The quantum solution, p.20
The Quantum Solution, page 20
“Absolutely not.” Zahra was regaining her equilibrium. This person was fishing in deep water, pretending to know more than she did in an attempt to get her to incriminate herself.
“I wonder if you recall seeing me there?”
“How could I, when I wasn’t—”
“I was sitting at the other end of the bar.” An Binh talked smoothly, compellingly over her. “But since you mistook me for a waitperson here, I suppose there’s no reason to think you saw me at all. To you, I must have seemed like part of the wallpaper.” The corners of her mouth turned up. “I suppose that’s one reason I’m usually invisible.”
Zahra felt compelled to lean forward. “Are you seriously playing the race card with me?”
“Heavens no,” An Binh said so politely Zahra had the dizzying sensation of once again falling into an alternate reality. “We’re both mixed race. However, we’re hardly the same, you and I.” She took a deeper savor of the old-fashioned. “I come from Vietnam and China. I have firsthand experience in being invisible, while you claim to come from an illustrious family and you’ve used that notoriety to be seen. Your goal has been to be recognized like a shiny celebrity. You’ve become an addict, while I understand that your addiction will kill you.” Her eyes gleamed in the gentle luster of the small table lamp, making them look like holes into another universe. “Your world is entirely self-directed; that’s a boon to people like me who are part of a shared vision.”
An Binh shrugged powerful shoulders, revealed unexpected musculature; Zahra felt a moment’s dislocation.
“I merely wish to point out,” An Binh continued, “that even though you didn’t notice me I was there when you met George Wilson for your clandestine rendezvous last night.”
Zahra’s blood pumped hard, the tolling of a bell presaging militant change. “Why would you use that particular phrase?”
“Why do you think?”
“You just said you were sitting at the other end of the bar.”
“And you said you weren’t at Carat last night, that you didn’t even know that Carat was a nightclub with, it must be said, a first-class bar.” She called for the waitperson passing nearby.
“I used the phrase ‘clandestine rendezvous,’ Zahra, because I am an expert lip reader.”
Zahra, a dazed expression leaking into her face, slid back into her seat.
An Binh ordered another old-fashioned.
Zahra was abruptly overwhelmed by the scent of spice and smoked black tea.
33
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
They did not go far, or more accurately not far enough. Toward the quayside, the street squeezed down to a narrowing lane scarcely wide enough for a single person let alone the Maserati. Evan was out of the car before Tribe had a chance to stay her or even deliver a warning. She wouldn’t have paid him the slightest attention anyway, so focused was she on catching up to Inessa. She could not allow her to escape the island, which seemed to be Inessa’s plan B.
He vaulted out of the car without opening the driver’s-side door. “You can’t go without me.”
“Watch me.” Her mouth felt full of rocks. Her jaw had swollen even more, the flesh beneath soft as an overripe peach.
“You don’t know the layout of this island.” He came up beside her. “I do.”
The blood was drying on her face but the throbbing from her neck up was hellacious, forcing her into prana—deep breathing coming from the base of her belly. She nodded, straining against her neck muscles, which had painfully locked up to protect the recoil her cervical vertebrae had suffered from Inessa’s incessant blows.
She had no energy to waste arguing with him. Besides, the point he was making was irrefutable. Knowledge of the ins and outs of the island was something she lacked, knowledge that would surely give her an edge against Inessa. She had learned most emphatically not to underestimate the other woman.
“You should know,” she said, the words forming but with difficulty and intense pain, “I injured Inessa’s leg and shoulder badly, but that doesn’t automatically give me an edge. An animal is most dangerous when it’s wounded; when it no longer has anything to lose.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said, producing a Walther PPK from a shoulder holster under his whiskey-colored suede jacket.
“Who do you think you are,” she said, “James Bond?”
“He should be so lucky. Isn’t he dead or something?”
“Or something,” she muttered.
They cautiously walked the narrow lane single file, Evan in the lead. No lights to either side of them, but far ahead they could make out the intermittent glimmer of the water, like the snow on a TV screen when a station has gone off the air.
And then just a few steps ahead she saw a different kind of glitter, as of light on oil. She stopped, Tribe just behind her.
“What is it?” he whispered.
She pointed as she knelt. “Look. Blood spatters.”
He nodded. “A trail for us to follow.”
“Maybe.” She rose. “Or maybe it’s deliberate.”
“A false trail?”
“A trap,” Evan said. “I know her now. I know how her mind works.” She looked around. “She’s luring us on into a narrow defile, a perfect place for an ambush.”
“Seriously?” He brandished the Walther. “What would she use for a weapon?”
She placed her hand atop the barrel of the handgun. “Put that away before you kill someone.” He made to move on but she stopped him. “Does this street lead directly to the harbor?” Her mouth was thick with words that for the moment seemed her enemy. She fought each word out through the pain they caused.
“It does.”
“Okay. No point in both of us heading into a possible ambush. Go back to the car. Take another route to the far end of this street.”
“By this time she may be already at the water.”
“I don’t think so. I hit the nerve bundle in her groin when I gave her that bone bruise. She won’t be going far.”
She pressed on alone. He didn’t protest, went back up the street. Perhaps this time it was he who saw the logic of her argument. She hoped so anyway.
Yet without him to keep her mind off her ravaged face the pain returned in wave after black wave, threatening to pull her under into unconsciousness. More than once she stumbled on a bottle or a discarded wax-paper wrapper, and once she found herself leaning against the front of a building not having any idea how she got there. Twice the pain in her head and neck amped up to an intolerable level, paralyzing her.
The lane continued to narrow, to a sliver of an alley whose sides pressed in on her, at times forcing her to turn sideways to fit through. The smell of the sea was much stronger, and now she could hear the slop and draw of individual waves hitting the low seawall. The rhythmic sound entered her brain, slowed it down. The pulse of the waves seemed to match the pulsing of her pain. She slid down the wall so slowly she wasn’t even aware of it until her bottom contacted the uneven cobbles. Her eyes closed. She fell into her time in Sumatra with Lyudmila, surrounded by the clatter of palm fronds, the roar of endless waterfalls, the drone of nighttime insects, the clamor of tiny tree frogs, and beneath it all the hiss and suck of the sea against the wide scimitar beach.
She awoke with a hand against her throat. Her eyes flew open to see Inessa’s face, to feel Inessa’s breath on her own face. She lifted her arms, and Inessa’s hand fell away; there was little strength in it, even less will. Inessa was on her knees in front of her, panting in agonizing pain. Her left arm fell loosely, hand, palm up, into her lap. They stared at each other, silent, intent simply on breathing.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Evan said after a time.
“No, you’re not.”
Evan could—or would—not answer.
“She tortured you.” Inessa’s voice, shrouded in inky shadow, seemed to come from far away. “We tortured you.” She shook her head slowly, as if even that small movement exhausted her. “Taissa was crazy. The things she wanted to do to you. But you escaped. I was fucking amazed, how you managed it.”
“Desperation is the mother of invention.” Evan stared into Inessa’s eyes, glittering like the sea just beyond them. “I didn’t want to kill her.”
“I know. She was like that, my sister. It was all or nothing, every time. She could never see the middle ground; maybe she didn’t want to see it. I think it was easier for her to see everything in black-and-white.”
“Isn’t it possible we all want that?” Evan said softly.
Inessa closed her eyes. “You really fucked me up. My whole left side is on fire.”
“Have you taken a good look at my face?”
Inessa tried to laugh, tears of pain and exhaustion leaking out of her eyes instead. “You sound like a bear trying to gargle rocks.”
“Hey, fuck you.”
They both tried to laugh as best they could.
Inessa stirred, moved so she was next to Evan, back against the wall. “I still hate your guts.”
“Naturally.”
They listened to the water, to the palm fronds’ clatter, to the ping of rigging against masts.
“I never thought it would come to this,” Inessa said at length.
“What is ‘this’?”
“An impasse.”
“Taissa would never put up with it.”
Inessa huffed. “You’re right about that.” She leaned her head against the wall. “She was so fucked up.”
“And you aren’t?”
“I’m just a little fucked up,” Inessa said, “though now you bring it up I no longer know what I am. I’ve been living close to death for so long I think I might already be half-dead.”
“We’ll have to do something about that.”
A hitch in Inessa’s breath. “So. Kill me then. I no longer have the strength to resist you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Evan said. “I never wanted to kill you.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want to know what you know,” Evan said. “Everything you know.”
Inessa bowed her head. “Take me back to the villa. Interrogate me. That’s what you planned to do, isn’t it?”
“Inessa, listen to me. Interrogation has now become the court of last resort.”
“I don’t believe you,” Inessa snapped.
“I know.” Evan shifted, her overtaxed muscles growing stiff. “But take a breath and think it through.”
“Why should I? What’s changed?”
“The circumstances. Look where we are—a long way from Istanbul. We’ve changed.”
“No, no, no. You still want the same thing from me.”
“Right now, I want your shoulder to be set and my face tended to. I’m not thinking past that.”
“When at an early age someone you rely on turns evil you learn not to trust anyone.”
Evan regarded her in a different light. “Your father or your mother?”
“My sister Taissa.”
An icy sensation crawled down Evan’s spine as she thought of Bobbi. Were their roles the same as Inessa’s and Taissa’s or the reverse? The night enclosed them, silent and obliging. She wondered if she should say something, but she didn’t know what that might be. Possibly that was because she did not know how she felt. She lifted her head, relieved. “Here comes Tribe.” She raised her voice as Tribe approached from the water end of the alley, shining his phone’s flashlight app over them. “Marsden, show Inessa your Walther.”
He took the weapon from its holster. Evan could feel Inessa tense through her pain, her eyes opened wide.
“Now holster it,” Evan said with a grunt as she levered herself into a standing position, back still against the wall. She felt vertigo grip her. The edges of her vision field seemed tarred. “And get us the hell out of here before we both pass out.”
34
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
“You need to put something in your stomach.” Juliet Korokova put her hand on Rodion’s arm. “Since you puked your guts out in the cold room.”
She hurried him along; she wasn’t much for comfort. Nevertheless, an inward shiver went through him at her touch.
They had stepped outside the door to the GRU’s morgue. An ambulance sat idling, its driver and his partner smoking cigarettes and staring at Rodion’s face, which, in the glaring overhead sodium lights, he was certain looked greener than an overripe round of Stilton cheese. He was certain they were laughing as he and the major passed by, and he was grateful to slide into the passenger’s seat of her car.
“I think it’s best if I go home,” he said, aware that his voice was far from steady. The excruciating ordeal she had put him through had drained him; he could not scrape up the energy to be angry at her. All he wanted to do was crawl into bed, draw the covers over his head, and try to forget the sight of Morokovsky’s head being slowly devoured in the vat of hydrochloric acid, skin and fascia curling up and bubbling off to give way to muscle and tendon, and finally bone, shining like bits of a baleful moon staring at him through coils of zinc-colored clouds.
“No, you don’t.” Korokova started the car and drove off in the opposite direction of his quarters. “We’re going to put something hot in your stomach, along with half a bottle of excellent vodka. And we’ll talk.”
“About what?” he said miserably.
“Your initiation.”
* * *
Like a princess in a modern fairy tale Major Korokova took him to a palace high above the city. With its magnificent views of the postmillennial commercial skyscrapers erupting into the air in the surrounding streets, it was easy enough for Rodion to believe he was in Shanghai or Dubai rather than Moscow.
“I’m still not hungry.” He had entered a state of wonder the moment he had stepped off the high-speed elevator into this sprawling penthouse apartment. The question that had first sprung to mind was Do you really live here?, but it was instantly dismissed by the part of his brain still functioning normally.
Korokova watched him as he took in the sleek sofas and chairs, the glass-topped free-form cocktail table, the hand-hewn hinoki-wood sideboard topped by at least a dozen bottles of liquor, walls painted a blue as pale as a cool morning’s sky. Four paintings were hung on the walls, depicting a fox, wolf, stag, and bear. There was something odd about them—their subjects’ stance, perhaps, or the glazed look in their eyes? Rodion couldn’t quite put his finger on it, until he looked at them from close up. He was startled to see that the artist had painstakingly reproduced taxidermized trophies. The dead animals were without context, floating on a background that wasn’t quite white, wasn’t quite blue, wasn’t quite green. It depended on your viewing angle.
“What’s the matter?” Korokova said. “Are you expecting a blood ritual?”
Rodion was so lost in parsing the paintings’ meaning he all but started at the sound of her voice. With some difficulty he managed to ignore the magnetic draw of the paintings and turn to her. “After what you put me through this afternoon I don’t know what to expect.”
“Let me give you a piece of advice, Rodion. Don’t expect anything.”
They were fully ten feet apart, but her scrutiny seemed to obliterate the distance between them, quickening his breath.
“I guess you’re right.” He felt the need to sit down, hesitated, then said to himself, The hell with it, and plopped himself onto an oversized upholstered leather chair. The relief was palpable. “I thought we were going to a favorite restaurant of yours.”
“A restaurant is no place to talk about matters that have real meaning.” She slipped off her coat, and the individual hairs on its fox collar and cuffs lifted. Static electricity; even in death the animal seemed to be standing at attention. “Besides, there are times when I cannot stomach hordes of people.”
It was at this point that, the fog of awe lifting, he realized there wasn’t one thing of a personal nature in the apartment. Further, there wasn’t a hint of the past anywhere in sight. She might have been a real estate agent showing him a model apartment for a new Western-style living complex. And, digging deeper, another thing he realized—there was nothing inherently Russian about the décor. Apart from the paintings, the entire living room was anodyne. The blandness must be deliberate, he surmised; it made the paintings even more disturbing than they otherwise would have been.
She crossed to the sideboard, hefted a bottle. “Do you like it here?”
She had mastered the knack of asking a question in a tone of voice that made it clear she had no interest either in it or the reply. Rodion wondered why; she certainly wasn’t one for small talk.
He rose, crossed to the wall of windows, stared out at the chessboard of lights that pierced the glass-and-steel façades of the soaring towers. He could see into a couple; the lit offices seemed bare. “I need to sleep, not eat,” he said.
She made no reply but came beside him, handed him a glass of vodka, sipped at hers.
He was astonished by the silence. Moscow was full of sounds, endless rivers of vehicles, diesel fumes, barked orders. But here, he found the city’s lack of noise oppressive, even eerie. It wasn’t the Moscow he knew. “Oligarch City,” he said. “Who were these skyscrapers meant to house?”
“Foreigners,” she said. “Foreign businesses. And now there are none.”
“There are no more imports from the West,” he mused. “Not even for the Bratva—the criminal gangs. Their black market has dried up.” The vodka set fire to his throat and esophagus. “No one wants to come to Moscow.”
“We no longer care for foreigners,” she mused.
“Unless they’re Chinese.”
Her tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth. “And even then.”
But she was either misinformed or lying. Rodion knew who was supposed to work in Oligarch City—the best and brightest Russian tech minds. But they had fled on the coattails of the oligarchs, poached by clever American venture-capital firms. He wondered how far gone the sanity of the Sovereign must be to eviscerate the country. The brain drain was as catastrophic as the embargo on Russian oil set in place by Britain and the EU, the only matter they could agree on since Brexit. The Sovereign, even as a young man in St. Petersburg, a patient man, had made three recent errors in his bellicose moves—militarily, politically, economically. The army was bogged down, losing men and matériel by the day; the invasion had awakened the sleeping giant NATO, now expanded and more solidified; Russia’s oil and gas refineries had been designated for the scrap heap as longtime customers in the West scrambled to get their petro-fuel fixes elsewhere. The Sovereign had been clever in enticing Western Europe into dependence on Russia’s cheap oil and gas. Yet the reverse had come to pass: the Federation’s economy was built on providing oil and gas to the West. The ill-conceived war in Ukraine had shattered that mutual reliance. Now all the Federation had was its cyberwarfare directorates and the increasingly unhinged threats emanating from the Sovereign’s designated mouthpieces on state-run TV and from the Sovereign himself.
