He hadn’t changed much. A touch older, a little sleeker, but still the fair-hair-just-starting-to-gray postgraduate in a Jermyn Street style blue pinstripe suit that screamed Capitol Hill. He watched Harris come toward him, a determined smile painted on his face, like he wanted to sell him a condo.
“Are you wired?” Scorpion asked.
Harris grimaced. “You didn’t have to be so skittish,” he said. “We could have done this at Langley.”
“No, we couldn’t,” Scorpion said. Not that it made much difference whether Harris was wired. He had to assume that several of the agents had mobile receivers and that anything he said was being recorded.
“Now what? Do we walk or go sit at a California Pizza Kitchen?” Harris letting his snobbery show.
“Don’t be a prick. We walk,” Scorpion said.
“How are you doing?” Harris asked, glancing sideways at him. “Are you all right?”
“Please don’t pretend you give a damn. Lying always gets things off on the wrong foot.”
Harris stopped walking and looked at him. “I don’t think you realize what’s been going on here. The President himself has been involved. He wants to know, are you okay?”
“He’s feeling guilty?”
“He said it was the toughest decision he’s ever had to make. I think it really got to him.”
“Tell him I’m fine.” That was true enough. He had spent the last three weeks in Lausanne, Switzerland. The clinique was very private, very discreet; the kind of place where movie stars and dictators went when they didn’t want anyone to know where they were. Thanks to Akhnetzov paying him the rest of his fee, he could afford it.
From his room he could see Lake Geneva and the snow-covered Alps in a jagged line across the horizon. During the day he worked with the physical therapist, doing rehab. The doctors said he had been lucky. There were no scars on his genitals, and as the pain receded, he would be sexually active again. He also spent some time with a dentist replacing the teeth that had been knocked out. At night he would walk up the steep rue du Petit-Chene to the Place St. Francois in the old town, stopping at a bistro for dinner. It was there that he read in the International Herald Tribune that Davydenko had won the election in Ukraine.
That night, thinking about Kiev and Iryna, he couldn’t get to sleep. Several times, he started to call her, then stopped. Toward the end of the second week he met a French female graduate student studying at the Ecole Polytechnique. She was pretty and funny and approached sex as if it were an equation she was dying to solve, and he was able to prove to himself that sexually, at least, he was still functional.
Harris frowned as a trio of teenage girls walked by. They wore tight jeans and tops and talked nonstop, all three on their cell phones, with eyes only for the shop windows and any boys as they passed the video games store.
“What about the girl? This Iryna Shevchenko?”
“What about her?”
“You had an affair?”
“Christ, you take it to the edge, don’t you?” Scorpion said, walking so rapidly Harris had to hurry to keep up.
“Take it easy,” Harris said.
“It’s none of your damn business!”
“You’re wrong,” Harris said, his voice cold. “It is business.” He looked around the mall as if scouting a battlefield. “Look, if you promise not to go crazy on me or throw whiskey in my face,” referring to the last time he and Scorpion had met, “can we find someplace civilized and get a drink?”
“Someone tipped the SBU about where I was in Kiev. I need to know why.”
“I know. But it’s a problem,” Harris said, trying his most winning smile, the one that got half the female interns in Washington to drop their pants when he was younger. “What do you say? Truce?”
“I won’t waste any more whiskey by throwing it in your face,” Scorpion said. “But I won’t promise not to kill you.”
“Close enough,” Harris said, and signaled to one of his men. A few minutes later a car pulled up at one of the entrances and drove them out of the parking lot and across the street to the Tysons 2 Mall. They walked into the Ritz Carlton and went into the lobby bar, still busy with the lunch crowd, found an empty table and sat down. Two of Harris’s men sat at a table near the doorway. Scorpion didn’t bother to check; he was confident Harris had every entrance and exit covered.
“It’s like a spooks’ convention,” Scorpion said, looking around the crowded bar. “Is there anybody left minding the store at Langley?”
“This is the place,” Harris agreed as the waitress came over. She was slim and good-looking enough to help justify the price of the drinks. “What’ll you have?”
“Belvedere Bloody Mary,” Scorpion said, thinking it was too bad you couldn’t get Stoli Elit or Nemiroff in the States.
“The same,” Harris said.
They waited till the waitress walked away. There was no one near their table. Scorpion wasn’t worried about bugs. Harris and the other spooks wouldn’t be there if they were being listened to.
“You said there was a problem,” he said.
Harris toyed with the triple dish of nibbles the waitress had brought. He looked uncomfortable.
“Look, maybe in some cosmic accounting sense, I-we-owe you. I’ll give you that. But frankly, if that’s all it was, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about it or you.” His eyes were blue and very cold. “It’s worse than that. If I tell you anything, I have to break protocol, every rule we have, and then I have to trust you. A Green Badge!” he said, referring to the fact that within CIA facilities, CIA personnel wore blue badges, while contractors and other nonemployees wear green badges. “And even if I could trust you,” his eyes narrowed as he looked straight at Scorpion, “what happens next time you go off in the wild blue yonder and get captured by the opposition? Then I not only have to trust that you won’t reveal something against someone you don’t like, on a matter of the highest national security, but you won’t do it under torture! You see my problem?” he finished, just as the waitress returned with their drinks.
Scorpion didn’t say anything. He watched the waitress as she wiggled to another table, wondering whether she had heard Harris’s last words about torture. She’s probably used to hearing all kinds of bizarre talk around here, he thought.
“You set me up, you son of a bitch,” he said, his voice soft, controlled, but intense. “You, Rabinowich, and Shaefer practically sent me an engraved invitation to Ukraine. You begged me to go and then you cut me off and then you sold me out. I was a couple of minutes away from a bullet in my head, so I’m supposed to give a shit about your problem? I’m your problem, Bob old buddy. If you really want to worry about something, I’d worry about me.”
Harris nodded grimly. He let his gaze wander around the bar at the gilt-framed paintings and men in expensive suits sitting over drinks.
“You look around and you’d think we live in a civilized world,” Harris said, “but that’s not true at all, is it? Who pointed you at us? Checkmate?” meaning Ivanov and the FSB.
Scorpion smiled. He took a long sip of the Bloody Mary and put it down on the table.
“I was wondering when you’d bring that up. Did I think he was feeding me black info? The thought occurred, but no, I didn’t think so. You know why?”
“You tell me,” Harris said.
“Because when I was laying there in that freezing cell, tortured to within an inch of my life, I realized there was another player in the game. Only I had neutralized them all: Kozhanovskiy, the Syndikat, the SBU, Gabrilov and the SVR, the Guoanbu’s Second Bureau, Shelayev, the Chorni Povyazky. Christ, I got to everyone but the Boy Scouts. But there was someone else, someone I didn’t know about. When Checkmate told me, I knew it was true.”
“What made you so sure?”
“The dog that didn’t bark.”
“What?”
“Sherlock Holmes. As a fail-safe, in case something happened to me, I uploaded the video of Shelayev’s confession to YouTube. Guess what? Nobody knew about it. It disappeared. This isn’t China. Who on earth could have gotten Google to take it off? Who has that kind of leverage over an American corporation? The minute Checkmate said it, the person I thought of was you.” His eyes focused on Harris like a laser.
Harris finished his Bloody Mary. The waitress started toward them, and he waved her off.
