Jad Bell: Bravo Part 18

"He's not going to try anything. He's on easy street."

"Take a hike."

Cardboard tucks the .45 away, and Bell and Nessuno part to let him and Chaindragger pa.s.s. They step out, and the door falls closed, latches with authority.

The water in the shower stops. Bell moves to the table, pulls one of the chairs out for Nessuno. She considers not taking it, wonders at the message she will send if she remains standing, decides it will make her look defensive. She sits, and Bell shifts to her right, to get a better view of the bathroom as Tohir emerges. He steps into the room slowly, favoring his good leg, a surprisingly lush-looking blue towel wrapped around his waist, hair heavy and wet. He's carrying his gla.s.ses in one hand, puts them on as he speaks.

"Your shower is s.h.i.t," Tohir says.

Then he sees her.

"Elisabet."

"Vosil."

He speaks softly, and deliberately, and in Uzbek. "I am going to kill you for what you did."

For an instant it's everything out of her nightmares. It's the road to the farmhouse and the tangled sheets and the difference between standing before him naked rather than nude, and she knows that's absurd, with him wearing a towel and her fully clothed. Not a threat or even a promise, just a recitation of fact. He will kill her.

Then the fear snaps into fury, and she's out of the chair and lunging at him before Bell can move, driving him back into the wall, fists working into soft tissue and bone. The gla.s.ses drop, Tohir trying to both cover and defend himself, and she's snarling, spitting rage, cursing him in Italian and Uzbek both. He screams in pain, the sound deliciously gratifying, and she punches at him again, now shouting, barely able to make out her own words.

"Don't you threaten me," she's saying. "Never again, never again, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d, you piece of s.h.i.t, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d piece of s.h.i.t. Never threaten me, never again, I am not yours, I was never yours."

Bell has an arm around her waist, one hand at her right wrist, she feels the floor leave her feet. The room turns, she's standing again, and Bell is pushing her back, toward the door.

"I was never yours." She starts forward again, blocked by Bell, who sends her back again, until she can feel the acoustic tile digging into her skin.

"We're all right," Bell's saying. "We're all right, we're all right."

She realizes he's talking to the others, Cardboard and Chaindragger, the men watching them on video. She can feel the heat high in her face.

Opposite her, Tohir is down on the floor, wedged against the wall, one hand straining for his gla.s.ses. The towel has slipped, bunched around one ankle, and his other hand covers the wound at his hip. He is naked, and raw, and when he brings his gla.s.ses to his face and raises his head, hissing in pain, his lips are bright with blood. It's only then that Nessuno feels the ripped flesh on her knuckles, the soreness where her fist met his mouth.

"She does that to me again," Tohir says, "you get nothing. Nothing."

"It's not going to happen again," Bell says. He's still fixed on her, not him. "Is it?"

"He threatens my life, he tries to-"

"Is it?"

Nessuno shakes her head.

Bell takes a step away from her, moves to Tohir to offer a hand that Tohir petulantly shoves away.

"I can get to my own feet."

"Then do it, and put on some clothes."

Tohir works himself upright, using the wall and the cot, dripping beads of water from his hair, the room cool enough to bring goose b.u.mps to his flesh. His mouth has tightened, and his nostrils flare as he inhales. Nessuno sees his nakedness in a new way, sees the vulnerability of his body, the still-puckered and inflamed flesh around the st.i.tches at his hip, a narrow thread of blood running from the sewn skin. She hit him in the wound, she knows, just as she knows it was no accident but pure malice.

She should feel remorse, or guilt, or shame, she thinks. Watching him struggling into his underwear, his pants, she should at least take pleasure in his suffering.

As it is, she's feeling nothing at all.

"I haven't eaten," Tohir says. "You have to feed me something."

"In a bit," Bell says.

"Now."

"Vosil," Nessuno says. "You're acting like a child."

He blinks at her behind his wire-rimmed gla.s.ses. In his eyes, she sees his desire to hurt her, so palpable it's a presence of its own in the room. He moves with effort to the table, seats himself with a grunt.

"So you starve me, you beat me, that's how this is going to go?"

She stares back at him, finds that he cannot hold her gaze. It's almost satisfying.

"Tell us about Zein," she says.

Tohir smirks. "You can't find him, can you?"

"We will," Bell says.

"And if I told you there were five other men just like him, all of them here, now, in your country?" He shifts his gaze from Nessuno to Bell. "What would you say to that?"

"I'd say you're trying to buy yourself more with what little you've got left." Bell takes one of the folding chairs from the wall, snaps it open, and turns it in his hand, sitting on it backwards. "At a certain point, Vosil, the shop closes, you understand? At a certain point, we're not buying what you're selling. You're at that point."

Tohir matches gazes with Bell, and for a moment, Nessuno is certain this is about to devolve into a c.o.c.k contest. Then Tohir looks at her.

"You remember in March?" he asks her. "When I sent you to Moscow?"

"I remember."

"Did you f.u.c.k him, too? That's what you do, right? f.u.c.k for your country?"

Nessuno almost dignifies that with a response. He'd sent her to talk to a man who was laundering money for them, the proceeds from the heroin that Tohir was bringing up from Afghanistan. It had been a lunch meeting at Bar Strelka, she bringing the routing numbers Tohir had made her memorize and the banker swearing up and down that he was taking no more than was his agreed-upon cut. He'd tried feeling her beneath the table, fat fingers on her thigh, and she'd taken his thumb and twisted and told him that if he tried it a second time, she'd be sure to tell Tohir that he was skimming the take. He'd lost his color but found his manners.

"I went to Africa to make arrangements for travel. Mostly, we sourced out of Guinea-Bissau."

"Sourced what?" Bell asks.

"Everything," Tohir says. "Drugs, weapons, people. Lots of people. Route from Europe or the rest of Africa or the Middle East, arrive as one man, leave as another."

"Zein started in Guinea-Bissau."

Tohir smirks. "Zein was created in Guinea-Bissau. So were Hawford, Dante, Verim, Ledor, and Alexander. All of them are now in this country, all of them are now on their way to their target."

"They're all here now?"

"Yes."

"When did they arrive?" Bell asks. "How long ago?"

"Some of them? A couple of months. Zein was one of the last."

"This was planned before the California attack?"

"That is correct."

"Why?"

Tohir shrugs. "I don't ask. He tells me what to do, I do it."

"What's the target?"

Tohir shakes his head. "Not yet." He adjusts his gla.s.ses, spits again on the carpet, more blood. He leans forward on the table, bringing his face just that much closer to Nessuno's. He's feeling better about himself, feeling much more in control. "You know I loved you, Elisabet?"

"You thought you loved me," she says. "What's the target, Vosil?"

"Don't you miss me?" He gestures at her, indicating her clothes. "You look like a matron dressed like that. You're beautiful; why do you hide it? With me you never had to hide it. You took pride in it, the way I looked at you. The way you made other men look at you with desire, the women with envy. Everything you've given up. Don't you miss it at all? Miss me, just the tiniest bit?"

"Answer me first."

He inclines his head, and Nessuno is surprised to see what looks like the glimpse of a human being behind his eyes. The anger and hatred have gone.

"It wasn't all an act, was it? It wasn't all a lie?"

"No, Vosil. It wasn't all a lie."

"Tell me you love me."

"She loves you," Nessuno says. "I don't."

Tohir sits back, jaw clenching, and Nessuno hears the lock behind her snap open, then the door. She doesn't look away, leaving that to Bell. Tohir's eyes flick away from hers, but his expression doesn't change, and again he's staring at her.

Steelriver moves into view on her right, approaching Bell. He leans down, whispers in Bell's ear. Nessuno thinks she hears the words brick yard.

Bell pushes up from the chair. "The shop's closing, Vosil. You don't want to talk to me, fine, talk to her. We want the target and the timetable."

He leaves, the door latching after him once more. Steelriver moves to the vacated seat, but he doesn't take it, remains standing.

Tohir sets his palms on the table, looks at them, then at Nessuno. "I don't know when. Soon, perhaps the next week or so, I should imagine on a weekend."

Weekend venue, Nessuno thinks. Tourist destination? Sporting event?

"Where?" she asks.

Tohir wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the blood staining his skin. He exhales, straightens, and then the bullet rips through his head, the gunshot and the impact so near to instantaneous that it's beyond Nessuno's ability to perceive. Tohir's eyes open and look into hers, the right side of his head breaking open. He holds for a fraction of a second that seems much longer before gravity remembers him, then pitches face-first to the table, a thin blob of blood spilling from his skull. Nessuno chokes on a cry, pushing back, sends her chair tumbling as she finds her feet, and Steelriver is holding his .45 in both hands, and now he's pointing it at her.

He's a shooter and she isn't; he has a gun and she doesn't; there's twelve feet between them. There's nothing she can do. As she watches, his expression changes, moves from pained to placid.

Outside, Nessuno can hear Bell shouting through the door. He's working the keypad as fast as he can, and it isn't fast enough.

Steelriver puts the barrel of his gun beneath his jaw.

"They've got my wife and my daughter," he tells her.

The door opens, and she hears Bell shout Steelriver's name, hears him say, "Tom! Jesus Christ, don't-"

And the gun goes off.

And Steelriver falls.

And Nessuno feels like she's falling, too.

Chapter Twenty.

IT IS THE first time in years that the Architect has had to travel like this, and it makes him nervous. He relies on his programs to define and direct his movements, the programs that he created, programs that generate true randomness, stochastic systems entirely of his own design. He has kept faith with them for several years now. He knows they work, not because of their speed-of-light computation but because of the time and deliberation he put into their creation.

He cannot use them now.

His original destination had been Milan, and he disembarked there as planned, but only because he was required to change trains in order to continue to Rome. He purchased a new ticket for the high-speed express from one of the automated machines, boarded, and once under way returned to his laptop to begin the painfully slow process of planning his new route and matching that route to each ID he planned to use and then destroy upon completing each leg. This last part pained him, because despite his resources and his reach, these ident.i.ties were precious and would be both time-consuming and aggravating to replace. This occupied him for most of the four-hour trip.

At Roma Termini he disembarked and made his way through the station, again pausing at one of the automated machines before threading his way through the ticketing hall, beneath the glittering tesserae that decorated the ceiling. He did not look up. He had been through this station seventeen times in the last five years alone, and always he had made a point to appreciate the beauty of the mosaic ceiling. This time, his preoccupation and paranoia were such that overhead was the only direction in which he did not cast his eye. At track 25, he boarded the Leonardo Express with two minutes to spare, and thirty-three minutes later he was exiting his third train of the day at Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci International Airport.

He checked in for his flight to Amsterdam, still using the DeMartino ident.i.ty. He remained DeMartino all the way to Schiphol airport, flying coach, at which point he became Ronald Spencer, pa.s.senger 12B on KLM, now traveling business cla.s.s to Montreal. He slept during much of the journey, spent the time he was awake staring out the window. The nervousness had decayed into boredom, then returned in a different form.

It had been so long since he'd seen her. He doubted she could recognize him, hoped she would all the same.

Five hours after clearing Canadian customs-the purpose of his visit: business; his profession: software design-the Architect is walking around the building in D.C.'s West End for a second time. He has his briefcase, but the rolling bag he left behind at his room at the Watergate, a room taken in the name of Willem Smart. It's two in the afternoon here, and he's aching for sleep, and despite the effects of the sunlight on his body clock, he doesn't trust his judgment. He wants to circle the block a third time, but twice was one too many already. He sees nothing to give him alarm, but that doesn't make him feel any more secure.

He looks at the building, its facade, and it is everything he remembers. He can pick out the windows that belong to her, and if his Zoyenka has done everything he required, and if those she compelled did what was required of them, she should be back home by now. But the Architect sees only closed blinds and no sign that she is home.

If it has gone wrong, he has lost her. The thought makes his stomach ache. Only the first of many things that will go wrong if he has miscalculated, he knows.

Heading for the front door of her building, the Architect finds himself wondering if he should have brought flowers for her.

He enters the lobby, gla.s.s and hardwoods, and a smartly dressed young man at the concierge's desk watches his approach, asks, "May I help you?" before the Architect has come to a stop.

"Jordan Hayden," the Architect says.