climbed in, and I noticed that this guy had his M16 within easy reach on the seat beside him. You can bet he wasn’t real damned happy to have us as cargo.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The driver, whose name was Harry, had instructions to take us straight to the embassy, which was terrifically inconvenient since Katrina and I needed to get our stories-aka alibi-straight. I insisted he drive to our hotel to let us get cleaned up, and when that didn’t work, I gave him the excruciating details about my recent surgery, and he either got sympathetic or bored with listening to me bitch, because he agreed to make one quick stop at the hotel for me to get some aspirin.
As soon as Katrina and I were headed up in the elevator, I urgently said, “Any thoughts?”
She retorted, “Chechens, my ass.”
We had come to the same conclusion, although presumably for different reasons, and after a fair amount of hesitation, I said, “I, uh, I’ve got a confession.”
“A confession?”
“I believe that’s the right word.” I stared straight ahead and said, “I met with Alexi Arbatov this morning.”
“You what?”
“The last time I saw Morrison, I asked him how he contacted him. It’s one of those discreet-marks-in-the- subway things those spies like to dream up and… well, anyway, I met with him.”
Icicles could hang off the look I was receiving. “I’m sure you had a damned good reason you didn’t include me in that decision.”
“I, well, I had a reason. I thought it was a good one.”
“Tell me that reason.”
“I thought the less that went along the better.”
“Well, fuck you,” she said, which was an appropriate sentiment.
Anyway, we’d reached the doors to our rooms, and I said, “Grab whatever you’re going to change into and come over. And be careful, these rooms could be bugged.”
She emerged seconds later carrying a clean dress, untorn stockings, and a pissed-off expression. I unlocked my door and she and I went in. I flipped on the TV and again there were the sights and sounds of a girl loudly doing the big nasty. If the room was bugged, whoever was listening on the other end had to be impressed, and was probably at that moment turning to his buddy: “Hey, Igor, check this. That American stud comes back from a gunfight and immediately nails his co-counsel. What an animalinski, huh? And just listen to her moan. Christ, no wonder those bastards won the cold war.”
I went to the shrunk and pulled out a fresh uniform, then hooked a finger for her to follow me into the bathroom, where I turned on the shower and got the water flowing in the sink-they do that in the movies, hopefully with good reason.
I stripped down to my underwear and said, “The point is, Arbatov says he’s got no idea what happened to Morrison. He claims Morrison wasn’t a traitor, and the arrest puts him at great peril.”
Katrina was stepping out of her skirt. “That was it?”
“No. He said I’m an amateur and that worried him.”
“Did you trust him?” she asked, yanking off her stockings and getting down to her panties and bra. Compartmentalize, I reminded myself-good thoughts to the frontal lobe, naughty thoughts to the rear. By the way, did I mention that she wore a thong?
Not quite tearing my eyes away, I said, “There’s something trustworthy about him. Of course, Morrison thought so, too, and look where it got him.”
She pulled the new dress over her shoulders. “You think Arbatov was behind the attack?”
“Yes. I didn’t think he’d recognize me, but he did. I made a big blunder. I wanted to smoke him out, only I didn’t think it through.”
She sat down to pull on her stockings. “You put a scare in him? Is that it?”
“Best guess-he showed up to see who had Morrison’s meeting signs, discovered it was me, that I knew about him, and he immediately rushed back to the office and arranged my assassination.”
“Our assassination.”
“Right.”
She stopped rolling up her stockings and looked up at me. “And now, because of the police report, Arbatov knows about me, too.”
“Well, yes, I think so,” I admitted.
I mean, this was some poor Washington attorney I’d hired for one-fifty a day, and now I was telling her that as a result of my appalling impulsiveness the number two guy in Russia’s notoriously deadly spy apparatus wanted her buried.
You watch all those great Hollywood spy movies and think how cool it is that the hero or heroine can outwit all those assassins and kill the bad guys, and save the world, and then end the movie in bed with the beautiful girl or dashing guy. That’s Hollywood for you. Back to the real world, the closing scene would be a bunch of people weeping over a grave, and it wouldn’t be the bad guys’.
She contemplated the possibilities and then asked, “You think he’ll try again?”
“Probably,” I admitted, standing in my underpants. “It won’t be so coarse next time… a car accident or a plane crash, something that can be explained as simple bad fortune. Like, ‘Gosh, those poor bastards; they survive a terrorist attack only to climb aboard a plane that loses an engine and plows into the ground. Talk about crappy luck.’ ”
“Put your pants on.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes, you are sorry. Put your pants on,” she insisted.
“I really am sorry,” I persisted.
She looked me dead in the eye. “If I had a gun, I’d shoot you. Put your goddamned pants on.”
So I did. “Okay,” she said, straightening her dress and adopting a very businesslike expression. “What are we going to tell them at the embassy?”
“We can’t tell them about Arbatov.”
“No, we can’t, can we?” You could tell that her wheels were really starting to crank, because this was no longer just a law case, because now, she was fighting for her life. I threw some cold water on my face and washed down two aspirins. I turned off the shower and the sink, and she followed me out.
We climbed back into the sedan, and I told Harry to stick with major boulevards-no side streets, no alleyways, nothing but the most traffic-clogged arteries he could find. He nodded like, yeah, exactly what he was thinking, too.
We arrived in twenty minutes, and the receptionist at the entrance told us to go straight up to the ambassador’s office. His secretary ushered us right in, and there were the ambassador, two guys I didn’t know from Adam, and that bone-chilling inquisitor, Mr. Jackler. The two guys I didn’t know from Adam made no effort to identify themselves, maybe because they never intended to, or maybe because Riser instantly bellowed, “You two sit right there,” pointing at two chairs across from two couches.
As Katrina and I complied, Riser and the others arranged themselves on the couches and faced us like an Admiral’s Mast. Riser squirmed around a moment, comfortably arranging his ass while he prepared to grill ours.
“You okay?” he finally asked, looking first at Katrina.
“I’m fine.” She stiffly added, “Just a little scraped up.”
He looked at me. “And you saw the doctor?”
“Yes sir,” I said, “and I can’t thank you enough for getting us out of that police station. I really can’t. It was really very kind.”
He bent forward. “Drummond, don’t try sucking up to me.”
