi in the opposite direction.

The Amberson Towers were three twenty-five-story condominium buildings sitting at angles to each other like the legs of a tripod. The buildings were about a block apart, separated by heavily wooded grounds. After cruising along the serpentine lane that laced together the front grounds of the three towers, the taxi approached the parking garage entrance of Amberson II, the center building. The driver stopped at a keypad at the entrance and punched in the appropriate code, and the horizontal tubular rod gate rose up slowly, allowing them to descend the ramp into the garage.

The garage took up three stories deep in the ground, but the taxi driver pulled into one of the second-level aisles and found a parking space. She cut the motor and quickly got out and went around and opened the trunk.

“You okay?” she asked, helping first Cate and then Irina out of the trunk. “Shit, I knew it’d be hot in there. And it’s not a hell of a lot better down here.”

Cate was indeed perspiring, but mostly because of the tension of her confinement, not the heat. The car trunk had made her even more claustrophobic than she had feared.

“You okay?” the driver asked again. Cate saw that she was wearing cowboy boots.

“Yes, we are all right,” Irina answered for both of them, straightening her dress. “Did you see anyone following you?”

“I don’t know. There may have been this one car at first,
a Mercedes. It showed up at the doughnut shop, cruised by, and then left. But I didn’t see it again after I left the Burlewood. I know nobody came into the Amberson gates after me.”

“Excellent.” Irina opened her purse and counted out seven hundred dollars and handed it to the driver.

“Seven!” The driver fanned out the one-hundred-dollar bills in her hands.

“Two more to forget us if anyone should ask you later,” Irina said. She leaned over and kissed the driver on the mouth. The woman looked as if she were going to melt.

“You still got my card?” she stammered.

“Oh, yes.” Irina smiled. “I am keeping it.”

The woman beamed. “Listen, anytime you need me, honey, I’m your woman.” She hesitated, not wanting to go, her curiosity elevated to absolute fascination. She was clearly fearful she would never see this gorgeous woman again. “You two take care,” she said finally, stuffing the money into her tight jeans pocket. Then she turned, got back into her taxi, and drove out of the garage.