churned hundreds of gallons of water and most of the space was filled with pipes and plumbing. The light traced what looked like ancient graffiti on the walls, and suddenly Matosian came forward to examine the writing more carefully.
“This is it,” he announced. “It’s not graffiti, though they’ve done a good job of making it look like it.”
“What is it then?”
“Cyrillic. Early Bulgarian Cyrillic.”
“What does it say? Can you read it?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered abstractedly. Matosian could read sixteen different alphabets and was fluent in twenty-two languages. “It’s… just a minute. It’s nonsense. ‘Roses are pie, are is the area of a circle.’ ”
“ ‘Are is’? Is that what it really says?”
“There’s no doubt about the words,” Matosian said.
“Maybe it’s a code,” Chloe offered.
“No, not a code. A puzzle.” His voice became more animated. “That’s it, a puzzle! Roses are…”
“Red!” she said.
“Yes they are.” Getting into it now, Matosian came back to the script. “So what’s left?”
“ ‘Pie are is the area of a circle.’ ”
“But it’s not,” Matosian exclaimed breathlessly. “That’s
“Red Square,” she said.
“Exactly.”
Matosian normally worked alone, but Chloe now clung to him, both of them shivering in the north wind that whipped through the square. She had refused to leave him in London even as they’d sped to the private airfield just outside Dover-bereft over the loss of her sister, and fearful for her own life, she saw him as her last ray of hope.
On Matosian’s personal jet, she’d fallen asleep until they were making their descent into Russia, and now suddenly, as an early morning crowd of tourists and bureaucrats hurriedly brushed by them, the enormity of their situation seemed to strike her for the first time.
“So Daphne never got to tell you what this was ultimately about?” she asked.
Matosian shook his head. “They got to her two steps ahead of me. She barely managed to get out the password and pass me the key before… before she was gone.”
“Do you think it might have something to do with the password itself? Gato.”
“Shh.” He put a gentle finger to her lips. “Let’s let that remain unspoken until we need it.” He looked around at the milling crowd. “But yes,” he went on, “I don’t think that’s impossible. My initial contact…”
She stopped him. “Who was that?”
A grim smile. “People say it as a joke, but in this case it’s as real as a heart attack. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. But let’s say it’s a high-ranking official of my country’s government. Very high-ranking, and all but invisible.”
“And he told you something about… the password?”
“Not in so many words. At Langley…”
“So it’s CIA then?”
“Forget I ever said that.” Matosian cast around, checking the faces in the crowd. Then, back to Chloe, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know if it started there. Just that it came through there.”
“I understand,” she said. “I’ll tell no one. Ever.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then, coming to the decision that he would trust her, he went on. “When he mentioned the password to me, I got the feeling that a cat, or the symbol of a cat, would play some role in what we were trying to locate, but when I asked, he just smiled that enigmatic smile of his and said, ‘I think you’ll find out when you need to.’ And then I was off to Florence.” He shook his head in apparent disbelief. “It’s hard to imagine that was only three days ago.”
“So what are we looking for here? This venue-Red Square-is a lot bigger than the pump house back in London. What ever it is could be anywhere.”
“You’re right.” Again, Matosian shook his head. “All we know is that somebody wanted me here and believed I would find and recognize what ever it was.” Now his face grew somber. “I feel like I’m letting my people down, that they might have picked the wrong man, that I wasn’t up to the job.”
“But no one’s told you what the job is!”
“That,” Matosian said, “comes with the territory.”
Suddenly a large black car pulled up and six men in heavy trench-coats appeared from its doors almost simultaneously in front of them. Matosian took Chloe’s arm and started to turn when he realized that one of the men had already gotten around directly behind him. He smiled in a relatively pleasant fashion and said in heavily accented English, “I have a gun and I will use it. You are both please to come with us.”
Matosian had been tortured before-in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and Colombia. He liked to think of himself as somewhat of an aficionado of torture. He knew that he would probably survive what ever they had in mind, but he wasn’t sure he could say the same thing about Chloe. And, now that she was in his care, he couldn’t live with that scenario.
He was going to have to break out and find her.
But currently he was in a dark subterranean room, the doors closed behind his captors after they’d tied him up on the simple wooden chair. They were obviously going to work first on his feet, and to that end, they had removed his shoes. But they’d thrown them to the side and left them against the wall. He was far better trained than they were and he’d already loosened the ropes with which they’d bound his legs and arms, but he wanted the ropes still to appear tight when they came back in to question him, so when he was sure he’d sufficiently weakened the knots, he rested.
He didn’t have long to wait. The big man with the heavy accent opened the door and turned on the light, one glaring bulb in the center of the ceiling.
“Mr. Matosian,” the man said as he came to stand in front of his captive. “I am Viktor. My last name, unimportant.”
“But enough about you, Viktor. What have you done with her?” Matosian asked.
“She’s safe. We haven’t touched her. Yet.”
“You don’t have to hurt anyone,” Matosian said. “I’ll tell you whatever you want. What ever I know.”
“You care very much for this woman, no?”
“Very much, yes. But you know, these ropes, they are too loose. You should know I can slip out of them whenever I want.”
“Very funny, that is. I watched Vladimir tie you up myself, of which no one is better.”
“Still,” Matosian said, “maybe you’d better check again. If you’re going to be tickling my feet, you wouldn’t want me to come undone from laughing too hard.”
Chuckling without any humor, Viktor took a step closer, bringing him into Matosian’s range. In a series of lightning moves, the seated man struck twice with his fists, once in the neck and the second shot to the nose, crushing the cartilage there. Before the blows had completely straightened Viktor up, Matosian had stepped out of the ropes binding his legs as well and now kicked out, hitting his captor again in the chest. Viktor went down in a silent hump.
Quickly donning his shoes and socks, Matosian was out into a narrow, dimly lit corridor within five seconds. Chloe had still been with them when they’d turned into his room, so she must be farther down the hall the way they’d been walking. So, turning in that direction, he started jogging, stopping to check the doors.
She was behind the third one, bound as he’d been, hand and foot, though they’d left her shoes on, and had put duct tape over her mouth.
