slid over. He slammed the passenger’s-side door shut and she put the car in gear, wondering what tender nerve she’d touched.
They continued along the road, heading down the mountainside.
“We’ll hit the highway soon enough,” she said to break the thickening silence. “I can’t wait to crawl into a warm bed.”
Inevitably there came a time when Arkadin took the initiative with Marlene. It happened while she was sleeping. He crept down the hall to her door. It was child’s play for him to pick the lock with nothing more than the wire that wrapped the cork in the bottle of champagne Icoupov served at dinner. Of course, being a Muslim, Icoupov himself had not partaken of the alcohol, but Arkadin and Marlene had no such restrictions. Arkadin had volunteered to open the champagne and when he did he palmed the wire.
The room smelled of her-of lemons and musk, a combination that set off a stirring below his belly. The moon was full, low on the horizon. It looked as if God were squeezing it between his palms.
Arkadin stood still, listening to her deep even breaths, every once in a while catching the hint of a snore. The bedcovers rustled as she turned onto her right side, away from him. He waited until her breathing settled again before moving to the bed. He climbed, knelt over her. Her face and shoulder were in moonlight, her neck in shadow, so that it appeared to him as if he’d already decapitated her. For some reason, this vision disturbed him. He tried to breathe deeply and easily, but the disturbing vision tightened his chest, made him so dizzy that he almost lost his balance.
And then he felt something hard and cold that in a drawn breath brought him back to himself. Marlene was awake, her head turned, staring at him. In her right hand was a Glock 20 10mm.
“I’ve got a full magazine,” she said.
Which meant she had fourteen more rounds if she missed the kill with her first shot. Not that that was likely. The Glock was one of the most powerful handguns on the market. She wasn’t fooling around.
“Back off.”
He rolled off the bed and she sat up. Her bare breasts shone whitely in the moonlight. She appeared totally unconcerned with her semi-nudity.
“You weren’t asleep.”
“I haven’t slept since I came here,” Marlene said. “I’ve been anticipating this moment. I’ve been waiting for you to steal into my room.”
She set aside the Glock. “Come to bed. You’re safe with me, Leonid Danilovich.”
As if mesmerized, he climbed back onto the bed and, like a little child, rested his head against the warm cushion of her breasts while she rocked him tenderly. She lay curled around him, willing her warmth to seep into his cool, marble flesh. Gradually, she felt his heartbeat cease its manic racing. To the steady sound of her heartbeat, he fell into slumber.
Some time later, she woke him with a whisper in his ear. It wasn’t difficult; he wanted to be released from his nightmare. He started, staring at her for a long moment, his body rigid. His mouth felt raw from yelling in his sleep. Returning to the present, he recognized her. He felt her arms around him, the protective curl of her body, and to her astonishment and elation he relaxed.
“Nothing can harm you here, Leonid Danilovich,” she breathed. “Not even your nightmares.”
He stared at her in an odd, unblinking fashion. Anyone else would have been frightened, but not Marlene.
“What made you cry out?” she said.
“There was blood everywhere… on the bed.”
“Your bed? Were you beaten, Leonid?”
He blinked, and the spell was broken. He turned over, faced away from her, waiting for the ashen light of dawn.
Twenty-One
ON A FINE clear afternoon, with the sun already low in the sky, Tyrone drove Soraya Moore to the NSA safe house nestled within the rolling hills of Virginia. Somewhere, in some anonymous cybercafй in northeast Washington, Kiki was sitting at a public computer terminal, waiting to sow the software virus she’d devised to disable the property’s two thousand CCTV surveillance cameras.
“It’ll loop the video images back on themselves endlessly,” she’d told them. “That was the easy part. In order to make the code a hundred percent invisible it’ll work for ten minutes, no more. At that point, it will, in essence, self-destruct, deforming into tiny packets of harmless code the system won’t pick up as anomalous.”
Everything now depended on timing. Since it was impossible to send an electronic signal from the NSA safe house without it being picked up and tagged as suspicious, they had worked out an external timing scheme, which meant that if anything went wrong-if Tyrone was delayed for any reason-the ten minutes would tick by and the plan would fail. This was the plan’s Achilles’ heel. Still, it was their only option and they decided to take it.
Besides, Deron had a number of goodies he’d concocted for them after consulting the architectural plans of the building he’d mysteriously conjured up. She had tried to get them herself and struck out; NSA had what she thought was a total lock on the property records.
Just before they stopped at the front gates, Soraya said, “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
Tyrone nodded, stony-faced. “Let’s get on wid it.” He was pissed that she’d even thought to ask that question. When he was on the street, if one of his crew dared to question his courage or resolve that would’ve been the end of him. Tyrone had to keep reminding himself that this wasn’t the street. He knew all too well that she’d accepted a huge risk in taking him in off the street-civilizing him, as he sometimes thought of the process when he felt particularly hemmed in by the rules and regulations of white men he knew nothing about.
He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, wondering if he’d ever have stepped into the white man’s world were it not for his love of her. Here was a woman of color-a Muslim, no less-who was working for the Man. Not just the Man, but the Man squared, cubed into infinity, whatever. If she didn’t mind doing it, why should he? But his upbringing was about as different from hers as it could get. From what she’d told him her parents had given her everything she needed; he barely had parents, and they either didn’t want to give him anything or were incapable of giving it. She had the advantage of a first-class education; he had Deron who, though he’d taught Tyrone many things, was no substitute for white man’s education.
What was ironic was that only months ago, he would have sneered at the kind of education she had. But once he’d met her he began to understand how ignorant he really was. He was street-smart, sure-more than she was. But he was intimidated around people who’d graduated high school and college. The more he observed them maneuvering through their world-how they talked, negotiated, interacted with one another-the more he understood just how stunted his life had been. Street smarts and nothing else was just what the doctor ordered for picking your way through the hood, but there was a whole fucking world beyond the hood. Once he realized that, like Deron, he wanted to explore the world beyond the borders of his neighborhood, he knew he’d have to remake himself from the toes up.
All this was on his mind when he saw the imposing stone-and-slate building within the high iron fence. As he knew from the plans he’d memorized at Deron’s it was perfectly symmetrical, with four high chimneys, eight gabled rooms. A spiky fistful of antennas, aerials, and satellite dishes was the only anomalous feature.
“You look very handsome in that suit,” Soraya said.
“It’s fuckin’ uncomfortable,” he said. “I feel stiff.”
“Just like every NSA agent.”
He laughed the way a Roman gladiator might as he entered the Colosseum.
“Which is the point,” she added. “You’ve got the tag Deron gave you?”
He patted a place over his heart. “Safe and sound.”
Soraya nodded. “Okay, here we go.”
He knew there was a chance he’d never come out of that house alive, but he didn’t care. Why should he? What had his life amounted to up until now? Shit-all. He’d stood up-just as Deron had-made his choice. That’s all a man asks for in this life.
