Then it hit him.
Slavo.
But how had they tracked Iryna? He was sure she hadn’t been followed to the train station. But maybe they didn’t need to. If Slavo had gotten hold of her latest cell phone number, they could have tracked her that way with GPS.
He looked up. There were sounds in the corridor. His heart began to beat rapidly. His life was about to end. For a moment his mind flashed on Iryna, then Najla that night in Amsterdam. He thought of Kelly and how she looked, her skin burnished like gold as the sun set over the Sea of Galilee. He was leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. Who doesn’t? he thought. Everyone leaves unfinished business behind.
He heard the guards coming closer. It sounded like at least a half-dozen of them. They stopped outside his cell door. His throat was dry. He couldn’t swallow. It was hard to breathe.
He remembered a night in the desert when he was a boy. One of Sheikh Zaid’s sons, Malik, by his second wife, Latifah, had died. The boy had fallen and the wound became infected, and by the time they got him to a hospital, it was too late.
They were sitting by a fire in the tent at night during the three days of mourning. Latifah started to cry uncontrollably, and Sheikh Zaid, instead of comforting her, sent her away. When Scorpion looked at him questioningly, Zaid had said: “She does not understand. There is a hadith of the Prophet of Allah, rasul sallahu alayhi wassalam, peace be upon him, of ibn Umar from his father. The Prophet said: ‘The deceased is tortured in his grave for the wailing done over him.’ ”
“So we should not cry?” Scorpion had asked.
“It makes no difference. But it is better not,” Sheikh Zaid said, but Scorpion could see the tears in his eyes.
A key scraped in the lock and the cell door clanged open. He steeled himself. A bullet in the back of the head and the pain ends. Say nothing. Show them nothing, he told himself. Everyone dies. He took a deep breath and looked at the man who stepped into the cell. The man was looking to the side, his face in shadow, saying something to a guard, and at first Scorpion couldn’t be sure who it was. Then he stepped into the light and he could see his face. A well-built man in his sixties in an Armani suit and steel-rimmed glasses, his hair almost completely white. It’s impossible, Scorpion told himself. He must be hallucinating.
“Scorpion,” the man said, and the voice was unmistakable.
Ivanov. Alias Checkmate, director of the Russian FSB Counterintelligence Directorate. Ivanov himself. Looking much as he had the last time Scorpion had seen him in Saint Petersburg. Immediately, it brought it all back. Najla. The Dacha Club on Nevsky Prospekt, and how it ended in the warehouse near the Narvskaya port. Scorpion struggled to his feet, his groin aching.
“Take off his shackles,” Ivanov told the guard in Russian, and said to Scorpion in English: “Can you walk?”
“I’m not sure,” Scorpion managed.
“Come on,” Ivanov said, grabbing his arm to help support him. The guard supported him on the other side. “We don’t have much time.”
Scorpion tried to walk. Without the shackles, he could do it, but just barely.
“So there was no invasion, no war?”.
“No. Why are you stopping?” Ivanov asked, as Scorpion stopped walking.
“There’s something I have to do,” he said.
“Not now. We only have a few minutes,” Ivanov said. “I don’t want this to turn into a nomenclatura administrative shitting contest.”
Ivanov and the guard helped him hobble down the corridor toward the locked steel door to the cell block. Screams echoed from behind several of the cell doors.
“Where’s Kulyakov?” Scorpion asked, leaning between Ivanov and the guard. There were two plainclothes men with them-he assumed they were FSB-and another prison guard.
“He’s not here,” Ivanov said, looking at the guard.
“Pravda,” the guard said. It is true.
“What about Stepan?” Scorpion asked.
“Who?”
“A crazy blondish man who helps with interrogations.”
“Yego krysha ushla,” the guard said to Ivanov-his roof is gone-meaning, he’s crazy as hell.
Ivanov stopped. He looked at Scorpion.
“We don’t have time for this.”
“He killed a young woman. She didn’t deserve it. Not from him,” Scorpion said, pushing them off and hobbling forward on his own.
“I was right,” Ivanov frowned. “You’re a sentimentalist.”
“It’ll only take a minute,” Scorpion said. “Gde on?” he asked the guard. Where is he?
The guard indicated the staircase. They went up two floors, Scorpion wincing at every step, to an office off a corridor. Ivanov opened the door and peered inside. He motioned the guard closer.
“Is that him?” he asked.
The guard nodded.
Stepan was sitting alone at a table. He was staring at a lit candle, where he held a squirming white mouse, its pink eyes bulging, over the flame with a pair of tongs.
“I’ll give you one minute,” Ivanov said, checking his watch. “Then we leave-with you or without you.”
Scorpion went in and closed the door behind him.
“Y ou saved me. Why?” Scorpion asked. They were sitting in the backseat of a Lada Riva sedan driving along Grushevskogo past government buildings in Mariinsky Park. For Scorpion, the setting was surreal. He felt like any second the view would be revealed as a dream and he would be back in his cell, about to receive a bullet in the head.
“I am superstitious. All Russians are, even the atheists. Especially the atheists.” Ivanov smiled. “Here,” he said, pouring a shot of vodka from a flask into a shot-sized metal cup. “Stolichnaya Elit, not that Ukrainian piss they drink here. You look like you need it. Budem sdarovy,” he said.
Scorpion drank and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s superstition got to do with it?” he asked.
“Twice now you have helped Russia,” Ivanov said. “The funny thing is both times you had no intention of doing it. These idiotsky adventuristov!” he growled, and Scorpion knew he was speaking of SVR adventurism. “Dragging us into a war with NATO that we have no business in and could not win, and for what? A Ukrainian politician we could buy, sell, or replace a hundred times over? Chto idiotism!” What idiocy! “Anyway,” he poured another slug of vodka into the metal cup and drank it down, “I had a feeling, a premonition, that someday we might need you again. ‘Bog lyubit troitsu,’ ” he said, quoting the old Russian proverb that God loves threes. He shrugged. “Call it superstition, or an insurance policy.” Scorpion started to laugh but had to stop, wincing because of the pain, and then laughed and winced at that.
“For a man who was within minutes of being a corpse, you are surprisingly jolly. What’s the joke?” Ivanov looked at him curiously.
“Superstition. Really?” Scorpion grinned. “I suppose the fact that keeping me alive as a witness to who really killed Cherkesov, and gives you leverage over both the SVR and whoever wins the election in Ukraine, has nothing to do with it.”
“I was right,” Ivanov said. “I always tell my subordinates one should never underestimate the Americans. Because they often do stupid things doesn’t mean all of them are stupid.” He shook his head. “If I thought I could trust you and if you weren’t such a damned sentimentalist, I would hire you in a second. I’m glad I didn’t terminate you that time in Saint Petersburg.”
“Makes two of us,” Scorpion said. “What happened with the invasion?”
“We did a deal.”
“What deal?”
“Davydenko and Kozhanovskiy jointly signed an agreement with the Russian foreign minister that regardless of who wins the election, Ukraina will conclude a treaty guaranteeing Russia a renewed lease on the Russian Black
