The testament, p.47
The Testament, page 47
Djura lunged at Bravo, his hands up and grasping, but Bebur stepped in front of him.
Khalif threw up his hands. "Are we to be enemies now for real?" he cried.
"We are not enemies." Pushing back against Djura, Bebur eyed them. "But don't mistake our loyalties. We will not follow your orders."
"Even if they make sense?"
"We will not wait for the mosque." Djura pointed to the terraced high-rise. "Up there we'll have the perfect vantage point."
Khalif nodded, and Bravo knew better than to protest. The decision had been made; for good or ill, the die had been cast.
Watching them retrieve their rifles from the backseat of his car, Khalif spat onto the concrete. "Don't underestimate them."
"I don't like it, it's an emotional decision."
"No, my friend, it's a business decision," Khalif said. "In killing Mikhail, Cornadoro crossed an unforgivable boundary. The sons have no choice. To protect themselves and their interests, their revenge must be swift and merciless. Otherwise, scenting weakness, the vultures will follow and eventually the sons will lose everything Mikhail worked so hard to build."
Up on the eleventh floor, Bebur insisted on unlocking the front door. Djura brushed by Bravo with no hint of animosity or grudge; his hostile reaction had been purely of the moment. Once they had assured themselves that the apartment was secure, they allowed Khalif and Bravo in. Bravo watched as they stepped gingerly out onto the terrace, which overlooked the front drive and, far below, the blue expanse of the sea. Despite their bravado, their continuing sense of responsibility toward his safety was touching.
After conferring among themselves, Djura came back in, heading out the apartment's front door, presumably to cover the building's rear service entrance, while Bebur hunkered down, peering through his rifle's sniper-scope in anticipation of seeing Cornadoro's truck.
Bravo called out and, as Djura turned, he crossed the living room.
"I appreciate everything you've done." He held out a hand. "I'm glad you have my back."
Djura looked him straight in the eye and without changing his expression one iota took Bravo's forearm in his heavy grip. Bravo did the same. Saluting like ancient Romans on the soon to be blood-soaked battleground of Erzurum or Tabriz.
Khalif led Bravo into the kitchen.
"Fancy a beer?" he said, hand on the refrigerator door handle.
"You've got to be kidding."
Khalif laughed. Depressing a hidden lever, he pulled on the door and the entire refrigerator swung open, revealing a hidden suite of rooms. As they stepped through, Bravo saw that the refrigerator was hinged on two sets of concealed gimbals.
Khalif's workspace was cold as the interior of the refrigerator through which they had come. It was sealed, HEPA-filtered, entirely self-contained. Heavy blackout drapes hid the windows so completely that not even a crack of daylight seeped through. Banks of electronic equipment, much of it incomprehensible to Bravo, lined two entire walls from floor to ceiling. It was like a twenty-first-century library: devoid of books, for that matter of any printed material, overflowing nonetheless with information that kept arriving invisibly, as magically as the water-filled buckets of the sorcerer's apprentice.
Khalif seated himself at the center of this metropolis of intelligence. Bravo, beside him, read off the list of frequencies Emma had sent. As it happened, Khalif had electronic copies of them all. Hardly surprising, given what Bravo had recently learned about his father's methodology in tracking down the identity of the traitor inside the Order.
The next step was to isolate Uncle Tony's rogue cipher, the parasite deep inside the intestines of the main carrier report. There was no point now in trying to decrypt the ciphers-that would come later. What he wanted to ascertain was who had taken the encrypted message as it was en route from London to Washington.
This proved simpler than he had imagined, since Khalif quickly discovered an electronic file-composed by Dexter Shaw-of all the retrieved rogue ciphers. Clearly, Dexter had been working on decoding them. There was no record of how successful he had been, though Khalif searched the database thoroughly.
Impatient, Bravo said, "Let me take a look."
Khalif slid out of the way and Bravo, fingers dancing over the workstation keyboard, returned to the original carrier reports as they had been when they'd left Uncle Tony's London location. First, he engaged the audio spectrum-analyzer to pinpoint the moment the rogue cipher had been plucked out of the main text, but when that failed he was forced to think a bit more in depth.
Surely his father would have followed his line of reasoning. He would have used the spectrum-analyzer and any number of other electronic aids in his attempt to find the precise moment the rogue cipher was taken. And he had failed. Bravo sat back, silently contemplating the wall of gadgetry, as sophisticated as a spaceship's control panel, which winked and blinked back at him like some dumb animal. He needed to return to the beginning, to find another line of reasoning that wasn't so obvious-that had not occurred to his father. He needed to make the dumb animal moo.
There was another way, there was always another way. He sat still as a statue, immersed in furious contemplation. Forget about finding the precise moment of acquisition, that was a dead end. It occurred to him then that there was no need to stay within the Order's frequency, that was the beginning of the dead end. If he was to truly return to the beginning, he needed to listen outside the frequency.
He asked Khalif to analyze the surrounding frequencies from the beginning of Uncle Tony's report. Khalif obliged, but again the readouts showed nothing but the norm. The damn dumb animal still refused to moo.
Djura, carefully wending his way through the cinder block bowels of Sinope A Blok, loaded Tac-50 beautifully balanced in his hand, was feeling good. An unwanted weight had been lifted off his shoulders. Being shackled to the American had rankled, gotten under his skin like a burr he couldn't reach. A warrior the American might be, but he was not family, not blood; he could betray them at any moment, as all Americans were known to do when the lure of money, power, cultural hegemony beckoned to them. Their corruption was complete, from the flesh down to the soul. Their naked greed, the measureless avarice would, in the end, prove to be their undoing, of this Djura had no doubt. But until that end arrived with the suddenness of an apocalyptic thunderclap, their gluttony was a contagion-at all costs to be avoided.
That Mikhail and his sons were capitalists bothered him not at all. They made money, yes, lots of it, but, like him, they had faith, which led them to use their wealth to help their people back in Georgia, rather than keep a revolving stable of young women, rather than buy out Tiffany's or the nearest Rolls-Royce dealership.
He had seen what remorseless corruption came from the sprawl of the American lifestyle. How could he not? It was all around him, as if he swam in a sea infested with plastic bags filled with iPods of American music, DVDs of American films, cassettes of American TV shows, all in loud and joyful praise of celebrity and consumerism. Not that Djura didn't enjoy a pink Internet peek of Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson, astonishingly exposed in various positions of sexual congress. The illicit nature of the moving images detonated like bombs on his retinas, providing a thrill he could not begin to define, let alone understand. But that was it; having taken these bites out of the rancid confection of American culture, he was certain his appetite had been sated. Unlike his brother Gigo, who had swallowed it whole and was now importing drugs and "Russian wives" from his five-bedroom triplex in the eternal golden sunshine above Miami Beach.
Gigo also had a cocaine habit as large as a Lincoln Navigator. Djura, passing the row of trash bins that stood near the rear entrance, shook himself. He hated the fact that he knew what a Lincoln Navigator was, knowledge unwanted but that nevertheless seeped into his skull. Evidence against the imagined purity of his life.
Which brought him back to Damon Cornadoro, corruptor on a grand scale. Djura would gladly take the American over Cornadoro, though probably he'd wind up shooting them both. They were infidels. Beneath the surface gloss, how much difference could there be between them?
Checking that the safety on the Tac-50 was off, he slowly pushed open the metal door into the open air. The morning was hot and sticky. Birds sang, insects whined, the hiss of traffic on its way up and down the hillside overspread his concrete bower. A car drove up, letting off a woman and a child. The woman was dressed in Western clothes, though to Djura she appeared Muslim. Her hands were filled with shopping bags. The child-a small boy-was busy licking an ice cream. The car drove off and the woman and child headed for the front entrance to Sinope A Blok. A man, dark-skinned, middle-aged, appeared, smoking a cigarette and talking on a cell phone. He strolled down to the curve of the driveway and stood in a patch of sunlight. A moment later, a car swung into view and he got in. The car pulled away, the sound of its exhaust echoing off the soundboard of the high-rise.
The heat abated a bit. A sea breeze all the way from Sevastopol, still stinking from Russian atomic submarines, tossed the tops of the sheared cypresses like the turbans of bowing imams. Speaking of imams, here came one, long beard aquiver, hurrying along the path toward him. In his wake, an ungainly woman, enveloped, as was proper, from the crown of her head to her sandaled feet in an abaya and a traditional Muslim head scarf. It would not be beyond Cornadoro to desecrate the holy state, to disguise himself as an imam, Djura thought. In fact, it would be just like him.
Squinting through the wan sunlight, Djura tried to take a closer look at the oncoming imam. But this chore was made difficult by the woman whose form obscured the imam's face, the part of him that interested Djaba.
Suspicions roused to full flower, he braced himself against the doorway, raised the Tac-50 into firing position. The imam was big-big as Cornadoro. And he had roughly the same build. This, Djura decided, was his target, but he would not fire until he was certain. Killing a Muslim imam was unthinkable, a disaster that would cause more damage to Mikhail's sons than they were prepared to handle. And so, tense and anxious, he waited with his forefinger curled intently around the trigger. In his mind, he already heard the satisfying sound, the thick, wet splat! splat! splat! of the bullets rending Cornadoro's flesh from bone. And the best part was that he wouldn't have to be close with him-unlike Mikhail, he could avoid the flat, deathly sweep of the push-dagger.
The imam was in range now. He said something sharp to the woman, who nodded in subservient fashion and dropped back several paces, her head down. Lucky for Djura, because now he had a clear look at the imam's face, and he exhaled a deep-drawn breath and his finger relaxed on the trigger. It wasn't Cornadoro, after all.
The imam's eyes barely registered Djura as he swept imperiously through the door. Djura's eyes barely registered the woman as she followed the imam, and so he missed the movement of her right hand as it appeared from beneath her voluminous ayaba, the blade of the push-dagger protruding between the second and third knuckles-knuckles larger and more callused than any female hand.
Djura became aware of the flat sweeping motion and, too late, tried to move. His arms were expertly pinioned behind him. The huge imam! At that instant the push-dagger entered his lower belly. He gave a brief cry as the ayaba-clad woman unwound her head scarf. He saw Damon Cornadoro's eyes burning into him.
"Where are they?" Cornadoro said with a twist of his wrist that caused Djura terrible pain. "Give me the information or your passage to Paradise will not be assured."
Chapter 29
Bravo, staring at the white-on-green squiggles, rubbed his temples with his fingertips. He was all too aware of time passing, time when he and Khalif should have been at the Sumela Monastery. Had he been wrong, was he going down another dead end? Was he doing what he'd accused the Glimmer Twins of doing? Was he making an emotional decision? No, he couldn't let this go. His father sat at his side, his energy pinning Bravo to his seat. There is an answer. Use what you know, Bravo, Dexter Shaw whispered inside his head.
"Play the frequencies again, both at once," he instructed Khalif. "But this time turn off all the readouts."
"What?"
"I want to listen-only listen. Do you understand?"
Khalif set the two frequencies to running simultaneously. A complex melody of beeps, hisses and squeals filled the room. At first, the cacophony sounded like a longed-for response to a SETI transmission-communication in an alien language-or the aural equivalent of the incomprehensible scrawling of an autistic child, both of which contained a message, no matter how deeply buried.
Bravo closed his eyes. If the electronic animal remained dumb, it was up to the human senses to solve the riddle of where the rogue cipher was going. The ear filtered sound and noise day in and day out. It was created to decipher the important sounds from the background wash of the world.
For him, it was only a matter of time before the layers of noise were stripped away and the melody presented itself. This was his business-or, at any rate, part of what he was good at. He could coax out the hidden with his senses-in manuscripts, in human speech, in the feel of forgeries purporting to be genuine archeological finds, in the scents of age and reason, despair and dissolution.
Now, in Khalif's postmodern bunker, having begun the process of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, he discerned the melody. And having defined it, listened to it, locking in its mathematical pattern, its sine-wave rise and fall, he heard the anomaly.
"Stop," he cried. "Stop it right there."
Opening his eyes, he had Khalif turn on all the readouts, even the ones that seemed irrelevant or spurious. And there it was: the dumb animal went "Moo."
"Why are we following Michael Berio?" Jenny said from her seat beside Camille in the small red sports car. It was a Soviet-made vehicle, and therefore wasn't a sports car at all but a Russian travesty. "Your own man."
"His real name is Damon Cornadoro. You know it, don't you?"
"My God." Jenny's face had drained of color. "The Knights' hired assassin? I've seen more than a dozen photos purporting to be him, all of different people. Christ, how could I not have known?"
"Don't blame yourself," Camille said. "He fooled me as well." Of course this wasn't true, no one fooled Camille, but from the moment she had understood the connection between Jenny and Bravo, she knew she'd have to change her plan. Isolating Bravo was no longer the object; co-opting him was. For that, she knew she'd need Jenny's help, which required her to spin a whole new web of lies.
Camille tossed her head. "You're the expert, you tell me-how dangerous is this Cornadoro?"
Jenny glanced at her nervously. "How about eleven on a scale of one to ten."
"That bad?"
"You heard the backfiring before, the squeal of tires? And then, a bit further on-"
"The accident that delayed us, yes, what about it?"
"I took a long look. That was no accident," Jenny said grimly. "So I doubt those sounds were backfires."
"What are you saying?"
"I think Kartli's men attempted to attack Cornadoro-an ambush, perhaps. I'd bet anything they were rifle shots we heard, and the squeal of tires was the target ramming the attacking cars. I've read Cornadoro's dossier-that sounds like him."
Camille considered. Trust was what she was soliciting from Jenny, and empathy was the path she had chosen to that trust. If she didn't feel it, Jenny wouldn't either.
"If, as you say, Cornadoro was the target, then it's safe to assume that Bravo was involved in the ambush," Camille said. She had had time to reason out her course of action during the bumper-to-bumper that led up to the police swarming like ants around the aggressively wrecked cars. She had craned her neck to see the blood, without any luck. "He needs to know that Cornadoro escaped and is still on his tail." She thrust her cell phone at Jenny. "Call him and tell him."
Jenny didn't move a muscle. "Me?"
"Why not?"
"You know why not. He still believes I murdered his Uncle Tony, still believes I'm working for the Knights."
"Then now's the time to show him that you're on his side." She gave Jenny a small smile. "My dear, listen, he hasn't believed a word you've told him. He told me so himself." She nodded. "Look, there's Cornadoro's truck up ahead. We haven't a moment to lose, he's already left it. Courage is what's required now. Number three."
"All right." Jenny nodded, took the cell phone. Heart hammering in her chest, she punched in the speed-dial number.
"Camille-"
The sound of his voice struck her like a physical blow. "It's Jenny, Bravo."
"Jenny, I-"
"No, don't hang up." A certain terror gripped her at the thought that she would blow this one chance to prove herself to him. "Listen, listen, I'm with Camille," she said in a rush. "We've been following Cornadoro-"
"You what?"
She winced at his shouted response but pressed on, determined. Courage. "There was an ambush, two cars were involved, I don't know how many men, though you probably do."
"It was a total screwup, Kartli's idea, not mine, but he's dead now-Cornadoro killed him just like he killed Father Mosto and Father Damaskinos."
An indrawn breath was all she could manage. Her head was swimming.
"I know Uncle Tony was the traitor."
"Bravo, Bravo!" She bent over, almost ill with relief. "But how-?"
"Jenny, I have to go. Really."
"Wait, wait! Cornadoro is coming, he's still coming."
"Where are you now?"
"At some huge high-rise housing complex."
Sinope A Blok.
"It's a number," Khalif said, staring at the readouts. "A phone number."
Bravo, his cell phone still cradled in one hand, said, "Cornadoro is here."
Khalif pointed. "Take a look at it while I go tell Bebur."
As he went through the refrigerator door, Bravo took a close look at the number. It wasn't a London number, not even an English number. There were two prefixes: a country code and a city code, and he recognized them both: Munich, Germany. A warning bell went off in his head, a deadness was growing inside him, a sick feeling, intimation of a new and monstrous reality.
