Part 13 (1/2)

”Sure.”

”I was wondering why you put on the stereo.”

Their eyes met.

”Easy,” she said with a shrug. ”I suddenly remembered that Fats Waller's always been one of your favorites.”

He kept looking at her.

”Well, that explains your choice of music,” he said. ”Not your uncharacteristic timing. Since you always say you enjoy your morning peace and quiet.”

She smiled.

”Surely you've guessed,” she said.

”No,” he said honestly. ”I don't have a clue.”

She moved closer beside him.

”It's a female thing,” she said, leaning her head against his shoulder. ”Now be still, dear husband, and maybe I'll explain it to you later.”

EIGHT.

NORTHERN ALBANIA APRIL 18, 2001.

AS THE GROANING, RUST-SPOTTED CITROEN NEARED the rendezvous point on the high Balkan pa.s.s some thirty miles outside Tirana, Sergei Ilkanovitch considered his two fellow Russians in the car, and suddenly and unexpectedly remembered his father's oft-repeated maxim that one could always judge a man by the shoes he wore. Rich or poor, it made no difference, he had insisted. A vagrant in rags would take pains to keep his shoes in the best possible condition if he had any character at all, while the most elevated member of the Presidium would be oblivious to their scuff and wear if he were of an inferior caliber. the rendezvous point on the high Balkan pa.s.s some thirty miles outside Tirana, Sergei Ilkanovitch considered his two fellow Russians in the car, and suddenly and unexpectedly remembered his father's oft-repeated maxim that one could always judge a man by the shoes he wore. Rich or poor, it made no difference, he had insisted. A vagrant in rags would take pains to keep his shoes in the best possible condition if he had any character at all, while the most elevated member of the Presidium would be oblivious to their scuff and wear if he were of an inferior caliber.

The person he'd frequently pointed to as an example of the latter had been Khrushchev, someone he'd held in the lowest esteem, calling him a simpleton who was overly impressed with American capitalism, a coward for yielding to Kennedy's bluff during the Cuban missile standoff, and an economic and political bungler responsible for the Black Sea uprising of 1963 and America's early lead in the arms race. When he'd theatrically banged his shoe on the desk before the United Nations General a.s.sembly, it was clearly seen to be shabby and run-down at the heel, providing a repellent insight into his character, and demeaning his country before the eyes of the entire world. In his boyhood, Sergei had heard his father complain endlessly about the Premier's supposed faux pas faux pas and had no idea what to make of it. He had seen the grainy black and white news footage of the event and been able to tell nothing of the shoe's condition. Nor had he known what it could have signified about Khrushchev or anything else. and had no idea what to make of it. He had seen the grainy black and white news footage of the event and been able to tell nothing of the shoe's condition. Nor had he known what it could have signified about Khrushchev or anything else.

But Sergei had soon given up trying to extract any wisdom from his father's observations, and remembered him now as a gruff, strident little man who might have been comical for his endless diatribes had he not been so full of anger and sulky frustration. An inspector in a state-operated automotive plant on the Volga, he had been incapable of relaxing after a day's work without his vodka. Consequently, Sergei's lasting image of the elder Ilkanovitch was one of him lying pa.s.sed out drunk on the couch in their austere one-bedroom worker's flat.

Sergei had been twelve when his father died of a heart attack in 1969, the youngest of four boys left to be supported by their mother's earnings as a seamstress and woefully inadequate government maintenance. Six months later, he had been sent to live with an uncle who was a mathematician with the government think tank in Akademgorodoc, the Western Siberian towns.h.i.+p for the intelligentsia that had been presumptuously known as Science City back in the days when the Communists still held romantic notions about leading the world into some futuristic paradise.

When he'd asked his mother why he had been chosen to go rather than one of his siblings, she had explained it was because he'd always excelled in school and had the greatest chance of benefitting from his uncle's tutelage. But despite her stated reasons Sergei had felt discarded, cast off like an undesirable sentenced to the Gulag, and suspected she had been more concerned with the wages his working-age brothers could bring into the household than his academic prospects. In the end, however, he had come to be grateful for her decision. Whatever he knew about life and living he had learned on his own, but to his uncle he credited the scientific curiosity that had led to his becoming a physicist.

Now the Citroen took a sharp curve in the road, flinging Sergei sideways so that he was b.u.mped against the right pa.s.senger door. He peered out his window, where the switchback skirted the very edge of the mountain-side, a dizzying sight that knotted his stomach with tension. Yet his driver had only accelerated as he took the turn, as if never pausing to consider that a single lapse would plunge them over the dropoff into some nameless chasm. How odd, then, for Sergei to still find himself thinking about an absurd paternal injunction to always take notice of men's shoes--but perhaps it was just a distraction to keep his panic at bay.

What, he wondered, would his father make of the pair of men who had been his guards and traveling companions for the past several days? Both had on Western-style boots of finely tooled leather, yet both were also adorned with tattoos that literally stamped them as hardened career criminals. The burly, thick-featured one on his left, Molkov, had a cross on each knuckle of his right hand, indicating the number of times he had been imprisoned. The ”seal” of the ring tattoo on his middle finger, a dagger entwined in a fanged serpent, denoted a murder conviction. The signet on his index finger resembling an inverted spade on a playing card labeled him as a gangster who had been jailed for a violent offense such as a.s.sault or armed robbery. The larger gladiator tattoo on his right arm--its bottom half discernible below the rolled-up sleeve of his khaki s.h.i.+rt--was perhaps the most malign of all, identifying him as an executioner with a pa.s.sion for inflicting s.a.d.i.s.tic deaths upon his victims.

Alexandre, the thin, bony Georgian seated in front of Sergei, wore a similar resume of offenses on his flesh--the knuckle crosses, the symbols boasting of myriad felonies. But there was another that Sergei found of particular interest, a signet-ring tattoo rendered in careful detail, depicting the sun rising above a horizon that was patterned like a checkerboard. This, he knew, was a testament to Alexandre's criminal ancestry, a proud declaration that he was upholding a familial tradition of lawlessness.

Sergei could not help but linger another moment on droll thoughts of his father, who presumably would have considered Molkov and Alexandre exemplary human beings from a glance at their feet, overlooking everything else about them. He, Sergei, appreciated irony the way some men did fine wine, caviar, or Cuban cigars, and there was one of most exquisite flavor to be found in these reflections--for he was also wearing shoes that were scrupulously cared for. Always wore the very best of shoes, in fact. It was a personal compulsion that, not unlike the tattoos of his companions, was a lasting mark of his own upbringing, although imprinted on his psyche rather than his body. But had his father been alive to know the moral threshold he was about to irrevocably cross, it might have been enough to make him rethink his singular method of gauging a man's worth.

Preoccupied with these thoughts, Sergei took several moments to realize that the car was finally slowing to a halt, its overstressed motor clanking and knocking as the driver guided it toward the sheer mountain wall rising to some great height on the left. He looked down at the hard-sh.e.l.led suitcase between his feet and gripped its handle, a sense of unreality was.h.i.+ng over him.

”Is this the place?” he said, leaning toward the man behind the wheel.

A dark-skinned ethnic Gheg with a black scruff of beard on his cheeks and a knitted white skullcap of the sort favored by his nation's Moslem majority, the driver shook his head--an affirmative gesture in Albania--his look in the rearview mirror intended to make Sergei feel foolish for having asked an unnecessary question. He possessed the unmistakable scorn of the zealot toward one whose motives were seen to be venal and selfish, although that hadn't seemed an obstacle to the procurement of the deadly technology Sergei had offered up for sale. There were, he thought, endless degrees of hypocrisy bridging the gap between world and want.

Sergei studied the heavy brush on the slope as the driver came to a full stop alongside it, pulling close enough for the tangled outgrowth of leaves and stems to rake across the Citroen's flank. The wait that followed prompted another attack of nerves. Sergei knew the car's approach would have been observed, and his inability to detect any sign of his hidden watchers made him feel uneasy and vulnerable. Still, he fought to take hold of himself. The Albanian guerrillas had every reason to be cautious. Furthermore, his two comrades were adequate insurance against deceit, and imposing reminders of his own linkage to the organizatsiya, organizatsiya, a force whose enmity it would be madness to provoke. a force whose enmity it would be madness to provoke.

He had waited for nearly five minutes when his eye caught a slight shuffle of movement in the brush above him. Then, at last, the guerrillas came threading down the slope, scurrying from the foliage one and two at a time and descending onto the pa.s.s just yards in front of the car.

There were a half dozen of them altogether, coa.r.s.e, rugged men that shared many of the driver's dark tribal features. They had a.s.sault rifles slung over their shoulders--Kalashnikovs, Berettas, MP5's. Their clothing was grimy from long wear, and ranged from combat fatigues to the name-brand American denims, athletic jackets, and sneakers that had become status symbols in the Asian and Eastern European nations where they were often cheaply manufactured before being s.h.i.+pped to the States, given an inflated value, then exported to the very countries in which they had been made to be sold at an astronomical profit. It was another of the delicious ironies that had occurred to Sergei today, bringing to mind an image of the legendary serpent devouring its own tail.

But he had no time now to mull these things. The apparent leader of the group, a taut, sharp-nosed man in fatigues with a long diagonal scar on his right cheek, was moving up closer to the car, two of his clansmen several paces behind him. He held in his right hand a worn leather satchel, and would be no less eager than Sergei to complete their business.

When he reached the Citroen's front grille, Sergei lifted his own case off the floor and turned to the stocky guard beside him.

”Let's go,” he said.

Molkov nodded. A short-barreled Micro-Uzi hung outside his s.h.i.+rt. Weighing under five pounds and just ten inches long with its tubular metal stock folded, the compact submachine gun was scarcely larger than a pistol. In front, Alexandre displayed an identical SMG, as well as a shoulder-holstered Glock 9mm, with equal impunity. They had driven out of Tirana with the weapons stashed beneath their seats, but now were too far from any policed area to worry about having to conceal them. The control of the outlaw bands that occupied these mountains was based on ancient clan ties and validated by strength of arms. Brandis.h.i.+ng the guns in open view was as much a matter of earning their respect as it was of physical protection.

Leaving the Albanian behind the wheel, the three of them got out of the car and walked around its front grille. As they did, Sergei's companions fell in on either side of him, Molkov to his right, Alexandre to his left. The guerrillas stood very still on the road and eyed them warily. There was no sound except for a brief ripple of birdsong that seemed to be sucked into the vast and hollow silence of the chasm below like a brightly colored ribbon caught in a vacuum.

Sergei approached the man with the scar on his face, a cord of tension once again twisting in his stomach. On the surface, the transaction he was about to conclude seemed almost routine--an exchange of money for black-market goods on some remote alpine pa.s.s in a country that was known for its illicit trading, and that amounted to nothing more than a parenthesis on the European continent. He did not know exactly where he was, would not be able to find this forsaken place on the map once he left it behind.

But it was here, in what were appropriately called the Mountains of the d.a.m.ned, that he was about to commit treason on a scale previously unheard of, perhaps even expand the very definition of the word to new conceptual bounds. Indeed, if he were to contemplate it, he imagined he might feel like a swimmer who had gone out farther from sh.o.r.e than ever before, each stroke fueled by a little inner dare, his confidence sustained with occasional backward glances to rea.s.sure himself he was still within sight of land, until at one point he turned and saw nothing but ocean ahead, ocean behind him, ocean stretching off infinitely in every direction, and suddenly realized that some trick of the tide had swept him off in an eyeblink, carrying him beyond the point of no return.

But enough, he admonished himself. Enough of that. He had made his choices and there was a deal to be done.

He and the guerrilla leader looked each other over with obligatory nods of acknowledgment. Then Sergei set his suitcase down on the hood of the car, thumbed open its combination latches, and raised the lid.

The guerrilla leader glanced down into the case.

”Yes,” he said in Russian, something like wonder on his features. ”Yes, yes.”

”It's all inside,” Sergei said. ”The component, of course, as well as detailed instructions and schematics for its placement within the larger device. And a little something extra that you may tell the purchaser is both a test and a taste.” Ah, yes, a taste. Like caviar. Or a vintage cigar. ”Everything that will be needed in Kazakhstan.”

”You are certain the information is reliable?”

”Absolutely. I've provided it in duplicate, both on disk and paper.” Sergei gave the guerrilla another moment to study the contents of the briefcase, then closed its lid. ”Now the payment.”

A thin smile touching his lips, the guerrilla nodded, then presented his satchel to Sergei.

Sergei felt a spark of excitement at the weight of its contents. Suddenly his fingers were trembling. Holding it by the strap with one hand, he lifted its flap with the other and looked inside.

It took him a moment to react, and when he did it was with shock and icy disbelief. He paled, all the blood in his body seeming to flush to his feet.

The satchel was filled with thick packs of blank white paper cut to the approximate size of American banknotes and bound together with rubber bands.

He snapped his eyes up at the guerrilla leader, saw that his smile had tightened at its corners, then turned quickly to Molkov.