Requiem For a Glass Heart (5 page)

“What is it?” She didn’t like the way he had said that, as if he were afraid she might have been emotionally unhinged by Griffin’s drunken revelations and imagined that she was going to have to be pampered for a while.

“You still have any interest in FCI?”

Foreign counter-intelligence had been her first assignment request when she had been transferred to Houston nearly six years earlier. But she had been assigned to organized crime instead. She volunteered for undercover operations, went back to Quantico for the training course, and then over the next few years worked three cases undercover. They weren’t FCI, but they were exciting enough and challenging. That was the main thing. But she hadn’t gone undercover in almost two years now. As far as she was concerned, it was way past time.

She looked at him. “Yeah, I’m interested,” she said.

He nodded. “This is a Group I special, a task force originating out of the New York office. They’ve got a target coming to Houston, and they want a woman who knows the city. I know the squad supervisor, Curtis Hain, he’s an old friend, and he’ll have the ticket on this. I’ll be checking in, but
he’s running the operation. You’ll be working with a small group of people from an off-site.”

“Here in Houston.”

“That’s right.”

Cate focused on this information. A special was a case that took precedence over all others. There wouldn’t have been anything else to say if he had said this at the beginning. This was an extraordinary opportunity. But she couldn’t entirely suppress her skepticism.

“Why me?”

“They wanted a woman, and they wanted one with some organized crime background and some undercover experience.”

“They don’t have women agents like that in Washington?”

“They don’t know Houston. Look, Cate, if you don’t feel a hundred percent about this, then it’s not for you. You know that.”

“I just take the assignment or I don’t? It’s like that?”

“No, they want to talk to you first.”

“When did you learn about this?”

“About a week ago. They contacted me and let me know they were pretty sure they were going to have a target here and they wanted to coordinate a joint operation. They said they’d need a female for undercover work. But they said it would be a few weeks away. Then a few hours ago they called and said they needed someone now. Look,” he said, “I knew how you used to feel about FCI. This came up. I thought you could handle it, and I recommended you. That’s all.”

They were staring at each other, and she sensed his next words coming at her before he spoke them. “But under the circumstances,” he said, “I don’t know if it’s the right thing …”

“No,” she heard herself say. “No, it’s not a problem.” Instantly her hesitation vanished. She wanted this, whatever the hell it was. The last four hours had brought about an enormous alteration in the way she viewed her life. Suddenly there were certain things she didn’t want to repeat. She didn’t want to go back to a tomorrow that was only a tepid variation of yesterday. She needed a dramatic change, and this was it.

“Look, I’m pissed off more than anything else,” she said,
fully aware of her dishonesty and hoping she could hide it. “What do you expect? It leaves a damned bad taste in my mouth, but it’s not a nervous breakdown kind of thing, for Christ’s sake.” She paused, her eyes fixed on him, trying to read him. “I really want a shot at this, Ennis. Very much.”

Strey nodded, still studying her. For a cold, brief moment she thought he was going to pull it out from under her. Then he said, “Instead of coming into the office tomorrow, just wait here. Somebody will give you a call and tell you what’s next.”

“Fine,” she said quickly, swallowing.

I
RINA LAY NAKED ON HER SIDE ON THE BED, STARING AT HER OWN
pearl-gray profile against the wall. She examined its contours closely and repeatedly—the reclining oval of her head, the sudden height of her shoulder falling in a gradual slope to her hip, the silhouette rising suddenly again and falling in another long slope to become her diminishing leg. This second, one-dimensional self alternately grew more pronounced and disappeared as the afternoon sun hid behind and then emerged from clouds, and then it steadily lengthened and distorted and became absorbed into the beige wall as the oblique light of late afternoon lost the ability to create any contrast at all.

The telephone was on the bed behind her, and when it rang she reached back with her arm and picked up the receiver without turning over.

“Hello,” she said.

“I guess you’d better go ahead and pick up a tin of tea,” the voice said.

“What kind?”

“Black tea.”

“Fine. I’ll do it,” she said. She reached back without looking and fumbled the receiver onto the cradle.

As always, she had committed the details to memory long beforehand and hardly had to think about what to do next.
For the moment, she did nothing. She stared at the wall, wondering where in it she had disappeared to, wondering what course her life would take if she simply lay there, just as she was now, until her shadow returned. She would remain there through the long evening and into the night. She would not move. She would not get up to eat. She would not get up to drink. Sometime during the night, probably in the long, interminable hours just before dawn, she would have to go to the bathroom. But she wouldn’t get up. She would lie there and urinate in bed, feeling the warm liquid come out from between her legs and run down the side of her groin and thigh onto the sheets. She would stay in that wet slough through the night and grow chilled in the discomfort of her own urine. She might sleep, but she would not dream. At dawn the black walls would begin to lighten, and they would grow lighter and lighter until the actual sun would rise at her back, throwing its fire across the bed and onto the wall.

Her shadow would be red.

She sat up on the edge of the bed, her back still to the window where the weak light that refused to throw her shadow languished on the sill. Walking around the end of the bed, she went to a clothes chest near the closet and opened the bottom drawer. It was empty. Taking the drawer out of the chest, she searched for and found a small canvas tab tucked into the corner of the bottom where the wood was joined to the front. She dug at the tab with her fingernail until she could grasp it. Tugging firmly on the tab, she lifted the false bottom out of the drawer.

Taped to the real bottom were two keys, a thick manila envelope, two packets of white powder, and a pair of surgical gloves. She pulled everything loose and laid it out on the bed, then returned the drawer to the chest. Sitting on the foot of the bed, she opened the envelope and dumped out the money. She counted it. Twenty thousand pounds. And then fifty pounds in small bills. She picked up the packets of powder and examined them. One had a pressure-sensitive seal that was red; the other’s seal was green. The colors were hardly noticeable unless you were looking for them.

She put all of the items on the bed into her purse, the one the bodyguards had gone through, it seemed, far in the past. The event was as vivid as if it had happened a moment before, but the circumstances surrounding it had merged with the
circumstances of the other events, all of which seemed remote and long ago. This was a recent phenomenon, this psychological separation of the circumstances and the events themselves.

She went into the bathroom and dressed, taking from the wire hangers the same underwear and light cotton dress that she had worn so long ago to the Bolshoy deaths. It took her a long time to finish with the small buttons. She ran a brush through her hair and noticed in the mirror that perspiration had discolored the underarms of the cheap summer dress. Russian fabric. Everything, dresses and lives and souls, stained easily in Russia.

Back in the bedroom, she picked up her purse from the bed and walked down the hallway to the front room, where she picked up a third key from the table by the front door. She stepped outside and locked the door behind her, then began walking along the quiet wooded street in the dusk, looking for all the world like hired help, a East European girl in her plain small-patterned dress carrying a shiny black patent leather purse. Within five minutes she had reached the nearest corner and a bus stop. The bus ride to the South Kensington Underground station took less than ten minutes.

Getting off the bus, she walked a little way to a pub and waited on the sidewalk, watching the early evening traffic. She hailed the first cab that drove by.

“Yes, ma’am, where’re you goin’?” the driver asked as she opened the back door and got inside.

“Wapping,” she said.

He looked at her over the back of the seat, taking in her simple dress, her lack of makeup, her uncoiffed hair.

“That’s a good ways,” he said. “It’d be cheaper by the Underground, just over there.” He jerked his head toward the South Kensington station. “Goes right to Wapping.”

“Thank you, but I’d rather take a cab,” she said.

He nodded, still eyeing her. This time he had picked up her accent. Immigrant. Household help or a hotel maid.

“I’m sorry, but for that distance—”

“In advance,” she said, opening her purse. “How much?”

He told her, and she handed him two large bills.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. He started to dig in his jacket pocket for the change.

“If you can drive me there without talking, you can keep the change,” she said.

He jerked up his head and looked at her over the seat again. But his hesitation was brief. He stuffed the money into his jacket pocket, nodded slowly, turned around, put the car in gear, and pulled away into traffic.

She didn’t care how long it took. Slumped in the corner opposite the driver, she watched the lights go by, watched the people in the street as the cab plowed through the early London evening. At the traffic lights she picked out individual faces to watch, but while the cab was in motion she let the lights and colors blur into streamers of confettied brilliance.

She fell asleep.

“Wapping,” the cab driver said, and she started awake. “Where you want to go?”

She sat up and looked around. Wapping was part of the massive Docklands development, an eight-and-a-half-square-mile redevelopment project begun in the early eighties with the intention of revitalizing the environs of the famous Thames ship yards, which had fallen into dereliction. Responding to government enticements, real estate speculators and foreign investors had weighed in to initiate the largest urban renewal project in Europe, an effort to change the face of a landscape well acquainted with hard times, from the Tower Bridge east to the East Royal Docks. It was an eighteen-billion-dollar project. Whole blocks were razed and a new world was created, or at least conceived, with condominiums and office towers springing up in a newly designed community of commercial and residential enterprises which threw together Cockney East Enders and chic yuppies in an untested futureworld.

Of all the Docklands neighborhoods, Wapping embraced the most evident extremes of wealth and poverty. It contained one of the East End’s most diverse collection of immigrants— Jews and Hindus and Muslims, Bengalis and Pakistanis, Vietnamese and Chinese, Nigerians and Indians; an endless moil of foreign hope and determination. Through the window of the cab Irina saw the spattered blue-glowing sequins of modern office windows at night and smelled the musty water of the Thames and the pungent odors of the cooking dinners of many nations.

“The Camberwell Building,” she said.

“Yeah, I know it,” he said.

In a few moments he stopped in front of a block of glass structures.

“It’s that one,” he said, pointing to a triad of glass towers, “the one on the right.” He looked at her. “It’s closed at night, ya know.”

“This is my first night with a custodial service,” she said. “I thought I was going to be late.”

She opened the door and got out of the cab.

“Good luck to ya,” the driver said and pulled away.

She walked across a small tidy plaza and went between the Camberwell Building and its neighbor, heading for a third building only slightly visible from the street where the cab had let her out. Entering another plaza, she crossed to the Margate Tower condominiums. The bottom of the building was filled with darkened shops and fast-food eateries and restaurants that closed in the evenings, when the thousands of employees in the surrounding commercial zone went home to the suburbs and the city.

She used the first key to activate the elevator and punched the button for the eighth floor. When the elevator stopped, she turned to her left and walked down two corridors to number 817. She rang the buzzer. Nothing. She rang it again. And again. She was just about to get the second key out of her purse when she heard someone fumbling at the door. It opened slightly.

“Yes?”

“You ordered black tea?”

“Bloody hell,” the man said. “You’re right on time, aren’t you?”

The door closed, the safety chain was undone, and the door opened wider. The man was in his late twenties. She didn’t know how Krupatin’s people found such men. He was hawk-nosed and broad-shouldered, with straight, long dark hair. He just looked at her. It appeared he had not long been out of the shower; his damp hair was roughly combed and his charcoal shirt was hanging out of his dark gray trousers, the baggy sleeves unbuttoned at the cuffs. His black loafers were alligator. He was freshly shaven.

“You ordered the black tea?” she asked again, this time with a slight smile.

“Oh, yeeeah.” He was looking right through the summer cotton.

“I’m not coming in until I know you ordered the black tea,” she said smoothly, almost coyly, but making the point.

“I ordered the damn tea, yeah.” He looked exasperated, but she waited. “Okay, let me see.” He rolled his eyes upward, remembering the exact words. “Yes-I-ordered-it-from-Clarks-on-Cromwell-Road,” he said in a mocking singsong, rocking his head from side to side.

“Verrry good.” She smiled brightly, her voice rewarding him for following the rules. “I have it.”

He stepped back to open the door wider.

“You are supposed to be alone.” She raised her eyebrows questioningly.

“Indeed I am.” Now he was grinning too.

He stepped back farther, and she entered the apartment. The place was furnished unimaginatively with contemporary furnishings, a lot of glass and chrome and straight lines. The lighting was low and moody, and a massive black sound system took up most of a wall, its dials and monitors of beady colored lights blinking and winking a silent composition. The volume had been turned down. It was a corner room, and the glass walls on two sides revealed the heart of London. Whatever he had paid for the place, two thirds of the price must surely have been for the view.

“You Russian?” he asked, following her into the living room.

“When did you get in?” she asked, looking around, giving the place an appraisal.

“Flew into City Airport two hours ago.” He was smiling at her, his expression flirtatious. “You’re a damned fine-looking Russkie.” He was very sure of himself, feeling cocky after a successful job.

“I’m German,” she offered with a small laugh.

He shrugged, continuing to stand between her and the entrance, grinning. His clothes were silk, slinky and modern.

“How about a drink?” he asked. “You look like you could use a drink. I’m having one.” He gestured toward a drink on a glass coffee table in front of a crescent-shaped sofa between them.

“Sure,” she said. “What you are having is fine.”

“In a jiff,” he said, and turned to the kitchen. She looked around.

“This is a beautiful view,” she called to him.

“Ya got to love it, don’t ya,” he called back.

She walked to the glass wall and looked out.

He came back into the living room carrying a glass like the one on the coffee table, his manner jaunty and anticipatory. He handed the glass to her.

“Sit down,” he offered.

She sat on the crescent-shaped sofa near the middle, holding her cold glass. She could smell the rum. God, who would have guessed it would be rum.

“You’re a hell of a messenger,” he said, sitting down and leaning back on the sofa, with one arm thrown across the back of it. He was looking at her with a silly grin, the kind of giddy expression that revolted her, the universal expression of lechery.

She raised her glass. He picked up his.

“Congratulations,” she said, “on your successful job.”

They drank from their glasses.

“You do this all alone?” he asked after swallowing the rum.

“They always know where I am,” she said. “I feel safe enough.”

“I bet you do.”

She smiled. “I have something for you.” She put down the glass, reached for her purse, and took out the manila envelope and handed it to him. “I have to watch you count it.”