wine!”
Somehow, perhaps because the burden of his secret had been lifted, or simply because the Bordeaux was a magical elixir, Novak was able to enjoy his dinner. He and Zhukovskaya made the conversation of two middle-aged people who had shared similar experiences over many years and observed the same absurdities. He was a man with a gift for a funny anecdote; she was a woman who was happy to laugh at his humor.
At the end of the meal, Zhukovskaya was as civilized, as kulturny, to use the Russian phrase, as she had promised. With great politeness, she asked him to hand over his cell phone. She also told him that there was about to be a problem with the telephone lines running in and out of his apartment building. He could not, in other words, alert anyone to what he had just told her. She informed him that he would be given a lift back to his home, and his wife.
“Please,” she said, “make this easy for both of us.”
Fifteen minutes later, Pavel Novak let himself in through his front door, crossed the hall, and stepped into the elevator, an ornate metal cage that had run up through the middle of the building’s spiral staircase for the better part of a century. He stopped on the fifth floor and went into his apartment. His wife was asleep in their bedroom. He kissed her face and whispered, “I love you,” in her ear.
She gave a sleepy little murmur of reply.
Novak looked at her with the love that a man has for a woman who has shared his life for almost three decades, a love in which youthful passion has given way to a far deeper blend of affection, knowledge, and mutual forgiveness. He laid his hand briefly on her shoulder, then he left the room.
He walked up to the top of the building and out through the door that led to the roof. He walked to the edge, looked around him at the lights and rooftops of Vienna, took one last, deep breath, and stepped out into the void.
63
Last thing at night, Carver called Grantham in London.
“It’s going down tomorrow,” he said. “Sometime in the afternoon.”
“Do you have any idea yet what you’re after?”
“Not yet. All the client told me was he was hoping to retrieve some kind of document in a sealed envelope. He didn’t tell me what was in the document that was so valuable. He just said, and I quote, that it was ‘vital to the future peace of the world.’ ”
“He what…?”
Whatever Grantham was expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Yeah, I know,” said Carver. “I thought it sounded pretty crazy, too. And that wasn’t the half of it. He’s got this obsession that we’re like the Romans, just as the empire was collapsing, with barbarians at the gate. Only the barbarians aren’t Huns and Vandals; they’re Islamic terrorists, trying to take over the world.”
“You’re joking.” Grantham gave a short, irritable sigh.
“Well, you can argue that out with him. All I know is, I’ll be aiming to make the handover sometime in the early evening. The location is the Hotel du Cap, same as our lunch. I’ll give you the precise time tomorrow. Within fifteen minutes of that time, I aim to be walking out of the hotel with the woman and, if possible, the document. I told Vermulen I didn’t want any of his men there when the deal went down, but I can’t believe he’ll keep to that. He’ll want to protect his investment. So I’m going to need extraction-a car, maybe even a driver, someone good-and a safe house for the night.”
Grantham gave a snort of disbelief. “Would you like me to lay on a private jet as well? You seemed to like those, as I recall.”
“Or I could just give Vermulen’s goons the document in exchange for Alix…”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
64
Even the powerful have bosses. And just as Olga Zhukovskaya could make her subordinates quake, so even she felt twinges of anxiety when calling her agency’s director in his bed to tell him bad news. She reported everything Novak had told her, stressing the urgency of the matter. In her view, the list of nuclear weapons and their precise whereabouts had to be recovered within twenty-four hours. After that, it could be lost forever.
“We know the whereabouts of a document that is of enormous military and political significance to the Motherland,” she concluded. “We should make immediate plans to seize it.”
The director had not survived a life of secrecy, infighting, and continual, often deadly regime changes by being rash or lacking in calculation. His immediate response was cautious.
“Can we be sure that this list really exists, or has the significance Novak claimed? The deployment of those weapons was under KGB control, their locations are still known to us alone, and I am not aware of any documents missing from our files. I suppose, theoretically, that Defense Ministry operatives might have found a way of copying or stealing our documentation…” He paused to contemplate the disturbing possibility that another agency might have outwitted his own, however temporarily. “In any case, Novak was a traitor who became a profiteer. All good reasons to disbelieve anything he says.”
“Quite so, Director. In any other circumstance I would agree with you on all counts. But I sat one meter from Novak when he was talking. I am certain that he was telling the truth.”
“Feminine intuition?” sneered the director.
