The Miko - 02 (22 page)

Naked, the hard blue light vying with the pink neon excrescence from Shinjuku and the faraway Ginza, boulevards that never slept, she stepped out onto the precisely raked rows of pebbles. They felt so cold and smooth on her bare soles.

Between two of the jutting black rocks she spread herself, draped on the flat ground, curled and serpentine, half in light, half in shadow, and became one with all that surrounded her.

There was an acute irony in using Tanya against the Russians, an elliptical symmetry that affected Minck in just the same way as did gazing upon one of Thomas Hart Benton’s huge canvases: its very existence made life worth living.

After Moscow, Minck had needed elements to demonstrate to him in a direct fashion the nobler, the elegant and uplifting aspects of life. His incarceration had leeched that part of his memory away. In returning to America he had had to learn the positive aspects of the human race all over again.

He looked up now as he sensed Tanya’s approach. That was another consequence of his imprisonment. Some unseen layer of his mind had been rubbed away by the constant scrutiny he had been under, and like sandpaper taken to skin, what was revealed underneath was a hypersensitivity to human presence.

Minck stared into those cool blue eyes, dotted with gray. They were large and direct, and they were always the first things he saw when he looked at her. That was his own personal purgatory.

They were the eyes of Mikhail. Her brother’s eyes. Mikhail, the dissident, had been the reason for Minck’s infiltration into Moscow in the first place. Mikhail had sent a message into the West: he possessed information vital to the American secret service system. Minck had been chosen by computer—because of his facility with idiomatic Russian as well as his somatic matchup with the Slavic Caucasian type—and they had sent him in to pull Mikhail out or, if that were, as they put it, unfeasible, to extract the information from him.

But in pursuit of that knowledge, he had been traduced. Someone in Mikhail’s cell had been turned, and Minck’s rdv with the dissident had ended in a hail of submachine-gun fire literally tearing Mikhail in two, in spotlights picking Minck out of the shadows, the snow falling, falling. All sounds muffled, blood in the snow like chips of coal strewn in an explosion of malice, chain-wrapped tires clink-clink-clinking in his ears as he ran from the raised voices, the muzzles spewing red death hidden behind the angry glare of the spotlights. And running through the knifing cold, snowflakes riming his lashes, blinding him, making him think, oddly, of Kathy, his college sweetheart, his wife. How she loved the snow, holding out her delicate hand, laughing in delight as one by one the flakes landed on her flesh, melting only after giving up their secret to her, only her.

Slipping on the patch of ice, undone by the blanket of snow, his ankle wrenching, going down, and then strong arms binding him, lights in his face, the gassy smells of cabbage and borscht invading his nostrils, voices harsh and guttural,
“Gde bumagie! Kak vass zavoot!”
Where are your papers? What is your name? repeated over and over, life already reduced down to one dull fragment. Eight years ago.

“Carroll?”

She was the only one who knew what the C. stood for; the only one who would dare use it if it were known. It was the only outward manifestation he would permit of the powerful bond between them.

“Yes, Tanya.”

She glanced down at the brief he had been reading. “Is the file on Nicholas Linnear complete?”

“No file on a human being is ever complete, no matter how up to date it is. I want you to remember that.” He said this last needlessly since Tanya remembered everything.

Looking at her again, Minck was struck anew by how much she resembled Mikhail. Both had the finely chiseled, high-cheek-boned face of the purebred White Russian rather than the broad, coarse-structured visage of the Slav. Both had that thick, straight shock of hair, though in latter days Tanya had had hers dyed a deep-burnished blond because, she said, it helped dampen the memories.

After he had broken out of Lubyanka, a colonel’s blood on his trembling hands, with all of the considerable might of the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnost
marshaled against him, with the militia out beating on dissident necks to extract information on his whereabouts, Tanya had led him out of Moscow and, eventually, Russia.

He owed her a lot, and it had incensed him when in the hands of the Family—in those days, of course, there was no Red Station—they had taken her away from him and, in a lightless cell, had begun on her what the KGB had worked on him. He soon put a stop to that, risking his own termination in the process. But that was only his first stumbling step to reclaiming a life that he thought had been cut away from him as surely and as professionally as a surgeon takes a scalpel to flesh.

Because of his incarceration, he was himself suspect at first. But when he delivered Mikhail’s information to them they saw reason and no longer suspected him of having been turned. He never let them know, however, that the information had come from Tanya long after Mikhail had died in the bloody Moscow fusillade, torn in frozen chunks from her throat during the long, bitter nights in hiding, so near the encroaching death drawing in all around them. He had had little strength after his ordeal and she had done his fighting for him, rising silently up out of their hiding places in cave or fen to cut down any soldier who strayed too close, a blood-drenched spectral figure returning to him after each lethal foray to lead him onward toward freedom. She was strong and she was hard and she had saved him many times, repaying him for taking her out of Lubyanka with him. And, he had quickly learned, her mind was as quick and powerful as was her body. Her memory had been the repository for all of Mikhail’s secrets, he being far too intelligent to commit anything so explosive to paper.

When, three years before, Minck, rising rapidly in the Family, had proposed the creation of the Red Station to deal with all the Russias, their satellites, and their global dealings, he was granted eighteen months in which to deliver what his presentation promised. It had only taken him eighteen weeks, and from then on a burgeoning slice of the Family’s annual budget was assured. He negotiated for his section much as a good attorney for a star baseball player will negotiate with a club president. His contract was airtight. If he continued to deliver. And Minck made certain of that.

But it was not really of budgets, Tanya, or even the Family that Minck was thinking now. He had sunk deep into an odd kind of reverie that, increasingly, had become his habit over the past several months.

In fact he was wondering how a highly intelligent, well-trained operations officer named Carroll Gordon Minck could find himself in such dire straits.

It was somewhat of a shock to him, because after his nightmare ordeal in Lubyanka he never thought he would feel this way again. In those bleak, bloodfilled days, the memory of Kathy was all that he had allowed himself to dwell on. Anything to do with the Family was strictly no go since at any given moment he could be dragged from his steel cot and shot full of God only knew what new blend of chemicals—psychedelics and neutral stimulators—so that he would be transported and talking before he knew that he had opened his mouth.

The Russians were at last as intimate with Kathy as he had ever been. But they knew no more about the Family than they had the day the snow had worked against him and they had pulled him in.
“Gde bumagie! Kak vass zavoot!”

When he returned to America, his relationship with Kathy was irreparably damaged. He had shared their most intimate moments with too many people for whom he felt only fear and loathing. It was as if he had sat down to discuss his sex life with the man who had just raped his wife. There had been a silent explosion in his head. He did not love Kathy any less on his return from his own private hell, but he found that he could not touch her without being torn out of time and place back to the dank, fearful cell deep within Moscow. That his mind would not allow, so they remained apart to the night she was killed. And of course by that time he had convinced himself that they had stripped him of his capacity to savor sexual release.

Then this whole godawful mess had begun. But still it was beyond him to understand how he had gotten from there to here, hopelessly in love with a woman whom he should not—
could
not—love. Was it only two weeks ago that he had clandestinely flown down to see her for the weekend? Oh, Christ, but it felt like two years. He stared blindly down at his hands and had to laugh at himself. Needed to do that lest he slit his wrists in utter frustration. What an idiot he was! And yet he could no more stop loving her than he could cease to hate the Russians. What elation filled him when he thought of the gift she had brought him—a simple enough pleasure, but one that he had been certain would never be his again. How could he possibly give that up?

And how he longed to confide in Tanya. He could whisper the secrets of the world into her ear without a qualm…but not his. No. This he could not allow her to know.

Because it was a clear sign of weakness in him. Then she would look into his eyes with that stern, Slavic gaze too serious to dismiss and tell him what he ought to do. And Minck knew what he ought to do; knew that he should have done it months ago. The woman he loved had to die,
had
to, for the sake of security. Every day she remained alive, a potentially damaging leak was walking around.

How many times during these past few months had he picked up the phone and begun to dial the coded mobile number? And how many times had the termination order died in his throat, leaving him with the acrid taste of ashes in his mouth. He could not do it. And yet he knew that he must.

“—in here.”

His head came up. “I’m sorry; I was—”

“Lost in thought,” Tanya said. “Yes, I could see.” Her eyes, Mikhail’s eyes, held his steadily. “I think it’s time for the pool.”

He nodded, sighing. She was fond of saying that giving the body a good workout did the same for the mind.

Tanya switched on ARRTS, the Active / Retrieval / Realtime / System, an advanced network that the Family had had installed for Red Station at the behest of its director. The system would now monitor all incoming and outgoing communication. In this mode it had been programmed by Minck to deal with the first three nominal levels of data on its own. For levels four through seven, it would hold before contacting Minck, wherever he was, for instructions on how to proceed.

They took the lead-lined elevator up three floors to the rec level, passing through two distinct modes of electronic security checks. Stripped down, Minck had a hard, lean body that looked at least ten years younger than it was. It seemed a perfectly normal body until one came close, and then one began to see details forming, the hard rills and scars, the patches of dead white skin, hairless and glossy. Lubyanka had been hard on him.

He hit the water in a quick flat-arced dive, the surface barely rippling at his smooth entrance. In a moment Tanya followed him into the Olympic-size pool. Both wore brief nylon suits. At these, and perhaps other times as well, Minck found himself admiring her lithe, muscular body. He so constantly relied on her steel-trap mind, her unerring cunning at trapping the Russians at their own game, that these infrequent moments always struck him anew like revelations from out of the blue. She had the wide shoulders and narrowish hips of the dedicated female athlete, but there was nothing masculine about her. Just powerful. And Minck never made the typical man’s mistake of equating the two.

They kicked full out for ten continuous laps up and back the long pool, using each other’s speed and stamina to spur themselves on.

Eventually Tanya won, as she always did, but by less of a margin than she had several months ago.

“Close,” he said, between breaths. He wiped the water off his face. “Very damn close.”

Tanya smiled. “You’ve been training harder than I have. I’ll have to remember that in future.”

Reaching upward, he pulled himself to a sitting position on the tile rim of the pool. Water scrolled off him, and his dark hair was plastered down across his forehead, giving him the look of a Roman senator. His clear gray eyes were unnaturally large in his face. He had recently shaved off his thick handlebar mustache and as a result looked astonishingly boyish for his forty-seven years.

Tanya, still treading water, waited patiently for him to begin. He had had a dour expression on his face ever since he had had the conversation with Dr. Kidd in New York. She had not been privy to the dialog and Minck had been particularly unforthcoming about it. She just hoped that was the only thing weighing on his mind now.

He was a man to whom, in far different circumstances, she could find herself intensely attracted. He had that quality she most admired in people: the expression of intellectualism through his physicality.

“It’s this goddamned Nicholas Linnear,” Minck was saying now with his characteristic abruptness. “I think we’re going to have to deal with him sooner than later.”

Now she knew how the conversation with Dr. Kidd had gone, but she said nothing of that.

Minck’s gray eyes leveled on her. “I don’t for a moment think I’m going to like the bastard; he’s too damn independent for his own good. And of course he’s monstrously dangerous.”

“I’ve read the file,” she said, pulling herself up beside him. “He’d never even contemplate aggression.”

“Oh, no,” Minck agreed. “Absolutely not. And that’s our key to him. He’s a naïf on our territory. We must therefore make quite certain he stays in our bailiwick so that we can reel him in when he’s given us everything we want.”

He ran his hands down his nearly hairless thighs. “Because should he be allowed to return to his own turf, then God help us. We’ll lose him, the Russians, and the whole ball of wax.”

“Hello?”

“Nick. Nick, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you all day!”

Mumbled something into the receiver. His eyes seemed glued shut.

“Nick?”