The quantum solution, p.28
The Quantum Solution, page 28
Peering out one of the landward windows, she could see two suits piling out of a black sedan, heading out along the dock toward her, the pounding of their thick-soled shoes like the drumbeats of an enemy legion. She knew by the cut of their suits and the cut of their jib that they were FBI agents come to fetch her.
Without another thought she crossed to the water side, opened a window, and slithered out, down the hull of the houseboat, into the Washington Channel, a fairly narrow two-mile-long waterway that separated the Southwest Waterfront area from the man-made East Potomac Park, paralleling the Potomac River beyond the park. Normally, she would not have cared for the cold, but at this moment it served to wake her fully, sweep away the cobwebs, sharpen her mind.
Plunging under the surface, she struck out for the park on the far shore, holding her breath, husbanding her oxygen supply. She was strong, opting for two-hour workouts at five every morning; she had learned how to defend herself on rough streets, how to get by with two or three hours’ sleep. Still, the channel’s current was swift enough that despite her best efforts she was thrown off course. She came up holding a line securing a sailboat to its mooring. Head half out of the water, regulating her breathing, she watched as the government agents scoured the houseboat’s interior for a clue as to whether she had actually been there and if so where she had gone. Watching them moving behind the houseboat’s windows, bewildered and then growing angry at being stymied, was as entertaining as binge-watching Stranger Things.
“Your world is entirely self-directed,” An Binh had said to her. “That’s a boon to people like me who are part of a shared vision.”
“Fuck you and the broom you rode in on,” Zahra whispered just before she started to slip back into the water. She gasped, tried to haul herself up, but the rope was slippery and she could not maintain her grip with her cold-numbed fingers. Her legs flailed, and she began to panic, her breaths coming in short, sharp bursts. She closed her eyes in a vain attempt to stop the tears from welling up. So close, she thought. I was so close to having it all.
I don’t want to die.
She must have said it out loud; a male voice above her replied, “You’re not going to die.”
Her eyes flew open, she looked up into the twilight to see a strong arm reaching down for her.
“Here. Take my hand.” The fingers wriggled like eels. “Come on now. Up you go.”
As if in a daze she reached up. As soon as she did so the hand grasped her forearm in a powerful grip, lifted her out of the water as if it was no effort at all.
He sat her on the gunwale of the sailboat. “Wait here,” he said. She did. Shivering uncontrollably. In a moment he returned with a blanket, wrapped it tightly around her as if swaddling an infant.
“There,” he said. “That’s better.”
He went to the cockpit, opened a locked door under the wheel and electronic navigation equipment. Brought back a bottle and two plastic glasses. “Nothing like bourbon to get your core temperature up, right?” He poured, they both drank. She winced but as the liquor flamed down her throat she felt the spark of life returned to her.
“I’m very grateful,” she said, and meant it. “My name’s Daisy.”
“As in Daisy Mae?”
She laughed as if she’d never heard that joke before. “Not quite. But I’m flattered.”
“Well, I’d have to see you in those cutoffs to be sure.”
Now he was flirting with her; she liked that.
“I’m Rob, first-class sailor,” he said. “But to be serious, what happened to you? Why were you floundering around in the water?”
She thought fast; she was a wiz at that. “A fight with my boyfriend, if you can believe that.”
“Must have been some fight.” He topped up their glasses. “Tell me about it.”
She shrugged. This was something she didn’t want to get into. The devil was in the details, and the more detailed your lie the greater the chances of getting tripped up. When it came to lying, she had learned early, the watchword was Keep It Simple, Stupid. “He was being an asshole one too many times,” she said, taking another sip of bourbon, getting to like its burn. “I jumped ship, as it were.”
“Abusive?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Physical?”
“Hit me in the stomach with an old phone book he kept around.”
“So ex-cop.”
She shrugged again. “I’d rather not…”
Rob nodded. “Sure. Of course. Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about.” She let the wrap of the blanket loosen around her front, revealing cleavage. Her wet shirt clung to her body. She never wore a bra.
His eyes traveled down to the V she had formed especially for him. “We ought to get you out of those wet clothes.”
She gave him a look somewhere between cruel and seductive. Men loved that; like a dog to a whistle they knew who their masters were. She made herself shiver. “Let’s see how else I can get warm.” It was four hours to midnight, more or less. There were worse ways to idle away the time.
* * *
Three hours later, Rob dropped her off in front of the L’Enfant train station in Northern Virginia. He’d no doubt assumed she was taking a train to Manassas. She still had to wait an hour, but she’d grown bored with Rob and urged their departure earlier than she had expected.
“I’ll dream of you in my clothes,” he said through the open window of his car.
Either she didn’t hear him or didn’t want to hear him.
Fifty minutes later, the black SUV flicked its lights twice just before it pulled in to the curb beside her. She heard the door locks disengage and climbed into the plush backseat. The car was scheduled to be there every night at midnight beginning on the day that Bill Fineman died until Zahra was able to find a foolproof way to leave her job without causing questions. There was always the chance that she would be picked up and interrogated, which is why the rendezvous with the SUV continued night after night until she arrived, because nothing worked to plan in DC, especially not during a crisis.
As the SUV headed away from the station, she opened the manila envelope. Out poured two thousand dollars, a burner phone, a driver’s license and passport under the name Daisy Mae Miller. No credit card, of course. Too easily traced. At least they didn’t use Smith or Brown, she thought wryly. She could afford to be wry now; she was safe. She laughed, put the money, the phone, and the docs away. She was wearing Rob’s clothes, which were too big for her but she had rolled up the cuffs of the chinos and the cuffs of the white shirt he’d been wearing, which gave off the scents of light sex-sweat and Tom Ford Ombré Leather. The problem had been shoes. Rob had solved that by stuffing newspaper in the toes of a battered pair of his Nikes. A jean jacket of his completed her disguise. All things considered, she thought, it wasn’t half bad. Already her sweaty hours with him were part of someone else’s life.
* * *
She was a clever child, such a precocious wunderkind she annoyed her father to no end. In fact, she enjoyed annoying him so much that finally, and against her mother’s wishes, he hired her out to an elderly man, a professor emeritus in Göttingen, the German city in which they lived. Because he was a professor he agreed to pay her father more than he could get for her anywhere else. She was seven. It wasn’t until three years later that the professor, in a fit of pique, told her that she had been sold to him. During the day he beat her, enjoyed it as if he were inflicting real pain. She accepted this time-honored male behavior as the cost of learning a series of disciplines with which she instantly fell in love. The old man was a professor in physics, an acolyte of Max Planck and the groundbreaking theories of energy quanta for which Planck won a Nobel Prize. At night, while the old man’s snores resounded through the house, she would creep into his vast library and one by one absorbed his books on mathematics—algebra, geometry, trigonometry, all the applied maths, including calculus. These years of unique intimacy and intense study eventually, inevitably, led her to physics, both theoretical and experimental, and finally to quanta and quantum physics. She was surprised the morning she turned sixteen when he told her he was adopting her. He had many powerful friends, one of whom was a judge, who gave her the professor’s family name, and because she asked for it, rechristened her Anna. By the time she was eighteen she had far outstripped Max Planck. By this time, the old professor had died, leaving her his entire estate, larger than she had imagined, with many real estate holdings. Within a month she had sold everything.
Moving to Poland, she sought out experts whose fathers had been in the East German Stasi. For the right amount of money they created another new identity for her. With this name and background she took entrance exams for several universities, stunning her elders, creating what amounted to a bidding war for her mind. Elated, she chose the most prestigious institution, achieving the highest grades. Upon her graduation, the quantum world was her oyster.
At length, she arrived in America as Zahra Planck, a grand plan already forming in her head.
* * *
Forty-five minutes after entering the SUV, she was seated in the plush leather seat of a slim private jet. She was the only passenger. Just before takeoff, she punched in a number on the phone. She could have made the call earlier, while she was in the SUV, but her MO was always to make them wait, especially if they were men. Men required an interval of anticipation to really get their juices flowing.
“I’m on the runway,” she said when she heard his voice at the other end. “Time to take care of Connerly before the feds break him.”
Without waiting for a reply, she closed the connection, put her seat back despite the requisite command not to do so during takeoff. Fuck that. She felt the thrumming beneath her as the jet picked up speed along the runway. The thrumming gathered between her thighs like a pool of warm slippery liquid. Eyes closed, she rubbed her thighs together, sighing. And then they were aloft.
Ten minutes later, while he was in the supposed safety of federal custody, Wes Connerly’s head exploded from the inside out.
44
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
“Red and black,” Evan said. “We need to stay in the red and the black.” Meaning, stay out of the white glare of the searchlight. It was looking for them, that much was a certainty, a part of Major Korokova’s military action.
Lyudmila had hardly nodded before Evan half-dragged her back and up into Tribe’s ruined helo.
“We’ll be safer here,” Evan said.
“Not for long,” Lyudmila replied. “You know that as well as I do.”
“You’re a pessimist? Now?” Evan said to lighten the dire straits they were in. But as she moved through the helo’s interior looking for anything in addition to the pilot’s pistol she and Lyudmila could use as a weapon it seemed to her as if time slowed down, got lodged behind her eyes. She had the distinct sense that while she and Lyudmila were moving, no one else outside the helo had taken a step, as if the three figures were stuck in hardened lava, motionless.
But then one of the gas-masked figures stuck the blunt snout of an AKS-74U assault rifle into the interior. Lyudmila lunged, tearing the weapon out of their hands, while Evan slammed the back of their head with the pistol butt. Together they hauled them into the helo.
Evan flipped the body over, tore off the gas mask.
“So sure, one of hers,” Lyudmila said. “I have a record of all her people. He’s 29155.”
As Evan well knew, Spetsnaz Unit 29155 was a part of GRU special forces dedicated to foreign assassinations and the destabilization of enemy countries.
Lyudmila grunted. “Bugrov here was part of the team that poisoned Sergei Skripal, the double agent for MI6, and his daughter several years ago.”
“Sounds about right from what Inessa’s told me about Korokova.”
Evan began to strip off Bugrov’s clothes.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like? I’m going out there dressed in his outfit.”
“There’s only one,” Lyudmila said.
“Please. Not in your condition.” She hadn’t expected Lyudmila to go but wasn’t surprised that she wanted to. She looked up and saw her scrounging around in lockers whose doors had been sheared, twisted, or melted off.
“Look what I found.” Lyudmila held up the object.
“Shades of A Fistful of Dollars.”
Lyudmila shook her head.
“It’s a Hollywood thing.”
“If I have my cultural references right that’s what we need now,” Lyudmila said as she watched Evan layer up in the assailant’s clothing. “A Hollywood ending.”
Evan grinned as she pulled on Bugrov’s thick socks, the heavy boots, doing her best to ignore the stink. She said, “I want you to know I forgive you.” Lyudmila looked up at her. “For all the lies, the deceit. For everything.”
“Look at you.” Lyudmila gestured at Evan’s wounds, bruises, contusions. “I never wanted you to be hurt.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t regret using you.”
“I know that too.” Evan turned to her friend. “Without you I never would have met my birth parents.”
“And without you I never would have been able to get Timur out of Russia. Time and again you provided the diversion that allowed me to work at prying Timur from the Sovereign.”
Evan picked up the gas mask, about to put it on. “But we’ve been through this before.”
“Not really. Not completely. Not here at the end.”
“Please don’t say that, Lyudmila.”
Lyudmila’s eyes narrowed; she put her hands on Evan’s shoulders. “You know that I love you. You’re the sister I wish I had.”
Evan shook her head. “Now’s not the time.”
Lyudmila took a step toward her. “If not now, when?”
They stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time but might only have been a second or two.
Lyudmila unearthed something long held tightly deep inside her. “There’s something else you should know—”
But Evan had already slipped on her gas mask and now stepped out the way Bugrov had come in.
45
MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Kata was standing in the shadowed doorway across the street from the kiosk within walking distance of FSB headquarters where she and Comrade Director Baev would have their clandestine meetings. Baev had been her boss when he was head of the SVR. He and Kusnetsov had been frenemies, accent on the latter, and he had tried to pull Kata into his schemes to bring Kusnetsov down. It was through Baev that Kata maneuvered her way up the FSB food chain. It wasn’t difficult. Baev was in love with her and she had done enough to keep him on the hook without ever giving him what he most desired. In a frenzy of frustration he had gone from one mistress to another, wrecking their lives completely without compunction. As for his wife, he had lost interest in her years ago; even when he was in her presence, his thoughts were on Kata. He would have done anything to please her.
Now Baev was either dead or worse. In any case out of the picture.
Kata stood still as a statue, gazing fixedly at the kiosk that like many other businesses in Russia was shuttered, its starkness glaring in the streetlights. Behind it, on the far corner, had been a branch of an insanely popular American fast-food chain. After the Americans pulled out, a Russian entrepreneur had bought the empty store and installed his idea of a Russian knockoff. From the absence of customers it was clear no one was interested in the imitation; they wanted their Big Macs with good American meat.
“Missing Baev?”
She did not even turn to look at Kusnetsov.
“We used to come here, share a packet of warm chestnuts.”
“And talk.”
“From that kiosk across the street.”
“Those days are gone forever.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his coat. “It’s good you came.”
“The decision wasn’t an easy one. I no longer have a directorate.” She gave him the side-eye. “When you called I had to hazard a guess as to which side you were on.”
He was wearing a double-breasted charcoal-gray astrakhan coat with oversized black leather buttons. “I’m on the side of trying to survive the hash the Sovereign is making of the Federation.”
“I was told you were with him earlier.”
“That’s true enough.” Snow was starting and Kusnetsov shivered a little, but not evidently from the cold. “Now he’s making noises about ‘liberating’ Poland.” The snow, picking up the soot of the city, swirled gray as ashes from a crematorium. “He’s well on his way to destroying us.”
“With these black-uniformed storm troopers?”
“Among other increasingly insane notions.”
“Those sigils they wear on their shoulders.”
“The ancient Nordic rune hagall—havoc.”
“Lovely,” Kata said. For a moment she seemed lost in thought. “To answer your question, yes, Baev and I talked regularly off the grid.”
“About me, I assume.”
“Mainly,” Kata replied.
“It must’ve been hell being friends with both of us.”
She could not decipher his tone. “It wasn’t easy; it wasn’t particularly hard either.”
“Not for you, anyway,” he said dryly.
She decided to move on. “Running the SVR wasn’t enough for him. He wanted your position.”
“These days who the hell knows what my position is.”
