“He has friends.”
“So do I. Fifty thousand of them.”
“What is this? A joke? A miserable fifty thousand hryvnia?”
“Dollars,” Scorpion said.
There was a moment of silence.
“It must be admitted, you are un type inhabituel. ” An unusual type. “What you did to my men on the bridge was exceptionnel. Kulyakov’s SBU. It’s a complication.”
“How much more complicated?” Scorpion asked.
“Seventy-five.”
“A hundred thousand. Half now, half when it’s done. In five minutes I’m getting rid of this cell phone. Text me a bank account number.”
“Maybe you come back to the club and we discuss it,” Mogilenko said.
“One more thing,” Scorpion said. “It has to take a long time. A work of art.”
“What did he do, this Kulyakov?” Mogilenko asked seriously.
“The same to a woman. Young, beautiful like Marilyn Monroe. You’d have liked her,” remembering the photograph of Alyona in the cafe.
“This changes nothing between us, salaud. You still owe me,” Mogilenko growled.
“At the end, he needs to be warmed up. Use l’essence.” Gasoline. “And he has to be still alive when you do it.”
“One hundred thousand. Half now, the rest within twenty-four hours of Kulyakov’s…” He hesitated. “… sortie de grand.” Grand exit. “And Kilbane, on the second payment, don’t make me wait.”
“D’accord,” Scorpion said, ending the call.
On the way back to the waiting room, he slipped the cell phone back into the SBU man’s pocket. He had just finished transferring the money for Mogilenko with his laptop when Iryna came in.
She looked the way she had when he first met her. She wore a black sheath dress, pearls, the Ferragamo purse, the pixie cut that, if anything, made her more striking, and then there were those stunning lapis lazuli eyes. It was as if she hadn’t been touched by prison or anything else that happened. When she saw him, she gave a little cry and ran into his arms. He could feel her trembling as he held her.
“I’ve been crying since yesterday. I thought you were dead,” she sobbed. He let her cry, holding her tight. Finally, she pulled back and looked at him. “I’m a mess. I wanted to look good for you.”
“You look damn good. You look as good as anything I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“I thought I’d never see you again. Then they told me you were at the airport. I don’t understand.” She shook her head. “Not any of it.”
“The Russians. I’m their insurance policy. In a way, it’s funny.” He half grinned. “Sometimes you need your enemies more than your friends.”
Her eyes scanned his face as if there were an answer for everything there, if she could just find it.
“What are you talking about? Insuring them against what?”
“In case Gorobets ever decides to do any original thinking that isn’t first preapproved in Moscow.”
“The Russians know about Shelayev? Is that why there wasn’t an attack?” He watched her wrinkle her brow and figure it out. “I see,” she said, fishing in her purse for a cigarette.
“For what it’s worth,” he shrugged, “you should feel good. We stopped the invasion. Without you, it wouldn’t have happened.”
She lit the cigarette and exhaled. “But we’re losing the election. The latest polls… they’re going to elect that idiot, Davydenko. Can you imagine?”
“Idiots get elected all the time. Welcome to democracy.”
“What do we do now?” she said, and it was like opening a floodgate. He couldn’t help himself. He had to ask it.
“If we hadn’t been captured, would you have come to Krakow?”
She got up, tossed the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it.
“Damn you,” she said. “Don’t you understand anything besides yourself? Can’t you see what’s happening? This isn’t America. Once Gorobets takes over, democracy is dead. Ukraine is finished. Viktor is a fool! He’s listening more to Slavo than to me these days. If I leave, there’s no opposition. Only Gorobets. My father,” she choked, “would roll over in his grave. I can’t.”
She grabbed both his hands tightly. Her eyes burned like blue fire. “Stay here. Stay with me. We’ll fight it together.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’d always be on the run. Too many people want me dead.” That was true enough, he thought. Mogilenko and the Syndikat, even with their deal. Gorobets. Kulyakov and the SBU, the SVR, even the CIA. “A whole alphabet wants me dead. Even worse, they would use me against you.” He looked into her eyes. “It won’t work. Either you get on the plane to Frankfurt with me or we’re done. I can’t stay.”
She leaned back and let go of his hands.
“You work for the CIA, don’t you? That’s what they could use against you, us, isn’t it?”
“No, I told you. I’m independent.”
“But you were with the CIA at one time?”
He nodded.
“Of course. It had to be something like that,” she said. “Politically, it’s impossible. We’re impossible.”
It’s worse than that, Scorpion thought. It was the CIA that betrayed them to Kulyakov.
She put her hand to his cheek. “You look like hell,” she said. “So why am I so damned attracted to you?”
“Maybe you just like men who are trouble. It’s very Slavic.”
She looked at him curiously. “We never fought, did we? Does that mean we don’t love each other? Not even enough to fight?”
“I don’t know what it means. Right now I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.”
“I’d have walked to Krakow to be with you if I wasn’t tied hand and foot to this country,” she said, and a shiver went through him. “I’d’ve crawled,” she said softly.
“It would have been worse if the Russians had come in. We saved a lot of lives,” he told her.
“Not everyone,” she said, and he knew she was thinking of Alyona.
“No, not everyone.”
One of the FSB men who had been in the car with him and Ivanov came in.
“ Gospodin Reinert, the plane is boarding,” he said.
Iryna came close to Scorpion. She smelled of cigarettes and Hermes 24 Faubourg, and it took everything he had not to put his hands all over her. The FSB man watched them from the open doorway, the sounds of the terminal flooding in. A boarding call for group two for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt came over the loudspeaker.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“Someone tipped the SBU to where we were,” Scorpion said.
“Do you know who?”
“Yes, but not why,” he said, thinking he was going to find out if it killed him.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Tysons Corner
Virginia, U.S.
There were two up, two down, four outside, and two cars mobile. Bob Harris was taking no chances, Scorpion thought. They were to meet at the Tysons Corner mall, just off the Beltway outside Washington, D.C. Not that all the firepower and agents doing surveillance from every angle surprised him. Harris was the CIA’s National Clandestine Service deputy director, and their meetings hadn’t always been friendly. Scorpion watched from the second floor of the mall as Harris looked around, checking that his men were in position before getting on the escalator.
