appeared. He turned off the highway, parked at the far end of the rest stop, away from the two vehicles that occupied parking slots. He got out, walked to the edge, and, with his back to her, took a long satisfying pee.
The day was bright and warmer than it had been in Sevastopol. The breeze coming off the water was laden with moisture that lay on his skin like sweat. On the way back to the car he rolled up his sleeves. His coat was slung with hers across the car’s backseat.
“We’d better enjoy this warmth while we can,” Devra said. “Once we get onto the Anatolian Plateau, the mountains will block this temperate weather. It’ll be colder than a witch’s teat.”
It was as if she’d never made the intimate statement. But she’d caught his attention, all right. It seemed to him now that he understood something important about her-or, more accurately, about himself. It went through Gala, as well, now that he thought of it. He seemed to have a certain power over women. He knew Gala loved him with every fiber of her being, and she wasn’t the first one. Now this slim tomboyish
“How many times have you been to Eskisёehir?” he asked.
“Enough to know what to expect.”
He sat back. “Where did you learn to answer questions without revealing a thing?”
“If I’m bad, I learned it at my mother’s breast.”
Arkadin looked away. He seemed to have trouble breathing. Without a word, he opened the door, bolted outside, stalking in small circles like a lion in the zoo.
I cannot be alone,” Arkadin had said to Semion Icoupov, and Icoupov had taken him at his word. At Icoupov’s villa where Arkadin was installed, his host provided a young man. But when, a week later, Arkadin had beaten his companion nearly into a coma, Icoupov switched tactics. He spent hours with Arkadin, trying to determine the root of his outbursts of fury. This failed utterly, as Arkadin seemed at a loss to remember, let alone explain these frightening episodes.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Icoupov said. “I don’t want to incarcerate you, but I need to protect myself.”
“I would never harm you,” Arkadin said.
“Not knowingly, perhaps,” the older man said ruminatively.
The following week a stoop-shouldered man with a formal goatee and colorless lips spent every afternoon with Arkadin. He sat in a plush upholstered chair, one leg crossed over the other, writing in a neat, crabbed hand in a tablet notebook he protected as if it were his child. For his part, Arkadin lay on his host’s favorite chaise longue, a roll pillow behind his head. He answered questions. He spoke at length about many things, but the things that shadowed his mind he kept tucked away in a black corner of the deepest depths of his mind, never to be spoken of. That door was closed forever.
At the end of three weeks, the psychiatrist handed in his report to Icoupov and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. No matter. Arkadin’s nightmares continued to haunt him in the dead of night when, upon awakening with a gasp and a start, he was convinced he heard rats scuttling, red eyes burning in the darkness. At those moments, the fact that Icoupov’s villa was completely vermin-free was of no solace to him. The rats lived inside him squirming, shrieking, feeding.
The next person Icoupov employed to burrow into Arkadin’s past in an attempt to cure him of his fits of rage was a woman whose sensuality and lush figure he felt would keep her safe from Arkadin’s outbursts of fury. Marlene was adept at handling men of all kinds and kinks. She possessed an uncanny ability to sense the specific thing a man desired from her, and provide it.
At first Arkadin didn’t trust Marlene. Why should he? He couldn’t trust the psychiatrist. Wasn’t she just another form of analyst sent to coax out the secrets of his past? Marlene of course noted this aversion in him and set about countering it. The way she saw it, Arkadin was living under a spell, self-induced or otherwise. It was up to her to concoct an antidote.
“This won’t be a short process,” she told Icoupov at the end of her first week with Arkadin, and he believed her.
Arkadin observed Marlene walking on little cat feet. He suspected she was smart enough to know that even the slightest misstep on her part might strike him as a seismic shift, and then all the progress she’d made in gaining his trust would evaporate like alcohol over a flame. She seemed to him wary, acutely aware that at any moment he could turn on her. She acted as if she were in a cage with a bear. Day by day you could track the training of it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t unexpectedly rip your face off.
Arkadin had to laugh at that, the care with which she was treating every aspect of him. But gradually something else began to creep into his consciousness. He suspected that she was coming to feel something genuine for him.
Devra watched Arkadin through the windshield. Then she kicked open her door, went after him. She shaded her eyes against a white sun plastered to a high, pale sky.
“What is it?” she said when she’d caught up to him. “What did I say?”
Arkadin turned a murderous look her way. He appeared to be in a towering rage, just barely holding himself together. Devra found herself wondering what would happen if he let himself go, but she also didn’t want to be in his way when it happened.
She felt an urge to touch him, to speak soothingly until he returned to a calmer state of mind, but she sensed that would only inflame him further. So she went back to the car to wait patiently for him to return.
Eventually he did, sitting sideways on the seat, his shoes on the ground as if he might bolt again.
“I’m not going to fuck you,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”
She felt he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t, that whatever it was was too bound up in what had happened to him a long time ago.
“It was a joke,” she said softly. “I was making a stupid joke.”
“There was a time when I would’ve thought nothing of it,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Sex is unimportant.”
She sensed that he was speaking about something else, something only he knew, and she glimpsed just how alone he was. She suspected that even in a crowd, even with friends-if he had any-he’d feel alone. It seemed to her that he’d walled himself off from sexual melding because it would underscore the depth of his apartness. He seemed to her to be a moonless planet with no sun to revolve around. Just emptiness everywhere as far as he could see. In that moment she realized that she loved him.
How long has he been in there?” Luther LaValle asked.
“Six days,” General Kendall replied. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were turned up. That precaution hadn’t been enough to protect them from spatters of blood. “But I guarantee that to him it feels like six months. He’s as disoriented as it’s possible for a human being to be.”
LaValle grunted, peering at the bearded Arab through the one-way mirror. The man looked like a raw piece of meat. LaValle didn’t know or care whether he was Sunni or Shi’a. They were the same to him-terrorists bent on destroying his way of life. He took these matters very personally.
“What’s he given up?”
“Enough that we know the copies of the Typhon intercepts Batt has given us are disinformation.”
“Still,” LaValle said, “it comes straight from Typhon.”
“This man’s very highly placed, there’s no question whatsoever of his identity, and he knows of no plans moving into their final stages to hit a major New York building.”
“That in itself could be disinformation,” LaValle said. “These bastards are masters of that kind of shit.”
“Right.” Kendall wiped his hands on a towel he’d thrown over his shoulder like a chef at the stove. “They love nothing better than to see us running around in circles, chasing our tails, which is what we’ll be doing if we put out an alert.”
LaValle nodded, as if to himself. “I want our best people to follow up on it. Confirm the Typhon intercepts.”
“We’ll do our best, but I feel it my duty to report that the prisoner laughed in my face when I asked him about this terrorist group.”
LaValle snapped his fingers several times. “What are they called again?”
“The Black Lesion, the Black Legion, something like that.”
